Why don't the carriers give me the option of disabling Direct Carrier Billing for my account? In fact, why don't they give me the option of disabling equipment purchase plans? More than once people have order hardware billed to my phone number! (No, I didn't have to actually pay for it, but it took a lot of work on my behalf to fix it.)
Because they get a cut. And the scummier the company, the larger the cut. Heck, it can be huge, like 90% of what you paid goes to the carrier.
And for that, they don't have to do anything - customers are forced to deal with the scummy company, there's no such thing as blocked charges, etc.
It completely benefits the carrier to allow it, completely screws over the customer.
The only way to get any of that sort of crap fixed is legislation, because right now it's tilted too much in the carrier's favor for them to do anything about it.
Because, on the whole, people like cars and governments like (gas) tax revenue.
Public transit takes both of those things away. Electric cars help with the pollution, but costs government the gas tax revenues, hence the sometimes "innovative" proposals you are starting to hear about how to tax electric car owners for their utilization of road infrastructure.
Still, in practically every city, outside of the places where there is simply no possible way to increase road capacity, people will prefer increased road capacity to any public transport solution.
Actually, you can thank General Motors for the love of cars.
Because back in the early 20th century, public transit in North America was actually.... extremely good. In any town or city, bit or small, you could get around using public transit. between horse drawn carriages to street cars it was a completely normal way to travel. Not just New York, or San Francisco, but any twon in any state.
Of course, the Model T brought cars into the mix, but not by much - they were relatively finicky things and you still had to contend with a lot of pedestrian traffic everywhere.
What replaced the street car was buses, which were considered high tech and advanced (since they didn't require rails). This did lead to the failure of many streetcar companies, since people flocked the novel bus that could go more places (and did) over the street car.
General Motors came along and basically decided to buy out all the failing street car companies. They didn't replace them, just bought them up, shut them down and left it as things were. Advertised the heck out of cars giving freedom (we're still talking early 20th century here) and there you go. After the second world war, the car became the status symbol and everyone bought into it, the interstate system was developed and so on. Plus, cities spread out into suburbs designed for cars and you end up with what we have today.
Hard to imagine, but at one time, the USA had a better public transportation system than Europe. Even today it still doesn't quite match what we had back then.
American car culture was literally developed from advertising - just like how weddings were transformed by a few De Beers ads insisting you must have a diamond ring.
I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding is that it's relatively lightweight compared to running a VM, and it has direct access to your Windows filesystem. I used to use Cygwin to run a script to resize my photos, I could see this being used in a similar way.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
Looks like someone needs to implement throttling of the CPU so you can avoid bootlooping, a la iOS.
There's only two reason for a phone to bootloop. Either the OS is horrendously corrupted and crashes (restorable via a reflash), or the battery is not strong enough to supply the power needed to boot the phone.
Since reflashing doesn't work (at least with my 6P) it's probably a battery issue, which given a year into the life of the phone, could happen with heavy users.
Funny how we'd prefer phones that crash and are nonfunctional over phones that try their best to remain functional even with dying batteries...
The 6P bootloop fix disables the high power cores to avoid the power draws that cause the phone to bootloop. Of course, it also makes it slower.
Sure, I get that some people may use Cortana. Sometimes. Maybe even on purpose. But for the love of all that is holy, at least let me actually disable it.
One thing Microsoft should've concentrated on was since Cortana integration is forced during Windows 10 setup, to make sure you can use Cortana to do the entire setup from start to end, including WiFi and everything.
Plenty of times we had to set up multiple Windows 10 machines. Being able to set up one using voice alone would've been extremely useful while you're arms are busy with another machine.
Yes. A candela is defined in terms of lumens per Watt.
A Watt is 1 J/s (Joule/second), or 1 (N-m)/s, or 1 (kg-m^2)/(s^2) or 1 Volt-Amp.
It's really the fact that these units can be defined in terms of Watts that causes them all to be dependent on the kilogram.
Incidentally,l the imperial system is locked to the metric system as well. An inch is, by definition, exactly 2.54cm (25.4mm). Similarly, there are exact conversions for mass and time.
Length, Mass and Time are the base units of every measurement system - all the other fundamental units will be based on them. For length, SI is defined in terms of c (speed of light in a vacuum) which requires time. Luckily time is measured as a fundamental frequency of the Cesium atom. The only missing thing is the kilogram.
Of course, the definition of the kilogram will require precise measurements of voltage (Joules per Coulomb, requires time), current (Coulombs/sec, again, requires time), velocity (requires both length and time) and gravity (technically requires mass, but there are ways to measure it without requiring mass)
I work with SIP and PBX professionally. I can pass anything I want out to my provider, but you can be assured that they know with absolute certainty what DIDs I SHOULD be passing out legitimately.
My provider could stop all spoofed numbers from me before they go out anywhere, and eliminate ~90% of all this scam/spam/spoofing overnight. Providers only need to police their own networks to reduce spoofing and all the crap that comes with it.
Any legitimate need to spoof a number (which are a vanishingly small number) should be documented and legally approved.
And some providers do. We switched landline providers and our new one filters the caller IDs we tell it. Our old one didn't, but the new one knows which phone numbers belong to us and does a quick lookup to make sure the number we pass it is one of ours. (We have something like 100 phone numbers, but we only have around 15 connections on a fractional).
The biggest source of the spoofs really is VoIP - and it's going to be hard to source filter those because many VoIP providers have large pools of numbers that they peer with everyone, so those lists need to be shared with all their connection providers. But that's becoming a fancy form of spoofing if your provider can simply acquire a number (from somewhere other th an you) and say it's theirs.
Perhaps all the VoIP providers need to get together and actually list out who owns what number in a centralized directory that can be consulted/ And if it's not there, then show up as 000-000-0000 or something to show an obviously invalid number and to hang up on them. But sucks to be on VoIP...
So, if they get this computer that can break encryption, people will suddenly know that the encryption used on the Internet is completely broken, and suddenly not trust it. They are building the shovel that will dig their own grave.
Well, at 72 qubits, they're not going to be cracking much that isn't already cracked already using classical computers.
It's estimated for the likes of RSA and ECC to fall, you're going to need a machine with at least as many qubits as the key size, and right now, each added qubit adds exponential complexity to the system - the coherence time shortens significantly with added qubits (how long they can remain in superposition to do your calculation before spontaneously collapsing). And you need long coherence times because you need to set up the initial system state and reading/writing the qubits takes a bit of time.
At least in the near future, all your secrets are still safe
Is it really so difficult, they want a good story well told. They probably don't want the same story told over and over again, often told worse than it was before. You can cheat, scope out all other media and check out what stories people liked and tell them in the movie format but remember to tell them well, so fuck off the nepotistic no nothings, that make things look good but tell really shit, clumsy, stupid stories because that is the limit of their intellect and they are to egoistic to hire smart people with knowledge who can improve the quality of the story told.
And you can join the filmmakers barely making it.
FIrst off, there's a reason why the summer blockbusters season is called blockbuster. It makes a TON of money. Even in their bad years. People want explosions and disasters and big robots and tons of CGI with comic book characters.
A movie is an escape - a chance to transport someone away from their problems in the world for a couple of hours and into a new world. Sometimes to let someone else do the driving, other times to numb the brain from all of today's problems.
There is plenty of room for movies that "make sense" or "tell a good story" but you'll generally be limiting yourself and your audience to people who want to think and analyze. The vast majority of people want to sit down, be entertained, and stop thinking for a while.
For a movie, its goal is to "put asses in seats". Entertaining them is how you do it, especially in this age where there are multiple options for spending a couple of hours.
Of course, you can share wonderful stories, but you'll find your reach awfully short - limited to art houses or film festivals. If you're lucky you'll get a mention somewhere and a bit of buzz but still won't reach a lot of people because the theatres showing your movie are few and inconvenient.
If the storm kicked up after the people were already there, then those people should have been pulled into the most reinforced areas of the building (typically the office) until it passed, because walls do collapse. This is not an unforeseeable event. Get the people away from the most hazardous conditions and ride it out. Don't just keep working.
I suppose you'd argue against evacuating the entire building when there's a fire, too. Only move the people that will be in the way of the fire department. No. Overreaction for the sake of caution is tolerable when the events are infrequent enough.
It depends on the storm. We've had bad storms, and if you stopped working every time a storm warning comes out, you might as well take the rest of the year off.
So perhaps it was a bad storm, but as far as anyone was concerned, par for the course during the stormy season. Of course, storms can kick up some wickedly local phenomena - microbursts for example that are difficult to predict, extremely local and can be damaging.
It can be a matter of just bad luck - it looks like a seasonal storm and everyone goes about their business, but then something wicked gets whipped up and a wall collapses as misfortune.
Of course, I wasn't there, but that's what I think when we got storm warnings - all it means is to be more careful when outside because winds might be strong and rain might be driving.
And of course, the wall could be defective, too - perhaps it was made incorrectly, or poorly maintained or something else that made it collapse prematurely.
Plus on the busy lines they have trains arriving every 5 minutes, so people aren't so inclined to rush and cause problems.
That doesn't matter. Our commuter trains arrive every 90 seconds during peak periods and you still get people pushing shoving and rushing the doors.
And I think that time is conservative - I think peak times can easily be 45 seconds or less between trains.
The final nail on the coffin is sometimes trains are backed up so you have several trains traveling together. The inevitable result is the first train is completely packed, and the second train can be so empty there are seats. Everyone rushes for the first, even though you can see (even from the front of the platform) that there's a train going to be appearing in about 10 seconds after the current train departs.
People who are smart realize this, let the people fight for the first train to be stuffed, stand back calmly and 10 seconds later enjoy a train with lots of space and a seat.
The real problem is people. What works in Japan doesn't work anywhere else - it's just the culture - to cut in line is to be incredibly rude and the Japanese can be exceedingly polite and patient.
If I'm that desperate for a TV show, I'll just download it off of TPB. At that point no one wins anything.
TV executives care not if you use TPB. Because it's an eyeball that's not counted, but since it wasn't revenue generating in the first place (no ads nor subscription revenue) you're a fan they don't care about. You don't matter to them.
If something they do causes a bunch of people to suddenly download the TV show, they see the declining viewership and cancel the show. So your downloading from TPB, instead of services like Amazon, iTunes or Google, they just see it as someone who doesn't care for the show
For ad based shows, they record how many eyeballs watch ads. DVRs have wreaked havoc on this and caused cancellation of many programs - the ones popular with DVR users and thus ad skippers were the first on the chopping blocks.
What people want is for Apple to be up front and transparent about this sort of "feature". Apple basically hid the fact they were doing this from everyone despite strong suspicions that something like it was happening. This makes it look (true or not) like Apple was up to something shady and/or coersive. Their explanation of trying to save the battery isn't implausible but by hiding the fact they were doing it it looks strongly like they were degrading performance to force upgrade sales. Had Apple been transparent about it from day one it would have been a non-issue.
Considering it only started with the iPhone 6, suspicions of the slowdowns started way back to the original iPhone. And it's been proven that OS upgrades do not degrade performance - the OS appears slower for various reasons, but not because the OS is intentionally clocking down the CPU in order to force people to upgrade. (In fact, iOS 12 is FASTER than iOS 11. At least apparently since raw benchmarks don't reveal a difference. It just feels snappier on older hardware).
Now, since iOS 10 or so, Apple did implement the CPU throttling on bad batteries, because the iPhone 6 was having premature shutdown issues. Apple got caught out because someone actually ran geekbench on it before and after a battery replacement. (Which also means the slowdown is not permanent - it only happens if the battery is unable to supply the necessary power. Replacing the battery restores speed.).
Of course, the alternative is boot looping, something a lot of Android phones like to do (same cause - battery can't supply the power needed to boot, so halfway through, it reboots. Various community fixes generally work by disabling power hungry CPU features, making your phone slower but at least working again).
Malware been downloading crap to your computer disguised as JPG and ZIP for years, and now we've gone full circle and become the malware
No, these are not merely renamed files, these are polyglot files - files that can be other files. But unlike say steganography, they aren't even hidden.
So this guy created a JPEG image that is a valid JPEG image. But inside it he stuffed in a ZIP file that can be extracted using any ZIP utility as-is.
The ability to combine two arbitrary files is relatively limited - ZIP is one of the few file formats that puts the important metadata at the end of the file (and most formats will ignore trailing junk if they encounter it) so you can use the ability of many file formats to create holes to put ZIP data into them (ZIP data is stored as offsets that need not be contiguous, so you can place ZIP data in holes created by the other format).
I find it very difficult to believe that lawyers won't take class action suits unless they get millions to tens of millions. The 1% suggested above you is generally (but not always) going to be too low, but you really want to argue these lawyers needed $2.12 million to litigate this, especially settling instead of a full trial? And that something more reasonable like $250k-$400k is just so little money lawyers aren't going to bother? Nobody is saying lawyers should do this for free. The objection is to the obscene greed of taking $2m of an $8m settlement and not infrequently even higher percentages. These suits are like lotteries for lawyers, not fairly compensated hard work.
First, the plaintiffs never pay a dime. The lawyers only make money if they get a settlement. Plenty of class actions end up going nowhere, so it ends up with plenty of billable hours lost.
I don;'t know about you, but there aren't many companies that can foot an all-or-nothing bill - would you rather take up a case with a client able to pay you your $200/hr rate, or take up a class action which may not pay up at all?
So the few cases you win have to pay for all the cases you didn't, or got dismissed or other things.
So yes, it's a huge risk - you're asking a law firm to front their lawyers, paralegals clerks, assistants, etc for a couple of years at least racking up what could be billable hours with paying clients for something that may or may not succeed.
It's all about ROI. The virtual jackpot right now means lawyers are willing to take the risk. Change the rules and lawyers can easily decide to take the paying case rather than the risky case.
No one really knows but it's between $750 and $1200 per box. The amount they charge you for not bringing the box back is less then how much it costs to make it.
I'm fairly certain you're off by an order of magnitude - $75-120 seems much more reasonable for what you get, and what comparable devices cost; Especially true in Canada where you can rent or buy the cable box (but you can only use theirs). The buy option is free and clear - you go to the store, pick up the box and pay. They don't ask if you're a subscriber or anything. You can do anything with them - use them, blow them up, disassemble them, etc.
If those boxes really cost several hundred bucks to make, the cable companies would certainly not make it possible to you to buy it for 1/10th the cost with no obligations to be a subscriber.
Big deal that at night you charge your battery and your phone at the same time.
I only know of one phone that had an external case you could use to charge an internal battery via USB. Most phones don't, so you have to swap the batteries again to ensure you have both batteries charged.
USB power banks are easier, since you can charge it and your phone at the same time using a multi-USB charger.
To me it's been quite odd that Apple is so keen on AMD GPUs, while never using them for primary processors.
Easy. Part shortages. One problem during the PowerPC era that Apple had was that neither Motorola (now Freescale) nor IBM would supply Apple with the processors Apple wanted. It was so bad that there would be delays for weeks of the top end models that Apple offered because the yields were terrible. This happened so consistently it was predictable - if you wanted a high end configuration, you reloaded the Apple Storage page and got your order in ASAP.
Freescale was not interested in fixing the shortages, which is why Apple went to IBM for the G5 processors, hoping IBM would give Apple more priority.
The reason Apple went with Intel was because Intel has sufficient capacity to actually produce the chips Apple wants. AMD unfortunately still had plenty of yield problems - evidenced over the years of how hard to get the high end chips were. Should Apple have picked AMD, AMD would've suffered trying to fulfill Apple's orders to the point where the market would've been flooded with unwanted processors that didn't make the cut.
ATI though didn't have those issues. And the only reason Apple went ATI was because nVidia's CEO blabbed about being Apple's supplier a couple of days before a keynote. Surprise surprise, said keynote now featured computers with ATI GPUs.
Clearly AMD has learned their lesson with Ryzen as I haven't heard of part shortages at any level - perhaps the old ATI team taught AMD how to design parts with higher yields.
The GPU integration has me scratching my head. AMD's integrated slaughters Intels in any fair (equal $) comparison. I dont see how the deal with Intel benefits AMD.
Intel is the #1 supplier of GPUs in the world. But as we all know, they suck. Even the higher end Iris models are OK, but generally not as performant. This deal combines an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU giving a single package integrated solution, something Apple seems to have their hand in making it possible.
It benefits AMD in that the #3 GPU supplier in the world is partnering up with the #1 CPU maker in the world. With this, AMD has an advantage that nVidia does not have - namely being able to provide Intel (#1 GPU supplier) with a very interesting competitive part. nVidia is stuck, because AMD provides integrated GPUs for both chipmakers, themselves and Intel. And Intel is happy because they now have a third option for highly integrated systems - you could go with a low end Intel GPU, a low but higher performance Iris Pro solution, or you can get a nice decked out CPU with AMD Vega graphics. It might not blow the pants off an nVidia GTX 2080 Ti, but for a mobile system, it offers compelling value.
And Apple is behind it - they want higher end (better than Iris Pro) graphics in a single package solution for stuff like their MacBooks and such which are space constrained.
... since it now doesn't matter since most developer and Microsoft and tech industry in general are pushing towards locked down computing. We're seeing the final push with windows 10+. They have already lawyered it and planted bombs in it to death anyway, there's no way publishers are going to go back to giving gamers full control of the software. We've seen the big final push from Ubisoft with the latest assasins creed and Microsoft has a huge streaming project they are working on, while releasing seriously hostile coded UWP games. This is a far cry from the 90's where we had the raw files because there was no internet they could use to steal pieces of files and game code to prevent gamers from owning nad controlling their software.
The last 20 years have been a real revolution for developers and publishers to get rid of game ownership by being able to not give the complete game to gamers because their customers can't reach them. The attack on game ownership began with ultima series back in the 90's as all PC rpg's in development were relabelled mmo's and moved over to server locked pieces of software, undermining control and the privacy of gamers as the gullible masses ate it up because they are clueless. The rise of steam, mmo's and f2p games are proof we live in an idiocracy.
The reason everything went online and DRM is simply - PC piracy is out of control. With piracy rates of 90% and higher, it was unsustainable and the system would collapse on itself eventually.
You saw this as either service side enforcement - online play for example, or through intrusive forms of DRM, or long delayed PC ports that are crap, all of which happened. When PC DRM was relatively ineffective, developers switched to online play, moving RPGs to MMOs like you said. With that, there was the rise of competent consoles - the PS2 and Xbox era started it, but the PS3 and Xbox360 pretty much told developers that consoles were the next big gaming thing and all the big development houses moved over. At the end of the last generation, there were little to no sole PC developers anymore - even Blizzard, a long holdout started console development.
With the rise of this, it also meant PC ports generally sucked - developers went for consoles first with their lower piracy rates. PC ports came later (unless the game had an online component that server side could check for), and were often crap - limiting screen resolutions, interfaces that sucked, etc. Basically companies knew they weren't going to make too much money so they never put much effort into the port.
Things changed this generation, not because of the consoles themselves, but the rise of high end protections like Denuvo and UWP. Denuvo showed some strength leading to developers allowing day 1 PC ports again, knowing that piracy would be held back enough for the developers to make some money from it. Of course, with Denuvo gone (it's crackable within hours) developers are once again starting to hold back.
Things like free 2 play and other stuff arose out of the piracy model as well - from the mobile space where Android piracy rates were comparable to PCs, plus shortcomings in the Android model w.r.t. paid apps pretty much meant free apps got worldwide exposure while paid apps were limited to a few countries. Developers took note and applied same towards the PC market as well. And it's also infected console developers for no good reason at all.
It's really the war between PC users, pirates and developers that has lead things to where they are now.
People don't understand caricatures anymore, and I am not sure what happened to change that. Now everything is taken as literal truth, offhand remarks are thought to have been planned and meticulously worded over the course of years with no possibility of using imprecise words or terms.
It is the Age of Offense, where people seem to only be truly happy if they've discovered at least two new ways of being offended every day.
People do, it's just that caricatures and other things like satire require thinking and effort in order to be understood. Problem is, US culture shuns intelligence in favor for brute strength. It's not even "let's make fun of nerds" it's an active shunning of even trying to be knowledgeable, Intelligence is seen as a negative - to be well read, or worldly is seen as something to be avoided.
Ignorance is king, and thinking (not even critical thinking) is something that should be avoided at all costs. Likewise, anything that requires higher thought (like complex humor vehicles like caricatures and satire) is more effort than what US culture expects. If you can't resolve things without shooting things up with guns, then it's not worth doing.
It's the celebration of id over ego. To be dumb is to be king. Lazy in thought is smart. Learning is uncool.
I had no idea cars have more hit points than they used to. But I've definitely seen improved reliability. I seem to remember when cars used to be nearly worthless at 100K miles. It's pretty much expected they'll last that long these days, plus quite a bit longer. And they spend far less time in the shop being tweaked and tuned than I remember as a kid. Granted, I'm a data point of one, but from what I hear, that's the general experience as well. On occasion people get stuck with a lemon, but that's always been the case.
It goes both ways - reliability has gone way up but so have prices, so corners are cut elsewhere. These days if you buy a car that needs a service every 5000 miles or 4 times a year, it's considered a high maintenance vehicle. You can buy vehicles that need only one servicing every 20k miles or once a year (average distance driven is around 20k miles a year, so 100k is a 5 year old car). That's one oil change a year and pretty much the limiting factor. Owning one of these vehicles is quite something since you only do it once a year and the cost isn't very high (maybe $500 all told) versus a car that needs 4 $300 services every few months.
Granted, there are corners cut - so your car may only last about 10-15 years before needing a major maintenance (that's 200k-300k miles) which usually involves stuff like timing belts and other high items. In the 90s, you can probably get one that lasts 20+ years.
Of course, having all this stuff is handy - side view cameras make parking a snap (though you always have idiots who can't park, or use every aid available to park properly and not make it impossible for you to get in your car). And pedestrians, who love to text and walk right into traffic wearing nothing but all black at night.
What I was getting at is that I thought GreyKey was still getting past the basic whole file system encryption, but that it was stymied getting to individual app files that had been encrypted until the app opened...
That's how I read it anyway, otherwise why even bother to mention GreyKey could "still access unencrypted files" if it couldn't even get to the filesystem? It implies it can see some files at all.
Could just be bad wording on the part of the summary or article but the fact it mentions files makes me suspect it can still get into the filesystem.
That's because people assume GrayKey is a magical box that you plug in and have full access to the device. It's not even close to how it works.
First, it basically does a tethered jailbreak - and injects a special app because of it. (Jailbroken apps have full access to the system - that's the original meaning of the "jailbreak" - the app could break out of the OS jail it was put in to run). This app uses those abilities to crack the device PIN. Once the PIN is broken you take the phone and connect it to a PC and use it download all the data.
What happened now is Apple changed things around that it can no longer crack the PIN - so either Apple patched the flaw that lead to the jailbreak, or fixed things that the injected app can't do the PIN search anymore. Thus the injected app only has the permissions a regular app has and access to whatever the OS allows it. Those are the limited "unencrypted" files. Likely it also cannot access the screen and thus you cannot answer the "App wants permission to access photos" dialogs as well to access photos.
If the phone is deliberately slowed down with no way to undo it, then even if I replace the battery the phone will be slow (though probably last longer than new).
The phone is slowed because the battery cannot handle the load. If you change the battery, the slowdown doesn't happen anymore. It's how people found it out.
When iOS boots, it sets a flag. If it boots successfully, then the flag is cleared. But if it fails and resets due to power brownouts, then iOS implements the slowdown.
This way even with a weak battery you can still use it.
Most phones don't do this. You may remember the Nexus 6P as entering a "boot loop" where it would boot, then restart without booting all the way. This is what happens if you don't control your power consumption. It boots, then comes to a part where it needs to draw a lot of power. The battery fails and the power IC detects the voltage drop and triggers a brownout reset. This causes the system to restart and attempt to boot again, where it reaches the same spot, dies, resets, etc.
The fix that some people came up with was disabling the high power CPU cores, which means the phone slows down, but it allows the phone to boot because the low power cores draw much less power so the battery can boot the OS all the way. But now your phone is slower.
There's no real answer to the problem. You either end up with a phone needing a battery replacement because it can't boot all the way or you have a slower phone. Honestly, the slower phone seems like the better outcome as it ensures you have a phone and not a brick. At least you'll be able to make an emergency call if you need to. It does allow you to use the phone lower than you would otherwise - if you had a boot looping phone, you must change the battery or get a new phone. If you have a slow phone, you may just hang onto it longer since it still works.
It goes both ways, really. You can be a cynic and think it's to force sales of new phones (though leaving the code out would do the same thing - the phone just stops working because it can't boot, so that's a far easier way to do it)
Androids key feature over Apple iOS isn't anything technical but the fact you can get outside of the box applications for it. The types of things that Apple will just not allow, because they are afraid of legal action, or just isolating the big names. Because you may have a hard time trying to get Nintendo to make games for your phone, if you happen to offer a ROM emulator as well. Or giving us a programming language interpreter however this could potentially cause security problems. Now risks come with reward. Apple gets rid of a lot of risk, but sometime we want the reward. Flag as Inappropriate
Except since iOS 10 or 11, iOS has supported sideloading. Granted, it's fairly limited (officially, only from source code - Apple doesn't care about license (sorry people who wanted to see RMS's head explode from proprietary OS enforcing open-source rules) but does want you to build from source, no binaries). The people who make f.lux attempted to use this loophole but Apple stopped them - no source code.
However, there are plenty of apps on Windows that will let you sideload to iOS as well, binaries even.
And there's a thriving "app store" for those who would build from source - emulators and other stuff.
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Because they get a cut. And the scummier the company, the larger the cut. Heck, it can be huge, like 90% of what you paid goes to the carrier.
And for that, they don't have to do anything - customers are forced to deal with the scummy company, there's no such thing as blocked charges, etc.
It completely benefits the carrier to allow it, completely screws over the customer.
The only way to get any of that sort of crap fixed is legislation, because right now it's tilted too much in the carrier's favor for them to do anything about it.
Actually, you can thank General Motors for the love of cars.
Because back in the early 20th century, public transit in North America was actually.... extremely good. In any town or city, bit or small, you could get around using public transit. between horse drawn carriages to street cars it was a completely normal way to travel. Not just New York, or San Francisco, but any twon in any state.
Of course, the Model T brought cars into the mix, but not by much - they were relatively finicky things and you still had to contend with a lot of pedestrian traffic everywhere.
What replaced the street car was buses, which were considered high tech and advanced (since they didn't require rails). This did lead to the failure of many streetcar companies, since people flocked the novel bus that could go more places (and did) over the street car.
General Motors came along and basically decided to buy out all the failing street car companies. They didn't replace them, just bought them up, shut them down and left it as things were. Advertised the heck out of cars giving freedom (we're still talking early 20th century here) and there you go. After the second world war, the car became the status symbol and everyone bought into it, the interstate system was developed and so on. Plus, cities spread out into suburbs designed for cars and you end up with what we have today.
Hard to imagine, but at one time, the USA had a better public transportation system than Europe. Even today it still doesn't quite match what we had back then.
American car culture was literally developed from advertising - just like how weddings were transformed by a few De Beers ads insisting you must have a diamond ring.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
Looks like someone needs to implement throttling of the CPU so you can avoid bootlooping, a la iOS.
There's only two reason for a phone to bootloop. Either the OS is horrendously corrupted and crashes (restorable via a reflash), or the battery is not strong enough to supply the power needed to boot the phone.
Since reflashing doesn't work (at least with my 6P) it's probably a battery issue, which given a year into the life of the phone, could happen with heavy users.
Funny how we'd prefer phones that crash and are nonfunctional over phones that try their best to remain functional even with dying batteries...
The 6P bootloop fix disables the high power cores to avoid the power draws that cause the phone to bootloop. Of course, it also makes it slower.
One thing Microsoft should've concentrated on was since Cortana integration is forced during Windows 10 setup, to make sure you can use Cortana to do the entire setup from start to end, including WiFi and everything.
Plenty of times we had to set up multiple Windows 10 machines. Being able to set up one using voice alone would've been extremely useful while you're arms are busy with another machine.
Yes. A candela is defined in terms of lumens per Watt.
A Watt is 1 J/s (Joule/second), or 1 (N-m)/s, or 1 (kg-m^2)/(s^2) or 1 Volt-Amp.
It's really the fact that these units can be defined in terms of Watts that causes them all to be dependent on the kilogram.
Incidentally,l the imperial system is locked to the metric system as well. An inch is, by definition, exactly 2.54cm (25.4mm). Similarly, there are exact conversions for mass and time.
Length, Mass and Time are the base units of every measurement system - all the other fundamental units will be based on them. For length, SI is defined in terms of c (speed of light in a vacuum) which requires time. Luckily time is measured as a fundamental frequency of the Cesium atom. The only missing thing is the kilogram.
Of course, the definition of the kilogram will require precise measurements of voltage (Joules per Coulomb, requires time), current (Coulombs/sec, again, requires time), velocity (requires both length and time) and gravity (technically requires mass, but there are ways to measure it without requiring mass)
And some providers do. We switched landline providers and our new one filters the caller IDs we tell it. Our old one didn't, but the new one knows which phone numbers belong to us and does a quick lookup to make sure the number we pass it is one of ours. (We have something like 100 phone numbers, but we only have around 15 connections on a fractional).
The biggest source of the spoofs really is VoIP - and it's going to be hard to source filter those because many VoIP providers have large pools of numbers that they peer with everyone, so those lists need to be shared with all their connection providers. But that's becoming a fancy form of spoofing if your provider can simply acquire a number (from somewhere other th an you) and say it's theirs.
Perhaps all the VoIP providers need to get together and actually list out who owns what number in a centralized directory that can be consulted/ And if it's not there, then show up as 000-000-0000 or something to show an obviously invalid number and to hang up on them. But sucks to be on VoIP...
Well, at 72 qubits, they're not going to be cracking much that isn't already cracked already using classical computers.
It's estimated for the likes of RSA and ECC to fall, you're going to need a machine with at least as many qubits as the key size, and right now, each added qubit adds exponential complexity to the system - the coherence time shortens significantly with added qubits (how long they can remain in superposition to do your calculation before spontaneously collapsing). And you need long coherence times because you need to set up the initial system state and reading/writing the qubits takes a bit of time.
At least in the near future, all your secrets are still safe
And you can join the filmmakers barely making it.
FIrst off, there's a reason why the summer blockbusters season is called blockbuster. It makes a TON of money. Even in their bad years. People want explosions and disasters and big robots and tons of CGI with comic book characters.
A movie is an escape - a chance to transport someone away from their problems in the world for a couple of hours and into a new world. Sometimes to let someone else do the driving, other times to numb the brain from all of today's problems.
There is plenty of room for movies that "make sense" or "tell a good story" but you'll generally be limiting yourself and your audience to people who want to think and analyze. The vast majority of people want to sit down, be entertained, and stop thinking for a while.
For a movie, its goal is to "put asses in seats". Entertaining them is how you do it, especially in this age where there are multiple options for spending a couple of hours.
Of course, you can share wonderful stories, but you'll find your reach awfully short - limited to art houses or film festivals. If you're lucky you'll get a mention somewhere and a bit of buzz but still won't reach a lot of people because the theatres showing your movie are few and inconvenient.
It depends on the storm. We've had bad storms, and if you stopped working every time a storm warning comes out, you might as well take the rest of the year off.
So perhaps it was a bad storm, but as far as anyone was concerned, par for the course during the stormy season. Of course, storms can kick up some wickedly local phenomena - microbursts for example that are difficult to predict, extremely local and can be damaging.
It can be a matter of just bad luck - it looks like a seasonal storm and everyone goes about their business, but then something wicked gets whipped up and a wall collapses as misfortune.
Of course, I wasn't there, but that's what I think when we got storm warnings - all it means is to be more careful when outside because winds might be strong and rain might be driving.
And of course, the wall could be defective, too - perhaps it was made incorrectly, or poorly maintained or something else that made it collapse prematurely.
From what I can tell, he was happy to be the name inspiration and Nintendo attempted to pay him many times but he refused the offer.
That doesn't matter. Our commuter trains arrive every 90 seconds during peak periods and you still get people pushing shoving and rushing the doors.
And I think that time is conservative - I think peak times can easily be 45 seconds or less between trains.
The final nail on the coffin is sometimes trains are backed up so you have several trains traveling together. The inevitable result is the first train is completely packed, and the second train can be so empty there are seats. Everyone rushes for the first, even though you can see (even from the front of the platform) that there's a train going to be appearing in about 10 seconds after the current train departs.
People who are smart realize this, let the people fight for the first train to be stuffed, stand back calmly and 10 seconds later enjoy a train with lots of space and a seat.
The real problem is people. What works in Japan doesn't work anywhere else - it's just the culture - to cut in line is to be incredibly rude and the Japanese can be exceedingly polite and patient.
TV executives care not if you use TPB. Because it's an eyeball that's not counted, but since it wasn't revenue generating in the first place (no ads nor subscription revenue) you're a fan they don't care about. You don't matter to them.
If something they do causes a bunch of people to suddenly download the TV show, they see the declining viewership and cancel the show. So your downloading from TPB, instead of services like Amazon, iTunes or Google, they just see it as someone who doesn't care for the show
For ad based shows, they record how many eyeballs watch ads. DVRs have wreaked havoc on this and caused cancellation of many programs - the ones popular with DVR users and thus ad skippers were the first on the chopping blocks.
Considering it only started with the iPhone 6, suspicions of the slowdowns started way back to the original iPhone. And it's been proven that OS upgrades do not degrade performance - the OS appears slower for various reasons, but not because the OS is intentionally clocking down the CPU in order to force people to upgrade. (In fact, iOS 12 is FASTER than iOS 11. At least apparently since raw benchmarks don't reveal a difference. It just feels snappier on older hardware).
Now, since iOS 10 or so, Apple did implement the CPU throttling on bad batteries, because the iPhone 6 was having premature shutdown issues. Apple got caught out because someone actually ran geekbench on it before and after a battery replacement. (Which also means the slowdown is not permanent - it only happens if the battery is unable to supply the necessary power. Replacing the battery restores speed.).
Of course, the alternative is boot looping, something a lot of Android phones like to do (same cause - battery can't supply the power needed to boot, so halfway through, it reboots. Various community fixes generally work by disabling power hungry CPU features, making your phone slower but at least working again).
No, these are not merely renamed files, these are polyglot files - files that can be other files. But unlike say steganography, they aren't even hidden.
So this guy created a JPEG image that is a valid JPEG image. But inside it he stuffed in a ZIP file that can be extracted using any ZIP utility as-is.
The ability to combine two arbitrary files is relatively limited - ZIP is one of the few file formats that puts the important metadata at the end of the file (and most formats will ignore trailing junk if they encounter it) so you can use the ability of many file formats to create holes to put ZIP data into them (ZIP data is stored as offsets that need not be contiguous, so you can place ZIP data in holes created by the other format).
First, the plaintiffs never pay a dime. The lawyers only make money if they get a settlement. Plenty of class actions end up going nowhere, so it ends up with plenty of billable hours lost.
I don;'t know about you, but there aren't many companies that can foot an all-or-nothing bill - would you rather take up a case with a client able to pay you your $200/hr rate, or take up a class action which may not pay up at all?
So the few cases you win have to pay for all the cases you didn't, or got dismissed or other things.
So yes, it's a huge risk - you're asking a law firm to front their lawyers, paralegals clerks, assistants, etc for a couple of years at least racking up what could be billable hours with paying clients for something that may or may not succeed.
It's all about ROI. The virtual jackpot right now means lawyers are willing to take the risk. Change the rules and lawyers can easily decide to take the paying case rather than the risky case.
I'm fairly certain you're off by an order of magnitude - $75-120 seems much more reasonable for what you get, and what comparable devices cost; Especially true in Canada where you can rent or buy the cable box (but you can only use theirs). The buy option is free and clear - you go to the store, pick up the box and pay. They don't ask if you're a subscriber or anything. You can do anything with them - use them, blow them up, disassemble them, etc.
If those boxes really cost several hundred bucks to make, the cable companies would certainly not make it possible to you to buy it for 1/10th the cost with no obligations to be a subscriber.
I only know of one phone that had an external case you could use to charge an internal battery via USB. Most phones don't, so you have to swap the batteries again to ensure you have both batteries charged.
USB power banks are easier, since you can charge it and your phone at the same time using a multi-USB charger.
Easy. Part shortages. One problem during the PowerPC era that Apple had was that neither Motorola (now Freescale) nor IBM would supply Apple with the processors Apple wanted. It was so bad that there would be delays for weeks of the top end models that Apple offered because the yields were terrible. This happened so consistently it was predictable - if you wanted a high end configuration, you reloaded the Apple Storage page and got your order in ASAP.
Freescale was not interested in fixing the shortages, which is why Apple went to IBM for the G5 processors, hoping IBM would give Apple more priority.
The reason Apple went with Intel was because Intel has sufficient capacity to actually produce the chips Apple wants. AMD unfortunately still had plenty of yield problems - evidenced over the years of how hard to get the high end chips were. Should Apple have picked AMD, AMD would've suffered trying to fulfill Apple's orders to the point where the market would've been flooded with unwanted processors that didn't make the cut.
ATI though didn't have those issues. And the only reason Apple went ATI was because nVidia's CEO blabbed about being Apple's supplier a couple of days before a keynote. Surprise surprise, said keynote now featured computers with ATI GPUs.
Clearly AMD has learned their lesson with Ryzen as I haven't heard of part shortages at any level - perhaps the old ATI team taught AMD how to design parts with higher yields.
Intel is the #1 supplier of GPUs in the world. But as we all know, they suck. Even the higher end Iris models are OK, but generally not as performant. This deal combines an Intel CPU with an AMD GPU giving a single package integrated solution, something Apple seems to have their hand in making it possible.
It benefits AMD in that the #3 GPU supplier in the world is partnering up with the #1 CPU maker in the world. With this, AMD has an advantage that nVidia does not have - namely being able to provide Intel (#1 GPU supplier) with a very interesting competitive part. nVidia is stuck, because AMD provides integrated GPUs for both chipmakers, themselves and Intel. And Intel is happy because they now have a third option for highly integrated systems - you could go with a low end Intel GPU, a low but higher performance Iris Pro solution, or you can get a nice decked out CPU with AMD Vega graphics. It might not blow the pants off an nVidia GTX 2080 Ti, but for a mobile system, it offers compelling value.
And Apple is behind it - they want higher end (better than Iris Pro) graphics in a single package solution for stuff like their MacBooks and such which are space constrained.
The reason everything went online and DRM is simply - PC piracy is out of control. With piracy rates of 90% and higher, it was unsustainable and the system would collapse on itself eventually.
You saw this as either service side enforcement - online play for example, or through intrusive forms of DRM, or long delayed PC ports that are crap, all of which happened. When PC DRM was relatively ineffective, developers switched to online play, moving RPGs to MMOs like you said. With that, there was the rise of competent consoles - the PS2 and Xbox era started it, but the PS3 and Xbox360 pretty much told developers that consoles were the next big gaming thing and all the big development houses moved over. At the end of the last generation, there were little to no sole PC developers anymore - even Blizzard, a long holdout started console development.
With the rise of this, it also meant PC ports generally sucked - developers went for consoles first with their lower piracy rates. PC ports came later (unless the game had an online component that server side could check for), and were often crap - limiting screen resolutions, interfaces that sucked, etc. Basically companies knew they weren't going to make too much money so they never put much effort into the port.
Things changed this generation, not because of the consoles themselves, but the rise of high end protections like Denuvo and UWP. Denuvo showed some strength leading to developers allowing day 1 PC ports again, knowing that piracy would be held back enough for the developers to make some money from it. Of course, with Denuvo gone (it's crackable within hours) developers are once again starting to hold back.
Things like free 2 play and other stuff arose out of the piracy model as well - from the mobile space where Android piracy rates were comparable to PCs, plus shortcomings in the Android model w.r.t. paid apps pretty much meant free apps got worldwide exposure while paid apps were limited to a few countries. Developers took note and applied same towards the PC market as well. And it's also infected console developers for no good reason at all.
It's really the war between PC users, pirates and developers that has lead things to where they are now.
It goes both ways - reliability has gone way up but so have prices, so corners are cut elsewhere. These days if you buy a car that needs a service every 5000 miles or 4 times a year, it's considered a high maintenance vehicle. You can buy vehicles that need only one servicing every 20k miles or once a year (average distance driven is around 20k miles a year, so 100k is a 5 year old car). That's one oil change a year and pretty much the limiting factor. Owning one of these vehicles is quite something since you only do it once a year and the cost isn't very high (maybe $500 all told) versus a car that needs 4 $300 services every few months.
Granted, there are corners cut - so your car may only last about 10-15 years before needing a major maintenance (that's 200k-300k miles) which usually involves stuff like timing belts and other high items. In the 90s, you can probably get one that lasts 20+ years.
Of course, having all this stuff is handy - side view cameras make parking a snap (though you always have idiots who can't park, or use every aid available to park properly and not make it impossible for you to get in your car). And pedestrians, who love to text and walk right into traffic wearing nothing but all black at night.
That's because people assume GrayKey is a magical box that you plug in and have full access to the device. It's not even close to how it works.
First, it basically does a tethered jailbreak - and injects a special app because of it. (Jailbroken apps have full access to the system - that's the original meaning of the "jailbreak" - the app could break out of the OS jail it was put in to run). This app uses those abilities to crack the device PIN. Once the PIN is broken you take the phone and connect it to a PC and use it download all the data.
What happened now is Apple changed things around that it can no longer crack the PIN - so either Apple patched the flaw that lead to the jailbreak, or fixed things that the injected app can't do the PIN search anymore. Thus the injected app only has the permissions a regular app has and access to whatever the OS allows it. Those are the limited "unencrypted" files. Likely it also cannot access the screen and thus you cannot answer the "App wants permission to access photos" dialogs as well to access photos.
The phone is slowed because the battery cannot handle the load. If you change the battery, the slowdown doesn't happen anymore. It's how people found it out.
When iOS boots, it sets a flag. If it boots successfully, then the flag is cleared. But if it fails and resets due to power brownouts, then iOS implements the slowdown.
This way even with a weak battery you can still use it.
Most phones don't do this. You may remember the Nexus 6P as entering a "boot loop" where it would boot, then restart without booting all the way. This is what happens if you don't control your power consumption. It boots, then comes to a part where it needs to draw a lot of power. The battery fails and the power IC detects the voltage drop and triggers a brownout reset. This causes the system to restart and attempt to boot again, where it reaches the same spot, dies, resets, etc.
The fix that some people came up with was disabling the high power CPU cores, which means the phone slows down, but it allows the phone to boot because the low power cores draw much less power so the battery can boot the OS all the way. But now your phone is slower.
There's no real answer to the problem. You either end up with a phone needing a battery replacement because it can't boot all the way or you have a slower phone. Honestly, the slower phone seems like the better outcome as it ensures you have a phone and not a brick. At least you'll be able to make an emergency call if you need to. It does allow you to use the phone lower than you would otherwise - if you had a boot looping phone, you must change the battery or get a new phone. If you have a slow phone, you may just hang onto it longer since it still works.
It goes both ways, really. You can be a cynic and think it's to force sales of new phones (though leaving the code out would do the same thing - the phone just stops working because it can't boot, so that's a far easier way to do it)
Except since iOS 10 or 11, iOS has supported sideloading. Granted, it's fairly limited (officially, only from source code - Apple doesn't care about license (sorry people who wanted to see RMS's head explode from proprietary OS enforcing open-source rules) but does want you to build from source, no binaries). The people who make f.lux attempted to use this loophole but Apple stopped them - no source code.
However, there are plenty of apps on Windows that will let you sideload to iOS as well, binaries even.
And there's a thriving "app store" for those who would build from source - emulators and other stuff.