I mean, The Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame - yes those two) have claimed repeatedly that they own around 10% of all bitcoins out there spread through various safe storage locations.
If that's true (that would be around 2M bitcoins), that would put their holdings at over $2B.
People simply do not seem to care about lockdown, general computing or indeed almost anything that much of the/. community holds dear; most just want to watch youtube and twittle their facebook and think nothing of their device requiring an account to function that will happily upload your favourite websites to your advertising overlo... I mean, The Cloud.
The traditional PC industry isn't going to die, but it will become increasingly marginalised, especially if like me you don't like "commoditised" machines that have been intentionally gimped.
Most people don't care because they just want something that works. They want a tool, an appliance. They don't want to mess with it "for the sake of messing with it" - just something they can start up, do their work, and shut down. They don't want to worry about viruses malware, or clicking the wrong link.
It's a side effect of the "commonization" (not commoditization) of computing. A computer is everywhere - and modern life is impossible without interacting with some computing device or other.
It's like cars - for the most part, most drivers don't care what goes on under the hood - they only care about the end results - good gas mileage, "sporty" and "powerful" (really, it means "I can merge on the highway and overtake without flooring it"), image (i.e., how it makes them feel), and reliability. It doesn't matter about hybrids or electric cars (they're really part of "good gas mileage" and "image"). Or if there's hamsters running in wheels under the hood.
Or if most of the stuff is buried deep within a piece of silicon in some black box under the hood. All they know is they need to follow the service schedule in the manual and the maintenance is generally taken care of (oil, fluids, etc).
They're not people who will spend hours under the hood tinkering (there are a few of them, but the vast majority of people don't care to do that) and so forth. If it fails to start, they call a tow truck.
Computers are just the same - the vast majority see them as tools to help them get things done. They don't care if the OS is free, open, locked down, or whatever, as long as it gets them where they need to go, that's sufficient. If it fails to boot, they take it to Geek Squad or to your local/. crowd.
That's why tablets are popular - they pretty much just work, are convenient to use (even laptops generally demand being put on a table rather than being easily handled and used while lying on the couch), and you don't have to wait too long for reboots and such.
Ditto consoles - pop the disc in, play game.
The PC market won't disappear, ever - just like we have pickup trucks, big rigs, and other vehicles, we'll need a full spectrum of devices from smartphones to tablets, laptops and desktops and servers. Of course, it also means prices will probably go up due to lower volumes, but is that such a bad thing? The race to the bottom has killed innovation in the PC industry as no one makes any money - think the vast sea of 1366x768 displays, 1080p displays, integrated graphics, and other common complaints of bargain basement PCs. And yet, if you have more expensive PCs, you see more innovation like SSDs, high res screens, different formfactors, etc (see Apple, and ultrabooks and other stuff). (Plus, not that you couldn't get high res displays before - you just paid more. The race to the bottom went beyond and cause everyone to cut corners and value).
Technically, they invented AdSense to combat the intrusiveness of then-contemporary ads.
Of course, they realized doing ads better wasn't cutting it, and then proceeded to own all the other ad companies they felt were "doing it wrong" when they were conjuring up AdSense.
With Google owning pretty much the entirety of online advertising, and a huge majority of mobile advertising, Google IS one of the biggest peddlers of those popups, popunders, deceptive and other ads.
(Though, to Google's credit, they do try to distance themselves from their ad acquisitions like DoubleClick and the like).
And to be honest, I can't remember the last time I saw an AdSense ad... other than on Google's search page. Everyone else seems to be using some Google subsidiary ad network.
just like tech employment: no one wants to pay american rates anymore and so the foreign market steps up to fill the void.
same with films and music: if the 'big players' can't be bothered anymore, smaller guys will step up and fill the void.
we will always have music and movies. and if the big guys go chap 11, it will be a Good Thing(tm) in disguise.
That's what's happening here - our government (BC, Canada) decided to not do the race to the bottom in film tax credits (in order to compete with other provinces), much to the hue and cry of the local production firms. Whether that's good or not, remains to be seen, though there is a drop off in the number of productions actually done here.
Instead, they started pursuing overseas film contracts - notably Bollywood. Of course, much bellyaching also happened, for Bollywood films are typically low budget (compared to Hollywood) and have much less effects and post production.
Of course, one of the arguments against film and tax credits is that the benefits really go towards the 1% in the US and that the money would be better spent on local industry than help making the rich get richer. (And Hollywood knows it - they routinely play locations off one another to get more and more tax credits). Depending on who you ask, it goes either way - either that money generates more tax revenues than the credits cost, or it's about the same. (No one argues less, because then it's obvious that it's far cheaper ot just pay those guys directly).
Its more accurate to say that apple only has 'premium' customers, while android customers (and android phones) run the complete range from bare bones to premium.
But mostly barebones - the premium Androids are a rarity given the sales numbers. Of course, the flagships do sell a lot, but they're vastly outsold by the millions of cheap-ass Android phones out there (who don't sell as many, but considering new ones come daily, do get a fair bit of turnover).
I'm sure a lot of Androids are bought as "I want an iPhone" "That'll be $500", "ooh, too much, what else you got?" (hands over a free Android) "This one is free with contract, and it works like an iPhone".
Or, another common scenario, "I could get a featurephone for free, or this smartphone for.. free"
In fact, the inability to differentiate between Android models depresses mobile advertising rates for Android - ad impressions for iOS users generally cost more (up to 2 times as much for an Android user), and yes, advertisers know that iOS users generally are the ones they want because they spend money.
Hell, apparently Facebook ads to iOS users have way better ROI than Android users
i remember a few years back backup to "cheap" disk was all the rage. if you were backing up to tape you were seen as some kind of mental patient
tape has its issues, but sucking up money like a trophy wife isn't one of them
Depends how much you want to store.
If it's just a little bit, using a DVD-R is perfectly adequate as a backup solution. Even BD-R for slightly larger amounts.
But if you have to store more, say a few to double digit TB, hard drives might be a reasonable solution - they're quite cheap and of reasonable size - 10 4TB drives can be had for just over $1K giving you 40TB of un-RAIDed storage.
But once you're up there in storage, where you can afford the $5k+ tape drive costs and $100 tapes (though which can store 10/20/30+ TB each), tape is definitely affordable.
And the LHC generates petabytes of data per second during an experiment, so tape drives are definitely economical.
There's a balance between cost per byte and initial acquisition cost. DVDs and BDs have extremely low acquisition costs, but relatively high cost per byte (you can get started with $100). Hard drives have higher costs, but lower cost per byte. Tape has the least cost per byte, but initial costs are quite high, and special requirements may make implementation using hard drives viable for a long time yet.
I had the same thought until I realized my wife's Xmas order was left on our front step last week by Canada Post. Normally they just leave a door hanger telling us where and when we can pick up the package.
Yeah, I had them leave two new Nexus phones sticking out of the box by the front door. They actually do it all the time, and even left a $1500 laptop sitting there. They, UPS, and others do it all the time. The good part is that I don't know anyone who's ever had something go missing. Yay Canada. I was reading something from someone from eastern Europe who came here about the things he found the most different about this country. Where he was from this was apparently unheard of , as anything left at your door would go missing. I'm guess that in some areas here it would be the same though.
The old hangar service is still available, but the sender has to request it explicitly (parcel volumes are so high that if they still did hangar service, the system would be overflowing within a week as parcels awaiting pickup pile up).
Usually it gets marked as "Do not safe drop" (i.e., do not leave package). Or signature service is requested. Otherwise it's treated like a piece of lettermail - left at your mailbox.
For FedEx and UPS, the same applies as well - the sender has the option to request a signature service or not - the latter being slightly cheaper and why Amazon and others often use it (better to replace the odd item than spend the extra 10 cents on shipping as volumes are high enough that you still save money).
It also cuts down on the customer service calls for people who complain about slow shipping because they don't make it out to the depot immediately.
All these options are really only available to the large shippers - if you send a package through the mail, FedEx or UPS, unless you use first class parcel, the default shipping options include full tracking with signature or no safe drop.
But ship enough and they let you have the option of just leaving it on the stoop - presumably if you ship enough that people aren't there to pick it up, FedEx/UPS etc., start to pile on the costs of repeated visits.
Some friendly users translated my free (open source) app to Simplified Chinese.
Where should I upload the APK to reach most of the Chinese market? What 2-3 app markets are the most popular in China? Thanks a lot!
Don't bother - someone else in China probably already has. And maybe even charge for it, and a couple of versions probably have added malware as well.
Quality control, piracy (both ways - paid apps for free in the store, and other devs submitting the same app and making money off it), etc., are non-existent.
There's a reason why the latest Android malware generally spreads through China first - the official app stores are so bad that you really cannot tell if you're getting the real thing, a pirated copy, an infected copy, whatever. That and the popularity of sideloading and such.
Nonsense. The source is there, anything can be disabled, changed, added. The only thing keeping Android from being completely open is the amount of blob code needed to access device-specific hardware. Google has as much control over your phone as you want, from 'none at all' to 'they know who I'm about to meet'. The choice is yours.
Actually, a modern Android phone (non-Chinese version) is actually full of closed source at the top - and I'm not talking about drivers, but Google-installed closed source.
AOSP gets you a basic phone, yes, but you'll notice most of the apps are actually missing and anyone using AOSP will probably ask why they're so crippled - Google has closed source versions of many apps that leave the AOSP versions in the dust.
These days, Android is dominant. Google no longer needs Android to be open-source in order to prevent an "iPhone takeover" or to build marketshare. And we see that happening - Google is restricting what they put in AOSP to prevent Amazon and others from taking AOSP and running with it - doing stuff like tying apps to Google Services Framework so devs can't port to Kindle easily, etc.
Perhaps the biggest threat to Google is that Samsung is the only player with a complete set of fully functional (closed source) replacement apps. But anyone starting from AOSP has a lot of extra development work to do.
The KK launcher ('home screen app') in Google apps is built around Google search. Don't want it? Just use another launcher, there is one for every need, some of them free software, others closed. The choice, again, is yours.
Yes you can. However, that's sure a HUGE PITA that for everyone concerned, no one would bother. Sure you'll have a few, but the vast majority won't, so much so that the few that do are insignificant and ignorable and if you're an app developer, you don't care.
I know there are probably a few people who change launchers daily, but others may try it once and forget it - the big problem with Android is the lack of a sane backup solution - you can spend hours/days customizing it, but then move to a new phone and then lose it all. Repeat a couple of times and it's just a huge PITA.
Sure, many companies play the "limit the supply" game, but given that the WSJ says that they've increased production of the iPhone 5s, I don't think that Apple is playing this game.
Limiting supply also means scalping, and Apple is against scalpers - a lot of their purchase policies are basically enacted to foil scalpers (it doesn't always work, because if you're willing to throw people at the problem...).
It's far less likely that Apple is artificially limiting supply - the iPhone has traditionally sold for ridiculous amounts of money (most of it going to scalpers) - people are just willing to pay $1000-2000+ for the latest iPhone - imported from the US if necessary. Apple would rather sell those people a phone at retail price than to encourage sales by "limiting supply" and "running out".
And heck, if the numbers are to be believed, Sony and Microsoft are learning that selling out works initially, but if you want sales, you have to have product in channels (i.e., the Xbone is actually having better sales than PS4 - because the latter is impossible to find due to low supplies, whilst the former is much easier to obtain as Microsoft skims people by simply being available).
"Sold out" is a cheap marketing ploy that only works at the beginning. Being constantly sold out means you're giving everyone else money as only die hards will explicitly continue to wait for your product.
A modern day password cracker (brute force) with a reasonably large dictionary can basically break all human generated paswords these days.
First - besides the dictionary, they also try variations - including l33t 5p34k variations, various capitalizations and putting numbers at the beginning or end of the word.
Second, the old trick of picking a phrase and using it? Also done - the dictionaries often pick phrases out of the Bible and other texts and run with those, too. You'd think this would be difficult, but surprisingly not. And there's the variations in the above as well.
A brute forcer that uses a dictionary often enlarges it through variations, which is still far less to check through than a full test-every-combination brute force.
About the only choices left are pure random passwords that the only way to break them is testing every combination.
Software that includes "PUPs" from the original software producer is not "legitimate". Any company with a EULA such as the one described is not a "legitimate" software company.
If you're a app developer using the free-to-play model (or freemium), it's another option to consider. And given PC gaming is also going towards the freemium model to bypass stuff like DRM and piracy.
But for the users, well, it means your PC becomes a passive bitcoin miner. Naturally that page has no information on the impact towards mobile battery life.
I'm kind of shocked that people are so shocked. It's like they thought they had privacy or something. Amazing how many people are waking up to the fact they were living in a fantasy world.
Yeah, it's like people are surprised that the actions they do in public (i.e., anything you do on the Internet) actually can be watched, observed and noticed by people.
I mean, if you want to keep something private, or want some privacy, you keep that stuff under wraps. You don't go post it online or anything where other people have access to it. Encryption works, to a point, but the best way to keep something from being revealed to anyone is to keep it to yourself.
The fact that some people have put up marketing things like "privacy controls" really doesn't change things - all Facebook has done is shown how ephemeral those settings are. The old saying of "don't put anything online you don't want to see in the New York Times tomorrow" still applies like it has for decades. (Though, I suppose a more modern variant is Google News or something).
There are plenty of parallel and serial port cards to adapt later desktops.
It's hard to believe, but yeah, there are tons of serial and parallel cards with PCIe interfaces on them. And if you have a laptop, ExpressCard serial and parallel ports exist too - and these aren't the chintzy USB ones (that use the USB port on the ExpressCard slot) - but use the real PCIe side of the slot and appear as a native port.
I'm just waiting for the Thunderbolt ones to come out as well - after all, it's also PCIe.
And I thought more modern CNCs have USB ports where you copy the file to a USB stick and then jam it into the USB port? Or floppy drives in the past?
(No, these CNCs don't hook to the PC via USB. They're standalone - you generate the file, copy it to a USB stick, and then plug the stick into the CNC's USB port and navigate to it.). I suppose the latest also support SD cards and the like.
Think of it this way, imagine someone did a study, where a single kid was vaccinated and later got autism. The authors of this study drew the conclusion that vaccines cause autism.
Would you consider that to be poor science? Because that is essentially what happened here, there were obvious problems with the experiment, and the science was badly done. Elsevier was being kind by saying there was no evidence of fraud, because either it was fraud or incompetence that motivated these scientists to publish.
What they should do is repeat the experiment with a better sample size.
It's poor science, yes, but it's an intriguing data point in which further study is required.
That's often how research is done - you work with a limited set of resources to see if the hypothesis is even correct. Like say, "vaccines cause autism". Well, you do a study, and find that yes, it does in your study, which warrants further study. Or you find that no, it doesn't, which shuts down the entire line of thinking.
Starting with a small sample size is perfectly OK, as long as one realizes that further study is required to see if the issue discovered was related to small sample size (e.g., local effect or other thing).
But no, you don't withdraw published papers for bad science - you release another one proving the original was bad. (Unlike the original Lancet paper, which was discovered to be fraudulent which does demand removal).
Unless the paper was done to engage in fraud, it should stand. It doesn't matter if the authors are biased, if the sample size is too small, or the paper uses "teh" everywhere. It should be judged as it stands. And if other studies show otherwise, well, they should be published as well, and that's how knowledge is obtained - you have done more studies that discredit an earlier study because of some variable that was uncontrolled.
Please don't use the BSD license. As Stallman has explained at length, its original version had the obnoxious advertising clause that made compliance very difficult for large projects. Even though there now is the "new style BSD" license, it is easy to confuse the two and mistakenly promote the old one. The MIT/X license is equivalent to the new BSD license and does not suffer from the confusion of multiple versions, so please use it instead of the BSD license.
OTOH, that advertising clause makes it useful if you want to PREVENT GPL projects from using it.
And it's not difficult for large projects - because BSD code is everywhere. If you go to the "about" screen on large projects you may see something like "Portions (c) Regents of University of California" and other stuff in the about dialog. In fact, a LOT of them have pages of such acknowledgements. (zlib is another one).
Specifically because it does not have the advertising clause - i.e. I do NOT want 3rd parties to be using my company name in their advertising.
They're not allowed to use the name in advertising. All the "advertising" clause states is that you MUST put the fact that your company developed some parts of it somewhere - in the legal documentation, about screen, etc. And they're not allowed to use it in such a way that implies endorsement or other such thing of the product.
Specifically, this is what the 3rd clause states:
4. Neither the name of the nor the
names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products
derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
I.e., no one using BSD code can use your name for promotion or otherwise. It's why if you look at it, you'll find "Portions (c) Regents of University of California" or other message hidden away. That's all the 3rd clause states - you can't state that because you used the BSD TCP/IP stack, you can slap "University of California" all over your promotional materials.
It is this clause that makes it GPL-incompatible since it restricts further redistribution by imposing a condition.
You can mod me down or call me what you like but it is fact that if I want to buy a mac (I hate Apple but for the sake of argument) and there is a cool piece of software then I can not have it. Why? If Apple does one include statement in c++ that includes a header that is GNU then the whole thing has to be free as well which is why critics called GPL viral.
I am not a troll here. But corporations have a right to distribute software as well. Sure the code is yours and if you don't want the mean bad corp to use it then use GNU. While it is true that corporations can use GNU they can not distribute it.
So MacOSX can't use it hence why they use CLANG now.
Apple did not move to CLANG because of GPL. In fact, they were pretty happy with the GPL until the FSF released GPLv3, which changed the entire landscape. With that, Apple decided it wasn't in their best interests and developed an alternative compiler suite (because everything FSF was going GPLv3, and a lot of other OS X libraries like Samba were going GPLv3) and other things.
The last checkin by Apple to GCC was related to blocks and stuff related to Grand Central Dispatch.
Basically Apple felt the GPLv3 wasn't useful to them anymore and potentially dangerous, so they decided to excise all GPL code (because they feared other GPL works going GPLv3). This caused problems in 10.5 as Apple's SMB/CIFS library wasn't exactly the best.
And many other companies have woken up to the reality that is GPLv3 and do full audits of code and everything now. I've seen policies that say if you want to use open-source, it must be reviewed by Legal - and this applies whether the use was a tool for internal use, or to be distributed as part of a product. And there's a small set of pre-approved softwa
Probably still better than Intel's Galileo board, which doesn't even have proper native GPIOs (they all go through a slow I2C I/O expander), is more expensive, and has worse power usage.
Compatibility is worse on this board though - it's a 486 core. Most modern Linux is compiled for i586 (Pentium) ISA, so you can't even run a stock Linux distribution (even the "i386" distros usually assume Pentium and up). You'll need to basically recompile everything for i486 instruction set to get it to work.
Last time I dealt with this, Puppy Linux was all that could run by default on it (I think it compiled everything i386 - though Linux needs 486 or better). Everything it didn't come with had to be recompiled from source as practically all binaries available were i586.
Though it can probably run Windows - I think XP should run just fine on it.
And yes, I've tried running i586 binaries on boards with the Vortex processor on them. You usually get a segfault or illegal instruction error sooner or later.
Bitcoin is just alternative currency. There are plenty of that around - most of them are pegged to some other currency though, but they are, for the most part alternative currency.
Think: Gift Cards (Amazon/Apple/Steam/Google/etc), alternative store currency (Canadian Tire Money), etc. Then there's non-traditional currency, like WoW Gold.
If anyone says Bitcoin isn't a "money" they're plain old lying. It can be used to facilitate trade (which is the purpose of currency).
Of course, there are a few fundamental problems with Bitcoin, but there are problems with all currencies.
When any economist, banker, etc., says Bitcoin is doomed, the real reason is them saying is "we haven't figured out a way to make money on it yet". No currency is invulnerable to making money by doing things of little value, Bitcoin included. It just means the quants haven't sat down to figure out schemes to exploit to get bitcoins for little effort. Either it's because the entire bitcoin market is too small so the benefits of skimming 1/1,000,000th of a Bitcoin from every transaction is barely worth the effort, or other reason.
It sounds to me, to be honest, that this was a difficult decision from Google's point of view. I say this because the fact it voided the warranty was obvious from the beginning, and this is a high profile project that would have been closely watched by Google from the beginning. The fact they took several days to eject the app from the store suggests they didn't actually want to, but felt obliged to either because they were under pressure from other members of the OHA, or simply because they didn't want to set a difficult precedent.
I think it's seen as Google is more and more afraid of losing control of Android and the whole reason of why they have Android to begin with. (Remember, Google was deathly afraid of Apple's iPhone OS back in the day - because they were dependent on Apple for mobile revenue. Android was seen as a way to ensure a stream of mobile ad revenue goes to Google).
In fact, Google's biggest threat is Amazon who is having a lot of success with their Android OS.
To combat this, Google has been closing off the source of a lot of Android applications, as well as enforcing the terms of OHA agreements and the like. A regular OHA Android with Google comes with a lot of apps that simply aren't in AOSP - either there's features missing (and the AOSP one is a bare bones version) or by integrating apps to use things that are Google-specific - e.g., forcing use of Google Services Framework. GSF is good in that it abstracts most of the Android APIs away so devs don't have to worry about supporting Gingerbread through Kit Kat, but it also has a nice side effect of tying those apps to Google Play store so devs won't try to submit to the Amazon App Store nor make the app available (easily) to the Kindle.
Google's scared - they bought Android for the purpose of not being locked out of mobile advertising, and it's that very thing that's threatening them.
I think the CM installer was difficult because what CM does may go against Google's best interest (i.e., ensuring you're seeing ads and all that).
I winced inside when I saw Daily Milk mentioned. It is Almost Entirely Unlike Chocolate[tm]. I went on a one-week trip to London many years ago, and those things infested all the tube stations. It was like something out of a Dr. Who episode, maybe one written by Douglas Adams.
Cadbury chocolate is made quite differently - they intentionally sour the milk a bit to give it a more distinct taste, which is why it's different. (It's also relatively popular north of the 49th).
Of course, if you're not used to it, it may taste terrible, but it's quite good. Then there's Swiss and Belgian chocolate... more traditional.
The American stuff is generally OK except around easter, when even the "real cocoa butter" bars are just plain awful - gritty, awful tasting and so much more.
It was because they were cheap. Very cheap. Unfortunately they were also very unreliable, and if there's one thing that people do not forgive, it's losing their data.
That was the big problem - the high failure rates. OCZ drives consistently were amongst the fastest drives, but any rational person would see that the numbers are so big they're meaningless. I mean, if you had to choose an OCZ drive with 500MB/sec reads and writes, or a more reliable one with 400MB/sec read and write, well, what 20% loss in speed probably will go unnoticed (copying a 1GB file - 2 seconds vs. 2.5 seconds), especially if it means your data is there tomorrow.
And yes, you can get good SSDs with ultra/super caps or big banks of tantalum caps that will let them handle sudden powerdowns gracefully. In fact, enterprise SSDs almost always have caps in them, while consumer drives don't. (Some of the new big-SSD and HDD hybrids power the SSD from the back EMF of the drive motor on sudden powerdown - that energy is also used to do emergency head parks).
Stop kidding yourself if you think the sales are that much better than other times throughout the year. Anytime of year when a product is the outgoing generation being cleared out (as is typically the case with blockbuster sales) you will get a significant discount. You are a sheep, you just haven't realized it yet.
It really depends. Stuff like electronics like to be cleared out before the end of the year because CES brings new shinys that retailres will get the rest of the year (there's a reason why CES is always practically the first week of January). Hell, CES is generally hell if you're in the business because it almost always means working through the holidays so you can be prepared by the new year.
And while yes, you can often find doorbuster sales at other times of the year, you have to work for them - either scanning the flyers relentlessly, checking deal sites, or browsing it in store. It's just easier to do it one day of the year than to continually try to find the best TV deal all year.
And so what if it's an old model? Often the old model works just as well as the new one. After all, is a 2012 TV any worse than any 2013 TV?
Then there's the time of getting cheap crap for the kids where you don't care if they screw it up, drop it, break it, etc.
And finally, well, for some people, shopping is fun and a way to spend the day. Just like some people use Windows while we scoff at them, others get their kicks doing some shopping. Coming home empty handed is fine (perhaps it didn't look so hot in the store?).
Some of it can be explained by CPU speed (the Bay Trail ran at 1.33GHz vs. 1.4 for the A7), but it also means the speed advantage at the low end low cost x86 is being rapidly reached by ARM CPUs.
In fact, Intel wants to position the Atom (especially Bay Trail) as a very fast embedded SoC for mobiles, but if existing SoCs are starting to catch up to it, there's very little advantage.
It also means when Android goes fully 64-bit, you can expect some massive performance improvements (most of it comes from the ARMv8 64 bit architecture more so than any specific microarchitecture change).
You'd have to qualify that with screen size. The average viewer sitting 10 feet away from his 40" TV wouldn't notice a different with 4K content, but give him a 70" or 80" screen, and he will.
Before I had an HD TV, I had a 30" CRT - if it had been 1080p capable, I wouldn't have noticed much (if any) difference between that and 480p. It wasn't until I upgraded to a 37" 720P LCD TV, and later to a 55" 1080p TV that I could take advantage of the higher resolutions. 4K is the same - users will need much bigger displays (or sit much closer to their TV) to really take advantage of it.
Unlikely, actually.
At 10 feet, a 70-80" TV would be just about "retina" for the average viewer with 1080p content, and that's approaching those with superior vision - you'd really want to be about 8 feet away.
At 4K, you'd need to sit even closer to get the benefits - and we may be hitting the limits soon because there's a limit to human vision in terms of field of view, and if it's all TV with "retina" style resolution, then that's the most TV you could really see all at once.
And yes, I'd call it "retina" even though that's a marketing term, because sit far enough away (and most people sit too far away) and you can't really see the extra pixels.
If you want to get to a place on time at the same time as everyone else, flying will not do it. Either leave before most people do or take other means of transportation. You'd have to be a complete idiot or new to flying to not know that.
Well, other than the dangers of flying into the storm, flying is a perfectly valid option. Of course, flying commercially will probably lead to pain, but there's nothing wrong with being a pilot and flying your own plane to your destination. (And given there are generally a lot more smaller airports, you may end up at a nice one really close to your intended destination).
Avoids TSA hassles, cattle herding of self-loading cargo, etc.
For most people that's not an option though, since they leave as soon as they can after work and for many there are no alternatives to airplanes. Basically, they're idiots for moving so far away from their families they can't get to them in a short drive and idiots for not getting themselves jobs where they have a flexible schedule? Either that or you have an incredible naive way of looking at the world.
There's several solutions. First of all, instead of trying to make it last minute, plan ahead. It's not like we cannot tell when Thanksgiving will be next year to go and plan some time off.
Heck, enough people do it that the weekend before is actually peak travel season where security and all that can be expected to take hours.
Given the entirety of the US shuts down for thanksgiving, and you can easily detect the slowdown a week before, time off should be fairly easy to obtain. The only reason would be if you're on pager duty or in an occupation where there has to be coverage 24/7.
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I mean, The Winklevoss twins (of Facebook fame - yes those two) have claimed repeatedly that they own around 10% of all bitcoins out there spread through various safe storage locations.
If that's true (that would be around 2M bitcoins), that would put their holdings at over $2B.
Most people don't care because they just want something that works. They want a tool, an appliance. They don't want to mess with it "for the sake of messing with it" - just something they can start up, do their work, and shut down. They don't want to worry about viruses malware, or clicking the wrong link.
It's a side effect of the "commonization" (not commoditization) of computing. A computer is everywhere - and modern life is impossible without interacting with some computing device or other.
It's like cars - for the most part, most drivers don't care what goes on under the hood - they only care about the end results - good gas mileage, "sporty" and "powerful" (really, it means "I can merge on the highway and overtake without flooring it"), image (i.e., how it makes them feel), and reliability. It doesn't matter about hybrids or electric cars (they're really part of "good gas mileage" and "image"). Or if there's hamsters running in wheels under the hood.
Or if most of the stuff is buried deep within a piece of silicon in some black box under the hood. All they know is they need to follow the service schedule in the manual and the maintenance is generally taken care of (oil, fluids, etc).
They're not people who will spend hours under the hood tinkering (there are a few of them, but the vast majority of people don't care to do that) and so forth. If it fails to start, they call a tow truck.
Computers are just the same - the vast majority see them as tools to help them get things done. They don't care if the OS is free, open, locked down, or whatever, as long as it gets them where they need to go, that's sufficient. If it fails to boot, they take it to Geek Squad or to your local /. crowd.
That's why tablets are popular - they pretty much just work, are convenient to use (even laptops generally demand being put on a table rather than being easily handled and used while lying on the couch), and you don't have to wait too long for reboots and such.
Ditto consoles - pop the disc in, play game.
The PC market won't disappear, ever - just like we have pickup trucks, big rigs, and other vehicles, we'll need a full spectrum of devices from smartphones to tablets, laptops and desktops and servers. Of course, it also means prices will probably go up due to lower volumes, but is that such a bad thing? The race to the bottom has killed innovation in the PC industry as no one makes any money - think the vast sea of 1366x768 displays, 1080p displays, integrated graphics, and other common complaints of bargain basement PCs. And yet, if you have more expensive PCs, you see more innovation like SSDs, high res screens, different formfactors, etc (see Apple, and ultrabooks and other stuff). (Plus, not that you couldn't get high res displays before - you just paid more. The race to the bottom went beyond and cause everyone to cut corners and value).
Technically, they invented AdSense to combat the intrusiveness of then-contemporary ads.
Of course, they realized doing ads better wasn't cutting it, and then proceeded to own all the other ad companies they felt were "doing it wrong" when they were conjuring up AdSense.
With Google owning pretty much the entirety of online advertising, and a huge majority of mobile advertising, Google IS one of the biggest peddlers of those popups, popunders, deceptive and other ads.
(Though, to Google's credit, they do try to distance themselves from their ad acquisitions like DoubleClick and the like).
And to be honest, I can't remember the last time I saw an AdSense ad... other than on Google's search page. Everyone else seems to be using some Google subsidiary ad network.
That's what's happening here - our government (BC, Canada) decided to not do the race to the bottom in film tax credits (in order to compete with other provinces), much to the hue and cry of the local production firms. Whether that's good or not, remains to be seen, though there is a drop off in the number of productions actually done here.
Instead, they started pursuing overseas film contracts - notably Bollywood. Of course, much bellyaching also happened, for Bollywood films are typically low budget (compared to Hollywood) and have much less effects and post production.
Of course, one of the arguments against film and tax credits is that the benefits really go towards the 1% in the US and that the money would be better spent on local industry than help making the rich get richer. (And Hollywood knows it - they routinely play locations off one another to get more and more tax credits). Depending on who you ask, it goes either way - either that money generates more tax revenues than the credits cost, or it's about the same. (No one argues less, because then it's obvious that it's far cheaper ot just pay those guys directly).
But mostly barebones - the premium Androids are a rarity given the sales numbers. Of course, the flagships do sell a lot, but they're vastly outsold by the millions of cheap-ass Android phones out there (who don't sell as many, but considering new ones come daily, do get a fair bit of turnover).
I'm sure a lot of Androids are bought as "I want an iPhone" "That'll be $500", "ooh, too much, what else you got?" (hands over a free Android) "This one is free with contract, and it works like an iPhone".
Or, another common scenario, "I could get a featurephone for free, or this smartphone for.. free"
In fact, the inability to differentiate between Android models depresses mobile advertising rates for Android - ad impressions for iOS users generally cost more (up to 2 times as much for an Android user), and yes, advertisers know that iOS users generally are the ones they want because they spend money.
Hell, apparently Facebook ads to iOS users have way better ROI than Android users
Depends how much you want to store.
If it's just a little bit, using a DVD-R is perfectly adequate as a backup solution. Even BD-R for slightly larger amounts.
But if you have to store more, say a few to double digit TB, hard drives might be a reasonable solution - they're quite cheap and of reasonable size - 10 4TB drives can be had for just over $1K giving you 40TB of un-RAIDed storage.
But once you're up there in storage, where you can afford the $5k+ tape drive costs and $100 tapes (though which can store 10/20/30+ TB each), tape is definitely affordable.
And the LHC generates petabytes of data per second during an experiment, so tape drives are definitely economical.
There's a balance between cost per byte and initial acquisition cost. DVDs and BDs have extremely low acquisition costs, but relatively high cost per byte (you can get started with $100). Hard drives have higher costs, but lower cost per byte. Tape has the least cost per byte, but initial costs are quite high, and special requirements may make implementation using hard drives viable for a long time yet.
The old hangar service is still available, but the sender has to request it explicitly (parcel volumes are so high that if they still did hangar service, the system would be overflowing within a week as parcels awaiting pickup pile up).
Usually it gets marked as "Do not safe drop" (i.e., do not leave package). Or signature service is requested. Otherwise it's treated like a piece of lettermail - left at your mailbox.
For FedEx and UPS, the same applies as well - the sender has the option to request a signature service or not - the latter being slightly cheaper and why Amazon and others often use it (better to replace the odd item than spend the extra 10 cents on shipping as volumes are high enough that you still save money).
It also cuts down on the customer service calls for people who complain about slow shipping because they don't make it out to the depot immediately.
All these options are really only available to the large shippers - if you send a package through the mail, FedEx or UPS, unless you use first class parcel, the default shipping options include full tracking with signature or no safe drop.
But ship enough and they let you have the option of just leaving it on the stoop - presumably if you ship enough that people aren't there to pick it up, FedEx/UPS etc., start to pile on the costs of repeated visits.
Don't bother - someone else in China probably already has. And maybe even charge for it, and a couple of versions probably have added malware as well.
Quality control, piracy (both ways - paid apps for free in the store, and other devs submitting the same app and making money off it), etc., are non-existent.
There's a reason why the latest Android malware generally spreads through China first - the official app stores are so bad that you really cannot tell if you're getting the real thing, a pirated copy, an infected copy, whatever. That and the popularity of sideloading and such.
Actually, a modern Android phone (non-Chinese version) is actually full of closed source at the top - and I'm not talking about drivers, but Google-installed closed source.
AOSP gets you a basic phone, yes, but you'll notice most of the apps are actually missing and anyone using AOSP will probably ask why they're so crippled - Google has closed source versions of many apps that leave the AOSP versions in the dust.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/
These days, Android is dominant. Google no longer needs Android to be open-source in order to prevent an "iPhone takeover" or to build marketshare. And we see that happening - Google is restricting what they put in AOSP to prevent Amazon and others from taking AOSP and running with it - doing stuff like tying apps to Google Services Framework so devs can't port to Kindle easily, etc.
Perhaps the biggest threat to Google is that Samsung is the only player with a complete set of fully functional (closed source) replacement apps. But anyone starting from AOSP has a lot of extra development work to do.
Yes you can. However, that's sure a HUGE PITA that for everyone concerned, no one would bother. Sure you'll have a few, but the vast majority won't, so much so that the few that do are insignificant and ignorable and if you're an app developer, you don't care.
I know there are probably a few people who change launchers daily, but others may try it once and forget it - the big problem with Android is the lack of a sane backup solution - you can spend hours/days customizing it, but then move to a new phone and then lose it all. Repeat a couple of times and it's just a huge PITA.
Limiting supply also means scalping, and Apple is against scalpers - a lot of their purchase policies are basically enacted to foil scalpers (it doesn't always work, because if you're willing to throw people at the problem...).
It's far less likely that Apple is artificially limiting supply - the iPhone has traditionally sold for ridiculous amounts of money (most of it going to scalpers) - people are just willing to pay $1000-2000+ for the latest iPhone - imported from the US if necessary. Apple would rather sell those people a phone at retail price than to encourage sales by "limiting supply" and "running out".
And heck, if the numbers are to be believed, Sony and Microsoft are learning that selling out works initially, but if you want sales, you have to have product in channels (i.e., the Xbone is actually having better sales than PS4 - because the latter is impossible to find due to low supplies, whilst the former is much easier to obtain as Microsoft skims people by simply being available).
"Sold out" is a cheap marketing ploy that only works at the beginning. Being constantly sold out means you're giving everyone else money as only die hards will explicitly continue to wait for your product.
A modern day password cracker (brute force) with a reasonably large dictionary can basically break all human generated paswords these days.
First - besides the dictionary, they also try variations - including l33t 5p34k variations, various capitalizations and putting numbers at the beginning or end of the word.
Second, the old trick of picking a phrase and using it? Also done - the dictionaries often pick phrases out of the Bible and other texts and run with those, too. You'd think this would be difficult, but surprisingly not. And there's the variations in the above as well.
A brute forcer that uses a dictionary often enlarges it through variations, which is still far less to check through than a full test-every-combination brute force.
About the only choices left are pure random passwords that the only way to break them is testing every combination.
Depends - ad-supported programs are a big industry as seen by Android apps. Though, even Android and iOS is not immune - a new plugin for Unity installs a passive Bitcoin miner.
If you're a app developer using the free-to-play model (or freemium), it's another option to consider. And given PC gaming is also going towards the freemium model to bypass stuff like DRM and piracy.
But for the users, well, it means your PC becomes a passive bitcoin miner. Naturally that page has no information on the impact towards mobile battery life.
Yeah, it's like people are surprised that the actions they do in public (i.e., anything you do on the Internet) actually can be watched, observed and noticed by people.
I mean, if you want to keep something private, or want some privacy, you keep that stuff under wraps. You don't go post it online or anything where other people have access to it. Encryption works, to a point, but the best way to keep something from being revealed to anyone is to keep it to yourself.
The fact that some people have put up marketing things like "privacy controls" really doesn't change things - all Facebook has done is shown how ephemeral those settings are. The old saying of "don't put anything online you don't want to see in the New York Times tomorrow" still applies like it has for decades. (Though, I suppose a more modern variant is Google News or something).
It's hard to believe, but yeah, there are tons of serial and parallel cards with PCIe interfaces on them. And if you have a laptop, ExpressCard serial and parallel ports exist too - and these aren't the chintzy USB ones (that use the USB port on the ExpressCard slot) - but use the real PCIe side of the slot and appear as a native port.
I'm just waiting for the Thunderbolt ones to come out as well - after all, it's also PCIe.
And I thought more modern CNCs have USB ports where you copy the file to a USB stick and then jam it into the USB port? Or floppy drives in the past?
(No, these CNCs don't hook to the PC via USB. They're standalone - you generate the file, copy it to a USB stick, and then plug the stick into the CNC's USB port and navigate to it.). I suppose the latest also support SD cards and the like.
It's poor science, yes, but it's an intriguing data point in which further study is required.
That's often how research is done - you work with a limited set of resources to see if the hypothesis is even correct. Like say, "vaccines cause autism". Well, you do a study, and find that yes, it does in your study, which warrants further study. Or you find that no, it doesn't, which shuts down the entire line of thinking.
Starting with a small sample size is perfectly OK, as long as one realizes that further study is required to see if the issue discovered was related to small sample size (e.g., local effect or other thing).
But no, you don't withdraw published papers for bad science - you release another one proving the original was bad. (Unlike the original Lancet paper, which was discovered to be fraudulent which does demand removal).
Unless the paper was done to engage in fraud, it should stand. It doesn't matter if the authors are biased, if the sample size is too small, or the paper uses "teh" everywhere. It should be judged as it stands. And if other studies show otherwise, well, they should be published as well, and that's how knowledge is obtained - you have done more studies that discredit an earlier study because of some variable that was uncontrolled.
OTOH, that advertising clause makes it useful if you want to PREVENT GPL projects from using it.
And it's not difficult for large projects - because BSD code is everywhere. If you go to the "about" screen on large projects you may see something like "Portions (c) Regents of University of California" and other stuff in the about dialog. In fact, a LOT of them have pages of such acknowledgements. (zlib is another one).
Compatibility is worse on this board though - it's a 486 core. Most modern Linux is compiled for i586 (Pentium) ISA, so you can't even run a stock Linux distribution (even the "i386" distros usually assume Pentium and up). You'll need to basically recompile everything for i486 instruction set to get it to work.
Last time I dealt with this, Puppy Linux was all that could run by default on it (I think it compiled everything i386 - though Linux needs 486 or better). Everything it didn't come with had to be recompiled from source as practically all binaries available were i586.
Though it can probably run Windows - I think XP should run just fine on it.
And yes, I've tried running i586 binaries on boards with the Vortex processor on them. You usually get a segfault or illegal instruction error sooner or later.
Bitcoin is just alternative currency. There are plenty of that around - most of them are pegged to some other currency though, but they are, for the most part alternative currency.
Think: Gift Cards (Amazon/Apple/Steam/Google/etc), alternative store currency (Canadian Tire Money), etc. Then there's non-traditional currency, like WoW Gold.
If anyone says Bitcoin isn't a "money" they're plain old lying. It can be used to facilitate trade (which is the purpose of currency).
Of course, there are a few fundamental problems with Bitcoin, but there are problems with all currencies.
When any economist, banker, etc., says Bitcoin is doomed, the real reason is them saying is "we haven't figured out a way to make money on it yet". No currency is invulnerable to making money by doing things of little value, Bitcoin included. It just means the quants haven't sat down to figure out schemes to exploit to get bitcoins for little effort. Either it's because the entire bitcoin market is too small so the benefits of skimming 1/1,000,000th of a Bitcoin from every transaction is barely worth the effort, or other reason.
That's the real message.
I think it's seen as Google is more and more afraid of losing control of Android and the whole reason of why they have Android to begin with. (Remember, Google was deathly afraid of Apple's iPhone OS back in the day - because they were dependent on Apple for mobile revenue. Android was seen as a way to ensure a stream of mobile ad revenue goes to Google).
In fact, Google's biggest threat is Amazon who is having a lot of success with their Android OS.
To combat this, Google has been closing off the source of a lot of Android applications, as well as enforcing the terms of OHA agreements and the like. A regular OHA Android with Google comes with a lot of apps that simply aren't in AOSP - either there's features missing (and the AOSP one is a bare bones version) or by integrating apps to use things that are Google-specific - e.g., forcing use of Google Services Framework. GSF is good in that it abstracts most of the Android APIs away so devs don't have to worry about supporting Gingerbread through Kit Kat, but it also has a nice side effect of tying those apps to Google Play store so devs won't try to submit to the Amazon App Store nor make the app available (easily) to the Kindle.
Google's scared - they bought Android for the purpose of not being locked out of mobile advertising, and it's that very thing that's threatening them.
I think the CM installer was difficult because what CM does may go against Google's best interest (i.e., ensuring you're seeing ads and all that).
Cadbury chocolate is made quite differently - they intentionally sour the milk a bit to give it a more distinct taste, which is why it's different. (It's also relatively popular north of the 49th).
Of course, if you're not used to it, it may taste terrible, but it's quite good. Then there's Swiss and Belgian chocolate... more traditional.
The American stuff is generally OK except around easter, when even the "real cocoa butter" bars are just plain awful - gritty, awful tasting and so much more.
That was the big problem - the high failure rates. OCZ drives consistently were amongst the fastest drives, but any rational person would see that the numbers are so big they're meaningless. I mean, if you had to choose an OCZ drive with 500MB/sec reads and writes, or a more reliable one with 400MB/sec read and write, well, what 20% loss in speed probably will go unnoticed (copying a 1GB file - 2 seconds vs. 2.5 seconds), especially if it means your data is there tomorrow.
And yes, you can get good SSDs with ultra/super caps or big banks of tantalum caps that will let them handle sudden powerdowns gracefully. In fact, enterprise SSDs almost always have caps in them, while consumer drives don't. (Some of the new big-SSD and HDD hybrids power the SSD from the back EMF of the drive motor on sudden powerdown - that energy is also used to do emergency head parks).
It really depends. Stuff like electronics like to be cleared out before the end of the year because CES brings new shinys that retailres will get the rest of the year (there's a reason why CES is always practically the first week of January). Hell, CES is generally hell if you're in the business because it almost always means working through the holidays so you can be prepared by the new year.
And while yes, you can often find doorbuster sales at other times of the year, you have to work for them - either scanning the flyers relentlessly, checking deal sites, or browsing it in store. It's just easier to do it one day of the year than to continually try to find the best TV deal all year.
And so what if it's an old model? Often the old model works just as well as the new one. After all, is a 2012 TV any worse than any 2013 TV?
Then there's the time of getting cheap crap for the kids where you don't care if they screw it up, drop it, break it, etc.
And finally, well, for some people, shopping is fun and a way to spend the day. Just like some people use Windows while we scoff at them, others get their kicks doing some shopping. Coming home empty handed is fine (perhaps it didn't look so hot in the store?).
They're not as fast as x86 yet, but they're catching up. Intel's latest Bay Trail Atom CPUs are fast (outclassing the old Atoms, but benchmarks put the Apple A7 at a bit faster.
Some of it can be explained by CPU speed (the Bay Trail ran at 1.33GHz vs. 1.4 for the A7), but it also means the speed advantage at the low end low cost x86 is being rapidly reached by ARM CPUs.
In fact, Intel wants to position the Atom (especially Bay Trail) as a very fast embedded SoC for mobiles, but if existing SoCs are starting to catch up to it, there's very little advantage.
It also means when Android goes fully 64-bit, you can expect some massive performance improvements (most of it comes from the ARMv8 64 bit architecture more so than any specific microarchitecture change).
Unlikely, actually.
At 10 feet, a 70-80" TV would be just about "retina" for the average viewer with 1080p content, and that's approaching those with superior vision - you'd really want to be about 8 feet away.
At 4K, you'd need to sit even closer to get the benefits - and we may be hitting the limits soon because there's a limit to human vision in terms of field of view, and if it's all TV with "retina" style resolution, then that's the most TV you could really see all at once.
And yes, I'd call it "retina" even though that's a marketing term, because sit far enough away (and most people sit too far away) and you can't really see the extra pixels.
Well, other than the dangers of flying into the storm, flying is a perfectly valid option. Of course, flying commercially will probably lead to pain, but there's nothing wrong with being a pilot and flying your own plane to your destination. (And given there are generally a lot more smaller airports, you may end up at a nice one really close to your intended destination).
Avoids TSA hassles, cattle herding of self-loading cargo, etc.
There's several solutions. First of all, instead of trying to make it last minute, plan ahead. It's not like we cannot tell when Thanksgiving will be next year to go and plan some time off.
Heck, enough people do it that the weekend before is actually peak travel season where security and all that can be expected to take hours.
Given the entirety of the US shuts down for thanksgiving, and you can easily detect the slowdown a week before, time off should be fairly easy to obtain. The only reason would be if you're on pager duty or in an occupation where there has to be coverage 24/7.