Perhaps, but is it any less enforceable than the FCC's RF emissions laws? Both are spewing crap into a finite broadcast medium, I think it's possible for the two to be considered almost analogues.
The FCC RF laws are highly enforceable. All it takes is a licensed user complaining about interference and the FCC can send a van around to monitor it. And the fines for operating equipment like that can be pretty harsh, too. The lightest of them is basically turning off the equipment, to seizure of said equipment to some rather large fines.
And it's the owner/operator who's responsible for the equipment, too.
If a licensed user's lawful use of equipment causes degradation of performance or other to unlicensed equipment, the FCC is powerless because the unlicensed equipment is forced ot accept the interference, even when it disrupts normal operation.
Of course, there are also licensed users who have "community sense" who often will fix other people's problems for free (e.g., cable TV is notably bad and often pixks up stray ham transmissions - ask nicely and they'll often fix the problem even though it's technically your fault.
And if the interference is temporary well, you can usually easily get away with it quite easily since by the time it's detected, it's too late.
Selling ads only gets you so far, if people don't click on the ads you show them (regardless of how tailored they are) or more importantly don't actually buy anything from the people the ads are for. Eventually people will stop advertising on facebook when they realize that they aren't generating enough money from the ads to justify their costs. At that point, the whole business collapses as the NSA already has all the data they need (and wouldn't pay facebook for data anyways).
Selling ads works for Google. Then again, between AdSense and DoubleClick and everyone else Google owns, Google commands around 98% of the online advertising market.
Facebook is sitting on a wealth of personal public information as well. (I say public because the reality is, it IS public, "privacy controls" is just a marketing scheme to get you to give up way more personal information than you'd give anyways). Enough of it that Google is quite envious of that data (hence tying everything to G+ in an attempt to gather as much personal information as possible)
All that information means Facebook has the ability to target specific demographics, or to run very interesting correlations - stuff that Target and other companies would kill for. (Target, for example, monitors purchases you do in their stores to determine if a child is on its way, and they have huge banks of analytical data for that based on in-store purchases. However, the analytics can get it wrong.). Imagine what kind of analytics could be done if Target got access to the information on Facebook and correlated it with their customer base.
And that's where Facebook sites - they have a wealth of information that people have voluntarily given them (thanks to "privacy controls" marketing). Such a big pile competitors like Google are envious and rapidly trying to build their own collection. While Google owns the vast majority of the online ad market.
The future of marketing isn't generic ads that attempt ot appeal to as many people as possible, it's using analytical data gathered form users to do hyper-specific advertising. Perhaps your profile says you're a hardcore Android user - well, I'm sure Samsung and the like would love to show you Android ads for their latest and greatest running the latest Android. They also know not to send you ads for the vast majority of lamer Android devices (if you're hardcore, you won't care for lame crapdroids). Likewise, if you're a hardcore iOS user, they know to avoid advertising to you as you're less likely to convert so the effort will be wasted.
Or imagine being able to market to those who own unlocked phones, or those who are coming out of a contract and looking around, etc.
As it is, in an open-plan office, I don't want to disturb my colleagues, or feed them a constant stream of what I'm searching for.
However, I've only just started using voice on my Nexus 4. I'd simply assumed it wouldn't work well enough, but I gave it a go when I wanted to send a text in a hurry -- and was astonished to find that it *faultlessly* transcribed "I'm on my way. If I'm not there in ten minutes avenge my death", spoken at full speed.
So since then I've checked out the full range of voice instructions, and plenty of them are useful.
And playing around with a Nexus 5 that a coworker got, I too discovered that I can drop "Ok... Google..." during a regular conversation and trigger it.
So in an open plan office, if the phone is at the home screen, you can have it do all sorts of interesting things by just muttering out loud. "OK Google, read last text" or other commands.
We had initially assumed that it was voice-specific, as he couldn't get it to trigger (the phone was on his desk beside him) while I was a cube away talking to him (an empty cube sat between us) and it triggered for me.
Makes you wonder if the Chrome version can use "I'm Feeling Lucky". Would be fun for the office tool who shows off his use of it in an open-plan office.
Dropbox started as a very dodgy collection of python scripts as a front end to Amazon storage, with a long list of security incidents right up to and including people getting other people's files without needing a password (just username in one case, file hashes in another and a failure to revoke access once granted but looks as if it did as a third). They had an idea but few resources to implement it. To go from where they were to where they are now and where they want to be requires a lot of work which is why they have so many development staff,
Not to mention Reddit really only has one interface - the web and HTML. Sure they have "web APIs" and all that, but it's still a collection of CGI in the end.
Dropbox not only has to manage storage and all that, but they have clients for all major mobile OSes, as well as clients for desktop OSes. And they own Mailbox or whatever it is as well, plus all the other integration with websites and other stuff. Just all the platform specific stuff and integration of web clients and all that is far more complex, so Dropbox has to have more people as a result.
Is there anywhere else you should buy computer parts from?
Do they still ship hard drives in ways that would void their warranties? I know I got real scared after someone ordered 10 and because of the way it was packaged, all 10 were dead (10 hard drives bound together, wrapped with bubblewrap, tossed in a box half filled with peanuts).
What I don't get is since OEM drives ship with OEM packaging to protect them, why they don't bother recycling that and using it to wrap the drives in.
Is there anyone that ships hard drives in packaging that is approved by the hard drive manufacturers as proper shipping containers? It almost seems like you could have Newegg ship straight to the manufacturer and the manufacturer will void the warranty for poor packaging.
Yep. And there were 1920x1200 displays as well, giving 16:10. Actually, I'm writing this on a 9½ year old laptop with 1920x1200 pixels on its built-in 17" screen (it's a Sony Vaio VGN-A117S). It runs fine with Xubuntu, and if its replacement lasts as long, it will be a bargain. I had planned on upgrading to something with more pixels, but some years ago all the laptops - other than a few linux-hostile Macs - went to fewer pixels. Luckily, that looks like changing again, although I'll wait a bit for the price to drop before getting one with 3200x1800 pixels. Even 16:9 is acceptable with enough vertical pixels, avoiding the shortscreen consequences of full HD.
No, you could buy Dell laptops with 1920x1200 screens. You still can, too.
Everyone who complains about low res screens are only limiting themselves - you could always buy a laptop with 1920x1200 screen. You just had to ante up for it because 1920x1080 is a commodity while 1920x1200 is more niche.
And ignore the $500 and under laptops - those are built to a price and that's the reason 1366x768 is common - everyone looks at you funny if you spend more money than that, yet there are very legitimate reasons to do so, like getting nicer screens, GPUs, etc.
And Macs were Linux hostile? Linux supported the EFI boot for a long time now - about the only troublesome spots were WiFi (Broadcom), and GPU (NVidia/AMD). Heck, wasn't Linus using a Mac Mini running Linux for a spell?
And the only reason it's changing is because of ultrabooks - basically it gave a reason for PC manufacturers to raise prices and thus actually put better stuff in laptops. The race to the bottom works only so far - after a certain point corners are cut to meet a price.
I'm skeptical about repairability, at least home repairability -- but as long as the cost of, and demand for, RAM and disk continue on their current trajectories, buying what you need now and upgrading over time makes a lot more sense than buying now for your needs two or three years down the road.
Well, even the retinas have a removable SSD so that can be upgraded quite easily.
Memory, not so much - by the time "a few years later" comes around, memory can be hard to find especially in the denser modules as everyone migrated to the new memory standard. If you buy the laptop that's using cutting edge memory, then yes, it makes sense to wait (e.g., DDR4). But if' it's using mainstream memory modules (e.g., DDR3) then buying now means not having to hunt for it when DDR5 is mainstream and DDR3 is now horrendously expensive. (Try finding DDR modules that are denser than 1GB per DIMM for any reasonable price. Even DDR2 - I have a laptop that's got 4GB of RAM, to upgrade it to 8 requires spending serious money. Even back when it came out it was expensive, and it's not much cheaper now years later).
Batteries are controversial - you get people claiming one thing and another, but the sad reality is, save business laptops, 99.99% of consumers don't not replace the battery at all. Once it dies, it's dead and sits there in the battery bay while the PC may still be in use. Sure they could re-cell them or buy a new battery or whatever (though new is iffy - given the speed of which new models come out). but most people don't give a damn or care.
If the person doesn't want it, they have the ability to create a living will (advance healthcare directive) and to designate someone with a durable power of attorney for healthcare.
Although it is generally not allowed to have a "kill me" suicide directive, you can include things like not using medical devices, not resuscitating, and not providing food or water or I/V nourishment while still getting pain medication.
No need for $8000/month. A natural death can follow quickly, especially if your order says to give you no food or water.
Problem with that is it requires being mentally competent. Which is fine if you do it well in advance, but if not, then you're subject to being kept alive just because.
Or to look at it the opposite side - when you see your pet dog struggling with their current life - when they cannot get up on their 4 legs without assistance, when they're only able to chew few kibble and pee and defecate where they lie - you could keep your pet in that state, but most feel it's time and put them to sleep because keeping them alive is serving no purpose - the pet can't go out and enjoy activities they were doing before - they're stuck in a wet, smelly spot all day. It's not like putting them to sleep is easy (it's not, you do question yourself for days on end before and after), but it is humane because you know they're not enjoying themselves by being stuck in a single spot all day when they really want to come over and participate.
It's really a quality of life thing more than anything else - just like how some people refuse treatment for disease because the effects render them a blubbering mess of a person who cannot take care of themselves anymore.
Sometimes it's just better to get it over with than to lie in a wheelchair all day staring at a spot in the wall and waiting for someone to basically push you around because you're unable to do anything other than lie around.
Says who? When people tell you that 300 PPI is the most that the human eye can resolve at 12 inches do you just accept it or do you question whether it is based on scientific fact? Some quick research indicates that this oft quoted "fact" is actually incorrect. It's closer to 1000 PPI.
The resolution of the eye is NOT constant. In fact, the highest resolution part of the eye is the central vision - quite a narrow part of the entire field of vision. Peripheral vision is horrendous, and really only optimized for one use case - motion detection.
It's possible to conduct a simple experiment to show this - simply have a friend show a photo of two people only about 3' apart while you stare at a dot 2' feet away (so the photos are about 1 1/2' away from the dot). Whilst staring at the dot, have your friend mix the order up and have you identify the people without moving your gaze away.
Most people can't tell much beyond color. A more "fun" version involves cheerleaders and people on a field, and half of the "cheerleaders" were dudes in a cheerleading outfit. The test subjects routinely weren't better than random guesses on picking the real cheerleader.
The reason the eye has such "high resolution" is because the eyes are always in motion - they're constantly scanning around and interpolating the image data.
The eye itself is a relatively poor image capture device - but when coupled with a VERY powerful imaging processor and VERY powerful image processing software, it can achieve super-high resolutions and very advanced processing including motion detection, recognition, and other things. Unfortunately, it also means it's easily fooled - see optical illusions and blind spot detection as ways to fool it.
Anyhow, ppi relates more to visual acuity which is a function of distance and density - and unless you're holding your phone to your nose, there aren't very many people complaining that a "retina" display has very noticeable pixels. Hell, the most common "retina" display one has is the humble HDTV - most people sit way too far back that 20/20 vision cannot resolve individual pixels, making even the low-dpi 1080p screen "retina" by definition. (Of course there are eagle eyes out there with 20/40+ vision who can benefit from being able to buy a cheaper smaller HDTV and still enjoy the high-resolution image).
True, an AC current probe isn't much use on an electric car.
Actually, they're still useful - I believe most use AC induction motors - the big controller box is typically a big-ass inverter (even if you wanted to use DC you'd still need the big-ass box for the power electronics and H-bridge and all that stuff (i.e., all the same stuff inside an inverter), the only real difference is your control method is slightly different between AC and DC motors.
You own a 40nm process fab? Are you a multi-billionaire?
Face the facts, you'll either be stuck running your hardware on very very expensive $1000+ FPGAs in order to get 1/10th of the performance of a $10 Allwinner SoC, or you'll be getting 1/100th the performance on a mere $200 FPGA dev board.
You don't have to be a multi-billionaire to own a fab. You also don't need millions to use a fab, either.
And 1/10th speed on a $1000 FPGA? Forget it. You're looking at 1/300th speed on a $250K FPGA (seriously - the ASIC I used ran at 1GHz on silicon, and 3MHz on the FPGAs). Granted, if you spend $1M or so, you can get maybe a 1/50-1/100th speed FPGA system (the FPGAs themselves cost $35K in 1000 quantity, and the system had 4-8 or more of those - yes, easily over a quarter mill in FPGAs alone).
In fact, university students routinely crank out ASICs relatively cheaply - so cheap that they're basically "free" so they run experimentation on the fab process including transistor matching, transistor performance qualifications, etc.
Granted, we're not talking 40nm here, as the student budget is closer to 1um - no deep sub-micron here. And the largest cost after that is well, the package. But such ancient fab equipment is basically free at this point in time, and you can still use basic photolithography systems so your masks don't have to cost $100K each (yes, masks are around $100K, and you need 20-30 depending on how many processing steps and layers you choose - that means taping out costs anywhere from $2M-3M.).
If you ever wonder why you have A0/A1/A2/B0 style steppings - it tells you what masks changed - you can do a full set from transistors to metal layers (A->B->C), or just modifications to the metal layers only (x0->x1->x2). The latter is often done because there are always spare transistors that are not connected to anything, so fixing bugs by wiring up those unused transistors saves a number of masks. Do it carefully enough and you can really minimize the number of new masks you need to wire up additional logic. Transistor density is often so low as wire density is the issue (which is why we have 10+ metal layers), so making a whole pile of spare gates in the unused areas means you can easily edit significant pieces of logic without needing a transistor level mask change. Heck, you can make them of different sizes in case the old logic lacks sufficient drive capability.
Tin is going to be a major problem for much semiconductor processing - as it means you basically now can't solder the chip, or do any even 'low' temperature processing after it's deposited - it has to be the last layer.
It's even worse than that. Tin whiskers - it's a characteristic of the metal. No one knows why, the only suspicion we have is Tin does it to relieve stress in the crystal.
And it appears atoms are willing to migrate from all throughout the bulk to whiskers - if you look at whiskers under a microscope (electron), you won't find depressions near whisker bases (indicating the atoms did not come from nearby - they "migrated" to the whisker. Of course, a whisker may steal an atom from the bulk near it, but that atom gets replaced by another one and another one, so much so the lattice is really missing an atom somewhere far away from the whisker.
And depositing the layer on top of other materials mean the lattice will be stressed naturally - so who knows what it would do?
(FYI - "bright" tin is the worst - it tends to whisker immediately, while "dull" tin generally doesn't whisker. This means tin hardware (screws, standoffs, mounts, etc) which are bright and shiny will whisker practically immediately and can short out attached electronics - it is his hardware that generally causes whisker shorts rather than solder joints).
Of course, a lead-tin alloy is one of the better ways to control whiskering (but it doesn't prevent it - lead-tin still does whisker, just less so than other known alloys).
One can only imagine what would happen if this whiskers.
This is the company that have developed the Kinect for Microsoft. What do you think is the future of the Kinect? Is it in the Microsoft's hands, now?
Yes, it is. A few years ago Microsoft purchased a company doing 3D imaging - they didn't have anything in time for the original Kinect, so Microsoft went PrimeSense there.
However, the Xbone has Kinect 2, which uses a time-of-flight (!) camera to determine depth instead of using structured light. Microsoft basically owns that technology which means we'll probably see tons of Kinect 2 upgraded robots once Microsoft releases a Windows version.
My concern is that the NSA has access to all of this kind of information about every citizen. Say that the president in 2021, whoever it is, starts accusing people that annoy him of terrorism and have them held indefinitely without right to trial. A number of citizens are displeased with this, so we decide to hold a rally against it. The NSA can instantly identify all of us, and subject us to the same fate. If a group of people spontaneously hold a protest, the president may not be able to get a group of 100 soldiers to shoot innocent civilians but it only takes one obedient soldier to manage a drone strike.
It's happened before, and often with little to no evidence.
Like the Salem Witch Trials. Or McCarthyism.
The NSA doesn't NEED information on you - it just needs to exploit something about you that's publicly known. Perhaps you're Muslim - that's usually an easy target (see all the fuss raised about building a mosque near the WTC?).
And the "witches" and "red commies" didn't usually have anymore evidence than a finger pointed at them.
Why not play to robots' areas of strength and just stick with wheels/treads/rotors/wings/etc., and worry about more advanced forms of locomotion later? I understand that humans want robots that look and act like humans, I suppose, but how about coming up with more practical designs?
Because the world is built around bipedalism (because humans built cities, buildings, etc). If you want to navigate a modern city, two feet generally will get you everywhere, while the other forms will get you limited access at best. Stairs is a particularly nasty problem - some tracked robots can navigate through them, but assistance is often needed and the front needs to be able to traverse the first step. Plus you have all sorts of CG issues since an appropriately steep staircase can result in a very tippy robot.
That's the main reason for bipedal robots - the others have been done and we know their limitations, and generally speaking, an able human is able to traverse over all the terrain that each individual locomotion mechanism can fail at.
And that's pretty hopeful. The thing is, in the real world, you just don't test all your patches. You can't; in any non-trivially sized network you're going to have hundreds of them to go through every week, and the workload is the same for a small or large business. That's why large businesses tend to do better (strangely enough) than small ones when it comes to patch management. And this is an attitude that is backed up by the numbers -- I would say over 9 times out of 10, a break/fix patch has no consequences being pushed into the production environment. It goes out. The version increments. The end. It's that 1 time that screws everyone up -- but it happens infrequently enough that management doesn't update its policies.
That may be true for a general computing system where patches come fast and furious from everywhere, but for closed systems like transit systems, ATC, etc., where the software is basically frozen, there's no excuse. The mantra of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies - i.e., software patches for the underlying OS are often NOT applied because they don't need to be (the system works). However, in the off chance an update is necessary (perhaps the control software has to be updated to handle new equipment that's no longer compatible, or other problem), then the new configuration is extensively tested because once it's set, it's frozen.
(In fact, the biggest problem is usually someone blindly connects the isolated control network to the main corporate LAN where all of a sudden it's no longer static. Heck it could trigger obscure bugs simply due ot added traffic load).
Every company wants cheap IT right now. They want an endless stream of no-benefit, no-complaint, low wage IT workers to come in and set things up so they can fire now newly redundant staff, enable them to compete with companies handing them their asses on a silver platter, implement new systems to replace ones that are often decades old, or reduce their current IT operating costs..
Of course - IT is a cost center. There are various accounting tricks one can do to show that IT can "bring in revenue" but the reality is, it's a cost. A necessary evil since things are way too complex for all but the smallest mom and pop operation to not have some form of computerized business system in place.
And just like other cost center departments like administration and such, businesses want to cut costs as much as possible because there's no hope that IT will ever make a dollar. Sure, they can ENABLE someone else to make a dollar, but directly, they don't make diddly.
Departments that have direct revenues often get increased budgets (e.g., sales and marketing), while indirect benefits (e.g. R&D) often get minor increases, and the main engineering or bulk gets little to no increase (despite fulfilling what sales and marketing actually promise).
Not like you can access the hardware to do anything with the thing that isn't corp approved
And you're comparing this to SteamOS boxes? I don't recall Valve or any of its hardware partners saying anything about running games on them that aren't yet approved on Steam.
I think Valve has said SteamOS will be open to replacements and stuff.
However, getting onto Steam isn't easy. There's an ad-hoc process called Greenlight that's iffy at best, and in the end, it's really a lot more like a harder version of the Apple App Store than anything. It's curated like Apple, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's store, and it's not as easy to get into as Apple's store. It's not as expensive as Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, and not as restrictive with devkits either.
If you're with a publisher, it's a lot easier getting onto Steam, but then you run into publisher issues (Microsoft used to demand every game on it be handled through publishers, and when a publisher goes bankrupt, interesting things happen - some are handled nicely like THQ, others have software stuck in limbo).
Then there's the whole steambox issue - which when you boil it down is a PC pretending to be a console. It's open and all that, but people don't and won't read system requirements. They'll purchase a game on Steambox, and if they bought the super cheap one with Intel graphics and have it run as crap, well, I'm certain that would do wonders for PC gaming where everyone downvotes games because it won't run on the super cheap boxes forcing devs to code for Intel graphics because that's what the most popular steambox had.
PC gamers may take up Steamboxes, but the general public (much larger market) assumes a Steambox will be another console and expect it to work like one. It only takes a reviewer to say "I bought the $200 SteamBox, and it runs like crap. Don't waste your money" to implicate all the other (more expensive and better performing) Steamboxes as crap as well - if it isn't worth wasting $200 on, would you want to waste $300, $400, $500?
And that's really the fundamental problem. Yeah, you can run your own games on it, but you'd have to mod it (easy enough to do) to do it. But most people, like on Android, will just use the Steam store, and getting on that isn't easy. Couple that with people not caring about what Steambox they had, and not knowing or wanting ot spend extra money buying the high end ones being either locked out of a good chunk of games, or having them run piss-poor...
The latest CPU is the A7, which is also different from other ARM processors on the market (for one thing, by implementing the ARMv8-A 64-bit architecture; I think it's the only currently-shipping 64-bit ARM processor).
It is, actually - every other 64-bit solution aims to ship in 2014, and Android I think is only scheduled to get 64-bit support in late 2014 as well.
And you want to know why the A7 is so fast? The ARMv8 architecture changes up how ARMs work so they're much more efficient - and faster. The A7 only runs 32 bit code a little faster than the A6, but when you run native 64-bit code, it speeds up seriously because of the way ARMv8 works.
If you're an Android fan, I would suggest buying nothing until Android gets 64-bit native, because it's going to get the advantages we're seeing with the A7 - yes, right now the A7 is keeping up with SOCs with twice the cores (A7 - dual, Snapdragon - quad) and over 50% higher clock speeds (1.4GHz vs. 2.2GHz). Imagine how fast Android will be with those advantages - it'll be 4-6 times faster than what we have today. Doubling the cores and bumping the speed up 50%, that is.
And I'm sure Intel's worried - the latest Bay Trail Atoms are basically even with the A7 in performance. Sure it's WIndows vs. iOS, but on the benchmarks, if ARM is catching up to Atom, then Intel's Atom advantage is shrinking fast. Intel has positioned the mobile Atoms as way better performers than ARMs, after all.
Once the quad core 2.2GHz 64-bit processors come out, Intel could very well be left in the dust.
The PS4 and XBone shouls really provide a nice steady revenue stream.
Be interesting once they've been out for a bit to get better details on the CPU.
And Intel. Remember, Intel having AMD barely alive means they are spared much anti-trust scrutiny. I'm fairly certain Intel pawned Microsoft and Sony off to AMD for that purpose - gives AMD a few more years of life.
(And Intel and AMD cross license so many patents, you can bet if AMD fails, those patents will be force sold to other competitors and not Intel per anti-trust and monopoly concerns, making life more difficult).
Of course, it's not a LOT of extra money - Microsoft and Sony are shaving pennies on consoles so they'll squeeze for a price that makes AMD money, but not a lot of it after expenses.
OTOH, it's good to have both Microsoft and Sony around competing against each other - keeps both honest. Sony got big and arrogant during the PS2 era that led them to release the PS3 as it was and Microsoft checked them on it, but it lead Microsoft to be fairly arrogant during the Xbox360 era as well.
And now we had Sony keeping Microsoft honest after the Xbone announcement in May w.r.t. DRM and sharing and all that stuff. And Microsoft keeping Sony honest by forcing Sony to pick up DLNA and media playback support (Microsoft announced it the day after the FAQ came out, and Sony relented a week later).
Re:Where was this caution with Wii U?
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have a Wii and I still rage about the lack of HD. Indeed the games are fun and that's why I rage instead of just forgetting about this crap piece of hardware. Good graphics won't turn a bad game into a good game but it certainly make things more enjoyable. The WiiU is OK though, it may not be able to show scenes as complex as the competition (Xbox one, PS4, PC) but at least, it is not an aliased mess.
And yet, HD on the Wii would've added costs that were completely unnecessary at the time.
Remember, back in 2006/7, HDTVs were pretty much limited to the family room, if the house had an HDTV. Almost certainly the main users of the Wii won't have an HDTV (well, I'm sure there were a few rich families who bought a HDTV for their kids back then).
These days it's inexcusable, but back then HDTVs were at the verge of exploding. In fact, it was so bad that Xbox360 and PS3 games were routinely marked down when they were unplayable on SDTVs - either because details essential to gameplay were too small to be seen (or blurry), or stuff like text is unreadable. And that was because Xbox360 and PS3 supported HDTV and many developers assumed players would be gaming on HDTVs, which wasn't true for a few years yet. The PS3 had it worse as it lacked a scaler chip, so if a TV couldn't handle the resolution it needed, it got downscaled to 480i. (e.g., if your TV didn't support 1080i/p and the game was 1080i/p, instead of going to 720p, it would go to 480i).
Of course these days HDTVs are wildly cheap and 1080p sets are common that even the old set in the basement that's unused is probably an HDTV since the SDTVs ended up scrapped.
Even with a perfect link cell connections are shit. Compare what your cellphone sounds like to Speex 16kbps; it's remarkable.
It better be when Speex gets 4x the bandwidth of GSM compressed voice (which really only gets around 2.4-4kbps). It's also why they quantize the hell out of the speech and filter the audio - I think the voice filters are actually narrower than a landline.
Well if the on-board femtocell repeaters work well enough, you won't have people shouting into their phones, other than to overcome cabin/engine noise. I could see requiring earbuds, (and who wouldn't want that anyway). With ear buds, you can carry on a conversation just as quietly as talking between people sitting adjacent.
It doesn't matter how good the connection is - idiots still SHOUT INTO THEIR PHONES for whatever reason. Either they have poor volume control (and never developed their "inside voice") or, as has been seen everywhere, they just don't care.
If you can't, and the results are EXTREMELY important (remember, floating point is an APPROXIMATION of numbers), then you have to read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Numbers. (Yes, it's an Oracle link, but if you google it, most of the links are PDFs while the Oracle one is HTML).
If you're worried about your cloud provider screwing with your results, then you're definitely doing it wrong (read that article).
And yes, lots of people, even scientists, do it wrong because the idealized notion of what a floating point type is and how it actually works in hardware is completely different. Floating point numbers are tricky - they're VERY easy to use, but they're also VERY easy to use wrongly, and it's only if you know how the actual hardware is doing the calculations can you structure your programs and algorithms to do it right.
And no actual hardware FPU or VPU (vector unit - some do floating point) implements the full IEEE spec. Many come close, but none implement it exactly - there's always an omission or two. Especially since a lot of FPUs provide extended precision that goes beyond IEEE spec.
To play devil's advocate for a second, measurements like the safety ratings inherently have error to them. For something like car safety, is a 5.4 really better than a 5.3, or was that just a quirk of the particular tests they did, and the 5.3 would be safer on the road?
Not really.
What happens is cars are rated to the current safety rating - the reason you can score above 5 is because the number is based on the raw figures and the current weightings.
The NHTSA records down in its database the raw numbers, then uses those numbers to calculate the safety rating based on the current weightings (from empirical data). This lets them recalculate the safety rating as need be - yesteryear's 5 stars may be this year's 3 stars, for example. Or, depending on how cars individually perform, it's possible two 5 star cars with the old rating may become a 3-star and a 4-star car.
So you cannot compare "stars" between model years, but you can compare them with historical vehicles recalculated to new standards. After all, many old 5 star vehicles may lack the safety features present on today's modern vehicles, so they won't be 5 stars anymore in the current rating.
The rating will go down as new model years and new tests are introduced - after all, we'd have hit 5 stars 50 years ago if the tests didn't change. The NHTSA updates its tests and ratings when too many cars are pegged - and there's a new test that apparently reflect the more common crashes that many "5 star" cars now fare poorly on.
Next year, the 2013 Tesla Model S may drop from 5.4 to 4.3. But the 2014 Tesla Model S may still get a full 5 stars because Tesla anticipated the new tests and built the cars to withstand them appropriately.
even the banks are screwed up. They should be telling me to call the number on my card. I wonder what would have happened if I had just ignored the call. I was quite disappointed.
For the record, Royal Bank of Canada.
I got a call earlier this week from fraud prevention. The message said to call the 1-800 number OR to call the number on the back of the card and use a certain option.
Of course, I just called the number on my card, hit 0 to get a human, and had him redirect me.
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The FCC RF laws are highly enforceable. All it takes is a licensed user complaining about interference and the FCC can send a van around to monitor it. And the fines for operating equipment like that can be pretty harsh, too. The lightest of them is basically turning off the equipment, to seizure of said equipment to some rather large fines.
And it's the owner/operator who's responsible for the equipment, too.
If a licensed user's lawful use of equipment causes degradation of performance or other to unlicensed equipment, the FCC is powerless because the unlicensed equipment is forced ot accept the interference, even when it disrupts normal operation.
Of course, there are also licensed users who have "community sense" who often will fix other people's problems for free (e.g., cable TV is notably bad and often pixks up stray ham transmissions - ask nicely and they'll often fix the problem even though it's technically your fault.
And if the interference is temporary well, you can usually easily get away with it quite easily since by the time it's detected, it's too late.
Selling ads works for Google. Then again, between AdSense and DoubleClick and everyone else Google owns, Google commands around 98% of the online advertising market.
Facebook is sitting on a wealth of personal public information as well. (I say public because the reality is, it IS public, "privacy controls" is just a marketing scheme to get you to give up way more personal information than you'd give anyways). Enough of it that Google is quite envious of that data (hence tying everything to G+ in an attempt to gather as much personal information as possible)
All that information means Facebook has the ability to target specific demographics, or to run very interesting correlations - stuff that Target and other companies would kill for. (Target, for example, monitors purchases you do in their stores to determine if a child is on its way, and they have huge banks of analytical data for that based on in-store purchases. However, the analytics can get it wrong.). Imagine what kind of analytics could be done if Target got access to the information on Facebook and correlated it with their customer base.
And that's where Facebook sites - they have a wealth of information that people have voluntarily given them (thanks to "privacy controls" marketing). Such a big pile competitors like Google are envious and rapidly trying to build their own collection. While Google owns the vast majority of the online ad market.
The future of marketing isn't generic ads that attempt ot appeal to as many people as possible, it's using analytical data gathered form users to do hyper-specific advertising. Perhaps your profile says you're a hardcore Android user - well, I'm sure Samsung and the like would love to show you Android ads for their latest and greatest running the latest Android. They also know not to send you ads for the vast majority of lamer Android devices (if you're hardcore, you won't care for lame crapdroids). Likewise, if you're a hardcore iOS user, they know to avoid advertising to you as you're less likely to convert so the effort will be wasted.
Or imagine being able to market to those who own unlocked phones, or those who are coming out of a contract and looking around, etc.
And playing around with a Nexus 5 that a coworker got, I too discovered that I can drop "Ok... Google..." during a regular conversation and trigger it.
So in an open plan office, if the phone is at the home screen, you can have it do all sorts of interesting things by just muttering out loud. "OK Google, read last text" or other commands.
We had initially assumed that it was voice-specific, as he couldn't get it to trigger (the phone was on his desk beside him) while I was a cube away talking to him (an empty cube sat between us) and it triggered for me.
Makes you wonder if the Chrome version can use "I'm Feeling Lucky". Would be fun for the office tool who shows off his use of it in an open-plan office.
Not to mention Reddit really only has one interface - the web and HTML. Sure they have "web APIs" and all that, but it's still a collection of CGI in the end.
Dropbox not only has to manage storage and all that, but they have clients for all major mobile OSes, as well as clients for desktop OSes. And they own Mailbox or whatever it is as well, plus all the other integration with websites and other stuff. Just all the platform specific stuff and integration of web clients and all that is far more complex, so Dropbox has to have more people as a result.
Do they still ship hard drives in ways that would void their warranties? I know I got real scared after someone ordered 10 and because of the way it was packaged, all 10 were dead (10 hard drives bound together, wrapped with bubblewrap, tossed in a box half filled with peanuts).
What I don't get is since OEM drives ship with OEM packaging to protect them, why they don't bother recycling that and using it to wrap the drives in.
Is there anyone that ships hard drives in packaging that is approved by the hard drive manufacturers as proper shipping containers? It almost seems like you could have Newegg ship straight to the manufacturer and the manufacturer will void the warranty for poor packaging.
No, you could buy Dell laptops with 1920x1200 screens. You still can, too.
Everyone who complains about low res screens are only limiting themselves - you could always buy a laptop with 1920x1200 screen. You just had to ante up for it because 1920x1080 is a commodity while 1920x1200 is more niche.
And ignore the $500 and under laptops - those are built to a price and that's the reason 1366x768 is common - everyone looks at you funny if you spend more money than that, yet there are very legitimate reasons to do so, like getting nicer screens, GPUs, etc.
And Macs were Linux hostile? Linux supported the EFI boot for a long time now - about the only troublesome spots were WiFi (Broadcom), and GPU (NVidia/AMD). Heck, wasn't Linus using a Mac Mini running Linux for a spell?
And the only reason it's changing is because of ultrabooks - basically it gave a reason for PC manufacturers to raise prices and thus actually put better stuff in laptops. The race to the bottom works only so far - after a certain point corners are cut to meet a price.
Well, even the retinas have a removable SSD so that can be upgraded quite easily.
Memory, not so much - by the time "a few years later" comes around, memory can be hard to find especially in the denser modules as everyone migrated to the new memory standard. If you buy the laptop that's using cutting edge memory, then yes, it makes sense to wait (e.g., DDR4). But if' it's using mainstream memory modules (e.g., DDR3) then buying now means not having to hunt for it when DDR5 is mainstream and DDR3 is now horrendously expensive. (Try finding DDR modules that are denser than 1GB per DIMM for any reasonable price. Even DDR2 - I have a laptop that's got 4GB of RAM, to upgrade it to 8 requires spending serious money. Even back when it came out it was expensive, and it's not much cheaper now years later).
Batteries are controversial - you get people claiming one thing and another, but the sad reality is, save business laptops, 99.99% of consumers don't not replace the battery at all. Once it dies, it's dead and sits there in the battery bay while the PC may still be in use. Sure they could re-cell them or buy a new battery or whatever (though new is iffy - given the speed of which new models come out). but most people don't give a damn or care.
Problem with that is it requires being mentally competent. Which is fine if you do it well in advance, but if not, then you're subject to being kept alive just because.
Or to look at it the opposite side - when you see your pet dog struggling with their current life - when they cannot get up on their 4 legs without assistance, when they're only able to chew few kibble and pee and defecate where they lie - you could keep your pet in that state, but most feel it's time and put them to sleep because keeping them alive is serving no purpose - the pet can't go out and enjoy activities they were doing before - they're stuck in a wet, smelly spot all day. It's not like putting them to sleep is easy (it's not, you do question yourself for days on end before and after), but it is humane because you know they're not enjoying themselves by being stuck in a single spot all day when they really want to come over and participate.
It's really a quality of life thing more than anything else - just like how some people refuse treatment for disease because the effects render them a blubbering mess of a person who cannot take care of themselves anymore.
Sometimes it's just better to get it over with than to lie in a wheelchair all day staring at a spot in the wall and waiting for someone to basically push you around because you're unable to do anything other than lie around.
Only by interpolation.
The resolution of the eye is NOT constant. In fact, the highest resolution part of the eye is the central vision - quite a narrow part of the entire field of vision. Peripheral vision is horrendous, and really only optimized for one use case - motion detection.
It's possible to conduct a simple experiment to show this - simply have a friend show a photo of two people only about 3' apart while you stare at a dot 2' feet away (so the photos are about 1 1/2' away from the dot). Whilst staring at the dot, have your friend mix the order up and have you identify the people without moving your gaze away.
Most people can't tell much beyond color. A more "fun" version involves cheerleaders and people on a field, and half of the "cheerleaders" were dudes in a cheerleading outfit. The test subjects routinely weren't better than random guesses on picking the real cheerleader.
The reason the eye has such "high resolution" is because the eyes are always in motion - they're constantly scanning around and interpolating the image data.
The eye itself is a relatively poor image capture device - but when coupled with a VERY powerful imaging processor and VERY powerful image processing software, it can achieve super-high resolutions and very advanced processing including motion detection, recognition, and other things. Unfortunately, it also means it's easily fooled - see optical illusions and blind spot detection as ways to fool it.
Anyhow, ppi relates more to visual acuity which is a function of distance and density - and unless you're holding your phone to your nose, there aren't very many people complaining that a "retina" display has very noticeable pixels. Hell, the most common "retina" display one has is the humble HDTV - most people sit way too far back that 20/20 vision cannot resolve individual pixels, making even the low-dpi 1080p screen "retina" by definition. (Of course there are eagle eyes out there with 20/40+ vision who can benefit from being able to buy a cheaper smaller HDTV and still enjoy the high-resolution image).
Actually, they're still useful - I believe most use AC induction motors - the big controller box is typically a big-ass inverter (even if you wanted to use DC you'd still need the big-ass box for the power electronics and H-bridge and all that stuff (i.e., all the same stuff inside an inverter), the only real difference is your control method is slightly different between AC and DC motors.
You don't have to be a multi-billionaire to own a fab. You also don't need millions to use a fab, either.
And 1/10th speed on a $1000 FPGA? Forget it. You're looking at 1/300th speed on a $250K FPGA (seriously - the ASIC I used ran at 1GHz on silicon, and 3MHz on the FPGAs). Granted, if you spend $1M or so, you can get maybe a 1/50-1/100th speed FPGA system (the FPGAs themselves cost $35K in 1000 quantity, and the system had 4-8 or more of those - yes, easily over a quarter mill in FPGAs alone).
In fact, university students routinely crank out ASICs relatively cheaply - so cheap that they're basically "free" so they run experimentation on the fab process including transistor matching, transistor performance qualifications, etc.
Granted, we're not talking 40nm here, as the student budget is closer to 1um - no deep sub-micron here. And the largest cost after that is well, the package. But such ancient fab equipment is basically free at this point in time, and you can still use basic photolithography systems so your masks don't have to cost $100K each (yes, masks are around $100K, and you need 20-30 depending on how many processing steps and layers you choose - that means taping out costs anywhere from $2M-3M.).
If you ever wonder why you have A0/A1/A2/B0 style steppings - it tells you what masks changed - you can do a full set from transistors to metal layers (A->B->C), or just modifications to the metal layers only (x0->x1->x2). The latter is often done because there are always spare transistors that are not connected to anything, so fixing bugs by wiring up those unused transistors saves a number of masks. Do it carefully enough and you can really minimize the number of new masks you need to wire up additional logic. Transistor density is often so low as wire density is the issue (which is why we have 10+ metal layers), so making a whole pile of spare gates in the unused areas means you can easily edit significant pieces of logic without needing a transistor level mask change. Heck, you can make them of different sizes in case the old logic lacks sufficient drive capability.
It's even worse than that. Tin whiskers - it's a characteristic of the metal. No one knows why, the only suspicion we have is Tin does it to relieve stress in the crystal.
And it appears atoms are willing to migrate from all throughout the bulk to whiskers - if you look at whiskers under a microscope (electron), you won't find depressions near whisker bases (indicating the atoms did not come from nearby - they "migrated" to the whisker. Of course, a whisker may steal an atom from the bulk near it, but that atom gets replaced by another one and another one, so much so the lattice is really missing an atom somewhere far away from the whisker.
And depositing the layer on top of other materials mean the lattice will be stressed naturally - so who knows what it would do?
(FYI - "bright" tin is the worst - it tends to whisker immediately, while "dull" tin generally doesn't whisker. This means tin hardware (screws, standoffs, mounts, etc) which are bright and shiny will whisker practically immediately and can short out attached electronics - it is his hardware that generally causes whisker shorts rather than solder joints).
Of course, a lead-tin alloy is one of the better ways to control whiskering (but it doesn't prevent it - lead-tin still does whisker, just less so than other known alloys).
One can only imagine what would happen if this whiskers.
Yes, it is. A few years ago Microsoft purchased a company doing 3D imaging - they didn't have anything in time for the original Kinect, so Microsoft went PrimeSense there.
However, the Xbone has Kinect 2, which uses a time-of-flight (!) camera to determine depth instead of using structured light. Microsoft basically owns that technology which means we'll probably see tons of Kinect 2 upgraded robots once Microsoft releases a Windows version.
It's happened before, and often with little to no evidence.
Like the Salem Witch Trials. Or McCarthyism.
The NSA doesn't NEED information on you - it just needs to exploit something about you that's publicly known. Perhaps you're Muslim - that's usually an easy target (see all the fuss raised about building a mosque near the WTC?).
And the "witches" and "red commies" didn't usually have anymore evidence than a finger pointed at them.
Because the world is built around bipedalism (because humans built cities, buildings, etc). If you want to navigate a modern city, two feet generally will get you everywhere, while the other forms will get you limited access at best. Stairs is a particularly nasty problem - some tracked robots can navigate through them, but assistance is often needed and the front needs to be able to traverse the first step. Plus you have all sorts of CG issues since an appropriately steep staircase can result in a very tippy robot.
That's the main reason for bipedal robots - the others have been done and we know their limitations, and generally speaking, an able human is able to traverse over all the terrain that each individual locomotion mechanism can fail at.
That may be true for a general computing system where patches come fast and furious from everywhere, but for closed systems like transit systems, ATC, etc., where the software is basically frozen, there's no excuse. The mantra of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies - i.e., software patches for the underlying OS are often NOT applied because they don't need to be (the system works). However, in the off chance an update is necessary (perhaps the control software has to be updated to handle new equipment that's no longer compatible, or other problem), then the new configuration is extensively tested because once it's set, it's frozen.
(In fact, the biggest problem is usually someone blindly connects the isolated control network to the main corporate LAN where all of a sudden it's no longer static. Heck it could trigger obscure bugs simply due ot added traffic load).
Of course - IT is a cost center. There are various accounting tricks one can do to show that IT can "bring in revenue" but the reality is, it's a cost. A necessary evil since things are way too complex for all but the smallest mom and pop operation to not have some form of computerized business system in place.
And just like other cost center departments like administration and such, businesses want to cut costs as much as possible because there's no hope that IT will ever make a dollar. Sure, they can ENABLE someone else to make a dollar, but directly, they don't make diddly.
Departments that have direct revenues often get increased budgets (e.g., sales and marketing), while indirect benefits (e.g. R&D) often get minor increases, and the main engineering or bulk gets little to no increase (despite fulfilling what sales and marketing actually promise).
I think Valve has said SteamOS will be open to replacements and stuff.
However, getting onto Steam isn't easy. There's an ad-hoc process called Greenlight that's iffy at best, and in the end, it's really a lot more like a harder version of the Apple App Store than anything. It's curated like Apple, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo's store, and it's not as easy to get into as Apple's store. It's not as expensive as Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo, and not as restrictive with devkits either.
If you're with a publisher, it's a lot easier getting onto Steam, but then you run into publisher issues (Microsoft used to demand every game on it be handled through publishers, and when a publisher goes bankrupt, interesting things happen - some are handled nicely like THQ, others have software stuck in limbo).
Then there's the whole steambox issue - which when you boil it down is a PC pretending to be a console. It's open and all that, but people don't and won't read system requirements. They'll purchase a game on Steambox, and if they bought the super cheap one with Intel graphics and have it run as crap, well, I'm certain that would do wonders for PC gaming where everyone downvotes games because it won't run on the super cheap boxes forcing devs to code for Intel graphics because that's what the most popular steambox had.
PC gamers may take up Steamboxes, but the general public (much larger market) assumes a Steambox will be another console and expect it to work like one. It only takes a reviewer to say "I bought the $200 SteamBox, and it runs like crap. Don't waste your money" to implicate all the other (more expensive and better performing) Steamboxes as crap as well - if it isn't worth wasting $200 on, would you want to waste $300, $400, $500?
And that's really the fundamental problem. Yeah, you can run your own games on it, but you'd have to mod it (easy enough to do) to do it. But most people, like on Android, will just use the Steam store, and getting on that isn't easy. Couple that with people not caring about what Steambox they had, and not knowing or wanting ot spend extra money buying the high end ones being either locked out of a good chunk of games, or having them run piss-poor...
It is, actually - every other 64-bit solution aims to ship in 2014, and Android I think is only scheduled to get 64-bit support in late 2014 as well.
And you want to know why the A7 is so fast? The ARMv8 architecture changes up how ARMs work so they're much more efficient - and faster. The A7 only runs 32 bit code a little faster than the A6, but when you run native 64-bit code, it speeds up seriously because of the way ARMv8 works.
If you're an Android fan, I would suggest buying nothing until Android gets 64-bit native, because it's going to get the advantages we're seeing with the A7 - yes, right now the A7 is keeping up with SOCs with twice the cores (A7 - dual, Snapdragon - quad) and over 50% higher clock speeds (1.4GHz vs. 2.2GHz). Imagine how fast Android will be with those advantages - it'll be 4-6 times faster than what we have today. Doubling the cores and bumping the speed up 50%, that is.
And I'm sure Intel's worried - the latest Bay Trail Atoms are basically even with the A7 in performance. Sure it's WIndows vs. iOS, but on the benchmarks, if ARM is catching up to Atom, then Intel's Atom advantage is shrinking fast. Intel has positioned the mobile Atoms as way better performers than ARMs, after all.
Once the quad core 2.2GHz 64-bit processors come out, Intel could very well be left in the dust.
And Intel. Remember, Intel having AMD barely alive means they are spared much anti-trust scrutiny. I'm fairly certain Intel pawned Microsoft and Sony off to AMD for that purpose - gives AMD a few more years of life.
(And Intel and AMD cross license so many patents, you can bet if AMD fails, those patents will be force sold to other competitors and not Intel per anti-trust and monopoly concerns, making life more difficult).
Of course, it's not a LOT of extra money - Microsoft and Sony are shaving pennies on consoles so they'll squeeze for a price that makes AMD money, but not a lot of it after expenses.
OTOH, it's good to have both Microsoft and Sony around competing against each other - keeps both honest. Sony got big and arrogant during the PS2 era that led them to release the PS3 as it was and Microsoft checked them on it, but it lead Microsoft to be fairly arrogant during the Xbox360 era as well.
And now we had Sony keeping Microsoft honest after the Xbone announcement in May w.r.t. DRM and sharing and all that stuff. And Microsoft keeping Sony honest by forcing Sony to pick up DLNA and media playback support (Microsoft announced it the day after the FAQ came out, and Sony relented a week later).
And yet, HD on the Wii would've added costs that were completely unnecessary at the time.
Remember, back in 2006/7, HDTVs were pretty much limited to the family room, if the house had an HDTV. Almost certainly the main users of the Wii won't have an HDTV (well, I'm sure there were a few rich families who bought a HDTV for their kids back then).
These days it's inexcusable, but back then HDTVs were at the verge of exploding. In fact, it was so bad that Xbox360 and PS3 games were routinely marked down when they were unplayable on SDTVs - either because details essential to gameplay were too small to be seen (or blurry), or stuff like text is unreadable. And that was because Xbox360 and PS3 supported HDTV and many developers assumed players would be gaming on HDTVs, which wasn't true for a few years yet. The PS3 had it worse as it lacked a scaler chip, so if a TV couldn't handle the resolution it needed, it got downscaled to 480i. (e.g., if your TV didn't support 1080i/p and the game was 1080i/p, instead of going to 720p, it would go to 480i).
Of course these days HDTVs are wildly cheap and 1080p sets are common that even the old set in the basement that's unused is probably an HDTV since the SDTVs ended up scrapped.
It better be when Speex gets 4x the bandwidth of GSM compressed voice (which really only gets around 2.4-4kbps). It's also why they quantize the hell out of the speech and filter the audio - I think the voice filters are actually narrower than a landline.
It doesn't matter how good the connection is - idiots still SHOUT INTO THEIR PHONES for whatever reason. Either they have poor volume control (and never developed their "inside voice") or, as has been seen everywhere, they just don't care.
Don't use floating point if you can avoid it.
If you can't, and the results are EXTREMELY important (remember, floating point is an APPROXIMATION of numbers), then you have to read What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Numbers. (Yes, it's an Oracle link, but if you google it, most of the links are PDFs while the Oracle one is HTML).
If you're worried about your cloud provider screwing with your results, then you're definitely doing it wrong (read that article).
And yes, lots of people, even scientists, do it wrong because the idealized notion of what a floating point type is and how it actually works in hardware is completely different. Floating point numbers are tricky - they're VERY easy to use, but they're also VERY easy to use wrongly, and it's only if you know how the actual hardware is doing the calculations can you structure your programs and algorithms to do it right.
And no actual hardware FPU or VPU (vector unit - some do floating point) implements the full IEEE spec. Many come close, but none implement it exactly - there's always an omission or two. Especially since a lot of FPUs provide extended precision that goes beyond IEEE spec.
Not really.
What happens is cars are rated to the current safety rating - the reason you can score above 5 is because the number is based on the raw figures and the current weightings.
The NHTSA records down in its database the raw numbers, then uses those numbers to calculate the safety rating based on the current weightings (from empirical data). This lets them recalculate the safety rating as need be - yesteryear's 5 stars may be this year's 3 stars, for example. Or, depending on how cars individually perform, it's possible two 5 star cars with the old rating may become a 3-star and a 4-star car.
So you cannot compare "stars" between model years, but you can compare them with historical vehicles recalculated to new standards. After all, many old 5 star vehicles may lack the safety features present on today's modern vehicles, so they won't be 5 stars anymore in the current rating.
The rating will go down as new model years and new tests are introduced - after all, we'd have hit 5 stars 50 years ago if the tests didn't change. The NHTSA updates its tests and ratings when too many cars are pegged - and there's a new test that apparently reflect the more common crashes that many "5 star" cars now fare poorly on.
Next year, the 2013 Tesla Model S may drop from 5.4 to 4.3. But the 2014 Tesla Model S may still get a full 5 stars because Tesla anticipated the new tests and built the cars to withstand them appropriately.
I got a call earlier this week from fraud prevention. The message said to call the 1-800 number OR to call the number on the back of the card and use a certain option.
Of course, I just called the number on my card, hit 0 to get a human, and had him redirect me.
And yes, it was Royal bank that did it.