As I've been saying ever since my first story [in 2008] advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot
It's understandable why you may have failed to consider this notion, but perhaps the reason that, in 4 years, the only group to take you seriously has been an idiotic vanity website is because it's a stupid fucking idea.
It worked for Zuckerberg. Remember that scene in The Social Network where he has a "who's hotter" site? He needs the formula for the algorithm that turns those decisions into an ordered ranking. (That's how chess rankings are computed. It means more to beat a high-rated opponent than a low-rated one.)
But what this article proposes is more like a human-powered spam filter. Or like ReCaptcha, which. underneath, is a random-sample voting system used to assist OCR systems that are processing scanned books. (It was a good idea originally, but now OCR is so good that when something gets kicked out for human processing, it probably isn't a valid word.)
Would it be a bit more appropriate to get rid of junkmail and phonebooks first?
USPS RecycleDirect (tm).
The new USPS RecycleDirect service diverts all bulk direct mail advertising addressed to you or your residence directly from the sending post office to a recycling center. You never see another piece of junk mail. Sign up today!
(No, the USPS doesn't really offer that. They should.)
Active styli are hardly new.
There are many good active styli, mostly for serious artists. The best sense both pressure and angle. Some have buttons for airbrush-like use. Some come in groups, so you can have a different stylus for each color.
The i[Phone|Pad] is poorly suited for stylus use, because it's intended to sense fat fingers, and there's a minimum contact width of about 4mm. So the business ends of Apple-compatible styli are blunt instruments, more like erasers than pen points.
I could see stopping enhancements, but actually taking the games down seems pointless. They can't cost that much to run. The operating costs are related to the number of users, who are presumably still viewing ads and buying in-game items. So there shouldn't be an operating loss.
What seems to be happening is that casual entertainment is moving to mobile, and Zynga was late with that. Zynga's business model relies on being in the right column of Facebook pages, and that column doesn't appear on phones. Zynga stock has dropped from 15 to 2.35 in less than a year. It's so bad that employees refused stock options. The consensus in the investment community seems to be that the CEO should resign.
The US should have a push for "hard metrication", which means using metric-sized components, to improve exports to the rest of the world. The military and auto industries are already metric. Electronics is mixed; newer components are metric pitch, but there's still a lot of 0.100 pin spacing around. Construction is still mostly inch. This is more important than the units consumers use.
(I restore old Teletype machines from the 1920s, which use inch fasteners, but fine thread; 6-40 instead of 6-32. Those are rare today. Gun parts suppliers still have them, but the selection of lengths and head styles is limited, so matching old parts is tough. On occasion I've had to buy long bolts, cut off the threaded part, and thread the base part myself. Despite this antique stuff, there's no reason that the US should not be routinely using metric screws for almost everything. Outside the US, getting non-metric screws is hard.)
War is not won by Rambos. Even special-ops types aren't built like Arnold. War is won by people who make the right decisions under pressure and have the skills and endurance to carry them out.
Contributing doesn't mean you get a robot. They're only building one, not gearing up for production.
There are currently at least 13 humanoid robots available for sale. The NAO NextGen is roughly comparable to what the Zurich group is proposing. They've sold about 2000 robots.
This seems to be all about building a powered skeleton. There's no indication that they have any new ideas on how to control the thing. Tendon-driven systems are less popular than they used to be; except for robot hands, the trend is towards using small motors and getting rid of the strings and pulleys.
It's a Swiss project. I expect beautiful engineering of small parts. But if they're not going to manufacture many copies, it's wasted effort.
Just read though all the documents provided. There's the possibility that there's other activity in the "redacted" documents, but what's reported isn't that interesting.
There's some material on the attempt to shut down the Port of Oakland, but it's mostly after the fact. That was mostly handled by the Oakland PD. The FBI was interested, but doesn't seem to have done much. There are some monthly reports of meetings with banks along the lines of "well, that's what Occupy is up to, now back to that check fraud problem you've been having". The Richmond Fed was apparently worried, but the FBI didn't see any real threat to them.
There are a few incidents that were investigated. Someone threw something burning over the White House fence, and it turned out to be a road flare. Some white powder was dumped in some protest, and it turned out to be uninteresting. One protester came in to the FBI to report that the leaders were holding secret meetings and she was worried about what they were up to. There was a concern that a right-wing group was going to attack an Occupy group.
There was apparently at least one one terrorism investigation. The FBI was concerned that a known suspected terrorist might use an Occupy group as cover to get close to a target.
It would be more interesting to see what Homeland Security was up to. The FBI has a real job, catching crooks, and measures success by convictions. So they don't want to devote too much effort to time-wasting activities. That doesn't up your stats, which is how you get promoted in the FBI. Homeland Security's anti-terrorism operation, on the other hand, has few terrorists to chase and too many people chasing them. So they're looking for work to keep themselves busy. Most of the troubles with law-enforcement come from the parts that generate their own work, not the parts that are complaint-driven.
Keep that blasphemy going out. The nuttier religions need criticism, ridicule, and opposition. As soon as a religion gets temporal power, like the power to put people in jail, it's in the politics business. Leaders of such religions have to take all the heat politicians do.
If the only way to tame out of control religions is war, that's worse for everybody, including the leaders of the religions. Historically, leaders of militant religions don't do well when they lose a war. See most of European history prior to 1800 or so.
Much early personal computer design was dominated by the "where do we put the back part of the CRT" problem. You see that in the article's pictures. Once screens became flat, and electronics became small, there was more design flexibility. Not much is done with it, though.
Organic designs have been tried over the years. Olivetti did some beautiful designs in the 1960s and 1970s, and most good museums of modern art will have a few Olivetti objects on display. Bang and Olufsen designs are much admired by designers, but the reaction of most people is "what's that?" There are limits to what consumers will accept.
Phones seem to have ended up as bricks, for now. For a while, flip phones were mainstream, but we now seem to be back to bricks, just thinner ones. Slightly larger devices are either flat bricks or big flip phones. There's little curvature in mobile devices. What matters is what's on the screen. (And the ability to fit the thing in a pocket or bag.)
The same thing happened to movie theaters decades ago. Movie theater auditoriums were once built in fanciful styles ranging from Moorish palaces to "atmospheric" theaters with the illusion of an open sky. Theaters had elaborate curtain systems, with both horizontal and vertical curtains. All of that is gone. Today the auditorium is a lightly decorated box with a bare screen. But the seats are better, the aisle lighting is better, and the projection and audio are much better. Function has triumphed because what matters is on the screen.
The next thing is supposed to be headwear, in the form of glasses with displays. It's not clear if that will catch on. Bluetooth headsets as jewelry never did.
The consensus in the SEO industry is that Apple bought all low-end data sources for business data. Somebody thought they were saving money.
Point-of-interest map data wasn't that great, either, so presumably Apple bought low-end data there, too. Map data cleanup is expensive and labor-intensive. Because business info isn't a substantial revenue generator for Apple, it's not surprising that Apple cut costs there. Over at Apple, business info drives search and ads, so it's crucial to the revenue stream.
The reverse is true for phones and tablets - Apple makes most of their money from phones and tablets, while for Google the whole Android thing generates a small fraction of revenue.
Once this starts hitting gun owners, we'll hear screams for stronger privacy legislation.
Dear Mr. Savage: As an AR-15 owner, you need the best magazines and ammo! Stainless steel 30 round magazines for your assault rifle! Great deals on bulk ammo! This is the good stuff, military grade Federal XM855 Green Tip Steel Penetrator! Made in USA! 500 rounds per box! Check out our ammo can bundles! Order today! And don't forget your AR-15 cleaning kit. (Expect delays due to high order volume).
(There's been a big increase in assault rifle sales since the last school massacre. Hence the ordering delays.)
Take a look at the call for which ENOENT was returned. The API spec says "EINVAL: The struct v4l2_queryctrl id is invalid. The struct v4l2_querymenu id is invalid or index is out of range (less than minimum or greater than maximum) or this particular menu item is not supported by the driver."
This is from a generic driver mechanism for USB camera-like devices. Because such devices aren't as standard as they should be, there's an insane number of options and possible errors. The spec says to return EINVAL for both incorrect calls and calls for which the device does not support the requested item.
The problem here is that the EINVAL error status doesn't distinguish between "program made bad call and is broken" and "we're iterating through the device functions to discover which ones are available, and this ID isn't meaningful on this device so skip it" EINVAL is supposed to mean "One or more of the ioctl parameters are invalid or out of the allowed range." A correctly made call should not return EINVAL.
The alternatives are limited, though. This is related to a historical Linux design problem, which comes from a historical UNIX problem - system call errors are reported using one error code, chosen from a short list written in the 1970s. "ENOENT" isn't really appropriate. "ENOTTY" ("The ioctl is not supported by the driver"), might be appropriate, except that the usual message for that is "Not a typewriter".
The API is a rather lame and excessively complex way to return what is merely a variable-length list of fixed-format structures. One would think that Linux would by now have a generic way to do that, since it comes up in other contexts.
Card makers ought to stop packing huge amounts of memory onto otherwise useless cards.
All that memory isn't for games. It's for people who do real work in 3D. Animators, artists, and engineers have big models to view, often with high-resolution textures. There, those gigabytes of display memory are useful. And when you switch windows, the whole graphics card doesn't have to be flushed.
In games, textures have already been optimized, merged, reduced in resolution and level of detail. Gamers tend not to have several graphics applications running in multiple windows.
I know, I know. I met him back when he had his original VR system, with a pair of SGI machines hooked up to 320-line or so goggles and about a second of lag between the head tracker and the video. Turn head, wait 1s for image to stabilize, repeat. Once people figured out that all you could do well in VR was move and shoot, interest declined. Even for gamers. (Autodesk had a big interest in VR at one time; the idea was that you'd be able to do architecture in VR with an intuitive interface. Pick up window, walk to wall, insert window in wall, step back, look at result, slide window to different position... Didn't work out. Without force feedback, manipulation in 3D VR is clumsy.)
Lanier's main complaint seems to be that being a second or third-tier musician doesn't pay well any more. Historically, it never did. The notion of musical stardom came from a brief period in history when duplicating phono records was a very expensive process. There are now somewhere between 5 and 8 million bands on Myspace. (Some of which might not suck.) So being a "musician" isn't a big deal any more.
Interestingly, he's against anonymity, which encourages ranting. But nobody listens to online ranting from anons much any more. Post on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward and you're lucky to get a rating above 0. Post on Wikipedia without logging in, and unless you have something really productive to say, you'll probably be reverted, Rant at people via e-mail and spam filters block you. Grief in a MMORPG, and you get kicked out and have to restart as a noob with low stats. Problem solved. (Mostly.)
Facebook and Google, on the other hand, are against anonymity because it interferes with monetizing data about their users. That's not a good reason.
Yep, 3rd harmonic, probably from an unfiltered Class C power amp.
Probably. Definitely emissions way out of band. Most US keyless entry devices are at 315MHz. An FM transmitter at 104.7 MHz would have a third harmonic up there. That's a really crappy transmitter. Normally, a keyless entry system will work even when you're parked next to a high power FM station transmitter tower. Sutro Tower in San Francisco has an 8KW FM station at 104.5, and doesn't cause this problem in nearby areas. That tower used to have 10 analog TV stations with a total power of about 18 megawatts.
This isn't rocket science. Any radio ham (well, anybody with an older or a higher level ticket) should know how to deal with this.
With NASDAQ next door, there has to be gobs of fiber running along Times Square.
NASDAQ isn't there at all. The NASDAQ put that sign in years ago to give them a visible presence in New York. NASDAQ corporate HQ is downtown at 165 Broadway. The signage is strictly for PR purposes.
Operationally, NASDAQ is distributed. The data centers aren't in New York. Neither are those of the NYSE; the main one is in New Jersey, but there's a backup elsewhere.
After Hurricane Sandy, the NYSE and the NASDAQ closed for two days. But not because they couldn't operate. The NYSE operations people wanted to transfer operational control to the NYSE Arca offices in Chicago and come back up the next day for online trading. The floor traders and the Wall Street financial community screamed. They were terrified of the financial system running without them. Especially if it worked just fine.
There's already a high speed rail connection from Guangzhou to Shenzhen North. The high speed rail connection through to Hong Kong is scheduled for completion in 2014, and will shorten travel time for that last link from 2 hours to 38 minutes. (Except that there's a border control point between Shentzen and Hong Kong that takes longer than the travel time.)
Another step has been taken in tying China more closely together. That's part of the political motivation. Traditionally, China's provinces were not closely connected. Each province was expected to be self-sufficient in food and other essentials. That continued through the Mao era, and it's not completely gone. There are still some inter-provincial trade restrictions.
Of course, the South still speaks Cantonese, while the North speaks Mandarin. This despite half a century of effort by the central government. "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".
The nuttier religions may be about to crack. In the US, the number of people reporting "no religion" has doubled in the past decade. There are now more than twice as many atheists and agnostics (4%) in the US as Jews (1.7%). "Unaffiliated" is at 16.1%. Islam only has 0.6% market share in the US, and Mormonism is at 1.7%.
Total US "Christian" is at 78%, but that's self-reported. The number of people who say they go to church is about twice the number churches report showing up.
Some religions need a high level of coercion to maintain market share. For most of the period since the decline of the Roman Empire, Catholicism was the worst offender. It took several wars in Europe to overthrow that tyranny. Today, militant Islam (and its mirror image, ultra-orthodox Judaism) struggle to keep their members in line and coerce their children into their grip.
That isn't about religion. It's about power. Political power. The religions that fear "blasphemy", demand obedience, and want theocracy are political organizations. They should be treated as such. They have no moral right to demand that they not be criticized. Indeed, citizens have a duty to point out their failings and fight their excesses.
So keep that "blasphemy" going out. Religious leaders, not their followers, should be afraid. (And up the production value; "Innocence of Muslims" was ineptly executed. Read "Florence of Arabia" for what's needed.)
History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. - Jefferson
I've had sizable amounts of junk come in from China Telecom DSL class C blocks in Shenzhen. It's obviously a botnet. Amusingly, by changing what the attackers get back, it's possible to slowly influence their behavior. The zombies just send blindly, trying SMTP and PHP attacks, and they continue to send even if they get no useful response. But after a few days, some control node notices that the botnet isn't accomplishing anything and stops. Except that a few zombies don't get the word and continue to send the same junk.
The resource-consuming API requests on our system go through a fair queuing system, so that many requests from the same IP address queue up behind each other and don't consume much in the way of resources. At one point, some grad student was trying to use the API, and they were doing it ineptly, sending hundreds of thousands of initial requests without ever making the followup call to get the results. This built up a huge work queue, but the fair queuing meant their requests had lowered priority and weren't impacting real users. After a few days of this, I blocked the IP address for 24 hours. After unblocking, the requests reappeared. So not only was the requester inept, they weren't paying attention to their own program. So I wrote to the department chair at the user's university, and after a few more days, the API calls stopped.
Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.
Facebook isn't in the same league as the big boys.
Revenue for most recent quarter:
Apple: $36 billion
Microsoft: $16 billion
Google: $14 billion
Amazon: $14 billion
Facebook: $1.2 billion
Facebook makes a lot of noise, but they're smaller than eBay, which had quarterly revenue around $4 billion, and about even with Yahoo.
Amazon is the company with room to expand. Amazon could potentially take over most of retail. Their real competitor is Wal-Mart.
The others are near the ceiling of their markets.
Google has failed to make money with anything other than search ads. Microsoft probably has a long life ahead of it, like IBM, serving the needs of business. Apple has a price maintenance problem - their huge markups may not survive the flood of lower-priced devices. Facebook is in a bind; their user base has peaked, and shoving more ads at users didn't work out for Myspace.
For traditional reasons dating back to the dial-up UUCP era, most email systems are store and forward. That's really no longer necessary. In an "always-on" era, mail should be synchronous. When an SMTP server receives a mail that it needs to forward (presumably only to a known address) it should, while holding the incoming connection open, send the appropriate outgoing mail. If the outgoing send succeeds, the SMTP server should reply to the its client with success. If not, it replies with a failure code. No "bounce" messages are ever sent. So there's no possibility of sending a "bounce" message to a faked address. "Joe jobs" become completely ineffective.
Any non-success status from the outgoing send gets passed back to the incoming connection. If the destination server is down, the SMTP 450 status (Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable) should be returned. For 4xx statuses, most mailers will resend, so the first mailer in the chain will handle retransmission. If the first mailer is a user SMTP client (rare today), the person sending will get an immediate fail, indicating that the mail was not received.
A simplified SMTP server like that would be appropriate for machines that only handle mail as a sideline and forward it somewhere else, like most web servers.
There are plenty of tablets under $99 on Alibaba, and even on Amazon. Finally, a major brand gets into it.
The main problem is that Acer is also a PC manufacturer, and thus vulnerable to pressure from Microsoft. That pressure is why both Asus and Dell introduced, then withdrew, Linux machines, and why the major brands went along with Microsoft's upper limit on XP-based netbook hardware.
Many of the smaller tablet manufacturers have no Microsoft involvement, and are thus in a good position to ignore Microsoft's desire to keep a higher price point.
Slashdot Mirror
As I've been saying ever since my first story [in 2008] advocating this algorithm, the only site I'm aware of that currently implements random-sample voting correctly, is HotOrNot
It's understandable why you may have failed to consider this notion, but perhaps the reason that, in 4 years, the only group to take you seriously has been an idiotic vanity website is because it's a stupid fucking idea.
It worked for Zuckerberg. Remember that scene in The Social Network where he has a "who's hotter" site? He needs the formula for the algorithm that turns those decisions into an ordered ranking. (That's how chess rankings are computed. It means more to beat a high-rated opponent than a low-rated one.)
But what this article proposes is more like a human-powered spam filter. Or like ReCaptcha, which. underneath, is a random-sample voting system used to assist OCR systems that are processing scanned books. (It was a good idea originally, but now OCR is so good that when something gets kicked out for human processing, it probably isn't a valid word.)
Would it be a bit more appropriate to get rid of junkmail and phonebooks first?
USPS RecycleDirect (tm).
The new USPS RecycleDirect service diverts all bulk direct mail advertising addressed to you or your residence directly from the sending post office to a recycling center. You never see another piece of junk mail. Sign up today!
(No, the USPS doesn't really offer that. They should.)
Active styli are hardly new. There are many good active styli, mostly for serious artists. The best sense both pressure and angle. Some have buttons for airbrush-like use. Some come in groups, so you can have a different stylus for each color.
The i[Phone|Pad] is poorly suited for stylus use, because it's intended to sense fat fingers, and there's a minimum contact width of about 4mm. So the business ends of Apple-compatible styli are blunt instruments, more like erasers than pen points.
You can use "metric screws" in a non-metric system and vice versa.
RTFM.
I could see stopping enhancements, but actually taking the games down seems pointless. They can't cost that much to run. The operating costs are related to the number of users, who are presumably still viewing ads and buying in-game items. So there shouldn't be an operating loss.
What seems to be happening is that casual entertainment is moving to mobile, and Zynga was late with that. Zynga's business model relies on being in the right column of Facebook pages, and that column doesn't appear on phones. Zynga stock has dropped from 15 to 2.35 in less than a year. It's so bad that employees refused stock options. The consensus in the investment community seems to be that the CEO should resign.
The US should have a push for "hard metrication", which means using metric-sized components, to improve exports to the rest of the world. The military and auto industries are already metric. Electronics is mixed; newer components are metric pitch, but there's still a lot of 0.100 pin spacing around. Construction is still mostly inch. This is more important than the units consumers use.
(I restore old Teletype machines from the 1920s, which use inch fasteners, but fine thread; 6-40 instead of 6-32. Those are rare today. Gun parts suppliers still have them, but the selection of lengths and head styles is limited, so matching old parts is tough. On occasion I've had to buy long bolts, cut off the threaded part, and thread the base part myself. Despite this antique stuff, there's no reason that the US should not be routinely using metric screws for almost everything. Outside the US, getting non-metric screws is hard.)
Search Alibaba for "Netbook": "185,881 Product(s) from 2,239 Supplier(s)". You can buy individual items. "Hot sell Mini Notebook 10.2 inch laptop Atom D425 Processor 1.8G Memory 1GB HDD 160G netbook wifi camera - US $217.00 / piece ", from Shenzhen Lihaicheng Tech Co., Ltd. Many sellers will ship directly to the US. Quality may be iffy, but there are seller reputations, and it's probably no worse than eBay.
Some of these are probably the same machines the big names were selling.
Somehow, I doubt this is the problem.
War is not won by Rambos. Even special-ops types aren't built like Arnold. War is won by people who make the right decisions under pressure and have the skills and endurance to carry them out.
"We're building a robot. Send money.".
Contributing doesn't mean you get a robot. They're only building one, not gearing up for production. There are currently at least 13 humanoid robots available for sale. The NAO NextGen is roughly comparable to what the Zurich group is proposing. They've sold about 2000 robots.
This seems to be all about building a powered skeleton. There's no indication that they have any new ideas on how to control the thing. Tendon-driven systems are less popular than they used to be; except for robot hands, the trend is towards using small motors and getting rid of the strings and pulleys.
It's a Swiss project. I expect beautiful engineering of small parts. But if they're not going to manufacture many copies, it's wasted effort.
Just read though all the documents provided. There's the possibility that there's other activity in the "redacted" documents, but what's reported isn't that interesting.
There's some material on the attempt to shut down the Port of Oakland, but it's mostly after the fact. That was mostly handled by the Oakland PD. The FBI was interested, but doesn't seem to have done much. There are some monthly reports of meetings with banks along the lines of "well, that's what Occupy is up to, now back to that check fraud problem you've been having". The Richmond Fed was apparently worried, but the FBI didn't see any real threat to them.
There are a few incidents that were investigated. Someone threw something burning over the White House fence, and it turned out to be a road flare. Some white powder was dumped in some protest, and it turned out to be uninteresting. One protester came in to the FBI to report that the leaders were holding secret meetings and she was worried about what they were up to. There was a concern that a right-wing group was going to attack an Occupy group.
There was apparently at least one one terrorism investigation. The FBI was concerned that a known suspected terrorist might use an Occupy group as cover to get close to a target.
It would be more interesting to see what Homeland Security was up to. The FBI has a real job, catching crooks, and measures success by convictions. So they don't want to devote too much effort to time-wasting activities. That doesn't up your stats, which is how you get promoted in the FBI. Homeland Security's anti-terrorism operation, on the other hand, has few terrorists to chase and too many people chasing them. So they're looking for work to keep themselves busy. Most of the troubles with law-enforcement come from the parts that generate their own work, not the parts that are complaint-driven.
Keep that blasphemy going out. The nuttier religions need criticism, ridicule, and opposition. As soon as a religion gets temporal power, like the power to put people in jail, it's in the politics business. Leaders of such religions have to take all the heat politicians do.
If the only way to tame out of control religions is war, that's worse for everybody, including the leaders of the religions. Historically, leaders of militant religions don't do well when they lose a war. See most of European history prior to 1800 or so.
Much early personal computer design was dominated by the "where do we put the back part of the CRT" problem. You see that in the article's pictures. Once screens became flat, and electronics became small, there was more design flexibility. Not much is done with it, though.
Organic designs have been tried over the years. Olivetti did some beautiful designs in the 1960s and 1970s, and most good museums of modern art will have a few Olivetti objects on display. Bang and Olufsen designs are much admired by designers, but the reaction of most people is "what's that?" There are limits to what consumers will accept.
Phones seem to have ended up as bricks, for now. For a while, flip phones were mainstream, but we now seem to be back to bricks, just thinner ones. Slightly larger devices are either flat bricks or big flip phones. There's little curvature in mobile devices. What matters is what's on the screen. (And the ability to fit the thing in a pocket or bag.)
The same thing happened to movie theaters decades ago. Movie theater auditoriums were once built in fanciful styles ranging from Moorish palaces to "atmospheric" theaters with the illusion of an open sky. Theaters had elaborate curtain systems, with both horizontal and vertical curtains. All of that is gone. Today the auditorium is a lightly decorated box with a bare screen. But the seats are better, the aisle lighting is better, and the projection and audio are much better. Function has triumphed because what matters is on the screen.
The next thing is supposed to be headwear, in the form of glasses with displays. It's not clear if that will catch on. Bluetooth headsets as jewelry never did.
The consensus in the SEO industry is that Apple bought all low-end data sources for business data. Somebody thought they were saving money.
Point-of-interest map data wasn't that great, either, so presumably Apple bought low-end data there, too. Map data cleanup is expensive and labor-intensive. Because business info isn't a substantial revenue generator for Apple, it's not surprising that Apple cut costs there. Over at Apple, business info drives search and ads, so it's crucial to the revenue stream.
The reverse is true for phones and tablets - Apple makes most of their money from phones and tablets, while for Google the whole Android thing generates a small fraction of revenue.
Once this starts hitting gun owners, we'll hear screams for stronger privacy legislation.
Dear Mr. Savage: As an AR-15 owner, you need the best magazines and ammo! Stainless steel 30 round magazines for your assault rifle! Great deals on bulk ammo! This is the good stuff, military grade Federal XM855 Green Tip Steel Penetrator! Made in USA! 500 rounds per box! Check out our ammo can bundles! Order today! And don't forget your AR-15 cleaning kit. (Expect delays due to high order volume).
(There's been a big increase in assault rifle sales since the last school massacre. Hence the ordering delays.)
Take a look at the call for which ENOENT was returned. The API spec says "EINVAL: The struct v4l2_queryctrl id is invalid. The struct v4l2_querymenu id is invalid or index is out of range (less than minimum or greater than maximum) or this particular menu item is not supported by the driver."
This is from a generic driver mechanism for USB camera-like devices. Because such devices aren't as standard as they should be, there's an insane number of options and possible errors. The spec says to return EINVAL for both incorrect calls and calls for which the device does not support the requested item.
The problem here is that the EINVAL error status doesn't distinguish between "program made bad call and is broken" and "we're iterating through the device functions to discover which ones are available, and this ID isn't meaningful on this device so skip it" EINVAL is supposed to mean "One or more of the ioctl parameters are invalid or out of the allowed range." A correctly made call should not return EINVAL.
The alternatives are limited, though. This is related to a historical Linux design problem, which comes from a historical UNIX problem - system call errors are reported using one error code, chosen from a short list written in the 1970s. "ENOENT" isn't really appropriate. "ENOTTY" ("The ioctl is not supported by the driver"), might be appropriate, except that the usual message for that is "Not a typewriter".
The API is a rather lame and excessively complex way to return what is merely a variable-length list of fixed-format structures. One would think that Linux would by now have a generic way to do that, since it comes up in other contexts.
Here's an example of an application which seems to be crashing because the programmer did not understand the nonstandard semantics of EINVAL in this API.
Card makers ought to stop packing huge amounts of memory onto otherwise useless cards.
All that memory isn't for games. It's for people who do real work in 3D. Animators, artists, and engineers have big models to view, often with high-resolution textures. There, those gigabytes of display memory are useful. And when you switch windows, the whole graphics card doesn't have to be flushed.
In games, textures have already been optimized, merged, reduced in resolution and level of detail. Gamers tend not to have several graphics applications running in multiple windows.
He got in early on 3D graphics and had dreadlocks
I know, I know. I met him back when he had his original VR system, with a pair of SGI machines hooked up to 320-line or so goggles and about a second of lag between the head tracker and the video. Turn head, wait 1s for image to stabilize, repeat. Once people figured out that all you could do well in VR was move and shoot, interest declined. Even for gamers. (Autodesk had a big interest in VR at one time; the idea was that you'd be able to do architecture in VR with an intuitive interface. Pick up window, walk to wall, insert window in wall, step back, look at result, slide window to different position... Didn't work out. Without force feedback, manipulation in 3D VR is clumsy.)
Lanier's main complaint seems to be that being a second or third-tier musician doesn't pay well any more. Historically, it never did. The notion of musical stardom came from a brief period in history when duplicating phono records was a very expensive process. There are now somewhere between 5 and 8 million bands on Myspace. (Some of which might not suck.) So being a "musician" isn't a big deal any more.
Interestingly, he's against anonymity, which encourages ranting. But nobody listens to online ranting from anons much any more. Post on Slashdot as Anonymous Coward and you're lucky to get a rating above 0. Post on Wikipedia without logging in, and unless you have something really productive to say, you'll probably be reverted, Rant at people via e-mail and spam filters block you. Grief in a MMORPG, and you get kicked out and have to restart as a noob with low stats. Problem solved. (Mostly.)
Facebook and Google, on the other hand, are against anonymity because it interferes with monetizing data about their users. That's not a good reason.
Yep, 3rd harmonic, probably from an unfiltered Class C power amp.
Probably. Definitely emissions way out of band. Most US keyless entry devices are at 315MHz. An FM transmitter at 104.7 MHz would have a third harmonic up there. That's a really crappy transmitter. Normally, a keyless entry system will work even when you're parked next to a high power FM station transmitter tower. Sutro Tower in San Francisco has an 8KW FM station at 104.5, and doesn't cause this problem in nearby areas. That tower used to have 10 analog TV stations with a total power of about 18 megawatts.
This isn't rocket science. Any radio ham (well, anybody with an older or a higher level ticket) should know how to deal with this.
With NASDAQ next door, there has to be gobs of fiber running along Times Square.
NASDAQ isn't there at all. The NASDAQ put that sign in years ago to give them a visible presence in New York. NASDAQ corporate HQ is downtown at 165 Broadway. The signage is strictly for PR purposes.
Operationally, NASDAQ is distributed. The data centers aren't in New York. Neither are those of the NYSE; the main one is in New Jersey, but there's a backup elsewhere.
After Hurricane Sandy, the NYSE and the NASDAQ closed for two days. But not because they couldn't operate. The NYSE operations people wanted to transfer operational control to the NYSE Arca offices in Chicago and come back up the next day for online trading. The floor traders and the Wall Street financial community screamed. They were terrified of the financial system running without them. Especially if it worked just fine.
There's already a high speed rail connection from Guangzhou to Shenzhen North. The high speed rail connection through to Hong Kong is scheduled for completion in 2014, and will shorten travel time for that last link from 2 hours to 38 minutes. (Except that there's a border control point between Shentzen and Hong Kong that takes longer than the travel time.)
Another step has been taken in tying China more closely together. That's part of the political motivation. Traditionally, China's provinces were not closely connected. Each province was expected to be self-sufficient in food and other essentials. That continued through the Mao era, and it's not completely gone. There are still some inter-provincial trade restrictions.
Of course, the South still speaks Cantonese, while the North speaks Mandarin. This despite half a century of effort by the central government. "The mountains are high and the Emperor is far away".
The nuttier religions may be about to crack. In the US, the number of people reporting "no religion" has doubled in the past decade. There are now more than twice as many atheists and agnostics (4%) in the US as Jews (1.7%). "Unaffiliated" is at 16.1%. Islam only has 0.6% market share in the US, and Mormonism is at 1.7%. Total US "Christian" is at 78%, but that's self-reported. The number of people who say they go to church is about twice the number churches report showing up.
Some religions need a high level of coercion to maintain market share. For most of the period since the decline of the Roman Empire, Catholicism was the worst offender. It took several wars in Europe to overthrow that tyranny. Today, militant Islam (and its mirror image, ultra-orthodox Judaism) struggle to keep their members in line and coerce their children into their grip.
That isn't about religion. It's about power. Political power. The religions that fear "blasphemy", demand obedience, and want theocracy are political organizations. They should be treated as such. They have no moral right to demand that they not be criticized. Indeed, citizens have a duty to point out their failings and fight their excesses.
So keep that "blasphemy" going out. Religious leaders, not their followers, should be afraid. (And up the production value; "Innocence of Muslims" was ineptly executed. Read "Florence of Arabia" for what's needed.)
History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance, of which their political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purpose. - Jefferson
I've had sizable amounts of junk come in from China Telecom DSL class C blocks in Shenzhen. It's obviously a botnet. Amusingly, by changing what the attackers get back, it's possible to slowly influence their behavior. The zombies just send blindly, trying SMTP and PHP attacks, and they continue to send even if they get no useful response. But after a few days, some control node notices that the botnet isn't accomplishing anything and stops. Except that a few zombies don't get the word and continue to send the same junk.
The resource-consuming API requests on our system go through a fair queuing system, so that many requests from the same IP address queue up behind each other and don't consume much in the way of resources. At one point, some grad student was trying to use the API, and they were doing it ineptly, sending hundreds of thousands of initial requests without ever making the followup call to get the results. This built up a huge work queue, but the fair queuing meant their requests had lowered priority and weren't impacting real users. After a few days of this, I blocked the IP address for 24 hours. After unblocking, the requests reappeared. So not only was the requester inept, they weren't paying attention to their own program. So I wrote to the department chair at the user's university, and after a few more days, the API calls stopped.
Nobody is interested in Microsoft. The "pack of four" includes *Facebook* over Microsoft.
Facebook isn't in the same league as the big boys.
Revenue for most recent quarter:
Facebook makes a lot of noise, but they're smaller than eBay, which had quarterly revenue around $4 billion, and about even with Yahoo.
Amazon is the company with room to expand. Amazon could potentially take over most of retail. Their real competitor is Wal-Mart.
The others are near the ceiling of their markets. Google has failed to make money with anything other than search ads. Microsoft probably has a long life ahead of it, like IBM, serving the needs of business. Apple has a price maintenance problem - their huge markups may not survive the flood of lower-priced devices. Facebook is in a bind; their user base has peaked, and shoving more ads at users didn't work out for Myspace.
For traditional reasons dating back to the dial-up UUCP era, most email systems are store and forward. That's really no longer necessary. In an "always-on" era, mail should be synchronous. When an SMTP server receives a mail that it needs to forward (presumably only to a known address) it should, while holding the incoming connection open, send the appropriate outgoing mail. If the outgoing send succeeds, the SMTP server should reply to the its client with success. If not, it replies with a failure code. No "bounce" messages are ever sent. So there's no possibility of sending a "bounce" message to a faked address. "Joe jobs" become completely ineffective.
Any non-success status from the outgoing send gets passed back to the incoming connection. If the destination server is down, the SMTP 450 status (Requested mail action not taken: mailbox unavailable) should be returned. For 4xx statuses, most mailers will resend, so the first mailer in the chain will handle retransmission. If the first mailer is a user SMTP client (rare today), the person sending will get an immediate fail, indicating that the mail was not received.
A simplified SMTP server like that would be appropriate for machines that only handle mail as a sideline and forward it somewhere else, like most web servers.
There are plenty of tablets under $99 on Alibaba, and even on Amazon. Finally, a major brand gets into it.
The main problem is that Acer is also a PC manufacturer, and thus vulnerable to pressure from Microsoft. That pressure is why both Asus and Dell introduced, then withdrew, Linux machines, and why the major brands went along with Microsoft's upper limit on XP-based netbook hardware. Many of the smaller tablet manufacturers have no Microsoft involvement, and are thus in a good position to ignore Microsoft's desire to keep a higher price point.