The summary says that increasing diversity will be good for innovation and technology, with no stated reason as to why. So I'll ask: why will increasing diversity be good for technology and innovation?
Well take it to a technical extreme. Which is better? An all-Linux or an all-Windows office? Or an office that uses a mix of Linux, Windows and other OSes?
And by better, I don't mean "easier to support" - it's easier to support the same environment, but which one leads to more interesting ideas and innovation?
Heck, we've gotten rid of the IE6 monoculture of the web - would you say things are better now that we've got diversity of browsers (even though it's only 3 engines - WebKit, Trident and Gecko) and people are doing interesting things, or were things better when everyone was just coding IE6?
And in general, like begets like - if you have 5 white dudes, they generally will be very similar in thinking - purely because each one got hired for compatibility with the others. In a more mixed environment, there's always going to be conflicts so it's very difficult to hire someone who won't cause issues sometime (unless they're completely passive).
Or, put another way, diversity of working environments - would you want to work in a place where the walls were beige, every cube was identical to every other cube (and personalization is limited by fiat), or one where employees are allowed a splash of color, personal items, etc?
Personally I'd be way more open to this stuff if it didn't want an internet connection.
Ultimately I see very little practical application for any of this anyway. As I said in a previous comment, I played around with home automation "back in the day" and while it's nifty, it doesn't really add a whole lot of value outside of some very specialized use cases.
Well, some things really are more convenient with a "smart" home. Sure you can always work around it, but sometimes the peace of mind is better.
E.g., verifying and setting the alarm - people still forget to set their alarms when they leave, and if you're going on vacation, checking to make sure while you're waiting for the flight can spare a lot of annoyed kids and other things. Plus, if you know a friend is coming over to take care of the place, you don't have to give them a code (many alarms have multi-user codes), you can always just disable it remotely then re-set it.
Or front door cameras - perhaps you're expecting something and the delivery guy is early. You can get systems that let you talk to the guy, even open the garage door so you can have them drop it off in there. Saves having to make it to the depot because the guy's a few minutes earlier than you, or having packages left out in the open ready for stealing since it'll be put in the garage (which you can shut remotely as well).
There's always the other ones - being able to come to a pre=cooled or pre-warmed house, for example.
. During the gulf war public use was actually turned off so the military could have better access. So I don't know how well those commercial ones you speak of worked. Then in 1993 it was back on
No, public access was never turned off. You need the "public" (C/A for Coarse Acquisition) signal even to get the P (precision?) military signal.
A military receiver first acquires the C/A signal, like a civilian receiver. it needs this in order to get all the timing locked up so it can then acquire the P signal to get the necessary correction information.
During the first Gulf War, military GPS units were hard to get, so they turned off selective availability so soldiers could use the civilian GPS units they brought with them. Then once the war was over, they turned selective availability back on to make the results imprecise.
All GPS units need the public (C/A) signal first before they can do anything.
That's possible, of course, but is it really hard to believe that an explosion would have prompted people to back out?
Well, the legal avenue would be non-delivery.
It turns out that SpaceShipTwo is the only one and now that it's gone, well, they have to rebuild it again and go through all the testing again, which means delays. At the very least, rebuilding SpaceShipTwo would take months (if not a year), which would push out the date by a year. Depending on how things go, that could easily mean you went from "first civilian" to something else if a competitor makes hay and gets out ahead. (Remember, Virgin Galactic is the frontrunner in the space tourism race).
And in most contracts, things like this could very well reopen the contract to termination because the timeline is no longer valid. And while SpaceShipTwo can be rebuilt, currently the vehicle no longer exists.
After that, the next step will be to have special purpose cores. For example, some phones have two low-power/low-speed cores, and two faster/more energy using cores. I wouldn't be surprised to see that, as well as cores that are dedicated to specific tasks, but general tasks can be put on those cores if need be. For example, a core for AES, cores that are optimized for floating point operations, but can do integer math, GPUs, a specialty core that is intended to be just for security sensitive processes (perhaps even running a Harvard architecture so that heap smashing is not possible), maybe even FPGAs.
Most ARM SoCs already have that, actually.
AES cores are called "security accelerators" and practically all modern ARM SoCs have them for security - either with full disk encryption or just offloading the crypto tasks. Floating point - ARM has the Vector Floating Point (VFP) unit for some time, though most people use NEON, the SIMD version of same.
Security sensitive processes? ARM has that too - TrustZone, and many SoCs even have a low-end ARM7 or ARM11 that stays in secure mode and handles everything involved in bringing the system up. It's the first processor that starts up, which then initializes peripherals, RAM, then boots the big powerful cores that you associate with the SoC. The big powerful cores handle the user level stuff, while system level stuff like power control is often passed to that system controller core.
It's useless for the thief to directly charge a card unless the thief also has a merchant account, which are not exactly trivial to sign up for, what with credit checks and all.
Merchant accounts are not only hard to get, but there's also a fundamental problem you missed - you need banking information. Just because you have a merchant account doesn't mean they cut you a cheque every month with the balance - no, they need bank information so they can transfer to your bank account, as well as handle recovery (chargebacks).
If you're getting money, the paper trail is fairly extensive because well, the banks have to send it to you and that requires a lot more personal information that generally has to be verified before the money is sent.
How long does it take, how important where you funds at the time. Needed to pay rent, buy medications, eat, awh shucks, you credit limit is exceeded no more credit for you and as a bonus they can screw with your credit history.
Uh, obviously you've never used a credit card, and are assuming they work like debit. No, they don't. If you get a fraudulent charge, you call them up, and find it, and they immediately cancel it and restore your credit. (Basically if it isn't fraudulent, they'll charge you again).
That's why credit cards are generally safer - you call them and everything's restored. You might be out a credit card for a few days as they reissue a new one to you, but no thief can hold your account hostage.
And no, your credit history is not impacted if you're hit with fraudulent charges.
Debit cards are governed by the fairness of your bank - many are offering the same protections as credit, but there's no legal requirement for them to do so. You have legal rights when you use a credit card, which include being able to report fraudulent usage, stolen cards (to which you're only liable for $50) and a host of other things.
Example: once you loose your phone, you've now immediately also lost your CC
That's more risk instead of less
If you lose your phone, you erase it. Doing so wipes the secure enclave and poof, goes all the tokens. Tokens represent credit cards, but cannot be linked to one (they're basically just 12-digit indices into a table at a bank - the last 4 digits is the same, but the first 12 are just an index the bank uses to look up the account).
And no, tokens are per-device - even if you hack it to get the token, the instant you move it to another device it'll fail because you need to fake the device IDs and other per-device identifiers as well.
Oh, and invalidating tokens is easy - you call your bank, and poof, the link between the token and your account is broken.
They are patenting it, not implementing it. This way no one else can implement it.
This is Disney. They're going to get the law changed to FORCE everyone to implement it (and of course, pay them the requisite licensing fees).
It's how Disney got Macrovision through back in the early days (it failed on early VCRs because their AGCs were slow, so by forcing lawmakers to have it implemented, everyone had to tighten things up).
You know Disney's heading to the lawmakers shortly to get Google etc., to have it in.
FIFA 15 would probably qualify as popular enough of a game to warrant one of the decent teams to try their hands on cracking it. However most completely new DRM schemes usually take a while to crack. Admittedly I have no clue. Sports games were never my thing as a long time PC gamer, but whenever I see friends playing them, it's usually on a console on the couch. I imagine it would feel really weird to play it on PC. It's quite feasible that target audience for FIFA games on PC is tiny.
Two things were the primary cause of the decline in PC DRM usage. First was the rise of the console as primary seller of games. Second was the rise of a PC only genre that was piracy free - MMOs.
Consoles meant people were spending money on games, so they became the primary development target - plus low piracy meant plenty of money. It's why PC ports started to suffer because they weren't bringing in the money (piracy, among other reasons). And with Steam, well, its DRM is "good enough" that once the consoles paid off the development costs, all Steam had to do was pay off the porting costs to PC and then it was pure profit. Of course, they could do a crappy port and refine it as money came in.
Indie games never had DRM so they didn't bother - they had other issues to deal with (obscurity for one) so piracy didn't really represent anything more than "marketing budget".
Except you'd more likely get around the ~$15 (guesstimate, no citation) OEM unit license cost as a refund. We're not talking the retail license here, and it puts into light what a rip-off the retail license cost actually is (assuming the extra cost of for the "support" that comes with the retail license.)
Probably less, though.
You forget the Windows license comes "for free" because of the hardware subsidy that comes with cheap computers. You know, all the crapware that is preinstalled? Even if OEM Windows cost HP $50, they probably get more than that to install Norton Antivirus, McAfee and others together , plus demos of plenty more software. Since you didn't accept Windows, technically those companies don't have to pay so you only get back a token sum.
Something like this probably heavily subsidized by all that crapware, too.
The problem with most daylight saving schemes is that they are based on location, not latitude. People living in the tropics don't need daylight saving since the variation is small enough to be ignored. If societies in latitudes outside the tropics want the change, go for it but base the delimitation on latitude, not arbitrary geopolitical or business boundaries.
DST is only useful for the mid-latitudes. At the tropics and northern latitudes, DST is useless. At the tropics, yes, the variation is practically nil for all intents and purposes. At the northern cap, when the sun comes up at 4:30AM and sets at 9PM, movement makes no difference (do you really want it 5:30 to 10PM? Most people will have trouble sleeping). Although having it at 4:30AM means early morning commuters do get the benefit of light during their commute rather than commute in the dark. Then there's the whole midnight sun thing.
Heck, in Canada, the southernmost edge actually technically never becomes night in the summer (civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight, to which it never leaves in the summer to become official night).
This is not your old 70's LORAN system. Thanks to advances in DSP processing, eLORAN gives your position with precision comparable to GPS (10m or so). It also have data channel that's used to broadcast DGPS corrections, so it complements GPS nicely. Because of low frequency, signal penetrates buildings and ground (however with greatly reduced range). This may be one of the solutions for a car navigation in tunels. Even if it produces less precise position, it's always better than no position at all.
Great contrast between UK and USA, where LORAN transmitters were demolished in the past years. When so many things dependd on GPS signals, we really need some backup system for precise timing and positioning. Not thinking about backup only means we will learn about it the hard way - and it will not be pretty.
Depends if they only plan to deploy them along coastlines or everywhere.
LORAN worked only because it had a collection of towers spread out in a line, and the preferred navigation route (most accurate) for LORAN involved being perpendicular to the line. For shipping routes that was great since they generally were well defined paths.
But if you're randomly tuning in a LORAN station, the accuracy (especially "reversed") was questionable at best.
The US decommissioned them because they were expensive to maintain, few people were using them (compared to GPS) and touchy to use.
Plus, GPS is so integral to US life that introducing an error signal back or turning it off would literally disrupt the US economy. Not just satnav, but satellite tracking and monitoring of equipment, timing (GPS is used to distribute time and synchronize clocks (required for cellphones)), navigation (RNP - Required Navigation Performance, is a new method airplanes use to approach airports that lets them fly closer in and lowered minimums, and relies heavily on GPS, which saves time (less time cooped in the cabin) and fuel, and makes the airports more efficient). The trucking industry heavily relies on GPS to track its cargo being moved about as do many package delivery companies.
Whoever submitted the story was referring to the form of government that the U.S. had around 1800.
Actually, even then it was highly unequal - voting was basically limited to people who were educated enough to vote. If you were just an uneducated commoner, generally speaking you weren't eligible to vote.
It was basically voting if you were part of the elite.
Is computer illiterate? Buy her or pops a Chromebook and they can't do their taxes on it.
Actually, I think they can, thanks to cloud-based tax software. Mostly because of the rise of OS X which means a bunch of Windows only tax software just won't work for them.
Sure, there are plenty of issues when trust Intuit and others with your tax information (it's web based, after all), but with a Chromebook, I'm sure security of the laptop isn't as big a problem.
And given the way people generally backup, at least users won't be able to have the IRS pull a fast one over them since they can retrieve what they filed online rather than try to hunt for a backup or realize it was on the crashed hard drive.
Not as secure, though if the IRS already has the data... but I'm sure for a lot of users, probably way more convenient, way more secure and way more recoverable.
I don't care what the offset is from GMT, just leaveitthehellalone. If businesses need winter hours, they can have those.
Anyone who thinks DST is easy obviously hasn't done stuff worldwide.
Because I've just had to deal with one customer in 4 different timezones - one in the US (Eastern time), one in Portugal (Western European) and the Netherlands (Central Europe).
And it was a weekly teleconference call. We had Portugal already in regular time )WET), but the Netherlands was moving from Central European Summer Time to Central European Time, while us in North America were still in DST.
Endless fun figuring out a convenient time for the meeting when DST transitions randomly for different people. For those curious, WET is UTC+0000, CET is UTC+0100, WEST is UTC+0100, CEST is UTC+0200. And we had to deal with PDT (UTC-0700), EDT (UTC-0400) as usual.
Oh yay, now we have DST over. One last time to figure out the meeting times and this unnecessary form of calculation can be put to rest for a few months (seriously, when they all switch at different times it's meant recalculating the time weekly).
FYI - Outlook sets the meeting time to always be whoever sends the meeting invitation out regardless of DST. So if they set it to 8AM PT, it will be 8AM PST, 8AM PDT, and whatever else that works out to be - so the meeting organizer's time stays at 8, while everyone else has to deal with a meeting that has moved an hour earlier/later. Very important if your customer says they want the meeting at 1pm their time.
I say get rid of it. International dealings get complex quickly.
With competition there would more likely be provision for people with low paying jobs or none through lower prices.
Not likely, actually. Prices will be lower in richer areas, but there will be no service to those areas that are poorer. Why? The regions won't be as profitable.
It's already been discovered that competition floods the richer areas but does zip to the poorer areas because there's no money to be made there.
So yeah, if you're a poorer person on the borders of a richer area, you may be able to get service. But if you're in the low rent district, getting service may be tough because they don't want to build out to you
It can convert existing HyperCard stacks to SuperCard ones in a few minutes and has extensive support. Yes, it runs on OS X and Intel Macs, too.
It's actually a bit better than HyperCard was back in the days - it supported color without extensions and other things, too. Of course, it costs money, but it's been available a long time.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this ruling applies with iOS, given 5 failures means you are reverting to passcode, or 48 hours requires passcode, or even a power off.
I mean, how does the ruling apply if the fingerprint reader gets disabled? (And you can do it by simply using an unregistered finger, tapping with the tip of your finger, or turning off the phone.).
So if they can force you to use the fingerprint reader, what happens when the phone won't let you use the fingerprint reader?
If you know the history of Adreno, you'll know it's actually based on an ATi (now AMD) chip.
Way back when (nearly 15 years ago), ATi was one of the first companies that made a mobile GPU back when people didn't even think you needed one (when embedded chips had framebuffers for graphics). Eventually they sold their mobile GPU division to Qualcomm who rebranded it Adreno.
So a lot of the Adreno's internals are based on AMD insides so a lot of it is actually documented by AMD.
Anyhow, it's likely Qualcomm only wants to support the Android port because that's where all their money is. However, they (and us, who work with Qualcomm to work on smaller projects) do get requests for graphics support on Linux and other OSes, so contributing to a free driver means the community can support their chips and they can sell a few more. Android is still their bread and butter and they probably optimize the heck out of it, but a free community driver for everyone else that handles good enough is great for those smaller projects.
'Solid-state' was the term invented to differentiate vacuum tube technology from semiconductor (solid-state) technology... Summary is not just wrong, it gets it exactly OPPOSITE this time.
Well, the first link was for a transistor amp that goes to THz speeds.
The second link was for a semiconductor fabbed amp that uses vacuum tube style technology to make it work. It isn't,,however, at all close to your traditional vacuum tube. First, there's no filament - just applying a differential voltage (10-15V) is enough to start shedding electrons off the cathode. The gap is so small that the low voltage is adequate, and you almost never need to use a vacuum - you could operate it in regular atmospheric air, or improve performance by using helium. (the gap is so small, that there's few air molecules that'll get in the way so performance doesn't suffer too much.
It works based on vacuum tube principles - a cathode sheds electrons, which flow through a regulating gate to an anode. But it's all made using current semiconductor processes on silicon. It's basically a solid state vacuum tube.
Actually you've demonstrated the parent's point very well. Pulseaudio like systemd solves very real problems. It had teething issues and now seems to work rather well.
The problem stems from the fact that they solve very hard problems. Audio IS hard - it's not just putting a stream to a card and having a beep come out from a speaker anymore - nowadays audio is FAR more complex. Most computers now have various ways to get audio in and out - a hardware ADC/DAC (sound card), Bluetooth, HDMI, digital (S/PDIF, TOSLINK), built in speakers/microphones, etc. etc. etc.
And the one you use at a given time depends on what you're doing. If you're on a VoIP call, you want to have its audio routed to a communications port (which may or may not be separate from the main audio out), you may or may not want to mute the main audio (or just lower the volume), and so forth.
Then there's the common case of mixing - you're watching a YouTube video and someone IMs you, so you need to mix the two streams together to play it out the main output.
Oh, now you unplugged the laptop from your desk and what was using the optical or HDMI audio outputs now needs to switch to the onboard speaker and microphone.
It turns out init isn't all that simple either. Because even SysVInit is fairly complex - it has to reap zombies (every process has init as its parent, eventually). It has to manage daemons (yes, even SysVInit has to manage daemons - take a look, you probably have a bunch of lines where it manages getty). It also has to run the hack that are RC scripts which appear to implement a lamer version to manage daemons. Oh yeah, it also has to shutdown and restart the computer, too. (And I don't mean stopping daemons and such, either).
So after all this, SysV already handles two forms of daemon management (each with their own plusses and minuses), it has to reap processes (to free up kernel resources), shuts down or reboots the computer, and it also has to handle starting up the computer.
It's a third party that the person with the private feed didn't authorize, reading their tweets. Also whether or not they retain the information, and what they do with it if they do.
Doesn't matter.
Just because you marked the tweet as private and only viewable to a few, is still viewable to all.
THERE IS NO PRIVACY SETTINGS. Once you post, even if it's "friends only", it is still public.
Because anyone who sees it is free to screenshot it (how many tweets have been deleted only to live on in screenshots?), copy/paste, retweet, report, etc.
If you're typing it out on the internet and someone else can see it, it's public information. A private feed or post is just like sharing a secret - it ain't a secret no more.
Hell, is it just as bad if all they did was provide a web interface where concerned users could copy and paste said tweets into it? In this case, the user (who you authorized) is reporting to a third party as well.
I don't know if I'm being paranoid, but I'm pretty sure there are backdoors in every major open source project : gcc, the linux kernel, ssh, gpg and bash to name a few. They've been either actively introduced by NSA/FSB/... or found and jealously kept secrets. It's not like recent history has proven this theory wrong.:-/
Except that shellshock dates to 1989. That's when the "feature" to export functions was added to bash per commit logs. And that predates Linux 0.1 by a couple of years, so your FBI/NSA/etc would have to have extreme foresight to believe that some piece of software would suddenly be popular, aided by an unknown barely-functional OS released a couple of years later, etc., etc., etc.
And if you're paranoid, use OpenBSD, where every line of code has been audited.
So now Motorola phones will have spyware and bugware like the Huawei ones?
Don't forget Xiaomi as well. Their mi5 software is actually given away because Xiaomi wants to become a cloud company and not a hardware company (i.e., they don't want to follow Apple's footsteps in making nice phones, but Google's footsteps by making nice phones that collect data).
The mi5 software is part of that and is why they give it away - to help collect data for the cloud.
Even Williams Electronics, an arcade game maker that used an upside-down Motorola logo, spun off its video game business to Midway, which is now part of Time Warner.
Actually, when it was spun off, it was Williams-Bally-Midway. In the 80s, Williams experimented with arcade games, and then acquired Midway to be their arcade division. (WIlliams also acquired Bally for pinball). Depending on the mood, the game would either be released under Williams or Midway (likewise for pinballs under Williams or Bally). Eventually more and more of it just went towards Midway until it was basically doing all the arcade games and got spun off later.
Williams-Bally today makes gaming devices (slot machines), having decided to shut down their pinball division instead of either suspending or spinning it off.
Actually, Jobs just brought people over to see the demo. No one actually saw any code.
It's why Woz had to invent (and patent) "regions" which was needed because it's the way to handle overlapping windows. (Woz got in a plane accident a short while later where he supposedly told Jobs when he visisted, "Don't worry, I didn't forget regions").
It was only after it was all said and done did someone from Xerox tell Woz their Alto didn't have overlapping windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Well take it to a technical extreme. Which is better? An all-Linux or an all-Windows office? Or an office that uses a mix of Linux, Windows and other OSes?
And by better, I don't mean "easier to support" - it's easier to support the same environment, but which one leads to more interesting ideas and innovation?
Heck, we've gotten rid of the IE6 monoculture of the web - would you say things are better now that we've got diversity of browsers (even though it's only 3 engines - WebKit, Trident and Gecko) and people are doing interesting things, or were things better when everyone was just coding IE6?
And in general, like begets like - if you have 5 white dudes, they generally will be very similar in thinking - purely because each one got hired for compatibility with the others. In a more mixed environment, there's always going to be conflicts so it's very difficult to hire someone who won't cause issues sometime (unless they're completely passive).
Or, put another way, diversity of working environments - would you want to work in a place where the walls were beige, every cube was identical to every other cube (and personalization is limited by fiat), or one where employees are allowed a splash of color, personal items, etc?
Well, some things really are more convenient with a "smart" home. Sure you can always work around it, but sometimes the peace of mind is better.
E.g., verifying and setting the alarm - people still forget to set their alarms when they leave, and if you're going on vacation, checking to make sure while you're waiting for the flight can spare a lot of annoyed kids and other things. Plus, if you know a friend is coming over to take care of the place, you don't have to give them a code (many alarms have multi-user codes), you can always just disable it remotely then re-set it.
Or front door cameras - perhaps you're expecting something and the delivery guy is early. You can get systems that let you talk to the guy, even open the garage door so you can have them drop it off in there. Saves having to make it to the depot because the guy's a few minutes earlier than you, or having packages left out in the open ready for stealing since it'll be put in the garage (which you can shut remotely as well).
There's always the other ones - being able to come to a pre=cooled or pre-warmed house, for example.
No, public access was never turned off. You need the "public" (C/A for Coarse Acquisition) signal even to get the P (precision?) military signal.
A military receiver first acquires the C/A signal, like a civilian receiver. it needs this in order to get all the timing locked up so it can then acquire the P signal to get the necessary correction information.
During the first Gulf War, military GPS units were hard to get, so they turned off selective availability so soldiers could use the civilian GPS units they brought with them. Then once the war was over, they turned selective availability back on to make the results imprecise.
All GPS units need the public (C/A) signal first before they can do anything.
Well, the legal avenue would be non-delivery.
It turns out that SpaceShipTwo is the only one and now that it's gone, well, they have to rebuild it again and go through all the testing again, which means delays. At the very least, rebuilding SpaceShipTwo would take months (if not a year), which would push out the date by a year. Depending on how things go, that could easily mean you went from "first civilian" to something else if a competitor makes hay and gets out ahead. (Remember, Virgin Galactic is the frontrunner in the space tourism race).
And in most contracts, things like this could very well reopen the contract to termination because the timeline is no longer valid. And while SpaceShipTwo can be rebuilt, currently the vehicle no longer exists.
Most ARM SoCs already have that, actually.
AES cores are called "security accelerators" and practically all modern ARM SoCs have them for security - either with full disk encryption or just offloading the crypto tasks. Floating point - ARM has the Vector Floating Point (VFP) unit for some time, though most people use NEON, the SIMD version of same.
Security sensitive processes? ARM has that too - TrustZone, and many SoCs even have a low-end ARM7 or ARM11 that stays in secure mode and handles everything involved in bringing the system up. It's the first processor that starts up, which then initializes peripherals, RAM, then boots the big powerful cores that you associate with the SoC. The big powerful cores handle the user level stuff, while system level stuff like power control is often passed to that system controller core.
Merchant accounts are not only hard to get, but there's also a fundamental problem you missed - you need banking information. Just because you have a merchant account doesn't mean they cut you a cheque every month with the balance - no, they need bank information so they can transfer to your bank account, as well as handle recovery (chargebacks).
If you're getting money, the paper trail is fairly extensive because well, the banks have to send it to you and that requires a lot more personal information that generally has to be verified before the money is sent.
Uh, obviously you've never used a credit card, and are assuming they work like debit. No, they don't. If you get a fraudulent charge, you call them up, and find it, and they immediately cancel it and restore your credit. (Basically if it isn't fraudulent, they'll charge you again).
That's why credit cards are generally safer - you call them and everything's restored. You might be out a credit card for a few days as they reissue a new one to you, but no thief can hold your account hostage.
And no, your credit history is not impacted if you're hit with fraudulent charges.
Debit cards are governed by the fairness of your bank - many are offering the same protections as credit, but there's no legal requirement for them to do so. You have legal rights when you use a credit card, which include being able to report fraudulent usage, stolen cards (to which you're only liable for $50) and a host of other things.
If you lose your phone, you erase it. Doing so wipes the secure enclave and poof, goes all the tokens. Tokens represent credit cards, but cannot be linked to one (they're basically just 12-digit indices into a table at a bank - the last 4 digits is the same, but the first 12 are just an index the bank uses to look up the account).
And no, tokens are per-device - even if you hack it to get the token, the instant you move it to another device it'll fail because you need to fake the device IDs and other per-device identifiers as well.
Oh, and invalidating tokens is easy - you call your bank, and poof, the link between the token and your account is broken.
This is Disney. They're going to get the law changed to FORCE everyone to implement it (and of course, pay them the requisite licensing fees).
It's how Disney got Macrovision through back in the early days (it failed on early VCRs because their AGCs were slow, so by forcing lawmakers to have it implemented, everyone had to tighten things up).
You know Disney's heading to the lawmakers shortly to get Google etc., to have it in.
Two things were the primary cause of the decline in PC DRM usage. First was the rise of the console as primary seller of games. Second was the rise of a PC only genre that was piracy free - MMOs.
Consoles meant people were spending money on games, so they became the primary development target - plus low piracy meant plenty of money. It's why PC ports started to suffer because they weren't bringing in the money (piracy, among other reasons). And with Steam, well, its DRM is "good enough" that once the consoles paid off the development costs, all Steam had to do was pay off the porting costs to PC and then it was pure profit. Of course, they could do a crappy port and refine it as money came in.
Indie games never had DRM so they didn't bother - they had other issues to deal with (obscurity for one) so piracy didn't really represent anything more than "marketing budget".
Probably less, though.
You forget the Windows license comes "for free" because of the hardware subsidy that comes with cheap computers. You know, all the crapware that is preinstalled? Even if OEM Windows cost HP $50, they probably get more than that to install Norton Antivirus, McAfee and others together , plus demos of plenty more software. Since you didn't accept Windows, technically those companies don't have to pay so you only get back a token sum.
Something like this probably heavily subsidized by all that crapware, too.
DST is only useful for the mid-latitudes. At the tropics and northern latitudes, DST is useless. At the tropics, yes, the variation is practically nil for all intents and purposes. At the northern cap, when the sun comes up at 4:30AM and sets at 9PM, movement makes no difference (do you really want it 5:30 to 10PM? Most people will have trouble sleeping). Although having it at 4:30AM means early morning commuters do get the benefit of light during their commute rather than commute in the dark. Then there's the whole midnight sun thing.
Heck, in Canada, the southernmost edge actually technically never becomes night in the summer (civil twilight, nautical twilight and astronomical twilight, to which it never leaves in the summer to become official night).
Depends if they only plan to deploy them along coastlines or everywhere.
LORAN worked only because it had a collection of towers spread out in a line, and the preferred navigation route (most accurate) for LORAN involved being perpendicular to the line. For shipping routes that was great since they generally were well defined paths.
But if you're randomly tuning in a LORAN station, the accuracy (especially "reversed") was questionable at best.
The US decommissioned them because they were expensive to maintain, few people were using them (compared to GPS) and touchy to use.
Plus, GPS is so integral to US life that introducing an error signal back or turning it off would literally disrupt the US economy. Not just satnav, but satellite tracking and monitoring of equipment, timing (GPS is used to distribute time and synchronize clocks (required for cellphones)), navigation (RNP - Required Navigation Performance, is a new method airplanes use to approach airports that lets them fly closer in and lowered minimums, and relies heavily on GPS, which saves time (less time cooped in the cabin) and fuel, and makes the airports more efficient). The trucking industry heavily relies on GPS to track its cargo being moved about as do many package delivery companies.
Actually, I think they can, thanks to cloud-based tax software. Mostly because of the rise of OS X which means a bunch of Windows only tax software just won't work for them.
Sure, there are plenty of issues when trust Intuit and others with your tax information (it's web based, after all), but with a Chromebook, I'm sure security of the laptop isn't as big a problem.
And given the way people generally backup, at least users won't be able to have the IRS pull a fast one over them since they can retrieve what they filed online rather than try to hunt for a backup or realize it was on the crashed hard drive.
Not as secure, though if the IRS already has the data... but I'm sure for a lot of users, probably way more convenient, way more secure and way more recoverable.
Anyone who thinks DST is easy obviously hasn't done stuff worldwide.
Because I've just had to deal with one customer in 4 different timezones - one in the US (Eastern time), one in Portugal (Western European) and the Netherlands (Central Europe).
And it was a weekly teleconference call. We had Portugal already in regular time )WET), but the Netherlands was moving from Central European Summer Time to Central European Time, while us in North America were still in DST.
Endless fun figuring out a convenient time for the meeting when DST transitions randomly for different people. For those curious, WET is UTC+0000, CET is UTC+0100, WEST is UTC+0100, CEST is UTC+0200. And we had to deal with PDT (UTC-0700), EDT (UTC-0400) as usual.
Oh yay, now we have DST over. One last time to figure out the meeting times and this unnecessary form of calculation can be put to rest for a few months (seriously, when they all switch at different times it's meant recalculating the time weekly).
FYI - Outlook sets the meeting time to always be whoever sends the meeting invitation out regardless of DST. So if they set it to 8AM PT, it will be 8AM PST, 8AM PDT, and whatever else that works out to be - so the meeting organizer's time stays at 8, while everyone else has to deal with a meeting that has moved an hour earlier/later. Very important if your customer says they want the meeting at 1pm their time.
I say get rid of it. International dealings get complex quickly.
Not likely, actually. Prices will be lower in richer areas, but there will be no service to those areas that are poorer. Why? The regions won't be as profitable.
It's already been discovered that competition floods the richer areas but does zip to the poorer areas because there's no money to be made there.
So yeah, if you're a poorer person on the borders of a richer area, you may be able to get service. But if you're in the low rent district, getting service may be tough because they don't want to build out to you
There is a version of "HyperCard" for modern Macs, and it's been around a LONG time now (at least before the 90s).
It's called SuperCard. (Official Site (it's hard to Google)).
It can convert existing HyperCard stacks to SuperCard ones in a few minutes and has extensive support. Yes, it runs on OS X and Intel Macs, too.
It's actually a bit better than HyperCard was back in the days - it supported color without extensions and other things, too. Of course, it costs money, but it's been available a long time.
Yeah, I'm not sure how this ruling applies with iOS, given 5 failures means you are reverting to passcode, or 48 hours requires passcode, or even a power off.
I mean, how does the ruling apply if the fingerprint reader gets disabled? (And you can do it by simply using an unregistered finger, tapping with the tip of your finger, or turning off the phone.).
So if they can force you to use the fingerprint reader, what happens when the phone won't let you use the fingerprint reader?
If you know the history of Adreno, you'll know it's actually based on an ATi (now AMD) chip.
Way back when (nearly 15 years ago), ATi was one of the first companies that made a mobile GPU back when people didn't even think you needed one (when embedded chips had framebuffers for graphics). Eventually they sold their mobile GPU division to Qualcomm who rebranded it Adreno.
So a lot of the Adreno's internals are based on AMD insides so a lot of it is actually documented by AMD.
Anyhow, it's likely Qualcomm only wants to support the Android port because that's where all their money is. However, they (and us, who work with Qualcomm to work on smaller projects) do get requests for graphics support on Linux and other OSes, so contributing to a free driver means the community can support their chips and they can sell a few more. Android is still their bread and butter and they probably optimize the heck out of it, but a free community driver for everyone else that handles good enough is great for those smaller projects.
Well, the first link was for a transistor amp that goes to THz speeds.
The second link was for a semiconductor fabbed amp that uses vacuum tube style technology to make it work. It isn't, ,however, at all close to your traditional vacuum tube. First, there's no filament - just applying a differential voltage (10-15V) is enough to start shedding electrons off the cathode. The gap is so small that the low voltage is adequate, and you almost never need to use a vacuum - you could operate it in regular atmospheric air, or improve performance by using helium. (the gap is so small, that there's few air molecules that'll get in the way so performance doesn't suffer too much.
It works based on vacuum tube principles - a cathode sheds electrons, which flow through a regulating gate to an anode. But it's all made using current semiconductor processes on silicon. It's basically a solid state vacuum tube.
The problem stems from the fact that they solve very hard problems. Audio IS hard - it's not just putting a stream to a card and having a beep come out from a speaker anymore - nowadays audio is FAR more complex. Most computers now have various ways to get audio in and out - a hardware ADC/DAC (sound card), Bluetooth, HDMI, digital (S/PDIF, TOSLINK), built in speakers/microphones, etc. etc. etc.
And the one you use at a given time depends on what you're doing. If you're on a VoIP call, you want to have its audio routed to a communications port (which may or may not be separate from the main audio out), you may or may not want to mute the main audio (or just lower the volume), and so forth.
Then there's the common case of mixing - you're watching a YouTube video and someone IMs you, so you need to mix the two streams together to play it out the main output.
Oh, now you unplugged the laptop from your desk and what was using the optical or HDMI audio outputs now needs to switch to the onboard speaker and microphone.
It turns out init isn't all that simple either. Because even SysVInit is fairly complex - it has to reap zombies (every process has init as its parent, eventually). It has to manage daemons (yes, even SysVInit has to manage daemons - take a look, you probably have a bunch of lines where it manages getty). It also has to run the hack that are RC scripts which appear to implement a lamer version to manage daemons. Oh yeah, it also has to shutdown and restart the computer, too. (And I don't mean stopping daemons and such, either).
So after all this, SysV already handles two forms of daemon management (each with their own plusses and minuses), it has to reap processes (to free up kernel resources), shuts down or reboots the computer, and it also has to handle starting up the computer.
Doesn't matter.
Just because you marked the tweet as private and only viewable to a few, is still viewable to all.
THERE IS NO PRIVACY SETTINGS. Once you post, even if it's "friends only", it is still public.
Because anyone who sees it is free to screenshot it (how many tweets have been deleted only to live on in screenshots?), copy/paste, retweet, report, etc.
If you're typing it out on the internet and someone else can see it, it's public information. A private feed or post is just like sharing a secret - it ain't a secret no more.
Hell, is it just as bad if all they did was provide a web interface where concerned users could copy and paste said tweets into it? In this case, the user (who you authorized) is reporting to a third party as well.
Except that shellshock dates to 1989. That's when the "feature" to export functions was added to bash per commit logs. And that predates Linux 0.1 by a couple of years, so your FBI/NSA/etc would have to have extreme foresight to believe that some piece of software would suddenly be popular, aided by an unknown barely-functional OS released a couple of years later, etc., etc., etc.
And if you're paranoid, use OpenBSD, where every line of code has been audited.
Don't forget Xiaomi as well. Their mi5 software is actually given away because Xiaomi wants to become a cloud company and not a hardware company (i.e., they don't want to follow Apple's footsteps in making nice phones, but Google's footsteps by making nice phones that collect data).
The mi5 software is part of that and is why they give it away - to help collect data for the cloud.
Actually, when it was spun off, it was Williams-Bally-Midway. In the 80s, Williams experimented with arcade games, and then acquired Midway to be their arcade division. (WIlliams also acquired Bally for pinball). Depending on the mood, the game would either be released under Williams or Midway (likewise for pinballs under Williams or Bally). Eventually more and more of it just went towards Midway until it was basically doing all the arcade games and got spun off later.
Williams-Bally today makes gaming devices (slot machines), having decided to shut down their pinball division instead of either suspending or spinning it off.
Actually, Jobs just brought people over to see the demo. No one actually saw any code.
It's why Woz had to invent (and patent) "regions" which was needed because it's the way to handle overlapping windows. (Woz got in a plane accident a short while later where he supposedly told Jobs when he visisted, "Don't worry, I didn't forget regions").
It was only after it was all said and done did someone from Xerox tell Woz their Alto didn't have overlapping windows.