It's falling prices, but it's a measure of how fast they're falling. Not too long ago, $1/GB was the "barrier" everyone wanted to cross. Before that it was probably $5/GB or something. Next we'll be looking to break $0.25/GB, then probably price parity with hard drives.
Price parity with hard drives is hard, because SSDs only really get cheaper according to Moore's law (because each transistor is the storage element - the more of them you can stuff on a die, the more storage). But hard drive capacity and cost don't have to follow Moore's law.
I mean, 4TB drives are only around $200 or so these days. And that gets you a 500GB SSD.
The growth in hard drive capacity will have to significantly slow for an extended period of time (or halt) before SSDs can really catch up.
Why does "trying to fix this" always lead to affirmative action?
Why can't "trying to fix this" fix the root cause?
I mean, if you need more women on your team, instead of trying to give preference to women, why not do two things: 1) Study why there are few women in the field 2) Remedy that, or encourage more women to join.
Because you know what? Another male dominated field is doing just that - aviation. And the statistics on that are generally VERY biased towards men (over 95% of pilots are men, for example). Yet what's happening is there are tons of women pilot groups (check out the Ninety Nines) as well as many very public women aviators.
And no, it wasn't too long ago when prevailing thoughts were "hell would freeze before we let women in the cockpit". (Alas, I think the tech industry as a whole is like that - still I the juvenile stage when trying to relate towards women).
To be fair, though, Apple does get a lot of representation from their retail side - it's over half of Apple's employees. And I will applaud Apple for really being blind and giving lots of people a chance to work. I've seen great diversity in the stores, and even those with challenges seem to not only get hired, but are really helpful as well.
I'm sure that in 1985 plutonium was available in every corner drug store, but in 2014 it's a little hard to come by.
Except you don't need it anymore in 2014. You just bring your car in and get a Mr. Fusion conversion. Just turns your food and other waste into pure energy, no more requirement for a nuclear reactor.
And while you're there, you might as well take it in for a hovercar conversion.
Wouldn't you have been better off if they had gone to Micro USB though? It's cheap, ubiquitous, supports full 1080p video without nasty compression and does everything else that the Lightning connector does. Apple could even have added some extra pins for their own functions, like Samsung and HTC have done, while still retaining full compatibility.
microUSB does NOT SUPPORT TV OUT.
Sorry, but do not confuse MHL, SlimPort or other "let's hack a micro USB compatible connector" standard with micro USB. MHL and SlimPort (two INCOMPATIBLE standards for video over something-that-appears-to-be-microUSB) are different ways of transmitting the video.
MHL is traditionally converted to HDMI (limited to 1080i60 or 1080p30, MHL 2.0 is required for 60fps support at 1080p) and the MHL-HDMI link is relatively strong. However, it is NOT a part of the HDMI spec - MHL is managed separately and independently from HDMI.
SlimPort is another standard - it's a bit more compelling because it allows for trivial conversion to DisplayPort via an adapter. But it's DisplayPort, and you need a converter (most likely active) to convert it to HDMI.
But you cannot connect a MHL device via a SlimPort cable and expect it to work.
And let's not forget we want a spec to last 10 years. In 10 years we've seen numerous changes to the USB port so you do need a small gaggle of adapters to be able to connect anything to anything. (There's a few popular ones, like micro A and A, but there's also mini-A for the few devices that had them on the host side. On the device side you have B, mini B, micro B. Assuming you ignore USB 3.0, because the 3.0 device side connectors only plug into 3.0 devices). For Apple, you have two cables - a 30 pin, or lightning.
And as someone who has had devices with MHL and moved to ones with SlimPort, it's frustrating because stuff doesn't work anymore. Even Apple at least made a converter to keep old stuff working.
Plus, the microUSB port is awful and unidirectional with it enforced by a flimsy piece of plastic. It won't be more than a day before we hear reports of users who basically broke the thing on their iPhones and iPads.
OTOH, at least there would be some standardization of connectivity - you won't see Android makers putting the USB port anywhere other at the bottom center oriented one way (which happens to be the way Apple chose), so at least Android docking stations would be more than clumsy things that consist of a device holder and a 3.5mm plug to go into your audio jack and a micro USB cable to charge (optional).
It's why even though the PS4 is technically better, the Xbone is still a contender. And it has to be, given the third entrant is a no-show this round.
Yes, laugh all you want about resolutiongate (oh wait, did you just dismiss that Killzone 1080p lawsuit? I thought PS4 was better because it could push 1080p vs. whatever the guys could do on Xbone).
And yes, the Xbone is a weaker system - but it doesn't matter, because the PS3 was a weaker system for most developers at launch too (half the system RAM since the other was dedicated graphics, if you didn't use the SPUs, you had two two-thread PowerPC cores vs. three two-thread PowerPC cores), etc. And it sold poorly the first few years. But after that, the PS3 was a decent contender to everyone else and it was pointless to joke about it.
Xbone is in the same position versus the PS4, and yet everyone is writing it off that Sony would dominate. Yes, Microsoft is stupid and arrogant (just like Sony was with the PS3), but they'll learn.
And both PS4 and Xbone are horrendously immature - if you take them now versus launch day, they are tons better, but there's still a shit-ton of work to do.
And what's making both better? Competition - you notice how PS4 and Xbone are now basically adding features the other had? Xbone gets Blu-Ray 3D in August, PS4 goes and gets it a week earlier.
Likewise, media support will be coming. And Xbone has external USB drive support for save games - PS4 will probably get that soon too (that was actually a launch feature to make up for the fact the Xbone's hard drive isn't easily removable - the external USB is a full featured citizen storage unlike the Xbox360's where there are differences between attached hard drive storage and USB).
Hell, perhaps we can kick their asses to do something fun with Kinect and the Playstation camera (which on launch day added rudimentary voice control to compete with Kinect - huh.).
Both Microsoft and Sony going after each other is good. Believing the PS4 will win may be true (like the Xbox360 won), but writing Microsoft off simply makes everything worse for us. It's the only way to keep Microsoft AND Sony from doing what Microsoft wanted to do with the Xbone in the first place.
Along those lines: the "gendering" (sort of) of USB was deliberate. USB is a master/slave protocol with a host that supplies power and a device that (optionally) consumes it. The cables were designed to prevent people from connecting two hosts together and shorting out their power supplies. The newer USB On-The-Go (OTG) standard allows two hosts to connect using special connectors (micro-AB) to control power switching and a connection protocol for deciding which end is the master, but it's pretty complicated and requires analog voltage measurement. Fun to have on a smart phone, but massive overkill for most devices.
No real device actually implement OTG - it's such a complex protocol with HNP and role-switching that very few people bothered. Especially since the real goal for the manufacturer really just wanted USB host support, USB client support, and not worry about HNP or other nonsense.
USB Forum did listen though, as USB 3.0 abandoned the OTG spec. Instead, they have "Dual Role Device" or DRD. Basically it can be a host or client depending on the voltage applied to a pin. No complex HNP or other protocol - the user basically just plugs in an adapter to bring it back to the normal USB A female plug.
OTG was conceived as a way for two people to connect their phones or other devices together and share data - HNP and role-switching as necessary in order to properly handle the transfer. It was all brilliant and everything, but so overly complex with high software requirements. Bluetooth also came around which basically handled all the use cases that USB OTG was envisioning, so in the end, the only real use was to provide USB host mode.
...of the e-mail. Any attempt to block spam or phising on the basis of mixing character sets would have to confront the fact that some people do need to mix character sets. Typically representations of Mari in the Latin alphabet, for example, also make use of the Greek letters beta and eta. In fact, eta is used in Latin representations of several minority languages of Russia. And the Reddit crowd loves making weird smilies in their English-language writing by means of symbols drawn from Indian scripts.
Or perhaps more practically, needing to send email with multiple translations in them. Either as a courtesy to your audience who may speak English or French, or German, and you're not quite sure which they're more comfortable with. So you send your email with all three languages in it.
North American based companies may do English, French and Spanish in their email.
Though perhaps one area where they could block in the body is in HTML tags - if there's a restricted character in a link, perhaps that's a reason to block.
I'm sure all you're saying is true, but I'm not sure he's marketing solely to court reporters. I think the idea is that it will be a keyboard that anyone who does a lot of typing (secretaries, journalists, writers, coders, etc.) might be interested in using to increase their typing speed, even if they don't reach 225 wpm. Many people would be happy to increase their typing speed from 75 wpm to say 150 wpm.
The thing is - while it's "neat" to write 150wpm, is it practical for all the effort you need to put in to achieve it?
I mean, how many people are really hobbled by 75wpm? So far taking the time to compose the thought and sentences brings the effective wpm down to below that.
Court reporters NEED 225wpm because fast talking people can burst up to that speed and they need to keep up - a buffer overflow is fatal.
But for most people, I doubt they'd be able to compose at 150wpm (the court reporter is basically just a speech recognition system that transcribes to a "proprietary" format - humans are very good and fast at this). But trying to compose original thought happens at a rate far slower than most people can type peak.
And those that can think faster, learn to type faster too - it's possible to achieve 125wpm on a QWERTY and using regular language. If you're a fast thinker, you'll most likely type faster just through the practice of typing alone.
Indeed. I fail to see why GPL software is being picked on here. You lift someone else's copyrighted code without permission and without abiding by any licensing agreements, you are SOL if you get busted.
I think it's the nightmare scenario.
You have program A. You contract vendor B to add feature C to program A. Unbeknownst to you, vendor B took GPL code D to implement feature C, making program A now GPL, unknown to you because vendor B took GPL'd code to add feature C.
So now your program A is GPL.
That's the nightmare scenario - someone basically pirated GPL code and forces your closed-source code to be GPL.
And it's happened to Microsoft before - they contracted someone to write the ISO-USB tool to write Windows OS ISOs to a USB stick for USB installs. Microsoft immediately took it down (they didn't know someone used a GPL'd library, so took it down when they learned of the breach), then figured out the whole licensing mess and posted it back up with full GPL sources.
That works in some cases, like this one, where Microsoft didn't care about the tool. But in this story, they couldn't GPL their main app for many legitimate reasons.
And that was one of the many thorny issues in this case.
The second is the fact that the GPL'd software contained patented items. (In theory, the GPL does state that using the code provides a license to those patents, but that expires when the license is revoked), so now the use of that code is also a patent infringement case - does the GPL confer users the right to use patented code if they follow the GPL?
In the end, it's a really messy situation involve patent infringement, GPL violations by a third party incorporated into your code, and other stuff. Commercial software license violations typically are far more quiet and it just boils down to contract law on who really violated the license or who was in the wrong.
This one adds the GPL into the mix and also adds stuff like "what is distribution?".
The real problem was the lack of legal oversight - for too long too many companies assumed the GPL and FOSS were "free" and all that and people just used the code willy-nilly. Yet if they licensed third-party software, what immediately happens is the license terms are reviewed by Legal to ensure they will be no problems using the code.
Only after the GPLv3 came out have companies started applying the same discipline to FOSS like they do to commercially-licensed code. Sure it means having to go to legal before you can use that nifty tool you found, but it protects everything in the end to have ALL code license-checked, even if it means wasting weeks of time before you can use it.
sn't this in the EU, where the right to alter history is already the law of he land?
So what is this reporter complaining about? If he doesn't like what someone is saying about him, all he had to do is erase the article from the internet and change history into whatever he likes. It's not like he's in the U.S.
it's not a right to alter history. It's a right to disassociate yourself from your actions of the past in a search engine.
I mean, if you stole a candy bar 10 years ago and then got caught and charged, and that's the only bad thing you did, then it would pop up in a Google search unfairly because that's all Google has on you. Despite it being a minor offense.
So you ask for it to be forgotten and disassociated from your name, so you Google yourself and it doesn't show up. If you Google people who got charged for stealing candy bars, well, your name SHOULD show up. As well as if there's a Wikipedia page on lists of people charged with stealing candy bars.
Heck, legally there are two related concepts - how at age 18 your slate is wiped clean of any poor teenage decisions you may have made, as well as having "served your time".
Otherwise what you did at age 14 when you were too young to know better can come back to haunt you when you're 22 and looking for your first job and background research pulls up the indiscretion.
In fact, brand management companies do this by taking advantage of the fact that new items generally outweigh old ones - so if you did something back, they generate a bunch of positive PR news and articles to bury the bad stuff on page 4 of the search results.
But that assumes you can afford brand management. If you're just a regular old person, well, just because you were drunk years ago and got shoved in a drunk tank overnight shouldn't impact your life a decade later (assuming it was a one-time thing).
And it applies only to search engines. The news article on the BBC that said you were tossed in a drunk tank can stay (it's fact).
Then again, you're probably one of those goody two-shoes who keeps their nose sparkling clean and does absolutely nothing wrong or makes a bad decision so has absolutely nothing to hide from anyone.
We already have freedom of movement, which is enshrined in the Constitution, as interpreted by case law.
What we don't have is freedom of anonymous movement.
The law doesn't state you have freedom to use any means of transport available. You can be banned from airlines, trains, buses, and your rights technically aren't infringed because you can still walk or drive your car (assuming it's fully legal), or hitch a ride in a friend's vehicle.
So yeah, you have freedom of movement without regards to practicality.
and ran by a supposed tech superstar genius, you'd think they'd at least get the basics of technology and media correct on their own e-penis self-promotion presentation...
None of those follow.
First, tech superstart geniuses probably have a minion doing their website because HTML and the like are beneath them. I mean, how many of you guys considered HTML a "programming language" or snickered when a resume came across with that listed as a skill?
Second, tech superstars really generate awful websites. it's why you don't let programmers do UIs because they don't understand or relate to people. HCI is a complex field. Superstars know everything they code is perfect and usable. (NOT - ed).
Third, have you met programming prima donnas? To say lack of social skills is just a starting flaw. Put them on camera and they will act like they know their crap, but in reality stumble, mumble and use lots of "ums" and "ahs" and other things. Again, learning how to enunciate, practice, and present is a skill only proles need to learn - superstars already can do it perfectly.
Really, it's just like a bunch of say, elite Linux coders who think everyone is blessed they decided to embrace F/OSS.
Re:And this is the same for copyrights.
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Patents That Kill
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Could Pixar have been kickstarted for ToyStory 1? I think they went to great lengths because there was more money to be made.
Well, Toy Story 1 came about because a certain Steven P. Jobs had a few dollars to throw around, and with the relatively non-success NeXT was having, decided to buy a stake in the struggling Pixar and take it in a new direction.
(Pixar was making computers back then - they sold a package for animation and visual FX). Jobs (yes, THAT Jobs) decided that no, let's do a feature film instead. The Pixar shorts you see about including Luxo were demo reels showing the power of their computers, while Toy Story was effectively their new direction from selling computers and software to doing motion pictures.
So basically you just learned how to do a full application (web server and GUI via html) and you think its new. Funny that just happens to be 20 years old as well, and its certainly not the first type someone wrote client server applications.
Nothing you're doing is new other than you're doing it now instead of someone else.
You just learned to do the 'full stack'. I've been doing it for over 20, before the web existed. Different languages, different layout engines, different libraries, same process.
One small difference - PCs were a lot less capable 20 years ago, and it was possible to know the whole stack much easier back then when "whole stack" didn't do much. I mean, it was the dawn of the GUI age with Windows 95 on the horizon, so most apps were DOS or Windows based and fairly basic at that. It was a lot easier to understand purely because when you're running in 4MB of RAM, there's not a log you COULD do.
If you needed to do anything more complex like query a shared database, you shelled out to a terminal program that connected to a database and re-ran the query there on the mainframe.
for $99 a year
Which turns a $300 console into a $900 console. Now I know where Apple got the idea.
And what aspect of "hobby programming" implied zero cost? Back then you could pay thousands for an IBM PC which had BASIC, for which you could just've bought a cheaper Apple or Commodore or many other more popular computers. And if you wanted to do assembly, well, ante up $200 for an assembler. C? Well, another $400 for the software, and make sure you upgrade to dual floppy or harddrive/floppy ($thousands) and have tons of memory.
Hell, Borland was popular because their compiler suite was not only fast, but cheap - for $200 you could get a full featured C compiler that didn't require you to shell out and run the compiler, assembler and linker manually.
The video game console makers have made it clear that their platforms are not intended for hobbyists.
Sony maybe, but Microsoft has long had the Xbox Live Indie Arcade where for $99 a year you can code up something and play it on an Xbox360 and even sell it on an Xbox360.
And Sony did at one point too when the PS3 ran Linux.
Microsoft has/had plans for bringing the program onto the Xbone as well.
This is so true... the comment "oh, you can't see the difference between 4k/1080p" is just as much nonsense as the one 10 years ago saying, "oh, you can't see the difference betwee 720p/1080p"
It is people talking out of their rear ends mostly...
Having seen them both in person, 4k blows away 1080p on the proper equipment.
Which for 99% of the population is never going to happen.
Because most people sit WAY too far away from their TVs - even 720p is "retina" resolution - increasing resolution does absolutely zip because they can't even resolve the added resolution.
A rough guide is about 1:1 screen size for 1080p - if you have 100" screen, you need to 100" away from it. a 60" set means you must sit 5' away from it. 4K is even worse, which is why they come in humongous sizes because unless you want to sit with the nose to the screen, you need a bigger screen.
Yeah, I'm sure if you set everything up properly, you can notice the difference. But for most people who sit 6-8' away from their TVs they have a set that's too small.
Only if you're dumb enough to let authentication program be suspceptible to such an attack. Dictionary attacks can be trivially defeated by rating limiting tries and after, say, 5 tries not allowing any more attempts for some cooldown period. No attacker is going to bother if they can only have 5 tries every 15 to 20 minutes.
Few attacks actually try to login repeatedly.
If they do, there are botnets that help you try lots in a short period of time.
Most attacks involve dumping the password hash database.
And even brute forcing is getting easier. If you need a SPECIFIC password, it's not any easier, but if you have a bunch of hashes and you want a good chunk of accounts (without caring if you have every account), it's actually easy. In fact, Ars Technica covers a domain-specific brute forcer.that relies on terminology from the sites cracked to get a list of potential passwords EXTREMELY quickly. Follow this with trivial modifications to get more. If you have a list of a million passwords, you could easily derive half of them this way, and then move on to the next list.
Remember, let's differentiate between cracking one SPECIFIC account and password, with cracking AN account and password from a list. You might be cool and use a super complex password that involves every typeable character on the keyboard, and yes, people may not find your password easy to crack. But perhaps your neighbour just used "password". Well, of the two, it's easy to crack AN account, but not a SPECIFIC account.
I will argue that at the root they actually are the same. A spammer and a drug dealer have in common the motivation to make money. A spammer cares no more - or less - about the condition of the customer than does a drug dealer. For that matter, plenty of spammers effectively are drug dealers, spamvertising for sites that sell (often counterfeit) drugs online.
Actually, that's less likely the case these days.
More likely is the three actor scenario - you have the spammer, the customer, and the victim. The customer is the person buying "marketing services", while the victim is you and I, the recipient.
In this case, the customer buys "10 million emails" for around $100 or so. Spammer makes money sending out the message, and the customer gets the emails sent. To the spammer, it really doesn't matter - he's made his money even if 99.99% of them are filtered. And if the customer isn't happy, well, there's another one around the corner needing "marketing services".
As for online drug stores - it turns out for whatever reason most don't actually do anything. A study ordered from around 20 spam online "pharmacies" and found 95% of them didn't take the money and run - they just didn't send anything, didn't charge anything, didn't do anything. The last one well, actually did ship them the items as described.
Turned out well, between credit cards and mail fraud, it's not really a profitable business to be in. Doesn't matter if you're overseas, either since a reversed charge is still a reversed charge.
Except instead of the bot finding the target, you designate the target, then pull the trigger. The gun won't fire until it's positioned in such a way that the designated target will be hit.
The thing is, the basic skills still need to be there. For their rifle, well, you still need to calm yourself down enough to be able to find the target, designate it, then squeeze and wait for it to fire. Sure it means you don't need to discipline yourself to breathe and even attune yourself to your heartbeat, but you still can't just designate, hold the trigger down and flail the gun everywhere.
The AR is similar - you still need to be able to hold it somewhat steady and in the direction of the target.
The comment at the end of the article about people going crazy with it is true - you're not going to be very effective with it if your aim is to kill as many people as you can. (And yes, you can forget about used gun sales - each gun is a "smart gun" and keyed to their user)
I'd perhaps call it more as "aim assist" that you find in console FPS games where as long as your target is within a circle, you'll always hit.
With the three months off being all in one chunk over the summer, many teachers I know end up getting a summer job, waiting tables or cleaning houseboats or whatever. If you were to split that time up into a couple week chunks throughout the year it would pretty much take away that option.
With one month off, it's a lot easier to plan for cashflow than a huge three month break. Many teachers work because three months is a really long time to be away from money and it's actually extremely hard to prepare for. But 3 1-month breaks is far easier to save for and schedule your spending around.
I would say the QR code would be mush more likely to deliver the message. Many people recognize them and know how to read them. Few would guess about the stamps even if they happened to have one of each handy.
Given that they're personalized stamps that you have made for yourself, I'm pretty sure those who get those stamps might know to do something interesting with them.
If it was a general issue stamp, yes, most people won't get it. But it's specially designed stamps for individuals who can choose to use them instead of regular stamps, so I think those would be used for special occasions.
Right...and even then, this was location-based information that Apple said the phone wasn't collecting. It could just as easily have been a misunderstanding about underlying software behavior at a low level (or even that the programmer who built it that way didn't even work at Apple any longer) as anything else.
It wasn't collecting the data. It was caching the data. Basically you go to a new area, the iPhone sends the MAC addresses of WiFi APs it sees, and Apple sends back a list of APs in the area and their locations. Apple sends more data than "you are here" so the phone doesn't constantly burn up data asking where it is - it has a small subset of the giant WiFi geolocation database so it can locate itself for a bit before it runs out.
Basically you asked Apple for a location, and Apple sends you your location AND data for locations around you so you can locate even if your data connection is interrupted. Depending on the density of APs, it could be a small area, or a large area which made it appear it was tracking you.
Your phone caches it so it doesn't even have to keep asking Apple every time - it can consult the cache and just get smaller updates.
The end user experience in either case is very similar, but the purpose of the data is completely different.
Anyhow, the problem with this phone isn't the apps, it's the default app package. As in you buy the phone, activate it, and boom, it's already sending your data to their servers without having launched an app or doing anything than running through initial setup and use. No apps installed, just what comes with the phone.
Kids should have at least a couple of months out of the year when they can just not worry about their studies and have fun and BE KIDS.
I mean, jeez! You only get to be a kid once. Let them enjoy those summer vacations. When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories are during those summer vacations! Why the heck should we take that away from our future generations?
Leave summer vacation in place. And stop freaking shortening it.
Year round school doesn't get rid of long breaks.
In fact, there are two traditional reasons for the summer break in North American schools (it's an anomaly - most schools around the world are year-round). First, are farms - school let out in the summer so kids could work the fields during prime growing season. (No fun here, just work from sunup to sundown).
The second reason was historically schools didn't have AC, so they'd adjourn during the hottest months for obvious reasons.
Year-round schooling has long breaks - you traditionally get the month of December off, and July off, with a shorter 2-week break in the middle (traditional spring break and fall break). Or if they forgo the break, the schools are in session for reduced hours. Heck, I've seen systems that got rid of the two-week breaks and instead hold separate morning and afternoon classes - you could choose to be a morning student, or an afternoon student.
The shorter breaks ensure the summer brain drain doesn't hurt too badly, and are long enough "to be kids".
The half-day schools may even be split - morning for elementary students, and afternoon for high school students - many behavioral studies have shown that teenage bodies really do not do well in the mornings.
The North American year round break is an anomaly due to many factors that are unique to North America. Of course, these days it isn't as applicable (fewer families are farmers and even fewer require their kids to work in the summer, schools have AC as a matter of course).
Year round schooling doesn't eliminate long breaks - it just breaks up the super long summer break into more manageable chunks that help prevent the huge loss of education that happens over the break and the huge amount of re-adjustment that happens in September as the school schedule gets readjusted.
because they're constantly subjected to rule changes. Every week, month, year, decade, there is the potential for having a very upsetting change in the fundamentals of the game. If eSports players can't keep up with these, then they fall out of brackets. That's why the people who were the top of the top 3 years ago aren't. Maybe that's what'll prevent eSports from ever gaining the same prominence as regular sports--an athlete can expect to have a 10-25 year career. A pro-gamer would be lucky to see a 10 year career, and I don't expect that'll ever change.
A pro athlete would be lucky to see a 10 year career - most drop out before then as well because their bodies just plain wear out.
And rule changes? Every sports league has rule changes. Typically done before the beginning of the season. A lot of them are minor tweaks, but rule changes do happen and it affects how teams play the game.
Rule changes are a way of life. Pro sports generally tweak rules as they're older games that have been played long enough that there aren't serious imbalance issues, but the organizers still tweak the game for various reasons, including livening up the play and avoiding excessive OT play.
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Price parity with hard drives is hard, because SSDs only really get cheaper according to Moore's law (because each transistor is the storage element - the more of them you can stuff on a die, the more storage). But hard drive capacity and cost don't have to follow Moore's law.
I mean, 4TB drives are only around $200 or so these days. And that gets you a 500GB SSD.
The growth in hard drive capacity will have to significantly slow for an extended period of time (or halt) before SSDs can really catch up.
Why does "trying to fix this" always lead to affirmative action?
Why can't "trying to fix this" fix the root cause?
I mean, if you need more women on your team, instead of trying to give preference to women, why not do two things:
1) Study why there are few women in the field
2) Remedy that, or encourage more women to join.
Because you know what? Another male dominated field is doing just that - aviation. And the statistics on that are generally VERY biased towards men (over 95% of pilots are men, for example). Yet what's happening is there are tons of women pilot groups (check out the Ninety Nines) as well as many very public women aviators.
And no, it wasn't too long ago when prevailing thoughts were "hell would freeze before we let women in the cockpit". (Alas, I think the tech industry as a whole is like that - still I the juvenile stage when trying to relate towards women).
To be fair, though, Apple does get a lot of representation from their retail side - it's over half of Apple's employees. And I will applaud Apple for really being blind and giving lots of people a chance to work. I've seen great diversity in the stores, and even those with challenges seem to not only get hired, but are really helpful as well.
Except you don't need it anymore in 2014. You just bring your car in and get a Mr. Fusion conversion. Just turns your food and other waste into pure energy, no more requirement for a nuclear reactor.
And while you're there, you might as well take it in for a hovercar conversion.
microUSB does NOT SUPPORT TV OUT.
Sorry, but do not confuse MHL, SlimPort or other "let's hack a micro USB compatible connector" standard with micro USB. MHL and SlimPort (two INCOMPATIBLE standards for video over something-that-appears-to-be-microUSB) are different ways of transmitting the video.
MHL is traditionally converted to HDMI (limited to 1080i60 or 1080p30, MHL 2.0 is required for 60fps support at 1080p) and the MHL-HDMI link is relatively strong. However, it is NOT a part of the HDMI spec - MHL is managed separately and independently from HDMI.
SlimPort is another standard - it's a bit more compelling because it allows for trivial conversion to DisplayPort via an adapter. But it's DisplayPort, and you need a converter (most likely active) to convert it to HDMI.
But you cannot connect a MHL device via a SlimPort cable and expect it to work.
And let's not forget we want a spec to last 10 years. In 10 years we've seen numerous changes to the USB port so you do need a small gaggle of adapters to be able to connect anything to anything. (There's a few popular ones, like micro A and A, but there's also mini-A for the few devices that had them on the host side. On the device side you have B, mini B, micro B. Assuming you ignore USB 3.0, because the 3.0 device side connectors only plug into 3.0 devices). For Apple, you have two cables - a 30 pin, or lightning.
And as someone who has had devices with MHL and moved to ones with SlimPort, it's frustrating because stuff doesn't work anymore. Even Apple at least made a converter to keep old stuff working.
Plus, the microUSB port is awful and unidirectional with it enforced by a flimsy piece of plastic. It won't be more than a day before we hear reports of users who basically broke the thing on their iPhones and iPads.
OTOH, at least there would be some standardization of connectivity - you won't see Android makers putting the USB port anywhere other at the bottom center oriented one way (which happens to be the way Apple chose), so at least Android docking stations would be more than clumsy things that consist of a device holder and a 3.5mm plug to go into your audio jack and a micro USB cable to charge (optional).
Yes, Sony will re-add it back.
It's why even though the PS4 is technically better, the Xbone is still a contender. And it has to be, given the third entrant is a no-show this round.
Yes, laugh all you want about resolutiongate (oh wait, did you just dismiss that Killzone 1080p lawsuit? I thought PS4 was better because it could push 1080p vs. whatever the guys could do on Xbone).
And yes, the Xbone is a weaker system - but it doesn't matter, because the PS3 was a weaker system for most developers at launch too (half the system RAM since the other was dedicated graphics, if you didn't use the SPUs, you had two two-thread PowerPC cores vs. three two-thread PowerPC cores), etc. And it sold poorly the first few years. But after that, the PS3 was a decent contender to everyone else and it was pointless to joke about it.
Xbone is in the same position versus the PS4, and yet everyone is writing it off that Sony would dominate. Yes, Microsoft is stupid and arrogant (just like Sony was with the PS3), but they'll learn.
And both PS4 and Xbone are horrendously immature - if you take them now versus launch day, they are tons better, but there's still a shit-ton of work to do.
And what's making both better? Competition - you notice how PS4 and Xbone are now basically adding features the other had? Xbone gets Blu-Ray 3D in August, PS4 goes and gets it a week earlier.
Likewise, media support will be coming. And Xbone has external USB drive support for save games - PS4 will probably get that soon too (that was actually a launch feature to make up for the fact the Xbone's hard drive isn't easily removable - the external USB is a full featured citizen storage unlike the Xbox360's where there are differences between attached hard drive storage and USB).
Hell, perhaps we can kick their asses to do something fun with Kinect and the Playstation camera (which on launch day added rudimentary voice control to compete with Kinect - huh.).
Both Microsoft and Sony going after each other is good. Believing the PS4 will win may be true (like the Xbox360 won), but writing Microsoft off simply makes everything worse for us. It's the only way to keep Microsoft AND Sony from doing what Microsoft wanted to do with the Xbone in the first place.
No real device actually implement OTG - it's such a complex protocol with HNP and role-switching that very few people bothered. Especially since the real goal for the manufacturer really just wanted USB host support, USB client support, and not worry about HNP or other nonsense.
USB Forum did listen though, as USB 3.0 abandoned the OTG spec. Instead, they have "Dual Role Device" or DRD. Basically it can be a host or client depending on the voltage applied to a pin. No complex HNP or other protocol - the user basically just plugs in an adapter to bring it back to the normal USB A female plug.
OTG was conceived as a way for two people to connect their phones or other devices together and share data - HNP and role-switching as necessary in order to properly handle the transfer. It was all brilliant and everything, but so overly complex with high software requirements. Bluetooth also came around which basically handled all the use cases that USB OTG was envisioning, so in the end, the only real use was to provide USB host mode.
Or perhaps more practically, needing to send email with multiple translations in them. Either as a courtesy to your audience who may speak English or French, or German, and you're not quite sure which they're more comfortable with. So you send your email with all three languages in it.
North American based companies may do English, French and Spanish in their email.
Though perhaps one area where they could block in the body is in HTML tags - if there's a restricted character in a link, perhaps that's a reason to block.
The thing is - while it's "neat" to write 150wpm, is it practical for all the effort you need to put in to achieve it?
I mean, how many people are really hobbled by 75wpm? So far taking the time to compose the thought and sentences brings the effective wpm down to below that.
Court reporters NEED 225wpm because fast talking people can burst up to that speed and they need to keep up - a buffer overflow is fatal.
But for most people, I doubt they'd be able to compose at 150wpm (the court reporter is basically just a speech recognition system that transcribes to a "proprietary" format - humans are very good and fast at this). But trying to compose original thought happens at a rate far slower than most people can type peak.
And those that can think faster, learn to type faster too - it's possible to achieve 125wpm on a QWERTY and using regular language. If you're a fast thinker, you'll most likely type faster just through the practice of typing alone.
I think it's the nightmare scenario.
You have program A. You contract vendor B to add feature C to program A. Unbeknownst to you, vendor B took GPL code D to implement feature C, making program A now GPL, unknown to you because vendor B took GPL'd code to add feature C.
So now your program A is GPL.
That's the nightmare scenario - someone basically pirated GPL code and forces your closed-source code to be GPL.
And it's happened to Microsoft before - they contracted someone to write the ISO-USB tool to write Windows OS ISOs to a USB stick for USB installs. Microsoft immediately took it down (they didn't know someone used a GPL'd library, so took it down when they learned of the breach), then figured out the whole licensing mess and posted it back up with full GPL sources.
That works in some cases, like this one, where Microsoft didn't care about the tool. But in this story, they couldn't GPL their main app for many legitimate reasons.
And that was one of the many thorny issues in this case.
The second is the fact that the GPL'd software contained patented items. (In theory, the GPL does state that using the code provides a license to those patents, but that expires when the license is revoked), so now the use of that code is also a patent infringement case - does the GPL confer users the right to use patented code if they follow the GPL?
In the end, it's a really messy situation involve patent infringement, GPL violations by a third party incorporated into your code, and other stuff. Commercial software license violations typically are far more quiet and it just boils down to contract law on who really violated the license or who was in the wrong.
This one adds the GPL into the mix and also adds stuff like "what is distribution?".
The real problem was the lack of legal oversight - for too long too many companies assumed the GPL and FOSS were "free" and all that and people just used the code willy-nilly. Yet if they licensed third-party software, what immediately happens is the license terms are reviewed by Legal to ensure they will be no problems using the code.
Only after the GPLv3 came out have companies started applying the same discipline to FOSS like they do to commercially-licensed code. Sure it means having to go to legal before you can use that nifty tool you found, but it protects everything in the end to have ALL code license-checked, even if it means wasting weeks of time before you can use it.
it's not a right to alter history. It's a right to disassociate yourself from your actions of the past in a search engine.
I mean, if you stole a candy bar 10 years ago and then got caught and charged, and that's the only bad thing you did, then it would pop up in a Google search unfairly because that's all Google has on you. Despite it being a minor offense.
So you ask for it to be forgotten and disassociated from your name, so you Google yourself and it doesn't show up. If you Google people who got charged for stealing candy bars, well, your name SHOULD show up. As well as if there's a Wikipedia page on lists of people charged with stealing candy bars.
Heck, legally there are two related concepts - how at age 18 your slate is wiped clean of any poor teenage decisions you may have made, as well as having "served your time".
Otherwise what you did at age 14 when you were too young to know better can come back to haunt you when you're 22 and looking for your first job and background research pulls up the indiscretion.
In fact, brand management companies do this by taking advantage of the fact that new items generally outweigh old ones - so if you did something back, they generate a bunch of positive PR news and articles to bury the bad stuff on page 4 of the search results.
But that assumes you can afford brand management. If you're just a regular old person, well, just because you were drunk years ago and got shoved in a drunk tank overnight shouldn't impact your life a decade later (assuming it was a one-time thing).
And it applies only to search engines. The news article on the BBC that said you were tossed in a drunk tank can stay (it's fact).
Then again, you're probably one of those goody two-shoes who keeps their nose sparkling clean and does absolutely nothing wrong or makes a bad decision so has absolutely nothing to hide from anyone.
The law doesn't state you have freedom to use any means of transport available. You can be banned from airlines, trains, buses, and your rights technically aren't infringed because you can still walk or drive your car (assuming it's fully legal), or hitch a ride in a friend's vehicle.
So yeah, you have freedom of movement without regards to practicality.
None of those follow.
First, tech superstart geniuses probably have a minion doing their website because HTML and the like are beneath them. I mean, how many of you guys considered HTML a "programming language" or snickered when a resume came across with that listed as a skill?
Second, tech superstars really generate awful websites. it's why you don't let programmers do UIs because they don't understand or relate to people. HCI is a complex field. Superstars know everything they code is perfect and usable. (NOT - ed).
Third, have you met programming prima donnas? To say lack of social skills is just a starting flaw. Put them on camera and they will act like they know their crap, but in reality stumble, mumble and use lots of "ums" and "ahs" and other things. Again, learning how to enunciate, practice, and present is a skill only proles need to learn - superstars already can do it perfectly.
Really, it's just like a bunch of say, elite Linux coders who think everyone is blessed they decided to embrace F/OSS.
Well, Toy Story 1 came about because a certain Steven P. Jobs had a few dollars to throw around, and with the relatively non-success NeXT was having, decided to buy a stake in the struggling Pixar and take it in a new direction.
(Pixar was making computers back then - they sold a package for animation and visual FX). Jobs (yes, THAT Jobs) decided that no, let's do a feature film instead. The Pixar shorts you see about including Luxo were demo reels showing the power of their computers, while Toy Story was effectively their new direction from selling computers and software to doing motion pictures.
One small difference - PCs were a lot less capable 20 years ago, and it was possible to know the whole stack much easier back then when "whole stack" didn't do much. I mean, it was the dawn of the GUI age with Windows 95 on the horizon, so most apps were DOS or Windows based and fairly basic at that. It was a lot easier to understand purely because when you're running in 4MB of RAM, there's not a log you COULD do.
If you needed to do anything more complex like query a shared database, you shelled out to a terminal program that connected to a database and re-ran the query there on the mainframe.
And what aspect of "hobby programming" implied zero cost? Back then you could pay thousands for an IBM PC which had BASIC, for which you could just've bought a cheaper Apple or Commodore or many other more popular computers. And if you wanted to do assembly, well, ante up $200 for an assembler. C? Well, another $400 for the software, and make sure you upgrade to dual floppy or harddrive/floppy ($thousands) and have tons of memory.
Hell, Borland was popular because their compiler suite was not only fast, but cheap - for $200 you could get a full featured C compiler that didn't require you to shell out and run the compiler, assembler and linker manually.
Sony maybe, but Microsoft has long had the Xbox Live Indie Arcade where for $99 a year you can code up something and play it on an Xbox360 and even sell it on an Xbox360.
And Sony did at one point too when the PS3 ran Linux.
Microsoft has/had plans for bringing the program onto the Xbone as well.
Which for 99% of the population is never going to happen.
Because most people sit WAY too far away from their TVs - even 720p is "retina" resolution - increasing resolution does absolutely zip because they can't even resolve the added resolution.
A rough guide is about 1:1 screen size for 1080p - if you have 100" screen, you need to 100" away from it. a 60" set means you must sit 5' away from it. 4K is even worse, which is why they come in humongous sizes because unless you want to sit with the nose to the screen, you need a bigger screen.
Yeah, I'm sure if you set everything up properly, you can notice the difference. But for most people who sit 6-8' away from their TVs they have a set that's too small.
Few attacks actually try to login repeatedly.
If they do, there are botnets that help you try lots in a short period of time.
Most attacks involve dumping the password hash database.
And even brute forcing is getting easier. If you need a SPECIFIC password, it's not any easier, but if you have a bunch of hashes and you want a good chunk of accounts (without caring if you have every account), it's actually easy. In fact, Ars Technica covers a domain-specific brute forcer.that relies on terminology from the sites cracked to get a list of potential passwords EXTREMELY quickly. Follow this with trivial modifications to get more. If you have a list of a million passwords, you could easily derive half of them this way, and then move on to the next list.
Remember, let's differentiate between cracking one SPECIFIC account and password, with cracking AN account and password from a list. You might be cool and use a super complex password that involves every typeable character on the keyboard, and yes, people may not find your password easy to crack. But perhaps your neighbour just used "password". Well, of the two, it's easy to crack AN account, but not a SPECIFIC account.
Actually, that's less likely the case these days.
More likely is the three actor scenario - you have the spammer, the customer, and the victim. The customer is the person buying "marketing services", while the victim is you and I, the recipient.
In this case, the customer buys "10 million emails" for around $100 or so. Spammer makes money sending out the message, and the customer gets the emails sent. To the spammer, it really doesn't matter - he's made his money even if 99.99% of them are filtered. And if the customer isn't happy, well, there's another one around the corner needing "marketing services".
As for online drug stores - it turns out for whatever reason most don't actually do anything. A study ordered from around 20 spam online "pharmacies" and found 95% of them didn't take the money and run - they just didn't send anything, didn't charge anything, didn't do anything. The last one well, actually did ship them the items as described.
Turned out well, between credit cards and mail fraud, it's not really a profitable business to be in. Doesn't matter if you're overseas, either since a reversed charge is still a reversed charge.
That's pretty much the summary.
Except instead of the bot finding the target, you designate the target, then pull the trigger. The gun won't fire until it's positioned in such a way that the designated target will be hit.
The thing is, the basic skills still need to be there. For their rifle, well, you still need to calm yourself down enough to be able to find the target, designate it, then squeeze and wait for it to fire. Sure it means you don't need to discipline yourself to breathe and even attune yourself to your heartbeat, but you still can't just designate, hold the trigger down and flail the gun everywhere.
The AR is similar - you still need to be able to hold it somewhat steady and in the direction of the target.
The comment at the end of the article about people going crazy with it is true - you're not going to be very effective with it if your aim is to kill as many people as you can. (And yes, you can forget about used gun sales - each gun is a "smart gun" and keyed to their user)
I'd perhaps call it more as "aim assist" that you find in console FPS games where as long as your target is within a circle, you'll always hit.
With one month off, it's a lot easier to plan for cashflow than a huge three month break. Many teachers work because three months is a really long time to be away from money and it's actually extremely hard to prepare for. But 3 1-month breaks is far easier to save for and schedule your spending around.
Given that they're personalized stamps that you have made for yourself, I'm pretty sure those who get those stamps might know to do something interesting with them.
If it was a general issue stamp, yes, most people won't get it. But it's specially designed stamps for individuals who can choose to use them instead of regular stamps, so I think those would be used for special occasions.
It wasn't collecting the data. It was caching the data. Basically you go to a new area, the iPhone sends the MAC addresses of WiFi APs it sees, and Apple sends back a list of APs in the area and their locations. Apple sends more data than "you are here" so the phone doesn't constantly burn up data asking where it is - it has a small subset of the giant WiFi geolocation database so it can locate itself for a bit before it runs out.
Basically you asked Apple for a location, and Apple sends you your location AND data for locations around you so you can locate even if your data connection is interrupted. Depending on the density of APs, it could be a small area, or a large area which made it appear it was tracking you.
Your phone caches it so it doesn't even have to keep asking Apple every time - it can consult the cache and just get smaller updates.
The end user experience in either case is very similar, but the purpose of the data is completely different.
Anyhow, the problem with this phone isn't the apps, it's the default app package. As in you buy the phone, activate it, and boom, it's already sending your data to their servers without having launched an app or doing anything than running through initial setup and use. No apps installed, just what comes with the phone.
Year round school doesn't get rid of long breaks.
In fact, there are two traditional reasons for the summer break in North American schools (it's an anomaly - most schools around the world are year-round). First, are farms - school let out in the summer so kids could work the fields during prime growing season. (No fun here, just work from sunup to sundown).
The second reason was historically schools didn't have AC, so they'd adjourn during the hottest months for obvious reasons.
Year-round schooling has long breaks - you traditionally get the month of December off, and July off, with a shorter 2-week break in the middle (traditional spring break and fall break). Or if they forgo the break, the schools are in session for reduced hours. Heck, I've seen systems that got rid of the two-week breaks and instead hold separate morning and afternoon classes - you could choose to be a morning student, or an afternoon student.
The shorter breaks ensure the summer brain drain doesn't hurt too badly, and are long enough "to be kids".
The half-day schools may even be split - morning for elementary students, and afternoon for high school students - many behavioral studies have shown that teenage bodies really do not do well in the mornings.
The North American year round break is an anomaly due to many factors that are unique to North America. Of course, these days it isn't as applicable (fewer families are farmers and even fewer require their kids to work in the summer, schools have AC as a matter of course).
Year round schooling doesn't eliminate long breaks - it just breaks up the super long summer break into more manageable chunks that help prevent the huge loss of education that happens over the break and the huge amount of re-adjustment that happens in September as the school schedule gets readjusted.
There are several.
The Netgear Nighthawk R7000 has source code available and DD-WRT support. The Asus RT-AC68U likewise has a great pedigree of open firmware support.
Both are fast - they can route as fast as their GigE ports allow.
Netgear's list is part of their MyOpenRouter site - http://www.myopenrouter.com/
A pro athlete would be lucky to see a 10 year career - most drop out before then as well because their bodies just plain wear out.
And rule changes? Every sports league has rule changes. Typically done before the beginning of the season. A lot of them are minor tweaks, but rule changes do happen and it affects how teams play the game.
Rule changes are a way of life. Pro sports generally tweak rules as they're older games that have been played long enough that there aren't serious imbalance issues, but the organizers still tweak the game for various reasons, including livening up the play and avoiding excessive OT play.