Same with Vista.....it sucked at first, hard (and also dishonest hardware vendors/M$ misleading people about hardware being able to run it did not help) but after a couple of service packs, it ran fine. Windows 7 was great from day 1.
Vista sucked because it broke a lot of programs, because those programs were coded with poor coding practices (most developers suck). Microsoft wanted to do a clean start and fix a lot of windows security issues (e.g., you have to elevate yourself to admin versus being admin). This resulted in a lot of programs assuming they could do something when they couldn't, leading to a big pile of confusion. (Just like it was possible to actually have a Windows system that was usable non-Admin, one could get Vista working well. It just took a LOT of work to get to that state).
A year later and everyone fixed their issues, making Vista much better. But since it was tainted, it was easier to repackage it as Windows 7 and leave the legacy of taint behind.
The "Be Prepared" motto isn't just for Boy Scouts, and it is not just about having what you need at hand, it's also about KNOWING what to do and being mentally prepared to do it quickly when required.
And documenting it all. Don't forget that.
And better yet, running it regularly lets you make sure the documentation is up to date (oh, the server is gone, it's been replaced by the new server and you need these new steps).
It's also good about figuring out what you don't know - you don't know what you don't know until you try it and end up with "where's that information?". In a drill, at least you can pause/stop and add it to the list of things to fix.
Or even stuff like "who knows this information?" - there's a lot of institutional knowledge and if it turns out someone has information you need, then it needs to be documented as well.
Their web app is fine. I run OS X and have used their site for years. Didn't even realize they had a download version.
Doesn't that sorta twinge at you though? I mean, tax software via the cloud is nifty and supports basically everyone, but it's the cloud. And it's accessing (and probably storing) some of the most valuable data around - your tax records.
People on/. already cringe at putting personal files up "in the cloud" and they're willingly putting their tax information in a cloud service?
Legacy spinning disks will be as dead in 10 years as tape is today.
Unlikely, because spinning rust still has a cost advantage over semiconductor storage for the same size. I mean, given $500 or so for 8TB, and a 1TB SSD is around $400 or so, that's 3 process nodes worth of improvement (or about 5 years).
Remember, storage capacity of semiconductor memory follows Moore's law. Tricks like multi-bit cells do increase capacity, but it's hard to make it reliable. 3 bits means 8 voltage levels and that is getting to the point where noise can change a bit easily.
And that's the problem with SSDs because hard drives aren't following Moore's law.
No, it was very specifically overseas targets, and the NSA put a lot of effort into hand filtering to ensure that no information on a "US Person" (citizen, permanent resident or corporation) was included in the information passed to the FBI. But, that part doesn't grab the headlines.
And always, some Americans always get mixed in because they hide the fact they're American and have a right to be filtered out...
930 million phones might be enough. Now we just need someone to write a worm that uses this to get noticed by taking down the cellular network for a few days and then maybe someone will get smart enough to require phone manufacturers to push updates for a reasonable amount of time (say 5 years after they stop selling the phone). I've seen phones stop receiving updates before their 2 year contract is even up. This should be breach of contract.
Well, technically, phones never got software updates - updates are a relatively new thing.
And really, the reason Google doesn't push OEMs to force software updates is because of AOSP. Samsung's a big offender, releasing anywhere from 2-3 new smartphones a week in 2014 (seriously, they released over 100 new phones last year), and over 1 tablet a week (yes, over 50 brand new tablets).
Granted, Samsung has more developers than Apple, Google and Microsoft combined, but you can bet terms like this would be the one that just moves OEMs to AOSP and undo all the work Google did. Hell, Samsung has replacement apps for every one of Google's (they're the only OEM to do so), so they're not dependent on Google's apps to sell phones.
And no, it's no surprise Samsung is also the largest Android manufacturer out there with a huge market share.
While some ascribe malice to the Tories' actions, it's become very clear to me, particularly during the years of the majority government, that while maliciousness may play a part in some of what they do, a good deal of what they do is just simply incompetent.
Quite likely, given that the Stephen Harper Party basically is like that. You see, the real reason why the Tories are so successful is because of Stephen Harper. He rules from the top down. This means his messaging is EXTREMELY effective because no one is allowed to speak out of line. Media scrums are very carefully controlled - if you're not a "pre-approved" reporter who submitted their question ahead of time, you're not going to be picked to ask a question.
When someone accidentally does open their mouth, then, it reveals they aren't any better or knowledgeable. Harper pretty much knows this - the other parties don't have as much party discipline which leads to foot-in-mouth issues. But by muzzling his party, he ensures they don't make these mistakes.
Basically you have to assume incompetence - they're really just little automatons who follow Harper's word. When you ask them to go off-script, they get the deer-in-the-headlights look.
I agree that we should make sure that our legacy of >5000 years of written language can be represented using whatever means of communications are currently in vogue. This is covered by Unicode/UTF. Great, so far.
Actually, the real reason is a bit simpler.
Unicode aims to be the coding system to rule all coding systems - the stated goal is to be able to encode all existing encoding systems into Unicode, and to convert it back.
The problem (and why Unicode had to add all the extra emoji) was the Japanese character sets were incomplete - it was not possible encode them into Unicode (the missing emoji did not map to a code point) and back again without losing information.
Now, switching between code sets well, you've got to make compromises. But when you're just converting between a code set and back again, the translation should be seamless.
So for Unicode, that meant incorporating the last set of new emojis that got added between the last pass and now, hence adding another 256 of them so Unicode could maintain the translation.
As for why, well, some engineer at NTT DoCoMo thought it would be more convenient way back in the 90s. And until Unicode, it turned out there was no rhyme or reason for the icons - even other carriers had their own sets making texting between carriers interesting.
The NICs themselves have the MAC flashed into their own firmware. So the 'problem' there is already solved by the upstream vendor.
The router firmware typically just reads the addresses from the NICs, unless you've overridedden it.
This is why you can flash a router with new firmware, including overriding and resetting all configuration and it doesn't lose its MAC.
That's almost never the case, actually.
Maybe on a PC NIC card it has an EEPROM that has the MAC and default startup information, but never on a router because the 20 cents costs too much.
Especially since the NIC is built into most routing chips, so there's nothing to customize.
Instead, the flash chip has a configuration partition that's read by software that programs the NICs appropriately - it can either be done at startup by the bootloader, or the NIC driver does it. Saves the cost of an extra chip and there's always spare room anyways. (The flash chip is also where the configuration is stored).
The reason the NIC isn't wiped when you flash is because you don't flash the entire chip - just a few partitions accessible to the user - usually just the software partition (since the kernel and filesystem are all you need) leaving the bootloader, system configuration and user configuration partitions untouched.
1) Even encrypted, I'd still be pretty wary of having arbitrary files stores on my machines. Even if legally in the clear, just dealing with an LEA when someone uses your machine as a child porn host is going to be unpleasant.
The way to do this is not to store whole files on an individual computer - instead it's to do a RAID-like system where you only have a small portion of the file.
And the worst problem of remote storage is that you need an internet service provider at both ends to access it. Maybe it's the second worst. Liability issues involving content would be the worst.
That's why you don't store it as files, you store it as a RAID-like stripe. There are many coding systems that let you pick how many stripes you want to make, and of those, how many you need to reconstruct the file - e.g., you can pick 3 of 4 (a la RAID5), 3 of 5 (RAID 6), or any arbitrarily set of stripes and minimums.
So if it's a super important file, you might want put it across many stripes with only a few to recover it.
UTF-8 is easily adopted by C based software like Nethack because null-terminated string logic works unmodified; a UTF-8 string has no embedded nulls to trip up any code that that measures string length by searching for a zero byte. For the most part things should "just work." UTF-16 and 32 strings have zero bytes embedded among characters, so you have to audit every bit of code to ensure compatibility.
I never understand how drivers flying heavys suddenly think they can do the seat-of-the-pants thing like they're flying a barnstormer, much less at the very moment when all their skill needs to come to play. But it happens. AF447 was not the first time raw ego flew into terrain and it won't be the last, unfortunately.
Funny enough, people believe the LACK OF basic flying skills ("seat of the pants" flying) generally results in a lot of accidents, including the Asiana flight that ended up crashing at SFO. And it's likely to happen MORE in countries that do not have a working GA infrastructure - where all flying is either commercial or military, and thus there's no such thing as flying for fun.
Basic flying skills are what's needed when the automation is going wrong. Automation can mess up easily - either being misprogrammed, or sensors failing or sensors covered up. The goal is to recognize the automation is incorrect, and figure out what is needed to fix it.
Pitot-static system not functioning? You know, Attitude+Power=Performance. A certain attitude, a certain power setting, and you know how the airplane is supposed to perform - you can estimate the airspeed based on that alone. Doesn't matter that the system is failed, you know how to make it not stall.
Stick-shaker and stall horn blaring? Even the lowest of low end aircraft have a stall horn. They're not powered by automation - it's a little sensor telling you the center of pressure is a bit too far forward on the wing and you're gonna stall. Doesn't matter what the automation says - you can stall at any attitude and at any airspeed - the only factor is the angle of relative wind to the chord. While low end aircraft use center of pressure to estimate, fancy aircraft have Angle of Attack indicators that measure this exact thing. If that stick shaker rumbles and the stall horn (or screaming betsy) is going off, you're stalling. Doesn't matter what the airplane is saying on any other screen - you're stalling or stalled.
Nothing wrong with seat of the pants flying. Most errors are caused by target fixation, disbelief (the airplane can't be stalled - the stick shaker must be wrong!), and other human responses. You believe the airplane is doing X, and you disregard all evidence the airplane is saying it's really doing Y. "Why is the stick shaker rumbling? I'm not in a stall".
It can be so bad even stick PUSHERS are overcome - a stick pusher triggers when the aircraft is actually in a stalled condition and crews have been known to overcome even that (it gets heavy, pull harder!).
Interestingly, it really is "seat of the pants" flying - about the only accurate sensor a human has in flying is... their butt. How the seat feels in their butt can tell a lot about the attitude and behavior of the airplane. The ears are among the worst, and eyes are pretty bad.
I use Pandora continuously at work, and I have discovered new music through it.
Radio, on the other hand, even if you hear a piece of music that you like, the chance of actually being told the name of the artist is close to zero. So, there is no chance to really "discover" music.
They're comparing music discovery via traditional radio and online radio vs. YouTube.
You say you don't listen to radio, but you just got included in the radio group because you used Pandora, which they consider an online radio stream.
It's really about whether people use radio or radio-like (online or satellite) mechanisms to discover new music, versus YouTube's music thing.
So everyone saying radio is dead and they're using spotify or something - well, they count that as radio usage.
Probably none. Despite the whining that people go on about the government here in Canada, they actually do productive things. They have stepped in the past to deal with issues from "autonomous government agencies" like the CRTC, but I'm sure someone is going to whine and cry about my post anyway.
Unlikely. The CRTC thing happened because it literally blew up in their face and the publicity behind it was growing. Even then it took months for something to happen - before the media got wind of it and it literally blew up. That's when government acted - because everyone started making noise about it. When it was just a few posts on an online forum, nothing.
This thing was a tiny paragraph in an editorial section. There is hardly any coverage of the notice-and-notice system, and I think most people probably didn't even know about it.
The only difference in this case is the ISP is sent a letter and the ISP forwards it on. The thing is, the "rights holders" have no idea who the letters are being sent to (you have to go to court to find out) so there's no way to filter out the notices by address (I'm certain in the US they note if they're about to send a letter to a politician or their family and "lose" it). And since it began on January 1, I'm sure all the companies were arming themselves to send notices out.
And I'm sure more than a few politicians got the notice - it's easy in Canada thanks to the fact that despite being right next door to the US, TV programming often comes later, we don't have quite as many music stores (it's basically iTunes - seems DRM-free destroyed all the other music stores), Netflix in Canada is a joke, and streaming radio... well, we have spotify and rdio. So pirating is sorta routine. And the end result is probably more than a few politicians getting the letter and wondering why they're citing US laws and all that.
And there probably were more than a few calls to the ISP about them and mentioning changes in Canadian law.
And knowing ISP incompetence from the big guys, I'm sure this will repeatedly keep happening as ISPs fail to filter out the notices that were supposed to go to politicians.
Remember, Geist got a letter forwarded to him by the ISP who was about to send it onwards. Quite likely a number of politicians got sent one because of their family members or something.
It really wouldn't even take that much work to pull this off. The hardest part would be keeping broadcast domain separation. If that IP is non-routable it means that either the entire country is on one broadcast domain or they're pulling off some relatively complicated layer 2/3 network segregation (lots of enormous lookup tables, etc). I imagine communications would be very slow all around either way.
Most people don't reasonably expect that a broadcast on 10/8 would go to every machine - in practically every network I've seen, it's been segmented into subnets - 10.0.1.x/24 might be for general office, 10.0.2/24 might be for the developers, etc.
it's what people do for 192.168.*.x - 192.168.0.x is for servers behind the firewall, 192.168.1.x is for PCs, 192.168.2.x is VPN, etc.
I suppose the bigger thing is that they decided to use private IP space rather than setting up a set of colliding public IP addresses.
The vendors have assured us that their servers are secure!
You joke, but it's perfectly possible that's the case.
The servers weren't hacked - the user credentials were. After all, you won't believe some of the phishes that get out there, and once they steal credentials, well, it doesn't matter how well the vendor protects the data - the vulnerability will always be stolen credentials.
Short of having cloud vendors mandate 2-factor security (imagine having to carry around an RSA key just to log into dropbox!), well, there's not much one can do.
Even SMS based functionality can break - apparently Google refuses to send you SMS if you travel overseas, so if you rely on that for authentication, you're screwed.
Part of the solution is to quit overemphasizing college where it isn't necessary.
Or more like there's a HUGE field of post-secondary educational opportunities out there besides college or university. And many of them may have more appeal than college/university.
The thing is, well, most parents grew up at a time when "blue collar" jobs were dangerous, generally unskilled, dirty and underappreciated. So the way out was the main office - get a job working in an office (a "white collar" job) and you won't have to endure heat, dirt, grease, oil and managers barking at you all day. And the ticket to a white collar job is... college or university.
Except things are quite different these days - there's many jobs that are blend of both, and even traditional blue collar jobs are often higher skilled and very much appreciated. And working conditions re far better with worker compensation boards and safety and health boards, etc.
So continuing education in stuff like trades and other areas may appeal more than studying and an office job. And we need to emphasize that these paths are perfectly fine - trade school works for a lot of people, and many don't want to sit in an office all day but be out and about. There's other opportunities as well - aviation for example - covers a whole range from the heavily degreed (which gets you to designing aircraft), to the trained (pilots) to the trades (mechanics). And many still end up with traditional degrees like BSc (pilots often get one, as do mechanics taking accredited programs), BA (airport management is a business) and others. ,
What happens if someone else creates an identicly perfect robotic player and joins the table? If, as the researches claim, winning limit Texas Hold'em is a directly solvable problem then anybody else who tries to solve the problem will come up with the exact same solution.
If these two robots played each other wouldn't the winner be determined by pure luck?
If you let them play over an extended period of time, they would draw - they won't lose, but they won't be up any money, either.
But if you were to randomly sample the game, you'd fine one of them would be up.
That's the nature of a solved game - given perfect play of both players, you'd basically get a draw game.
With the new Haswell-E processors, the CPU has 40 lanes of PCIe x4. So on a lot of high end x99 motherboards you'll see four PCIe gen3 x16 slots. However, since the CPU only has 40 lanes, this means not all of those "x16" slots are truely using 16 lanes of PCIe. Normally when four cards are plugged in, you'll get slot 0 running at x16, and the other three slots running at x8. (For video cards this hardly matters as last I checked no modern video card can saturate a x8 gen3 pcie).
That's been generally true, actually.
Here's a secret of PCIe - you don't need all 16 lanes hooked up to use a x16 slot. In fact, PCIe slots are designed to be downward compatible - if you have a x1 card, it can go in a x16 slot no problem. If you have a x2 card, it can't go into a x1 slot, but it can go into a x4 slot and use 2 lanes. Or that x4 slot can only have one lane and it'll use one lane. So a x16 slot is pretty universal.
There is no real reason why a PC cannot have x16 slots exclusively (it lets you plug in PCIe cards anywhere) so you can plug in anything into the slots. If you wanted, you can plug in cards that have more lanes into slots with less and the unused lanes are disabled.
And yes, most motherboards have a "primary" slot where it's a real x16 slot, and 1 or 2 or more SLI or Crossfire slots which are x8 or even x4.
Either that, or they just realized they could use it as a publicity stunt.
This.
There are TWO "app stores" that every iOS device has access to. The walled garden is the obvious one, but there's one where there is NO DRM, no approvals, nothing. And it was around since the original iPhone and since iPhoneOS 1.0
It was Apple's original SDK strategy, too.
It's called a web application and it uses HTML and JavaScript to do everything. You "install" it via Safari and it shows up as a icon in the home screen. No approvals from Apple are required (it's just a very specially formulated link), it can do a lot of things already (thanks to HTML5 integration) and is completely DRM-free. Do it right and it's practically native.
Oh yeah, you can program it in any OS, no Mac required:). As a bonus, it'll be usable on other OSes, too. (I think Android has the same ability too).
I agree this is probably true. But it's not a bad idea, it's a good idea. Specifically, it's called capitalism. Good channels survive. For example the Sci-Fi channel does not exist. There is an abomination called the SyFy channel that should die a horrible death. Why? They screwed themselves. Before they even changed their name, they abandoned good Sci-Fi for wrestlers talking about vampires for some god forsaken reason.
But getting rid of bad channels is not a bad thing. New channels will take their place. Good TV will still find a place to get made. They need to fire those idiots and let someone else with more brains and less marketing have a go at it.
False.
Cable channels ALREADY have prepared for a la carte. And they're not going the "better channels" route. They're going the "more eyeballs" route.
First, you'll notice that your favorite programs are now spread across three or four channels. What used to be on History is now on H2/H3/other associated channels now. What used to be on Discovery is now on Science and the other channels.
Next, have you noticed how the main channels like Discovery and History have gone practically all reality? Guess what? That's on purpose - because those kind of shows are popular with the public and get the eyeballs in. More eyeballs means more people wanting that channel.
Your model is called the PBS model. No, we're not going to get more PBS-like programming channels (ever notice how PBS, who doesn't worry about eyeballs, always seems to keep a high level of programming and no ads?). Even so, PBS is under attack because of taxpayer funding through various means.
In the battle for subscribers, you don't get them by producing thoughtful shows. You get them by producing crap that gets eyeballs in. Few want good documentaries on World War II. More want more Pawn Stars (and they want drama, not crap about crap), more people racing each other through dirt countryside and all that.
Oh wait, you'll need ot purchase 4 channels now for that to spread the eyeballs around, too.
In short - only two ways to get good programming - PBS, or subscriber funded channels like HBO. The other channels? They're going to fight tooth and nail for eyeballs.
And yes, it'll cost more. After all, Discovery by itself is around 25 cents/subscriber/month, with all the bundling they force, it's probably closer to 40-45 cents. You can bet your cable provider will charge 25 cents or more for each channel. Maybe a whopping dollar per channel (right now, less than $1 of your fees are for Discovery).
You want to see savings? ESPN charges $10-15/subscribe/month. Probably more because of bundling.
Trust me, the networks are all prepared for this day. And they're not going after the people who want to see smarter TV programming. They're going after the lowest common denominator because there are more of them than you. History and Discovery catering to you? Probably a few subscribers. Cater to the crowds? At least 10 times, if not more subscribers.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this actually be a niche market, similar to NAS appliances. A box that one plops down, configures, installs a client on Windows, OS X, or Linux, and can do the basic range of backups, be it files, or complete bare metal OS images. A file restore would be just accessing the backup client. A complete image restore could even be telling the appliance to map a USB port to a virtual bootable image, boot the machine via the USB port, and let the application code do the rest from there. That way, the machine is never on the network in a vulnerable state.
Technically, Microsoft created one, then canned it, as usual.
Windows Home Server contained an EXCELLENT network backup utility - it did image-based backups (but can do file-based restores easily), deduplication, is not accessible via SMB shares, fast, cheap, and a whole lot more. The only downside was it was Windows-only - it could only do NTFS disks because it relies on Volume Shadow Services and on disk-tracking (it finds out what actually changed on disk between runs so it only needs to backup the changed content).
It was a great backup, restore and upgrade tool - the recovery program was a bootable CD, and the drivers it needs are stored with the backup so all you need is a USB thumbdrive, copy a specific folder off the machine's backup and use it with the boot CD so the boot CD can access hard drives and network.
And it was automated - every night every machine would get backed up.
But as is typical for Microsoft, they canned WHS and let the backup program in it die because well, it was too useful.
All of their hardware sucks. Largely because the software in their hardware sucks. They're using Android, fine, but it's a locked-down version of Android customized to exclusively use their own store (I believe you can get Google Play back, but it takes work). Which is them giving both the user and Google a big "fuck you."
So? Why shouldn't Amazon be allowed to create a walled garden? You make it seem like it's a right that all Android devices must be open and all that. Amazon wants to make their own walled garden, and the Android license lets them. take it up with Google.
In fact, why do you think "Google Play Services" exist? To help narrow down Android fragmentation? No, it's to lock developers into the Google Play APIs so they can't easily port to Amazon - I mean why ignore one of Android's biggest issues for years then come up with a solution?
Anyhow, you have to realize Amazon's trying to be an Apple, and Amazon's got a pretty big market clout. "Amazon" might not make phones, but everyone's ordered products from them, and a significant number of people have Prime. So you already have brand recognition right there.
Except unlike Apple, Amazon makes no money on hardware. They sell content, so allowing you to load up another store's content is verboten - the goal is to use Amazon for music, movies, books and TV. Of course, Amazon isn't completely pure, either given their DoJ handout and everything. (Hint: monopsonys can be evil too).
Apple wants to sell hardware, so they sell content merely to help them sell the hardware - what's the point of a music player without music? Hence, the iTunes store.
It's because, turns out, the real estate the company bought is a more stable stream of income than the retail company itself. The company ebbs and flows at a rate related to the human attention span, but the world is not going to be getting bigger any time soon...
Actually that was sort of the plan of the Best Buy co-founder wanted to embrace before the current Best Buy board denied his purchase offer for the company.
He wanted to embrace showrooming - it already happens now, so why not actually support it, encourage it, and turn best buy from a store selling stuff into a showroom selling stuff.
And it makes a lot of sense - people still want to touch and feel products, but other than Apple, Microsoft and Samsung, most manufacturers are not able to maintain a network of stores to sell stuff through. Enter Best Buy who will lease you out a space for your product so people can come by and touch, feel, play and if you can keep them in stock, buy off the shelf. If not, Best Buy will gladly help you order it online.
Of course there has to be a sundry list of items they regularly stock, but that is minor - the goal is to be a showroom where you may be able to buy stuff, but more so you can come and see and feel the product. In other words, the customer is not the guy walking in the door, it's the manufacturers of the products inside, and I'm sure with partnerships with Amazon and other fulfilment companies, they can get special offers like ship it to the store for free and the like.
It already is like that for the big players - when you see the PS4 and Xbone aisles - know Sony and Microsoft actually pay Best Buy for the entire aisle. Those product displays? Yes, purchased space. Notice how the Apple area has different (often nicer) carpeting? Yes, Apple paid for that area, AND the renovations to get it to be like that.
Basically, the goal is to fill the niche that online shopping cannot fill - the ability to see the product.
Who didn't see not having their own fabs was going to bite them in the rear? Only a bunch of bean counters would not have seen this coming.
Fabs are expensive. As in, REALLY expensive. They cost $1B to build, and easily $10+B to equip (or more). So you're already in the hole many billions of dollars and you haven't produced anything yet.
Oh, and there's a clock ticking away, because you're going to need to spend another $10+B to buy ALL NEW EQUIPMENT to handle the upcoming node shrink.
The only way to do that is to have a fab running continuously churning out product, and to find uses for the older node equipment (which now has to be discounted some because people want to use the new shiny equipment).
Fabs like TSMC however have been major innovators because it allowed fabless companies like NVidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and hundreds more to exist without having to make major capital investments in fabs but get the technology out there. Imagine you want to do a chip, and now you need to convince your investors that to make it, you need to spend $15+B. Versus a few million.
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Vista sucked because it broke a lot of programs, because those programs were coded with poor coding practices (most developers suck). Microsoft wanted to do a clean start and fix a lot of windows security issues (e.g., you have to elevate yourself to admin versus being admin). This resulted in a lot of programs assuming they could do something when they couldn't, leading to a big pile of confusion. (Just like it was possible to actually have a Windows system that was usable non-Admin, one could get Vista working well. It just took a LOT of work to get to that state).
A year later and everyone fixed their issues, making Vista much better. But since it was tainted, it was easier to repackage it as Windows 7 and leave the legacy of taint behind.
And documenting it all. Don't forget that.
And better yet, running it regularly lets you make sure the documentation is up to date (oh, the server is gone, it's been replaced by the new server and you need these new steps).
It's also good about figuring out what you don't know - you don't know what you don't know until you try it and end up with "where's that information?". In a drill, at least you can pause/stop and add it to the list of things to fix.
Or even stuff like "who knows this information?" - there's a lot of institutional knowledge and if it turns out someone has information you need, then it needs to be documented as well.
Doesn't that sorta twinge at you though? I mean, tax software via the cloud is nifty and supports basically everyone, but it's the cloud. And it's accessing (and probably storing) some of the most valuable data around - your tax records.
People on /. already cringe at putting personal files up "in the cloud" and they're willingly putting their tax information in a cloud service?
Unlikely, because spinning rust still has a cost advantage over semiconductor storage for the same size. I mean, given $500 or so for 8TB, and a 1TB SSD is around $400 or so, that's 3 process nodes worth of improvement (or about 5 years).
Remember, storage capacity of semiconductor memory follows Moore's law. Tricks like multi-bit cells do increase capacity, but it's hard to make it reliable. 3 bits means 8 voltage levels and that is getting to the point where noise can change a bit easily.
And that's the problem with SSDs because hard drives aren't following Moore's law.
And always, some Americans always get mixed in because they hide the fact they're American and have a right to be filtered out...
That's one of the ironies...
Well, technically, phones never got software updates - updates are a relatively new thing.
And really, the reason Google doesn't push OEMs to force software updates is because of AOSP. Samsung's a big offender, releasing anywhere from 2-3 new smartphones a week in 2014 (seriously, they released over 100 new phones last year), and over 1 tablet a week (yes, over 50 brand new tablets).
Granted, Samsung has more developers than Apple, Google and Microsoft combined, but you can bet terms like this would be the one that just moves OEMs to AOSP and undo all the work Google did. Hell, Samsung has replacement apps for every one of Google's (they're the only OEM to do so), so they're not dependent on Google's apps to sell phones.
And no, it's no surprise Samsung is also the largest Android manufacturer out there with a huge market share.
Quite likely, given that the Stephen Harper Party basically is like that. You see, the real reason why the Tories are so successful is because of Stephen Harper. He rules from the top down. This means his messaging is EXTREMELY effective because no one is allowed to speak out of line. Media scrums are very carefully controlled - if you're not a "pre-approved" reporter who submitted their question ahead of time, you're not going to be picked to ask a question.
When someone accidentally does open their mouth, then, it reveals they aren't any better or knowledgeable. Harper pretty much knows this - the other parties don't have as much party discipline which leads to foot-in-mouth issues. But by muzzling his party, he ensures they don't make these mistakes.
Basically you have to assume incompetence - they're really just little automatons who follow Harper's word. When you ask them to go off-script, they get the deer-in-the-headlights look.
Actually, the real reason is a bit simpler.
Unicode aims to be the coding system to rule all coding systems - the stated goal is to be able to encode all existing encoding systems into Unicode, and to convert it back.
The problem (and why Unicode had to add all the extra emoji) was the Japanese character sets were incomplete - it was not possible encode them into Unicode (the missing emoji did not map to a code point) and back again without losing information.
Now, switching between code sets well, you've got to make compromises. But when you're just converting between a code set and back again, the translation should be seamless.
So for Unicode, that meant incorporating the last set of new emojis that got added between the last pass and now, hence adding another 256 of them so Unicode could maintain the translation.
As for why, well, some engineer at NTT DoCoMo thought it would be more convenient way back in the 90s. And until Unicode, it turned out there was no rhyme or reason for the icons - even other carriers had their own sets making texting between carriers interesting.
That's almost never the case, actually.
Maybe on a PC NIC card it has an EEPROM that has the MAC and default startup information, but never on a router because the 20 cents costs too much.
Especially since the NIC is built into most routing chips, so there's nothing to customize.
Instead, the flash chip has a configuration partition that's read by software that programs the NICs appropriately - it can either be done at startup by the bootloader, or the NIC driver does it. Saves the cost of an extra chip and there's always spare room anyways. (The flash chip is also where the configuration is stored).
The reason the NIC isn't wiped when you flash is because you don't flash the entire chip - just a few partitions accessible to the user - usually just the software partition (since the kernel and filesystem are all you need) leaving the bootloader, system configuration and user configuration partitions untouched.
The way to do this is not to store whole files on an individual computer - instead it's to do a RAID-like system where you only have a small portion of the file.
That's why you don't store it as files, you store it as a RAID-like stripe. There are many coding systems that let you pick how many stripes you want to make, and of those, how many you need to reconstruct the file - e.g., you can pick 3 of 4 (a la RAID5), 3 of 5 (RAID 6), or any arbitrarily set of stripes and minimums.
So if it's a super important file, you might want put it across many stripes with only a few to recover it.
Incorrect. UTF-9 works for 8-bit chars.
Here's the truth for C:
sizeof(char) <= sizeof(short int) <= sizeof(int) <=sizeof(long) <= sizeof(long long)
In the past, chars were often not 8 bits long. And there are many architectures where the smallest type is not 8 bits, but 16 or 32 bits.
It's why we have the exact-size specifiers of (u)int8_t, (u)int16_t, (u)int32_t and (u)int64_t.
Funny enough, people believe the LACK OF basic flying skills ("seat of the pants" flying) generally results in a lot of accidents, including the Asiana flight that ended up crashing at SFO. And it's likely to happen MORE in countries that do not have a working GA infrastructure - where all flying is either commercial or military, and thus there's no such thing as flying for fun.
Basic flying skills are what's needed when the automation is going wrong. Automation can mess up easily - either being misprogrammed, or sensors failing or sensors covered up. The goal is to recognize the automation is incorrect, and figure out what is needed to fix it.
Pitot-static system not functioning? You know, Attitude+Power=Performance. A certain attitude, a certain power setting, and you know how the airplane is supposed to perform - you can estimate the airspeed based on that alone. Doesn't matter that the system is failed, you know how to make it not stall.
Stick-shaker and stall horn blaring? Even the lowest of low end aircraft have a stall horn. They're not powered by automation - it's a little sensor telling you the center of pressure is a bit too far forward on the wing and you're gonna stall. Doesn't matter what the automation says - you can stall at any attitude and at any airspeed - the only factor is the angle of relative wind to the chord. While low end aircraft use center of pressure to estimate, fancy aircraft have Angle of Attack indicators that measure this exact thing. If that stick shaker rumbles and the stall horn (or screaming betsy) is going off, you're stalling. Doesn't matter what the airplane is saying on any other screen - you're stalling or stalled.
Nothing wrong with seat of the pants flying. Most errors are caused by target fixation, disbelief (the airplane can't be stalled - the stick shaker must be wrong!), and other human responses. You believe the airplane is doing X, and you disregard all evidence the airplane is saying it's really doing Y. "Why is the stick shaker rumbling? I'm not in a stall".
It can be so bad even stick PUSHERS are overcome - a stick pusher triggers when the aircraft is actually in a stalled condition and crews have been known to overcome even that (it gets heavy, pull harder!).
Interestingly, it really is "seat of the pants" flying - about the only accurate sensor a human has in flying is... their butt. How the seat feels in their butt can tell a lot about the attitude and behavior of the airplane. The ears are among the worst, and eyes are pretty bad.
They're comparing music discovery via traditional radio and online radio vs. YouTube.
You say you don't listen to radio, but you just got included in the radio group because you used Pandora, which they consider an online radio stream.
It's really about whether people use radio or radio-like (online or satellite) mechanisms to discover new music, versus YouTube's music thing.
So everyone saying radio is dead and they're using spotify or something - well, they count that as radio usage.
Unlikely. The CRTC thing happened because it literally blew up in their face and the publicity behind it was growing. Even then it took months for something to happen - before the media got wind of it and it literally blew up. That's when government acted - because everyone started making noise about it. When it was just a few posts on an online forum, nothing.
This thing was a tiny paragraph in an editorial section. There is hardly any coverage of the notice-and-notice system, and I think most people probably didn't even know about it.
The only difference in this case is the ISP is sent a letter and the ISP forwards it on. The thing is, the "rights holders" have no idea who the letters are being sent to (you have to go to court to find out) so there's no way to filter out the notices by address (I'm certain in the US they note if they're about to send a letter to a politician or their family and "lose" it). And since it began on January 1, I'm sure all the companies were arming themselves to send notices out.
And I'm sure more than a few politicians got the notice - it's easy in Canada thanks to the fact that despite being right next door to the US, TV programming often comes later, we don't have quite as many music stores (it's basically iTunes - seems DRM-free destroyed all the other music stores), Netflix in Canada is a joke, and streaming radio... well, we have spotify and rdio. So pirating is sorta routine. And the end result is probably more than a few politicians getting the letter and wondering why they're citing US laws and all that.
And there probably were more than a few calls to the ISP about them and mentioning changes in Canadian law.
And knowing ISP incompetence from the big guys, I'm sure this will repeatedly keep happening as ISPs fail to filter out the notices that were supposed to go to politicians.
Remember, Geist got a letter forwarded to him by the ISP who was about to send it onwards. Quite likely a number of politicians got sent one because of their family members or something.
Most people don't reasonably expect that a broadcast on 10/8 would go to every machine - in practically every network I've seen, it's been segmented into subnets - 10.0.1.x/24 might be for general office, 10.0.2/24 might be for the developers, etc.
it's what people do for 192.168.*.x - 192.168.0.x is for servers behind the firewall, 192.168.1.x is for PCs, 192.168.2.x is VPN, etc.
I suppose the bigger thing is that they decided to use private IP space rather than setting up a set of colliding public IP addresses.
You joke, but it's perfectly possible that's the case.
The servers weren't hacked - the user credentials were. After all, you won't believe some of the phishes that get out there, and once they steal credentials, well, it doesn't matter how well the vendor protects the data - the vulnerability will always be stolen credentials.
Short of having cloud vendors mandate 2-factor security (imagine having to carry around an RSA key just to log into dropbox!), well, there's not much one can do.
Even SMS based functionality can break - apparently Google refuses to send you SMS if you travel overseas, so if you rely on that for authentication, you're screwed.
Or more like there's a HUGE field of post-secondary educational opportunities out there besides college or university. And many of them may have more appeal than college/university.
The thing is, well, most parents grew up at a time when "blue collar" jobs were dangerous, generally unskilled, dirty and underappreciated. So the way out was the main office - get a job working in an office (a "white collar" job) and you won't have to endure heat, dirt, grease, oil and managers barking at you all day. And the ticket to a white collar job is ... college or university.
Except things are quite different these days - there's many jobs that are blend of both, and even traditional blue collar jobs are often higher skilled and very much appreciated. And working conditions re far better with worker compensation boards and safety and health boards, etc.
So continuing education in stuff like trades and other areas may appeal more than studying and an office job. And we need to emphasize that these paths are perfectly fine - trade school works for a lot of people, and many don't want to sit in an office all day but be out and about. There's other opportunities as well - aviation for example - covers a whole range from the heavily degreed (which gets you to designing aircraft), to the trained (pilots) to the trades (mechanics). And many still end up with traditional degrees like BSc (pilots often get one, as do mechanics taking accredited programs), BA (airport management is a business) and others. ,
If you let them play over an extended period of time, they would draw - they won't lose, but they won't be up any money, either.
But if you were to randomly sample the game, you'd fine one of them would be up.
That's the nature of a solved game - given perfect play of both players, you'd basically get a draw game.
That's been generally true, actually.
Here's a secret of PCIe - you don't need all 16 lanes hooked up to use a x16 slot. In fact, PCIe slots are designed to be downward compatible - if you have a x1 card, it can go in a x16 slot no problem. If you have a x2 card, it can't go into a x1 slot, but it can go into a x4 slot and use 2 lanes. Or that x4 slot can only have one lane and it'll use one lane. So a x16 slot is pretty universal.
There is no real reason why a PC cannot have x16 slots exclusively (it lets you plug in PCIe cards anywhere) so you can plug in anything into the slots. If you wanted, you can plug in cards that have more lanes into slots with less and the unused lanes are disabled.
And yes, most motherboards have a "primary" slot where it's a real x16 slot, and 1 or 2 or more SLI or Crossfire slots which are x8 or even x4.
This.
There are TWO "app stores" that every iOS device has access to. The walled garden is the obvious one, but there's one where there is NO DRM, no approvals, nothing. And it was around since the original iPhone and since iPhoneOS 1.0
It was Apple's original SDK strategy, too.
It's called a web application and it uses HTML and JavaScript to do everything. You "install" it via Safari and it shows up as a icon in the home screen. No approvals from Apple are required (it's just a very specially formulated link), it can do a lot of things already (thanks to HTML5 integration) and is completely DRM-free. Do it right and it's practically native.
Oh yeah, you can program it in any OS, no Mac required :). As a bonus, it'll be usable on other OSes, too. (I think Android has the same ability too).
False.
Cable channels ALREADY have prepared for a la carte. And they're not going the "better channels" route. They're going the "more eyeballs" route.
First, you'll notice that your favorite programs are now spread across three or four channels. What used to be on History is now on H2/H3/other associated channels now. What used to be on Discovery is now on Science and the other channels.
Next, have you noticed how the main channels like Discovery and History have gone practically all reality? Guess what? That's on purpose - because those kind of shows are popular with the public and get the eyeballs in. More eyeballs means more people wanting that channel.
Your model is called the PBS model. No, we're not going to get more PBS-like programming channels (ever notice how PBS, who doesn't worry about eyeballs, always seems to keep a high level of programming and no ads?). Even so, PBS is under attack because of taxpayer funding through various means.
In the battle for subscribers, you don't get them by producing thoughtful shows. You get them by producing crap that gets eyeballs in. Few want good documentaries on World War II. More want more Pawn Stars (and they want drama, not crap about crap), more people racing each other through dirt countryside and all that.
Oh wait, you'll need ot purchase 4 channels now for that to spread the eyeballs around, too.
In short - only two ways to get good programming - PBS, or subscriber funded channels like HBO. The other channels? They're going to fight tooth and nail for eyeballs.
And yes, it'll cost more. After all, Discovery by itself is around 25 cents/subscriber/month, with all the bundling they force, it's probably closer to 40-45 cents. You can bet your cable provider will charge 25 cents or more for each channel. Maybe a whopping dollar per channel (right now, less than $1 of your fees are for Discovery).
You want to see savings? ESPN charges $10-15/subscribe/month. Probably more because of bundling.
Trust me, the networks are all prepared for this day. And they're not going after the people who want to see smarter TV programming. They're going after the lowest common denominator because there are more of them than you. History and Discovery catering to you? Probably a few subscribers. Cater to the crowds? At least 10 times, if not more subscribers.
Technically, Microsoft created one, then canned it, as usual.
Windows Home Server contained an EXCELLENT network backup utility - it did image-based backups (but can do file-based restores easily), deduplication, is not accessible via SMB shares, fast, cheap, and a whole lot more. The only downside was it was Windows-only - it could only do NTFS disks because it relies on Volume Shadow Services and on disk-tracking (it finds out what actually changed on disk between runs so it only needs to backup the changed content).
It was a great backup, restore and upgrade tool - the recovery program was a bootable CD, and the drivers it needs are stored with the backup so all you need is a USB thumbdrive, copy a specific folder off the machine's backup and use it with the boot CD so the boot CD can access hard drives and network.
And it was automated - every night every machine would get backed up.
But as is typical for Microsoft, they canned WHS and let the backup program in it die because well, it was too useful.
So? Why shouldn't Amazon be allowed to create a walled garden? You make it seem like it's a right that all Android devices must be open and all that. Amazon wants to make their own walled garden, and the Android license lets them. take it up with Google.
In fact, why do you think "Google Play Services" exist? To help narrow down Android fragmentation? No, it's to lock developers into the Google Play APIs so they can't easily port to Amazon - I mean why ignore one of Android's biggest issues for years then come up with a solution?
Anyhow, you have to realize Amazon's trying to be an Apple, and Amazon's got a pretty big market clout. "Amazon" might not make phones, but everyone's ordered products from them, and a significant number of people have Prime. So you already have brand recognition right there.
Except unlike Apple, Amazon makes no money on hardware. They sell content, so allowing you to load up another store's content is verboten - the goal is to use Amazon for music, movies, books and TV. Of course, Amazon isn't completely pure, either given their DoJ handout and everything. (Hint: monopsonys can be evil too).
Apple wants to sell hardware, so they sell content merely to help them sell the hardware - what's the point of a music player without music? Hence, the iTunes store.
Actually that was sort of the plan of the Best Buy co-founder wanted to embrace before the current Best Buy board denied his purchase offer for the company.
He wanted to embrace showrooming - it already happens now, so why not actually support it, encourage it, and turn best buy from a store selling stuff into a showroom selling stuff.
And it makes a lot of sense - people still want to touch and feel products, but other than Apple, Microsoft and Samsung, most manufacturers are not able to maintain a network of stores to sell stuff through. Enter Best Buy who will lease you out a space for your product so people can come by and touch, feel, play and if you can keep them in stock, buy off the shelf. If not, Best Buy will gladly help you order it online.
Of course there has to be a sundry list of items they regularly stock, but that is minor - the goal is to be a showroom where you may be able to buy stuff, but more so you can come and see and feel the product. In other words, the customer is not the guy walking in the door, it's the manufacturers of the products inside, and I'm sure with partnerships with Amazon and other fulfilment companies, they can get special offers like ship it to the store for free and the like.
It already is like that for the big players - when you see the PS4 and Xbone aisles - know Sony and Microsoft actually pay Best Buy for the entire aisle. Those product displays? Yes, purchased space. Notice how the Apple area has different (often nicer) carpeting? Yes, Apple paid for that area, AND the renovations to get it to be like that.
Basically, the goal is to fill the niche that online shopping cannot fill - the ability to see the product.
Fabs are expensive. As in, REALLY expensive. They cost $1B to build, and easily $10+B to equip (or more). So you're already in the hole many billions of dollars and you haven't produced anything yet.
Oh, and there's a clock ticking away, because you're going to need to spend another $10+B to buy ALL NEW EQUIPMENT to handle the upcoming node shrink.
The only way to do that is to have a fab running continuously churning out product, and to find uses for the older node equipment (which now has to be discounted some because people want to use the new shiny equipment).
Fabs like TSMC however have been major innovators because it allowed fabless companies like NVidia, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and hundreds more to exist without having to make major capital investments in fabs but get the technology out there. Imagine you want to do a chip, and now you need to convince your investors that to make it, you need to spend $15+B. Versus a few million.