Posts by Herby 3058 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2007
TV's you know rot on the vine, and need to be replaced every few years. Isn't that why we had the big push to digital TV a few years ago. Fast forward a few years, and we have to get something obsolete to generate more sales of newer, better things.
Me? I still have 5 CRT based TVs at home, and they work just fine. Thank you very much.
P.S. CRT TVs still have the BEST contract ratio of any display technology!
Me thinks that the Chocolate Factory is trying to reverse the trend. It wants those nice paid ads to be before the release, not after. That way it can get the bug bux.
Predicting new movie releases success is a very iffy process. It might be a little bit easier with sequels, but you never know.
In any event, predicting pent-up demand for a product has always been difficult, and will continue to be. If Goooogle could predict where the demand is going to be, their crystal ball is better than mine. Unfortunately crystal balls just don't work, so predictions aren't there!
Good luck anyway.
Ground Zero
Maybe they can repeat this for the Apple Doughnut (whatever it is called).
Now, if they succeed in getting it named a foreign country so they can bring in all the overseas profits, they could pave the place with gold bricks!
He created an LLC to put on the event. Shield himself from the ravages of the Coastal Commission (which at times is VERY overreaching).
But if a $9M wedding is nothing, $2.5M is just a little less, and the price of doing business.
If the Coastal Commission didn't like it, they never should have allowed the event to start in the first place!
To remove the protective cover on the Lens when you are shooting forward. It might be hiding under the case you just bought. It really screws up ALL the flash pictures, but they look OK when you frame them.
Another thing: photography is an art like other things. To get it right takes LOTS of practice (and making mistakes).
Me: I'd hire some of the BEST photographers as trainers for the new found picture takers. They might impart some useful knowledge!
Now where was that Speed Grafic I had stored away in the closet.
Maybe the Foreign Secretary just wants to tell Ecuador something on the order: "We really don't care that you have him, but he stays there (in the embassy). Tell us when he goes outside."
It might cure lots of things. No need for police outside until things start to happen. Jail in any form works for me! I wouldn't want to be holed up in an embassy for over a year and keep going strong. Much less in a country like Ecuador!
Given that some of the small USB chargers that are posing as Apple ones exist (usually cost reduced by removing the hash filters!), this might be a real problem. The biggest problem is that the space for the "nasty" part is quite small. That being said, it could be reduced down to a single chip if its only function were to install a file on the "host".
Lots of $$$ needed for this, but some people (governments) had such resources! Possibly even the US government you never know (file detects Arabic script and goes further...).
Look, it may have already been done, and we just don't know about it!
I've heard of ICs (programmed ROMs) being ground up and used as asphalt filler. After all it is just a bit of refined sand and some Aluminum bonding wires. The plastic makes pretty good glue after being melted.
Yes, there are some things like this. I have heard of examples about Panasonic, Motorola, and Signetics just to name a few.
It seems that revenue people what the objects destroyed in order to claim a total loss. Either that, or they sell them off to surplus stores for pennies and claim the loss that way. Amazing what you can get a surplus stores these days. Some in "reasonable" shape, suitable for re-purposing at low cost!
Just try to find a house number with that one. My sister had an address with that number and was forced to change it to 668. It is kinda like the 13th floor which also has "bad karma" associated with it. The solution for 13th floors is to skip it, but apartments, you just change it to 12a (I've seen both!).
I will note that it is amazing what stomach acid will do, it is pretty caustic!
The object of Armies (as stated by a general a while ago) is to:
1) Kill people.
2) Break things.
All else is irrelevant, or aids in the task at hand. Sure there are several ways of doing these tasks, some "more humane" than others, but the basic tasks remain.
Consider your own body. It is continually at war with germs and other nasties. Disarming it (read AIDS) doesn't work, so we make up helpers (antibiotics) to fight the "war". Sometimes the drugs we invent can be harmful to the bodies "civilian" population (chemotherapy) but we soldier on. In the end we hope the good guys beat out the bad guys. Life is like that. Sorry!
Yes, Virginia, touch is here to stay. That is all fine and dandy, but when people sit down and want to do WORK they have no need for a touch screen which takes reaching for the large screen they are used to having in front of them. If you aren't holding the screen, touch really doesn't make ANY sense, no matter HOW much lipstick, mascara and gold plating they do to the operating system.
Those who have offices or cubicles who use computers use the mouse (or the occasional trackball) as the pointing device since it takes little hand movement from the keyboard. Maybe if Microsoft mandated that those who created W8 actually had to USE it on small screens and using touch they might figure out a different interface.
So, yes, fondleslabs and smaller devices exist, but work gets done with a keyboard, mouse and a nice large (1920x1200 pixel in my case) screen.
Pretty soon it adds up to "real money".
Put this in the category of a "tax", where AT&T (a modem test command!) is both the tax collector and the beneficiary of the tax. Yes, it will be raised. This is just a nice way to up the price. The problem now is that we've gotten used to it.
So, this just drops to the bottom line.
How about an "Orange", being the amount of information he actually downloaded.
So Mr. Mazkouri downloaded an orange of data.
To make things clearer, maybe define an "orange" as 1Tbyte, then he downloaded 1.6 oranges of data (units should be nice round numbers).
We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.
Then load Windows 8. All one needs to do is add a keyboard and a mouse (or take in some hand gestures) and you got a reasonable piece of kit.
Sure there is $$$ to be made doing games (more that the Movie industry I'm told) but I really don't want to be holed up in some dark living room watching stuff wander on my screen.
If I wanted a game, I'd get my old "Pong" game that I built on a circuit board (only a couple of chips) and entertain myself. It was OK then, and it is OK now. For more advanced stuff, a nice spacewar (on a pdp-11) like I saw at the Stanford coffee house in the early 70's. Otherwise, why bother. Sure there are lots of nice graphics, but Cinema is much more entertaining to me.
As for the name. Why is it called "One"? didn't they already have the first "Xbox" a long time ago. Seems that going from "360" to "One" is backwards to me. Maybe they should call it "Xbox Vista" or some such.
...get rid of the stupid "computer noise" that is injected while it "looks up" things, it might be helpful. I do know that SQL querys are a fact of life, but silly beep-boop-bleep sounds while you are doing it is terrible.
All of this gives new meaning to the quote "Watson come here, I need to see you", uttered over 125+ years ago.
On a personal note: Calling it by that name isn't the best thing in the world.
I like a nice tasty steak, with a nice baked potato. Heavy on the chives, bacon, and sour cream on the potato.
Vegetables? Not if I can help it (my wife has other ideas though (*SIGH*)).
If this was "ideal" restaurants would be out of business. What do you do for that nice "conversation over dinner"?
Maybe these guys are developing a version of their OS that WILL work on Nokia phones. They already know the hardware, so it won't be that difficult.
They could offer an "UPDATE" to the silly WP8 Nokia thing that Microsoft likes to have battles in weddings about.
Maybe this IS Nokia's "Plan B". You never know.
Less than 50 years ago, the first Martian "probe" was a "flyby" mission that took pictures to a tape recorder (for storage) and then sending the (monochrome, with two filters) results back here to Earth. That was the "state of the art" at the time (around 1965 or so). We really have come a long way since then.
Think of the technology changes in your lifetime. They are quite "fascinating" (as Spock would say).
Look, Apple and other companies didn't write the rules that were enacted by the various governments (much as they would like to). Instead they FOLLOWED the rules as they stand. Sure the matrix of rules was analyzed to find the lowest tax rates available, but that is what a company is supposed to do. To do anything else would be irresponsible.
If a government wants to generate tax revenue, it needs to look at the matrix and find out that (surprise) they get more money by taxing big bux at lower rates than by taxing less at higher rates. Here in the USA, we have this terrible tax rate (30%+) for corporations. If they reduced it to a more amenable rate they would get more money to the treasury, simple as that.
This was shown to be true when they reduced the tax rate on capital gains here in the USA. The lower rate for more $$$ to the treasury. Unfortunately our Big Hefe who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. thought that lowering taxes to increase revenue was "unfair".
"Socialism works fine until you run out of other peoples money" (ob British quote)
The skimmer is internal to the machine reading the card, and attaches itself to the logic circuity.
Why not just build a circuit board that takes the output of the magnetics and intercepts it before passing it along. Man in the middle style. The bad guys seem to have access to the innards of machines these days (there was a news story about a gas (petrol) station here that was compromised on its inside.
Still, a nice idea!
Here in the US of A the "self service" parking usually entails getting a ticket when you go into the parking facility, and then when you are about to leave, going up to a vending machine, and submitting said ticket and plying the machine with folding green paper with pictures of presidents and other elder statesmen, or a credit card. The machine dutifly records said payment on the ticket and the time, and you slip said (now validated) ticket in the slot at the exit gate and your car is now out of jail, and you are free to go.
Now if you don't pay, you don't get out of the garage/car-park, being trapped until you can find some attendant or just give up and ram the gate (they are usually pretty flimsy) and bust out of "car jail".
The alternatives are as I saw this last weekend, having a fixed price to pay upon entering a parking facility (it was up to $30/vehicle at the Rock Concert in Napa!), and the time was "unlimited". Of course if the car stayed overnight or was abandoned, a nice friendly towing company would take possession and cost MUCH MORE to get it out of "maximum security car jail" (aka impound lot).
Now where was that nice portable jet pack when you needed it!
These "ChromeBooks" are like dogs nibbling at their heels. Ignored at first but later VERY annoying. The ChromeBook described is a perfect "Wife's computer" for someone that just needs to browse a bunch and send out a few emails. Connectivity via WiFi is perfectly nice and the few extra features are available for the "tech of the family" (Me) to help out.
One of these is going to be MUCH better than a silly "Dance Card" (Surface) designed by the increasing insignificant company in Redmond, which costs more than twice than this model!
Good job HP (I seem to say this more in the past 6 months :-)
So Mr. Jobs outsourced his job. Looks like he learned business pretty early in his life.
Of course, it would be interesting to see a schematic of the 40+ chip solution to ponder just how it works.
Yes, I do like to program in "solder". I find it amazing how few people understand any facet of the language!
The lower the frequency, the less bandwidth us usually available. So, all this new 700 MHz stuff that is appearing from the old UHF TV channels won't have lots of capacity. They demonstrated 1GHz bit rate at 11 GHz, which is just about right. Assuming 8 bits per signaling element (good luck with that!) you still need 125 MHz of bandwidth to get stuff through. Finding that much RF real estate is VERY difficult at low frequencies as the pie is quite subdivided for all the users.
So, you have high frequencies, and there the path loss starts climbing in and you end up heating the air you pass the waves through. This indicates a higher power in BOTH directions which gets difficult in something hand held.
Bottom line: Good luck, you WILL need it!
Nobody got fired for buying Microsoft products.
Sadly this is quite true in the "business" world. It really doesn't matter what the costs are, a big company like Microsoft is considered infallible. They keep adding features to products and convince suckers (aka customers) that the product is necessary, even if they really don't need the latest upgrade. This cycle persists with every new release of Office/Windows.
One of these days, LibreOffice will have a NEW valuable feature that will catch the attention of an IT CTO or something "C" similar, and then they will latch onto it as being cool necessary to do their business functions. Microsoft will, of course, implement it in an incompatible way, but if there is enough delay between the "open" implementation and the Microsoft (closed) implementation that the "business world" takes notice, it might turn the tide. Until then all I can do is call the BSA hotline and complain that my software (Linux/LibreOffice) doesn't have a license key, and it is copied all over the place, just to see what they do.
Life goes on (*SIGH*).
Is SO easy. That's why we do it, and will continue to do it.
We know that Microsoft doesn't care, and never will, so we will be critical for quite a long time.
Get over it. We know Microsoft products are just an effort to maintain your monopoly, and due to all your tie-ins and non published "standards", we're stuck. Hell yes we are critical!
And yes, I use Linux as much as I can, even at work where they foistered a laptop on me (it had W7, and the first thing I did was load Fedora 17 on it).
I want my airplane time to be "Quiet Time" where NOBODY will disturb me. I can get one of those head covering pillows (I just saw it on TV) and get some (medically induced, or otherwise) shut-eye.
The difference between doing it "in-flight" or on the ground is of little consequence to me. If people need my input, they know I'm on the plane, and they can WAIT! Besides, most of the time I'm on a plane I'm on VACATION!
While this "concept" won't actually be a viable weapon, there is one thing you forget. As far as regulators are concerned, the "receiver" IS the gun. Barrels aren't considered as a "gun", and need not have serial numbers attached to them (they have other characteristics that are unique though). It is the receiver that is 3D printed and as far as regulators (ATF people) are concerned that is the heart of the gun.
Anyone (with money) can obtain a barrel quite easily. This has ALWAYS been the case. Couple this with a 3-D printed "rest of the gun" and you have a very workable device. Oh, by the way, VERY untraceable as well. The sales of gun barrels are not recorded, nor are they restricted in any way, so the net result is a nice multishot device that anyone can make.
This is like back in prohibition times when a kit of yeast, and condensed fruit juice was sold with a big warning "if you put these together and let it sit for a while, you could make an illegal substance". They sold lots of said kits. No alcohol, but easily made!
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