If the rumors are to be believed, Futurama cost $1.3 million per episode to produce back in 2003 during the original run. We know Comedy Central gave them a smaller budget this time around, so let's just assume a million per episode.
So let us say we all want to fund a season of Futurama (putting our money where our mouth is):
16 episode season x $1,000,000 = $16,000,000.
Now assume the average audience is 2 million. Some would be willing to pay, some would not. But assume the lost TV viewers are made up for with the DVD buyers (who are worth a lot more). That works out to around $8/person to fund a season.
If I had the option, I would gladly pay $8-$10 per season.
For reference, AMC's Mad Men cost between $2-2.5 million per episode. In the first season, it didn't even break a million viewers. The second season had 2 million, same as Futurama.
I don't believe the economics are at the root of the cancellation; it's probably an executive trying to make their mark by shaking up programming and cancelling Futurama makes way for his/her pet project - one they can take credit for launching.
Can you clarify your sources for this? I was under the impression that the new Apple Push Notification system (on which iMessage is based) does a standard certificate request to the auth service (after logging in with your Apple ID), then uses that certificate to encrypt the APN connection. So at no time does Apple have your private key.
What I don't know is whether the service does a similar key exchange between the sender and recipients so the message contents are never decrypted on Apple's servers. In theory the device could simply generate a key for each unique conversation, do the public key exchange, then be sure the body was safe, the headers and overall body would themselves be encrypted over the secure connection between your device and Apple using the client and server certificates you got when you turned on iMessage on the device.
Chrome blazed the trail on multi-process isolation of the web engine (so one ill-behaved tab doesn't crash the whole browser among other things) but that trail was built above the WebKit API layer. The WebKit team implemented a similar model, but cross-platform and inside WebKit itself so anyone using WebKit can take advantage of it.
Google has a lot invested in Chrome, so it doesn't surprise me they'd rather fork and do their own thing, rather than adopt the common model. It also allows them to stop caring about so much of the cross-platform stuff, though Chrome for MacOS will continue to exist so its not like they are saving anything compared to adopting Apple's commits (which typically target the OS X core).
The North Korean regime is based on several odd pillars.
One is that the Korean people are racially superior to others; their naturally superior, child-like nature is why they've been repeatedly conquered in the past. Kim is their mother-protector who gently guides them while sheltering them from the evil, corrupt world outside. They are encouraged from a young age not to think about things, merely to embrace their instincts and emotional reactions; as the naturally most superior race, their instincts are pure and right and thinking too much can lead them astray.
A corellary to that is Americans are inferior half-breeds who can't help but be aggressive war-mongers and Korean baby-killers. Not even American women and children can be spared or trusted because their nature precludes it. Korean mothers are told if they leave their kids alone with American children, the American children will attack or kill theirs because of their nature. That isn't treated as a weakness by the way... Merely a result of the natural state of Korean innocence. In fact the Chinese, Europeans, Africans, et al are all inferior races, naturally untrustworthy, and beneath contempt.
Second is that the NK population is well aware they have a reduced standard of living, but it is a sacrifice they must all make to ensure they aren't conquered by a foreign power again... Necessary to preserve the superior race of the Korean people. It's the military first policy. The information firewall has been down for some time - that's why they came up with the military first policy as a way to explain the discrepancy. Think Germany in January 1945. They've obviously lost the war, yet they fight on... Some even fanatically so. Why? Why bother showing up to build tanks? Why volunteer for suicide missions? To protect the homeland (and what else can you do anyway?)
So without an ever-present enemy threatening to massacre the Korean people in a genocidal rage, an enemy that can't be reasoned or negotiated with, the reason for the NK's existence is removed.
Remember: they have been repeatedly promising that when the US is vanquished from the penninsula, the one true master race will finally be united.
When you understand these things, NK's actions make plenty of sense.
Power loss protection (super capacitors) was stated on four of the drives (the four least expensive to boot). Only three performed flawlessly in the unserialized writes test. Those aren't great odds. In fact only two drives passed all tests with no errors, and it wasn't necessarily the SLC "enterprise" drives, though those two also passed the serialized writes test.
In case you aren't aware, unserialized writes invalidate *every* assumption, including write ahead, journaling, even your fancy BTRFS/ZFS. His example is a database where the transaction log write was sync'd before the data page write, then after a power failure the data page is persisted but the log write is gone.
You can recover from many of the other errors or at least detect them but unserialized writes can silently corrupt data or even ruin the entire filesystem.
Obviously the metadata/dead failures are the exception... Those render the whole SSD useless.
The vast majority of the federal budget is mandatory, necessary maintenance/upkeep, earned benefits people paid for years of their lives for, or temporary benefits.
The amount of the budget that funds everything else, stuff like NASA, scientific research, etc makes up a relatively tiny slice of the budget.
So yes, 85 billion isn't huge compared to the overall total but when you subtract out Medicare, Social Security, etc it ends up being a bigger chunk than it first appears.
Besides which, to find total government employment you have to include state and local governments. Total government employment has dropped significantly over the past few years. If the government had held steady we'd have 6% unemployment (or lower) right now. If households, the private sector, and government cut at the same time it's called a depression.
Oh and anyone comparing the government to a family budget is a complete and utter moron. Families don't pay bills and receive income in a currency the family prints in their basement; by definition the federal government can coin or print as much money as they want, including without borrowing if it so chooses (the Fed credits the government account with cash ex nilhilio when the US Mint makes coins). Granted, if you do too much of that interest rates will rise... And if the economy were closer to 100% utilization it would distort the market. But we aren't and interest rates are still at historic lows; banks, corporations, and the richest of the rich are hoarding cash in massive amounts.
We should have automatic stabilizers that kick in and out without requiring Congress' approval. In recessions, government spending kicks up to cover the gap. In boom times spending cuts back and the debt is repaid.
Fat chance at funding research, NASA, infrastructure, or anything else.
Congress passes budgets, not the president, and the GOP controls the House. I hope you like more slash & burn, tax cuts for billionaires, etc. We no longer have the capacity to do anything great because the Koch brothers don't want to pay any extra taxes. As more money funnels to the top, the consumer class (making up 70% of our economy) no longer have the money to consume. This further depresses the economy, making the labor market worse, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle, unless the government comes in and jump-starts things by increasing demand... Of course when things return to normal those same government actions turn into distortions and the debt must then be repaid. No idea why so many seem to think the same solution must be applicable to all circumstances.
Of course those genius job creators are investing and hiring more.... Aahahahahahaah I can't even finish that sentence. Their money is either parked doing nothing or rapidly chasing anything that looks like yield, regardless of quality.
China is mis-allocating capital in much the same way, though for different reasons. When too much money accumulates at the top it drives investment bubbles as the money looks for something, anything to invest in, driving the cost of borrowing/taking on investors down even for risky propositions. As the risk no longer correlates with costs, people dogpile into wasteful areas (overbuilding in China, empty cities, etc or tech bubble/housing bubble here).
Some idiots think the CRA or deadbeat borrowers caused the housing collapse but the banks were desperate to fling loans at anyone with a pulse because they wanted the sweet, sweet commissions and investors were eager to buy anything related to housing like CDOs, MBS, etc because they offered a nominal return of ~6% with supposedly "no risk". Banks went on a branch-building binge, including in poor ghettos, because they ran out of prime customers. They heavily pushed subprime and alternative loans as a way to find new people to loan to.
Anyway the point of this ramble is until the Republican FYGM generation dies off, we're destined to be a has-been country with no ability to accomplish great things. Losing the USSR as an enemy was the worst thing to happen to us because we no longer have a bogeyman we can use to shut down the conservative's bullshit. No one can argue against a tax to pay for an interstate system when we have the Ruskies to worry about! The people who bitched and moaned about science spending/NASA were told to STFU, we have to beat the Russians to the moon! We saw the pollution and environmental devastation of east Germany and Nixon signed the EPA into law.
This conflicts with Google's model because it would require paying for customer service. Instead, Google makes the developers handle refunds, etc and simply acts as a payment processor/facilitator.
In that respect they get to wash their hands of the whole thing and let everyone else deal with it on an ad-hoc basis.
By comparison, Apple is the seller/merchant and handles all the customer service (including device install/compatibility problems), paying sales taxes, etc. App developers are paid sales commissions/royalties.
There are benefits/drawbacks in both cases but I personally prefer the Apple model, since as a single developer working on my apps after-hours I don't have the time to deal with credit card issues, refunds, device support, etc.
So how do they report that to *you*, the developer? I have to fill out a sales tax report with my B&O taxes - there's no way of saying "Apple paid it - go ask them". Unless you get some sort of official statement tied to your business license, *or* Apple treats you like a 1099.
Apple handles iAds differently from other purchases. In the case of the ad network, it pays that out to individuals as income/profit and provides tax forms.
For regular app and IAP sales, it is structured as a sales commission/royalties so Apple is the seller and obligated to pay sales tax. As the developer you receive the commission and no tax forms are sent. You are responsible for accurately reporting your commissions to the IRS.
This is for the US; for other countries it depends on your local laws and how they treat royalty/commission payments.
A Renault engineer got on the phone with the guy and walked him through various attempts to stop the car, stop the engine, go into neutral, etc. I would hazard a guess that the engineer had him try anything considered safe (don't want to accidentally lock the steering wheel at that speed).
If the computer were sending commands to disengage the throttle but there was a mechanical problem or a bug in an electronic component the engine simply may not have responded to the command. Depending on the transmission design, at max throttle it may have refused or been unable to disengage and slide into neutral either.
I think this sort of thing highlights how important it is to have an alternate emergency cutoff, one not dependent on the electronic control systems. Something like a secondary switch contact in the on/off button that if held down for 15 seconds automatically cuts power to the fuel pump with a simple, dumb electronic relay circuit.
Of course if you've ever looked at the "security" or "design" of these in-car networks (CANBUS, etc) then you realize how awful they are. Think along the lines of your average cable company DVR. They are full of holes - eg a radio that had a bluetooth stack full of buffer overruns, allowing you to hijack its CPU, which cross-connected various supposedly segmented busses, giving you remote access to the ECU. The demo I saw just rolled the windows down or remotely flash the headlights, but you could certainly stop the engine, turn off traction control, unrecoverably crash the ECU, etc.
"You have the latest flash virus. Have you opened any Word documents lately?"
"Of course! I use Word all day."
(scans hdd, finds the one in email that started it)
"Did you open this?"
"Of course I did. It's the weekly report."
"Didn't it WARN you there may be a virus?"
"No"
"I'm pretty sure it popped up and warned you about the security implications of opening documents containing flash applets from untrusted sources"
"What does that mean?"
"It means it warned you about a possible virus"
"Oh, well stuff pops up all the time and I just click OK so the computer will work. Sometimes it pops up again so I click Cancel"
Users are bombarded with dialog boxes, permission boxes, info bars, tray notifications, software update notifications, and so forth all day long. They don't read them, they just click YES/OK. If it pops up again, they try CANCEL (even if the text is different - remember they don't read it!)
That's why IE's ActiveX scheme was a massive failure - it relied on users to know what ActiveX was, know what digital certificates were, then make an informed security decision for each and every control that wanted to install. Even if the native code execution wasn't a huge hole all by itself the whole scheme is a massive failure because most users don't know what ActiveX is, wouldn't know how to verify a certificate if they wanted to, and can't control what the control does after it's installed.
This is also why Android is a huge security fail. It relies on the user to understand what the permissions mean and what the consequences are at the time of install. Even if you understood exactly what those 18 permissions were (including scrolling down to expand the list and finding identically named permissions but with slightly different detail text under them)... you can't enable-disable them if you decide the app shouldn't have some of them. Should App X be able to modify or delete USB storage? maybe... depends on what it wants to do! Should it be able to make phone calls or send text messages? Maybe... too bad you won't be asked about it when it signs you up for $9.99/mo SMS services. What about manage accounts? Maybe the app wants to legitimately manage accounts... or maybe it will delete your entire google account. Who knows, but you sure won't be prompted about it.
Any system that relies on the user to make potentially dangerous security decisions is an automatic failure; doubly so if the decision is irreversible and persistent for all time (which covers the vast majority of security systems in use today).
I'm almost certain that in the future we'll grant permissions to different apps and websites by answering at the time the app wants access to the resource, not forever. Further I think the system will want to keep a history (think git, but for the entire filesystem), allowing you to effectively "roll back" a bad security decision. That probably means browsers and apps all run isolated in their own OS-provided VM/sandbox and all sharing or filesystem access routes through the version control system.
Same exact thing happened to me, only I was a paying customer previously. Once I stopped paying for their credit monitoring service, I started getting spam to that email address.
I know it was them because I own my own domain and use unique addresses for everything; all the spam was clearly addressed to XXXXX_equifax@XXXXXXX.com
As noted the issue was not the batteries, which have passed muster after inspection by the FAA and the NTSB - the focus now is on the charging systems and monitoring systems, as well as the related failure of the containment system.
Here's the thing... These batteries should have on-board controllers, with temperature and physical deformation sensors on each cell.
Any sort of over-voltage, current over-draw, overheating, or cell bulging should trigger a temporary disconnect.
It should be literally impossible to damage the battery, no matter what the airplane systems attempt to do to it. That is obviously not the case if they are relying on circuits external to the battery for safety.
This is the long term future for a lot of manual labor across the board. What that will mean for the future of human society is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
How a consumer-driven economy can survive these changes is another huge question mark.
Why is everyone here in the US hooked on the "false dillema" falicy?
Why can't there be multiple issues? We do have the people that overeat, but there's more that a few people that have had problems with obesity and no one quite understands what the real cause is. There can always be multiple causes and multiple solutions (or not one single solution).
It's more than just that. Controlled studies where volunteers spent a couple weeks locked in a research facility eating only the precisely measured meals given to them by researchers showed variations in weight gain/loss, even after accounting for muscle mass, overall health, and amount of exercise the volunteers engaged in. Some participants lost weight, some stayed relatively the same, and some gained weight.
A persistently (and severely) restricted diet will eventually overcome all other factors and force you to lose weight, but it is obvious that some people absorb way more calories from the same meal than others. If the gut bacteria are breaking down certain complex carbohydrates, starches, etc that would otherwise go undigested, they could easily account for the difference.
In fact, in a famine or food-poor situation, such bacteria would be evolutionarily selected for, as they would give the carriers a leg-up, allowing them to stay healthy and non-malnurished while their neighbors starved.
If you watch every season of Cops within a reasonably short period of time (say over a month or two) you can clearly see the shift in police procedures and attitudes spreading across the country. (It started before Tasers by the way.)
The earliest seasons have old-fashioned policing, where cops talk to irate people and calm them down, as long as the person doesn't get violent. If the suspects put their hands up, the cops just handcuff them standing up, no degrading "get on the ground" treatment, no crushing the suspect's neck with their knees, no body-slamming people to the ground, then while resting on top of them screaming "stop resisting!"
By the mid-90s seasons you see this wave of assaults and violence spread across the police forces. People put their hands up, the cops have no reason to suspect any violence, but they body-slam them to the ground anyway. Many times you see 5-9 cops on top of one person, often standing on the person's arms while multiple people scream "put your hands behind your back!" (Which they physically cannot do) and "stop resisting!" In other cases they demand people get down on the ground, just to humiliate them.
The Taser is just another in a line of police battery tactics, designed to humiliate, degrade, and torture suspects, but without leaving any permanent marks that you can sue over.
It bears repeating: don't talk to these thugs for any reason. Never answer their questions and comply with all orders, no matter how degrading. Never consent to a search of your person or car if asked. If they search anyway, say nothing and talk to your lawyer. Don't bring up video evidence or violations or they'll destroy evidence to cover their tracks, do not rely on honesty - police will always cover for themselves, no matter how heinous the crime, and the police union will get them reinstated with back pay after the public stops caring about the story. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride.
We live in a police state, same as China or Soviet Russia. Deal with it.
The telcos are slowly strangling the internet... from bandwidth caps, to non-compete agreements with the cable companies, from AUPs that prohibit servers, blocked ports/protocols, to a complete refusal to roll out fiber even in dense urban areas.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc should each pony up some cash and begin a nationwide deployment right now. Not with an eye toward making a huge profit, but to ensure they continue to have access to their customers without toll-booths being setup inbetween because you can rest-assured that is exactly where the Telco/CableCo dualopoly is moving us.
This is a matter of long-term survival and they need to act now.
Same reason they should be buying their own media companies, before Big Content buys enough of Congress to make YouTube illegal and slaps a 100% tax on all flash memory.
The RIAA, MPAA, Telcos, and CableCos aren't necessary. It's time to eliminate them but the window on that is closing - soon they'll have too much influence to be assailable and we'll be in the Gilded Age 2.0, stuck for years until a massive depression finally loosens their grip on power.
If you are in a small town, specializing in out of print or hard to find catalogs probably won't be enough to survive... Kinda how record stores are restricted to large metro areas.
But here are some ideas:
Get a post office account and offer pre-paid mail-in returns. It will take some doing to ensure the packaging is light and small enough to keep mailing costs down, but it would make it far more convenient to rent.
Allow reservations online.
Open a small pizza pro or similar franchise in the corner of the store so people can grab dinner and a movie all at once.
Sell esoteric candy and theater popcorn, for the same reason, but at reasonable prices.
Buy and sell used DVDs. Take the movie home and keep it? Just 12.99-19.99 depending on the movie. Bring it back? Then just the rental fee. Look at what Vintage Stock / Movie Trading Company is doing, where the buy-in price is determined by software that looks at the current stock across all stores vs the past few months of sales. More popular movies or really rare ones are worth more, and thus entice people to bring them in.
Buy and sell game systems, used and new.
Offer disc resurfacing services for damaged discs.
If your market supports it, buy and sell Vinyl records, including new releases that come with digital downloads.
Offer home theater consulting services, offer training on what surround sound is or how to build your own HT setup.
Make sure the store is a fun/inviting environment to be in: have couches setup and the latest game systems available to play, have a kiosk with IMDB so people can easily lookup who was in what movie (bonus points if you can hookup Google voice search API to it so its voice controlled). Become an Apple authorized reseller/service center. Sell cables/adapters, the AppleTV, and demo AirPlay to people, etc.
I'm sure you could think of others. If people feel comfortable and want to spend time in your store, they'll be much more likely to purchase something.
What's the point here? You can do the same thing with all the proprietary public safety network gear various vendors are peddling - they are mostly hilariously insecure. Or if you have a portable generator, just flood the public safety band with interference. It accomplishes the same thing.
The article claims older 3G and 2G networks would still work if LTE were jammed but that's completely false. There are a ton of ways to jam those by using fake femtocell pilot signals or otherwise interfering with synchronization signals.
In fact the MIMO technology of LTE could make it slightly harder to jam if the base stations are properly filtering stray signals. Use car-mounted MIMO for the user-side and you would get something way better than any of the existing systems at resisting interference.
There isn't much you can really do against a determined foe. There are just too many bot computers out there ready and willing to flood your servers with traffic. Huge companies with lots of staff, racks upon racks of servers, and really fat pipes have been hit with these attacks and failed to stop them.
Now there are a few things you can do to help... You'll note that these things are all extremely important for high-volume sites or major legit traffic spikes:
Have a switch in your website app that turns off all dynamic access, logins, session state, content generation, Ajax loading, etc and just serves static pages. This should also disable any kind of downloads unless you are already serving them from a CDN. If you are under attack (or just get featured on slashdot) throw the switch. Your website won't be terribly functional, but it will still be up. If you want to get fancy, have several levels of degradation where you can progressively turn features off to lighten database loads, etc. but without throwing up error pages or just having the site completely fall down. (ex if your sidebar typically shows recent comments via a database query, then just show a cached set of comments only updated once per day. Now every page access is using one less database query.) This is super critical because the first resource to be exhausted will be your database's ability to answer queries. The second will be your web server's ability to track session state and process requests. Especially if your site does anything even mildly complicated.
If your OS/Webserver/app support it, turn on kernel caching, install a cache plugin, etc. Especially make sure the parts of your pages, images, etc that can be cached are cached. If the under attack flag is set, vastly increase the cache timeouts. Make sure proxy caching is enabled too so any clients behind ISP proxies, etc don't hit your systems. Serve jQuery, fonts, etc from Google's CDN. That's just good practice anyway and free.
If possible, use a CDN for images and other content. CloudFlare is a good one. Companies like Dediserve offer cheap CDN. There are thousands of others. If the panic switch is set, you can even serve the static pages off the CDN if you structure things correctly. These help offset bandwidth saturation.
Take the time to setup a VM of at least your basic site and keep it on standby at Amazon/Azure. If you are under attack or heavy load, spin up a bunch of nodes using that VM image. If you leave your load balancing running on their systems 24/7 then it is trivial to add nodes to the pool. Running a bunch of extra servers for just a few minutes or hours shouldn't cost a ton and will encourage all but the most determined script kiddies to find an easier target once they see your site is still up.
The most common resources exhausted during an attack (in order):
1. Database servers 2. Web server CPU load or memory 3. Bandwidth 4. Load balancers
Again, like I said, none of this will stop a determined attacker with a million node DDoS botnet... But it will make you a less vulnerable target.
In Java since properties are explicit it's obvious for example that the following would be problematic.
This comment is a great example of supposed "wisdom" that really isn't wise at all.
The compiler/runtime in C# will optimize your example away if it can prove the property isn't calling a webservice or generating side-effects, which is true 99.9% of the time.
Secondly, there is nothing preventing you from doing the exact same thing in C# as you did in Java and good design would dictate that expensive values shouldn't be calculated in properties, they should be methods.
I'm much more interested in the fact that C# treats functions as first-class objects (plus delegates and events) so I don't have to write lots of useless boilerplate to do extremely simple operations. When I can actually get a Java developer to sit down and use LINQ in the real-world, they always come away amazed at how useful it is and how easily it eliminates several methods, nested for loops, etc by simply allowing you to express your intent.
Of course the Lisp guys are standing off to the side screaming "WE'VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS!!!" but I would wager that the latest versions of C# have done more to introduce functional programming concepts to a wider variety of programmers than all the functional languages put together.
Most of the posters here seem to misunderstand what this is; it is NOT just a simple Forward Error Correction scheme.
TCP has two design decisions (as pointed out by others) that are totally wrong for a WiFi environment where random packet loss is a normal and expected operating condition:
1. A lost packet means a collision or network congestion, therefore the proper response to a lost packet notification is to slow down the transmit rate
2. When packet #2 is lost, even though the client has perfectly cromulent copies of packets 3-1094932, they must *all* be thrown away and the entire stream is restarted. There is no facility to go back and retransmit just the missing packet - the ACK can't say "I got packets 1,3-1094932, please just re-send #2".
This new scheme reconstructs packet #2 in this scenario by using the FEC data in the other packets. This allows the link to tolerate a certain % of packet loss without requiring any re-transmits, thus all those packets from 3 upwards don't have to be retransmitted. It also greatly reduces latency as reconstructing packet #2 is faster (due to the computationally efficient FEC algorithm) than requesting a retransmit. This also prevents the TCP link from scaling back its transmit rate, further improving performance.
It's definitely clever. One of the downsides of relying on older technology (TCP in this case) is when it makes fundamental assumptions that are completely, horribly wrong for new applications (WiFi).
To those who ask why not just do this at the link layer? Because then you are wasting the effort on protocols like UDP, etc that may not want or need this kind of correction. It may also introduce delays that are unacceptable for certain applications (like VoIP). A 50ms delay is great to avoid degrading your file transfer from 10mbit to 0.5mbit, but is completely useless during a VoIP call or a multi-player FPS. Personally I'd like to see this kind of tech rolled into the next version of TCP to make it an official part of the standard... then again I'd like to see the standard MTU size increased given the ubiquity of gigabit ethernet these days, but that still hasn't happened as far as I know, due to incompatibilities, interop issues, etc.
Could the analog components of the amplifier/filter circuits be degrading? If capacitors are leaking, etc then that would definitely make the performance decrease but maybe not enough to completely stop working.
You should consider another option: older equipment may not have firmware as good at dealing with congestion (802.11N helps with this), or maybe the new box has 5Ghz which has much less interference issues? Maybe the real degradation was the neighbors installing access points? You may also have had certain pieces of gear installed that interacted badly with your access point (some of them have really awful firmware or very loose implementations of the standard).
These are just guesses... I haven't personally had any degradation except for interference in the 2.4Ghz band. When I bought this house devices would only detect my network and maybe one other. Now seven show up. Interference isn't just a problem in apartments anymore.
In theory they should degrade to read-only just as others have pointed out in other posts, allowing you to copy data off them.
In reality, just like modern hard drives, they have unrecoverable firmware bugs, fuses that can blow with a power surge, controller chips that can burn up, etc.
And just like hard drives, when that happens in theory you should still be able to read the data off the flash chips but there are revisions to the controller, firmware, etc that make that more or less successful depending on the manufacturer. You also can't just pop the board off the drive like with an HDD, you need a really good surface mount resoldering capability.
So the answer is "it depends"... If the drive itself doesn't fail but reaches the end of its useful life or was put on the shelf less than 10 years ago (flash capacitors do slowly drain away) then the data should be readable or mostly readable.
If the drive itself fails, good luck. Maybe you can bypass the fuse, maybe you can re-flash the firmware, or maybe it's toast. Get ready to pay big bucks to find out.
P.S. OCZ is fine for build it yourself or cheap applications but be careful. They have been known to buy X-grade flash chips for some of their product lines - chips the manufacturers list as only good for kid toys or non-critical, low-volume applications. Don't know if they are still doing it but I avoid their stuff. Intel's drives are the best and have the most-tested firmware but you pay for it. Crucial is Micron's consumer brand and tends to be pretty good given they make the actual flash - they are my go-to brand right now. Samsung isn't always the fastest but seems to be reliable.
Do your research and focus on firmware and reliability, not absolute maximum throughput/IOPs.
Horse and buggy makers were still making money (and lots of it!) when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Doesn't mean a big change wasn't coming.
The bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Office on the desktop. PC sales have slowed and begun shrinking - people just don't need to upgrade as often and the market is saturated.
The iPad alone is a significant slice of the PC market (25% in the US) but more importantly it continues on a tremendous hockey stick growth curve. That's a market that Microsoft cant sell Windows to and refuses to sell Office to. It doesn't take a genius to see the wall of pain coming Microsoft's way and Windows 8 is a desperate attempt to push what worked in the past into a new area. Windows has been so successful in the PC arena that Microsoft cant imagine life without it or any strategy to monetize iPad users that doesn't involve billions in risk on producing their own hardware (like, say, Office for iPad.... A no-risk proposal that might cost a few million in developer salaries).
That's always how entrenched players get beaten. It simply doesn't matter how dominant Microsoft is on the desktop because all the growth is happening in tablets and mobile... And being good early does you nothing there, you have to be good at the right time - the time when the market starts to look like a hockey stick so network and ecosystem effects can become self-reinforcing. Microsoft has already missed that point. That's why people think they are irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
If the rumors are to be believed, Futurama cost $1.3 million per episode to produce back in 2003 during the original run. We know Comedy Central gave them a smaller budget this time around, so let's just assume a million per episode.
So let us say we all want to fund a season of Futurama (putting our money where our mouth is):
16 episode season x $1,000,000 = $16,000,000.
Now assume the average audience is 2 million. Some would be willing to pay, some would not. But assume the lost TV viewers are made up for with the DVD buyers (who are worth a lot more). That works out to around $8/person to fund a season.
If I had the option, I would gladly pay $8-$10 per season.
For reference, AMC's Mad Men cost between $2-2.5 million per episode. In the first season, it didn't even break a million viewers. The second season had 2 million, same as Futurama.
I don't believe the economics are at the root of the cancellation; it's probably an executive trying to make their mark by shaking up programming and cancelling Futurama makes way for his/her pet project - one they can take credit for launching.
Can you clarify your sources for this? I was under the impression that the new Apple Push Notification system (on which iMessage is based) does a standard certificate request to the auth service (after logging in with your Apple ID), then uses that certificate to encrypt the APN connection. So at no time does Apple have your private key.
What I don't know is whether the service does a similar key exchange between the sender and recipients so the message contents are never decrypted on Apple's servers. In theory the device could simply generate a key for each unique conversation, do the public key exchange, then be sure the body was safe, the headers and overall body would themselves be encrypted over the secure connection between your device and Apple using the client and server certificates you got when you turned on iMessage on the device.
Chrome blazed the trail on multi-process isolation of the web engine (so one ill-behaved tab doesn't crash the whole browser among other things) but that trail was built above the WebKit API layer. The WebKit team implemented a similar model, but cross-platform and inside WebKit itself so anyone using WebKit can take advantage of it.
Google has a lot invested in Chrome, so it doesn't surprise me they'd rather fork and do their own thing, rather than adopt the common model. It also allows them to stop caring about so much of the cross-platform stuff, though Chrome for MacOS will continue to exist so its not like they are saving anything compared to adopting Apple's commits (which typically target the OS X core).
The North Korean regime is based on several odd pillars.
One is that the Korean people are racially superior to others; their naturally superior, child-like nature is why they've been repeatedly conquered in the past. Kim is their mother-protector who gently guides them while sheltering them from the evil, corrupt world outside. They are encouraged from a young age not to think about things, merely to embrace their instincts and emotional reactions; as the naturally most superior race, their instincts are pure and right and thinking too much can lead them astray.
A corellary to that is Americans are inferior half-breeds who can't help but be aggressive war-mongers and Korean baby-killers. Not even American women and children can be spared or trusted because their nature precludes it. Korean mothers are told if they leave their kids alone with American children, the American children will attack or kill theirs because of their nature. That isn't treated as a weakness by the way... Merely a result of the natural state of Korean innocence. In fact the Chinese, Europeans, Africans, et al are all inferior races, naturally untrustworthy, and beneath contempt.
Second is that the NK population is well aware they have a reduced standard of living, but it is a sacrifice they must all make to ensure they aren't conquered by a foreign power again... Necessary to preserve the superior race of the Korean people. It's the military first policy. The information firewall has been down for some time - that's why they came up with the military first policy as a way to explain the discrepancy. Think Germany in January 1945. They've obviously lost the war, yet they fight on... Some even fanatically so. Why? Why bother showing up to build tanks? Why volunteer for suicide missions? To protect the homeland (and what else can you do anyway?)
So without an ever-present enemy threatening to massacre the Korean people in a genocidal rage, an enemy that can't be reasoned or negotiated with, the reason for the NK's existence is removed.
Remember: they have been repeatedly promising that when the US is vanquished from the penninsula, the one true master race will finally be united.
When you understand these things, NK's actions make plenty of sense.
Power loss protection (super capacitors) was stated on four of the drives (the four least expensive to boot). Only three performed flawlessly in the unserialized writes test. Those aren't great odds. In fact only two drives passed all tests with no errors, and it wasn't necessarily the SLC "enterprise" drives, though those two also passed the serialized writes test.
In case you aren't aware, unserialized writes invalidate *every* assumption, including write ahead, journaling, even your fancy BTRFS/ZFS. His example is a database where the transaction log write was sync'd before the data page write, then after a power failure the data page is persisted but the log write is gone.
You can recover from many of the other errors or at least detect them but unserialized writes can silently corrupt data or even ruin the entire filesystem.
Obviously the metadata/dead failures are the exception... Those render the whole SSD useless.
The vast majority of the federal budget is mandatory, necessary maintenance/upkeep, earned benefits people paid for years of their lives for, or temporary benefits.
The amount of the budget that funds everything else, stuff like NASA, scientific research, etc makes up a relatively tiny slice of the budget.
So yes, 85 billion isn't huge compared to the overall total but when you subtract out Medicare, Social Security, etc it ends up being a bigger chunk than it first appears.
Besides which, to find total government employment you have to include state and local governments. Total government employment has dropped significantly over the past few years. If the government had held steady we'd have 6% unemployment (or lower) right now. If households, the private sector, and government cut at the same time it's called a depression.
Oh and anyone comparing the government to a family budget is a complete and utter moron. Families don't pay bills and receive income in a currency the family prints in their basement; by definition the federal government can coin or print as much money as they want, including without borrowing if it so chooses (the Fed credits the government account with cash ex nilhilio when the US Mint makes coins). Granted, if you do too much of that interest rates will rise... And if the economy were closer to 100% utilization it would distort the market. But we aren't and interest rates are still at historic lows; banks, corporations, and the richest of the rich are hoarding cash in massive amounts.
We should have automatic stabilizers that kick in and out without requiring Congress' approval. In recessions, government spending kicks up to cover the gap. In boom times spending cuts back and the debt is repaid.
Fat chance at funding research, NASA, infrastructure, or anything else.
Congress passes budgets, not the president, and the GOP controls the House. I hope you like more slash & burn, tax cuts for billionaires, etc. We no longer have the capacity to do anything great because the Koch brothers don't want to pay any extra taxes. As more money funnels to the top, the consumer class (making up 70% of our economy) no longer have the money to consume. This further depresses the economy, making the labor market worse, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle, unless the government comes in and jump-starts things by increasing demand... Of course when things return to normal those same government actions turn into distortions and the debt must then be repaid. No idea why so many seem to think the same solution must be applicable to all circumstances.
Of course those genius job creators are investing and hiring more.... Aahahahahahaah I can't even finish that sentence. Their money is either parked doing nothing or rapidly chasing anything that looks like yield, regardless of quality.
China is mis-allocating capital in much the same way, though for different reasons. When too much money accumulates at the top it drives investment bubbles as the money looks for something, anything to invest in, driving the cost of borrowing/taking on investors down even for risky propositions. As the risk no longer correlates with costs, people dogpile into wasteful areas (overbuilding in China, empty cities, etc or tech bubble/housing bubble here).
Some idiots think the CRA or deadbeat borrowers caused the housing collapse but the banks were desperate to fling loans at anyone with a pulse because they wanted the sweet, sweet commissions and investors were eager to buy anything related to housing like CDOs, MBS, etc because they offered a nominal return of ~6% with supposedly "no risk". Banks went on a branch-building binge, including in poor ghettos, because they ran out of prime customers. They heavily pushed subprime and alternative loans as a way to find new people to loan to.
Anyway the point of this ramble is until the Republican FYGM generation dies off, we're destined to be a has-been country with no ability to accomplish great things. Losing the USSR as an enemy was the worst thing to happen to us because we no longer have a bogeyman we can use to shut down the conservative's bullshit. No one can argue against a tax to pay for an interstate system when we have the Ruskies to worry about! The people who bitched and moaned about science spending/NASA were told to STFU, we have to beat the Russians to the moon! We saw the pollution and environmental devastation of east Germany and Nixon signed the EPA into law.
It's just sad.
This conflicts with Google's model because it would require paying for customer service. Instead, Google makes the developers handle refunds, etc and simply acts as a payment processor/facilitator.
In that respect they get to wash their hands of the whole thing and let everyone else deal with it on an ad-hoc basis.
By comparison, Apple is the seller/merchant and handles all the customer service (including device install/compatibility problems), paying sales taxes, etc. App developers are paid sales commissions/royalties.
There are benefits/drawbacks in both cases but I personally prefer the Apple model, since as a single developer working on my apps after-hours I don't have the time to deal with credit card issues, refunds, device support, etc.
So how do they report that to *you*, the developer? I have to fill out a sales tax report with my B&O taxes - there's no way of saying "Apple paid it - go ask them". Unless you get some sort of official statement tied to your business license, *or* Apple treats you like a 1099.
Apple handles iAds differently from other purchases. In the case of the ad network, it pays that out to individuals as income/profit and provides tax forms.
For regular app and IAP sales, it is structured as a sales commission/royalties so Apple is the seller and obligated to pay sales tax. As the developer you receive the commission and no tax forms are sent. You are responsible for accurately reporting your commissions to the IRS.
This is for the US; for other countries it depends on your local laws and how they treat royalty/commission payments.
A Renault engineer got on the phone with the guy and walked him through various attempts to stop the car, stop the engine, go into neutral, etc. I would hazard a guess that the engineer had him try anything considered safe (don't want to accidentally lock the steering wheel at that speed).
If the computer were sending commands to disengage the throttle but there was a mechanical problem or a bug in an electronic component the engine simply may not have responded to the command. Depending on the transmission design, at max throttle it may have refused or been unable to disengage and slide into neutral either.
I think this sort of thing highlights how important it is to have an alternate emergency cutoff, one not dependent on the electronic control systems. Something like a secondary switch contact in the on/off button that if held down for 15 seconds automatically cuts power to the fuel pump with a simple, dumb electronic relay circuit.
Of course if you've ever looked at the "security" or "design" of these in-car networks (CANBUS, etc) then you realize how awful they are. Think along the lines of your average cable company DVR. They are full of holes - eg a radio that had a bluetooth stack full of buffer overruns, allowing you to hijack its CPU, which cross-connected various supposedly segmented busses, giving you remote access to the ECU. The demo I saw just rolled the windows down or remotely flash the headlights, but you could certainly stop the engine, turn off traction control, unrecoverably crash the ECU, etc.
Here's the real version of that conversation:
"So what's wrong with it?"
"You have the latest flash virus. Have you opened any Word documents lately?"
"Of course! I use Word all day."
(scans hdd, finds the one in email that started it)
"Did you open this?"
"Of course I did. It's the weekly report."
"Didn't it WARN you there may be a virus?"
"No"
"I'm pretty sure it popped up and warned you about the security implications of opening documents containing flash applets from untrusted sources"
"What does that mean?"
"It means it warned you about a possible virus"
"Oh, well stuff pops up all the time and I just click OK so the computer will work. Sometimes it pops up again so I click Cancel"
Users are bombarded with dialog boxes, permission boxes, info bars, tray notifications, software update notifications, and so forth all day long. They don't read them, they just click YES/OK. If it pops up again, they try CANCEL (even if the text is different - remember they don't read it!)
That's why IE's ActiveX scheme was a massive failure - it relied on users to know what ActiveX was, know what digital certificates were, then make an informed security decision for each and every control that wanted to install. Even if the native code execution wasn't a huge hole all by itself the whole scheme is a massive failure because most users don't know what ActiveX is, wouldn't know how to verify a certificate if they wanted to, and can't control what the control does after it's installed.
This is also why Android is a huge security fail. It relies on the user to understand what the permissions mean and what the consequences are at the time of install. Even if you understood exactly what those 18 permissions were (including scrolling down to expand the list and finding identically named permissions but with slightly different detail text under them)... you can't enable-disable them if you decide the app shouldn't have some of them. Should App X be able to modify or delete USB storage? maybe... depends on what it wants to do! Should it be able to make phone calls or send text messages? Maybe... too bad you won't be asked about it when it signs you up for $9.99/mo SMS services. What about manage accounts? Maybe the app wants to legitimately manage accounts... or maybe it will delete your entire google account. Who knows, but you sure won't be prompted about it.
Any system that relies on the user to make potentially dangerous security decisions is an automatic failure; doubly so if the decision is irreversible and persistent for all time (which covers the vast majority of security systems in use today).
I'm almost certain that in the future we'll grant permissions to different apps and websites by answering at the time the app wants access to the resource, not forever. Further I think the system will want to keep a history (think git, but for the entire filesystem), allowing you to effectively "roll back" a bad security decision. That probably means browsers and apps all run isolated in their own OS-provided VM/sandbox and all sharing or filesystem access routes through the version control system.
Same exact thing happened to me, only I was a paying customer previously. Once I stopped paying for their credit monitoring service, I started getting spam to that email address.
I know it was them because I own my own domain and use unique addresses for everything; all the spam was clearly addressed to XXXXX_equifax@XXXXXXX.com
As noted the issue was not the batteries, which have passed muster after inspection by the FAA and the NTSB - the focus now is on the charging systems and monitoring systems, as well as the related failure of the containment system.
Here's the thing... These batteries should have on-board controllers, with temperature and physical deformation sensors on each cell.
Any sort of over-voltage, current over-draw, overheating, or cell bulging should trigger a temporary disconnect.
It should be literally impossible to damage the battery, no matter what the airplane systems attempt to do to it. That is obviously not the case if they are relying on circuits external to the battery for safety.
This is the long term future for a lot of manual labor across the board. What that will mean for the future of human society is anyone's guess. Perhaps we'll all work 10 hour weeks. Or maybe most will be surfs, crushed under the boots of the aristocracy (robot owners).
How a consumer-driven economy can survive these changes is another huge question mark.
Why is everyone here in the US hooked on the "false dillema" falicy?
Why can't there be multiple issues? We do have the people that overeat, but there's more that a few people that have had problems with obesity and no one quite understands what the real cause is. There can always be multiple causes and multiple solutions (or not one single solution).
It's more than just that. Controlled studies where volunteers spent a couple weeks locked in a research facility eating only the precisely measured meals given to them by researchers showed variations in weight gain/loss, even after accounting for muscle mass, overall health, and amount of exercise the volunteers engaged in. Some participants lost weight, some stayed relatively the same, and some gained weight.
A persistently (and severely) restricted diet will eventually overcome all other factors and force you to lose weight, but it is obvious that some people absorb way more calories from the same meal than others. If the gut bacteria are breaking down certain complex carbohydrates, starches, etc that would otherwise go undigested, they could easily account for the difference.
In fact, in a famine or food-poor situation, such bacteria would be evolutionarily selected for, as they would give the carriers a leg-up, allowing them to stay healthy and non-malnurished while their neighbors starved.
If you watch every season of Cops within a reasonably short period of time (say over a month or two) you can clearly see the shift in police procedures and attitudes spreading across the country. (It started before Tasers by the way.)
The earliest seasons have old-fashioned policing, where cops talk to irate people and calm them down, as long as the person doesn't get violent. If the suspects put their hands up, the cops just handcuff them standing up, no degrading "get on the ground" treatment, no crushing the suspect's neck with their knees, no body-slamming people to the ground, then while resting on top of them screaming "stop resisting!"
By the mid-90s seasons you see this wave of assaults and violence spread across the police forces. People put their hands up, the cops have no reason to suspect any violence, but they body-slam them to the ground anyway. Many times you see 5-9 cops on top of one person, often standing on the person's arms while multiple people scream "put your hands behind your back!" (Which they physically cannot do) and "stop resisting!" In other cases they demand people get down on the ground, just to humiliate them.
The Taser is just another in a line of police battery tactics, designed to humiliate, degrade, and torture suspects, but without leaving any permanent marks that you can sue over.
It bears repeating: don't talk to these thugs for any reason. Never answer their questions and comply with all orders, no matter how degrading. Never consent to a search of your person or car if asked. If they search anyway, say nothing and talk to your lawyer. Don't bring up video evidence or violations or they'll destroy evidence to cover their tracks, do not rely on honesty - police will always cover for themselves, no matter how heinous the crime, and the police union will get them reinstated with back pay after the public stops caring about the story. You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride.
We live in a police state, same as China or Soviet Russia. Deal with it.
The telcos are slowly strangling the internet... from bandwidth caps, to non-compete agreements with the cable companies, from AUPs that prohibit servers, blocked ports/protocols, to a complete refusal to roll out fiber even in dense urban areas.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc should each pony up some cash and begin a nationwide deployment right now. Not with an eye toward making a huge profit, but to ensure they continue to have access to their customers without toll-booths being setup inbetween because you can rest-assured that is exactly where the Telco/CableCo dualopoly is moving us.
This is a matter of long-term survival and they need to act now.
Same reason they should be buying their own media companies, before Big Content buys enough of Congress to make YouTube illegal and slaps a 100% tax on all flash memory.
The RIAA, MPAA, Telcos, and CableCos aren't necessary. It's time to eliminate them but the window on that is closing - soon they'll have too much influence to be assailable and we'll be in the Gilded Age 2.0, stuck for years until a massive depression finally loosens their grip on power.
If you are in a small town, specializing in out of print or hard to find catalogs probably won't be enough to survive... Kinda how record stores are restricted to large metro areas.
But here are some ideas:
Get a post office account and offer pre-paid mail-in returns. It will take some doing to ensure the packaging is light and small enough to keep mailing costs down, but it would make it far more convenient to rent.
Allow reservations online.
Open a small pizza pro or similar franchise in the corner of the store so people can grab dinner and a movie all at once.
Sell esoteric candy and theater popcorn, for the same reason, but at reasonable prices.
Buy and sell used DVDs. Take the movie home and keep it? Just 12.99-19.99 depending on the movie. Bring it back? Then just the rental fee. Look at what Vintage Stock / Movie Trading Company is doing, where the buy-in price is determined by software that looks at the current stock across all stores vs the past few months of sales. More popular movies or really rare ones are worth more, and thus entice people to bring them in.
Buy and sell game systems, used and new.
Offer disc resurfacing services for damaged discs.
If your market supports it, buy and sell Vinyl records, including new releases that come with digital downloads.
Offer home theater consulting services, offer training on what surround sound is or how to build your own HT setup.
Make sure the store is a fun/inviting environment to be in: have couches setup and the latest game systems available to play, have a kiosk with IMDB so people can easily lookup who was in what movie (bonus points if you can hookup Google voice search API to it so its voice controlled). Become an Apple authorized reseller/service center. Sell cables/adapters, the AppleTV, and demo AirPlay to people, etc.
I'm sure you could think of others. If people feel comfortable and want to spend time in your store, they'll be much more likely to purchase something.
These are just a few ideas that spring to mind.
What's the point here? You can do the same thing with all the proprietary public safety network gear various vendors are peddling - they are mostly hilariously insecure. Or if you have a portable generator, just flood the public safety band with interference. It accomplishes the same thing.
The article claims older 3G and 2G networks would still work if LTE were jammed but that's completely false. There are a ton of ways to jam those by using fake femtocell pilot signals or otherwise interfering with synchronization signals.
In fact the MIMO technology of LTE could make it slightly harder to jam if the base stations are properly filtering stray signals. Use car-mounted MIMO for the user-side and you would get something way better than any of the existing systems at resisting interference.
There isn't much you can really do against a determined foe. There are just too many bot computers out there ready and willing to flood your servers with traffic. Huge companies with lots of staff, racks upon racks of servers, and really fat pipes have been hit with these attacks and failed to stop them.
Now there are a few things you can do to help... You'll note that these things are all extremely important for high-volume sites or major legit traffic spikes:
Have a switch in your website app that turns off all dynamic access, logins, session state, content generation, Ajax loading, etc and just serves static pages. This should also disable any kind of downloads unless you are already serving them from a CDN. If you are under attack (or just get featured on slashdot) throw the switch. Your website won't be terribly functional, but it will still be up. If you want to get fancy, have several levels of degradation where you can progressively turn features off to lighten database loads, etc. but without throwing up error pages or just having the site completely fall down. (ex if your sidebar typically shows recent comments via a database query, then just show a cached set of comments only updated once per day. Now every page access is using one less database query.) This is super critical because the first resource to be exhausted will be your database's ability to answer queries. The second will be your web server's ability to track session state and process requests. Especially if your site does anything even mildly complicated.
If your OS/Webserver/app support it, turn on kernel caching, install a cache plugin, etc. Especially make sure the parts of your pages, images, etc that can be cached are cached. If the under attack flag is set, vastly increase the cache timeouts. Make sure proxy caching is enabled too so any clients behind ISP proxies, etc don't hit your systems. Serve jQuery, fonts, etc from Google's CDN. That's just good practice anyway and free.
If possible, use a CDN for images and other content. CloudFlare is a good one. Companies like Dediserve offer cheap CDN. There are thousands of others. If the panic switch is set, you can even serve the static pages off the CDN if you structure things correctly. These help offset bandwidth saturation.
Take the time to setup a VM of at least your basic site and keep it on standby at Amazon/Azure. If you are under attack or heavy load, spin up a bunch of nodes using that VM image. If you leave your load balancing running on their systems 24/7 then it is trivial to add nodes to the pool. Running a bunch of extra servers for just a few minutes or hours shouldn't cost a ton and will encourage all but the most determined script kiddies to find an easier target once they see your site is still up.
The most common resources exhausted during an attack (in order):
1. Database servers
2. Web server CPU load or memory
3. Bandwidth
4. Load balancers
Again, like I said, none of this will stop a determined attacker with a million node DDoS botnet... But it will make you a less vulnerable target.
In Java since properties are explicit it's obvious for example that the following would be problematic.
This comment is a great example of supposed "wisdom" that really isn't wise at all.
The compiler/runtime in C# will optimize your example away if it can prove the property isn't calling a webservice or generating side-effects, which is true 99.9% of the time.
Secondly, there is nothing preventing you from doing the exact same thing in C# as you did in Java and good design would dictate that expensive values shouldn't be calculated in properties, they should be methods.
I'm much more interested in the fact that C# treats functions as first-class objects (plus delegates and events) so I don't have to write lots of useless boilerplate to do extremely simple operations. When I can actually get a Java developer to sit down and use LINQ in the real-world, they always come away amazed at how useful it is and how easily it eliminates several methods, nested for loops, etc by simply allowing you to express your intent.
Of course the Lisp guys are standing off to the side screaming "WE'VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS!!!" but I would wager that the latest versions of C# have done more to introduce functional programming concepts to a wider variety of programmers than all the functional languages put together.
Most of the posters here seem to misunderstand what this is; it is NOT just a simple Forward Error Correction scheme.
TCP has two design decisions (as pointed out by others) that are totally wrong for a WiFi environment where random packet loss is a normal and expected operating condition:
1. A lost packet means a collision or network congestion, therefore the proper response to a lost packet notification is to slow down the transmit rate
2. When packet #2 is lost, even though the client has perfectly cromulent copies of packets 3-1094932, they must *all* be thrown away and the entire stream is restarted. There is no facility to go back and retransmit just the missing packet - the ACK can't say "I got packets 1,3-1094932, please just re-send #2".
This new scheme reconstructs packet #2 in this scenario by using the FEC data in the other packets. This allows the link to tolerate a certain % of packet loss without requiring any re-transmits, thus all those packets from 3 upwards don't have to be retransmitted. It also greatly reduces latency as reconstructing packet #2 is faster (due to the computationally efficient FEC algorithm) than requesting a retransmit. This also prevents the TCP link from scaling back its transmit rate, further improving performance.
It's definitely clever. One of the downsides of relying on older technology (TCP in this case) is when it makes fundamental assumptions that are completely, horribly wrong for new applications (WiFi).
To those who ask why not just do this at the link layer? Because then you are wasting the effort on protocols like UDP, etc that may not want or need this kind of correction. It may also introduce delays that are unacceptable for certain applications (like VoIP). A 50ms delay is great to avoid degrading your file transfer from 10mbit to 0.5mbit, but is completely useless during a VoIP call or a multi-player FPS. Personally I'd like to see this kind of tech rolled into the next version of TCP to make it an official part of the standard... then again I'd like to see the standard MTU size increased given the ubiquity of gigabit ethernet these days, but that still hasn't happened as far as I know, due to incompatibilities, interop issues, etc.
Could the analog components of the amplifier/filter circuits be degrading? If capacitors are leaking, etc then that would definitely make the performance decrease but maybe not enough to completely stop working.
You should consider another option: older equipment may not have firmware as good at dealing with congestion (802.11N helps with this), or maybe the new box has 5Ghz which has much less interference issues? Maybe the real degradation was the neighbors installing access points? You may also have had certain pieces of gear installed that interacted badly with your access point (some of them have really awful firmware or very loose implementations of the standard).
These are just guesses... I haven't personally had any degradation except for interference in the 2.4Ghz band. When I bought this house devices would only detect my network and maybe one other. Now seven show up. Interference isn't just a problem in apartments anymore.
In theory they should degrade to read-only just as others have pointed out in other posts, allowing you to copy data off them.
In reality, just like modern hard drives, they have unrecoverable firmware bugs, fuses that can blow with a power surge, controller chips that can burn up, etc.
And just like hard drives, when that happens in theory you should still be able to read the data off the flash chips but there are revisions to the controller, firmware, etc that make that more or less successful depending on the manufacturer. You also can't just pop the board off the drive like with an HDD, you need a really good surface mount resoldering capability.
So the answer is "it depends"... If the drive itself doesn't fail but reaches the end of its useful life or was put on the shelf less than 10 years ago (flash capacitors do slowly drain away) then the data should be readable or mostly readable.
If the drive itself fails, good luck. Maybe you can bypass the fuse, maybe you can re-flash the firmware, or maybe it's toast. Get ready to pay big bucks to find out.
P.S. OCZ is fine for build it yourself or cheap applications but be careful. They have been known to buy X-grade flash chips for some of their product lines - chips the manufacturers list as only good for kid toys or non-critical, low-volume applications. Don't know if they are still doing it but I avoid their stuff.
Intel's drives are the best and have the most-tested firmware but you pay for it. Crucial is Micron's consumer brand and tends to be pretty good given they make the actual flash - they are my go-to brand right now. Samsung isn't always the fastest but seems to be reliable.
Do your research and focus on firmware and reliability, not absolute maximum throughput/IOPs.
Microsoft is making money
Horse and buggy makers were still making money (and lots of it!) when the first Model T rolled off the assembly line. Doesn't mean a big change wasn't coming.
The bulk of Microsoft's revenue comes from Windows and Office on the desktop. PC sales have slowed and begun shrinking - people just don't need to upgrade as often and the market is saturated.
The iPad alone is a significant slice of the PC market (25% in the US) but more importantly it continues on a tremendous hockey stick growth curve. That's a market that Microsoft cant sell Windows to and refuses to sell Office to. It doesn't take a genius to see the wall of pain coming Microsoft's way and Windows 8 is a desperate attempt to push what worked in the past into a new area. Windows has been so successful in the PC arena that Microsoft cant imagine life without it or any strategy to monetize iPad users that doesn't involve billions in risk on producing their own hardware (like, say, Office for iPad.... A no-risk proposal that might cost a few million in developer salaries).
That's always how entrenched players get beaten. It simply doesn't matter how dominant Microsoft is on the desktop because all the growth is happening in tablets and mobile... And being good early does you nothing there, you have to be good at the right time - the time when the market starts to look like a hockey stick so network and ecosystem effects can become self-reinforcing. Microsoft has already missed that point. That's why people think they are irrelevant.