Posts by PikeyDawg 53 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Aug 2010
Network security or even air gapping does not ensure protection against external threats (see STUXNET), much less internal.
Agreed that is ridiculous not to lock down the firewalls, but that only gets you so far... which really isn't far at all. Proper security has to happen at all levels.
The IR transmitter wasn't mentioned here but for me, of the new/unique features in the S4 that is the most interesting for me.
A universal remote app that can control any TV in the house regardless of the little ones throwing the actual remote in the toybox/kitchen cabinet/under the couch/etc... not to mention the fun that could be had remote controlling devices in other circumstances.
Much easier than setting up a Pi as a web enabled IR blaster....
...which made almost the exact same demonstration 20+ years ago with a similar nonconductive (proprietary?) liquid.
File this in the flying car category (also featured on that show)... If there is going to be immersive cooling mineral oil is the only solution that has seen real action.
A tank-treaded grass annihilator with a reel/cylinder mower in front... all exposed like something out of a 1980s horror movie. Obligatory... if you make a mower this bad-ass you have to produce a Terrafirminator-style commercial for it.
There's that, or you could go a little more nancy pants on it and make it a hover mower. With adequate edging around the lawn, a robust inflatable bumper on the mower, and an adequately random control mechanism (say, a blower/pusher that randomly rotates to push in a new direction once it detects a stop) you could just let it bounce around the yard with no real intelligence or remote control required. We could call this one the ADHD version.
Beer, because all men deserve a nice cold one when mowing the yard... even if it's just watching a robot do it on our behalf. After all, someone had to turn it on, right?
I own copies of most of those already
: /
That said, I stand by my overly verbose treatment for Pearl Harbor 2 directed by Uwe Boll... I think it could be the next MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus.
Happy Friday all - cheers!
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Taggart (Steven Seagal) a former secret agent who moved to Hawaii to surf and practice Zen - realizes he must finally avenge the murder of his Japanese fiance Miku (Paris Hilton) and his near death at the hands of Miku's father Admiral Yamamoto (Jackie Chan), who had been "dishonored" by their interracial relationship.
He commandeers his friend Abraham Lincoln Johnson's (Chris Tucker) boat to chase the Japanese fleet... but Johnson does not let his friend or boat go it alone and joins up with Taggart making an unlikely team... the straight faced Taggart and "jive-talkin" Johnson.
Taggart is informed by the President of the United States (George W.) that Yamamoto's battleship had split off from the fleet heading east. They don't catch up until just outside of San Francisco.
They sneak aboard under cover of darkness to find only a skeleton crew. Johnson is injured in the fight. Taggart confronts Yamamoto - who thought he had killed Taggart years ago - and avenges Miku in an epic Kung Fu battle.
The injured Johnson realizes the ship is loaded with explosives and informs Taggart of the "explosive situation". Taggart radios the President, who tells him Yamamoto planned to kamikaze attack the Golden Gate Bridge!
The ship is locked on course, full steam ahead. Johnson offers to stay, but Taggart improvises a time delay fuse, carries his friend to their boat and they escape into the sunrise. The Japanese ship explodes, just shy of the Golden Gate Bridge and morning rush hour traffic.
Cut to a ceremony at the White House where the President honors Taggart and Johnson. After discussing Taggart's refusal to go back into service with his staff, the President gives the go-ahead to start working on "that nucular thingie".
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Travis Taggart (Steven Seagal) - a former secret agent (they didn't have Navy SEALs pre-WW2) who had retired to Hawaii to surf and practice Zen meditation - realizes he must finally avenge the murder of his Japanese fiance Miku (Paris Hilton with dyed black hair) and his near death at the hands of Miku's father Admiral Yamamoto (played by Jackie Chan), who had been "dishonored" by their interracial relationship.
He commandeers his friend Abraham Lincoln Johnson's (Chris Tucker with a slight Jamaican accent) hot-rodded fishing boat to give chase to Admiral Yamamoto and the Japanese fleet... but Abraham Lincoln Johnson is not the type of guy to let his friend - or his boat - go into danger alone and joins up with Taggart (Seagal) making an unlikely team... the straight faced Taggart and the "jive-talkin" Abraham Lincoln Johnson. Hilarity - and singing - ensues.
Through his fierce reputation and years of secret service for the US government, Taggart is informed by no less than the President of the United States (played by George W. Bush) that Admiral Yamamoto's battleship had split off from the fleet heading East. Even with their hot-rodded fishing boat, they don't catch up with Yamamoto until just outside of San Francisco.
Under cover of darkness, they sneak on board the Japanese ship only to find it almost completely abandoned with just a skeleton crew. In the fight with the crew Abraham Lincoln Johnson is injured - leaving Taggart to go it alone. After making his way to the helm, Taggart confronts Yamamoto - who thought he had killed Taggart years ago - and finally avenges Miku in an epic Kung Fu battle.
During the battle, the injured Abraham Lincoln Johnson realizes that the ship is loaded with explosives and appears right after the epic demise of Yamamoto, clever tag line from Taggart, and follow-on musical number/dancing... to inform Taggart of the "explosive situation". Taggart radios the President, who has just received intel that Yamamoto - not content with his crushing victory at Pearl Harbor - was going to kamikaze attack the Golden Gate Bridge.
Taggart quickly discovers that the Yamamoto had locked the ship on course, full steam ahead. In typical sidekick fashion the injured Abraham Lincoln Johnson offers to stay on the boat to prematurely detonate the explosives - but Taggart will not hear of it. He improvises a time delay fuse, carries his friend back to their boat and they escape off into the sunrise as the Japanese ship explodes, just shy of the Golden Gate Bridge - saving the morning rush hour traffic driving by.
Cut forward to a small ceremony at the White House where the President honors Taggart and his friend. Being so moved by the black sidekick's devotion to the obviously awesome Taggart - and hearing Taggart imply that he probably couldn't have done it without him - the President (played by George W.) immediately repeals all racial segregation / inequality in the United States... and after discussing Taggart's refusal to go back into service with his staff, gives the go-ahead to start working on "that nucular thingie".
The end. Cue some kick ass 80's rock!
Re: Tim - "although i'll warrant it'd be hard-pressed to live up to Mr.Dawg's review"
Fair enough - I was being a bit of a fanboi there :)
Re: DrewC
In fairness, it might not be the easiest (Plex maybe?) MC around, and doesn't have a PVR built in (yet) like WMC, but it is the most extensible (people have integrated it with everything from Netflix to Game Emulators), most content-compatible (it plays pretty much everything you can throw at it out of the box), and cross-platform compatible (supported on Linux, Windows, OSX, and iOS - and has a free remote control app for Android) MC around.
With enough effort - nothing is free after all - you can get an experience that almost rivals the Kaleidescape systems - which used to sell for more than $30k. Not bad for free + hardware - and just to put it in context, I have it running on one single core Atom + Ion nettop that I bought for $180 - pushing 1080p.
Specific to the new release (Eden - v11.0) they've added real - not experimental - support for iOS (Apple TVs and iPads in particular), GPU hardware acceleration under Linux for AMD (this used to be limited to Nvidia), and MySQL for the configuration back-end (allowing you to stop a movie in one room and pick up where you left off in another)... among MANY other changes and improvements.
Looks like there will also be a version for the Raspberry Pi at some point in the future - they've already demonstrated it running 1080p video.
But put all the carrier and device specific crap into a VM host (think ESX) and let the mobile OS just be a VM.
That way the OS could be updated much more cheaply, and the hardware experience from an app standpoint could be more normalized.
All the carriers and hardware mfrs would have to worry about customizing is the host, which is by an order of maybe two or three magnitudes less complicated than an entire OS.
...but the concept of a single, portable, ubiquitous computing device has always been something I have been enamored with - from the Atrix to the Transformer.
Don't get me wrong, there are still use cases for real laptops and desktops, but if we're not already here, we're pretty damn close to where 90+% of personal computing can be done with the next gen (like the Tegra 3) mobile processors. Why do I need 5 different mini-computers (smart phone, laptop, tablet, smart tv, in-car navigation) that don't really sync anything when one core device, OS and set of information could power it all assuming, of course, the interconnectivity is available.
Considering the shite CEOs that I've seen in my day, making 2-3x this much *before* bonus... this is probably the one instance where I would say that *this* CEO might have deserved a higher pay grade
*raises a pint to Mr. Brown and ARM - all the best to the both of you in the future.
Is to waste ink and force the targets to buy more. I'm not sure about Fax machines, but if their ink costs are anything like my inkjet printer I can imagine this would be annoying.
That said, I'd be a little surprised if a company like Amazon was still doing a lot of paper-based faxing. Many companies have moved to Electronic Faxing (received by a computer instead of a fax machine, makes a PDF instead of a physical printout, etc) in which case this would be a pointless exercise.
but there is a company that put an SD video camera (HD version might be out already, if not it's in development) into a pair of sunglasses. How did the intro to the 6 Million Dollar Man go... "We can do it... we have the technology"?
Regardless... this is a triumph! Why did we climb the mountain? Because it's there! Why did we dive to the very darkest and deepest depths of the ocean? Because we could!
Congrats to all involved!
Does fostering/rehabilitating cats and dogs with the local Humane Society for 5 years count as experience?
I might have come across as overstating the case somewhat earlier. If so it wasn't intentional. As you say, "Pets are often quite tame"... I don't disagree with that at all.
What I was trying to get at is that most people, IMO and experience at least, don't know how to read an animal properly or how to approach and handle them in a severely stressed or injury situation. It is quite easy for someone to unintentionally escalate a situation with improper handling/approach, and sometimes in an injury situation - and definitely more so if the owner isn't around - there is just no getting around the fact the animal does not want to be touched and feels it needs to defend itself.
In such an extreme case - which I have seen before - proper equipment (like firefighters' jackets and gloves, welders gloves, blankets, catch poles, or a combination thereof) or *extremely* adept handling is required to administer medical attention. That *is* a rarity, but it happens... even well tempered animals.
Furthermore, from a legal and liability standpoint, AFAIK, there is no formal distinction between an animal bite (more specifically dogs as nobody seems to really care about legislating for cat scratches/bites) under duress vs. normal circumstances. While I don't see firefighters as the type to run around suing or filing complaints on everyone, in the end it's in everyone's interest that the firefighter have at least some basic information (if not training) about reading and handling animals and proper equipment to keep them safe *should* it be necessary for those rare and extreme situations.
...that probably will be how it works out. If the pets in question aren't incapacitated or otherwise amenable to the treatment in question, the firefighters won't push it and they won't get the treatment.
There's always exceptions though. To their credit, the fire brigade is made up of go-getter types and I could see some, at least, if not most giving up only as a last resort vs. first sign of "piss off and get the hell away from me"
Cute little cuddly wuddly cat or dog (potentially injured) has just been pulled out of a burning building by strange masked men/women and then said stranger goes to strap a strange device over their muzzle.
I don't care if we're talking Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, my dog Skip... an injured/stressed animal is likely to react badly to that situation.
Just hope they provide the firefighters with some training on handling animals and a set of welders gloves.
There is a cable company somewhere (US I think) that hosts their DVR functionality in a hosted, cloud-like infrastructure for their customers. Because of rebroadcasting rules, they have to maintain separate copies of every client's DVR'd show - so if they have 1,000 customers who DVR the latest "American Idol" (or whatever) they have to host 1,000 copies of the same show. Apparently it's still cheaper to deploy this streaming, "cloud" based DVR's than deploying traditional DVR's with local hard drives.
Seriously, there are already 100 f'ing ways to do Live TV, DVR and, more obscurely, access "Premium Internet Content" from one place (look up Tversity Pro - http://tversity.com/support/premium-websites/). They might be a pain in the ass compared to whatever sure-to-be-slick approach Apple is cooking up, but compared to paying $2/show for shit that was already broadcast for free off the public systems or on your already-subscribed-for cable... I'll go the cheap route any day.
What someone (maybe Google, you listening big brother?) needs to do is to compete head-on with the cable companies and let you subscribe to a channel with access to their scheduled lineups as, more or less, a playlist and everything on-demand post-original-broadcast in the very likely event that you miss a show at its original airtime. *
The only reason for live-anything these days is really sports (maybe business news if you're a day trader, or regular news if you just have too much time and joi de vivre). Nobody wants to plan their lives around when Desperate Housewives (or whatever you're into) comes on.
When you purchase cable, in the states at least, everything comes in these great big bundles. My last cable bill was, I think, in the neighborhood of $70/month for probably 300-400 channels and equipment (HD DVR, extra box or two) - probably $55 or so before equipment. Of those 300-400 channels, we *might* have watched 30 (if even that) on a somewhat regular basis, which would put us in the neighborhood of, at most, paying around $2/channel for what we really used... or $0.13 a channel if you average it out across everything ($0.17 if you include equipment).
Anyone who thinks this business model will survive a charge the same (or an 1,100% premium depending on how you want to look at the numbers) for a single episode vs. access to the entire channel through cable is daft. Unless you only watch a handful of shows (which, with two kids in the house quite fond of their Disney channels, definitely doesn't apply to me) this makes no economic sense for the customers... which is usually a pretty decent indicator for the viability of a business model.
iTunes has been doing decent charging reasonable prices (about the same as a real cd) for mp3s. In the movie rental business Netflix and Redbox are slapping the crap out of everyone because they somehow managed to provide content for *really* cheap compared to on-demand through cable providers who charge the same, more or less, as brick and mortar rental stores. Digital content can be successful but the problem here is that they're going in the other direction - charging more for their service where you provide the bandwidth and you purchase the hardware, than if you went the traditional route.
It reminds me of the article here (I think) recently about an online source for renting some obscure TV series that was charging more for the online rentals than it costs to buy the DVDs. Why would anyone sign up for that???
* I claim patent pending, copyright and for good measure a trademark on all ideas presented in this post and any derivative works thereof :D
I might have sounded like it, but I'm not a lens/kit snob I swear it! I guess at the end of it all, there were really two points (not hard and fast of course) I was trying to get at:
1.) The SLR system is made for interchangeable lenses. A lot of people don't take advantage of that, just like they don't take advantage of Manual/Program modes vs. the Automatic settings.
2.) You don't have to break the bank to use non-kit glass. The cheap little Canon 50m F1.8 (new for £77.44 on Amazon), for example, can do some really neat things when it comes to low light and defocus (bokeh). You can also rent glass from a number of providers.
All that said, and finally to your point... knowing your equipment and how to use it rules all else and you don't need the latest/greatest/biggest/baddest of everything to make a good picture.
A camera system is like a set of chef knives - buying a really expensive set will not make you a great chef... especially if you don't really know how to use that paring knife, boning knife, etc.
Sorry if this rehashes too much from the article...
Lenses are a *big* part of the image quality (IQ). In many ways they're more important than the back. When looking at the test images there are certain things that will always be consistent with a given back (ISO performance, white balance) but most of what people think of when they think of IQ (depth of field, bokeh, color rendition, sharpness) is either directly or in large part due to the lens.
So with the test images, keep in mind that if you're only planning on keeping the kit lens these are what your images will look like... but if you throw a prime, or a soft focus lens, or a macro lens on you'll be able to do some really wild stuff and get some great images (if you know what you're doing of course) even with one of these cheap backs.
In the US there are massive differences in cost of living region to region, city to city, etc as well. Right now San Francisco is the most expensive place to live. According to at this COL calculator (http://www.bestplaces.net/col/), I would need to make double to have an equivalent standard of living if I relocated there.
It costs a little vs the regular (free) version, but integrates with a number of online content providers and should work with XBox, PS3 and any DLNA compatible TV or media player.
I've been meaning to install and play around with it, but haven't had a chance to yet... so FWIW there you go.
We have a few clients using Goodlink to help them manage their non-Blackberry phones. Rumor has it they have an iPad management product in the works too.
I was a little surprised to see them pop back up again - way back when they were exclusively for Palm devices if I recall correctly.
...but in practice it's a pain. It is possible of course, but especially for OWA (where people could be checking in from other people's machines, kiosks, etc) this will make life hell for your users.
Not disagreeing per se, just thought you might have been glossing over it a little. As much as I hate the whole trusted root architecture, it does value.
...but I'm not even sure if this even qualifies as a rebranding in the traditional sense. This was a merging of two distinct corporate brands, both of which had well known underlying product brands (Opteron, Radeon, etc) and the two distinct product lines (CPU's/GPU's) are planned to merge very shortly into the new Fusion APU's.
Seems to me that ditching the ATI name is absolutely the right thing to do from a branding standpoint - it would just get too confusing otherwise. I guess they could have kept it for the discrete cards, but really why bother? AMD doesn't have deep pockets and managing extraneous brands isn't cheap.
Don't take this the wrong way, but we are not representative of general computer users. As much as we might think otherwise there are a significant portion of the users that don't even know what brand of CPU is in their machine much less GPU - to them an HP is an HP, a Dell is a Del, an Acer is an Acer, etc. All they really care about is if the machine can run the programs they need to use. Their GPU could be from Tesco for all they care.
Even then, with the way things are headed (call it fusion, call it an APU, call it integrated graphics) the whole concept of discrete graphics will become niche (high end gaming, graphics/CAD workstation) instead of general usage... and that's really the only area where the loss of the ATI brand will really hurt. The computer makers (HP, Dell, etc) and corporate buyers will know what they're getting, the average punter won't really care, and the gearheads who need discrete graphics will just have to get used to saying AMD instead of ATI.
So to those who say this is a bad move, with two major bands how would you propose AMD name their new fusion chips? "AMD-Bulldozer-ATI-Radeon APU Inside" doesn't really roll off the tounge or fit on one of those neat little stickers very well IMO.
Your comment reminds me of the people who ditch a perfectly good new(er) car for a hybrid to "Save the Planet" or bulldoze their old non-eco-friendly house for a more efficient "earth friendly" house that's twice the size.
My new file server will replace a 7 or 8 year old Pentium 4 Dell that makes the lights dim when I flip the switch (ok not really but it has a 400w power supply and I'm pretty sure there's not much wiggle room when I'm flogging it with a 5 hour Handbrake DVD encoding) - so it needs to be upgraded anyway and if I'm going to be leaving it running 24x7 I would like to get the best efficiency vs. necessary minimum level of performance when I build the new one.
That said, the Atoms are pretty much crippled for what I'm looking to do (like running Tversity). I own two of them (an HTPC nettop and a browse-the-web-and-watch-at-best-SD-video netbook) and there is a definite limit to what you can do with them. I don't think this upgrade will change that any.
Sorry but I should have mentioned that VIA had been in the low power CPU market well before the Atom - Intel didn't create this market as I implied, they just took it from rare niche to mainstream with the Atom.
/Steve of course - who else gets more credit for "creating" markets that already exist?
That's not just a feeling about the Atom's capabilities, and it's not an artificially restriction - it is most definitely designed to fit inside a pretty tiny box. Why else would they put screen size restrictions on it - or intentionally limit the I/O bus so you can't really get the full oomph out of that ION2 GPU in your nettop/netbook. Many of Intel's design decisions - like the ECC memory controllers mentioned earlier - are designed to keep their different processor markets tiered and distinct.
To their credit, low-power CPUs were an unexplored/unserved market when Intel created the Atom and I am quite happy with the two Atom-based machines that I own... but at the same time I do have a problem with the Intel's [Low Power] = [Cheap Crippled Shit] equation.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that to achieve significant power efficiency like the 8 hours I get with my netbook I will not be able to have the same performance as my watt-guzzling multi-core full-size laptop that might make it 1:15... but if AMD can deliver a significant improvement in the performance-to-efficiency equation vs. Intel, I can't imagine Netbook, Laptop, and non-ARM "Pad" Manufacturers would stick with Intel just because of market share.
Put it this way, at comparable price points if Mfr. A's AMD-based Netbook can run for 10 hours, effectively run more than one application at a time, and run HD video (flash or otherwise) - and Mfr. B's Intel Atom-based Netbook can run for 10 hours, runs sluggish once you run more than 2 or 3 apps at a time, and skips/stutters all to hell when you try to watch HD video... Mfr. A is going to sell more Netbooks. The real question here IMO is if AMD can deliver.
"MOON SHRINKING FAST - shock NASA discovery
LHC-spawned black hole gobbling it from within?*"
That was the best RSS summary I have ever read - for real.
I think it's worth mentioning that I too sometimes experience shrinkage. Imagine swimming in -153°C water, a little shrinkage is to be expected.
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