Re:"We believed we knew better what customers need
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How BlackBerry Blew It
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In many respects the first iPhone didn't have much to offer over your average Blackberry, but it looked cool, and more importantly, was built on top of hte marketing and technology of the iPod. Apple already had a leg up in having produced a killer device and knew how to extend that to the smartphone. Basically, the Blackberry become the staid competitor, functional to be sure, but lacking the "hip" factor. It became like a snowball for Apple. More customers meant more developers, more developers meant bigger app store, bigger app store meant more customers.
Actually, the iPhone on launch only did 3 things. Jobs himself kept pointing it out.
"It's a phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator. A Phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator".
The iPhone had something no other phone had at that point - a functional web browser! Before this, the only web browser that was even half decent was... Opera Mobile. Which you could pay $40 for, or if your manufacturer paid $10,000, Opera would port to your platform.
Of course, if you didn't get it with your device or pay for it, you usually got some crappy-ass web browser that was not much different from lynx. (Hell, that's provided you didn't get one limited to WAP).
Now we have a phone that comes with not just a web browser, but a web browser that renders just like a desktop PC (Opera Mobile came close, but Safari used the full Webkit engine, not a cut down one).
And that changed everything - I think Jobs loved to show off how functional it was with the rubber banding (patent denied in EU), pinch-to-zoom, and how the NYT website looked the same on the phone as it does on the desktop.
I'm sure people once thought students who only learned to type on PCs would be at a disadvantage compared to those who learned to type on a typewriter.
Not as much as you'd think - typists were a completely separate profession until the PC came out. You just didn't need strong typing skills in the past as you do today.
The only real benefit to using a typewriter is that you learn to type accurately without making a mistake (because mistakes a costly). But it never hurt if you had something important to have someone else type it out for you.
Of course, these days the typist has gone the way of the buggy whip so everyone now has to learn to type - taking a dictation and having someone else type it is a rarity.
Gates,Ballmer,Jobs,Zuckerberg,, Did they have NSA'ed and back door'ed devices? Hypothetically, conspiratorially, assuming, if these guys had one of those UN-NSA'ed, NON-backDoor'ed devices for their own use, what is the market value / political value of those devices ? Or lets assume NSA has several thousands of those clean devices, how could they prevent one of those clean devices being dissected in one of those xxx-hat meetings. As documents leaked, these devices will be brought to day light as well, one day. What would be the brand's response? Will john citizen stop using smart phones or social media? or disgraces governments resign? or NSA will change the port number to access your device and continue?
According to the Snowden slides, Jobs is exempt - he was dead long before Apple joined the NSA program (mid-late 2012). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all joined much earlier - Apple was the latecomer and it happened under Cook's watch.
Solution: free people from the necessity of getting a job and working for an ignorant boss. Vote for government to provide a basic income to anyone who asks, and stimulate the natural creative instinct with challenges. The focus should be on the advance of knowledge, not "any job is a good job". With free MOOCs and the ability to collaborate in an ad-hoc way through the unprecedented communication tool that the internet provides, it is no longer necessary for individuals to work for a company to contribute.
The problem is your suggestion suffers from the ills of communism and the free market. And not ills of communism like red fever or "it's not democracy", but real problems exposed by communism.
The first is that it denies the fact that humans are not equal - some really are better than others. If I'm a brilliant artist, but I can't seem to hold down a good job (letting me do my art my way - or whatever), then I'm going to get the same money as the bum who can barely draw a stick figure.
Then the next stage will be people who perhaps see themselves as "more important" should start demanding that they get a bit more basic income because they contribute more. E.g., the engineer who designs a bridge on basic income (and thus makes people's lives easier) vs. me, the artist. Who deserves more?
And then we end up just like Animal House.
It also ignores another reality - humans are lazy. It's why we invented automation, tools, computers and other things - to have them do stuff we don't want to do. This proposal has the potential to turn into a bunch of people just living off "basic income" to do nothing but sit down and watch TV all day. People get extremely dependent on stuff like this as evidenced in the real world today.
The truth is, the free market sucks, as does communism (as an economic model). We've not come up with any alternative that doesn't have problems of one or the other, or both. It's just like how democracy sucks (ask someone in the minority about the tyranny of the majority), as does communism (as a political system). We've not come up with any form of economic or political model that's better, and we've been trying for thousands of years to figure it out.
You'd better be careful about what others post about you as well. Simply having an account allows you to be tagged. Right now, Facebook allows you to disallow those tags, but that policy could change at any time. Frankly, it's safest not to have a Facebook account at all if you care about privacy.
Actually, if you DON'T have an account you can still be tagged. In fact, unless you have an account, you can't even deny the tags. (Nevermind shadow accounts).
No one said you have to be on Facebook, G+ or LinkedIn all the time. You can have a basic page and put up basically nothing - any information you put up there, you do it voluntarily, no matter how much Facebook or Google or whatever encourage you to add.
I don't post my daily life and statuses on my FB page, nor on G+. If I wanted to write about my life, I use a diary like we have for years. If I wanted it public, I'd write it on a blog I host.
Anyway this is all beside the point. I'll open the floor back to you to tell us what alternative plug you can suggest. Only criteria is that it has a current carrying capacity higher than 1A, is capable of supporting high speed data transfer, can be easily centred and inserted without looking and is no more than 3mm high.
I don't know. Apple's lightning connector seems to meet the requirements, though perhaps not exactly in the way I'd do it properly.
It handles 2A sufficiently (it's used on the iPad), it does high speed transfers (USB2, though not USB3), can be centered (Apple bevelled the edges of the socket) and is less than 3mm high.
As additional benefits, it's waterproof, the connector is solid (machined metal, pins inserted and plastic injection molded around it, giving ti remarkable mechanical strength - the cable is likely to fail first from bending). But more importantly, it's bi-directional. It doesn't matter which way you insert it.
Things to fix - first, the spring parts should be on the plug, not the jack (opposite the way they are now)- the springs are the most likely parts to fail or weaken over time. Though, it's a tough point as having springs on the plug mean they get worn much faster as the springs get exposed to handling. I'd also take the time to put the contacts on both sides on the device side and rather than some complex scheme Apple has going, merely have the internal wiring switch the pins around so no electronics are needed to figure the right way around. Having contacts on both sides (rather than springs as is right now on the jack) means later on in life, if one side is worn out, you still have the other side.
And I'd add a couple of holes on the side for an optional catch so other accessories can plug in and hang on.
First you need to download and install a neural network program in your smartphone, train it with loads and loads of data. Then turn it on and leave it running. Then it can become a keystroke logger. At this point it worse than the proverbial unix virus, "You got a unix virus. It works on honor system. Please forward this mail to all addresses in your.mailrc and sudo \rm -rf / Thank you."
It's easily done if you give someone the right motivation.
Remember the jailbreak worm that relied on people leaving the default password unchanged? Same deal - you managed to get someone to blindly install openssh and leave it running so they can get something.
Face it, Dancing Pigs makes the Honor System Virus possible these days.
Heck, all you'd need is a bugged program that calls out for "free international texting!". There's your loads and loads of text right there.
Actually, there's nothing in MicroUSB itself that makes it particularly fragile.
It's the handset manufacturers who don't want it to be robust. They're very happy selling you a device with a 90 day warranty and an expected lifespan of about a year.
Avtually, it being small is reason enough - it means it's small enough to be installed via automated pick and place machines.
But it also means the only mechanical attachment it has to the board is a set of solder pads - two big ones near the part where the cable inserts. If you want tabs that go through the PCB, it requires a separate through-hole process to finish the attachment, extra costs.
The problem with soldered mechanical attachment points is that they result in the weakest part being the glue that holds the copper to the PCB. Wiggle the cable a little bit or jam it a touch too hard and you delaminate the copper foil from the board. Eventually the tabs break off the PCB and the connector is literally held by the 5 pins at the back which aren't strong enough to withstand much insertion and removal cycles.
Perhaps the EU should mandate that the connectors be epoxied down to the board so an accidental bump or jerk doesn't destroy the connector. Once the pads rip off, it's the only way to reattach the connector.
Be especially wary of docking stations that attempt to do an Apple and have a micro-USB jack stick straight up and be a mechanical attachment point for the docking station and that port is not generally expected to withstand much mechanical strain.
Heck, the EU should probably go with something similar to Lightning - where there's no plastic tongues inside the connector. I've seen them break off - on both the device and the cable ends. Making the jack a solid piece with external connections like lightning or those 2.5mm plugs is far more structurally sound than relying on flimly slivers of plastic.
"Open standards"? They're trying to grow their market to sell more DRM-based stuff, that's not really open. The Linux kernel is just a tool, not their target.
More correctly, Steam is the original App Store. Just like the Apple App Store, except Valve did it first, and curated all the same (Yes, it's curated. Greenlight is merely a way for "the rest of us" to try to submit in a game. If you're not a major publisher, or a well known indie game, it's the only way to get into Valve's App Store).
The reason we have Steam on Linux is because Microsoft and Apple have competing app stores. Linux doesn't, and Valve has a well known app store that they can count of a lot of support for.
And since Linux probably won't ever get an app store, having Steam on Linux basically means they have the entire field to themselves due to brand recognition.
One feature of autism/Asperger's is obsessions. This and male teenage hormones do not mix well. I had many obsessions as an autistic/Asperger's teenage girl. The "girl" part can be a moderating factor in the expression of autism. [I'm officially diagnosed BTW]
The problem is not autism or Asperger's. The problem is using autism or Asperger's as an excuse to behave badly.
Because you know what happens? The public starts to believe in it.
If you want a more innocent example - take video games and violence. The two are no inextricably linked together. People start blaming the games for making their kids go psycho and now people get into this belief. And then you have the perpetrators arguing the same thing (even in court) - that video games made them do it.
Or Asperger's and cursing - just because some find it uncontrollable, everyone else excuses their profane language that way.
Do it often enough and people will think all autistics (or Asperger's) are anti-social psychos who really cannot be trusted around because it appears everyone is excusing their behavior as a result of it.
The worst part of it all is it will be a self-perpetuating myth that cannot be killed.
This is exactly why my company has timesheets due on Tuesdays for the previous week. How your situation can exist is simply beyond me.
Oh, believe me, I've tried to explain how it's not possible to do this, and that if they need accurate time they'll have to wait until my work week is over.
What happens (it happens to me as well) is that the managers need the timesheets to figure out how billing went for the week. And that their bosses demand that information by COB Friday. Since they need to process the information, they need that data by noon Friday. The upper management then needs to process that data to have it ready by noon Monday.
Of course, they demand accurate billing and to estimate on the hours on Friday.
In which case, if you know that sometimes you have to go to 1am, I'd say to fill out the timesheet to 1am. If you worked less, file an amendment saying you didn't need it - if they don't process it, oh well.
Sometimes instead you do it Friday-noon to Friday-noon
I am a software developer, I do understand that my email can be "read" in route, but what bothers me is that that email is not accorded the same protections as my hand delivered envelope, Some reads my letter by steaming open the envelope, bad; someone reading my email because they can catch it in route; okay. That is not how it should be. If someone reads my email (without my permission) they should be held to the same level of privacy invasion as one who reads my snail mail. If I give gmail permission to scan my mail so be it, but that does not mean I abdicate my privacy for anyone else to read it. At least that is how email should be viewed today.
Email is not considered an envelope. It's considered a postcard, where the contents are visible to any and all who handle the mail.
If you want to put it in an envelope, that would involve encrypting it.
Of course, the situation here is very subtle - you as a Google user agreed to the T&Cs of Google's service and the privacy policy. The sender of said email may not have agreed to such tracking though - not being a Google user or whatever.
Even worse, Google is building up "ghost" profiles of such people. Essentially, replace "NSA" with "Google" and the situation's basically the same. (Ditto Facebook - if you don't have an account, Facebook will still build a ghost profile of you from other people's posts. And to fix that you need to make a Facebook account...).
The point at which students initially had difficulty varied too. A surprising number had trouble with concept of a for loop. All of those students did make it past that though. What all of the students that had significant trouble with the course had in common, though, was the ability to generalize. They had problems with coming up with simple algorithms to solve simple problems. They could describe how to solve for very specific circumstances. Indeed, it seemed, most of the students could code a solution to a very specialize specific scenario, but, at least initially, not the general case. Many student improved greatly in this regard by the end, but a decent number still had issues (and I am only considering the ones that put forth effort in the course).
Most of the students having issues could somewhat understand logical concepts. They could debug simple implementation issues, and they could usually look at other people's working code and explain what the code was doing. These students lacked the ability to think abstractly and apply logic and their learning to new problems where the steps to solve the problem weren't laid out for them. I believe it is the same issue you see in middle/high school math classes where many students can manipulate equations just fine but have problems with solving story problems.
So, I do believe learning (proper) programming at an early age would benefit people. They would get more practice with thinking abstractly and have a venue for seeing practical and essentially immediate results.
Coding will not help that. It's a big problem everywhere - and has been for years.
The fundamental problem is not coding. It's the way we teach - in this case, it's a form of rote memorization rather than application. Memorization is easy - ask any student who studies for a test and can spew back facts, figures and formulas without skipping a beat.
The thing is, it's application of the concepts, or realization when situations are very similar.
It's not limited to science - we often say "history repeats itself" because it's true - but it makes you wonder why we don't see it coming given that similar situations crop up again and again and again. (Heck, the Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence made important observations - remember the part about "light and transient causes"?).
The thing education lacks is the ability to teach synthesis, because it's very hard, and it's something that's difficult to apply to an entire classroom because everyone is different. (Synthesis is where you take what you know and apply it by synthesizing a solution - basically by seeing generalizations). Sometimes it's called critical thinking though that term is usually only in reference to texts.
What exactly defines a "good place to build"? If you define it as somewhere with low flooding risk, low earthquake risk, low hurricane risk, etc., there are lots of places in the middle of the U.S. that fit that standard. There are even places with all of that and low risk of wildfires and low risk of tornadoes as well, though one has to be a bit choosy to avoid those things in the middle of the U.S. And of course freak weather is always a possibility.
What about other factors like climate (does it get hot in the summer, cold in the winter, humidity, etc), access to essential resources (water, mainly - does it have to be trucked in or is there a nice river or aquifer that could serve the town), what kind of wildlife is there (is it deserted or is there a nice selection of wildlife), trees, etc.
Typically, that's why people settled on the waterfronts, rivers, etc. Unfortunately, those kind of places are at least vulnerable to flooding.
If you want greenery like a forest, well now you're subject to fires.
If you're in the middle of the desert, well, you're reliant on something to bring you essentials like water, and then you're subject to that something breaking.
Like mountain living? Well now you have earthquakes (a lot of mountains are formed because plates crash into each other and shove upwards). It's why the west coast is so rocky with lots of mountain ranges while the eastern part is flat flat flat.
You don't get to customize them anymore. You pick one of a small number (half a dozen or so) of equally ugly colors with stupid names you don't even recognize, you pick one of a small number (less than three, usually) of standard trims, and you might have one or two options you can select (like alloy vs steel wheels); in most cases, upgrading to option-X requires upgrading the entire trim (or buying it after-market). Oh, make no mistake, I have no doubt you could get it with whatever you want. But whether they say it or not, you will pay for trim-package-B when they "throw in for free" the 17" rims.
There's a science behind it, and it turns out customers prefer the limited options overwhelmingly to having the ability to pick and choose every little thing. It also turns out to be surprisingly cheaper because you get to standardize parts.
The trim package one is annoying, but sometimes it's essential because if you want say, leather seats, they come with a bum warmer (because most people buy them with bum warmers in the past, so it's easier to build one seat than two - one with and one without), which requires a button for your dashboard to control it. But that button also requires an extra fusebox relay and a interior control computer to manage it. Of course, the computer software isn't flexible so if you get it with that option, you get the onboard navigation system as well, which means you need the upgraded trim level just to get leather seats.
Navigation systems generally cause this because to put in the screen requires electronics changes and the dash changes, which means again, upgraded trim level because you're changing so many things (navigation means you need a central screen, perhsps interaction buttons on the steering wheel, integration with the instrument cluster screen, etc. which changes everything.
Do this more than a few times and the number of parts and assemblies required balloons immensely which just complicates the supply line, complicates the car computer software etc. etc. etc.
I mean ok, yes, it plays everything under the sun. But not very well.
For something as widely popular and prolific as VLC, I simply don't understand why its not the pre-eminent media player that rivals anything on the market...without any compromise. The UI of VLC sucks, still, especially tablet incarnations of it, and while it might load a video, often the video craps out even though it plays perfectly fine on other dreaded "closed source" media players. Simply being able to load a video format is not "support" of that video format, it should play flawlessly and have all the capabilities to track throughout the movie with having it hang for several minutes. Its the 21st century, I shouldn't have to wait for video to load regardless of what format it is.
VLC is the prime example debunking the myth that open source software is better because its community developed. If the community actually invested more effort into improving VLC code rather than just lauding its superiority then VLC would actually be the best media player on the market.
The problem with VLC is endemic of a lot of open-source code. It's basically where the programmer is king and everyone else is a peon. Great if you're a developer, but it fails in that a modern non-trivial program needs much more than just a programmer (and that the project lead on most open source is a programmer doesn't help). Hell, programmers and engineers generally are the WORST people you want to develop certain aspects of your application - notably stuff related to UI, UX and documentation.
The issue is that open-source generally "ranks" people in terms of LoC submitted (or commits, or whatever). Designers, technical writers and other stuff don't usually generate things considered "valuable" to the developer - how many times have you heard this refrain - "you have the source, there's your documentation".
And the UI and UX is very important these days but also heavily discounted because they generally make life difficult because implementing a widget here instead of there seems like a pointless exercise. Especially when they want to re-do how things work (see all the pushback to how Apple decided to reinvent how people used computers by doing auto-save (and even allowing versioning and "going back In time" to see how a document looked at a prior point, even allowing one to manipulate a previous save).
That said, VLC's UI is generally sufficient (especially compared to many other media players), though it could use a bit of tweaking (like disassociating the mousewheel from the volume control - Allowing one to reduce the range of the volume control (or peg it at 100% so you don't accidentally set it to 117% or having to live with it at 98 or 105% because you can't get it back to 100%).
You do realize that the glitches that you complain about are due to VLC avoiding patented, closed source solutions? In this light they are actually doing awesome work!
Sorry, I don't buy this, because VLC implements plenty of patented stuff - besides all the MPEG formats (heavily patented) and image formats (most of which are patented), and audio formats (also patented).
If you created a player that was trying to avoid patented stuff, you'd be left with a player that does Vorbis, Theora, WebM and a few other formats. And be of little use because the formats people really use (h.264 currently, DivX/MPEG-4 ASP before) are all heavily patented.
Of course, there's some things where it's understandable - like DVD and Blu-Ray playback where the copy protection on both generally interferes with straight playback as they should. VLC does not have much in the way of fixing issues related to copy protection - being that it's a full time job. (See how much an AnyDVD license is and that you have to subscribe because it changes so much).
A single button that, if hit, would reboot the system???? That's is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. If you hit it by accident, goodbye to your work. Remember that when you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL in DOS, it didn't even give you a prompt to shut down, it just rebooted. Who in their right mind would want that in a single key??
You can look at illegal child porn images and instantly know that they're illegal, but you can't just look at a file and know either way if its illegal or not
Determining if an image is child porn is not as easy as you make it seem. In fact, a lot of people get caught up in child porn laws doing stuff both parties consent to.
E.g., if a parent posts a photo of their baby on Facebook - is that child porn? If they were dressed in only a diaper? For a LOT of child porn definitions, this actually counts.
Or what happens today - sexting. Teens send pics of themselves in sexual positions. By practically all definitions, that's child porn. And many a teen have ended up snarled because the images fit that definition perfectly, despite both parties being of similar age and equally consenting. Heck, even if it's photos of themselves it can still count.
Determining when a particular image is child porn or not is not simple at all. Of course, it's somewhat easier in that a site that specializes in child porn images generally won't be used by teens sexting each other, but still. You also end up with sites like 4chan and reddit where they may have questionable images...
Woz also invented the floppy disc drive for the Apple II. While floppy drives weren't exactly new at the time, the big innovation that Woz did was in reducing the chip count considerably and moving much of the timing circuitry and formatting systems into software, thus making the disc controllers much more affordable. The Apple II computers were one of the first mass produced computers with that technology and gave Apple Computer a very early lead over their competitors who were still using cassette tapes for data storage systems.
I still have awe at how Woz was not able to create the Integer BASIC interpreter used on the Apple I & Apple II computers, but that he hand assembled every op code into raw binary before putting it into the ROM chip. It was something that a lack of capital forced to happen... which is also why Woz developed the mini assembler that was found in the Apple II monitor ROM so he didn't need to do that again.
The floppy drive thing was interesting, because the early floppy drives used a lot of chips because they offloaded a lot of work from the CPU to the drive electronics. When Woz was experimenting, he got the drive from Shugart and poked around with the operations manual. Eventually he realized he could get rid of most of the controller on the drive and completely simplify things. (It took a bit of convincing to get Shugart to sell Apple plain mechanisms without controller chips).
What Woz REALLY did with these innovations was realize that the CPU can do most of the world and be far cheaper at it - i.e., offload to software what was done in hardware to reduce cost and complexity.
As for hand assembly - back in those days it was easy enough, if a bit tedious. These were the days where if you wanted an assembler, they cost a lot of money and only ran on big computers like PDPs and the like. Of course, when you only had a tiny amount of memory, it only was a few days work to hand assemble the OS and other things. Plus if you looked at the disk controller code, you'll find stuff in there that could only be done if you hand-assembled it - there were severe timing restrictions caused by the software approach that required that a bunch of code be located at specific locations so the 6502 clock count would just make the necessary timing. If the code moved, there was a chance it would break the driver. Again, something you could only do back when things were simpler and could hand assemble the code to ensure that you got what you needed and could double-check the cycle counts.
It doesn't really matter since there are only two videocard vendors now
There are THREE major videocard vendors. You missed the biggest of them all by far (bigger than the other two combined).
Yes, Intel counts - they are by far the largest graphics provider. Of course, Intel graphics is so-so compared to the latest and greatest, but it is surprisingly "good enough" and unless you want to target the enthusiast market exclusively, you'll have to deal with Intel.
Then there's the various little video providers like Via (they bought S3, remember and own a lot of patents), which really don't matter for games, but may matter in other areas.
Imagine if Woz would have had an early job offer at say HP. He might have become a respected engineer over there, but unlikely with the same recognition today.
Woz was working at HP (in their calculator division) while he was building the Apple I. In fact, HP had a policy that allowed people to take parts home for experimentation (and Woz used it to build the Apple I). The only catch is that if you build anything, you must show it to HP to give them right of first refusal to build and commercialize the product.
In fact, during this time, Woz applied to transfer to HP's computer division, and was rejected, multiple times.
Eventually he built the Apple I, and he showed it to HP management. They liked it, HOWEVER, they rejected the idea that it can connect to an ordinary TV. They felt that doing so violated the HP way - what if the customer has a piss-poor TV? They'll blame HP for making a crap product! No, your device must use an HP display.
So in the end, Woz got his release on the Apple I, HP only made workstations (and nothing for the home computer market). When Jobs went about selling the Apple I, and got an order for 1000 of them, Woz quit HP and they entered into building the Apple I full time.
There was insufficient capital, so Woz sold his HP calculator to pay for the PCBs, and they could only build about 10 or so at a time - they'd build 10 of them, then they'd pay the suppliers for the next batch (whom refused to release the parts until they were prepaid - so the parts sat in a secured locker at the factory). Jobs would take the 10 units and deliver them and take partial payment.
Woz and Jobs complimented each other. It was Jobs' idea to sell the Apple I (Woz was planning on just selling boards and schematics). That was innovation #1, because it meant a computer no longer was the exclusive territory of the big companies nor hardcore hackers - people could *buy* one prebuilt (and many stores threw in the requisite additional parts - power supply, keyboard, case). Until then, even the Altairs were shipped as a kit you had to put together, so limited to the hobbyist market. Of course, even the hobbyist market was big enough to create Microsoft and have Gates port his BASIC to it. Of course, it's also when Gates wrote his famous piracy letter.
Innovation #2 came with the Apple II - in which Jobs packaged it all up in a plastic case so now any mom and dad with no engineering skills can go to the store and buy it completely assembled and for the time, stylish looking.
The better question is "How do you scrub something off the Internet?" Barbra Streisand wants to know...
First, it applies to minors as it's assumed they can't really be held responsible for their posts - given you can't delete anything on the internet, they may not realize what you post today may haunt them in the far future. Also, privacy options are so complex that it can be hard to understand.
Second, the law merely says that a minor's post are to be made private, not deleted. Because you can't delete anything off the 'net and it's unrealistic to expect that. So instead, the "eraser law" merely hides the public posts. This means that no, it's not gone forever, because it can't be - between caches, archives and Google, nothing is ever removed.
Instead, it just means you get a way to simply declare you want everything you posted before you reached 118 marked as private and not shown to the public anymore. It does not address caches, archives and Google have to delete the data, but that the "primary source" is not available.
That's all. It's remarkably practical for a tech law - it realizes that deletion is impractical (or impossible) and that users may want to keep their accounts, but hide youthful indiscretions.
But the judge can also tell the jury the reason for explaining Mr. Sham is for them to determine if NPS really has "an ongoing concern" in the Eastern District of Texas.
If not, then the case is closed - the court has no jurisdiction as NPS is not properly located there.
The jury has to make the decision to see if the case is even valid.
From the Questions section, they say you can hack it as you like, change the OS, change the hardware, and that the SteamOS source code will be available.
And that's something you can do with PCs today.
But very few people care to upgrade their PCs - they just buy new ones because upgrading is just an annoyance.
So unless the steam box is supposed to appeal to hardcore PC gamers who basically build their own PCs, regular buyers wanting a console experience would just say "screw it".
They want a box that sits in the living room and they don't need to touch it. They don't have to bother - they insert the disc and play the game. With the steam box, what's going to happen when your hareware's inadequate? The answer of "Buy this piece of hardware to upgrade your box" would go over like a lead balloon - you have to spend MORE money?! (Meanwhile, PS4 and Xbox One owners are playing it happily and "just as well" for the most part). Or you'll get complaints that "Steambox runs game poorly - buy PS4 or Xbox version instead".
Openness is great, but you also have to understand WHY people moved to consoles. PC gaming isn't dead, but it's not as big as it once was once console started getting "good enough" that the games weren't just a shadow of what the PC version could attain.
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Actually, the iPhone on launch only did 3 things. Jobs himself kept pointing it out.
"It's a phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator. A Phone, an iPod, an Internet communicator".
The iPhone had something no other phone had at that point - a functional web browser! Before this, the only web browser that was even half decent was... Opera Mobile. Which you could pay $40 for, or if your manufacturer paid $10,000, Opera would port to your platform.
Of course, if you didn't get it with your device or pay for it, you usually got some crappy-ass web browser that was not much different from lynx. (Hell, that's provided you didn't get one limited to WAP).
Now we have a phone that comes with not just a web browser, but a web browser that renders just like a desktop PC (Opera Mobile came close, but Safari used the full Webkit engine, not a cut down one).
And that changed everything - I think Jobs loved to show off how functional it was with the rubber banding (patent denied in EU), pinch-to-zoom, and how the NYT website looked the same on the phone as it does on the desktop.
Not as much as you'd think - typists were a completely separate profession until the PC came out. You just didn't need strong typing skills in the past as you do today.
The only real benefit to using a typewriter is that you learn to type accurately without making a mistake (because mistakes a costly). But it never hurt if you had something important to have someone else type it out for you.
Of course, these days the typist has gone the way of the buggy whip so everyone now has to learn to type - taking a dictation and having someone else type it is a rarity.
According to the Snowden slides, Jobs is exempt - he was dead long before Apple joined the NSA program (mid-late 2012). Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all joined much earlier - Apple was the latecomer and it happened under Cook's watch.
The problem is your suggestion suffers from the ills of communism and the free market. And not ills of communism like red fever or "it's not democracy", but real problems exposed by communism.
The first is that it denies the fact that humans are not equal - some really are better than others. If I'm a brilliant artist, but I can't seem to hold down a good job (letting me do my art my way - or whatever), then I'm going to get the same money as the bum who can barely draw a stick figure.
Then the next stage will be people who perhaps see themselves as "more important" should start demanding that they get a bit more basic income because they contribute more. E.g., the engineer who designs a bridge on basic income (and thus makes people's lives easier) vs. me, the artist. Who deserves more?
And then we end up just like Animal House.
It also ignores another reality - humans are lazy. It's why we invented automation, tools, computers and other things - to have them do stuff we don't want to do. This proposal has the potential to turn into a bunch of people just living off "basic income" to do nothing but sit down and watch TV all day. People get extremely dependent on stuff like this as evidenced in the real world today.
The truth is, the free market sucks, as does communism (as an economic model). We've not come up with any alternative that doesn't have problems of one or the other, or both. It's just like how democracy sucks (ask someone in the minority about the tyranny of the majority), as does communism (as a political system). We've not come up with any form of economic or political model that's better, and we've been trying for thousands of years to figure it out.
Actually, if you DON'T have an account you can still be tagged. In fact, unless you have an account, you can't even deny the tags. (Nevermind shadow accounts).
No one said you have to be on Facebook, G+ or LinkedIn all the time. You can have a basic page and put up basically nothing - any information you put up there, you do it voluntarily, no matter how much Facebook or Google or whatever encourage you to add.
I don't post my daily life and statuses on my FB page, nor on G+. If I wanted to write about my life, I use a diary like we have for years. If I wanted it public, I'd write it on a blog I host.
I don't know. Apple's lightning connector seems to meet the requirements, though perhaps not exactly in the way I'd do it properly.
It handles 2A sufficiently (it's used on the iPad), it does high speed transfers (USB2, though not USB3), can be centered (Apple bevelled the edges of the socket) and is less than 3mm high.
As additional benefits, it's waterproof, the connector is solid (machined metal, pins inserted and plastic injection molded around it, giving ti remarkable mechanical strength - the cable is likely to fail first from bending). But more importantly, it's bi-directional. It doesn't matter which way you insert it.
Things to fix - first, the spring parts should be on the plug, not the jack (opposite the way they are now)- the springs are the most likely parts to fail or weaken over time. Though, it's a tough point as having springs on the plug mean they get worn much faster as the springs get exposed to handling. I'd also take the time to put the contacts on both sides on the device side and rather than some complex scheme Apple has going, merely have the internal wiring switch the pins around so no electronics are needed to figure the right way around. Having contacts on both sides (rather than springs as is right now on the jack) means later on in life, if one side is worn out, you still have the other side.
And I'd add a couple of holes on the side for an optional catch so other accessories can plug in and hang on.
It's easily done if you give someone the right motivation.
Remember the jailbreak worm that relied on people leaving the default password unchanged? Same deal - you managed to get someone to blindly install openssh and leave it running so they can get something.
Face it, Dancing Pigs makes the Honor System Virus possible these days.
Heck, all you'd need is a bugged program that calls out for "free international texting!". There's your loads and loads of text right there.
Avtually, it being small is reason enough - it means it's small enough to be installed via automated pick and place machines.
But it also means the only mechanical attachment it has to the board is a set of solder pads - two big ones near the part where the cable inserts. If you want tabs that go through the PCB, it requires a separate through-hole process to finish the attachment, extra costs.
The problem with soldered mechanical attachment points is that they result in the weakest part being the glue that holds the copper to the PCB. Wiggle the cable a little bit or jam it a touch too hard and you delaminate the copper foil from the board. Eventually the tabs break off the PCB and the connector is literally held by the 5 pins at the back which aren't strong enough to withstand much insertion and removal cycles.
Perhaps the EU should mandate that the connectors be epoxied down to the board so an accidental bump or jerk doesn't destroy the connector. Once the pads rip off, it's the only way to reattach the connector.
Be especially wary of docking stations that attempt to do an Apple and have a micro-USB jack stick straight up and be a mechanical attachment point for the docking station and that port is not generally expected to withstand much mechanical strain.
Heck, the EU should probably go with something similar to Lightning - where there's no plastic tongues inside the connector. I've seen them break off - on both the device and the cable ends. Making the jack a solid piece with external connections like lightning or those 2.5mm plugs is far more structurally sound than relying on flimly slivers of plastic.
More correctly, Steam is the original App Store. Just like the Apple App Store, except Valve did it first, and curated all the same (Yes, it's curated. Greenlight is merely a way for "the rest of us" to try to submit in a game. If you're not a major publisher, or a well known indie game, it's the only way to get into Valve's App Store).
The reason we have Steam on Linux is because Microsoft and Apple have competing app stores. Linux doesn't, and Valve has a well known app store that they can count of a lot of support for.
And since Linux probably won't ever get an app store, having Steam on Linux basically means they have the entire field to themselves due to brand recognition.
The problem is not autism or Asperger's. The problem is using autism or Asperger's as an excuse to behave badly.
Because you know what happens? The public starts to believe in it.
If you want a more innocent example - take video games and violence. The two are no inextricably linked together. People start blaming the games for making their kids go psycho and now people get into this belief. And then you have the perpetrators arguing the same thing (even in court) - that video games made them do it.
Or Asperger's and cursing - just because some find it uncontrollable, everyone else excuses their profane language that way.
Do it often enough and people will think all autistics (or Asperger's) are anti-social psychos who really cannot be trusted around because it appears everyone is excusing their behavior as a result of it.
The worst part of it all is it will be a self-perpetuating myth that cannot be killed.
What happens (it happens to me as well) is that the managers need the timesheets to figure out how billing went for the week. And that their bosses demand that information by COB Friday. Since they need to process the information, they need that data by noon Friday. The upper management then needs to process that data to have it ready by noon Monday.
Of course, they demand accurate billing and to estimate on the hours on Friday.
In which case, if you know that sometimes you have to go to 1am, I'd say to fill out the timesheet to 1am. If you worked less, file an amendment saying you didn't need it - if they don't process it, oh well.
Sometimes instead you do it Friday-noon to Friday-noon
Email is not considered an envelope. It's considered a postcard, where the contents are visible to any and all who handle the mail.
If you want to put it in an envelope, that would involve encrypting it.
Of course, the situation here is very subtle - you as a Google user agreed to the T&Cs of Google's service and the privacy policy. The sender of said email may not have agreed to such tracking though - not being a Google user or whatever.
Even worse, Google is building up "ghost" profiles of such people. Essentially, replace "NSA" with "Google" and the situation's basically the same. (Ditto Facebook - if you don't have an account, Facebook will still build a ghost profile of you from other people's posts. And to fix that you need to make a Facebook account...).
Coding will not help that. It's a big problem everywhere - and has been for years.
My Feynman recalls his experience teaching science in Brazil. They score very high on tests, but they suffer from the exact same problem - they can answer a very specific question, but when put in a similar situation, fail to realize it.
The fundamental problem is not coding. It's the way we teach - in this case, it's a form of rote memorization rather than application. Memorization is easy - ask any student who studies for a test and can spew back facts, figures and formulas without skipping a beat.
The thing is, it's application of the concepts, or realization when situations are very similar.
It's not limited to science - we often say "history repeats itself" because it's true - but it makes you wonder why we don't see it coming given that similar situations crop up again and again and again. (Heck, the Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence made important observations - remember the part about "light and transient causes"?).
The thing education lacks is the ability to teach synthesis, because it's very hard, and it's something that's difficult to apply to an entire classroom because everyone is different. (Synthesis is where you take what you know and apply it by synthesizing a solution - basically by seeing generalizations). Sometimes it's called critical thinking though that term is usually only in reference to texts.
ISTR that the period of the human body clock is not 24 hours, but 27.
That is, if you remove the cues of time from someone, their natural sleep/wake cycle would rapidly approach 27 hours.
Something about it being based on a relaxation oscillator which means the day/night rotation of the earth actually resets it constantly...
What about other factors like climate (does it get hot in the summer, cold in the winter, humidity, etc), access to essential resources (water, mainly - does it have to be trucked in or is there a nice river or aquifer that could serve the town), what kind of wildlife is there (is it deserted or is there a nice selection of wildlife), trees, etc.
Typically, that's why people settled on the waterfronts, rivers, etc. Unfortunately, those kind of places are at least vulnerable to flooding.
If you want greenery like a forest, well now you're subject to fires.
If you're in the middle of the desert, well, you're reliant on something to bring you essentials like water, and then you're subject to that something breaking.
Like mountain living? Well now you have earthquakes (a lot of mountains are formed because plates crash into each other and shove upwards). It's why the west coast is so rocky with lots of mountain ranges while the eastern part is flat flat flat.
There's a science behind it, and it turns out customers prefer the limited options overwhelmingly to having the ability to pick and choose every little thing. It also turns out to be surprisingly cheaper because you get to standardize parts.
The trim package one is annoying, but sometimes it's essential because if you want say, leather seats, they come with a bum warmer (because most people buy them with bum warmers in the past, so it's easier to build one seat than two - one with and one without), which requires a button for your dashboard to control it. But that button also requires an extra fusebox relay and a interior control computer to manage it. Of course, the computer software isn't flexible so if you get it with that option, you get the onboard navigation system as well, which means you need the upgraded trim level just to get leather seats.
Navigation systems generally cause this because to put in the screen requires electronics changes and the dash changes, which means again, upgraded trim level because you're changing so many things (navigation means you need a central screen, perhsps interaction buttons on the steering wheel, integration with the instrument cluster screen, etc. which changes everything.
Do this more than a few times and the number of parts and assemblies required balloons immensely which just complicates the supply line, complicates the car computer software etc. etc. etc.
The problem with VLC is endemic of a lot of open-source code. It's basically where the programmer is king and everyone else is a peon. Great if you're a developer, but it fails in that a modern non-trivial program needs much more than just a programmer (and that the project lead on most open source is a programmer doesn't help). Hell, programmers and engineers generally are the WORST people you want to develop certain aspects of your application - notably stuff related to UI, UX and documentation.
The issue is that open-source generally "ranks" people in terms of LoC submitted (or commits, or whatever). Designers, technical writers and other stuff don't usually generate things considered "valuable" to the developer - how many times have you heard this refrain - "you have the source, there's your documentation".
And the UI and UX is very important these days but also heavily discounted because they generally make life difficult because implementing a widget here instead of there seems like a pointless exercise. Especially when they want to re-do how things work (see all the pushback to how Apple decided to reinvent how people used computers by doing auto-save (and even allowing versioning and "going back In time" to see how a document looked at a prior point, even allowing one to manipulate a previous save).
That said, VLC's UI is generally sufficient (especially compared to many other media players), though it could use a bit of tweaking (like disassociating the mousewheel from the volume control - Allowing one to reduce the range of the volume control (or peg it at 100% so you don't accidentally set it to 117% or having to live with it at 98 or 105% because you can't get it back to 100%).
Sorry, I don't buy this, because VLC implements plenty of patented stuff - besides all the MPEG formats (heavily patented) and image formats (most of which are patented), and audio formats (also patented).
If you created a player that was trying to avoid patented stuff, you'd be left with a player that does Vorbis, Theora, WebM and a few other formats. And be of little use because the formats people really use (h.264 currently, DivX/MPEG-4 ASP before) are all heavily patented.
Of course, there's some things where it's understandable - like DVD and Blu-Ray playback where the copy protection on both generally interferes with straight playback as they should. VLC does not have much in the way of fixing issues related to copy protection - being that it's a full time job. (See how much an AnyDVD license is and that you have to subscribe because it changes so much).
Actually, there were a few home computers that did have a single button reboot key. Some were rather famous and put it in a really bad spot (scroll down about 1/4 of the way or search for "reset").
Of course, it was fixed In a later model (it was relocated to a spot less likely to be accidentally hit).
Determining if an image is child porn is not as easy as you make it seem. In fact, a lot of people get caught up in child porn laws doing stuff both parties consent to.
E.g., if a parent posts a photo of their baby on Facebook - is that child porn? If they were dressed in only a diaper? For a LOT of child porn definitions, this actually counts.
Or what happens today - sexting. Teens send pics of themselves in sexual positions. By practically all definitions, that's child porn. And many a teen have ended up snarled because the images fit that definition perfectly, despite both parties being of similar age and equally consenting. Heck, even if it's photos of themselves it can still count.
Determining when a particular image is child porn or not is not simple at all. Of course, it's somewhat easier in that a site that specializes in child porn images generally won't be used by teens sexting each other, but still. You also end up with sites like 4chan and reddit where they may have questionable images...
The floppy drive thing was interesting, because the early floppy drives used a lot of chips because they offloaded a lot of work from the CPU to the drive electronics. When Woz was experimenting, he got the drive from Shugart and poked around with the operations manual. Eventually he realized he could get rid of most of the controller on the drive and completely simplify things. (It took a bit of convincing to get Shugart to sell Apple plain mechanisms without controller chips).
What Woz REALLY did with these innovations was realize that the CPU can do most of the world and be far cheaper at it - i.e., offload to software what was done in hardware to reduce cost and complexity.
As for hand assembly - back in those days it was easy enough, if a bit tedious. These were the days where if you wanted an assembler, they cost a lot of money and only ran on big computers like PDPs and the like. Of course, when you only had a tiny amount of memory, it only was a few days work to hand assemble the OS and other things. Plus if you looked at the disk controller code, you'll find stuff in there that could only be done if you hand-assembled it - there were severe timing restrictions caused by the software approach that required that a bunch of code be located at specific locations so the 6502 clock count would just make the necessary timing. If the code moved, there was a chance it would break the driver. Again, something you could only do back when things were simpler and could hand assemble the code to ensure that you got what you needed and could double-check the cycle counts.
There are THREE major videocard vendors. You missed the biggest of them all by far (bigger than the other two combined).
Yes, Intel counts - they are by far the largest graphics provider. Of course, Intel graphics is so-so compared to the latest and greatest, but it is surprisingly "good enough" and unless you want to target the enthusiast market exclusively, you'll have to deal with Intel.
Then there's the various little video providers like Via (they bought S3, remember and own a lot of patents), which really don't matter for games, but may matter in other areas.
Woz was working at HP (in their calculator division) while he was building the Apple I. In fact, HP had a policy that allowed people to take parts home for experimentation (and Woz used it to build the Apple I). The only catch is that if you build anything, you must show it to HP to give them right of first refusal to build and commercialize the product.
In fact, during this time, Woz applied to transfer to HP's computer division, and was rejected, multiple times.
Eventually he built the Apple I, and he showed it to HP management. They liked it, HOWEVER, they rejected the idea that it can connect to an ordinary TV. They felt that doing so violated the HP way - what if the customer has a piss-poor TV? They'll blame HP for making a crap product! No, your device must use an HP display.
So in the end, Woz got his release on the Apple I, HP only made workstations (and nothing for the home computer market). When Jobs went about selling the Apple I, and got an order for 1000 of them, Woz quit HP and they entered into building the Apple I full time.
There was insufficient capital, so Woz sold his HP calculator to pay for the PCBs, and they could only build about 10 or so at a time - they'd build 10 of them, then they'd pay the suppliers for the next batch (whom refused to release the parts until they were prepaid - so the parts sat in a secured locker at the factory). Jobs would take the 10 units and deliver them and take partial payment.
Woz and Jobs complimented each other. It was Jobs' idea to sell the Apple I (Woz was planning on just selling boards and schematics). That was innovation #1, because it meant a computer no longer was the exclusive territory of the big companies nor hardcore hackers - people could *buy* one prebuilt (and many stores threw in the requisite additional parts - power supply, keyboard, case). Until then, even the Altairs were shipped as a kit you had to put together, so limited to the hobbyist market. Of course, even the hobbyist market was big enough to create Microsoft and have Gates port his BASIC to it. Of course, it's also when Gates wrote his famous piracy letter.
Innovation #2 came with the Apple II - in which Jobs packaged it all up in a plastic case so now any mom and dad with no engineering skills can go to the store and buy it completely assembled and for the time, stylish looking.
First, it applies to minors as it's assumed they can't really be held responsible for their posts - given you can't delete anything on the internet, they may not realize what you post today may haunt them in the far future. Also, privacy options are so complex that it can be hard to understand.
Second, the law merely says that a minor's post are to be made private, not deleted. Because you can't delete anything off the 'net and it's unrealistic to expect that. So instead, the "eraser law" merely hides the public posts. This means that no, it's not gone forever, because it can't be - between caches, archives and Google, nothing is ever removed.
Instead, it just means you get a way to simply declare you want everything you posted before you reached 118 marked as private and not shown to the public anymore. It does not address caches, archives and Google have to delete the data, but that the "primary source" is not available.
That's all. It's remarkably practical for a tech law - it realizes that deletion is impractical (or impossible) and that users may want to keep their accounts, but hide youthful indiscretions.
But the judge can also tell the jury the reason for explaining Mr. Sham is for them to determine if NPS really has "an ongoing concern" in the Eastern District of Texas.
If not, then the case is closed - the court has no jurisdiction as NPS is not properly located there.
The jury has to make the decision to see if the case is even valid.
And that's something you can do with PCs today.
But very few people care to upgrade their PCs - they just buy new ones because upgrading is just an annoyance.
So unless the steam box is supposed to appeal to hardcore PC gamers who basically build their own PCs, regular buyers wanting a console experience would just say "screw it".
They want a box that sits in the living room and they don't need to touch it. They don't have to bother - they insert the disc and play the game. With the steam box, what's going to happen when your hareware's inadequate? The answer of "Buy this piece of hardware to upgrade your box" would go over like a lead balloon - you have to spend MORE money?! (Meanwhile, PS4 and Xbox One owners are playing it happily and "just as well" for the most part). Or you'll get complaints that "Steambox runs game poorly - buy PS4 or Xbox version instead".
Openness is great, but you also have to understand WHY people moved to consoles. PC gaming isn't dead, but it's not as big as it once was once console started getting "good enough" that the games weren't just a shadow of what the PC version could attain.
And now you have to do upgrades of hardware?