Apollo 13 had plenty of good bits but the invented conflict in the crew showed that Ron Howard is a poor choice for director when you what something to approximate reality instead of being a fantasy.
And you know what? Creative license was taken throughout the movie including the use of composite characters (flight director was not a real person but a composite).
The reason for this is it's a movie based on a real event. It's a movie, not a documentary, so there has to be certain creative license taken in order to produce something that works with the public.
The conflict was invented to help move the action along because otherwise you have a rather boring movie - the trick is to do it in such a way that it's realistic (it COULD happen) and minor (so the people portrayed don't get tarred with that "reality").
Titanic (you know the James Cameron film?) is the same thing - Rosa didn't exist at all, but was a nice plot device to move things along. Again, it was a fictional movie based on a real event, not a documentary.
There are plenty of documentaries on Apollo 13 and Titanic, go see those if you want the facts. The movies themselves help present the stuff in a more entertaining (asses in seats) way but to accomplish it requires taking creative license.
Requiring fees based on the deployment platform used does not constitute "free" software under any open source definition I have ever read.
Eh?
Free software is about freedom, not price. You can sell your Free software based on your deployment platform. In fact, prior to the internet, if you wanted GNU stuff, you paid the FSF $5000 to get tapes with the software you wanted.
If you create something, you can give it for free on Linux, and make Windows and Mac users pay. Of course, you run into the the possibility that some Windows or Mac user might take your free software and build it for Windows and Mac and give it away. Just because you sell it, doesn't mean someone else can't build it and give it away.
The only thing that is not free is if you demand in your license that Linux users get it for free, but Windows and Mac users must pay and no one else may build it for Windows or Linux (since that's a restriction on use).
I'll start taking all this gender equality stuff being reported seriously when I see at least half as many articles complaining about the latter as I see about the former. If one is a "problem", so is the other. Otherwise I'll take it there's an implicit assumption that women like to teach (or are better teachers) than men. And likewise men like STEM (or are better at STEM) than women.
Of course, a problem is males are driven away from pre-school, elementary and middle school - it's not for lack of will, but there's an inherent distrust that a male teacher will rape all the female students that basically scare off the male teachers.
It's not for lack of interest or lack of skills, it's from an environment that basically does not allow men to teach.
And that's potentially the problem in IT - it's not the women are less skilled or less interested, it's that the men are somehow driving them away.
It's not a problem if it's simply "women don't want to be in IT" and the reason is "they're just not interested". That's something we can't change - you can't force girls to be interested in computers if they're not interested.
But if they ARE interested, and something else drives them away that we CAN control, then why don't we? Do we create a hostile atmosphere that makes women uncomfortable? Is there something that we don't do that they want us to do (e.g., shower daily)?
And that's what we really need to research. Perhaps 25% of women in STEM is fine, if 25% of them are interested in STEM fields and the 75% are in other areas, then that's perfect representation. It's a problem if say, 50% of women want to go into STEM and half of hose are somehow driven away from STEM, which means there's a problem we should fix.
Of course, this research is hard, and the answers will upset people - it may upset STEM workers because it can say stuff that they don't want to hear (e.g., "STEM workers are awfully misogynistic and should undergo gender sensitivity training as part of a regular ongoing training program"). Or it may upset women when it turns out they just aren't interested to begin with.
All the interesting intellectual and cultural parts from the book are not present in the adaption. I am thinking, that the adaption goes the "kick the jap and nazi ass..." in the end, and thats no good.
No, you cannot just take a book and translate it directly to TV. Or a video game. Or a movie.
They're all different media, and different media has different requirements, and different ways of presenting.
For example, in a book, you can spend a LOT of time going into lavish detail. You can't do that on TV or movies, because you'd bore the audience. So you basically have to skip all that and just show it and make reference to it, but what took half a chapter is basically over in 10 seconds on screen.
It also applies to things that may take a big set up - like say a car accident. Well geez, on screen that's only a few minute scene in slo-mo, even though that might make up a major plot point. And even details like something flying off the car can be missed in all the action.
I get those from time to time so I accidentally give them the wrong name and address. I wonder who they sent out to the apartment complex.
And why would Amazon do that? This is an Amazon-sponsored, Amazon-paid-for, Amazon-produced, Amazon-distributed show. Amazon owns the bloody thing!
Amazon could easily make it available to anywhere Amazon has a country presence.
I presume Amazon is producing those things for their Prime service, so they'd have exclusivity over the produced materials (otherwise I'm sure Ridley Scott will sell it to Netflix too).
Netflix makes their shows available in all regions since they make the show.
I get those from time to time so I accidentally give them the wrong name and address. I wonder who they sent out to the apartment complex.
Interestingly, most of those calls don't go anywhere. Even though you make an appointment, they often don't show up.
The ones that do, are always in a nondescript van with no business name or anything. That's because they change names basically weekly to keep out of scam lists.
Isn't this already the business model for most "apps" these days?
Only on Android.
If you have an app, on iOS, you'll make more money selling it ad-free outright in the App Store. But on Android, you won't make much if you sell it outright - you're far better off putting ads in the app.
Ad-based apps on Android generate far more money than ad-based apps on iOS. LIkewise, Ad-free paid apps on iOS generate far more money than paid apps on Android. (Usually because the Play Store isn't available everywhere, nor is Google Checkout/Wallet, so if you have a paid app, that pretty much eliminates your app from showing up in half the places Google Play is available).
So no, raping customer information is NOT a standard business model. Especially since on iOS you can restrict access to your contacts, location/photos (which are a location proxy). Hell, you can't even track a user across apps easily anymore.
Proprietary formats can't be universally judged as good or bad. There are plenty of counter-examples in both directions. For example, the lack of DRM in the Atari 2600 killed the videogame industry by allowing a huge flood of low quality games to flood the market, and the presence of DRM in the NES revived it by allowing Nintendo to act as a gatekeeper to stop that from happening.
Or take something like Apple's Lightning port. It was non-standard since everyone else used micro USB, yet it improved on the USB connector in key areas like being able to be plugged in either way, and being more robust.
Enough so that the ideas gained from the lightning connector were incorporated into a new conector
Now, USB is "better" in that it's more "standardized" but you have to realize how standards organizations work - they are composed of members who have many competing agendas, usually wanting to push their patents into the standard, and in the end, the final standard comes down to who scratched more backs during the technical discussions.
Why is USB so CPU intensive? Intel probably wanted it that way to sell more and better CPUs (only intel has the VID 0x8086, being one of the founders). Etc. etc. etc.
And sometimes a company has a hard decision to make - go with a standard, or go proprietary, and going proprietary requires a lot of work and justification on why it's better. Apple couldn't just invent a new connector without giving the users tangible benefits - a connector that goes in either way is definitely one of them and makes it slightly edge out the standard.
Plus, Apple at least had enough pull to be able to swing it and ensure there would be accessories and other things using the new connector.
The main negative is....ebooks... Publishers want to gouge people for having the text of a book read to them, and would rather screw over blind people than permit Apple to read the text of ebooks for no additional charge. Some publishers have some kind of workaround for blind people, so they don't come across as complete douchebags, but the workarounds also tend to be a hassle.
Actually, I haven't heard much brouhaha over using an iPad to read to you - and this was back when the Kindle was being demonized for offering the feature, yet the iPad could do it via accessibility. It isn't the most friendliest of features but you can use VoiceOver with iBooks and have it read aloud any book as part of it.
No, it's not going to be easy since it reads everything else as well, but it comes standard with the iPad.
I guess it's "hard enough" that people don't bother.
I am glad Google is sticking to their policies. 3 months is easily enough time to deploy a fix.
As one of Microsoft's end users, I'd much rather be faced with the quantifiable risk of deploying a patch than the unquantifiable risk that every system I own has been compromised, any data on them exfiltrated or encrypted and used to hold me to ransom, and the possibility that my systems have been used to attack others.
For all we know, Microsoft could be playing a PR game by developing patches and then holding them just past Google's 90 day window. Two in a row now? Seems fishy to me.
Obviously posted by someone who doesn't work in software development, or has to deal with the fact the software needs to work in millions of configurations and with interdependencies.
Plus, the bugs need to be investigated for the root cause. Patching over the flaw doesn't help things since it leaves the vulnerability open. See shellshock - the bug was plastered over the first time and it didn't work, so another patch was released days later with a workaround, but the fundamental problem was still there.
These aren't little toy utilities you write to scratch your itch, these are major millions of line code bases where bugs can be simple errors in code, to complex design bugs. Like say, shellshock (which is a design bug and now you have a problem of how to fix it because people are relying on the faulty behavior). Sure there are tons of automated test suites and they're probably the reason why they had to recall the patch, twice.
As for malfunctioning patches, you'll sing a different tune when you have to go fix dozens of PCs because the patch bluescreens, or you can't install software anymore. Either way, millions of PCs get bricked from a bad update just to meet some company's arbitrary timeline.
And I don't know, those 3+ recalled patches were pretty serious if you were one of the affected people.
This is a situation where the "slippery slope" argument really does apply. If Google is just going to sit on bugs until the vendor patches... they're going to end up with bedsores. And no one likes bedsores.
Instead, they embarass the vendors a couple times, and once heads are pulled out of asses and people realize they're not screwing around, they start taking these things seriously.
You know, Microsoft told Google that yes, it was fixed. But you know what? They found a bug in the fix and they needed more time to fix it.
So what do you want Microsoft to do - release a buggy patch that could kill PCs? Or ask for more time so they could fix it right?
Now, Microsoft had to recall at least 3 patches in 2014 because of various issues. I'm guessing that the 90 day time limit was responsible - Google pressured Microsoft to release patches, and then they were insufficiently tested.
And yes, it can take a LONG time to fix bugs. Especially if they're deep in the system, and the deeper they are, the more testing that has to be done because the likelihood of breaking stuff is bigger. And given PCs come in millions of configurations, testing is hard.
I'm sure the time will come when Google bricks a bunch of phones because they updated Google Play Services because I'm sure Google doesn't test their update against every Android phone out there. Or they force the vendor to fix it.
And yes, for bugs you want it fixed right. I mean, Shellshock took at least 3 different patches. The first patch didn't really work, the second patch was a workaround but still left the vulnerability in - it was just harder to exploit. And the third patch actually went and fixed the issue.
This reminds me of a game from something like 10 years ago that would delete everything from Program Files if you uninstalled it. I can't remember which one that was.
I think World or Warcraft had a bug that deleted boot.ini, which on NT/XP was what the boot loader read to figure out how to boot Windows. (Vista onwards made that file a binary one instead).
End result was a bunch of people had their boot.ini files wiped. XP had a recovery mode where if it doesn't find boot.init, it checks the first partition on the first hard disk - if it finds ntldr, it'll use that. If not (you installed Windows on another drive, or another partition), you get the "cannot find ntldr" error.
So it affected everyone but Windows was working in a back up mode.
I'll be honest. I would be very very hard to not put a fucking bullet in the head of anyone who threatened, let alone tried to take my child away from me. I'd be that case you'd hear about on TV where the parent murdered the people who came to take his child away and everything would go to shit. And it could all happen because a teacher makes a mistake in their perception of a situation. Scary world. How things can escalate.
No, in the news you'd hear about a gun nut who shot at and killed government employees trying to remove children from a harmful environment (see gun nut).
It's never about "the parent protecting their children" when CPS is involved. It's always spun as the parent is the bad guy and shooting at them just reinforces that spin that you're armed and dangerous and really shouldn't be taking care of kids.
The spin basically means you'd be driven out of the neighbourhood as "bad man with gun", and if some journalist digs deep and finds your employer, you could quite likely lose your job (and good luck finding a new one with your name plastered everywhere). (And journalists will do it, because they want to see if you work for a school, daycare, or other business involving children. Even if not, they'll ask your employer and employees about you and your behavior).
It is actually a priority. Google's ad-ranking system takes into account not just the revenue potential from an ad click but also "ad quality", a metric that considers various aspects of the ad, the site to which it links, and more, all related to the user experience. Because Google knows that it's important that when users click on a Google ad they have a good experience. Otherwise, they'll click less. Given that Google only gets paid when they click, that's directly bad for revenue. It likely also reduces the value of the ad to the advertiser, since users who do click may arrive more skeptical of what they'll find, and be less likely to buy. So advertisers will bid less, and that's bad for revenue.
Too bad that only applies to ads sold directly by Google Ads, and not say, DoubleClick or every other ad network Google owns and operates.
Your robot slips up & kills a human being? Then either you or that robot's manufacturer may take the blaim - possibly including monetary compensation. Your robot factory goes out of control, its products go out to produce more of themselves, and wreak havoc all over the place? Then your company should pay up - and possibly go bankrupt as a result. Of course, powerful people may find ways around this, but hey: same old shit we've seen for ages.
And still doesn't address the fundamental issue!
I mean, so the factory is bankrupt. That's a human thing. The factory is still producing robots even after it's gone bankrupt and we're still in the same pickle.
Assigning blame doesn't really do anything - the problem is we need to fix it and there are no obvious ways to do so.
I know the fashionable thing to do is to bash Radioshack, but there really isn't a brick and mortar that still sells components for tinkerers. If I needed a capacitor for a project, I could nip out and get one from the drawers.
One needs to remember than internet shopping is actually quite new - back in the "old days" when you needed parts, you called up DigiKey, read aloud your parts list and then waited a couple of weeks for it to come back, hopefully you didn't transpose a digit or so.
Or you typed it out on paper and then send them a letter, then waited a month for the stuff to come back.
If you were lucky, you had a fax machine and could get your stuff in a couple of weeks.
This made stores like Radio Shack invaluable for many a tinkerer - not having to wait for DigiKey (and their $25 order minimum, shipping charges, and weeks), as well as those without a credit card to purchase with. You could get practically everything you need or the store could help get it for you.
Of course, they started to die out when the 90s came and people quit caring about electronics - it's only in the past half decade or so that the "maker" movement brought back interest in electronics.
China is preparing for a cyber war. They've watched what happened to North Korea. Having more direct connections to the net both prevents you from being DDOS'd as easily and allows you to counterattack. It's a simple numbers game. The person with the biggest pipe is going to end up winning the fight.
Doubt it. NK has barely any internet presence - you can probably count the number of hosts based on NK. All the DDoS meant was well, the Glorious Leader missed out on cat videos for the day essentially.
And NK doesn't have many users to begin with - many African nations have far more internet users than NK.
I don't understand how softare that's been around THIS long could still be pumping out "critical" security bugs by the dozen.
It's a typical case of "cost center".
Flash Player is free. It's developed and distributed for free. That means it costs Adobe money to put development effort into it.
Adobe makes money selling software, and free software like Reader and Flash Player make no money for Adobe, other than potentially encouraging people to buy their tools by making a large market available.
But still, it costs money to make, so anyone working on Flash player must get stuff working and then shut it down to work on more profitable projects. So "do it fast" versus "do it securely and right".
Adobe doesn't care if customer machines get pwned - they sold the tools for developers to create, so the customer is the developer, not the end user.
When you're paying with something like ApplePay, it's all instantaneous. Your credit card gets billed immediately. This is how it has always worked with credit cards, but the back-channels are different. The idea is, more people are going to be using phones for transactions, the possibility of fraud goes up, and you need more instantaneous checking for potential fraud.
Actually, Apple Pay is just a fancy credit card.
The Apple part is only involved in setting it up - your phone talks to Apple who talks to your bank to verify the credit card and your bank then sends a proxy card to Apple who forwards it to your phone, the proxy card is tied to your device as part of a hardware hash that gets sent whenever you use Apple Pay.
Using Apple Pay is EMV, and Apple is completely uninvolved in the transaction. (Other than maybe having the transaction history encrypted and synced to you iCloud account as a backup so you can review all your transactions at the end of the month).
Well, that doesn't apply to just inspectors. An inspector just gathers evidence of law breaking. That section doesn't protect you if you're breaking the law in the first place.
The inspector isn't doing anything out of the ordinary - he's calling a Uber vehicle like all the other Uber customers out there. To cry entrapment, that would mean encouraging someone who wasn't an Uber driver to become one to be caught. But these drivers already are in breach of law, so no, you're not encouraging them to break the law they're already breaking.
Additionally, that clause really only means "you can't ask an uber driver to break laws". Like you can't tell them to go down a one-way street the wrong way.
Modularity sounds like a good idea, but in practice, in cellphones, I don't think it'll work. In objects of that size every millimeter counts, and modularity takes up quite a bit of space at that scale, because each part needs to be enclosed, securely attach to the others, etc. The trade-offs will mean you'll be able to pick one or two things (e.g. speed, battery life, extra features, etc.) but not all at the same time.
A lot of people think phones are already too thin. I had to buy a case for mine just to thicken it up so I wouldn't drop it as easily. I dropped my previous phone 3 times in 2 years. I dropped my new one 3 times in 2 weeks before I got the case.
I think it'll flop, but for a different reason. 4-5 years ago it would've been a huge success. Back then, the advances were coming in quickly and steadily. 2G, 3G, 4G. Single core, dual core, quad core. 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB. 800x480, 1024x600, 1280x720, 1920x1080, 2560x1440. Today, not so much. Smartphones are pretty close to the point where you can buy one and use it until it breaks. A lot people I know who aren't obsessed with having the latest and greatest have the Galaxy S3 (released 2.7 years ago) and have zero reason to upgrade. It does everything they need, and could potentially need from a phone for the foreseeable future.
People don't really care for modularity.
Judge by an example of modularity - the desktop PC. It was the ultimate - you could swap anything in and anything out, drivers are basically a non-issue with them either built in or auto-downloaded, etc.
And yet, people went for smaller and more integrated... laptops. Desktop sales used to dominate PC sales until a decade ago when laptops outsold desktops and have continued to do so since.
And these were desktops in all shapes and sizes - from small and tiny to huge hulking monsters with plenty of space for a dozen hard drives if you desired.
Of course, you can still buy desktop PCs these days, as they're the go-to form factor if you want ultimate performance (with a cost to match - laptops have gotten pretty low in the pricing tier and decent desktop PCs are pricier now).
The idea of a "PC like cellphone" will cater to a niche. The question becomes whether that niche is big enough to sustain a market and whether or not the driver model can tolerate crappy code. (Most of Windows' issues stem from the fact that hardware manufacturers write crappy code - the goal is to sell hardware, so if you can cut corners on a driver because that's a huge expense, that's more profit to you). it's why Linux gets good marks on that department - those who can write kernel code are often in charge of writing drivers, and they're more interested in getting their hardware working properly and well over trying to chuck something out the door quick.
1) Consent. No one is forcing me to use Google products. (Well, except my employer, which contracts with Google for email and various other services, but anything that they have access to is my employer's property anyway and I have no expectation of privacy to begin with.) I could completely banish Google from my personal life without severely impacting anything I do. It's a little more difficult to escape the reach of governments.
I'd like to see you try.
Because in the end, Google gets your information anyways because I'm certain a significant number of people you email use Gmail. And on analysis, that can easily be 50% or more emails now archived by Google about you. (I think someone analyzed their email - and realized if they included work email, Google had about 50% of the entire collection. Among personal emails only, it was over 75%. That's right, Google ends up with a copy in most cases).
I'd rather have it owned by taxpayers/municipalities or the people than the government. Not entirely unlike BLM land. Public broadband of the people for the people and by the people.
Technically, they're one and the same - the utility owned by taxpayers/municipalities IS owned by the government! Public services are provided by government or under contract by the government.
Exactly. It's a bribe. It's not hugely valuable data (the city could get almost as much useful data from taxi firms really) but because the city officials don't really understand magical mystical computers, it seem like some kind of golden egg.
Not to mention I don't think it's very valuable data. It's basically a self-selected survey of results, when a city really needs a general broad survey.
It's like cities that have apps where you could report problems along the road and other issues - they found that it was the richer areas that were getting the most service calls while the poorer ones were getting shafted - because the richer areas could afford the devices to run the apps.
So this would show you the travel habits of the well-to-do who can afford phones and know about services like Uber, while the old lady using the bus puts up with worse service because Uber's data shows they should optimize traffic elsewhere.
Cities need all information for transit and traffic information, not just selected information meant to make a few of their citizen's lives easier.
And what's with Uber claiming to be an app company? That's like Microsoft claiming to be a hardware company - while true, it's but just a small part of their business unless Uber the App company is a separated entity from Uber the transportation provider.
Tablets aren't a replacement for home use either. Everyone I know who bought a tablet still use their full-sized (or laptop) computers daily. Some of them don't even use the tablet anymore.
Why do people keep thinking this? Even Steve Jobs noted that there will always be room for a PC in a Post-PC world. He likened the PC to a truck - it can do practically anything you ask it to, and it'll do it, perhaps not efficiently, but it'll do it. The tablet was a car - good for a lot of things, but not everything. We'll always need trucks (and looking at a busy city street, trucks of various forms still occupy a large proportion of traffic).
Perhaps it was Android spreading that rumor as a do-it-all replacement.
Yes, a tablet can do a lot, they satisfy perhaps 80-90% of most PC needs, but there's always the little bit that's leftover. Instead of people getting rid of their PCs, they simply use them less, or not at all, but instead of everyone needing a PC for everyone, they are down to maybe 1-2 PCs shared by the whole family.
And yeah, my oldest PCs are beyond the 7 year mark, so it's time to replace them..
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And you know what? Creative license was taken throughout the movie including the use of composite characters (flight director was not a real person but a composite).
The reason for this is it's a movie based on a real event. It's a movie, not a documentary, so there has to be certain creative license taken in order to produce something that works with the public.
The conflict was invented to help move the action along because otherwise you have a rather boring movie - the trick is to do it in such a way that it's realistic (it COULD happen) and minor (so the people portrayed don't get tarred with that "reality").
Titanic (you know the James Cameron film?) is the same thing - Rosa didn't exist at all, but was a nice plot device to move things along. Again, it was a fictional movie based on a real event, not a documentary.
There are plenty of documentaries on Apollo 13 and Titanic, go see those if you want the facts. The movies themselves help present the stuff in a more entertaining (asses in seats) way but to accomplish it requires taking creative license.
Eh?
Free software is about freedom, not price. You can sell your Free software based on your deployment platform. In fact, prior to the internet, if you wanted GNU stuff, you paid the FSF $5000 to get tapes with the software you wanted.
If you create something, you can give it for free on Linux, and make Windows and Mac users pay. Of course, you run into the the possibility that some Windows or Mac user might take your free software and build it for Windows and Mac and give it away. Just because you sell it, doesn't mean someone else can't build it and give it away.
The only thing that is not free is if you demand in your license that Linux users get it for free, but Windows and Mac users must pay and no one else may build it for Windows or Linux (since that's a restriction on use).
Funny enough, there is a concern. MenTeach is about children's success. We want a diverse workforce, both men and women teachers, educating and caring for our children.
Of course, a problem is males are driven away from pre-school, elementary and middle school - it's not for lack of will, but there's an inherent distrust that a male teacher will rape all the female students that basically scare off the male teachers.
It's not for lack of interest or lack of skills, it's from an environment that basically does not allow men to teach.
And that's potentially the problem in IT - it's not the women are less skilled or less interested, it's that the men are somehow driving them away.
It's not a problem if it's simply "women don't want to be in IT" and the reason is "they're just not interested". That's something we can't change - you can't force girls to be interested in computers if they're not interested.
But if they ARE interested, and something else drives them away that we CAN control, then why don't we? Do we create a hostile atmosphere that makes women uncomfortable? Is there something that we don't do that they want us to do (e.g., shower daily)?
And that's what we really need to research. Perhaps 25% of women in STEM is fine, if 25% of them are interested in STEM fields and the 75% are in other areas, then that's perfect representation. It's a problem if say, 50% of women want to go into STEM and half of hose are somehow driven away from STEM, which means there's a problem we should fix.
Of course, this research is hard, and the answers will upset people - it may upset STEM workers because it can say stuff that they don't want to hear (e.g., "STEM workers are awfully misogynistic and should undergo gender sensitivity training as part of a regular ongoing training program"). Or it may upset women when it turns out they just aren't interested to begin with.
No, you cannot just take a book and translate it directly to TV. Or a video game. Or a movie.
They're all different media, and different media has different requirements, and different ways of presenting.
For example, in a book, you can spend a LOT of time going into lavish detail. You can't do that on TV or movies, because you'd bore the audience. So you basically have to skip all that and just show it and make reference to it, but what took half a chapter is basically over in 10 seconds on screen.
It also applies to things that may take a big set up - like say a car accident. Well geez, on screen that's only a few minute scene in slo-mo, even though that might make up a major plot point. And even details like something flying off the car can be missed in all the action.
And why would Amazon do that? This is an Amazon-sponsored, Amazon-paid-for, Amazon-produced, Amazon-distributed show. Amazon owns the bloody thing!
Amazon could easily make it available to anywhere Amazon has a country presence.
I presume Amazon is producing those things for their Prime service, so they'd have exclusivity over the produced materials (otherwise I'm sure Ridley Scott will sell it to Netflix too).
Netflix makes their shows available in all regions since they make the show.
Interestingly, most of those calls don't go anywhere. Even though you make an appointment, they often don't show up.
The ones that do, are always in a nondescript van with no business name or anything. That's because they change names basically weekly to keep out of scam lists.
Only on Android.
If you have an app, on iOS, you'll make more money selling it ad-free outright in the App Store. But on Android, you won't make much if you sell it outright - you're far better off putting ads in the app.
Ad-based apps on Android generate far more money than ad-based apps on iOS. LIkewise, Ad-free paid apps on iOS generate far more money than paid apps on Android. (Usually because the Play Store isn't available everywhere, nor is Google Checkout/Wallet, so if you have a paid app, that pretty much eliminates your app from showing up in half the places Google Play is available).
So no, raping customer information is NOT a standard business model. Especially since on iOS you can restrict access to your contacts, location/photos (which are a location proxy). Hell, you can't even track a user across apps easily anymore.
Or take something like Apple's Lightning port. It was non-standard since everyone else used micro USB, yet it improved on the USB connector in key areas like being able to be plugged in either way, and being more robust.
Enough so that the ideas gained from the lightning connector were incorporated into a new conector
Now, USB is "better" in that it's more "standardized" but you have to realize how standards organizations work - they are composed of members who have many competing agendas, usually wanting to push their patents into the standard, and in the end, the final standard comes down to who scratched more backs during the technical discussions.
Why is USB so CPU intensive? Intel probably wanted it that way to sell more and better CPUs (only intel has the VID 0x8086, being one of the founders). Etc. etc. etc.
And sometimes a company has a hard decision to make - go with a standard, or go proprietary, and going proprietary requires a lot of work and justification on why it's better. Apple couldn't just invent a new connector without giving the users tangible benefits - a connector that goes in either way is definitely one of them and makes it slightly edge out the standard.
Plus, Apple at least had enough pull to be able to swing it and ensure there would be accessories and other things using the new connector.
Actually, I haven't heard much brouhaha over using an iPad to read to you - and this was back when the Kindle was being demonized for offering the feature, yet the iPad could do it via accessibility. It isn't the most friendliest of features but you can use VoiceOver with iBooks and have it read aloud any book as part of it.
No, it's not going to be easy since it reads everything else as well, but it comes standard with the iPad.
I guess it's "hard enough" that people don't bother.
Obviously posted by someone who doesn't work in software development, or has to deal with the fact the software needs to work in millions of configurations and with interdependencies.
Plus, the bugs need to be investigated for the root cause. Patching over the flaw doesn't help things since it leaves the vulnerability open. See shellshock - the bug was plastered over the first time and it didn't work, so another patch was released days later with a workaround, but the fundamental problem was still there.
These aren't little toy utilities you write to scratch your itch, these are major millions of line code bases where bugs can be simple errors in code, to complex design bugs. Like say, shellshock (which is a design bug and now you have a problem of how to fix it because people are relying on the faulty behavior). Sure there are tons of automated test suites and they're probably the reason why they had to recall the patch, twice.
As for malfunctioning patches, you'll sing a different tune when you have to go fix dozens of PCs because the patch bluescreens, or you can't install software anymore. Either way, millions of PCs get bricked from a bad update just to meet some company's arbitrary timeline.
And I don't know, those 3+ recalled patches were pretty serious if you were one of the affected people.
You know, Microsoft told Google that yes, it was fixed. But you know what? They found a bug in the fix and they needed more time to fix it.
So what do you want Microsoft to do - release a buggy patch that could kill PCs? Or ask for more time so they could fix it right?
Now, Microsoft had to recall at least 3 patches in 2014 because of various issues. I'm guessing that the 90 day time limit was responsible - Google pressured Microsoft to release patches, and then they were insufficiently tested.
And yes, it can take a LONG time to fix bugs. Especially if they're deep in the system, and the deeper they are, the more testing that has to be done because the likelihood of breaking stuff is bigger. And given PCs come in millions of configurations, testing is hard.
I'm sure the time will come when Google bricks a bunch of phones because they updated Google Play Services because I'm sure Google doesn't test their update against every Android phone out there. Or they force the vendor to fix it.
And yes, for bugs you want it fixed right. I mean, Shellshock took at least 3 different patches. The first patch didn't really work, the second patch was a workaround but still left the vulnerability in - it was just harder to exploit. And the third patch actually went and fixed the issue.
I think World or Warcraft had a bug that deleted boot.ini, which on NT/XP was what the boot loader read to figure out how to boot Windows. (Vista onwards made that file a binary one instead).
End result was a bunch of people had their boot.ini files wiped. XP had a recovery mode where if it doesn't find boot.init, it checks the first partition on the first hard disk - if it finds ntldr, it'll use that. If not (you installed Windows on another drive, or another partition), you get the "cannot find ntldr" error.
So it affected everyone but Windows was working in a back up mode.
No, in the news you'd hear about a gun nut who shot at and killed government employees trying to remove children from a harmful environment (see gun nut).
It's never about "the parent protecting their children" when CPS is involved. It's always spun as the parent is the bad guy and shooting at them just reinforces that spin that you're armed and dangerous and really shouldn't be taking care of kids.
The spin basically means you'd be driven out of the neighbourhood as "bad man with gun", and if some journalist digs deep and finds your employer, you could quite likely lose your job (and good luck finding a new one with your name plastered everywhere). (And journalists will do it, because they want to see if you work for a school, daycare, or other business involving children. Even if not, they'll ask your employer and employees about you and your behavior).
Too bad that only applies to ads sold directly by Google Ads, and not say, DoubleClick or every other ad network Google owns and operates.
And still doesn't address the fundamental issue!
I mean, so the factory is bankrupt. That's a human thing. The factory is still producing robots even after it's gone bankrupt and we're still in the same pickle.
Assigning blame doesn't really do anything - the problem is we need to fix it and there are no obvious ways to do so.
One needs to remember than internet shopping is actually quite new - back in the "old days" when you needed parts, you called up DigiKey, read aloud your parts list and then waited a couple of weeks for it to come back, hopefully you didn't transpose a digit or so.
Or you typed it out on paper and then send them a letter, then waited a month for the stuff to come back.
If you were lucky, you had a fax machine and could get your stuff in a couple of weeks.
This made stores like Radio Shack invaluable for many a tinkerer - not having to wait for DigiKey (and their $25 order minimum, shipping charges, and weeks), as well as those without a credit card to purchase with. You could get practically everything you need or the store could help get it for you.
Of course, they started to die out when the 90s came and people quit caring about electronics - it's only in the past half decade or so that the "maker" movement brought back interest in electronics.
Doubt it. NK has barely any internet presence - you can probably count the number of hosts based on NK. All the DDoS meant was well, the Glorious Leader missed out on cat videos for the day essentially.
And NK doesn't have many users to begin with - many African nations have far more internet users than NK.
It's a typical case of "cost center".
Flash Player is free. It's developed and distributed for free. That means it costs Adobe money to put development effort into it.
Adobe makes money selling software, and free software like Reader and Flash Player make no money for Adobe, other than potentially encouraging people to buy their tools by making a large market available.
But still, it costs money to make, so anyone working on Flash player must get stuff working and then shut it down to work on more profitable projects. So "do it fast" versus "do it securely and right".
Adobe doesn't care if customer machines get pwned - they sold the tools for developers to create, so the customer is the developer, not the end user.
Actually, Apple Pay is just a fancy credit card.
The Apple part is only involved in setting it up - your phone talks to Apple who talks to your bank to verify the credit card and your bank then sends a proxy card to Apple who forwards it to your phone, the proxy card is tied to your device as part of a hardware hash that gets sent whenever you use Apple Pay.
Using Apple Pay is EMV, and Apple is completely uninvolved in the transaction. (Other than maybe having the transaction history encrypted and synced to you iCloud account as a backup so you can review all your transactions at the end of the month).
People don't really care for modularity.
Judge by an example of modularity - the desktop PC. It was the ultimate - you could swap anything in and anything out, drivers are basically a non-issue with them either built in or auto-downloaded, etc.
And yet, people went for smaller and more integrated... laptops. Desktop sales used to dominate PC sales until a decade ago when laptops outsold desktops and have continued to do so since.
And these were desktops in all shapes and sizes - from small and tiny to huge hulking monsters with plenty of space for a dozen hard drives if you desired.
Of course, you can still buy desktop PCs these days, as they're the go-to form factor if you want ultimate performance (with a cost to match - laptops have gotten pretty low in the pricing tier and decent desktop PCs are pricier now).
The idea of a "PC like cellphone" will cater to a niche. The question becomes whether that niche is big enough to sustain a market and whether or not the driver model can tolerate crappy code. (Most of Windows' issues stem from the fact that hardware manufacturers write crappy code - the goal is to sell hardware, so if you can cut corners on a driver because that's a huge expense, that's more profit to you). it's why Linux gets good marks on that department - those who can write kernel code are often in charge of writing drivers, and they're more interested in getting their hardware working properly and well over trying to chuck something out the door quick.
I'd like to see you try.
Because in the end, Google gets your information anyways because I'm certain a significant number of people you email use Gmail. And on analysis, that can easily be 50% or more emails now archived by Google about you. (I think someone analyzed their email - and realized if they included work email, Google had about 50% of the entire collection. Among personal emails only, it was over 75%. That's right, Google ends up with a copy in most cases).
Technically, they're one and the same - the utility owned by taxpayers/municipalities IS owned by the government! Public services are provided by government or under contract by the government.
Not to mention I don't think it's very valuable data. It's basically a self-selected survey of results, when a city really needs a general broad survey.
It's like cities that have apps where you could report problems along the road and other issues - they found that it was the richer areas that were getting the most service calls while the poorer ones were getting shafted - because the richer areas could afford the devices to run the apps.
So this would show you the travel habits of the well-to-do who can afford phones and know about services like Uber, while the old lady using the bus puts up with worse service because Uber's data shows they should optimize traffic elsewhere.
Cities need all information for transit and traffic information, not just selected information meant to make a few of their citizen's lives easier.
And what's with Uber claiming to be an app company? That's like Microsoft claiming to be a hardware company - while true, it's but just a small part of their business unless Uber the App company is a separated entity from Uber the transportation provider.
Why do people keep thinking this? Even Steve Jobs noted that there will always be room for a PC in a Post-PC world. He likened the PC to a truck - it can do practically anything you ask it to, and it'll do it, perhaps not efficiently, but it'll do it. The tablet was a car - good for a lot of things, but not everything. We'll always need trucks (and looking at a busy city street, trucks of various forms still occupy a large proportion of traffic).
Perhaps it was Android spreading that rumor as a do-it-all replacement.
Yes, a tablet can do a lot, they satisfy perhaps 80-90% of most PC needs, but there's always the little bit that's leftover. Instead of people getting rid of their PCs, they simply use them less, or not at all, but instead of everyone needing a PC for everyone, they are down to maybe 1-2 PCs shared by the whole family.
And yeah, my oldest PCs are beyond the 7 year mark, so it's time to replace them..