Short answer, "Yes." Long answer; It's 8am and I haven't had my morning coffee. I don't discuss orbital mechanics before caffination. But I'm sure someone else will in a few hours, once the East coast has finished wasting time on all the other websites we go to in order to avoid working and come here...
It's significant because many people use the same password for multiple sites, so access to a relatively "harmless" database like this one will inevitably open up access to more sensitive stuff.
That still doesn't solve that pesky problem of their being no connection to the outside world. You can't hack the Gibson if there are no incoming lines. -_- I could give you the root password to my computer and it would do you zero good because there's no way to make a connection to my computer: You couldn't even get past the crappy wifi router. I would expect the NSA's super top secret networks would be at least as secure as my $15 linksys router in this regard.
Similar circuits could one day be wrapped around the heart like 'an electronic pericardium' to correct irregularities such as arrhythmia."
Soluble... That word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Well, it's a good thing the human body doesn't consist primarily of water. Also, slashdot: First you're down for several hours last night, and now your editors have apparently been outsourced to india and have only a tenuous grasp on the english language. Yes, go run to the dictionary, I can wait. As for the rest of you: Does anyone else think Dice has sucked so hard since acquiring the site they're in danger of forming an event horizon from which even a clue cannot escape?
Yeah, they have the password for the usernames of their website. You know, the one that has only public information. Wow, I'm so impressed. In other news, government and private-sector agencies use passwords to prevent people from randomly updating their public websites, which contain no sensitive or terribly interesting information. It's like saying I hacked the whitehouse because I was able to get into the e-mail account of one of the assistant junior staffer's intern's. woo, look at me!:\
Also, Protip: Don't embarass one of the few agencies in the world with the resources and inclination to track you down (ie, the NSA). They basically built a whole second internet to track all the traffic on the first internet, and then built a giant super data warehouse to warehouse all the other warehouses. Not exactly the kind of people who's cheerios you want to piss in.
Add more Gs to it. That's what the telcos did. They bring a 2G, you bring a 3G. They bring a 3G, you bring a 4G. That's the chic--marketing way! Then we took that whole gigabyte thing with harddrives and just rounded down. Asking companies to compete based on actual specifications instead of marketing bullshit is communist. If you support that kind of commie non-sense then you're the reason we're losing jobs to China. Blah blah blah... *barfs*
This isn't news. The GPS signal is very, very weak. It's actually right at the noise floor and using some rather ingenious encoding to resolve the signal. The signal itself is fully-documented for consumer equipment. Given the weak signal strength and the protocol having no encryption or validation to speak of, of course jamming is possible; Receiver selectivity dictates it'll lock on to the strongest signal, the root square law dictates that just about any terrestrial source with line of sight will be stronger than the one in space. The only problem to work out then is processing; You have to figure out where the receiver is now, and then figure out where you want it to be, and adjust all the signals it could receive from the GPS satellites simultaniously to cause it to (falsely) lock on to the new position. And considering that the timing needs to be in fractions of a millisecond to have any value at all, you need to be very exact.
Most of the equipment is dedicated to computing what the signal needs to be.... the actual transmitter is dirt cheap.
My point of view is that extremists don't attract large numbers of followers or support. Moderates do -- and moderates, unlike extremists, are open to negotiation and compromise. Whatever he may have accomplished, he'll never have a large mainstream following, anymore than any other kind of extremist would. History is replete with examples that support my "point of view". History has only a few examples of extremists which persuaded the majority or caused significant social change... upon which, they ceased being extremists.
The odds are greatly in favor of my position: RMS is a liability far more than an asset. We have better spokespersons for the movement, who have the common decency to not kick in the door and start screaming at people they disagree with.
If, by "oppressive governments", you mean places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China, I don't think they're looking for excuses to shutdown Tor. They've always seen it as the enemy, and just make it illegal by fiat. They have zero need for excuses to shutdown Tor.
I was also including a certain world superpower with a penchant taking away the rights of their citizens because the terrorists want to take away their rights. This superpower's main diplomat in the middle east is a predator drone that rains hellstone and fire randomly on people who are terrorists only slightly more often than they're innocent civilians. This superpower also has a global and far-reaching spy network to track almost all wireless communications in realtime, worldwide, and has stated it's slowly building in an "internet kill switch" that could disable the entire internet, worldwide, mostly for shits and giggles.
But yeah, Iran, China, etc., they're kinda bad too...
This is just the bot net people being lazy and taking the easy approach. It's already been shown you can design decentralized networks that require no "bootstrap" information like DNS in order to find other nodes and communicate. But it is beyond the abilities of these low-level social miscreants to create, so they're piggybacking on a network that they think can hide their malicious activity. Tor only anonymizes the source of the data; Anything between the exit node and destination is sent in the clear and likely they've made some mistake that'll allow it to be blockable.
Of course, this is exactly what the oppressive governments of the world (and those who oppress by claiming they're "liberating" others), have been looking for to shut down the Tor network. You can expect more attempts at legislating it away to come soon. Fundamentally though it doesn't solve the problem, which is that the criminal underworld has figured out how to do what industrialists figured out 50 years ago: If you take just a little from a lot of people, you can get very rich, and those people won't fight back because the cost of retaliation is higher than the loss. As a result, people everywhere are being nickel and dimed to death.
Botnets are simply the illegal mirror counterpart to the legal crime of draining pensions and unethical banking to turn a profit: Harm many only a little, and you too can be rich.
He could have a little class though doing it. Like bursting in and yelling "TROLL! In the dungeon!... Thought you'd want to know," and then collapsing on the floor. Busting in on someone else's announcement and unleashing a string of profanities and ranting isn't classy -- it's how drunk people act. Is that really who we want as the poster child for the open source movement? A guy who looks like he hasn't shaved or showered in ages and acts piss drunk in public?
He doesn't live in the real world and it doesn't help that he is probably a little looney.
That's a bigger problem than most people want to admit. Very often, an open source project doesn't fail because it's technically inferior to other products, but because of ideological differences between developers. Take the *BSD community: It's dying right now because it split off into four major variants due to political in-fighting. The reason why Linux and Apache have succeeded isn't just technical superiority, but because those groups kept political infighting to a managable level. That's the biggest problem in the open source community right now -- it's leadership ability. Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of that with engineers. Engineers want to build things, not manage it, and their respect of others within a project is based solely on technical ability. So the only projects that really succeed are when by happy coincidence the lead developer also possesses leadership ability. And this is a rare combination! Not just in open source, but everywhere. The better you are at technical skills (as a rule) the worse you are with people skills.
Richard could be one of those much-needed bridge people who can lead and also garner respect for his technical skills, but he's too damn stubborn and headstrong. His only real use in the community anymore is as a lighthouse -- a warning to others not to become too political, lest you become marginalized and gimp. If he'd just let up a little bit and recognize that getting 90% of what you want is still a win, maybe he could be useful. Right now though, the "All or nothing" approach isn't doing him any favors, just like almost everyone else -- whether it's business, politics, or hobby, very few people succeed with that attitude.
Those keyboards are overpriced shit. They bought the one thing that was worth anything off of the Northgate brand, doubled the price, and never invested in the brand after; No advertising, no redesign, they just bought it and murdered it. These days nobody even knows that good keyboards ever existed; they think the "jello touch" Microsoft split-keyboards are the best the industry has to offer. And now all the rage is "touch" displays because Apple's doing it. Well, good for them... but it's 30 year old tech, and the only place it's found a home in business has been point of sale terminals and package delivery, where light data entry is required and the data being entered doesn't vary much.
Don't listen to the pundits saying "Touch is the fuuuuture!" -- yeah. whatever. I heard that same line back in 1987. It was the same back then with "3D displays". There's more than a few failed attempts filling up landfills already. Google "VR goggles" sometime... -_- There are some interface devices that just fit with our mode of living, and a lot more that don't. Touch screen will only ever be niche, and anyone will tell you a keyboard with solid tactile feedback can help you type 20-50% faster. It doesn't have to be noisy, either.
I do prefer to buy things that last, but really, the frequent upgrades that have been forced upon us in some ways have been a blessing.
If something is truly better, people will buy that instead, and the things that aren't as good will eventually go extinct. There's no need to force customers to upgrade, and in most cases this fails miserably with poor results for all involved. Remember when Microsoft tried to force people and corporations to upgrade to Vista from XP? It was such a horrible cluster-fuck that at one point they were offering free downgrades to XP with the purchase of a Vista license! They had to extend their support agreement for XP because almost all of their big contracts with the Fortune 100 companies told them: "If you try to force this on us, we will fucking bury you in so much litigation and negative press Microsoft will become synonymous with failure." Vista was dropped like a hot potato and Windows 7 was rushed out the door -- without all of the forced upgrades and licensing bullshit that caused Vista to implode on the launch pad. Net result? It's only taken two years, but businesses are switching over now. Microsoft hasn't learned its lesson though -- they just pushed Windows 8 out the door with the same kind of licensing and restrictions that Vista had. Anyone heard of a business migrating to Windows 8? Nope. I'm not aware of a single Fortune 500 company that has plans to upgrade to it. Ever.
Forced obsolesence might get you a few dollars in the short term, but your customers will have no loyalty.
Prof. Obvious of the Romero Institute noted today that people who already strongly believe something will continue to do so regardless of new evidence. In related news, the government edges closer to falling off the fiscal cliff, the totally solvable budget problem that we created to force our two political parties to play nice together. Both sides have recently stated they aren't open to negotiation, will not offer any concessions, and aren't talking to each other, however our correspondent on the scene reported recently that they have started writing numbers down on a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper was not immediately available for comment at the time of this post.
Back in the 90s, a company called Northgate Computer Systems, based out of Minnesota, ranked right up there in terms of marketshare, etc as Dell, HP, etc. They had several government contracts which were exceptionally lucrative. They also made keyboards that everyone at the time lusted for because they were super-reliable, very comfortable to use, and quiet despite the snappiness of the keys. You simply couldn't find a better keyboard. Everything was looking great for them, until senior management made a series of horrible and totally avoidable blunders and within a year the company tanked. The one thing to survive the company's demise was their patents on keyboards -- bought out by a company called Avant Stellar (if memory serves). They charge a fortune for their keyboards, and they aren't as reliable as those old ones are.
I can understand why these guys decided to hack together a microcontroller assembly to get it working on modern hardware: human interface equipment back in that day and age was built to last forever. It could even survive contact with 5 year olds, as my keyboard frequently crashed onto concrete floors, was pissed on by animals, and crushed by falling monitors (remember: Back in the day, a 19" monitor weighed a good 50 pounds). Things that would kill today's keyboards dead, it simply brushed off as a non-event.
I wish things were built like that today, rather than this planned obsolesence bullsh*t. There's some things in this industry that just don't change: The power cord, the mouse, the keyboard, and the cases. Build those things to last guys. Really.
Yeah, because those investors need to be protected from, uhm, you know, something or other.
The entire point of the SEC is to ensure a level playing field for investors. Facebook may seem "public", but it isn't because it doesn't provide equal access to everyone. If you can view the information without having to login or provide any identifying information, then it's public. All he had to do was cross-post the same information elsewhere and it would have been fine. The SEC doesn't care what information is given away (well, sorta, but let's not get bogged down on details) as long as it's available to all on an equal basis.
It's not unreasonable for them to say "If you post to Facebook, you have to post it publicly as well." Now, whether or not he gets in trouble is another matter -- it could be that what he was saying didn't really have a business impact, in which case they'll probably slap him on the wrist and say "Don't do that again."
...and the banks are walking? Seriously. Priorities people!
I take the reason for this outrage is that you've never mastered starting breakfast and then getting dressed and brushing your teeth while it cooked. The SEC, being an organization of thousands, is capable of multitasking. Investigations take months, and involve a lot of delays while paperwork is gathered, experts are called to review and document their findings, etc. All of that careful auditing and documentation takes time... and if you rush it, you risk making a mistake that the lawyers can use to get the case thrown out. And when you're dealing with "the banks"(tm), do you suppose maybe they're being extra careful (ie, slow)?
Netflix had 29.4 million online streaming accounts as of September 2012, and with 720 hours in a month, 1E9 hours works out to each subscriber viewing an average 34 hours of online streaming per month.
You seem to be forgeting that each individual account can have multiple devices streaming simultaniously. Only PC-based playback is restricted to single-instance. I don't know if Netflix users watch the same amount of online material as their TV-based counterparts, but we can infer a few things by assuming they do. The average person watches about 51.1 hours of TV a month. There are an average of about 2.55 people per household. That comes out to about 130.3 hours watched per household. Assuming 1 Netflix subscription per household, you get 3.8 billion hours of viewing per month.
I don't think 1 billion hours from that number of users is all that difficult to believe. Netflix users aren't substituting time in front of the TV straight across; That it's a supplimental activity is not an unreasonable conclusion. The CEO's numbers are well-within believability.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
That is the result of a network admin who is a moron. Even managed switches these days come with extensive QoS features, and more and more come with deep packet inspection. There is no excuse for having your phones take a crap because of a sudden burst of internet traffic. None.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works.
Businesses like things that just work. Your cell phone may be cutting edge state of the art, the thing all the cool kids are using and blah blah blah, but businesses care about those kinds of things... said no one. Ever. Businesses care about fixed costs and reliability and your cell phone won't ever have either. Configure one little thing wrong and you could be eating hundreds of dollars in overage fees... and god help you if your battery charge is running low and you're in the middle of an important call.
Displaying an image would require a data bus, and I don't want that crap irritating my eyeballs by hanging out plastic ribbon cables.
I take the idea of wireless data transfer is a new concept for you. Allow me to introduce you to, uhh, the past 150 years of technological progress, the latest of which are RFID chips smaller than a grain of sand and capable of complex two-way negotiation at fairly high speed for their simplicity. You will not need plastic ribbon cables. As well, there are some kinds of plastics that are electrically conductive; the etch could be painted directly onto the lens and would be so thin you'd be unable to see it or notice any real loss of contrast or brightness, yet be capable of acting as antenna and as simple circuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Does launch latitude matters for polar orbits?
Short answer, "Yes." Long answer; It's 8am and I haven't had my morning coffee. I don't discuss orbital mechanics before caffination. But I'm sure someone else will in a few hours, once the East coast has finished wasting time on all the other websites we go to in order to avoid working and come here...
I'm a bit scared of all this die shrinkage.
I'm not sure why this was modded down.
Political correctness. Think about it for a second, you'll get it.
Most of it is contained by cell membranes. Also, water's not the only solvent. And from the summary:
I was making fun of the tragically amusing misleading headline less than the merely inaccurate summary.
It's significant because many people use the same password for multiple sites, so access to a relatively "harmless" database like this one will inevitably open up access to more sensitive stuff.
That still doesn't solve that pesky problem of their being no connection to the outside world. You can't hack the Gibson if there are no incoming lines. -_- I could give you the root password to my computer and it would do you zero good because there's no way to make a connection to my computer: You couldn't even get past the crappy wifi router. I would expect the NSA's super top secret networks would be at least as secure as my $15 linksys router in this regard.
Similar circuits could one day be wrapped around the heart like 'an electronic pericardium' to correct irregularities such as arrhythmia."
Soluble... That word, I do not think it means what you think it means. Well, it's a good thing the human body doesn't consist primarily of water. Also, slashdot: First you're down for several hours last night, and now your editors have apparently been outsourced to india and have only a tenuous grasp on the english language. Yes, go run to the dictionary, I can wait. As for the rest of you: Does anyone else think Dice has sucked so hard since acquiring the site they're in danger of forming an event horizon from which even a clue cannot escape?
Yeah, they have the password for the usernames of their website. You know, the one that has only public information. Wow, I'm so impressed. In other news, government and private-sector agencies use passwords to prevent people from randomly updating their public websites, which contain no sensitive or terribly interesting information. It's like saying I hacked the whitehouse because I was able to get into the e-mail account of one of the assistant junior staffer's intern's. woo, look at me! :\
Also, Protip: Don't embarass one of the few agencies in the world with the resources and inclination to track you down (ie, the NSA). They basically built a whole second internet to track all the traffic on the first internet, and then built a giant super data warehouse to warehouse all the other warehouses. Not exactly the kind of people who's cheerios you want to piss in.
So it isn't like the telcos trying to market "moar Gzzzz!!!11" to consumers, it is that they are trying to figure out a way to catch Intel.
They could try investing in R&D. You know, just a thought...
...there is nothing 14nm about it.
Add more Gs to it. That's what the telcos did. They bring a 2G, you bring a 3G. They bring a 3G, you bring a 4G. That's the chic--marketing way! Then we took that whole gigabyte thing with harddrives and just rounded down. Asking companies to compete based on actual specifications instead of marketing bullshit is communist. If you support that kind of commie non-sense then you're the reason we're losing jobs to China. Blah blah blah... *barfs*
This isn't news. The GPS signal is very, very weak. It's actually right at the noise floor and using some rather ingenious encoding to resolve the signal. The signal itself is fully-documented for consumer equipment. Given the weak signal strength and the protocol having no encryption or validation to speak of, of course jamming is possible; Receiver selectivity dictates it'll lock on to the strongest signal, the root square law dictates that just about any terrestrial source with line of sight will be stronger than the one in space. The only problem to work out then is processing; You have to figure out where the receiver is now, and then figure out where you want it to be, and adjust all the signals it could receive from the GPS satellites simultaniously to cause it to (falsely) lock on to the new position. And considering that the timing needs to be in fractions of a millisecond to have any value at all, you need to be very exact.
Most of the equipment is dedicated to computing what the signal needs to be.... the actual transmitter is dirt cheap.
Well, that's your point of view.
My point of view is that extremists don't attract large numbers of followers or support. Moderates do -- and moderates, unlike extremists, are open to negotiation and compromise. Whatever he may have accomplished, he'll never have a large mainstream following, anymore than any other kind of extremist would. History is replete with examples that support my "point of view". History has only a few examples of extremists which persuaded the majority or caused significant social change... upon which, they ceased being extremists.
The odds are greatly in favor of my position: RMS is a liability far more than an asset. We have better spokespersons for the movement, who have the common decency to not kick in the door and start screaming at people they disagree with.
If, by "oppressive governments", you mean places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or China, I don't think they're looking for excuses to shutdown Tor. They've always seen it as the enemy, and just make it illegal by fiat. They have zero need for excuses to shutdown Tor.
I was also including a certain world superpower with a penchant taking away the rights of their citizens because the terrorists want to take away their rights. This superpower's main diplomat in the middle east is a predator drone that rains hellstone and fire randomly on people who are terrorists only slightly more often than they're innocent civilians. This superpower also has a global and far-reaching spy network to track almost all wireless communications in realtime, worldwide, and has stated it's slowly building in an "internet kill switch" that could disable the entire internet, worldwide, mostly for shits and giggles.
But yeah, Iran, China, etc., they're kinda bad too...
This is just the bot net people being lazy and taking the easy approach. It's already been shown you can design decentralized networks that require no "bootstrap" information like DNS in order to find other nodes and communicate. But it is beyond the abilities of these low-level social miscreants to create, so they're piggybacking on a network that they think can hide their malicious activity. Tor only anonymizes the source of the data; Anything between the exit node and destination is sent in the clear and likely they've made some mistake that'll allow it to be blockable.
Of course, this is exactly what the oppressive governments of the world (and those who oppress by claiming they're "liberating" others), have been looking for to shut down the Tor network. You can expect more attempts at legislating it away to come soon. Fundamentally though it doesn't solve the problem, which is that the criminal underworld has figured out how to do what industrialists figured out 50 years ago: If you take just a little from a lot of people, you can get very rich, and those people won't fight back because the cost of retaliation is higher than the loss. As a result, people everywhere are being nickel and dimed to death.
Botnets are simply the illegal mirror counterpart to the legal crime of draining pensions and unethical banking to turn a profit: Harm many only a little, and you too can be rich.
but at least RMS let us know it COULD happen...
He could have a little class though doing it. Like bursting in and yelling "TROLL! In the dungeon! ... Thought you'd want to know," and then collapsing on the floor. Busting in on someone else's announcement and unleashing a string of profanities and ranting isn't classy -- it's how drunk people act. Is that really who we want as the poster child for the open source movement? A guy who looks like he hasn't shaved or showered in ages and acts piss drunk in public?
He doesn't live in the real world and it doesn't help that he is probably a little looney.
That's a bigger problem than most people want to admit. Very often, an open source project doesn't fail because it's technically inferior to other products, but because of ideological differences between developers. Take the *BSD community: It's dying right now because it split off into four major variants due to political in-fighting. The reason why Linux and Apache have succeeded isn't just technical superiority, but because those groups kept political infighting to a managable level. That's the biggest problem in the open source community right now -- it's leadership ability. Frankly, there isn't a whole lot of that with engineers. Engineers want to build things, not manage it, and their respect of others within a project is based solely on technical ability. So the only projects that really succeed are when by happy coincidence the lead developer also possesses leadership ability. And this is a rare combination! Not just in open source, but everywhere. The better you are at technical skills (as a rule) the worse you are with people skills.
Richard could be one of those much-needed bridge people who can lead and also garner respect for his technical skills, but he's too damn stubborn and headstrong. His only real use in the community anymore is as a lighthouse -- a warning to others not to become too political, lest you become marginalized and gimp. If he'd just let up a little bit and recognize that getting 90% of what you want is still a win, maybe he could be useful. Right now though, the "All or nothing" approach isn't doing him any favors, just like almost everyone else -- whether it's business, politics, or hobby, very few people succeed with that attitude.
Those keyboards are overpriced shit. They bought the one thing that was worth anything off of the Northgate brand, doubled the price, and never invested in the brand after; No advertising, no redesign, they just bought it and murdered it. These days nobody even knows that good keyboards ever existed; they think the "jello touch" Microsoft split-keyboards are the best the industry has to offer. And now all the rage is "touch" displays because Apple's doing it. Well, good for them... but it's 30 year old tech, and the only place it's found a home in business has been point of sale terminals and package delivery, where light data entry is required and the data being entered doesn't vary much.
Don't listen to the pundits saying "Touch is the fuuuuture!" -- yeah. whatever. I heard that same line back in 1987. It was the same back then with "3D displays". There's more than a few failed attempts filling up landfills already. Google "VR goggles" sometime... -_- There are some interface devices that just fit with our mode of living, and a lot more that don't. Touch screen will only ever be niche, and anyone will tell you a keyboard with solid tactile feedback can help you type 20-50% faster. It doesn't have to be noisy, either.
The Carbon Cliff, not the Fiscal Cliff, should be the focus of discussion.
Like the Fiscal Cliff, the Carbon Cliff is the totally preventable economic crisis that we caused because we can't work together.
I do prefer to buy things that last, but really, the frequent upgrades that have been forced upon us in some ways have been a blessing.
If something is truly better, people will buy that instead, and the things that aren't as good will eventually go extinct. There's no need to force customers to upgrade, and in most cases this fails miserably with poor results for all involved. Remember when Microsoft tried to force people and corporations to upgrade to Vista from XP? It was such a horrible cluster-fuck that at one point they were offering free downgrades to XP with the purchase of a Vista license! They had to extend their support agreement for XP because almost all of their big contracts with the Fortune 100 companies told them: "If you try to force this on us, we will fucking bury you in so much litigation and negative press Microsoft will become synonymous with failure." Vista was dropped like a hot potato and Windows 7 was rushed out the door -- without all of the forced upgrades and licensing bullshit that caused Vista to implode on the launch pad. Net result? It's only taken two years, but businesses are switching over now. Microsoft hasn't learned its lesson though -- they just pushed Windows 8 out the door with the same kind of licensing and restrictions that Vista had. Anyone heard of a business migrating to Windows 8? Nope. I'm not aware of a single Fortune 500 company that has plans to upgrade to it. Ever.
Forced obsolesence might get you a few dollars in the short term, but your customers will have no loyalty.
Prof. Obvious of the Romero Institute noted today that people who already strongly believe something will continue to do so regardless of new evidence. In related news, the government edges closer to falling off the fiscal cliff, the totally solvable budget problem that we created to force our two political parties to play nice together. Both sides have recently stated they aren't open to negotiation, will not offer any concessions, and aren't talking to each other, however our correspondent on the scene reported recently that they have started writing numbers down on a sheet of paper. The sheet of paper was not immediately available for comment at the time of this post.
Back in the 90s, a company called Northgate Computer Systems, based out of Minnesota, ranked right up there in terms of marketshare, etc as Dell, HP, etc. They had several government contracts which were exceptionally lucrative. They also made keyboards that everyone at the time lusted for because they were super-reliable, very comfortable to use, and quiet despite the snappiness of the keys. You simply couldn't find a better keyboard. Everything was looking great for them, until senior management made a series of horrible and totally avoidable blunders and within a year the company tanked. The one thing to survive the company's demise was their patents on keyboards -- bought out by a company called Avant Stellar (if memory serves). They charge a fortune for their keyboards, and they aren't as reliable as those old ones are.
I can understand why these guys decided to hack together a microcontroller assembly to get it working on modern hardware: human interface equipment back in that day and age was built to last forever. It could even survive contact with 5 year olds, as my keyboard frequently crashed onto concrete floors, was pissed on by animals, and crushed by falling monitors (remember: Back in the day, a 19" monitor weighed a good 50 pounds). Things that would kill today's keyboards dead, it simply brushed off as a non-event.
I wish things were built like that today, rather than this planned obsolesence bullsh*t. There's some things in this industry that just don't change: The power cord, the mouse, the keyboard, and the cases. Build those things to last guys. Really.
Yeah, because those investors need to be protected from, uhm, you know, something or other.
The entire point of the SEC is to ensure a level playing field for investors. Facebook may seem "public", but it isn't because it doesn't provide equal access to everyone. If you can view the information without having to login or provide any identifying information, then it's public. All he had to do was cross-post the same information elsewhere and it would have been fine. The SEC doesn't care what information is given away (well, sorta, but let's not get bogged down on details) as long as it's available to all on an equal basis.
It's not unreasonable for them to say "If you post to Facebook, you have to post it publicly as well." Now, whether or not he gets in trouble is another matter -- it could be that what he was saying didn't really have a business impact, in which case they'll probably slap him on the wrist and say "Don't do that again."
...and the banks are walking? Seriously. Priorities people!
I take the reason for this outrage is that you've never mastered starting breakfast and then getting dressed and brushing your teeth while it cooked. The SEC, being an organization of thousands, is capable of multitasking. Investigations take months, and involve a lot of delays while paperwork is gathered, experts are called to review and document their findings, etc. All of that careful auditing and documentation takes time... and if you rush it, you risk making a mistake that the lawyers can use to get the case thrown out. And when you're dealing with "the banks"(tm), do you suppose maybe they're being extra careful (ie, slow)?
Oh, and your omelette is on fire.
Netflix had 29.4 million online streaming accounts as of September 2012, and with 720 hours in a month, 1E9 hours works out to each subscriber viewing an average 34 hours of online streaming per month.
You seem to be forgeting that each individual account can have multiple devices streaming simultaniously. Only PC-based playback is restricted to single-instance. I don't know if Netflix users watch the same amount of online material as their TV-based counterparts, but we can infer a few things by assuming they do. The average person watches about 51.1 hours of TV a month. There are an average of about 2.55 people per household. That comes out to about 130.3 hours watched per household. Assuming 1 Netflix subscription per household, you get 3.8 billion hours of viewing per month.
I don't think 1 billion hours from that number of users is all that difficult to believe. Netflix users aren't substituting time in front of the TV straight across; That it's a supplimental activity is not an unreasonable conclusion. The CEO's numbers are well-within believability.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
That is the result of a network admin who is a moron. Even managed switches these days come with extensive QoS features, and more and more come with deep packet inspection. There is no excuse for having your phones take a crap because of a sudden burst of internet traffic. None.
Are the days of the office phone (and the office phone system) at an end?"
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works.
Businesses like things that just work. Your cell phone may be cutting edge state of the art, the thing all the cool kids are using and blah blah blah, but businesses care about those kinds of things... said no one. Ever. Businesses care about fixed costs and reliability and your cell phone won't ever have either. Configure one little thing wrong and you could be eating hundreds of dollars in overage fees... and god help you if your battery charge is running low and you're in the middle of an important call.
Land lines: Because they just work, bitches.
Displaying an image would require a data bus, and I don't want that crap irritating my eyeballs by hanging out plastic ribbon cables.
I take the idea of wireless data transfer is a new concept for you. Allow me to introduce you to, uhh, the past 150 years of technological progress, the latest of which are RFID chips smaller than a grain of sand and capable of complex two-way negotiation at fairly high speed for their simplicity. You will not need plastic ribbon cables. As well, there are some kinds of plastics that are electrically conductive; the etch could be painted directly onto the lens and would be so thin you'd be unable to see it or notice any real loss of contrast or brightness, yet be capable of acting as antenna and as simple circuits.