av500

Are there seriously people that used Megaupload as their sole and only place to store their data? What if there was a fire in the server room? Or some MU intern typed rm -rf /?

yes, I tried to pick my title accordingly

my biggest gripe with QR codes is that the built-in camera apps on smartphones dot not scan for them by default. Instead I have to hunt through my installed apps to find the "barcode scanner" or whatever.

Why can't the default camera recognize a QR code, either in preview or after taking the picture?

now we should wait to see the Indian media industry quadruple their revenues because suddenly all the pirated content is being bought now....

but the problem is that you do not know what is signal and what is noise. If you have two pixels with correlated noise, you have in the extreme case s_1 + n and s_2 + n, so averaging that gives you (s_1 + s_2) / 2 + n. If the noise is uncorrelated, then it might be positive in one pixel and negative in the others, so it might cancel itself out. In the extreme case you would have s_1 + n_1 and s_2 + n_2 and (n_1 + n_2) / 2 < n. Thus you have reduced the noise.

"...And in good light, visual noise is virtually non-existent...." - well of course, but it's not about good light, it's about bad light.

yes, but binning pixels is inferior to averaging because the noise in adjacent pixels is correlated. (I had a nice paper about that, still looking for it)

so, while Nikon and Canon are still not there at 41MP with full frame sensors, Nokia did it with a tiny phone sensor? if true, they should drop making phones immediately.

I still remember the hype around the (5MP?) camera on the N95 back then. Even the Nokia published samples were horrible, but the press made it sound like that was the best camera phone ever...

with so much noise per pixel that they are forced to bin 7 pixels together to produce a final 5MP image....

So Mozilla's fully open "Boot to Gecko" will power the carriers walled garden "fully closed" wet dreams?

it might still have e.g. a binary wifi driver, not many of these are fully open either...

I have only anecdotal evidence from people that are masochistic enough to compile their stuff natively, I prefer to cross-build.

It takes "ages", but that is mainly due to the very slow mass storage speed that current ARM SoCs feature. Mobile phones and development boards like the Pandaboard use SD cards as mass storage and SD cards can be very slow when not used for typically linear read/write operations in your digital camera

There are very few hardfp benchmarks that really compare just this feature and leave the rest of the system identical. E.g. comparing Debian armv5 with floating point emulation vs Ubuntu armv7hf of course yields a huge gain, but that mainly is not due to the fact that floating point values are now passed in fp registers.

If SW relies heavily on passing a handful of floating point values in function calls, it should be rewritten to use NEON/SIMD on ARM - and then all you pass is a pointer to the data, regardless of the calling convention. And once you move to writing the mission critical stuff in assembly, you can chose your own calling convention for subroutines as you see fit anyway.

there is no need to compensate end users for lost data as the MU terms of service explicitly ruled out any such compensation...

Agreed, nobody did, but everybody is screaming bloody murder now it seems...

most likely the data hosting companies were not part of the whole DoJ takedown operation, so for them it's basically like any other client who stops payments....

Only legitimate users who did not keep a local copy of their files will lose their data...

Unfortunately Google cache has stopped serving the MU terms of service, but this link still has them: http://www.scribd.com/doc/78876728/Megaupload-Condiciones-de... and there it says:

"No Warranty

You expressly understand and agree that: (a) your use of the Service is at your sole risk. Megaupload Services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. Megaupload and its suppliers, to the fullest extent permitted by law, disclaim all warranties, including but not limited to warranties of title, fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability and non-infringement of proprietary or third party rights. Megaupload and its suppliers make no warranties about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of our Services, software, or content; (b) Megaupload makes no warranty that (i) the Service will meet your requirements, (ii) the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free,(iii) the results that may be obtained from the use of the service will be accurate or reliable, (iv) the quality of any products, services, information, or other material purchased or obtained by you through the Service will meet your expectations, and (v) any errors in the software will be corrected; ..."

I have HTML5 enabled in Youtube, yet I still cannot watch most of the videos because they are served as Flash only. So why is Google pushing Webm when their top video site does not make use of it?

Megaupload terms of service:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:sn3wCcf...

Whoever stored files there and had the idea they were "safe" should read point (8) of the above...

I stand corrected

Part of being so cheap might be that the main SoC is subsidized by Broadcom. I have no problem with that, TI is doing the same for the Pandaboard (http://www.pandaboard.org)

In other words, software is successfully running on a CPU, this is news?

Vendors have to make sure they build phones that they can sell, the phone being simply $15 cheaper won't do that. Apple sells more 4S than 4 and more 4 than 3GS, so it cannot be that the price is the only decision point

There is no official source on that which I could quote. But it is what I have been told by people involved.

There is another aspect, a lump sum of 5-15$ per unit might look like a lot of money for M$, but over a 2y period thats not much. All that such a deal would do is to make the phone a bit more expensive, same as if another earthquake hit and some parts like CPUs or RAM became more costly. Carriers would easily swallow that for subsidized phones. All the search revenue, App store revenue etc. would still go to others like Google. And most important, the customer would be lost to M$ - If M$ wants to take a significant market share in mobile, collecting royalties on Android is not the way.

Most of them pay nothing at all. Samsung, HTC and LG made a deal where they agreed to make a few Win7 phones in exchange for patent freedom from M$. Part of the deal is to still claim that they are paying royalties in order to uphold this FUD. M$ hopes that this way they will make some money via Win7 phones.

Look at B&N, they are fighting M$ in court because they cannot make a deal like the phone people did.

reading that makes me wonder how open source projects existed at all before GitHub...

GitHub exposes the once private forks that people had lying around on their HDDs, so I count that as a plus.

As for developing open source in a collaborative way, that goes much further than just a git infrastructure, there's mailing lists, patch reviews, roadmap discussion etc... exactly like in ye olde days

Just that e.g. HTC and Samsung and Acer don't pay anything at all, they just promised to a) also make Win7 phones and b) tell the world they pay royalties.

Since LG was a Window Mobile shop in the past, I guess they did the same...

Ah yes, I can imagine moving a pot to the side and the thing asking with a popup:

"I detected you moved a pot, would you like me to set up a new cooking area? Confirm|Cancel|File Not Found"

both went with Android, and I think they did the right move..