It's a chore to find how to re-enable core features that have been removed and disable terrible additions (like the recent giant green arrow animations every single time a file is downloaded)
Even then there are some that just don't have a way to re-enable. Like autocompleting URL bars that autocomplete entire URLs, and not just domains or partial URLs. Even more annoyingly, Firefox refuses to autocomplete ports - so if you visit http://localhost8080/ Firefox oh-so-helpfully autocompletes just "http://localhost".
You didn't even need to cite it - 210 degrees is greater than 180 degrees (or be able to outstretch your hands and see both hands whilst looking forward). 210 degrees means you can look straight ahead and see a little behind you (15 degrees each way) which given human eyes are pointed forwards, means even directly left and right vision is already almost impossible, nevermind vision to the reverse.
I don't think Apple will nail it either because what people want in a smart watch is out of reach of current technology - the components are just too big.
Which is probably one reason why we haven't seen it yet. With few notable exceptions, and almost none in the last decade, Apple doesn't release half-baked products. Certainly not on the hardware side.
I don't think that it is out of reach of current technology, I'm sure that you could get a nice feature set into a slim watch form factor. Look at what was done with the iPod Nano. It had storage, a modest microcontroller, a color touchscreen, and an audio codec. About the only thing missing from it is some form of radio communications - bluetooth 4 being the most likely candidate - and modestly greater battery capacity to support that.
Battery life is an important one - supposedly Apple's prototypes are getting 3-4 days, which is considered insufficient. One day is horrendous, and even the Galaxy Gear doesn't get that - going into deep battery preservation modes near the end as the battery runs down and it still doesn't quite make it. (One day - you forget to charge it and you're done for).
3-4 days Apple deems insufficient (they are aiming for an entire week), but at least you can forget to charge it overnight and it still works in the morning.
But then again, Apple's probably wondering what's the use. I mean, it makes sense for Samsung as ever-larger phones means they get put in places that are harder to access constantly so the watch is essential to avoid having to dig the phone out from the bottom of a purse or messenger bag just to see if you have new messages.
Or like how HTC has a "small phone accessory" to go along with the big phone so you don't have to dig out your big phone just to reply to a text.
I honestly don't care too much about my phone's specs, but build-your-own laptops have never seemed to surface despite BYO desktops being an important surviving part of that shrinking sector. I just want to be able to buy processor and graphics upgrades and not have to purchase a new monitor and keyboard whenever I want a new mobile computer.
They do exist, but most people don't know about them because they usually exit the market shortly after introduction when buyers go and see that they'll end up buying a 10 lbs monster that only has 2 hours of battery life and looks like a huge plastic brick with gaps and holes everywhere. For the same price, they could get one that's pretty much similar in performance, weighs under half that, gets twice the battery life, and doesn't look ugly as sin.
Also, just because the phone is moduler doesn't mean there's no profit - you can expect rapid changes to formfactors that mean you need to replace the major components all the time (similar to how CPU/Motherboard/Memory tend to be tied together on desktop PCs these days, especially if you keep them a few years).
The bells and whistles in those cases are perhaps more to generate buzz among non-nerds. If I go to say university website and it has all the information (like address) I need in plain black text on plain white background, and I can ctrl+F and get on with my life in a second, I appreciate that. However, for every one person like me who doesn't want any frills, there are a dozen silly people who will complain about how boring the website is and oh can't we do better and maybe highlight some of the unique features of state college university like maybe the bell tower and some multiracial group of kids playing frisbee on the quad and the logo and at least have some sports updates and twitter and facebook link and I saw a dancing baby image a few years ago...
Too true, actually.
We often complain when Microsoft changes the Windows UI (which they have from XP to Vista/7 and 8), the Office UI (2003, 2007/2010), etc. Why? Because it's shinier and people see changes.
Likewise, while the basic UI of Android has remained the same (home screen, launcher), the individual elements (how the launcher works, default home screen layout) has changed considerably. And nevermind Linux.
But constrast this to iOS and OS X. Both have remained relatively static (until iOS7, and even Mavericks has only small changes) over the years - enough that people are calling the UI "old" and "stale" and "in need for a refresh". The thinking is if you haven't rearranged the deck chairs, then nothing's really changed and it's time for new and flashy.
Of course, I detest this new reversion to "flatness" - what, are we back in the 90s? Even Windows 3.1 was more colorful than the apparently monochromatic UIs we're heading towards. (Yes, while I could use less leather and green felt, a little accent here and there gets away from plainness).
And most people know that most of that slump is due to Apple selling iPads.
Hilariously...and I do mean this Hilariously especially as you have quotes the Apples earnings. iPAD sales have dropped over the last few quarters with *cough* inventory shenanigans, and in the latest results http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q4fy13datasum.pdf show sales down sequentially and flat year on year. In a market *exploding*...here are IDC's figures http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24253413 to show how far Apple is falling behind the rest of the market with its market share *plummeting* from 60% to 30% Market Share.
It just shows you most people don't know.
Or could iPad sales drop because well, people are waiting for the new model?
Apple's sales are VERY cyclical. Basically, there's an extremely strong spike in sales near release (oh wait, last quarter didn't bring in new iPads people were waiting for). Given the new iPads were just announced last week in time for the holiday season, you can expect a very robust quarter this time around because people waited.
I don't particularly like the strategy, but Apple is highly predictable. I can say you'll see brand new iPads holiday season 2014, new iPhones just after Back to School, etc.
Hell, you can say the Galaxy S4 outsold the iPhone 5S the first 6 months of the year!
Yet LLVM's so-called "liberal" license (I'd rather call it a encourage-others-to-rip-off-your-hard-work license) allows GCC to re-use their code to improve GCC, and they cannot do the same. It's a losing game for those who are not GCC.
Not really. It basically shows the hypocrisy that is the GPL lover/BSD hater, because those folks always say that "BSD allows companies to close the source! BAD!".
Yet they are the ones that "close the source" and claim license superiority. The GPL effectively closes the source to the original BSD project, the exact opposite of what it intended to do, and BSD exposes that hypocrisy.
GPL can't claim superiority by preventing what other licenses permit, when it does the exact same thing.
And anyhow, one can BSD code and make it GPL-incompatible quite easily - just use the unmodified license. It just takes one source file to have it.
I don't particularly like the GPLv3 myself, and have considered a dual license GPLv2 (only) and BSD (unmodified) - allows use in GPL v2/v2+ (but not v2+ upgraded to v3 because of v3/v3+ code), and other projects. Unmodified BSD is inherently incompatible so GPLv3 code can't take it with either license (GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv3 - you can only use GPLv2+ with GPLv3(+) which upgrades the v2+ to v3(+)).
BTW, has anybody else noticed the change in time? Way back when, GPL:ing your compiler was the right thing to do, forcing it to be open source. This way GCC devs knew improvements would be fed back to the main line. But nowdays (I argue), LLVM's more liberal license is giving it an edge in the way industry is taking an interest. LLVM/Clang is becoming the "obvious" choice when developing a custom compiler, as you don't have to contribute your stuff to mainline LLVM.
No, what happened was the GPLv3 has spooked a LOT of corporations who suddenly realize that they can't continue to do their laissez-faire approach to open-source. They're implementing full license reviews like they do with regular commercial software.
I've seen many companies set up open-source code review processes and require pre-approval before any open-source project is introduced - either used internally as a tool, or to be put into the product. There's a list of pre-approved projects, and everything not on the list must go through legal for approval.
The fact that LLVM/CLang is BSD wasn't the reason for its popularity. It's the fact that the alternative choice is GPLv3. And companies are deathly scared of the GPLv3 - they don't know what possible effects it might have - just put it in the wrong way and things go south, badly. (Especially if you have an extensive group of GPLv2 code).
In the end, GPLv3 basically got companies that use open-source code scared, so they began looking for alternates, and LLVM was one of the more mature multi-architecture compilers out there (driven no doubt by tremendous funding by Apple).
The government may get a warrant for the contents of one safe-deposit box, but they don't have the right to a warrant for the combination to the bank's vault.
They did. They got a warrant for a pen register on Snowden's account.
Lavabit then tried to comply, but they gave back an encrypted log file. The government then requested keys for the logs. But thanks tot he way Lavabit works, doing such a request would be the equivalent of releasing the entire keys to Lavabit.
So they replied they couldn't do that.
The next warrant was then a full wiretap warrant for those keys.
Now, whether or not Lavabit could've simply decrypted the logs and re-encrypted them with a one-time key and handed that over, no one knows.
But basically the problem was Lavabit tried to comply, but thanks to their architecture, made it so the only way to comply was a full wiretap warrant.
OTOH, one wonders about the end-game. Was it really got get Snowden's login date, times and locations, or was it to shut down Lavabit and other services?
Good idea, but can't really see that catching on, unfortunately.
Even worse, it does absolutely nothing to stop metadata collection.
Every e-mail you send, the NSA can see the source and destination, even if they can't read the contents. If you believe they only collect metadata, well, they aren't missing anything. Every website you visit, likewise - they got the IP address. They might not know the exact site, but they knew you talked to that server.
And they can figure out your traffic from metadata quite easily. If it's on port 22, well, it's probably SSH. If it's 443, and they see an initial small burst of up traffic followed by a larger down traffic, it's HTTP.
If you really want to hide traffic, you need to implement two things - everyone uses the same source and destination ports for all traffic, and for the duration of the connection, the bandwidth consumed must be level. If it's a low upload connection, you need to maintain the upload for the entire duration, and any up and down traffic has to be equalized so they don't reveal anything - i.e., bursty traffic has to be made constant. This may involve uploading a bunch of random-contents "null" packets.
This way all your connections just seem to be constant traffic.
the reason we have these human verification systems is obvious, as small group of people are ruining it for everyone. perhaps if we actually have strict enforcement of catching spammers then we wouldnt need all this annoying bullshit.
right now we are developing stronger armor when what we should be doing is stopping the shooter/spammer.
The problem is that spamming is a social problem - there's no technological solution to social problems. There's a lot of technological solutions that get close, but none actually solve the problem.
And the reason spamming is a social problem is it's related to greed. And unfortunately, greed is a human trait that no matter what you try, you cannot suppress. It's just part and parcel of being human.
Finally, there's no point making captchas unreadable anymore - they've gone beyond trying to automate them and now just use pools of people,
You might as well make them based on audience-appropriate questions. LIke for/., you might just ask in plain text combined with images - "Complete this phrase: 'News for nerds. _____ _____ _________.;".
Instead of OCR, there's many tasks that are still easier to do as a human than computers.
Other things could be "Which of these companies is similar to this one? (shows Target logo)" and choices like Wal-Mart, Toys'r'us, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Or "What product does this company sell?"
Then use the ads that Google serves. A month ago, Google announced HTTPS support for AdSense.
And yet, Google doesn't roll out HTTPS support for the rest of the ad companies they own? You'd think if they can do AdSense, they can do AdMob and DoubleClick and their many other ad platforms they host...
Given Google serves like 98% of the ads on the internet (through AdSense, DoubleClick and other companies), it seems Google's the one holding HTTPS everywhere...
The weird bit is Aperture. And not Final Cut X (apparently, FTFA). Aperture has been billed as the 'pro' photography app although it's a bit of a lightweight compared with Adobe (may their souls rot in a maggot infested camel turd) offerings. Likewise Final Cut X - although it acts more like a prosumer app than the previous versions of Final Cut and doesn't do half what Premiere Pro / After Effects does (nor does it cost as much).
If Apple opens up Final Cut to this system, then it's pretty clear that Apple is dropping the high end photography / graphics professionals (all two dozen left) for the much larger, potentially more lucrative 'prosumer' market. Which makes me wonder who, if anyone, is planning on buying the Darth Trashcan when it is available.
That's because Apple is upgrading those apps that came out on CD. Aperture was, at one point distributed on CD. As was iWork and iLife. The products contained in them are continuations.
Final Cut Pro X is a complete rewrite of Final Cut Pro, and depending on who you ask, better and worse. But as it's a new product, it doesn't get the "upgrade" treatment. Ditto Logic.
Anyhow, you'd get a bunch of angry people if their Final Cut Pro got upgraded to FCP X. (And the old FCP is still available from Apple, because there's still lots of people using them and they need additional licenses)
Likewise, I suspect Nintendo will turn the Wii U ship around. It won't be as popular as the Wii--the Wii was a one-time blip that I doubt anyone will repeat--but the Wii U will probably do fine once it has a decent library and gets enough household recognition. I hope Nintendo learned a lesson there: don't launch a console that causes naming confusion and don't launch one without a good set of launch titles!
Well, the problem with the Wii was third party games practically all sucked. And in recent years, Nintendo has all been about first-party games because third party devs really produced lousy games (I think this started around the GameCube era?).
And the Wii U's problem is the dearth of first-party games - everything the Wii U has (save maybe 3-4 first party titles), is already out on other consoles so there's very little reason to buy a Wii U.
That was Nintendo's problem - there were few first party titles at launch. Now that there's far more, the Wii U is selling a bit better, but its first year was marred by the lack of compelling content that differentiated it over the existing consoles.
I have a WII, didn't see the need to upgrade to the WII-U. I also have a XBox, had a PS3 but only because I wanted to watch BlueRays. Is it me, or has Nintendo just lagged a bit in terms of graphics? They revolutionized the controllers with the WII, but now I really feel the others have caught up. I do not know if the Nintendo catalog will be enough to keep people with the platform just to play those games. Time will tell
It's not you. It's that the Wii was aimed at a different market. When the Wii was release way back in 2007, HDTVs were a relative rarity. A good chunk had one, almost no one had two or more. And the one HDTV was almost never in the kid's room. (It's unfortunate, but Nintendo's got a reputation for being aimed towards kids).
So having HDMI was considered not very useful - when most people weren't going to use it, why bother? It's another licensing fee to pay out in the end.
Now that HDTVs are everywhere and old SD sets are basically all gone (all replaced by the old HDTVs...), HDMI is basically essential and you can count on even the kids having an HDTV.
The only time it really was an issue was the few Wiis that were hooked up to the main TV alongside the Xbox and PS3 so the kids had to fight to use it alongside dad who wanted to watch the news.
You think taking your shoes off violates your fourth amendment rights?
No, only if taking off the shoes was ordered by a government agent or otherwise required by a federal law, then yes, yes it is a violation of fourth ammendment rights. A private airline may put whatever restrictions they like on passengers buying tickets. FFS if fubar airlines wanted to ask every passenger to submit to a strip search, and informed them of this before they bought their ticket... you wouldn't hear a peep from me. (except about why I wont fly on their airline)
However, the government, very specifically, is bound to a code of civil rights which includes standards which, constitutes the agreement under which they operate, and especially conduct searches. If they do not respect civil rights, then they are acting beyond their agreed authority.
As far as I am concerned, even a metal detector is more search than the constitution authorizes. Anytime you are looking for anything, its a search, and if you are looking on another persons person, aside from what is plainly visible without aid, you are searching them. Its pretty fucking simple.
You're free to not take off your shoes - if you feel the metal detectors and x-ray machines are too much an invasion of privacy, you are completely free to turn back and exit the airport.
You won't get on your flight, but that's a different matter.
It's a fourth amendment issue only if they prevent you from voluntarily leaving after deciding that you'd feel violated. So you can get to the front of the security line, see the x-ray machines, metal detectors, scanners, etc., you're free to turn around and leave, and the TSA cannot prevent you from leaving.
Personally, All I really want as far as playing with different OSes is the ability to switch the primary boot device to an SD Card. I don't care if I can't mess around with the on-board storage, but there should be a switch, or some other easily accessible method (similarly to the PC BIOS menus) that I can just boot off a different device. You're right, there needs to be a way to fix things regardless of if the OS is broken. That way people can boot whichever OS they want, and they don't have to worry about messing up the hardwired ROM on the system. Also, it gives people a way to overwrite what's in the onboard ROM, in the case where it does get trashed, either by the user messing with it, or by an official upgrade that went bad.
That's a function of the SoC and the boot loaders - some SoCs only allow booting from one SD controller (i.e., eMMC), while others have a complex boot protocol where the various processors are started up in sequence.
And sometimes, you're just not allowed to distribute a recovery program (especially on well used SoCs) to prevent people from hacking other devices with it.
I wrote an SD recovery loader for a common SoC by a very common SoC vendor. I had to make changes to the boot loaders (there were about 4 or 5 of them) to support booting from SD (it could boot eMMC fine, but the code checked to ensure it didn't boot externally). And in the end, it was only an internal use - we wanted to distribute it to customers so they could recover the platforms, but were told we weren't allowed to.
And yes, a modern multicore SoC almost always has a boot protocol - what powers up out of reset first is almost always a management processor (usually a low powered ARM9 or ARM11 core) which boots the ROM code embedded in the SoC. That ROM code (which often can be used for recovery, but again, SoC companies control the tools used to recover and provision a device from ROM which allows one to manufacture a board and program it without needing JTAG) loads a block or two out of eMMC or other storage, verifies the signature, and boots that (usually from SRAM). That bootloader (usually restricted In size) initializes main memory and loads another bootloader out of storage into RAM. It also then sets up the first core of the big ARM cluster to boot from that location in RAM, and takes the first core out of reset. That loader loads even more code off storage to boot the OS.
Unlike a PC which boots off onboard storage for the BIOS then boots off external (hard drive/SSD) storage, SoCs and other embedded devices combine the bootloaders and OS in the same storage media, so it's possible to overwrite the entire thing by accident. And SoC vendors rarely let non-NDA'd people get at their tools.
Now, eMMC does have a mode that's generally not accessible once booted - every eMMC chip has one or two "boot partitions" which are special areas of the chip (you need to issue special commands to get at it) where the bootloader can be stored. The boot ROM issues the necessary commands to switch to the boot partition and loads the binary code from that. Then before jumping into the OS loader, the final bootloader switches the eMMC back to user mode (or not - issuing the initialization sequence resets the chip back to normal mode).
The problem is that no card reader supports such modes, so you need to develop a loader to load it onto the chip directly, you can't use SD cards for development (they don't support the mode - it's an eMMC requirement), and provisioning is just a bit harder since you can't usually mass-program the chips beforehand.
If you're asking that something be shipped to Toronto and you want to charge someone living in Florida, that's -3 points. If you enter the CVV2 from the back of the card, that's +3 points and they balance out.
If you've had prior transactions at least 90 days ago that weren't disputed, that's +2 points. Using an OPEN proxy -4. Business CC +1.
Depending on the value of the transaction, it could be immediately approved, you could be asked for more information, or the merchant could manually check and approve or decline. For example, the merchant can ask for the bank phone number that's also printed on the back off the card.
You missed one - shipping address is on record with card holder. Your credit card has a billing address that is checked for matches, and you can put in a number of additional addresses on your card, so when a retailer does an extended address verification (only the billing shows up on a normal verification), the shipping address can be matched to one already on the card.
It's easy to do (just call your card company and ask to add addresses, and remember to delete old ones). That information is propagated to card processors so it takes around 24 hours to sync up.
Having the shipping address on your card certainly helps a lot - transactions can get flagged if you're suddenly shipping to a new address.
And yes, some banks even allow you to add in non-local addresses - I have a US address, and that's on my card as well.
Even if the online system doesn't check automatically, retailers are free to call the provider and ask to verify the address as per manual checks.
It isn't. Even if it were, what does it have to do with Uber? What's driving down the wages in this case is that these drivers are offering a service that requires little special training and has a low cost of entry. Historically, through rent seeking and monopolization, they have been able to fleece their customers. Now that there is actual competition, their wages decrease, as they should. I as a customer do not owe a cab driver a good income, I owe him exactly and only as much as the cheapest guy willing to offer the service to me.
Furthermore, if I take my own usage of Uber as an example, they are getting more customers. I almost never take cabs because they are such a hassle and so unpredictable, but Uber is a much better experience.
For now. Because unless you can pick drivers, the better way to "strike" is to do stuff where there's a lot of flexibility. There are plenty of ways to protest that will hurt Uber more.
Like poor pre-planning - getting "lost" or purposely driving into gridlock which can turn a 20 minute car ride into a 40 minutes or more. Or taking roundabout routes, or driving dangerously, etc.
Or hell, having a jalopy and "breaking down". Add bonus points for breaking down and having a bunch of the driver's buddies fleece the customer.
All it takes is for a few people to experience this to get Uber's reputation down.
Right now things are good because it's early. Once greed and ways to beat the system come in, it'll degrade very quickly. Unlicensed cabs are still unlicensed cabs.
(I'm surprised that Google is getting into banners. Targeted search ads are much more valuable than banners. Banner ad click-through rates are so low as to barely be measurable.)
I'm guessing they ran the Google Analytics on it and discovered that too many people are blocking ads by their subsidiaries (DoubleClick, etc). So now they're going to pipe some of those DoubleClick ads through Google.com as it's a lot harder to block banners that way.
And website owners can have a lot of fun because they can do things that set off a lot of ad blockers inadvertently. The Daily WTF, when they run their classic ads, puts all the images under "ads", so the URLs contain "ads". Naturally, the first few posts are from people with ad blockers asking where the ads were.
Before you know it, self-hosted ads and putting contents alongside ad assets will become a lot more common.
They can't. Many of the power improvements that Apple has done break compatibility badly. You have to be willing to force applications to upgrade like Apple does to do what they've done in the same way. Microsoft is going to have to approach the problem via a much more complex and lengthy process.
Except Apple has done a lot of work to give a conservative default to old apps. Just running on Mavericks gets you App Nap by default. What Apple did was they used system libraries to notify the kernel about the application so as long as you're making the required library calls, you're participating in App Nap by default.
Of course, if you add support for Mavericks, you can get finer grained control of power savings (including the ability to defer tasks until you're on AC power) rather than conservative guesses.
Of course, there's also a name-and-shame thing going on, so devs are encouraged to update ASAP.
For compatibility, Apple has maintained the same position they always have - only use APIs that are documented by Apple. Functionality is only guaranteed in that case. If you go outside the boundaries (no one's stopping you from using private APIs after all), then Apple reserves the right to break those non-documented APIs at will, and they generally do.
Microsoft has the same problem - devs use private APIs and private resources way too liberally, creating hidden dependencies. It's why even today, you can find "Program Manager" as a window title (because too many developers look for that exact title), why a whole pile of applications assume "C:\Program Files" (the 64-bit change to "Program Files (x86)" did a number on this), and why Windows is full of legacy cruft. Microsoft has tried to change things around - see what happened when Vista broke a lot of things. Vista basically tried to break off a lot of legacy crap, and revealed all the brokenness (and general incompetence) of Windows developers.
It's also why Vista, Windows 7 and others have a Documents And Settings link to Users, why each user profile has a My Documents link etc. (And yes, Microsoft has an API - GetSystemPath or something like that - to get the path of the Windows directory, Program Files, user profile, etc).
Let me put it this way: Linus Torvalds Advocates For 2560x1600 Standard Laptop Displays
The fact that laptops stagnated ten years ago (and even regressed, in many cases) at around half that in both directions is just sad.
Not really - you could always get laptops with high-res displays. It's just that the market wanted cheaper, not better.
Price, not specs, was the #1 goal, which meant cutting corners and finding ways to lower the cost to build them.
When laptops plunged through the $1000 barrier, that was how the savings were achieved. If you were willing to pay, people were willing to sell. Even today the higher margins of ultrabooks means a lot of work went into making computers with better specs. Of course, they also cost more, but it meant they don't have to skimp on expensive items like screens anymore.
I suppose the cry is not "where are my high resolution displays" but rather "why can't I find one at the price I wanna pay". Because despite all the complaining, displays with high resolutions, even ones with 1920x1200, have been available. It's just that those kinds of things didn't drop in price as fast as people were cutting corners managed to drop them.
At the very least, realize that money has always ALWAYS found influence in government, in every government, in every system tried. You can't stop it with a simple law like "no lobbyists." You can only make sure its out in the open and potentially corruption can be identified and rooted out with the ballot box or impeachment.
Or you dilute lobbying power. Bring back the 1-in-30,000 rule. Don't worry about fat pay - pay 'em based on the mean, median or mode of the area they represent. And modern technology means they don't have to be in DC at all - they can work their entire careers from an office in their area.
Thus they are more accessible to people, the political donations that the people they represent means they're more powerful, and lobbying 5000+ is a lot harder. Spending $10M achieves a lot when you only need to convince under 200 people. $10M doesn't go so far for 5000-odd. And arranging that many people to meet and greet is practically impossible to get in the same room.
Since SW doesn't even attempt to use HW for modern 2D operations, it will likely be a long time before HW will support this kind of stuff...
Most graphics cards support 2D acceleration since the 90s - it's something that's been built into Windows for ages. Though given how fast it is to draw primitives like lines and such, it's typically far faster to do it in software than to run through the graphics card to render it to a framebuffer.
Though for PDFs, what happens is the Adobe Reader generally uses its own software based rendering engine rather than the OS accelerated GDI primitives. This is because the OS versions are dependent on Windows and Window Handles, and a complex drawing consumes those up in a hurry. (Using something like Foxit Reader which does use GDI can result in resource exhaustion which means you end up with missing lines and other objects - not fun. Though the ones you do see are drawn very quickly).
Of course, Microsoft deprecated DirectDraw (a way to accomplish 2D accelerated drawing) sometime in the DirectX 6 era or so...
The fan-based and fan-supported reincarnation [...] has CBS's consent.
How did they manage to negotiate this?
Maybe because CBS "gets it"?
It's true this would never have happened back in the Viacom/Paramount days (Viacom actually threatened Star Trek fansites back in the day with C&D's) and back when the sole goal of Star Trek was to exact the maximum number of dollars available, even if doing so required being extremely petty. (They still do to an extent, given that Star Trek DVDs and Blu-Rays are twice the price as normal TV box sets).
But I suppose CBS realizes that fandom is real, they can't control it, and if someone wants to make something that potentially could help them (since they own the rights to it and the movies are popular), well, it costs them nothing and gains them everything.
I'm sure they also retain a lot of the rights - e.g., DVD and Blu-Ray
Slashdot Mirror
Even then there are some that just don't have a way to re-enable. Like autocompleting URL bars that autocomplete entire URLs, and not just domains or partial URLs. Even more annoyingly, Firefox refuses to autocomplete ports - so if you visit http://localhost8080/ Firefox oh-so-helpfully autocompletes just "http://localhost".
But I go to direct deep URLs on a lot of things.
You didn't even need to cite it - 210 degrees is greater than 180 degrees (or be able to outstretch your hands and see both hands whilst looking forward). 210 degrees means you can look straight ahead and see a little behind you (15 degrees each way) which given human eyes are pointed forwards, means even directly left and right vision is already almost impossible, nevermind vision to the reverse.
Battery life is an important one - supposedly Apple's prototypes are getting 3-4 days, which is considered insufficient. One day is horrendous, and even the Galaxy Gear doesn't get that - going into deep battery preservation modes near the end as the battery runs down and it still doesn't quite make it. (One day - you forget to charge it and you're done for).
3-4 days Apple deems insufficient (they are aiming for an entire week), but at least you can forget to charge it overnight and it still works in the morning.
But then again, Apple's probably wondering what's the use. I mean, it makes sense for Samsung as ever-larger phones means they get put in places that are harder to access constantly so the watch is essential to avoid having to dig the phone out from the bottom of a purse or messenger bag just to see if you have new messages.
Or like how HTC has a "small phone accessory" to go along with the big phone so you don't have to dig out your big phone just to reply to a text.
They do exist, but most people don't know about them because they usually exit the market shortly after introduction when buyers go and see that they'll end up buying a 10 lbs monster that only has 2 hours of battery life and looks like a huge plastic brick with gaps and holes everywhere. For the same price, they could get one that's pretty much similar in performance, weighs under half that, gets twice the battery life, and doesn't look ugly as sin.
Also, just because the phone is moduler doesn't mean there's no profit - you can expect rapid changes to formfactors that mean you need to replace the major components all the time (similar to how CPU/Motherboard/Memory tend to be tied together on desktop PCs these days, especially if you keep them a few years).
Too true, actually.
We often complain when Microsoft changes the Windows UI (which they have from XP to Vista/7 and 8), the Office UI (2003, 2007/2010), etc. Why? Because it's shinier and people see changes.
Likewise, while the basic UI of Android has remained the same (home screen, launcher), the individual elements (how the launcher works, default home screen layout) has changed considerably. And nevermind Linux.
But constrast this to iOS and OS X. Both have remained relatively static (until iOS7, and even Mavericks has only small changes) over the years - enough that people are calling the UI "old" and "stale" and "in need for a refresh". The thinking is if you haven't rearranged the deck chairs, then nothing's really changed and it's time for new and flashy.
Of course, I detest this new reversion to "flatness" - what, are we back in the 90s? Even Windows 3.1 was more colorful than the apparently monochromatic UIs we're heading towards. (Yes, while I could use less leather and green felt, a little accent here and there gets away from plainness).
Or could iPad sales drop because well, people are waiting for the new model?
Apple's sales are VERY cyclical. Basically, there's an extremely strong spike in sales near release (oh wait, last quarter didn't bring in new iPads people were waiting for). Given the new iPads were just announced last week in time for the holiday season, you can expect a very robust quarter this time around because people waited.
I don't particularly like the strategy, but Apple is highly predictable. I can say you'll see brand new iPads holiday season 2014, new iPhones just after Back to School, etc.
Hell, you can say the Galaxy S4 outsold the iPhone 5S the first 6 months of the year!
Not really. It basically shows the hypocrisy that is the GPL lover/BSD hater, because those folks always say that "BSD allows companies to close the source! BAD!".
Yet they are the ones that "close the source" and claim license superiority. The GPL effectively closes the source to the original BSD project, the exact opposite of what it intended to do, and BSD exposes that hypocrisy.
GPL can't claim superiority by preventing what other licenses permit, when it does the exact same thing.
And anyhow, one can BSD code and make it GPL-incompatible quite easily - just use the unmodified license. It just takes one source file to have it.
I don't particularly like the GPLv3 myself, and have considered a dual license GPLv2 (only) and BSD (unmodified) - allows use in GPL v2/v2+ (but not v2+ upgraded to v3 because of v3/v3+ code), and other projects. Unmodified BSD is inherently incompatible so GPLv3 code can't take it with either license (GPLv2 is incompatible with GPLv3 - you can only use GPLv2+ with GPLv3(+) which upgrades the v2+ to v3(+)).
No, what happened was the GPLv3 has spooked a LOT of corporations who suddenly realize that they can't continue to do their laissez-faire approach to open-source. They're implementing full license reviews like they do with regular commercial software.
I've seen many companies set up open-source code review processes and require pre-approval before any open-source project is introduced - either used internally as a tool, or to be put into the product. There's a list of pre-approved projects, and everything not on the list must go through legal for approval.
The fact that LLVM/CLang is BSD wasn't the reason for its popularity. It's the fact that the alternative choice is GPLv3. And companies are deathly scared of the GPLv3 - they don't know what possible effects it might have - just put it in the wrong way and things go south, badly. (Especially if you have an extensive group of GPLv2 code).
In the end, GPLv3 basically got companies that use open-source code scared, so they began looking for alternates, and LLVM was one of the more mature multi-architecture compilers out there (driven no doubt by tremendous funding by Apple).
They did. They got a warrant for a pen register on Snowden's account.
Lavabit then tried to comply, but they gave back an encrypted log file. The government then requested keys for the logs. But thanks tot he way Lavabit works, doing such a request would be the equivalent of releasing the entire keys to Lavabit.
So they replied they couldn't do that.
The next warrant was then a full wiretap warrant for those keys.
Now, whether or not Lavabit could've simply decrypted the logs and re-encrypted them with a one-time key and handed that over, no one knows.
But basically the problem was Lavabit tried to comply, but thanks to their architecture, made it so the only way to comply was a full wiretap warrant.
OTOH, one wonders about the end-game. Was it really got get Snowden's login date, times and locations, or was it to shut down Lavabit and other services?
Even worse, it does absolutely nothing to stop metadata collection.
Every e-mail you send, the NSA can see the source and destination, even if they can't read the contents. If you believe they only collect metadata, well, they aren't missing anything. Every website you visit, likewise - they got the IP address. They might not know the exact site, but they knew you talked to that server.
And they can figure out your traffic from metadata quite easily. If it's on port 22, well, it's probably SSH. If it's 443, and they see an initial small burst of up traffic followed by a larger down traffic, it's HTTP.
If you really want to hide traffic, you need to implement two things - everyone uses the same source and destination ports for all traffic, and for the duration of the connection, the bandwidth consumed must be level. If it's a low upload connection, you need to maintain the upload for the entire duration, and any up and down traffic has to be equalized so they don't reveal anything - i.e., bursty traffic has to be made constant. This may involve uploading a bunch of random-contents "null" packets.
This way all your connections just seem to be constant traffic.
The problem is that spamming is a social problem - there's no technological solution to social problems. There's a lot of technological solutions that get close, but none actually solve the problem.
And the reason spamming is a social problem is it's related to greed. And unfortunately, greed is a human trait that no matter what you try, you cannot suppress. It's just part and parcel of being human.
Finally, there's no point making captchas unreadable anymore - they've gone beyond trying to automate them and now just use pools of people,
You might as well make them based on audience-appropriate questions. LIke for /., you might just ask in plain text combined with images - "Complete this phrase: 'News for nerds. _____ _____ _________.;".
Instead of OCR, there's many tasks that are still easier to do as a human than computers.
Other things could be "Which of these companies is similar to this one? (shows Target logo)" and choices like Wal-Mart, Toys'r'us, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. Or "What product does this company sell?"
And yet, Google doesn't roll out HTTPS support for the rest of the ad companies they own? You'd think if they can do AdSense, they can do AdMob and DoubleClick and their many other ad platforms they host...
Given Google serves like 98% of the ads on the internet (through AdSense, DoubleClick and other companies), it seems Google's the one holding HTTPS everywhere...
That's because Apple is upgrading those apps that came out on CD. Aperture was, at one point distributed on CD. As was iWork and iLife. The products contained in them are continuations.
Final Cut Pro X is a complete rewrite of Final Cut Pro, and depending on who you ask, better and worse. But as it's a new product, it doesn't get the "upgrade" treatment. Ditto Logic.
Anyhow, you'd get a bunch of angry people if their Final Cut Pro got upgraded to FCP X. (And the old FCP is still available from Apple, because there's still lots of people using them and they need additional licenses)
Well, the problem with the Wii was third party games practically all sucked. And in recent years, Nintendo has all been about first-party games because third party devs really produced lousy games (I think this started around the GameCube era?).
And the Wii U's problem is the dearth of first-party games - everything the Wii U has (save maybe 3-4 first party titles), is already out on other consoles so there's very little reason to buy a Wii U.
That was Nintendo's problem - there were few first party titles at launch. Now that there's far more, the Wii U is selling a bit better, but its first year was marred by the lack of compelling content that differentiated it over the existing consoles.
It's not you. It's that the Wii was aimed at a different market. When the Wii was release way back in 2007, HDTVs were a relative rarity. A good chunk had one, almost no one had two or more. And the one HDTV was almost never in the kid's room. (It's unfortunate, but Nintendo's got a reputation for being aimed towards kids).
So having HDMI was considered not very useful - when most people weren't going to use it, why bother? It's another licensing fee to pay out in the end.
Now that HDTVs are everywhere and old SD sets are basically all gone (all replaced by the old HDTVs...), HDMI is basically essential and you can count on even the kids having an HDTV.
The only time it really was an issue was the few Wiis that were hooked up to the main TV alongside the Xbox and PS3 so the kids had to fight to use it alongside dad who wanted to watch the news.
You're free to not take off your shoes - if you feel the metal detectors and x-ray machines are too much an invasion of privacy, you are completely free to turn back and exit the airport.
You won't get on your flight, but that's a different matter.
It's a fourth amendment issue only if they prevent you from voluntarily leaving after deciding that you'd feel violated. So you can get to the front of the security line, see the x-ray machines, metal detectors, scanners, etc., you're free to turn around and leave, and the TSA cannot prevent you from leaving.
That's a function of the SoC and the boot loaders - some SoCs only allow booting from one SD controller (i.e., eMMC), while others have a complex boot protocol where the various processors are started up in sequence.
And sometimes, you're just not allowed to distribute a recovery program (especially on well used SoCs) to prevent people from hacking other devices with it.
I wrote an SD recovery loader for a common SoC by a very common SoC vendor. I had to make changes to the boot loaders (there were about 4 or 5 of them) to support booting from SD (it could boot eMMC fine, but the code checked to ensure it didn't boot externally). And in the end, it was only an internal use - we wanted to distribute it to customers so they could recover the platforms, but were told we weren't allowed to.
And yes, a modern multicore SoC almost always has a boot protocol - what powers up out of reset first is almost always a management processor (usually a low powered ARM9 or ARM11 core) which boots the ROM code embedded in the SoC. That ROM code (which often can be used for recovery, but again, SoC companies control the tools used to recover and provision a device from ROM which allows one to manufacture a board and program it without needing JTAG) loads a block or two out of eMMC or other storage, verifies the signature, and boots that (usually from SRAM). That bootloader (usually restricted In size) initializes main memory and loads another bootloader out of storage into RAM. It also then sets up the first core of the big ARM cluster to boot from that location in RAM, and takes the first core out of reset. That loader loads even more code off storage to boot the OS.
Unlike a PC which boots off onboard storage for the BIOS then boots off external (hard drive/SSD) storage, SoCs and other embedded devices combine the bootloaders and OS in the same storage media, so it's possible to overwrite the entire thing by accident. And SoC vendors rarely let non-NDA'd people get at their tools.
Now, eMMC does have a mode that's generally not accessible once booted - every eMMC chip has one or two "boot partitions" which are special areas of the chip (you need to issue special commands to get at it) where the bootloader can be stored. The boot ROM issues the necessary commands to switch to the boot partition and loads the binary code from that. Then before jumping into the OS loader, the final bootloader switches the eMMC back to user mode (or not - issuing the initialization sequence resets the chip back to normal mode).
The problem is that no card reader supports such modes, so you need to develop a loader to load it onto the chip directly, you can't use SD cards for development (they don't support the mode - it's an eMMC requirement), and provisioning is just a bit harder since you can't usually mass-program the chips beforehand.
You missed one - shipping address is on record with card holder. Your credit card has a billing address that is checked for matches, and you can put in a number of additional addresses on your card, so when a retailer does an extended address verification (only the billing shows up on a normal verification), the shipping address can be matched to one already on the card.
It's easy to do (just call your card company and ask to add addresses, and remember to delete old ones). That information is propagated to card processors so it takes around 24 hours to sync up.
Having the shipping address on your card certainly helps a lot - transactions can get flagged if you're suddenly shipping to a new address.
And yes, some banks even allow you to add in non-local addresses - I have a US address, and that's on my card as well.
Even if the online system doesn't check automatically, retailers are free to call the provider and ask to verify the address as per manual checks.
I'm guessing they ran the Google Analytics on it and discovered that too many people are blocking ads by their subsidiaries (DoubleClick, etc). So now they're going to pipe some of those DoubleClick ads through Google.com as it's a lot harder to block banners that way.
And website owners can have a lot of fun because they can do things that set off a lot of ad blockers inadvertently. The Daily WTF, when they run their classic ads, puts all the images under "ads", so the URLs contain "ads". Naturally, the first few posts are from people with ad blockers asking where the ads were.
Before you know it, self-hosted ads and putting contents alongside ad assets will become a lot more common.
Except Apple has done a lot of work to give a conservative default to old apps. Just running on Mavericks gets you App Nap by default. What Apple did was they used system libraries to notify the kernel about the application so as long as you're making the required library calls, you're participating in App Nap by default.
Of course, if you add support for Mavericks, you can get finer grained control of power savings (including the ability to defer tasks until you're on AC power) rather than conservative guesses.
Of course, there's also a name-and-shame thing going on, so devs are encouraged to update ASAP.
For compatibility, Apple has maintained the same position they always have - only use APIs that are documented by Apple. Functionality is only guaranteed in that case. If you go outside the boundaries (no one's stopping you from using private APIs after all), then Apple reserves the right to break those non-documented APIs at will, and they generally do.
Microsoft has the same problem - devs use private APIs and private resources way too liberally, creating hidden dependencies. It's why even today, you can find "Program Manager" as a window title (because too many developers look for that exact title), why a whole pile of applications assume "C:\Program Files" (the 64-bit change to "Program Files (x86)" did a number on this), and why Windows is full of legacy cruft. Microsoft has tried to change things around - see what happened when Vista broke a lot of things. Vista basically tried to break off a lot of legacy crap, and revealed all the brokenness (and general incompetence) of Windows developers.
It's also why Vista, Windows 7 and others have a Documents And Settings link to Users, why each user profile has a My Documents link etc. (And yes, Microsoft has an API - GetSystemPath or something like that - to get the path of the Windows directory, Program Files, user profile, etc).
Not really - you could always get laptops with high-res displays. It's just that the market wanted cheaper, not better.
Price, not specs, was the #1 goal, which meant cutting corners and finding ways to lower the cost to build them.
When laptops plunged through the $1000 barrier, that was how the savings were achieved. If you were willing to pay, people were willing to sell. Even today the higher margins of ultrabooks means a lot of work went into making computers with better specs. Of course, they also cost more, but it meant they don't have to skimp on expensive items like screens anymore.
I suppose the cry is not "where are my high resolution displays" but rather "why can't I find one at the price I wanna pay". Because despite all the complaining, displays with high resolutions, even ones with 1920x1200, have been available. It's just that those kinds of things didn't drop in price as fast as people were cutting corners managed to drop them.
Or you dilute lobbying power. Bring back the 1-in-30,000 rule. Don't worry about fat pay - pay 'em based on the mean, median or mode of the area they represent. And modern technology means they don't have to be in DC at all - they can work their entire careers from an office in their area.
Thus they are more accessible to people, the political donations that the people they represent means they're more powerful, and lobbying 5000+ is a lot harder. Spending $10M achieves a lot when you only need to convince under 200 people. $10M doesn't go so far for 5000-odd. And arranging that many people to meet and greet is practically impossible to get in the same room.
Most graphics cards support 2D acceleration since the 90s - it's something that's been built into Windows for ages. Though given how fast it is to draw primitives like lines and such, it's typically far faster to do it in software than to run through the graphics card to render it to a framebuffer.
Though for PDFs, what happens is the Adobe Reader generally uses its own software based rendering engine rather than the OS accelerated GDI primitives. This is because the OS versions are dependent on Windows and Window Handles, and a complex drawing consumes those up in a hurry. (Using something like Foxit Reader which does use GDI can result in resource exhaustion which means you end up with missing lines and other objects - not fun. Though the ones you do see are drawn very quickly).
Of course, Microsoft deprecated DirectDraw (a way to accomplish 2D accelerated drawing) sometime in the DirectX 6 era or so...
Maybe because CBS "gets it"?
It's true this would never have happened back in the Viacom/Paramount days (Viacom actually threatened Star Trek fansites back in the day with C&D's) and back when the sole goal of Star Trek was to exact the maximum number of dollars available, even if doing so required being extremely petty. (They still do to an extent, given that Star Trek DVDs and Blu-Rays are twice the price as normal TV box sets).
But I suppose CBS realizes that fandom is real, they can't control it, and if someone wants to make something that potentially could help them (since they own the rights to it and the movies are popular), well, it costs them nothing and gains them everything.
I'm sure they also retain a lot of the rights - e.g., DVD and Blu-Ray