Provide risk-free 30 day trial period; realistic coverage maps, upfront price disclosure, and end early termination fees."
Yes, yes, yes, and maybe not.
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early. Even if you explicitly banned early termination fees, they would introduce fees for paying off the phone if you cancel the contract early that would be eerily similar to the termination fee. I guess it would be more explicit to the user though. Worse could be they keep the contract fees the same, but you have to pay in addition for your phone.
The 30-day trial period should be enough to find out about service issues that you wouldn't know about until you had the contact otherwise.
Then again, I'm not in America, but a couple of the same issues occur in England.
It's probably quite hard to be amazingly revolutionary in a device that costs $140 to build, considering the other hardware contained within, so the only revolutionary aspect can be the following:
1) Software / UI 2) Keyboard layout / simplification 3) Intelligent use of input mechanisms within the software
There's a lot of work that can be done with (1) if you don't care about losing what we have at the moment. This seems to be the main thrust of the 'revolution', but until we use it, we will not know if they're going down a path with good chances of survival and evolution towards better things, or if they're going to hit a wall. They've done (2) as well, and (3) ties in with (1) once you're writing applications rather than UI systems.
The linked HIG shows you the combo graphics-tablet and trackpad input interface.
With a finger it works as a trackpad (well, the centre portion does). With a stylus the entire input area works as a graphics tablet. It's as wide as the device, but not that tall, think of it like an widened traditional trackpad.
It could have potential. I'd have to use it to form an opinion.
The OLPC hardware is very nice actually. I've held it in my hands, and it is sturdy and looks nice. The worst part is the keyboard, which is dire - hopefully this is something they will work on in the future to improve. Sadly it had run out of battery when I got my mitts on it, so I cannot comment on the user interface, and the operation thereof.
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
The pitch now is that EVD will not be an alternative to DVD but its successor - essentially it's been repositioned as an alternative to HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Technology provided by London-based New Media Enterprises, which has been touting a format it calls VMD (Versatile Multi-layer Disc), to provided a storage capacity sufficient for HD content but read using standard red lasers rather than blue.
To get it there, some 20 CE vendors yesterday unveiled 54 EVD players, China's Xinhau state news agency reports. Among the suppliers were the Haier Group, one of the world's biggest white-goods makers, and TCL Group, which manufactures kit for France's Thomson, owner of the RCA brand.
Review magazines are pointless when you can read reviews online, with hundreds of game-resolution screenshots, and then there are sites like metacritic and so on that collate reviews so you don't get one crap review. And it is instant.
Also I don't want to read crap written for teenagers. I didn't want to when I was a teenager, but back then computing magazines were far more grown up.
Future Publishing started off with Amstrad Action some 21 years ago. It will be a shame to see them die (inevitable within a few years really) but they didn't give us a special last-edition AA, nor a last-edition Commodore Format. They deserve all they're getting.
The only (computing) magazine I've bought this year has been Retro Gamer. Yeah, you can get that stuff online, but it is nicely presented with adult articles.
I am interested in this LegOS. Does it run on standard x86 hardware?
I think that Legos is the most retarded pluralisation of Lego, however incorrect just using Lego as the term is. Hell Legoes seems more correct (c.f., Hero -> Heroes). Then again the English language isn't exactly consistent, and the American variant hasn't made any leaps to improve it.
Good work on the teaching of the whys and wherefores of things to your offspring though.
You'll need those windows PCs for all the jobless Windows certification programs, like the MCSE and so on. That requires Office on each Windows PC.
However for all the other Library PCs, all you need is a plain desktop with a giant 'Intarweb Click This GIANT Icon' icon in the middle (with the browser configured to not keep a history). Hell, for value add include a "Messaging" icon too (configured to never save the user's settings). Put the rest of the functionality behind an "Other" icon. Linux is ideal for this, you create your "LibraryLinux" distro and install it everywhere.
Arguably installing a bunch of Mac Minis and LCD monitors would have worked out cheaper, and people don't have many issues using Mac OS X, and Office is available for it.
Quite clearly this was horribly mismanaged, and quite possibly poorly thought out in the beginning. One person can install 2000 copies of Linux in a month, assuming they put a little upfront effort into the distribution and default software install. That shouldn't cost more than £40k, including travel expenses. I'm assuming they reused PCs...
You can check out the chevrons on Google Maps
on
Ancient Crash, Epic Wave
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They're at the south end of Madagascar. Worth a look, in fact at first glance a lot of the south-eastern coast looks like it is showing signs of where a tsunami washed inland a lot, but the chevrons are very clear when you find them. Also there appear to be some more chevrons at the top end of the country, at a different angle, but it's not my line of expertise so I may be wrong.
However it is a neat method of finding recent oceanic meteorite impacts. I don't know how long the chevrons would last - the bigger the impact the longer they'd last seems like an obvious insight though, and 600ft high chevrons would take a very long time to erode, ice ages notwithstanding.
The Ars review pointed out that the device didn't work.
That's right. It doesn't work. Syncing music failed to complete. Every time.
How is that worth 7/10? Failure to perform its core function is the most important factor in any consumer electronics device, and the Zune failed. Maybe it is limited to a few systems/players, and Ars just happened to be using one of those. It didn't help that they compared it against a 60GB iPod, rather than the direct competitor, the 30GB iPod (which is thinner and lighter).
You can't give a score based on potential, IF it worked correctly. Otherwise Ars' initial review of Aperture would have had a score greater than 4/10.
The issues raised by comments to Ars' article have prompted Ars to create a scoring guidelines system for future articles. Hopefully 'failure to operate primary function reliably' will mean a low score (i.e., 5/10). The Zune also lacked the functionality of the iPod in many areas, e.g., games and other non-music features, but these are secondary (or tertiary!) and should be seen as 'other nice things'.
Once Microsoft update the Zune firmware and the client software so that primary functions operate correctly, then the review can be reassessed and rescored based upon the other factors, such as ease of use, appearance, etc. It does look like the Zune's user interface isn't half bad from all the reviews I've seen, so that will be a major plus once the problems are ironed out. Appearance is subjective, and shouldn't factor highly into any product review's final score.
Zune v2.0 or v3.0 will fix all the issues I'm sure, this is typical Microsoft.
Hopefully the end result will be to kick Apple into being a bit more innovative with the iPod. We'll see if a widescreen iPod touchscreen will appear soon enough though. And that could prove to be a massacre - a 4" screen vs. a 3" screen is far more appealing than a 3" screen vs. a 2.5" screen.
Yup, they get dropped off in high-guman-traffic areas for Friday and Saturday nights. They're plastic, no technology. You piss into the recepticle (a pee pod has a receptible on each of its sides) and the piss accumulates in the middle in some form of tank. Then they're collected in the early morning. The recepticle is large enough to vomit into too.
Very Cheap. Low-tech. Sucks if you're female though.
One of the locations is outside the public toilets, which are locked at night to stop bum banditry and drug abuse (the toilets have needle bins).
From some of the animations on the product website, it looks like the software can actually procedurally generate the textures at render time. Hence the 'aging room' videos, as the parameters to the procedural textures are altered subtley over time. I imagine the code must be running as a shader. A lot of overhead for a mere shader though, most games would simply pregenerate the textures at load time.
That's what I do too. All searches are on Google (usually by the browser search field rather than going to the site) and I'll check out the Wikipedia article if it appears, whilst also having the benefit of a full search to peruse as well.
The default on a Mac is to NOT resize icons on the dock. That has to be set in the preferences. And what's this stuff about 'aromatically' resizing?
The shadow around a window is very subtle, but it allows the window to stand out visually from other windows. It is actually damn useful. Functionality improved because of this 'fluff'. It consumes very little resources because it's all done on the graphics card, and even a fricking Radeon 9200 can cope with it, hell a Rage 128 can probably deal with it. It is excellent design - it saves screen space - no window borders required.
Bad interface design is Vista. Dark. Heavy use of shadows, yet with MASSIVE window borders that have resource intensive blurring effects applied.
OS X 10.4 had code to allow for resolution independence, but it wasn't enabled. I'd guess that it is a definite for 10.5. OS X has been using the graphics card to composite the desktop for several years now, hence OS X's smooth animations and subtle drop shadows. I have never seen 'desktop tearing' on a Mac for years. Expose can be activated with F9 (all windows) and F10 (application windows). You can then use the cursor keys to choose a window, and return to activate it. Command-` switches application windows, so you don't even have to use the mouse to activate that download window to see how it is going. I've found OS X to be far better with keyboard use than Windows, and far more consistent between applications. OS X 10.5 should have the full Quartz 2D Extreme, which is disabled in 10.4. That will move more of the interface creation onto the GPU. Vista is slightly ahead here, although it hasn't been released yet so actually it isn't a valid comparison. I've found that any effect in Mac OS X will aid functionality (apart from the drop effect in Dashboard). Windows has always had effects for the sake of it, like 'expanding menus' or 'fading menus' or whatnot. Iconification shows you where to click to unhide the window. Hopefully Vista will use effects for the sake of improving functionality and increasing usability.
I'm glad that Windows works for you, but before you mouth off against Mac OS X it would actually make sense to use it for a while and learn about the technologies it incorporates.
And wasn't OS X 10.0 or even 10.1 out by the time XP was released? So comparing against OS 9 is a bit rich. Admittedly 10.0 was a turd, but it did lay the foundations that Vista is now only just catching up on. It will be hard for Vista's murky interface to compete with the 6 years of tweaking OS X has had, as another comment said. It takes time to get these things right, and I guess Vista will only start looking professional sometime in 2010.
That's if they log the requests - given that they're a Norwegian company, they have some pretty tough privacy laws to content with.
I expect that it will depend on the terms and conditions in the end, and that they will say 'we will not log or use your data in a user-specific manner (not even AOL style 'user == number' obfuscation, hehe), however we may use it to compile statistics on accesses to phishing sites', which could prove quite useful in anti-phisher court trials.
It's no different to IE7 or the next version of Safari. The best way to check a website is authentic is to check the URL against a blacklist and then tell the user in big red text in a way they'd be retarded to ignore about the threat. I do think it would be better to download the blacklist to the client and resync it often however.
How do the Firefox add-ins, IE7 and Safari 3 handle anti-phishing?
a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance
No, AMD have a range of CPUs that lose in terms of performance only, however AMD's prices have been adjusted so they aren't losing in terms of performance/price. Barely, admittedly.
And in terms of price only, AMD are winning there. The cheapest Core 2 Duo, the E6300, is $180. The X2 3800+ is $150. Beneath that are tonnes of single core Athlon 64s and Semprons that make Intel's cheap P4 offerings look lame. If you are spending under $150 on the CPU on your system, then AMD is your best choice still. That probably accounts for the vast majority of computer sales.
Intel win out when it comes to the high end, because AMD don't have a competitor there. Of course, if you like buying >$500 CPUs then I'm very happy for you, and you will enjoy the vast performance of an E6800 and know it beats everything else out there. Personally I think it is a poor investment to buy cutting edge.
Kentsfield vs. 4x4 will be six of one, half a dozen of the other. We'll find out halfway through November.
It's amusing how people think that AMD are going to die because for a year Intel finally will have a better product. For these people AMD has been dying for years and years, yet AMD has only got better and stronger, in markets that matter such as servers. AMD have a superior platform, and that matters here. Who cares about a slightly faster FPU when you can plug in a SIMD co-processor that is 10 - 100x faster? The future? No, they're already available.
ATSC is a committee, not a standard. If you hadn't noticed, we're talking about the standard.
Do you really really honestly believe that in 1982 ATSC came about with MPEG2 and HDTV.
Because Wikipedia can be wrong does not make it always wrong in this case. You just make yourself look like an idiot for ranting against Wikipedia. At least I gave a source. Where's yours? Oh, it's Wikipedia.
You said no facts, just unverified assertions. Fact: DVB-T was in use 3 whole years before ATSC. Logical Conclusion: DVB-T as a standard came first. That or ATSC is very poor and wasn't suitable for most world markets.
In fact from the Slashdot stories back in the day, I remember when ATSC came out and people were wondering why the US was adopting a completely different standard to what the rest of the world used, a standard that had bad properties in urban areas that DVB-T didn't have. The conclusion was that the US was again persuing a 'them and us' route to their standards.
Hmm, digital terrestrial receivers cost from £25 in the UK, and have been available since 2002 (prior to that the receivers were supplied with subscription digital terrestrial tv that went bust). I can easily see the price reducing further in the next couple of years, and the addition of a short range analogue NTSC transmitter to let multiple deprecated TVs view the output. Okay, the UK ones are SDTV digital, but that is all that is required for the mass market free-to-air system; HDTV free-to-air should not be an aim in the near future in any country if they want to keep the cost low.
It must be a £10 thing to add digital reception to a TV these days, I don't understand why this isn't a mandatory feature on all new TVs.
And six to eight TVs - wtf? Unless there are 30 people living in the house, WHY?
And new TV stations usually end up on Satellite and Cable services, at least they do over here in the UK. We only had 5 analogue channels anyway, and you were lucky if you got all five at the same time. There was never room for new channels on analogue, digital enabled new channels for us, hence the massive uptake. The jump to 30 freeview channels for those of us who don't need subscription TV was great. Indeed I get 150 free channels on free-to-air satellite, but they're 70% shopping channels and late night softcore 'phone a girl' porn services.
As a technical note, the £25 DTT receiver utilises a 250MHz PowerPC 405 processor. Neat.
ATSC was started first, and Europe just decided to chose something entirely different
It was?
We've had digital terrestrial television in the UK since the late 90s, recalling the failed ITV Digital system that died and is now the Freeview system.
Hmm, what does Wikipedia say. Oh look: "ATSC coexists with the earlier and more widely-used DVB-T standard"
Get your facts right instead of going on an Anti-Europe rant.
It's free speech to be able to say the truth about anything without fear of punishment. It's free speech to praise/criticise the government without fear of punishment. It is free speech to say your viewpoint ("I hate Jews", "Immigrants are benefits scum",...), even if it is wrong. It is not free speech to incite murder. It is not free speech to tell blatant lies about someone or something. In the UK it's doubly illegal if you're being racist (although I think this is stupid, a crime is a crime, why give special consideration?! - discuss).
Since when was free speech about allowing someone to vandalise a memorial (in this case a web site) and incite murder against people? Quite clearly a crime was committed. The question is whether or not 3 years is a suitable amount of punishment for the crime (in this case 3 years will mean 8 months in jail and 10 months tagged in the community with a curfew and possible restrictions based upon the crime committed). That's what we should be discussing.
Even if they did prosecute, it does you know good once they'd messed with your database or otherwise hacked you.
It isn't hard to secure an online application against SQL injection. So there's no excuses for the developer to write 'SELECT blah FROM table WHERE field='$forminput';' directly in their code is there?
Your example should be about you going to the police station complaining because you don't have a lock on your door, not because you need a paid security guard.
Yes, I agree that hacking crimes should be punished more, but that doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to secure yourself and your property.
E.g., build and assemble in China, package in target country.
This does go against their direct shipping to the customer from the factory system they currently operate.
However the small packaging for the nano is a good first step. Also the turnover on Apple computer hardware tends to be less than PC hardware - people will keep an Apple running for a year or two more than a PC in general. Of course there will those of us running 12 year old SparcStations as print servers and old P200s as routers, but generally people replace PCs when the old one gets slow for whatever reason. Lower turnover means less hardware being recycled overall.
I read it on a forum somewhere earlier today, in fact it might have been in the comments to the Engadget article itself.
I cannot validate the veracity of the statement sadly, I don't buy videos from iTunes, and the few bits of music I have from iTunes have been obtained via free iTunes coupons on bottles of coke. Me, a cheapskate?! Never:)
1) Remove 320x240 video from library. 2) Check for purchases. 3) Download 640x480 video for free.
So you aren't forced to re-purchase it. iTunes Store is just allowing you to buy a second copy, like buying two copied of the same album - something people used to do a lot, one for the home, one for the car.
On the other hand, it is wrong of Apple to be selling videos at a high resolution that are lower quality than the original low resolution videos. This situation is only applicable to some videos however - I'd hazard that one batch of videos was converted incorrectly, and Apple will have to re-encode the videos now they're aware that some of the videos are poor quality. If Apple don't re-encode the videos, then they deserve the hate they're getting if only because they're purposely selling a poor quality product. They should also allow people to re-download the re-encoded video if they purchased the poorly encoded video.
Slashdot Mirror
Provide risk-free 30 day trial period; realistic coverage maps, upfront price disclosure, and end early termination fees."
Yes, yes, yes, and maybe not.
Remember that the cost of the phone is included in a contract, and that's why you get the termination fee if you cancel early. Even if you explicitly banned early termination fees, they would introduce fees for paying off the phone if you cancel the contract early that would be eerily similar to the termination fee. I guess it would be more explicit to the user though. Worse could be they keep the contract fees the same, but you have to pay in addition for your phone.
The 30-day trial period should be enough to find out about service issues that you wouldn't know about until you had the contact otherwise.
Then again, I'm not in America, but a couple of the same issues occur in England.
It's probably quite hard to be amazingly revolutionary in a device that costs $140 to build, considering the other hardware contained within, so the only revolutionary aspect can be the following:
1) Software / UI
2) Keyboard layout / simplification
3) Intelligent use of input mechanisms within the software
There's a lot of work that can be done with (1) if you don't care about losing what we have at the moment. This seems to be the main thrust of the 'revolution', but until we use it, we will not know if they're going down a path with good chances of survival and evolution towards better things, or if they're going to hit a wall. They've done (2) as well, and (3) ties in with (1) once you're writing applications rather than UI systems.
The linked HIG shows you the combo graphics-tablet and trackpad input interface.
With a finger it works as a trackpad (well, the centre portion does). With a stylus the entire input area works as a graphics tablet. It's as wide as the device, but not that tall, think of it like an widened traditional trackpad.
It could have potential. I'd have to use it to form an opinion.
The OLPC hardware is very nice actually. I've held it in my hands, and it is sturdy and looks nice. The worst part is the keyboard, which is dire - hopefully this is something they will work on in the future to improve. Sadly it had run out of battery when I got my mitts on it, so I cannot comment on the user interface, and the operation thereof.
However there are some interesting points in the blog post - it just depends on whether they are valid for the OLPC.
Fitts Law in corners for example works well when you have a mouse you can fling into the corner. But the OLPC has a trackpad, and we all know they're not so good for flinging the cursor into the corner. Something localised would be far better, for example a double-tap + pop-up directional menu for actions. Also Mac OS X lets you assign the corners to actions, contrary to his post. Many people disable these because they're annoying!
Review magazines are pointless when you can read reviews online, with hundreds of game-resolution screenshots, and then there are sites like metacritic and so on that collate reviews so you don't get one crap review. And it is instant.
Also I don't want to read crap written for teenagers. I didn't want to when I was a teenager, but back then computing magazines were far more grown up.
Future Publishing started off with Amstrad Action some 21 years ago. It will be a shame to see them die (inevitable within a few years really) but they didn't give us a special last-edition AA, nor a last-edition Commodore Format. They deserve all they're getting.
The only (computing) magazine I've bought this year has been Retro Gamer. Yeah, you can get that stuff online, but it is nicely presented with adult articles.
I am interested in this LegOS. Does it run on standard x86 hardware?
I think that Legos is the most retarded pluralisation of Lego, however incorrect just using Lego as the term is. Hell Legoes seems more correct (c.f., Hero -> Heroes). Then again the English language isn't exactly consistent, and the American variant hasn't made any leaps to improve it.
Good work on the teaching of the whys and wherefores of things to your offspring though.
You'll need those windows PCs for all the jobless Windows certification programs, like the MCSE and so on. That requires Office on each Windows PC.
...
However for all the other Library PCs, all you need is a plain desktop with a giant 'Intarweb Click This GIANT Icon' icon in the middle (with the browser configured to not keep a history). Hell, for value add include a "Messaging" icon too (configured to never save the user's settings). Put the rest of the functionality behind an "Other" icon. Linux is ideal for this, you create your "LibraryLinux" distro and install it everywhere.
Arguably installing a bunch of Mac Minis and LCD monitors would have worked out cheaper, and people don't have many issues using Mac OS X, and Office is available for it.
Quite clearly this was horribly mismanaged, and quite possibly poorly thought out in the beginning. One person can install 2000 copies of Linux in a month, assuming they put a little upfront effort into the distribution and default software install. That shouldn't cost more than £40k, including travel expenses. I'm assuming they reused PCs
They're at the south end of Madagascar. Worth a look, in fact at first glance a lot of the south-eastern coast looks like it is showing signs of where a tsunami washed inland a lot, but the chevrons are very clear when you find them. Also there appear to be some more chevrons at the top end of the country, at a different angle, but it's not my line of expertise so I may be wrong.
However it is a neat method of finding recent oceanic meteorite impacts. I don't know how long the chevrons would last - the bigger the impact the longer they'd last seems like an obvious insight though, and 600ft high chevrons would take a very long time to erode, ice ages notwithstanding.
The Ars review pointed out that the device didn't work.
That's right. It doesn't work. Syncing music failed to complete. Every time.
How is that worth 7/10? Failure to perform its core function is the most important factor in any consumer electronics device, and the Zune failed. Maybe it is limited to a few systems/players, and Ars just happened to be using one of those. It didn't help that they compared it against a 60GB iPod, rather than the direct competitor, the 30GB iPod (which is thinner and lighter).
You can't give a score based on potential, IF it worked correctly. Otherwise Ars' initial review of Aperture would have had a score greater than 4/10.
The issues raised by comments to Ars' article have prompted Ars to create a scoring guidelines system for future articles. Hopefully 'failure to operate primary function reliably' will mean a low score (i.e., 5/10). The Zune also lacked the functionality of the iPod in many areas, e.g., games and other non-music features, but these are secondary (or tertiary!) and should be seen as 'other nice things'.
Once Microsoft update the Zune firmware and the client software so that primary functions operate correctly, then the review can be reassessed and rescored based upon the other factors, such as ease of use, appearance, etc. It does look like the Zune's user interface isn't half bad from all the reviews I've seen, so that will be a major plus once the problems are ironed out. Appearance is subjective, and shouldn't factor highly into any product review's final score.
Zune v2.0 or v3.0 will fix all the issues I'm sure, this is typical Microsoft.
Hopefully the end result will be to kick Apple into being a bit more innovative with the iPod. We'll see if a widescreen iPod touchscreen will appear soon enough though. And that could prove to be a massacre - a 4" screen vs. a 3" screen is far more appealing than a 3" screen vs. a 2.5" screen.
Yup, they get dropped off in high-guman-traffic areas for Friday and Saturday nights. They're plastic, no technology. You piss into the recepticle (a pee pod has a receptible on each of its sides) and the piss accumulates in the middle in some form of tank. Then they're collected in the early morning. The recepticle is large enough to vomit into too.
Very Cheap. Low-tech. Sucks if you're female though.
One of the locations is outside the public toilets, which are locked at night to stop bum banditry and drug abuse (the toilets have needle bins).
From some of the animations on the product website, it looks like the software can actually procedurally generate the textures at render time. Hence the 'aging room' videos, as the parameters to the procedural textures are altered subtley over time. I imagine the code must be running as a shader. A lot of overhead for a mere shader though, most games would simply pregenerate the textures at load time.
That's what I do too. All searches are on Google (usually by the browser search field rather than going to the site) and I'll check out the Wikipedia article if it appears, whilst also having the benefit of a full search to peruse as well.
Sheesh. Use a Mac before commenting on it.
The default on a Mac is to NOT resize icons on the dock. That has to be set in the preferences. And what's this stuff about 'aromatically' resizing?
The shadow around a window is very subtle, but it allows the window to stand out visually from other windows. It is actually damn useful. Functionality improved because of this 'fluff'. It consumes very little resources because it's all done on the graphics card, and even a fricking Radeon 9200 can cope with it, hell a Rage 128 can probably deal with it. It is excellent design - it saves screen space - no window borders required.
Bad interface design is Vista. Dark. Heavy use of shadows, yet with MASSIVE window borders that have resource intensive blurring effects applied.
Oh wait, you're trolling.
OS X 10.4 had code to allow for resolution independence, but it wasn't enabled. I'd guess that it is a definite for 10.5.
OS X has been using the graphics card to composite the desktop for several years now, hence OS X's smooth animations and subtle drop shadows. I have never seen 'desktop tearing' on a Mac for years.
Expose can be activated with F9 (all windows) and F10 (application windows). You can then use the cursor keys to choose a window, and return to activate it. Command-` switches application windows, so you don't even have to use the mouse to activate that download window to see how it is going. I've found OS X to be far better with keyboard use than Windows, and far more consistent between applications.
OS X 10.5 should have the full Quartz 2D Extreme, which is disabled in 10.4. That will move more of the interface creation onto the GPU. Vista is slightly ahead here, although it hasn't been released yet so actually it isn't a valid comparison.
I've found that any effect in Mac OS X will aid functionality (apart from the drop effect in Dashboard). Windows has always had effects for the sake of it, like 'expanding menus' or 'fading menus' or whatnot. Iconification shows you where to click to unhide the window. Hopefully Vista will use effects for the sake of improving functionality and increasing usability.
I'm glad that Windows works for you, but before you mouth off against Mac OS X it would actually make sense to use it for a while and learn about the technologies it incorporates.
And wasn't OS X 10.0 or even 10.1 out by the time XP was released? So comparing against OS 9 is a bit rich. Admittedly 10.0 was a turd, but it did lay the foundations that Vista is now only just catching up on. It will be hard for Vista's murky interface to compete with the 6 years of tweaking OS X has had, as another comment said. It takes time to get these things right, and I guess Vista will only start looking professional sometime in 2010.
That's if they log the requests - given that they're a Norwegian company, they have some pretty tough privacy laws to content with.
I expect that it will depend on the terms and conditions in the end, and that they will say 'we will not log or use your data in a user-specific manner (not even AOL style 'user == number' obfuscation, hehe), however we may use it to compile statistics on accesses to phishing sites', which could prove quite useful in anti-phisher court trials.
It's no different to IE7 or the next version of Safari. The best way to check a website is authentic is to check the URL against a blacklist and then tell the user in big red text in a way they'd be retarded to ignore about the threat. I do think it would be better to download the blacklist to the client and resync it often however.
How do the Firefox add-ins, IE7 and Safari 3 handle anti-phishing?
a range of CPUs that, currently, loses out to Intel's Core 2 processors in both price and performance
No, AMD have a range of CPUs that lose in terms of performance only, however AMD's prices have been adjusted so they aren't losing in terms of performance/price. Barely, admittedly.
And in terms of price only, AMD are winning there. The cheapest Core 2 Duo, the E6300, is $180. The X2 3800+ is $150. Beneath that are tonnes of single core Athlon 64s and Semprons that make Intel's cheap P4 offerings look lame. If you are spending under $150 on the CPU on your system, then AMD is your best choice still. That probably accounts for the vast majority of computer sales.
Intel win out when it comes to the high end, because AMD don't have a competitor there. Of course, if you like buying >$500 CPUs then I'm very happy for you, and you will enjoy the vast performance of an E6800 and know it beats everything else out there. Personally I think it is a poor investment to buy cutting edge.
Kentsfield vs. 4x4 will be six of one, half a dozen of the other. We'll find out halfway through November.
It's amusing how people think that AMD are going to die because for a year Intel finally will have a better product. For these people AMD has been dying for years and years, yet AMD has only got better and stronger, in markets that matter such as servers. AMD have a superior platform, and that matters here. Who cares about a slightly faster FPU when you can plug in a SIMD co-processor that is 10 - 100x faster? The future? No, they're already available.
ATSC is a committee, not a standard. If you hadn't noticed, we're talking about the standard.
Do you really really honestly believe that in 1982 ATSC came about with MPEG2 and HDTV.
Because Wikipedia can be wrong does not make it always wrong in this case. You just make yourself look like an idiot for ranting against Wikipedia. At least I gave a source. Where's yours? Oh, it's Wikipedia.
You said no facts, just unverified assertions. Fact: DVB-T was in use 3 whole years before ATSC. Logical Conclusion: DVB-T as a standard came first. That or ATSC is very poor and wasn't suitable for most world markets.
In fact from the Slashdot stories back in the day, I remember when ATSC came out and people were wondering why the US was adopting a completely different standard to what the rest of the world used, a standard that had bad properties in urban areas that DVB-T didn't have. The conclusion was that the US was again persuing a 'them and us' route to their standards.
In fact, no converters seem to exist at any price
Hmm, digital terrestrial receivers cost from £25 in the UK, and have been available since 2002 (prior to that the receivers were supplied with subscription digital terrestrial tv that went bust). I can easily see the price reducing further in the next couple of years, and the addition of a short range analogue NTSC transmitter to let multiple deprecated TVs view the output. Okay, the UK ones are SDTV digital, but that is all that is required for the mass market free-to-air system; HDTV free-to-air should not be an aim in the near future in any country if they want to keep the cost low.
It must be a £10 thing to add digital reception to a TV these days, I don't understand why this isn't a mandatory feature on all new TVs.
And six to eight TVs - wtf? Unless there are 30 people living in the house, WHY?
And new TV stations usually end up on Satellite and Cable services, at least they do over here in the UK. We only had 5 analogue channels anyway, and you were lucky if you got all five at the same time. There was never room for new channels on analogue, digital enabled new channels for us, hence the massive uptake. The jump to 30 freeview channels for those of us who don't need subscription TV was great. Indeed I get 150 free channels on free-to-air satellite, but they're 70% shopping channels and late night softcore 'phone a girl' porn services.
As a technical note, the £25 DTT receiver utilises a 250MHz PowerPC 405 processor. Neat.
ATSC was started first, and Europe just decided to chose something entirely different
It was?
We've had digital terrestrial television in the UK since the late 90s, recalling the failed ITV Digital system that died and is now the Freeview system.
Hmm, what does Wikipedia say. Oh look: "ATSC coexists with the earlier and more widely-used DVB-T standard"
Get your facts right instead of going on an Anti-Europe rant.
It's free speech to be able to say the truth about anything without fear of punishment. It's free speech to praise/criticise the government without fear of punishment. It is free speech to say your viewpoint ("I hate Jews", "Immigrants are benefits scum", ...), even if it is wrong. It is not free speech to incite murder. It is not free speech to tell blatant lies about someone or something. In the UK it's doubly illegal if you're being racist (although I think this is stupid, a crime is a crime, why give special consideration?! - discuss).
Since when was free speech about allowing someone to vandalise a memorial (in this case a web site) and incite murder against people? Quite clearly a crime was committed. The question is whether or not 3 years is a suitable amount of punishment for the crime (in this case 3 years will mean 8 months in jail and 10 months tagged in the community with a curfew and possible restrictions based upon the crime committed). That's what we should be discussing.
Even if they did prosecute, it does you know good once they'd messed with your database or otherwise hacked you.
It isn't hard to secure an online application against SQL injection. So there's no excuses for the developer to write 'SELECT blah FROM table WHERE field='$forminput';' directly in their code is there?
Your example should be about you going to the police station complaining because you don't have a lock on your door, not because you need a paid security guard.
Yes, I agree that hacking crimes should be punished more, but that doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to secure yourself and your property.
E.g., build and assemble in China, package in target country.
This does go against their direct shipping to the customer from the factory system they currently operate.
However the small packaging for the nano is a good first step. Also the turnover on Apple computer hardware tends to be less than PC hardware - people will keep an Apple running for a year or two more than a PC in general. Of course there will those of us running 12 year old SparcStations as print servers and old P200s as routers, but generally people replace PCs when the old one gets slow for whatever reason. Lower turnover means less hardware being recycled overall.
I read it on a forum somewhere earlier today, in fact it might have been in the comments to the Engadget article itself.
:)
I cannot validate the veracity of the statement sadly, I don't buy videos from iTunes, and the few bits of music I have from iTunes have been obtained via free iTunes coupons on bottles of coke. Me, a cheapskate?! Never
Apparently you can do the following in iTunes:
1) Remove 320x240 video from library.
2) Check for purchases.
3) Download 640x480 video for free.
So you aren't forced to re-purchase it. iTunes Store is just allowing you to buy a second copy, like buying two copied of the same album - something people used to do a lot, one for the home, one for the car.
On the other hand, it is wrong of Apple to be selling videos at a high resolution that are lower quality than the original low resolution videos. This situation is only applicable to some videos however - I'd hazard that one batch of videos was converted incorrectly, and Apple will have to re-encode the videos now they're aware that some of the videos are poor quality. If Apple don't re-encode the videos, then they deserve the hate they're getting if only because they're purposely selling a poor quality product. They should also allow people to re-download the re-encoded video if they purchased the poorly encoded video.