*embarrassed* I read them over but missed the data options mixed with the voice plans. About 6months ago I went over all of the options I knew about and was frustratingly disappointed.

Thanks for reading more carefully than I did. I'm looking to sign up with one of these guys after work today.

Maybe it's just me being picky and not a competition issue...but I rarely get close to 400min/mo. That's the smallest plan offered (unless I'm a senior) and I pay $39. I have a smart phone, but don't have a data plan (use wifi only)--but would love to have one. I think a data plan would cost another $20-30 (about $70 total before taxes).

None of those plans would really fit my needs. What I would prefer is similar to what I saw in London; a pay-as-you-go talk and data system. Nobody in the US has pay-as-you-go data and the pay-as-you-go talk stuff has weird rules where things expire at the end of the month or you get charged a dollar a day.

I'm willing to believe that I'm an outlier and one of the few who can look past that impulse to pay nothing up front in exchange for a contract and high monthly bill.

I can't remember the specific article I read, but hopefully the Loudness War is coming to an end because of the rise of digital streaming (and their normalization and other volume adjusting algorithms), but who knows, that could start a Dynamics War.

Wikipedia has some info on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war#2010s

Is this the one you type in the lock screen? I just found and read the article and it's unclear. If so, I thought the iPhone makes you wait longer and longer after consecutive failed attempts which would slow down a brute-force attack quite a bit. Also, I can't remember if it was an Exchange policy, a feature on the iPhone (or of Android), but I thought I remember seeing a setting that would wipe the phone after 10 consecutive failed attempts.

Steve Jobs said it at the WWDC keynoe when it was announced in June of last year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HP37O0horpY#t=6m44s
"We're going to the standards bodies starting tomorrow and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard."

Sorry for the YouTube link, I couldn't load Quicktime streaming here.
http://www.apple.com/apple-events/wwdc-2010/

In the larger and and more critical config files usually we'd validate and keep it under revision control. Unless it's writing out an ascii config file, it's hard to diff a gui or work with example configs. It would be a major pain to take a screen shot of every tab if it's as vebose/complex as you described (and even harder validating from a screen shot of an old config).

The gui can have niceties like drop downs for enumerated lists or auto-correct for formatting (such as phone numbers).

I find it kind of funny that HDR means the opposite thing in photography versus video games
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/7391/1244894383293.jpg (pulled from some old digg post)

Traditionally games render the world and keep it between 0 and 1 (zero being black/completely dark and 1 being white). HDR is computing values above and below and clipping so things that are blown out (like reflections and highlights) are super white. I think it was an update to Half Life 2 that first did this in a commercial game.

In photography, they take multiple exposures and stick them in to an HDR image. Then, they use tone mapping to convert it to an 8-bit visible image. Tone-mapped images are generally called HDR, even though that's a misnomer.

Roger Ebert asked the same thing (on page 4)
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/30/why-i-hate-3-d-and-you-should-too.html

I think there's a couple reasons. The first, and probably most significant, is nostalgia by film makers. They love the motion blur of 24fps. It helps evoke the "feeling" of film. Every film student I know either wants to shoot or convert their footage to 24fps. There is a noticeable difference. When you start increasing the resolution and frame rate, you lose motion blur and it starts to look like home video or video games (when generally don't compute motion blur at all).

Another big issue is the amount of light. When you have more frames in a second, each frame has less light to suck up. It's a big issue with high-speed film. Having sensors that are more light-sensitive is a fairly recent thing (combined with advanced noise reduction) and will continuously get better.

The stuttering is something cinematographers keep in mind when shooting (or at least, they should). I read an article about shooting imax and they said the biggest problem was the stuttering. They're also using 24fps, but the screens are much larger. When you pan, the object could jump 2 to 3 feet per frame. They intentionally had slower pans to compensate. You noticing this is probably a side-effect of larger theatrical screen and larger tvs at home.

I've done work with HFH and I'm pretty sure "almost always" is an exaggeration. But, even if you're right, not all OSS is free labor. Companies like Red Hat pay lots of engineers. In addition, companies like the one I work for have contracts with Red Hat and pay them to implement new features.

Isn't that something a software update could take care of? I know it's not reasonable to expect development resources for a game that's been out awhile, but Bungie seems like a fairly large company that would have the resources to send a few guys to look at that scenario.