This trope really needs to die. If people were treated like products they wouldn't use Google services. Google has to treat users as customers, and indeed does sell a lot of stuff to them (services, apps, hardware). If it didn't the users would go somewhere else and Google would die.
This is obvious. The situation is simply more complex than the trope makes out. Unless you can get past the trope we can't really discuss Google in any meaningful way. There are problems, but not "you are the product".
Basically, Google provides a service for FREE. Users use said service, and Google collects information about said users. Google sells information to their customers, who pay good money to advertise and analyze those users. Money goes into Google's pockets, paying engineers and providers to provide the service.
They key here is that Google provides the services for free. But the quid-pro-quo is that Google collects information about the users so they can sell that information to advertisers and anyone else who will pay for it.
Users currently value their privacy at less than free - they'd rather use a free email provider than pay some money. That's why Google is where they are - they sell you to other people. And for the most part, you don't care as long as Google gives you free stuff.
You want to create a mailing list with people who agree to receive such mailings? Just set up a sweepstake in a local mall over a weekend. Give away some $50 item and by the end of the weekend, the box will be full of names, addresses and phone numbers. Even better, all that is likely legit, since you probably will call the winner, and will mail the prize to them.
Anyhow, the other worry with such information sent to Google is well, it's a lot easier to subpoena that information from Google, who does not have to protect your Amendment rights, than it would if the information was in your control. Throttle position is useful to see if you were braking or trying to avoid the accident, or were street racing, etc.
Face it, it's going to be a law enforcement goldmine.
Information about the car is what CONSUMERS want. Google is asking for it because we are asking for it.
Well, it's already available... I mean, coolant temp is that little gauge, fuel is the other gauge. I don't particularly care about throttle position since it's less useful (if I want to go faster, my foot presses harder on the gas pedal, and I watch the speedometer needle climb).
Etc.
The Apple model is "Don't collect anything unless there's a reason we need it". Google's is "Collect all the data, and when we can find neat analytics to do, we can do it on the stuff we collected".
But you kinda-sorta already know Apple's been angling at the "you're not the product" aspect for privacy the past couple of years or so as a way to compete with Google.
But for the NYT, it's not just the New York population. It's the population of the English speaking upper crust. Lot's more than 12 million. That's why the one million number is pretty weak.
This is digital ONLY subscriptions.
You do realize the NYT is also available in regular deadtree format, right? And it's extremely popular in that format, well exceeding digital.
Personally, I prefer the deadtree. I don't need up to the minute coverage, and the deadtree means when I sit down to read it (on my commute), I get a reasonable summary of all the stuff that happened the day before. Sure, it's a day old, but if I didn't care about it yesterday to get up to the minute news, then it wasn't important for me to keep up with it.
But that doesn't mean it's not important - it's good to keep up with what's happening outside your field of interest (it's called being worldly, and even though it has zilch to do with what you care about, that doesn't mean it isn't necessarily important), after all. It's just I'd rather take it in a summary all at once than to go try to find out what happened.
If you were facebook, you'd be insane not to have intelligence contracts.
And somehow, TLAs and other intelligence agencies require real names in order to identify people?
To be honest, whether or not anyone requires a real name policy is probably irrelevant to such agencies - they already either know the person's real name, or they don't. If they don't know, it's not like the real name policy will offer any help. And if they do know, whether the account is used as a pseudonym or not, makes zilch difference.
To be absolutely honest, I'm sure the lowlevel ones will use their handles as their facebook profile, and thus making facebook the go-to site for TLAs to identify people. If you're a careful hacker who maintains no links between your handle and your real world identity, then facebook's policy neither helps nor hinders.
So ironically, it'll give TLAs more opportunity to go after the stupid hackers and script kiddies who are stupid enough to use their handles on facebook, and post real pictures that help identify them and their locations to everyone.
Plus, I'm sure the TLAs are going to watch for profile name changes, making it even easier to identify and link handles to real identities.
And this is especially true about The Big Bang Theory, because it's among the highest-rated shows on TV. Its ratings numbers are basically unheard of for most programming except sports. Sports still dominate the ratings, but TBBT gets extremely big numbers compared to everyone else.
And CBS is racking in huge bucks because of this - from first run and syndication, so no, they're not likely to change anything.
If you want numbers, sports usually gets anywhere from 8-10+ ratings, while TBBT is a 3-6. Most other programming is between 0-2. Yes, that includes the ever popular "reality" shows.
Because of this, a rather significant number of those 300M people are actually watching, and with those numbers, you're going to get a lot of complaints.
* some enterprise based company has some windows only app. They want tablets in hands of users walking around (maybe for supervisors at a call center). Surface would make the entrance fee much higher than acceptable. Cheap android tables + a tweaked wine + their slightly tweaked app = MUCH cheaper. Could easily bring enough savings to be worth it.
There are cheap Windows tablets too. Often running the exact same processor that the Android version runs.
And by cheap, I mean $80 cheap. There's a bunch more around $130 or so. And they're really decent tablets at that - great screens, reasonable touch screens, and a lot more. In fact, I shudder at the "cheap" Android tablets. The cheap Windows tablets I used have all been decent.
There's no "Windows tax" for this - The reason they shipped with "Windows 8.1 with Bing" was to limit OEM customization in exchange for... free Windows licenses. All it means Is the OEM cannot do customizations like set Google as the default search. The user is, however, free to do so The user is even prompted during first run to set it up.
I own an HP Stream 7... cost me $100 back in the day. It's a surprisingly fast tablet, and to be honest, it's blown away all my expectations of a $100 tablet. Enough such that a low end Android may not make a whole lot of sense.
Apple's method of securing appspace for the enterprise failed.
Actually, this is by design
One of the reasons for having the Enterprise certificate is to distribute apps without Apple approval. Because Apple can't really test, and enterprises really don't want to go through the hassle of having every line of business app approved.
So Apple always has offered an "out" - a way to get non-Apple-approved apps onto devices. Apple calls it their Enterprise program, where you guy a $500 (yearly) certificate from Apple, and that will let you self-sign apps and install them on devices that install the appropriate provisioning file.
So first, the provisioning file is installed (which also lets enterprises set key rules like lock screen password or PIN security and other policies). Then you can install apps signed by the same certificate.
It's not a big surprise that malware authors would use it, but for most normal users, such certificates often come by if you want to use pirated apps (there are plenty of sites out there selling you "re-signing" services for like $25 a year - they will sign cracked apps for you to install on your device).
In short, to install this malware - 1) You need to install the mobile provisioning certificate - a web page cannot do it, as the user must tap "OK" to actually install it. A user can list and view such provisioning certificates at will. They self-expire after a year.
2) You need to download the affected app, that's signed with the same certificate as the provisioning file. (So one company's apps cannot be installed via some other company's certificate).
3) The certificate hasn't been revoked.
The enterprise system is working exactly as designed
So out of curiosity how do you think we should develop GMO crops without patents? These things cost billions of dollars in very hard R&D to develop and bring to market. Without a patent then anyone will grow some of your seeds and then sell them next year to compete with your seeds and they had to do none of the work.
Then if it's so important, design the seeds to not do that. Montsanto is famous for "terminator genes" that do just that. Except well, they don't work. Turns out plants generally evolve out those traits. At which point, tough.
And there's plenty of "GMO" stuff that doesn't involve Monstanto - usually done by people cross-breeding or plants acquiring genetic material from bacterial and other things. And people STILL do it today - they still crossbreed. The world's hottest pepper was cross-bred, and was not genetically modified. It takes a little longer (it's generally easy to cross breed it, but a LOT harder to make the cross actually stick through subsequent generations)
And yet, farmers do it all the time because they want their crops to grow better. Survival of the fittest helps.
New cards are not a very good solution for fraud, since a cardholder can be a victim of 3-6 breaches a year. Sooner or later you run out of account numbers.
it's actually later.
The 16-digit card number is composed of a 6 digit type and institution code, and with restrictions, the last digit has to meet an algorithm (Lund's algorithm), so you have at least 9 digits that are completely independent of each other. The institution code has a first digit that tells you the type of card (4 = Visa, 5 = MasterCard, 6 = Amex I think), and the rest identify the institution and even sub-family of cards (many banks share many codes). And of that, a billion independent card numbers. A big institution often has control of the last 3 digits of their institution code, giving them a total of what, 1 trillion numbers. If they have 200M members, that's 5000 numbers for everyone, on average.
There are generally plenty to go around, and I'm sure once they run out, they'll probably start to recycle them, given it will have been decades since the last time the number was valid.
I'd like to watch it when does it become available on VOD services so I can buy and watch it online?
Still can't find a date anywhere...
You need a date? You can consider in general, a movie hits VOD around 3 months after first premiering. Or probably closer to two months after its off first run status and the cheap theatres get it. This frees up the good prints for other regions.
Movies that have particularly good runs that say in first-run status for a long time will be delayed longer. But 3-6 months is typical.
Right now, we're seeing the early summer movies start to come out, so you can guess it'll be mid-winter 2016 (around say, February) at the earliest, late spring at the latest.
Depends how well the film does. Right now we're in opening weekend.
The reference implementation is under GPLv3. Everyone is of course still free to create their own implementation and license it under whichever license they want.
At which point, as a developer, I'll go "So where's the demand?"
This is a new "supposedly better" file format. But no one supports it yet, so you want me to waste my time creating an implementation for it?
Effectively, a chicken and egg situation - no one wants to implement it if they don't have to because the license isn't usable and no one's using it, and if no one implements it, no one uses it.
It's why reference implementations are usually in a very permissive license to at least pick up adoption - no one might be using it yet, but if it's BSD, I can go and add support for it trivially in my program. And when people do use it, all these programs are magically compatible because it was cheap to add support for it.
But as it is, simply telling me "implement it yourself" is interpreted more as a "go f*** yourself". I have better things to work on in my program - bugs, features, and stuff people actually need and use. I'm not going to waste time implementing something that's not out there yet. (And if I wait long enough, there might be a more suitably-licensed version when demand requires it).
Right now, the ball is in their court. Either they can convince content creators to use their tools to make content available (which if the tools don't integrate with their workflow, won't happen), or prove their format is so vastly superior it's worth the effort. Because unless there is demand, no one will support it. (And content creators will probably see that no one supports it and wonder why they should make special effort). Chicken and egg.
Right now, unless someone does it out of generousity, it's dead.
Paetron is a service whereby artists, musicians, etc. can seek sponsors to fund their craft. In years of old musicians and artists often had a wealthy patron; this simply makes it possible for the masses to fund their artist or musician of choice.
And this hack may not seem to reveal any useful information - after all the payment information and passwords are either hashed, or not stored.
But there's a lot of "social networking" type information - you can find out what a subscriber sponsors, and even find out how much an artist actually makes in a month. (This can be useful information if you've wanted them to do a piece on something, but they always said some other group always paid more - I know of an artist who paints and what he paints depends on which group paid the most).
Then there are the folks who use Patreon for support... now you get to find out how much they REALLY make in a month. I know of several YouTube content creators who release videos for free, and get ad money, but also solicit funds from Patreon, as well as sell advertising on their website and other things. Sometimes just out of curiosity you wonder how much they're pulling in for this "full time job".
Some of the analytics might prove interesting and maybe that "starving artist" you see might not be quite so starving after all.
I had been hoping Amazon Prime video would be added to AppleTV. Guess this means pretty much no way that's going to happen.
I had been meaning to order a number of things from Amazon, looks like a great time to explore other purchase options.
Not gonna lie though; probably will keep Prime.
I guess Apple (and Google) would be within bounds to pull the Amazon app, and see who blinks first...
Well, for the original AppleTV, Apple works with partners in producing the channels (this is in contrast with Roku where partners simply code it up themselves).
It's likely Apple has tried to talk with Amazon on bringing Prime Video to AppleTV, but Amazon either rejected them, or refused to provide them assistance (Apple actually coded up all the channels on AppleTV in partnership with content providers).
This will get interesting later on because the model will be flipped around with tvOS - instead of Apple coding up the AppleTV content, it'll be content providers. At which point, Amazon would squarely be at fault for not supporting tvOS.
And Amazon's apps aren't on Google Play - they were at one point, then Amazon violated some rule or other and Google removed them. They still remain up on iOS though, and I assume they're useful enough to Apple that they'll remain there. (Remember, apps for iOS are used to sell the hardware, so it's not in Apple's interest to remove apps that are potentially popular, like video streaming apps.)
Truth be told, given how long Amazon took to get Prime Video up on Android, it's likely Amazon didn't want to work with Apple to get it on AppleTV.
There isn't any legal reason that prevents you from opening it up. Just do it.
Apple is exerting a concept that doesn't legally exist.
The problem was iFixit signed an NDA to receive said unit. That NDA specified that not only could the unit NOT be taken apart, the unit was not to be publicly discussed.
So iFixit could very well take apart their unit. But then they violated the second part of their NDA by publishing the teardown on their website.
The legal concept is "breach of contract". The fact that Apple decided to revoke the developer account the breached the terms of the agreement is considered minor. FYI - the app was removed because iFixit is no longer a valid developer of apps. Apple routinely removes apps of developers who no longer maintain valid developer accounts. (As does Google and other companies).
So the app was not removed because Apple said so, the App was removed because the developer account it was associated with was no longer valid. And the reason it was no longer valid is because iFixit broke their NDA they willingly signed.
All things considered, breaking an NDA generally has far harsher penalties. The fact iFixit lost only their developer account is fairly minor. Apple could rightfully demand that the teardown be removed as well. It's unlikely they will, nor will they likely seek financial compensation for it because the product will be released later this month, so any legal proceedings will take longer and cost more money.
Go on. Violate your NDA with your company or one of the many NDAs your company.
This is about the US, and emissions are not an advertised spec, though I've seen some push to put CO2 on the label, but this was about NOx, which I've not seen anyone ever advertise.
No, but they're advertised as "Clean" vehicles. Sure the meaning is vague and fuzzy, but the whole intention is for consumers to believe the VW cars they were buying were better for the environment if they chose the diesel option.
The fact that under normal operations they emitted more than legal limits would mean that they are not "clean" vehicles and consumers were duped.
Anyhow, it's likely the law is a good one - it's far easier to get a conviction under the civil system than the criminal system because evidentiary rules and the legal requirements for guilt are lower. Criminal convictions are nice, but it's possible there's enough plausible deniability that a conviction will be impossible and everyone gets off scot-free.
There's a real possibility that you are a better programmer than the average Microsoft programmer. Really.
Or more like he's a better programmer than the average programmer. Far too many do stuff like push to production, or edit in production, or just check in a quick "it should work" straight into source control without even compiling it.
So a self-extracting RAR can be rigged to exploit your machine. A self-extracting RAR is an executable. So a executable from an untrusted source can exploit your box. Wake me when you have a real vulnerability.
Actually, the problem is NOT the executable. The SFX part is NOT compromised at all. It's completely legitimate standard WinRAR SFX.
However, the bug is that there's a buffer overflow in the SFX program - you can give it a malicious HTML file that cause it to execute code.
The deal is that all a malicious user has to do is inject their file into a RAR archive and set a flag to have the SFX program show it as part of the SFX process. The SFX stub will check clean by all anti-virus because it's the same SFX stub as what WinRAR ships with.
It's entirely possible that you cannot detect this - if the archive is password protected, for example, so you can't detect the bad HTML file at all. And the SFX will still check clean, but really infect your PC.
The only workaround is to use WinRAR itself to open the SFX
Also, I'll have you know that I go to sleep at night with a big smile on my face knowing that somewhere in the world, there are television advertisers gnashing their teeth in their sleep because they know that someone like me with a TiVo DVR with 30-second skip turned on is just going blip-blip-blip past all their skeezy little commercials, and right back to the program I want to watch. Also I have an antenna on the roof for OTA broadcast reception, so I pay nothing, nada, zip, zippo, zero to watch TV to start with. XD XD XD After all, it's my God-given right as a citizen of the United States of America, with it's rich history of civil disobedience to wave my middle finger in the air at these corporate bastards and their shitty commercials; Don't Tread On Me, motherfuckers!!! XD XD XD
Actually, the networks really don't care if you skip ads. Why? Because that just lowers ratings on shows.
Sure they talk a big game about how downloading kills ads and all that - but that's really just noise.
You know Neilsen ratings? There are several of them - the ones the public gets (the "free" ones) are ones called LIve (Same Day), Live + 3 days (L+3), and Live + 7. Same Day are the ones watched within 24 hours of airing, and are the numbers usually reported. But in honest truth, everyone knows a lot of people don't watch it same day - hence live + 3 and Live + 7 numbers, which are the numbers reported to advertisers when setting ad rates. They're public and auditable. Now, most networks use L+3 numbers, but CBS realized that a lot of their shows are seen up to a week later, so they charge L+7 rates.
Now, here's the tricky bit - none of this matters to the network. Because they pay for what's called "Commercial" numbers. Which is the ratings for the show's commercials! There are commercial numbers for the same day, +3 and +7 days as well. These are highly secretive and kept close. The program is merely a conduit for eyeballs to see ads. If the audience doesn't seem to be watching ads, then no matter how high the ratings get for the program, the show is cut.
So really, the networks don't mind if you torrent the show, DVR and skip the ads, etc, because that just means they open up your program's timeslot for a different show whose audience doesn't do those things as much.
In other words - the networks really don't give a damn. If you wonder why there's fewer shows that appeal to the geeks of the world - well, any show that appeals to those who know how to "beat the man" already starts off with a handicap because an audience that knows how to skip ads or does skip ads? Well, that's not going to get good C ratings. Even if the SD/L+3/L+7 numbers are excellent, if the C numbers are terrible, the show is axed.
As for OTA - well, networks don't care. In fact, the networks, when they get into disputes with cable or satellite operators often suggest picking up an antenna.
No that's the point. I believe it only works when you start the app connected to wifi, and then if it detects that it is weak it will switch over so it appears uninterrupted. I'm not sure how the don't use cellular switch affects it.
The betas had a bug where the WiFi Assist option didn't obey the "Use Cellular Data" or other limits - it assumed you were on WiFI when you were on cellular.
I believe it's been fixed, so when it switches, to cellular, all the cellular restrictions are obeyed.
It's handy for the periods when you're just out of practical range of the WiFi and you still get a little bit of signal. It's assuming you're going to use data anyways rather than try to wait for the wifi to ever respond...
Why is there an API for sending a text message from a web page? Why does this need to exist at all?
You'd think someone at Apple, when they came up for this idea for this, would be shot down by someone else saying "Sorry dude, this is a feature that can be abused."
Same deal with javascript being able to open the App Store. WHY??
JavaScript can't open the App Store. What it can do is open a link to iTunes. What happens here is if you click a link that points to iTunes (iTunes Preview), on the desktop, it goes to a page that shows you the target, followed by a button that says "Open in iTunes" at which point iTunes is supposed to open and go to the app/music/movie/tv page of that item.
On iOS, if you do the same, instead of iTunes opening, it goes to the appropriate store that sellsthe item. This is a regular feature and it's the same on iOS or Android. If you click on the "Apple App Store" button or the "Get it on Google Play", same result - it takes you to that product page in the appropriate store. Both are basically links that get treated specially.
Likewise, it's possible to do text messaging - iOS has the ability to recognize phone numbers on webpages, and if you tap them, gets you the ability to send a text or phone that number. (Sometimes its heuristics mess up in humorous ways).
That's by design.
However, iOS does not allow anyone to send a text, make a phone call, send an email or other things without manual intervention. Siri can do it, but only after Siri composes it for you. Again, this is for safety purposes - apps cannot programmatically run up your phone bill. So at worst, you have an app switch out to Messages or Mail or the App Store on you. But at that point, you must tap "Purchase" or "Send" to actually perform the task. (a webpage can't do it because that point, the other app is onscreen)
I wouldn't call this a new phenomena... I have seen ads do this for years - especially on mobile ones where they pop up a full screen interstitial that advertises some freemuim game and the javascript calls open() on it which triggers the app store.
It's really a form of advertising that's existed on desktops for years exploiting the new mobile technology, except instead of switching between apps, it's triggering plugins.
Heck, the email one is really a lot like mailto: URLs that can fill in the To, Subject and body of a message, and wait for you to click Send.
Indeed. Metrics are very tricky. Applied wrongly (the standard case) they harm you a lot. Also, in many cases, "productivity" is not what it seems to be, unless you are a mindless factory worker that only produces more or fewer of a specific part and quality is not a concern. For example, I have made brief remarks in meetings that ended up preventing massive losses to customers. How do you measure that? Right, you cannot.
The problem with metrics is, well, you get what you measure.
And for a lot of metrics, what you measure is not what you're wanting to measure, because what you want to measure is vague and not easily measureable. E.g., productivity is not something you can measure. You can't take two people and easily say that one is more productive than the other.
And there are other metrics you CAN measure directly, but the cause and effect are so far removed from the people that it's impossible to actually determine who contributed. E.g., savings. Sure you can say the company saved $100,000 this quarter, but which employee did the most?
And even then, there are hidden consequences.
As I said above, you get what you measure. If you measure savings, you will get savings. But you may also have to deal with the consequences of it - perhaps regular maintenance becomes irregular and you're setting yourself up for a catastrophic failure in a couple of years. But since you'll have 8 quarters of meeting the metric, it doesn't matter if the failure costs more than what was saved. Or you'll find people will struggle with obsolete equipment way beyond its replacement date to make the numbers come in lower.
Likewise, if you try to measure productivity, people will make the measurement. If you measure keystrokes, yes, you'll find keystrokes increase. But that might mean "space" and "backspace" are the most popular keys.
If you measure lines of code, you'll find a lot of copy-pasta coding.
And so on - you will get what you measure. You will not get what you don't measure. And the weaker the relationship between what you REALLY want to measure and the proxy you're using, the more useless the measure is.
I would add a second thought: First, it doesn't make sense to have an invented place speak a real language in lieu of an invented one. It just creates a confusing context. Lets say the people of the eastern regions in Game of Thrones would speak a language like the Mansi language. It would somehow place Westernesse into the Ural mountains as Mansi is spoken east of the Ural. People from West Siberia, who might not speak Mansi, but recognize the sound of it would always be somehow reminded of their home land instead of being immersed in a phantasy world, and the Mansi people then would then wonder if the people of Westeros should somehow be identified with the Russians, and why there is no Khanty language (a neighboring language both locally and linguistically) in the series.
This is a huge issue actually. Language and history are intrinsically tied together. Take Europe, for example - as various empires ruled and died, their influence over language is embedded in it. You have the Roman empire and the Romantic languages (French, Spanish, Italian), Germanic languages, Barbaric languages, and the evolution of various European languages is tied to all of this.
Reviving old languages means this history is lost, or even worse, corrupted
The premise behind these simulations is that giving directions to crowds will improve flow of people.
It's a mighty big assumption that the folks in the crowds would follow a signal to "slow down". Between the culture in general (ever see a tidy British style queue in the middle east?), and the general human dynamics of large crowds of people, I don't have much hope of this being a success.
Perhaps a better solution would be to increase the time window for this event- spread the crowd over a few months instead of a few days.
Well, the problem is you can't increase the duration or space (both are non-infinite and solutions only work until you run into limits).
You CAN however influence how people move. If you want people to move slower, you can visibly narrow their path or put obstacles in the way. (Moving the curbs closer together is often used as a traffic calming measure - drivers inevitably slow down when they feel the road is narrowing)
The other thing is barriers - you use the barriers to help keep the flow more orderly. Without them people are going to randomly enter the area and exit from all sorts of directions. A barrier as well as clearly delineated entrance and exits mean you can get the flow to behave the way you want.
It's non-obvious, but it does work. And these days, if you want to slow down the flow, all you need to do is send a few texts. There are enough "zombie walkers" (people who text and walk with their eyes glued to their phones) that sending notifications or texts would probably cause them to stop and impede flow briefly.
PC gaming is a larger market than all other platforms... COMBINED.
The problem is that no one owns it and so big companies like to push the notion that the PC is shit. They talk about Xbox or PS4 or mobile and ignore that while there are lots of people that do that, it isn't where the meat and potatoes are of the gaming world.
Mobile gaming being the future? F'ing candy crush? Okay. Believe what you like there.
PS/Xbox is the future? Even industry insiders are saying that the consoles have maybe one or two more generations left in them at most.
PC is a bigger market by installed base. But not by profit.
Just like Android outselling iOS 4:1 should have developers jumping on the Android bandwagon developing Android first, iOS second. Again, other than a small amount, most devs go iOS first.
Installed base means nothing if developers can't feed themselves. And with console piracy rates under 10%, while PC piracy rates are over 90%, the installed base of paying PC users is quite a bit smaller.
The PC has basically one genre of games available - online. Be it an FPS, MMO, RTS, MOBA, or whatever, PC rules online. Mostly because those are the kind of games that you can't really pirate effectively.
The Original Xbox generation started doing the PC in - not because they were better, but because the money showed that consoles were starting to bring it in. Last-gen is where it really took off, and PC users complained about lousy "ports" and how the PC version is delayed. Well, that's because the games in general make money from consoles (with the exception of the above), so once the developers and publishers have their ROI, they port it over to PC. Two reasons - first, the PC port is basically going to just pay for itself after piracy (and it's often done "just do it quickly and inexpensively" hence the general low quality of PC versions). Second, by delaying the release a few months, the price will also drop, which hopefully means lower piracy as well (since lower prices generally mean less piracy).
Hell, things like local servers and such are disappearing from the PC versions. And unless the title is from one of the above genres, there are few PC AAA titles out there. (PC FPSes are still raking it in because of their online nature (no local servers...) meaning piracy is lower, and superior control schemes. It's why Call of Duty or Battlefield still do Day-1 PC versions, besides which they help boost the "$100B sold on day 1" stat).
Now, PCs do excel in one other area - indie games. Primarily because those games are immune to piracy (there's so much crap out there that piracy is more of a marketing thing). And it's so easy to develop for PC that piracy doesn't really hurt that badly, either.
The concept of a "supermoon" was invented by an astrologer, and has exactly zero astronomical significance. The moon is slightly larger in the sky. Whooooaah.
The "supermoon" may have little astronomical significance, but the moon has significant cultural significance. Many of which carry on to this day. We used to think the moon made us crazy, hence words based on the moon for crazy - lunatic, lunacy, etc.
And there's other cultural significance, including terms like "once in a blue moon" (which was retro-defined as two full moons in a month, which isn't all that rare an event).
The "supermoon" is just the moon reaching it's closest approach to earth, however, the "rare event" is the fact it's at its closest approach AND we have a lunar eclipse.
There may be zero astronomical significance to what happens/happened, but given the moon's ties to human culture, it's more of a cultural thing than scientific. At the very least, you can give everyone a scientific lecture on the moon to educate them, which isn't a bad thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, Google provides a service for FREE. Users use said service, and Google collects information about said users. Google sells information to their customers, who pay good money to advertise and analyze those users. Money goes into Google's pockets, paying engineers and providers to provide the service.
They key here is that Google provides the services for free. But the quid-pro-quo is that Google collects information about the users so they can sell that information to advertisers and anyone else who will pay for it.
Users currently value their privacy at less than free - they'd rather use a free email provider than pay some money. That's why Google is where they are - they sell you to other people. And for the most part, you don't care as long as Google gives you free stuff.
You want to create a mailing list with people who agree to receive such mailings? Just set up a sweepstake in a local mall over a weekend. Give away some $50 item and by the end of the weekend, the box will be full of names, addresses and phone numbers. Even better, all that is likely legit, since you probably will call the winner, and will mail the prize to them.
Anyhow, the other worry with such information sent to Google is well, it's a lot easier to subpoena that information from Google, who does not have to protect your Amendment rights, than it would if the information was in your control. Throttle position is useful to see if you were braking or trying to avoid the accident, or were street racing, etc.
Face it, it's going to be a law enforcement goldmine.
Well, it's already available... I mean, coolant temp is that little gauge, fuel is the other gauge. I don't particularly care about throttle position since it's less useful (if I want to go faster, my foot presses harder on the gas pedal, and I watch the speedometer needle climb).
Etc.
The Apple model is "Don't collect anything unless there's a reason we need it". Google's is "Collect all the data, and when we can find neat analytics to do, we can do it on the stuff we collected".
But you kinda-sorta already know Apple's been angling at the "you're not the product" aspect for privacy the past couple of years or so as a way to compete with Google.
But for the NYT, it's not just the New York population. It's the population of the English speaking upper crust. Lot's more than 12 million. That's why the one million number is pretty weak.
This is digital ONLY subscriptions.
You do realize the NYT is also available in regular deadtree format, right? And it's extremely popular in that format, well exceeding digital.
Personally, I prefer the deadtree. I don't need up to the minute coverage, and the deadtree means when I sit down to read it (on my commute), I get a reasonable summary of all the stuff that happened the day before. Sure, it's a day old, but if I didn't care about it yesterday to get up to the minute news, then it wasn't important for me to keep up with it.
But that doesn't mean it's not important - it's good to keep up with what's happening outside your field of interest (it's called being worldly, and even though it has zilch to do with what you care about, that doesn't mean it isn't necessarily important), after all. It's just I'd rather take it in a summary all at once than to go try to find out what happened.
And somehow, TLAs and other intelligence agencies require real names in order to identify people?
To be honest, whether or not anyone requires a real name policy is probably irrelevant to such agencies - they already either know the person's real name, or they don't. If they don't know, it's not like the real name policy will offer any help. And if they do know, whether the account is used as a pseudonym or not, makes zilch difference.
To be absolutely honest, I'm sure the lowlevel ones will use their handles as their facebook profile, and thus making facebook the go-to site for TLAs to identify people. If you're a careful hacker who maintains no links between your handle and your real world identity, then facebook's policy neither helps nor hinders.
So ironically, it'll give TLAs more opportunity to go after the stupid hackers and script kiddies who are stupid enough to use their handles on facebook, and post real pictures that help identify them and their locations to everyone.
Plus, I'm sure the TLAs are going to watch for profile name changes, making it even easier to identify and link handles to real identities.
Exactly.
And this is especially true about The Big Bang Theory, because it's among the highest-rated shows on TV. Its ratings numbers are basically unheard of for most programming except sports. Sports still dominate the ratings, but TBBT gets extremely big numbers compared to everyone else.
And CBS is racking in huge bucks because of this - from first run and syndication, so no, they're not likely to change anything.
If you want numbers, sports usually gets anywhere from 8-10+ ratings, while TBBT is a 3-6. Most other programming is between 0-2. Yes, that includes the ever popular "reality" shows.
Because of this, a rather significant number of those 300M people are actually watching, and with those numbers, you're going to get a lot of complaints.
There are cheap Windows tablets too. Often running the exact same processor that the Android version runs.
And by cheap, I mean $80 cheap. There's a bunch more around $130 or so. And they're really decent tablets at that - great screens, reasonable touch screens, and a lot more. In fact, I shudder at the "cheap" Android tablets. The cheap Windows tablets I used have all been decent.
There's no "Windows tax" for this - The reason they shipped with "Windows 8.1 with Bing" was to limit OEM customization in exchange for... free Windows licenses. All it means Is the OEM cannot do customizations like set Google as the default search. The user is, however, free to do so The user is even prompted during first run to set it up.
I own an HP Stream 7... cost me $100 back in the day. It's a surprisingly fast tablet, and to be honest, it's blown away all my expectations of a $100 tablet. Enough such that a low end Android may not make a whole lot of sense.
Actually, this is by design
One of the reasons for having the Enterprise certificate is to distribute apps without Apple approval. Because Apple can't really test, and enterprises really don't want to go through the hassle of having every line of business app approved.
So Apple always has offered an "out" - a way to get non-Apple-approved apps onto devices. Apple calls it their Enterprise program, where you guy a $500 (yearly) certificate from Apple, and that will let you self-sign apps and install them on devices that install the appropriate provisioning file.
So first, the provisioning file is installed (which also lets enterprises set key rules like lock screen password or PIN security and other policies). Then you can install apps signed by the same certificate.
It's not a big surprise that malware authors would use it, but for most normal users, such certificates often come by if you want to use pirated apps (there are plenty of sites out there selling you "re-signing" services for like $25 a year - they will sign cracked apps for you to install on your device).
In short, to install this malware - 1) You need to install the mobile provisioning certificate - a web page cannot do it, as the user must tap "OK" to actually install it. A user can list and view such provisioning certificates at will. They self-expire after a year.
2) You need to download the affected app, that's signed with the same certificate as the provisioning file. (So one company's apps cannot be installed via some other company's certificate).
3) The certificate hasn't been revoked.
The enterprise system is working exactly as designed
Then if it's so important, design the seeds to not do that. Montsanto is famous for "terminator genes" that do just that. Except well, they don't work. Turns out plants generally evolve out those traits. At which point, tough.
And there's plenty of "GMO" stuff that doesn't involve Monstanto - usually done by people cross-breeding or plants acquiring genetic material from bacterial and other things. And people STILL do it today - they still crossbreed. The world's hottest pepper was cross-bred, and was not genetically modified. It takes a little longer (it's generally easy to cross breed it, but a LOT harder to make the cross actually stick through subsequent generations)
And yet, farmers do it all the time because they want their crops to grow better. Survival of the fittest helps.
it's actually later.
The 16-digit card number is composed of a 6 digit type and institution code, and with restrictions, the last digit has to meet an algorithm (Lund's algorithm), so you have at least 9 digits that are completely independent of each other. The institution code has a first digit that tells you the type of card (4 = Visa, 5 = MasterCard, 6 = Amex I think), and the rest identify the institution and even sub-family of cards (many banks share many codes). And of that, a billion independent card numbers. A big institution often has control of the last 3 digits of their institution code, giving them a total of what, 1 trillion numbers. If they have 200M members, that's 5000 numbers for everyone, on average.
There are generally plenty to go around, and I'm sure once they run out, they'll probably start to recycle them, given it will have been decades since the last time the number was valid.
You need a date? You can consider in general, a movie hits VOD around 3 months after first premiering. Or probably closer to two months after its off first run status and the cheap theatres get it. This frees up the good prints for other regions.
Movies that have particularly good runs that say in first-run status for a long time will be delayed longer. But 3-6 months is typical.
Right now, we're seeing the early summer movies start to come out, so you can guess it'll be mid-winter 2016 (around say, February) at the earliest, late spring at the latest.
Depends how well the film does. Right now we're in opening weekend.
At which point, as a developer, I'll go "So where's the demand?"
This is a new "supposedly better" file format. But no one supports it yet, so you want me to waste my time creating an implementation for it?
Effectively, a chicken and egg situation - no one wants to implement it if they don't have to because the license isn't usable and no one's using it, and if no one implements it, no one uses it.
It's why reference implementations are usually in a very permissive license to at least pick up adoption - no one might be using it yet, but if it's BSD, I can go and add support for it trivially in my program. And when people do use it, all these programs are magically compatible because it was cheap to add support for it.
But as it is, simply telling me "implement it yourself" is interpreted more as a "go f*** yourself". I have better things to work on in my program - bugs, features, and stuff people actually need and use. I'm not going to waste time implementing something that's not out there yet. (And if I wait long enough, there might be a more suitably-licensed version when demand requires it).
Right now, the ball is in their court. Either they can convince content creators to use their tools to make content available (which if the tools don't integrate with their workflow, won't happen), or prove their format is so vastly superior it's worth the effort. Because unless there is demand, no one will support it. (And content creators will probably see that no one supports it and wonder why they should make special effort). Chicken and egg.
Right now, unless someone does it out of generousity, it's dead.
And this hack may not seem to reveal any useful information - after all the payment information and passwords are either hashed, or not stored.
But there's a lot of "social networking" type information - you can find out what a subscriber sponsors, and even find out how much an artist actually makes in a month. (This can be useful information if you've wanted them to do a piece on something, but they always said some other group always paid more - I know of an artist who paints and what he paints depends on which group paid the most).
Then there are the folks who use Patreon for support... now you get to find out how much they REALLY make in a month. I know of several YouTube content creators who release videos for free, and get ad money, but also solicit funds from Patreon, as well as sell advertising on their website and other things. Sometimes just out of curiosity you wonder how much they're pulling in for this "full time job".
Some of the analytics might prove interesting and maybe that "starving artist" you see might not be quite so starving after all.
Well, for the original AppleTV, Apple works with partners in producing the channels (this is in contrast with Roku where partners simply code it up themselves).
It's likely Apple has tried to talk with Amazon on bringing Prime Video to AppleTV, but Amazon either rejected them, or refused to provide them assistance (Apple actually coded up all the channels on AppleTV in partnership with content providers).
This will get interesting later on because the model will be flipped around with tvOS - instead of Apple coding up the AppleTV content, it'll be content providers. At which point, Amazon would squarely be at fault for not supporting tvOS.
And Amazon's apps aren't on Google Play - they were at one point, then Amazon violated some rule or other and Google removed them. They still remain up on iOS though, and I assume they're useful enough to Apple that they'll remain there. (Remember, apps for iOS are used to sell the hardware, so it's not in Apple's interest to remove apps that are potentially popular, like video streaming apps.)
Truth be told, given how long Amazon took to get Prime Video up on Android, it's likely Amazon didn't want to work with Apple to get it on AppleTV.
The problem was iFixit signed an NDA to receive said unit. That NDA specified that not only could the unit NOT be taken apart, the unit was not to be publicly discussed.
So iFixit could very well take apart their unit. But then they violated the second part of their NDA by publishing the teardown on their website.
The legal concept is "breach of contract". The fact that Apple decided to revoke the developer account the breached the terms of the agreement is considered minor. FYI - the app was removed because iFixit is no longer a valid developer of apps. Apple routinely removes apps of developers who no longer maintain valid developer accounts. (As does Google and other companies).
So the app was not removed because Apple said so, the App was removed because the developer account it was associated with was no longer valid. And the reason it was no longer valid is because iFixit broke their NDA they willingly signed.
All things considered, breaking an NDA generally has far harsher penalties. The fact iFixit lost only their developer account is fairly minor. Apple could rightfully demand that the teardown be removed as well. It's unlikely they will, nor will they likely seek financial compensation for it because the product will be released later this month, so any legal proceedings will take longer and cost more money.
Go on. Violate your NDA with your company or one of the many NDAs your company.
No, but they're advertised as "Clean" vehicles. Sure the meaning is vague and fuzzy, but the whole intention is for consumers to believe the VW cars they were buying were better for the environment if they chose the diesel option.
The fact that under normal operations they emitted more than legal limits would mean that they are not "clean" vehicles and consumers were duped.
Anyhow, it's likely the law is a good one - it's far easier to get a conviction under the civil system than the criminal system because evidentiary rules and the legal requirements for guilt are lower. Criminal convictions are nice, but it's possible there's enough plausible deniability that a conviction will be impossible and everyone gets off scot-free.
Or more like he's a better programmer than the average programmer. Far too many do stuff like push to production, or edit in production, or just check in a quick "it should work" straight into source control without even compiling it.
Actually, the problem is NOT the executable. The SFX part is NOT compromised at all. It's completely legitimate standard WinRAR SFX.
However, the bug is that there's a buffer overflow in the SFX program - you can give it a malicious HTML file that cause it to execute code.
The deal is that all a malicious user has to do is inject their file into a RAR archive and set a flag to have the SFX program show it as part of the SFX process. The SFX stub will check clean by all anti-virus because it's the same SFX stub as what WinRAR ships with.
It's entirely possible that you cannot detect this - if the archive is password protected, for example, so you can't detect the bad HTML file at all. And the SFX will still check clean, but really infect your PC.
The only workaround is to use WinRAR itself to open the SFX
Actually, the networks really don't care if you skip ads. Why? Because that just lowers ratings on shows.
Sure they talk a big game about how downloading kills ads and all that - but that's really just noise.
You know Neilsen ratings? There are several of them - the ones the public gets (the "free" ones) are ones called LIve (Same Day), Live + 3 days (L+3), and Live + 7. Same Day are the ones watched within 24 hours of airing, and are the numbers usually reported. But in honest truth, everyone knows a lot of people don't watch it same day - hence live + 3 and Live + 7 numbers, which are the numbers reported to advertisers when setting ad rates. They're public and auditable. Now, most networks use L+3 numbers, but CBS realized that a lot of their shows are seen up to a week later, so they charge L+7 rates.
Now, here's the tricky bit - none of this matters to the network. Because they pay for what's called "Commercial" numbers. Which is the ratings for the show's commercials! There are commercial numbers for the same day, +3 and +7 days as well. These are highly secretive and kept close. The program is merely a conduit for eyeballs to see ads. If the audience doesn't seem to be watching ads, then no matter how high the ratings get for the program, the show is cut.
So really, the networks don't mind if you torrent the show, DVR and skip the ads, etc, because that just means they open up your program's timeslot for a different show whose audience doesn't do those things as much.
In other words - the networks really don't give a damn. If you wonder why there's fewer shows that appeal to the geeks of the world - well, any show that appeals to those who know how to "beat the man" already starts off with a handicap because an audience that knows how to skip ads or does skip ads? Well, that's not going to get good C ratings. Even if the SD/L+3/L+7 numbers are excellent, if the C numbers are terrible, the show is axed.
As for OTA - well, networks don't care. In fact, the networks, when they get into disputes with cable or satellite operators often suggest picking up an antenna.
The betas had a bug where the WiFi Assist option didn't obey the "Use Cellular Data" or other limits - it assumed you were on WiFI when you were on cellular.
I believe it's been fixed, so when it switches, to cellular, all the cellular restrictions are obeyed.
It's handy for the periods when you're just out of practical range of the WiFi and you still get a little bit of signal. It's assuming you're going to use data anyways rather than try to wait for the wifi to ever respond...
JavaScript can't open the App Store. What it can do is open a link to iTunes. What happens here is if you click a link that points to iTunes (iTunes Preview), on the desktop, it goes to a page that shows you the target, followed by a button that says "Open in iTunes" at which point iTunes is supposed to open and go to the app/music/movie/tv page of that item.
On iOS, if you do the same, instead of iTunes opening, it goes to the appropriate store that sellsthe item. This is a regular feature and it's the same on iOS or Android. If you click on the "Apple App Store" button or the "Get it on Google Play", same result - it takes you to that product page in the appropriate store. Both are basically links that get treated specially.
Likewise, it's possible to do text messaging - iOS has the ability to recognize phone numbers on webpages, and if you tap them, gets you the ability to send a text or phone that number. (Sometimes its heuristics mess up in humorous ways).
That's by design.
However, iOS does not allow anyone to send a text, make a phone call, send an email or other things without manual intervention. Siri can do it, but only after Siri composes it for you. Again, this is for safety purposes - apps cannot programmatically run up your phone bill. So at worst, you have an app switch out to Messages or Mail or the App Store on you. But at that point, you must tap "Purchase" or "Send" to actually perform the task. (a webpage can't do it because that point, the other app is onscreen)
I wouldn't call this a new phenomena ... I have seen ads do this for years - especially on mobile ones where they pop up a full screen interstitial that advertises some freemuim game and the javascript calls open() on it which triggers the app store.
It's really a form of advertising that's existed on desktops for years exploiting the new mobile technology, except instead of switching between apps, it's triggering plugins.
Heck, the email one is really a lot like mailto: URLs that can fill in the To, Subject and body of a message, and wait for you to click Send.
The problem with metrics is, well, you get what you measure.
And for a lot of metrics, what you measure is not what you're wanting to measure, because what you want to measure is vague and not easily measureable. E.g., productivity is not something you can measure. You can't take two people and easily say that one is more productive than the other.
And there are other metrics you CAN measure directly, but the cause and effect are so far removed from the people that it's impossible to actually determine who contributed. E.g., savings. Sure you can say the company saved $100,000 this quarter, but which employee did the most?
And even then, there are hidden consequences.
As I said above, you get what you measure. If you measure savings, you will get savings. But you may also have to deal with the consequences of it - perhaps regular maintenance becomes irregular and you're setting yourself up for a catastrophic failure in a couple of years. But since you'll have 8 quarters of meeting the metric, it doesn't matter if the failure costs more than what was saved. Or you'll find people will struggle with obsolete equipment way beyond its replacement date to make the numbers come in lower.
Likewise, if you try to measure productivity, people will make the measurement. If you measure keystrokes, yes, you'll find keystrokes increase. But that might mean "space" and "backspace" are the most popular keys.
If you measure lines of code, you'll find a lot of copy-pasta coding.
And so on - you will get what you measure. You will not get what you don't measure. And the weaker the relationship between what you REALLY want to measure and the proxy you're using, the more useless the measure is.
This is a huge issue actually. Language and history are intrinsically tied together. Take Europe, for example - as various empires ruled and died, their influence over language is embedded in it. You have the Roman empire and the Romantic languages (French, Spanish, Italian), Germanic languages, Barbaric languages, and the evolution of various European languages is tied to all of this.
Reviving old languages means this history is lost, or even worse, corrupted
Well, the problem is you can't increase the duration or space (both are non-infinite and solutions only work until you run into limits).
You CAN however influence how people move. If you want people to move slower, you can visibly narrow their path or put obstacles in the way. (Moving the curbs closer together is often used as a traffic calming measure - drivers inevitably slow down when they feel the road is narrowing)
The other thing is barriers - you use the barriers to help keep the flow more orderly. Without them people are going to randomly enter the area and exit from all sorts of directions. A barrier as well as clearly delineated entrance and exits mean you can get the flow to behave the way you want.
It's non-obvious, but it does work. And these days, if you want to slow down the flow, all you need to do is send a few texts. There are enough "zombie walkers" (people who text and walk with their eyes glued to their phones) that sending notifications or texts would probably cause them to stop and impede flow briefly.
PC is a bigger market by installed base. But not by profit.
Just like Android outselling iOS 4:1 should have developers jumping on the Android bandwagon developing Android first, iOS second. Again, other than a small amount, most devs go iOS first.
Installed base means nothing if developers can't feed themselves. And with console piracy rates under 10%, while PC piracy rates are over 90%, the installed base of paying PC users is quite a bit smaller.
The PC has basically one genre of games available - online. Be it an FPS, MMO, RTS, MOBA, or whatever, PC rules online. Mostly because those are the kind of games that you can't really pirate effectively.
The Original Xbox generation started doing the PC in - not because they were better, but because the money showed that consoles were starting to bring it in. Last-gen is where it really took off, and PC users complained about lousy "ports" and how the PC version is delayed. Well, that's because the games in general make money from consoles (with the exception of the above), so once the developers and publishers have their ROI, they port it over to PC. Two reasons - first, the PC port is basically going to just pay for itself after piracy (and it's often done "just do it quickly and inexpensively" hence the general low quality of PC versions). Second, by delaying the release a few months, the price will also drop, which hopefully means lower piracy as well (since lower prices generally mean less piracy).
Hell, things like local servers and such are disappearing from the PC versions. And unless the title is from one of the above genres, there are few PC AAA titles out there. (PC FPSes are still raking it in because of their online nature (no local servers...) meaning piracy is lower, and superior control schemes. It's why Call of Duty or Battlefield still do Day-1 PC versions, besides which they help boost the "$100B sold on day 1" stat).
Now, PCs do excel in one other area - indie games. Primarily because those games are immune to piracy (there's so much crap out there that piracy is more of a marketing thing). And it's so easy to develop for PC that piracy doesn't really hurt that badly, either.
The "supermoon" may have little astronomical significance, but the moon has significant cultural significance. Many of which carry on to this day. We used to think the moon made us crazy, hence words based on the moon for crazy - lunatic, lunacy, etc.
And there's other cultural significance, including terms like "once in a blue moon" (which was retro-defined as two full moons in a month, which isn't all that rare an event).
The "supermoon" is just the moon reaching it's closest approach to earth, however, the "rare event" is the fact it's at its closest approach AND we have a lunar eclipse.
There may be zero astronomical significance to what happens/happened, but given the moon's ties to human culture, it's more of a cultural thing than scientific. At the very least, you can give everyone a scientific lecture on the moon to educate them, which isn't a bad thing.