The CIA has its own airforce: a modest percentage of the drone raids are carried out by JSOC or some other DoD element; but one of the reasons that 'drones' are more controversial than ordinary ground attack aircraft is that the expansion of drone warfare was aggressively used by the CIA to expand the effective size of their 'air force', so when you see 'drone' it's much more likely that the story is 'the CIA decided to kill somebody, identity classified, because of evidence(classified) evaluated according to a classified standard of evidence', rather than it being a conventional wartime air force or army activity.
Spooks still don't dogfight; but they have plenty of both surveillance and ground attack aircraft.
Has there ever been a time when the FBI's activities didn't involve being deeply dodgy? From their glorious beginnings as J. Edgar Hoover's personal commie-huntin' team to the present it always seems to be something with these guys.
The problem would appear to be that(unlike a real autopsy) they are working on the assumption that the guy who incorrectly took the gamble that the company would be a success and who(whether through their own effort, or because of outside circumstances, or both) flew it into the ground, is a reliable source of information on why it crashed.
Sometimes, this is likely to be true. They were there, they may have identified the problem at the time but been unable to solve it, or identified it in retrospect. In other cases, though, it's fairly likely that not knowing enough about what causes companies to fail is one of the reasons that the company failed, and the person who oversaw the failure is a really poor judge of what happened.
Apparently experiences differ; but my experience with F3 was adequate(not bug free; but manageable) after editing the.ini file to restrict the game to 2 cores only. For some reason, I don't know the gory details, running on 3 or more cores causes hard locks or crash-to-desktop every 15 minutes or so. With that out of the way, it's pretty well behaved.
Fallout: NV and Skyrim both don't have that problem, and, while they crash occasionally, are mostly just a medley of Bethesda's beloved broken quests and dodgy dialog trees. Not that you should have to; but at least you can go into the console and grovel around, or use unofficial fixes.
It's a pity, they know how to build an open world RPG that's great fun; but they really phone it in on QA.
It probably doesn't help that the current-gen consoles are both so similar to each other and similar to PCs. Yes, the last-gens have the virtue of dev tools and middleware being about as mature as they are ever likely to get, so if you don't need to get heroic and ultra close to the metal there has probably never been an easier time to build an adequately functional XB360/PS3 game; but they are still weirder and a lot more constrained than the current generation.
Given that Bethesda couldn't keep Skyrim from turning into a trainwreck(particularly once the DLCs were applied) on the PS3, and the XB360 to a lesser extent, this might be an act of mercy on their part. Unless they've been doing nothing but scrimping and optimizing, which would not go over well on the current consoles or the PC side, what they'd ship for last-gen consoles would likely be little short of fraud.
I'd rather more companies be willing to say "no, we can't do that, so we won't pretend otherwise" than have more 'support' for platforms that end up being hopeless trainwrecks.
Bethesda is not...exactly renowned...for their technical brilliance and dedication to software quality, so I wouldn't expect them to be on the bleeding edge of the possible for any given platform; but they'll still do a hell of a lot better on nearly-normal-x86s with 8GB of RAM than they will on two differently weird PPC boxes with 512MB, so I'd say that this counts as good news.
Frankly, though, Bethesda is one of the outfits that I just wouldn't touch on the console. Their specialty is bug-riddled-but-bursting-with-promise, and they've historically had good relations with modders, so you miss out on a whole lot on the console side, even if it isn't a total clusterfuck like Skyrim+expansions on PS3.
With some games you can expect reasonably complete polish and/or hostility to mods on the PC side, so consoles are more or less the same deal; but Bethesda RPGs are not those games.
Arguably, the question should be "how could a less advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles?"
All kinds of engineering talent, organizational expertise, a logistics and trade network that spanned the Mediterranean world; were necessary to run something like the Colosseum. Those loads of wild animals(some pretty exotic) and ample supplies of variously trained gladiators don't just deliver themselves, you know; nor is building that much stadium seating with rocks and manual labor exactly trivial.(Never mind the 'let's flood the place and have a lethal naval battle' days, those are a huge pain.)
Any mangy barbarian can enjoy drunken brawling, hunting, and the occasional duel or dog fight; but bloody spectacle is something best left to the experts.
I suspect that students aren't rational actors(humans in general aren't nearly so rational as the 'homo economicus' model likes to pretend, and kids are just dumb sometimes); but this suggests the possibility that the part of the problem, especially for the students from the most screwed demographics, might be an accurate perception of return on investment (likely along with a bit of time discounting).
If I attend a good, or at least reasonable, school; the ROI is both better and more visible: If I do a decent job, I can graduate with a GPA that will actually get me into a decent college; possibly even a really good one if I bust my ass. Plus, I observe students in grades ahead of me achieving these outcomes, and adults(ideally for me, including my parents) enjoying reasonably successful lives thanks to their own investments.
If I attend a really shitty school, concluding that the ROI just doesn't justify investment in education might actually be correct(it could also be incorrect; but persuasive because of the human tendency to aggressive time discounting and just drawing conclusions from others nearby in the absence of good data). If my effort isn't going to improve my expected outcome, I might find a better ROI somewhere else; even if it's still a pretty grim one.
It is undeniably the case that you can't usefully educate a student who doesn't give a fuck. Some mixture of individual idiosyncrasies and social messaging seems to account for a substantial portion of how much of a fuck is or isn't given, with teachers in the frustrating position of often caring a lot but having limited power; but it's worth remembering that demanding an investment of effort is actually demanding irrational behavior unless you can deliver an educational environment good enough to reward that investment. Irrationality isn't too hard to come by, so it still might work from time to time; but it certainly won't help your cause.
Well... the elimination of artisan labor and the rise of mechanized production processes was effectively a process where a (complex set of) tools enhanced quality so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.
Of course, the day we get technology capable of doing the same for education will also be the day where we have technology sufficient to render obsolete all educated workers, so the fact that technology has finally fixed schools will be a footnote in a much more dramatic restructuring of basically everything.
It isn't; but there are still some people who think we haven't yet failed hard enough to declare the experiment concluded.
The one arguable exception(which, unfortunately, serves to help the deluded cling to their delusions) is that technology does(and long has) have a great deal to do with how easy generating and distributing documents(and more recently sound and video) is.
If(and only if) you are already ready to learn on your own, or are receiving suitable assistance from competent teachers, technology has revolutionized the hell out of how easy and cheap it is to get your hands on information. If it hadn't, 'education' would still be something that only priest and scribes received, so that they could keep records on clay tablets. Something like mass literacy just wouldn't be economic (or worth very much, given how little there would be to read) without cheap printing and cheap paper.
Trouble is, barring fairly radical advances in computer-human interaction, technology is fairly poor at helping you turn 'information' into 'knowledge'(especially at lower levels, obviously a statistician or epidemiologist or GIS guru would note that being able to shuffle huge datasets is quite handy, and this is true; but that's a different problem than the fact that the kid not reading his textbook is not learning at exactly the same rate as the kid not reading the copious library of texts on all areas of knowledge on his ebook reader). It is also poor(in practice, often worse than useless, thanks to youtube and every other distraction on the internet) at motivating the unmotivated to stay on task.
Technology has its points; but most of its virtues accrue to people who already have good teachers and/or atypically good motivation and autodidactic habits. Few are fully immune to its vices; but they'll hit the weakly motivated, ill-taught, and otherwise least promising the hardest. This makes it a very poor silver bullet for attempting to 'close the achievement gap'.
I suspect that it used to be good for the internet that it wasn't considered a utility, given the risk of being misunderstood and folded into some aspect of Ma Bell's 'regulated monopoly' as the non-line-switched stepchild; but now that the incumbents have caught on, and realized that the internet is both a serious threat to cable TV and wireline phone; and that there is lots of money to be made by using your man-in-the-middle position to extract rents from activity on the internet; that time has probably passed.
I don't need a municipal ISP; but I'd be delighted to have my municipality run fiber to a peering point with the same competence that they've shown with handling my utility hookups. Once you get the last mile out of the way, competition becomes something more than a quaint theory again, so you can let the market take it from there; but as long as the last mile is, at best, a duopoly, and in the hands of incumbents who don't really have incentives aligned with the good of the internet; we have a problem.
Back in the day, when lots of what we now take for granted was pretty much impossible in-browser unless you went Flash, Java, or were among the lost and the damned using ActiveX controls. At that time, Adobe still treated web devs as their customers, since that was substantially the case. They still weren't competent on security or anything, this is Adobe we are talking about; but there was at least the idea that it would be a good thing if Flash were something you could build a usable 'rich' website in without either the dev or the user clawing out their own eyes in frustration and pain.
Now, Flash is largely relegated to being the fallback video player(and occasionally the one for idiots who think that its relatively weak obfuscation provides protection against piracy that is worth more than the cost of having to deliver RTMPe streams, rather than just serving.flv or.mp4 files from any HTTP server ever); and a platform for building seriously obnoxious and/or malicious ads.
Unfortunately, as their 'legitimate' customers dry up, Adobe's remaining Flash customers are, increasingly, people who want to annoy, track, or attack you.
From the perspective of the end user, that means that the platform is being abused; but given that Adobe can have no realistic prospect of regaining ground among legitimate web developers with Flash, they arguably have a pragmatic incentive to get as sleazy as the law and PR concerns will allow, since that is the last part of their customer base that will dry up.
Apparently, the head of a company that produces Canadian TV is butthurt about the fact that Canadians will go to extra inconvenience to avoid being stuck with her product and gain access to the US market. Intellectually dishonest and largely nonsensical argument; but the motives are clear enough.
She is going to need a downright brilliant propaganda team to convince anyone that paying for netflix is 'stealing'; just because she doesn't like it.
There's really not much difference between using a VPN to gain access to US electronic markets and using a car to gain access to US malls. Is it 'stealing' when a Canadian drives across the border and buys something in the US? Even by the standards of self-interested bullshit from incumbent monopolist assholes, this is unimpressive work.
Those 'quality assurance' requirements, and various other kissing of Google's pinkie ring, only apply if you want a shot at Google Play Services and the official Google app store. It is pretty grim and spartan; but you can do whatever you want with AOSP(subject to GPL2 for the linux kernel stuff, Apache for most of the rest, some proprietary blobs in a lot of BSPs).
Google's pressure (probably sensible, some low-end Android devices are utterly goddamn awful and you wouldn't want your name within a mile of them) would prevent "Android-Google Blessed" from making it into the cheap seats; but it would not, necessarily, prevent the annihilation of various historical 'featurephone'/'quasi-smart' phone OSes, and the assorted cut-down JVMs; in favor of firmware that is android underneath with a skin and preinstalled apps suited to whatever dreadful screen the phone has.
I'd second that question. Genuine 'dumbphones' are still way too cheap(and very easy on the battery) for Android to be relevant; but 'featurephone' BoM and specs start to head toward the land of Allwinner, Mediatek, and other somewhat downmarket but adequately punchy Android-oriented SoCs.
I imagine that one barrier to reasonably stock android is screen: all the default Android UI/UX very strongly assumes that you have a screen of decent resolution, typically multiple point touch is expected unless it's a set top box setup. Dumbphones, by contrast, frequently still have smaller, lousier, screens, non-touch, and a UI that depends on buttons only(or a blackberry-style little touch area).
As long as you don't care about Google's blessing, there's no reason you couldn't build your horrible little ecosystem of crap on top of Android, rather than BREW(and whatever its analogs are in GSM land) and one of the dinky JVMs, so I have to imagine that licensing costs for those components are something that vendors don't try their luck on, so maybe that keeps them in the market?
There may be some models that don't live up to it; but cheap Nokias tend to have a good reputation because they are good. Dumbphones, sure; but Nokia did a good deal of work hammering out the basic 'rugged and durable(no specific MIL-STD-whatever quoted; but hard to kill even with some splashes and a lot of clutzy dropping onto rocky, dusty ground); reasonably usable UI, battery lasts for ages' candybar; and until we reach the point where we make things out of nanoprinted computronium because it's cheaper than injection moulded plastic, that's about as close to 'timeless' as cellphone designs get.
I assume that Microsoft won't be too eager to knife-fight with some of the cut price offbrand dumbphones, and will attempt to drive adoption of devices at least smart enough to talk to their online services in some capacity, even if they don't yet run WP8/10/whatever; but they'd be insane to not at least continue selling Nokia's good work, and at least doing incremental refreshes, until people stop buying. (Plus, after what happened when MS bought Danger and decided that the Sidekick Must Run WinCE; thereby turning a ready-made success into 'project pink', I assume that they learned something about the virtues of not fixing what isn't broken.)
The one weird(though largely harmless in practice) thing about having the intro be both skippable and 'in game', is that it doesn't appear to level in any way, since it was built as a lightweight introduction; and none of the characters involved will react as though it's unusual if you come back later and start it.
Stagger out of the doctor's house, looking like you could really use the help, and Sunny will show you some stuff about guns, wilderness medicine, and Ringo will be deeply pessimistic about your chances against Joe Cobb unless you rally more or less the entire town.
Walk back to Goodsprings, power armor gleaming, CZ-57 Avenger on your hip and enough mini nukes in your backpack to qualify for a seat on the security council, if there were such a thing; and Sunny is still happy to help the new guy plink bottles and kill a few geckos, and Ringo still doesn't think that you'll be able to handle Joe Cobb. This...ends poorly...for Joe.
You are allowed to use 'magic quadrants' under circumstances where a "here's something vaguely comedic; but seriously folks..." slide is acceptable, right? If, say, there aren't any Gary Larson cartoons or XKCD comics that suit the topic?
One would hope that the American Cancer Society would, at least, be an organization that understands that uncontrolled proliferation can be seriously detrimental to an organization; and that sometimes substantial resection, however unpleasant and expensive, is the best available course of action.
It's a lucky coincidence that that applies to IT systems as well!
Ok, DC-DC converters do have a legitimate place in battery powered systems. You want a blue or white LED in your flashlight without resorting to an expensive cell chemistry or 3ish alkalines in series? Well, DC-DC converter it is. You(for some reason) have an antique filament-bulb flashlight and you don't want it to spend the last chunk of its life putting out relatively useless IR because the filament temperature is too low for visible light? A DC-DC converter will fully flatten the batteries faster(because of its own losses, and because current draw has to increase as voltage droops in order to maintain the same power output); but at least the entire lifespan will be spent putting out usable light.
However, there's a problem here: Most even vaguely well designed widgets already tolerate some amount of voltage variation. Especially because NiCd and NiMH rechargeables are only good for ~1.2v(maybe 1.3-1.4 hot off the charger, for a few moments), alkalines for ~1.5; but with well known droop as they are exhausted or if discharge current is too high; and lithium primary cells in AAA or AA packages are up around 1.7, with less droop; you simply can't build a consumer widget that is too picky about battery voltage. If you do, you'll be flooded with unhappy and confused customers and probably lots of expensive returns.
This seems to constrain the useful market for this product to a very narrow, rather weird, niche: Anything that already tolerates voltage droop well will see very limited benefit. Anything with very low power draw will also see very limited benefit, because even badly depleted batteries slump as discharge current increases. Devices with very high power draw might see a benefit; because they will drive the battery to slump most quickly(and, according to the discharge curves for most alkalines, very high currents will cause substantial slump well before the capacity is exhausted); but the DC-DC converter will need even higher discharge current in order to keep power output constant as voltage drops, which will exacerbate the voltage slump, and likely hit the wall where the effective internal resistance of the battery is high enough that it simply won't deliver any more current.
So what actually gains? Devices that are maldesigned enough to brown out with even modest voltage droop; but also sufficiently low drain that the draw of the converter will remain within the battery's 'best-case' discharge cycle; but not so low drain that the (modest; but nonzero) losses in the DC-DC converter increase the overall drain by a substantial amount.
Slashdot Mirror
The CIA has its own airforce: a modest percentage of the drone raids are carried out by JSOC or some other DoD element; but one of the reasons that 'drones' are more controversial than ordinary ground attack aircraft is that the expansion of drone warfare was aggressively used by the CIA to expand the effective size of their 'air force', so when you see 'drone' it's much more likely that the story is 'the CIA decided to kill somebody, identity classified, because of evidence(classified) evaluated according to a classified standard of evidence', rather than it being a conventional wartime air force or army activity.
Spooks still don't dogfight; but they have plenty of both surveillance and ground attack aircraft.
Has there ever been a time when the FBI's activities didn't involve being deeply dodgy? From their glorious beginnings as J. Edgar Hoover's personal commie-huntin' team to the present it always seems to be something with these guys.
The problem would appear to be that(unlike a real autopsy) they are working on the assumption that the guy who incorrectly took the gamble that the company would be a success and who(whether through their own effort, or because of outside circumstances, or both) flew it into the ground, is a reliable source of information on why it crashed.
Sometimes, this is likely to be true. They were there, they may have identified the problem at the time but been unable to solve it, or identified it in retrospect. In other cases, though, it's fairly likely that not knowing enough about what causes companies to fail is one of the reasons that the company failed, and the person who oversaw the failure is a really poor judge of what happened.
Apparently experiences differ; but my experience with F3 was adequate(not bug free; but manageable) after editing the .ini file to restrict the game to 2 cores only. For some reason, I don't know the gory details, running on 3 or more cores causes hard locks or crash-to-desktop every 15 minutes or so. With that out of the way, it's pretty well behaved.
Fallout: NV and Skyrim both don't have that problem, and, while they crash occasionally, are mostly just a medley of Bethesda's beloved broken quests and dodgy dialog trees. Not that you should have to; but at least you can go into the console and grovel around, or use unofficial fixes.
It's a pity, they know how to build an open world RPG that's great fun; but they really phone it in on QA.
They aren't shrugging off current-gen consoles(PS4/XBOne), just the last gen ones, plus whatever Nintendo is doing off in their corner these days.
It probably doesn't help that the current-gen consoles are both so similar to each other and similar to PCs. Yes, the last-gens have the virtue of dev tools and middleware being about as mature as they are ever likely to get, so if you don't need to get heroic and ultra close to the metal there has probably never been an easier time to build an adequately functional XB360/PS3 game; but they are still weirder and a lot more constrained than the current generation.
Given that Bethesda couldn't keep Skyrim from turning into a trainwreck(particularly once the DLCs were applied) on the PS3, and the XB360 to a lesser extent, this might be an act of mercy on their part. Unless they've been doing nothing but scrimping and optimizing, which would not go over well on the current consoles or the PC side, what they'd ship for last-gen consoles would likely be little short of fraud.
I'd rather more companies be willing to say "no, we can't do that, so we won't pretend otherwise" than have more 'support' for platforms that end up being hopeless trainwrecks.
Bethesda is not...exactly renowned...for their technical brilliance and dedication to software quality, so I wouldn't expect them to be on the bleeding edge of the possible for any given platform; but they'll still do a hell of a lot better on nearly-normal-x86s with 8GB of RAM than they will on two differently weird PPC boxes with 512MB, so I'd say that this counts as good news.
Frankly, though, Bethesda is one of the outfits that I just wouldn't touch on the console. Their specialty is bug-riddled-but-bursting-with-promise, and they've historically had good relations with modders, so you miss out on a whole lot on the console side, even if it isn't a total clusterfuck like Skyrim+expansions on PS3.
With some games you can expect reasonably complete polish and/or hostility to mods on the PC side, so consoles are more or less the same deal; but Bethesda RPGs are not those games.
You have to wonder where it all went wrong for the Romans to turn into Italians.
Arguably, the question should be "how could a less advanced culture have staged such bloody spectacles?"
All kinds of engineering talent, organizational expertise, a logistics and trade network that spanned the Mediterranean world; were necessary to run something like the Colosseum. Those loads of wild animals(some pretty exotic) and ample supplies of variously trained gladiators don't just deliver themselves, you know; nor is building that much stadium seating with rocks and manual labor exactly trivial.(Never mind the 'let's flood the place and have a lethal naval battle' days, those are a huge pain.)
Any mangy barbarian can enjoy drunken brawling, hunting, and the occasional duel or dog fight; but bloody spectacle is something best left to the experts.
I suspect that students aren't rational actors(humans in general aren't nearly so rational as the 'homo economicus' model likes to pretend, and kids are just dumb sometimes); but this suggests the possibility that the part of the problem, especially for the students from the most screwed demographics, might be an accurate perception of return on investment (likely along with a bit of time discounting).
If I attend a good, or at least reasonable, school; the ROI is both better and more visible: If I do a decent job, I can graduate with a GPA that will actually get me into a decent college; possibly even a really good one if I bust my ass. Plus, I observe students in grades ahead of me achieving these outcomes, and adults(ideally for me, including my parents) enjoying reasonably successful lives thanks to their own investments.
If I attend a really shitty school, concluding that the ROI just doesn't justify investment in education might actually be correct(it could also be incorrect; but persuasive because of the human tendency to aggressive time discounting and just drawing conclusions from others nearby in the absence of good data). If my effort isn't going to improve my expected outcome, I might find a better ROI somewhere else; even if it's still a pretty grim one.
It is undeniably the case that you can't usefully educate a student who doesn't give a fuck. Some mixture of individual idiosyncrasies and social messaging seems to account for a substantial portion of how much of a fuck is or isn't given, with teachers in the frustrating position of often caring a lot but having limited power; but it's worth remembering that demanding an investment of effort is actually demanding irrational behavior unless you can deliver an educational environment good enough to reward that investment. Irrationality isn't too hard to come by, so it still might work from time to time; but it certainly won't help your cause.
Well... the elimination of artisan labor and the rise of mechanized production processes was effectively a process where a (complex set of) tools enhanced quality so much that it made the bad carpenters and the good carpenters more or less indistinguishable.
Of course, the day we get technology capable of doing the same for education will also be the day where we have technology sufficient to render obsolete all educated workers, so the fact that technology has finally fixed schools will be a footnote in a much more dramatic restructuring of basically everything.
It isn't; but there are still some people who think we haven't yet failed hard enough to declare the experiment concluded.
The one arguable exception(which, unfortunately, serves to help the deluded cling to their delusions) is that technology does(and long has) have a great deal to do with how easy generating and distributing documents(and more recently sound and video) is.
If(and only if) you are already ready to learn on your own, or are receiving suitable assistance from competent teachers, technology has revolutionized the hell out of how easy and cheap it is to get your hands on information. If it hadn't, 'education' would still be something that only priest and scribes received, so that they could keep records on clay tablets. Something like mass literacy just wouldn't be economic (or worth very much, given how little there would be to read) without cheap printing and cheap paper.
Trouble is, barring fairly radical advances in computer-human interaction, technology is fairly poor at helping you turn 'information' into 'knowledge'(especially at lower levels, obviously a statistician or epidemiologist or GIS guru would note that being able to shuffle huge datasets is quite handy, and this is true; but that's a different problem than the fact that the kid not reading his textbook is not learning at exactly the same rate as the kid not reading the copious library of texts on all areas of knowledge on his ebook reader). It is also poor(in practice, often worse than useless, thanks to youtube and every other distraction on the internet) at motivating the unmotivated to stay on task.
Technology has its points; but most of its virtues accrue to people who already have good teachers and/or atypically good motivation and autodidactic habits. Few are fully immune to its vices; but they'll hit the weakly motivated, ill-taught, and otherwise least promising the hardest. This makes it a very poor silver bullet for attempting to 'close the achievement gap'.
I suspect that it used to be good for the internet that it wasn't considered a utility, given the risk of being misunderstood and folded into some aspect of Ma Bell's 'regulated monopoly' as the non-line-switched stepchild; but now that the incumbents have caught on, and realized that the internet is both a serious threat to cable TV and wireline phone; and that there is lots of money to be made by using your man-in-the-middle position to extract rents from activity on the internet; that time has probably passed.
I don't need a municipal ISP; but I'd be delighted to have my municipality run fiber to a peering point with the same competence that they've shown with handling my utility hookups. Once you get the last mile out of the way, competition becomes something more than a quaint theory again, so you can let the market take it from there; but as long as the last mile is, at best, a duopoly, and in the hands of incumbents who don't really have incentives aligned with the good of the internet; we have a problem.
Depends on who your customers are...
.flv or .mp4 files from any HTTP server ever); and a platform for building seriously obnoxious and/or malicious ads.
Back in the day, when lots of what we now take for granted was pretty much impossible in-browser unless you went Flash, Java, or were among the lost and the damned using ActiveX controls. At that time, Adobe still treated web devs as their customers, since that was substantially the case. They still weren't competent on security or anything, this is Adobe we are talking about; but there was at least the idea that it would be a good thing if Flash were something you could build a usable 'rich' website in without either the dev or the user clawing out their own eyes in frustration and pain.
Now, Flash is largely relegated to being the fallback video player(and occasionally the one for idiots who think that its relatively weak obfuscation provides protection against piracy that is worth more than the cost of having to deliver RTMPe streams, rather than just serving
Unfortunately, as their 'legitimate' customers dry up, Adobe's remaining Flash customers are, increasingly, people who want to annoy, track, or attack you.
From the perspective of the end user, that means that the platform is being abused; but given that Adobe can have no realistic prospect of regaining ground among legitimate web developers with Flash, they arguably have a pragmatic incentive to get as sleazy as the law and PR concerns will allow, since that is the last part of their customer base that will dry up.
Asteroids do not concern me, Slashdot.
Apparently, the head of a company that produces Canadian TV is butthurt about the fact that Canadians will go to extra inconvenience to avoid being stuck with her product and gain access to the US market. Intellectually dishonest and largely nonsensical argument; but the motives are clear enough.
She is going to need a downright brilliant propaganda team to convince anyone that paying for netflix is 'stealing'; just because she doesn't like it.
There's really not much difference between using a VPN to gain access to US electronic markets and using a car to gain access to US malls. Is it 'stealing' when a Canadian drives across the border and buys something in the US? Even by the standards of self-interested bullshit from incumbent monopolist assholes, this is unimpressive work.
Those 'quality assurance' requirements, and various other kissing of Google's pinkie ring, only apply if you want a shot at Google Play Services and the official Google app store. It is pretty grim and spartan; but you can do whatever you want with AOSP(subject to GPL2 for the linux kernel stuff, Apache for most of the rest, some proprietary blobs in a lot of BSPs).
Google's pressure (probably sensible, some low-end Android devices are utterly goddamn awful and you wouldn't want your name within a mile of them) would prevent "Android-Google Blessed" from making it into the cheap seats; but it would not, necessarily, prevent the annihilation of various historical 'featurephone'/'quasi-smart' phone OSes, and the assorted cut-down JVMs; in favor of firmware that is android underneath with a skin and preinstalled apps suited to whatever dreadful screen the phone has.
I'd second that question. Genuine 'dumbphones' are still way too cheap(and very easy on the battery) for Android to be relevant; but 'featurephone' BoM and specs start to head toward the land of Allwinner, Mediatek, and other somewhat downmarket but adequately punchy Android-oriented SoCs.
I imagine that one barrier to reasonably stock android is screen: all the default Android UI/UX very strongly assumes that you have a screen of decent resolution, typically multiple point touch is expected unless it's a set top box setup. Dumbphones, by contrast, frequently still have smaller, lousier, screens, non-touch, and a UI that depends on buttons only(or a blackberry-style little touch area).
As long as you don't care about Google's blessing, there's no reason you couldn't build your horrible little ecosystem of crap on top of Android, rather than BREW(and whatever its analogs are in GSM land) and one of the dinky JVMs, so I have to imagine that licensing costs for those components are something that vendors don't try their luck on, so maybe that keeps them in the market?
There may be some models that don't live up to it; but cheap Nokias tend to have a good reputation because they are good. Dumbphones, sure; but Nokia did a good deal of work hammering out the basic 'rugged and durable(no specific MIL-STD-whatever quoted; but hard to kill even with some splashes and a lot of clutzy dropping onto rocky, dusty ground); reasonably usable UI, battery lasts for ages' candybar; and until we reach the point where we make things out of nanoprinted computronium because it's cheaper than injection moulded plastic, that's about as close to 'timeless' as cellphone designs get.
I assume that Microsoft won't be too eager to knife-fight with some of the cut price offbrand dumbphones, and will attempt to drive adoption of devices at least smart enough to talk to their online services in some capacity, even if they don't yet run WP8/10/whatever; but they'd be insane to not at least continue selling Nokia's good work, and at least doing incremental refreshes, until people stop buying. (Plus, after what happened when MS bought Danger and decided that the Sidekick Must Run WinCE; thereby turning a ready-made success into 'project pink', I assume that they learned something about the virtues of not fixing what isn't broken.)
The one weird(though largely harmless in practice) thing about having the intro be both skippable and 'in game', is that it doesn't appear to level in any way, since it was built as a lightweight introduction; and none of the characters involved will react as though it's unusual if you come back later and start it.
Stagger out of the doctor's house, looking like you could really use the help, and Sunny will show you some stuff about guns, wilderness medicine, and Ringo will be deeply pessimistic about your chances against Joe Cobb unless you rally more or less the entire town.
Walk back to Goodsprings, power armor gleaming, CZ-57 Avenger on your hip and enough mini nukes in your backpack to qualify for a seat on the security council, if there were such a thing; and Sunny is still happy to help the new guy plink bottles and kill a few geckos, and Ringo still doesn't think that you'll be able to handle Joe Cobb. This...ends poorly...for Joe.
You are allowed to use 'magic quadrants' under circumstances where a "here's something vaguely comedic; but seriously folks..." slide is acceptable, right? If, say, there aren't any Gary Larson cartoons or XKCD comics that suit the topic?
One would hope that the American Cancer Society would, at least, be an organization that understands that uncontrolled proliferation can be seriously detrimental to an organization; and that sometimes substantial resection, however unpleasant and expensive, is the best available course of action.
It's a lucky coincidence that that applies to IT systems as well!
Ok, DC-DC converters do have a legitimate place in battery powered systems. You want a blue or white LED in your flashlight without resorting to an expensive cell chemistry or 3ish alkalines in series? Well, DC-DC converter it is. You(for some reason) have an antique filament-bulb flashlight and you don't want it to spend the last chunk of its life putting out relatively useless IR because the filament temperature is too low for visible light? A DC-DC converter will fully flatten the batteries faster(because of its own losses, and because current draw has to increase as voltage droops in order to maintain the same power output); but at least the entire lifespan will be spent putting out usable light.
However, there's a problem here: Most even vaguely well designed widgets already tolerate some amount of voltage variation. Especially because NiCd and NiMH rechargeables are only good for ~1.2v(maybe 1.3-1.4 hot off the charger, for a few moments), alkalines for ~1.5; but with well known droop as they are exhausted or if discharge current is too high; and lithium primary cells in AAA or AA packages are up around 1.7, with less droop; you simply can't build a consumer widget that is too picky about battery voltage. If you do, you'll be flooded with unhappy and confused customers and probably lots of expensive returns.
This seems to constrain the useful market for this product to a very narrow, rather weird, niche: Anything that already tolerates voltage droop well will see very limited benefit. Anything with very low power draw will also see very limited benefit, because even badly depleted batteries slump as discharge current increases. Devices with very high power draw might see a benefit; because they will drive the battery to slump most quickly(and, according to the discharge curves for most alkalines, very high currents will cause substantial slump well before the capacity is exhausted); but the DC-DC converter will need even higher discharge current in order to keep power output constant as voltage drops, which will exacerbate the voltage slump, and likely hit the wall where the effective internal resistance of the battery is high enough that it simply won't deliver any more current.
So what actually gains? Devices that are maldesigned enough to brown out with even modest voltage droop; but also sufficiently low drain that the draw of the converter will remain within the battery's 'best-case' discharge cycle; but not so low drain that the (modest; but nonzero) losses in the DC-DC converter increase the overall drain by a substantial amount.
Anyone have a device or devices in mind?