The PS2 and XBox were vulnerable to modchips. The PSP suffered exploits and custom firmware took over. The 360 too was modded although Microsoft bans people from XBL to keep it under control. Nintendo seems to treat copy protection as an afterthought which may explain why their systems are all cracked. About the only console to withstand attack is the PS3, although Sony had to shut off some features and move code into higher kernel rings to secure it. All that whining over OtherOS being removed and Geohot being prosecuted was Sony protecting their platform from piracy.
Actually, the PS3 is completely broken to CFW. If you want to pirate games, just check your favorite torrent site.
The hack came AFTER Sony removed OtherOS.
The problem is, and what Microsoft learned in the Xbox days is you have two kinds of people - homebrewers and pirates. Both have the same goal initially - to break the locks so they can run their own code. Thing is, stuff like Xbox Live Indie Arcade and OtherOS meant homebrewers COULD run their own code. Pirates were left in the cold because neither method allowed running commercial code.
Problem is, if homebrewers get locked out, like they did when OtherOS is removed, they start getting busy re-opening it. In fact, the homebrewers were basically trying to get OtherOS back (and even on the slims, which never supported it). In doing so, they basically broke open the entire security of the PS3 which has never been heavily scrutinized before.
Homebrewers generally are very smart individuals who thrive in looking around. People like GeoHot and the like and see lockdown as a challenge. Pirates in general aren't, so the greatest attack happens when the homebrewers try to break your system, and the pirates simply ride their coattails.
Efforts to re-secure the PS3 failed, and even the PSP failed to the same attacks. Basically the master keys to both are out, and once that happens it's game over. (Prior to this, the PSP wasn't completely broken - new PSPs didn't have firmware that was vulnerable to known exploits). With the master key, anyone can write anything as if it was an "official " release - firmware, games (resetting their lockdown bits), etc.
The 360 only suffered from a optical drive hack - limiting the attacks to specific submodels of the Xbox running specific versions of firmware. The hack was basically lying to the main software about the type of disc - if you insert a burned DVD, it would report it as an official game disc rather than a burned DVD. That's why the official Microsoft daskboard could still run, and detect the hack. Or why Microsoft knows when you hacked it if you accidentally connect that Xbox to a network - there was no way around the protections. Which is why the Xbox360 hack only ran pirated games.
That's why they have contracts, because if they get cold feet after the fact the photographer can point to it and say sorry, but you signed off on this, I'm not tossing away all my hard work. I don't know of any standard modelling contracts that include clauses for a model to change her mind later.
All contracts should have provisions for breaking them. All contracts usually do because otherwise it's a very messy thing.
(There are many reasons why a contract can't be fulfilled and must be broken - including inability to deliver (either the product turned out to be a dud, or the financing to pay for it dried up), some act of God (fire, natural disaster, etc) that now prevents the completion of the contract, changing of minds, etc.
Now, they usually include penalty clauses to compensate the other side for the costs they may have incurred expecting completion. E.g., if you're expecting a delivery of wood to build a house, and the lumber yard decides they have a more lucrative contract to fill, then if your contract is sound, you would request compensation for breaking, including refunding any money previously paid, reimbursement of expenses like hiring workers who cannot work because of no materials but need to be paid, contract extensions of other work, delays, etc., even the cost of finding another lumber yard to supply you in an emergency and the additional costs incurred in doing so (because you'd pay far higher to get it more quickly and it's a sudden order unaccounted for), etc.
Likewise modelling contracts can have escape clauses for both sides. Of course, this may mean the model may have to pay a lot of money to compensate for losses incurred (e.g., if the model was in a lot of scenes that need to be re-shot, then the expenses of that need to be covered, etc).
Absent escape clauses, it's messier because now you're in breach of contract law and having to deal with the courts.
From the article: "For VoLTE to work, both phones on the call need to have the software." So it doesn't work by having the network act as a proxy between the old GSM voice protocol and the new VoLTE protocol. Will it work even if both VoLTE-supporting phones are on different carriers, or will calls between AT&T and T-Mobile need to fall back to old tech?
Old tech. VoLTE is only for the air interface protocol in handling calls and passing them off to the POTS network.
You see, LTE is data only, and it works exactly the same as if you transferred a packet between two phones - unless the source and destination are on the same carrier, at some point the packet will hit the Internet as a regular IP packet.
VoLTE is the same - and it has to be because if you move into a cell that doesn't have LTE, the towers need to hand you off to a regular old 2G or 3G connection. So at some point your voice will have to be re-encoded
VoLTE is strictly between you and the carrier - and even if the other end is on the same carrier, it probably will get translated to regular voice traffic in-between.
Also, will it fail when two companies implement VoLTE slightly differently? Think early 802.11n implementations...
Then you fall back. There's going to be plenty of incompatibilities in the early period and quite likely both you and your carrier have to be running very specific versions of the phone stack and firmware to work, gradually increasing in compatibility as time goes on.
The same reason they put FM radios in Android phones. There are cheap WiFi chips with everything in it. Wifi, Bluetooth and FM radio. It would cost a few cents to add another chip antenna to the board though... I wouldn't be surprised if the '3 in 1' chips were cheaper anyway though, since they're much more popular.
Bluetooth doesn't require another antenna. It operates on the same band as the 2.4GHz WiFi does. As long as you have a WiFi antenna, it can be used for a Bluetooth antenna.
And most WiFi/Bluetooth combos do just that. In fact, the WiFi and Bluetooth sides communicate so neither tries to interfere with each other - it's called Bluetooth coexistence. About the only place you'll see separate Bluetooth and WiFi antennas are in PCs, which use discrete WiFi and Bluetooth modules and have no way of doing coexistence.
Though, using these combo chips is slightly more complex because the WiFi firmware often loads the Bluetooth firmware as well, so you need to be careful of the initialization order. And to know that if you turn off WiFi, you can't kill power to the WiFi chip because Bluetooth is still on.
Lazy device developers often don't kill power to the chip so if you turn them "off", it doesn't turn off.
In fact, that's most likely the situation here - the power management is more complex on combo chips, and leaving the chip powered up always drains batteries way too quick. So disable the Bluetooth, and turn off the WiFi wen the user requests it.
My complaint is always the lack of vertical resolution. At least for a working monitor. 1440 is little better than most of the monitors outtoday but very little in proportion to its horizontal resolution.
Or how about lack of resolution in general?
A consumer 4K monitor is 3840x2160. This screen is 3440x1440. Neither dimension is as big as a consumer 4K screen - it's 400 pixels too skinny, and 720 pixels too short.
So no, a regular 4K screen would get you more pixels.
And let's not even talk about the difference between consumer 4K and cinema 4K - the latter being 4096x2160.
ePay is so hostile for anyone selling casually its no longer worth your time. Paypal now holds onto your funds for weeks if you haven't sold anything recently and your feedback score or number of auctions makes no difference. No matter what small item is sold everyone complains. As a seller you'll automatically lose any complaint filed against you. People overpay for items and then complain something is wrong and then pick arbitrary partial refund values. The auction fees themselves have gotten ridiculous, over 10% on small items. As a buyer you won't find any auction deals. That time has long past. Now its mostly a marketplace for Chinese storefronts.
Why can't someone come up with an alternative? Google has a payment system up and running so why can't they make a competitor?
Because Google Wallet is effectively a merchant account. And merchant accounts aren't available to every Joe Blow on the street (unlike Paypal, which allows anyone to send a credit card payment to anyone else).
And Paypal's policies aren't actually out of line with merchant accounts - did you know that a vendor accepting credit cards is liable for transactions up to 6 months in the future? And that when a chargeback occurs, you are required to show proof of transaction (so keep those receipts neatly filed!) which have to be sent as proof.
Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, etc., they all require pre-qualification in order to open an account and get payments. If you're only selling some random vase on eBay once a year, you pretty much can't open an account (there are big fees to be paid for not hitting minimum monthly transaction amounts - which are usually quite low, e.g., $500 in credit charges a month).
It's why eBay+Paypal go well together because sending money by mail is an anachronism for online shopping.
That, and Paypal supports opening a receiving account almost anywhere around the world. Google Wallet and Amazon are limited because of local regulations that make it harder to be one generic face of payment systems. (Once you have an account, you can accept payment from anywhere).
The only other alternative is to create a new payment scheme that allows people to send and receive money from each other. Like Bitcoin, but to also make it convenient on everyone concerned.
I heard the problem at eBay was that an employee's login had been compromised (via social engineering apparently, but we might never know). Regardless of how that happened, that an employee was able to login from a remote location shows the sad state of affairs of security today.
You know of things like "teleworking" or "telecommuting" right? And some companies, especially technology ones, tend to have a LOT of people who do that. Heck, they may not even live in the same COUNTRY as the company. In fact, most technology companies generally have "forward thinking" when they do it. See Yahoo when their new CEO cancelled all telecommuting. It's often encouraged by companies too.
So remote logins are a way of life. Most companies have it, even ones that don't do telework because employees may need to travel and access resources back at HQ.
So remote logins are a fact of life. eBay is no different.
Now, there may be plenty of ways to get at the data - we know it's possible because eBay users have to, well, be able to update their addresses, phone numbers, etc. online. Perhaps once on the network they could phish for someone with the right credentials (if they socially engineered their way into one person's account, there's probably plenty more victims).
And thus comes the great security issue. How to let anyone and everyone read and write a particular record (i.e., a user to review, update and pass on information (like shipping addresses)) of a database, while keeping the database off of the internet.
I may be missing something, but if you have a circular log and the head meets the tail, how can you not start fragmenting to fill the holes in the log? My understanding of circular logs is you just start writing over the oldest data, which you cannot do with permanent storage.
That's where overprovisioning and write-amplification come into play. The head NEVER meets the tail - the circular log is larger than the advertised size. E.g., a 120GB (120,000,000,000 byte) SSD would have 128GiB of flash. That difference is over-provisioning (and even older 128GB SSDs had 128GiB of flash). That overprovisioning accounts for bad blocks (up to 2% of flash is bad when new!), as well as ensuring there is a safe "landing zone" for new data, storage of the FTL tables (the "middleware" the article talks about), etc.
So there is always more physical storage available than exposed, and a periodic thread in the SSD firmware reclaims blocks that have been TRIMmed or overwritten (i.e., marked "dirty") by cleaning up the head and moving the unchanged data to the tail. (You need to move unchanged data too otherwise slowly changing areas of disk will not wear evenly).
The write amplification happens then - because you're causing more data to be written when no writes were issued by the host - writes of the data itself, and writes to the FTL tables to point to the new data location.
Corruption of the FTL tables is serious business - it's the primary cause of SSD failure, and easily repairable too (do an ATA SECURE ERASE forces a reinitialization of the tables putting the SSD back to full operation, at a loss of user data).
The real innovations for SSDs would be to be able to search FTL tables faster, update them safer, and lessen their susceptibility to corruption.
(Modern SSDs are bottlenecked by SATA3, hence the move to PCIe SSDs).
Philips is still a good, solid brand. The others are HORRIFIC examples.
Kodak is a failed company, who sold their brand in the liquidation sale, to cheap Chinese crap manufacturers.
Yeah, Philips is still operated out of the Netherlands and their consumer electronics are still available in Europe, while they've mostly disappeared from North America. Excepting personal hygiene products, that is.
Kodak is a textbook story on cannibalization - if you don't do it, someone else will. Kodak's sad story comes out from the fact that they refused to recognize that their primary line of business was going away - selling chemicals. They invented digital cameras, yet refused to do anything about them as they would eat into their chemical sales. Well, when digital cameras started getting really popular, the writing was on the wall that their chemical sales were going to nosedive. (And they had great opportunities as well - it's not like Apple chose Kodak for one of the first cheap consumer oriented digital cameras for nothing!) Sure the first digital cameras were crap, but it's technology and technology marches on. They had an opportunity to develop it as a hedge against chemical sales, and they failed to capitalize.
Agilent still makes cool, quality stuff as far as I know. Expensive as always, though. The modern stuff running linux or windows doesn't feel quite the same as old, hefty CRT stuff... which is all I can afford anyway, but still looks to be built well.
The low-end Agilent 2000 series scopes are actually quite affordable, and they give a *lot* for the price. Plus, they're upgradable in every way (except 2/4 channels) so you start with something basic and upgrade as needed.
If you can afford it, the 3000 series isn't that much more. Hell, the top-of-the-line with everything included is around $13K or so. But that's a 4-channel GHz bandwidth scope with waveform generator and logic analyzer. The low end 4 channel 70MHz one is around $3K or so. The 2000 series is around $1K new.
Or get an ancient Rigol 1054 or something. Agilent OEM'd their low end range from Rigol prior to releasing their 2000 series.
Heck, even Tek has a nice scope (released in 2014) that starts around $4k, and top of the line is $13K including GHz bandwidth, wavegen, logic analyzer and spectrum analyzer (to 3GHz).
And all these are aimed at the high end hobbyist for the basic model and are upgradable. The sub-$1000 market is dominated by the Chinese makers - Rigol is a popular one, and remember when I mentioned they OEM'd for Agilent? Agilent branding was around 4x the price for the same model. Hell, the early Rigols even had hacks to upgrade them for free.
As for HP calculators - I think the latest 48 series were basically ARM based models running a Saturn emulator - they actually emulated the Saturn 4-bit CPU and ran the existing HP48gx firmware on it.
For various (often stupid) reasons most brands don't want to be associated with "porn" even in a very passing way. So advertisers will pull their ads if you have what they deem to be porn.
Excellent point. So don't just blame Google when it fails you. Blame your crappy business model that puts too many eggs in too few baskets, and the advertisers that account for Google's revenue. Google can be an incredible resource and a traffic and revenue generator for you, but you can't just do whatever you want, refuse to adapt, and expect to cash in forever.
You do realize Google basically has a monopoly in the ad market, right? They own the vast majority of ad networks, serve the vast majority of ads, and make the vast majority of the ad money out there. They have like 98% marketshare.
Basically if you don't want to charge users money, you have, Google. And that's about it. The remaining ad networks are for th elikes of The Pirate Bay and the like - basically full of scams.
I know it is PC to rant on Facebook privacy on Slashdot, but I've never understood why. It is a service that you voluntarily sign up for and every time you share something you actively choose to share that info, who to share it with. And all the people here who think (or pretend to) that Facebook privacy controls are difficult, really?? Hand in your geek card, they are and have always been quite easy, straight forward settings. If you can't handle that, you perhaps should reconsider having an internet connected PC.
Not to mention, if you're a geek, you'd know the old saying "never put online what you don't want the world to know".
In other words, the ultimate privacy control is don't post in the first place. There is nothing Facebook could do to make public what you haven't posted.
It's the simplest, most basic privacy setting in the world, it works everywhere on every social network,
No matter how Google or Facebook alter their websites, this one privacy setting will always work, guaranteed.
Re:Bah, we already said goodbye to CTRL-S years ag
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Goodbye, Ctrl-S
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There are several issues here. I am offended that some operating systems have hijacked ascii characters to use for meta functionality... ie: ^C, ^V, ^S... ie: I want the same copy/paste key sequences in all of my apps, but I can't have that. I can't remap firefox to use Alt-C/Alt-V for copy/paste or Alt-T for 'new tab'... For those of us who live/work/survive in terminal windows, we want a consistant user interface... This consistancy is (for the most part ) on OS X.
Well, the Apple/Command key is really just a meta key in the end. It's just that Apple realized it should be used for shortcuts.
Of course, Microsoft didn't have that luxury as IBM decided to make a keyboard without a meta key for their PCs, and thus some bright spark at Microsoft decided to use Ctrl-C/V/X/Z instead.
It's so bad that Ctrl-V is remapped to Ctrl-Q on the Windows version of Vim.
Anyhow, I think autosave is nice, but only coupled with Apple's implementation of it. Basically it versions each autosave so you can go back in time and see it how it was at various stages, including being able to cut/copy/paste from the old version to the new.
Because otherwise, autosave is handy when your computer or the app crashes, but you can lose a lot of state information when you just have the current working copy saved.
The article invalidates what you're saying. OR isn't special. They just showed their hand early in an attempt to get free marketing. What they're doing isn't technologically difficult given the advances in things like 3d rendering, compact displays, low-cost motion sensors, and lower-latency inputs.
Well, OR has one thing going for it - it's consumer-level pricing is cheap.
Eye-displays from Sony, etc (just regular "theatre" goggles and such) are ridiculously expensive - I think Sony sold one (720p per eye) for something like $2000 or so. Most proper VR headsets except super cheap junk sold to consumers cost around that much. OR provides a decent setup for a price that's actually within reach.
That is OR's legacy. Similar to how Microsoft's Kinect (and soon Kinect 2/Xbone) made it possible to get super-cheap depth imaging. Once it's within reach, the possibilities are endless.
is whoring legal in switzerland? for â50K in the "VIP room" i'd better get a blowjob along with my watch and souvenir suit.
Given it's probably like the Vomit Comet, if you can get it done in 30 seconds, then yeah. If not, well, it's going to be... interesting.
After all, Zero-G did it first, but they charge around $5k/person, so this Swiss company doing it for half that price is interesting.
Then again, I think the Zero-G experience is more of the "premium" experience, so the prices are comparable. It's just they have a low cost version where you can float around a bit.
According to the article, the victim has to install an app from a pop-up. If the user leaves "Unknown sources" turned off, the user can't get infected. I imagine that most people in the western world who turn on "Unknown sources" are users of third-party marketplaces that require "Unknown sources", such as Amazon Appstore or F-Droid. In order to get infected, you have to 1. turn on "Unknown sources", 2. forget to turn it off after you're done installing or updating apps from a third-party marketplace, and 3. install an apk file linked from a pop-up (source: the featured article by Symantec). If you're dumb enough to do #3 on your phone, you're dumb enough to do the same thing on your desktop, even if it does run GNU/Linux.
Most people don't do #2. Doesn't matter if you should, or if you tell them to, they won't do it.
Oh, they may the first time, but then the next time they visit the Amazon App Store, they're going to forget.
So once it's set, consider it permanently set because most users will not bother.
#3 is social engineering. If they're browsing the web, they get a little popup that says "Install our app and see the videos for free!" well, there you go.
Or "Security update required - please install and run this app to update your phone".
etc.
Hell, remember the "You need to install this codec" popups on Windows? Same thing, really.
In all of my years of using and seeking products of this kind, I think I have ONCE seen a similar product available for retail. It was an expensive MCE setup that included a disk jukebox.
The industry at large never really supported this concept.
K-scape has always been a product for the 1% sold on the basis of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it".
It's not even about DRM.
In the end it boiled down a simple contractual dispute - Kaleidoscope signed an agreement with the DVD CCA over CSS so their equipment could play DVDs. In that agreement, it made note of stuff that basically said you couldn't rip the discs to a hard drive and play it without the disc being present.
That's it. Nothing more.
The contention was over DRM, yes, but they were legal signatories and bound to the terms of the agreement when they signed it.
And given their market, they could've just as well easily negotiated new terms that allowed for storage of the data provided other terms were met, like requiring all images to be keyed to the specific unit. (If you can afford one of these systems, you probably won't bother trying to resell the disc).
Or they could build a hugeass disc loader at the same time. Again, you're talking about a rather expensive system to begin with - a disc carousel isn't a big deal.
Except that X11 over the network with any modern toolkit is already effectively forcing X11 to do what Wayland will do - only X11 does it badly and without compression
Well, you could run it over SSH with compression enabled.
Though, run something like firefox over remote X, and that's a real dog. You could pretty much download and install firefox locally before the remote X version of firefox would even give a hint that it's starting.
(I had to remote firefox because we were diagnosing an issue where some machines could access a website and others couldn't so I needed some more data).
Oh, and this was over SSH with X forwarding, no compression, GigE network all the way. The only thing was the target system was Linux, the X server was Cygwin-X on Windows.
Starting anything more complex than an xterm remotely is an exercise in patience.
"Gee Officer, I don't know why this thing is speeding"
Given it's a driverless car, why would it need to speed?
I mean, the whole point of a driverless car is so you don't have to drive it. The computerized driver can pay more attention to the road, and anticipate things much faster than a human. It doesn't have emotions so it doesn't really NEED to speed at all - it can follow others at the limit quite happily.
After all, short of going crazy fast over the limit, does going 10mph faster REALLY save you that much time? It usually ends up being a very minor savings if there is any.
Of course, this means no one pays for speeding tickets because there aren't any to be issued, other than impatient human drivers who can't do the limit.
Exactly. my 2011 Quad i7 macbook pro 3 years later it's specs are the SAME as other high end laptops and I have a wonderful 1080p screen plus it's metal case has outlasted the 3 dells I had before it as it still looks new. (I bought the Dell Professional line of laptops that cost as much as Macbook pros)
Actually, the 17" MacBook Pros use a 1920x1200 screen, which is 16:10 instead of 16:9 and often desired because it means you can do a 1080p scene and still have a few pixels for controls.
If this is because they're upset at Microsoft for dropping XP support so quickly, then what are they going to? What OS has a longer support cycle than XP's 12.5 years?
Red Hat's is 10 years. AIX is 5-7. HP-UX is 8. Ubuntu LTS is 5 years. Mac OS is 4-ish. Solaris is likely the closest at 12 years... But its still less. Maybe they'll roll their own support?
That have state-sponsored Linuc distributions, too, you know. I think one a long time ago was called Red Flag Linux.
My favorite is CubeCheater where you take a photo of each of the faces of the cube and it shows you how to solve it in 20 moves or less.
Alas, it's no longer available, though I have copies thanks to iTunes backups:). (No, just because an app is gone, doesn't mean you can't still use it as long as you have a copy, through iTunes or otherwise. Apple has not yet activated any functionality to delete or block apps already in users' possession).
There are a lot of Canadian geese that do not bother migrating all the way back to Canada anymore. I am sick of getting hissed at while I walk along the Allegheny river trail every day.
Hell, there are Canada geese too lazy to migrate south for the winter.
I remember my youth seeing the noisy V formations as they honked their way south in the fall. These days, nothing. Just geese year-round in Canada.
Bleh.
Admittedly, it's warm enough year-round that they don't really need to migrated. At least this part of Canada is.
Oh, get CBP/DHS on your geese. The ones that go south and return back are known as snowbirds. If they're not going back they're illegal immigrants:).
mac systems may not even boot with the old Partition tables that are needed for older NON EFI systems that windows runs on.
also the Mac os Recovery Partition may even be wiped out.
They may boot with the old partition table, but if you do not obey the old partitioning, they will not get any further.
You see, when Macs boot, they use a special OS loader in the EFI partition (a FAT-formatted partition). The EFI loader loads it (bootx.efi, IIRC) and executes it as an EFI program. That EFI program then looks for the OS system partition and loads the kernel. The OS loader uses the EFI library to access the hard drive and display and has a built-in filesystem driver to read HFS+.
Without the EFI partition, you'll just get the blinking question mark as EFI can't find the OS loader.
Perhaps -- but right now, it looks like the treatment may work best on people who have not been vaccinated. In other words, the anti-vac population may have yet anotther reason to tell people not to get their vaccination.
The irony is that it also means you can't contract measles yourself, either, since contracting measles is pretty much the same as getting the vaccine. It's just the vaccine isn't as contagious nor as deadly as the real measles virus. Or as incapacitating - you can be out and about after getting the shot, but if you have measles, you'll feel just plain awful.
So once you've contracted measles, you'll have the measles antibody as well (the same as if you had a vaccination).
The problem is, to not get measles, you need a 90% vaccination rate.
So don't vaccinate and hope you don't get measles in case you get this cancer. But if you don't vaccinate and others follow you, once measles takes hold you'll get infected and your cancer treatment is less effective. Or vaccinate and your cancer treatment is less effective.
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Actually, the PS3 is completely broken to CFW. If you want to pirate games, just check your favorite torrent site.
The hack came AFTER Sony removed OtherOS.
The problem is, and what Microsoft learned in the Xbox days is you have two kinds of people - homebrewers and pirates. Both have the same goal initially - to break the locks so they can run their own code. Thing is, stuff like Xbox Live Indie Arcade and OtherOS meant homebrewers COULD run their own code. Pirates were left in the cold because neither method allowed running commercial code.
Problem is, if homebrewers get locked out, like they did when OtherOS is removed, they start getting busy re-opening it. In fact, the homebrewers were basically trying to get OtherOS back (and even on the slims, which never supported it). In doing so, they basically broke open the entire security of the PS3 which has never been heavily scrutinized before.
Homebrewers generally are very smart individuals who thrive in looking around. People like GeoHot and the like and see lockdown as a challenge. Pirates in general aren't, so the greatest attack happens when the homebrewers try to break your system, and the pirates simply ride their coattails.
Efforts to re-secure the PS3 failed, and even the PSP failed to the same attacks. Basically the master keys to both are out, and once that happens it's game over. (Prior to this, the PSP wasn't completely broken - new PSPs didn't have firmware that was vulnerable to known exploits). With the master key, anyone can write anything as if it was an "official " release - firmware, games (resetting their lockdown bits), etc.
The 360 only suffered from a optical drive hack - limiting the attacks to specific submodels of the Xbox running specific versions of firmware. The hack was basically lying to the main software about the type of disc - if you insert a burned DVD, it would report it as an official game disc rather than a burned DVD. That's why the official Microsoft daskboard could still run, and detect the hack. Or why Microsoft knows when you hacked it if you accidentally connect that Xbox to a network - there was no way around the protections. Which is why the Xbox360 hack only ran pirated games.
All contracts should have provisions for breaking them. All contracts usually do because otherwise it's a very messy thing.
(There are many reasons why a contract can't be fulfilled and must be broken - including inability to deliver (either the product turned out to be a dud, or the financing to pay for it dried up), some act of God (fire, natural disaster, etc) that now prevents the completion of the contract, changing of minds, etc.
Now, they usually include penalty clauses to compensate the other side for the costs they may have incurred expecting completion. E.g., if you're expecting a delivery of wood to build a house, and the lumber yard decides they have a more lucrative contract to fill, then if your contract is sound, you would request compensation for breaking, including refunding any money previously paid, reimbursement of expenses like hiring workers who cannot work because of no materials but need to be paid, contract extensions of other work, delays, etc., even the cost of finding another lumber yard to supply you in an emergency and the additional costs incurred in doing so (because you'd pay far higher to get it more quickly and it's a sudden order unaccounted for), etc.
Likewise modelling contracts can have escape clauses for both sides. Of course, this may mean the model may have to pay a lot of money to compensate for losses incurred (e.g., if the model was in a lot of scenes that need to be re-shot, then the expenses of that need to be covered, etc).
Absent escape clauses, it's messier because now you're in breach of contract law and having to deal with the courts.
Old tech. VoLTE is only for the air interface protocol in handling calls and passing them off to the POTS network.
You see, LTE is data only, and it works exactly the same as if you transferred a packet between two phones - unless the source and destination are on the same carrier, at some point the packet will hit the Internet as a regular IP packet.
VoLTE is the same - and it has to be because if you move into a cell that doesn't have LTE, the towers need to hand you off to a regular old 2G or 3G connection. So at some point your voice will have to be re-encoded
VoLTE is strictly between you and the carrier - and even if the other end is on the same carrier, it probably will get translated to regular voice traffic in-between.
Then you fall back. There's going to be plenty of incompatibilities in the early period and quite likely both you and your carrier have to be running very specific versions of the phone stack and firmware to work, gradually increasing in compatibility as time goes on.
Bluetooth doesn't require another antenna. It operates on the same band as the 2.4GHz WiFi does. As long as you have a WiFi antenna, it can be used for a Bluetooth antenna.
And most WiFi/Bluetooth combos do just that. In fact, the WiFi and Bluetooth sides communicate so neither tries to interfere with each other - it's called Bluetooth coexistence. About the only place you'll see separate Bluetooth and WiFi antennas are in PCs, which use discrete WiFi and Bluetooth modules and have no way of doing coexistence.
Though, using these combo chips is slightly more complex because the WiFi firmware often loads the Bluetooth firmware as well, so you need to be careful of the initialization order. And to know that if you turn off WiFi, you can't kill power to the WiFi chip because Bluetooth is still on.
Lazy device developers often don't kill power to the chip so if you turn them "off", it doesn't turn off.
In fact, that's most likely the situation here - the power management is more complex on combo chips, and leaving the chip powered up always drains batteries way too quick. So disable the Bluetooth, and turn off the WiFi wen the user requests it.
Or how about lack of resolution in general?
A consumer 4K monitor is 3840x2160. This screen is 3440x1440. Neither dimension is as big as a consumer 4K screen - it's 400 pixels too skinny, and 720 pixels too short.
So no, a regular 4K screen would get you more pixels.
And let's not even talk about the difference between consumer 4K and cinema 4K - the latter being 4096x2160.
Because Google Wallet is effectively a merchant account. And merchant accounts aren't available to every Joe Blow on the street (unlike Paypal, which allows anyone to send a credit card payment to anyone else).
And Paypal's policies aren't actually out of line with merchant accounts - did you know that a vendor accepting credit cards is liable for transactions up to 6 months in the future? And that when a chargeback occurs, you are required to show proof of transaction (so keep those receipts neatly filed!) which have to be sent as proof.
Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, etc., they all require pre-qualification in order to open an account and get payments. If you're only selling some random vase on eBay once a year, you pretty much can't open an account (there are big fees to be paid for not hitting minimum monthly transaction amounts - which are usually quite low, e.g., $500 in credit charges a month).
It's why eBay+Paypal go well together because sending money by mail is an anachronism for online shopping.
That, and Paypal supports opening a receiving account almost anywhere around the world. Google Wallet and Amazon are limited because of local regulations that make it harder to be one generic face of payment systems. (Once you have an account, you can accept payment from anywhere).
The only other alternative is to create a new payment scheme that allows people to send and receive money from each other. Like Bitcoin, but to also make it convenient on everyone concerned.
You know of things like "teleworking" or "telecommuting" right? And some companies, especially technology ones, tend to have a LOT of people who do that. Heck, they may not even live in the same COUNTRY as the company. In fact, most technology companies generally have "forward thinking" when they do it. See Yahoo when their new CEO cancelled all telecommuting. It's often encouraged by companies too.
So remote logins are a way of life. Most companies have it, even ones that don't do telework because employees may need to travel and access resources back at HQ.
So remote logins are a fact of life. eBay is no different.
Now, there may be plenty of ways to get at the data - we know it's possible because eBay users have to, well, be able to update their addresses, phone numbers, etc. online. Perhaps once on the network they could phish for someone with the right credentials (if they socially engineered their way into one person's account, there's probably plenty more victims).
And thus comes the great security issue. How to let anyone and everyone read and write a particular record (i.e., a user to review, update and pass on information (like shipping addresses)) of a database, while keeping the database off of the internet.
That's where overprovisioning and write-amplification come into play. The head NEVER meets the tail - the circular log is larger than the advertised size. E.g., a 120GB (120,000,000,000 byte) SSD would have 128GiB of flash. That difference is over-provisioning (and even older 128GB SSDs had 128GiB of flash). That overprovisioning accounts for bad blocks (up to 2% of flash is bad when new!), as well as ensuring there is a safe "landing zone" for new data, storage of the FTL tables (the "middleware" the article talks about), etc.
So there is always more physical storage available than exposed, and a periodic thread in the SSD firmware reclaims blocks that have been TRIMmed or overwritten (i.e., marked "dirty") by cleaning up the head and moving the unchanged data to the tail. (You need to move unchanged data too otherwise slowly changing areas of disk will not wear evenly).
The write amplification happens then - because you're causing more data to be written when no writes were issued by the host - writes of the data itself, and writes to the FTL tables to point to the new data location.
Corruption of the FTL tables is serious business - it's the primary cause of SSD failure, and easily repairable too (do an ATA SECURE ERASE forces a reinitialization of the tables putting the SSD back to full operation, at a loss of user data).
The real innovations for SSDs would be to be able to search FTL tables faster, update them safer, and lessen their susceptibility to corruption.
(Modern SSDs are bottlenecked by SATA3, hence the move to PCIe SSDs).
Yeah, Philips is still operated out of the Netherlands and their consumer electronics are still available in Europe, while they've mostly disappeared from North America. Excepting personal hygiene products, that is.
Kodak is a textbook story on cannibalization - if you don't do it, someone else will. Kodak's sad story comes out from the fact that they refused to recognize that their primary line of business was going away - selling chemicals. They invented digital cameras, yet refused to do anything about them as they would eat into their chemical sales. Well, when digital cameras started getting really popular, the writing was on the wall that their chemical sales were going to nosedive. (And they had great opportunities as well - it's not like Apple chose Kodak for one of the first cheap consumer oriented digital cameras for nothing!) Sure the first digital cameras were crap, but it's technology and technology marches on. They had an opportunity to develop it as a hedge against chemical sales, and they failed to capitalize.
The low-end Agilent 2000 series scopes are actually quite affordable, and they give a *lot* for the price. Plus, they're upgradable in every way (except 2/4 channels) so you start with something basic and upgrade as needed.
If you can afford it, the 3000 series isn't that much more. Hell, the top-of-the-line with everything included is around $13K or so. But that's a 4-channel GHz bandwidth scope with waveform generator and logic analyzer. The low end 4 channel 70MHz one is around $3K or so. The 2000 series is around $1K new.
Or get an ancient Rigol 1054 or something. Agilent OEM'd their low end range from Rigol prior to releasing their 2000 series.
Heck, even Tek has a nice scope (released in 2014) that starts around $4k, and top of the line is $13K including GHz bandwidth, wavegen, logic analyzer and spectrum analyzer (to 3GHz).
And all these are aimed at the high end hobbyist for the basic model and are upgradable. The sub-$1000 market is dominated by the Chinese makers - Rigol is a popular one, and remember when I mentioned they OEM'd for Agilent? Agilent branding was around 4x the price for the same model. Hell, the early Rigols even had hacks to upgrade them for free.
As for HP calculators - I think the latest 48 series were basically ARM based models running a Saturn emulator - they actually emulated the Saturn 4-bit CPU and ran the existing HP48gx firmware on it.
You do realize Google basically has a monopoly in the ad market, right? They own the vast majority of ad networks, serve the vast majority of ads, and make the vast majority of the ad money out there. They have like 98% marketshare.
Basically if you don't want to charge users money, you have, Google. And that's about it. The remaining ad networks are for th elikes of The Pirate Bay and the like - basically full of scams.
Perhaps the problem is Google is too big to fail.
Not to mention, if you're a geek, you'd know the old saying "never put online what you don't want the world to know".
In other words, the ultimate privacy control is don't post in the first place. There is nothing Facebook could do to make public what you haven't posted.
It's the simplest, most basic privacy setting in the world, it works everywhere on every social network,
No matter how Google or Facebook alter their websites, this one privacy setting will always work, guaranteed.
Well, the Apple/Command key is really just a meta key in the end. It's just that Apple realized it should be used for shortcuts.
Of course, Microsoft didn't have that luxury as IBM decided to make a keyboard without a meta key for their PCs, and thus some bright spark at Microsoft decided to use Ctrl-C/V/X/Z instead.
It's so bad that Ctrl-V is remapped to Ctrl-Q on the Windows version of Vim.
Anyhow, I think autosave is nice, but only coupled with Apple's implementation of it. Basically it versions each autosave so you can go back in time and see it how it was at various stages, including being able to cut/copy/paste from the old version to the new.
Because otherwise, autosave is handy when your computer or the app crashes, but you can lose a lot of state information when you just have the current working copy saved.
Well, OR has one thing going for it - it's consumer-level pricing is cheap.
Eye-displays from Sony, etc (just regular "theatre" goggles and such) are ridiculously expensive - I think Sony sold one (720p per eye) for something like $2000 or so. Most proper VR headsets except super cheap junk sold to consumers cost around that much. OR provides a decent setup for a price that's actually within reach.
That is OR's legacy. Similar to how Microsoft's Kinect (and soon Kinect 2/Xbone) made it possible to get super-cheap depth imaging. Once it's within reach, the possibilities are endless.
Given it's probably like the Vomit Comet, if you can get it done in 30 seconds, then yeah. If not, well, it's going to be... interesting.
After all, Zero-G did it first, but they charge around $5k/person, so this Swiss company doing it for half that price is interesting.
Then again, I think the Zero-G experience is more of the "premium" experience, so the prices are comparable. It's just they have a low cost version where you can float around a bit.
Most people don't do #2. Doesn't matter if you should, or if you tell them to, they won't do it.
Oh, they may the first time, but then the next time they visit the Amazon App Store, they're going to forget.
So once it's set, consider it permanently set because most users will not bother.
#3 is social engineering. If they're browsing the web, they get a little popup that says "Install our app and see the videos for free!" well, there you go.
Or "Security update required - please install and run this app to update your phone".
etc.
Hell, remember the "You need to install this codec" popups on Windows? Same thing, really.
It's not even about DRM.
In the end it boiled down a simple contractual dispute - Kaleidoscope signed an agreement with the DVD CCA over CSS so their equipment could play DVDs. In that agreement, it made note of stuff that basically said you couldn't rip the discs to a hard drive and play it without the disc being present.
That's it. Nothing more.
The contention was over DRM, yes, but they were legal signatories and bound to the terms of the agreement when they signed it.
And given their market, they could've just as well easily negotiated new terms that allowed for storage of the data provided other terms were met, like requiring all images to be keyed to the specific unit. (If you can afford one of these systems, you probably won't bother trying to resell the disc).
Or they could build a hugeass disc loader at the same time. Again, you're talking about a rather expensive system to begin with - a disc carousel isn't a big deal.
Well, you could run it over SSH with compression enabled.
Though, run something like firefox over remote X, and that's a real dog. You could pretty much download and install firefox locally before the remote X version of firefox would even give a hint that it's starting.
(I had to remote firefox because we were diagnosing an issue where some machines could access a website and others couldn't so I needed some more data).
Oh, and this was over SSH with X forwarding, no compression, GigE network all the way. The only thing was the target system was Linux, the X server was Cygwin-X on Windows.
Starting anything more complex than an xterm remotely is an exercise in patience.
Given it's a driverless car, why would it need to speed?
I mean, the whole point of a driverless car is so you don't have to drive it. The computerized driver can pay more attention to the road, and anticipate things much faster than a human. It doesn't have emotions so it doesn't really NEED to speed at all - it can follow others at the limit quite happily.
After all, short of going crazy fast over the limit, does going 10mph faster REALLY save you that much time? It usually ends up being a very minor savings if there is any.
Of course, this means no one pays for speeding tickets because there aren't any to be issued, other than impatient human drivers who can't do the limit.
Actually, the 17" MacBook Pros use a 1920x1200 screen, which is 16:10 instead of 16:9 and often desired because it means you can do a 1080p scene and still have a few pixels for controls.
That have state-sponsored Linuc distributions, too, you know. I think one a long time ago was called Red Flag Linux.
There are plenty of apps for that.
My favorite is CubeCheater where you take a photo of each of the faces of the cube and it shows you how to solve it in 20 moves or less.
Alas, it's no longer available, though I have copies thanks to iTunes backups :). (No, just because an app is gone, doesn't mean you can't still use it as long as you have a copy, through iTunes or otherwise. Apple has not yet activated any functionality to delete or block apps already in users' possession).
Hell, there are Canada geese too lazy to migrate south for the winter.
I remember my youth seeing the noisy V formations as they honked their way south in the fall. These days, nothing. Just geese year-round in Canada.
Bleh.
Admittedly, it's warm enough year-round that they don't really need to migrated. At least this part of Canada is.
Oh, get CBP/DHS on your geese. The ones that go south and return back are known as snowbirds. If they're not going back they're illegal immigrants :).
They may boot with the old partition table, but if you do not obey the old partitioning, they will not get any further.
You see, when Macs boot, they use a special OS loader in the EFI partition (a FAT-formatted partition). The EFI loader loads it (bootx.efi, IIRC) and executes it as an EFI program. That EFI program then looks for the OS system partition and loads the kernel. The OS loader uses the EFI library to access the hard drive and display and has a built-in filesystem driver to read HFS+.
Without the EFI partition, you'll just get the blinking question mark as EFI can't find the OS loader.
The irony is that it also means you can't contract measles yourself, either, since contracting measles is pretty much the same as getting the vaccine. It's just the vaccine isn't as contagious nor as deadly as the real measles virus. Or as incapacitating - you can be out and about after getting the shot, but if you have measles, you'll feel just plain awful.
So once you've contracted measles, you'll have the measles antibody as well (the same as if you had a vaccination).
The problem is, to not get measles, you need a 90% vaccination rate.
So don't vaccinate and hope you don't get measles in case you get this cancer. But if you don't vaccinate and others follow you, once measles takes hold you'll get infected and your cancer treatment is less effective. Or vaccinate and your cancer treatment is less effective.