Ciommon sense says that if a GSM receiver can throw off enough EM noise to affect the ultra-high sensitivity receiver in your $20 walmart clock radio, then there's a distinct possibility that it might throw off enough EM noise to affect a receiver looking for a 5 watt transmitter halfway to GEO orbit. It could also, you know, put some noise on a radio that the pilots are using for air traffic control.
GSM receivers don't inherently do anything. GSM transmitters, however, rapidly power on and off their transmitter in a way that effectively creates a high-intensity transmission at a very low frequency (within the human hearing range) that is readily received and boosted by audio-frequency gain stages. That's a well-understood design flaw in the GSM encoding scheme.
I'm rather surprised that the iPads for pilots aren't 3G-capable. You could avoid all the GSM problems by using a CDMA (Verizon or Sprint) iPad with no SIM card installed, and the device would be a lot more useful when the pilot isn't in the air. And the Wi-Fi-only iPads don't have GPS receivers, which means they would be substantially less useful as an emergency backup in the event of a navigation system failure....
Although some of the prototypes at Stanford might have been based on GCC, to the best of my knowledge, all commercial versions of Coverity are based on the EDG parser. So no, they did not build their business model around a hacked version of GCC.
You're getting ripped off too! That's 400/300 = 1.33 a watt. We sell skids of 23 panels at 79 cents a watt. You can have any number less than a skid for an extra $5. And that's here in Canada, where things aren't exactly best-in-the-world pricing.
That was just based on a quick check of Google. I'm not surprised that you can get them cheaper than that if you look around a bit more than my fifteen seconds.:-)
To me it seems like the major motivation behind LLVM / Clang were to make a great open source compiler that wasn't GPL.
Sort of. Their motivation was to make not a compiler, but a compiler construction kit with lots of highly reusable pieces that could be used as parts of other software. The Clang/LLVM combination is a lot more modular, and integrates more easily with other software. Even if GCC were BSD-licensed, it is just not capable of doing half the things that Apple's developer tools use Clang for today (static analysis, code refactoring, etc.).
Unfortunately, that discussion ignores time-domain processing, such as pitch shifting. The more samples you have, the greater the precision of pitch detection (more FFT buckets for a given sampling period), and the more natural the results are likely to be without doing overlapping windows or upsampling or other tricks that potentially introduce additional artifacts. At least this has been my experience.
Also, although hardware-based digital filters are better than analog filters, as I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong), the steeper the roll-off in an FIR filter, the more latency you introduce into the filter, which still means you have certain limits that wouldn't necessarily exist in a software-based filter. I'm not sure how important this is in practice, of course.
So, if you have a 96 kHz recording, you'd better have "headphones that can accurately reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz" and whatnot, otherwise you're going to get distortion.
When you're talking about an analog component like a speaker, it acts more like a slow slew rate than distortion. The high frequency components basically just aren't reproduced if the diaphragm can't respond quickly enough. Instead of moving out by one unit and back by one unit, it might move out by half a unit and back by half a unit in that time, or out by a tenth of a unit and back by a tenth. And the farther outside the designed frequency range, the more the motion caused by that signal falls off until it isn't actually having an appreciable effect on the sound at all.
This is not to say that it has no effect whatsoever. It is entirely possible to cause damage to speakers by injecting a strong high-frequency component. All the energy that does not go out as physical motion gets turned into heat. But by distortion, I'm assuming you were referring to the sound quality rather than physical distortion of the voice coils.:-D
I looked into this myself. With the 30% credit and for a 3KW system the vendor was offering it was right around $30K using 280watt panels.
Then they were ripping you off severely. You can buy 300 watt panels for about $400 apiece delivered (you would have to split the order with one of your neighbors because of minimum quantity requirements, mind you). And a 3 kW inverter should cost under 2 grand, for a measly $6,000 in total materials cost. That suggests they were going to charge you a whopping $24,000 in labor costs....
Typically, the labor is only about 20-30% of the total cost of installation. With your numbers, it is a jaw-dropping 80% labor cost. Even in California, that's obscene.
Turning a program up in the "soft sections" is exactly what you should never, ever do when listening to a program.
That's not necessarily the case. Consider a classical piece with three movements. The second movement is soft and slow. The entire CD is almost certainly mastered so that the relative volume from one track to the next is preserved—that is, the soft movement will be significantly quieter than the other two movements.
If you are listening only to the soft movement, however, it is perfectly reasonable to crank up the volume so that you can hear more of the details—details that could easily be buried in the digital noise when listening to a 16-bit recording.
Speaking as someone who frequently does recording, your comment suggests that no one has done that test with classical music in a properly controlled listening environment using quality gear while giving the test subject the ability to control the volume arbitrarily. When you crank up the volume, the noise floor difference in soft passages alone should make the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit signal paths a dead giveaway, even for someone with moderate to severe hearing loss. It isn't even subtle. Of course, if the person doesn't turn it down for the loud passages, he/she will likely suffer hearing damage, but perhaps that's why he/she has moderate to severe hearing loss in the first place.:-D
The 44.1 vs. 96 kHz difference is more subtle, requiring someone with top-notch hearing (very rare), headphones that can accurately reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz, and 96 kHz DAC hardware that does not have a bandpass filter starting at 16 kHz. If you fail to verify even one of those requirements, you would expect no one to be able to hear the difference, because there won't be any difference.
Ah, but you're assuming that there's an advantage to being the actual seller/distributor. Except for books and movies, most of what Amazon sells, it sells by being a marketplace for other sellers. A bit of it is fulfilled by Amazon, but that's the exception rather than the rule as far as I can tell. If Google wanted to become a similar marketplace for other sellers, all they'd have to do is come up with a good, robust API for pushing content changes instead of doing content scraping, make their services available to any company who wants to do business in exchange for making Google's ads available on their site, and tie all of the technologies that they have already built together (including their payment system), and in a matter of months at most, they could have a marketplace that rivals Amazon's in everything except for the stuff that Amazon sells themselves.
If Google did that, it would seriously hurt Amazon because it would be cheaper for the companies involved, so they would very quickly end up having broader offerings than Amazon. And chances are, Barnes & Noble would join such a Google marketplace, teaming up against Amazon, so they'd probably get all the book and movie distribution taken care of without ever having to open a single warehouse.
You see, what Amazon sells—what makes them unique—is that they are a single storefront where you can get almost everything. And they're the only such storefront other than perhaps (Fl)e(a)Bay. If they had competition in that space, it would be a game changer. It might not bankrupt Amazon, but it would put a serious dent in their business.
I think the situation in Syria today has proven that some of our leaders are keenly aware of the past mistakes in arming an uprising against our enemies.
It's actually rather scary that our last two Presidential elections both saved us from what would likely have been one the worst foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history. Romney, McCain, and Hilary Clinton all support arming the Syrian rebels. I may not always agree with Obama (heck, I usually don't agree with him), but on this issue, we dodged a bullet the size of a freight train by electing who we did. Just saying.
Not really, the brick and mortar stores are at a disadvantage because they are brick and mortar stores not because of tax. I live in Virginia which has a 5% sales tax (I believe) and I don't even think of it when shopping, I just look at the price. If I can get it from Amazon or whomever including shipping cheaper than what Best Buy advertises it for, I will buy it from Amazon (or see if Best Buy will match which they will normal do and still pay the tax).
If we're talking about a big-ticket item, people might pay attention to that extra $100 in tax. On the other hand, most big-ticket items are also large, and involve expensive shipping, which usually balances out most of that advantage. By adding sales tax for online purchases, that actually potentially puts brick-and-mortar stores at an advantage cost-wise, because local stores get their products by the pallet, which ends up being much cheaper per unit. Online distributors either have to charge that extra cost or build it into the product price. Either way, the extra shipping costs end up costing almost as much as having "a store, with utilities, employees, and inventory every 10 or so miles" when you put a pencil to it.
What puts brick-and-mortar stores at a sizable disadvantage is the fact that they cannot feasibly match the selection of online stores. Even Fry's, arguably one of the better electronics stores out there, rarely has whatever it is I came in there for, so unless I'm buying something highly fungible like DVDs, I usually end up ordering whatever I need online. And these days, half the time, I don't even bother driving over there because I'm so certain that they won't have what I need. If brick-and-mortar stores want to compete with that, they need to provide some sort of paper or electronic catalog in each department showing the things they sell and helping you find them. And they need to have a list of other things that you can special order for in-store pickup and make it as easy as possible for you to do so.
Also, longer hours would help. Most people work during normal business hours. If your business is only open during normal business hours, your business doesn't exist to me. In fact, if you close before 8:00 at night, unless you're open on Saturday, you don't exist to me. For that matter, there's no reason for most places to be open at all during normal business hours except around lunchtime, but I digress. For brick-and-mortar stores to compete, they really need to be open 24 hours per day like online stores are.
Here's why: Suppose I decide, "Hey, I want to buy a couple more DVDs." If Fry's is open, I might run out there. But when they aren't open, Amazon is. Every time someone buys something online that they could have bought in your store had you been open, it cements the viability of online shopping in their minds as a better alternative to buying from your store. And over time, this erodes your market far beyond the handful of purchases that you missed.
When do I most wish Fry's were open? From about 10 at night to about 1 in the morning. That's when I've gotten off work, have gotten buried in a project, and realize that I've forgotten a key component. If they were open, I'd drive over and pick it up. But they aren't, so I lose several hours of potential work. Or if it isn't a component that I absolutely have to have right then, half the time I just order it online while I'm thinking about it rather than waiting until the next day to go to Fry's and see if maybe they have it. If they were open, I'd drive over. But they aren't, so they lose that sale. Statistically, I would make a trip to Fry's outside their normal hours about once every 2–3 weeks, so they lose a lot of business from me by not being open later. That starts to make Amazon look pretty good by comparison.
It really doesn't take that much extra effort to have a couple of employees around to maintain a store after hours. It might not balance out the extra revenue immediately, but it can help prevent the continued erosion of your business in the long run.
No it's not always the user's fault. Try doing this on an un-jailbroken iOS device.
Only the approach is different. There's nothing preventing you from convincing users to install a web browser that provides some customization features and displays extra ads in exchange. And if you can convince them to install it and use it, you now have adware that isn't really substantially different from adware that installs itself as a Safari browser extension on the desktop.
So yes, adware that requires a user to explicitly install it is always the user's fault. You can certainly try to make it harder for the user to make changes that they can't undo, as iOS does (and, to some degree, OS X does), but ultimately if a user is so naïve that he or she is incapable of recognizing scams, that user will eventually get conned, and there's really not much you can do about it besides finding and arresting the people who do the conning and punishing them harshly so that they will serve as an example to others.
Coming to think of it: the only president that doesn't need hanging was Jimmy Carter.
None of those presidents were deliberately acting against U.S. interest (except Nixon). Of course, if you allow yourself the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Carter also did some things that were highly detrimental to the U.S.'s strategic interests—arming the mujahideen, for example:
In 1979, he began arming and providing funds for the mujahideen in Afghanistan to help them topple their government out of fear that communism would spread to the Middle East and would dry up our oil supply.
After the Soviet Union fell (under Bush Sr.), the U.S. stopped funding them.
They started to hate the U.S. for supporting and prolonging the war but not helping build their country back up afterwards.
Portions of the mujahideen became what we now know as the Taliban.
The Taliban, in turn, trained and protected Al Qaeda, who hijacked American planes and flew them into buildings about 11.5 years ago.
The Taliban are also killing American troops in Afghanistan now with weapons that the U.S. government gave them.
Of course, Reagan expanded the program significantly, and Bush cut off funds and failed to take any actions to stabilize Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But Bush's decision not to interfere would not have mattered as much had Carter not interfered in the first place.
Then again, I can't think of any time when the U.S. tried to topple a foreign government that didn't come back to bite it in the you-know-where. One of the primary reasons why so many extremist groups exist in the first place is because the U.S. government helped tear down Iran's democratic government and replaced it with a puppet government under the Shah, which it supported for decades.
I'm not saying that we wouldn't have terrorism if the U.S. had not provided material support to people who would probably be called terrorists today, tried to set up puppet governments in Iran and other places, or allowed Afghanistan to degrade into a horrible state of civil war after the Soviets pulled out, but we'd likely have a lot fewer terrorists, and it is quite clear that the terrorists who did exist would not have as much money and would not be as well armed. If nothing else, these are lessons that future Presidents need to learn.
From what I have seen, I would say Apple is more of a Johnny-come-lately than any sort of "market leader".
Apple released the iPod Nano 6th generation way back in 2010, and it was frequently worn as a smart watch, so I would say that the three watches you mention are, in fact, the Johnnies-come-lately. Perspective is a funny thing.:-)
Amazon: Makes products that almost nobody wants to buy, sells mostly stuff that other people make, is a middleman that would collapse tomorrow if Google ever decided to get serious about having a products marketplace, is at least lately losing money or barely breaking even, has over $3B in long-term debt, and misses earnings. Current P/E: 714.
Apple: Makes products that almost everybody wants to buy, sells mostly stuff that they designed, is a middleman mainly for software (and cannot be easily replaced in that capacity, at least in iOS, without replacing the hardware), made $13.1 billion in profit last quarter, has $137B in cash and liquid assets (with no debt), and usually makes or beats all but the most absurd estimates. Current P/E: 10.25
In no universe does this make sense except perhaps in one where the stock price is the multiplicative inverse of earnings. To give folks an idea of how jaw-droppingly bizarre this is, you need to factor in the cash/debt position of both companies. If you subtract Apple's cash per share from their stock price, and you get about $410, which is about 33.33 times their earnings last quarter. If you take Amazon's last-quarter EPS of 9 cents and multiply by 33.33, you get $3 per share. If you then subtract their debt per share ($3B / 454.55M shares outstanding comes to about $6.59), then by that same standard, Amazon's share value would be worth a whopping negative $3.59 per share....
Note that I'm not actually saying Amazon stock is worthless—I'd consider it to be worth about $30-50 per share, using last year's annual EPS and a sane 30x multiplier—but that still makes it overpriced by a factor of 8 even if you ignore this bad quarter. And that's assuming that Amazon straightens up their act and starts being profitable again in a quarter or two. If last quarter's trend continues for two or three more quarters, I'd expect Amazon's stock to be delisted for falling below a buck by this time next year, and if that doesn't happen, it means investors are asleep at the switch.
It's overly simplistic, perhaps, but we already have a pretty good idea how to do it. It's just enough of a pain in the backside that nobody has bothered yet.
One requirement for security is a human being whose job it is to reduce fraud. For example:
If anyone attempts a password reset, require that they authenticate themselves either in person or through two or more unique and hard-to-forge factors. For example, email and a land-line phone is hard to hack. Email and a cell phone is trivial, so that's one factor. Email an an answering machine is weak. Insist on finding the person at home. Or an in-person visit.
Before you accept that $20,000 EFT, call the person up and ask if they're really wiring 20 grand to Nigeria.
And so on. The more automated things get, the more trivial fraud becomes, because there's no human being looking at it and saying, "You know, this doesn't make sense."
Another requirement is a nearly unhackable device whose job is to present a transaction to the user, that only authorizes the transaction in response to a physical user action. This cannot be securely done in software on general-purpose devices because the system on which they are built is simply too complex, and too likely to contain bugs that allow an attacker to compromise the underlying OS, at which point the software becomes untrusted. Think "small secondary LCD panel just above your keyboard that is controlled by separate CPU with very minimal software", and you're in the right ballpark.
However, even with all of these things, there's no such thing as absolute security. One rather ironic problem with security is that the more secure you make your system, the more complacent users get about security. The simpler something is to use, the less users are willing to think. And so on. This poses very real problems for any security in which the user plays any significant role in decision-making. In other words, even if you have the dongle or second screen or whatever, if the user gets used to assuming that they should click "Authorize" every time, you have a problem.
To this end, it would actually be moderately useful for OS vendors to periodically present bogus requests to their users as though they were real. If the user fails, they would get an email that says, "Thank you for transferring ten million dollars to our account in Croatia" or whatever....
This vulnerability is in a TON of software. Python 2.X (which most people are still using) doesn't even allow you to verify the CN without adding a bunch of code to make it happen yourself. http://bugs.python.org/issue1589 [python.org] Most APIs allow you to do it both ways, but I think it is time that they stop making it optional. If you want to use SSL, use it properly otherwise it isn't worth wasting your time with it.
No, that's a very different vulnerability. What you're talking about would allow any valid certificate for site A to pose as site B, which means that there is almost no security, but if you can determine whose valid cert is being used, you are likely to have at least some idea who was responsible for it. There's at least a partial audit trail, in other words.
This vulnerability, by contrast, is that any self-signed certificate for site A can pose as site A. The common name must match, but everything else can be complete garbage, including the signature on the cert. This means that there is exactly zero security and zero audit trail.
This is the sort of security I'd expect from someone who knew nothing at all about SSL, and who just thought it was a magic box that made things secure....:-/ Unfortunately, this class of mistake is painfully common, particularly in the mobile app space. Anyone who is considering overriding SSL chain validation really needs to read the following articles:
Given how many news reports we see about this sort of thing, I think it is clear that Android needs to do a better job of messaging the importance of doing SSL chain validation right. IMO, it's telling that Android's networking training area does not appear to even mention the need for security anywhere, as far as I could tell. In fact, I'm really not finding any big-picture documentation for Android networking at all. It reminds me of learning POSIX networking by reading the UNIX Socket FAQ. And this is why we keep seeing these sorts of news reports. Just saying.
Apparently, users are supposed to be "trained to recognise phishing emails and other Internet frauds". IT has enough trouble these days trying to recognise them, and somehow our ordinary users are supposed to recognise them too?
Actually, phishing emails are trivial for humans to recognize. They all have a single characteristic: they contain at least one link that the user is likely to click, linking to a site other than the site that the email is about. Any email that meets those criteria should be considered phishing (with the possible exception of innocuous things like "Rate this merchant", which are spam, not phishing).
They're hard to recognize programmatically because the software can't easily know that the email looks like an email from your bank. But once you have identified that it looks like it came from your bank, if the links go anywhere other than to your bank's website, there's a problem.
That said, ultimately, I blame the banks. They are, or at least should be, well aware that email senders are trivially forged, and they have not taken steps to sign their emails even though they are an obvious example of something that should be signed.
Further, banks should also know that users are likely to click links in email messages, so if they really want to prevent phishing, they should never include links in email messages. If a bank makes it clear that their policy is "We will never send you an email containing links to our website," and if users start getting emails from their bank that say, "Go to our website for more details," with no link, at first they might be slightly annoyed, but once they get used to that, an email from that bank with a link (any link) will immediately jump out at them as being dubious, which is exactly the correct response.
Unfortunately, the marketing people would have a cow, because they think that security is less important than being able to accurately measure the response to email campaigns using click-through rates. Ultimately, the MBAs and MarCom majors of the world are the reason that phishing is so easy, and that so many people are fooled by it every day.
It still solves the [I argue larger] problem of remote attackers having to crack a complex password. Even your example of Aabbaabbaabb1! is not obvious to an attacker and not easily cracked.
Not at all. These days, you have to assume that your connection to the Internet is compromised, and so is the computer that you're using to connect. Odds are good that a remote attacker has already installed a keylogger on your machine and doesn't need to crack the password. Any real security absolutely requires a robust two-factor scheme in which one of the factors has no Internet connection, in which a new authentication token must be generated for each potentially dangerous operation (e.g. associating a new bank account for money transfers), and in which that second factor communicates over a very simple, but secure protocol (no side channels, simple data format, protected by PK crypto, etc.) so that the device cannot readily be compromised, but can present enough information so that the user can adequately determine that the operation should be allowed.
For example, you might have a USB dongle that communicates using a simple shared buffer, and each request for authentication is signed by the company's servers, and is verified by the USB dongle. It then displays the text of the message (if the signature passes) to tell the user what he/she is agreeing to, and if the user chooses "Agree", then it provides a one-time-use token back to the computer so that it can pass it back to the company's servers, which then verify the signature on that token.
What is this the third time we had a story about it leaving the solar system? Some include the Oort Cloud in the solar system so are we facing hundreds of years of these announcements?
No. We'd be facing thousands of years of these announcements. From NASA:
Sometime before the year 2020, Voyager 1 will become the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause-the outer boundary of the vast region of space dominated by the solar wind and the sun's magnetic field-and reach interstellar space. In that sense, it can be said that the spacecraft will be able to sample what space is like beyond our solar system. (If we define the solar system as the sun and everything that primarily orbits the sun, however, Voyager 1 will remain within the confines of the solar system until it emerges from the Oort cloud in another 14,000 to 28,000 years).
Fortunately, in 28,000 years, its plutonium power supply will only be producing somewhere around 4 * 10^-94 watts, so I'm pretty sure we won't be talking to it by then.:-)
Try shaving a hundred Gs off your CEO's multi-million dollar salary and spread that around among your line troop positions. That'll fix your HR problem overnight.
No, it really won't. Well, it will, but it will increase someone else's HR problem. If the industry as a whole did this, nothing would change at all in the short term except that we'd have more money. And in the long term, because we would retire earlier, in a couple of decades, they would have an even bigger HR problem.
The core of the HR problem is not pay. The core of the problem is lack of women. When you work for a company where the overwhelming majority of the engineers are male (which is pretty much every tech company), assuming you're straight, the opportunities for forming relationships are limited by the nearly nonexistent dating pool. In the ~12 years I've spent at my current employer, I can almost count the number of women I've met at work on two hands, and the number of dateable women (not married, not 30 years my senior, etc.) on one. And I'm not counting in binary.
And when you consider how intense the pressure is to make work the center of your life, and how little opportunity there is for interacting cross-functionally with people outside your immediate project team, high tech is the last career I would recommend to guys going into school unless they really, really love to write software. You'll have more opportunities for meeting a potential mate working in nearly any other career.
Want to fix the entire HR problem? Convince more women to get into technical careers. Encourage women to take an interest in programming and engineering by teaching girls how to write software and build things at a young age. Create scholarship programs that give free rides for women in engineering. Fix the colossal gender imbalance in high tech, and more sane people will want to work in high tech.
While you're at it, create a work environment that fosters communication across teams. Do not, under any circumstances, create paranoid, schizoid environments where everything is ultra-confidential and you aren't allowed to talk to anybody about anything. This results in nobody talking to anyone else, no one meeting anyone else, and a whole lot of very lonely and miserable employees.
Considering the crap quality of so much of today's software, maybe a little experience would be a good idea.
But the IT industry doesn't generally write that software. The question was about IT, not engineering.
IT is, quite frankly, a trade job. The required skills change constantly, and fresh grads from some place like DeVry are more likely to be up-to-date in their IT knowledge than people who have been doing it for decades. What this means is that for IT purposes, you arguably become less valuable as you get older. By the time you're pushing 40, you need to either be a manager or en engineer.
It's not quite that simple, but it is roughly approximated by a parabola. After about 30 hours, you get rapidly diminishing returns from the extra hours. So the next 10 hours (to 40) get you about 5 hours of actual work (35 total), and the next 20 hours (to 60) get you about 5 hours of work (40 total). And when you cross the threshold where your work hours begin to reduce your sleep below 8 hours per night, employees' cognitive abilities and immune function decline markedly, resulting in more sick days and less productivity than at a lower number of hours.
For very short periods—two weeks or less—you can get away with 80 hour work weeks if and only if the employee is really excited to be working on a particular project. But after about two or three weeks, biology gets in the way, and the employees crash and burn. And that can never work if it is driven by management. When an employee decides to spend extra time because they feel that it is for the good of everyone, you get that productivity boost. When management asks an employee to spend extra time, you don't get any significant productivity boost. Fun with psychology.
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GSM receivers don't inherently do anything. GSM transmitters, however, rapidly power on and off their transmitter in a way that effectively creates a high-intensity transmission at a very low frequency (within the human hearing range) that is readily received and boosted by audio-frequency gain stages. That's a well-understood design flaw in the GSM encoding scheme.
I'm rather surprised that the iPads for pilots aren't 3G-capable. You could avoid all the GSM problems by using a CDMA (Verizon or Sprint) iPad with no SIM card installed, and the device would be a lot more useful when the pilot isn't in the air. And the Wi-Fi-only iPads don't have GPS receivers, which means they would be substantially less useful as an emergency backup in the event of a navigation system failure....
Although some of the prototypes at Stanford might have been based on GCC, to the best of my knowledge, all commercial versions of Coverity are based on the EDG parser. So no, they did not build their business model around a hacked version of GCC.
That was just based on a quick check of Google. I'm not surprised that you can get them cheaper than that if you look around a bit more than my fifteen seconds. :-)
Sort of. Their motivation was to make not a compiler, but a compiler construction kit with lots of highly reusable pieces that could be used as parts of other software. The Clang/LLVM combination is a lot more modular, and integrates more easily with other software. Even if GCC were BSD-licensed, it is just not capable of doing half the things that Apple's developer tools use Clang for today (static analysis, code refactoring, etc.).
Unfortunately, that discussion ignores time-domain processing, such as pitch shifting. The more samples you have, the greater the precision of pitch detection (more FFT buckets for a given sampling period), and the more natural the results are likely to be without doing overlapping windows or upsampling or other tricks that potentially introduce additional artifacts. At least this has been my experience.
Also, although hardware-based digital filters are better than analog filters, as I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong), the steeper the roll-off in an FIR filter, the more latency you introduce into the filter, which still means you have certain limits that wouldn't necessarily exist in a software-based filter. I'm not sure how important this is in practice, of course.
When you're talking about an analog component like a speaker, it acts more like a slow slew rate than distortion. The high frequency components basically just aren't reproduced if the diaphragm can't respond quickly enough. Instead of moving out by one unit and back by one unit, it might move out by half a unit and back by half a unit in that time, or out by a tenth of a unit and back by a tenth. And the farther outside the designed frequency range, the more the motion caused by that signal falls off until it isn't actually having an appreciable effect on the sound at all.
This is not to say that it has no effect whatsoever. It is entirely possible to cause damage to speakers by injecting a strong high-frequency component. All the energy that does not go out as physical motion gets turned into heat. But by distortion, I'm assuming you were referring to the sound quality rather than physical distortion of the voice coils. :-D
Then they were ripping you off severely. You can buy 300 watt panels for about $400 apiece delivered (you would have to split the order with one of your neighbors because of minimum quantity requirements, mind you). And a 3 kW inverter should cost under 2 grand, for a measly $6,000 in total materials cost. That suggests they were going to charge you a whopping $24,000 in labor costs....
Typically, the labor is only about 20-30% of the total cost of installation. With your numbers, it is a jaw-dropping 80% labor cost. Even in California, that's obscene.
1945.
That's not necessarily the case. Consider a classical piece with three movements. The second movement is soft and slow. The entire CD is almost certainly mastered so that the relative volume from one track to the next is preserved—that is, the soft movement will be significantly quieter than the other two movements.
If you are listening only to the soft movement, however, it is perfectly reasonable to crank up the volume so that you can hear more of the details—details that could easily be buried in the digital noise when listening to a 16-bit recording.
Speaking as someone who frequently does recording, your comment suggests that no one has done that test with classical music in a properly controlled listening environment using quality gear while giving the test subject the ability to control the volume arbitrarily. When you crank up the volume, the noise floor difference in soft passages alone should make the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit signal paths a dead giveaway, even for someone with moderate to severe hearing loss. It isn't even subtle. Of course, if the person doesn't turn it down for the loud passages, he/she will likely suffer hearing damage, but perhaps that's why he/she has moderate to severe hearing loss in the first place. :-D
The 44.1 vs. 96 kHz difference is more subtle, requiring someone with top-notch hearing (very rare), headphones that can accurately reproduce frequencies above 20 kHz, and 96 kHz DAC hardware that does not have a bandpass filter starting at 16 kHz. If you fail to verify even one of those requirements, you would expect no one to be able to hear the difference, because there won't be any difference.
Ah, but you're assuming that there's an advantage to being the actual seller/distributor. Except for books and movies, most of what Amazon sells, it sells by being a marketplace for other sellers. A bit of it is fulfilled by Amazon, but that's the exception rather than the rule as far as I can tell. If Google wanted to become a similar marketplace for other sellers, all they'd have to do is come up with a good, robust API for pushing content changes instead of doing content scraping, make their services available to any company who wants to do business in exchange for making Google's ads available on their site, and tie all of the technologies that they have already built together (including their payment system), and in a matter of months at most, they could have a marketplace that rivals Amazon's in everything except for the stuff that Amazon sells themselves.
If Google did that, it would seriously hurt Amazon because it would be cheaper for the companies involved, so they would very quickly end up having broader offerings than Amazon. And chances are, Barnes & Noble would join such a Google marketplace, teaming up against Amazon, so they'd probably get all the book and movie distribution taken care of without ever having to open a single warehouse.
You see, what Amazon sells—what makes them unique—is that they are a single storefront where you can get almost everything. And they're the only such storefront other than perhaps (Fl)e(a)Bay. If they had competition in that space, it would be a game changer. It might not bankrupt Amazon, but it would put a serious dent in their business.
Fixed that for you.
It's actually rather scary that our last two Presidential elections both saved us from what would likely have been one the worst foreign policy mistakes in U.S. history. Romney, McCain, and Hilary Clinton all support arming the Syrian rebels. I may not always agree with Obama (heck, I usually don't agree with him), but on this issue, we dodged a bullet the size of a freight train by electing who we did. Just saying.
If we're talking about a big-ticket item, people might pay attention to that extra $100 in tax. On the other hand, most big-ticket items are also large, and involve expensive shipping, which usually balances out most of that advantage. By adding sales tax for online purchases, that actually potentially puts brick-and-mortar stores at an advantage cost-wise, because local stores get their products by the pallet, which ends up being much cheaper per unit. Online distributors either have to charge that extra cost or build it into the product price. Either way, the extra shipping costs end up costing almost as much as having "a store, with utilities, employees, and inventory every 10 or so miles" when you put a pencil to it.
What puts brick-and-mortar stores at a sizable disadvantage is the fact that they cannot feasibly match the selection of online stores. Even Fry's, arguably one of the better electronics stores out there, rarely has whatever it is I came in there for, so unless I'm buying something highly fungible like DVDs, I usually end up ordering whatever I need online. And these days, half the time, I don't even bother driving over there because I'm so certain that they won't have what I need. If brick-and-mortar stores want to compete with that, they need to provide some sort of paper or electronic catalog in each department showing the things they sell and helping you find them. And they need to have a list of other things that you can special order for in-store pickup and make it as easy as possible for you to do so.
Also, longer hours would help. Most people work during normal business hours. If your business is only open during normal business hours, your business doesn't exist to me. In fact, if you close before 8:00 at night, unless you're open on Saturday, you don't exist to me. For that matter, there's no reason for most places to be open at all during normal business hours except around lunchtime, but I digress. For brick-and-mortar stores to compete, they really need to be open 24 hours per day like online stores are.
Here's why: Suppose I decide, "Hey, I want to buy a couple more DVDs." If Fry's is open, I might run out there. But when they aren't open, Amazon is. Every time someone buys something online that they could have bought in your store had you been open, it cements the viability of online shopping in their minds as a better alternative to buying from your store. And over time, this erodes your market far beyond the handful of purchases that you missed.
When do I most wish Fry's were open? From about 10 at night to about 1 in the morning. That's when I've gotten off work, have gotten buried in a project, and realize that I've forgotten a key component. If they were open, I'd drive over and pick it up. But they aren't, so I lose several hours of potential work. Or if it isn't a component that I absolutely have to have right then, half the time I just order it online while I'm thinking about it rather than waiting until the next day to go to Fry's and see if maybe they have it. If they were open, I'd drive over. But they aren't, so they lose that sale. Statistically, I would make a trip to Fry's outside their normal hours about once every 2–3 weeks, so they lose a lot of business from me by not being open later. That starts to make Amazon look pretty good by comparison.
It really doesn't take that much extra effort to have a couple of employees around to maintain a store after hours. It might not balance out the extra revenue immediately, but it can help prevent the continued erosion of your business in the long run.
Only the approach is different. There's nothing preventing you from convincing users to install a web browser that provides some customization features and displays extra ads in exchange. And if you can convince them to install it and use it, you now have adware that isn't really substantially different from adware that installs itself as a Safari browser extension on the desktop.
So yes, adware that requires a user to explicitly install it is always the user's fault. You can certainly try to make it harder for the user to make changes that they can't undo, as iOS does (and, to some degree, OS X does), but ultimately if a user is so naïve that he or she is incapable of recognizing scams, that user will eventually get conned, and there's really not much you can do about it besides finding and arresting the people who do the conning and punishing them harshly so that they will serve as an example to others.
None of those presidents were deliberately acting against U.S. interest (except Nixon). Of course, if you allow yourself the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Carter also did some things that were highly detrimental to the U.S.'s strategic interests—arming the mujahideen, for example:
Of course, Reagan expanded the program significantly, and Bush cut off funds and failed to take any actions to stabilize Afghanistan after the Soviets left. But Bush's decision not to interfere would not have mattered as much had Carter not interfered in the first place.
Then again, I can't think of any time when the U.S. tried to topple a foreign government that didn't come back to bite it in the you-know-where. One of the primary reasons why so many extremist groups exist in the first place is because the U.S. government helped tear down Iran's democratic government and replaced it with a puppet government under the Shah, which it supported for decades.
I'm not saying that we wouldn't have terrorism if the U.S. had not provided material support to people who would probably be called terrorists today, tried to set up puppet governments in Iran and other places, or allowed Afghanistan to degrade into a horrible state of civil war after the Soviets pulled out, but we'd likely have a lot fewer terrorists, and it is quite clear that the terrorists who did exist would not have as much money and would not be as well armed. If nothing else, these are lessons that future Presidents need to learn.
Apple released the iPod Nano 6th generation way back in 2010, and it was frequently worn as a smart watch, so I would say that the three watches you mention are, in fact, the Johnnies-come-lately. Perspective is a funny thing. :-)
Hugely overvalued from what I'm seeing.
Amazon: Makes products that almost nobody wants to buy, sells mostly stuff that other people make, is a middleman that would collapse tomorrow if Google ever decided to get serious about having a products marketplace, is at least lately losing money or barely breaking even, has over $3B in long-term debt, and misses earnings. Current P/E: 714.
Apple: Makes products that almost everybody wants to buy, sells mostly stuff that they designed, is a middleman mainly for software (and cannot be easily replaced in that capacity, at least in iOS, without replacing the hardware), made $13.1 billion in profit last quarter, has $137B in cash and liquid assets (with no debt), and usually makes or beats all but the most absurd estimates. Current P/E: 10.25
In no universe does this make sense except perhaps in one where the stock price is the multiplicative inverse of earnings. To give folks an idea of how jaw-droppingly bizarre this is, you need to factor in the cash/debt position of both companies. If you subtract Apple's cash per share from their stock price, and you get about $410, which is about 33.33 times their earnings last quarter. If you take Amazon's last-quarter EPS of 9 cents and multiply by 33.33, you get $3 per share. If you then subtract their debt per share ($3B / 454.55M shares outstanding comes to about $6.59), then by that same standard, Amazon's share value would be worth a whopping negative $3.59 per share....
Note that I'm not actually saying Amazon stock is worthless—I'd consider it to be worth about $30-50 per share, using last year's annual EPS and a sane 30x multiplier—but that still makes it overpriced by a factor of 8 even if you ignore this bad quarter. And that's assuming that Amazon straightens up their act and starts being profitable again in a quarter or two. If last quarter's trend continues for two or three more quarters, I'd expect Amazon's stock to be delisted for falling below a buck by this time next year, and if that doesn't happen, it means investors are asleep at the switch.
It's overly simplistic, perhaps, but we already have a pretty good idea how to do it. It's just enough of a pain in the backside that nobody has bothered yet.
One requirement for security is a human being whose job it is to reduce fraud. For example:
And so on. The more automated things get, the more trivial fraud becomes, because there's no human being looking at it and saying, "You know, this doesn't make sense."
Another requirement is a nearly unhackable device whose job is to present a transaction to the user, that only authorizes the transaction in response to a physical user action. This cannot be securely done in software on general-purpose devices because the system on which they are built is simply too complex, and too likely to contain bugs that allow an attacker to compromise the underlying OS, at which point the software becomes untrusted. Think "small secondary LCD panel just above your keyboard that is controlled by separate CPU with very minimal software", and you're in the right ballpark.
However, even with all of these things, there's no such thing as absolute security. One rather ironic problem with security is that the more secure you make your system, the more complacent users get about security. The simpler something is to use, the less users are willing to think. And so on. This poses very real problems for any security in which the user plays any significant role in decision-making. In other words, even if you have the dongle or second screen or whatever, if the user gets used to assuming that they should click "Authorize" every time, you have a problem.
To this end, it would actually be moderately useful for OS vendors to periodically present bogus requests to their users as though they were real. If the user fails, they would get an email that says, "Thank you for transferring ten million dollars to our account in Croatia" or whatever....
No, that's a very different vulnerability. What you're talking about would allow any valid certificate for site A to pose as site B, which means that there is almost no security, but if you can determine whose valid cert is being used, you are likely to have at least some idea who was responsible for it. There's at least a partial audit trail, in other words.
This vulnerability, by contrast, is that any self-signed certificate for site A can pose as site A. The common name must match, but everything else can be complete garbage, including the signature on the cert. This means that there is exactly zero security and zero audit trail.
This is the sort of security I'd expect from someone who knew nothing at all about SSL, and who just thought it was a magic box that made things secure.... :-/ Unfortunately, this class of mistake is painfully common, particularly in the mobile app space. Anyone who is considering overriding SSL chain validation really needs to read the following articles:
Given how many news reports we see about this sort of thing, I think it is clear that Android needs to do a better job of messaging the importance of doing SSL chain validation right. IMO, it's telling that Android's networking training area does not appear to even mention the need for security anywhere, as far as I could tell. In fact, I'm really not finding any big-picture documentation for Android networking at all. It reminds me of learning POSIX networking by reading the UNIX Socket FAQ. And this is why we keep seeing these sorts of news reports. Just saying.
Actually, phishing emails are trivial for humans to recognize. They all have a single characteristic: they contain at least one link that the user is likely to click, linking to a site other than the site that the email is about. Any email that meets those criteria should be considered phishing (with the possible exception of innocuous things like "Rate this merchant", which are spam, not phishing).
They're hard to recognize programmatically because the software can't easily know that the email looks like an email from your bank. But once you have identified that it looks like it came from your bank, if the links go anywhere other than to your bank's website, there's a problem.
That said, ultimately, I blame the banks. They are, or at least should be, well aware that email senders are trivially forged, and they have not taken steps to sign their emails even though they are an obvious example of something that should be signed.
Further, banks should also know that users are likely to click links in email messages, so if they really want to prevent phishing, they should never include links in email messages. If a bank makes it clear that their policy is "We will never send you an email containing links to our website," and if users start getting emails from their bank that say, "Go to our website for more details," with no link, at first they might be slightly annoyed, but once they get used to that, an email from that bank with a link (any link) will immediately jump out at them as being dubious, which is exactly the correct response.
Unfortunately, the marketing people would have a cow, because they think that security is less important than being able to accurately measure the response to email campaigns using click-through rates. Ultimately, the MBAs and MarCom majors of the world are the reason that phishing is so easy, and that so many people are fooled by it every day.
Not at all. These days, you have to assume that your connection to the Internet is compromised, and so is the computer that you're using to connect. Odds are good that a remote attacker has already installed a keylogger on your machine and doesn't need to crack the password. Any real security absolutely requires a robust two-factor scheme in which one of the factors has no Internet connection, in which a new authentication token must be generated for each potentially dangerous operation (e.g. associating a new bank account for money transfers), and in which that second factor communicates over a very simple, but secure protocol (no side channels, simple data format, protected by PK crypto, etc.) so that the device cannot readily be compromised, but can present enough information so that the user can adequately determine that the operation should be allowed.
For example, you might have a USB dongle that communicates using a simple shared buffer, and each request for authentication is signed by the company's servers, and is verified by the USB dongle. It then displays the text of the message (if the signature passes) to tell the user what he/she is agreeing to, and if the user chooses "Agree", then it provides a one-time-use token back to the computer so that it can pass it back to the company's servers, which then verify the signature on that token.
No. We'd be facing thousands of years of these announcements. From NASA:
Fortunately, in 28,000 years, its plutonium power supply will only be producing somewhere around 4 * 10^-94 watts, so I'm pretty sure we won't be talking to it by then. :-)
What Fry's do you go to? The last aisle at my Fry's is the random crap aisle.
No, it really won't. Well, it will, but it will increase someone else's HR problem. If the industry as a whole did this, nothing would change at all in the short term except that we'd have more money. And in the long term, because we would retire earlier, in a couple of decades, they would have an even bigger HR problem.
The core of the HR problem is not pay. The core of the problem is lack of women. When you work for a company where the overwhelming majority of the engineers are male (which is pretty much every tech company), assuming you're straight, the opportunities for forming relationships are limited by the nearly nonexistent dating pool. In the ~12 years I've spent at my current employer, I can almost count the number of women I've met at work on two hands, and the number of dateable women (not married, not 30 years my senior, etc.) on one. And I'm not counting in binary.
And when you consider how intense the pressure is to make work the center of your life, and how little opportunity there is for interacting cross-functionally with people outside your immediate project team, high tech is the last career I would recommend to guys going into school unless they really, really love to write software. You'll have more opportunities for meeting a potential mate working in nearly any other career.
Want to fix the entire HR problem? Convince more women to get into technical careers. Encourage women to take an interest in programming and engineering by teaching girls how to write software and build things at a young age. Create scholarship programs that give free rides for women in engineering. Fix the colossal gender imbalance in high tech, and more sane people will want to work in high tech.
While you're at it, create a work environment that fosters communication across teams. Do not, under any circumstances, create paranoid, schizoid environments where everything is ultra-confidential and you aren't allowed to talk to anybody about anything. This results in nobody talking to anyone else, no one meeting anyone else, and a whole lot of very lonely and miserable employees.
But the IT industry doesn't generally write that software. The question was about IT, not engineering.
IT is, quite frankly, a trade job. The required skills change constantly, and fresh grads from some place like DeVry are more likely to be up-to-date in their IT knowledge than people who have been doing it for decades. What this means is that for IT purposes, you arguably become less valuable as you get older. By the time you're pushing 40, you need to either be a manager or en engineer.
It's not quite that simple, but it is roughly approximated by a parabola. After about 30 hours, you get rapidly diminishing returns from the extra hours. So the next 10 hours (to 40) get you about 5 hours of actual work (35 total), and the next 20 hours (to 60) get you about 5 hours of work (40 total). And when you cross the threshold where your work hours begin to reduce your sleep below 8 hours per night, employees' cognitive abilities and immune function decline markedly, resulting in more sick days and less productivity than at a lower number of hours.
For very short periods—two weeks or less—you can get away with 80 hour work weeks if and only if the employee is really excited to be working on a particular project. But after about two or three weeks, biology gets in the way, and the employees crash and burn. And that can never work if it is driven by management. When an employee decides to spend extra time because they feel that it is for the good of everyone, you get that productivity boost. When management asks an employee to spend extra time, you don't get any significant productivity boost. Fun with psychology.