Alternately, Falcone is considering ways to appeal the FCC's decision or even swap spectrum with the Department of Defense.
Seriously? I know they're understandably upset that the satellite bands they purchased can't be used for terrestrial, but come on guys, this is just a waste of time.
You know what wouldn't be a waste of time? Creating the satellite based network their original proposal had.
If this is anything like their previous relationships, it won't end well.
Remember those early versions of OS X? The ones that shipped with IE 5 as the default (and only) web browser. Any self respecting person would immediately uninstall IE after downloading Mozilla/Opera/Netscape because IE 5 was horrible.
I think we should give Microsoft a chance to show that they've changed, but if history is any indication, this agreement will likely end up causing user frustration and resentment.
I know, I know, it's billed as being a web-only tablet at this point in time, but I honestly can't see it being released without support for the PDF format, it's just too common to overlook.
I know I'll be getting one when it becomes available.
The other problem is, does this truly cushion the blow, taking the energy into the crashbag and causing the pedestrian to be more likely to remain on the stopped vehicle, or is it more elastic, imparting acceleration back into the poor pedestrian in time for them to slide off the car
I'd be interested in hearing what the force threshold for such a device is. Right now I see this as yet another expensive thing to replace when you accidentally bump the front of your car while moving your trash can, a football hitting the front of your car, etc.
Realistically, I think that if they set it high enough so that an unintentional bump won't set it off, if you, as a pedestrian, get hit by said car, you're pretty much done for anyway.
Wait a minute here.... I read this story and I thought, well hey, a company tried to force on everyone a product that wasn't desirable for the consumer, waited a long time to deliver that product, and has a history of making some products that don't do so well, so is in deep trouble financially and might go under. Seemed pretty reasonable to me, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? If you don't make products that people want to buy, aren't you supposed to do poorly?
Gee, I was just thinking the same thing about GM and Chrysler, but of course they're a different story... somehow they're still in business. Capitalism at work, I suppose...
But then I remembered this is an April Fools joke.
Continually throwing money at companies that don't make products that consumers want or have the funds to purchase right now is no joke in my opinion. My children are going to be paying for our choices for many years to come, and they may not even have General Motors around to show for it.
Hypothetically, if we used Microsoft and Apple as an example for the car industry. What if Apple had a sudden upsurge in market share? Is that because they make a product that consumers want? Just because Apple's market share is increasing doesn't mean that they have a better product, it just means that consumers are choosing them more over the competition. Even though the Mac generally cost more than the average PC does, Apple still manages to make inroads in their market share.
Consider the automotive world. GM and Toyota, while the market shares are vastly more proportional, the same sort of logic applies. Why is GM doing so badly compared to other car manufacturers? I'd have to say that the reasons for Apple and Toyota's increased market share are the same, despite their completely different industries, and that reason is innovation. GM has this marvelous idea for a hybrid, the Volt. Oh, did I say marvelous? I meant horrible. The Volt will go a stunning 60 miles before the gas motor kicks in, and when it does, kiss your good gas mileage goodbye. Compare that to the Toyota Prius, already on the market, affordable, and it gets over 45MPG on average. Doesn't even seem like a comparison to me.
maxtorman: Thank you for your insightful explanations into this matter. You've helped restore my faith in Seagate from a PR perspective and I'm still open to buying Seagate hard drives in the future.
Now, in saying that, I'd like to know something about a certain SMART reading I'm getting off my 7200.11 500GB drive.
ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 118 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 169917319
Now this drive has 6295 Power On Hours, and has been in my PC for 9 months now, no problems so far. It actually outperforms all my other drives, including a Western Digital Caviar 500GB drive by a wide margin, so kudos on that.
However, I am slightly worried by this value that smartctl is reporting, as NONE of my other drives have a Raw Read Error Rate higher than 0. Nine months in, nothings wrong, still I can't help but feel that this number is going to come back and haunt me. Luckily I have a 7200.10 that's free that I am now backing up my data to. Despite this value, the drive still passes SMART testing, so it obviously hasn't passed the threshold yet.
So, my question is this, is my drive on a road to premature failure? Should I contact Seagate support over this issue, or wait until the drive becomes unusable? Does this number have any significance, or is it a known issue that I can ignore?
If you absolutely must have a Linux tablet PC get a Nokia N800. Fits in your pocket, runs Maemo, lots of online community support and they can be had for under $200.
As a Nokia N800 owner, I can tell you that it is without a doubt one of the worst mobile devices you can own. Having owned one since mid-2007, I can tell you that I would *not* have bought it had I known it was so bad.
It has MANY faults that place it well below the competition in terms of usefulness:
- The integrated media player is so bad it's astounding that Nokia doesn't feel bad for just including it. It doesn't support many formats, and it's horrid at playing any file with a decent bit-rate.
- Diablo, which is the update to OS2008 and was supposed to solve all problems is even more of a pain than 2008 and 2007 were. The horrible mozilla based browser on my N800 won't even START anymore, let alone go anywhere. WHAT was wrong with the Opera based browser that was available in 2007?! Nothing, that's what. Worst of all is that I can't even install it anymore!
- The only good media application for the N800 is Canola, and it's still in beta (and likes to corrupt it's database on a regular bases too)
- Nokia has licensed the PowerVR 3D technology that's in the N800, however they have not, and have made it clear that they will not release a driver to use this piece of silicon which is wasting away otherwise. Instead, the N800 uses frame-buffer graphics, which are not only hard on the ARM CPU, but brutal when it comes to watching video. The iPod Touch/iPhone use the EXACT SAME PowerVR chip, and guess what, I'd rather have an iPod right now because at least watching videos on it doesn't suck, that and I can play decent games!
- If you do find a bug in the OS, Nokia will deny it's existence until some kind member of the community fixes it or someone within the company finally realizes after weeks of inquiries and bug reports that the bug is actually their fault. IF you're lucky enough for them to even take a look at it, you'll have an even harder time getting them to care about you more than you care about Charon orbiting Pluto. That's not how a company should treat their customers.
- The N800 has many emulators for it, however only a select few of them work well (Garnet is one that is actually worth the disk space it consumes) and most of them aren't any good.
- If you happen to own a blue-tooth GPS and would like to use it with the N800, you're incredibly limited in the software you can choose (Maemo mapper or Nokia's WayFinder software) both having their downsides (Maemo mapper needs an Internet connection to download directions and Nokia's WayFinder app is heavy on the battery and costs way too much)
- The battery life sucks on the N800. I got, at most, 2 hours out of it a year after I bought it. A new battery for the N800 is prohibitively expensive, with Nokia asking $50 for a replacement. I don't know about others, but I'm not inclined to spend 1/3 of the cost of a full laptop battery on a replacement for the N800 that will be all but useless in a year anyway.
---
Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the N800 is that it makes a nice torrenting machine with two SDHC slots, but only if you're near a power outlet, otherwise, forget it.
"The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data -- 140TB, 20TB of which is email -- which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system.
Well, to be fair, email wasn't quite as popular during Clinton's administration as it is now. Then again, the 400GB of e-mails that the Clinton administration must have generated (if it is 50 times less than 20TB) must have been rather hard to store when he left office.
Only if the person doing the tricking is a member of a law enforcement agency, and is doing it for the purpose of catching you performing an illegal act.
For example, a law enforcement agent cannot, as I understand it, impersonate a drug dealer for the purposes of arresting drug addicts for purchase and possession of illegal narcotics from said agent.
Alternative to physical action, you could always send a bunch of emails from a bogus return/sender email address (like that of your ISP) claiming to be a copyright holder who will sue the pants off him if he continues.
Or, you could just prioritize traffic from everyone else's MAC addresses.
Even easier than airplane mode, now with less fuss and bother, we bring you the cell phone jamming pouch! It's so simple, I believe even a blindfolded lab rat could figure out how to use it.
Given that the newest package listed on their site is from 2003, I might consider a different project. Gnomemeeting is one option, however I haven't found it to be that user friendly. You could use GTalk, assuming they all have Google accounts.
http://www.mebeam.com/ has a plug-in for GTalk that allows for multi-way video conferencing.
'Mind Gaming' will be this year's vaporware buzzword.
Hardly, OCZ has already released their neural impulse actuator, which allows gamers to map neural impulses to keys that would be used in gameplay. (ie. WADS) It's not vaporware, it's already here and on shelves (or will be very shortly.)
...that the U.S. government has resumed wiretapping with the help of telecommunications companies.
Which just goes to show you that they never had any intention to stop wiretapping, just to throw a big tantrum over it and then go back to spying on Americans the good old fashioned way, illegally.
Large government seeking an open relationship with hypersonic weaponry. Must be open to new targets and positions. Performance and stamina of the utmost importance. Physical appearance subject to negotiation. Bigger is better. 1240
I'm surprised that the RIAA doesn't pay lawyers to inquire as to whether they heard the question right. Two or more explanations and they collect money on the "artist's" behalf for a public performance.
RIAA: Protecting the rights of every artist out there, whether they want to sell their soul to collect the money or not...
And that makes me wonder what the risk of hijacking would be if carrying guns was allowed (even encouraged?) on airplanes. I'd love to see a terrorist managing to take control of a plane for more than 5 minutes if other passengers had guns.
I have another original idea for dealing with a terrorist on a plane. First you give all the passengers flower leis that have been spray with a snake aphrodesiak. Then, put a crate of snakes in the hold set to release when the terrorist takes control of the plane. Then the snakes kill the-- what? it's already been done?!
DUPLICATION is a lot easier with digital forms of media. I mean, holy crap/., this is probably one of the fastest dupes in the same field of interest I've ever seen.
I'm sorry sir, but this was deemed an unlawful duplication and we, the DIAA (Duplication Industry Association of America) hereby demand that you pay us $10,000/character or we will be forced to take this matter to the courts. Thanks for posting with a nickname that our private investigators can to track an IP address that might possibly be yours, unless you're writing that from a public terminal in which case we're going to need the keyboard to run a DNA scan on... at your expense, of course. Assuming we find your DNA on it. If not, we'll just frame a bunch of innocent people with some evidence that we pulled out of a dark place (no, VGCats readers, not Canada.)
We appreciate your generous donation to our worthy cause, your hard earned dollars will help to fund more pointless lawsuits against people much like yourself.
I think it's getting to be ridiculous. Intel has announced that they too, are going to design their own motherboard specification. I'm all for moving forward with PC design, but I think that we're suffering from too much choice. If you look at a PC case today, chances are it will support ATX and mATX motherboards.
Why do we need so many different types of motherboards. All the people I know that have ATX motherboards with 4/5/6 PCI slots are never using more than 3. Seriously, we live in an age where most functions that previously called for a PCI card are now fulfilled with integrated offerings. I know, some people don't like integrated audio, they'd prefer to spend $150 on a PCI sound card, because it makes that much of a difference... My primary PC is an mATX motherboard. I'm only using the PCI-E 16x slot for my video card. I have an open PCI slot, and an open PCI-E 1x slot. I'm not using either. Not because I can't, well one PCI slot is blocked by the video card's heatsync, but I don't need to have 2 PCI slots anyway.
People, PCI is 32bit, it can only pass ~130MB (bi-directional,) it ain't that good! Please, card manufacturers, make the jump to PCI-E, whether it be 64bit, or just 4x/1x. Sure, PCI cards are dirt cheap, but the spec is so old and modern cards (physics processor, SATA controller, SCSI controller...) require more bandwidth than what PCI has to offer.
I say, and I know that some people oppose this, that we should try to phase out ATX in favor of mATX, BTX, and ITX. I feel that ATX was great back when, but times have changed, and it's time for the industry to adapt. I'm not suggesting anything to rash, just slowly make the transition.
Slashdot Mirror
Alternately, Falcone is considering ways to appeal the FCC's decision or even swap spectrum with the Department of Defense.
Seriously? I know they're understandably upset that the satellite bands they purchased can't be used for terrestrial, but come on guys, this is just a waste of time.
You know what wouldn't be a waste of time? Creating the satellite based network their original proposal had.
If this is anything like their previous relationships, it won't end well.
Remember those early versions of OS X? The ones that shipped with IE 5 as the default (and only) web browser. Any self respecting person would immediately uninstall IE after downloading Mozilla/Opera/Netscape because IE 5 was horrible.
I think we should give Microsoft a chance to show that they've changed, but if history is any indication, this agreement will likely end up causing user frustration and resentment.
Have you considered the Crunch ?
I know, I know, it's billed as being a web-only tablet at this point in time, but I honestly can't see it being released without support for the PDF format, it's just too common to overlook. I know I'll be getting one when it becomes available.
The other problem is, does this truly cushion the blow, taking the energy into the crashbag and causing the pedestrian to be more likely to remain on the stopped vehicle, or is it more elastic, imparting acceleration back into the poor pedestrian in time for them to slide off the car
I'd be interested in hearing what the force threshold for such a device is. Right now I see this as yet another expensive thing to replace when you accidentally bump the front of your car while moving your trash can, a football hitting the front of your car, etc.
Realistically, I think that if they set it high enough so that an unintentional bump won't set it off, if you, as a pedestrian, get hit by said car, you're pretty much done for anyway.
Wait a minute here.... I read this story and I thought, well hey, a company tried to force on everyone a product that wasn't desirable for the consumer, waited a long time to deliver that product, and has a history of making some products that don't do so well, so is in deep trouble financially and might go under. Seemed pretty reasonable to me, isn't that how capitalism is supposed to work? If you don't make products that people want to buy, aren't you supposed to do poorly?
Gee, I was just thinking the same thing about GM and Chrysler, but of course they're a different story... somehow they're still in business. Capitalism at work, I suppose...
But then I remembered this is an April Fools joke.
Continually throwing money at companies that don't make products that consumers want or have the funds to purchase right now is no joke in my opinion. My children are going to be paying for our choices for many years to come, and they may not even have General Motors around to show for it.
Hypothetically, if we used Microsoft and Apple as an example for the car industry. What if Apple had a sudden upsurge in market share? Is that because they make a product that consumers want? Just because Apple's market share is increasing doesn't mean that they have a better product, it just means that consumers are choosing them more over the competition. Even though the Mac generally cost more than the average PC does, Apple still manages to make inroads in their market share.
Consider the automotive world. GM and Toyota, while the market shares are vastly more proportional, the same sort of logic applies. Why is GM doing so badly compared to other car manufacturers? I'd have to say that the reasons for Apple and Toyota's increased market share are the same, despite their completely different industries, and that reason is innovation. GM has this marvelous idea for a hybrid, the Volt. Oh, did I say marvelous? I meant horrible. The Volt will go a stunning 60 miles before the gas motor kicks in, and when it does, kiss your good gas mileage goodbye. Compare that to the Toyota Prius, already on the market, affordable, and it gets over 45MPG on average. Doesn't even seem like a comparison to me.
This happened Tuesday and Network Solutions has restored service, therefore, this story is moot.
http://blog.networksolutions.com/2009/potential-latency-on-network-solutions-dns/
maxtorman: Thank you for your insightful explanations into this matter. You've helped restore my faith in Seagate from a PR perspective and I'm still open to buying Seagate hard drives in the future.
Now, in saying that, I'd like to know something about a certain SMART reading I'm getting off my 7200.11 500GB drive.
ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 118 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 169917319
Now this drive has 6295 Power On Hours, and has been in my PC for 9 months now, no problems so far. It actually outperforms all my other drives, including a Western Digital Caviar 500GB drive by a wide margin, so kudos on that.
However, I am slightly worried by this value that smartctl is reporting, as NONE of my other drives have a Raw Read Error Rate higher than 0. Nine months in, nothings wrong, still I can't help but feel that this number is going to come back and haunt me. Luckily I have a 7200.10 that's free that I am now backing up my data to. Despite this value, the drive still passes SMART testing, so it obviously hasn't passed the threshold yet.
So, my question is this, is my drive on a road to premature failure? Should I contact Seagate support over this issue, or wait until the drive becomes unusable? Does this number have any significance, or is it a known issue that I can ignore?
If you absolutely must have a Linux tablet PC get a Nokia N800. Fits in your pocket, runs Maemo, lots of online community support and they can be had for under $200.
As a Nokia N800 owner, I can tell you that it is without a doubt one of the worst mobile devices you can own. Having owned one since mid-2007, I can tell you that I would *not* have bought it had I known it was so bad.
It has MANY faults that place it well below the competition in terms of usefulness:
- The integrated media player is so bad it's astounding that Nokia doesn't feel bad for just including it. It doesn't support many formats, and it's horrid at playing any file with a decent bit-rate.
- Diablo, which is the update to OS2008 and was supposed to solve all problems is even more of a pain than 2008 and 2007 were. The horrible mozilla based browser on my N800 won't even START anymore, let alone go anywhere. WHAT was wrong with the Opera based browser that was available in 2007?! Nothing, that's what. Worst of all is that I can't even install it anymore!
- The only good media application for the N800 is Canola, and it's still in beta (and likes to corrupt it's database on a regular bases too)
- Nokia has licensed the PowerVR 3D technology that's in the N800, however they have not, and have made it clear that they will not release a driver to use this piece of silicon which is wasting away otherwise. Instead, the N800 uses frame-buffer graphics, which are not only hard on the ARM CPU, but brutal when it comes to watching video. The iPod Touch/iPhone use the EXACT SAME PowerVR chip, and guess what, I'd rather have an iPod right now because at least watching videos on it doesn't suck, that and I can play decent games!
- If you do find a bug in the OS, Nokia will deny it's existence until some kind member of the community fixes it or someone within the company finally realizes after weeks of inquiries and bug reports that the bug is actually their fault. IF you're lucky enough for them to even take a look at it, you'll have an even harder time getting them to care about you more than you care about Charon orbiting Pluto. That's not how a company should treat their customers.
- The N800 has many emulators for it, however only a select few of them work well (Garnet is one that is actually worth the disk space it consumes) and most of them aren't any good.
- If you happen to own a blue-tooth GPS and would like to use it with the N800, you're incredibly limited in the software you can choose (Maemo mapper or Nokia's WayFinder software) both having their downsides (Maemo mapper needs an Internet connection to download directions and Nokia's WayFinder app is heavy on the battery and costs way too much)
- The battery life sucks on the N800. I got, at most, 2 hours out of it a year after I bought it. A new battery for the N800 is prohibitively expensive, with Nokia asking $50 for a replacement. I don't know about others, but I'm not inclined to spend 1/3 of the cost of a full laptop battery on a replacement for the N800 that will be all but useless in a year anyway.
---
Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the N800 is that it makes a nice torrenting machine with two SDHC slots, but only if you're near a power outlet, otherwise, forget it.
"The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data -- 140TB, 20TB of which is email -- which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system.
Well, to be fair, email wasn't quite as popular during Clinton's administration as it is now. Then again, the 400GB of e-mails that the Clinton administration must have generated (if it is 50 times less than 20TB) must have been rather hard to store when he left office.
Only if the person doing the tricking is a member of a law enforcement agency, and is doing it for the purpose of catching you performing an illegal act.
For example, a law enforcement agent cannot, as I understand it, impersonate a drug dealer for the purposes of arresting drug addicts for purchase and possession of illegal narcotics from said agent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
Perhaps the Netflix inventory system runs on a virtual machine, in which case, the outage may be caused by this
It's called typesetting and, unfortunately, LaTeX is still the freakin' best.
What do you mean by "unfortunately"?
Unfortunately no software since [LaTeX] has come close to the feature-set and quality of LaTeX.
emerge -av screen
Mac OS X:
fink install screen
Alternative to physical action, you could always send a bunch of emails from a bogus return/sender email address (like that of your ISP) claiming to be a copyright holder who will sue the pants off him if he continues.
Or, you could just prioritize traffic from everyone else's MAC addresses.
Step 1: Buy pouch (http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.1305 $2.85 at the time of writing w/free shipping!)
Step 2: Put phone in pouch before entering mall
Step 3: Take phone out of pouch periodically to check text messages/make calls.
Step 4: Confuse system by having phone randomly appear for short intervals around the mall.
Step 5: ???
Step 6: Profit!
http://www.mebeam.com/ has a plug-in for GTalk that allows for multi-way video conferencing.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/5qdp38 (Link to the plug-in)
Hardly, OCZ has already released their neural impulse actuator, which allows gamers to map neural impulses to keys that would be used in gameplay. (ie. WADS) It's not vaporware, it's already here and on shelves (or will be very shortly.)
http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/press/2008/273
...that the U.S. government has resumed wiretapping with the help of telecommunications companies.Which just goes to show you that they never had any intention to stop wiretapping, just to throw a big tantrum over it and then go back to spying on Americans the good old fashioned way, illegally.
Large government seeking an open relationship with hypersonic weaponry. Must be open to new targets and positions. Performance and stamina of the utmost importance. Physical appearance subject to negotiation. Bigger is better. 1240
Yeah, but look at the Anti-Aliasing! It's so crisp!
I'm surprised that the RIAA doesn't pay lawyers to inquire as to whether they heard the question right. Two or more explanations and they collect money on the "artist's" behalf for a public performance.
RIAA: Protecting the rights of every artist out there, whether they want to sell their soul to collect the money or not...
Onto the next media provider please...
Rent desired DVD. Download HandBrake. Encode into H264.
Legal? AFAIK it is in countries that don't have the wonderful copyright laws the US does... but I'm not a lawyer.
As bad as downloading it from a torrent? I think not.
To quote bash.org: "I saw 2 men in black suits knocking on my door so I microwaved my hard drive :\"
I have another original idea for dealing with a terrorist on a plane. First you give all the passengers flower leis that have been spray with a snake aphrodesiak. Then, put a crate of snakes in the hold set to release when the terrorist takes control of the plane. Then the snakes kill the-- what? it's already been done?!
Damn, better luck next time I guess..
I'm sorry sir, but this was deemed an unlawful duplication and we, the DIAA (Duplication Industry Association of America) hereby demand that you pay us $10,000/character or we will be forced to take this matter to the courts. Thanks for posting with a nickname that our private investigators can to track an IP address that might possibly be yours, unless you're writing that from a public terminal in which case we're going to need the keyboard to run a DNA scan on... at your expense, of course. Assuming we find your DNA on it. If not, we'll just frame a bunch of innocent people with some evidence that we pulled out of a dark place (no, VGCats readers, not Canada.)
We appreciate your generous donation to our worthy cause, your hard earned dollars will help to fund more pointless lawsuits against people much like yourself.
Why do we need so many different types of motherboards. All the people I know that have ATX motherboards with 4/5/6 PCI slots are never using more than 3. Seriously, we live in an age where most functions that previously called for a PCI card are now fulfilled with integrated offerings. I know, some people don't like integrated audio, they'd prefer to spend $150 on a PCI sound card, because it makes that much of a difference... My primary PC is an mATX motherboard. I'm only using the PCI-E 16x slot for my video card. I have an open PCI slot, and an open PCI-E 1x slot. I'm not using either. Not because I can't, well one PCI slot is blocked by the video card's heatsync, but I don't need to have 2 PCI slots anyway.
People, PCI is 32bit, it can only pass ~130MB (bi-directional,) it ain't that good! Please, card manufacturers, make the jump to PCI-E, whether it be 64bit, or just 4x/1x. Sure, PCI cards are dirt cheap, but the spec is so old and modern cards (physics processor, SATA controller, SCSI controller...) require more bandwidth than what PCI has to offer.
I say, and I know that some people oppose this, that we should try to phase out ATX in favor of mATX, BTX, and ITX. I feel that ATX was great back when, but times have changed, and it's time for the industry to adapt. I'm not suggesting anything to rash, just slowly make the transition.