It does NOTHING to stop "metadata" collection - your IP packets still have source and destination addresses that have to be encoded in ways anyone can decode it (i.e., if you encrypt that, then every router needs to be able to decrypt it, making it essentially plaintext). Note: Tor solves this problem.
It does nothing about traffic flow fingerprinting - that is, examining how the packets evolve over time to figure out traffic. It's possible to differentiate HTTP traffic from SSH and others just by watching enough packets.
All encryption gets you is the ability to hide the contents of the transmission. Whether or not it's useful depends on a lot of factors. But let's just say with traffic flows the way it is, metadata analysis wil probably get you most of the way. And sometimes a little ingenuity can solve the content problem - e.g., if the target IP is a web host and the traffic flow implies HTTP, then the content can be reasonably inferred to be some HTTP content contained on the server, so all you need is to find out what domains that machine hosts.
Someone encodes something in VP9 that I actually want to watch.
Actually, next-gen codec fights are on NOW.
The war of VP8/h.264 is lost. Get over it, move on and try to get in the next gen. Whether it's h.265 or VP9 or some other codec, it's not decided yet.
The time to move is NOW to get VP9 spec all complete (not a code based spec like VP8, but a proper spec that details everything on paper - "read the code" is NOT a valid solution here) and everywhere.
Get demonstrations working and ready. Get on working groups for next-gen formats (including MPEG, SMPTE etc) to promote and push VP9. Even pursue it on next-gen Blu-Ray formats.
Even get hardware guys involved making available royalty free hardware accelerated encode and decode blocks so it can be incorporated "for free".
The VP9 fight is starting, and it would be silly to concentrated on lost fights (h.264/VP8) when the playfield is completely level again and waiting for entrants.
THe 6502 was an amazing processor. the Apple II was also a 6502. Unlike it's near contemporaries, the 8086 and Z-80 (and 6800), the instruction set was reduced.
The reason for the popularity of the 6502 came down to one factor - cost. An 8086, 68000, Z80, etc., would've run you about $200 or so, while MOS was selling the 6502 for... $20. And you got a databook too.
The 6800 from Motorola was supposed to be the "cheap" chip (compared to the 68000), but it was still pricey - enough so that a bunch of Motorola engineers broke away and formed MOS and designed a 6800 workalike. This they called the 6500. Motorola sued them for releasing a competing product (it was basically pin-compatible), so what they did was switch a few pins around and re-released the 6500 as the 6502.
So that and the cost of it meant a lot of hobbyists used 6502s including one little company named after a fruit.
In the situations I've encountered turnaround time hasn't been the bottleneck keeping smaller businesses from automating things with robots. Maybe there are some cases where you really need custom stuff on the spot, but more often you can wait a week. The problem is that at small scale stuff is expensive and high-overhead. If you want one industrial robot, you are going to pay a lot for it, and you are going to incur a lot of labor costs just getting the thing to work.
It depends on a lot of factors.
One reason why China employs a lot of humans to make stuff is because they're not only cheap, but adaptable - there's very little time required to make a change during production to fix an issue that arises. If you're doing it automated, waiting a week can be a disaster if in the middle of a production run for holidays you discover a flaw.
Turnaround time is important if you want to have products on shelves by a certain date - you usually work around it because you know how far in advance everything has to be lined up and work backwards - it's why you have stuff like day 1 patches and all that (because you're looking at months from when you must begin production to when the product is in consumer's hands).
Then there are those who service the Wal-marts and the like, where a week delay simply means instead of being put out front and center, someone else's product is in that spot and you're relegated to some obscure part of the store where the stockers could find space.
And the reason most people don't see these is because the business already builds it into their production schedule - programming robots takes a week, so you "ship" a week earlier.
There's no doubt that the PS4 and Xbone will be jailbroken. Probably quite quickly - they ARE x86 units after all. They really are really fancy derivatives of the original Xbox, and that thing was cracked 10 ways to sunday.
Hell, it might be preferable to have a launch unit where it's easily hacked than a later model where the hacks are far less available and definitely not soft-moddable.
You can get almost all of the same games for the PC you're using to emulate the console. They're probably much cheaper on the PC. The PC versions will probably work better than the console versions plus the emulator. The online functions of the consoles will probably never work on the emulator.
It seems like a lot of effort to build something inferior.
It depends.
A lot of PC releases these days are $60, and ship months after the console release. (You do get the odd one that's same day - usually limited to FPSes and such).
If it's an indie game, you're correct on all counts - the PC version will be cheaper and better. But if it's an "AAA" game, then chances are the price will be same as consoles, released months afterwards and be an inferior port.
The problem is piracy has killed a chunk of the PC gaming market - when 90% piracy numbers are considered "normal". Indies, who really are less about making a ton of money and more about getting mind-share, don't care - piracy definitely helps them (think free advertising). Plus the low dev costs of PCs generally mean it's easy and cheap to develop.
But the others look at the numbers and decline - the PC port of a game that sells out on consoles may only break even at best in real terms.
In general, to the big players, the ROI of PC is poor.
Of course, it's also meant that the PC has a huge pile of smaller developers making more innovative games, and coupled with mobile platforms encouraging indie development, the loss of AAA hasn't REALLY hurt the PC much - there's still plenty of good games for it. It's only if you want AAA games that you'll find the PC lacking (say, Grand Theft Auto 5, spring 2014).
It's also why Microsoft and Sony are tripping over themselves trying to attract the indie crowd.
Do the math. OP's dad was in his prime working years at the height of the PC revolution all the way up to the launch of the Web. 1982 was 31 years ago. OP's father was 44 or younger. And there wasn't nearly as much age discrimination back then. Let's say dad took early retirement at 62, 13 years ago. That was 2000. That was already the height of the dot-com bubble. Everybody in the office was shopping online at lunch (at other times too), and trading online.
In 1982, kids and computer geeks had PCs. Most kids used them to play games. The office would have maybe 2-3 PCs (remember they started around $5000 or so for an IBM and rose to $10,000 if you went fully tricked out), so maybe the CEO or VP had 'em on their desk. And the accountant, being that accounting was a very popular killer app back then. But the vast majority of people did things the old way.
The real computerization started in the 90s where everyone started having PCs on their desks and were expected to start using it. Probably around 1991 when Windows 3.1 was released (and wildly popular).
And online shopping really only took off about 5-6 years ago - sure people have been doing online shopping and auctions for years before, but a surprisingly large number of people didn't bother and didn't trust it (I still know people who don't do online shopping. It's a pain when they ask me for gift ideas). Don't confuse the internet-savvy with the general population - if the dot-com shopping boom really worked, there wouldn't have been a bust.
I hate to say it, but some people can't think even if forced to at gun point or with the promise of vast wealth. I (as an adult learner) was in a class of high school students learning CNC and manual machining. I told them about my father, a CNC programmer of over 40 years experience, and how his tax refund was almost always more than I made for any given year. The instructor backed me up, stating that he made a lot of his yearly income doing side projects and contract work during the summer.
I couldn't believe it. Some of these kids had "squirrel brains", as one so eloquently put it. Many of them dropped out of the class to become welders. It really was the best they could do. I was shocked at the demonstrated lack of (talent/drive/intelligence - pick one).
Everyone is different. Not everyone can figure out the logic behind code, or algorithms. There's a certain bit of skill required in being able to be told "I need to total up this list of numbers" and being able to take a conceptual leap to telling a machine how to do it precisely, step by step.
Just like on the CNC - you probably have the skills and knowledge on how to take the starting block and the final desired output and command the CNC to manipulate it to generate the output. And possibly the skill to realize which actions are redundant and just slow the entire process down. But to do so generally requires a level of spatial reasoning to figure out which bits you need, and how much you can remove at a time.
There are plenty of people who don't really get "thinking" type jobs and prefer more hands-on type jobs (e.g., welding). They probably can be extremely proficient and skillful welders too, and able to detect just by looking when a weld is bad. Or knowing how the sound the welder makes can tell you how good a welder someone is.
Different sets of skills, intuition and other things are required.
Coding is really the same - there are leaps of logic and skills that not everyone has. And it's not for lack of trying - we all love to rage on Visual Basic, but there's a language that DID try to make coding easy for everyone. Of course, look where it is today to realize that sometimes, everyone being a coder isn't a good thing.
Let me go rah rah for you. If 23andme is so shitty at providing accurate medical information to aid the lay person in evaluating their results then the MARKET will put them out of business as consumers will a) stop using them and b) competitors who provide better service will emerge.
If you believe that, I have some snake oil to sell you. In fact, that's why the FDA was created - people were making tons of money selling hokey products that claim to improve your life, from poisons to strange electro-stimulator devices. Chances are, they didn't work, and if you were lucky, you weren't worse off for it (if not, death, chronic disease (more sales!) was your fate). But enough people did get sick and die that people wanted "something to be done".
The problem is the market cannot decide - because the chances and everything is so vague and time delayed that how do you really know? It's like predicting the weather.
So you have a "greater than normal chance" of some disease. What do you do? Do you change your lifestyle? What if you got it anyways? (The big problem is genetics just tells you how prone you are to something. The environment contributes significantly to whether or not you actually get it).
Or take cancer. Perhaps the genetic test says you're less likely to get melanoma. Does it mean you can avoid sunscreen and tan yourself until you're completely charred safe in knowing you probably won't get melanoma?
And hell, fake medical information is bad. See anti-vaccination groups bringing back diseases that were well under control or even eradicated (e.g., smallpox) only a couple of decades earlier.
Really? Apples IAD network is driven by data culled from users of Itunes, Iradio etc. Iad is sold as "targeted by exclusive consumption data exclusive to Apple." Buy you joining their network, you are buying this data, ergo Apple is selling it.
Newsflash - no one uses iAds.
In fact, I can bet Google paid Apple to develop iAd so Google can acquire AdMob, the #1 ad network for mobile devices. Remember, the DoJ was investigating Google over the purchase and decided that iAd was a worthy competitor to AdMob and thus let Google had the sale.
AdMob is everywhere, iAds is not. iAds only work on iOS devices. AdMob works on iOS abd Android (80% of smartphone market, remember?) and probably other devices as well (Windows Phone, BlackBerry).
In fact, Google is probably the only company funding iAd - it's such a poor ROI for everyone involved that Apple should shut it down. Of course, Google won't let them because it puts Google under potential anti-trust.
I'm amazed that they were able to eradicate small pox
Actually, it's not eradicated, and it's actually making a comeback (thanks to the anti-vaxxers).
Smallpox, It wasn't eradicated from the world (many third world countries have outbreaks), but generally in North America and Europe, the chances of contracting it were nil. It's why they started going after chickenpox as well.
Anyhow, those with a medical reason to not get vaccinated don't generally hang out with others who aren't vaccinated as well, so they get some herd immunity.
It's the likes of Jenny McCarthy and their ilk - like attracts like so you end up with whole groups who aren't immunized congregating together and regularly and who will rapidly pass disease from one to another. One person in a herd not having it is fine. A whole herd not having it means the entire herd gets it.
I have a 40Ah battery in my car (at 12V, that's 480 Wh). If it were drawing like a Model S, it would be dead in under half a day... I often go *weeks* without driving.
45W is huge. Your phone in active standby (screen off) is probably around 45mW... A Macbook Air under load is 45W. That is an *astronomical* amount of energy in standby. Even the cellular connection can only account for, maybe, 1W. Is this for the auto door pulls? Battery heaters?
Isn't the model number the kWh of the battery pack? The 85 is an 85kWh car, right?
So, you know, when you go on vacation, make sure to leave your car plugged in...
Well, the high voltage battery constantly charges the 12V battery, and the 12V battery enables the contactors for the high voltage battery (as a safety feature). If you remove the 12V battery, the high voltage battery disconnects automatically (if you're needing to rescue someone inside, the rescuer manual says to cut the 12V battery cables to disconnect the high-voltage battery).
I suppose part of it could be to power the big relays that connect the battery to the rest of the high voltage lines. (remember, those things have to pass a huge amount of current, so the 12V coil may have to be fairly beefy).
It's also just a relay - unlatched. Remove the battery and the HV disconnects. Reconnect it and the HV reconnects.
Not sure if you guys are trolling or just misinformed. Windows bugs have long since ceased to be the exploit mechanism for viruses; last time I saw a breakdown on it (a year or so ago) it was something like 35% java holes, 25% adobe acrobat holes, 20% adobe flash holes, 10% browser holes, and a small percentage of OS vulnearabilities.
Additionally, since Vista, Windows' "security" has generally been as good or better than its competitors; it had strong ASLR before OSX / Linux, for starters. The issue is that none of that stuff protects against A) buggy plugins, or B) user-executed viruses (aka trojans). The other big issue is that theres been a ton of misinformation on the issue, particularly by Apple's marketing; Im really not clear why anyone would take advertising at face value, or assume that it is technically accurate. Didnt Apple fall FIRST in the first 5-6 Pwn2Own competitions?
And those vulnerabilities exist just to run user-mode worms, in the end - because having an administrator prompt suddenly appear without warning is a sure sign of an infection.
Despite all the rootkits and other stuff, if they can't find a privilege escalation hole, it runs in the background as a user-mode process - you don't need to be root to connect to port 25 or read a user's files, after all.
As for Pwn2Own, the results really are meaningless - if you break OS X, you win a MacBook. If you break Windows, you get a Sony laptop. If you break Linux, you get a Dell. And they aren't necessarily the nicest machines on the lineup, either.
Well geez, Apple, Sony, Dell. If you wanted a new laptop, which do you pick? Most people DO like the looks of a MacBook Pro (even the lowest end configuration is still a nice looking laptop). Then likely Sony comes next (their laptops are fairly good looking). Which leaves the Dell, for those who just want a laptop and try to avoid the massive crowds going for the more desirable units.
Results may be more interesting if they all were Macbooks or something so they'd all be equally desirable.
It's just the same if you offered up an iPhone 5s, a Galaxy S4, a Blackberry Q10 or Z10 and other phones. The iPhone will go first (generally), followed by the Galaxy S4 (it's still a nice phone), and BlackBerry probably will "survive" - does it make their OS more secure? Or just less desirable?
I have a couple of calculator apps on the Android market. Obviously, a calculator has zero need for any of your personal data, and that's how much I collect -- zero.
I recently received an email from "Appayable.com". They provide me with a spyware module to add to my apps. The spyware module collects users' personal data and uploads it to Appayable.com. I get paid. Profit!
They say they only sell anonymized data, but I still thought it was a pretty reprehensible business model. I suspect it's pretty common practice, though.
So a question is - are your apps free? Or do I have to cough up $$$ for them?
If they're free, then how do you eat? Do you just do this as a side hobby?
And that's the key - a lot of people do this to make money, and the problem is the Android business model makes it very hard to do so (Google Play store revenue for developers is but a tiny fraction of Amazon App Store, - something like 1/3rd or less). This is in part due to the limitations of Google Wallet making non-free apps have less visibility. Especially in the early days where Android was everywhere, but paid apps was US-only. (The irony being that as a Canadian company that released an app, we couldn't even BUY OUR OWN APP!)
So people hitched onto the ad-supported model (adware) - developers need the money, and the longer you can keep users using your app, the more money you make.
Naturally, Google benefits, owning one of the larger mobile advertising companies out there. But there are others.
And yes, developers seeking to make money from apps will integrate those modules in - easy money and they get to set the price to free, eliminating a lot of barriers to installation.
Their flashlight app was requesting network and GPS privs? There's obviously a fundamental problem with the Android security model, and I'm just going to go ahead and point my finger at people. First off, people assume that just because it's on the Play store, it's safe to install. Obviously not the case. Second, people obviously don't review the privs their apps request and say something like "Why the fuck does a flashlight app need access to my GPS and network?"
The problem with the Android permissions model is it gives power to the technical, while ignoring the typical.
The thing is, the Dancing Pigs (or rabbits) phenomena is real, and users who get recommended to try an app will want to try it. You can pop up a dozen dialog boxes saying it's bad, but the user will dutifully close them just to run the app.
Relying on the user to secure themselves has proven to be ineffectual, and it's shown itself repeatedly. Even on iOS - you can get a user to do some pretty amazing things if you walk them through the steps and the outcome is something they want. (It's how various worms that relied on jailbreaks spread - users installed OpenSSH, dutifully installed SSH clients, and failed to change the default password).
Hell, you probably can harvest a ton of passwords to Google, Facebook, Twitter and others if you set up a site that offers "free porn!" and lets them use those sites to "log into" your site (where you're capturing the usernames and passwords, of course).
Mozilla could have used the money to encourage people to write free software.
And that would accomplish very little of note, to be honest.
Yes, they could've, and maybe they even should've, but if you're trying to get developers to your platform, it doesn't help your cause to force their hand. Especially if it's a new platform that they have to learn new stuff on, and the ROI is uncertain enough that really, there's no point to.
After all, If you want to write a game, you can do so under plenty of engines, Unity being fairly cross platform, and if you're willing to install a browser, there you go. Or you can then port it to Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, Android, and consoles and skip the web.
Forcing it to be open-source just means you'll probably get a few dinky ports of existing open-source games which the public probably will see and then promptly ignore.
It's really like Android - why did Google give it permissive open-source? Because they knew if they released it under GPL and the like, no one would bother with it, and given the goal was to counter the iOS threat back then, having as many people as possible get to use it is a really good strategy. (Though it's starting to backfire since Google has been having to close off more and more of it as competition using the open-source version get popular. The goal being that anyone using AOSP would have to write a ton of code just to get it up to where you'd be with Google).
I don't have much sympathy for Google in the patents arms race. Google was aware what the rules of the game were, they were aware Apple had patented the wazoo out of the iPhone ("And BOY have we patented it!" - Steve Jobs, iPhone Introduction), and yet they copied anyway.
Actually, Google's been good about respecting those patents. The most famous "rounded corners" patent isn't even valid on default Android - it's the custom shells that people put on, notably, TouchWiz, that violates the patent. (It didn't help that the Galaxy S was immediately called an "iPhone clone" by reviewers because it pretty much worked like an iPhone).
But if you stuck with Android by default, you were in the clear because the conditions necessary for the rounded corners patent was never satisfied with stock Android. It's why Apple never went after Google because they didn't have a case. But Samsung basically copied it, save a few minor details.
Of course, TouchWiz doesn't include that anymore, preferring to go with a much more Android-y look.
Initially the Wall Street guys were against Bitcoin because they couldn't figure out how to make money off of it. But now they've studied it and studied it and studied it, and now you're seeing the results of the research - they've found ways to manipulate it in the same fashion as regular currency markets.
BoA is just the start - expect the rest of Wall Street to start investing heavily in Bitcoins as they try to eke out fractional coins on every transaction. And the Bitcoin infrastructure is near the point where it's "too big to fail" - even if it crashes, there's too much entrenched to abandon it completely, creating a perfect opportunity for the suits to actually acquire even more cheaply.
Oh yeah, they'll probably also find a way to do HFT using it, so get ready to parse billions of new entries in the blockchain. Don't underestimate the mathematical prowess of bankers - once they show interest, they've found ways to make money off it.
Unless the efficiency is high, you're basically paying more to charge your car than if you just plugged it in.
True, but it can be like WiFi where the convenience trumps the inefficiency. Think public charging spaces - you park your car, pay the parking fee (which can include the cost of the charge) and walk away. You save yourself the hassle of bringing out your heavy charge cable and all that, saving it from potential theft (I haven't seen many that can lock to the car) and unplugging by activists (I haven't seen many with locking doors over the plug, either).
And yes, if it's wet and rainy, it's an added convenience.
(Yes, people do get offended by seeing an electric car plugged in and will often unplug them while charging).
Why is Microsoft selling Windows 8 for so much more than Windows XP? For most uses it's not significantly better.......
Is it? ISTR Windows XP sold for around $200-300 back when it was new and shiny and not 3 versions old. Windows 8 is $200-300 as well.
Of course, if you're comparing today, well, Microsoft stopped selling XP a long time ago (shortly after 7 came out), and the price was reduced because that's what happens to old stuff that's been out of a while - you can't continue selling it for full price anymore.
Though, I don't get the argument that supporting XP protects against piracy...
How come applying thermal grease is still such a big problem in the semiconductor industry? They've been doing it for decades, but still haven't figured out how to get it right every time.
Even Apple, who are renowned for their design and manufacturing prowess, keeps hiring companies that screw it up.
I think it's too much variation in the way heatsinks attach to the chip. Ideally it would be something like how heatsinks on Intel do it (there may be others, but Intel is what I have experience on) - you put on a small dab (which can be on a gun that gives a pre-measured amount like the condiment guns at fast food joints), and then the act of putting the heatsink on spreads it.
But that's if the heatsink applies pressure - other times it's just stuck on with glue or the mechanism has too much give for it to work well.
It's sort of why the industry moved to pads and the like - putting on the paste and smoothing it out took too much time to manufacture and is too prone to mistakes, so they use a pad and eliminate the problem head on.
Asked about it, Coraid said, yes, the warranty is better on "Enterprise-class" or "RAID-class" drives, but also, the firmware is different. They claim that drives intended for the consumer / SOHO market spend a lot of time retrying marginal reads before declaring an unreadable sector and sparing it. They say that SAN-class drives limit the retry time, because the array controller handles it more efficiently, since it has the big-picture view.
Yes, the limited retry time is to basically get back to the RAID controller before it fails the entire drive. After all, if a drive takes its own sweet time responding (like regular consumer drives do), then the RAID controller may timeout and declare the drive has been removed.
But if it's just a bad sector on that drive, well, RAID protects against that - so having it quickly return back with "cannot be read" means the RAID controller can rewrite the bad sector and have it remapped automatically. No need trying to get the data if it can be reconstructed.
And better to fail a sector than an entire drive - rebuilds are never fun times.
Go ahead. Fire up SolidWorks on your pad or phone. Or AutoCAD. Go On. I dare you. Now tell me the desktop is dead.
The desktop will never die. It'll become a niche, though. Just like you have cars, trucks, semis, etc.,. on the road - there are various roles each plays. A pickup would seem to satisfy most needs really well, but it's got properties that aren't as nice (lower fuel economy, larger, more difficult to park in crowded lots etc). So people choose cars instead and when they have a need for a pickup, they rent or borrow, etc.
The same's happening with computing. People will still have a general purpose PC, but they won't need one for every member of the family anymore - perhaps one for the entire family for the few times it's needed, while smartphones and tablets take over the rest of the jobs that the average (i.e., non-/.) family needs.
There will always be people who need power (e.g., CAD, programmers) that cannot be provided by a smartphone or tablet - it's just like why we still have semis rolling on the roads. But these jobs are far outnumbered by "everything else - people who don't do any of those things and may never need to.
That's really what's happening - the market matured and it turns out people don't need a be-all-end-all tool that does everything when a user's "everything" really is just a few things. Better to do just those things better than everything poorly.
No, I have a stunning lack of trust in retailers and analytics companies.
I simply refuse to provide them with data to make money from me when I don't need to.
So you basically don't shop online, that is?
All the retailers are doing is trying to at least get on par with what online retailers are getting, because face it, being an online retailer rocks.
First, less staff, less cost (your warehouse can be anywhere that's cheap). Plus you get piles of analytics - Amazon probably has the shopping habits of most of North America down in their databases. And it's fairly good analytics as well - names, addresses (not just zip codes!) and a precise history of what they bought and what was sent to what address.
A brick and mortar? Well damn, they get none of that. At best they get a zip code locator, or a rough (anonymous) outline of what aisles you visit. And you can pay in anonymous cash, too.
My lame company only prides itself on stupid shit like making good products and pleasing its customers.
Submitter never said what his company actually does.
Perhaps having a "nice office aesthetic" is a requirement in the field they work in - perhaps it's even... design! Last thing most customers looking for design work want to do is walk into a butt-ugly office that's full of drab (but functional) office furniture.
And there are many fields where yes, the office aesthetic does matter, especially in creative industries. And customers expect it, nay, demand it - they want to see what sort of creative "product" the company has, and office design is one of them that's visible, beyond existing products on the market.
Apple has shown that form is important - if not as important, as function. Having function is necessary, but so is form, as function without form is a complex mess no user desires. Though of course, sometimes they lean too far towards the "form" part at times.
And sometimes, it's actually GOOD to work in an environment that's not just beige cubes in a beige office with beige tables and beige equipment.
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Except encryption is not a universal answer.
It does NOTHING to stop "metadata" collection - your IP packets still have source and destination addresses that have to be encoded in ways anyone can decode it (i.e., if you encrypt that, then every router needs to be able to decrypt it, making it essentially plaintext). Note: Tor solves this problem.
It does nothing about traffic flow fingerprinting - that is, examining how the packets evolve over time to figure out traffic. It's possible to differentiate HTTP traffic from SSH and others just by watching enough packets.
All encryption gets you is the ability to hide the contents of the transmission. Whether or not it's useful depends on a lot of factors. But let's just say with traffic flows the way it is, metadata analysis wil probably get you most of the way. And sometimes a little ingenuity can solve the content problem - e.g., if the target IP is a web host and the traffic flow implies HTTP, then the content can be reasonably inferred to be some HTTP content contained on the server, so all you need is to find out what domains that machine hosts.
Actually, next-gen codec fights are on NOW.
The war of VP8/h.264 is lost. Get over it, move on and try to get in the next gen. Whether it's h.265 or VP9 or some other codec, it's not decided yet.
The time to move is NOW to get VP9 spec all complete (not a code based spec like VP8, but a proper spec that details everything on paper - "read the code" is NOT a valid solution here) and everywhere.
Get demonstrations working and ready. Get on working groups for next-gen formats (including MPEG, SMPTE etc) to promote and push VP9. Even pursue it on next-gen Blu-Ray formats.
Even get hardware guys involved making available royalty free hardware accelerated encode and decode blocks so it can be incorporated "for free".
The VP9 fight is starting, and it would be silly to concentrated on lost fights (h.264/VP8) when the playfield is completely level again and waiting for entrants.
The reason for the popularity of the 6502 came down to one factor - cost. An 8086, 68000, Z80, etc., would've run you about $200 or so, while MOS was selling the 6502 for... $20. And you got a databook too.
The 6800 from Motorola was supposed to be the "cheap" chip (compared to the 68000), but it was still pricey - enough so that a bunch of Motorola engineers broke away and formed MOS and designed a 6800 workalike. This they called the 6500. Motorola sued them for releasing a competing product (it was basically pin-compatible), so what they did was switch a few pins around and re-released the 6500 as the 6502.
So that and the cost of it meant a lot of hobbyists used 6502s including one little company named after a fruit.
It depends on a lot of factors.
One reason why China employs a lot of humans to make stuff is because they're not only cheap, but adaptable - there's very little time required to make a change during production to fix an issue that arises. If you're doing it automated, waiting a week can be a disaster if in the middle of a production run for holidays you discover a flaw.
Turnaround time is important if you want to have products on shelves by a certain date - you usually work around it because you know how far in advance everything has to be lined up and work backwards - it's why you have stuff like day 1 patches and all that (because you're looking at months from when you must begin production to when the product is in consumer's hands).
Then there are those who service the Wal-marts and the like, where a week delay simply means instead of being put out front and center, someone else's product is in that spot and you're relegated to some obscure part of the store where the stockers could find space.
And the reason most people don't see these is because the business already builds it into their production schedule - programming robots takes a week, so you "ship" a week earlier.
There's no doubt that the PS4 and Xbone will be jailbroken. Probably quite quickly - they ARE x86 units after all. They really are really fancy derivatives of the original Xbox, and that thing was cracked 10 ways to sunday.
Hell, it might be preferable to have a launch unit where it's easily hacked than a later model where the hacks are far less available and definitely not soft-moddable.
It depends.
A lot of PC releases these days are $60, and ship months after the console release. (You do get the odd one that's same day - usually limited to FPSes and such).
If it's an indie game, you're correct on all counts - the PC version will be cheaper and better. But if it's an "AAA" game, then chances are the price will be same as consoles, released months afterwards and be an inferior port.
The problem is piracy has killed a chunk of the PC gaming market - when 90% piracy numbers are considered "normal". Indies, who really are less about making a ton of money and more about getting mind-share, don't care - piracy definitely helps them (think free advertising). Plus the low dev costs of PCs generally mean it's easy and cheap to develop.
But the others look at the numbers and decline - the PC port of a game that sells out on consoles may only break even at best in real terms.
In general, to the big players, the ROI of PC is poor.
Of course, it's also meant that the PC has a huge pile of smaller developers making more innovative games, and coupled with mobile platforms encouraging indie development, the loss of AAA hasn't REALLY hurt the PC much - there's still plenty of good games for it. It's only if you want AAA games that you'll find the PC lacking (say, Grand Theft Auto 5, spring 2014).
It's also why Microsoft and Sony are tripping over themselves trying to attract the indie crowd.
In 1982, kids and computer geeks had PCs. Most kids used them to play games. The office would have maybe 2-3 PCs (remember they started around $5000 or so for an IBM and rose to $10,000 if you went fully tricked out), so maybe the CEO or VP had 'em on their desk. And the accountant, being that accounting was a very popular killer app back then. But the vast majority of people did things the old way.
The real computerization started in the 90s where everyone started having PCs on their desks and were expected to start using it. Probably around 1991 when Windows 3.1 was released (and wildly popular).
And online shopping really only took off about 5-6 years ago - sure people have been doing online shopping and auctions for years before, but a surprisingly large number of people didn't bother and didn't trust it (I still know people who don't do online shopping. It's a pain when they ask me for gift ideas). Don't confuse the internet-savvy with the general population - if the dot-com shopping boom really worked, there wouldn't have been a bust.
Everyone is different. Not everyone can figure out the logic behind code, or algorithms. There's a certain bit of skill required in being able to be told "I need to total up this list of numbers" and being able to take a conceptual leap to telling a machine how to do it precisely, step by step.
Just like on the CNC - you probably have the skills and knowledge on how to take the starting block and the final desired output and command the CNC to manipulate it to generate the output. And possibly the skill to realize which actions are redundant and just slow the entire process down. But to do so generally requires a level of spatial reasoning to figure out which bits you need, and how much you can remove at a time.
There are plenty of people who don't really get "thinking" type jobs and prefer more hands-on type jobs (e.g., welding). They probably can be extremely proficient and skillful welders too, and able to detect just by looking when a weld is bad. Or knowing how the sound the welder makes can tell you how good a welder someone is.
Different sets of skills, intuition and other things are required.
Coding is really the same - there are leaps of logic and skills that not everyone has. And it's not for lack of trying - we all love to rage on Visual Basic, but there's a language that DID try to make coding easy for everyone. Of course, look where it is today to realize that sometimes, everyone being a coder isn't a good thing.
If you believe that, I have some snake oil to sell you. In fact, that's why the FDA was created - people were making tons of money selling hokey products that claim to improve your life, from poisons to strange electro-stimulator devices. Chances are, they didn't work, and if you were lucky, you weren't worse off for it (if not, death, chronic disease (more sales!) was your fate). But enough people did get sick and die that people wanted "something to be done".
The problem is the market cannot decide - because the chances and everything is so vague and time delayed that how do you really know? It's like predicting the weather.
So you have a "greater than normal chance" of some disease. What do you do? Do you change your lifestyle? What if you got it anyways? (The big problem is genetics just tells you how prone you are to something. The environment contributes significantly to whether or not you actually get it).
Or take cancer. Perhaps the genetic test says you're less likely to get melanoma. Does it mean you can avoid sunscreen and tan yourself until you're completely charred safe in knowing you probably won't get melanoma?
And hell, fake medical information is bad. See anti-vaccination groups bringing back diseases that were well under control or even eradicated (e.g., smallpox) only a couple of decades earlier.
Newsflash - no one uses iAds.
In fact, I can bet Google paid Apple to develop iAd so Google can acquire AdMob, the #1 ad network for mobile devices. Remember, the DoJ was investigating Google over the purchase and decided that iAd was a worthy competitor to AdMob and thus let Google had the sale.
AdMob is everywhere, iAds is not. iAds only work on iOS devices. AdMob works on iOS abd Android (80% of smartphone market, remember?) and probably other devices as well (Windows Phone, BlackBerry).
In fact, Google is probably the only company funding iAd - it's such a poor ROI for everyone involved that Apple should shut it down. Of course, Google won't let them because it puts Google under potential anti-trust.
Actually, it's not eradicated, and it's actually making a comeback (thanks to the anti-vaxxers).
Smallpox, It wasn't eradicated from the world (many third world countries have outbreaks), but generally in North America and Europe, the chances of contracting it were nil. It's why they started going after chickenpox as well.
Anyhow, those with a medical reason to not get vaccinated don't generally hang out with others who aren't vaccinated as well, so they get some herd immunity.
It's the likes of Jenny McCarthy and their ilk - like attracts like so you end up with whole groups who aren't immunized congregating together and regularly and who will rapidly pass disease from one to another. One person in a herd not having it is fine. A whole herd not having it means the entire herd gets it.
Well, the high voltage battery constantly charges the 12V battery, and the 12V battery enables the contactors for the high voltage battery (as a safety feature). If you remove the 12V battery, the high voltage battery disconnects automatically (if you're needing to rescue someone inside, the rescuer manual says to cut the 12V battery cables to disconnect the high-voltage battery).
I suppose part of it could be to power the big relays that connect the battery to the rest of the high voltage lines. (remember, those things have to pass a huge amount of current, so the 12V coil may have to be fairly beefy).
It's also just a relay - unlatched. Remove the battery and the HV disconnects. Reconnect it and the HV reconnects.
And those vulnerabilities exist just to run user-mode worms, in the end - because having an administrator prompt suddenly appear without warning is a sure sign of an infection.
Despite all the rootkits and other stuff, if they can't find a privilege escalation hole, it runs in the background as a user-mode process - you don't need to be root to connect to port 25 or read a user's files, after all.
As for Pwn2Own, the results really are meaningless - if you break OS X, you win a MacBook. If you break Windows, you get a Sony laptop. If you break Linux, you get a Dell. And they aren't necessarily the nicest machines on the lineup, either.
Well geez, Apple, Sony, Dell. If you wanted a new laptop, which do you pick? Most people DO like the looks of a MacBook Pro (even the lowest end configuration is still a nice looking laptop). Then likely Sony comes next (their laptops are fairly good looking). Which leaves the Dell, for those who just want a laptop and try to avoid the massive crowds going for the more desirable units.
Results may be more interesting if they all were Macbooks or something so they'd all be equally desirable.
It's just the same if you offered up an iPhone 5s, a Galaxy S4, a Blackberry Q10 or Z10 and other phones. The iPhone will go first (generally), followed by the Galaxy S4 (it's still a nice phone), and BlackBerry probably will "survive" - does it make their OS more secure? Or just less desirable?
So a question is - are your apps free? Or do I have to cough up $$$ for them?
If they're free, then how do you eat? Do you just do this as a side hobby?
And that's the key - a lot of people do this to make money, and the problem is the Android business model makes it very hard to do so (Google Play store revenue for developers is but a tiny fraction of Amazon App Store, - something like 1/3rd or less). This is in part due to the limitations of Google Wallet making non-free apps have less visibility. Especially in the early days where Android was everywhere, but paid apps was US-only. (The irony being that as a Canadian company that released an app, we couldn't even BUY OUR OWN APP!)
So people hitched onto the ad-supported model (adware) - developers need the money, and the longer you can keep users using your app, the more money you make.
Naturally, Google benefits, owning one of the larger mobile advertising companies out there. But there are others.
And yes, developers seeking to make money from apps will integrate those modules in - easy money and they get to set the price to free, eliminating a lot of barriers to installation.
The problem with the Android permissions model is it gives power to the technical, while ignoring the typical.
The thing is, the Dancing Pigs (or rabbits) phenomena is real, and users who get recommended to try an app will want to try it. You can pop up a dozen dialog boxes saying it's bad, but the user will dutifully close them just to run the app.
Relying on the user to secure themselves has proven to be ineffectual, and it's shown itself repeatedly. Even on iOS - you can get a user to do some pretty amazing things if you walk them through the steps and the outcome is something they want. (It's how various worms that relied on jailbreaks spread - users installed OpenSSH, dutifully installed SSH clients, and failed to change the default password).
Hell, you probably can harvest a ton of passwords to Google, Facebook, Twitter and others if you set up a site that offers "free porn!" and lets them use those sites to "log into" your site (where you're capturing the usernames and passwords, of course).
And that would accomplish very little of note, to be honest.
Yes, they could've, and maybe they even should've, but if you're trying to get developers to your platform, it doesn't help your cause to force their hand. Especially if it's a new platform that they have to learn new stuff on, and the ROI is uncertain enough that really, there's no point to.
After all, If you want to write a game, you can do so under plenty of engines, Unity being fairly cross platform, and if you're willing to install a browser, there you go. Or you can then port it to Windows, Linux, OS X, iOS, Android, and consoles and skip the web.
Forcing it to be open-source just means you'll probably get a few dinky ports of existing open-source games which the public probably will see and then promptly ignore.
It's really like Android - why did Google give it permissive open-source? Because they knew if they released it under GPL and the like, no one would bother with it, and given the goal was to counter the iOS threat back then, having as many people as possible get to use it is a really good strategy. (Though it's starting to backfire since Google has been having to close off more and more of it as competition using the open-source version get popular. The goal being that anyone using AOSP would have to write a ton of code just to get it up to where you'd be with Google).
Actually, Google's been good about respecting those patents. The most famous "rounded corners" patent isn't even valid on default Android - it's the custom shells that people put on, notably, TouchWiz, that violates the patent. (It didn't help that the Galaxy S was immediately called an "iPhone clone" by reviewers because it pretty much worked like an iPhone).
But if you stuck with Android by default, you were in the clear because the conditions necessary for the rounded corners patent was never satisfied with stock Android. It's why Apple never went after Google because they didn't have a case. But Samsung basically copied it, save a few minor details.
Of course, TouchWiz doesn't include that anymore, preferring to go with a much more Android-y look.
Initially the Wall Street guys were against Bitcoin because they couldn't figure out how to make money off of it. But now they've studied it and studied it and studied it, and now you're seeing the results of the research - they've found ways to manipulate it in the same fashion as regular currency markets.
BoA is just the start - expect the rest of Wall Street to start investing heavily in Bitcoins as they try to eke out fractional coins on every transaction. And the Bitcoin infrastructure is near the point where it's "too big to fail" - even if it crashes, there's too much entrenched to abandon it completely, creating a perfect opportunity for the suits to actually acquire even more cheaply.
Oh yeah, they'll probably also find a way to do HFT using it, so get ready to parse billions of new entries in the blockchain. Don't underestimate the mathematical prowess of bankers - once they show interest, they've found ways to make money off it.
True, but it can be like WiFi where the convenience trumps the inefficiency. Think public charging spaces - you park your car, pay the parking fee (which can include the cost of the charge) and walk away. You save yourself the hassle of bringing out your heavy charge cable and all that, saving it from potential theft (I haven't seen many that can lock to the car) and unplugging by activists (I haven't seen many with locking doors over the plug, either).
And yes, if it's wet and rainy, it's an added convenience.
(Yes, people do get offended by seeing an electric car plugged in and will often unplug them while charging).
Is it? ISTR Windows XP sold for around $200-300 back when it was new and shiny and not 3 versions old. Windows 8 is $200-300 as well.
Of course, if you're comparing today, well, Microsoft stopped selling XP a long time ago (shortly after 7 came out), and the price was reduced because that's what happens to old stuff that's been out of a while - you can't continue selling it for full price anymore.
Though, I don't get the argument that supporting XP protects against piracy...
I think it's too much variation in the way heatsinks attach to the chip. Ideally it would be something like how heatsinks on Intel do it (there may be others, but Intel is what I have experience on) - you put on a small dab (which can be on a gun that gives a pre-measured amount like the condiment guns at fast food joints), and then the act of putting the heatsink on spreads it.
But that's if the heatsink applies pressure - other times it's just stuck on with glue or the mechanism has too much give for it to work well.
It's sort of why the industry moved to pads and the like - putting on the paste and smoothing it out took too much time to manufacture and is too prone to mistakes, so they use a pad and eliminate the problem head on.
Yes, the limited retry time is to basically get back to the RAID controller before it fails the entire drive. After all, if a drive takes its own sweet time responding (like regular consumer drives do), then the RAID controller may timeout and declare the drive has been removed.
But if it's just a bad sector on that drive, well, RAID protects against that - so having it quickly return back with "cannot be read" means the RAID controller can rewrite the bad sector and have it remapped automatically. No need trying to get the data if it can be reconstructed.
And better to fail a sector than an entire drive - rebuilds are never fun times.
The desktop will never die. It'll become a niche, though. Just like you have cars, trucks, semis, etc.,. on the road - there are various roles each plays. A pickup would seem to satisfy most needs really well, but it's got properties that aren't as nice (lower fuel economy, larger, more difficult to park in crowded lots etc). So people choose cars instead and when they have a need for a pickup, they rent or borrow, etc.
The same's happening with computing. People will still have a general purpose PC, but they won't need one for every member of the family anymore - perhaps one for the entire family for the few times it's needed, while smartphones and tablets take over the rest of the jobs that the average (i.e., non-/.) family needs.
There will always be people who need power (e.g., CAD, programmers) that cannot be provided by a smartphone or tablet - it's just like why we still have semis rolling on the roads. But these jobs are far outnumbered by "everything else - people who don't do any of those things and may never need to.
That's really what's happening - the market matured and it turns out people don't need a be-all-end-all tool that does everything when a user's "everything" really is just a few things. Better to do just those things better than everything poorly.
So you basically don't shop online, that is?
All the retailers are doing is trying to at least get on par with what online retailers are getting, because face it, being an online retailer rocks.
First, less staff, less cost (your warehouse can be anywhere that's cheap). Plus you get piles of analytics - Amazon probably has the shopping habits of most of North America down in their databases. And it's fairly good analytics as well - names, addresses (not just zip codes!) and a precise history of what they bought and what was sent to what address.
A brick and mortar? Well damn, they get none of that. At best they get a zip code locator, or a rough (anonymous) outline of what aisles you visit. And you can pay in anonymous cash, too.
Submitter never said what his company actually does.
Perhaps having a "nice office aesthetic" is a requirement in the field they work in - perhaps it's even ... design! Last thing most customers looking for design work want to do is walk into a butt-ugly office that's full of drab (but functional) office furniture.
And there are many fields where yes, the office aesthetic does matter, especially in creative industries. And customers expect it, nay, demand it - they want to see what sort of creative "product" the company has, and office design is one of them that's visible, beyond existing products on the market.
Apple has shown that form is important - if not as important, as function. Having function is necessary, but so is form, as function without form is a complex mess no user desires. Though of course, sometimes they lean too far towards the "form" part at times.
And sometimes, it's actually GOOD to work in an environment that's not just beige cubes in a beige office with beige tables and beige equipment.