They screwed up, yes, but if they would be "punished as criminal and in an extremely harsh and public way" nobody would ever do anything useful anymore. The problems leading to this crash have to be analyzed and understood and then they have to make sure that the same thing can't happen again.
You know, when an accident happens, the safety board (NTSB, TSB, BEA, etc) interviews are actually privileged information. As in, if you're being interviewed by the safety board, anything you say cannot be used as evidence against you.
It's a privilege that the safety boards all fight for.
The reason for this is the safety board's goal is to not find fault, but to find solutions to preventing it from happening again. Doesn't matter if someone hit a button that said "Crash this plane" and pushed it on purpose. They know that if the interviews were not privileged communications, no one would speak to them for fear of self-incrimination. And when that happens, everyone clams up, and you can't figure out why an accident happened or make recommendations to prevent the issue the next time it happens.
This is especially more so when most complex accidents are a chain of events - this happened, then that happened, then this next thing, plus X, Y and Z and if any of them didn't occur, the accident wouldn't have happened. Almost never is it the result of one definitive action.
Never back up what you can trivially reinstall. Many computers would benefit from a fresh load anyway. As long as you keep all your data in one place, and then back that place up, life is good. With that said, I wouldn't want to fresh-reinstall all those Windows boxes either... so I have saved templates for most of the various Windows I have licenses for. Obviously I don't have a Vista, Win95, or WinME VM.
Even if you can trivially reinstall them, it's usually faster to just go from a broken state to a running state by restoring a backup of everything including the OS. At least it'll get you to the state where you were running.
Yes, reinstalls are good, but having a backup of the old install is also handy perhaps to figure out why something in the new install doesn't work like it did on the old.
Computer Science is the study of computation. Computer programming is engineering, not science. I don't know what it's like today, but when I was in college most of the Computer Scientists could barely program at all, and in general looked down on programming as a kind of crude, dirty manual labor.
No, computer programming is a trade. Like plumber, or electrician. You go to a trade school and they'll teach you Java or C++ or whatever in a semester.
Computer engineering is the application of computers to solve problems - usually it refers to the field involving both hardware and software (e.g., embedded systems). Software engineering applies computer science and encompasses system architecture, design and integration. There is a lot of overlap between computer engineering and software engineering. Coding is required, but not in any specific language since it varies. Computer engineers may require assembly, C, C++ and other languages, while software engineers may also involve scripting and higher level languages, database design, etc.
Programmer aka codemonkey is a trade job. There are plenty of those people who will take your spec and write code for you. Engineers will take your requirements, and translate and design the system and give you specs you can give the programmers to write. And scientists generate the tools the engineers need in order to translate what people want to physical reality.
I'm assuming that there would also be the latency between the end user and the ground antennae using terrestrial copper and fiber, otherwise this would be a mostly one-way internet. I doubt the individual would have the power to upload a fast stream directly to the satellite.
There are two way satellite internet systems.
The thing is, a lot of things people do aren't latency dependent. Sure it takes a little while to start up, but once you've got it established, you can get really good bandwidth (satellite are high-bandwidth, high latency).
Sure you won't game on satellite internet, but you can quite acceptably stream your TV (Netflix, etc) watch videos, and surf the web.
Usually there's a front end at the terrestrial station because TCP/IP doesn't handle a high latency link that well and would unnecessarily throttle the speed.
Gaming and VoIP are out of the picture, but that still leaves a ton of material that is still useful including streaming video and webpages.
Our grid could be protected with reasonable expenditures. We couldn't prevent all damage, but we could limit it. Solid-state electronics have to be protected two ways: overall shielding, and limiting/protection at the I/O points. For example, an old desktop computer in a heavy metal case, with a good ground, probably wouldn't notice the EMP... *except* for induced voltages coming in on the video, mouse and printer cables. Those would probably send the motherboard screaming into the shrubbery.:)
It's the induced voltages that are the main problem, actually.
In a lightning storm, the lightning damage is rarely from a direct strike (there is very little that will survive a direct strike - not even the "lightning rods" on your house - those would vaporize). However, what happens is the lightning strike induces a lot of voltage in AC and other long signal lines (phone, cable, etc) and it's those currents (which are substantial) is what causes all the damage.
Similarly, a CME (coronal mass ejection) which generates all those pretty Northern (and Southern) lights are charged particles, and moving charged particles induce magnetic fields. Those magnetic fields interact with Earth's magnetic field which causes currents to be induced in long distance power lines. it's what took out Quebec in the 1980s - those induced currents caused safety breakers to trip and bring the system offline.
EMPs aren't traditionally referred to on those events though - EMPs are usually caused by local sources - a nuclear bomb, HERF gun, etc, which work on similar principles, but cause damage because they induce currents to flow in electronic devices that burn them out, not via external lines that burn out the interfaces.
As for lightning rods - remember lightning is caused by a build up of static electricity. A lightning rod on your house has a pointed tip whose entire point is to prevent the buildup by equalizing the charges - the tip is pointy which encourages electric charges to flow by concentrating the electric field. The entire point is not to be the item lightning hits, but to prevent lightning by preventing a differential in electric charge from happening.
Or... how about take on the hard job and documenting your job?
Right now, the information to do your job is spread across millions of emails and no matter who your replacement is, it's going to take forever to read it all.
So why not sit down, and write down everything you know. Print it out and if there's email to go along with it, print it out and stick it in the binder with your instructions.
Have it serve as the "owner's manual" for your job. Your replacement will be glad to have such a nice document to get up to speed, and your coworkers who will be shouldering the load will also have a nice reference.
Yes, it's easier to leave a lump of email for the next guy, but you can bet it'll be a jumble of confusion until you actually map out what's going on.
Or you can realize that if the company doesn't care enough to have a replacement hired, or a system in place to store this knowledge... they either don't know or don't care enough to plan for this.
That assumes they aren't trying to hire a replacement. Sometimes someone gives their two weeks, and it can take longer than that to hire a replacement. Heck, it usually takes a couple of months from posting the job offer and leaving it up for a little while, interviews, etc.
I mean, one option is to make it like Europe where people in important positions must give 2-6 months notice, but since I don't think that's possible in the US, 2 weeks is not a lot of time and many companies will not have anyone able to be called up to do a live knowledge transfer.
At a certain point, hand holding your employer through such things isn't really your problem.
True, but there's the concept of not burning bridges. I get the "companies are out to screw you" feeling, but actively trying to screw your old company just ends up screwing your coworkers who may re-appear at some future point in life. If all they remember of you is you left them with a bunch of broken things and a giant FUCK YOU, well, there goes that opportunity.
Yes, it's highly unfair that employers can screw you over, while your options for retaliation are limited, at least if you intend to either continue working in the same industry or in the same area. Life is horrendously unfair, but while those 10 seconds of screwing over everyone feel good, it can be dangerous down the road.
Most larger install bases have extended post EOL support though I'm unsure if 2003 will receive this extended support.
Yes, it will.
Remember, July 2015 is when extended (security only) FREE support ends. For Microsoft, there are two dates - the first date is when feature support ends (no more new features will be added to the OS) - OSes like Vista and even 7 have already past this date or are approaching the date rapidly. Beyond that, is another period called extended support, where the OS only receives security updates, no more feature updates.
But this is the free support - Microsoft is more than happy to accept your money for paid incident support and those people will continue to get security updates and all that for their installations. Remember a bunch of places got extended XP support by paying for it for an extra year.
If you're willing to pay, Microsoft is willing to support you.
Sounds like a god damn brilliant plan to me. Triple the cost of electricity and then no one will want to buy an Electric Vehicle or use it for anything else.
Except gasoline/diesel is much more expensive in Europe (take your per-gallon price, change the currency symbol to Euro, and change "gallon" to "litre" and you'll get the idea of prices).
Basically, an EV went from a "you're an idiot not to" to "damn, where am I gonna stuff all the money I'm saving".
Re:Does El Capitan Fix Major Problems?
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WWDC 2015 Roundup
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· Score: 2, Insightful
-Can we have an OS that doesn't feel like it is from the early 90s?
You can blame the "journalists" for that one.
Basically the big reason why iOS made the change to flatness and why flatness is the new hotness is because some very big loudmouths started saying they hated the way everything looked the same as it did before.
I believe the term bandied about was "stale". As in "iOS6 - the same old iOS that looks the same as it did since 2007. Stale, compared to the flashy updates to the UI Android makes, or the radical flatness of Windows phone". Ditto OS X.
Of course, everyone who's ever worked in UI knows people like UIs to, well, not change - that some menu option will always be located in the same place, that things generally look the same. If there's a change, there had better be a damn good reason for the change.
TL; DR: Some loudmouth bloggers, journalists, etc., hated the way things looked the same and called it stale and needed refreshing. Apple obliged and the "new UI" was adored by said loudmouths. And hated by everyone else didn't think it was stale, but functional.
Make life harder for advertisers and the MAFIAA and the like.
First off, IPv4+NAT squashes all computers down to 1 IP address that short of actual packet analysis is hard to figure out who is who, so now to track a computer across the internet requires the use of a lot of things - cookies, super cookies, browser fingerprinting, etc. With IPv6, within a localized time period, I can be confident that if the IP address matches up, it's the same computer (and likely, same user). Doesn't matter if your privacy thing changes the IP daily - within a period of time I can correlate logs between sites to figure where you've been. And if you log into any site, like say Google, it doesn't matter how often your IP changes - I can now correlate site history across many days.
IPv6 should be a golden time for marketers because it makes their lives much easier in following people around. And it doesn't have to happen live, you can take webserver logs and correlate the movements of a user or a PC.
The MAFIAA would also love this because while 1 IPv4 address doesn't reveal one user (there can be many people behind 1 IPv4 address), 1 IPv6 address can pretty much reveal one computer. And there is often a higher correlation between users and computers than there are being users and individual IP addresses. I mean, one IPv4 address doesn't tell you much other than someone using something decided to do some piracy. With IPv6, that something can be narrowed down to one computer within a household, and analysis of that computer can often reveal who the culprit is as very few PCs in a household are shared. (Though, thanks to Apple, one PC per family member is less likely to be the norm, but there are still enough PCs that often one person is the sole user). Heck, combine it with the tracking and you may be almost definitely pin it on someone. There goes the IP address is not a person defense.
Now, you'd think those two "benefits" would be why Google, Facebook, advertisers, and the content industry would be pushing heavily for IPv6 adoption...
NAT has no security benefits. NAT's sole purpose is address scarcity. Firewalls are for firewalling. NAT is for breaking the pre-IPv6 internet out of necessity.
NAT is also useful for isolating the inside from the outside. Perhaps you don't remember in the pre-NAT days when everything had their own IP. Then it came time to renumber the network because the IP address range changed, resulting in every machine being renumbered. Sure you had DHCP/BootP to autoconfigure the systems, but when you've been used to typing 192.168.10.101 for the printer, now having to type 172.16.38.212 is a serious PITA.
With NAT, the printer can always be 192.168.10.101. It doesn't matter if upstream the IP forces a network renumber - the NAT gateway handles it all.
IPv6's solution is link-local addresses, but those are non-routable for obvious reasons. You could assign a whole range of private IPv6 addrsses but now that just seems to be making work.
So NAPT lets me not care about my prefix (and I can guarantee 99% of SOHO users don't care about any benefits of IPv6). It can even do IPv4/v6 translations (the "p" stands for protocol). I say without NAPT, you're going to get a LOT of calls from parents asking "I used to type 11:22:33::FF, but that doesn't work anymore. What idiot makes me type 36:1A:4D::33? Who thought that was a good idea?"
I am really, really surprised that they chose to tell us any of this honestly, unless they announced this to try to stem the flow of marketing from ISIS toward young impressionable Muslims by making the social media aspect seem particularly dangerous. If the rank-and-file can't publish their experiences without being blown up, the rank-and-file might stop trying to encourage others to join. That leaves the older people at the top to try to make such decisions, and they might not be as good at convincing the young to join them.
It's young and impressionable, actually. You don't have to be muslim to fall for their marketing - it's really quite slick and makes it almost seem like a vacation.
And yes, it's probably why they revealed it.- and there's probably a ton more going on. What they usually do is have some slick YouTube videos with some link, then a guy will call you over Skype a while later with instructions on how to get to Syria and the wonderful life you're going to have.
If you have friends, the first few weeks there WILL be as they advertise so you can try to get your friends to come over too. Word of mouth recruitment is one of the keys to which ISIL gets people to join them. Because if you're a college student, and your friend suddenly sends you a link showing you how wonderful life is over there, and you've just spent the last 12 hours cramming for an exam, well, the "freedom" sounds very appealing.
ISIL knows how to work social media and is winning the online propaganda war. Hell, they're probably actively censoring images that try to show what life is really like (hint: it's as you think), because that would hurt recruitment.
FTFS: "prices for consumers have dropped to an average of $91.55 for a 128GB SSD and $164.34 for a 256GB SSD"
Perhaps I'm missing something, but why would an additional 256 GB flash cost $300 and an additional 768 GB cost $800 when you buy a 15" MacBook Pro? Or perhaps there's a boardroom in Cupertino where they're laughing and shoveling money the whole day:D
Well, the MacBook Pro doesn't use SATA SSDs, because SATA is bottlenecking SSD performance. SATA3 SSDs are only getting 540MB/sec - a really magic figure because every SATA SSD is hitting it these days. They're basically at the point where there's so much excess performance in an SSD that you can cut back on stuff like capacitors and use performance killing modes to operate safely without them.
The SSD in the MacBook Pro is hitting speeds of 2GB/sec reads (nearly 4 times SATA) and 1.5GB/sec writes (nearly 3 times SATA).
So part of the justification is well, you're getting really freaking fast SSDs. I think they actually tried it - copying an 8GB video file from that SSD to itself took around 15 seconds (which included all the filesystem overhead). That';s 4 seconds to read, 6 seconds to write, and 5 seconds for the OS to mess about or inefficiency in its buffers or whatever.
We Europeans are often curious why you Americans do not appear to do anything about NSA, even if it presents a significant problem?
The problem is that surveillance is profitable.
There is NO government in the world that doesn't spy, none at all. Because ones that spy have an inherent advantage over ones that don't. The government can hem and haw over spying over its own citizens, but in the end, spying is beneficial and gives advantage to the country doing the spying.
Scale it down a bit and let's go to industrial espionage - why do countries do it? Because it's beneficial to spy on another country's tech - at the very least you get to figure out if their public face matches their private face (are they a real threat or are they blowing smoke?).
Saying you don't spy is merely a feel-good measure that results in massive disadvantage to you in the world.
What concerns me is when those advertisers are finally forced to start writing them in javascript + Canvas / SVG / WebGL... yes it's possible to write efficient animated HTML5 content, request animation frame etc... but that's not forced, you think advertisers give a shit about that stuff? they will use everything at their disposal once flash is considered completely obsolete. Look forward to unsandboxed memory leaks and poorly optimised animation directly in your page... yay
Well, your browser has direct control of that stuff, so it can easily make it also click-to-play and other things. Heck, the browser can easily see that maybe since the tab is not active, it won't run that crap so the ad is halted.
HTML5 is not evil because it mixes in everything, but it's a good thing that your browser is in charge, not some 3rd party plugin that you can't control. I mean, stuff like tracking cookies done using Flash are much harder for your browser to track and obey user privacy settings with, than something your browser runs directly and can implement the desired user policy.
With third party plugins, you're at the mercy of the third party provider to do stuff. With HTML5, the user (or really the browser) is in charge.
Exactly. The US has a sick and twisted version of capitalism that is poison. It uses laws and government regulations to pick and choose which industries/businesses get favored as opposed to the market. Usually based on how much they donate bribe a congressman/senator or two. It's because if we lived in a truly free market the market may not choose their product.
That's why the food industry resists GMO labeling and fought things like labeling TransFat and the new Added Sugar.
What you say isn't counter to capitalism or the free market. Remember the end goal for a company Is monopoly. The fact that companies are lobbying is a sign there is a free market to spend to buy out government (which is something that should happen in a pure capitalist model - he who has the capital, has the vote).
Regulations are what are supposed to keep the playing field level to allow newcomers to come in, otherwise the old guard will do anything to put them out of business, including such tactics as dumping, mergers and acquisitions and other things.
Microeconomically, the free market and invisible hand works well. Macroeconomically, it doesn't, because there are just some markets where it's not feasible to enter at all and those with the capital know that they can lock up those markets.
Such markets include anything with high capital costs, like semiconductor manufacturing, things geographically spread out, like infrastructure, or things that require purchasing expensive things like transportation. Anytime a newcomer has to interact with the old boy's club means the newcomer is at an automatic disadvantage. And in markets that few can enter, it means the invisible hand doesn't push markets to efficiency, but acts more like a slap to the face.
There is an article over at New Scientist where they power devices with a hardware-modified router that delivers an extra 20 Watts on an unused channel. They claim to get around the FCC's 1 Watt limit by transmitting only a carrier wave.
Is that really how the regulation works? If I don't put any information in the signal, I can use all of the power that I want?
Well, in theory, yes. Because an unmodulated carrier wave has zero bandwidth. The instant you modulate it (with any modulation type - AM, FM, other modes) it takes up a non-zero amount of bandwidth.
AM transmissions are an illustration of this - the standard AM transmitted over MW broadcast, or aircraft is known as double-sideband non-suppressed carrier - the carrier frequency consumes almost 75% of the power in an AM signal not doing anything useful (other than providing a trivially easy signal to lock onto for the tuner, which is why they transmit it). Single-sideband eliminates the carrier (suppressed-carrier) and half of the sideband (either upper or lower, referring to the frequency of the sideband compared to the carrier). This lets you use all the amplifer power for useful modulation, and halves bandwidth, at the expense of more complex receivers (which usually work by regenerating a local carrier and the other sideband, then doing a traditional demodulation).
Of course, it's all theoretical since to generate a perfect zero bandwidth carrier requires generating a perfect sinewave - practically impossible. Any distortions to the sinewave result in sidelobes and now make your signal not zero bandwidth.
My intuition as well. In fact, when looking at discharge curves for alkaline batteries and assume than any reasonable gadget will use them down to something like 1.15V (otherwise it does not work with NiMH accumulators which only have 1.22V when fully charged), I expect that you will get less than an 80% boost. That is a bit different from the claimed 500% to 800% and explains why the battery industry does not care much.
Of course a device with brain-dead power engineering that claims that batteries are dead at 1.4V would get something like an 1000% boost, but such a device is broken by design and also does not work with accumulators in the first place. Also note that if said device is an LED flashlight with step-up regulator (single-cell ones all are), it already does what this thing is claiming to do.
Actually, if you look at battery datasheets, if you cut off at 0.9V per cell, you have basically gotten around 95% of the energy out of it.
The problem is, most devices don't go down to 0.9V - they cut out at 1.1V or higher and you've just thrown away about 50% of the cell. If you cut out higher than that, you're throwing away perfectly good batteries.
So no, this thing doesn't do any magic, other than letting you extract more out of your battery because most devices are pure crap and they cut out way too early. Depending on how crappy the design, it could give you easily double the battery life.
Designing for batteries is hard - even alkalines tend to be 1.5V, then drop to 1.2V within a few % of use, then basically linearly drop from there to 0.8V or so at which point you're at 99% extraction. But that's a huge range of voltages - from 1.5V to 0.9V per cell. If you use two batteries in series and use a LDO to power your 1.8V processor, that LDO will cut out at around 2V or so, or 1V/cell, which still gets you only 75% of capacity or so. Use a lamer LDO and you can easily cut out at 1.1V a cell or more and waste so much battery.
So wait, you're telling us that we can purchase a new Beats Pill XL for $249, then turn around and get $325 electronic trade-in? That's $76 profit!!!
Probably, though word of the recall probably hit the retailers so they won't sell anymore to anyone.
But I believe Apple has to refund the cost to everyone who bought one even if they bought it at the launch price. And the overhead to go and check to see what everyone really paid may outweigh the fact that a few people who bought one yesterday might make a few bucks in profit.
After all, people don't keep receipts so if you're going to have a policy that applies to them, it better be uniform - if people who don't have receipts get $325 and people who do get what they paid, well, if you paid less, you'd "lose" the receipt as well.
And I'm sure the extra money helps Apple maintain their image - if you're going to profit, it's just extra incentive to send in the unit, and well, exploding fire-y things is probably something Apple wants to avoid. If it means paying an extra $75 to people, so be it.
The real question is - was this done by Apple themselves or did the CPSC or other agency demand Apple do it?
Linux is full of aliased options. Can you explain the difference between: cp -r cp -R cp --recursive
There are long options too, with no aliases ls --dereference-command-line-symlink-to-dir
Easy. The difference is you're using GNU.
UNIX traditionally only has short options, which are parsed using getopt(3). GNU adds getopt_long(3) which adds the long options, but I think only to GPL applications because you must link against a GPL library (libiberty?) in order to use them.
Using getopt() to parse your command line is extremely common and makes your utility work just like all the other utilities.
Cut cords all you want. As soon as it starts effecting their bottom line they'll just raise the isp rates to compensate. I can't believe this isn't more obvious to people.
And why do you think Comcast gives you only 250GB a month?
Cable companies know about cord cutting. Networks know about cord cutting (which is why they offer streaming services - because cord cutters using streaming can be forced to watch ads - no DVR-style ad skipping here!). Cable companies just make it harder - by limiting how much you transfer and all that.
And others know there are certain things people just will not time-shift - like sports. And given a lot of services introduce a 1 day delay, they also know if you want to talk about the show on social media, well, you gotta see it live.
Oh, while/. might not do social media, you can bet talking about TV shows is generally a very popular activity on twitter and other services. Enough so that it's almost impossible to not be spoiled.
Technically yes to both. Intel was a major backer of USB (partly why it's so CPU intensive these days - it means Intel gets to sell more CPUs!), and they did Thunderbolt as well.
USB C was something Apple gave the USB folks because they're just disgusted with the crap that is the USB connector and what they did to add USB 3.0 SuperSpeed support. Basic things like a symmetrical cable so you don't have to worry which end goes where, and cables that go in either way so you don't have to examine where in the spin-1/2 cycle the port and plug are in.
Of course, one wonders if Apple didn't push Intel to adopt USB-C for thunderbolt as well...
An article that opened my eyes said that washing laundry with hot water is pointless, modern washing machines with modern washing powder can wash clothes without the need for hot water and many clothes will last longer/fade less when washed cold. (caveat - very dirty / stinky clothes might still need heat).
All the gov't need to do is put a leaflet through everyone's door, informing them of how they could easily cut their fuel bills. Simple solution, why don't they do it?
Because Americans respond poorly to things like that.
Just imagine the last election and all Obama wanted to do was make sure everyone's tires were inflated properly. Just a simple little suggestion, costs basically nothing, yet can improve a car's mileage a few percent. It's a win-win for everyone - car runs better, uses less gas, consumer saves money (uses less gas), and the remedy is so trivially simple it's pretty much free.
There are plenty of tricks like that to save energy (and thus money) that cost almost nothing to implement and do just as good a job as before (washing in cold water being another one).
It just goes against American culture when someone makes a suggestion that pretty much benefits everyone with practically nil downside. Or even worse, thinking it's a mass conspiracy. Or that it's a Right to not do these things - I have a right to have under/over inflated tires! My parents used hot water washes, and I don't care that cold does just as good a job - we always used hot water! Don't know if it's resistance to change, or government is bad, or saving the environment is UnAmerican or what.
And no, none of these things are even as "radical" as switching out incandescent bulbs to something else. There's a pile of simple things people can do that basically are freebies.
Isn't that the opposite of what the phosphors used in a CRT do when hit by electrons? Is it too much to think the reverse is possible?
No, the electrons go through a circuit, which is the entire point.
In a CRT, the output of the flyback transformer is a really high voltage, which connects to the CRT face through a heavily insulated plug. If you take a look at any CRT, there's a thick heavy cable in the middle of the body that runs to the flyback transformer. Inside the CRT, the electron gun is at negative potential and it's slowly accelerated past the deflection coils, then it basically accelerates due to the electric field from the gun to the front of the screen. It hits the phosphor which imparts energy into the phoshor atoms which then do the whole higher-energy state thing and they drop back down to ground state that emits a photon of a specific color.
The electron that hit the phosphor returns back via that nice flyback cable to complete the circuit. Otherwise the screen wouild quickly dim as the phosphor layer takes on a highly negative charge.
Yes, I got the polarities right. Remember electrons flow from negative to positive.
Right there with ya. I'm a software developer and system administrator...It'd probably take me a month or so to read up on malware techniques and come up with a delivery mechanism and a way to do distributed CNC via RSA or PGP key.
Honestly, it's a social skill - it requires communicating the user, or at least knowing what users want.
If you know how to do SEO, the absolutely easiest way to infect someone is offering free downloads of some commercial app. Like Office, Photoshop, even Windows. Or the keygens to it. The most common way is to wrap the keygen with your downloader so the user runs the wrapped app which then silently downloads malware while running the real keygen.
Until Google started censoring the results, you could type an app's name and the first few results would be "cracks" "keygen" "download" and "warez".
Hint: This applies for smartphone apps too. People are cheap. If they can save $1, they'll try.
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You know, when an accident happens, the safety board (NTSB, TSB, BEA, etc) interviews are actually privileged information. As in, if you're being interviewed by the safety board, anything you say cannot be used as evidence against you.
It's a privilege that the safety boards all fight for.
The reason for this is the safety board's goal is to not find fault, but to find solutions to preventing it from happening again. Doesn't matter if someone hit a button that said "Crash this plane" and pushed it on purpose. They know that if the interviews were not privileged communications, no one would speak to them for fear of self-incrimination. And when that happens, everyone clams up, and you can't figure out why an accident happened or make recommendations to prevent the issue the next time it happens.
This is especially more so when most complex accidents are a chain of events - this happened, then that happened, then this next thing, plus X, Y and Z and if any of them didn't occur, the accident wouldn't have happened. Almost never is it the result of one definitive action.
No, computer programming is a trade. Like plumber, or electrician. You go to a trade school and they'll teach you Java or C++ or whatever in a semester.
Computer engineering is the application of computers to solve problems - usually it refers to the field involving both hardware and software (e.g., embedded systems). Software engineering applies computer science and encompasses system architecture, design and integration. There is a lot of overlap between computer engineering and software engineering. Coding is required, but not in any specific language since it varies. Computer engineers may require assembly, C, C++ and other languages, while software engineers may also involve scripting and higher level languages, database design, etc.
Programmer aka codemonkey is a trade job. There are plenty of those people who will take your spec and write code for you. Engineers will take your requirements, and translate and design the system and give you specs you can give the programmers to write. And scientists generate the tools the engineers need in order to translate what people want to physical reality.
There are two way satellite internet systems.
The thing is, a lot of things people do aren't latency dependent. Sure it takes a little while to start up, but once you've got it established, you can get really good bandwidth (satellite are high-bandwidth, high latency).
Sure you won't game on satellite internet, but you can quite acceptably stream your TV (Netflix, etc) watch videos, and surf the web.
Usually there's a front end at the terrestrial station because TCP/IP doesn't handle a high latency link that well and would unnecessarily throttle the speed.
Gaming and VoIP are out of the picture, but that still leaves a ton of material that is still useful including streaming video and webpages.
It's the induced voltages that are the main problem, actually.
In a lightning storm, the lightning damage is rarely from a direct strike (there is very little that will survive a direct strike - not even the "lightning rods" on your house - those would vaporize). However, what happens is the lightning strike induces a lot of voltage in AC and other long signal lines (phone, cable, etc) and it's those currents (which are substantial) is what causes all the damage.
Similarly, a CME (coronal mass ejection) which generates all those pretty Northern (and Southern) lights are charged particles, and moving charged particles induce magnetic fields. Those magnetic fields interact with Earth's magnetic field which causes currents to be induced in long distance power lines. it's what took out Quebec in the 1980s - those induced currents caused safety breakers to trip and bring the system offline.
EMPs aren't traditionally referred to on those events though - EMPs are usually caused by local sources - a nuclear bomb, HERF gun, etc, which work on similar principles, but cause damage because they induce currents to flow in electronic devices that burn them out, not via external lines that burn out the interfaces.
As for lightning rods - remember lightning is caused by a build up of static electricity. A lightning rod on your house has a pointed tip whose entire point is to prevent the buildup by equalizing the charges - the tip is pointy which encourages electric charges to flow by concentrating the electric field. The entire point is not to be the item lightning hits, but to prevent lightning by preventing a differential in electric charge from happening.
Or... how about take on the hard job and documenting your job?
Right now, the information to do your job is spread across millions of emails and no matter who your replacement is, it's going to take forever to read it all.
So why not sit down, and write down everything you know. Print it out and if there's email to go along with it, print it out and stick it in the binder with your instructions.
Have it serve as the "owner's manual" for your job. Your replacement will be glad to have such a nice document to get up to speed, and your coworkers who will be shouldering the load will also have a nice reference.
Yes, it's easier to leave a lump of email for the next guy, but you can bet it'll be a jumble of confusion until you actually map out what's going on.
That assumes they aren't trying to hire a replacement. Sometimes someone gives their two weeks, and it can take longer than that to hire a replacement. Heck, it usually takes a couple of months from posting the job offer and leaving it up for a little while, interviews, etc.
I mean, one option is to make it like Europe where people in important positions must give 2-6 months notice, but since I don't think that's possible in the US, 2 weeks is not a lot of time and many companies will not have anyone able to be called up to do a live knowledge transfer.
True, but there's the concept of not burning bridges. I get the "companies are out to screw you" feeling, but actively trying to screw your old company just ends up screwing your coworkers who may re-appear at some future point in life. If all they remember of you is you left them with a bunch of broken things and a giant FUCK YOU, well, there goes that opportunity.
Yes, it's highly unfair that employers can screw you over, while your options for retaliation are limited, at least if you intend to either continue working in the same industry or in the same area. Life is horrendously unfair, but while those 10 seconds of screwing over everyone feel good, it can be dangerous down the road.
Yes, it will.
Remember, July 2015 is when extended (security only) FREE support ends. For Microsoft, there are two dates - the first date is when feature support ends (no more new features will be added to the OS) - OSes like Vista and even 7 have already past this date or are approaching the date rapidly. Beyond that, is another period called extended support, where the OS only receives security updates, no more feature updates.
But this is the free support - Microsoft is more than happy to accept your money for paid incident support and those people will continue to get security updates and all that for their installations. Remember a bunch of places got extended XP support by paying for it for an extra year.
If you're willing to pay, Microsoft is willing to support you.
$0.3625/ KWH
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Sounds like a god damn brilliant plan to me. Triple the cost of electricity and then no one will want to buy an Electric Vehicle or use it for anything else.
Except gasoline/diesel is much more expensive in Europe (take your per-gallon price, change the currency symbol to Euro, and change "gallon" to "litre" and you'll get the idea of prices).
Basically, an EV went from a "you're an idiot not to" to "damn, where am I gonna stuff all the money I'm saving".
You can blame the "journalists" for that one.
Basically the big reason why iOS made the change to flatness and why flatness is the new hotness is because some very big loudmouths started saying they hated the way everything looked the same as it did before.
I believe the term bandied about was "stale". As in "iOS6 - the same old iOS that looks the same as it did since 2007. Stale, compared to the flashy updates to the UI Android makes, or the radical flatness of Windows phone". Ditto OS X.
Of course, everyone who's ever worked in UI knows people like UIs to, well, not change - that some menu option will always be located in the same place, that things generally look the same. If there's a change, there had better be a damn good reason for the change.
TL; DR: Some loudmouth bloggers, journalists, etc., hated the way things looked the same and called it stale and needed refreshing. Apple obliged and the "new UI" was adored by said loudmouths. And hated by everyone else didn't think it was stale, but functional.
NAT is also useful for isolating the inside from the outside. Perhaps you don't remember in the pre-NAT days when everything had their own IP. Then it came time to renumber the network because the IP address range changed, resulting in every machine being renumbered. Sure you had DHCP/BootP to autoconfigure the systems, but when you've been used to typing 192.168.10.101 for the printer, now having to type 172.16.38.212 is a serious PITA.
With NAT, the printer can always be 192.168.10.101. It doesn't matter if upstream the IP forces a network renumber - the NAT gateway handles it all.
IPv6's solution is link-local addresses, but those are non-routable for obvious reasons. You could assign a whole range of private IPv6 addrsses but now that just seems to be making work.
So NAPT lets me not care about my prefix (and I can guarantee 99% of SOHO users don't care about any benefits of IPv6). It can even do IPv4/v6 translations (the "p" stands for protocol). I say without NAPT, you're going to get a LOT of calls from parents asking "I used to type 11:22:33::FF, but that doesn't work anymore. What idiot makes me type 36:1A:4D::33? Who thought that was a good idea?"
It's young and impressionable, actually. You don't have to be muslim to fall for their marketing - it's really quite slick and makes it almost seem like a vacation.
And yes, it's probably why they revealed it.- and there's probably a ton more going on. What they usually do is have some slick YouTube videos with some link, then a guy will call you over Skype a while later with instructions on how to get to Syria and the wonderful life you're going to have.
If you have friends, the first few weeks there WILL be as they advertise so you can try to get your friends to come over too. Word of mouth recruitment is one of the keys to which ISIL gets people to join them. Because if you're a college student, and your friend suddenly sends you a link showing you how wonderful life is over there, and you've just spent the last 12 hours cramming for an exam, well, the "freedom" sounds very appealing.
ISIL knows how to work social media and is winning the online propaganda war. Hell, they're probably actively censoring images that try to show what life is really like (hint: it's as you think), because that would hurt recruitment.
Well, the MacBook Pro doesn't use SATA SSDs, because SATA is bottlenecking SSD performance. SATA3 SSDs are only getting 540MB/sec - a really magic figure because every SATA SSD is hitting it these days. They're basically at the point where there's so much excess performance in an SSD that you can cut back on stuff like capacitors and use performance killing modes to operate safely without them.
The SSD in the MacBook Pro is hitting speeds of 2GB/sec reads (nearly 4 times SATA) and 1.5GB/sec writes (nearly 3 times SATA).
So part of the justification is well, you're getting really freaking fast SSDs. I think they actually tried it - copying an 8GB video file from that SSD to itself took around 15 seconds (which included all the filesystem overhead). That';s 4 seconds to read, 6 seconds to write, and 5 seconds for the OS to mess about or inefficiency in its buffers or whatever.
The problem is that surveillance is profitable.
There is NO government in the world that doesn't spy, none at all. Because ones that spy have an inherent advantage over ones that don't. The government can hem and haw over spying over its own citizens, but in the end, spying is beneficial and gives advantage to the country doing the spying.
Scale it down a bit and let's go to industrial espionage - why do countries do it? Because it's beneficial to spy on another country's tech - at the very least you get to figure out if their public face matches their private face (are they a real threat or are they blowing smoke?).
Saying you don't spy is merely a feel-good measure that results in massive disadvantage to you in the world.
Well, your browser has direct control of that stuff, so it can easily make it also click-to-play and other things. Heck, the browser can easily see that maybe since the tab is not active, it won't run that crap so the ad is halted.
HTML5 is not evil because it mixes in everything, but it's a good thing that your browser is in charge, not some 3rd party plugin that you can't control. I mean, stuff like tracking cookies done using Flash are much harder for your browser to track and obey user privacy settings with, than something your browser runs directly and can implement the desired user policy.
With third party plugins, you're at the mercy of the third party provider to do stuff. With HTML5, the user (or really the browser) is in charge.
What you say isn't counter to capitalism or the free market. Remember the end goal for a company Is monopoly. The fact that companies are lobbying is a sign there is a free market to spend to buy out government (which is something that should happen in a pure capitalist model - he who has the capital, has the vote).
Regulations are what are supposed to keep the playing field level to allow newcomers to come in, otherwise the old guard will do anything to put them out of business, including such tactics as dumping, mergers and acquisitions and other things.
Microeconomically, the free market and invisible hand works well. Macroeconomically, it doesn't, because there are just some markets where it's not feasible to enter at all and those with the capital know that they can lock up those markets.
Such markets include anything with high capital costs, like semiconductor manufacturing, things geographically spread out, like infrastructure, or things that require purchasing expensive things like transportation. Anytime a newcomer has to interact with the old boy's club means the newcomer is at an automatic disadvantage. And in markets that few can enter, it means the invisible hand doesn't push markets to efficiency, but acts more like a slap to the face.
Well, in theory, yes. Because an unmodulated carrier wave has zero bandwidth. The instant you modulate it (with any modulation type - AM, FM, other modes) it takes up a non-zero amount of bandwidth.
AM transmissions are an illustration of this - the standard AM transmitted over MW broadcast, or aircraft is known as double-sideband non-suppressed carrier - the carrier frequency consumes almost 75% of the power in an AM signal not doing anything useful (other than providing a trivially easy signal to lock onto for the tuner, which is why they transmit it). Single-sideband eliminates the carrier (suppressed-carrier) and half of the sideband (either upper or lower, referring to the frequency of the sideband compared to the carrier). This lets you use all the amplifer power for useful modulation, and halves bandwidth, at the expense of more complex receivers (which usually work by regenerating a local carrier and the other sideband, then doing a traditional demodulation).
Of course, it's all theoretical since to generate a perfect zero bandwidth carrier requires generating a perfect sinewave - practically impossible. Any distortions to the sinewave result in sidelobes and now make your signal not zero bandwidth.
Actually, if you look at battery datasheets, if you cut off at 0.9V per cell, you have basically gotten around 95% of the energy out of it.
The problem is, most devices don't go down to 0.9V - they cut out at 1.1V or higher and you've just thrown away about 50% of the cell. If you cut out higher than that, you're throwing away perfectly good batteries.
So no, this thing doesn't do any magic, other than letting you extract more out of your battery because most devices are pure crap and they cut out way too early. Depending on how crappy the design, it could give you easily double the battery life.
Designing for batteries is hard - even alkalines tend to be 1.5V, then drop to 1.2V within a few % of use, then basically linearly drop from there to 0.8V or so at which point you're at 99% extraction. But that's a huge range of voltages - from 1.5V to 0.9V per cell. If you use two batteries in series and use a LDO to power your 1.8V processor, that LDO will cut out at around 2V or so, or 1V/cell, which still gets you only 75% of capacity or so. Use a lamer LDO and you can easily cut out at 1.1V a cell or more and waste so much battery.
Probably, though word of the recall probably hit the retailers so they won't sell anymore to anyone.
But I believe Apple has to refund the cost to everyone who bought one even if they bought it at the launch price. And the overhead to go and check to see what everyone really paid may outweigh the fact that a few people who bought one yesterday might make a few bucks in profit.
After all, people don't keep receipts so if you're going to have a policy that applies to them, it better be uniform - if people who don't have receipts get $325 and people who do get what they paid, well, if you paid less, you'd "lose" the receipt as well.
And I'm sure the extra money helps Apple maintain their image - if you're going to profit, it's just extra incentive to send in the unit, and well, exploding fire-y things is probably something Apple wants to avoid. If it means paying an extra $75 to people, so be it.
The real question is - was this done by Apple themselves or did the CPSC or other agency demand Apple do it?
Easy. The difference is you're using GNU.
UNIX traditionally only has short options, which are parsed using getopt(3). GNU adds getopt_long(3) which adds the long options, but I think only to GPL applications because you must link against a GPL library (libiberty?) in order to use them.
Using getopt() to parse your command line is extremely common and makes your utility work just like all the other utilities.
Using getopt_long() only works if you have GNU.
And why do you think Comcast gives you only 250GB a month?
Cable companies know about cord cutting. Networks know about cord cutting (which is why they offer streaming services - because cord cutters using streaming can be forced to watch ads - no DVR-style ad skipping here!). Cable companies just make it harder - by limiting how much you transfer and all that.
And others know there are certain things people just will not time-shift - like sports. And given a lot of services introduce a 1 day delay, they also know if you want to talk about the show on social media, well, you gotta see it live.
Oh, while /. might not do social media, you can bet talking about TV shows is generally a very popular activity on twitter and other services. Enough so that it's almost impossible to not be spoiled.
Technically yes to both. Intel was a major backer of USB (partly why it's so CPU intensive these days - it means Intel gets to sell more CPUs!), and they did Thunderbolt as well.
USB C was something Apple gave the USB folks because they're just disgusted with the crap that is the USB connector and what they did to add USB 3.0 SuperSpeed support. Basic things like a symmetrical cable so you don't have to worry which end goes where, and cables that go in either way so you don't have to examine where in the spin-1/2 cycle the port and plug are in.
Of course, one wonders if Apple didn't push Intel to adopt USB-C for thunderbolt as well...
Because Americans respond poorly to things like that.
Just imagine the last election and all Obama wanted to do was make sure everyone's tires were inflated properly. Just a simple little suggestion, costs basically nothing, yet can improve a car's mileage a few percent. It's a win-win for everyone - car runs better, uses less gas, consumer saves money (uses less gas), and the remedy is so trivially simple it's pretty much free.
There are plenty of tricks like that to save energy (and thus money) that cost almost nothing to implement and do just as good a job as before (washing in cold water being another one).
It just goes against American culture when someone makes a suggestion that pretty much benefits everyone with practically nil downside. Or even worse, thinking it's a mass conspiracy. Or that it's a Right to not do these things - I have a right to have under/over inflated tires! My parents used hot water washes, and I don't care that cold does just as good a job - we always used hot water! Don't know if it's resistance to change, or government is bad, or saving the environment is UnAmerican or what.
And no, none of these things are even as "radical" as switching out incandescent bulbs to something else. There's a pile of simple things people can do that basically are freebies.
No, the electrons go through a circuit, which is the entire point.
In a CRT, the output of the flyback transformer is a really high voltage, which connects to the CRT face through a heavily insulated plug. If you take a look at any CRT, there's a thick heavy cable in the middle of the body that runs to the flyback transformer. Inside the CRT, the electron gun is at negative potential and it's slowly accelerated past the deflection coils, then it basically accelerates due to the electric field from the gun to the front of the screen. It hits the phosphor which imparts energy into the phoshor atoms which then do the whole higher-energy state thing and they drop back down to ground state that emits a photon of a specific color.
The electron that hit the phosphor returns back via that nice flyback cable to complete the circuit. Otherwise the screen wouild quickly dim as the phosphor layer takes on a highly negative charge.
Yes, I got the polarities right. Remember electrons flow from negative to positive.
Honestly, it's a social skill - it requires communicating the user, or at least knowing what users want.
If you know how to do SEO, the absolutely easiest way to infect someone is offering free downloads of some commercial app. Like Office, Photoshop, even Windows. Or the keygens to it. The most common way is to wrap the keygen with your downloader so the user runs the wrapped app which then silently downloads malware while running the real keygen.
Until Google started censoring the results, you could type an app's name and the first few results would be "cracks" "keygen" "download" and "warez".
Hint: This applies for smartphone apps too. People are cheap. If they can save $1, they'll try.