Posts by Blain Hamon 336 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
Make sure that when you take your lithium pills, they're highly monitored by the doctor so you don't get an overdose, as the effective level is close to the toxic level. Symptoms include slurred speech, tremors, coma, and kidney failure.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/002667.htm
But you're right. We can just make our electric grids to handle several orders of magnitude more power than normal with no cost or problem!
Good eye. It'd be 16Mw, an order larger than the wind tunnel. To charge 3 cars, which would be the 2.4Mw, then you'd need to call the CEGB grid switch control.
More importantly, if you want to charge 1,513 cars, you need 1.21 Gigawatts. And they don't even go back in time when they hit 88MPH.
Personally, I'm waiting for my car to be powered by Mr. Fusion.
You can see at 8:30, he calls it High Dynamic Range, and never claims it's high-definition. He also doesn't claim to have made it.
I'll wait until it's in third party hands before I believe any claims of whether or not it does a good job at high resolutions. It's worth noting, however, some factors that may make it easier for an iPhone to do the job vs a standard camera.
First, the images are likely lower resolution, so less to capture, less to process, and less error to be seen by movement. Secondly, the iDevice cameras on devices that can run 4.0 (And thus, 4.1) can handle video, so it's likely that the CCDs will be fast. Thirdly, the iDevices have enough RAM and CPU to squirrel away the images so that the next ones can be taken. Fourthly, the 600MHZ-1Ghz iDevice CPUs are probably much more powerful than a standard camera's. And lastly, MacOS (And by extension, iOS, even if end devs don't get access to it) can use the OpenGL GPUs for fast image processing.
Vs an iPhone 4, the iPod touch is missing the phone module, GPS module, the antennas, fancy backing, second microphone, vibrator, and mute switch. Also, don't forget that the iPod is using a lower quality camera and has a much smaller battery (No expensive GPS and 3G to support).
Given that the price difference in an iPad with JUST the 3G data chip is £100, not including voice phone hardware, I can see where it adds up quickly.
Instead, they take an old product, tweak a bit, keep the name to add confusion, and release. After all, a 12-year-old 233 Mhz PowerPC system with a 15" CRT and a 1 month old 3.6Ghz Intel system with a 27" flatscreen are both called iMacs.
Right. Mine's the one with the "How to tell the Late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro from a Mid 2009 Unibody MacBook Pro" list in the pocket.
"If you can't stop in time or go around them then you are driving *TOO FAST* for the circumstances (NB this is not the same as speeding because you could be below the limit but on a slippery road or in situations where visibility is reduced)"
Exactly. Why I slammed this example was because the way this was presented was such that it's likely that it'd give a false sense of security. Why drive slowly? I've got Fog Lights! Why be careful about turns with icy roads? I've got All Wheel Drive with Traction Control! Why take this freeway onramp slowly? I've got VW-Branded Computing! The article already demonstrated a scary amount of undeserved trust, with drivers reading newspapers.
I suppose it's all moot, and hopefully we'll get something that is actually beneficial, and therefore, won't be all attention-getting and thus never covered; to silently assist, not replace. No batmobile-esque autopilot, just sensors that might slow down the car in dangerous curves, prime the brakes and downshift to react quicker if something's ahead, or maybe assist the air bag AI to reduce false positives and false negatives.
Or, knowing car manufacturers, a hidden phone-home to alert the local dealer to pester you to come in for some expensive needed maintenance.
"Well, you couldn't imagine: after a few seconds, they already took the newspaper and read the news articles. So they trusted already the machine, which was great."
Actually, I could, because I've seen people do just as bad while still driving on the road, and there's been cases where people have thought cruise control did just that. It's really easy to gain misplaced trust.
Having been a tow truck driver, I've seen not just driver error but sensor failures (VWs are particularly bad for the brake sensor ), mechanical failures (VW locks are also bad), computer glitches (Ever had to disconnect the battery of a BMW or Buick to reboot the car?), etc, etc.
Problem becomes where you either cannot or do not override the system when the system fails. It's like the issue how antilock brakes haven't reduced crashes because people start relying on them in ways that balance out all the benefits. ( http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060927201332.htm )
Let's run the blind curve scenario again, but instead of a downed car, it's a tree. Now the driver not only doesn't get a warning, but will be less likely to take action when they don't get a warning. Too rare on the freeway? Fine, how about a person walking away from their downed car. Still too unlikely? Fine, in places where car safety is needed most, cars are grandfathered in, so most vehicles (Especially large expensive ones like big rigs) would be invisible to communications. Replace the nation's entire car fleet, you say? Sure. But then when a car stopped because the alternator died*, there'd be no power for communications.
It's a cute idea, but the car-of-the-future plans they were spouting only work on a closed and tightly controlled test track.
*This is something common enough that some auto clubs offer roadside alternator replacement.
From Dell*'s point of view, the streak isn't running on Linux, it's running on Android. That is, Dell chose the Android OS because it gets the app store, browser, and all sorts of goodies without any extra work. Were it not for Android, Dell wouldn't be using Linux, or BSD, or anything else where they have to supply the bulk of the work.
*I mean the side of Dell that sells consumer products. I imagine the corporate/IT/server side of Dell operates differently.
> Do you think you'd get away with telling MS that "It's OK I'll pay for this software eventually, but you'll just have to wait"
Dell does that to even HARDWARE. And the wait was made even longer in June
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/28/dell_payments/
The same Dell that sold known bad hardware
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/29/dell_optiplex_issues/
So yes, the Linux kernel has obligations. It's just that, well, Dell doesn't exactly honor obligations unless the lawsuit is more expensive.
I didn't notice the next week time frame, admittedly, but the key word the article used -what prompted my diatribe- was 'unveil', not 'ship'. Apple 'unveiled' the iPad months before actually shipping. Ballmer 'unveiled' the HP Slate at CES, and it's still not shipping. The Crunchpad was 'unveiled' as far back as July 2009.
Is Samsung going to make it possible to purchase the device in 8 days? In stores? WIll there be reviews beforehand? I would love to be proven wrong, but I am skeptical that next week will hold much more than the formal announcement, price and specs, and perhaps pre-ordering.
Anyone else getting tired of companies announcing their tablets months and months into vaporware territory? Kudos at least go to Archos that actually shipped a direct competitor to the iPad, and honorable mentions go to Acer's touchscreen laptop and Dell's oversized android phone.
But that's about only one tablet-ish-thing reviewed a month compared to the scads of announcements. Sure, it's great fun* to have reasons for more Apple-related flame wars. But for all the bluster, mentions of iPad killers sort of vanish once they actually ship and numbers come in, thus my mention of JooJoo last time.
So I say this to big multinational companies whom are unaffected by my opinions: either make awesome systems that truly, actually have the power to at least make a decent showing in sales, or stop announcing them ages before they ship. Actions speak louder than words.
*not actually fun nor great.
There's actually an interesting example of it in the States. A lot of cities are switching from incandescent lighting to LEDs for stop lights. In places like California, it's a nobrainer, and is very successful. In places like Chicago, however, they had to switch back to incandescents, because in the winter, snow would accumulate in the light ports and block light. Using incandescents there would melt away the snow, a useful side effect that LEDs did not provide.
However, I wonder about the energy efficiency of a 100W bulb vs a 12W light and a 80W heater. It still might be economical to have the LEDs because then each do what they're best at. That is, a light must be somewhere high, so the heat generated by the 100W is more likely to be lost through the roof, whereas the dedicated heater can be localized or part of central heating, where the heat can be better used and delivered.
> Open office is open source code, Sun/oracle/Star/GOD can't take it back.
I did a quick look at http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/lgpl_license.html for an example, and the LGPL there did not discuss patents at all. I am not a lawyer, yadda yadda, but suppose the following happens:
Suppose there's some patents that could apply to OO that Oracle owns. Or even makes some patents covering parts of OO explicitly. Users of OO are safe, I'd guess, but Oracle could claim that those that distribute a fork of OO are violating the patent because the fork is a different product. Since the LGPL doesn't mention patents, only licensing and transference of source code, all the vendors of the 'different products' might be called unlicensed violators.
And if Oracle were to discontinue working on OO, then all new versions of OO would be forks, and be targets. Effectively, an easy way to setup submarine patents with the results that was suggested.
Sure, the code can be seen, but with the patents in the way, it may be look, but don't touch. Please, please tell me I'm wrong.
> British satcomms firm Inmarsat was recently awarded a contract to supply the trial F6 swarm with constant broadband access via commercial satellites
So they are contactable even when out of line-of-sight from US ground stations or other military comms platforms by being in line-of-sight from non-US ground stations or nonmilitary comms platforms. British satcomms counts for both.
Dollars to donuts, it was that he was still logged on to gmail.com via cookies. And if it's on company hardware and through the company network, well, there'd be a huge paper trail at the router and remote administration enabled for IT purposes.
Given how aggressively Apple hunts down rumor mill leaks, I wouldn't be surprised if they stumbled across this while doing a scan for leaks to media.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/1521/saturday-night-live-disney-vault-vt
(Hopefully that can be seen across the pond) Okay, most of it was fake, but the HUAC bit was real, where he claimed various animators who were striking for better pay and unions were communists.
http://filmtv.eserver.org/disney-huac-testimony.txt
"MS should also worry about the segments they are alienating by become more Apple-like."
Sigh. I was going to have my usual flame comparing various UI elements, of Windows copying the Mac, but really, it gets old fast. It's a shame that people these days have never used an Xerox Alto, Canon Cat, Squeak environment, or any other UI that shows just how different a UI can be. Maybe then they won't consider 'we have the close box on the right and the system-level menu button on the lower right' as totally different and innovative.
I could drone on and do fanboyism and reinterpret the stats, but really, who wants to hear more of that, especially from me?
No, what I want to see is a virus or worm or other malware whose sole purpose is to modify agent identifier strings. Not even to make those XP machines to claim they're Macs or Linux systems. No, what I want to see would be news coverage like:
Net Applications reported that almost overnight, XP and Vista market share dropped down to single digits, while a sudden rise in Pants OS market share, using the latest "I Can't Believe It's Not Browser" client, version one point badgers.
Compare the image labeled 602 to the first screenshot of http://www.futuretap.com/home/whereto-en/
Okay, I'm an Apple fanboy, but even I can see this being a copy-paste. They didn't even change the layout or icons save the handshake! Can anyone properly translate patent-ese into English? What are they patenting, exactly, when one of the patents includes a screenshot of someone else's product?
What I want to know is, why wont IE 6 hurry up and die already?*
http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=3&qpcustom=Microsoft+Internet+Explorer+6.0
*Yes, yes, I know, there's still companies out there dependent on one-off ActiveX controls on their internal network, but guh. Even MSFT wants to get rid of that albatross.
But it's a difference between versions 5.1 and 7 of the same product. It's an incremental improvement but does not rewrite the rules. The start button's in the same place. The task bar (Now with icons instead of text) is in the same place, the windows are the same shape, close button's the same place, scroll bars the same functionality, etc, etc, etc.
I think that handwriting and speech recognition are red herrings. The iPad has no handwriting, save for writing some alternate asian keyboards, and the speech recognition is mostly by the wayside and is hardly even considered when it comes to the iPad. One could argue that even XP's speech and handwriting offerings are superior.
Price is a factor, bit I don't think it's the only factor. The entire thing seems of "Hey! They're doing what we've been doing for 10 years, but they're doing it different and succeeding! Let's keep doing what we've been doing for 10 years, but make it cheaper, it's bound to work!"
Tablets running Windows XP or 7 were out long before the iPad was even announced. And the plan is to freshen up Windows 7 on tablets, and possibly make them cheaper or smaller? If that were really the problem, wouldn't netbooks have kept iPads at bay, instead of iPads making large enough an impact to concern Ballmer?
Of course, if they were to use a UI designed for something that doesn't have a keyboard and mouse attached, they couldn't claim user familiarity or software base, so maybe it's willful ignorance.
I haven't fully read the docs, but it does look like they use public key encryption to ensure that the response is a valid one coming from Google, and that some of the API is compiled into your app. That is, it's entirely possible that the only part the OS provides is the HTTP connection. If the verification also includes an encrypted timestamp to thwart repeating the verification, even replacing the OS might be insufficient to crack it.
Of course, were you to modify the application, all bets are off already, open source or not.
With regards to the original post, I do remember the outrage on Apple providing an optional means for developers to make money, called iAd. But really, any Apple and/or Android article brings out the flames and the juicy juicy page hits, eh?*
I've got a T-mo G1 on 1.6** and Android has some things that still really really bug me. First, the fragmentation is very annoying: My less-than a year old android unable to upgrade to 2.0***, when two year old iPhones/iPods can run 4.0****.
On the Android UI, ennnh. It's fragmented even within the same OS. Sending a text message, the 'send' button is above the keyboard. In other apps, the fame functionality is in the bottom of the keyboard.
In the browser, there's no way to know if hitting the back button will exit the browser, go back one page, or close that window and return to another window. I've seen all three actions. Sometimes when you exit the browser and come back, all the windows are gone, and maybe even missing from history. Horribly inconsistent unless you've memorized how it functions and what state it's in.
In messaging, if you switched by holding down home, sometimes hitting back will take you to all threads, sometimes it exits the app. If you use Menu>More>All Threads, it appears you've exited the thread, but if you hit back again, the thread you've exited from reappears.
AC@15:57 is quite right; As a developer, follow the profits. I disagree with him that I am not sure that Android will be a stronger revenue source in the future. Or rather, that Android's marketplace will reach as many customers as things like OPhone and carrier customization fragment things. But that's the reason we don't put all our eggs in one basket.
*Not that there's anything wrong with making an advertising buck. By the way, is it me, or did El Reg's flash-based adverts go away?
**Yes, even though I'm an iPhone dev, because I want to give AT&T as least of my money as possible. I used to have a Sidekick, but MSFT killed that off.
***I'm aware that if I were to root and hack my system I *might* cobble together a 2.1 build. But that'd be like saying the iPhone doesn't have app store restrictions because you can jailbreak it.
****Technically you can install iPhone OS 4 on a 3G, but I'd heavily advise against it, which is a nice way of saying, 'it sucks on the 3G'.
This can all be done with ajax and such, and good adblocking or javascript disabling will foil it, yeah, but there's a bit of paranoia that says, "What's stopping the same logic from sneaking into Chrome at the binary level, where it reports even if you have adblocking or the page doesn't even use Google?"
So trying to not troll here, but Opera on the Mac is quite a rarity, and that gesture seems... 'odd' to put it charitably.
Heck, I'm tempted to retract my 95% to 99%... Tried using the macbook trackpad on Team Fortress 2 last night, and the only real drawback was that I couldn't trigger the uber while healing with the medic.
The only problem I have with the magic mouse and the mighty mouse before it was that there's no way to specify clicking both the left and right mouse buttons at the same time (On the mighty mouse, tapping both sides is treated as a left mouse click, which makes sense, but...).
True, this only becomes an issue in gaming, and I typically use a Kensington trackball anyways, but still, a 95% solution, but not 100%.
Or, specifically, when -[UIApplication openUrl:] was invoked with a tel url, version 3.0.0 would take you to the phone app, but not actually make the call until the big button was pushed. Versions previous to that would autostart the call, and versions after that would autostart the call.
I don't remember the reason why Apple changed back to autostarting the call. I guess it was because of all the autodialer apps meant to make it possible to one-button call from the home screen. People finding the phone not actually making the call might have considered this next layer of required user interaction a bug.
In the US, premium-rate is often known as 900 or 976 due to those being the area code and local prefixes, respectively. So in that area, I suppose the dialer could prompt before calling with a simple check. Is such a filter possible with UK premium rate numbers?
Full disclosure: Jeff's my boss, but I'm posting as myself, not representing Appcelerator or anything.
Actually, Jeff does do a lot of coding, and you can see it on Appcelerator's Github repo since you won't believe me. There's underneath an API, and then there's underneath an API. Since we're talking about threading, let's go into detail.
iPhone OS (Sorry, iOS) run on the mach kernel, which does offer a POSIX API, namely you can do all the pthreading you want. This is very low level, and when Apple talks about 'their' APIs, they don't mean APIs like these. Instead, Apple refers to its APIs such as Cocoa Touch, Core Foundation, Grand Central Dispatch, etc. Several of these offer different ways to do threading.
In the foundation classes, there's -[NSObject performSelectorInBackground:withObject:] and -[NSObject performSelectorOnMainThread:withObject:waitUntilDone:]. With NSOperation and NSOperationQueue, the OS does load balancing and pool management that you wouldn't get automatically with pthreads. Titanium uses both of these APIs. The only reason that Titanium doesn't also use Grand Central Dispatch, which allows execution of anonymous code blocks in different threads, is because we still support 3.1.x, which doesn't have the OS functions.
It's highly unlikely that Adobe's packaging would use NSObject and NSOperation's threading methods, because that is OS-specific and would be missing in everything but the iPhone and Macintosh systems. It's highly likely that they would instead use the underlying pthreads, which are present even in Windows.
So. If Apple tweaked its thread scheduling underneath NSObject and NSOperation APIs to better handle multitasking such as using Grand Central Dispatch and better manage their sue of pthreads, Adobe iPhone packager apps, if they use only pthreads and don't touch NSObject and NSOperation, may not see the benefit.
Or, in the short version, since "an API" may refer to NSObject or NSOperation:
If Apple tweaked its thread scheduling underneath an API to better handle multitasking, Adobe iPhone packager apps may not see the benefit.
See how that works?
Yeah, we've had projecting onto water for a while now. That's not what's novel about it.
What appears to be the new whizzy thing is the timing with multiple layers such that you can control which plane of water the light reflects from. That is, it's allowing a previously 2D-only projection system to be multiplexed into something 3D. And that's pretty darn neat.
Sidestepping the arguments above, I do have to question the reasoning of the group's name and attitude. Do they expect to be taken as a serious security group by their peers?
A name that intentionally confuses seems to be one more of parody or roguishness than of professionalism. My first thought of it was of Cult of the Dead Cow, whose acronym of CDC intentionally refers to the Center for Disease Control. With being 'spurned' in the name, do they intend to have any impression of impartialness or lack of bias? In declaring that they won't be beholden to outside pressures, how will they claim to be a part of the system?
Flaws do need to be brought to the public eye, but this requires a quality of delivery as well as content. I fear that any serious progress that this group may try to make would be undone by Microsoft simply announcing, "We do not respond to threats and intimidation by rogue hackers." Regardless of the truth of the matter, the label may stick due to how this group presents itself.
Is twofold. One, iFixIt is a mac/iPhone/Apple device repair company. Being able to take apart a device is really helpful in being able to repair it. Second, they sell replacement parts and tools. This is good publicity for them, without doing annoying commercials or trolling for links.
There's a couple of tells to determine the internet's origins.
First, the name and lineage comes from ARPAnet, which was named after the US's Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Second is the IP4 allocation blocks, seen at http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/map_of_the_internet.jpg
Note how the first dozen or two /8 subnet blocks are companies or government organizations that are based in the US.
Third is the domain naming, which is why typing in .gov, even while in the UK, will instead lead to a government in the US.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, while doing a lot to advance the internet, is about 20 to 30 years too late to be a founding father of the Internet. Founding father of the World Wide Web, yes, but we're too technical to get those two confused, right?
I'm usually the last to be on MSFT's side, being an apple fanboy and all, but five days? Even ignoring how slow MSFT (and Apple) have been to patch flaws, five days is by no means a timely fashion.
Even assuming MSFT was able to find and fix the bug instantly, there's lag involved in regression testing to ensure the patch doesn't adversely interact with the numerous permutations of setups out there. There's lag in getting the word out or to wait till Patch Tuesday. There's lag involved for sysadmins to download and find time to test the patch themselves. There's lag for actually being able to deploy the patch onto all machines.
This was not 'Here is your notice of the exploit.' This was, 'By the time you can even look, much less solve this, I'll have already released the exploit into the wild.' Yes, it bothers me as well that MSFT made yet another security hole, but two wrongs don't make a right.
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