Apparently due to the need for cheap domain names, spammers are running their outbound mail configured with cheap TLDs. I suppose they are doing this so that they can have an actual domain name that resolves properly because it's too easy to block an invalid domain name?
Whatever the reason, if you run your own inbound MTA, a lot of spam can be blocked by simply setting it to discard any mail from these sleazy TLDs, before even reaching the point of doing blackhole list lookup. The worst ones these days are.top and.stream, because apparently you can get a domain for $0.88/mo. Sure, spam still comes in from pwned computers, but a surprising amount comes in from IPs with properly resolving A records, and a surprising amount of that spam comes from TLDs that no sane person would be sending mail from.
So I guess some good did come out of ICANN getting greedy with selling all those new TLDs after all.
All of the computers with "standard" disk controller chips used the index hole. (And some CP/M machines were hard sectored, which definitely requires it. That one time I tried to format a 5 1/4" floppy that I didn't realize was hard-sectored was certainly interesting.) I know the TRS-80 used the index hole (I usually made a rough index hole with an X-acto knife), and Atari used it too (I've seen it in the XF551 code).
The Apple II didn't use the index because Woz found out that he didn't need it (even copy protection just used the relative position timing between tracks), and I don't think Commodore used it either.
They started deprecating the old ADSL-1 service four or five years ago, at least in the SBC areas. Proper U-Verse is VDSL-2, but I'm sure there are still plenty of areas which never got the Project Lightspeed (FTTN) upgrades. Also, those upgrades date back to the days when it was still SBC (Southwestern Bell Co.), so it will probably vary based on what the RBOC was doing when acquired.
They have definitely been pushing DirecTV hard over the past year or so since buying them: a DirecTV flyer in almost every weekly stack of junk mail, plus almost monthly direct mail to existing U-Verse customers, even those with their IPTV service.
I think the main reason to abandon the IPTV has to be that they've finally realized that the last mile bandwidth on crap copper is just too precious to use more than 50% of it to stream TV (and FWIW, they charge $10/mo extra for the privilege of receiving HD, probably to discourage the higher usage), so now that they own DirectTV they'd rather shill that than actually install the fiber that they've been putting off for decades. That's going to bite them in the ass eventually. When they installed U-Verse at my mom's house, the tech had to try a second and a third copper pair to get one that would even work.
Sure, it's technically cool to push video over VDSL2, but it's simply more economical to push one-way content from a satellite. Coax works so well because it's a wideband system, and it's even possible to put a one-way wideband signal on fiber separate along with data, but DSL has a much lower bandwidth limit over a pair of aging copper wires.
Meanwhile, I'm moving from one Google Fiber city where it wouldn't have reached me for years anyhow (far NW Austin), to another (San Antonio) where it also probably won't reach me for years.
I wouldn't exactly call the mini headphone jack studio-quality to begin with. You can get USB sound dongles from $10 for a cheap dongle with 3.5mm jacks, to $40 for a 7.1 with multiple headphone jacks, or $40 for a 2-in 4-out DJ unit with RCA plugs, and you can get pro ones with a better better quality ADC/DAC and XLR/TRS jacks for a (big) chunk of change more. Or even a full USB mixer panel.
If you're using a laptop, you probably want a docked set-up for studio work anyhow, and USB means less plugs to connect. On my Late-2011-17", I rarely use headphones just for playing music (this ain't no iPod that you stick in your pocket), but I do have a USB unit (with proper RCA jacks) wired to my home theater audio stuff when I want to hear music on real speakers, and I get amplifier headroom for the bad source levels often found with streaming.
On a laptop, I'd be fine with an extra USB port instead of a headphone jack. I can always plug in a cheap tiny dongle if I need headphone audio. And on a desktop, who cares? I'd probably use optical on a desktop. Looking at the panel space they take up, if they also remove the line-in, that's more than enough for another USB-A port, or maybe even enough for two USB-C ports.
A cell phone is different because there aren't a lot of generic USB ports to slap adapters on. (Cue picture of the Lightning headphone dongle that won't let you charge at the same time.) Also, the headphone jack credit card readers are quite common among nomadic retailers. Perhaps a brick dongle that plugs into Lightning with a credit card slot, headphone jack, and charging port? It could even have a smart card chip reader! Those Square things do seem kind of flimsy to me.
The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
I don't see a single one of those that you couldn't have gotten at the official time of release, if NMS was what it was expected to be. I could understand if you mentioned some pre-order bonuses (there were apparently some, as well as a limited-edition box set), but you didn't, so they apparently weren't a big motivation. You mention being a big Steam user, so it couldn't have been because you were worried about it being out of stock in stores.
I rarely play new games, but in the past I have pre-ordered when I got something cool for it right away... something cooler than an in-game thingy upgrade. Or if I could play a pre-release version right away, like when I bought Minecraft back in the alpha days. Actually, being able to play a pre-release game right away is a big reason for me to buy in. That means other people have been playing it, and big problems like NMS has would Get Noticed.
Not that waiting for release day would have helped this time. People didn't realize the enormity of all the problems with NMS until a few days after release. I won't fault anyone from wanting to play on day one instead of waiting a few days for someone else to be a guinea pig. But I've got to draw the line at pre-ordering something you're going to play on Steam (no worries about stores running out) when you don't get some good swag from doing so. Or at least a 15% discount.
A DL is a privilege, not a right. The state can express itself by refusing to give you a DL if you refuse to take a picture without stuff covering your face.
So they bought all the sub-gawkers except for the main gawker.com, right?
When do we get to see Jalopnik TV on our local Univision station? The production values of the average Univision entertainment show combined with Jalopnik's focus on all kinds of cars (low-riders, anyone?) would be an awesome match.
La Marcha Superior! Starring Señor Jason Torchinsky!
In other words, it's really a devkit for the camera, not the CPU. But they can't miss the opportunity for another chance at forcing x86 into the embedded space.
Intel still hasn't gotten the clue that most people don't care about or don't even want to go near x86 (or x64) for embedded computing. It's a hammer looking for a nail. The only thing x86 ever had going for it was the momentum of decades of MS-DOS and its follow-ons. It's a really mediocre architecture full of bodges on top of warts, and it would have died long ago if IBM hadn't picked it.
Bubble sort can also be implemented on a singly-linked list.
Also, if you look at a graphical representation of the sort, you can see that running the inner loop from high to low is slightly more efficient. (but you can't do that with the singly-linked list version)
From what I read yesterday, it's like a cross between Elite (apparently the game was inspired by Elite) and Minecraft, only with the persistence of Minecraft removed (very few things you do will persist after you move on, even on your own game client) and the building parts of Minecraft basically removed, too. So you just visit random planets and see random alien life. I'll admit that back in the day it was awesome seeing some of the landscapes from Minecraft.
But what else did Minecraft have? Minecraft = random world + persistent building + survival. Which part hasn't been mentioned yet? That's right! Your exploration is constantly interrupted by SURVIVAL! You must get more resources before you can continue looking at awesome landscapes!
Apparently it really is a beautiful game engine, but with nothing particular to do other than wander around. In hindsight, maybe it should have had procedural generation, but dared to keep a potentially infinite database of what you changed (like Minecraft), and had a multi-user server mode (like Minecraft) where you and one to thirty of your friends can explore the random shit together. There should be no need for any attempt at global persistence, Minecraft has shown global persistence to be unnecessary for fun, just you and a few of your bros. And it brings in uncontrolled content that lets people spray virtual graffiti worldwide.
What's wrong with games where you can set up your own server for a dozen or two players to just have fun? It certainly avoids the server capacity problems that NMS had at opening when "everyone tried to play in the first 15 minutes". I mean, if you're going to have hardly any persistence or player-to-player interaction anyhow, why make people have to use the same servers for anything but authentication? But muh software piracy? Like that stopped Minecraft from printing money when people figured out how to hack it for unregistered players.
On the other hand, the ads in dead tree newspapers don't sing, dance, cover the non-advertising content, or attempt to install crap on your computer. In my experience the few sites that actually run their own ad servers tend to have non-annoying ads (for instance, hackaday), but most whore themselves out to ad wholesalers who will sub-whore out to other ad wholesalers, the latter of which are often the ones with the lowest standards. The real bottom-feeding scum are the ones that are used by piracy sites like TPB, but I think they expect their serious users to block ads anyhow.
It can also let you know when a house in another city is having HVAC trouble. But there's still no need for it to be exposed to the live internet, when it can simply poll a cloud service every few minutes for updates.
I've got two in different houses. I'm moving out of one of those houses, and the thermostat will come with me, even if I don't have a place for it right away. They also support a JSON local control protocol, so they won't be bricks if/when the cloud service dies.
Slashdot Mirror
Well at least they got the dorky part right this time!
Apparently due to the need for cheap domain names, spammers are running their outbound mail configured with cheap TLDs. I suppose they are doing this so that they can have an actual domain name that resolves properly because it's too easy to block an invalid domain name?
Whatever the reason, if you run your own inbound MTA, a lot of spam can be blocked by simply setting it to discard any mail from these sleazy TLDs, before even reaching the point of doing blackhole list lookup. The worst ones these days are .top and .stream, because apparently you can get a domain for $0.88/mo. Sure, spam still comes in from pwned computers, but a surprising amount comes in from IPs with properly resolving A records, and a surprising amount of that spam comes from TLDs that no sane person would be sending mail from.
So I guess some good did come out of ICANN getting greedy with selling all those new TLDs after all.
Does it let you download the raw unrestricted MPEG files to a computer?
I keep buying hard drives for my antenna MythTV.
All of the computers with "standard" disk controller chips used the index hole. (And some CP/M machines were hard sectored, which definitely requires it. That one time I tried to format a 5 1/4" floppy that I didn't realize was hard-sectored was certainly interesting.) I know the TRS-80 used the index hole (I usually made a rough index hole with an X-acto knife), and Atari used it too (I've seen it in the XF551 code).
The Apple II didn't use the index because Woz found out that he didn't need it (even copy protection just used the relative position timing between tracks), and I don't think Commodore used it either.
Of course if you're in a north-facing apartment, you're still basically fucked. GEO is southward in the northern hemisphere.
They started deprecating the old ADSL-1 service four or five years ago, at least in the SBC areas. Proper U-Verse is VDSL-2, but I'm sure there are still plenty of areas which never got the Project Lightspeed (FTTN) upgrades. Also, those upgrades date back to the days when it was still SBC (Southwestern Bell Co.), so it will probably vary based on what the RBOC was doing when acquired.
They have definitely been pushing DirecTV hard over the past year or so since buying them: a DirecTV flyer in almost every weekly stack of junk mail, plus almost monthly direct mail to existing U-Verse customers, even those with their IPTV service.
I think the main reason to abandon the IPTV has to be that they've finally realized that the last mile bandwidth on crap copper is just too precious to use more than 50% of it to stream TV (and FWIW, they charge $10/mo extra for the privilege of receiving HD, probably to discourage the higher usage), so now that they own DirectTV they'd rather shill that than actually install the fiber that they've been putting off for decades. That's going to bite them in the ass eventually. When they installed U-Verse at my mom's house, the tech had to try a second and a third copper pair to get one that would even work.
Sure, it's technically cool to push video over VDSL2, but it's simply more economical to push one-way content from a satellite. Coax works so well because it's a wideband system, and it's even possible to put a one-way wideband signal on fiber separate along with data, but DSL has a much lower bandwidth limit over a pair of aging copper wires.
Meanwhile, I'm moving from one Google Fiber city where it wouldn't have reached me for years anyhow (far NW Austin), to another (San Antonio) where it also probably won't reach me for years.
I want and need a 3.5mm jack.
Here you go. Eight bucks and they often put it on sale for five.
I wouldn't exactly call the mini headphone jack studio-quality to begin with. You can get USB sound dongles from $10 for a cheap dongle with 3.5mm jacks, to $40 for a 7.1 with multiple headphone jacks, or $40 for a 2-in 4-out DJ unit with RCA plugs, and you can get pro ones with a better better quality ADC/DAC and XLR/TRS jacks for a (big) chunk of change more. Or even a full USB mixer panel.
If you're using a laptop, you probably want a docked set-up for studio work anyhow, and USB means less plugs to connect. On my Late-2011-17", I rarely use headphones just for playing music (this ain't no iPod that you stick in your pocket), but I do have a USB unit (with proper RCA jacks) wired to my home theater audio stuff when I want to hear music on real speakers, and I get amplifier headroom for the bad source levels often found with streaming.
On a laptop, I'd be fine with an extra USB port instead of a headphone jack. I can always plug in a cheap tiny dongle if I need headphone audio. And on a desktop, who cares? I'd probably use optical on a desktop. Looking at the panel space they take up, if they also remove the line-in, that's more than enough for another USB-A port, or maybe even enough for two USB-C ports.
A cell phone is different because there aren't a lot of generic USB ports to slap adapters on. (Cue picture of the Lightning headphone dongle that won't let you charge at the same time.) Also, the headphone jack credit card readers are quite common among nomadic retailers. Perhaps a brick dongle that plugs into Lightning with a credit card slot, headphone jack, and charging port? It could even have a smart card chip reader! Those Square things do seem kind of flimsy to me.
"ninety percent of everything is crap"
Yes, now they don't have to worry about bad weather this weekend!
The hell with the FTC. Hello Games is in the UK, right? They have much stricter advertising standards over there.
The reasons for pre-order were many, but to name a few:
I don't see a single one of those that you couldn't have gotten at the official time of release, if NMS was what it was expected to be. I could understand if you mentioned some pre-order bonuses (there were apparently some, as well as a limited-edition box set), but you didn't, so they apparently weren't a big motivation. You mention being a big Steam user, so it couldn't have been because you were worried about it being out of stock in stores.
I rarely play new games, but in the past I have pre-ordered when I got something cool for it right away... something cooler than an in-game thingy upgrade. Or if I could play a pre-release version right away, like when I bought Minecraft back in the alpha days. Actually, being able to play a pre-release game right away is a big reason for me to buy in. That means other people have been playing it, and big problems like NMS has would Get Noticed.
Not that waiting for release day would have helped this time. People didn't realize the enormity of all the problems with NMS until a few days after release. I won't fault anyone from wanting to play on day one instead of waiting a few days for someone else to be a guinea pig. But I've got to draw the line at pre-ordering something you're going to play on Steam (no worries about stores running out) when you don't get some good swag from doing so. Or at least a 15% discount.
A DL is a privilege, not a right. The state can express itself by refusing to give you a DL if you refuse to take a picture without stuff covering your face.
It doesn't matter how pretty you make a bomb, in the end all it has to do is go "boom".
Then again, it does help if it doesn't fall apart before it hits the target.
So they bought all the sub-gawkers except for the main gawker.com, right?
When do we get to see Jalopnik TV on our local Univision station? The production values of the average Univision entertainment show combined with Jalopnik's focus on all kinds of cars (low-riders, anyone?) would be an awesome match.
La Marcha Superior! Starring Señor Jason Torchinsky!
In other words, it's really a devkit for the camera, not the CPU. But they can't miss the opportunity for another chance at forcing x86 into the embedded space.
Intel still hasn't gotten the clue that most people don't care about or don't even want to go near x86 (or x64) for embedded computing. It's a hammer looking for a nail. The only thing x86 ever had going for it was the momentum of decades of MS-DOS and its follow-ons. It's a really mediocre architecture full of bodges on top of warts, and it would have died long ago if IBM hadn't picked it.
Bubble sort can also be implemented on a singly-linked list.
Also, if you look at a graphical representation of the sort, you can see that running the inner loop from high to low is slightly more efficient. (but you can't do that with the singly-linked list version)
From what I read yesterday, it's like a cross between Elite (apparently the game was inspired by Elite) and Minecraft, only with the persistence of Minecraft removed (very few things you do will persist after you move on, even on your own game client) and the building parts of Minecraft basically removed, too. So you just visit random planets and see random alien life. I'll admit that back in the day it was awesome seeing some of the landscapes from Minecraft.
But what else did Minecraft have? Minecraft = random world + persistent building + survival. Which part hasn't been mentioned yet? That's right! Your exploration is constantly interrupted by SURVIVAL! You must get more resources before you can continue looking at awesome landscapes!
Apparently it really is a beautiful game engine, but with nothing particular to do other than wander around. In hindsight, maybe it should have had procedural generation, but dared to keep a potentially infinite database of what you changed (like Minecraft), and had a multi-user server mode (like Minecraft) where you and one to thirty of your friends can explore the random shit together. There should be no need for any attempt at global persistence, Minecraft has shown global persistence to be unnecessary for fun, just you and a few of your bros. And it brings in uncontrolled content that lets people spray virtual graffiti worldwide.
What's wrong with games where you can set up your own server for a dozen or two players to just have fun? It certainly avoids the server capacity problems that NMS had at opening when "everyone tried to play in the first 15 minutes". I mean, if you're going to have hardly any persistence or player-to-player interaction anyhow, why make people have to use the same servers for anything but authentication? But muh software piracy? Like that stopped Minecraft from printing money when people figured out how to hack it for unregistered players.
Now all they need to do is combine it with the technology from Clippy the Paperclip.
It looks like you're trying to get an orgasm. Would you like some help with that?
On the other hand, the ads in dead tree newspapers don't sing, dance, cover the non-advertising content, or attempt to install crap on your computer. In my experience the few sites that actually run their own ad servers tend to have non-annoying ads (for instance, hackaday), but most whore themselves out to ad wholesalers who will sub-whore out to other ad wholesalers, the latter of which are often the ones with the lowest standards. The real bottom-feeding scum are the ones that are used by piracy sites like TPB, but I think they expect their serious users to block ads anyhow.
It's the "smart" TVs that worry me more. There are a lot more of those out there.
It can also let you know when a house in another city is having HVAC trouble. But there's still no need for it to be exposed to the live internet, when it can simply poll a cloud service every few minutes for updates.
I've got two in different houses. I'm moving out of one of those houses, and the thermostat will come with me, even if I don't have a place for it right away. They also support a JSON local control protocol, so they won't be bricks if/when the cloud service dies.