
Matte! "Matte black", goddammit!
231 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Aug 2007
The public would be unhappy if the Navy hanged them, or spent boatloads (heh) of money locking the pirates up for enough time to really matter. Really, what alternatives are there? If you want to change this one, start campaigning for the hangings.
You may find that rather more games have demos than you previously expected. But those are on Steam as well. Chalk that one up for having a parallel delivery system for both demo and game. For non-Steam games, it's not easy to build a game that has DRM and is written to be delivered on a disc that is always accessible, then can trivially be adapted to run without that DRM off of data downloaded and saved, and that CANNOT be extended to the full game by adding in the missing content copied off the disc by others and downloaded to a hard drive.
Geo- and media-specific licensing of other media ancillary to the production of the main media (as with the "pictures behind the panel not licensed for outside UK above") is something that was excusable a decade and a half ago, but for contemporary productions, it's just short-sightedness. Any contract over the matter can be be worded to specify additional payment at a later date in the event of overseas use of the primary programme.
That's pretty much the problem at this point. It's been an entire year of a major competing handheld system released after everyone's been pretty dry for some time, with a major new "wow" feature. Maybe it's of debatable necessity, but it's at least New and Different, while the the Vita's a serious and practical evolution of the platform, without anything really new. It's also competing against dozens of smartphones with a wide variety of applications including games, tablets with a wide variety of applications including games, and e-reader devices that support a wide variety of applications including games. And pretty much anyone that can afford to have any of those has at least one already. In order to do *well* in that kind of a saturated market, a new entry needs to have a reason to sell to someone that can afford the money and attention to a *second* (or third or fourth) device, not being able to rely on customers well-disposed to the Playstation milieu and looking for *a* device to do portable entertainment things.
MOST people respond to a bit of drink by becoming more accommodating, more forgiving, and more likely to stay quietly in their seats and pass the time in a slightly garrulous fuzziness. Some small number of folks don't respond that way or cannot stop themselves at one, two, or three, and those are the ones that make the news.
Especially since a Federal judge so recently ruled that videoing police at work IS covered by 1st Amendment protections (the freedom of speech and press one), even if John Public is the one doing the recording. There just has to be a reasonable assumption it is in the public's interest to know.
Really, though the merits of THIS PARTICULAR decision are thin, if you dig up the post in question, you'd suppose the decision was made on the merits of Ms Cox being an idiot and she should be fined the $2.5 million for an undefined number of assaults on grammar and egregious Abuse of Capitalization. I cannot help but think that were I in the position of the judge and had I been thus forced to read and reread Cox's writing, I'd be disinclined to rule in her favor from the start. It's a good thing I'm not a judge, I suppose.
The usual challenge to "factually accurate" is to in fact prove that the "factually accurate" is factually inaccurate in some sense as part of the libel suit. But apparently Mr Bigwig COULDN'T prove that any of the things blogged about were materially wrong, and was therefore required to fall back on intimidation and "deep pockets" attacks.
Another reason companies buy back shares is that part of their compensation plans include the offer of discounted shares to employees for purchase. In order to sell shares at a discount, the firm has to have shares to sell. Which means they have to issue new ones (not necessarily a convenient thing to be doing regularly) or buy them on the open market.
Save that keeping the old is often cheaper than retooling process. How do you think giant mainframes and COBOL have lasted this long? They work, they work the same way that they did last year and five years ago, and do so reliably enough that a Director of IT can swear in court that these results are exactly as reliable as those from a decade ago. There's a reason that unhooking people from old stuff is so hard: they depend on it.
So the recommendation is to set aside the custom-built applications, honed over decades to do EXACTLY what the business wants and needs, using processes that are difficult if not impossible to replicate in anything other than another custom application, which (if changed) will provide different results are require readjusting or retooling ALL the information handling and decision making downstream, if one doesn't get a new custom app written that works with The Cloud?
Good. That's my field.
Just rebooting your router may not be enough to get a new IP address. See, most depend on some variety of DHCP, which essentially takes the device address of your router, associates it with the IP address it assigned to your router, and if your router has not been off-line long enough for the lease to have expired while the router was down, will by preference assign you the the same IP address again. So, rebooting your router MIGHT get you a new IP address, but there's good odds that you'll get the same one again. Stuff just works better that way, including the ISP's own caching, which gives them an incentive to do this above and beyond that's how all the networking course recommend it behave.
One might say even say that by shunting their voice transport onto IP, while still making it look like a phone and calling it a phone, they have effective *handed* the FCC authority over their data trafficking and had they wished to leave the FCC out of it, they would have been well-served to leave the services ENTIRELY distinct and separate.
It may be a challenge to check millions of messages for copyright-infringing works, but it's a lot easier to check messages for "Newsgroups: .*alt\.binaries" and not pass those. Considering how much machine resources get used per useful MB of non-infringing binary files, that's probably not even a bad idea; there's little reason to hide the source of files that are perfectly legal to distribute. And there's nothing in there that says text posts have to go either, which means what I use USENET for doesn't change.
It's a combination of "online multiplayer" (to a distant server), "local wireless multiplayer" over zero-config ad-hoc wifi, "sleep-time automatic updating" mostly in the form of content delivery (they've been sending new videos and some free games/reference tools to handhelds lately), and "streetpass", a optional promiscuous avatar exchange thing, which influences gameplay in some software. There's some really cool possibilities within the latter two passive communications things, but they haven't been taken advantage of much yet, in the same way that the VR games using the onboard stereo camera haven't been either.
Indeed, the solution is to site windfarms along motorways. The noise had got to be quieter than a few hundred thousand Diesel horsepower roaring past per hour.
(Frankly, I find the faint noise and elegant motion of wind turbines soothing and encouraging. Once the property around them has been sufficiently devalued, I'll happily move there.)
Chrysler solved this problem in the 1950s when they were testing-marketing their turbine car. by using a regenerator. This used exhaust heat to warm up incoming air to the turbine, which not only cooled the exhaust to safe temperatures, it also increased the fuel efficiency in the process. I'm not suggesting that this car does that, but that it's not an unfixable problem...
I really miss the days when the patent office required you submit an exemplar device along with the application. So many seem to be of the "1) idea 2) some magic happens here 3) expected results" pattern that doesn't really say anything about how one gets from the idea to the results...
'cept there's probably still going to be a filesystem, still going to be documents in folders, still going to be a hierarchy of directories.
The thing that really amuses though is that once again, Jobs is completely ignoring the work done by his predecessor that DID EXACTLY WHAT HE'S CLAIMING VICTORY FOR NOW, back 20 years ago. Oh, it didn't go the cloudy thing, but the no-file-system, documents-and-apps-can-share-data thing? That's all Newton territory.
The simple answer is that there are no LTE iPhones available from any provider. Apple does not make them. No Apple phone has LTE radio kit inside. There is no announcement of support for LTE on iPhones, and only some speculation in the press that it may be coming sometime in 2012. The "4G" in the iPhone branding is the same G as the iPod 5.5G, and has precisely nothing to do with LTE. Are we clear on this yet? Okay then.
I've got one of the LTE Thunderbolts, and Verizon has been thrashing out LTE in the city center not far from here, so I've actually had the opportunity to do some real-world playing. Well, almost real-world: the LTE network is clearly not serving a big load of customers yet since LTE phones are in limited availability and very expensive (about twice the cost of non-LTE phones with otherwise similar feature sets), but also is in what amounts to "beta testing" since the beginning of the year, with a real light-up scheduled for next month. Typical indoor performance with the thing being used as a wi-fi modem has been getting about 2-3 Mbs upload and 8-10 Mbs download. That's nowhere near the potential maximum to be sure, but it bears noting that this is STILL faster than most DSL or cable-modem performances available, and pretty much within 70% of the top end of internet service available to consumers at any reasonable price. That is, top-end l33t g4m3r cable-modem speeds in the same area typically get about 1.5 up and about 12 down, and for approximately twice as much money as I'm being charged for my mobile plan.
It has been what? 10 years? Something like that.... since the last time thin clients were all the rage. we'll be back to autonomous workstations again by 2017. Early part of decade: terminals/thin client/web-apps. Late part of decade: autonomous computing/client-server architecture
"I dont remember MySpace having all this privacy hoo-har..."
MySpace A) didn't much provide access to your data to random other developers. 2) It never gave any pretense that one was expected to provide any real information for the bios, which is completely the reverse of what Facebook's thing is. The entire point of Facebook is being real, though it occasionally goes about it in somewhat dubious manners, c) MySpace was also such an obviously oozing sore that no one really expected any security, reliability, or even bare functionality from the site. If anything worked, it was mostly by guess and happenstance, and anything someone else did could come along and break the page at any time anyway. Only idiots would possibly take it seriously.
I'll tell you the point: single-shot triangulation. One picture and you get not only the image, but a *measurable* image, in which you can tell what something looks like, how far away it is, and using that distance, exactly how big it is, for everything in the scene. A laser rangefinder can tell you how far away one thing is, not all of them.
Why bother? HUGE market (there's a ton of iOS devices out there), relatively mature and stable SDK, luxurious developer support, and a your delivery and payment mechanisms part of the package. And, given that you're developing something that's actually fairly novel and doesn't offend too many people, the chance of Apple taking a long hard look at your application are pretty slim.
"Following the loss of details relating to 21 passport applications in May 2010, IPS took immediate action to cancel the application information. We are confident that customers were not subject to any risk of identity fraud."
Knowing what I do about what goes onto passport applications, pray tell how exactly does any of that information get "cancelled"? Do those involved get new names and birthdates? New tax IDs and eye colours?
The revenue is definitely going to swing toward the higher end of the revenue estimates, if not more. The low-end product (4-bay, USB or Firewire, no ethernet) has a street price typically around US$350-375, whilst for anything with a network port, one tends to see prices on the far side of $600. And that is for the bare box. Populating the thing with Drobo-certified mechanisms will cost another $200+ per drive when you buy them in bundles of (minimum) four or more 1TB drives, You'll add another $100 per drive for 2TB mechanisms, again in the shrinkwrapped block of 4 or 5 drives. Roughly, you'll spend $2000 for 8TB of NAS with Drobo-certified storage in a desktop housing. (Rackmount kit costs extra.)
If one assumes that even one sale in ten is to a suitably paranoid customer that actually wants some assurance that thing will work and a support contract to go with it, the average sale is going to be much closer to $800 than $600, even at the discounts that make up the channel profits. These things are NOT cheap, even if they work flawlessly, and may not even be cheaper in the long run than time spent on call-out work by a contractor that knows storage reasonably well.