Well, now that I read the actual policy instead of just people's opinions on it, I would say that it is open to interpretation. By "Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected", does that mean executable code (app binaries) or scripts/source code? If it is the former, then JavaScript interpreters would presumably be okay. If it means the latter, then it wouldn't. It might be worth the Firefox folks' time to contact the app store review people and just point-blank ask them whether a run-time interpreter of downloaded application-behavior-scripting code (without JIT) is okay.
Apparently Oracles case was so weak a group of largely non-technical people decided it was much of nothing in 30 minutes.
I don't know where you get the impression that they were largely non-technical people. AFAIK, this trial was held in a SF Bay Area court. I doubt fewer than half the jurors worked at tech companies, and even the judge had programming experience.
It's a great deal more important than even you are suggesting. If APIs are copyrightable, then Linux and *BSD just became illegal for implementing POSIX without a license from The Open Group. Such a decision would absolutely have to be appealed up to SCOTUS, and if necessary, reversed by an emergency act of Congress. It simply cannot be allowed to stand, as it would essentially end Western civilization as we know it. Imagine 90% of the world's servers becoming illegal overnight. Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight. Such a decision would essentially bring the computing industry and every industry that depends on it to a grinding halt.
And since the prohibition on interpreters went away almost two years ago, the only thing preventing Firefox from porting to iOS is... well, Firefox. That and their JavaScript performance would probably be diminished because they probably won't be able to JIT the JavaScript into unsigned native code.
Not really. The fact that the one clock had been allowed to drift so far was user error, which any system can fall victim to. Someone should have noticed the error and reset the clock long before it had drifted by twenty minutes. Even if you just reset the clocks at every DST change as a matter of policy, they shouldn't drift that far. If they do, then the devices need to be returned to the manufacturers as defective. Most people wouldn't accept that much drift in a $5 wristwatch, much less a $10,000 medical device.
The GGP did make a valid point that it moves from multiple points of failure to a single point of failure that can be manipulated to wreak havoc. Ostensibly, if someone monkeyed with the time server, or if there were bugs with the DST flag, such a solution could cause a lot of patients to get their medication twice or whatever, rather than just one in the case of a single drifting clock that hasn't been reset in a while (or got set incorrectly to begin with). So the GGP isn't wrong that the potential for harm in the event of a serious failure is much greater; but it doesn't matter because the potential for detection is commensurately greater.
A teacher can understand what essential part of understanding you are missing and make an analogy that explains exactly that. He can then change the analogy if you don't get it.
For a subject like math where you're learning a skill, computers can do a good job of that, too. You evaluate the child's performance by asking questions that have only one right answer. Based on what things that child got wrong, you explain the concept in a different way.
This doesn't work as well for non-skill classes, however, and doesn't work at all for skill classes where there is not just one correct answer. For example, God help us all if we try to use computers to teach English beyond the most basic of grammar lessons. By my estimation, computers' ability to understand English grammar is approaching that of a two-year-old, if that. Computers can't handle nuance.
Now there's another reason for the enemy to take out the satellites, or jam GPS.
No, the server would go into free-run mode if it cannot receive a signal, and all of the clocks would be the same, just with a little bit of drift. And even if the servers went down, in the worst case, the devices would do the same thing, which means even in the worst case, you would be no worse off than you are now, and realistically, because NTP provides drift compensation statistics, they would probably drift far less than they do now, on average, even in the event of a complete failure.
It just makes all the clocks on the hospital go wrong when it starts to move to wrong times on the NTP server.
Including the clock in the hall. Everything but the doctor's watch. Therefore, for the most part, all of them would be self-consistent. The reason this was a problem is that the doctor nearly performed a medical procedure twice because one person was using one clock as a baseline and another person was using a different clock. If all the clocks use the same baseline, they will all be the same. It doesn't actually matter if they are right.
Also, if everybody's clocks were suddenly wrong, the odds of somebody noticing the problem quickly are much, much higher than if a single patient's clock is wrong.
Hi this is phil from IT. Yeah we are having some problems with logins, can you read me the number off the back of your dongle? Thanks!
Again, that's a targeted attack. There are lots of things that are possible when you are attacking a specific person that do not work for mass attacks such as would occur with viruses and trojans. Also, in order to do anything useful with it, you would need to know the person's account name and PIN, which means you would either have to convince the person to reveal it, watch the person key it in, or hack the person's device. This is much harder than remote hacking because:
I'm going to assume that most people are not clueless enough to give up a PIN to a random person over the phone (unlike a serial number, which most people would assume is a harmless piece of information).
Watching the person key in the PIN requires physical proximity.
If you've already hacked the person's computing device, had it used a software-based token generator, you would already have the key information without needing to figure out that person's phone number, call them (with a risk of being traced), and trick them into revealing the serial number.
Thus, attacking a hardware-based token generator is much harder than attacking a software-based token generator under pretty much all circumstances, and requires the attacker to take a much higher personal risk.
It still requires physical access. Therefore, it is still orders of magnitude safer than a software token on a networked device like a phone, laptop, etc. that can potentially be cracked from thousands of miles away.
Yes, ostensibly someone with a really high power camera lens could shoot a picture of the back from across the street while the person is using it, but even that means a targeted attack on a specific individual with a lot of prep work ahead of time. For high-profile targets, that might be a concern, but even then, it could be easily prevented with a piece of black tape. By contrast, software tokens could be trivially cracked as part of the normal process of compromising random people's devices. As two-factor authentication becomes more common for online banking, such fishing expeditions will become more common as well.
No, you'e thinking too linearly. The density increases in two dimensions, so the capacity increases by the square of the density (approximately). You would need just shy of a 4x increase in capacity without increasing the number of platters. If you can find a way to decrease the spacing between platters, you could get a 15x capacity increase with an even smaller density increase.
Because I can afford to lose a couple of hundred bucks on speculation. Same reason I occasionally spend a few hundred bucks on a penny stock. Most of them will go down or stay flat, but every now and then, one will buck the norm and skyrocket.
Should have it gone up? By all accounts, yes, but it did not.
Inflation requires not only the devaluation of money, but also a lack of hoarding. It isn't the quantity of money, but rather the quantity of money in active use that determines whether inflation or deflation occur. If quantitative easing injects money into a normally functioning economy, it creates inflation. If quantitative easing injects money into a collapsing economy at a rate equal to the rate at which people are pulling their money out of the economy and hoarding it under their mattresses, it creates no inflation. If it injects money at a lower rate, deflation occurs in spite of the quantitative easing.
How about you price your item based on it's cost to you and the profit you require to stay in business.
Won't work. If he's buying something from you for a buck, he's buying something from other people for a buck, too. Those other vendors are buying from your suppliers, increasing demand for the raw materials that you use to make your product. Some of those raw materials will be available in limited supply (either temporarily, such as food that takes time to grow, or permanently, such as mineral deposits). This means that either the price for those products must go up or you will have to buy supplies farther ahead so that when the market runs out of them and the price skyrockets because of desperation, you can continue to sell your goods.
And if he isn't buying extra products from your suppliers, he is buying extra products from you, and you are increasing the speed at which the raw materials are depleted.
Either way, your cost of doing business will go up, and you can either eat that cost difference as a loss or raise your prices.
Your view is completely inconsistent with the laws in most countries. If I were to kill a man because I panicked while trying to steal bread to feed my starving family, the result would be no less tragic than if I had killed him because I wanted to sleep with his wife. However, the latter killing would have been committed with malice aforethought; such a crime results in murder charges and makes the accused eligible for the death penalty in most states. By contrast, the former would have lacked malice, and in the absence of "special circumstances" laws, such a crime results in a lesser charge, such as manslaughter.
It isn't a wild-ass guess by any means. A P/E of 30 is considered to be high in this industry. Anything over that usually marks the stock as a poor buy. The Facebook offer price had a P/E of about a hundred, making it a really, really poor buy unless the stock got pushed up by irrational buying. So a high price for that stock (P/E of 30) would be about a third of the offer price, or about twelve or thirteen bucks per share, and a P/E in the high single digits would generally be considered a strong buy, at or around three bucks per share. To call this stock ridiculously overpriced is something of an extreme understatement.
Now to be fair, the P/E doesn't tell the whole story—some might argue that the forward P/E is a better metric—but I haven't bothered to calculate the forward P/E because the regular P/E is such utter insanity that further study of the stock is pretty much moot.
Yeah, I bought a few shares just because I figured if it hadn't collapsed by the end of the first day, there was a chance that hype might drive the price up. That said, I only bought a few shares because when I calculated what I thought the IPO price should be, I concluded that its maximum sane starting point was only about $12, and realistically more like $5–6.
I'll buy more shares when it hits three bucks, because at that point, it will be a strong buy.
That being the case, there are few things as geekishly awesome as an automatic (ie self-winding) mechanical wristwatch.
Personally, I'm partial to the Citizen Eco-Drive watches. They look like traditional mechanical analog watches, but under they hood, they use atomic clock signals to keep exacting time, and use solar panels to stay charged. They're not cheap, but you get to walk around all day, smug in the knowledge that everybody thinks you have to wind your watch every day.
even home recording is laughed at (technically) if you are not using 24/96.
Home recording is also usually laughed at if they go higher than 24/96, e.g. 24/192. 96 kHz is a sweet spot for a lot of reasons. In particular, it produces fewer artifacts and better accuracy when performing pitch detection and correction, and it correctly reproduces up to the maximum hearing range of the human ear instead of (in many cases) rolling off well below the Nyquist limit. I would also expect better quality when doing other things that involve Fourier transforms, such as convolution reverbs (if memory serves). Pedantically, you could achieve the same results by doing SRC to 96 kHz, applying the effect, and then reducing the sample rate back to 48 kHz, but in practice, the plug-ins don't do that, because those effects are computationally expensive enough without all that extra work.
Also, by recommending 96 kHz, you encourage people to buy gear that is relatively recent. The quality of audio amplification has improved significantly in the past twenty years. It's amazing how much better most newer preamps are than the off-the-shelf components were just a decade or so back—lower noise floors, lower THD, etc. Even if those folks decide to record at 48 kHz in the end, they're likely to get better sound than they would from most gear that maxes out at 48 kHz.
Actually, polystyrene caps can make a huge difference over electrolytic or tantalum caps in certain parts of some circuits. For example, in condenser microphones, the coupling capacitor between a microphone element and the first FET stage is a critical part of the circuit in which the signal level is very, very weak. Thus even tiny amounts of noise from cheap capacitors can have a significant effect on the final result. A fair number of cheap Chinese microphones sound dramatically better if you replace the cheap dipped tantalum caps they use with a film cap or poly cap.
We're not talking about a small difference here, either. We're talking night and day. A deaf person could just about hear the difference.:-) Replacing just the handful of tantalum capacitors in those microphones can make the difference between a muddy sound with a harsh, brittle top end and a fairly clean, accurate representation of what is being recorded... all for about five bucks and a few minutes of soldering. (Even better, the most important one—the FET coupling cap—is usually direct-wired between the capsule mount and the FET's lead, so you don't have to worry about lifting traces....)
Capacitors within the feedback path of an amplifier circuit can also degrade the sound noticeably. Admittedly, this isn't as much of an issue these days with the rise of modern, chip-based amplifier circuits, but it is still worth keeping in mind, particularly given that most condenser microphones still use transistor-based amplifier circuits.
Just to be clear, though, it doesn't have to be polystyrene film. The difference between a polystyrene cap and a traditional metal (polyester) film cap is negligible compared with the difference between film caps and electrolytic or (*shiver*) tantalum caps. Tantalum caps simply should not be within a city block of any trace that carries an audio signal.... Okay, slight exaggeration, but you get my point.
And, of course, it doesn't make sense to replace every capacitor. If it isn't in the signal path, it usually won't make much difference (though the absence of capacitors in the right places on power supply rails can cause some fun problems), and even if it is, it may or may not make much of a difference, depending on where the capacitor is in the signal path.
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Well, now that I read the actual policy instead of just people's opinions on it, I would say that it is open to interpretation. By "Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected", does that mean executable code (app binaries) or scripts/source code? If it is the former, then JavaScript interpreters would presumably be okay. If it means the latter, then it wouldn't. It might be worth the Firefox folks' time to contact the app store review people and just point-blank ask them whether a run-time interpreter of downloaded application-behavior-scripting code (without JIT) is okay.
I don't know where you get the impression that they were largely non-technical people. AFAIK, this trial was held in a SF Bay Area court. I doubt fewer than half the jurors worked at tech companies, and even the judge had programming experience.
It's a great deal more important than even you are suggesting. If APIs are copyrightable, then Linux and *BSD just became illegal for implementing POSIX without a license from The Open Group. Such a decision would absolutely have to be appealed up to SCOTUS, and if necessary, reversed by an emergency act of Congress. It simply cannot be allowed to stand, as it would essentially end Western civilization as we know it. Imagine 90% of the world's servers becoming illegal overnight. Imagine the machines that run 75% of the world's stock markets becoming illegal overnight. Such a decision would essentially bring the computing industry and every industry that depends on it to a grinding halt.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4891642/interpreter-for-the-iphone
Never mind. Now that I read that more carefully, it doesn't apply here.
And since the prohibition on interpreters went away almost two years ago, the only thing preventing Firefox from porting to iOS is... well, Firefox. That and their JavaScript performance would probably be diminished because they probably won't be able to JIT the JavaScript into unsigned native code.
Not really. The fact that the one clock had been allowed to drift so far was user error, which any system can fall victim to. Someone should have noticed the error and reset the clock long before it had drifted by twenty minutes. Even if you just reset the clocks at every DST change as a matter of policy, they shouldn't drift that far. If they do, then the devices need to be returned to the manufacturers as defective. Most people wouldn't accept that much drift in a $5 wristwatch, much less a $10,000 medical device.
The GGP did make a valid point that it moves from multiple points of failure to a single point of failure that can be manipulated to wreak havoc. Ostensibly, if someone monkeyed with the time server, or if there were bugs with the DST flag, such a solution could cause a lot of patients to get their medication twice or whatever, rather than just one in the case of a single drifting clock that hasn't been reset in a while (or got set incorrectly to begin with). So the GGP isn't wrong that the potential for harm in the event of a serious failure is much greater; but it doesn't matter because the potential for detection is commensurately greater.
For a subject like math where you're learning a skill, computers can do a good job of that, too. You evaluate the child's performance by asking questions that have only one right answer. Based on what things that child got wrong, you explain the concept in a different way.
This doesn't work as well for non-skill classes, however, and doesn't work at all for skill classes where there is not just one correct answer. For example, God help us all if we try to use computers to teach English beyond the most basic of grammar lessons. By my estimation, computers' ability to understand English grammar is approaching that of a two-year-old, if that. Computers can't handle nuance.
No, the server would go into free-run mode if it cannot receive a signal, and all of the clocks would be the same, just with a little bit of drift. And even if the servers went down, in the worst case, the devices would do the same thing, which means even in the worst case, you would be no worse off than you are now, and realistically, because NTP provides drift compensation statistics, they would probably drift far less than they do now, on average, even in the event of a complete failure.
Including the clock in the hall. Everything but the doctor's watch. Therefore, for the most part, all of them would be self-consistent. The reason this was a problem is that the doctor nearly performed a medical procedure twice because one person was using one clock as a baseline and another person was using a different clock. If all the clocks use the same baseline, they will all be the same. It doesn't actually matter if they are right.
Also, if everybody's clocks were suddenly wrong, the odds of somebody noticing the problem quickly are much, much higher than if a single patient's clock is wrong.
Again, that's a targeted attack. There are lots of things that are possible when you are attacking a specific person that do not work for mass attacks such as would occur with viruses and trojans. Also, in order to do anything useful with it, you would need to know the person's account name and PIN, which means you would either have to convince the person to reveal it, watch the person key it in, or hack the person's device. This is much harder than remote hacking because:
Thus, attacking a hardware-based token generator is much harder than attacking a software-based token generator under pretty much all circumstances, and requires the attacker to take a much higher personal risk.
In that case, yes, it would have to increase by a factor of 15.
It still requires physical access. Therefore, it is still orders of magnitude safer than a software token on a networked device like a phone, laptop, etc. that can potentially be cracked from thousands of miles away.
Yes, ostensibly someone with a really high power camera lens could shoot a picture of the back from across the street while the person is using it, but even that means a targeted attack on a specific individual with a lot of prep work ahead of time. For high-profile targets, that might be a concern, but even then, it could be easily prevented with a piece of black tape. By contrast, software tokens could be trivially cracked as part of the normal process of compromising random people's devices. As two-factor authentication becomes more common for online banking, such fishing expeditions will become more common as well.
No, you'e thinking too linearly. The density increases in two dimensions, so the capacity increases by the square of the density (approximately). You would need just shy of a 4x increase in capacity without increasing the number of platters. If you can find a way to decrease the spacing between platters, you could get a 15x capacity increase with an even smaller density increase.
The hardware token is not networked, and thus cannot readily by attacked and cloned without physical access (if then).
Because I can afford to lose a couple of hundred bucks on speculation. Same reason I occasionally spend a few hundred bucks on a penny stock. Most of them will go down or stay flat, but every now and then, one will buck the norm and skyrocket.
Inflation requires not only the devaluation of money, but also a lack of hoarding. It isn't the quantity of money, but rather the quantity of money in active use that determines whether inflation or deflation occur. If quantitative easing injects money into a normally functioning economy, it creates inflation. If quantitative easing injects money into a collapsing economy at a rate equal to the rate at which people are pulling their money out of the economy and hoarding it under their mattresses, it creates no inflation. If it injects money at a lower rate, deflation occurs in spite of the quantitative easing.
Won't work. If he's buying something from you for a buck, he's buying something from other people for a buck, too. Those other vendors are buying from your suppliers, increasing demand for the raw materials that you use to make your product. Some of those raw materials will be available in limited supply (either temporarily, such as food that takes time to grow, or permanently, such as mineral deposits). This means that either the price for those products must go up or you will have to buy supplies farther ahead so that when the market runs out of them and the price skyrockets because of desperation, you can continue to sell your goods.
And if he isn't buying extra products from your suppliers, he is buying extra products from you, and you are increasing the speed at which the raw materials are depleted.
Either way, your cost of doing business will go up, and you can either eat that cost difference as a loss or raise your prices.
Your view is completely inconsistent with the laws in most countries. If I were to kill a man because I panicked while trying to steal bread to feed my starving family, the result would be no less tragic than if I had killed him because I wanted to sleep with his wife. However, the latter killing would have been committed with malice aforethought; such a crime results in murder charges and makes the accused eligible for the death penalty in most states. By contrast, the former would have lacked malice, and in the absence of "special circumstances" laws, such a crime results in a lesser charge, such as manslaughter.
It isn't a wild-ass guess by any means. A P/E of 30 is considered to be high in this industry. Anything over that usually marks the stock as a poor buy. The Facebook offer price had a P/E of about a hundred, making it a really, really poor buy unless the stock got pushed up by irrational buying. So a high price for that stock (P/E of 30) would be about a third of the offer price, or about twelve or thirteen bucks per share, and a P/E in the high single digits would generally be considered a strong buy, at or around three bucks per share. To call this stock ridiculously overpriced is something of an extreme understatement.
Now to be fair, the P/E doesn't tell the whole story—some might argue that the forward P/E is a better metric—but I haven't bothered to calculate the forward P/E because the regular P/E is such utter insanity that further study of the stock is pretty much moot.
Yeah, I bought a few shares just because I figured if it hadn't collapsed by the end of the first day, there was a chance that hype might drive the price up. That said, I only bought a few shares because when I calculated what I thought the IPO price should be, I concluded that its maximum sane starting point was only about $12, and realistically more like $5–6.
I'll buy more shares when it hits three bucks, because at that point, it will be a strong buy.
1 edison = 100 amperes
...a vampire? :-D
Personally, I'm partial to the Citizen Eco-Drive watches. They look like traditional mechanical analog watches, but under they hood, they use atomic clock signals to keep exacting time, and use solar panels to stay charged. They're not cheap, but you get to walk around all day, smug in the knowledge that everybody thinks you have to wind your watch every day.
Home recording is also usually laughed at if they go higher than 24/96, e.g. 24/192. 96 kHz is a sweet spot for a lot of reasons. In particular, it produces fewer artifacts and better accuracy when performing pitch detection and correction, and it correctly reproduces up to the maximum hearing range of the human ear instead of (in many cases) rolling off well below the Nyquist limit. I would also expect better quality when doing other things that involve Fourier transforms, such as convolution reverbs (if memory serves). Pedantically, you could achieve the same results by doing SRC to 96 kHz, applying the effect, and then reducing the sample rate back to 48 kHz, but in practice, the plug-ins don't do that, because those effects are computationally expensive enough without all that extra work.
Also, by recommending 96 kHz, you encourage people to buy gear that is relatively recent. The quality of audio amplification has improved significantly in the past twenty years. It's amazing how much better most newer preamps are than the off-the-shelf components were just a decade or so back—lower noise floors, lower THD, etc. Even if those folks decide to record at 48 kHz in the end, they're likely to get better sound than they would from most gear that maxes out at 48 kHz.
Actually, polystyrene caps can make a huge difference over electrolytic or tantalum caps in certain parts of some circuits. For example, in condenser microphones, the coupling capacitor between a microphone element and the first FET stage is a critical part of the circuit in which the signal level is very, very weak. Thus even tiny amounts of noise from cheap capacitors can have a significant effect on the final result. A fair number of cheap Chinese microphones sound dramatically better if you replace the cheap dipped tantalum caps they use with a film cap or poly cap.
We're not talking about a small difference here, either. We're talking night and day. A deaf person could just about hear the difference. :-) Replacing just the handful of tantalum capacitors in those microphones can make the difference between a muddy sound with a harsh, brittle top end and a fairly clean, accurate representation of what is being recorded... all for about five bucks and a few minutes of soldering. (Even better, the most important one—the FET coupling cap—is usually direct-wired between the capsule mount and the FET's lead, so you don't have to worry about lifting traces....)
Capacitors within the feedback path of an amplifier circuit can also degrade the sound noticeably. Admittedly, this isn't as much of an issue these days with the rise of modern, chip-based amplifier circuits, but it is still worth keeping in mind, particularly given that most condenser microphones still use transistor-based amplifier circuits.
Just to be clear, though, it doesn't have to be polystyrene film. The difference between a polystyrene cap and a traditional metal (polyester) film cap is negligible compared with the difference between film caps and electrolytic or (*shiver*) tantalum caps. Tantalum caps simply should not be within a city block of any trace that carries an audio signal.... Okay, slight exaggeration, but you get my point.
And, of course, it doesn't make sense to replace every capacitor. If it isn't in the signal path, it usually won't make much difference (though the absence of capacitors in the right places on power supply rails can cause some fun problems), and even if it is, it may or may not make much of a difference, depending on where the capacitor is in the signal path.