Fwiw, Netflix pays big money to try and make sure it does interest you.
That's because of business model.
Netflix gathers a TON of statistics about who their subscribers are. Right now, they're mostly upper middle to middle class people who generally have professional style jobs and university degrees and all that.
Why is that important? Because Netflix's revenue source is subscribers. So they have to produce and obtain content that appeal to their subscribers. You're not going to see the latest exploitive TV show on Netflix if it's not appealing.
The goal if Netflix is to weigh the balance - who are the people likely to subscribe? Who are their current subscribers? If they produce content, are their current subscribers likely to leave?
Appealing to the lowest common denominator works for network TV, because those people are eyeballs and network TV is all about eyeballs. (If you want free TV, stick an antenna on the roof. Network TV still produces TV for free).
But those eyeballs even if you put the content on Netflix are unlikely to become subscribers. So it's pointless for Netflix to produce those shows because it'll attract few subscribers.
And yes, it's all about balance - is the Netflix subscriber base ready for a show about homosexual people? Maybe, if their subscriber base is more liberal, and they know that liberal minded people are more likely to pay for subscriptions.
That's the sort of decisions that go into Netflix programming. Netflix is not about eyeballs, it's about subscribers, and knowing their preferences. It's also about knowing their demographic - the people who would subscribe but currently don't, so knowing more about them to produce programming they like to encourage them to subscribe.
But that's not the same decision making that goes into CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and others, because they don't have subscriber counts, they have raw eyeballs.
The problem most Greeks suddenly face is that their money is now locked up as electronic balances in banks that have shut down for a week and won't let them have more than 60 euros at a time. After crises like this (even America's own "great recession"), people tend to prefer forms of money are more than just bits or fiat paper, such as gold and silver.
Greeks aren't stupid.
They're withdrawing their money now while it is in Euros. Not gold or silver, but Euros. Because if/when Greece exists the Eurozone, they may return to drachmas. And those Greek bank accounts that were holding Euros? They'd be converted automatically at some set rate. So one day the machine will spit out Euros, the next day, it's drachmas.
And Greeks know that if they switch back, drachmas will be basically worthless because no one will accept them.
It's not the Euro crashing in price (the market has pretty much priced that out already), it's whatever currency Greece uses next. It can be tree leaves for all anyone cares.
So Greeks are causing a huge run on the banks because at least their money is safer in Euros than it is in drachmas, tree leaves, Zimbabwe dollars, etc.
It's not electronic currency that's the problem, either - part of those whole 60 Euro a day thing also means Greeks can't transfer their Euros outside of Greece.
The Greek public isn't stupid. They know their country is in trouble, and they also know their life savings will evaporate in a pinch once they leave the Euro. That's why they're withdrawing Euros as fast as possible because the Euro will have value. The government will force-convert all existing electronic balances at some rate.
To put it another way - let's say you have USD$2000 in the bank (not in the US, but your country happens to use US dollars). The economic conditions are such that the government will probably go to a new currency because the US dollar is too expensive for them to maintain. So what do you do? Do you wait it out so your government will turn your bank account from US dollars to worthless scrip? Or do you try to withdraw all your US dollars because that will likely have more value than whatever scrip comes out?
In most failed countries, the default currency will be either the Euro or the US dollar, because the local currency is worthless. Zimbabwe is an extreme example of it.
Stupid, stupid, STUPID! Why have numRows and numCols in a sparse array? Things with unnecessary, arbitrary bounds annoy me. My implementation of Conway's Game of Life runs on a sparse array precisely because that allows the world to stretch arbitrarily in any direction a glider goes, limited only by the capacity of the bignum library and the total store available to the program.
Easy. How do you test that you're handling boundaries correctly?
I mean, yeah, your bignum goes from negative infinity to positive infinity. But what happens as you approach those numbers?
Also, how do you test that you're not arbitrarily limiting the results? More than one program has been caught in the 32-to-64 bit transition because they cast pointers to uint32's. (Enough that there's "uintptr_t" which is an int type big enough to cast a pointer to).
So why not have a way to arbitrarily limit the size? Even better, add in the ability to adjust the boundaries. That way you can do testing on small, easily testable and quickly reproducible array sizes and nail down the most common bugs you'll encounter (especially ones that require wrap around handling), before you run more extensive tests.
Plus, constants can be changed. One common test would be to change numRows and numCols and rebuild/re-run the test and make sure it handles the new value successfully and that it still works. You know, to make sure values like that aren't hard coded. (You may laugh, but enough people code "C:\Windows", or "C:\Program Files", to matter. It's basically assuming a constant will stay, well, constant, instead of checking. Apple threw Square Enix for a loop because Apple renamed the documents folder for storing volatile per-app content. Square Enix hardcoded their paths (despite Apple telling people HOW to do it properly), resulting in app breakage. Even worse, Square Enix's solution was "do not upgrade your phone/tablet". Apple threatened to withdraw their apps because of complaints, and within a week, new versions were released).
So yeah, you may use bignums, but maybe someone internally decided 32 bit ints were good enough, because well, it's a test app and no one was going to actually run it long enough to verify. (Funny, in production, how often people hit limits we think are "too big"... see IPv4. Windows' 49 day bug, etc).
Google's stock price would barely quiver if Chrome, Android, GMail, etc all evaporated overnight. Might even go UP like when companies announce staff cuts. Those little freebie side-projects are largely there to convince the public and Google's own employees that they're a do-good technology company. Delivering tested, bullet-proof software apparently isn't part of the agenda in that "cool" part of their shop.
No, the purpose of Chrome, Android, GMail, etc isn't to show the public they are a do-gooder technology company. It's to attract eyeballs. Android was a response to iOS - Google was worried that Apple's dominance in the area would be bad news for their mobile advertising aspirations, so they needed a mobile OS in order to retain and attract eyeballs.
Google's products are merely an attractant to get eyeballs. When you are the product, they need to make stuff to keep you coming back. They sell advertisers access to those eyeballs.
The whole point of their testing and adjustments is seeing if it will attract or deter eyeballs.
Then there are charities which do things worldwide and have naturally high overheads. Orbis International, aka "flying eye hospital" is one of them. Basically they fly a donated DC-10 (from FedEx, I believe, one of their old planes and they remain one of their biggest sponsors) to poor parts of the world, and treat all manner of diseases that affect eyesight, for free.
Flying a DC-10 isn't cheap, and operating one isn't either. But they do it because this lets them have a controlled operating room and recovery area. These are places where if there is a hospital, it isn't set up to do eye surgery, so they bring the hospital to them with a minimum level of technology and cleanliness.
So yeah, they have huge overheads, but for all those children and adults they help, it literally is a life changer to go from barely seeing to opening a new dimension to life. It also means instead of living their days out on the street begging they could actually be productive members of society, and be able to attend school Or even a father with failing eyesight can have his vision restored and resume working. (They're not about eyeglasses, but more about cataracts, glaucoma, cancer, and other complex eye diseases).
If you want your dollar to have the most impact on people, give locally - the food bank is generally an excellent place who have the connections that literally stretch every dollar (while they get lots of in food donations, they need money to buy the staples that aren't often donated - fresh produce, for example). But there are a few charities where yes, more money goes into running them, but that's because they need to do bigger things - MSF, Orbis, etc.
Also, 30 minutes is waaay better than the versions we've seen previously, which could only operate for a few minutes at a time. And... I guess we're still calling it a "jetpack" even though it's just using turbofans? I guess there's no other commonly-known term to describe it?
The Bell Aerospace rocket belt (what we used to call jetpacks) only worked for up to 30 seconds at a time. More commercial versions again, 30 seconds.
It's why those water jet things that use a jetski are so popular - sure you're tethered 20' to a jetski or other thing sitting on the water, but you get 90% of the way to a jetpack without the annoyance of only 30 seconds of flight.
The Martin Jetpack has been going for a long time now - over a decade, so I'm confident they got the issues worked out (a decade ago, they were already demonstrating, albeit tethered).
As for 'jetpack' well, the term is ambiguous, and there's a reason we call the ones we see in public rocket belts. But turbofan engines are popular on jetliners (see what I did there?). Especially modern high-bypass ones.
I suspect the primary reason for this is to maintain high ad prices by not charging advertisers for useless click. For instance, if I were to post this response on a mobile platform, I would first have to close the ad tab at the bottom so I could click the submit button. Sometimes instead of closing the ad, I click it. If the advertiser is getting charged per click, and google were the provider, this would generate revenue for Google while providing negative value for the advertiser, as it would tend to make me dislike the advertiser. This would tend to push ad rates down, which still would not compensate for the negative end user impression.
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.
Of course Google is trying to reduce accidental ad clicks - because accidentals reduce ad rates if advertisers feel most people are not viewing the ad because they want to.
And you can bet more than a few advertisers probably pulled their campaigns after seeing most of their money went to Google over people who never intended to follow through with the ad.
Anytime Google does something beneficial to the users, it's probably because the advertisers got pissed off. Here, it would be advertisers getting pissed off paying for accidental taps.
Google rarely, if ever, allows real malware to slip through. Yes, there is adware and exploitive free to play games, but you can uninstall them and they're gone. What makes malware malware is you need to ffr to get rid of it.
Sorry, not true. Maybe if you stick on the straight and narrow "Google" ads, but Google owns most of the ad networks out there, including your favorites like DoubleClick (famous pop ups and pop unders, and more than a few times sent infected ads), AdMob (who does most of the mobile advertising - Google themselves don't do it), as well as several others. Google owns the online advertising business - the only ones they don't are the scummy ones who advertise on bittorrent sites and the like
My watch has force touch, and I'm not a big fan. You have to push a little too much to make me comfortable, it's not a natural motion. It's also just a binary thing, you either tap or force touch. There's no gradient of pressure. We'll see what the implementation is on the watch
You can really think of it as the touch equivalent of "right click". Something that touch screens do poorly is how to emulate a right-click or contextual action. Many do it as a touch-hold (press your finger to the screen for a second). If you're able to sense pressure, that lets you avoid the delay and just call up a contextual action by pressing hard.
Though, you'd probably need feedback to show that you did press hard enough... like a tap.
I worked for a company that had similar policies - they installed tons of spyware on their system. The spyware would monitor what files got written, what files got opened, and so on, and it would visibly slow down the PC. (The tons of other management apps they had on it didn't help, either).
And these were brand new i7 laptops, running Windows 7.
A few weeks into the deployment, and people were complaining about sluggishness or other odd behavior, and ended up getting their antivirus swapped out which seemed to fix some of the oddities. The others suddenly got BSODs constantly - they coudln't go through a whole day of work without a BSOD in the middle of it, and it turned out the old antivirus was having a conflict with the disk encryption software. (One effect of being switched to new antivirus was they also switch encryption software to Bitlocker), and I remember that the machines without BSODs had their encryption and antivirus swapped out.
And yes, they spied on you. If you copied source code to a USB drive, you could expect either an email the next day from IT asking why you did it (CC'd to your manager), or have IT security and your manager come up to you and ask what you did it for.
They also spied on what you did - employees have been fired for playing a pirated movie on their laptops at home, on the off time. And I'm sure it was heavily scrutinized, given there were perfectly legitimate reasons to have stuff like VLC on your PC, or movie files (you needed them for testing).
Heck, the source code thing caught a few people who needed to do testing - testing USB hardware by doing basic file I/O (they copied the source tree to serve as test files). And it was especially fun since one of the processors had firmware and you had to copy the firmware you just compiled using USB for testing. It was all too easy to include a few source files in there...
About the only good thing was they had a backup utility so when you connected over VPN or to their network, the backup would run and get you most of the way should your hard drive crap out. But that was the only good slowdown that happened. You learned to connect to the VPN when you got into work, let it backup your PC while you get your coffee etc,
2) A battery back is physically bigger than a phone battery and most require an extra cable. How is that ever going to be more convienent then just carrying another charged battery?
How do you charge said battery? I know Samsung, for some models, make a "dock" so you can stuff your battery in that and charge it. But otherwise, you have to charge it in your phone. If you're using the second battery, you then have to swap out the batteries, then put your phone back on charge. If you're like me, you forget to do so a few hours later and now you have a dead battery and a charged one, and no time to charge the dead battery.
With an external pack, I plug the charger to the external pack, and either plug the phone into another charger, or into the pack, and they all charge in a chain. In the morning, the pack and phone is charged, and I didn't have to anything more complex than put them both to a charger.
Extra batteries are for chumps unless your phone has special charging dock that lets you charge it outside the phone. Charging batteries in the phone is annoying unless you remember to swap them once the existing one fills up. And most likely, you'll forget, so you're back to one battery again.
I've never seen such push back over something that really is much more annoying. Sure an external pack is bulkier, but they are way more convenient to use - especially when charging.
It's like removable batteries for laptops - so the low battery warning goes off, what do you do? Shut everything down and change the battery? (Old Apple laptops back in the day had a 5 minute battery so you could suspend the laptop to RAM, then swap the main battery without losing RAM and then resume where you left off, back in the days when people carried several batteries as a matter of course, and there were charging bays and all that...). I don't think many Windows laptops did - once the battery ran low, you had to shut it down, swap, then boot it back up. And these days I don't think any computer has a temporary battery for swapping while suspending.
Agreed. On the other hand... what plane can't tolerate a drone strike? Not really up on drones but seems to me the vast majority are smaller and lighter than a lot of birds. Bird strikes obviously aren't good if they hit an engine. But outside of that I'm trying to figger out what the major problem is. So did the drone encroach the planes airspace or did the plane encroach the drones airspace?
A bird strike is damaging. If you have altitude, you have options. Firefighting aircraft don't have altitude - they're working at 1500' or less. At that altitude, if something happens, there aren't many options. If the engine is damaged (yes, the plane survives, but that doesn't mean it doesn't incur damage. You can survive an earthquake or a car accident, but that doesn't mean you're not severely injured), there are serious issues about getting out there.
Flying in a fire is extremely difficult, too - the air is extremely turbulent from the heat, and you have to maintain a narrow line so your water/retardant has most effect - too high and it scatters, useless, too low and you lay a narrow thick line that doesn't cover much area.
Last thing you want to do while concentrating on flying through is worry about other traffic. In fact, in most active aerial firefighting, one aircraft serves as a traffic controller - each aircraft, be it a waterbomber, helicopter with bambi bucket, or other vehicle is carefully sequenced and told where to drop. An unauthorized party - be it drone, aircraft or other vehicle calls off this out of safety of the third party (while rare, a sudden drop of water can cause significant damage or crash a light aircraft, endangering the people inside).
And in a fire zone, the airspace is restricted. It doesn't matter if the drone was flying before the fire - once the fire starts up, the area is immediately restricted airspace. I had to fly around wildfire restricted zones which happened to encroach in the approach path of an airport - it doesn't matter - you have to divert around the zone. ATC helps by keeping you away, but you're expected to know about the airspace restrictions.
Pay more for the background check, apparently. They shouldn't take a long time, especially since they're mostly worthless.
No, paying more doesn't help.
I know of several background check companies. One of them checks everything in your resume - they verify that yes, you attended College U. between those dates you claimed, and that yes, you were in the right department (that information's mostly public). They even go and verify your past employers. When you hire people from other countries, it takes even longer (the larger companies have scouts in other countries).
Then there are ones that check your references, and they have to give a couple of weeks for responses as well. I got fed up doing so many of those I just answer basic questions so it takes no longer than 2 minutes. Because the only information they need is the start date and end date. I'm not going to divulge salary information to a third party, nor am I going to offer opinions or judgements. The last two require ME to do work, and sorry, you didn't pay me to answer your questions.
And what's with them doing it in the most obnoxious way possible? I get an email with a word document or HTML file, and they want me to FAX IT BACK?! I didn't bother with the ones who couldn't even be courteous enough to give me a toll free number.
Perhaps those background check companies need to look at themselves first and realize that the people they're checking are busy folks too, and if they want answers, making it as frictionless as possible to answer would go a long way to getting better responses. Hell, mail me a letter, enclose a $5 gift card, and I'll be more than happy to spend 10 minutes doing your thing. And if you're doing that, SASE please, so all I have to do is drop it in the mailbox.
Show you did some effort (even if it was Bob in the mailroom whose job is to take a printout of your forms, stuff in a gift card and a return envelope into a bigger envelope, and drop it in the mailbox).
I still wonder how could Google access these files, if CRC does not allow this.
The same way other companies like "expert sex change" (.com, if you must) used to show up in the rankings, but if you go there, you see paywall after paywall.
Basically the sites look for the Googlebot user-agent and adjust their results slightly - by exposing the entire content of the page. So all of it is nicely indexed by Google, and when you search, they show up. But the answer (which Google got to see) is hidden away through logins because you're not Google.
You used to be able to see it through the cache links, and I think Google is actually cracking down on people who try to SEO by targeting the bot (you don't see expert sex change on the list anymore).
But sites like CRC did the same - if you were Google, you got more access. You might want to try browsing the web as Googlebot...
He doesn't. He's appealing to beliefs, whether supported by science or not - first, the belief that wifi radiation can be dangerous, and second, the belief that his widget is safer than the competition.
I'd say the competitor has poor marketing.
With that "pregnant woman" setting, I'd go and say "My router is much safer than theirs. Theirs emits dangerous wifi - so dangerous they have to put in a pregnant woman setting to prevent their wifi from hurting your unborn child. Our wifi doesn't need that setting as it's inherently safer and won't hurt your unborn child!"
After all, it can go either way - either admit their setting is better. or trash their setting as evidence they need it, while yours doesn't.
The thing is, as a drone pilot, if I see a fire, the last thing I want to do is get in the way of firefighters and/or emergency services.
That's because you were probably raised right and still have the sense you were born with.
We can't assume the same about everybody else. In fact, it's safest to assume everyone else has no idea how to behave and will fuck stuff up more often than not.
In fact, I can imagine a reason why people would bring their drone into a wildfire - cool video shoot.
Sadly, it appears taking shots of things from new and unusual angles to get the view on YouTube seems to be the order of the day.
I mean, when you can bring your drone over a wildfire to get cool video of that fire burning down someone's house, that'll bring the clicks and the money.
And you know YouTube pays people too much when they can destroy a $10,000 Apple Watch Edition and pay for it from the YouTube proceeds.
So yeah, catch a wildfire from a cool angle burning up someone's prized possession, make serious cash, who cares if you're putting people's property or lives in danger. Just the YouTube clicks matter.
DHCPv6 is nothing like DHCPv4. It was designed from the ground up differently, just like IPv6 itself was. It's the only mechanism out there that an IPv6 network admin has to control which devices get which addresses. Denying a DHCPv6 solution just forces people into a 2 sizes fit all, which is far from ideal. Also, DHCPv6 is the only thing that allows one to have, say/96 subnets (assuming that they don't give a fuck to SLAAC) or even a/128 assignment.
And there are many valid uses of DHCP where IPv6 doesn't exist, or is insufficient. RA and RADNS works for the most basic case, but enterprise needs are far more varied.
I mean, think desktop management - it's not unusual to have DHCP right now give the PC an IP and boot it off the network (DHCP options for boot-server and boot-file) - otherwise known as PXE, as well as in an OS environment for the OS to pick up which is the authentication server it should use (LDAP, Active Directory, etc) and so on.
I suppose IPv6's way is to have those services announce themselves over the network, but then it becomes limited to a network segment and you start filling the network up with broadcasts. Plus, it's a lot harder to manage - for example, you can give someone a new PC by noting its MAC address and the OS install/download/etc happen automatically by plugging it in and booting it up. to that configuration.
see, in the US (for those not from here) if we call you a 'contractor' in the software field, then we can have you work 40 hours/week minimum, likely ask for more and not pay more (just guilting you into working more, the unspoken threat is to cancel your contract the very next day). but the super sweet deal they get is that they don't cover your healthcare (not one penny), they don't cover the national holidays, the religious holidays or even your actual sick days. all that costs you a day's pay for each day you take off during those times. we have a lot of US monday holidays and, as a contractor, I hated it. I got 32 hours of pay that week, other fulltime employees got their full week's pay and 1 day loss of pay is actually a lot, when you add it up. and no, as a contractor, you do NOT get paid more than the f/t guys. that stopped happening 10 or 20 years ago, at least. today, the contractor in sw is the lowest rank, the most disposable and everyone knows it.
That mean contracting's not for you. First off, you need better negotiation skills. And potentially sales skills because you're supposed to negotiate all those things in your contract.
Your hourly rate should include extra money to pay for your benefits and your taxes that the employer would've paid. And the contract is for a definite period of time - it cannot be indefinite (or you and your company run a real risk of being reclassified as employee), so add in a holiday bonus to the rate. If you make $30/hr as a FT employee, you had better be charging out $50+ as contractor to cover extra expenses, vacation, PTO, etc.
Your contract should also include termination clauses - penalties paid if terminated early. If you're good, you can get it so you get full payment for rest of the contract, if not, you can make it so you get 30 days.
And while you're drafting your contract, add in IP provisions because it's appropriate.
Yes, contractors suck, especially if you lack the skills to sell yourself. Yes, if your company is switching you, it sucks and you will probably agree to something just for stability, which is the wrong thing to do. Or at the very least, make it a super-short 30 day contract so your exploitation period is short while you regroup and negotiate better terms. At the same time, use that time to look for another job - because either way, you're free to do so. As a contractor, the company cannot limit you from checking out other prospects or even doing multiple jobs.
SSDs just make it worse, since when they fail, they are usually impossible to recover.
My hard drive failures generally tend to be unrecoverable - sure I might be able to get pieces of data, but once they go, it's generally gone. SSDs just up and dying is no real biggie (backups!).
I suppose the real sad thing is that Microsoft had one of the best backup solutions for networked Windows computers, especially in a home/SOHO setting. Windows Home Server had a stupidly simple to use backup system - it worked at a file and image level so if you were upgrading or restoring, you popped in the boot DVD, booted the PC with the new hard drive off it, logged into your WHS, and clicked "restore". Couple of hours later and your PC is up and running.
And it backed up all PCs nightly - woke them up, did the backup, put them back to sleep. Plus all your usual de-duplicating and other things. And in the few cases where a PC needs drivers, the backup created a driver folder you can view on another PC, copy those to a thumb drive, and when the boot DVD prompted, you stuck those in and it loaded them.
it was also stupidly simple to use - install the Windows Home Server connector, add it to the backup rotation and done.
I generally don't pay much attention to the music (of course I'm aware it's there) when I'm watching a film.
But seeing as he's done the tunes for a few that a I really like I might try digging out a few soundtracks, or watching with the picture off.
You might think you don't, but you actually do. Even if you're not aware of it.
Sound is actually a critical part of a motion picture - more so than the picture itself! Many studies have been conducted (and you can do it yourself, too) - with the sound muted (turn on subtitles), you'll find the movie is actually lacking. Reverse it - with the picture off and the sound on, and it doesn't matter - you get the full range of emotions and environment that the director was trying to create, even though you're not actually seeing the images. That's how important sound is.
Even before the era of talkies where you had a gramophone or piano player, they were doing the same thing - to provide context and emphasis for the images.
And the movie's score plays a VERY important role in emotional development - it's not just putting some music to fill in some gaps, but the right choice of instruments, tempo and cues adds excitement to action sequences, suspense during sneak scenes, sorrow or sadness during bad events, etc.
If you have a movie that is particularly moving, try watching it without sound and you'll wonder what the big deal was.
Oh and yes, the music is intended to be background music - you're not supposed to notice it unless the director really has a lull in the dialog or effects or is doing a hero sequence. That's what makes it even more powerful.
If you have a particularly good ear, and given modern movies typically follow a standard three-act structure, pay attention to the hero theme - first when it plays out at the beginning ("everything's going great!"), then see how it evolves in the second act (hero is challenged) and third act (hero is wounded and must somehow overcome). And finally after the denouement, hear the theme again (hero succeeds).
It's somewhat ironic, that in a motion picture, sound is probably the most important aspect of it, not the picture.
If we don't want to save the world because it's "not profitable", then we are truly fucked. What are we, Ferengi?
Actually, the real reason it's "not profitable" is because of cost externalization.
If I burn toxic chemicals and release it into the atmosphere, it costs me very little. it costs society a lot (increased health care for those downwind, etc).
And that's why it's "not profitable". We haven't costed out a lot of things - it's still cheaper to pollute than to control pollution.
Rarely is stuff truly "free" - it just means it isn't priced right. Spewing toxic chemicals in the air is effectively free, because the only people who pay are those downwind.
It doesn't help that you have people in the government that are used to purchasing Ships... They don't seem to comprehend software, the speed at which it changes, the technology changes, etc... They want to buy a unit of something and then just perform maintenance (if your software breaks you should just be able to add a coat of paint right?).
Actually, software maintenance is a thing - software needs to be maintained just like a gearbox or an engine or a nuclear reactor. Here they're paying Microsoft to maintain it - effectively Microsoft is a contractor.
And it makes sense too - even in an embedded system, isolated from the internet, there's still opportunities for infection (you still need to get data into and out of the system, and USB keys are stupidly easy ways to update core components.
Heck, infected USB keys was one way the USAF got their drone consoles infected - mission waypoints etc., were stored on USB keys and copied to the consoles (beats hand-entering the data!), and well, there you go.
As for why Windows, well, if someone writes a really specialized piece of software, and you use it, you pretty much are stuck with what OS they use. It doesn't have to be custom development, just a piece of really niche software that you need.
And don't forget your local food bank. Those you can help either by giving them cash (they normally have enough leverage that $1 in donations can buy at least $2 worth of food), or by buying stuff they're constantly in need of (it's not just canned goods, but stuff like fresh produce) and donating it.
Food banks are a lifeline - many users are just on the edge - food, rent, or utiltiies. No one goes to a food bank unless they really have to, and users are limited in selection to what was donated. There's typically plenty of canned goods, but lesser amounts of fresh produce. Even "fancy" foods are well appreciated by users.
And they need volunteers - when you meet the people who use them, you'll see how normal most are - they just happened to fall on hard times. but they're generally otherwise normal families/
Yeah, last year Qualcomm was all the shiz. But can you move 100K+ parts/month? No? Then it's off the table.
Broadcom, Nvidia, even TI (worse parts and massively worse support, IMO) same, same same. Bottom line? I'd recommend Freescale 9 times out of 10 for any of the medium to small players if I was looking for a high end ARM SOC.
Not correct. Qualcomm has plenty of support companies who will gladly do smaller quantities. Sure you won't get the personalized support that Samsung and all the other big guys get, but they have access to the same resources - basically these companies aggregate a bunch of smaller companies into a bigger one, plus handling all the common questions because everyone asks them.
In fact, all you have to do is ask Qualcomm and they'll hand you the contact information for a company that'll help you out.
The reason for this was Qualcomm saw what happened to nVidia - back when Tegra was the SoC - nVidia was not talking to anyone moving less than 1M units. Qualcomm took over and they notice there's a lot of interest in their chips, but they know they can't support every company who only wants to do 1K, 10K, 100K units. So Qualcomm basically create a bunch of platforms to satisfy these smaller requests, and contracts companies to support them. (These SoCs demand high-precision PCBs which are costly to make, tricky to design, and take a LONG time to manufacture, so Qualcomm designs modules which adapts the complex PCBs to a simpler edge connector or board-to-board connector).
Probably not going to happen because of this. Sony doesn't want you to be able to play the games you already bought. Then again, Microsoft doesn't really want you to either, but they're behind in the game, so their hand was forced. Also, backward compatibility only supports a handful of games. I typically don't buy a console until 3-4 years after it's out, then I can get GOTY editions of games for $30 instead of new "patched out of the box" games for $60.
Sony wants you to buy it again. The number of re-releases this generation is staggering - there's plenty of PS3 games being remade for PS4, a few Xbox360 games remade for Xbone (a few, not as many as Sony it seems).
As for Microsoft? They're behind, yes, but not hugely behind. And not far enough to be desperate - when you're talking about both shipping tens of millions already, you're not "in trouble". Plus, Microsoft found the new price point where sales have picked up and even exceeded PS4 sales.
All we can say is life is good when both are actually competing with each other.
(By any measure, the Xbone is a success by itself. Just when you compare it against the PS4, it's not as successful).
And you can bet Sony is probably trying hard to get PS3 backwards compatibility going because Microsoft's announced it, and Sony's game schedule is starting to look skimpy because Sony's E3 presentation was more about games "in the future", while Microsoft's was "this year or next".
You're forgetting about focus groups, which is where most politician's views/presentations are actually crafted. Polls are used as feedback for "how are we doing with 20 to 30 year-old Latino transvestites who self-identify as Republicans" to identify where (demographically) more advertising money needs to be spent.
You know, political parties have the campaigning down pat. They don't rely on public polls for their information and policy positions. They have, through decades of research and analysis, figured out who generally votes for them, and who is in their target demographic they need to convince.
Using that local knowledge Is what gets them ahead - not some political poll run by calling up a bunch of people who aren't controlled.
For example - some political parties ignore public polls altogether because the weighting of the public is skewed. If your party skews towards the middle age and older folks, then issues that affect young people are not ones that concern you. And if the poll was done at the local university? Doesn't matter if you scored only 8% and your opponent 90%. If you know that of that group of people, only 10% actually vote, you ignore them. The time and money can be better spent getting at the 30% undecided in the group that do vote. (See: Elections in Canada where the "popular vote" was nowhere near the actual vote - often because the polls used inaccurate weightings and other errors.)
Political parties know their demographics, they know who votes for them, who's likely to vote for them, and who are the people who actually get out and vote.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because of business model.
Netflix gathers a TON of statistics about who their subscribers are. Right now, they're mostly upper middle to middle class people who generally have professional style jobs and university degrees and all that.
Why is that important? Because Netflix's revenue source is subscribers. So they have to produce and obtain content that appeal to their subscribers. You're not going to see the latest exploitive TV show on Netflix if it's not appealing.
The goal if Netflix is to weigh the balance - who are the people likely to subscribe? Who are their current subscribers? If they produce content, are their current subscribers likely to leave?
Appealing to the lowest common denominator works for network TV, because those people are eyeballs and network TV is all about eyeballs. (If you want free TV, stick an antenna on the roof. Network TV still produces TV for free).
But those eyeballs even if you put the content on Netflix are unlikely to become subscribers. So it's pointless for Netflix to produce those shows because it'll attract few subscribers.
And yes, it's all about balance - is the Netflix subscriber base ready for a show about homosexual people? Maybe, if their subscriber base is more liberal, and they know that liberal minded people are more likely to pay for subscriptions.
That's the sort of decisions that go into Netflix programming. Netflix is not about eyeballs, it's about subscribers, and knowing their preferences. It's also about knowing their demographic - the people who would subscribe but currently don't, so knowing more about them to produce programming they like to encourage them to subscribe.
But that's not the same decision making that goes into CBS, NBC, FOX, ABC, and others, because they don't have subscriber counts, they have raw eyeballs.
Greeks aren't stupid.
They're withdrawing their money now while it is in Euros. Not gold or silver, but Euros. Because if/when Greece exists the Eurozone, they may return to drachmas. And those Greek bank accounts that were holding Euros? They'd be converted automatically at some set rate. So one day the machine will spit out Euros, the next day, it's drachmas.
And Greeks know that if they switch back, drachmas will be basically worthless because no one will accept them.
It's not the Euro crashing in price (the market has pretty much priced that out already), it's whatever currency Greece uses next. It can be tree leaves for all anyone cares.
So Greeks are causing a huge run on the banks because at least their money is safer in Euros than it is in drachmas, tree leaves, Zimbabwe dollars, etc.
It's not electronic currency that's the problem, either - part of those whole 60 Euro a day thing also means Greeks can't transfer their Euros outside of Greece.
The Greek public isn't stupid. They know their country is in trouble, and they also know their life savings will evaporate in a pinch once they leave the Euro. That's why they're withdrawing Euros as fast as possible because the Euro will have value. The government will force-convert all existing electronic balances at some rate.
To put it another way - let's say you have USD$2000 in the bank (not in the US, but your country happens to use US dollars). The economic conditions are such that the government will probably go to a new currency because the US dollar is too expensive for them to maintain. So what do you do? Do you wait it out so your government will turn your bank account from US dollars to worthless scrip? Or do you try to withdraw all your US dollars because that will likely have more value than whatever scrip comes out?
In most failed countries, the default currency will be either the Euro or the US dollar, because the local currency is worthless. Zimbabwe is an extreme example of it.
Easy. How do you test that you're handling boundaries correctly?
I mean, yeah, your bignum goes from negative infinity to positive infinity. But what happens as you approach those numbers?
Also, how do you test that you're not arbitrarily limiting the results? More than one program has been caught in the 32-to-64 bit transition because they cast pointers to uint32's. (Enough that there's "uintptr_t" which is an int type big enough to cast a pointer to).
So why not have a way to arbitrarily limit the size? Even better, add in the ability to adjust the boundaries. That way you can do testing on small, easily testable and quickly reproducible array sizes and nail down the most common bugs you'll encounter (especially ones that require wrap around handling), before you run more extensive tests.
Plus, constants can be changed. One common test would be to change numRows and numCols and rebuild/re-run the test and make sure it handles the new value successfully and that it still works. You know, to make sure values like that aren't hard coded. (You may laugh, but enough people code "C:\Windows", or "C:\Program Files", to matter. It's basically assuming a constant will stay, well, constant, instead of checking. Apple threw Square Enix for a loop because Apple renamed the documents folder for storing volatile per-app content. Square Enix hardcoded their paths (despite Apple telling people HOW to do it properly), resulting in app breakage. Even worse, Square Enix's solution was "do not upgrade your phone/tablet". Apple threatened to withdraw their apps because of complaints, and within a week, new versions were released).
So yeah, you may use bignums, but maybe someone internally decided 32 bit ints were good enough, because well, it's a test app and no one was going to actually run it long enough to verify. (Funny, in production, how often people hit limits we think are "too big"... see IPv4. Windows' 49 day bug, etc).
No, the purpose of Chrome, Android, GMail, etc isn't to show the public they are a do-gooder technology company. It's to attract eyeballs. Android was a response to iOS - Google was worried that Apple's dominance in the area would be bad news for their mobile advertising aspirations, so they needed a mobile OS in order to retain and attract eyeballs.
Google's products are merely an attractant to get eyeballs. When you are the product, they need to make stuff to keep you coming back. They sell advertisers access to those eyeballs.
The whole point of their testing and adjustments is seeing if it will attract or deter eyeballs.
Then there are charities which do things worldwide and have naturally high overheads. Orbis International, aka "flying eye hospital" is one of them. Basically they fly a donated DC-10 (from FedEx, I believe, one of their old planes and they remain one of their biggest sponsors) to poor parts of the world, and treat all manner of diseases that affect eyesight, for free.
Flying a DC-10 isn't cheap, and operating one isn't either. But they do it because this lets them have a controlled operating room and recovery area. These are places where if there is a hospital, it isn't set up to do eye surgery, so they bring the hospital to them with a minimum level of technology and cleanliness.
So yeah, they have huge overheads, but for all those children and adults they help, it literally is a life changer to go from barely seeing to opening a new dimension to life. It also means instead of living their days out on the street begging they could actually be productive members of society, and be able to attend school Or even a father with failing eyesight can have his vision restored and resume working. (They're not about eyeglasses, but more about cataracts, glaucoma, cancer, and other complex eye diseases).
If you want your dollar to have the most impact on people, give locally - the food bank is generally an excellent place who have the connections that literally stretch every dollar (while they get lots of in food donations, they need money to buy the staples that aren't often donated - fresh produce, for example). But there are a few charities where yes, more money goes into running them, but that's because they need to do bigger things - MSF, Orbis, etc.
The Bell Aerospace rocket belt (what we used to call jetpacks) only worked for up to 30 seconds at a time. More commercial versions again, 30 seconds.
It's why those water jet things that use a jetski are so popular - sure you're tethered 20' to a jetski or other thing sitting on the water, but you get 90% of the way to a jetpack without the annoyance of only 30 seconds of flight.
The Martin Jetpack has been going for a long time now - over a decade, so I'm confident they got the issues worked out (a decade ago, they were already demonstrating, albeit tethered).
As for 'jetpack' well, the term is ambiguous, and there's a reason we call the ones we see in public rocket belts. But turbofan engines are popular on jetliners (see what I did there?). Especially modern high-bypass ones.
Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner.
Of course Google is trying to reduce accidental ad clicks - because accidentals reduce ad rates if advertisers feel most people are not viewing the ad because they want to.
And you can bet more than a few advertisers probably pulled their campaigns after seeing most of their money went to Google over people who never intended to follow through with the ad.
Anytime Google does something beneficial to the users, it's probably because the advertisers got pissed off. Here, it would be advertisers getting pissed off paying for accidental taps.
Sorry, not true. Maybe if you stick on the straight and narrow "Google" ads, but Google owns most of the ad networks out there, including your favorites like DoubleClick (famous pop ups and pop unders, and more than a few times sent infected ads), AdMob (who does most of the mobile advertising - Google themselves don't do it), as well as several others. Google owns the online advertising business - the only ones they don't are the scummy ones who advertise on bittorrent sites and the like
You can really think of it as the touch equivalent of "right click". Something that touch screens do poorly is how to emulate a right-click or contextual action. Many do it as a touch-hold (press your finger to the screen for a second). If you're able to sense pressure, that lets you avoid the delay and just call up a contextual action by pressing hard.
Though, you'd probably need feedback to show that you did press hard enough... like a tap.
I worked for a company that had similar policies - they installed tons of spyware on their system. The spyware would monitor what files got written, what files got opened, and so on, and it would visibly slow down the PC. (The tons of other management apps they had on it didn't help, either).
And these were brand new i7 laptops, running Windows 7.
A few weeks into the deployment, and people were complaining about sluggishness or other odd behavior, and ended up getting their antivirus swapped out which seemed to fix some of the oddities. The others suddenly got BSODs constantly - they coudln't go through a whole day of work without a BSOD in the middle of it, and it turned out the old antivirus was having a conflict with the disk encryption software. (One effect of being switched to new antivirus was they also switch encryption software to Bitlocker), and I remember that the machines without BSODs had their encryption and antivirus swapped out.
And yes, they spied on you. If you copied source code to a USB drive, you could expect either an email the next day from IT asking why you did it (CC'd to your manager), or have IT security and your manager come up to you and ask what you did it for.
They also spied on what you did - employees have been fired for playing a pirated movie on their laptops at home, on the off time. And I'm sure it was heavily scrutinized, given there were perfectly legitimate reasons to have stuff like VLC on your PC, or movie files (you needed them for testing).
Heck, the source code thing caught a few people who needed to do testing - testing USB hardware by doing basic file I/O (they copied the source tree to serve as test files). And it was especially fun since one of the processors had firmware and you had to copy the firmware you just compiled using USB for testing. It was all too easy to include a few source files in there...
About the only good thing was they had a backup utility so when you connected over VPN or to their network, the backup would run and get you most of the way should your hard drive crap out. But that was the only good slowdown that happened. You learned to connect to the VPN when you got into work, let it backup your PC while you get your coffee etc,
How do you charge said battery? I know Samsung, for some models, make a "dock" so you can stuff your battery in that and charge it. But otherwise, you have to charge it in your phone. If you're using the second battery, you then have to swap out the batteries, then put your phone back on charge. If you're like me, you forget to do so a few hours later and now you have a dead battery and a charged one, and no time to charge the dead battery.
With an external pack, I plug the charger to the external pack, and either plug the phone into another charger, or into the pack, and they all charge in a chain. In the morning, the pack and phone is charged, and I didn't have to anything more complex than put them both to a charger.
Extra batteries are for chumps unless your phone has special charging dock that lets you charge it outside the phone. Charging batteries in the phone is annoying unless you remember to swap them once the existing one fills up. And most likely, you'll forget, so you're back to one battery again.
I've never seen such push back over something that really is much more annoying. Sure an external pack is bulkier, but they are way more convenient to use - especially when charging.
It's like removable batteries for laptops - so the low battery warning goes off, what do you do? Shut everything down and change the battery? (Old Apple laptops back in the day had a 5 minute battery so you could suspend the laptop to RAM, then swap the main battery without losing RAM and then resume where you left off, back in the days when people carried several batteries as a matter of course, and there were charging bays and all that...). I don't think many Windows laptops did - once the battery ran low, you had to shut it down, swap, then boot it back up. And these days I don't think any computer has a temporary battery for swapping while suspending.
A bird strike is damaging. If you have altitude, you have options. Firefighting aircraft don't have altitude - they're working at 1500' or less. At that altitude, if something happens, there aren't many options. If the engine is damaged (yes, the plane survives, but that doesn't mean it doesn't incur damage. You can survive an earthquake or a car accident, but that doesn't mean you're not severely injured), there are serious issues about getting out there.
Flying in a fire is extremely difficult, too - the air is extremely turbulent from the heat, and you have to maintain a narrow line so your water/retardant has most effect - too high and it scatters, useless, too low and you lay a narrow thick line that doesn't cover much area.
Last thing you want to do while concentrating on flying through is worry about other traffic. In fact, in most active aerial firefighting, one aircraft serves as a traffic controller - each aircraft, be it a waterbomber, helicopter with bambi bucket, or other vehicle is carefully sequenced and told where to drop. An unauthorized party - be it drone, aircraft or other vehicle calls off this out of safety of the third party (while rare, a sudden drop of water can cause significant damage or crash a light aircraft, endangering the people inside).
And in a fire zone, the airspace is restricted. It doesn't matter if the drone was flying before the fire - once the fire starts up, the area is immediately restricted airspace. I had to fly around wildfire restricted zones which happened to encroach in the approach path of an airport - it doesn't matter - you have to divert around the zone. ATC helps by keeping you away, but you're expected to know about the airspace restrictions.
No, paying more doesn't help.
I know of several background check companies. One of them checks everything in your resume - they verify that yes, you attended College U. between those dates you claimed, and that yes, you were in the right department (that information's mostly public). They even go and verify your past employers. When you hire people from other countries, it takes even longer (the larger companies have scouts in other countries).
Then there are ones that check your references, and they have to give a couple of weeks for responses as well. I got fed up doing so many of those I just answer basic questions so it takes no longer than 2 minutes. Because the only information they need is the start date and end date. I'm not going to divulge salary information to a third party, nor am I going to offer opinions or judgements. The last two require ME to do work, and sorry, you didn't pay me to answer your questions.
And what's with them doing it in the most obnoxious way possible? I get an email with a word document or HTML file, and they want me to FAX IT BACK?! I didn't bother with the ones who couldn't even be courteous enough to give me a toll free number.
Perhaps those background check companies need to look at themselves first and realize that the people they're checking are busy folks too, and if they want answers, making it as frictionless as possible to answer would go a long way to getting better responses. Hell, mail me a letter, enclose a $5 gift card, and I'll be more than happy to spend 10 minutes doing your thing. And if you're doing that, SASE please, so all I have to do is drop it in the mailbox.
Show you did some effort (even if it was Bob in the mailroom whose job is to take a printout of your forms, stuff in a gift card and a return envelope into a bigger envelope, and drop it in the mailbox).
The same way other companies like "expert sex change" (.com, if you must) used to show up in the rankings, but if you go there, you see paywall after paywall.
Basically the sites look for the Googlebot user-agent and adjust their results slightly - by exposing the entire content of the page. So all of it is nicely indexed by Google, and when you search, they show up. But the answer (which Google got to see) is hidden away through logins because you're not Google.
You used to be able to see it through the cache links, and I think Google is actually cracking down on people who try to SEO by targeting the bot (you don't see expert sex change on the list anymore).
But sites like CRC did the same - if you were Google, you got more access. You might want to try browsing the web as Googlebot...
I'd say the competitor has poor marketing.
With that "pregnant woman" setting, I'd go and say "My router is much safer than theirs. Theirs emits dangerous wifi - so dangerous they have to put in a pregnant woman setting to prevent their wifi from hurting your unborn child. Our wifi doesn't need that setting as it's inherently safer and won't hurt your unborn child!"
After all, it can go either way - either admit their setting is better. or trash their setting as evidence they need it, while yours doesn't.
In fact, I can imagine a reason why people would bring their drone into a wildfire - cool video shoot.
Sadly, it appears taking shots of things from new and unusual angles to get the view on YouTube seems to be the order of the day.
I mean, when you can bring your drone over a wildfire to get cool video of that fire burning down someone's house, that'll bring the clicks and the money.
And you know YouTube pays people too much when they can destroy a $10,000 Apple Watch Edition and pay for it from the YouTube proceeds.
So yeah, catch a wildfire from a cool angle burning up someone's prized possession, make serious cash, who cares if you're putting people's property or lives in danger. Just the YouTube clicks matter.
And there are many valid uses of DHCP where IPv6 doesn't exist, or is insufficient. RA and RADNS works for the most basic case, but enterprise needs are far more varied.
I mean, think desktop management - it's not unusual to have DHCP right now give the PC an IP and boot it off the network (DHCP options for boot-server and boot-file) - otherwise known as PXE, as well as in an OS environment for the OS to pick up which is the authentication server it should use (LDAP, Active Directory, etc) and so on.
I suppose IPv6's way is to have those services announce themselves over the network, but then it becomes limited to a network segment and you start filling the network up with broadcasts. Plus, it's a lot harder to manage - for example, you can give someone a new PC by noting its MAC address and the OS install/download/etc happen automatically by plugging it in and booting it up. to that configuration.
That mean contracting's not for you. First off, you need better negotiation skills. And potentially sales skills because you're supposed to negotiate all those things in your contract.
Your hourly rate should include extra money to pay for your benefits and your taxes that the employer would've paid. And the contract is for a definite period of time - it cannot be indefinite (or you and your company run a real risk of being reclassified as employee), so add in a holiday bonus to the rate. If you make $30/hr as a FT employee, you had better be charging out $50+ as contractor to cover extra expenses, vacation, PTO, etc.
Your contract should also include termination clauses - penalties paid if terminated early. If you're good, you can get it so you get full payment for rest of the contract, if not, you can make it so you get 30 days.
And while you're drafting your contract, add in IP provisions because it's appropriate.
Yes, contractors suck, especially if you lack the skills to sell yourself. Yes, if your company is switching you, it sucks and you will probably agree to something just for stability, which is the wrong thing to do. Or at the very least, make it a super-short 30 day contract so your exploitation period is short while you regroup and negotiate better terms. At the same time, use that time to look for another job - because either way, you're free to do so. As a contractor, the company cannot limit you from checking out other prospects or even doing multiple jobs.
My hard drive failures generally tend to be unrecoverable - sure I might be able to get pieces of data, but once they go, it's generally gone. SSDs just up and dying is no real biggie (backups!).
I suppose the real sad thing is that Microsoft had one of the best backup solutions for networked Windows computers, especially in a home/SOHO setting. Windows Home Server had a stupidly simple to use backup system - it worked at a file and image level so if you were upgrading or restoring, you popped in the boot DVD, booted the PC with the new hard drive off it, logged into your WHS, and clicked "restore". Couple of hours later and your PC is up and running.
And it backed up all PCs nightly - woke them up, did the backup, put them back to sleep. Plus all your usual de-duplicating and other things. And in the few cases where a PC needs drivers, the backup created a driver folder you can view on another PC, copy those to a thumb drive, and when the boot DVD prompted, you stuck those in and it loaded them.
it was also stupidly simple to use - install the Windows Home Server connector, add it to the backup rotation and done.
You might think you don't, but you actually do. Even if you're not aware of it.
Sound is actually a critical part of a motion picture - more so than the picture itself! Many studies have been conducted (and you can do it yourself, too) - with the sound muted (turn on subtitles), you'll find the movie is actually lacking. Reverse it - with the picture off and the sound on, and it doesn't matter - you get the full range of emotions and environment that the director was trying to create, even though you're not actually seeing the images. That's how important sound is.
Even before the era of talkies where you had a gramophone or piano player, they were doing the same thing - to provide context and emphasis for the images.
And the movie's score plays a VERY important role in emotional development - it's not just putting some music to fill in some gaps, but the right choice of instruments, tempo and cues adds excitement to action sequences, suspense during sneak scenes, sorrow or sadness during bad events, etc.
If you have a movie that is particularly moving, try watching it without sound and you'll wonder what the big deal was.
Oh and yes, the music is intended to be background music - you're not supposed to notice it unless the director really has a lull in the dialog or effects or is doing a hero sequence. That's what makes it even more powerful.
If you have a particularly good ear, and given modern movies typically follow a standard three-act structure, pay attention to the hero theme - first when it plays out at the beginning ("everything's going great!"), then see how it evolves in the second act (hero is challenged) and third act (hero is wounded and must somehow overcome). And finally after the denouement, hear the theme again (hero succeeds).
It's somewhat ironic, that in a motion picture, sound is probably the most important aspect of it, not the picture.
Actually, the real reason it's "not profitable" is because of cost externalization.
If I burn toxic chemicals and release it into the atmosphere, it costs me very little. it costs society a lot (increased health care for those downwind, etc).
And that's why it's "not profitable". We haven't costed out a lot of things - it's still cheaper to pollute than to control pollution.
Rarely is stuff truly "free" - it just means it isn't priced right. Spewing toxic chemicals in the air is effectively free, because the only people who pay are those downwind.
Actually, software maintenance is a thing - software needs to be maintained just like a gearbox or an engine or a nuclear reactor. Here they're paying Microsoft to maintain it - effectively Microsoft is a contractor.
And it makes sense too - even in an embedded system, isolated from the internet, there's still opportunities for infection (you still need to get data into and out of the system, and USB keys are stupidly easy ways to update core components.
Heck, infected USB keys was one way the USAF got their drone consoles infected - mission waypoints etc., were stored on USB keys and copied to the consoles (beats hand-entering the data!), and well, there you go.
As for why Windows, well, if someone writes a really specialized piece of software, and you use it, you pretty much are stuck with what OS they use. It doesn't have to be custom development, just a piece of really niche software that you need.
And don't forget your local food bank. Those you can help either by giving them cash (they normally have enough leverage that $1 in donations can buy at least $2 worth of food), or by buying stuff they're constantly in need of (it's not just canned goods, but stuff like fresh produce) and donating it.
Food banks are a lifeline - many users are just on the edge - food, rent, or utiltiies. No one goes to a food bank unless they really have to, and users are limited in selection to what was donated. There's typically plenty of canned goods, but lesser amounts of fresh produce. Even "fancy" foods are well appreciated by users.
And they need volunteers - when you meet the people who use them, you'll see how normal most are - they just happened to fall on hard times. but they're generally otherwise normal families/
Not correct. Qualcomm has plenty of support companies who will gladly do smaller quantities. Sure you won't get the personalized support that Samsung and all the other big guys get, but they have access to the same resources - basically these companies aggregate a bunch of smaller companies into a bigger one, plus handling all the common questions because everyone asks them.
In fact, all you have to do is ask Qualcomm and they'll hand you the contact information for a company that'll help you out.
The reason for this was Qualcomm saw what happened to nVidia - back when Tegra was the SoC - nVidia was not talking to anyone moving less than 1M units. Qualcomm took over and they notice there's a lot of interest in their chips, but they know they can't support every company who only wants to do 1K, 10K, 100K units. So Qualcomm basically create a bunch of platforms to satisfy these smaller requests, and contracts companies to support them. (These SoCs demand high-precision PCBs which are costly to make, tricky to design, and take a LONG time to manufacture, so Qualcomm designs modules which adapts the complex PCBs to a simpler edge connector or board-to-board connector).
Sony wants you to buy it again. The number of re-releases this generation is staggering - there's plenty of PS3 games being remade for PS4, a few Xbox360 games remade for Xbone (a few, not as many as Sony it seems).
As for Microsoft? They're behind, yes, but not hugely behind. And not far enough to be desperate - when you're talking about both shipping tens of millions already, you're not "in trouble". Plus, Microsoft found the new price point where sales have picked up and even exceeded PS4 sales.
All we can say is life is good when both are actually competing with each other.
(By any measure, the Xbone is a success by itself. Just when you compare it against the PS4, it's not as successful).
And you can bet Sony is probably trying hard to get PS3 backwards compatibility going because Microsoft's announced it, and Sony's game schedule is starting to look skimpy because Sony's E3 presentation was more about games "in the future", while Microsoft's was "this year or next".
You know, political parties have the campaigning down pat. They don't rely on public polls for their information and policy positions. They have, through decades of research and analysis, figured out who generally votes for them, and who is in their target demographic they need to convince.
Using that local knowledge Is what gets them ahead - not some political poll run by calling up a bunch of people who aren't controlled.
For example - some political parties ignore public polls altogether because the weighting of the public is skewed. If your party skews towards the middle age and older folks, then issues that affect young people are not ones that concern you. And if the poll was done at the local university? Doesn't matter if you scored only 8% and your opponent 90%. If you know that of that group of people, only 10% actually vote, you ignore them. The time and money can be better spent getting at the 30% undecided in the group that do vote. (See: Elections in Canada where the "popular vote" was nowhere near the actual vote - often because the polls used inaccurate weightings and other errors.)
Political parties know their demographics, they know who votes for them, who's likely to vote for them, and who are the people who actually get out and vote.