Verifying that foobar@gmail.com is a valid address doesn't give spammers any real information: the namespace is so full even most pwgen outputs point to existing names, as long as you don't have embedded numbers (on gmail, addresses seem to have numbers at the end).
Actually, it does. Because it tells the spammers that the recipient opened the email
Google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email. And the moment you do, Google just confirmed that the email was read. And that information is very valuable.
There are two ways Google can fix it:
1) Set "Don't load images" back as default again, as it is now and in every email client. 2) Simply load every image, so valuable information like that isn't revealed - the marketer just pays for bandwidth and gets zero information - they don't even know if the image is read. No storage requirements as Google can re-write the email to self-contain all the images.
Of course, Google is probably going into email marketing - given how Gmail has sprouted that "Promotions" tab (yes, you can turn it off, but don't you think it immediately foreshadows something? It's not Spam, but "Promotions" - what, spam that someone paid to bypass Google's filters?). And they don't need competition - best way to squash it is to starve out the existing marketers.
And of course, since Google's in the information business, selling that information is very valuable - Google knows what you like, so they can sell targeted ads into your inbox.
I can't give you a date for when I'd be comfortable saying that, but I strongly suspect your 2007 is at least a little early. The computer I'm posting from now, actually, I built in late 2007, and it is BIOS. I don't remember enough about the chipsets that were available at the time to precisely place mine (P35), but I'd say my motherboard is definitely at least mid-range and was perhaps slightly high-end.
Intel started providing UEFI as an option since the turn of the millennium I believe. And Intel stopped providing BIOSes since the Core 2 chips - every board since then shipped exclusively UEFI. Of course, most don't expose it - they run a BIOS compatibility layer instead so the computer boots into UEFI and runs the BIOS application.
It's only in recent years that PC manufacturers began to expose the UEFI interface out of necessity - you can't boot from a > 2TB drive using the BIOS anymore as you hit the maximum size of partition in the MBR.
Apple has, of course, been doing this for a long while now.
Do "legitimate" businesses like piping companies or wire companies buy copper wholesale from scrapyards which are clearly dealing in stolen copper? I'm just confused as to how there is a market for stolen copper. I understand that it is easier to rip it out of an air conditioning unit than it is to dig it out of the ground, but I'd think it would be easy to reduce demand for stolen copper and kill the market for it by penalizing companies who accept stolen goods, same as any other goods. I'd expect that the companies who are buying copper wouldn't be buying in such small quantities that it would be hard to identify where it was coming from.
Recyclers do.
There are plenty of companies that take leftover metal at scrap rates and they go and recycle the metal. Legitimate recyclers buy the metal from companies that have leftovers from metalworking. They also buy stuff like cars and other things for scrap.
Of course, the less legitimate ones have a don't-ask policy that they buy the metal (usually at a lower rate) and do it all under the table.
Depending on the city, there can be legislation that curbs such activities, and the legitimate ones often will refuse to pay in cash - they pay by cheque after a holding delay (14-30 days). Additional policies can include full records of the material (linked to police like pawnbrokers are) and ID requirements. Spot checks are often done by various parties including the media who try to test the recyclers and often report it in the papers.
Then there are "sale of stolen goods" style laws that often give the item back to the original owner, the one who paid for the stolen item is now out the item and the cash. It's happened several times when some plaque or special metal status goes missing and shows up in some recycler's lot.
One of Android's selling points has always been it's open nature, and the fact that it's not as locked down as iOS. This seems like it's taking a step in the direction of locking down the OS for the user, and unlocking it for everyone else...
The only reason Google "gave away" Android is because Google needed to counter the iOS threat. Remember, Google viewed the potential harm that iOS could do - it could lock Google out of the advertising business (being that Google owned the vast majority of online ad networks, and the iPhone couldn't show Flash ads that were extremely popular) in the mobile market. Google was forced to buy and release Android so they'd always have a hook. (And Google may have paid Apple to create iAds - so they could avoid DoJ scrutiny over their purchase of mobile advertising heavyweight AdMob).
Remember, Android exists because Google felt threatened that Apple could cut Google off at any point, thus depriving Google of their main source of revenue.
With this in mind, Google has already been heavy handed - the OHA version is different from the AOSP version, and you need the OHA version if you want to release a phone. And doing so meant you obliged by the OHA terms (which included the inability to load in replacements of Google Apps - so no cometing Maps or other services were allowed). Or even the thought of creating a phone that COULD run Android apps could get you kicked out of the OHA, as Acer found out when they wanted to release a phone with a mobile OS that had Android compatibility layer.
Of course, Google can do this as tney no longer need Android open-sourced anymore - it's achieved its goal of preventing Google from being locked out of iOS/mobile. In fact, the biggest threat to Google is AOSP (see Kindle), hence closed-sourcing of features.
Oh yeah, the privacy features in Android were removed because they interfered with Google's revenue - ads. Remember how I said Google owns the largest ad networks? They also own the largest mobile ad network as well. It's curious how a two-bit ad network like iAds could even be considered a "competitor" - most ads on iOS are again done by a Google-owned company rather than iAds.
Yes, many Wikipedia editors seem more obsessed with destruction of content rather than creation. I added something once that I didn't realise someone would be so absurdly anal as to suggest requiring a citation and they just removed the whole block of information, rather than spend literally 10 seconds searching Google to merely add the citation they so desperately wanted. I did one of those dispute deletion things and the tit who deleted it was overturned but it still put me off ever wasting my time there again.
Wikipedia is going to reach a fundamental limit of knowledge if these people equal or outweigh the helpful editors because their whole existence will be spent removing as much content as positive contributors add and worse, it's far easier to remove content than spend time researching, citing, and correctly formatting it so destroyers of content will always have the upper hand.
Wikipedia reminds me of the book Animal Farm, which was originally written as a critique on Communism. Yet it appears we reached the exact same conclusions that we got nearly 70 years ago - everyone who edits is equal, but some are more equal than others.
to be honest, it's really a wonderful experiment to see how even though we're all supposedly well educated in the matter, humans STILL end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
You can always make a G+ account just for the purpose of youtube, yet never use it for anything else, right?
Yet if you do not enable multiple account signins, Google will be more than happy to merge your accounts together. It's constantly asking even post-merge if I want to keep my youtube signin and name versus using my G+ profile.
This is a huge pain in the ass. I am attending university part time and their email system uses Gmail. Switching back and forth between my main Google profile and my school email is usually a painful process, one which often dumps me into error pages, redirect loops, or back to a homepage. Other open tabs are automatically logged out of one account when I switch to the other.
There's a setting to enable multiple account signins - I use it as I have a Gmail and a GApps account which are separate from each other (The GApps came from an friend's hosting account who moved all the stuff to Google). In the personal profile, go to your settings and enable multiple sign-in (it's off by default presuming you want to avoid the situation where you have a few dozen tabs all logged in and mass confusion). Just enable it, then log out of both accounts. Log into your main account then open a new tab and you should be able to log into your school account.
No. They should not. At least not proportionally. Because computers are the kind of tools that can amplify an event exponentially into oblivion, it makes no sense. Human lifetimes are finite, and we serve absolutely no-one by indulging ourselves in locking up non-violent criminals away for eternity. That idea is simply frightning from a civilized stand point.
In other words, it's better to steal $1 from 1,000,000 people than to steal $1,000,000 from one person, because if you do the former with a computer, you get off scot-free, while if you do the latter, you'd be doing hard time pretty damn quickly.
In fact, that's exactly how companies operate these days - if they need more profit, they'll intentionally mis-bill you $1 or so and hope you don't call it in. Do it over a year and it's several million dollars more for the CEO's new yacht.
Then again, it's the same reasoning for not punishing people for spamming - it only costs a fraction of a penny to everyone to "just delete it", yet incurs very real costs (over all spam you receive, and over and above the added server storage and computation for filters and potentially lost false positives).
Or telemarketing - it only costs you a few seconds to say "no thanks" and hang up.
There are plenty of things that don't cost any one individual a whole lot, but do incur societal costs as a whole.
Google has been slowly making Youtube worse. First they get rid of channel customization, then they get rid of the ability to have a background image, then they start repeatedly asking for your real name and most recently they make it a requirement that you have a Google+ account to upload videos or to post comments.
Vimeo, Blip and Twitch are looking better every day.
It's even worse for content creators. Dave Jones (EEVBlog) rants about the changes that affect content creators. These include changes to the commenting system such that it's practically impossible to do a proper reply, including notifications when new comments are posted. Even worse is that all the stuff you get notified about now only happens via G+.
And Twitch is only good for gaming videos - as PS4 owners found out using the camera accessory. At one point Twitch had to ban uploads from PS4s for it, and now they've hidden those links until they're manually approved.
In that case the truck's engine is too big and you'd get better efficiency running the engine of a smaller car at a higher speed. Alas, VW 2.0L diesels don't have power take-offs, as far as I know.
The reason to have a big engine is basically "pep" or "get up and go".
That's the only reason why engines (and electric cars) need big beefy motors in the 100kW range. In fact, once you're cruising, you're actually using very little energy (you're just replacing the energy lost in the system - drag, friction, etc). But moving the big beast in the first place in a short period of time, that requires high power.
And people want pep. I mean, you can stick a small tiny fuel-efficient engine and people would complain it lacks it, despite saving tons of fuel and all the other good things.
So everything's built to handle the high power output for a brief period of time (in most cases, you cannot run the system at 100% power for very long - or even at a constant higher power rating. It's why they sell tow packages because the car manufacturers long ago realized people only use all the power for very short periods of time, so undersizing the radiators and cooling the transmission naturally is good enough). Because once you've gone from zero to 100 and merged onto the highway, it doesn't take much to maintain speed.
It's also why airplane engines are hugely derated (think - 160 cu.in. engine (approx. 5L) only making... 300hp) - they're actually required to be at high power levels for extended periods of time - 50% or more.
Also no backdoors. This alone would justify switching.
Depends on what backdoors. NSA hidden backdoors? Maybe not. Security issues? There may be plenty.
I know that many Linux systems end up quickly outdated (practically all of mine have mile-long lists of security updates waiting), mostly because you don't really want to hose your machine during development, and you end up with odd requirements like needing Ubuntu 10.04 still installed (despite it being out of LTS support in a few months).
So the big question is - how are all the updates handled? After all, after a few months you might end up with every machine still running the original version as users either fail to notice the update dialog or ignore it. (It's part of the reason why Windows defaults to installing automatically and simply forcing a reboot).
When I lived in Germany, I remember colleagues telling me of acquaintances who received similar letters (for generic filesharing, typically movies), who then caved in and paid. This is however not so common and no one told me they actually received these letters (and most people did download TV series and movies, by their own admission). I still believe these letters are sent randomly, hoping to intimidate people who are likely to have downloaded something.
Isn't it also Germany that has an odd law that states that anyone pretty much can enforce the copyright of someone else? So if a third party sees copyright infringement happening, they have a legal right to demand the activity stop and demand payment, even though they have no legal standing with the creator.
Of course, they have to remit a portion of the money collected to the original copyright holder, but if the original copyright holder can't, or won't, prosecute, someone else can do so on their behalf...
Why was there "no prior art" if Rambus simply took the JEDEC committee's ideas and created patenst? There should be VOLUMES of prior art from the JEDEC meeting minutes to people's scribbles in their notepads. You're seriously telling me that Rambus was the only company attending the meetings to take notes? And they managed to get their patents ramrodded through before anyone on the JEDEC committee decided to take their first note? Ya, no.
No, what happened is Rambus has the patents already applied for. They then influenced the standards committee to use the patented items without telling them of the patent applications.
It's not a case of Rambus patenting what was discussed in secret. It's a case of Rambus intentionally steering towards the use of patented things without notifying them (per requirements of the committee) of that pending patent application.
And that's where the "wrongness" comes in - Rambus knew that they were intentionally deceiving the standards committee into using patented technology that they did not disclose.
Standards committees using patents are fine. It's when the participants intentionally mislead the committee into choosing technology that's patented without disclosing the fact that gets everyone twisted up.
Unless you were recently dealing with a repair requiring that size drive, the mistake could have been more complicated. Hard drives did not always use 1000 as incements for size. Originally, before creative marketing took advantage of SI units, the drives were measured by actual data capacity. Perhaps your purchase was a transition period and the owner was looking at the CHS to determine the data size verses the marketed size.
I know at the time they changed how the claimed size was created a lot of confusion. My toshiba laptop with its enormous for the time 2.1 gig harddrive was actually a smaller drive using compresion to be reported as larger. Toshiba ended up replacing the drive in 1997 or so because someone was suing them. But i only found out because the CD rom needed waranty repair.
For all intents and purposes, the switch to SI happened way back in the 80s when IDE first came out and you didn't have to go enter in bad sector lists into the BIOS anymore. Heck, you probably can remember shopping for hard drives and looking at the bad sector list to find one with the least number of them.
Of course, in those days the capacity probably included using the bad sectors as well.
But the use of SI units has been around forever, when even just writing the number of bytes out was doable. (I still remember the WD press release when they announced IDE).
And I recall plenty of ads that stated "1MB = 1 Million Bytes" back in the way early 90s.
Of course, this cheat is somewhat handy for SSDs where you cannot use every byte because of FTL and other overheads in the system (including 2% bad block when new overhead - yes, up to 2% of flash can be bad from the get-go - so that 128GiB flash can have 2.5GiB in bad blocks).
Anyhow, I've had this situation happen to me - a store I frequented accidentally sent me an item I didn't order. They offered to refund me for shipping, or I could buy it at a step discount (this was like a $130 item, they offered to sell it to me for $55. Or I could send it back.). Now, I know it wasn't a scam since I dealt with the store before (and they have superb customer service), and the guy even admitted that after the costs of return shipping, $55 was about all he could hope to recover in the end. I just bought it - $55 for a $130 item including free shipping? That was a steal (and I was eyeing the item anyhow, being offered to me discounted, free shipping and in my hand now? Icing).
And I know of other stores that did the same thing - they shipped us too much of a USB3.0 card, and said we could keep it - it was a $20 item and not work the whole RMA and return shipping thing.
Of course, I was dealing with well trusted stores.
Heck, Amazon did it to me too - they switched to a new shipper and who misdelivered it. Amazon shipped a replacement and a week later, the misdelivered item arrived. I called Amazon up, they sent me a return label and everything. I went and shipped it back. When I noticed they accidentally credited my account, I called them about it - they were so kind they removed the partial credit (Amazon charged $6 for shipping -taken out of the refund), and I then realized I got the items for free. I called them back and told them, and the customer service just shrugged - they really didn't have the power to fix it, and the costs to do it all would probably have exceeded the item cost (around $40). And yes, I admitted to them I wanted to be honest and pay for the stuff I got (it was their mistake, after all).
In the end, I got free stuff, deeply discounted stuff, and a clear conscience knowing that I at least tried and got permission. Free stuff is nice. Free stuff legally acquired? Even better. And companies that know their business well know when to cut losses and when to pursue.
Zavvi has a right to ask for the product back - the problem here is using the "nuke" option instead of the "diplomacy" option. After all, instead of the letter threatening action, they could send an informativ
How can Rambus now 'licence' dead patents? Surely now the company must be wound up and consigned to the trash can of history.
Actually, it is in trouble these days - neither the PS4 nor the Xbone use RDRAM anymore. Before that, Rambus made a ton of money for RDRAM inside the PS2 (the best selling console in the world, period) and XDR-DRAM in the PS3.
But now the PS4 uses GDDR5, and the Xbone uses regular DDR3.
I torrent ("pirate") shows and I never have any of these problems. Ever. I'd rather use a service like that but not when they go out of their way to be annoying. You cannot irritate me into buying something. You can't scream at me into buying something. You can be un-obnoxious and treat me with respect and maybe I'll be more receptive to the sales pitch. Till they figure that out, it's pirate bay for me baby.
Except they can take your show off the air because of poor ratings.
Here's a secret - the ratings you see for public viewing by Neilsen is one of three numbers - Live, Live+Same Day, or Live+7 Day. But NONE of these numbers are used by stations when determining if a show is worthwhile to continue or to cancel.
Stations buy the C3 numbers - Commericals Only 3 Day numbers. The huge difference is the L/L+SD/L+7 numbers average the ratings minute-by-minute of the entire program. The C+3 numbers include the minute-by-minute ratings of the commercial breaks only - the programming ratings are NOT included. Basically the ratings stations use measure only the ads - the content is there to attract eyeballs to the ads.
Now, the only correlation is that C+3 ratings are generally very close (usually within 0.1 or 0.2) of the L+SD number.
So TV execs are perfectly happy to ignore piracy - because those people never generate revenue, they have no influence (remember the programming is there to attract eyeballs to see ads). If a show is heavily pirated, it depresses the ratings down and the show either gets its budget cut, or cancelled.
Of course, sometimes the shows still sell ads - in product placement. And it's been shown that even syndicated shows that they have product placement ads inserted into the scene - advertising stuff that wasn't even available when the show originally aired.
The other way is subscriber TV - like how Netflix, Amazon, etc are having their own TV series paid for by subscription dollars.
It's somewhat disturbing to me that in addition to not understanding the summary, I also don't understand your explanation or for that matter, what the topic under discussion even might be (other than some vague physics thing).
Also I realized apparently I don't know what a holograph is.
Basically, there are two major concepts.
First, is duality. This is where two models can represent the same system (they are duals of each other). The thing with duality is that in many cases, a problem that is impossible to solve in one model may be trivially done in another. You may know the duality between time-domain and frequency-domain systems - a convolution in one is a multiplication in the other (which is handy for some really difficult convolutions).
The other concept is a hologram. Take a traditional hologram you can buy as a souvenir - it's just a flat piece of transparent material (glass or plastic), yet look through it and you see a 3D image hovering in space - projected if you will, in 3D. And it is 3D, because you can look around the object. Yet the object is stored on a 2D medium. (FYI - the same concept applies to holographic sights - the dot is projected on the target in 3D space). Holograms are useful because they can cast higher dimensional spaces into lower dimensional spaces, yet retain the original resolution and details of the higher dimensional space (or how they get a 3D projection on a 2D surface).
Holographic theory is one where our 3D world is actually on a 2D surface. Like a hologram.
Now, what the results are is that they found a set of dual systems that represent reality - between string theory and quantum mechanics using holographic theory. In other words, they could do a calculation using string theory and have the results line up with quantum mechanics (and holograms). By proving this, a difficult problem in quantum mechanics can be translated to string theory and be easily solved there, then the results translated back, which gives the same answer as if you did it the hard way.
This sounds like exactly the right move, except for maybe not being able to serve the Chinese market like they might have in Hong Kong.
China's just more open about it than other Asian countries, to be honest. Practically every Asian country censors the Internet, and many often have very bizarre laws regarding commerce and the like. None have free speech (and have the power to arbitrarily jail and execute people).
The only reason we hear about China is they're more open about it. But practically everyone engages in the same practices and human rights violations that China does, they just do it behind closed doors and make it illegal to tell anyone about it.
And they're good at it too - a lot of them can put up a pretty face to attract foreign money, while at the same time screwing over the foreigners. It's actually quite a good display of diplomacy.
user interfaces have gotton very shitty since a lot of it is outsourced and foreign designers have a 'grid' mentality (to save cost as the ONLY thing they care about).
look at most guis, also. grids of buttons. they don't often stray from a matrix style of rows and columns. blech! there's no navigation ability (to find the button you want, quickly) when its all just anonymous style rows and cols.
I always vary my gui designs and try to make each screen very unique and easy to quickly ID.
when I build hardware, I vary the layout and use diff size and shape buttons and the more important ones are bigger and never near the dangerous ones (how many times have you seen a quit button next to a very important button, with a small mouse slip its easy to make a BIG mistake).
gui layout is an art form but we give it to 'mechanical' style people (ie, robot thinking) and for manuf costs, we mostly go with grid layouts; which is really working against us, for human factors usability.
finally, programmers won't commit to a set of features and they are also lazy. look at android. so many apps keep changing their layout. they dont' CARE if the user just learned the previous layout, they want change for change sake; and also because they were in such a rush to get something out, they have not taken enough time to think about what long-term buttons should be there and how to keep them stable from release to release (same location, color, shape and away from other 'dangerous' buttons that you don't want to hit by accident).
on the side, I design and build hardware (audio gear and test equip gear) and all of my designs use hardware buttons and I think long and hard before I pick a layout. once I do, I stick with it and the goal is to have the gear still be around and useful 20 or more years later. almost no one has that goal anymore - what a shame.
No, the big problem is that people aren't treating UI design with respect it deserves. Back in the old days, things were simple enough that an engineer could rig up a few designs that were limited in nature and work reasonably well. After all, designing a car stereo with radio buttons (yes, that's where the term comes from) was limited to mechanical ingenuity since pushing the button had to physically adjust a mechanism.
But these days, software means things can be a lot better, but we're still letting engineers design the UI - because they always have and always will. (Back in the 80s, this was still acceptable as computers were limited enough that you couldn't really stuff a million features into a program).
But these days, with all the complexity that exists, that's impossible. It's why there exists designers, specifically UI and UX designers that optimize UIs for the user. Engineers are likely to just "add another button" assuming equal importance, without really considering the user. This was fine when you only had 10 functions, but as functions are added, "adding a button" results in grids of buttons working identically because each one gets added by engineers who don't consider the overall system.
And yes, it's endemic in the entire culture - designers are often treated as secondary to the "product makers" like engineers and software developers. (This is a huge problem in open-source, where coding ability is considered #1 over other "soft skills" like UI/UX design, documentation, etc and without disciplined leadership, everyone works on "fun stuff" rather than dull boring stuff. And users are expected to be technically competent programmers rather than just plain users skilled in their area).
It's why you end up with grids of similar looking buttons, why it seems functions aren't logically grouped or why little-used functions are front-and-center while often used ones end up buried in menus 10 layers deep.
Of course, a common complaint is a UI/UX designer often "screws things up" or "simplifies too much" - true, except for the most part, users don't care about having a billion opt
Big data monopolies like Google are the stuff of nightmare for privacy-minded individuals.
But there's a silver lining to that particular cloud: as the most important player in the field, they're the most visible target for abuse of all kinds. Which means that you have a better chance of dodging the abuse if you simply don't put yourself in the center of the target, by not using any Google product.
You DO realize it's pretty much impossible to avoid Google, right?
You may think to avoid direct Google-owned services like Google Search, Mail, YouTube, Picasa, etc. etc. etc., but what about all the other Google owned stuff? Like how Google owns something like 98% of online advertising (through DoubleClick and many other ad companies they own, but don't link directly to). Or sites that use Google Analytics, Google Ad Services, Google User APIs, Google Tag Services?
And it's no better on mobile - Google owns the big guy on the block, AdMob (probably through a bunch of payments to Apple to create iAds so the DoJ and others will allow the purchase of AdMob by Google (competition! iAds is worthy!) - which to be honest, I don't see as often as AdMob ads). Funny how iAds is barely used (only on iOS apps), while AdMob is in-app ads, mobile web browsing ads, and other such things.
Last century, we had all of this capability, working, as RTP and RTSP. Of course, since that wasn't HTML-based (for very good reasons), we eneded up with DLNA, supported by hundreds, if not thousands, of devices from various vendors. Of course, Apple couldn't do anything already working and standard, which would mess up their revenue model of locking in the fanboys, so they came up with yet another protocol, as did Microsoft. Further, there are a few other minor players (Sonos, for example) that also created their own revenue-protection scheme.
DLNA and UPnP go hand in hand with Microsoft (in fact, part of the problem with DLNA is incompatible implementations between Microsoft Windows and other devices (back when it was DLNA and UPnP). This was solved years ago when DLNA and UPnP merged into one standard, which was fine as the various DLNA versions were incompatible. Yes, this is the same UPnP that opens holes in your firewall and all that - same protocol level, all done by Microsoft.
Apple's protocol is based on ZeroConf, which is an IETF standard for doing things like service discovery, except instead of broadcasts and multicasts, it relies solely on multicasted DNS (hence mDNSResponder), and is, for the most part (excepting the fact it's multicast) DNS.
AirPlay is a proprietary extension on top of it to allow output of lossless music, videos and other media. Of course, with the size of the Apple ecosystem and the age of AirPlay, changes to the system are impossible (and the keys are well known) without breaking a pile of things.
Also, with AirPlay so prevalent (it's in a lot of devices) there are more AirPlay sources than Apple devices - many Android apps support streaming output through AirPlay as a compatibility measure, and even things like XBMC support both input (i.e., it can act as an AirPlay target) and output (it can play to AirPlay targets).
Of course, if you want to be successful, make it work over Bluetooth. Sure you have A2DP, but that's an awful protocol with an even worse mandatory (lossy) codec ("high quality" 768kbps mode can sound worse than 128kbps MP3).
I think a more detailed changelog should be in order, particularly with the bugfixes presented. That way if there is an issue that I had with a prior release I can see in the changelog whether the issue has been addressed or not. If not, I can continue to nag them about the issue.
That's handled by the bug tracker. Depending on how bugs are filed, it can be external notifications (which may or may not allow direct editing, or just notification only) in which case the customer knows immediately when the fix happens, or it may go through a technical contact who's responsible for notifying customers of the bug status and if it's fixed and when to expect the fix.
Customers don't want change logs - if there's thousands of changes, it's too dense a document to actually read and figure out if a bug is in there. Even if you were technical, you might run a few keyword searches through it, or just email about the status of the issue rather than try to read a dense 20-page document containing a list of every checkin.
Bug fixes, security issues, they usually get tossed under "Bug fixes" and "Security fixes".
No slashdot article can be complete until the remark about how much colder that place was before AGW kicked in.
Actually, it could be *warmer* before AGW.
AGW has an annoying effect of moving weather away from moderation to extremes. So the cold gets colder, the warms get hotter, the temperate drier or wetter (droughts/floods), etc.
That's the main effects of climate change - the weather starts hitting the extremes. You get drought, followed by extensive flooding, followed by drought, etc. Summers get hotter still, winters get even colder.
Who wins with the Internet of Things? Corporations and Governments. If you're not a hobbyist, why do you need a *BSD-powered toaster?
The thing is, the "Internet of Things" has been toyed around with since the dot-com days. Everyone's been talking about wiring up appliances, toasters and all that.
Heck, even the common scenario has been around for decades - you ask your computer what to make for dinner, and it talks to your fridge and other appliances to figure out what you have, then consults recipes that you can make with what you have.
Then you have the fridge that notices you're running low on some stuff and places an order with the grocer.
Then there are the "smart" fridges that embed screens that let you surf the web and all that (before it was x86 boxes, now it's android tablets) .
It's only now that it's actually possible to do it all. (One of my company's products was to make embedded devices "smart" and that included stuff like vending machines and other appliances around the house - again, the internet of things, over a decade earlier).
But econ has this weird quality that makes everyone an expert in their own mind. I'm not talking about only slashdot. I notice this on almost every site, tv show, and in many real life conversations.
The thing is, we all interact with the economy - we earn money, we spend money, we pay taxes.
Of course, the BIG problem is we only interact at the microeconomic level. When you start translating things to the macroeconomic level, the rules change significantly. And this is where the disconnect happens. Things that are obvious at the micro level simply "blow up" at the macro level because you're not dealing with small interactions between few parties, but suddenly aggregate numbers of consumers against aggregate numbers of sellers
It's also why the layperson can make a very compelling case for some economic strategy that appeals to a lot of people - because it's probably true in the microeconomic sense (and everyone has experience there). The problem is very few people experience the macroeconomic picture which is where the government operates and such simple solutions get complicated very quickly when you're dealing to aggregate populations.
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Actually, it does. Because it tells the spammers that the recipient opened the email
Google doesn't fetch the image until you open the email. And the moment you do, Google just confirmed that the email was read. And that information is very valuable.
There are two ways Google can fix it:
1) Set "Don't load images" back as default again, as it is now and in every email client.
2) Simply load every image, so valuable information like that isn't revealed - the marketer just pays for bandwidth and gets zero information - they don't even know if the image is read. No storage requirements as Google can re-write the email to self-contain all the images.
Of course, Google is probably going into email marketing - given how Gmail has sprouted that "Promotions" tab (yes, you can turn it off, but don't you think it immediately foreshadows something? It's not Spam, but "Promotions" - what, spam that someone paid to bypass Google's filters?). And they don't need competition - best way to squash it is to starve out the existing marketers.
And of course, since Google's in the information business, selling that information is very valuable - Google knows what you like, so they can sell targeted ads into your inbox.
Intel started providing UEFI as an option since the turn of the millennium I believe. And Intel stopped providing BIOSes since the Core 2 chips - every board since then shipped exclusively UEFI. Of course, most don't expose it - they run a BIOS compatibility layer instead so the computer boots into UEFI and runs the BIOS application.
It's only in recent years that PC manufacturers began to expose the UEFI interface out of necessity - you can't boot from a > 2TB drive using the BIOS anymore as you hit the maximum size of partition in the MBR.
Apple has, of course, been doing this for a long while now.
Recyclers do.
There are plenty of companies that take leftover metal at scrap rates and they go and recycle the metal. Legitimate recyclers buy the metal from companies that have leftovers from metalworking. They also buy stuff like cars and other things for scrap.
Of course, the less legitimate ones have a don't-ask policy that they buy the metal (usually at a lower rate) and do it all under the table.
Depending on the city, there can be legislation that curbs such activities, and the legitimate ones often will refuse to pay in cash - they pay by cheque after a holding delay (14-30 days). Additional policies can include full records of the material (linked to police like pawnbrokers are) and ID requirements. Spot checks are often done by various parties including the media who try to test the recyclers and often report it in the papers.
Then there are "sale of stolen goods" style laws that often give the item back to the original owner, the one who paid for the stolen item is now out the item and the cash. It's happened several times when some plaque or special metal status goes missing and shows up in some recycler's lot.
Which is great, if there aren't sites that use HTTPS because they can, thus making session restore completely useless.
It's fine if it's only stuff that needs to be secure like your banking and such, but when they start securing web forums and other things....
The only reason Google "gave away" Android is because Google needed to counter the iOS threat. Remember, Google viewed the potential harm that iOS could do - it could lock Google out of the advertising business (being that Google owned the vast majority of online ad networks, and the iPhone couldn't show Flash ads that were extremely popular) in the mobile market. Google was forced to buy and release Android so they'd always have a hook. (And Google may have paid Apple to create iAds - so they could avoid DoJ scrutiny over their purchase of mobile advertising heavyweight AdMob).
Remember, Android exists because Google felt threatened that Apple could cut Google off at any point, thus depriving Google of their main source of revenue.
With this in mind, Google has already been heavy handed - the OHA version is different from the AOSP version, and you need the OHA version if you want to release a phone. And doing so meant you obliged by the OHA terms (which included the inability to load in replacements of Google Apps - so no cometing Maps or other services were allowed). Or even the thought of creating a phone that COULD run Android apps could get you kicked out of the OHA, as Acer found out when they wanted to release a phone with a mobile OS that had Android compatibility layer.
In fact, Google's been locking features out of AOSP for a while now - a lot of new features aren't in AOSP as Google has made them closed-source apps. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
Of course, Google can do this as tney no longer need Android open-sourced anymore - it's achieved its goal of preventing Google from being locked out of iOS/mobile. In fact, the biggest threat to Google is AOSP (see Kindle), hence closed-sourcing of features.
Oh yeah, the privacy features in Android were removed because they interfered with Google's revenue - ads. Remember how I said Google owns the largest ad networks? They also own the largest mobile ad network as well. It's curious how a two-bit ad network like iAds could even be considered a "competitor" - most ads on iOS are again done by a Google-owned company rather than iAds.
Wikipedia reminds me of the book Animal Farm, which was originally written as a critique on Communism. Yet it appears we reached the exact same conclusions that we got nearly 70 years ago - everyone who edits is equal, but some are more equal than others.
to be honest, it's really a wonderful experiment to see how even though we're all supposedly well educated in the matter, humans STILL end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Yet if you do not enable multiple account signins, Google will be more than happy to merge your accounts together. It's constantly asking even post-merge if I want to keep my youtube signin and name versus using my G+ profile.
There's a setting to enable multiple account signins - I use it as I have a Gmail and a GApps account which are separate from each other (The GApps came from an friend's hosting account who moved all the stuff to Google). In the personal profile, go to your settings and enable multiple sign-in (it's off by default presuming you want to avoid the situation where you have a few dozen tabs all logged in and mass confusion). Just enable it, then log out of both accounts. Log into your main account then open a new tab and you should be able to log into your school account.
In other words, it's better to steal $1 from 1,000,000 people than to steal $1,000,000 from one person, because if you do the former with a computer, you get off scot-free, while if you do the latter, you'd be doing hard time pretty damn quickly.
In fact, that's exactly how companies operate these days - if they need more profit, they'll intentionally mis-bill you $1 or so and hope you don't call it in. Do it over a year and it's several million dollars more for the CEO's new yacht.
Then again, it's the same reasoning for not punishing people for spamming - it only costs a fraction of a penny to everyone to "just delete it", yet incurs very real costs (over all spam you receive, and over and above the added server storage and computation for filters and potentially lost false positives).
Or telemarketing - it only costs you a few seconds to say "no thanks" and hang up.
There are plenty of things that don't cost any one individual a whole lot, but do incur societal costs as a whole.
It's even worse for content creators. Dave Jones (EEVBlog) rants about the changes that affect content creators. These include changes to the commenting system such that it's practically impossible to do a proper reply, including notifications when new comments are posted. Even worse is that all the stuff you get notified about now only happens via G+.
And Twitch is only good for gaming videos - as PS4 owners found out using the camera accessory. At one point Twitch had to ban uploads from PS4s for it, and now they've hidden those links until they're manually approved.
Vimeo might be the best alternative.
The reason to have a big engine is basically "pep" or "get up and go".
That's the only reason why engines (and electric cars) need big beefy motors in the 100kW range. In fact, once you're cruising, you're actually using very little energy (you're just replacing the energy lost in the system - drag, friction, etc). But moving the big beast in the first place in a short period of time, that requires high power.
And people want pep. I mean, you can stick a small tiny fuel-efficient engine and people would complain it lacks it, despite saving tons of fuel and all the other good things.
So everything's built to handle the high power output for a brief period of time (in most cases, you cannot run the system at 100% power for very long - or even at a constant higher power rating. It's why they sell tow packages because the car manufacturers long ago realized people only use all the power for very short periods of time, so undersizing the radiators and cooling the transmission naturally is good enough). Because once you've gone from zero to 100 and merged onto the highway, it doesn't take much to maintain speed.
It's also why airplane engines are hugely derated (think - 160 cu.in. engine (approx. 5L) only making... 300hp) - they're actually required to be at high power levels for extended periods of time - 50% or more.
Depends on what backdoors. NSA hidden backdoors? Maybe not. Security issues? There may be plenty.
I know that many Linux systems end up quickly outdated (practically all of mine have mile-long lists of security updates waiting), mostly because you don't really want to hose your machine during development, and you end up with odd requirements like needing Ubuntu 10.04 still installed (despite it being out of LTS support in a few months).
So the big question is - how are all the updates handled? After all, after a few months you might end up with every machine still running the original version as users either fail to notice the update dialog or ignore it. (It's part of the reason why Windows defaults to installing automatically and simply forcing a reboot).
Isn't it also Germany that has an odd law that states that anyone pretty much can enforce the copyright of someone else? So if a third party sees copyright infringement happening, they have a legal right to demand the activity stop and demand payment, even though they have no legal standing with the creator.
Of course, they have to remit a portion of the money collected to the original copyright holder, but if the original copyright holder can't, or won't, prosecute, someone else can do so on their behalf...
No, what happened is Rambus has the patents already applied for. They then influenced the standards committee to use the patented items without telling them of the patent applications.
It's not a case of Rambus patenting what was discussed in secret. It's a case of Rambus intentionally steering towards the use of patented things without notifying them (per requirements of the committee) of that pending patent application.
And that's where the "wrongness" comes in - Rambus knew that they were intentionally deceiving the standards committee into using patented technology that they did not disclose.
Standards committees using patents are fine. It's when the participants intentionally mislead the committee into choosing technology that's patented without disclosing the fact that gets everyone twisted up.
For all intents and purposes, the switch to SI happened way back in the 80s when IDE first came out and you didn't have to go enter in bad sector lists into the BIOS anymore. Heck, you probably can remember shopping for hard drives and looking at the bad sector list to find one with the least number of them.
Of course, in those days the capacity probably included using the bad sectors as well.
But the use of SI units has been around forever, when even just writing the number of bytes out was doable. (I still remember the WD press release when they announced IDE).
And I recall plenty of ads that stated "1MB = 1 Million Bytes" back in the way early 90s.
Of course, this cheat is somewhat handy for SSDs where you cannot use every byte because of FTL and other overheads in the system (including 2% bad block when new overhead - yes, up to 2% of flash can be bad from the get-go - so that 128GiB flash can have 2.5GiB in bad blocks).
Anyhow, I've had this situation happen to me - a store I frequented accidentally sent me an item I didn't order. They offered to refund me for shipping, or I could buy it at a step discount (this was like a $130 item, they offered to sell it to me for $55. Or I could send it back.). Now, I know it wasn't a scam since I dealt with the store before (and they have superb customer service), and the guy even admitted that after the costs of return shipping, $55 was about all he could hope to recover in the end. I just bought it - $55 for a $130 item including free shipping? That was a steal (and I was eyeing the item anyhow, being offered to me discounted, free shipping and in my hand now? Icing).
And I know of other stores that did the same thing - they shipped us too much of a USB3.0 card, and said we could keep it - it was a $20 item and not work the whole RMA and return shipping thing.
Of course, I was dealing with well trusted stores.
Heck, Amazon did it to me too - they switched to a new shipper and who misdelivered it. Amazon shipped a replacement and a week later, the misdelivered item arrived. I called Amazon up, they sent me a return label and everything. I went and shipped it back. When I noticed they accidentally credited my account, I called them about it - they were so kind they removed the partial credit (Amazon charged $6 for shipping -taken out of the refund), and I then realized I got the items for free. I called them back and told them, and the customer service just shrugged - they really didn't have the power to fix it, and the costs to do it all would probably have exceeded the item cost (around $40). And yes, I admitted to them I wanted to be honest and pay for the stuff I got (it was their mistake, after all).
In the end, I got free stuff, deeply discounted stuff, and a clear conscience knowing that I at least tried and got permission. Free stuff is nice. Free stuff legally acquired? Even better. And companies that know their business well know when to cut losses and when to pursue.
Zavvi has a right to ask for the product back - the problem here is using the "nuke" option instead of the "diplomacy" option. After all, instead of the letter threatening action, they could send an informativ
Actually, it is in trouble these days - neither the PS4 nor the Xbone use RDRAM anymore. Before that, Rambus made a ton of money for RDRAM inside the PS2 (the best selling console in the world, period) and XDR-DRAM in the PS3.
But now the PS4 uses GDDR5, and the Xbone uses regular DDR3.
Except they can take your show off the air because of poor ratings.
Here's a secret - the ratings you see for public viewing by Neilsen is one of three numbers - Live, Live+Same Day, or Live+7 Day. But NONE of these numbers are used by stations when determining if a show is worthwhile to continue or to cancel.
Stations buy the C3 numbers - Commericals Only 3 Day numbers. The huge difference is the L/L+SD/L+7 numbers average the ratings minute-by-minute of the entire program. The C+3 numbers include the minute-by-minute ratings of the commercial breaks only - the programming ratings are NOT included. Basically the ratings stations use measure only the ads - the content is there to attract eyeballs to the ads.
Now, the only correlation is that C+3 ratings are generally very close (usually within 0.1 or 0.2) of the L+SD number.
So TV execs are perfectly happy to ignore piracy - because those people never generate revenue, they have no influence (remember the programming is there to attract eyeballs to see ads). If a show is heavily pirated, it depresses the ratings down and the show either gets its budget cut, or cancelled.
Of course, sometimes the shows still sell ads - in product placement. And it's been shown that even syndicated shows that they have product placement ads inserted into the scene - advertising stuff that wasn't even available when the show originally aired.
The other way is subscriber TV - like how Netflix, Amazon, etc are having their own TV series paid for by subscription dollars.
Basically, there are two major concepts.
First, is duality. This is where two models can represent the same system (they are duals of each other). The thing with duality is that in many cases, a problem that is impossible to solve in one model may be trivially done in another. You may know the duality between time-domain and frequency-domain systems - a convolution in one is a multiplication in the other (which is handy for some really difficult convolutions).
The other concept is a hologram. Take a traditional hologram you can buy as a souvenir - it's just a flat piece of transparent material (glass or plastic), yet look through it and you see a 3D image hovering in space - projected if you will, in 3D. And it is 3D, because you can look around the object. Yet the object is stored on a 2D medium. (FYI - the same concept applies to holographic sights - the dot is projected on the target in 3D space). Holograms are useful because they can cast higher dimensional spaces into lower dimensional spaces, yet retain the original resolution and details of the higher dimensional space (or how they get a 3D projection on a 2D surface).
Holographic theory is one where our 3D world is actually on a 2D surface. Like a hologram.
Now, what the results are is that they found a set of dual systems that represent reality - between string theory and quantum mechanics using holographic theory. In other words, they could do a calculation using string theory and have the results line up with quantum mechanics (and holograms). By proving this, a difficult problem in quantum mechanics can be translated to string theory and be easily solved there, then the results translated back, which gives the same answer as if you did it the hard way.
China's just more open about it than other Asian countries, to be honest. Practically every Asian country censors the Internet, and many often have very bizarre laws regarding commerce and the like. None have free speech (and have the power to arbitrarily jail and execute people).
The only reason we hear about China is they're more open about it. But practically everyone engages in the same practices and human rights violations that China does, they just do it behind closed doors and make it illegal to tell anyone about it.
And they're good at it too - a lot of them can put up a pretty face to attract foreign money, while at the same time screwing over the foreigners. It's actually quite a good display of diplomacy.
No, the big problem is that people aren't treating UI design with respect it deserves. Back in the old days, things were simple enough that an engineer could rig up a few designs that were limited in nature and work reasonably well. After all, designing a car stereo with radio buttons (yes, that's where the term comes from) was limited to mechanical ingenuity since pushing the button had to physically adjust a mechanism.
But these days, software means things can be a lot better, but we're still letting engineers design the UI - because they always have and always will. (Back in the 80s, this was still acceptable as computers were limited enough that you couldn't really stuff a million features into a program).
But these days, with all the complexity that exists, that's impossible. It's why there exists designers, specifically UI and UX designers that optimize UIs for the user. Engineers are likely to just "add another button" assuming equal importance, without really considering the user. This was fine when you only had 10 functions, but as functions are added, "adding a button" results in grids of buttons working identically because each one gets added by engineers who don't consider the overall system.
And yes, it's endemic in the entire culture - designers are often treated as secondary to the "product makers" like engineers and software developers. (This is a huge problem in open-source, where coding ability is considered #1 over other "soft skills" like UI/UX design, documentation, etc and without disciplined leadership, everyone works on "fun stuff" rather than dull boring stuff. And users are expected to be technically competent programmers rather than just plain users skilled in their area).
It's why you end up with grids of similar looking buttons, why it seems functions aren't logically grouped or why little-used functions are front-and-center while often used ones end up buried in menus 10 layers deep.
Of course, a common complaint is a UI/UX designer often "screws things up" or "simplifies too much" - true, except for the most part, users don't care about having a billion opt
You DO realize it's pretty much impossible to avoid Google, right?
You may think to avoid direct Google-owned services like Google Search, Mail, YouTube, Picasa, etc. etc. etc., but what about all the other Google owned stuff? Like how Google owns something like 98% of online advertising (through DoubleClick and many other ad companies they own, but don't link directly to). Or sites that use Google Analytics, Google Ad Services, Google User APIs, Google Tag Services?
And it's no better on mobile - Google owns the big guy on the block, AdMob (probably through a bunch of payments to Apple to create iAds so the DoJ and others will allow the purchase of AdMob by Google (competition! iAds is worthy!) - which to be honest, I don't see as often as AdMob ads). Funny how iAds is barely used (only on iOS apps), while AdMob is in-app ads, mobile web browsing ads, and other such things.
DLNA and UPnP go hand in hand with Microsoft (in fact, part of the problem with DLNA is incompatible implementations between Microsoft Windows and other devices (back when it was DLNA and UPnP). This was solved years ago when DLNA and UPnP merged into one standard, which was fine as the various DLNA versions were incompatible. Yes, this is the same UPnP that opens holes in your firewall and all that - same protocol level, all done by Microsoft.
Apple's protocol is based on ZeroConf, which is an IETF standard for doing things like service discovery, except instead of broadcasts and multicasts, it relies solely on multicasted DNS (hence mDNSResponder), and is, for the most part (excepting the fact it's multicast) DNS.
AirPlay is a proprietary extension on top of it to allow output of lossless music, videos and other media. Of course, with the size of the Apple ecosystem and the age of AirPlay, changes to the system are impossible (and the keys are well known) without breaking a pile of things.
Also, with AirPlay so prevalent (it's in a lot of devices) there are more AirPlay sources than Apple devices - many Android apps support streaming output through AirPlay as a compatibility measure, and even things like XBMC support both input (i.e., it can act as an AirPlay target) and output (it can play to AirPlay targets).
Of course, if you want to be successful, make it work over Bluetooth. Sure you have A2DP, but that's an awful protocol with an even worse mandatory (lossy) codec ("high quality" 768kbps mode can sound worse than 128kbps MP3).
That's handled by the bug tracker. Depending on how bugs are filed, it can be external notifications (which may or may not allow direct editing, or just notification only) in which case the customer knows immediately when the fix happens, or it may go through a technical contact who's responsible for notifying customers of the bug status and if it's fixed and when to expect the fix.
Customers don't want change logs - if there's thousands of changes, it's too dense a document to actually read and figure out if a bug is in there. Even if you were technical, you might run a few keyword searches through it, or just email about the status of the issue rather than try to read a dense 20-page document containing a list of every checkin.
Bug fixes, security issues, they usually get tossed under "Bug fixes" and "Security fixes".
Actually, it could be *warmer* before AGW.
AGW has an annoying effect of moving weather away from moderation to extremes. So the cold gets colder, the warms get hotter, the temperate drier or wetter (droughts/floods), etc.
That's the main effects of climate change - the weather starts hitting the extremes. You get drought, followed by extensive flooding, followed by drought, etc. Summers get hotter still, winters get even colder.
The thing is, the "Internet of Things" has been toyed around with since the dot-com days. Everyone's been talking about wiring up appliances, toasters and all that.
Heck, even the common scenario has been around for decades - you ask your computer what to make for dinner, and it talks to your fridge and other appliances to figure out what you have, then consults recipes that you can make with what you have.
Then you have the fridge that notices you're running low on some stuff and places an order with the grocer.
Then there are the "smart" fridges that embed screens that let you surf the web and all that (before it was x86 boxes, now it's android tablets) .
It's only now that it's actually possible to do it all. (One of my company's products was to make embedded devices "smart" and that included stuff like vending machines and other appliances around the house - again, the internet of things, over a decade earlier).
The thing is, we all interact with the economy - we earn money, we spend money, we pay taxes.
Of course, the BIG problem is we only interact at the microeconomic level. When you start translating things to the macroeconomic level, the rules change significantly. And this is where the disconnect happens. Things that are obvious at the micro level simply "blow up" at the macro level because you're not dealing with small interactions between few parties, but suddenly aggregate numbers of consumers against aggregate numbers of sellers
It's also why the layperson can make a very compelling case for some economic strategy that appeals to a lot of people - because it's probably true in the microeconomic sense (and everyone has experience there). The problem is very few people experience the macroeconomic picture which is where the government operates and such simple solutions get complicated very quickly when you're dealing to aggregate populations.