So the whole, "I don't know of any planes that have crashed because of a cellphone call" doesn't mean there isn't interference. It just means that the pilots handle it--sometimes by having the Flight Attendants re-check to make sure that people have turned things off. I remember reading about a pilot who got a signal that one of the cargo doors had opened while at 30,000 feet. He ignored it because if that signal had been true, he'd also see a whole bunch of other warnings about depressurization and the plane would probably be acting strangely.
The more obvious cases are easy.
The worrying ones will be where the autopilot DOESN'T disconnect, and instead just follows an erroneous navigation input (be it GPS, INS, whatever). and subtly drifts off course. Over land, it's easy to compensate for, but over the water, you don't know until you reach the other side. Even if you were in contact with ATC, radar coverage is spotty and you many inadvertently burst into the wrong airspace. China and Russia don't take kindly to intrusions.
Obvious faults are obvious. It's the little ones that put you off course slightly that are the more worrying ones. A half-degree error compounds over many miles, and even worse the instruments will look exactly like they intended. You just won't find out until it's too late.
Or wait until the Air Data computer gets confused and produces strange readings. More than one accident has happened where the instruments said something completely different from reality.
Of course, given we know phones can cause GPS-unlocks in navigation equipment, even that isn't necessarily a safe backup.
Those phones were also largely ignored because of the expense. Of course, they didn't necessarily communicate to the cell towers like your phone does either - they probably went through the plane's standard communications mechanisms (f.e sat-com, etc.) and then got routed out to a phone system on the ground.
In-flight calls would be similar. You'd roam onto the airplane's microcell rather than try to reach the ground (the signal can only go out the windows, which makes it a fair bit weaker and it bounces around the cabin as it reflects off the skin).
Of course, it's extraterrestrial, so like cell networks on cruise ships, well, there is NO roaming plan for that - you're dinged at dollars/minute (because they can), and the companies involved specifically do NOT make roaming agreements with any cell carrier, so they can pass the cost straight to your carrier who has no choice but to pass it on. They can't even reduce the fees like they normally can (because the roaming agreements give them discounted access so they can absorb the extra costs) since there's no roaming agreement.
The phone searches, sees the airplane's microcell as the only carrier which will happily let it roam (it's not preferred, but it's the only option).
Of course, we'll also see tons of complaints about this, but no carrier can really do anything about it - the company demands payment in full, the carrier has to pay and you get dinged the full amount. Hell, your carrier can't even send you a text message to warn you.
What's special about a 64-bit ARM processor? Haven't they been in iPhone 5S phones for almost a year now?
Well, Apple pretty much skunked everyone, because the roadmaps for 64-bit ARM processors had them sampling middle of 2014, for release end of 2014. These were roadmaps published by Qualcomm, Broadcom and everyone else.
So Apple pretty much got a year and a half head start (devices weren't to ship until mid 2015).
Oh, Android for 64-bit ARM wasn't supposed to be out until end of 2014, either.
Which meant if you really wanted, you shouldn't buy a phone in 2014 because what made the iPhone and iPad so fast WAS 64-bit. ARMv8 is much more efficient - 32 bit code gets a minor speedup, but the 64-bit stuff runs WAY faster.
Moreover, opening the source code gives nerds a fighting chance to update abandoned devices. Don't believe me? Look at Cyanogenmod.
Only if your device is "popular" enough. Given there are dozens of new Android phones being released daily (Samsung alone just released 4 "budget phones" yesterday), I don't see how Cyanogen can support them. In fact, I'm pretty much going to say Cyanogen only supports phones the nerds want - the high end high spec phones.
Meanwhile, if you're one of the people owning the 90% of phones sold for free or cheap with contract, I'm fairly certain odds are against you on having Cyanogen support for your phone.
(The "flagships" and interesting phones make up less than 10% of the Android population - Google said during the I/O they had 1B unique devices the past 30 days. In the past 2 years, the flagship phones sold less than 100M).
So some IoT stuff will have modded firmware. The vast majority of stuff probably won't.
That will be the last time I fly commercial. The LAST thing I want to do is be couped up in an aluminum can for 1+ hours listening to half of other people's mindless drivel conversations on their phones. It's already bad enough the second the plane hits the runway on landing everyone pulls out their phones to call people. And they don't just have the "ok we just landed I'll meet you out front in 20 minutes" short talk. - No it turns into long drawn out annoying conversations hat CERTAINLY can wait until they are off the plane to have.
Well, the good news is well, it's likely to NOT happen because the way the airlines will do it is you roam onto the airplane's microcell.
Just like you can use your cellphone on a cruise ship (the "Cellular at Sea" carrier, anyone?), these are extra-territorial cells run by ripoff companies that really ding you. And they make NO roaming agreements with anyone, knowing they have a captive audience and they can really charge you. So no travel plans you may engage in covers it (check it out - they specifically say "not on boats"). In fact, if you REALLY had to use it, you would probably be better off getting a Globalstar or Iridium satellite phone - it's cheaper.
You phone really won't want to roam on it because it's not on any preferred list of roaming towers.
So if you whip out your phone, see "Cellular int he air" or whatever, and smirk at the guy trying to do sweet nothings knowing he's probably paying $2-5/minute for the privilege. (That's $120-300/hr). Even worse, your carrier will have to pay the ripoff company the full rate because there's no discounted roaming agreement, so no chance to plead innocence and have them knock the $2000+ bill to something decent.
Solar is already price competitive in some places and is set to get cheaper.,
THe breakpoint is around 40 cents/kWh.
In fact, there's a more interesting worry going on - the grid as we know it today may not survive. With high electricity costs, people may "go it alone" and simply disconnect off the grid, with their solar, wind, etc., systems generating enough to satisfy peak demand.
This means those that cannot afford the systems end up "stuck" on the grid and guess who those people are? Which means who gets stuck with a rapidly deteriorating grid?
More or less every SSD on the market currently will saturate even a 6Gbit/s SATA connection, you don't have to buy the latest and greatest to achieve maximum possible transfer speed. If you put this SSD in a new PC today, the SSD will pretty much be the last component to be obsolete, save maybe the physical case itself. This situation is going to persist for some time, so I can easily see one of these drives being used for 10 years across various upgraded PCs. It'll keep up with faster CPUs and RAM, no problem.
We've hit the 540MB/sec barrier a long time ago - I think last year when SATA3 was getting popular, actually.
it's why companies like Apple are moving to PCIe - the SATA bottleneck was very obvious it was going to be hit basically upon release of the SATA3 standard.
PCIe SSDs are easily getting 700MB/sec and higher. On a bad day. High end ones like Wozniak's Fusion I/O were hitting gigabytes/second reads and writes years ago.
I am not saying the goal of reducing spam is bad, in fact I agree an opt in system would make more sense, but unfortunately businesses have had this law sprung upon them, with little warning, and the penalties for infraction are huge
The law was enacted in 2010. In fact, it was proposed back in 2009.
I know, 4 years is "not enough time" I mean, Microsoft has been telling people XP's support would end in April 2014 for years now and everyone STILL got caught off guard.
Everyone had years to prepare. Of course, the problem is most businesses, unless the deadline is tomorrow, will put it off.
You can tell everyone that the price of gas will go up tomorrow by 5 cents, and everyone will gripe that the price of gas went up by 5 cents the next day!
Perhaps it's just better to spring things on people because obviously giving people plenty of advance notice just results in them panicking at the last moment anyways.
Wikipedia is ruled by a group of petty, self-nominated bureaucrats. And the system - as horribly broken as it is - cannot be reformed, because there are too many vested interests who want to see it STAY broken.
Wikipedia illustrates the pitfalls of communism, in the end. It's just the latest example and one we've been able to observe in a rather short timeframe. It doesn't mean it doesn't work, but well, there are things to avoid.
Remember Animal Farm? You start with "everyone is equal", then as things happen, you then add "but some are more equal than others".
Everyone starts out equal. Then miscreants start to figure out that they can do bad things. Then rules are implemented by those to prevent the bad things. Then miscreants figure out they can misuse the rules to do even more bad things. Then you elevate a few above to help control things. And then they can go power tripping ("Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely").
Wikipedia is, literally, a study in the rise and fall of communism. Eventually it'll morph into some other system, democratic, dictatorship, or otherwise (as Linux has shown, dictatorships aren't ALL bad).
As for explaining things in three lines of text, try it sometime with someone who has not mastered your own specialty.
How about sitting through a 20 minute review of something that could be skimmed or read with far more detail?
The problem with video is people think "it's easy" compared to say, writing it out in text. It isn't.
In fact, to produce a video should require FAR more effort if you want to do something that's not just "hey look at this cool thing" that can be shot on a smartphone and shown in less than 5 minutes.
If it's a process you want to document, video helps, but you don't need to show every step in video. Show the tricky ones, with a zoom in to help find hard to locate bolts, screws, etc so the relation of the item to the whole is shown. Process the audio so it's not full of noise - redub if you have to.
If you have static information to show, show it in an image above or below the video so people don't have to pause to get a better look. And if it's not clear, highlight the item in the video version.
Video is great for a lot of things. It's overuse that's a problem because if I want to change the oil in my car, I don't need to see 10 minutes of someone getting out of their car, getting it on a ramp, raising it up, showing me the tools. That can be shown as text beforehand. Use video to show me where to find the drain plug. Or the oil filter (both can be hard to find), then show me a static photo so I can examine it more closely.
Of course, if it's to show off some cute cat videos, well, nothing needs to be said, but I don't want to see the 100 hours of you trying to get your cat being cute, I want to see maybe 1 take at most then your cat being cute.
So you are saying that anyone can just park a largish airborne platform over top of important important government facilities but I still have to get pat down at the airport to fly commercial.
That just shows to go you how pointless all this security theater really is! I mean fill the cockpit with potassium perchlorate and just let the balloon go once you are over the target.
It can't really still be that easy can it? Not that we have exactly solved the truck bomb problem, but you can't get an unauthorized vehicle especially close to most sensitive targets anymore.
If it was that vital and important, why is it a) above ground, b) public knowledge, and c) not policed?
Government may do stupid things, but they aren't complete idiots. We know it's an NSA facility, but if it was so vital to operations, then why do we know where it is (it certainly wasn't hidden away as some random data center), and who owns it?
Even the most top secret of facilities often has to deal with boring mundane stuff. Hell, for all you know, it could be managing the timesheets of the NSA and other completely unclassified stuff (e.g., software installs).
Bomb that and you'd just force a bunch of people to fill in timesheets some other way, to have IT personnel run around with thumbdrives containing Microsoft Office, and inconvenience the secretary typing up revisions to the NSA employee handbook or something.
OK, fine, maybe you'll disrupt their ability to make a personal phone call or for pizza so they now have to walk out of the secure area to use their cellphone.
My kids' school, they ban using Wiki for research.
(Personally, I'd think that a perfect jumping-off point for teaching the difference between primary and secondary sources, critical reading, and source evaluation. But hey, what do I know, I'm not a teacher.)
Uh, they probably ban it because it's a secondary source. You are fine at using it for a jumping off point, but that's all you can use it for - to jump off.
You're not using wikipedia for research, you're using it for the background in order to do research.
And it also means you don't copy and paste Wikipedia and hand it in )adding plagiarism to the all sorts of badness).
Because you know kids would. Banning it probably is easier to describe to them, but any smart kid would just use it anyways and hide the fact that they used it by going to the original sources. *gasp* Research!
It's the same as it was back in the old days where we were banned from using the encyclopedias. No one said we couldn't do it on our own time and then use the references in our final work...
Not to mention - did you design your product for your anticipated volumes?
If you plan to sell 10,000 of them, you need to THINK about 10,000 units. What parts to order, can you even get them in 10,000 quantities, and will you get the requisite support? I mean, if you're planning 10,000 units, you need to also make sure that the vendors are willing to support you by getting you the information you need.
A while back, in the Tegra 2 days, nVidia will NOT talk to anyone with less than 1M units. It doesn't matter that you can buy their dev kit, you can design your whole software and hardware around it, they just will not talk to you. These days it's easier since nVidia is now on the sidelines and no longer the #1 segment.
Even the big buys like Qualcomm and Freescale won't talk to little peoeple. Instead, they contract out small scale support to other companies (the company I work for does exactly that). But that company is a middleman and can often only release limited amount of information. E.g., we can design hardware using Qualcomm chips for small runs (because we aggregate small runs into bigger runs, so Qualcomm supports us as whole, while we're smaller and nimbler and can support the small runs much better), but we cannot release information (due to NDAs) to anyone else, nor can we release the source code beyond what we're allowed to. So if you have some super-duper design using a Qualcomm chip, well, you'll have to convince us to make it for you and take a cut of the profits (we aren't doing it for free) or we do some NRE for you.
In fact, if you want some Qualcomm chips, you can't buy them except through smaller companies like us and we're not allowed to sell you raw chips that aren't soldered to a board.
Which exchange carries an inventory of bitcoins for their own use, rather than just maintaining customer accounts ?
All of them. It's called "liquidity". And they carry both currency (be it US dollars or whatever) and bitcoins.
E.g., let's say I want to buy a bitcoin. I go to an exchange, give them several hundred dollars. I expect a bitcoin in return. But the exchange has to own a bitcoin in order to sell it to me!
Or I want to sell a bitcoin, so I give it my bitcoin and expect several hundred dollars back in return. Except the cxchange has to have currency to give me!
Now, you can treat an exchange as a "market" where you match up bitcoin sellers and bitcoin buyers, but that's not liquid at all. If I want to sell a bitcoin, I need to set a price, and put it on the market, and wait for a buyer who would trade me currency for that bitcoin. If the sellers are priced higher than the buyers, little trading happens. And after all the trades are done, you're left with the lowest ask price that's a bit higher than the highest bid price, where trading stops until either a buyer decides they really need the bitcoin and ups their bid enough so it meets a sellers ask, or a seller desperately needs currency and lowers their ask price enough that it meets the highest bid.
If the bid-ask spread is particularly big, the market is said to have low liquidity - the only trades happen are those who are desperate and sell at the low price, or buyers who are desperate and bid at the high price.
It's a market. You can only buy stuff when a seller is willing to sell you at that price. And you can only sell stuff when there's a buyer willing ot buy at the price.
Low liquidity is a bad thing because it literally means you're options are to pay a high price, or to sell way too low.
Oh, and this is how every market works - be it your store, eBay, the Steam market, the "real money auction houses" of games, stock markets, etc.
Perhaps you saw something in a store that you wanted, but thought, "it's too expensive, I'll wait for a sale". Well, you just put up a bid to buy it lower than the asking price. When it goes on sale (i.e., the seller lowers their ask), you then buy it. And meeting in the middle can happen - if the price is too high for you, and too low for them, perhaps they'll discount it partway, at which point you go "good enough" and buy it at the higher than you wanted, but lower than before price.
FreeDOS was also a popular way to do firmware updates because it gets you to a well known state that's single tasking and nothing could interrupt the process. Especially nice was it was small and you could put it on a floppy with tons of space for your firmware and other things.
Though nowadays, since most people don't boot from floppies, they now use Linux based update software - sure it's multitasking, but it's a nice controlled Linux environment to do stuff in. Especially since it doesn't have to all fit in a 1.44MB floppy - a thumbdrive or CD will let you easily a large amount of space so you can even have multiple updaters so the user only needs to download one huge "do it all" that figures out what needs updating over downloading and making a half dozen update disks hoping to have the right model and revision.
And especially these days where DOS drivers are getting fewer and farther between, if you need drivers (e.g., SATA drivers), you're more likely to find it in Linux than in DOS. So for those things like SSD firmware updates, a Linux boot drive will likely be able to talk to most SATA controllers without the user needing to reconfigure their PC. For the leftovers, they can try using legacy mode, but the number of people who need it are far fewer.
FreeDOS is almost never used for production - they have specialized boot images running Windows or whatever, then just wipe it with the final OS image
Canadian IT head here. Just spent the morning reading over the law that this is in knee-jerk reaction to. I think Microsoft's reaction is warranted. According to the new law, a company can be charged up to 10 Million dollars for an infraction (read single email) of un-solicited email. The law is poorly formed, and not well thought out, as well as lengthy and vague enough to create a broad swatch of culpable people.
What it boils down to is this. If you send an un-solicited email to someone you have not done business with in the last 2 years, and they have not opted in before and, and they believe your email to be spam, boom, you are culpable. Also if you install software on someone's computer without explicit, but easy to understand examples of what the software is/does you can also be held culpable.
And you know how people fix it? They dump their mailing lists and ask people to sign up again.
Yes, I've gotten about 40 of those emails asking me to sign up or bye-bye. Good! I re-signed up for 2 honest ones I really couldn't live without. And out of those 40 of them? Well, most of it was list sharing since they happened at work.
Sure, it means your 30,000+ member mailing list gets trolled down to 1,000 or less. But that's a GOOD THING. A lot of people gave up unsubscribing years ago, and I'm sure as companies merged and separated that mailing lists got munged up.
If you're so worried about it, all you need to do is dump your complete mailing list collection and start anew. Then implement double-opt-in, and expiry dates in your mailing lists.
It's not hard. At our company, we simply sent out one last email that said "Please sign up for our mailing list" and detailed that because of the law, we're deleting the entire mailing list and starting afresh, and if you want to receive the emails, just click to join and double-opt-in. Put in a 2 year timer on them to ask them to do it again in 2016, and you're done.
If you're worried about emailing someone you haven't done business in two years? Don't put them on your mailing list EVER. Have a checkbox that simply invites them to your mailing list.
It's not hard. Dump your current list. Add a timer to every email address on when they signed up. Then do double-opt-in and you're done.
Whine whine whine, they gave me an email on the order form and I can't market to them!? Good. If they wanted, they could sign up! They gave you an email address for the order to send them status updates on the order not for putting on the "what's hot this week" list.
All email a company produces in Canada form this point on have to include a link in the bottom or ability to opt out of all future email.
What's wrong with that? If I don't want your email, I most likely don't want all your email. I don't care for your weekly specials, your yearly specials, your weekly sales on computer parts, your email catalog of discounts, etc. One click should get me out of all of those. And no BS "your request will be handled in 3-4 weeks" - this is the 21st century. If you can add me in 10 seconds, you can remove in 10 seconds. You don't have to send it ot the CEO to approve.
Companies are whining because the rules mean they can't do a lot of crap anymore. I'm sure most of the people on that Microsoft list no longer work in a way that makes it relevant anymore to them, they were just lazy to remove themselves and clicking delete is a lot quicker than trying to find out how to unsubscribe.
Hell, I bet it also removes a lot of auto-spam from the list. Remember why most mailing lists end up on antispam lists? Because it's easier to click the "Spam" button on your email client, GMail, Hotmail, etc.
So no more adding me to your marketing mails because I happened to place an order with you for one item only you sell in Canada, that I might need again in 5 years.No more unbounded email l
That reminds me of this post by Brian Krebs. How hard would these things be to set up with some nefarious device that installs a Trojan on any phone that connects? I imagine a well-crafted overlay panel wouldn't be too hard to put on one of these things, or they could come by at night and just install it internally. Sounds too dangerous to me, I think they're going to find this is more trouble than it's worth.
Except I'm fairly certain the vast majority of Android and iOS devices now ask for permission before they allow this. I think it was added somewhere in Android 4.2 or 4.3, and in iOS6 - they ask you if they trust the computer on the other end (yes, you can tell if it's a computer or a charger). If no, they stop negotiation and go dumb.
But are you happy with the way that iPhoto pulls all your images into one gigantic database, which (a) gradually swallows up your entire computer and (b) a corrupt library means you have lost ALL your images.
Actually, the original photos are still fine even if the database is corrupted. The iPhoto database is just a folder, and inside are the main iPhoto database where it's indexed everything. Also inside it are your original photos, untouched, and I believe the modified ones.
So no, your photos are always safe, you may lose the index and I believe option-clicking iPhoto will let you rebuild a corrupted database.
Apple is a lot of things, but being completely idiotic isn't one of them.
Oh... bullshit. There were almost 6 times as many Android devices sold last quarter than iOS. How are we still propagating the "Android is for geeks" line?
Because Androids are cheap as crap. As in free.
Google said they had 1B unique Android devices in the last 30 days. I'm pretty sure the top-shelf flagship phones sold int he past couple of years total under 100M (the SGS4 sold around 50M as of October 2013, and the SGS5 is probably around 20M so far).
So less than 10% of Androids sold in the past two years are flagships, of the 1B unique devices that Google recorded last month.
That means the rest of the phones are the free or crap phones that have crappier screens, crappy processors, or crappy RAM. Or what people get for $50 and under.
The people who buy the LG are the build-your-own-PC crowd. The people who buy Androids are ones who see iPhones, see the price tag, and gets the carrier salesperson to sell them a "works like an iPhone but it's FREE!" deal.
Heck, I'm sure people will run to the store, see the LG, see the price tag, then just get the salesperson to sell them "works just like the LG, but it's FREE" phone.
(Though, who buys a phone on the cusp of 64-bit ARMs? The reason the iPhone 5/5s is so fast is because of the ARMv8 architecture...).
If you're going to Canada first then the US, you're in luck because there's a really easy SIM to get for Canadians heading South.
It's called Roam Mobility and they're a US MVNO that sells their SIMs in Canada (if you're on the west coast, head into a London Drugs store, go to the cell department and ask to buy a Roam Mobility SIM.
If not, they do sell the SIMs online. It's a fairly nice option for Canadians heading to the US for days, weeks or a month. And it's pretty much no-questions-asked - you just buy the SIM and activate it online for however long you need.
In Canada, well, prepaid generally is a bigger bother - while you can buy SIMs by heading to a store, they aren't too happy about selling them (less money for them). As an earlier poster said, you probably want to use Wind or Mobilicity if you can (if you do Wind, pay for the US package and you can roam in the US as well, which isn't too bad a deal)., but you will need a phone that can do AWS (e.g., the iPhone 5/5s can, last I checked, as well as the other regular bands). They can sell you one, but beware that unlocked ones like Nexus phones are WILDLY overpriced (I've seen a Nexus 4 be almost $600 - yes, you could walk into an Apple Store and get the iPhone 5. The Nexus 4 sold for around $250 or so off Google Play). But that's only if your current phone doesn't do AWS (I mention the iPhone 5 because it does, as well as regular bands from other carriers. I do know that there often are special AWS models of popular Android flagships like the SGS3 (a friend tried to activate one and couldn't because it didn't do AWS), and I think the Nexus 4 couldn't either unless you got the special one.)
Oh, and no carrier, despite having the "no contract price" on the phone will ever sell you a handset for that price unless you actually were in a contract and wanted an out-of-sync upgrade. Other than Wind or Mobilicity, who are prepaid services, that is. (As I'm no longer in a contract, well, it means my phone options in Canada are limited to Apple if I wanted in-store service, or Google if I wanted to put up with Google Play (bleh - I got burned badly with the Nexus 7 when I could buy it retail for cheaper, and have it sooner than when Google finally fulfilled my order! I mean, I could walk into a store and buy one, or order it online for free shipping and have it in my hand a couple of weeks sooner (stupid UPS)).
2600 is a business with plenty of history and should have lots of proof they're doing OK, if that is in fact the case. Getting a line of credit to make up for the lost issue or two shouldn't remotely be a problem...which means one of three things: they're not doing "quite well", they're incompetent, or they are, in fact, trying to take advantage of the community.
The problem is, the magazine industry, much like the newspaper industry, isn't doing all that great. And niche publications like 2600 aren't doing that great either. First, they don't take advertising, which means if you've actually shopped 2600, it's among the more expensive publications out there for what you get on the surface. It's actually very high priced.
Second, it's not like they're a mainstream magazine - while you can probably find them at Barnes and Noble, they're not really available elsewhere other than at a specialist magazine retailer (mostly again, from a cost and audience perspective).
Third, well, the information in it you can probably find it online, like most other computer and information technology magazines. And that is killer. Most other computer related magazines have stopped printing a deadtree edition for that reason.
Finally, while they have gone electronic, I'm not sure if their distribution is all that great - I see them on B&N, I don't know about Amazon as I don't use Amazon for ebooks.
Their distribution in the end isn't that big - I have to look it up, but every magazine sent through the USPS as media mail has to have a distribution panel in it where it describes how many issues were printed, sold (broken out by subscriptions and retail sales), returned, and pulped. I'm fairly certain it isn't a huge number - perhaps 10,000 or so issues per quarter. That isn't a lot of money after printing and other costs.
Basically they've been the victim of the internet age.
Nop, you can not just use --. because many commands do not understand --
"--" is understood by getopt(), a library function to parse command line options. getopt() can simply print a warning out stderr when it's called and comes across un-escaped operatnds.
Bonus points if it defaults to printing errors when it's run in a non-TTY environment (e.g., shell script).
Extra credit for programs like rm that pre-scan their arguments to see if they match files - so if you passed in "-r" in the option area without a -- somewhere further along and a file named "-r" exists, error out and suggest using --. So "rm -r file" would work, unless there's a file named "-r" in the directory. "rm -r -- file" would generate no noise, as would "rm -r -- -r"
The females and minorities I've worked with have had equal ability. It seems that there's just far more white men in the US that are inclined to be software developers than there are females and minorities who are inclined to do so. Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and many others are merely reflecting the demographics of the broader industry.
I think it's just demographics of who goes into CS and engineering, though slightly skewed because I could swear a majority of students in STEM tracks were Asian, not white. Though all those companies generally have a fairly big showing of Asians (roughly 33%), it does seem a bit on low side given they can easily make up 60-80% of a graduating class.
Though, the percentage of female Asian students in STEM was also fairly high - perhaps 10% of that population.
The specificity is odd, but I think you need to take the disposable income of the people who own the cars into account as well. A higher percentage of Audi drivers than Corolla drivers will shell out for this system. Depending on the difference in percentage it might still make sense to pick the Corolla but the math isn't quite as simple as car counting.
I would think the Corolla guys would probably be more interested in the system than an Audi driver, who tend to be a bit more fanatical about driving. I mean, the Corolla is really just a means to get from point A to point B reliably with little fuss, muss or anything. It's cheap, efficient, reliable, and for pretty much everyone, a boring car offering little in the way of "fun" for a drive.
An Audi, though, people generally buy them because they want to feel the road, every bump, shift down and power through, etc. It's a more fun ride and those who purchase it generally do it because they don't want to get from point A to point B, but want to have a journey and some fun doing so. They enjoy driving.
A self-driving addon would seem counter to this. You might as well ask if they make it for Ferraris or Lamborghinis or something.
How exactly is 1500-15000 worth of equipment 'hobbyists'? And that's on top of the money you've already spent on getting a 3d printer.
Lots of hobbies can demand that much. Some hobbies have a wide range of spending (e.g., golf, electronics, computers) from practically free to many thousands, others demand huge upfront costs (e.g., flying, boating, etc).
Just because it's a hobby doesn't mean people can't spend outrageous amounts of money on it. I mean, people can spend $13K on an oscilloscope for their hobby too. Or several K in guns. Or stamps. Or comic books. Or plenty of other stuff. Or pinball machines, the popular ones easily costing $25K+ for home (and many people can't stop at one - three to a whole arcade in their basement...).
And there are plenty where people spend over $100K (over several years) on one project. (E.g., kit-plane building, model aircraft, etc).
It does require some amount of fiscal responsibility and the ability to save and delay gratification, but it's certainly possible.
Heck, back in the day, people would also spend many thousands of dollars in a computer just to play videogames on them and drag them across town to play with others.
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The more obvious cases are easy.
The worrying ones will be where the autopilot DOESN'T disconnect, and instead just follows an erroneous navigation input (be it GPS, INS, whatever). and subtly drifts off course. Over land, it's easy to compensate for, but over the water, you don't know until you reach the other side. Even if you were in contact with ATC, radar coverage is spotty and you many inadvertently burst into the wrong airspace. China and Russia don't take kindly to intrusions.
Obvious faults are obvious. It's the little ones that put you off course slightly that are the more worrying ones. A half-degree error compounds over many miles, and even worse the instruments will look exactly like they intended. You just won't find out until it's too late.
Or wait until the Air Data computer gets confused and produces strange readings. More than one accident has happened where the instruments said something completely different from reality.
Of course, given we know phones can cause GPS-unlocks in navigation equipment, even that isn't necessarily a safe backup.
In-flight calls would be similar. You'd roam onto the airplane's microcell rather than try to reach the ground (the signal can only go out the windows, which makes it a fair bit weaker and it bounces around the cabin as it reflects off the skin).
Of course, it's extraterrestrial, so like cell networks on cruise ships, well, there is NO roaming plan for that - you're dinged at dollars/minute (because they can), and the companies involved specifically do NOT make roaming agreements with any cell carrier, so they can pass the cost straight to your carrier who has no choice but to pass it on. They can't even reduce the fees like they normally can (because the roaming agreements give them discounted access so they can absorb the extra costs) since there's no roaming agreement.
The phone searches, sees the airplane's microcell as the only carrier which will happily let it roam (it's not preferred, but it's the only option).
Of course, we'll also see tons of complaints about this, but no carrier can really do anything about it - the company demands payment in full, the carrier has to pay and you get dinged the full amount. Hell, your carrier can't even send you a text message to warn you.
Well, Apple pretty much skunked everyone, because the roadmaps for 64-bit ARM processors had them sampling middle of 2014, for release end of 2014. These were roadmaps published by Qualcomm, Broadcom and everyone else.
So Apple pretty much got a year and a half head start (devices weren't to ship until mid 2015).
Oh, Android for 64-bit ARM wasn't supposed to be out until end of 2014, either.
Which meant if you really wanted, you shouldn't buy a phone in 2014 because what made the iPhone and iPad so fast WAS 64-bit. ARMv8 is much more efficient - 32 bit code gets a minor speedup, but the 64-bit stuff runs WAY faster.
Only if your device is "popular" enough. Given there are dozens of new Android phones being released daily (Samsung alone just released 4 "budget phones" yesterday), I don't see how Cyanogen can support them. In fact, I'm pretty much going to say Cyanogen only supports phones the nerds want - the high end high spec phones.
Meanwhile, if you're one of the people owning the 90% of phones sold for free or cheap with contract, I'm fairly certain odds are against you on having Cyanogen support for your phone.
(The "flagships" and interesting phones make up less than 10% of the Android population - Google said during the I/O they had 1B unique devices the past 30 days. In the past 2 years, the flagship phones sold less than 100M).
So some IoT stuff will have modded firmware. The vast majority of stuff probably won't.
Well, the good news is well, it's likely to NOT happen because the way the airlines will do it is you roam onto the airplane's microcell.
Just like you can use your cellphone on a cruise ship (the "Cellular at Sea" carrier, anyone?), these are extra-territorial cells run by ripoff companies that really ding you. And they make NO roaming agreements with anyone, knowing they have a captive audience and they can really charge you. So no travel plans you may engage in covers it (check it out - they specifically say "not on boats"). In fact, if you REALLY had to use it, you would probably be better off getting a Globalstar or Iridium satellite phone - it's cheaper.
You phone really won't want to roam on it because it's not on any preferred list of roaming towers.
So if you whip out your phone, see "Cellular int he air" or whatever, and smirk at the guy trying to do sweet nothings knowing he's probably paying $2-5/minute for the privilege. (That's $120-300/hr). Even worse, your carrier will have to pay the ripoff company the full rate because there's no discounted roaming agreement, so no chance to plead innocence and have them knock the $2000+ bill to something decent.
THe breakpoint is around 40 cents/kWh.
In fact, there's a more interesting worry going on - the grid as we know it today may not survive. With high electricity costs, people may "go it alone" and simply disconnect off the grid, with their solar, wind, etc., systems generating enough to satisfy peak demand.
This means those that cannot afford the systems end up "stuck" on the grid and guess who those people are? Which means who gets stuck with a rapidly deteriorating grid?
We've hit the 540MB/sec barrier a long time ago - I think last year when SATA3 was getting popular, actually.
it's why companies like Apple are moving to PCIe - the SATA bottleneck was very obvious it was going to be hit basically upon release of the SATA3 standard.
PCIe SSDs are easily getting 700MB/sec and higher. On a bad day. High end ones like Wozniak's Fusion I/O were hitting gigabytes/second reads and writes years ago.
The law was enacted in 2010. In fact, it was proposed back in 2009.
I know, 4 years is "not enough time" I mean, Microsoft has been telling people XP's support would end in April 2014 for years now and everyone STILL got caught off guard.
Everyone had years to prepare. Of course, the problem is most businesses, unless the deadline is tomorrow, will put it off.
You can tell everyone that the price of gas will go up tomorrow by 5 cents, and everyone will gripe that the price of gas went up by 5 cents the next day!
Perhaps it's just better to spring things on people because obviously giving people plenty of advance notice just results in them panicking at the last moment anyways.
Wikipedia illustrates the pitfalls of communism, in the end. It's just the latest example and one we've been able to observe in a rather short timeframe. It doesn't mean it doesn't work, but well, there are things to avoid.
Remember Animal Farm? You start with "everyone is equal", then as things happen, you then add "but some are more equal than others".
Everyone starts out equal. Then miscreants start to figure out that they can do bad things. Then rules are implemented by those to prevent the bad things. Then miscreants figure out they can misuse the rules to do even more bad things. Then you elevate a few above to help control things. And then they can go power tripping ("Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely").
Wikipedia is, literally, a study in the rise and fall of communism. Eventually it'll morph into some other system, democratic, dictatorship, or otherwise (as Linux has shown, dictatorships aren't ALL bad).
How about sitting through a 20 minute review of something that could be skimmed or read with far more detail?
The problem with video is people think "it's easy" compared to say, writing it out in text. It isn't.
In fact, to produce a video should require FAR more effort if you want to do something that's not just "hey look at this cool thing" that can be shot on a smartphone and shown in less than 5 minutes.
If it's a process you want to document, video helps, but you don't need to show every step in video. Show the tricky ones, with a zoom in to help find hard to locate bolts, screws, etc so the relation of the item to the whole is shown. Process the audio so it's not full of noise - redub if you have to.
If you have static information to show, show it in an image above or below the video so people don't have to pause to get a better look. And if it's not clear, highlight the item in the video version.
Video is great for a lot of things. It's overuse that's a problem because if I want to change the oil in my car, I don't need to see 10 minutes of someone getting out of their car, getting it on a ramp, raising it up, showing me the tools. That can be shown as text beforehand. Use video to show me where to find the drain plug. Or the oil filter (both can be hard to find), then show me a static photo so I can examine it more closely.
Of course, if it's to show off some cute cat videos, well, nothing needs to be said, but I don't want to see the 100 hours of you trying to get your cat being cute, I want to see maybe 1 take at most then your cat being cute.
If it was that vital and important, why is it a) above ground, b) public knowledge, and c) not policed?
Government may do stupid things, but they aren't complete idiots. We know it's an NSA facility, but if it was so vital to operations, then why do we know where it is (it certainly wasn't hidden away as some random data center), and who owns it?
Even the most top secret of facilities often has to deal with boring mundane stuff. Hell, for all you know, it could be managing the timesheets of the NSA and other completely unclassified stuff (e.g., software installs).
Bomb that and you'd just force a bunch of people to fill in timesheets some other way, to have IT personnel run around with thumbdrives containing Microsoft Office, and inconvenience the secretary typing up revisions to the NSA employee handbook or something.
OK, fine, maybe you'll disrupt their ability to make a personal phone call or for pizza so they now have to walk out of the secure area to use their cellphone.
Uh, they probably ban it because it's a secondary source. You are fine at using it for a jumping off point, but that's all you can use it for - to jump off.
You're not using wikipedia for research, you're using it for the background in order to do research.
And it also means you don't copy and paste Wikipedia and hand it in )adding plagiarism to the all sorts of badness).
Because you know kids would. Banning it probably is easier to describe to them, but any smart kid would just use it anyways and hide the fact that they used it by going to the original sources. *gasp* Research!
It's the same as it was back in the old days where we were banned from using the encyclopedias. No one said we couldn't do it on our own time and then use the references in our final work...
Not to mention - did you design your product for your anticipated volumes?
If you plan to sell 10,000 of them, you need to THINK about 10,000 units. What parts to order, can you even get them in 10,000 quantities, and will you get the requisite support? I mean, if you're planning 10,000 units, you need to also make sure that the vendors are willing to support you by getting you the information you need.
A while back, in the Tegra 2 days, nVidia will NOT talk to anyone with less than 1M units. It doesn't matter that you can buy their dev kit, you can design your whole software and hardware around it, they just will not talk to you. These days it's easier since nVidia is now on the sidelines and no longer the #1 segment.
Even the big buys like Qualcomm and Freescale won't talk to little peoeple. Instead, they contract out small scale support to other companies (the company I work for does exactly that). But that company is a middleman and can often only release limited amount of information. E.g., we can design hardware using Qualcomm chips for small runs (because we aggregate small runs into bigger runs, so Qualcomm supports us as whole, while we're smaller and nimbler and can support the small runs much better), but we cannot release information (due to NDAs) to anyone else, nor can we release the source code beyond what we're allowed to. So if you have some super-duper design using a Qualcomm chip, well, you'll have to convince us to make it for you and take a cut of the profits (we aren't doing it for free) or we do some NRE for you.
In fact, if you want some Qualcomm chips, you can't buy them except through smaller companies like us and we're not allowed to sell you raw chips that aren't soldered to a board.
All of them. It's called "liquidity". And they carry both currency (be it US dollars or whatever) and bitcoins.
E.g., let's say I want to buy a bitcoin. I go to an exchange, give them several hundred dollars. I expect a bitcoin in return. But the exchange has to own a bitcoin in order to sell it to me!
Or I want to sell a bitcoin, so I give it my bitcoin and expect several hundred dollars back in return. Except the cxchange has to have currency to give me!
Now, you can treat an exchange as a "market" where you match up bitcoin sellers and bitcoin buyers, but that's not liquid at all. If I want to sell a bitcoin, I need to set a price, and put it on the market, and wait for a buyer who would trade me currency for that bitcoin. If the sellers are priced higher than the buyers, little trading happens. And after all the trades are done, you're left with the lowest ask price that's a bit higher than the highest bid price, where trading stops until either a buyer decides they really need the bitcoin and ups their bid enough so it meets a sellers ask, or a seller desperately needs currency and lowers their ask price enough that it meets the highest bid.
If the bid-ask spread is particularly big, the market is said to have low liquidity - the only trades happen are those who are desperate and sell at the low price, or buyers who are desperate and bid at the high price.
It's a market. You can only buy stuff when a seller is willing to sell you at that price. And you can only sell stuff when there's a buyer willing ot buy at the price.
Low liquidity is a bad thing because it literally means you're options are to pay a high price, or to sell way too low.
Oh, and this is how every market works - be it your store, eBay, the Steam market, the "real money auction houses" of games, stock markets, etc.
Perhaps you saw something in a store that you wanted, but thought, "it's too expensive, I'll wait for a sale". Well, you just put up a bid to buy it lower than the asking price. When it goes on sale (i.e., the seller lowers their ask), you then buy it. And meeting in the middle can happen - if the price is too high for you, and too low for them, perhaps they'll discount it partway, at which point you go "good enough" and buy it at the higher than you wanted, but lower than before price.
FreeDOS was also a popular way to do firmware updates because it gets you to a well known state that's single tasking and nothing could interrupt the process. Especially nice was it was small and you could put it on a floppy with tons of space for your firmware and other things.
Though nowadays, since most people don't boot from floppies, they now use Linux based update software - sure it's multitasking, but it's a nice controlled Linux environment to do stuff in. Especially since it doesn't have to all fit in a 1.44MB floppy - a thumbdrive or CD will let you easily a large amount of space so you can even have multiple updaters so the user only needs to download one huge "do it all" that figures out what needs updating over downloading and making a half dozen update disks hoping to have the right model and revision.
And especially these days where DOS drivers are getting fewer and farther between, if you need drivers (e.g., SATA drivers), you're more likely to find it in Linux than in DOS. So for those things like SSD firmware updates, a Linux boot drive will likely be able to talk to most SATA controllers without the user needing to reconfigure their PC. For the leftovers, they can try using legacy mode, but the number of people who need it are far fewer.
FreeDOS is almost never used for production - they have specialized boot images running Windows or whatever, then just wipe it with the final OS image
And you know how people fix it? They dump their mailing lists and ask people to sign up again.
Yes, I've gotten about 40 of those emails asking me to sign up or bye-bye. Good! I re-signed up for 2 honest ones I really couldn't live without. And out of those 40 of them? Well, most of it was list sharing since they happened at work.
Sure, it means your 30,000+ member mailing list gets trolled down to 1,000 or less. But that's a GOOD THING. A lot of people gave up unsubscribing years ago, and I'm sure as companies merged and separated that mailing lists got munged up.
If you're so worried about it, all you need to do is dump your complete mailing list collection and start anew. Then implement double-opt-in, and expiry dates in your mailing lists.
It's not hard. At our company, we simply sent out one last email that said "Please sign up for our mailing list" and detailed that because of the law, we're deleting the entire mailing list and starting afresh, and if you want to receive the emails, just click to join and double-opt-in. Put in a 2 year timer on them to ask them to do it again in 2016, and you're done.
If you're worried about emailing someone you haven't done business in two years? Don't put them on your mailing list EVER. Have a checkbox that simply invites them to your mailing list.
It's not hard. Dump your current list. Add a timer to every email address on when they signed up. Then do double-opt-in and you're done.
Whine whine whine, they gave me an email on the order form and I can't market to them!? Good. If they wanted, they could sign up! They gave you an email address for the order to send them status updates on the order not for putting on the "what's hot this week" list.
What's wrong with that? If I don't want your email, I most likely don't want all your email. I don't care for your weekly specials, your yearly specials, your weekly sales on computer parts, your email catalog of discounts, etc. One click should get me out of all of those. And no BS "your request will be handled in 3-4 weeks" - this is the 21st century. If you can add me in 10 seconds, you can remove in 10 seconds. You don't have to send it ot the CEO to approve.
Companies are whining because the rules mean they can't do a lot of crap anymore. I'm sure most of the people on that Microsoft list no longer work in a way that makes it relevant anymore to them, they were just lazy to remove themselves and clicking delete is a lot quicker than trying to find out how to unsubscribe.
Hell, I bet it also removes a lot of auto-spam from the list. Remember why most mailing lists end up on antispam lists? Because it's easier to click the "Spam" button on your email client, GMail, Hotmail, etc.
So no more adding me to your marketing mails because I happened to place an order with you for one item only you sell in Canada, that I might need again in 5 years.No more unbounded email l
Except I'm fairly certain the vast majority of Android and iOS devices now ask for permission before they allow this. I think it was added somewhere in Android 4.2 or 4.3, and in iOS6 - they ask you if they trust the computer on the other end (yes, you can tell if it's a computer or a charger). If no, they stop negotiation and go dumb.
Actually, the original photos are still fine even if the database is corrupted. The iPhoto database is just a folder, and inside are the main iPhoto database where it's indexed everything. Also inside it are your original photos, untouched, and I believe the modified ones.
So no, your photos are always safe, you may lose the index and I believe option-clicking iPhoto will let you rebuild a corrupted database.
Apple is a lot of things, but being completely idiotic isn't one of them.
Because Androids are cheap as crap. As in free.
Google said they had 1B unique Android devices in the last 30 days. I'm pretty sure the top-shelf flagship phones sold int he past couple of years total under 100M (the SGS4 sold around 50M as of October 2013, and the SGS5 is probably around 20M so far).
So less than 10% of Androids sold in the past two years are flagships, of the 1B unique devices that Google recorded last month.
That means the rest of the phones are the free or crap phones that have crappier screens, crappy processors, or crappy RAM. Or what people get for $50 and under.
The people who buy the LG are the build-your-own-PC crowd. The people who buy Androids are ones who see iPhones, see the price tag, and gets the carrier salesperson to sell them a "works like an iPhone but it's FREE!" deal.
Heck, I'm sure people will run to the store, see the LG, see the price tag, then just get the salesperson to sell them "works just like the LG, but it's FREE" phone.
(Though, who buys a phone on the cusp of 64-bit ARMs? The reason the iPhone 5/5s is so fast is because of the ARMv8 architecture...).
If you're going to Canada first then the US, you're in luck because there's a really easy SIM to get for Canadians heading South.
It's called Roam Mobility and they're a US MVNO that sells their SIMs in Canada (if you're on the west coast, head into a London Drugs store, go to the cell department and ask to buy a Roam Mobility SIM.
If not, they do sell the SIMs online. It's a fairly nice option for Canadians heading to the US for days, weeks or a month. And it's pretty much no-questions-asked - you just buy the SIM and activate it online for however long you need.
In Canada, well, prepaid generally is a bigger bother - while you can buy SIMs by heading to a store, they aren't too happy about selling them (less money for them). As an earlier poster said, you probably want to use Wind or Mobilicity if you can (if you do Wind, pay for the US package and you can roam in the US as well, which isn't too bad a deal)., but you will need a phone that can do AWS (e.g., the iPhone 5/5s can, last I checked, as well as the other regular bands). They can sell you one, but beware that unlocked ones like Nexus phones are WILDLY overpriced (I've seen a Nexus 4 be almost $600 - yes, you could walk into an Apple Store and get the iPhone 5. The Nexus 4 sold for around $250 or so off Google Play). But that's only if your current phone doesn't do AWS (I mention the iPhone 5 because it does, as well as regular bands from other carriers. I do know that there often are special AWS models of popular Android flagships like the SGS3 (a friend tried to activate one and couldn't because it didn't do AWS), and I think the Nexus 4 couldn't either unless you got the special one.)
Oh, and no carrier, despite having the "no contract price" on the phone will ever sell you a handset for that price unless you actually were in a contract and wanted an out-of-sync upgrade. Other than Wind or Mobilicity, who are prepaid services, that is. (As I'm no longer in a contract, well, it means my phone options in Canada are limited to Apple if I wanted in-store service, or Google if I wanted to put up with Google Play (bleh - I got burned badly with the Nexus 7 when I could buy it retail for cheaper, and have it sooner than when Google finally fulfilled my order! I mean, I could walk into a store and buy one, or order it online for free shipping and have it in my hand a couple of weeks sooner (stupid UPS)).
The problem is, the magazine industry, much like the newspaper industry, isn't doing all that great. And niche publications like 2600 aren't doing that great either. First, they don't take advertising, which means if you've actually shopped 2600, it's among the more expensive publications out there for what you get on the surface. It's actually very high priced.
Second, it's not like they're a mainstream magazine - while you can probably find them at Barnes and Noble, they're not really available elsewhere other than at a specialist magazine retailer (mostly again, from a cost and audience perspective).
Third, well, the information in it you can probably find it online, like most other computer and information technology magazines. And that is killer. Most other computer related magazines have stopped printing a deadtree edition for that reason.
Finally, while they have gone electronic, I'm not sure if their distribution is all that great - I see them on B&N, I don't know about Amazon as I don't use Amazon for ebooks.
Their distribution in the end isn't that big - I have to look it up, but every magazine sent through the USPS as media mail has to have a distribution panel in it where it describes how many issues were printed, sold (broken out by subscriptions and retail sales), returned, and pulped. I'm fairly certain it isn't a huge number - perhaps 10,000 or so issues per quarter. That isn't a lot of money after printing and other costs.
Basically they've been the victim of the internet age.
"--" is understood by getopt(), a library function to parse command line options. getopt() can simply print a warning out stderr when it's called and comes across un-escaped operatnds.
Bonus points if it defaults to printing errors when it's run in a non-TTY environment (e.g., shell script).
Extra credit for programs like rm that pre-scan their arguments to see if they match files - so if you passed in "-r" in the option area without a -- somewhere further along and a file named "-r" exists, error out and suggest using --. So "rm -r file" would work, unless there's a file named "-r" in the directory. "rm -r -- file" would generate no noise, as would "rm -r -- -r"
I think it's just demographics of who goes into CS and engineering, though slightly skewed because I could swear a majority of students in STEM tracks were Asian, not white. Though all those companies generally have a fairly big showing of Asians (roughly 33%), it does seem a bit on low side given they can easily make up 60-80% of a graduating class.
Though, the percentage of female Asian students in STEM was also fairly high - perhaps 10% of that population.
I would think the Corolla guys would probably be more interested in the system than an Audi driver, who tend to be a bit more fanatical about driving. I mean, the Corolla is really just a means to get from point A to point B reliably with little fuss, muss or anything. It's cheap, efficient, reliable, and for pretty much everyone, a boring car offering little in the way of "fun" for a drive.
An Audi, though, people generally buy them because they want to feel the road, every bump, shift down and power through, etc. It's a more fun ride and those who purchase it generally do it because they don't want to get from point A to point B, but want to have a journey and some fun doing so. They enjoy driving.
A self-driving addon would seem counter to this. You might as well ask if they make it for Ferraris or Lamborghinis or something.
Lots of hobbies can demand that much. Some hobbies have a wide range of spending (e.g., golf, electronics, computers) from practically free to many thousands, others demand huge upfront costs (e.g., flying, boating, etc).
Just because it's a hobby doesn't mean people can't spend outrageous amounts of money on it. I mean, people can spend $13K on an oscilloscope for their hobby too. Or several K in guns. Or stamps. Or comic books. Or plenty of other stuff. Or pinball machines, the popular ones easily costing $25K+ for home (and many people can't stop at one - three to a whole arcade in their basement...).
And there are plenty where people spend over $100K (over several years) on one project. (E.g., kit-plane building, model aircraft, etc).
It does require some amount of fiscal responsibility and the ability to save and delay gratification, but it's certainly possible.
Heck, back in the day, people would also spend many thousands of dollars in a computer just to play videogames on them and drag them across town to play with others.