Back in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when I used Windows, I realized sleep mode was a complete joke, unreliable, and just stopped using it by the time I upgraded to Windows XP or shortly after. In Linux, I am still not a fan of waiting for the damn thing to "wake up" for 5-10 seconds before it will even accept my password, so the only component that ever even enters standby on my machines is the moniter (and this has been the case for over a decade, even dating back to my last years in Windows). Windows, Linux--doesn't matter what the OS is, not putting the system into standby makes the whole experience much smoother, faster and hassle-free.
On the other hand, though--it is a good thing this was fixed for those laptop users out there.
All the power save modes were a joke until XP or so - it was always a point of pride on the Mac side that one could close the lid, wait a few moments and then cart the laptop somewhere else. Or better yet, close the lid, and change the battery then open the lid and resume working as if nothing happened. If anything, working sleep mode was an expected feature on Mac, and a joke on PCs.
It started to change when Microsoft helped to create the ACPI spec - prior to this, power management was done by the BIOS (because of DOS), so systems more complex had to shut down everything, switch back to 16 bit real mode, then call the BIOS. That is, if the BIOS didn't do it underneath the OS in the first place (fun to be had!).
Problems abounded if you had peripherals. ACPI changed it by moving the power management responsibilities to the OS (if power-aware - if not power aware, it was the old BIOS behavior). So now the OS could do all the necessary work and put the system to sleep in an orderly fashion.
Of course, it took years from then for the OS, BIOS (ACPI) and device drivers to stabilize to the point where one could suspend/resume predictably.
Though, it's not all roses - there are still many things that can prevent a system from sleeping, leading to hot laptop syndrome where you close the lid and the laptop doesn't go to sleep. Unfortunately, Macs have regressed in this regard as well.
Nothing is stopping you from writing one either, except time and desire.
Good luck getting anything worthwhile to even be noticed, much less brought to committee or the floor. If it is a somewhat hot button, it can be argued about incessantly, then tabled to a committee for review/revision over and over until it is gutted and has riders you would have never dreamed of that are completely unrelated.
You can increase your chances with the green lubricant - the more you apply, the easier the time you have to get the bill brought forward. If you lubricate more than one with the green lubricant,, things move quicker still.
How frustrating that the NHTSA caps at 5/5, as if that makes a car perfectly safe. There's ALWAYS room for improvement, and as far as I can tell, Tesla extrapolated the 5.4 score to reflect measurable stats that the NHTSA provided.
The NHTSA caps it at 5 because that's the current limit of the measurement.
You can score above it. In fact, periodically, as cars get safer, the NHTSA re-scales all the ratings. Now, using the raw scores, they can recalculate all the scores for every car they tested - yesterday's 5 star may be tomorrow's 4 star or even 3 star.
They realize that technology evolves, and as more cars hit the 5 stars, they'll decide to make the criterion even tougher and recompute all the scores.
I'm sure there are probably a few "5 star" cars that are classics today that more than a few people would be scared to get into - of course, using today's ratings it won't be 5 stars anymore. Heck, it may rate 0 stars because it lacks modern safety systems.
There are four ways to deal with scores that improve with time.
One is to ignore it and let everything get capped, which rapidly gets useless if the reason is due to technology.
Another is to simply make the scores uncomparable - yesterday's 10/10 can't be compared to today's 10/10 or tomorrow's 10/10. Great for stuff that's highly transient where you probably won't want to compare with historical results.
Third is to increase the scale, like the Windows Experience Index. It was capped at 5.0 for Vista, 7.9 for 7, and who knows what it is for 8.
Fourth is you keep raw data, and when too many are scoring top marks, you readjust the scale. And then recomputed the new marks based on the readjusted case. This one is the most comparable (you can look at history and see what its old stars were, and what it is as the system evolved), and it's also the most work since everything needs recalculation (easy for computers, though). But it lets you see what yesterday's thing is compared to today's thing directly (as long as you use the current results - it's pointless comparing yesterday's 5 star with today's 6 star. But you can compare Vehicle A's old 5 star with today's rating to see how it fares, or Vehicle A vs Vehicle B using today's ratings).
You're pulling your punches. USB was a completely half-ass standard to start with, and then was continually modified with half-ass frankenstein additions to provide features that were already in competing bus technologies, once its designers finally had to admit that those features were actually useful.
Anyway it is not much of a surprise that things can slip in the USB area. There are only a few developers who are both talented enough to work do it right and also have the patience for wasting their talent making the dung sculptures that USB stacks always turn out to be.
Things in USB have generally been quite buggy and will always be that way - it's quite a complex spec and controllers and software never behave the way they should.
Take something like initial enumeration - the initial descriptor you read is 18 bytes long. Neither Linux nor Windows actually does an 18-byte read to get a full descriptor. I suppose it could be a USB test to ensure your controller software can handle an undersized read without screwing up.
Then there was the time I screwed up my USB descriptor (screwed up the type). End result was Linux kept panicking on me - the moment I plug it in, boom panic. (This was years ago. I would assume it's fixed). Windows didn't do anything.
I think part of the problem is basically there hasn't been any USB fuzzing tools, so most USB stacks are buggy and have lots of exploitable flaws. Hell, it was how the PS3 was exploited once.
Because most laptops generally have terrible pointing devices. If they have touchpads, they're usually far too tiny to be useful (Apple ones excluded - why can't others put big ass touchpads on their laptops?)
The rubber trackpoint ones are nice for PCs, though the rubber tips wear down way too quickly and you end up with a slippery lump in short order.
And practically all are pathetic at scrolling. Unless it's an Apple trackpad where the double finger scroll works (once you fix the ()#@% scroll direction).
Life's just generally easier with an external pointing device.
I'm happy with Tesla claiming a 5.4... as long as the same scoring is reported for other cars. I haven't heard a peep about what competing vehicles got when scored the same way. Maybe i missed it, but it sure seemed like none of the 'reporters' were willing to even do the mildest amount of investigation to give the public an honest comparison and that's where the real problem is.
Apparently, it's capped at 5. However, that doesn't mean a car can't score higher, it's just it's reported as 5.
The reason for the "5.4" is that they keep the raw scores - they occasionally have to reset all the scores because cars were basically passing the current criteria. So they reset the meanings to make 5 a harder goal still. Of course, since you can't compare a 5 from the past to a 5 today, they reassess all the scores and give them new ratings based on what the current rating system is. So yesterday's 5 might be today's 4.
They keep raw values because you can't obviously re-test obsolete vehicles, but you still need to be able to compare.
The other way, of course, is to add further ratings - so 5 stars today is 5 stars tomorrow - you see this with some ranking systems, e.g., Windows Experience Index where the max value is raised (5 in Vista, 7.9 in 7, I don't know what 8 has).
It's just that today, Tesla's Model S exceeds current safety ratings (they had to "cheat" to get it to roll over because there was no standard test maneuver they could do to roll it over, and I think on the roof crush test, it broke the machine).
Of course, tomorrow when people make even safer cars, the Model S might score a 4 with the new criteria.
I made 60k/year doing it, and I felt under paid....
It's a stressful, physically demanding, and dangerous job.
That's the thing, though. It's an unskilled job for the most part, and you're making $60K, which is more than what a lot of skilled jobs pay.
Of course, the catch is your last line - if you look at people who graduate with basically high school education (or not even that - most of these don't require a diploma) that pull in big bucks like that, it's gonna be a hazardous and physically demanding job - whether it's a fisherman, tower rigger, oilman, whatever.
That's the nature of the work - unskilled labor pays typically a LOT less money and the only ones with decent pay are the dangerous and physically demanding ones. And yes, there's a bit of turnover because people see the pay, get googly-eyed and sign up for the job - hey, it beats 4 more years of school and the pay's pretty much the same, why not?
If you dropped out of high school, these jobs are pretty much the only way to not make a pittance. You can always get the GED later on...
What exactly is Firefox OS doing better than what is already available with iOS/Android/Windows Phone/BlackBerry/etc.?
Even from a geek's perspective I really see nothing better about Firefox OS than the OSes available today.
Easy - it's an OS that OEMs can customize heavily. It's not what Firefox brings to the table, it what's the OEMs can do to differentiate their phones in the market. Basically, LG wants to have a phone to sell they can call their own. Android's fairly big and complex so it's hard to fully do what you want with it. Firefox OS hopefully promises to be much simpler so each OEM can "make it their own".
Plus, the price is right.
If they target it as a low to mid range phone option that's more substance over style, it could find a very nice market full of people that are kind of tired of the high-end expensive 2-year contract cycles.
Except there are TONS of low-end Android phones. In fact, they're one of the largest reasons why Android beats iOS - why should someone spend $200 for an iPhone 5 when the sales guy is pushing their 3-Android-Phones-for-free deal?
Even best sellers like SGS3 are barely 10% of the Android market (60M units vs. 900M Androids) - and Samsung has 80% of that market. The rest of the phones are the ones they're releasing practically daily - all the million variations of low end phones you can go and get for free or so. So the top end phones do sell tons, but the low end phones get shoveled out the door.
CFQ only comes in to play when accessing new uncached data from disk when disk is at medium-high usage (at low usage any read/write queues are empty). I'm struggling to figure out any interactive programs that fit that description. Web/email/documents/games etc... don't touch the disk in any significant way and the cache handles most disk accesses for them anyway.
Until you start swapping. And most users tend to run a ton of programs at once (or load up dozens of tabs in Firefox) so the kernel starts to swap to disk. Yes, they probably should upgrade their RAM, but that takes money and people don't like spending it.
So now you have a system under memory pressure trying to save some memory for disk cache, and on the edge of thrashing. All you need is something like a movie or music playback to blip because its buffers ran out.
and yes, it also appears some webmasters code their websites assumiing their users have machines with quad cores and 16GB of RAM.
All in all, I think it's a nice problem to have. Compare that to the kernel being stagnant, it's great that being able to include submitted code safely and fast enough becomes an issue to look into. I doubt MS or any of the other big software companies have issues where features and improvements are being *produced* so fast that QA is unable to keep up. I suspect that they have more of an issue with them being *requested* faster than the company can provide.
Until you're stuck on the other side - Android tracks the latest kernel, so what happens is OEMs don't like to upgrade the OS on the phone because even going between versions means a kernel upgrade and porting drivers to the new kernel (a major annoyance when APIs change, too).
Half of all research papers are not worth the paper they will never be printed on. How many peer-reviewed papers are free to read?
My thoughts exactly. Or not even that - how about the papers you want to read? It doesn't matter if 99% of the papers are available for free if the one you want is paywalled only!
And it assumes that it's an even distribution - that in all fields, a paper you want has a 50% chance of being free (or you can find an equivalent for free). Depending on the field and the article, this assuming is not true at all.
Another example of the increasing skill requirements for today's work force. 50 years ago the only skills required to rob a bank was the ability to hold a gun and drive a getaway car. Now - sheesh - you have to know how to break into a high security switch.
The average guy has no chance to make it nowadays.
Not to mention that takes were probably higher in the bad old days as well. Nowadays since it's all numbers in a database, the bank only needs enough cash to cover withdrawals for the day (which aren't that much because most people do their withdrawals from an ATM, or they just use debit/credit and twiddle numbers in a database), so the end result is most bank robberies really only get the robber $10K or less.
Hell, sometimes If you're planning on doing a big withdrawal in cash, you have to give the bank several days notification so they can actually get the bills ready. (If it's just closing your account, they write you a money order or bank draft, which is just a form of database twiddling again).
At any rate, the above, if one takes Itanium to be the implementation definition for EPIC, since Intel came up w/ the term, is that EPIC is not VLIW, but something in b/w VLIW and RISC. I do think it's a redundant architecture, and makes the point that RISC was actually the sweet spot on the spectrum between having all the complexity in hardware (CISC) vs having it all in the compiler (VLIW). However, as others have pointed out, Itanium managed to kill 3 architectures - PA-RISC, MIPS V and Alpha - before it turned out to be short of its goals. It would be nice if Intel decided to make several versions of it and try and proliferate it in the market.
Well, EPIC was an interesting experiment at pushing into software was is now done by hardware.
Remember the front end of a modern CPU (most of them these days, there's still a few that are straight) consists of a instruction buffer, instruction decomposer, and reorder buffers. What happens is the instruction comes to the processor and is decomposed into micro-ops. These micro-ops are then sent to the reorder buffer (where they acquire their register renaming and dependency checks) and then issued to the superscalar execution units as the hardware determines what instructions can be executed when.
Itanium pushes all that into software - thinking that since most software is compiled and not handwritten, the compiler knows the interdependencies and things that look like dependencies but may not be and is able to do the parallelization to the superscalar execution units, instruction reordering and dependency checking and enforcement and such since it's closer to the actual source code.
Thus supposedly you had two benefits - as compilers got better, your code sped up as it gets executed more efficiently by the older processors as well. The other benefit was you could get more speedups since the hardware had to be conservative when issuing instructions because missing a dependency (false or otherwise) will result in incorrect operation. But since the compiler knew what the code was doing, it could be very aggressive with its instruction reordering. If the compiler knew it had to load something from memory, it could issue a preload instruction many cycles before so the data would be ready and waiting by the time the need came around (right now the front end decomposes the memory access into a load and stuffs it into the reorder buffer in the hopes the ROB is big enough that the load/store will be executed before the instruction that needs it winds its way through the decode and issue). This can also include precomputing memory addresses if the compiler knows the values ahead of time.
The problem was - the compilers of the day weren't up to the task - it's a really hard problem. That and the x86 guys were making great strides in their hardware-based approach to the point where the supposed benefits just weren't realized.
Not on launch day. But at $100 cheaper and Sony management that's at least capable of opening their mouths without immediately sticking their fucking feet in them, I'm a lot more optimistic about their chances in this next gen than Microsoft's. And I say that as a loyal Xbox1 and 360 fan.
Though, at what cost? Move is dead now - because Sony wanted to undercut Microsoft with that $100. And you KNOW it was done for that reason because otherwise why build in Move into every controller?
At least by bundling in Kinect, every developer knows every player has one and can use it for enhancing the gameplay.
NOTE: I said "enhance" gameplay. I didn't say get a freaking workout playing Halo or something. Because Kinect doesn't require you to get your ass off the couch - even with butt firmly planted you still move around a lot - enough for Kinect to pick up on it and influence game play.
Of course, with the ability to turn it off, it would mean such inputs aren't guaranteed to be there, but at least a developer knows the user turned it off on purpose.
Some ideas: 1) FPS games - well, peeking around cover just got a whole lot more interactive if you can lean to peek around the cover. Or voice commands to AI teammates. 2) Adventure/Platform games - the Hail Mary leap across a chasm just got a whole lot more interesting. Almost universally everyone moves the controller or pumps it hoping it'll influence the jump. Now it can. 3) Teabagging maneuver - face it, when people teabag, they move the controller in and out while doing so. no need to hit a button anymore when Kinect can do it for you. 4) Pinball - how about nudging using the controller? No need for tricky analog stick bumps - just move your arms like you would naturally.
I'm guessing Move was supposed ot have the same results as well, but given few will have Move (especially at what, $70-80 for the camera?)....
Of course, I think Sony will win this round again - Microsoft is obviously a bit arrogant after winning last round, given their retractions of late. And the $100 difference. Problem is it's a whole new ball game again. And yes, I do like the Xbox for many reasons, and I do have both on preorder. But I can clearly see unless Microsoft really does something, they stand to lose, big.
Even a $50 price drop would help narrow the gap tremendously.
Wow, based on current exchange rates... the Europeans are getting screwed on that deal. (Assuming, of course, that Slashdot was capable of showing the euro and pound symbols, that is)
It looks like in real currency, they'll pay more for this. Is that typical?
Well, the EU prices include tax(es) (don't forget VAT is 20+% in EU, plus import duties of 20+% as well). Then add in the cost of an extended warranty (because all durable goods have 2 years return-to-store mandatory warranty, sometimes 3 years) and it really comes out even in the end. I think Sony charges $50 for a 2 year extended warranty, too. Other places like Best Buy probably charge more.
So it's $399 US + 20% tax = $480 US + $50 extended warranty = $530 US is what the EU pays, or €395. Not bad. £338, which is close enough at today's rate.
It's wrong to prevent anyone from copy code. It's unethical. Instead you should share the code with anyone, preferably under an FSF approved free software license.
No, it's not "wrong" or unethical to prevent anyone from copying code. Free software licenses require copyrights. Asserting that the owner of source code has no right to control copying of their work via copyright carries with it the assertion that the terms of ALL software licenses - even those 'approved by the FSF' - may be safely disregarded at will.
If you really want to go down that road, then you have no basis to complain when a company takes your GPLv3 code and does whatever they want with it, and contributes nothing back to the community. After all - if you would assert your right to take a copy and do whatever you want with it, they can do the same thing: and they have a MUCH bigger legal team.
And that's exactly how you pirate OSS. Though the FOSS community doesn't usually call it piracy (probably to avoid association with other fine copyright wielding folks like the MPAA and RIAA?), just "license violations".
Though to be fair, the FOSS community doesn't blindly sue pirates either (especially en masse) - they generally go after the commercial pirates - the ones who sell the stolen code (either embedded In hardware or as part of a larger package). Not the small time pirate sharing their latest FOSS binaries with their friends. So there's that aspect as well.
But whether it's music, movies, software (both FOSS and commercial), it can be pirated. FOSS is just unusual in that if you don't accept the license, you still have rights to the software - the ones granted by copyright law. In most commercial software, you have to accept the license.
They're probably doing the opposite. Hundreds of people with no real need to have admin privileges have them, which makes it impossible for the people whose job it is to manage the system to do so. So they may not even be planning to lay anybody off, just take away their admin rights, put some automation in place to make it efficient for the actual IT staff to do their job more effectively and let the people who formerly had admin rights get on with their real jobs.
Exactly.
Or more likely, they're segregating admins - does a sysadmin really need access to ALL the systems? Or just the ones they're responsible for?
Should the DBA have admin access on the mail server? etc. etc. etc.
Presumably there's been tons of scope creep and as people transferred, no one came around and recalculated what admin privileges they should have. Be there long enough and you probably end up getting access to practically all systems.
I suppose if one was just in a small company as the only admin they may think they're laying off admins of everything, but large organizations often have layered admins with varying layers of access. One may complain why the CTO has all the root passwords, but if they were promoted from sysadmin, well...
I think Windows 8 would be fabulously useful in a tablet / hybrid form factor. A full blown PC which can be used like a netbook, or like a tablet depending on the circumstances. Atom processors have reached a stage where you get similar battery life and form factor as an ARM based device and would be powerful enough for word processing, light gaming, development, video playback etc.
They do make Atom-based tablets that cost around $600 or so that run full Windows 8, you know. Just peruse the shelves at Best Buy and you'll see plenty of them.
Problem is, Atom may be power efficient like ARM, but ir runs like crap running full blown Windows. Yes, it runs, just terribly. They were created for a price point and they hit that, but the UX is just... awful.
They start making up figures on a market that has not started yet? Seems like a real great (and useful) idea to me...
One could derive useful figures though - all you really need to do is take the amount of drivers who text or phone and apply a fudge factor presuming they're doing it because their commute is boring. (A lot of people do stuff behind the wheel because their drive is boring and instead of paying due attention, their limited attention span turns to distraction).
Since same people cannot be convinced to take the bus, and really would be anywhere else but driving, they'd probably be among the first to adopt self-driving vars.
why not build a proper 10" netbook with all accesories for $400?
Because no one was making money at $400 for a netbook.
After you put the parts together, add Windows, add the crapware to make it cheaper, there isn't much money left over.
Or have you forgotten how prior to the iPad, netbooks started creeping upwards in price? They were $300 initially, then everyone realized that no one was making any money and they started adding stuff to justify it costing $400, $500 and more. Yes, there were netbooks that cost more than low end laptops.
Then Apple produced the iPad and everyone dropped netbooks - why make something that makes a couple of bucks when you can make a tablet and make much more money.
Even the $500 laptops don't make much money, but knowing they could use crappy mass produced 1366x768 screens, crappy keyboards and stuff it n a huge as hell case (you could find 17" 1366x768 screens!) and make it weigh a ton, and after it all, they can make some money.
Anything nice and small and like an ARM tablet will have to be an ultrabook, and those price points are a lot higher.
Checklist for approval: Does the app crash on our profiler? Does the app look like it does something useful? Will users feel like they've been lied to by the App Store listing?
Note that Apple's motivation is not to ensure that only quality apps get into the store. Rather, they just want to make sure that the store itself isn't tarnished. If 30% of your downloaded apps are just shells around scam-laden videos, you'll stop using the store, so they just test each app long enough to make sure that it kinda-sorta does what's claimed. Any problems after that are going to be blamed on the developer, not Apple.
Not to mention none of the things the app does violate the security of the system. All the stuff it can do - take photos, steal your information (contacts, etc), and other things are stuff any app can do - they're not accessing any APIs they're not allowed to or anything else.
Granted, perhaps some of the things it does it shouldn't have access to (e.g., contacts and such), but that's something that's changing in iOS7 anyways.
At best, it's really a user-level piece of malware that can't touch the system and still has to live within the restrictions of an app. It's not getting access that an app doesn't already have, and it's not violating any security restrictions that apps have either (so no, it's not a jailbreak). About the only thing is what took it so long...?
You can erase and re-encode a different account number on an old mag stripe card. You may have noticed some stores have the cashier manually enter the last four digits of the credit card to prevent against this kind of fraud.
For a credit card, they actually enter in the CVV code - that code is NOT encoded on the stripe and only the issuing bank knows it.
No, not almost invariably. Invariably. You always follow up on security hole bug reports. Always. If you do not do this, you are incompetent. Assuming this security researcher gave them a reasonable amount of time (the summary here doesn't say), then this is once again a demonstration of Facebook talking "secure" but implementing the opposite, hyping their bounty program while refusing to pay out.
For that matter, you should always follow up on non-security bug reports unless they're obvious garbage (e.g. porn site spam submitted to your bug reporting page by a bot). But security bugs? There's no excuse for not following up on those. Ever. EVER.
Except that most are bogus. Yes, bogus.
Imagine you're Facebook and you're getting piles of "I can post on someone else's timeline!" Well, you can be 99.999% of those cases are probably one of user error - as in, the user reporting it could do it because the permissions said so.
Likewise, Microsoft probably receives a bunch of equally annoying reports of "If I do X, I could do Y and HAXXOR!". Except X requires admin priviledges, in which case you're doing Y as admin and yes, that's expected behavior when you're admin. In fact, instead of doing Y, if you can do X, just do HAXXOR and you're done and save yourself the effort. (A surprisingly large number of reports involve either getting admin as a prerequisite or having it already).
And unfortunately, when you get thousands of such reports an hour by "security researchers", you need something to do first round culling of the bogus from the possibly requiring investigation.
How many effective READ/WRITE cycle can the chip in SSD perform, before they start degrading ?
There are user-done studies on such matters and some of them are quite impressive - to the point where you'll scrap the computer first before encountering failure.
The main reason why SSDs fail prematurely is their tables get corrupt. An SSD uses a FTL (flash translation layer) that translates the externally visible sector address to the internal flash array address. FTLs are heavily patented algorithms and there are many of them. The FTL also handles stuff like wear levelling, bad blocks and garbage collection. It's no surprise that the FTL has an impact on SSD performance.
All this is typically stored in some area set aside for it because scanning the entire array is much too slow (takes many seconds, slowing down the power on boot). In addition, the use of stronger ECC algorithms uses up the available spare area of the flash leaving none for the FTL to manage.
So on power up, the SSD controller gets the tables from flash and starts operating extremely quickly. Of course, the problem is what happens when the tables are corrupt - they're usually held in DDR SDRAM for speed, but they need to be synced to the media periodically, and that's where problems happen (because you don't want to wear out the table blocks, as well... so you need the FTL to manage *that*...).
So if you manage to pull power to the SSD at the wrong time, there's a strong chance it'll corrupt the tables because it's in the midst of syncing them to media.
Good SSDs avoid this by structuring their writes, or more commonly, using onboard capacitance to provide emergency power which can flush out the memory buffers to storage quickly. On some SSD teardowns, you can see a huge row of 10+ tantalum capacitors just for this purpose.
Unsurprisingly, just as advances in computer technology have allowed us to make bigger, messier, errors faster than ever before, they are allowing us to exploit the fact that human statistical intuition is pretty much shit better than ever.
Or to make content-less graphics as well. Really, an infographic is just a slick form of PowerPoint presentation, and everyone knows how trivially easy it is to make a complete slide deck that's impressive, but in the end, be completely content-free.
Heck, it's such a problem the US military has the same issue - they can produce very slick looking slide decks, but are either incomprehensible or are just worthless.
It isn't limited to PowerPoint, either - a slick graphic can be just as easily misleading, content-free or incomprehensible. And still on first glance look useful. (The eye is drawn to flash, while content analysis requires actually going through the content and critical thinking, a much slower process than the quick glimpse a graph gets you. It's why humans fall for the same traps).
Generally speaking, the game industry is stratified. If you start at the bottom, you're pretty much stuck with the crap. High turnover, crap work, little room for advancement. Basically the treadmill for the "I w4nn4 m4k3 g4m3z!" folks who see all the glamour and all that and who are too young (or stupid) to realize so does everyone else who grew up with video games.
However, if you start with a portfolio of games, you already know you won't take crap so you get into the design and high level architecture and direction of the game. Which is where everyone wants to be - making the bigger bucks and less grunt work.
Of course, to get there requires... a portfolio of games. Which can be either mods of existing games, or games you developed yourself. And it's never been easier - between PC, iOS and Android (if you plan on developing for consoles, iOS is more instructive on the whole approval thing), getting your game "out there" is possible.
And remember - once you've done the grunt work and have gone through and made games, the studios all know you won't take crap and do 80 hour weeks of QA or stuff for below minimum wage (salary, remember).
So... take the $70k job, use your spare time to create your own games. If they get popular, the studios will contact YOU and make you sweet deals because they know what you're used to and that you won't take abuse.
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All the power save modes were a joke until XP or so - it was always a point of pride on the Mac side that one could close the lid, wait a few moments and then cart the laptop somewhere else. Or better yet, close the lid, and change the battery then open the lid and resume working as if nothing happened. If anything, working sleep mode was an expected feature on Mac, and a joke on PCs.
It started to change when Microsoft helped to create the ACPI spec - prior to this, power management was done by the BIOS (because of DOS), so systems more complex had to shut down everything, switch back to 16 bit real mode, then call the BIOS. That is, if the BIOS didn't do it underneath the OS in the first place (fun to be had!).
Problems abounded if you had peripherals. ACPI changed it by moving the power management responsibilities to the OS (if power-aware - if not power aware, it was the old BIOS behavior). So now the OS could do all the necessary work and put the system to sleep in an orderly fashion.
Of course, it took years from then for the OS, BIOS (ACPI) and device drivers to stabilize to the point where one could suspend/resume predictably.
Though, it's not all roses - there are still many things that can prevent a system from sleeping, leading to hot laptop syndrome where you close the lid and the laptop doesn't go to sleep. Unfortunately, Macs have regressed in this regard as well.
You can increase your chances with the green lubricant - the more you apply, the easier the time you have to get the bill brought forward. If you lubricate more than one with the green lubricant,, things move quicker still.
The NHTSA caps it at 5 because that's the current limit of the measurement.
You can score above it. In fact, periodically, as cars get safer, the NHTSA re-scales all the ratings. Now, using the raw scores, they can recalculate all the scores for every car they tested - yesterday's 5 star may be tomorrow's 4 star or even 3 star.
They realize that technology evolves, and as more cars hit the 5 stars, they'll decide to make the criterion even tougher and recompute all the scores.
I'm sure there are probably a few "5 star" cars that are classics today that more than a few people would be scared to get into - of course, using today's ratings it won't be 5 stars anymore. Heck, it may rate 0 stars because it lacks modern safety systems.
There are four ways to deal with scores that improve with time.
One is to ignore it and let everything get capped, which rapidly gets useless if the reason is due to technology.
Another is to simply make the scores uncomparable - yesterday's 10/10 can't be compared to today's 10/10 or tomorrow's 10/10. Great for stuff that's highly transient where you probably won't want to compare with historical results.
Third is to increase the scale, like the Windows Experience Index. It was capped at 5.0 for Vista, 7.9 for 7, and who knows what it is for 8.
Fourth is you keep raw data, and when too many are scoring top marks, you readjust the scale. And then recomputed the new marks based on the readjusted case. This one is the most comparable (you can look at history and see what its old stars were, and what it is as the system evolved), and it's also the most work since everything needs recalculation (easy for computers, though). But it lets you see what yesterday's thing is compared to today's thing directly (as long as you use the current results - it's pointless comparing yesterday's 5 star with today's 6 star. But you can compare Vehicle A's old 5 star with today's rating to see how it fares, or Vehicle A vs Vehicle B using today's ratings).
Things in USB have generally been quite buggy and will always be that way - it's quite a complex spec and controllers and software never behave the way they should.
Take something like initial enumeration - the initial descriptor you read is 18 bytes long. Neither Linux nor Windows actually does an 18-byte read to get a full descriptor. I suppose it could be a USB test to ensure your controller software can handle an undersized read without screwing up.
Then there was the time I screwed up my USB descriptor (screwed up the type). End result was Linux kept panicking on me - the moment I plug it in, boom panic. (This was years ago. I would assume it's fixed). Windows didn't do anything.
I think part of the problem is basically there hasn't been any USB fuzzing tools, so most USB stacks are buggy and have lots of exploitable flaws. Hell, it was how the PS3 was exploited once.
Because most laptops generally have terrible pointing devices. If they have touchpads, they're usually far too tiny to be useful (Apple ones excluded - why can't others put big ass touchpads on their laptops?)
The rubber trackpoint ones are nice for PCs, though the rubber tips wear down way too quickly and you end up with a slippery lump in short order.
And practically all are pathetic at scrolling. Unless it's an Apple trackpad where the double finger scroll works (once you fix the ()#@% scroll direction).
Life's just generally easier with an external pointing device.
Apparently, it's capped at 5. However, that doesn't mean a car can't score higher, it's just it's reported as 5.
The reason for the "5.4" is that they keep the raw scores - they occasionally have to reset all the scores because cars were basically passing the current criteria. So they reset the meanings to make 5 a harder goal still. Of course, since you can't compare a 5 from the past to a 5 today, they reassess all the scores and give them new ratings based on what the current rating system is. So yesterday's 5 might be today's 4.
They keep raw values because you can't obviously re-test obsolete vehicles, but you still need to be able to compare.
The other way, of course, is to add further ratings - so 5 stars today is 5 stars tomorrow - you see this with some ranking systems, e.g., Windows Experience Index where the max value is raised (5 in Vista, 7.9 in 7, I don't know what 8 has).
It's just that today, Tesla's Model S exceeds current safety ratings (they had to "cheat" to get it to roll over because there was no standard test maneuver they could do to roll it over, and I think on the roof crush test, it broke the machine).
Of course, tomorrow when people make even safer cars, the Model S might score a 4 with the new criteria.
That's the thing, though. It's an unskilled job for the most part, and you're making $60K, which is more than what a lot of skilled jobs pay.
Of course, the catch is your last line - if you look at people who graduate with basically high school education (or not even that - most of these don't require a diploma) that pull in big bucks like that, it's gonna be a hazardous and physically demanding job - whether it's a fisherman, tower rigger, oilman, whatever.
That's the nature of the work - unskilled labor pays typically a LOT less money and the only ones with decent pay are the dangerous and physically demanding ones. And yes, there's a bit of turnover because people see the pay, get googly-eyed and sign up for the job - hey, it beats 4 more years of school and the pay's pretty much the same, why not?
If you dropped out of high school, these jobs are pretty much the only way to not make a pittance. You can always get the GED later on...
Easy - it's an OS that OEMs can customize heavily. It's not what Firefox brings to the table, it what's the OEMs can do to differentiate their phones in the market. Basically, LG wants to have a phone to sell they can call their own. Android's fairly big and complex so it's hard to fully do what you want with it. Firefox OS hopefully promises to be much simpler so each OEM can "make it their own".
Plus, the price is right.
Except there are TONS of low-end Android phones. In fact, they're one of the largest reasons why Android beats iOS - why should someone spend $200 for an iPhone 5 when the sales guy is pushing their 3-Android-Phones-for-free deal?
Even best sellers like SGS3 are barely 10% of the Android market (60M units vs. 900M Androids) - and Samsung has 80% of that market. The rest of the phones are the ones they're releasing practically daily - all the million variations of low end phones you can go and get for free or so. So the top end phones do sell tons, but the low end phones get shoveled out the door.
Until you start swapping. And most users tend to run a ton of programs at once (or load up dozens of tabs in Firefox) so the kernel starts to swap to disk. Yes, they probably should upgrade their RAM, but that takes money and people don't like spending it.
So now you have a system under memory pressure trying to save some memory for disk cache, and on the edge of thrashing. All you need is something like a movie or music playback to blip because its buffers ran out.
and yes, it also appears some webmasters code their websites assumiing their users have machines with quad cores and 16GB of RAM.
Until you're stuck on the other side - Android tracks the latest kernel, so what happens is OEMs don't like to upgrade the OS on the phone because even going between versions means a kernel upgrade and porting drivers to the new kernel (a major annoyance when APIs change, too).
My thoughts exactly. Or not even that - how about the papers you want to read? It doesn't matter if 99% of the papers are available for free if the one you want is paywalled only!
And it assumes that it's an even distribution - that in all fields, a paper you want has a 50% chance of being free (or you can find an equivalent for free). Depending on the field and the article, this assuming is not true at all.
Not to mention that takes were probably higher in the bad old days as well. Nowadays since it's all numbers in a database, the bank only needs enough cash to cover withdrawals for the day (which aren't that much because most people do their withdrawals from an ATM, or they just use debit/credit and twiddle numbers in a database), so the end result is most bank robberies really only get the robber $10K or less.
Hell, sometimes If you're planning on doing a big withdrawal in cash, you have to give the bank several days notification so they can actually get the bills ready. (If it's just closing your account, they write you a money order or bank draft, which is just a form of database twiddling again).
Well, EPIC was an interesting experiment at pushing into software was is now done by hardware.
Remember the front end of a modern CPU (most of them these days, there's still a few that are straight) consists of a instruction buffer, instruction decomposer, and reorder buffers. What happens is the instruction comes to the processor and is decomposed into micro-ops. These micro-ops are then sent to the reorder buffer (where they acquire their register renaming and dependency checks) and then issued to the superscalar execution units as the hardware determines what instructions can be executed when.
Itanium pushes all that into software - thinking that since most software is compiled and not handwritten, the compiler knows the interdependencies and things that look like dependencies but may not be and is able to do the parallelization to the superscalar execution units, instruction reordering and dependency checking and enforcement and such since it's closer to the actual source code.
Thus supposedly you had two benefits - as compilers got better, your code sped up as it gets executed more efficiently by the older processors as well. The other benefit was you could get more speedups since the hardware had to be conservative when issuing instructions because missing a dependency (false or otherwise) will result in incorrect operation. But since the compiler knew what the code was doing, it could be very aggressive with its instruction reordering. If the compiler knew it had to load something from memory, it could issue a preload instruction many cycles before so the data would be ready and waiting by the time the need came around (right now the front end decomposes the memory access into a load and stuffs it into the reorder buffer in the hopes the ROB is big enough that the load/store will be executed before the instruction that needs it winds its way through the decode and issue). This can also include precomputing memory addresses if the compiler knows the values ahead of time.
The problem was - the compilers of the day weren't up to the task - it's a really hard problem. That and the x86 guys were making great strides in their hardware-based approach to the point where the supposed benefits just weren't realized.
Though, at what cost? Move is dead now - because Sony wanted to undercut Microsoft with that $100. And you KNOW it was done for that reason because otherwise why build in Move into every controller?
At least by bundling in Kinect, every developer knows every player has one and can use it for enhancing the gameplay.
NOTE: I said "enhance" gameplay. I didn't say get a freaking workout playing Halo or something. Because Kinect doesn't require you to get your ass off the couch - even with butt firmly planted you still move around a lot - enough for Kinect to pick up on it and influence game play.
Of course, with the ability to turn it off, it would mean such inputs aren't guaranteed to be there, but at least a developer knows the user turned it off on purpose.
Some ideas:
1) FPS games - well, peeking around cover just got a whole lot more interactive if you can lean to peek around the cover. Or voice commands to AI teammates.
2) Adventure/Platform games - the Hail Mary leap across a chasm just got a whole lot more interesting. Almost universally everyone moves the controller or pumps it hoping it'll influence the jump. Now it can.
3) Teabagging maneuver - face it, when people teabag, they move the controller in and out while doing so. no need to hit a button anymore when Kinect can do it for you.
4) Pinball - how about nudging using the controller? No need for tricky analog stick bumps - just move your arms like you would naturally.
I'm guessing Move was supposed ot have the same results as well, but given few will have Move (especially at what, $70-80 for the camera?)....
Of course, I think Sony will win this round again - Microsoft is obviously a bit arrogant after winning last round, given their retractions of late. And the $100 difference. Problem is it's a whole new ball game again. And yes, I do like the Xbox for many reasons, and I do have both on preorder. But I can clearly see unless Microsoft really does something, they stand to lose, big.
Even a $50 price drop would help narrow the gap tremendously.
Well, the EU prices include tax(es) (don't forget VAT is 20+% in EU, plus import duties of 20+% as well). Then add in the cost of an extended warranty (because all durable goods have 2 years return-to-store mandatory warranty, sometimes 3 years) and it really comes out even in the end. I think Sony charges $50 for a 2 year extended warranty, too. Other places like Best Buy probably charge more.
So it's $399 US + 20% tax = $480 US + $50 extended warranty = $530 US is what the EU pays, or €395. Not bad. £338, which is close enough at today's rate.
And FYI - € is €, £ is £
And that's exactly how you pirate OSS. Though the FOSS community doesn't usually call it piracy (probably to avoid association with other fine copyright wielding folks like the MPAA and RIAA?), just "license violations".
Though to be fair, the FOSS community doesn't blindly sue pirates either (especially en masse) - they generally go after the commercial pirates - the ones who sell the stolen code (either embedded In hardware or as part of a larger package). Not the small time pirate sharing their latest FOSS binaries with their friends. So there's that aspect as well.
But whether it's music, movies, software (both FOSS and commercial), it can be pirated. FOSS is just unusual in that if you don't accept the license, you still have rights to the software - the ones granted by copyright law. In most commercial software, you have to accept the license.
Exactly.
Or more likely, they're segregating admins - does a sysadmin really need access to ALL the systems? Or just the ones they're responsible for?
Should the DBA have admin access on the mail server? etc. etc. etc.
Presumably there's been tons of scope creep and as people transferred, no one came around and recalculated what admin privileges they should have. Be there long enough and you probably end up getting access to practically all systems.
I suppose if one was just in a small company as the only admin they may think they're laying off admins of everything, but large organizations often have layered admins with varying layers of access. One may complain why the CTO has all the root passwords, but if they were promoted from sysadmin, well...
They do make Atom-based tablets that cost around $600 or so that run full Windows 8, you know. Just peruse the shelves at Best Buy and you'll see plenty of them.
Problem is, Atom may be power efficient like ARM, but ir runs like crap running full blown Windows. Yes, it runs, just terribly. They were created for a price point and they hit that, but the UX is just... awful.
One could derive useful figures though - all you really need to do is take the amount of drivers who text or phone and apply a fudge factor presuming they're doing it because their commute is boring. (A lot of people do stuff behind the wheel because their drive is boring and instead of paying due attention, their limited attention span turns to distraction).
Since same people cannot be convinced to take the bus, and really would be anywhere else but driving, they'd probably be among the first to adopt self-driving vars.
Because no one was making money at $400 for a netbook.
After you put the parts together, add Windows, add the crapware to make it cheaper, there isn't much money left over.
Or have you forgotten how prior to the iPad, netbooks started creeping upwards in price? They were $300 initially, then everyone realized that no one was making any money and they started adding stuff to justify it costing $400, $500 and more. Yes, there were netbooks that cost more than low end laptops.
Then Apple produced the iPad and everyone dropped netbooks - why make something that makes a couple of bucks when you can make a tablet and make much more money.
Even the $500 laptops don't make much money, but knowing they could use crappy mass produced 1366x768 screens, crappy keyboards and stuff it n a huge as hell case (you could find 17" 1366x768 screens!) and make it weigh a ton, and after it all, they can make some money.
Anything nice and small and like an ARM tablet will have to be an ultrabook, and those price points are a lot higher.
Not to mention none of the things the app does violate the security of the system. All the stuff it can do - take photos, steal your information (contacts, etc), and other things are stuff any app can do - they're not accessing any APIs they're not allowed to or anything else.
Granted, perhaps some of the things it does it shouldn't have access to (e.g., contacts and such), but that's something that's changing in iOS7 anyways.
At best, it's really a user-level piece of malware that can't touch the system and still has to live within the restrictions of an app. It's not getting access that an app doesn't already have, and it's not violating any security restrictions that apps have either (so no, it's not a jailbreak). About the only thing is what took it so long...?
For a credit card, they actually enter in the CVV code - that code is NOT encoded on the stripe and only the issuing bank knows it.
Except that most are bogus. Yes, bogus.
Imagine you're Facebook and you're getting piles of "I can post on someone else's timeline!" Well, you can be 99.999% of those cases are probably one of user error - as in, the user reporting it could do it because the permissions said so.
Likewise, Microsoft probably receives a bunch of equally annoying reports of "If I do X, I could do Y and HAXXOR!". Except X requires admin priviledges, in which case you're doing Y as admin and yes, that's expected behavior when you're admin. In fact, instead of doing Y, if you can do X, just do HAXXOR and you're done and save yourself the effort. (A surprisingly large number of reports involve either getting admin as a prerequisite or having it already).
And unfortunately, when you get thousands of such reports an hour by "security researchers", you need something to do first round culling of the bogus from the possibly requiring investigation.
There are user-done studies on such matters and some of them are quite impressive - to the point where you'll scrap the computer first before encountering failure.
The main reason why SSDs fail prematurely is their tables get corrupt. An SSD uses a FTL (flash translation layer) that translates the externally visible sector address to the internal flash array address. FTLs are heavily patented algorithms and there are many of them. The FTL also handles stuff like wear levelling, bad blocks and garbage collection. It's no surprise that the FTL has an impact on SSD performance.
All this is typically stored in some area set aside for it because scanning the entire array is much too slow (takes many seconds, slowing down the power on boot). In addition, the use of stronger ECC algorithms uses up the available spare area of the flash leaving none for the FTL to manage.
So on power up, the SSD controller gets the tables from flash and starts operating extremely quickly. Of course, the problem is what happens when the tables are corrupt - they're usually held in DDR SDRAM for speed, but they need to be synced to the media periodically, and that's where problems happen (because you don't want to wear out the table blocks, as well... so you need the FTL to manage *that*...).
So if you manage to pull power to the SSD at the wrong time, there's a strong chance it'll corrupt the tables because it's in the midst of syncing them to media.
Good SSDs avoid this by structuring their writes, or more commonly, using onboard capacitance to provide emergency power which can flush out the memory buffers to storage quickly. On some SSD teardowns, you can see a huge row of 10+ tantalum capacitors just for this purpose.
Or to make content-less graphics as well. Really, an infographic is just a slick form of PowerPoint presentation, and everyone knows how trivially easy it is to make a complete slide deck that's impressive, but in the end, be completely content-free.
Heck, it's such a problem the US military has the same issue - they can produce very slick looking slide decks, but are either incomprehensible or are just worthless.
It isn't limited to PowerPoint, either - a slick graphic can be just as easily misleading, content-free or incomprehensible. And still on first glance look useful. (The eye is drawn to flash, while content analysis requires actually going through the content and critical thinking, a much slower process than the quick glimpse a graph gets you. It's why humans fall for the same traps).