FAA crack down in ???? uber better not try the independent contractor / we are not X with them. The last thing we want is jay's helicopter rides to crash as he can't pay for upkeep or the right insurance due to ubers low pay.
The FAA has pretty much shut down all sorts of "ridesharing" for aircraft that aren't following the rules, and given it's Airbus involved, I'm certain they're going to follow the rules.
The FAAs will have no conniption about shutting this down in the middle of the competition and stranding everyone if it proves to violate the rules.
We, the viewers, hate you. You are sliding down a slight but increasingly steep slope into the deep dark hole of irrelevance and you don't even know it. It shows that you don't know it, because you increasingly devote time on your networks to advertising, at the expense of quality content. You continue with a business model of stretching out fairly mediocre and predictable stories over two or three hours, spread across two or three arbitrary 'ratings' weeks in order to inflate your own numbers, while admonishing Netflix for being dishonest.
You fought tooth and nail against VCRs. You fought against DVRs. You now fight against online streaming. All of these technologies actually make experiencing your content better, yet you still fight them. We see through your bullshit, and we've found a content delivery paradigm we like better: all-you-can-stream for a low monthly charge. No advertising at all. All episodes of a season, and past seasons, available RIGHT NOW.
As soon as someone cracks the hegemony largely preventing the streaming of live sports without having a cable or satellite subscription, you're done. And you still continue on like it's 1983. And what you don't realize, is that we can't wait to fire you for being completely inept in your own business and refusing to innovate in even the slightest ways.
Stop clutching at the past, and embrace the future, before the future holds a pillow over your head and we all rejoice.
First off, the networks and Netflix may be "in a war" but it's not really a mutually exclusive one. For starters, they serve different markets.
The networks base their ad rates on Neilsen ratings - and in particular, the C ratings (C, C3, C7) which are the eyeballs watching the ads. They pay good money for those numbers, which keeps Neilsen in business. The numbers that you see reported around? That's the free stuff Neilsen gives out and is completely meaningless. While there is some correlation, just because a show does well doesn't necessarily mean it gets a good C rating.
And they fought the VCR and all that because Neilsen carried only live ratings - the numbers they billed advertisers. If people taped a show for later viewing, they didn't count as a viewer, and lost out on ad revenue. (Today, a prime-time 30 second ad spot is anywhere from $80K to $150K). Bur once Neilsen started tracking those, the networks stopped fighting for it, because they could bill advertisers on better C (Live+Same Day), C3 (Live+3 days) and CBS for the 2015/2016 season now uses C7 (Live+7 days) numbers when determining ad rates!
DVRs were fought because they reduced the C numbers, but kept the regular numbers intact (ad skipping). Today? The networks have their own tricks with DVRs to screw with users and make it hard to switch channels. As well, shows with bad C numbers? They're dropped.
Streaming was the same, then they realized that they had a perfect solution - unskippable ads. So now all the streams have ads you cannot fast forward past on purpose.
And they don't care about downloads - because downloads count as zero towards the programming - so if everyone's downloading the show rather than watching it on OTA or other TV, the networks see it as a poorly performing show (bad revenue numbers) and they cancel the show. That's why your favorite shows are often cancelled - the ones that favor a larger proportion of people who use DVRs and technology just don't get good C numbers.
Netflix? They produce good programming because you're their target market. They want you as a subscriber because you'll pay for their content. Unlike networks which live and die by the eyeball (and thus must have programming that attracts them), Netflix only needs to make programming that will get people to subscribe and remain subscribed. They won't produce a show for the masses because the masses are unlikely to subscribe - so they serve content that subscribers, and new subscribers will want.
Data caps. I expect that's what keeps Reed Hastings awake at nights. When people expect 4K streams but their ISP charges an arm and a leg for the data in those 4K streams, Netflix becomes less viable.
Streaming as a whole becomes less viable.
The networks LOVE streaming because they love being able to force ads on you - unskippable ones, at that. With broadcast (OTA or cable/satellite/etc), you can stick it into your DVR and then play it back later and skip the ads.
But of course, the cable ISPs who sell TV service, well, TV service is VERY profitable. They'll sell you a bundle of Discovery Network channels for $5/month, when their true cost is around... 80 cents or so. (Discovery Channel is around 25 cents/subscriber/month, and that's the top tier channel. The rest of the channels cost a lot less). Ditto for History and other networks where they can bill you $5-10 a month when their cost is under $1 total. (And you know with a la carte, they're going to charge $5 a channel that costs them under a 25 cents).
Being a "dumb internet pipe" isn't very profitable. Oh, they make lots of money, but they make lots more selling you TV. Data caps are just another way for them to "encourage" you to subscribe for TV service rather than
Are naieve. Iran continues to enrich bomb-grade nuclear fuel in underground/concealed sites.
Perhaps, but enriched fuel is HARD to make. The technology is quite.. finicky and specialized and not available to you and me.
To enrich uranium to weapons grade requires centrifuges, a lot of them (because it's the only way to separate U-235 from U-238). Civil enrichment uses a few centrifuges to none (there are designs that don't need enriched fuel). But that's because they only need 5% U-235 to work. Weapons grade is 40% or higher (and bombs need almost pure - 90%+), which requires a stunningly large array of centrifuges at which point it's really hard to do and keep a secret underground - it's going to be a huge facility.
And let's not forget that the world IS watching and monitoring. You cannot detonate a nuclear bomb anywhere without it being detected by third parties. Underground? The earth is covered with seismographs recording everything from earthquakes to nuclear bombs. There are isotope detectors scattered around detecting the products of the nuclear reactions. And you can't do it out in the open because a lot of satellites carry detectors.
Plus, nevermind the intelligence capabilities of everyone - think of what it would take to design something like Stuxnet to only fire at the right target configured a certain way. Chances are, if there is such an underground facility, it's well known. You can't really hide such a facility - having to dig out lots of earth and then moving it places means it's captured on satellite photos and everything. And such a facility requires a lot of infrastructure and likely will generate quite a bit of heat, which shows up nicely on thermal cameras, again on satellites.
And if it really posed a threat, well, a "bomb" will be accidentally dropped on it. After all, it landed out there in the middle of the desert where there was nothing there.
I've got no problem with that. These companies are in business to make money. They aren't charities, and I wouldn't expect them to give away the software that provides most of their income. If they did, they'd go out of business.
But consider what you said. Just because it costs them nothing to open source something, and there's no benefit to keeping it closed, that still isn't a reason to open source it. They could just as easily keep it closed anyway. And in the old Microsoft, which saw open source as evil and did everything they could to discredit it, that's exactly what they would have done. Their new attitude seems to be, "If it doesn't hurt us to open source something, then sure, let's go ahead and do it." That's a big change.
Well, it's because they have a new boss on top. The first boss said sharing was bad and you're an evil person if you did (Bill's famous letter to hobbyists in the 70s). The second one basically kept "Microsoft is dominant and we will rule" while the current one is more humble and akin to "OK, we have PCs, but PCs are not the be-all-end-all computing device anymore, and while we make a lot of money here, it's a mature product and it won't last". It's why they're putting Office everywhere - even on non-Windows things - you can have it on your smartphone, your tablet, etc. And while it's not necessarily great for producing content, if you need to update a slide on the way to the customer, well, that's a sale of Office365 subscriptions, because they can do it in under a minute, rather than try to dig out their laptop, start it up, etc.
If anything, the new Microsoft realizes its no longer the central part of everyone's lives - you don't need a PC for everyone in the household (and likewise a Windows and Office license) - a lot, if not most, are perfectly happy to just use a smartphone and tablet, and maybe from time to time, use the shared PC.
So it's busy finding new ways to be a part, to make itself relevant again. Not a bad thing, really - if you were wedded to a Microsoft solution, it just means Microsoft is now offering more ways to stay Microsoft only. If you're not, well, maybe it will attract you into the fold.
Futurama was good, all of it. The Simpsons started sucking pretty quickly, and they really suck today.
Guess which one is still on the air?
Suck sells.
Only if you don't understand how TV works.
First of all, there are three predominant business models for TV. If you don't know them, then you won't be able to produce the right content for them.
First, we have the free to air model - where the signal is free, and you get the content for free (or could). Here, the content, and the overhead is paid for by ads. In fact, the content only exists to sell ads, and content can reduce its cost by selling ads within it (product placement)..There's a whole industry built around this, and you know it as the Neilsen raitings. But that's not the truth - because the ratings you see published are just incidental to the real numbers that pay for it. The "free" numbers we get are the L+SD (Live + Same Day), L+3 (Live + 3 days) and L+7 (Live + 7 days) numbers, which are basically the audience numbers for the program. Now, these numbers mean diddly squat to the networks because that's not what they pay for.The networks pay for the C, C3 and C7 numbers, which are the same numbers, minus program content - i.e., they represent the people who during the program watched the ads. That's the numbers they pay Neilsen big bucks for, the numbers they really collect, and what they generate revenue from. Those numbers set the rate for a 30 second spot. In general, they can range anywhere from 80K to 150K during prime time. So your average 30 minute show may pull in a million bucks.
So the content used here must attract eyeballs, and the eyeballs it attracts would be the ones who aren't savvy enough to use fast forward on their DVRs or other thing. And they must have mass eyeball appeal, hence lowest common denominator (i.e., "suck sells"). Because the more eyeballs means the more eyeballs watching ads, means higher ad rates.
Now, if we take this one step further - and analyze what's happening. The networks love streaming TV because guess what? They can force people to watch ads (they hate DVRs), so higher rates if you stream your TV. And if you torrent it for the ad-free view, well, they don't care. Because when it comes time to decide at the end of the season, your "view" means zilch - it doesn't matter if a TV show is torrented billions or trillions of times - if it isn't bringing in the commercial eyeballs, it's cut.
The second model of TV is the subscription model. This can be from cable channels (though with a la carte, it's shifting to the first model. Pay attention as you'll see what impacts it has on your favorite programs), to full on subscription services like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, among others. For this model, the primary goal is to attract subscribers (except cable channels, which have to attract ad eyeballs too, and with the move to a la carte, even more eyeballs as subscription rates drop, so your favorite programs may watch to go lowest common denominator). But for full on subscription services, their goal to make money is to provide you with content that will keep you paying the subscription fee, AND attract new subscribers. They're continuously examining their demographic - what content they like (to produce content you want to watch and thus, keep paying subscription fees for), and who they'd like to attract as subscribers. This programming will not be lowest common denominator because they don't want eyeballs, they want paying eyeballs. So they'll only attract people who will pay for the content. You'll hear a lot of people how they like what Netflix, etc. is producing - and guess what? That's the point - Netflix is producing what you, a subscriber, likes because they want you to keep paying the $9 a month. The person you hear complaining about Netflix not having what they like? Probably wasn't going to subscribe anyways so no loss.
Woodworking itself isn't all that expensive if you already have the tools. I had to buy some maple when we were rebuilding a TV-show prop and the 8' hardwood boards were like $15 each if memory serves.
And that's why you learn where your local makerspace is. Because they will often have all the tools for you to use for a nominal membership fee. Good ones will have metalworking tools as well, and the fancy ones have CNC and laser cutters for use, as well.
As well as having people who know people who can get you the training you need to use the tools safely.
And this is the sad part. Most businesses don't have competent IT that even has the first clue about network security. Plus you should ALWAYS have no trust for any device on your network. Treat them all as hostile and only let them have what is needed to do what you want.
Businesses that don't spend money on IT that is competent deserve what they get.
Most businesses can't afford an IT person. Most businesses have internet access, usually provided to give customers free wi-fi and provided at a low or highly discounted rate to the business so they could do things like handle emails and social media.
So you're talking about an owner, a couple of managers and maybe 6 or 7 employees, maybe a couple of computers for office work and social media promotions, and perhaps a few tablets scattered through the store for POS or employee access.
They will likely buy a cheap webcam and use it for surveillance and maybe even a webcam on their website. And they have no way to configure a "vlan" or anything else because their ISP providing the access gave them a preconfigured wireless router - the most "IT help" they got was the technician who came in and asked what they liked their private wifi password to be.
And most other businesses are the same - they're just too small to really care about IT, especially when it's really just a couple of PCs and tablets and smartphones.
I replaced the old router serving as the house AP with a Ubiquity UniFi AP-AC-PRO - a nice fairly low cost enterprise-class AP over the holidays. (It only costs $150!)
And I have to admit, I'm impressed - covers three floors and everything with full signal at 2.4GHz, and at 5GHz, it's actually usable on all three floors.
Even better, I didn't have to do any of the WiFi dances to get a signal - just a rock solid signal that doesn't drop or do anything funny.
Sure, the consumer space has a lot of higher tech gear like this one, but in the end, having chased the high end in my quest for just solid WiFi, I simply gave up and bought the UniFi. Haven't been happier since - everything just connects to it with no muss and no fuss.
I'm tired of bugs and non-functioning high end WiFi rouiters that promise a lot, but before they become stable, become orphaned
So yeah, looks nifty, but I'll pass. Even at only AC1900, it's more than fast enough for me and I value the ability to just connect and not worry about a thing over getting raw speed, but only if I angle things just right otherwise I get zilch.
They could have started banning accounts or locking to a particular IP or something, but they didn't take the heavy handed approach.
IP blocking doesn't work - because someone can watch Netflix at home using their home broadband, while someone else is using a mobile connection. Or maybe if they're all together, mom, dad, and the children are each on their own devices using their own data with 4 separate IPs.
That's why limiting IPs isn't feasible - there are very legitimate reasons to have multiple IPs even if everyone is in the same room!
The benefit for them is that they can reduce costs by reducing the bitrate, and claim not to have reduced picture quality. They have done it before - when HD broadcasts started they were around 18Mb/sec IIRC, but were later reduced to less than half that (average per channel, they actually balance about 18Mb/sec between two channels in a kind of VBR system). They claimed that the picture didn't suffer but it very clearly did, and it's now rather poor.
They are under immense financial pressure, and reducing bitrate (and picture quality) allows them to save something else, someone else's job.
The problem is, HEVC is expensive. While the MPEG-LA made h.264 the way it is by making streaming free (if the viewer doesn't pay) and offering caps to the maximum license fees, thereby encouraging big users (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, etc) to switch to h.264 and merely pay the cap every year
Of course, MPEG-LA wanted to encourage the switch to HEVC by offering the same terms, and several patentholders balked which is why they pulled out of the MPEG-LA pool and created the HEVC Alliance which licenses without a cap, without free streaming (they want some money per HEVC stream), meaning the money you save in bandwidth might go straight to licensing fees.
And I'm sure the BBC streams under h.264 were basically cost-free since the streams were available at no charge (granted, you paid with your TV license, but the MPEG-LA doesn't count that), so switching will create costs.
Zero-rated content is problematic because it supplants other means of getting universal access to the internet. We agree that the argument for zero-rating is: 'It's better than nothing.' But that's begging the question. Why does 'nothing' have to be the alternative?
Telco revenues in the developing world have nearly doubled in the last 10 years. Virtually all revenue growth in the telco sector is in the developing world. And yet... not only are we not keeping up with the rate of increase in bandwidth, subscription base and accessibility in the developed world, we're actually falling behind.
Service levels are improving by leaps and bounds in the developed world, in a sector with *stable* income. And yet they're not improving nearly as much in a part of the world that's seen 50% revenue growth in 10 years.
How is it that the only way we can get actual servicesâ"you know, the thing telcos are given partial monopolies to deliverâ"is when customers are commoditised and effectively sold on an exclusive basis to an information service operator?
Easy - because the alternative IS nothing. Everyone wants to bash Facebook for offering a walled garden, but there is no alternative to it. No telecom operator, charity or other organization is stepping up to the plate and offering free connectivity to the people.
Facebook's not offering it "for free" for they're gathering information, but people are getting access to limited knowledge and perhaps even staying in touch with family far away through facebook.
Given how much opposition there is to what facebook is offering, you'd think facebook got exclusivity or something and pushed every other free internet provider off the market. Or you'd think they'd get together and be able to offer an alternative that's freer and less walled.
Personally, I think a useful EHR makes my day easier and helps with patient care. If I can get old results quickly, if I can view new results sensibly and if I can more easily communicate what I'm doing to other health care providers and the patient, then a number of vexing problems get better. Unfortunately, current EHRs don't do much of any of those things.
And even more, have the ability to SHARE the information. The problem with current EHR systems is each doctor's system is a data island, which is completely useless!
EHR systems need to interoperate. If you go to the hospital, the hospital's EHR system should be able to fetch the record from your doctor's office to figure out if it's something your doctor is monitoring, to get what medications you're on, etc. And if your doctor ordered tests, to get a view into those test results and compare them with results now, because that can provide insight into why you're visiting the hospital.
Then when you visit your doctor, they can pull all the data from the hospital and see how things are going as well.
It's the sharing of information that makes EHR valuable. A data island means an EHR is just a fancy paperwork keeping system.
But sharing it among doctors, hospitals and so makes it more valuable. Perhaps you're travelling and have to visit the doctor - the local doctor can pull up your file and review it - perhaps you had a medication conflict. And when you get back, the doctor's notes are also there for your regular doctor.
And that's the problem - EHR systems are designed purposefully to NOT interoperate by their greedy vendors, meaning they're completely useless systems.
Perhaps instead of EHR systems, we call it "medical internet" where the goal is to share patient information in ways that help patients. Unfortunately, this will never happen because insurance companies and everyone else will try to hijack it for everything BUT medical care.
There's one thing about systemd that I don't understand: If it is terrible (and I have no doubt that it is, from its philosophy to its implementation), why have almost all of the major Linux distributions moved to it?
Because maybe it isn't as terrible as it seems?
Sure, there's a lot of NEW things in it, but isn't Linux all about new? And things are different, which gets people tied up in knots.
And the other thing is, people don't realize the shortcomings of the ever-popular SysVInit - I mean, why do we emulate in SysVInit, init? Init is a daemon manager - in practically all Linux distros, it's managing getty (which spawns login). And when you end your session getty dies, and init duly restarts it, like a good daemon manager does. And you can have daemons kill and restart based on runlevel. This is built in, standard default behavior of init. Yet everyone creates elaborate scripts that do the same thing, or even programs that spawn a child that does the service, and when it crashes or dies, it respawns it. Something init already does. Init even does rate limiting - if a daemon quits too quickly, init stops starting it for a few minutes.
SystemD formalizes this as a fundamental part of the system - init really should manage daemons, not a rough collection of shell scripts that try to mimic its behavior.
Granted, things are more complex, like how PulseAudio made audio more complicated. But then you realize that audio IS complicated these days, especially on a desktop OS. There was a time you could open/dev/dsp and that's it, but those days are long gone, because users have multiple audio devices and not only that, but those audio devices can change suddenly. And no, the hardware can change - perhaps they're listening on wireless headphones through Bluetooth, but then they want to switch to speakers which require switching the underlying hardware, and so forth.
And initialization and startup is similar.
In the end, what's happening to Linux is what Android did to Linux. Android has its own init system (init manages daemons, like it should), its own graphical system, its own audio layer and much more.
And it was done because the demands of mobile make it purposely complex and consumer expectations ensure it isn't easy.
If you take apart most Li-Ion battery packs from laptops you will find a thermistor. This is to help prevent the battery from overheating while charging/discharging. Nothing new here except perhaps they are putting them in smaller single cell Li-Ion batteries like cell phone batteries.
LiPos have them as well for the same reason.
But this isn't a thermistor that controls a circuit - it's a new cell construction technique that basically has the cell turn itself off when it gets too hot, not externally via a circuit (that may or may not exist, or may be defeated because the Chinese maker of the pack wanted to save a buck).
Yes, counterfeit battery packs exist, and they often are missing the safety circuits as well as using dodgy cells. While there are often very good 3rd party suppliers of battery packs, there are dozens more dodgy sellers of questionable quality 3rd party packs ready and willing to sell you incendiary devices. Probably the reason why those "hoverboards" we see keep catching on fire.
So having the cell be able to protect itself would provide a big increase in safety if you ever find yourself stuck using some crappy quality 3rd party battery packl
That's the technical explanation, but the mathematical one is actually fairly simple - you convert the multiplication to an addition. There are several ways to do this - logarithms are one common way (A*B = inverse log(log(A) + log(B)) ), but so is convolution, or realizing that addition and multiplication in say, the time domain becomes multiplication and addition in the frequency domain, respectively.
So if you have two numbers, you do the FFT of them to convert the domains, then you add them up, and then do the inverse FFT. The FFT is not the only way - the DCT is another way (the FFT is an optimized for computers Fourier transform using sines, while DCT uses cosines). You might use the DCT if you have say, DCT hardware available like on a GPU (video encoders and decoders generally use the DCT over the FFT as the DCT's first parameter gets you the DC level)
The reason you are changing the bulbs so frequently is because the factories have engineered them to fail. When they were selling the bulbs for 0.25 a-piece, making them last 100 years would have been financial suicide.
Filament bulbs can last 5+ years, if you engineer them to, especially at the "warmer feeling" lower temperatures.
Not to mention I the early 20s the Phoebus Cartel got together to deliberately limit the lifespan of lightbulbs to around 1000 hours or so. The argument was making them last longer wasted electricity since they would produce more heat and less light, but the real purpose was basically to create planned obsolescence and sell more lightbulbs at an inflated price.
While it doesn't exist now, I wouldn't be surprised if the companies involved simply continued making the lightbulbs that way. I mean, the companies involved are the same ones making lightbulbs to this day.
First, billions of transistors is actually easy - most of the transistors in a modern CPU is actually spent on caches and other memory. Logic itself doesn't have as high a transistor density as you might think. In fact, in practically all ASIC designs, there's so much extra silicon space that they put extra gates there that do nothing but are tied to a logic value. These spare transistors serve to provide "rework" room for the design. If you look at most steppings, you start with A0, then you have A1, A2,... B0, B1,... etc. Well, going from A0 to A1 is basically just a metal mask change - they don't change the transistor masks (each mask costs around $100K each, and 10 layer metal designs have often 30+ masks, so a $3M cost before the first silicon is patterned). instead, they rewire the transistors using this spare sea of transistors to fix the issues - hopefully only needing to change 5, maybe 10 masks tops ($1M). When you go from Ax to B0, that implies a complete new mask set - either there are too many fixes, or the design is being revised.
As for simulation, it's multi-stage. First each block is individually tested, and simulated, then it's all brought together and software simulated to check for easy to spot faults and have full inner visibility to see why things are the way they are. The complexity of modern CPUs and SoCs means this is only around 1Hz, usually less, so it's reserved for initial testing and sanity checking test vectors.
The next step is to put in on an accelerator - systems like Cadence's Palladium which can get your clock speeds up to the hundreds of Hz range. The simulation isn't as visible and the timings can be off, but you can functionally check most of the blocks and with careful probes design, bring error cases back to the software model to understand what's going on.
The next stage is FPGA simulation - you're testing the logic itself and FPGAs (we're talking about the ones that cost easily $30K each, and no, you need at least 4 or 8 of them or more - that's a quarter million dollars in FPGAs!). But the system moves to the kHz range to even 1MHz. Which despite its slowness, is actually fast enough to boot an OS like Windows or Linux or run test software so software development for drivers and such can begin. Visibility is limited to whatever probes you could install and whatever debugging tools your FPGA toolset has.
Then it's all laid out and routed and all that, and software simulations are run to verify timings - ensuring there are no setup and hold violations in the final floorplan.
And it's not as bad as you think - each block is quite independent and as long as the interface contract is held (setup and hold, timings and other things for the block), the tools will tell you how close you are to violating the specs for each block. So you can test each block in isolation and as long as the interface contract is held, be assured it will work.
Of course, it won't catch integration errors like ground bounce or other such things that. It's akin more to building a space shuttle or airplane - with the right design, you can get something that works.
A Parametric Speaker travels long distances and is highly directional. They basically work by emitting the sound as ultrasonic waves (which because of their higher frequency, do not have the dispersal as lower frequency waves do). When those waves bounce off something, it causes a downmix to happen bringing the audio back to audible hearing range.
But the sound travels farther, and if it hits you dead on, it sounds like it's coming from inside your head. And it's directional so while you're broadcasting, people standing beside you don't hear a thing. Might drive the dogs nuts, though.
It is spooky to have this and playing some music, then bouncing it off a far wall and hearing the music originate from the wall. People with directional hearing will swear it came from that location. Bouncing it off a ceiling and you get the same effect.
I'm sure someone somewhere is about to make an emitter so you can use it for the new object based audio systems (Dolby Atmos/DTS:X) which require ceiling speakers. You could use this technology to simply point the virtual speaker at a spot on the ceiling without having to wire up a whole new set of speakers.
This would be fine, if it actually worked. The Win 10 upgrade doesn't work on my system, for no other reason other than I converted from Spinning drive to SSD drive. The Win 10 Upgrade borks about half way through the install.
Hah, I get this annoying notification on one of my systems. And then it says "Unfortunately this PC is unable to run Windows 10". Basically the graphics driver is out of date and there's no hope for it.
So now I get bothered and the thing doesn't even give me the option to have it stop. Why nag me when the thing says Windows 10 won't even work?!
But gender is a major part of programming. Programming is essentially seen as an individual endeavor much like science. You are expected to grind out technical solutions to problems almost as puzzles. That brings with it the "individual" as the main driver, in contraposition to group science projects which are much harder to organize and require greater resources.
You keep telling yourself that.
Because programming may be individual, but software development is highly social - there are very few pieces of software that can be developed by one person working alone.
So the ideal developer needs social skills because their work forms part of a much bigger work and thus has to interoperate. They need to be able to discuss with not only the developers using the code, but also the developers of the code that their code uses.
And even "the one part" is large enough that a small team of people need to work on it. Or take on Extreme Programming/Pair Programming/Agile or whatever it's called where you're sharing and reviewing code or working together.
At which point, girls might actually be better at the whole software development thing because their ability to socialize makes them much better communicators and thus, software developers.
Of course, the real problem is there is a cultural bias that "computers" and "video games" are boy's toys. You can really blame Nintendo for this - after the big video game crash (which if you look closely, feature girls just as much as boys, and many a female developer worked for Atari), Nintendo was looking for a way to market the NES. Nintendo didn't want to market it as a "video game" because of the negative connotations (video game crash, remember? Retailers are wary of spending that sort of cash), so in a brilliant move, they marketed it as a toy. But toy stores were basically separated by gender - you have girls toys on one side of the store, a DMZ, then boy's toys on the other side.
Nintendo needed to figure out where to sell it - so they marketed it as a boy's toy and featured it in the boy's section. If you take a look at Nintendo advertising, it was all boys playing the NES.
Take a look at advertising before and after the crash - before, you see families where mom, dad, son and daughter are playing, while post crash, it's all boys, and maybe a male parent.
If you ever wondered why society considers "videogames" to be something kids do rather than adults, you can really trace it to Nintendo.
And naturally, where videogames went, computers followed since a primary task of most computers was to play videogames.
Sorry to burst your bubble but wireless has been used for well over a decade in various infrastructure systems. Not more than a mile away from where I'm sitting are a string of traffic lights all linked by wireless for better traffic flow. I have little doubt that the vendor for them took few if any security precautions, like many vendors they probably rely on security through obscurity. While I fully agree that there should be significant limits on wireless integration, there are ways to implement it safely. To do so however we need fully open and vetted protocols and systems with fail-safes in the CERTAIN EVENT that a security exploit is found/abused. An example with traffic lights would be hardware set limits for light times and safety rules, so that even of someone hacked the wireless they couldn't set both roads to green or green. And of course networked and critical systems should be separate pieces of hardware, with little if any two way communication from the network side to the critical side.
Actually, even WiFi has been using 900MHz for a long time now - it's not standard, but I am aware there are several implementations that use 802.11g at 900MHz instead of 2.4GHz. Proprietary of course, but you get with it all your standard WiFi security - open, WEP, WPA, WPA2.
As for traffic lights, they actually do have protection - the outputs of the controller pass through a verifier to ensure unsafe states for the lights do not happen - if that happens, they immediately start the blinking light behavior to indicate the signal is down and prevent the controller from controlling the lights until the verifier is reset.
You can't override this - the verifiers have the line-voltage signals as inputs (just before going to the lights) and the only output is really "signal failure". After all, they're really just checking to make sure two intersecting greens don't happen (either green through, or turning arrow greens that conflict), or that pedestrian lights make sense (considered a green), etc.
Traffic light intersections are "simple" enough that it's actually possible to enumerate all the states they could be in and only allow the valid ones. Even the most complex of intersections generally are easy to figure out the valid light patterns in a state table.
I've never done it but I've always wanted to play with acoustic imaging in heaphones. Clearly a two speaker system has 2 degrees of freedom and therefore cannot have any 3D effects. Yet we know that our ears can tell sounds that come from behind from those that come from ahead. This is because our brains process the sound for a reverb or delayed echo. So you cread the 3D effect by delaying the left ear's sound slightly and feeding it to the right ear.
that of course is just fake spacial assignment. THere's some way to be more clever about what you delay based on the dolby encoding to assign the delayed sound correctly. I don't know what that is but it can't be a lot more complex than your matrix decoding of the sum and difference channel. The difference is that instead of sending it to the rear speakers, you now have to delay it. Here's a websearch with a couple leads on this:
The technical term is actually "head related transfer function" which takes a signal and transforms it into what the ears would actually hear.
And on a basic level, you can do this with some software a loud sound source and a couple of microphones, and some code cleverness.
Basically what you want to do is in your desired room, set up the microphones as if they were ears. Then start recording and set off your loud sound (clap, starter pistol, etc). This will record the impulse response of the room, from your source location to your pickup location. From there, you can take the two impulse reponses and convolve it with a signal. Play the resulting sound through headphones and it'll sound exactly like the sound was coming from that spot in the room, and you were sitting where the microphones were.
If you do this 6 times, you can simulate a 5.1 surround sound system. There are at least several surround virtualization methods that use this impulse method to generate a virtual surround sound for headphones.
It is conceivable that with extremely careful design an SSD could be designed to provide power loss protection without backup capacitors but apparently no one has managed to do that yet - or at least not with adequate performance. Take a good look at the design of something like ZFS for a clue as to how one might go about doing that.
Actually, the performance issues have been solved - because SATA is a bottleneck. SATA-III can only do about 500-540MB/sec, which is why all SSDs using SATA pretty much quote that figure. The internal hardware is much faster. which is why PCIe is being used and easily getting 1.5+GB/sec reads and writes. When you have a controller and media capable for 1.5GB and stuck at 540MB/sec due to interface limitations, you can waste performance doing things the safe way. I mean, if it cripples performance to 600MB/sec, that's still faster than SATA and good enough.
This law is the worst, dumbest idea in the history of bad ideas. Actually the intention itself isn't bad, but the law is. Because "collecting personal data" is also interpreted to mean cookies of pretty much any kind, meaning it applies to almost all website. Thus on almost every bloody site you visit, you first have to click through this stupid and pointless warning. The net effect has been pretty much zero; and as the article suggests it may actually be dangerous: people are now so used to clicking away these warnings that the do so without really looking at them. Thankfully an increasing number of companies and organisations are starting to ignore this law.
Well, the intention is that the consumer is to start questioning why. I mean, if I go a browse a few pages, not logging in or anything, WHY is it setting cookies? Why does it need to track me? Fine, sure, if I log in, you need a cookie to track that. But if I'm a guest, why are you doing it? Why do you need session cookies when I'm just pulling information?
I mean, we asked why people stored cookies just to view static web sites. And most web content is static - if I'm finding information out about a car, I don't need a cookie to track me as I view the options and features and specifications.
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The FAA has pretty much shut down all sorts of "ridesharing" for aircraft that aren't following the rules, and given it's Airbus involved, I'm certain they're going to follow the rules.
The FAAs will have no conniption about shutting this down in the middle of the competition and stranding everyone if it proves to violate the rules.
First off, the networks and Netflix may be "in a war" but it's not really a mutually exclusive one. For starters, they serve different markets.
The networks base their ad rates on Neilsen ratings - and in particular, the C ratings (C, C3, C7) which are the eyeballs watching the ads. They pay good money for those numbers, which keeps Neilsen in business. The numbers that you see reported around? That's the free stuff Neilsen gives out and is completely meaningless. While there is some correlation, just because a show does well doesn't necessarily mean it gets a good C rating.
And they fought the VCR and all that because Neilsen carried only live ratings - the numbers they billed advertisers. If people taped a show for later viewing, they didn't count as a viewer, and lost out on ad revenue. (Today, a prime-time 30 second ad spot is anywhere from $80K to $150K). Bur once Neilsen started tracking those, the networks stopped fighting for it, because they could bill advertisers on better C (Live+Same Day), C3 (Live+3 days) and CBS for the 2015/2016 season now uses C7 (Live+7 days) numbers when determining ad rates!
DVRs were fought because they reduced the C numbers, but kept the regular numbers intact (ad skipping). Today? The networks have their own tricks with DVRs to screw with users and make it hard to switch channels. As well, shows with bad C numbers? They're dropped.
Streaming was the same, then they realized that they had a perfect solution - unskippable ads. So now all the streams have ads you cannot fast forward past on purpose.
And they don't care about downloads - because downloads count as zero towards the programming - so if everyone's downloading the show rather than watching it on OTA or other TV, the networks see it as a poorly performing show (bad revenue numbers) and they cancel the show. That's why your favorite shows are often cancelled - the ones that favor a larger proportion of people who use DVRs and technology just don't get good C numbers.
Netflix? They produce good programming because you're their target market. They want you as a subscriber because you'll pay for their content. Unlike networks which live and die by the eyeball (and thus must have programming that attracts them), Netflix only needs to make programming that will get people to subscribe and remain subscribed. They won't produce a show for the masses because the masses are unlikely to subscribe - so they serve content that subscribers, and new subscribers will want.
If the tastes change thoug
Streaming as a whole becomes less viable.
The networks LOVE streaming because they love being able to force ads on you - unskippable ones, at that. With broadcast (OTA or cable/satellite/etc), you can stick it into your DVR and then play it back later and skip the ads.
But of course, the cable ISPs who sell TV service, well, TV service is VERY profitable. They'll sell you a bundle of Discovery Network channels for $5/month, when their true cost is around... 80 cents or so. (Discovery Channel is around 25 cents/subscriber/month, and that's the top tier channel. The rest of the channels cost a lot less). Ditto for History and other networks where they can bill you $5-10 a month when their cost is under $1 total. (And you know with a la carte, they're going to charge $5 a channel that costs them under a 25 cents).
Being a "dumb internet pipe" isn't very profitable. Oh, they make lots of money, but they make lots more selling you TV. Data caps are just another way for them to "encourage" you to subscribe for TV service rather than
Perhaps, but enriched fuel is HARD to make. The technology is quite.. finicky and specialized and not available to you and me.
To enrich uranium to weapons grade requires centrifuges, a lot of them (because it's the only way to separate U-235 from U-238). Civil enrichment uses a few centrifuges to none (there are designs that don't need enriched fuel). But that's because they only need 5% U-235 to work. Weapons grade is 40% or higher (and bombs need almost pure - 90%+), which requires a stunningly large array of centrifuges at which point it's really hard to do and keep a secret underground - it's going to be a huge facility.
And let's not forget that the world IS watching and monitoring. You cannot detonate a nuclear bomb anywhere without it being detected by third parties. Underground? The earth is covered with seismographs recording everything from earthquakes to nuclear bombs. There are isotope detectors scattered around detecting the products of the nuclear reactions. And you can't do it out in the open because a lot of satellites carry detectors.
Plus, nevermind the intelligence capabilities of everyone - think of what it would take to design something like Stuxnet to only fire at the right target configured a certain way. Chances are, if there is such an underground facility, it's well known. You can't really hide such a facility - having to dig out lots of earth and then moving it places means it's captured on satellite photos and everything. And such a facility requires a lot of infrastructure and likely will generate quite a bit of heat, which shows up nicely on thermal cameras, again on satellites.
And if it really posed a threat, well, a "bomb" will be accidentally dropped on it. After all, it landed out there in the middle of the desert where there was nothing there.
Well, it's because they have a new boss on top. The first boss said sharing was bad and you're an evil person if you did (Bill's famous letter to hobbyists in the 70s). The second one basically kept "Microsoft is dominant and we will rule" while the current one is more humble and akin to "OK, we have PCs, but PCs are not the be-all-end-all computing device anymore, and while we make a lot of money here, it's a mature product and it won't last". It's why they're putting Office everywhere - even on non-Windows things - you can have it on your smartphone, your tablet, etc. And while it's not necessarily great for producing content, if you need to update a slide on the way to the customer, well, that's a sale of Office365 subscriptions, because they can do it in under a minute, rather than try to dig out their laptop, start it up, etc.
If anything, the new Microsoft realizes its no longer the central part of everyone's lives - you don't need a PC for everyone in the household (and likewise a Windows and Office license) - a lot, if not most, are perfectly happy to just use a smartphone and tablet, and maybe from time to time, use the shared PC.
So it's busy finding new ways to be a part, to make itself relevant again. Not a bad thing, really - if you were wedded to a Microsoft solution, it just means Microsoft is now offering more ways to stay Microsoft only. If you're not, well, maybe it will attract you into the fold.
Only if you don't understand how TV works.
First of all, there are three predominant business models for TV. If you don't know them, then you won't be able to produce the right content for them.
First, we have the free to air model - where the signal is free, and you get the content for free (or could). Here, the content, and the overhead is paid for by ads. In fact, the content only exists to sell ads, and content can reduce its cost by selling ads within it (product placement)..There's a whole industry built around this, and you know it as the Neilsen raitings. But that's not the truth - because the ratings you see published are just incidental to the real numbers that pay for it. The "free" numbers we get are the L+SD (Live + Same Day), L+3 (Live + 3 days) and L+7 (Live + 7 days) numbers, which are basically the audience numbers for the program. Now, these numbers mean diddly squat to the networks because that's not what they pay for.The networks pay for the C, C3 and C7 numbers, which are the same numbers, minus program content - i.e., they represent the people who during the program watched the ads. That's the numbers they pay Neilsen big bucks for, the numbers they really collect, and what they generate revenue from. Those numbers set the rate for a 30 second spot. In general, they can range anywhere from 80K to 150K during prime time. So your average 30 minute show may pull in a million bucks.
So the content used here must attract eyeballs, and the eyeballs it attracts would be the ones who aren't savvy enough to use fast forward on their DVRs or other thing. And they must have mass eyeball appeal, hence lowest common denominator (i.e., "suck sells"). Because the more eyeballs means the more eyeballs watching ads, means higher ad rates.
Now, if we take this one step further - and analyze what's happening. The networks love streaming TV because guess what? They can force people to watch ads (they hate DVRs), so higher rates if you stream your TV. And if you torrent it for the ad-free view, well, they don't care. Because when it comes time to decide at the end of the season, your "view" means zilch - it doesn't matter if a TV show is torrented billions or trillions of times - if it isn't bringing in the commercial eyeballs, it's cut.
The second model of TV is the subscription model. This can be from cable channels (though with a la carte, it's shifting to the first model. Pay attention as you'll see what impacts it has on your favorite programs), to full on subscription services like HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, among others. For this model, the primary goal is to attract subscribers (except cable channels, which have to attract ad eyeballs too, and with the move to a la carte, even more eyeballs as subscription rates drop, so your favorite programs may watch to go lowest common denominator). But for full on subscription services, their goal to make money is to provide you with content that will keep you paying the subscription fee, AND attract new subscribers. They're continuously examining their demographic - what content they like (to produce content you want to watch and thus, keep paying subscription fees for), and who they'd like to attract as subscribers. This programming will not be lowest common denominator because they don't want eyeballs, they want paying eyeballs. So they'll only attract people who will pay for the content. You'll hear a lot of people how they like what Netflix, etc. is producing - and guess what? That's the point - Netflix is producing what you, a subscriber, likes because they want you to keep paying the $9 a month. The person you hear complaining about Netflix not having what they like? Probably wasn't going to subscribe anyways so no loss.
The third and final model is government or othe
And that's why you learn where your local makerspace is. Because they will often have all the tools for you to use for a nominal membership fee. Good ones will have metalworking tools as well, and the fancy ones have CNC and laser cutters for use, as well.
As well as having people who know people who can get you the training you need to use the tools safely.
Most businesses can't afford an IT person. Most businesses have internet access, usually provided to give customers free wi-fi and provided at a low or highly discounted rate to the business so they could do things like handle emails and social media.
So you're talking about an owner, a couple of managers and maybe 6 or 7 employees, maybe a couple of computers for office work and social media promotions, and perhaps a few tablets scattered through the store for POS or employee access.
They will likely buy a cheap webcam and use it for surveillance and maybe even a webcam on their website. And they have no way to configure a "vlan" or anything else because their ISP providing the access gave them a preconfigured wireless router - the most "IT help" they got was the technician who came in and asked what they liked their private wifi password to be.
And most other businesses are the same - they're just too small to really care about IT, especially when it's really just a couple of PCs and tablets and smartphones.
I replaced the old router serving as the house AP with a Ubiquity UniFi AP-AC-PRO - a nice fairly low cost enterprise-class AP over the holidays. (It only costs $150!)
And I have to admit, I'm impressed - covers three floors and everything with full signal at 2.4GHz, and at 5GHz, it's actually usable on all three floors.
Even better, I didn't have to do any of the WiFi dances to get a signal - just a rock solid signal that doesn't drop or do anything funny.
Sure, the consumer space has a lot of higher tech gear like this one, but in the end, having chased the high end in my quest for just solid WiFi, I simply gave up and bought the UniFi. Haven't been happier since - everything just connects to it with no muss and no fuss.
I'm tired of bugs and non-functioning high end WiFi rouiters that promise a lot, but before they become stable, become orphaned
So yeah, looks nifty, but I'll pass. Even at only AC1900, it's more than fast enough for me and I value the ability to just connect and not worry about a thing over getting raw speed, but only if I angle things just right otherwise I get zilch.
IP blocking doesn't work - because someone can watch Netflix at home using their home broadband, while someone else is using a mobile connection. Or maybe if they're all together, mom, dad, and the children are each on their own devices using their own data with 4 separate IPs.
That's why limiting IPs isn't feasible - there are very legitimate reasons to have multiple IPs even if everyone is in the same room!
The problem is, HEVC is expensive. While the MPEG-LA made h.264 the way it is by making streaming free (if the viewer doesn't pay) and offering caps to the maximum license fees, thereby encouraging big users (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, etc) to switch to h.264 and merely pay the cap every year
Of course, MPEG-LA wanted to encourage the switch to HEVC by offering the same terms, and several patentholders balked which is why they pulled out of the MPEG-LA pool and created the HEVC Alliance which licenses without a cap, without free streaming (they want some money per HEVC stream), meaning the money you save in bandwidth might go straight to licensing fees.
And I'm sure the BBC streams under h.264 were basically cost-free since the streams were available at no charge (granted, you paid with your TV license, but the MPEG-LA doesn't count that), so switching will create costs.
Easy - because the alternative IS nothing. Everyone wants to bash Facebook for offering a walled garden, but there is no alternative to it. No telecom operator, charity or other organization is stepping up to the plate and offering free connectivity to the people.
Facebook's not offering it "for free" for they're gathering information, but people are getting access to limited knowledge and perhaps even staying in touch with family far away through facebook.
Given how much opposition there is to what facebook is offering, you'd think facebook got exclusivity or something and pushed every other free internet provider off the market. Or you'd think they'd get together and be able to offer an alternative that's freer and less walled.
And even more, have the ability to SHARE the information. The problem with current EHR systems is each doctor's system is a data island, which is completely useless!
EHR systems need to interoperate. If you go to the hospital, the hospital's EHR system should be able to fetch the record from your doctor's office to figure out if it's something your doctor is monitoring, to get what medications you're on, etc. And if your doctor ordered tests, to get a view into those test results and compare them with results now, because that can provide insight into why you're visiting the hospital.
Then when you visit your doctor, they can pull all the data from the hospital and see how things are going as well.
It's the sharing of information that makes EHR valuable. A data island means an EHR is just a fancy paperwork keeping system.
But sharing it among doctors, hospitals and so makes it more valuable. Perhaps you're travelling and have to visit the doctor - the local doctor can pull up your file and review it - perhaps you had a medication conflict. And when you get back, the doctor's notes are also there for your regular doctor.
And that's the problem - EHR systems are designed purposefully to NOT interoperate by their greedy vendors, meaning they're completely useless systems.
Perhaps instead of EHR systems, we call it "medical internet" where the goal is to share patient information in ways that help patients. Unfortunately, this will never happen because insurance companies and everyone else will try to hijack it for everything BUT medical care.
Because maybe it isn't as terrible as it seems?
Sure, there's a lot of NEW things in it, but isn't Linux all about new? And things are different, which gets people tied up in knots.
And the other thing is, people don't realize the shortcomings of the ever-popular SysVInit - I mean, why do we emulate in SysVInit, init? Init is a daemon manager - in practically all Linux distros, it's managing getty (which spawns login). And when you end your session getty dies, and init duly restarts it, like a good daemon manager does. And you can have daemons kill and restart based on runlevel. This is built in, standard default behavior of init. Yet everyone creates elaborate scripts that do the same thing, or even programs that spawn a child that does the service, and when it crashes or dies, it respawns it. Something init already does. Init even does rate limiting - if a daemon quits too quickly, init stops starting it for a few minutes.
SystemD formalizes this as a fundamental part of the system - init really should manage daemons, not a rough collection of shell scripts that try to mimic its behavior.
Granted, things are more complex, like how PulseAudio made audio more complicated. But then you realize that audio IS complicated these days, especially on a desktop OS. There was a time you could open /dev/dsp and that's it, but those days are long gone, because users have multiple audio devices and not only that, but those audio devices can change suddenly. And no, the hardware can change - perhaps they're listening on wireless headphones through Bluetooth, but then they want to switch to speakers which require switching the underlying hardware, and so forth.
And initialization and startup is similar.
In the end, what's happening to Linux is what Android did to Linux. Android has its own init system (init manages daemons, like it should), its own graphical system, its own audio layer and much more.
And it was done because the demands of mobile make it purposely complex and consumer expectations ensure it isn't easy.
LiPos have them as well for the same reason.
But this isn't a thermistor that controls a circuit - it's a new cell construction technique that basically has the cell turn itself off when it gets too hot, not externally via a circuit (that may or may not exist, or may be defeated because the Chinese maker of the pack wanted to save a buck).
Yes, counterfeit battery packs exist, and they often are missing the safety circuits as well as using dodgy cells. While there are often very good 3rd party suppliers of battery packs, there are dozens more dodgy sellers of questionable quality 3rd party packs ready and willing to sell you incendiary devices. Probably the reason why those "hoverboards" we see keep catching on fire.
So having the cell be able to protect itself would provide a big increase in safety if you ever find yourself stuck using some crappy quality 3rd party battery packl
That's the technical explanation, but the mathematical one is actually fairly simple - you convert the multiplication to an addition. There are several ways to do this - logarithms are one common way (A*B = inverse log(log(A) + log(B)) ), but so is convolution, or realizing that addition and multiplication in say, the time domain becomes multiplication and addition in the frequency domain, respectively.
So if you have two numbers, you do the FFT of them to convert the domains, then you add them up, and then do the inverse FFT. The FFT is not the only way - the DCT is another way (the FFT is an optimized for computers Fourier transform using sines, while DCT uses cosines). You might use the DCT if you have say, DCT hardware available like on a GPU (video encoders and decoders generally use the DCT over the FFT as the DCT's first parameter gets you the DC level)
Not to mention I the early 20s the Phoebus Cartel got together to deliberately limit the lifespan of lightbulbs to around 1000 hours or so. The argument was making them last longer wasted electricity since they would produce more heat and less light, but the real purpose was basically to create planned obsolescence and sell more lightbulbs at an inflated price.
While it doesn't exist now, I wouldn't be surprised if the companies involved simply continued making the lightbulbs that way. I mean, the companies involved are the same ones making lightbulbs to this day.
I've done this.
First, billions of transistors is actually easy - most of the transistors in a modern CPU is actually spent on caches and other memory. Logic itself doesn't have as high a transistor density as you might think. In fact, in practically all ASIC designs, there's so much extra silicon space that they put extra gates there that do nothing but are tied to a logic value. These spare transistors serve to provide "rework" room for the design. If you look at most steppings, you start with A0, then you have A1, A2, ... B0, B1, ... etc. Well, going from A0 to A1 is basically just a metal mask change - they don't change the transistor masks (each mask costs around $100K each, and 10 layer metal designs have often 30+ masks, so a $3M cost before the first silicon is patterned). instead, they rewire the transistors using this spare sea of transistors to fix the issues - hopefully only needing to change 5, maybe 10 masks tops ($1M). When you go from Ax to B0, that implies a complete new mask set - either there are too many fixes, or the design is being revised.
As for simulation, it's multi-stage. First each block is individually tested, and simulated, then it's all brought together and software simulated to check for easy to spot faults and have full inner visibility to see why things are the way they are. The complexity of modern CPUs and SoCs means this is only around 1Hz, usually less, so it's reserved for initial testing and sanity checking test vectors.
The next step is to put in on an accelerator - systems like Cadence's Palladium which can get your clock speeds up to the hundreds of Hz range. The simulation isn't as visible and the timings can be off, but you can functionally check most of the blocks and with careful probes design, bring error cases back to the software model to understand what's going on.
The next stage is FPGA simulation - you're testing the logic itself and FPGAs (we're talking about the ones that cost easily $30K each, and no, you need at least 4 or 8 of them or more - that's a quarter million dollars in FPGAs!). But the system moves to the kHz range to even 1MHz. Which despite its slowness, is actually fast enough to boot an OS like Windows or Linux or run test software so software development for drivers and such can begin. Visibility is limited to whatever probes you could install and whatever debugging tools your FPGA toolset has.
Then it's all laid out and routed and all that, and software simulations are run to verify timings - ensuring there are no setup and hold violations in the final floorplan.
And it's not as bad as you think - each block is quite independent and as long as the interface contract is held (setup and hold, timings and other things for the block), the tools will tell you how close you are to violating the specs for each block. So you can test each block in isolation and as long as the interface contract is held, be assured it will work.
Of course, it won't catch integration errors like ground bounce or other such things that. It's akin more to building a space shuttle or airplane - with the right design, you can get something that works.
A Parametric Speaker travels long distances and is highly directional. They basically work by emitting the sound as ultrasonic waves (which because of their higher frequency, do not have the dispersal as lower frequency waves do). When those waves bounce off something, it causes a downmix to happen bringing the audio back to audible hearing range.
But the sound travels farther, and if it hits you dead on, it sounds like it's coming from inside your head. And it's directional so while you're broadcasting, people standing beside you don't hear a thing. Might drive the dogs nuts, though.
It is spooky to have this and playing some music, then bouncing it off a far wall and hearing the music originate from the wall. People with directional hearing will swear it came from that location. Bouncing it off a ceiling and you get the same effect.
I'm sure someone somewhere is about to make an emitter so you can use it for the new object based audio systems (Dolby Atmos/DTS:X) which require ceiling speakers. You could use this technology to simply point the virtual speaker at a spot on the ceiling without having to wire up a whole new set of speakers.
Hah, I get this annoying notification on one of my systems. And then it says "Unfortunately this PC is unable to run Windows 10". Basically the graphics driver is out of date and there's no hope for it.
So now I get bothered and the thing doesn't even give me the option to have it stop. Why nag me when the thing says Windows 10 won't even work?!
You keep telling yourself that.
Because programming may be individual, but software development is highly social - there are very few pieces of software that can be developed by one person working alone.
So the ideal developer needs social skills because their work forms part of a much bigger work and thus has to interoperate. They need to be able to discuss with not only the developers using the code, but also the developers of the code that their code uses.
And even "the one part" is large enough that a small team of people need to work on it. Or take on Extreme Programming/Pair Programming/Agile or whatever it's called where you're sharing and reviewing code or working together.
At which point, girls might actually be better at the whole software development thing because their ability to socialize makes them much better communicators and thus, software developers.
Of course, the real problem is there is a cultural bias that "computers" and "video games" are boy's toys. You can really blame Nintendo for this - after the big video game crash (which if you look closely, feature girls just as much as boys, and many a female developer worked for Atari), Nintendo was looking for a way to market the NES. Nintendo didn't want to market it as a "video game" because of the negative connotations (video game crash, remember? Retailers are wary of spending that sort of cash), so in a brilliant move, they marketed it as a toy. But toy stores were basically separated by gender - you have girls toys on one side of the store, a DMZ, then boy's toys on the other side.
Nintendo needed to figure out where to sell it - so they marketed it as a boy's toy and featured it in the boy's section. If you take a look at Nintendo advertising, it was all boys playing the NES.
Take a look at advertising before and after the crash - before, you see families where mom, dad, son and daughter are playing, while post crash, it's all boys, and maybe a male parent.
If you ever wondered why society considers "videogames" to be something kids do rather than adults, you can really trace it to Nintendo.
And naturally, where videogames went, computers followed since a primary task of most computers was to play videogames.
Actually, even WiFi has been using 900MHz for a long time now - it's not standard, but I am aware there are several implementations that use 802.11g at 900MHz instead of 2.4GHz. Proprietary of course, but you get with it all your standard WiFi security - open, WEP, WPA, WPA2.
As for traffic lights, they actually do have protection - the outputs of the controller pass through a verifier to ensure unsafe states for the lights do not happen - if that happens, they immediately start the blinking light behavior to indicate the signal is down and prevent the controller from controlling the lights until the verifier is reset.
You can't override this - the verifiers have the line-voltage signals as inputs (just before going to the lights) and the only output is really "signal failure". After all, they're really just checking to make sure two intersecting greens don't happen (either green through, or turning arrow greens that conflict), or that pedestrian lights make sense (considered a green), etc.
Traffic light intersections are "simple" enough that it's actually possible to enumerate all the states they could be in and only allow the valid ones. Even the most complex of intersections generally are easy to figure out the valid light patterns in a state table.
The technical term is actually "head related transfer function" which takes a signal and transforms it into what the ears would actually hear.
And on a basic level, you can do this with some software a loud sound source and a couple of microphones, and some code cleverness.
Basically what you want to do is in your desired room, set up the microphones as if they were ears. Then start recording and set off your loud sound (clap, starter pistol, etc). This will record the impulse response of the room, from your source location to your pickup location. From there, you can take the two impulse reponses and convolve it with a signal. Play the resulting sound through headphones and it'll sound exactly like the sound was coming from that spot in the room, and you were sitting where the microphones were.
If you do this 6 times, you can simulate a 5.1 surround sound system. There are at least several surround virtualization methods that use this impulse method to generate a virtual surround sound for headphones.
Actually, the performance issues have been solved - because SATA is a bottleneck. SATA-III can only do about 500-540MB/sec, which is why all SSDs using SATA pretty much quote that figure. The internal hardware is much faster. which is why PCIe is being used and easily getting 1.5+GB/sec reads and writes. When you have a controller and media capable for 1.5GB and stuck at 540MB/sec due to interface limitations, you can waste performance doing things the safe way. I mean, if it cripples performance to 600MB/sec, that's still faster than SATA and good enough.
Well, the intention is that the consumer is to start questioning why. I mean, if I go a browse a few pages, not logging in or anything, WHY is it setting cookies? Why does it need to track me? Fine, sure, if I log in, you need a cookie to track that. But if I'm a guest, why are you doing it? Why do you need session cookies when I'm just pulling information?
I mean, we asked why people stored cookies just to view static web sites. And most web content is static - if I'm finding information out about a car, I don't need a cookie to track me as I view the options and features and specifications.
Etc. etc. etc.