I'm pretty sure this is just an update to the "60W equivalent" Phillips bulbs that Home Depot has been selling for about $30 for some time now. I have several - two in a kitchen overhead fixture, and a couple in cheap "torch" lamps and a couple of Ikea floor lamps. They really have a nice warm color and they dim reasonably well with my Insteon dimmer, though they still don't dim to "architectural" levels (10%). The range of dimming works well in my kitchen though.

These use UV LEDs. There is a glass envelope which is coated with phosphor on the inside, and the UV light excites the phosphor.

I just think they tweaked it a bit, as they were already just below the efficiency criteria for the prize.

Oh, yea, even figuring out how to contact Skype by email is a hassle. They have a web form for this. Only problem is, you have to be a Skype customer. Why, nobody who isn't a Skype customer would ever need to contact Skype, right?

Catch-22.

Aside: pretty dismayed over how hard big companies try to hide from consumers these days.

Skype doesn't care. But maybe their new robot overlo.... er, Microsoft will.

A friend of mine started harassing me with text messages after he "found" an iPhone on the floor of a bar (no, seriously! no, not a prototype...) and I wouldn't help him reset it. (Actually I did - I said "Google it, it's easy".

I had to add a blocking service from ATT, but then he switched to bombing me SMS messages from Skype. So, I attempted to contact Skype to get it stopped. Ever try to contact Skype? Like, a live person on the phone? I never managed to figure that out, but at least I did manage to get some clueless person at Skype to email me.

It turns out there is a standard for stopping unwanted SMS messages from 5-digit codes. (The messages came from Skype's 5-digit code). You text back STOP and they are supposed to stop sending you SMSs. Guess what? Skype doesn't bother.

I went around and around with the clueless rep over email, and they basically told me "we can't do this, contact your carrier". I tried to explain that I'd already talked to a rep from the carrier, and they told it was Skype's responsibility to do this. I tried to tell them that their "STOP" system was broken/nonexistent. They just never "got it".

Catch-22.

Airprint, like so many Apple services, is a specific configuration of open-standard protocols, APIs, etc. that they've given a a proprietary name to, while trying to convince customers that they've created something unique and proprietary.

I guess they've judged more of their customers value "unique and proprietary" over "universal". And that those who value the latter "get the joke".

Other examples of Apple "proprietary" technology that isn't include FaceTime and iMessage.

I find it amusing when some "hacker" discovers how to "break" Apple's latest "proprietary" protocol. (i.e. they RTFM, just like Apple.)

They do throw in little gotchas like, for example, the additional fields they require in the service announcements for Airprint. You can bet that if an open standard has the capability of adding arbitrary data fields, Apple will use and require them.

Oops, sorry, slashdot ate my XML:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
  <name replace-wildcards="yes">Samsung CLP-550 on %h</name>
  <service>
    <type>_ipp._tcp</type>
    <subtype>_universal._sub._ipp._tcp</subtype>
    <port>631</port>
    <txt-record>txtver=1</txt-record>
    <txt-record>qtotal=1</txt-record>
    <txt-record>rp=printers/CLP-550</txt-record>
    <txt-record>ty=Samsung CLP-550 Printer</txt-record>
    <txt-record>adminurl=http://colossus.local:631/printers/CLP-550</txt-record>
    <txt-record>note=Samsung CLP-550</txt-record>
    <txt-record>priority=0</txt-record>
    <txt-record>product=virtual Printer</txt-record>
    <txt-record>printer-state=3</txt-record>
    <txt-record>printer-type=0x801046</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Transparent=T</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Binary=T</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Fax=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Color=T</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Duplex=T</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Staple=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Copies=T</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Collate=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Punch=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Bind=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Sort=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>Scan=F</txt-record>
    <txt-record>pdl=application/octet-stream,application/pdf,application/postscript,image/jpeg,image/png,image/urf</txt-record>
    <txt-record>URF=W8,SRGB24,CP1,RS600</txt-record>
  </service>
</service-group>

You just need a properly-configured service file for avahi. There are a couple of fields that are required for Airprint. For reference, here's the printer.service file I've been using. The URF and PDL text records, as well as the tag are needed to keep Airprint happy.

    Samsung CLP-550 on %h
   
        _ipp._tcp
        _universal._sub._ipp._tcp
        631
        txtver=1
        qtotal=1
        rp=printers/CLP-550
        ty=Samsung CLP-550 Printer
        adminurl=http://colossus.local:631/printers/CLP-550
        note=Samsung CLP-550
        priority=0
        product=virtual Printer
        printer-state=3
        printer-type=0x801046
        Transparent=T
        Binary=T
        Fax=F
        Color=T
        Duplex=T
        Staple=F
        Copies=T
        Collate=F
        Punch=F
        Bind=F
        Sort=F
        Scan=F
        pdl=application/octet-stream,application/pdf,application/postscript,image/jpeg,image/png,image/urf
        URF=W8,SRGB24,CP1,RS600
   

I haven't seen anything yet on this scenario: what if you AREN'T a Facebook user (yes, there are a few of us) but you're tagged in pictures? (Facebook users can tag non-Facebook users). Will this feature suggest that friends tag you when you appear in new pictures that they upload?

If so, how would a non-Facebook user opt-out?

Of course this problem starts with the ability to tag non-Facebook users, so it's not a new intrusion - it's one that's existed for some time.

You're being too helpful. The email system is broken, and has been broken since the start. The problem is that anybody can put any email address they want as the return or reply address, whether it belongs to them or not. There's no verification of identity or "ownership".

It's not your job to fix this. So, delete it or put filters in place to do that automatically when possible.

Only if it gets overwhelming you'll need to take some kind of action. I once had a situation with my live.net domain (now owned by Microsoft) where a spammer thought that live.net email addresses would look nifty on spam for "live girls" phone services. Enough outraged recipients emailed the return address that it created a problem not just for me but for my ISP, which got flooded for a day or so to the point of degraded service until they could put filters in place.

I was able to track down the culprit with the help of a C|Net news story offering a monetary reward, a helpful hacker-type, and with the cooperation of the call center that provided service for the "live girls" line. Amazingly, the end result was not just the discontinuance of the spam, but two anonymous money orders in the mail (I think totaling $900) that was supposedly the disgorged profits of the spammer. The operator of the service claims he hired some guy to publicize the service, and had "no idea" he was doing so via spam. The call center gave the operator 24 hours to resolve the situation, threatening to disconnect the lines.

Aside from that, there was once an ISP at live.com (pre-Microsoft), and many users mistakenly entered their email address as live.net instead. For a time I would helpfully email correspondents telling them that they were using the wrong return address. And too many people just didn't "get it" and got hostile. It got to be enough of a bother that I set-up an auto-reply. But the auto-reply just got me bounce messages more often than not compounding the problem. So, I wound up just dropping messages addressed to live.com addresses on the floor. Which is probably the best thing for you to do.

With a few exceptions (Google App Engine as suggested elsewhere being one) "The Cloud" is nothing but one or more VMs that you can start/stop/scale at will and pay for only what you use. Have you even looked at any of the "cloud" implementations?

If you can't manage one VM, how are you going to manage a dozen?

I do think Windows is a poor choice, but if you are locked into that, you can certainly get Windows VMs on cloud providers.

As for "VM vs Cloud", yes, go directly to the cloud (which of course is just a VM.) That is, if you KNOW you need to scale, don't go to a VM provider and then switch later to a cloud provider. Just start with the cloud provider so that you only have to learn the tools once. So, for example, pick Amazon over Linode.

I wonder, though, just how important head or eye tracking is? When you're viewing an iPad, I'd think that your head and eyes are pretty fixed. I noticed that in the demo, it was the iPad that was moving, not the viewer's head. Of course, that might just be because that's the best way to shoot a demo video - we might get seasick if the camera was moving around to mimic head movement!

But, given that a typical user isn't likely to move their head around while viewing an iPad, why not simply use the gyroscope (and possibly accelerometer, as well?) to track the movements of the iPad itself? Perhaps that would create the effect well enough, without the processing overhead of image processing.

What took Google so long? I've been waiting for this feature for YEARS. It is obvious, as are a number of other not-so-difficult-to-implement features that Google would have implemented long ago if they were truly trying to meet user's needs:

- Classify "type" of site - retail merchant, manufacturer, blog, parking, professional association, amateur enthusiast, personal, etc. etc.

- Allow users to select the type of sites to include in search results. If I'm researching a product, I don't want to see retail merchants (yet). I might want authoritative results from the manufacturer, reviews from major publishers, etc. I am constantly frustrated when trying to do research on a subject WHERE THERE IS NO PRODUCT INVOLVED and getting nothing but retail stores and link farms.

- Allow users to filter over-all based on type of site.

- Ban sites (what Google just implemented).

- Allow user to control whether other user's bans influence their search results.

- Third-party ban lists. Some (most?) content-blocking software allows this. e.g. different groups rate site content and make their lists available as a kind of plug-in.

- The ultimate user control - let USERS make use of demographics. Maybe I want to see the results ordered by the most popular results with republicans/democrats/Armenians/teachers, age 40+, etc. etc. etc. I suppose Google is already doing this for me (IF I also had GMail, and IF I logged-in to Google...) but *I* want to be in control of this, not Google.

Sigh. Now I have to seriously consider logging-in to Google for search. Don't really want to, though. It's a carrot, but not much of a carrot.

Did you know that the very first 6502 layout had an unused space reserved for an electrical outlet? No, not an electrical outlet on the chip, silly! An electrical outlet on the wall of the designer.

I was writing the software for a firmware-based gasoline pump based on the 4040 when the Mostek 6502 was announced. The pricing and power were a huge breakthrough - we could now afford to use an 8-bit processor instead of 4-bit, and the chip was way easier to interface. We arranged a visit to Mostek and came back with a prized pre-production chip with the lid soldered on. We met Chuck Peddle, and he showed us a prototype of the KIM development board. We also took back with us a 9-track tape of a 6502 assembler (written in Fortran) for installation on the local university's timesharing system, which at the time sold time to the public.

We also met the chip designers and saw the original hand-drawn layout for the chip. No automatic routing software - just drawing on a huge sheet of paper on one wall of one of the guy's offices. There was actually an area of silicon that could not be used because there was an electrical outlet on the wall that they needed for something in the office, so they just didn't draw on that part. The finished design was then rendered in Rubylith, and we were shown a "cell library" which consisted of a set of large drawers with various circuit elements pre-cut in Rubylith.

Since the KIM was not yet available, we built our own development system - first wirewrapped, and later a set of circuit boards, using 44-bit edge connectors and defined a bus We let my friend Rene use the circuit board layouts we had, and he did some additional boards himself, laying down black tape on mylar. We were given a monitor program that would allow us to load paper tapes produced on a TTY connected to timesharing system and do some debugging.

It was a really fun and easy chip to program, and I worked on several other firmware projects using the 6502 over the next few years. I did some 6800 as well, but always preferred the 6502.

To clarify the iPhone situation: the initial reports (on MacRumors) were from people inspecting their billing reports and apparently seeing nightly uploads at 2AM. This varied - mine were around midnight, and perhaps had to do with timezone. Most reports were 2AM, though.

So, I set-up to try to catch the packets. There was not yet any indication that the traffic was going over the cellular network exclusively - just that "something" was being sent nightly at 2AM and people were suspicious - while they slept, their phones were uploading SOMETHING.

I set out to capture it, assuming that while the phone was on my wiFi network, it would route the traffic over the WiFi. But I never say any traffic, other than when I was actually using the iPhone for data.

Based on that, we concluded that some traffic must be being sent exclusively over the cellular network. Unfortunately, snooping on that takes more sophisticated equipment than a smart switch on your LAN, and I don't think the traffic was ever identified.

This would be a case of dejavu for iPhone owners - if there were any that had switched to Windows 7...

This issue came up a while back with the iPhone. Users world-wide on different carriers reported a similar issue. I don't think it was ever fully resolved, but the consensus seemed to be "aggregate billing". That is, the billing system might be aggregating many small sessions during the day and reporting them at the time of "collection" rather than the actual time of use. That is, people were seeing data being billed during times of day when they KNEW they were at home or the office on WiFi, but perhaps it was just when they were out of the house and reported later.

Alternately there was a theory about "statistics" (what kind?) being sent that are always sent over the carrier network.

Like I said, never fully resolved. I set up my smart switch so that I could monitor outbound traffic, and never caught anything definitive. Dunno if anybody else ever figured out what the traffic was.

BTW, here's the current published latency for NASDAQ's OUCH interface. 98uSec.

http://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=inet

I should point out that the times that I logged circa-2002 included a round-trip through our server. That is, they were measurements from the time our software decided to initiate a trade against ISLD to the time we received and processing a confirmation message indicating that we had bought the shares.

The NASDAQ figures quoted above are from the customer's network port, throgh NASDAQ's equipment, and back to the customer's network port. (I assume measured at the NASDAQ facility.) So, it's a significantly shorter path.

So what do we take from this?

- Linux can do ~100 uSec trades today.

- Linux and MS-DOS could do ~100 uSec trades several years ago.

- The additional latency of a customer-side trading system of Windows-2000/MFC several years ago was probably much less than 100 uSec, since the total round trip was in that range.

- .net might suck. Or maybe just un-talented programmers.

The fact that we aren't see 50uSec or 10uSec trades today is not surprising, given the exponential growth in volume...

I suspect that OUCH is still the undisputed king of low-latency execution.

Furthermore, NASDAQ's volume is very significantly greater than the LSE's, and OUCH-entered orders represent a significantly greater proportion of NASDAQ's total volume than LSE's "dark pool".