Neil Young already has the Pono Player. It plays FLAC.
I have one, and its technology sucks balls.
It's got a great DAC - an ESS SABRE 9016 - that powers many modern A/V receivers. Point there.
The problem is the amplifiers suck.
Ayre amps supposedly have no feedback, and that makes it "good". I suppose it is given they sell amps for $20,000 that are handmade in Colorado. However, just because you can hand make something doesn't translate into a mass-manufactured product. First off, the amp in the Pono is fully discrete (transistors, no op-amps). This is fine, if you manage to match all the transistors in each stage properly. Also fine in a $20,000 handmade product where you can go through and characterize every transistor and find matching pairs so they behave identically. But in a mass manufactured product, they probably are grabbing transistors off a reel, which means instant mismatches since they're within their specs, but will deviate due to manufacturing issues.
So a discrete amp already is at a disadvantage because without taking time to characterize every part, you're going to get an amp that behaves differently between channels and between units.
Yes, integrated units are better - best are dual units because matching within a die is far better (under 1% difference) that matching between dice (over 10-20%). IC designers know this, and they know that manufacturing can trim the differences down to practically nil within a die (in IC manufacturing, everything is based on ratios - you cannot say you want a 1K resistor because you'll get 1K +/- 30% tolerance. But you can design two transistors that will be well within 1% of each other, even if you need a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio or more - so designers work on ratios rather than absolute values). It's why you have dual DAC and dual op-amp or even more (6 channel DACs are common too) in a single package - the matching between the parts will be remarkably close, brought in closer because they can be laser trimmed during fab.
The next problem is lack of feedback causing a REALLY HIGH output impedance - about 5 ohms. If you don't know, this causes EQ because headphones with 8 ohm impedance can really vary between 1-12+ ohms over the audio range. This causes EQ (equalization) which means the amplifier actually produces different gains at different frequencies, a la a graphic equalizer. You can use an EQ to reverse this trend (that's what they're actually for - to equalize the response), but that's a bunch of processing. I've seen comments that say you should go for 8 times the output impedance at a minimum - so 40 ohm headphones or higher to minimize the EQ (at 8 times, the variance is around 0.5db).
Again, Ayre amps may do this because you're going to pair it up with good speakers that already will have higher impedances so you won't notice. But Joe Average will be using jellybean 8/16/32 ohm headphones (most common impedances).
The problem with Pono is that it hits EVERY audiophile rumor out there. Discrete good, op-amp bad (true back in the 70s with early opamps, but since the 80s we've had great audio op-amps that have excellent transfer characteristics). Feedback is bad (because feeding back a "time delayed" signal just ruins the audio purity - never mind that we're talking nanoseconds here) - even though using it lets you have lower output impedances. And that high output impedance means EQ up the hell.
And let's not say about the claim from Ayre themselves saying it's 80-90% as good as their $20,000 amp. That's just wrong on so many levels - are you saying that the amp is overpriced? Or to go the extra mile costs an extra $19,600?
Hell, I'm surprised they stuck with 3.5mm jacks given all the design work - 3.5mm jacks while convenient, do have limitations w.r.t. cross talk and other parameters.
And the hardware's kinda crappy - underpowered SoC running Android AOSP 2.2. yes, 2.2. it's sluggish all around.
I've actually never wanted to back out of a kickstarter as much as I have with Pono.
Will Apple update the Macbook Air and the Mac mini with these new CPUs?
Mac Mini was already updated recently, so no, that won't be updated. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line - they basically do NOT sell. Apple probably wants to drop both but there's a contingent of very loud complainers who would raise the global noise level should Apple actually do so.
(And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old - blame Intel for that one since Intel decided to not keep the footprints the same. Apple in the end chose one socket and had to fit all the options using that socket - Intel chose to make their quad-core i7 a different socket and the Mac Mini's production run doesn't justify having multiple motherboards).
Macbook Air though was presumably waiting for Broadwell to come out, so quite possibly. The portables still do sell well enough that Apple puts a minimal amount of money in them.
Why? Has your laptop ever been confiscated or read by police? I seriously doubt it.
When traveling, especially international (which is what the OP said), customs DOES have a right to search electronic devices. They have a right to impound your laptop, at that.
Sure, perhaps the TSA goon can't seize your laptop while you're traveling domestic, but considering anyone can seize your laptop internationally, well, it's potentially risky.
And no, hiding your porn a few folders deep is pointless if int he end the searcher runs a tool that just enumerates all photos on the hard drive. Which is what they do - they don't bother with directory structure, filetimes or datestamps, they just get all the files in a flat view and maybe even detect ones where the internal timestamps don't match the external ones.
Something like TrueCrypt will prevent a casual 15 minute scan of your hard drive from detecting stuff, yes, but there are probably enough footprints that you're using TrueCrypt and the like for them to impound your laptop for further investigation.
Let's add iTunes and Final Cut Pro to the mix as well.
What happened with all those products is their codebase was basically abandoned and restarted from scratch - either because it got too complex after growing organically for years.
So all your examples basically refer to the "old" versions (iLife 09 vs. current, iWork 09 vs. current) and the "new" versions out right now. But they're actually two completely different codebases.
As is typical for Apple (this has been going on for decades), when Apple rewrites an app, their first few versions are generally of lower quality and has less features and more bugs. You want a modern example? Take OS X - 10.0 was barely usable - it was sluggish, it was missing basic features (DVD player, anyone? This took 2 years before it reappeared!) that were in the cruddy, crumbling MacOS Classic. Basically yeah, you could run OS X, but really sticking with the tried and true was better.
10.2 is considered perhaps the first usable version of OS X where it was basically feature complete. It was also the last of the early OS X series where the updates were free (10.1 and 10.2 were free upgrades from 10.0 for early adopters). 10.3 was a paid update and brought immense improvements,
So yeah, every time Apple rewrites the code, the rewritten code is always feature-incomplete with even basic features missing, it's completely buggy and is barely usable.
It's no surprise iWork, iLife, iTunes (11 was new), FCP, etc., they all were the same. Hell, in FCP's case, Apple decided the restart selling FCP because so many people complained about FCPX. It's been a few years since FCPX has been released and things have settled down some - you see filmmakers who didn't go through the early versions of FCPX use it nowadays. But the early days were dicey.
Apple's rewrites are generally crap initially - you got to give them 2-4 years before they stabilize and reach feature parity with the old version. Hell, iTunes 11 took a few versions to get back in the game and there are more than a few who didn't watch to use iTunes 11 for a while despite it actually working a lot better.
If Bitstamp did get hacked, then what regulation do you have in mind? "Don't get hacked" is not something you really need a regulation for.
Maybe you meant regulations in general that make it hard for new/small companies to handle money. Assuming there's a correlation between bigness and competence is...... optimistic.
I think the main reason we don't see this happening so much in the banking space is that banks will work together to reverse transactions when possible, and all accounts are ID verified, whereas the Bitcoin community doesn't do that.
How about regulations like "don't be stupid when handling other people's money"?
Perhaps proper accounting and transacting systems - a simple MySQL backed PHP web site is not sufficient to run an exchange, with proper failover and all that?
The typical transaction generates so much paper trails that if any part of the system does fail, you can see where the money got hung up. It might take a while since you need to correlate tons of records, but it's there.
It's called double entry - for every transaction, two entries are made in the ledger - one showing an account that got debited, another showing the account that got credited, and if one of those entries is not there, well, there's the money.
And why is an exchange using the same wallet all the time? Surely that's banking with bitcoin 101 - you can create a wallet anytime, so why not create wallets for each transaction then discard them when it was complete? Rather than have one master wallet that can be compromised?
Of course, the problem is all this book-keeping creates a paper trail, which probably goes against the whole bitcoin concept.
Sorry, but no. There is no need for a fallback for infotainment. Inability to browse cat pictures or watch youtube is not an emergency that has to be planned for, with redundancy acquired at a great overall expense. These infotainment systems increase car costs, you end up paying for them regardless of usage.
Also, if you don't already own a smart device, yet can afford a car equipped with infotainment system, it is clearly a matter of choice.
Actually, infotainment systems are stupidly cheap because everything's in software. Navigation systems are generally the main goal (and trust me, cars are used in areas where there is lousy data coverage, so offline maps are handy) which gets you a big screen. The radio part is fairly trivial as are the bluetooth parts.
Basically to have an onboard GPS gives you a lot, and you might as well reuse the screen instead of having more screens for the climate control, radio (AM/FM/satellite/CD/etc) and dozens of other features that require user feedback. This leaves the knobs and switches which are just attached to a giant PCB hooked to the infotainment system as well. The actual mechanics are done by servos and such (allowing things like defoggers to turn on the AC to dehumidify the air and get the windows clear quickly). Yes, sometimes you really want to run the AC in winter.
All this makes for a more compact and less complex front panel because instead of having to have a bunch of levers and such to hook up, it's just a simple connector. Oh yeah, the car weighs a few pounds less as well.
Then there's the rental cars and fleet vehicles which may be basic in everything, but since you can't rely on the current driver to have a smart device...
Infotainment systems are pure electronics. Very cheap, very light and very simple in the end - it's why even your most basic of econoboxes has 'em, and even they have upgrades for full navigation systems because in the end, it's jujst a matter of the software loaded onto it.
Even something like voice recognition is free - the hardware's there (for the handsfree system) so just have a button and you're done.
Of course, some cars have taken to the extreme and ditched the front panel - making it an iPad app or something that coordinates all the UI controls.
There are service providers that specialize in DDoS mitigation. Some of them already host banks (lots of them, in some cases), and have multiple terabits of bandwidth available to survive DDoS attacks with minimal impact. They're able to mitigate attacks in the hundreds of gigabits.
They're not cheap, but they work, and banks tend to be able to afford it.
Though it makes you wonder if companies like CloudFront and all aren't also behind paying some money to LizardSquad and such to do DDoS attacks to promote their services. I mean, it's unlikely a company like Microsoft uses them (being the target of many attacks, I'm sure their systems are already hardened just because everyone wants to break into Microsoft), but hey, maybe you kinda-sorta-shoulda put Xbox LIve behind CloudFront, no?
The goal is, of course, money, and someone like Microsoft can pay a lot of it.
I mean, just take a look at any site's javascript include and practically everyone's using cloudfront now.
wrong, we over 50 were taught to fix shit, starting at age 10 in my case. Guys [1] usually fell into two categories, the electrical or mechanical.
[1] sorry wrong headed thinking about women meant females left out, though sewing and cooking are good skills everyone should have
But that's because stuff cost a lot more then than now.
I mean, in the 70s, 80s, if you wanted a big screen (larger than an say, 20" or so) TV, it could easily cost half a year's disposable income. If that thing failed, you're taking it to the repair shop because saving up meant giving up a lot for another half a year.
Cars too - these days, the modern new car basically needs very little done to it - change the oil every half year or so, and top up liquids. That's really all to it - you don't tinker with points, replace plugs, or do anything else until it gets to 100K miles or so at which point things are worn out to beyond tolerance. Back in the day, something was always failing or going rough or need tweaking so on the weekends you'd basically go fix it.
Same goes for everything else - I mean, today's TVs come in sizes we could never imagine even 10 years ago (I saw a 60" TV about 10 years ago and wondered at how big and unaffordable and luxury that is (think $20K). These days you can pick up one under $1000 on sale!). Nevermind back in the 70s and 80s where "big screen" was 19 glorious inches.
So yeah, today's stuff is far more reliable, and far cheaper than ever before. Moving a 60" TV for fixing - if it takes longer than about 4 hours, it's BER - beyond economical repair because the labor cost would be close to $500 already. Any more and you might as well pick up a new TV because you'd have spent that same amount.
If I had the money, I'd pick up the sweet 85" 4K TV I saw, but that was $17K. You bet I'd take it in for repair. But if it fails 10 years later, well, I could probably pick up one for $1000 and be done with it. I'd give the old set to the neighborhood kid who has nothing but a lot of time on his hands to try to fix - if he gets it working, he gets a free big screen TV (albeit oudated). If not, well, it just cost him some free time.
And that's the deal with things today - if my phone breaks, I won't bother fixing it - I could, and if it had sentimental value I would, but a new phone isn't that much more money.
And yes, I did the recycled computer thing too - work was selling their old PCs for $20 or so, and I picked one up, to experiment with. Turned out by the time I finished, I put in about $200 worth of parts, and no, $20 was its still expected resale value. By the time I got around to junking that machine, I had spent maybe $400 with upgrades along the way.
Repair is a hobby. Do it for fun in your free time. When my TV breaks, I won't fix it, I'd go out and buy a new TV and have it working in a couple of hours (including driving to the store and unpacking it). I can figure out what to do with my old TV later - recycle, repair it (myself - I can't pay a repairman to repair what is now a $800 TV new), or if it is somewhat functional, use it as a spare.
Anyhow, I wouldn't say today's kids lack skills - the maker movement shows that today's stuff is also a lot more complex - no longer just electrical or mechanical, it's both electronic, electrical, mechanical AND software all rolled into one.
The redefinition of the word "piracy" is not natural evolution though, it's a deliberate attempt by copyright maximallists to prejudice courts and pressure Congress. Yes, language changes. But corruption and manipulation should be resisted.
Except "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement" actually predates civil law. It was first used around the very early 17th century (1603-ish) - The Stationer's Company of London received in 1553 the right to hold monopoly on publication (what we would later know as copyright) and recorded in 1603 or so the first use of the term piracy to denote infringement of that monopoly.
This predates the formation of the US and the Constitution and the 14+14 copyright term by a couple of centuries (hence the English references)
Interestingly enough, according to the OED, the term pirate is from the 16th century, so the use of piracy to mean copyright infringement happened not too long after the word was adopted on the high seas.
No, it's not a modern evolution - it's an ancient one, and dates back to practically a few decades after pirate was used in a nautical sense. So complaining about piracy and misue of it, you're nearly half a millennia too late - that ship has long sailed and pirate/piracy has both meanings since basically their inception.
Oh, and copyright maximalists and such prefer the word "theft" to "pirate". Or "stealing". Piracy and copyright infringement (the latter is a more modern term since piracy predates copyright as a term) are less strong terms than "IP theft" or "stealing movies". Even "copying" is far less strong.
The Xbox 360 security system was very impressive and only encountered truly serious problems right at the very end of the consoles much extended lifespan. I've got an interest in computer security so I'm eagerly awaiting talks on how the Xbox One is done, but given the general success of the 360 architecture I suspect the One is very similar, with some tweaks and additional defence in depth.
I haven't heard of any major security breaks in the Xbox360 - the old ones that were present are still there (reflashing the optical drive to play pirated games). If there's a major break that opened it up, I haven't heard of it.
The PS3 was completely pwned in 2011 or so whenthey discovered the security keys, but you still can't get online with a hacked Xbox360 because it won't run homebrew still and the dashboard still can detect hacks.
As for the Xbox One, the Xbox360 and Xbone implement a traditional security system - both run games in user mode (the original Xbox ran code in kernel mode so one game hack opened the entire machine) and in the caose of the Xbox One, runs a hypervisor with two guest OSes - the game OS and the application OS.
About the only interesting thing would be the fact the Xbox One can also be a dev console.
And the XDK released appears to be for the ID@Xbox program - the one indie developers use which is probably close to the full thing, and probably fuller than what the eventual Xbox Live Indie Arcade devkit would have.
Somewhere towards the end of their reign of dominance, more when they started to be pushed out by being too small to be of any use and cheap CD-Rs (not USB back then---it worked like crap) they got super cheap and started to massively suck. Some would work only a few times before conking out.
I've found the 3.5" ones to be fairly reliable, even near the end. The ones that were HORRENDOUSLY unreliable were the 5.25" ones, because the 360K and 1.2MB ones were physically incompatible with each other (the 360K had tracks twice as wide as the 1.2MB version). While a 1.2MB drive could reliably read a 360k floppy, it could not write to them reliably because they only wrote half the track. The end result was something that maybe-kinda-sorta could work in a 360k drive.
The 3.5" disks generally tended to be reliable for a year or so - even the bottom of the basket AOL ones. After that, if you weren't using name-brand disks, it isn't reliable - the coatings start to flake.
At least Sony when moving from 720k to 1440k (or "1.44MB" - using *both* binary and decimal prefixes in the same measurement!) made them completely compatible.
I assume the idea is that you make more money stealing $1 many times from more people over a year than you do trying to steal all of it from all of it at once.
It works in real life all the time, actually - companies do this quite routinely. Jack up your bill by $2 and they can rack up millions over the year, and it doesn't matter if it's a contract or not because how much are you going to spend trying to recovery $24/year? If it's a cellphone contract, the max they're going charge you is $48 more over the contract's 2 year lifespan. You going to sue them over that? Now repeat that for a million subscribers and that's an extra $2M a month in free profits.
Maybe you can jack it up by $5 ($60/year) because it's still too low to bother.
It's why they made class-action lawsuits, because someone stealing $48M/year would get sued/arrested/etc if it was against one person, but against 1M people? Worthless.
As for this, well, given it's still "free money", even at Bitcoin's deflated value of around $350 or so, it's still free money. Who cares about efficiency or anything when you can steal CPU cycles like that - just scan github checkins for the key, then use the APIs to automatically create sessions and all that and rack up the bitcoins. Even the github scanner doesn't have to be owned by the user - they probably stole some guy's EC2 credential and are using one of his instances for it unbeknownst to the user. Free money!
Yep, that cha-ching sound you're hearing is the sound of VPN, Proxy, and seedbox providers in more freer countries taking New customers from Canada - welcome aboard:)
I wonder how true that is.
First off, most VPN and Proxy providers don't provide one IP per subscriber - it's shared among multiple subscribers (through NAT, usually). So if you're using a VPN or proxy server with 10 other people at the same time, an IP address will not pinpoint a guilty party. What's the provider to do - send 10 notices out?
I mean, depending on how those notices are worded, you could argue that you're being extorted (9 people can argue that, but I'm sure the 10th will too) for money since you didn't do anything wrong and they're asking money.
In fact, a lot of VPNs in the US have a "real time DMCA" function (apparently it's a TCP port or something), but that function always fails if more than one user is on it because you cannot conclusively identify the user (the real-time part means the notice is sent while the user is still doing the activity because there are no logs, so you can only send an alert while the user is doing it).
So the general gist of it is - use a server that's got multiple people on it because really, short of exact connection tracking and logging, it's going to be problematic to pinpoint who is committing the activity. Unless you're going to force logging of all connections to users.
Of course, one might want to avoid using the port forwarding feature of the VPN service if they can trace it to a specific port (for incoming connections).
(My VPN service is based in the US, mostly for netflix and stuff).
WTF?! We're talking about general recursion, not some stupid, easily avoidable cases. Even in the case of qsort - you need to make 2 (not one) recursive calls one for left and one for right, and you need to keep the midpoint somewhere on the stack... Basically it's easier to roll your own, totally heap based accounting than try to be clever with stack frames. Plus GP explicitly said that there is recursion and your c compiler does not do tail recursion anyway (or you can't count on it)
No, you can do quicksort in one recursive call. Even in the two recursive call scenario, an optimizing compiler will turn it into one recursive call and a loop - it's such a basic operation it's called tail recursion.
Basically if you have a recursive function call at the end of the function, instead of making it a recursive call, you can reuse the current stack frame by readjusting the input parameters (on the stack) and jumping to the beginning of the function, saving yourself the headache of setting up and tearing down a stack frame because you're reusing the current stack frame. (or in other words, you're doing a loop).
In fact, this can be generalized into tall call optimization where if you call another function at the end of a function, the optimizing compiler will reuse the stack frame of the current function for the call instead.
Syntactically the code looks the same, but the output is vastly different because you get operations that rewrite the stack frame (a particularly smart compiler might actually put the parameters of the call right where they need to be by moving the arguments around so the final two instructions is a stack adjustment to compensate for different stack sizes and a direct jump, so when the tail function returns, it doesn't stop back at the calling function, but goes back to the original function.
So yes, you're right in that there's supposed to be two recursive calls in quicksort, but in practice, there's only one because the last one is always tail-recursive so compilers merely reuse the existing stack frame.
The thing is, he sold "commemorative coins" with inflated bullshit values instead of the actual weight of gold, to senior citizens and pensioners who were told by his bullshit commercials that it was not only a safe investment, but that it was the ONLY place they could put their money given the "volatility!"
I remember and see those ads all the time. I remember disregarding them until my dad came to me asking about them. Took me about 5 minutes of Googling before I was told they were not as rare as the ad said. Everything else was true, but neglected to mention that they were common and easily obtainable from alternate sources. Of course, the real price of them was less than half what the ad was charging. Someone's gotta pay for the ad, I guess.
It was merely a store that resold US mint coins with huge markups - you could easily go to a regular store and get them far cheaper.
The phrase might be true, but we're seeing the effects of insufficient eyes. In reality, how many sets of eyes are actually reviewing these libraries at a source code level? I rather strongly suspect that in most cases they are simply used under the assumption that "well, everyone uses it, it must be okay".
Well, everyone's assuming that since everyone else is using it, there must be a lot of eyes on it. I mean, surely a project can't grow to be embedded in practically everything and have glaring bugs in it, right? Given so many "beta testers" of the software, all bugs should've been resolved because everyone must be using it in sufficiently different ways that the paths all get exercised, right?
And yes, I too used OpenSSL and was quite disappointed as to its complexity and lack of documentation. I mean, if everyone else uses it, you'd think there would be some rather great documentation for it - I mean, did everyone else waste a couple of weeks trying to make sense of trying to use it? If it's used so much, it must have well designed APIs and great documentation to go with it to be that popular.
Then again, I suspect a good reason for its widespread use is it's basic functionality that's not replicated anywhere else.So yes, it's one of those rare exceptions because everyone uses it because it's your only choice, and yes, everyone else has to bang their heads on it for a few weeks to make heads or tails of it.
And no, big complex things don't have to be complicated - Linux is big and complex, yet has some rather good documentation about it. A good source explorer (or even LXR) and you can easily figure out if an API is doing what you expect. It's just that Linux is well compartmentalized, APIs are generally stable and things are generally written to what you expect. Oh, and people do write documentation about it.
In fact, Linux is probably more complex because there's a lot of code that is NOT included in the build so you have to sift through mounds of dead code. Or not, since a lot of the time it's obvious.
The thing is, with Linux, there are people who are willing to document and refactor. OpenSSL is complex because a lot of it grew organically - stuff gets added as time goes on but little gets refactored. In Linux, there are people actively culling bad pieces of code and rewriting it to be cleaner, better, more efficient, whatever. So stuff doesn't generally grow out of control before someone decides to prune it and try to figure out a better way to do these things.
User experience: I don't know if they have changed this recently, but the last time I used an Android device with a SD card used for storage, it was a PITA. IIRC the SD card could only be used for documents or media, while the partition space usable by apps and the OS was still fixed to onboard. That was fairly useless, since most of what I wanted to use up space with was various huge (500 MB+, thanks Disney) apps to keep my kids entertained when I wasn't using the phone. Also I had to select a storage partition whenever downloading something, and the phone gave me no clue about what I could/should allocate where. All in all, the SD card seemed like a much cooler idea than it was in practice.
Well, you can put apps on SD cards now. At least since ICS, anyhow.
But still, user experience is pretty poor because now the user has MANAGE the storage. Where did you want to put the photo? Oh, internal storage is full! Please pick external storage! Oh doing so lost the image you took, Sorry.
Then there's the whole "where he (*@&#% is the file" issue - put some files on SD, some on internal storage, and the file will be in the wrong place when you need it. So now you need a file manager to manage moving files between SD and internal storage. Another user headache who just wants to use their device.
And nevermind that SD cards rarely use permission-based filesystems, so now any app using SD cards can access all data on SD cards. Given iOS perchant for security and trying to keep user data isolated by app so no app can access anyone else's data except through well defined APIs, well, an SD card is the perfect way to violate that. A malicioius app may decide to corrupt a data file of another app to do stuff it wants - perhaps that app holds passwords, so it writes a corrupt password file that causes it run code that passes it the password and the secured password store.
Or the director could just avoid doubt by exclusively licensing the motion picture to the studio for 20 years. This would be long enough for the theatrical release, the current home video format, and the next home video format, after which point the copyright reverts to the director.
You realize that the director doesn't hold copyright, right? The writers do - they wrote the story! Or they created a derivative story from another story (e.g., movie based on a book), which means part of the copyright is owned by the original author.
Then there's the photographer's right - copyright is owned by the "fixer" of the creative work - the one who puts the work onto media. A writer does it by putting pen to paper (or keys to word processor). A singer does it by recording it to audio tape. A photographer/filmmaker does it by exposing film.
And there's all the other works contained within a movie - the music score, for example. THat one is ESPECIALLY tricky because those are licensed as a whole - the orchestra signs over their rights for a fixed fee for limited uses.
You clearly know nothing about economics. If pay decreased because of scarcity, so would the price of things you spent your pay on. It's a complete myth that currency has to expand with the economy. Before modern fiat currencies when gold was money the economy out grew the mining of gold, wages deceased and goods decrease in price, economic growth continued. Modern fiat currencies require no deflation because the currency is not moved but created as debt.
Actually, economic growth slowed greatly when gold got hard to find. The economy is not about money. It's about the movement of money. A strong economy is one where money is moving around.
Deflation makes economic activity halt. If something you want is going to be cheaper tomorrow, will you buy it today, or tomorrow? Sure, some items will have to be bought - there are certain necessities to life after all. However, you can bet big time that alternatives to spending money in a deflationary cycle will happen - if the good is food, people will grow their own or form community gardens and try to avoid spending as much as possible (because it gets cheaper tomorrow).
Or if that's too foreign, perhaps you had to talk to someone about getting say, a computer. Or other advanced tech product. They'll say "well, tomorrow a new model is coming out" or "next year will have a better model" and the end result is... no purchase. Because something better is around the corner and they're not willing to commit and lose out on that something better.
So in a deflationary cycle, hoarding or saving of money is the name of the game because it'll always be cheaper tomorrow.
That's why we moved to fiat currencies - economic growth was being limited by the available supply of gold - if we couldn't mine more, we couldn't pay people more, so existing stock got more valuable and people stopped spending, stalling out the economy.
That said, inflationary economies aren't good either - too much inflation and people get paid less and less - see Zimbabwe.
So one needs to balance inflation - not too much, but not too little that you risk going into a deflationary cycle which will not just stall any economic recovery, but completely bury it because people immediately stop spending when they know goods tomorrow are cheaper.
Talk about overstating the obvious. You can't leave work anymore. Every boss or company problem invades you digitally. Whether it's an e-mail or a text message you're always on the clock and expected in most cases to be available. This used to be true for tech workers but it's now anybody.
A few questions - why are you checking work email outside of work? Why are you giving work your personal cellphone number?
It's an important question, because unless they give you a blackberry or a phone, you really have no obligation to give them freebies like data usage or texts or anything.
I mean, sure you CAN link your work email to your personal phone, but why? That's a personal choice of making work invade personal time and money, since you're paying for the phone service. Ditto texts and all that. (Sure you can argue about unlimited data plans or text plans, but let's say you don't because either it's not available or you don't wish to upgrade to that service, or even if you already have it, there's no reason you have to let work know).
It's your personal device, folks, don't let work co-opt it. If they want you reachable after hours, they can pay for their own phone and service, or work out an arrangement where they pay part or all of your service charges. (BYOD is cool, but a lot of companies realize that one advantage is instead of giving employees phones and paying $30/month per line for services, they can offload it to the employee).
Heck, even my parents realized what BYOD really was and they asked if their service fees would be reimbursed. No? Thanks, but the work-issued phone works great.
Perhaps the court needs to expressly rule that the use of technology to gain information about what is going on inside someone's home constitutes a search and requires a warrant. It seems obvious to me that this is a breach of everyone's constitutional rights.
That is absolutely nonsensical. Do eye glasses count as technology? Does sitting in a car and looking out the window count as technology? Subjective laws are never a good thing.
The distinction that everyone seems to be missing is a matter of principle. Would it be legal for someone not working as a LEO to use one of these devices nonconsentually? Probably not, it would probably be considered stalking, voyeurism, etc.
I believe the threshold was "is the product commonly available to everyone". So stuff like eyeglasses are valid technologies police can use because the public has easy access to them.
A thermal imaging camera, until VERY recently (say, 2014) cost a lot of money and was not readily available, and thus its use was primarily limited to the police and limited commercial entities. So the court is right in that it cannot be caused because the equipment was not available or commonly used by the public.
Of course, these days, when thermal cameras are sold off the shelf in retail stores and available online for a couple hundred bucks (the FLIR One was sold inside Apple stores, while the Seek Thermal is a $200 dongle for your iOS or Android device), the argument against might actually change because thermal imaging IS available to the public.
Anyhow, apparently the use of the radar was incidental to the search - there was already enough reason to search the home (as part of an "emergency exception" that allows searches without a warrant). Yes, it's a fairly big loophole in that your home can be searched if a criminal breaks in while police are chasing them and YOU charged with crimes incidental to the other crime. Interestingly, the use of radar would be of aid to the homeowner because if police can determine there's no one in the room, they're not allowed to search it! Whereas if they did it the "traditional way" of hunting the suspect they'd have every right to search.
(FYI - The Illustrated Guide to Law is an extremely interesting and informative guide to what the law REALLY says and how it evolved, and how some things aren't as you'd expect. Some of your rights can be so easily given up mistakenly (and it's designed like that because prior to some event, it was all over the place).
Re:"extensive measures" taken...
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In my experience, the first problem is EGO. There is always some executive who bases his/her EGO on what exemptions he/she can get.
I'm too important NOT to have access to X. From anywhere. Along with all my people.
And then other executives have to have the same access because, otherwise, they are not as important. And IT can handle it, right?
So you end up with too many people with too much access. And admin/root access to their machines. That they also use for non-work related activities because why shouldn't I have iTunes on my work laptop?
So you end up with 100 people with VPN access to the HR servers and 95 of them don't even know it and 99 of them don't use it. BUT THEY ALL "HAVE" TO HAVE IT AND IT IS AUTHORIZED.
Do what good IT does - give it to them for a week, and see who uses it. If no one logs in after the first day, then close it back down again. If someone asks, just re-enable and blame some software update or something thanks for noticing.
Repeat as often as necessary.
I can bet 99% of the time, no one will notice because really all requests get filtered through one person in the end who knows the system. Then they are the only ones that need access.
Let them have their ego. Then close it and let them believe they still have it because you looked at the logs and saw they never touched it after the first day.
It's probably affecting their own commerce... especially if you're a western businessman traveling through China and you can't access your own email. Many companies large and small use Gmail's servers for their own email service.
Their commerce, actually, not western commerce.
You see, a bunch of companies in China do business by email, and a LOT of them use gmail because it frees them from having to pay for their own email service. (And Asians generally are cheapskates - they'll get by trying to spend as little money as possible).
I've dealt with companies where their email system is a free Gmail account - you see username-company@gmail.com listed on their business cards or some variation thereof. Gmail is free, after all, so why bother paying for a domain and email server when people are willing to do it for free?
Likewise, some do it using qq.com or other free Chinese mail provider.
So yeah, turns out blocking gmail blocks a lot of companies from doing business.
What is the problem that a driverless car is going to fix?
To paraphrase Henry Ford, it sounds to me like google is actually trying to build a faster horse,
The problem is simple - in North America, people drive because they're forced to. In most other countries, they drive because they WANT to.
This is problematic as you have a bunch of drivers on the road who would really want to be doing anything else other than driving, so they're driving distracted and all sorts of other things.
Public transit? If you're lucky.
In other countries, public transit is plentiful and you can even get around quite efficiently. This means those who don't want to drive, don't have to. Leaving the roads free for those who want to drive, and in theory drive better because instead of someone hating every minute of it and doing everything BUT driving (e.g., texting), they're enjoying the ride and the art of driving.
I'm not anything close to an expert, but wouldn't a stall be easily recoverable at 32,000+ feet? If a plane fell from this altitude without any radio contact I would think it would be some kind of catastrophic structural or mechanical failure.
Or a cumulonimbus (CB) cloud. Pilots are generally advised to stay 20 miles AWAY from storm clouds because of intense up and down drafts.
It's likely the pilot was trying to do that when denied by ATC - and towering CB can go up to the stratosphere (literally - it's why they get their anvil shape).
No plane can outfly the up or downdrafts which can be several thousand feet per minute. Fly into it and 32,000 feet can be gone in just a few minutes. Never mind wind shear which can basically rob an airplane of all airspeed.
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I have one, and its technology sucks balls.
It's got a great DAC - an ESS SABRE 9016 - that powers many modern A/V receivers. Point there.
The problem is the amplifiers suck.
Ayre amps supposedly have no feedback, and that makes it "good". I suppose it is given they sell amps for $20,000 that are handmade in Colorado. However, just because you can hand make something doesn't translate into a mass-manufactured product. First off, the amp in the Pono is fully discrete (transistors, no op-amps). This is fine, if you manage to match all the transistors in each stage properly. Also fine in a $20,000 handmade product where you can go through and characterize every transistor and find matching pairs so they behave identically. But in a mass manufactured product, they probably are grabbing transistors off a reel, which means instant mismatches since they're within their specs, but will deviate due to manufacturing issues.
So a discrete amp already is at a disadvantage because without taking time to characterize every part, you're going to get an amp that behaves differently between channels and between units.
Yes, integrated units are better - best are dual units because matching within a die is far better (under 1% difference) that matching between dice (over 10-20%). IC designers know this, and they know that manufacturing can trim the differences down to practically nil within a die (in IC manufacturing, everything is based on ratios - you cannot say you want a 1K resistor because you'll get 1K +/- 30% tolerance. But you can design two transistors that will be well within 1% of each other, even if you need a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio or more - so designers work on ratios rather than absolute values). It's why you have dual DAC and dual op-amp or even more (6 channel DACs are common too) in a single package - the matching between the parts will be remarkably close, brought in closer because they can be laser trimmed during fab.
The next problem is lack of feedback causing a REALLY HIGH output impedance - about 5 ohms. If you don't know, this causes EQ because headphones with 8 ohm impedance can really vary between 1-12+ ohms over the audio range. This causes EQ (equalization) which means the amplifier actually produces different gains at different frequencies, a la a graphic equalizer. You can use an EQ to reverse this trend (that's what they're actually for - to equalize the response), but that's a bunch of processing. I've seen comments that say you should go for 8 times the output impedance at a minimum - so 40 ohm headphones or higher to minimize the EQ (at 8 times, the variance is around 0.5db).
Again, Ayre amps may do this because you're going to pair it up with good speakers that already will have higher impedances so you won't notice. But Joe Average will be using jellybean 8/16/32 ohm headphones (most common impedances).
The problem with Pono is that it hits EVERY audiophile rumor out there. Discrete good, op-amp bad (true back in the 70s with early opamps, but since the 80s we've had great audio op-amps that have excellent transfer characteristics). Feedback is bad (because feeding back a "time delayed" signal just ruins the audio purity - never mind that we're talking nanoseconds here) - even though using it lets you have lower output impedances. And that high output impedance means EQ up the hell.
And let's not say about the claim from Ayre themselves saying it's 80-90% as good as their $20,000 amp. That's just wrong on so many levels - are you saying that the amp is overpriced? Or to go the extra mile costs an extra $19,600?
Hell, I'm surprised they stuck with 3.5mm jacks given all the design work - 3.5mm jacks while convenient, do have limitations w.r.t. cross talk and other parameters.
And the hardware's kinda crappy - underpowered SoC running Android AOSP 2.2. yes, 2.2. it's sluggish all around.
I've actually never wanted to back out of a kickstarter as much as I have with Pono.
Mac Mini was already updated recently, so no, that won't be updated. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro are the black sheep fo the product line - they basically do NOT sell. Apple probably wants to drop both but there's a contingent of very loud complainers who would raise the global noise level should Apple actually do so.
(And no, the new Mac Mini is not faster than the old - blame Intel for that one since Intel decided to not keep the footprints the same. Apple in the end chose one socket and had to fit all the options using that socket - Intel chose to make their quad-core i7 a different socket and the Mac Mini's production run doesn't justify having multiple motherboards).
Macbook Air though was presumably waiting for Broadwell to come out, so quite possibly. The portables still do sell well enough that Apple puts a minimal amount of money in them.
When traveling, especially international (which is what the OP said), customs DOES have a right to search electronic devices. They have a right to impound your laptop, at that.
Sure, perhaps the TSA goon can't seize your laptop while you're traveling domestic, but considering anyone can seize your laptop internationally, well, it's potentially risky.
And no, hiding your porn a few folders deep is pointless if int he end the searcher runs a tool that just enumerates all photos on the hard drive. Which is what they do - they don't bother with directory structure, filetimes or datestamps, they just get all the files in a flat view and maybe even detect ones where the internal timestamps don't match the external ones.
Something like TrueCrypt will prevent a casual 15 minute scan of your hard drive from detecting stuff, yes, but there are probably enough footprints that you're using TrueCrypt and the like for them to impound your laptop for further investigation.
Kinda, sorta, but not really.
Let's add iTunes and Final Cut Pro to the mix as well.
What happened with all those products is their codebase was basically abandoned and restarted from scratch - either because it got too complex after growing organically for years.
So all your examples basically refer to the "old" versions (iLife 09 vs. current, iWork 09 vs. current) and the "new" versions out right now. But they're actually two completely different codebases.
As is typical for Apple (this has been going on for decades), when Apple rewrites an app, their first few versions are generally of lower quality and has less features and more bugs. You want a modern example? Take OS X - 10.0 was barely usable - it was sluggish, it was missing basic features (DVD player, anyone? This took 2 years before it reappeared!) that were in the cruddy, crumbling MacOS Classic. Basically yeah, you could run OS X, but really sticking with the tried and true was better.
10.2 is considered perhaps the first usable version of OS X where it was basically feature complete. It was also the last of the early OS X series where the updates were free (10.1 and 10.2 were free upgrades from 10.0 for early adopters). 10.3 was a paid update and brought immense improvements,
So yeah, every time Apple rewrites the code, the rewritten code is always feature-incomplete with even basic features missing, it's completely buggy and is barely usable.
It's no surprise iWork, iLife, iTunes (11 was new), FCP, etc., they all were the same. Hell, in FCP's case, Apple decided the restart selling FCP because so many people complained about FCPX. It's been a few years since FCPX has been released and things have settled down some - you see filmmakers who didn't go through the early versions of FCPX use it nowadays. But the early days were dicey.
Apple's rewrites are generally crap initially - you got to give them 2-4 years before they stabilize and reach feature parity with the old version. Hell, iTunes 11 took a few versions to get back in the game and there are more than a few who didn't watch to use iTunes 11 for a while despite it actually working a lot better.
How about regulations like "don't be stupid when handling other people's money"?
Perhaps proper accounting and transacting systems - a simple MySQL backed PHP web site is not sufficient to run an exchange, with proper failover and all that?
The typical transaction generates so much paper trails that if any part of the system does fail, you can see where the money got hung up. It might take a while since you need to correlate tons of records, but it's there.
It's called double entry - for every transaction, two entries are made in the ledger - one showing an account that got debited, another showing the account that got credited, and if one of those entries is not there, well, there's the money.
And why is an exchange using the same wallet all the time? Surely that's banking with bitcoin 101 - you can create a wallet anytime, so why not create wallets for each transaction then discard them when it was complete? Rather than have one master wallet that can be compromised?
Of course, the problem is all this book-keeping creates a paper trail, which probably goes against the whole bitcoin concept.
Actually, infotainment systems are stupidly cheap because everything's in software. Navigation systems are generally the main goal (and trust me, cars are used in areas where there is lousy data coverage, so offline maps are handy) which gets you a big screen. The radio part is fairly trivial as are the bluetooth parts.
Basically to have an onboard GPS gives you a lot, and you might as well reuse the screen instead of having more screens for the climate control, radio (AM/FM/satellite/CD/etc) and dozens of other features that require user feedback. This leaves the knobs and switches which are just attached to a giant PCB hooked to the infotainment system as well. The actual mechanics are done by servos and such (allowing things like defoggers to turn on the AC to dehumidify the air and get the windows clear quickly). Yes, sometimes you really want to run the AC in winter.
All this makes for a more compact and less complex front panel because instead of having to have a bunch of levers and such to hook up, it's just a simple connector. Oh yeah, the car weighs a few pounds less as well.
Then there's the rental cars and fleet vehicles which may be basic in everything, but since you can't rely on the current driver to have a smart device...
Infotainment systems are pure electronics. Very cheap, very light and very simple in the end - it's why even your most basic of econoboxes has 'em, and even they have upgrades for full navigation systems because in the end, it's jujst a matter of the software loaded onto it.
Even something like voice recognition is free - the hardware's there (for the handsfree system) so just have a button and you're done.
Of course, some cars have taken to the extreme and ditched the front panel - making it an iPad app or something that coordinates all the UI controls.
Though it makes you wonder if companies like CloudFront and all aren't also behind paying some money to LizardSquad and such to do DDoS attacks to promote their services. I mean, it's unlikely a company like Microsoft uses them (being the target of many attacks, I'm sure their systems are already hardened just because everyone wants to break into Microsoft), but hey, maybe you kinda-sorta-shoulda put Xbox LIve behind CloudFront, no?
The goal is, of course, money, and someone like Microsoft can pay a lot of it.
I mean, just take a look at any site's javascript include and practically everyone's using cloudfront now.
But that's because stuff cost a lot more then than now.
I mean, in the 70s, 80s, if you wanted a big screen (larger than an say, 20" or so) TV, it could easily cost half a year's disposable income. If that thing failed, you're taking it to the repair shop because saving up meant giving up a lot for another half a year.
Cars too - these days, the modern new car basically needs very little done to it - change the oil every half year or so, and top up liquids. That's really all to it - you don't tinker with points, replace plugs, or do anything else until it gets to 100K miles or so at which point things are worn out to beyond tolerance. Back in the day, something was always failing or going rough or need tweaking so on the weekends you'd basically go fix it.
Same goes for everything else - I mean, today's TVs come in sizes we could never imagine even 10 years ago (I saw a 60" TV about 10 years ago and wondered at how big and unaffordable and luxury that is (think $20K). These days you can pick up one under $1000 on sale!). Nevermind back in the 70s and 80s where "big screen" was 19 glorious inches.
So yeah, today's stuff is far more reliable, and far cheaper than ever before. Moving a 60" TV for fixing - if it takes longer than about 4 hours, it's BER - beyond economical repair because the labor cost would be close to $500 already. Any more and you might as well pick up a new TV because you'd have spent that same amount.
If I had the money, I'd pick up the sweet 85" 4K TV I saw, but that was $17K. You bet I'd take it in for repair. But if it fails 10 years later, well, I could probably pick up one for $1000 and be done with it. I'd give the old set to the neighborhood kid who has nothing but a lot of time on his hands to try to fix - if he gets it working, he gets a free big screen TV (albeit oudated). If not, well, it just cost him some free time.
And that's the deal with things today - if my phone breaks, I won't bother fixing it - I could, and if it had sentimental value I would, but a new phone isn't that much more money.
And yes, I did the recycled computer thing too - work was selling their old PCs for $20 or so, and I picked one up, to experiment with. Turned out by the time I finished, I put in about $200 worth of parts, and no, $20 was its still expected resale value. By the time I got around to junking that machine, I had spent maybe $400 with upgrades along the way.
Repair is a hobby. Do it for fun in your free time. When my TV breaks, I won't fix it, I'd go out and buy a new TV and have it working in a couple of hours (including driving to the store and unpacking it). I can figure out what to do with my old TV later - recycle, repair it (myself - I can't pay a repairman to repair what is now a $800 TV new), or if it is somewhat functional, use it as a spare.
Anyhow, I wouldn't say today's kids lack skills - the maker movement shows that today's stuff is also a lot more complex - no longer just electrical or mechanical, it's both electronic, electrical, mechanical AND software all rolled into one.
Except "piracy" to mean "copyright infringement" actually predates civil law. It was first used around the very early 17th century (1603-ish) - The Stationer's Company of London received in 1553 the right to hold monopoly on publication (what we would later know as copyright) and recorded in 1603 or so the first use of the term piracy to denote infringement of that monopoly.
This predates the formation of the US and the Constitution and the 14+14 copyright term by a couple of centuries (hence the English references)
Interestingly enough, according to the OED, the term pirate is from the 16th century, so the use of piracy to mean copyright infringement happened not too long after the word was adopted on the high seas.
No, it's not a modern evolution - it's an ancient one, and dates back to practically a few decades after pirate was used in a nautical sense. So complaining about piracy and misue of it, you're nearly half a millennia too late - that ship has long sailed and pirate/piracy has both meanings since basically their inception.
Oh, and copyright maximalists and such prefer the word "theft" to "pirate". Or "stealing". Piracy and copyright infringement (the latter is a more modern term since piracy predates copyright as a term) are less strong terms than "IP theft" or "stealing movies". Even "copying" is far less strong.
I haven't heard of any major security breaks in the Xbox360 - the old ones that were present are still there (reflashing the optical drive to play pirated games). If there's a major break that opened it up, I haven't heard of it.
The PS3 was completely pwned in 2011 or so whenthey discovered the security keys, but you still can't get online with a hacked Xbox360 because it won't run homebrew still and the dashboard still can detect hacks.
As for the Xbox One, the Xbox360 and Xbone implement a traditional security system - both run games in user mode (the original Xbox ran code in kernel mode so one game hack opened the entire machine) and in the caose of the Xbox One, runs a hypervisor with two guest OSes - the game OS and the application OS.
About the only interesting thing would be the fact the Xbox One can also be a dev console.
And the XDK released appears to be for the ID@Xbox program - the one indie developers use which is probably close to the full thing, and probably fuller than what the eventual Xbox Live Indie Arcade devkit would have.
I've found the 3.5" ones to be fairly reliable, even near the end. The ones that were HORRENDOUSLY unreliable were the 5.25" ones, because the 360K and 1.2MB ones were physically incompatible with each other (the 360K had tracks twice as wide as the 1.2MB version). While a 1.2MB drive could reliably read a 360k floppy, it could not write to them reliably because they only wrote half the track. The end result was something that maybe-kinda-sorta could work in a 360k drive.
The 3.5" disks generally tended to be reliable for a year or so - even the bottom of the basket AOL ones. After that, if you weren't using name-brand disks, it isn't reliable - the coatings start to flake.
At least Sony when moving from 720k to 1440k (or "1.44MB" - using *both* binary and decimal prefixes in the same measurement!) made them completely compatible.
It works in real life all the time, actually - companies do this quite routinely. Jack up your bill by $2 and they can rack up millions over the year, and it doesn't matter if it's a contract or not because how much are you going to spend trying to recovery $24/year? If it's a cellphone contract, the max they're going charge you is $48 more over the contract's 2 year lifespan. You going to sue them over that? Now repeat that for a million subscribers and that's an extra $2M a month in free profits.
Maybe you can jack it up by $5 ($60/year) because it's still too low to bother.
It's why they made class-action lawsuits, because someone stealing $48M/year would get sued/arrested/etc if it was against one person, but against 1M people? Worthless.
As for this, well, given it's still "free money", even at Bitcoin's deflated value of around $350 or so, it's still free money. Who cares about efficiency or anything when you can steal CPU cycles like that - just scan github checkins for the key, then use the APIs to automatically create sessions and all that and rack up the bitcoins. Even the github scanner doesn't have to be owned by the user - they probably stole some guy's EC2 credential and are using one of his instances for it unbeknownst to the user. Free money!
I wonder how true that is.
First off, most VPN and Proxy providers don't provide one IP per subscriber - it's shared among multiple subscribers (through NAT, usually). So if you're using a VPN or proxy server with 10 other people at the same time, an IP address will not pinpoint a guilty party. What's the provider to do - send 10 notices out?
I mean, depending on how those notices are worded, you could argue that you're being extorted (9 people can argue that, but I'm sure the 10th will too) for money since you didn't do anything wrong and they're asking money.
In fact, a lot of VPNs in the US have a "real time DMCA" function (apparently it's a TCP port or something), but that function always fails if more than one user is on it because you cannot conclusively identify the user (the real-time part means the notice is sent while the user is still doing the activity because there are no logs, so you can only send an alert while the user is doing it).
So the general gist of it is - use a server that's got multiple people on it because really, short of exact connection tracking and logging, it's going to be problematic to pinpoint who is committing the activity. Unless you're going to force logging of all connections to users.
Of course, one might want to avoid using the port forwarding feature of the VPN service if they can trace it to a specific port (for incoming connections).
(My VPN service is based in the US, mostly for netflix and stuff).
No, you can do quicksort in one recursive call. Even in the two recursive call scenario, an optimizing compiler will turn it into one recursive call and a loop - it's such a basic operation it's called tail recursion.
Basically if you have a recursive function call at the end of the function, instead of making it a recursive call, you can reuse the current stack frame by readjusting the input parameters (on the stack) and jumping to the beginning of the function, saving yourself the headache of setting up and tearing down a stack frame because you're reusing the current stack frame. (or in other words, you're doing a loop).
In fact, this can be generalized into tall call optimization where if you call another function at the end of a function, the optimizing compiler will reuse the stack frame of the current function for the call instead.
Syntactically the code looks the same, but the output is vastly different because you get operations that rewrite the stack frame (a particularly smart compiler might actually put the parameters of the call right where they need to be by moving the arguments around so the final two instructions is a stack adjustment to compensate for different stack sizes and a direct jump, so when the tail function returns, it doesn't stop back at the calling function, but goes back to the original function.
So yes, you're right in that there's supposed to be two recursive calls in quicksort, but in practice, there's only one because the last one is always tail-recursive so compilers merely reuse the existing stack frame.
I remember and see those ads all the time. I remember disregarding them until my dad came to me asking about them. Took me about 5 minutes of Googling before I was told they were not as rare as the ad said. Everything else was true, but neglected to mention that they were common and easily obtainable from alternate sources. Of course, the real price of them was less than half what the ad was charging. Someone's gotta pay for the ad, I guess.
It was merely a store that resold US mint coins with huge markups - you could easily go to a regular store and get them far cheaper.
Well, everyone's assuming that since everyone else is using it, there must be a lot of eyes on it. I mean, surely a project can't grow to be embedded in practically everything and have glaring bugs in it, right? Given so many "beta testers" of the software, all bugs should've been resolved because everyone must be using it in sufficiently different ways that the paths all get exercised, right?
And yes, I too used OpenSSL and was quite disappointed as to its complexity and lack of documentation. I mean, if everyone else uses it, you'd think there would be some rather great documentation for it - I mean, did everyone else waste a couple of weeks trying to make sense of trying to use it? If it's used so much, it must have well designed APIs and great documentation to go with it to be that popular.
Then again, I suspect a good reason for its widespread use is it's basic functionality that's not replicated anywhere else.So yes, it's one of those rare exceptions because everyone uses it because it's your only choice, and yes, everyone else has to bang their heads on it for a few weeks to make heads or tails of it.
And no, big complex things don't have to be complicated - Linux is big and complex, yet has some rather good documentation about it. A good source explorer (or even LXR) and you can easily figure out if an API is doing what you expect. It's just that Linux is well compartmentalized, APIs are generally stable and things are generally written to what you expect. Oh, and people do write documentation about it.
In fact, Linux is probably more complex because there's a lot of code that is NOT included in the build so you have to sift through mounds of dead code. Or not, since a lot of the time it's obvious.
The thing is, with Linux, there are people who are willing to document and refactor. OpenSSL is complex because a lot of it grew organically - stuff gets added as time goes on but little gets refactored. In Linux, there are people actively culling bad pieces of code and rewriting it to be cleaner, better, more efficient, whatever. So stuff doesn't generally grow out of control before someone decides to prune it and try to figure out a better way to do these things.
Well, you can put apps on SD cards now. At least since ICS, anyhow.
But still, user experience is pretty poor because now the user has MANAGE the storage. Where did you want to put the photo? Oh, internal storage is full! Please pick external storage! Oh doing so lost the image you took, Sorry.
Then there's the whole "where he (*@&#% is the file" issue - put some files on SD, some on internal storage, and the file will be in the wrong place when you need it. So now you need a file manager to manage moving files between SD and internal storage. Another user headache who just wants to use their device.
And nevermind that SD cards rarely use permission-based filesystems, so now any app using SD cards can access all data on SD cards. Given iOS perchant for security and trying to keep user data isolated by app so no app can access anyone else's data except through well defined APIs, well, an SD card is the perfect way to violate that. A malicioius app may decide to corrupt a data file of another app to do stuff it wants - perhaps that app holds passwords, so it writes a corrupt password file that causes it run code that passes it the password and the secured password store.
You realize that the director doesn't hold copyright, right? The writers do - they wrote the story! Or they created a derivative story from another story (e.g., movie based on a book), which means part of the copyright is owned by the original author.
Then there's the photographer's right - copyright is owned by the "fixer" of the creative work - the one who puts the work onto media. A writer does it by putting pen to paper (or keys to word processor). A singer does it by recording it to audio tape. A photographer/filmmaker does it by exposing film.
And there's all the other works contained within a movie - the music score, for example. THat one is ESPECIALLY tricky because those are licensed as a whole - the orchestra signs over their rights for a fixed fee for limited uses.
Actually, economic growth slowed greatly when gold got hard to find. The economy is not about money. It's about the movement of money. A strong economy is one where money is moving around.
Deflation makes economic activity halt. If something you want is going to be cheaper tomorrow, will you buy it today, or tomorrow? Sure, some items will have to be bought - there are certain necessities to life after all. However, you can bet big time that alternatives to spending money in a deflationary cycle will happen - if the good is food, people will grow their own or form community gardens and try to avoid spending as much as possible (because it gets cheaper tomorrow).
Or if that's too foreign, perhaps you had to talk to someone about getting say, a computer. Or other advanced tech product. They'll say "well, tomorrow a new model is coming out" or "next year will have a better model" and the end result is... no purchase. Because something better is around the corner and they're not willing to commit and lose out on that something better.
So in a deflationary cycle, hoarding or saving of money is the name of the game because it'll always be cheaper tomorrow.
That's why we moved to fiat currencies - economic growth was being limited by the available supply of gold - if we couldn't mine more, we couldn't pay people more, so existing stock got more valuable and people stopped spending, stalling out the economy.
That said, inflationary economies aren't good either - too much inflation and people get paid less and less - see Zimbabwe.
So one needs to balance inflation - not too much, but not too little that you risk going into a deflationary cycle which will not just stall any economic recovery, but completely bury it because people immediately stop spending when they know goods tomorrow are cheaper.
A few questions - why are you checking work email outside of work? Why are you giving work your personal cellphone number?
It's an important question, because unless they give you a blackberry or a phone, you really have no obligation to give them freebies like data usage or texts or anything.
I mean, sure you CAN link your work email to your personal phone, but why? That's a personal choice of making work invade personal time and money, since you're paying for the phone service. Ditto texts and all that. (Sure you can argue about unlimited data plans or text plans, but let's say you don't because either it's not available or you don't wish to upgrade to that service, or even if you already have it, there's no reason you have to let work know).
It's your personal device, folks, don't let work co-opt it. If they want you reachable after hours, they can pay for their own phone and service, or work out an arrangement where they pay part or all of your service charges. (BYOD is cool, but a lot of companies realize that one advantage is instead of giving employees phones and paying $30/month per line for services, they can offload it to the employee).
Heck, even my parents realized what BYOD really was and they asked if their service fees would be reimbursed. No? Thanks, but the work-issued phone works great.
I believe the threshold was "is the product commonly available to everyone". So stuff like eyeglasses are valid technologies police can use because the public has easy access to them.
A thermal imaging camera, until VERY recently (say, 2014) cost a lot of money and was not readily available, and thus its use was primarily limited to the police and limited commercial entities. So the court is right in that it cannot be caused because the equipment was not available or commonly used by the public.
Of course, these days, when thermal cameras are sold off the shelf in retail stores and available online for a couple hundred bucks (the FLIR One was sold inside Apple stores, while the Seek Thermal is a $200 dongle for your iOS or Android device), the argument against might actually change because thermal imaging IS available to the public.
Anyhow, apparently the use of the radar was incidental to the search - there was already enough reason to search the home (as part of an "emergency exception" that allows searches without a warrant). Yes, it's a fairly big loophole in that your home can be searched if a criminal breaks in while police are chasing them and YOU charged with crimes incidental to the other crime. Interestingly, the use of radar would be of aid to the homeowner because if police can determine there's no one in the room, they're not allowed to search it! Whereas if they did it the "traditional way" of hunting the suspect they'd have every right to search.
(FYI - The Illustrated Guide to Law is an extremely interesting and informative guide to what the law REALLY says and how it evolved, and how some things aren't as you'd expect. Some of your rights can be so easily given up mistakenly (and it's designed like that because prior to some event, it was all over the place).
Do what good IT does - give it to them for a week, and see who uses it. If no one logs in after the first day, then close it back down again. If someone asks, just re-enable and blame some software update or something thanks for noticing.
Repeat as often as necessary.
I can bet 99% of the time, no one will notice because really all requests get filtered through one person in the end who knows the system. Then they are the only ones that need access.
Let them have their ego. Then close it and let them believe they still have it because you looked at the logs and saw they never touched it after the first day.
Their commerce, actually, not western commerce.
You see, a bunch of companies in China do business by email, and a LOT of them use gmail because it frees them from having to pay for their own email service. (And Asians generally are cheapskates - they'll get by trying to spend as little money as possible).
I've dealt with companies where their email system is a free Gmail account - you see username-company@gmail.com listed on their business cards or some variation thereof. Gmail is free, after all, so why bother paying for a domain and email server when people are willing to do it for free?
Likewise, some do it using qq.com or other free Chinese mail provider.
So yeah, turns out blocking gmail blocks a lot of companies from doing business.
The problem is simple - in North America, people drive because they're forced to. In most other countries, they drive because they WANT to.
This is problematic as you have a bunch of drivers on the road who would really want to be doing anything else other than driving, so they're driving distracted and all sorts of other things.
Public transit? If you're lucky.
In other countries, public transit is plentiful and you can even get around quite efficiently. This means those who don't want to drive, don't have to. Leaving the roads free for those who want to drive, and in theory drive better because instead of someone hating every minute of it and doing everything BUT driving (e.g., texting), they're enjoying the ride and the art of driving.
Or a cumulonimbus (CB) cloud. Pilots are generally advised to stay 20 miles AWAY from storm clouds because of intense up and down drafts.
It's likely the pilot was trying to do that when denied by ATC - and towering CB can go up to the stratosphere (literally - it's why they get their anvil shape).
No plane can outfly the up or downdrafts which can be several thousand feet per minute. Fly into it and 32,000 feet can be gone in just a few minutes. Never mind wind shear which can basically rob an airplane of all airspeed.
Embedded CBs are even scarier.