So in the free trial to promote the service Apple is supposed to pick up all the costs. It seems unfair since the artists since the artists are receiving some benefit of exposure during the trial too. I think it would be fair to have some sort of reduced fees during the trial period to recognize the fact that Apple still has expenses related to providing the service.
I don't like the argument the artists are using that since Apple is using the free period to promote Apple's service then Apple should pay all of the artists fees. There are lots of ways that the artists are getting promoted yet they still expect to get paid for it. How come they never have to make a sacrifice for the sake of promotion? It's always someone else that needs to make the sacrifice and never themselves. Yes, I can understand that there are many struggling artists out there but the ones that are complaining the loudest are those that have the most money. Taylor Swift could easily make do without three month of royalties from streaming from Apples service but she's the one that screamed the loudest. H
Well, that's how the internet and contracts work these days - if you don't like it, make a big stink in public and companies will go rushing to fix it. Customer service by the noisiest and most demanding.
Anyhow, Apple is going to pay per stream, so it's likely they'll give less play to the more expensive artists and more play to the cheaper ones.
And you can bet that 71.5% or 73% is now going to vanish back to industry standard 70%. I don't know how that extra 1.5/3% would have worked out for artists - how long would a subscriber have to be subscribed before that extra money makes a difference, but I assume others have done the calculation.
And don't feel too sorry for Apple - you can bet they're going to use this to pressure those rates downwards - we'll give you more per stream during those 3 months if you give us 69.9%...
No, not everything where men currently dominate. Not mining, not oil rig work, not farming, not anything involving manual or dangerous labour.
Only fields where there's lots of money and\or social status
Actually, women are making inroads into those manual dangerous jobs. Mining, construction, oil rigs. You know they actually DO pay a lot of money! (Think 6 figures, with less than a high school education - those jobs are the last high paying unskilled labour jobs out there).
And people do believe in its growth - enough so that one woman was fed up with the safety gear and started her own company to create a line of female-oriented work wear. You know, like safety coveralls and the like. No, it's not that the stuff fit improperly (well, there were some issues, but nothing that couldn't be worked around), but something a bit more... conventional. Basically if a woman had to use the facilities, it meant they had to doff all their gear first.
And there are plenty of other occupations, like pilots, where there are dedicated groups trying to improve the 5% female pilot ratio. (It's nothing to do with interest because the ratio of girls interested is quite high).
There are biological differences, yes (see working wear for women), but that doesn't mean they aren't rapidly entering those occupations. And hell, girls wanting to be like boys? When I was growing up, they got to be known as tomboys. Not every girl wanted to play with Barbie - plenty wanted to play with cars, transformers, gi joes, and other "boys toys".
I had ordered something over the internet from a company I had previously turned some trade with , and this latest transaction initiated a request for some photo ID to go with the bank card. Or. You can pay with Paypal.
I believe it's statistically safer to use Umbrella Corporations like Amazon and Paypal, than to leave too much info in too many different hands.
This happened to me too - I was about to comply and send off the request when I realized at the last minute that not only was the information "in the clear", but there was no protection of that information at all. I mean, what's the point of SSL and all that when you're just going to email that information in the clear?
Plus, well, most cardholder agreements will shift the liability to you if you intentionally send copies of your card around.
For me, I cancelled the order. I don't know why I didn't just use Paypal in the first place, but no biggie. They lost out anyhow because the first time, they sent me a 10% off coupon. I used that the replacement order so I saved 10% off by not screwing around with companies that may have honest intentions, but go about it the wrong way.
I wonder what happens if they try to do it with Paypal... that could lead to some messy consequences if they held onto the money and refused to ship.
A word of warning for everybody: Neither the new R9 3xx series GPUs nor the Fiji (Fury) parts support HDMI 2.0. That means that you will not be able to output 4k60 pictures to your brand new 4k TV. That's fairly silly for a graphics card that is advertised as making 4k gaming a reality.
Are you sure? Because you only need 10.2Gbps for HDMI 2.0, which is the same bandwidth as HDMI 1.4. It's how current HDMI 2.0 devices support 4k60 right now.
The video card might now have a proper 18Gbps HDMI port, which will also give you 4k60.
Right now, everyone cheats - 4k60 on 10.2Gbps is done using 4:2:0 - practically all 4K60 ready devices on the market today do it. Though full 18Gbps HDMI devices are finally starting to come out (which will give you 4k60 at 4:4:4), but still not common.
Anyhow, I don't think it matters. Work gave me a 4K monitor and I'm doing 4K60 on it with a 7770HD card. Using DisplayPort. Of course I'm not gaming on it, but having all those pixels is nice.
It does. It's actually fully Unicode-compliant. It's just on the input and recently (as of a couple of years ago) the output side passes through a Unicode whitelist.
You see a Unicode codepoint is not necessarily a character.. It can be a character modifier. So you can be handling a string containing multiple codepoints, and yet on screen it only resolves to one character. Some of these include right-to-left overrides (which alter the flow of text on the screen so you can write a string and the display agent will reverse it). There are other modifiers that include flourishes, and Unicode 8 adds "skin type modifiers" as well for emoji. As in, if you display a face, the font should use a "non-human shading" (Apple chose a Simpsons-like yellow, Microsoft chose a pale zombie-ish hue). But with the addition of a skintone/diversity modifier, when combined with the emoji codepoint, can give you a variety of skin tones.
And it's also what screwed up iOS - the string you send is full of modifiers which makes it extremely hard to decide where to break the line. (Arabic is one where there are lots of modifiers because a character can appear differently based on the characters that appear before and after it).
And what does this have to do with/.? Easy - a lot of commenters abused the modifiers to screw with the website. And unless you know how to handle Unicode, it's really hard to properly reset the parser state./. used to be able to display the screwed up the comments - if you Google for the oddball string n"5:erocS" it would show it (because Google ignores modifiers). If you wonder, that's the string "Score:5" as commenters use to fake-moderate their posts. But since/. strips unicode on display now, you get to see the messed up post as it was typed out
To anyone. Certainly not to anyone who's got such varied motives as Apple.
I'm pretty sure they can't - as in if Apple bought them Google would shut it down.
DuckDuckGo is just using Google in the end, after all. And I'm sure Google's agreements with Apple would preclude Apple from starting up a similar service using Google's search results. (Remember, Google still pays Apple a few billion dollars to be the default search engine).
Anyhow, doesn't iOS offer DDG as a search engine option besides Google and Yahoo/Bing?
In short, give up on the idea of there *ever* being a "They've got everything" music site. Anyone who puts up a site of any kind will only have agreements with a subset of publishers. That's just a fact of life.
Especially after the iTunes Music Store debacle that nearly killed the labels.
Basically the music industry was so happy with iTunes that they kept giving it more and more, and then they realized that they were no longer in control - they were Apple's bitch, and Apple knew that, for they kept strongarming the music labels into 99 cent downloads always.
With the iPod being the dominant player, it meant any other DRM store was out of the picture. The only break in Apple's stronghold over them was to offer Amazon the ability to sell DRM-free music, which was the only chink in Apple's armor and the only way Amazon could sell music for iPods.
And with that, Apple wanted to also negotiate DRM-free music, and they industry handed Apple their demands including flexible pricing ($1.29 per track) and other deals Apple had to agree to.
So no, the music industry will never let one music service control them again - they will deliberately make it so no one has everything.
The movie industry learned the same lessons, which is why there will never be a store with it all, either.
Sony probably backed it to give them another edge over the Xbox One.
Not really - FF7 is coming to Xbone and PC as well. And FF7 plain old is coming straight to iOS this year. The FF7 remake for PS4/Xbone/PC? Unnannounced release date.
In fact, the big problem with Sony's E3 announcements Is they're for games so far in the future - even Microsoft's ones are for games to be released in 2015 and 2016 and potentially 2017 at the latest.
I'm suspecting the PS4 grew too big too fast and now Sony's in a bit of a bind because they don't have any more games coming out in the near future - at least big splashy titles. I mean, look at the upcoming PS4 lineup and you see remake after remake - not sequels, remakes. God of War 3, Uncharted 1-3, and a few other games - all of which existed already on previous systems.
Granted, Sony isn't exclusively guilty, even Microsoft did it with the Master Chief collection and several others. But other than that, they didn't seem to announce remakes.
But I wouldn't blame Sony for Square's remakes - those are pure profit. Last year, Squeenix released FFX/X-2 for PS3 and Vita, and this year they released it again for PS4. Then there are plenty of them for iOS as well, all priced extremely high for mobile apps ($15+). And I'm sure the money was good - after Apple threatened to remove a few of the games because it broke under iOS8 (worked on iOS7, crashed on iOS8 and many people were angry that Square was basically saying "don't update your OS - we're not fixing it" that they complained to Apple, and I'm sure Apple threatened removal. A week later, new versions appeared that worked).
How do they verify you're not hijacking a Web site? What if you block HTTPS (there's no https server!) and submit CSR, and it tries to verify a cookie on the associated HTTP site, which you're MITM and so replace by inserting your cookie?
Easy. Let's Encrypt doesn't give you a certificate (at least not easily). What you need to do is to run a daemon on your server. That daemon will connect to Let's Encrypt to request the certificate, and on the server end, they verify the IP the daemon is connecting from matches that of your domain (e.g., if you want www.example.com, the daemon will connect form your http server IP, and the Let's Encrypt server will check that the daemon IP is the same as www.example.com before issuing you a certificate).
From then, if the daemon supports your http server (Apache, Nginx), it will automatically install the certificate and configure your server (or it can be a front end service listening on 443 proxying your server). If it's not supported, then it'll give you a certificate you install manually.
Since the whole process is automated, it very well could issue you only 1 month long certificates since the daemon is supposed to automatically fetch and renew the certificate.
I'd post one, but... most small shop car mechanics are independent contractors. They own their own tools (like Uber drivers own their own cars), they carry their own insurance (like Uber drivers carry their own insurance), they set their own hours (like Uber drivers set their own hours), they can decline a specific job (like Uber drivers can decline a specific job), they can work for other shops (like Uber drivers can work for other car services or elsewhere), and they have a written contract (like Uber drivers have a written contract).
And contractors need to take special precautions as well. Uber basically needs to work out a fixed term contract, then kick the driver off Uber for some time - it must be clearly obvious they are contractors and not employees, and are completely free to pursue other jobs in the meantime.
It's on a per-driver basis, yes, so Uber needs to make sure drivers know they cannot work for Uber for more than X months without taking time off, or finding alternate work (e.g., for Lyft) because they need to show independence from Uber.
This can mean that an Uber driver will sign in to both Uber and Lyft and choose jobs from either - while they are logged into Uber, they cannot be exclusively on "uber-only time" (since Uber doesn't consider them to be working for Uber yet).
As for taxis - remember that taxis often have limitations. E.g., you must be able to offer accessible service - if you don't, then you must arrange for accessible service. So if you're a taxi and a handicapped person hails you, and you're not accessible-equipped, the legislation often says said driver must not only hail an appropriate cab, but ALSO STAY WITH THE FARE until picked up. No "oh I didn't know you were handicapped, see ya sucker" - the driver is forced to stay with the fare until an appropriate ride is available. Plus a whole pile of other anti-discrimination and other laws.
I wouldn't be remotely shocked if the businesses that didn't receive payments still find it reasonable to ascribe late penalties to their customers and say "Hey, it wasn't our fault your payments were late".
You're right, and the question is - why should they? I mean, wouldn't you be pissed off if your workplace couldn't pay you on time because of this? It was their bank being the problem, but your creditors don't care that you didn't get paid today. Etc. etc.
And while credit cards not working or ATMs and such for 3 days may not be a "big issue", for some people, it really is a huge issue. It can mean basically starving if they can't get the money for food that day, or maybe a preauthorized payment suddenly doesn't go through on their credit card.
In the lower rungs of society, bank problems can really be huge issues.
Drones put an extra layer of abstraction between the pilot and murdering they are doing, hence the term "bug splat". It's just an image on a screen, like you see on TV. The high number of civilian casualties attributed to drone strikes is thought to be partially due to this disconnect, where as a pilot sitting in the aircraft in the actual country and seeing live human beings with his own eyes (maybe at the AF base, if not from the air) seems to be more restrained.
More correctly, there's a physicality to being there and experiencing it "live". I mean, people go to concerts, despite being able to just watch a YouTube clip of the same. They go to sporting events with all the overpriced tickets and all that, when they could just save the time and money by watching it on their 60" flat screen TV.
There's a difference to "being there" versus "watching it on TV" The fighter pilot is "there" (even from those isolated away from the action - think stealth bombers and such which base in the US, and fly day-long missions to theatre, drop the bombs, then fly back to the US), while the drone pilot is like the guy watching football on TV.
The other thing is, well, drone pilots are often recruited from the gaming population because well, flying a drone is a lot like playing a video game. The controller might be more advanced (as in military drones, though the lighter weight drones often use standard PlayStation or Xbox controllers). I mean, we argue games like Call of Duty and all that are all fake - you're just killing images on a screen and numbers in some computer. Well a drone is the same - except the people you're potentially killing aren't just pixels on a screen, but real humans. (Another reason why they like gamers - most are able to think that everything on screen is fake and it's not real - when you're killing, dehumanizing the enemy is a very powerful tool that lets a soldier be able to pull the trigger. Likening the pixels generated by Call of Duty or Battlefield to the pixels you see on the drone video monitor makes it much easier.
Watch some videos on the drones sometimes - you'll see it referred to video games a lot. There's a very good reason for that - they want it to be like a video game - you're not killing people, you're killing pixels.
You can reverse-engineer a connector, a case, etc., quite easily, and many people did with the Lightning connector.
However, if you're a case manufacturer, and you want day-1 sales of your product, you sign up for the program and Apple will send you under an NDA engineering drawings so you can base your designs off them, manufacture your product, package it up and ship it to Apple to sell in stores on day 1 of product launch. Apple even has solid aluminum mockups so you can test your product's mechanicals against a representative sample.
And for complex products, like say a dock, you need entry in the program to buy the special parts that let you make your dock - authentication chips, protocols, etc.
And finally, well, if you want your product sold at Apple stores where people are not only going to be buying Apple's products, but yours will be on the shelf for the user to pick from, you need to be a part of the program.
Anyhow, didn't Apple have this problem with Bose at one time too - Bose was suing Beats as well? It resulted in Apple temporarily removing all of Bose's products of shelves, then Apple and Bose came to a settlement and they're back.
TRIM is an optimization that when properly used, can make an SSD faster. Emphasis on can, and properly used. It can also be used to reduce write amplification (the ratio of number of writes to flash over the number of writes the host computer actually did. More later).
You can use an SSD with a non-TRIM aware OS and it will work just fine.
In an SSD, you have pages which are mapped to sectors. As you overwrite a logical sector, the wear levelling algorithm marks the old pages as "dirty" and stores the updated contents in a new page elsewhere in the storage array. If you repeated hammer a sector, that sector's contents will be repeated across the array - there will only be one valid sector, and a bunch of older ones marked as dirty.
Depending on SSD load, a garbage collector may have enough time to run, and it will look at each flash block, move all the pages still valid in it elsewhere, then erase the block and make it ready for use. It's not important this runs as if you issue a write and there's no free blocks, the flash controller will migrate valid sectors elsewhere and erase a block on demand.
Note I said valid sectors - since a modern flash array may have many (128 or more) 512 byte sectors mapped to a block, rarely will all sectors be dirty at once, and long-standing data will often need to be moved elsewhere so a block can be freed up. But moving a sector incurs a write into the array, which means if you wrote the sector once at the beginning, and never touched it again, that sector may be rewritten multiple times throughout the SSD's life - so a 512 byte sector write may incur many megabytes of writes as it's moved throughout the flash array. That is write amplification - you only wrote 512 bytes, but incurred megabytes of wear on the flash. (Ideally you want 1.0 - every sector you write is written to the array exactly once)
Now let's examine what happens with TRIM. When you delete a file, the OS merely updates a few sectors that free up the directory entry and add the disk blocks to the free bitmap. As the OS writes to the drive, the sectors belonging to the deleted file get moved about (the SSD doesn't know which sectors it no longer needs to move around), incurring write amplification and making the SSD a bit slower as it has to move sectors that the OS isn't really using.
That's where TRIM comes in - when you delete a file, TRIM tells the SSD that the sector belongs to a deleted file, and the SSD will treat that sector as empty until the OS writes to it. It will not move the sector elsewhere as the OS said its contents were no longer relevant. This means the SSD won't need to move the contents of a deleted file around, lowering write amplification, as well as saving the need to move that sector, making the SSD faster.
There is nothing in an SSD that requires TRIM - just that TRIM support in an OS and SSD makes storage faster and last longer. Early SSDs lacked TRIM, as did earlier OSes, so you need to be able to treat an SSD like a regular block device.
In fact, in older SSDs, they often got slower as time went on because they were moving around deleted data - the only way to speed them up was to use an ATA_SECURE_ERASE which basically reset the entire array. Nowadays most OSes will do an equivalent TRIM if you delete the partition.
Oh yeah, because of this, SSDs are terrible for forensics...
It's not as if Windows or MacOS has any magic that makes queued TRIM work with non-compliant and poorly-coded hardware, right?
OS X disables TRIM on third-party SSDs by default. On Mavericks and below, there's an app called TRIM Enabler that enables TRIM on third-party SSDs. On Yosemite, kernel signing prevents this from happening, resulting in a really sketchy method to get TRIM operational.
El Capitan is supposed to come with a way to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs, but it requires special modes and using the command line to enable it.
I suppose Windows makes everyone thing TRIM just works, while Apple and Linux have experienced problems which is why TRIM is more problematic.
On Linux, I manually TRIM using fstrim - just put it in your cron.weekly or something.
I understand this controller isn't meant for casual players, but I think this is an example of choosing complexity over usability. If I'm trying to get more gamers to play Xbox One, I would invest in technologies that will allow normal players to enjoy a game as much as pro players rather than invest in technologies that widens the gap between pro players and normal players. There are far more normal gamers than "pro" gamers.
True, but does that mean pro gamers shouldn't have their niche? The controller is $150 - if you're going to invest that much, you're not likely to be a normal user trying to find knockoff third party crappy controllers for $20.
Laptop PCs sell way more than desktops, but does that mean the desktop PC is ancient history? No, just because the public wants laptops doesn't mean there isn't a niche of people who still want to hang onto desktops for a myriad of reasons, and thus there are people who make equipment for desktop PCs.
As long as there is a niche and people in that niche are willing to spend money, there will be people willing to satisfy that niche.
This controller is one of them - no one goes around and says they'll make a controller that costs 250% the price of a normal controller ($60) and that's the way the industry is heading.
I won't buy one (other than maybe as a curiosity), but I know why they might want such fancy complex controls. There's a reason why the shoulder buttons are rigged to be hair triggers and moved to the bottom, for example.
I just wonder how they are going to handle fraud via mail order or where the card isn't present. This will still be an issue.
Same way they always have - CNP transactions cost more and are riskier.
It'll be a cost an internet merchant will have to pay, and there's no way around it. Either the merchant adds friction to the process (some merchants ask you to fax/email a copy of the card which if you look at the cardholder agreement is something you should never, ever, do), or they end up using something like Paypal, or disallow separate billing/shipping addresses or other things.
Just FYI - if a merchant asks you to email/fax them an image of your card, be aware that shifts the liability back onto you if the person at the other end decides to go wild with your card.
Then again, it may just simply be the cost of doing business. It's not like the threat is new or anything - I mean, I don't expect fraudulent e-commerce rates to rise because well, it's always been that way.
1. Try the top 100 common passwords on every user, with a few simple variations. That will net you maybe 50-60% of accounts.
2. Check if any users are also in other, weaker or already cracked databases. Often they will be using the same password, or a simple variation of it. That gets you to maybe 80%.
3. Sort the remaining targets by value. Users with.gov addresses at the top, then email accounts that don't support 2FA. Run more comprehensive dictionary attacks against them. Maybe use Amazon to speed the process up. That will get you to around 90-95%.
You missed one. A modern password cracker now handles variations as part of the attack.
They use mask attacks because most passwords with "numbers and symbols and capitals" don't really add much entropy to test.
For example, lets say the password enforces at least 1 number, and you know the password is lower case. Well, in theory, you'd have to check 36^password_length to brute force, but you may only need to check 26^password_length + 10 passwords. Or less. If you do a dictionary attack, you only have to test 10 times more variations - e.g., if you're testing "apple" as the password, the cracker will test "apple", "apple0", "apple1"... "apple9" and then move on to the next password because most people will do that. A more informed cracker might also try "app1e", "appl3" and "app13".
This remarkably shrinks the keyspace to search down considerably and pretty much renders all the "special symbols, numbers, capitals" moot. If you add a capital, almost always it will be "Apple" and not "aPple" or any other variant.
He's the real man behind apple. After all, he's the creator. Jobs only marketed it. (But he did do that well.)
False, if Jobs and Woz didn't get together, Apple would never have happened. This is really a case where the two together were more than the sum of their parts.
You have to remember Woz was your typical socially awkward geek who worked quietly and did things behind the scenes. When he designed the Apple 1, or rather bits and pieces of it, he was working at HP. He designed the video terminal first just as an exercise (just a bog standard video terminal that got him to play with NTSC signals), then decided to add on a CPU board to give ti "smarts" - so what you had was a standalone computer connected to a video terminal, and there you had the Apple 1. But that's it, Woz was happy to just let it be.
However, given Jobs and Woz's close relationship, Jobs realized what Woz has done and basically realized the potential.of that invention, thus turning this oddball CPU board with video terminal contraption into the Apple 1. Woz then went to HP about commercializing it, and HP rejected it because they feared allowing users to use any old TV would result in all sorts of problems.
Basically you needed the engineering wisdom Woz has, and couple it with the business acuity that Jobs has in order to create a successful company. Heck it was Jobs' idea to sell blue boxes - after he read the article in Esquire. Jobs basically went to Woz and asked him to design a box, and Woz made a clever design and Jobs sold it.
Alone, each wouldn't have accomplished much - Woz would've just been Yet Another Anonymous Engineer with a lot of clever circuits at home collecting dust. Jobs would've just been a dissatisfied manager. But because both got together did they make history together.
I'd rather pay $1 for a good app with no ads than have it free. Go shill your shit somewhere else
And therein lies the problem.
It turns out iOS users don't mind paying for apps, but Android unfortunately through its early part in life pretty much only encouraged free apps - paid apps were second class citizens (they never showed up if users couldn't pay for it, and the early days of Google Wallet meant everyone outside the US. We had an Android app that we developed, but could not buy, which was hilarious when the CEO mentioned we could expensive it).
The business model for iOS is to develop a good app on iOS and just charge for it - if it's a good app, people will pay for it. There are plenty of games on iOS that cost $5 or more.
On Android, however, people won't pay for apps, so your only real way of making money is to make it free and make it up in ads.
it fucks me up all the time. I use a vpn and my endpoint is all over the place. google really throws a hissy fit when I send email from my home (on a vpn) using imap. mostly they grey list me and time me out. if I use my own paid email vendor things are always fine.
That's because you're tripping up the anti-fraud detectors, which also tries to detect illicit logins to your account.
Think of it as a physical check - in 2 hours, could you log into your account from say, New York, then again from San Jose? Short of magical transportation technology, you can't, so one of those logins is fake and perhaps your account should be flagged so you can take countermeasures.
Your VPN is basically defeating one of the major checks to protect your account. If you're fed up with this behavior, I'm sure you can lower the security on your account to disable the check, at the risk of not being able to detect a fraudulent login if it happens.
The same thing applies to financial transactions - the banks have immense systems used to detect potentially fraudulent transactions. You can often see it if you travel abroad and your credit card gets denied (note: the banks normally allow this if they see you paid for travel and have used the card in locations that make sense for travel).
But if it happens ofte, you can also call your bank and tell them to disable that check on your account. It just means having to be a bit more proactive in checking your statements to make sure there aren't fraudulent transactions.
Which person? How can they tell the difference between the person sleeping and...
The other person sleeping next to them? The pet in the room? Curtains, gently blowing in the breeze? The person shifting in their bed? Sounds from heating/cooling coming online and the air shifting around in the room as a result?
First off, sonar can be made discriminatory by simple correllation of the signal. That eliminates noises in the room by default. It's usually a brief chirp, and you only have to sample for a few milliseconds for a response.
Second, we're not talking about a huge range here - someone puts their phone on the table and it really only has to scan up to around 4' (1.2m) for so. Scan any more and you'll have to deal with partners, pets, curtains, and the wall. This also means you can use a softer signal so you don't wake up the user.
Partners, pets, etc aren't an issue when you're dealing with such a short range - you can assume the only hit you'll see is the person you're monitoring - and unless your partner or pet sleeps on top of you (which may explain your apnea problems...), well, it should work for basically anyone who needs it.
And I 'm sure the doctor can ask the patient to not let their pets sleep on top of them, or to activate the unit when night-time bed activities are done.
Uh, no, the whole point is that the service checks for the dependency, and if it's met, then all good, and if it's not met, it requests the dependency to be started.
And let's say something horrendous happened that the service fails to start, but takes absolutely forever to do so.
SysVInit, this init, are single thread init systems. They can't block because they'd block the startup. Your dependent service starting the service continues to block startup. And let's say it only takes a second when it succeeds, but 10 minutes when it fails. If it happens before a chance to get to a prompt (e.g., before networking), it could easily take hours for the system to get to a usable state.
A multithreaded startup would let your script attempt to start up (in fact, your script would point out the dependency, while the init system would handle satisfying them), and block on the failing service, while starting up other services so you have an attempt at fixing the problem.
Pretty much everyone uses Twitch. Unless Google can get support for Twitch removed from a few key games/systems I don't see people switching in large numbers. Would be kind of like dethroning Paypal at this point.
That assumes you don't have any room for improvement.
I know I never watch twitch or other game streaming sites. Why? They're annoying as hell to use - every 30 seconds you get blasted with a 30 second ad at full volume, so you lose 30 seconds of video, etc.
Sure you can install adblockers and such, but it's an added pain. If Google figures out a way to do it without interrupting viewing of the stream, I'd gladly use their service.
Paypal can be dethroned, if you realize what Paypal's business actually is. Which is allowing people to pay one another, especially using credit cards, without a merchant account. So Joe Random with a paypal account can take erratic one-off payments from random people over the Internet. It's irregular, and maybe you do one a year or something, or one a month. Thing is, you can't open a merchant account with business like that - it'll cost you more money (minimum transaction volume fees, etc), and you need an account if you want to take credit cards (especially in e-commerce, where any friction in payment will result in a steep loss in sales). No one's even attempted to try to beat Paypal at this game, which is why everyone is forced to use them.
That's all you need to do - make it a less frustrating experience and people are likely to switch over.
A bespoke system like this is difficult to modify or expand. It could also crap out at any time, leaving them to scramble for a replacement. It makes sense to replace it. It does not make sense to spend $2M to do so. They should track down the ex-student that wrote the original program, and pay him a few $k to port it to a new device. A Raspberry Pi would be a good choice.
That's just a controller. That controller needs to talk to hardware, and 20 year old hardware may be getting quite crufty and in need of replacement or upgrading just to bring it to something we can interface with.
And most of that cost is probably in the installation - you're not just replacing an Amiga, you're replacing the stuff the Amiga controls that talks to the air handling systems, all of which are probably located in weird, long dusty locations covered in 20 years of dust and dirt. At the same time, you probably have to upgrade the wiring as well, and that is probably a good chunk of the cost.
Oh yeah, it probably has to be done in the summer as well, so your installers will be sweating it out installing replacement equipment.
A few Pis, a few sensors, a few relay boards, cheap stuff. but all the installation work and replacement of wiring, etc, probably accounts for the vast majority of the money.
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Well, that's how the internet and contracts work these days - if you don't like it, make a big stink in public and companies will go rushing to fix it. Customer service by the noisiest and most demanding.
Anyhow, Apple is going to pay per stream, so it's likely they'll give less play to the more expensive artists and more play to the cheaper ones.
And you can bet that 71.5% or 73% is now going to vanish back to industry standard 70%. I don't know how that extra 1.5/3% would have worked out for artists - how long would a subscriber have to be subscribed before that extra money makes a difference, but I assume others have done the calculation.
And don't feel too sorry for Apple - you can bet they're going to use this to pressure those rates downwards - we'll give you more per stream during those 3 months if you give us 69.9%...
Actually, women are making inroads into those manual dangerous jobs. Mining, construction, oil rigs. You know they actually DO pay a lot of money! (Think 6 figures, with less than a high school education - those jobs are the last high paying unskilled labour jobs out there).
And people do believe in its growth - enough so that one woman was fed up with the safety gear and started her own company to create a line of female-oriented work wear. You know, like safety coveralls and the like. No, it's not that the stuff fit improperly (well, there were some issues, but nothing that couldn't be worked around), but something a bit more... conventional. Basically if a woman had to use the facilities, it meant they had to doff all their gear first.
And there are plenty of other occupations, like pilots, where there are dedicated groups trying to improve the 5% female pilot ratio. (It's nothing to do with interest because the ratio of girls interested is quite high).
There are biological differences, yes (see working wear for women), but that doesn't mean they aren't rapidly entering those occupations. And hell, girls wanting to be like boys? When I was growing up, they got to be known as tomboys. Not every girl wanted to play with Barbie - plenty wanted to play with cars, transformers, gi joes, and other "boys toys".
This happened to me too - I was about to comply and send off the request when I realized at the last minute that not only was the information "in the clear", but there was no protection of that information at all. I mean, what's the point of SSL and all that when you're just going to email that information in the clear?
Plus, well, most cardholder agreements will shift the liability to you if you intentionally send copies of your card around.
For me, I cancelled the order. I don't know why I didn't just use Paypal in the first place, but no biggie. They lost out anyhow because the first time, they sent me a 10% off coupon. I used that the replacement order so I saved 10% off by not screwing around with companies that may have honest intentions, but go about it the wrong way.
I wonder what happens if they try to do it with Paypal... that could lead to some messy consequences if they held onto the money and refused to ship.
Are you sure? Because you only need 10.2Gbps for HDMI 2.0, which is the same bandwidth as HDMI 1.4. It's how current HDMI 2.0 devices support 4k60 right now.
The video card might now have a proper 18Gbps HDMI port, which will also give you 4k60.
Right now, everyone cheats - 4k60 on 10.2Gbps is done using 4:2:0 - practically all 4K60 ready devices on the market today do it. Though full 18Gbps HDMI devices are finally starting to come out (which will give you 4k60 at 4:4:4), but still not common.
Anyhow, I don't think it matters. Work gave me a 4K monitor and I'm doing 4K60 on it with a 7770HD card. Using DisplayPort. Of course I'm not gaming on it, but having all those pixels is nice.
It does. It's actually fully Unicode-compliant. It's just on the input and recently (as of a couple of years ago) the output side passes through a Unicode whitelist.
You see a Unicode codepoint is not necessarily a character.. It can be a character modifier. So you can be handling a string containing multiple codepoints, and yet on screen it only resolves to one character. Some of these include right-to-left overrides (which alter the flow of text on the screen so you can write a string and the display agent will reverse it). There are other modifiers that include flourishes, and Unicode 8 adds "skin type modifiers" as well for emoji. As in, if you display a face, the font should use a "non-human shading" (Apple chose a Simpsons-like yellow, Microsoft chose a pale zombie-ish hue). But with the addition of a skintone/diversity modifier, when combined with the emoji codepoint, can give you a variety of skin tones.
And it's also what screwed up iOS - the string you send is full of modifiers which makes it extremely hard to decide where to break the line. (Arabic is one where there are lots of modifiers because a character can appear differently based on the characters that appear before and after it).
And what does this have to do with /.? Easy - a lot of commenters abused the modifiers to screw with the website. And unless you know how to handle Unicode, it's really hard to properly reset the parser state. /. used to be able to display the screwed up the comments - if you Google for the oddball string n"5:erocS" it would show it (because Google ignores modifiers). If you wonder, that's the string "Score:5" as commenters use to fake-moderate their posts. But since /. strips unicode on display now, you get to see the messed up post as it was typed out
I'm pretty sure they can't - as in if Apple bought them Google would shut it down.
DuckDuckGo is just using Google in the end, after all. And I'm sure Google's agreements with Apple would preclude Apple from starting up a similar service using Google's search results. (Remember, Google still pays Apple a few billion dollars to be the default search engine).
Anyhow, doesn't iOS offer DDG as a search engine option besides Google and Yahoo/Bing?
Especially after the iTunes Music Store debacle that nearly killed the labels.
Basically the music industry was so happy with iTunes that they kept giving it more and more, and then they realized that they were no longer in control - they were Apple's bitch, and Apple knew that, for they kept strongarming the music labels into 99 cent downloads always.
With the iPod being the dominant player, it meant any other DRM store was out of the picture. The only break in Apple's stronghold over them was to offer Amazon the ability to sell DRM-free music, which was the only chink in Apple's armor and the only way Amazon could sell music for iPods.
And with that, Apple wanted to also negotiate DRM-free music, and they industry handed Apple their demands including flexible pricing ($1.29 per track) and other deals Apple had to agree to.
So no, the music industry will never let one music service control them again - they will deliberately make it so no one has everything.
The movie industry learned the same lessons, which is why there will never be a store with it all, either.
Not really - FF7 is coming to Xbone and PC as well. And FF7 plain old is coming straight to iOS this year. The FF7 remake for PS4/Xbone/PC? Unnannounced release date.
In fact, the big problem with Sony's E3 announcements Is they're for games so far in the future - even Microsoft's ones are for games to be released in 2015 and 2016 and potentially 2017 at the latest.
I'm suspecting the PS4 grew too big too fast and now Sony's in a bit of a bind because they don't have any more games coming out in the near future - at least big splashy titles. I mean, look at the upcoming PS4 lineup and you see remake after remake - not sequels, remakes. God of War 3, Uncharted 1-3, and a few other games - all of which existed already on previous systems.
Granted, Sony isn't exclusively guilty, even Microsoft did it with the Master Chief collection and several others. But other than that, they didn't seem to announce remakes.
But I wouldn't blame Sony for Square's remakes - those are pure profit. Last year, Squeenix released FFX/X-2 for PS3 and Vita, and this year they released it again for PS4. Then there are plenty of them for iOS as well, all priced extremely high for mobile apps ($15+). And I'm sure the money was good - after Apple threatened to remove a few of the games because it broke under iOS8 (worked on iOS7, crashed on iOS8 and many people were angry that Square was basically saying "don't update your OS - we're not fixing it" that they complained to Apple, and I'm sure Apple threatened removal. A week later, new versions appeared that worked).
Easy. Let's Encrypt doesn't give you a certificate (at least not easily). What you need to do is to run a daemon on your server. That daemon will connect to Let's Encrypt to request the certificate, and on the server end, they verify the IP the daemon is connecting from matches that of your domain (e.g., if you want www.example.com, the daemon will connect form your http server IP, and the Let's Encrypt server will check that the daemon IP is the same as www.example.com before issuing you a certificate).
From then, if the daemon supports your http server (Apache, Nginx), it will automatically install the certificate and configure your server (or it can be a front end service listening on 443 proxying your server). If it's not supported, then it'll give you a certificate you install manually.
Since the whole process is automated, it very well could issue you only 1 month long certificates since the daemon is supposed to automatically fetch and renew the certificate.
And contractors need to take special precautions as well. Uber basically needs to work out a fixed term contract, then kick the driver off Uber for some time - it must be clearly obvious they are contractors and not employees, and are completely free to pursue other jobs in the meantime.
It's on a per-driver basis, yes, so Uber needs to make sure drivers know they cannot work for Uber for more than X months without taking time off, or finding alternate work (e.g., for Lyft) because they need to show independence from Uber.
This can mean that an Uber driver will sign in to both Uber and Lyft and choose jobs from either - while they are logged into Uber, they cannot be exclusively on "uber-only time" (since Uber doesn't consider them to be working for Uber yet).
As for taxis - remember that taxis often have limitations. E.g., you must be able to offer accessible service - if you don't, then you must arrange for accessible service. So if you're a taxi and a handicapped person hails you, and you're not accessible-equipped, the legislation often says said driver must not only hail an appropriate cab, but ALSO STAY WITH THE FARE until picked up. No "oh I didn't know you were handicapped, see ya sucker" - the driver is forced to stay with the fare until an appropriate ride is available. Plus a whole pile of other anti-discrimination and other laws.
You're right, and the question is - why should they? I mean, wouldn't you be pissed off if your workplace couldn't pay you on time because of this? It was their bank being the problem, but your creditors don't care that you didn't get paid today. Etc. etc.
And while credit cards not working or ATMs and such for 3 days may not be a "big issue", for some people, it really is a huge issue. It can mean basically starving if they can't get the money for food that day, or maybe a preauthorized payment suddenly doesn't go through on their credit card.
In the lower rungs of society, bank problems can really be huge issues.
More correctly, there's a physicality to being there and experiencing it "live". I mean, people go to concerts, despite being able to just watch a YouTube clip of the same. They go to sporting events with all the overpriced tickets and all that, when they could just save the time and money by watching it on their 60" flat screen TV.
There's a difference to "being there" versus "watching it on TV" The fighter pilot is "there" (even from those isolated away from the action - think stealth bombers and such which base in the US, and fly day-long missions to theatre, drop the bombs, then fly back to the US), while the drone pilot is like the guy watching football on TV.
The other thing is, well, drone pilots are often recruited from the gaming population because well, flying a drone is a lot like playing a video game. The controller might be more advanced (as in military drones, though the lighter weight drones often use standard PlayStation or Xbox controllers). I mean, we argue games like Call of Duty and all that are all fake - you're just killing images on a screen and numbers in some computer. Well a drone is the same - except the people you're potentially killing aren't just pixels on a screen, but real humans. (Another reason why they like gamers - most are able to think that everything on screen is fake and it's not real - when you're killing, dehumanizing the enemy is a very powerful tool that lets a soldier be able to pull the trigger. Likening the pixels generated by Call of Duty or Battlefield to the pixels you see on the drone video monitor makes it much easier.
Watch some videos on the drones sometimes - you'll see it referred to video games a lot. There's a very good reason for that - they want it to be like a video game - you're not killing people, you're killing pixels.
It does if you want access to specs.
You can reverse-engineer a connector, a case, etc., quite easily, and many people did with the Lightning connector.
However, if you're a case manufacturer, and you want day-1 sales of your product, you sign up for the program and Apple will send you under an NDA engineering drawings so you can base your designs off them, manufacture your product, package it up and ship it to Apple to sell in stores on day 1 of product launch. Apple even has solid aluminum mockups so you can test your product's mechanicals against a representative sample.
And for complex products, like say a dock, you need entry in the program to buy the special parts that let you make your dock - authentication chips, protocols, etc.
And finally, well, if you want your product sold at Apple stores where people are not only going to be buying Apple's products, but yours will be on the shelf for the user to pick from, you need to be a part of the program.
Anyhow, didn't Apple have this problem with Bose at one time too - Bose was suing Beats as well? It resulted in Apple temporarily removing all of Bose's products of shelves, then Apple and Bose came to a settlement and they're back.
No, TRIM support doesn't matter to SSDs.
TRIM is an optimization that when properly used, can make an SSD faster. Emphasis on can, and properly used. It can also be used to reduce write amplification (the ratio of number of writes to flash over the number of writes the host computer actually did. More later).
You can use an SSD with a non-TRIM aware OS and it will work just fine.
In an SSD, you have pages which are mapped to sectors. As you overwrite a logical sector, the wear levelling algorithm marks the old pages as "dirty" and stores the updated contents in a new page elsewhere in the storage array. If you repeated hammer a sector, that sector's contents will be repeated across the array - there will only be one valid sector, and a bunch of older ones marked as dirty.
Depending on SSD load, a garbage collector may have enough time to run, and it will look at each flash block, move all the pages still valid in it elsewhere, then erase the block and make it ready for use. It's not important this runs as if you issue a write and there's no free blocks, the flash controller will migrate valid sectors elsewhere and erase a block on demand.
Note I said valid sectors - since a modern flash array may have many (128 or more) 512 byte sectors mapped to a block, rarely will all sectors be dirty at once, and long-standing data will often need to be moved elsewhere so a block can be freed up. But moving a sector incurs a write into the array, which means if you wrote the sector once at the beginning, and never touched it again, that sector may be rewritten multiple times throughout the SSD's life - so a 512 byte sector write may incur many megabytes of writes as it's moved throughout the flash array. That is write amplification - you only wrote 512 bytes, but incurred megabytes of wear on the flash. (Ideally you want 1.0 - every sector you write is written to the array exactly once)
Now let's examine what happens with TRIM. When you delete a file, the OS merely updates a few sectors that free up the directory entry and add the disk blocks to the free bitmap. As the OS writes to the drive, the sectors belonging to the deleted file get moved about (the SSD doesn't know which sectors it no longer needs to move around), incurring write amplification and making the SSD a bit slower as it has to move sectors that the OS isn't really using.
That's where TRIM comes in - when you delete a file, TRIM tells the SSD that the sector belongs to a deleted file, and the SSD will treat that sector as empty until the OS writes to it. It will not move the sector elsewhere as the OS said its contents were no longer relevant. This means the SSD won't need to move the contents of a deleted file around, lowering write amplification, as well as saving the need to move that sector, making the SSD faster.
There is nothing in an SSD that requires TRIM - just that TRIM support in an OS and SSD makes storage faster and last longer. Early SSDs lacked TRIM, as did earlier OSes, so you need to be able to treat an SSD like a regular block device.
In fact, in older SSDs, they often got slower as time went on because they were moving around deleted data - the only way to speed them up was to use an ATA_SECURE_ERASE which basically reset the entire array. Nowadays most OSes will do an equivalent TRIM if you delete the partition.
Oh yeah, because of this, SSDs are terrible for forensics...
OS X disables TRIM on third-party SSDs by default. On Mavericks and below, there's an app called TRIM Enabler that enables TRIM on third-party SSDs. On Yosemite, kernel signing prevents this from happening, resulting in a really sketchy method to get TRIM operational.
El Capitan is supposed to come with a way to enable TRIM on third-party SSDs, but it requires special modes and using the command line to enable it.
I suppose Windows makes everyone thing TRIM just works, while Apple and Linux have experienced problems which is why TRIM is more problematic.
On Linux, I manually TRIM using fstrim - just put it in your cron.weekly or something.
True, but does that mean pro gamers shouldn't have their niche? The controller is $150 - if you're going to invest that much, you're not likely to be a normal user trying to find knockoff third party crappy controllers for $20.
Laptop PCs sell way more than desktops, but does that mean the desktop PC is ancient history? No, just because the public wants laptops doesn't mean there isn't a niche of people who still want to hang onto desktops for a myriad of reasons, and thus there are people who make equipment for desktop PCs.
As long as there is a niche and people in that niche are willing to spend money, there will be people willing to satisfy that niche.
This controller is one of them - no one goes around and says they'll make a controller that costs 250% the price of a normal controller ($60) and that's the way the industry is heading.
I won't buy one (other than maybe as a curiosity), but I know why they might want such fancy complex controls. There's a reason why the shoulder buttons are rigged to be hair triggers and moved to the bottom, for example.
Same way they always have - CNP transactions cost more and are riskier.
It'll be a cost an internet merchant will have to pay, and there's no way around it. Either the merchant adds friction to the process (some merchants ask you to fax/email a copy of the card which if you look at the cardholder agreement is something you should never, ever, do), or they end up using something like Paypal, or disallow separate billing/shipping addresses or other things.
Just FYI - if a merchant asks you to email/fax them an image of your card, be aware that shifts the liability back onto you if the person at the other end decides to go wild with your card.
Then again, it may just simply be the cost of doing business. It's not like the threat is new or anything - I mean, I don't expect fraudulent e-commerce rates to rise because well, it's always been that way.
You missed one. A modern password cracker now handles variations as part of the attack.
They use mask attacks because most passwords with "numbers and symbols and capitals" don't really add much entropy to test.
For example, lets say the password enforces at least 1 number, and you know the password is lower case. Well, in theory, you'd have to check 36^password_length to brute force, but you may only need to check 26^password_length + 10 passwords. Or less. If you do a dictionary attack, you only have to test 10 times more variations - e.g., if you're testing "apple" as the password, the cracker will test "apple", "apple0", "apple1" ... "apple9" and then move on to the next password because most people will do that. A more informed cracker might also try "app1e", "appl3" and "app13".
This remarkably shrinks the keyspace to search down considerably and pretty much renders all the "special symbols, numbers, capitals" moot. If you add a capital, almost always it will be "Apple" and not "aPple" or any other variant.
False, if Jobs and Woz didn't get together, Apple would never have happened. This is really a case where the two together were more than the sum of their parts.
You have to remember Woz was your typical socially awkward geek who worked quietly and did things behind the scenes. When he designed the Apple 1, or rather bits and pieces of it, he was working at HP. He designed the video terminal first just as an exercise (just a bog standard video terminal that got him to play with NTSC signals), then decided to add on a CPU board to give ti "smarts" - so what you had was a standalone computer connected to a video terminal, and there you had the Apple 1. But that's it, Woz was happy to just let it be.
However, given Jobs and Woz's close relationship, Jobs realized what Woz has done and basically realized the potential.of that invention, thus turning this oddball CPU board with video terminal contraption into the Apple 1. Woz then went to HP about commercializing it, and HP rejected it because they feared allowing users to use any old TV would result in all sorts of problems.
Basically you needed the engineering wisdom Woz has, and couple it with the business acuity that Jobs has in order to create a successful company. Heck it was Jobs' idea to sell blue boxes - after he read the article in Esquire. Jobs basically went to Woz and asked him to design a box, and Woz made a clever design and Jobs sold it.
Alone, each wouldn't have accomplished much - Woz would've just been Yet Another Anonymous Engineer with a lot of clever circuits at home collecting dust. Jobs would've just been a dissatisfied manager. But because both got together did they make history together.
And therein lies the problem.
It turns out iOS users don't mind paying for apps, but Android unfortunately through its early part in life pretty much only encouraged free apps - paid apps were second class citizens (they never showed up if users couldn't pay for it, and the early days of Google Wallet meant everyone outside the US. We had an Android app that we developed, but could not buy, which was hilarious when the CEO mentioned we could expensive it).
The business model for iOS is to develop a good app on iOS and just charge for it - if it's a good app, people will pay for it. There are plenty of games on iOS that cost $5 or more.
On Android, however, people won't pay for apps, so your only real way of making money is to make it free and make it up in ads.
That's because you're tripping up the anti-fraud detectors, which also tries to detect illicit logins to your account.
Think of it as a physical check - in 2 hours, could you log into your account from say, New York, then again from San Jose? Short of magical transportation technology, you can't, so one of those logins is fake and perhaps your account should be flagged so you can take countermeasures.
Your VPN is basically defeating one of the major checks to protect your account. If you're fed up with this behavior, I'm sure you can lower the security on your account to disable the check, at the risk of not being able to detect a fraudulent login if it happens.
The same thing applies to financial transactions - the banks have immense systems used to detect potentially fraudulent transactions. You can often see it if you travel abroad and your credit card gets denied (note: the banks normally allow this if they see you paid for travel and have used the card in locations that make sense for travel).
But if it happens ofte, you can also call your bank and tell them to disable that check on your account. It just means having to be a bit more proactive in checking your statements to make sure there aren't fraudulent transactions.
First off, sonar can be made discriminatory by simple correllation of the signal. That eliminates noises in the room by default. It's usually a brief chirp, and you only have to sample for a few milliseconds for a response.
Second, we're not talking about a huge range here - someone puts their phone on the table and it really only has to scan up to around 4' (1.2m) for so. Scan any more and you'll have to deal with partners, pets, curtains, and the wall. This also means you can use a softer signal so you don't wake up the user.
Partners, pets, etc aren't an issue when you're dealing with such a short range - you can assume the only hit you'll see is the person you're monitoring - and unless your partner or pet sleeps on top of you (which may explain your apnea problems...), well, it should work for basically anyone who needs it.
And I 'm sure the doctor can ask the patient to not let their pets sleep on top of them, or to activate the unit when night-time bed activities are done.
And let's say something horrendous happened that the service fails to start, but takes absolutely forever to do so.
SysVInit, this init, are single thread init systems. They can't block because they'd block the startup. Your dependent service starting the service continues to block startup. And let's say it only takes a second when it succeeds, but 10 minutes when it fails. If it happens before a chance to get to a prompt (e.g., before networking), it could easily take hours for the system to get to a usable state.
A multithreaded startup would let your script attempt to start up (in fact, your script would point out the dependency, while the init system would handle satisfying them), and block on the failing service, while starting up other services so you have an attempt at fixing the problem.
That assumes you don't have any room for improvement.
I know I never watch twitch or other game streaming sites. Why? They're annoying as hell to use - every 30 seconds you get blasted with a 30 second ad at full volume, so you lose 30 seconds of video, etc.
Sure you can install adblockers and such, but it's an added pain. If Google figures out a way to do it without interrupting viewing of the stream, I'd gladly use their service.
Paypal can be dethroned, if you realize what Paypal's business actually is. Which is allowing people to pay one another, especially using credit cards, without a merchant account. So Joe Random with a paypal account can take erratic one-off payments from random people over the Internet. It's irregular, and maybe you do one a year or something, or one a month. Thing is, you can't open a merchant account with business like that - it'll cost you more money (minimum transaction volume fees, etc), and you need an account if you want to take credit cards (especially in e-commerce, where any friction in payment will result in a steep loss in sales). No one's even attempted to try to beat Paypal at this game, which is why everyone is forced to use them.
That's all you need to do - make it a less frustrating experience and people are likely to switch over.
That's just a controller. That controller needs to talk to hardware, and 20 year old hardware may be getting quite crufty and in need of replacement or upgrading just to bring it to something we can interface with.
And most of that cost is probably in the installation - you're not just replacing an Amiga, you're replacing the stuff the Amiga controls that talks to the air handling systems, all of which are probably located in weird, long dusty locations covered in 20 years of dust and dirt. At the same time, you probably have to upgrade the wiring as well, and that is probably a good chunk of the cost.
Oh yeah, it probably has to be done in the summer as well, so your installers will be sweating it out installing replacement equipment.
A few Pis, a few sensors, a few relay boards, cheap stuff. but all the installation work and replacement of wiring, etc, probably accounts for the vast majority of the money.