All of the cyberstalker companies like BlueKai, Janrain, Scorecard, Doubeclick, etc create phantom profiles of people on the web that just sit dormant until you give one of their partner websites your email address and then they file all that dormant data in with any other data associated with your address.
DoubleClick doesn't do that. It's DoubleClick, A Google(tm) Company, so you can expect that to already happen. Probably just visit a Google site while logged in and one using DoubleClick ads and boom. And a lot of people do both, given how big DoubleClick is and Google account logins. (Especially now that Google unified their privacy policy).
The lifespan issue with SSDs has three main factors.
1: Type of flash memory (SLC, MLC, TLC, in order of decreasing durability) 2: Size of the flash drive (larger drives have more room for wear leveling algorithms to work with, thus staving off flash cell burnouts due to exceeding maximum number of writes). 3: The amount of throughput on the flash drive. An expected heavy load is roughly 10GB/day. Doubling the load halves the lifetime of the drive. Quadrupling the load quarters it.
Granted, the cache on a Hybrid is being used a bit differently than how you would use a straight SSD. But, with such a small cache drive, you ARE going to wind up cooking it after a relatively brief period of time.
Which for most users and usage scenarios, is basically forever. There's been a volunteer-run test of longevity which stresses an SSD until it fails by writing data to it continually. And the SMART data typically gives you plenty of advance warning - the Media Wear Indicator (MWI) tells you how many cycles are left in the array - once it hits zero, it means the number of write-erase cycles has hit the guaranteed limit and you're running in unknown territory (though there are usually still spare blocks and most will still have plenty of life). If you want guarantees, once the MWI hits zero, it's time to back up and get a new SSD. The tests run until the drive itself dies which tell you how long you have left. So you generally have a LONG indication of media wear out.
However, the biggest problem SSDs face is actually sudden loss and corruption of the FTL tables (the ones that map logical sectors to actual flash sectors). If you hear of SSDs dying prematurely, it's almost always because of table corruption. These tables contain things like sector translation, sector wear, dirty/clean bits, trim status, etc.
In the past, you could regenerate the tables from the spare area data (typically 16 bytes per 512 byte data area), but use of enhanced ECC algorithms consume that space up to accommodate better error handling. Plus it also meant way longer mount times as the controller had to scan the entire media for the information (many seconds long).
These days, controllers come with 512MB or more of RAM to hold the tables in memory for quick access. The problem is the tables are often written out lazily to storage, which means if you yank the power suddenly, the SSD might not be able to write the dirty data to stable media, or worse yet, it'll be in the middle of the write operation which leaves data in an unknown state.
Good SSDs often have piles of capacitors to serve as emergency power which can keep the array powered for a couple of seconds - more than enough time to flush the tables to storage and protect your data. Of course, this costs a lot more money and is usually present only in the top tier drives and enterprise class SSDs. If an SSD dies suddenly, it's usually because of this.
Hard drives use the back EMF produced by the spinning platters to perform emergency shutdown procedures, including retracting the heads.
BTW its not a train but a capsule suspended in air by magnets in a tube. The sound it would make is probably the muffled woosh as often heard by readers of Slashdot.
Part of the challenge is that the tube would be evacuated of most of the air too, so the whoosh would be barely audible (you can't have a perfect vacuum). The reason for this is eliminating drag - induced drag is the biggest problem at high speeds. Getting rid of the air gets rid of the largest source of energy loss in the system.
Of course, it has to be long enough to justify the extra energy required to keep the air pressure low, the airlocks, etc. which should be less than the energy lost due to drag.
No, but it means that people with a need for DOS should still be using DOS. In a lot of cases, only DOS supports legacy or hobbyist hardware that bit-bangs the parallel port. Likewise, the AC that you replied to has a need for Windows XP for much the same reason: to use hardware that lacks an NT 6 driver.
I've bit-banged the parallel port. In Windows XP. I've even had Win32 programs bit-bang the parallel port too. Presumably, one could do it for Windows 7 and 8 as well, though you'd have a hard time finding it because malware authors have basically caused every signing certificate used to sign it to be invalidated.
How? There's a driver out there called giveio that resets the processes' I/O permissions in the task block so that using the in and out instructions don't generate an exception.
Not really recommended these days to be honest, and if you really need to bit-bang, there are often USB HID controllers with GPIO pins you can use.
Apple managed it, why didn't MS? They should have put a transparent VM into Vista and 7 to run binaries, drivers, etc and called it Windows Classic. They could have had everyone migrated by now and made more money in the process.
Re:Google can fix it with a hammer.
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That is exactly what google should do. If your drivers are not in the mainline kernel, your parts do not go into nexus devices.
Two results:
1) Nexus devices run like crap because open drivers suck and are unable to use hardware.
2) Nexus are the most open devices, but damn does battery life suck.
The first is because you don't need the GPU, but Android performance stinks without acceleration. And the stuff open-source has access too tends to be fairly limited. so performance is never as good as it can be.
The second is because there are two truly "open" SoC manufacturers out there. First is Freescale, though the GPUs are PowerVR and those are NDA'd to heck and back. The other is... Intel, who actually has a completely open graphics stack.
Perhaps that's what Google should do - work with Intel to put the x86 into the next Nexus device. Then you have a completely open stack, save the phone firmware (not a problem for tablets). Of course, I don't think Intel's ARM emulator is open, so we can toss that out - but it'll encourage app devs to build for x86.... win-win-win!
I'm sure you can live with phones and tablets that get half the battery life for now, right? Because it's open!
Re:Google can fix it with a hammer.
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Except Google will find itself without a Nexus device to sell. Especially since Google has started toning down their Nexus line and starting offering "Google Edition" phones which are stock Android phones.
Because you think companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc care that the drivers are open or not? They sign the NDAs and get access to partial source code they need to create their devices.
As for using obsolete fabs and such - it's still expensive. Masks still cost around $100,000 each, and you need 10 or more of them still for a modern chip, so a tapeout run still costs a couple of million dollars.
FPGAs can be used, but when I used them, the dev systems used FPGAs cost $30K each, and the entire system ran at 10MHz. Oh, and you needed 4 FPGAs to simulate a subset of the chip. (That said, if you have 10 hours or so, Android DOES boot...).
The big problem still is the 3D stuff - all highly patented - implementing an open core will basically violate piles of patents, including many dating all the way back to when companies like S3 existed.
Of course, you can run Android in pure 2D mode, as 2D graphics are mostly patent free, but performance stinks. At the very least, a plain old framebuffer with no hardware acceleration can be implemented using open and free drivers.
How to know when someone doesn't understand Russia? Of all the human rights problems to list, they choose the (favorite hipster issue of) Pussy Riot. You don't think killing journalists or fixing elections is a little more worthy of note?
Or how about the current anti-homosexual agenda that's sparking protests all around the world because of the 2014 Olympics. (Are they going to arrest all homosexual athletes? There's been no guarantee issued...).
Hell, you'd think that Obama would spread a rumor that Snowden was gay or something.
I just checked and Chrome keeps my passwords in a file under "C:\Users\\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default". This directory is permission locked to me only. Even other admins can't access it unless they add permissions manually.
As far as I can tell Chrome does use filesystem level security to protect individual user's passwords.
Which should not be the only means of protection - perhaps I reboot the system into a Linux or Windows live CD or USB which ignores permissions. Or perhaps some application I use accidentally granted full permissions to everyone?
At least with encryption, there's still another layer of protection.
And of course, casual copying that happens while you're logged in and have permissions to access said fail.
Installing a Trojan or other malware may not be as easy given they normally require administrator rights, but if you're logged in, then encryption protects you from the casual copying attack.
Interesting, I have heard many people complain how much better the iOS version of Google apps work compared to their Android counterparts. I doubt Google is intentionally gimping either product.
Not quite mutually exclusive, but I've heard how horrible Google's iOS apps are compared to other iOS apps. Crashing is the biggest complaint (it's almost as if Apple sees "Google" in the title and just approves it blindly - there have been MANY Google apps that simply crash on launching. So much so that Google has had to remove their app until they fix it).
Of course, it doesn't say much about Android if people find the crappy iOS version "better".
OTOH, one has to understand why Microsoft and Google are doing this - Microsoft needs to sell Office 365 subscriptions, so Office for iOS and Android which hook exclusively with Office365 is a great way to do so. If it ran well on Firefox, Linux is covered as well (Office365 is cloud-based, after all). And Microsoft is heavily pushing Office365 on Mac, even though they have Office for Mac (which is subscription free).
Likewise, Google has iOS apps for the same reason - because it gets eyeballs on Google for ad purposes. Now, when will Google get around to fixing their maps - the damn road's been there for 4+ years now and it has street view, but no actual address information. Despite everyone else having it since early 2010!
In seriousness though, 20khz at 200A is enough to wipe magnetic strips in the wallets of pedestrians, and possibly to energize braces in people's mouths. (The metals used do leave ion concentrations in the saliva, making the mouth into a lytic cap, with the braces as the pickup and dielectric.) The concrete will be somewhat paramagnetic, but probably not enough to prevent the field from reaching up pretty high above the roadbed.
I sure hope they aren't installing it in areas where pedestrian traffic will be high. The potential for nuked credit cards opens a big legal liability.
You know, you don't keep pumping the field out when there's no bus on top of it and waste energy. Given you have a coil, it's stupidly easy to put out a weak detection field where you can look for a resonance and then apply power when you detect the bus. When the bus leaves the area, the controller detects the detuning and turns off the field.
And if the controller is smarter, it can signal controllers ahead of it to energize as well.
This isn't your dumb wireless charger you have at home to charge your Nexus or other consumer device. These things are smart and they have to be given the power involved.
Exactly! I've been looking for anything that explicitly states whether the electrocution was caused by a counterfeit charger or a genuine one, and I have yet to find it. Instead I find cleverly worded PR from Cupertino that discusses the potential hazards of knock-off chargers, but without ever specifically stating that the charger in question wasn't one of their theirs. I find this curious.
Well, considering said charger is probably in police evidence, and Apple probably doesn't have full access to it to verify its authenticity, we'll never find out until their investigation is done. Also being investigated is the possibility the house wiring is bad. Some knockoffs are so good it's hard to tell - the ones we see in the western world usually have tells like misspellings or oddball spacings in the text "Use only with info mat ion technology equipment". The knockoffs even go so far as to remove the "Designed by Apple" and the manufacturer (JET, Delta) trademarks to get around IP violation bans. It's why Apple shows the entire text of the charger - because you won't miss a logo that's not there.
If the knockoff guys spent the same effort in designing the charger that they did in evading and making the stuff look real, they'd do better than Apple or Samsung (the latter gets top marks for quality chargers).
What are you talking about? It was an iPhone charging on a USB port of a laptop. No charger involved, just the 5V USB, which is why I consider my case weirder.
Check your laptop's grounding - it appears to be floating. Your laptop charger is probably not completely isolated so it's letting some line voltage through the floating ground pin. I've seen it happen when 3 pin equipment is not connected to ground so it floats, putting a good 30VAC on the ground shielding. Touch that and you get a nice buzz.
You'll probably see the same if you touch the metal of your laptop when it's not ground referenced (e.g., you probably won't notice if you plug it into a monitor which grounds the laptop, but if you touch the VGA, DVI or HDMI shield, zap!). Of course, most laptops aren't metal and the metal Is hidden away so you'll probably inadvertently ground-reference it plugging in external stuff.
I understand that microsoft wants to serve their user even in android mobile but their software is only perfect when it is applied in their own os and not in other OS.
Except the one in Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone are standalone Office.
The office for Android and iOS are front ends to Office365, the cloud version of Office, and a subscription service.
Microsoft should make an effort to making these Office365 clients good because if they're good, they promote usage of Office365 and thus, subscription revenue. In fact, it's hard to buy regular Office these days because all you see everywhere are Office365 cards.
Perhaps this is a stupid question, but why does Apple like to use proprietary chargers/connectors so much in the first place?
It may be that poor-quality third-party chargers could damage the device. But then I have to ask, why are iDevices so fragile in the first place? It seems most other smartphones have a standard USB port and can work with any old 5V power supply.
Because at the time, there was no standard for USB charging (this was way back in 2003). And since you wanted dumb chargers, you needed a way to signal how much current the charger was willing to give (USB devices are only allowed to draw 100mA prior to enumeration, and 500mA only if the host allows). Since that was relatively unacceptable, Apple came up with a way to do it.
First, the resistors pull D+ and D- to various states which signals 4 different charge currents - 100mA, 500mA, 1A, 2A. (the first and last were reserved until later on). This was because you didn't want to pull too much power out of an inadequate charger.
Second, the 30 pin connector was just standardized (back in 2003), because there were no standards for connecting up A/V equipment to a portable device, so Apple used the 30 pin to allow accessory makers to build accessories cheaply - a serial port for control, analog audio outputs so you didn't need a DAC, etc.
Sometime later, the USB guys made a USB charger spec which shorted D+ and D- together to signal a charger. Unfortunately, the USB charger spec is deficient in that it does not signal charge current - the official spec says youc an draw 800mA or so (and it relaxes the 100mA pre-enumeration requirements so you could boost charge your battery until you can boot far enough to detect chargers and such). Of course, without current signalling, things are confusing because your tablet might try to draw 2A out of a 500mA adapter (I've seen cheap adapters blow up because they overheat).
As for what happens here to cause Apple to do this - cheap adapters are cheap. There is often ZERO regard to safety, including things like basic creepage and clearance (how far must high voltage rails be separated), the use of substandard safety parts (snubber capacitors), etc. In some designs, the USB port is barely 1mm away from mains voltage - a particularly humid day can easily bridge the distance and put a rather significant amount of voltage on the USB port. Or a critical part can fail and due to bad isolation, you get line voltage on the USB port.
Here's what a real Apple adapter looks like inside. The green dot recall was because the pins could fall out, and you can see Apple molded them into the plastic so the only way to rip them out is to destroy the plastic cover.
A dozen adapters tested. Apple is not the best - Samsung chargers are better! But the crappy chargers are clearly crap. In fact, you'll know them because your phone's touch screen stops working when you charge it. This happens on all phones - Apple, or Android. The noisiness of the power rails interferes with the analog touchscreen electronics.
There's nothing special to an Apple charger or any other charger. In fact, modern USB charger controller ICs now have autoswitch modes where they try all known charger methods to be the one universal charger. Youc an convert a standard USB charging charger to an Apple one with a few resistors, and an Apple one to a standard just as e
So there is going to be more gun violence, and there is not much we can do to stop it.
Actually there is. Though it's unlikely to ever happen in the US.
And the thing to do is change the culture of violence - the US is defined around guns - it started through war, it propagated through war. War is basically in every American's blood because the entire US history is filled with it. Even in peace times we hark back to the days of the wild west where it was you and your gun.
Basically the gun has been gloried as this magnificent thing, instead of the hunk of metal and wood that's really just a plain old ordinary tool. Heck, you guys put the right to own a gun in your Constitution!
It's why Canada, for example, does have gun control laws, yet is also awash with loads of guns (both legal and illegally smuggled from the US) but doesn't have as high a per-capita shooting rate as the US. It also helps that the laws mean long guns are legal, but handguns tend to be more heavily restricted.
It's a purely cultural thing - Americans end up believing guns are cool and awesome to have and one is powerful with a gun. Canadians get taught to respect the gun, because it's useful as a tool for gathering food. Plus I suppose, the less violent nature (for many Americans resorting to violence is the first thing to do, while other countries it's usually very last thing).
Then there's the whole "self" thing Americans are fond of, while other countries are more "community" oriented. The former is good in that everyone is self-reliant and not dependent, while the latter is that people can rely on others and that no, you don't have to hunt, defend, and do everything yourself, when you can delegate out the defense to one group, the hunting to another, etc.
In the end, the problem is social, and probably unfixable because the US has a history of violence and has grown up believing violence is a good thing.
And yes, I'm saving up for the rifle I want, after understanding that yes, it's perfectly legal to own and use in Canada. Once I get my license.
The RSA encryption has been depreciated for years now. Hell, back in 2000 we were saying that DES was insecure, and triple-DES was just a stop-gap. Everyone's been switching to AES for awhile now. This isn't news.
Wow, that is so wrong.
RSA is an asymmetric (aka publick key) cipher - because it requires two keys - one to encrypt, one to decrypt. AES, DES, 3DES are symmetric ciphers because you use the same key to encrypt and decrypt.
RSA and EC (elliptic curve) encryption is useful if you want to send data to someone without the hassles of secretly sharing the key ahead of time - e.g., I can encrypt a message using the public key and only the private key can decrypt it. Or I can use my private key to encrypt a message, and the public key can be used to decrypt it (the latter is often used to sign stuff, except the message is typically a hash instead of the original message).
The reason you use AES, DES, 3DES is because public key encryption is hideously slow. In the case of RSA, you're exponentiating one horrendously large number with other horrendously large numbers. (If your message is long, that horrendously large number Is big).
That's why what every public key encryption thing does is it encrypts the message with a fast symmetric cipher like AES, then encrypts the key (much shorter) with RSA or EC. If I want to send you a document, I encrypt it with AES, then use your public key to encrypt the AES key I used.
It's also why signing uses a hash - it's easier to encrypt the hash than the message. And verification just means recomputing the hash, and then decrypting the encrypted hash with the public key, producing the original hash to which can be compared to the just computed one.
The breakthrough in math would be a way to factor a large number quickly - which is what RSA relies on for security - it's easy to multiply two big numbers, but it's very time consuming to factor it.
I'm not sure how I should feel about the rejection. Angry because they rejected it, or pleased because it was a stupid app that honestly would probably result in a very negative user reaction as thousands of people drop and break their phones.
This is a good point. People are quick to confuse Apple with a company that actually innovates and pushes boundaries and stuff, when in fact, they just release highly-polished (and sometimes very well-timed) products that are often 5 or 10 years old.
Correct. But that discounts the importance of polish and timing.
Polish is very important - a technical feature is completely pointless if people don't use it, can't use it, or are unable to figure it out.
Timing is important in business because, as Apple will see this year, people get bored. Releasing product all at once in the fall seems like a great idea but damn the other 3 quarters where everyone bitches about "not innovating".
The iPod is an example of both - polish in that it was a player with tons of storage, in a formfactor that was convenient for a lot of people. At a time when MP3 players were JUST taking off, Apple produces something that has a slick UI (the wheel makes navigating through huge lists quickly), slick syncing (firewire, when most computers sported USB1.1) and iTunes (making it stupidly easy to manipulate your music library and convert your CDs to MP3s). A couple of years later they tossed in the iTunes store, bringing the music industry into the 21st century, kicking and screaming.
The iPhone brought polish to smartphones. In the name of Mobile Safari. Because until then, most mobile browsers were crap (I had one with Opera Mobile - the better ones, but it was slow and was showing its age).
The iPad brought polish to tablets - because instead of crappy lets-run-Windows, it ran iOS which was more adapted to touchscreens than even OS X is. Sure you could run OS X on a tablet, but the experience was mediocre at best - GUI concepts and designs for mouse and keyboard just don't translate well to pen and touches.
Hell, the iPhone wasn't considered revolutionary - Apple hoped it would maybe get 1% of the market, or 1 million phones. (It took 77 days to hit 1 million). Of course, the 3G sold 1 million opening weekend, despite well know problems.
The iPad was universally panned - it was so bad, Jobs even said they'd cut the price if it didn't sell well.
And the iPod, well. The millionth iPod sold in 2003, and by then it was the 3rd gen iPod with dock connector.
Don't discount polish. When people say things look "inconsistent" or "work poorly", it doesn't matter how big the numbers are on the spec sheet - the user ends up forgoing those features. Open source is primarily bad at this (often because non-programmers are discounted - this includes technical writers, designers, and testers - yes, it's your itch, but when users complain something works badly and could be better, perhaps it could go from "your itch" to "everyone's itch" and not "try this alternative").
I'm in basic agreement with you. However, tin whiskers don't grow everywhere. Only in relatively strong electric fields.
It is possible to route traces to prevent most tin whiskers. Not that 'they' have that completely mastered or that it will ever be perfect.
That's a different form of whiskering. The true tin whiskers form spontaneously without any input at all - it's a natural phenomenon that tin tends to do. Presumably it's to relieve stress in the lattice. There's also two kinds of tin - bright and dull. Bright tin is well, shiny, but it's also the most prone to whiskering, while dull tin doesn't tend to whisker as much.
In fact, when tin whiskers, it forms a crystal with atoms drawn from throughout the bulk - there's no depression near the whisker where the atoms were, so it's a very peculiar attribute of it.
Lead with tin controls whiskering the best to our knowledge (but we stopped experimenting when we found it). In fact, use of bright tin decreased when it was discovered that it was a leading cause of whickering, though you can find bright-tin-finished component leads. The biggest culprit though is tin hardware used for mounting components and other things. That stuff whiskers wildly (mostly bright tin because we all like shiny), and it just does it out of natural tin behavior.
If tin whiskers because of electric fields or electrochemical interactions, that's not true whiskering. Tin will always whisker, no matter the alloy.
Anyhow, this whole lead debate is getting interesting - mostly because the environmentalists have finished going after the last source of leaded fuel - avgas. (And trust me, the aviation industry WANTS to get rid of leaded avgas because it's more expensive to process (lead contamination means there's only one refinery in North America that can handle it, we have to import tetraethyl lead from the UK, and the refinery only runs one day a year to make all the avgas needed for that year. Imagine how much of the cost is maintaining the leaded refinery the rest of the year).
That bug is caused by Slashdot still refusing to implement this 20-year-old technology. I mean, this being some sort of cutting-edge tech blog and all, who'd expect them to properly support a character-encoding technology that came out two decades ago?
/. does support Unicode (UTF-8 sucks, btw - it's a compatibility hack). It's just that/. decided to whitelist Unicode characters rather than allow them all, because plenty of people have screwed around with Unicode control characters to completely destroy the page layout.
Yes, it's one thing that makes Unicode annoying to deal with - the fact you can copy one character of text, but actually end up copying a half dozen or more because Unicode codepoints encompass decorations to said characters as well (many non-printing).
And yes, UTF-8 is an annoyance to deal with because you can only parse it unidirectionally. If you need to go backwards through text, you're better off converting it first to UTF-16 or UTF-32.
The problem (as always) is with people. People are going to unpack their new router, pull out the card marked "STOP! IMPORTANT! DO NOT THROW AWAY THIS CARD!" with the secure random passwords on it, join all their devices to the network, then put the card in a pile with all the other very important cards marked "STOP! IMPORTANT! DO NOT THROW AWAY THIS CARD!" like the warranty registration form and the certificate of compliance from the Icelandic telecom ministry.
Six months later, they'll "clean up" the office and throw all those cards in the recycling bin.
A year after that, they'll buy a new smartphone and want to join it to the network, but the password card is missing. So they'll call tech support and plead for help.
If the password is derived from the router's MAC address or SSID or serial number, then the manufacturer can provide a tool for phone support to recover passwords. If you have a truly secure random password and WPA key, the only possible answer is "Well, then it's fucked. Buy a new one."
My router had a perfect solution to that.
The passwords and everything were written on the router itself. The WPA key that it defaults to on reset. The password the admin interface defaults to. The PIN code if you use it. All printed on the label at the bottom of the router.
No "do not throw away this card" crap. For all I know, all that stuff is derived from the serial number and printed during manufacturing to save some EEPROM space, but the information is there, it's somewhat secure (unless they derive it from the WiFi MAC), and if I lose it, well, it doesn't matter because I've lost the router.
This really bothers me about Amazon. At least with eBay I know that that I'm buying from some random person, but on Amazon, when you first click on an item, it's not clear whether you are buying off Amazon, directly from a reputable manufacturer, or some random person. There's no obvious way to filter searches to only show Amazon stuff either.
There's a checkbox that says "Sold by" and you can check "Amazon" to show you stuff Amazon sells. If you want "fulfilled by Amazon" as well, check "Prime eligible".
Personally, I never do a zShop - they're just like eBay except hiding behind Amazon's name. And it seems I've found zShops that also do Buy It Now on eBay and who run their own web store, all with differing prices. On the same item.
Anyhow, it's time to move away from the crap that is BIOS - besides 16-bit issues, the MBR's had its day (it can't support >2TiB drives), and booting by loading 128kiB of code that randomly hooks the BIOS is always calling for trouble. Like how you could boot form internal disk, onboard disk controller, external disk controller, NIC, or CD, but only one of them because the BIOS ROM hooks would get overridden and strangeness ensues. At least with everything integrated the BIOS could be written without needing ROM expansions so you can boot off floppy, CD, NIC, USB and then internal disk controllers without having to enable individual ones.
Hell, a better BIOS that enumerates things properly would be a dream - having disks that initialize the same way every time in whatever OS you use so the first disk in the system would be the first disk Linux and Windows sees.
I've heard it said that the reason people resort to untrusted sources is because official markets (Apple App store, or Google Play store, Amazon, etc) are not available in many countries, or the prices, designed for western economies, are simply not affordable in second and third world countries.
Except Apple isn't the problem. Apple makes sure that when it sells a product to a country, that country has an App Store at the very least. And since Apple controls it all, it does a fairly good job at ensuring that if you're buying an iSomething, you got the App Store. Many countries also have music and movies, but not all.
The deal with Android is that it is sold in many places where Google Play is not allowed or where Google Play does not support payment (when Android launched, it only supported payment from the US - so only free apps were shown in other countries).
Of course, since Android makes it easy to sideload apps, people realized that they needed to pirate apps in order to get any good ones that required payment, so all sorts of "app stores" came into existence.
Of course, that checkbox is quite useless in Android because there are plenty of legitimate app stores as well - Amazon being one, but Humble Bundle sells a few as well.
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DoubleClick doesn't do that. It's DoubleClick, A Google(tm) Company, so you can expect that to already happen. Probably just visit a Google site while logged in and one using DoubleClick ads and boom. And a lot of people do both, given how big DoubleClick is and Google account logins. (Especially now that Google unified their privacy policy).
Got a few hundred? This is all you need.
Or if the console supports component video out, problem solved.
The 360 didn't put HDCP on the HDMI. The PS3 did, so all the capture cards today tell you to use component in for the PS3.
Which for most users and usage scenarios, is basically forever. There's been a volunteer-run test of longevity which stresses an SSD until it fails by writing data to it continually. And the SMART data typically gives you plenty of advance warning - the Media Wear Indicator (MWI) tells you how many cycles are left in the array - once it hits zero, it means the number of write-erase cycles has hit the guaranteed limit and you're running in unknown territory (though there are usually still spare blocks and most will still have plenty of life). If you want guarantees, once the MWI hits zero, it's time to back up and get a new SSD. The tests run until the drive itself dies which tell you how long you have left. So you generally have a LONG indication of media wear out.
However, the biggest problem SSDs face is actually sudden loss and corruption of the FTL tables (the ones that map logical sectors to actual flash sectors). If you hear of SSDs dying prematurely, it's almost always because of table corruption. These tables contain things like sector translation, sector wear, dirty/clean bits, trim status, etc.
In the past, you could regenerate the tables from the spare area data (typically 16 bytes per 512 byte data area), but use of enhanced ECC algorithms consume that space up to accommodate better error handling. Plus it also meant way longer mount times as the controller had to scan the entire media for the information (many seconds long).
These days, controllers come with 512MB or more of RAM to hold the tables in memory for quick access. The problem is the tables are often written out lazily to storage, which means if you yank the power suddenly, the SSD might not be able to write the dirty data to stable media, or worse yet, it'll be in the middle of the write operation which leaves data in an unknown state.
Good SSDs often have piles of capacitors to serve as emergency power which can keep the array powered for a couple of seconds - more than enough time to flush the tables to storage and protect your data. Of course, this costs a lot more money and is usually present only in the top tier drives and enterprise class SSDs. If an SSD dies suddenly, it's usually because of this.
Hard drives use the back EMF produced by the spinning platters to perform emergency shutdown procedures, including retracting the heads.
Part of the challenge is that the tube would be evacuated of most of the air too, so the whoosh would be barely audible (you can't have a perfect vacuum). The reason for this is eliminating drag - induced drag is the biggest problem at high speeds. Getting rid of the air gets rid of the largest source of energy loss in the system.
Of course, it has to be long enough to justify the extra energy required to keep the air pressure low, the airlocks, etc. which should be less than the energy lost due to drag.
I've bit-banged the parallel port. In Windows XP. I've even had Win32 programs bit-bang the parallel port too. Presumably, one could do it for Windows 7 and 8 as well, though you'd have a hard time finding it because malware authors have basically caused every signing certificate used to sign it to be invalidated.
How? There's a driver out there called giveio that resets the processes' I/O permissions in the task block so that using the in and out instructions don't generate an exception.
Not really recommended these days to be honest, and if you really need to bit-bang, there are often USB HID controllers with GPIO pins you can use.
I know right? You know, Microsoft could make it really easy and call it "Windows XP Mode"!
Two results:
1) Nexus devices run like crap because open drivers suck and are unable to use hardware.
2) Nexus are the most open devices, but damn does battery life suck.
The first is because you don't need the GPU, but Android performance stinks without acceleration. And the stuff open-source has access too tends to be fairly limited. so performance is never as good as it can be.
The second is because there are two truly "open" SoC manufacturers out there. First is Freescale, though the GPUs are PowerVR and those are NDA'd to heck and back. The other is... Intel, who actually has a completely open graphics stack.
Perhaps that's what Google should do - work with Intel to put the x86 into the next Nexus device. Then you have a completely open stack, save the phone firmware (not a problem for tablets). Of course, I don't think Intel's ARM emulator is open, so we can toss that out - but it'll encourage app devs to build for x86.... win-win-win!
I'm sure you can live with phones and tablets that get half the battery life for now, right? Because it's open!
Except Google will find itself without a Nexus device to sell. Especially since Google has started toning down their Nexus line and starting offering "Google Edition" phones which are stock Android phones.
Because you think companies like Samsung, HTC, LG, etc care that the drivers are open or not? They sign the NDAs and get access to partial source code they need to create their devices.
As for using obsolete fabs and such - it's still expensive. Masks still cost around $100,000 each, and you need 10 or more of them still for a modern chip, so a tapeout run still costs a couple of million dollars.
FPGAs can be used, but when I used them, the dev systems used FPGAs cost $30K each, and the entire system ran at 10MHz. Oh, and you needed 4 FPGAs to simulate a subset of the chip. (That said, if you have 10 hours or so, Android DOES boot...).
The big problem still is the 3D stuff - all highly patented - implementing an open core will basically violate piles of patents, including many dating all the way back to when companies like S3 existed.
Of course, you can run Android in pure 2D mode, as 2D graphics are mostly patent free, but performance stinks. At the very least, a plain old framebuffer with no hardware acceleration can be implemented using open and free drivers.
Or how about the current anti-homosexual agenda that's sparking protests all around the world because of the 2014 Olympics. (Are they going to arrest all homosexual athletes? There's been no guarantee issued...).
Hell, you'd think that Obama would spread a rumor that Snowden was gay or something.
Which should not be the only means of protection - perhaps I reboot the system into a Linux or Windows live CD or USB which ignores permissions. Or perhaps some application I use accidentally granted full permissions to everyone?
At least with encryption, there's still another layer of protection.
And of course, casual copying that happens while you're logged in and have permissions to access said fail.
Installing a Trojan or other malware may not be as easy given they normally require administrator rights, but if you're logged in, then encryption protects you from the casual copying attack.
Not quite mutually exclusive, but I've heard how horrible Google's iOS apps are compared to other iOS apps. Crashing is the biggest complaint (it's almost as if Apple sees "Google" in the title and just approves it blindly - there have been MANY Google apps that simply crash on launching. So much so that Google has had to remove their app until they fix it).
Of course, it doesn't say much about Android if people find the crappy iOS version "better".
OTOH, one has to understand why Microsoft and Google are doing this - Microsoft needs to sell Office 365 subscriptions, so Office for iOS and Android which hook exclusively with Office365 is a great way to do so. If it ran well on Firefox, Linux is covered as well (Office365 is cloud-based, after all). And Microsoft is heavily pushing Office365 on Mac, even though they have Office for Mac (which is subscription free).
Likewise, Google has iOS apps for the same reason - because it gets eyeballs on Google for ad purposes. Now, when will Google get around to fixing their maps - the damn road's been there for 4+ years now and it has street view, but no actual address information. Despite everyone else having it since early 2010!
You know, you don't keep pumping the field out when there's no bus on top of it and waste energy. Given you have a coil, it's stupidly easy to put out a weak detection field where you can look for a resonance and then apply power when you detect the bus. When the bus leaves the area, the controller detects the detuning and turns off the field.
And if the controller is smarter, it can signal controllers ahead of it to energize as well.
This isn't your dumb wireless charger you have at home to charge your Nexus or other consumer device. These things are smart and they have to be given the power involved.
Well, considering said charger is probably in police evidence, and Apple probably doesn't have full access to it to verify its authenticity, we'll never find out until their investigation is done. Also being investigated is the possibility the house wiring is bad. Some knockoffs are so good it's hard to tell - the ones we see in the western world usually have tells like misspellings or oddball spacings in the text "Use only with info mat ion technology equipment". The knockoffs even go so far as to remove the "Designed by Apple" and the manufacturer (JET, Delta) trademarks to get around IP violation bans. It's why Apple shows the entire text of the charger - because you won't miss a logo that's not there.
If the knockoff guys spent the same effort in designing the charger that they did in evading and making the stuff look real, they'd do better than Apple or Samsung (the latter gets top marks for quality chargers).
Check your laptop's grounding - it appears to be floating. Your laptop charger is probably not completely isolated so it's letting some line voltage through the floating ground pin. I've seen it happen when 3 pin equipment is not connected to ground so it floats, putting a good 30VAC on the ground shielding. Touch that and you get a nice buzz.
You'll probably see the same if you touch the metal of your laptop when it's not ground referenced (e.g., you probably won't notice if you plug it into a monitor which grounds the laptop, but if you touch the VGA, DVI or HDMI shield, zap!). Of course, most laptops aren't metal and the metal Is hidden away so you'll probably inadvertently ground-reference it plugging in external stuff.
Except the one in Windows 8 RT and Windows Phone are standalone Office.
The office for Android and iOS are front ends to Office365, the cloud version of Office, and a subscription service.
Microsoft should make an effort to making these Office365 clients good because if they're good, they promote usage of Office365 and thus, subscription revenue. In fact, it's hard to buy regular Office these days because all you see everywhere are Office365 cards.
Because at the time, there was no standard for USB charging (this was way back in 2003). And since you wanted dumb chargers, you needed a way to signal how much current the charger was willing to give (USB devices are only allowed to draw 100mA prior to enumeration, and 500mA only if the host allows). Since that was relatively unacceptable, Apple came up with a way to do it.
First, the resistors pull D+ and D- to various states which signals 4 different charge currents - 100mA, 500mA, 1A, 2A. (the first and last were reserved until later on). This was because you didn't want to pull too much power out of an inadequate charger.
Second, the 30 pin connector was just standardized (back in 2003), because there were no standards for connecting up A/V equipment to a portable device, so Apple used the 30 pin to allow accessory makers to build accessories cheaply - a serial port for control, analog audio outputs so you didn't need a DAC, etc.
Sometime later, the USB guys made a USB charger spec which shorted D+ and D- together to signal a charger. Unfortunately, the USB charger spec is deficient in that it does not signal charge current - the official spec says youc an draw 800mA or so (and it relaxes the 100mA pre-enumeration requirements so you could boost charge your battery until you can boot far enough to detect chargers and such). Of course, without current signalling, things are confusing because your tablet might try to draw 2A out of a 500mA adapter (I've seen cheap adapters blow up because they overheat).
As for what happens here to cause Apple to do this - cheap adapters are cheap. There is often ZERO regard to safety, including things like basic creepage and clearance (how far must high voltage rails be separated), the use of substandard safety parts (snubber capacitors), etc. In some designs, the USB port is barely 1mm away from mains voltage - a particularly humid day can easily bridge the distance and put a rather significant amount of voltage on the USB port. Or a critical part can fail and due to bad isolation, you get line voltage on the USB port.
Here's what a real Apple adapter looks like inside. The green dot recall was because the pins could fall out, and you can see Apple molded them into the plastic so the only way to rip them out is to destroy the plastic cover.
A fake charger torn down. Note the general crappiness.
A dozen adapters tested. Apple is not the best - Samsung chargers are better! But the crappy chargers are clearly crap. In fact, you'll know them because your phone's touch screen stops working when you charge it. This happens on all phones - Apple, or Android. The noisiness of the power rails interferes with the analog touchscreen electronics.
Dave Jones (EEVBlog) tears down two fake chargers he got. He's not impressed and he's really shocked at the lousy nature of it. Taking them apart was the best thing you could do safety wise than using them.
There's nothing special to an Apple charger or any other charger. In fact, modern USB charger controller ICs now have autoswitch modes where they try all known charger methods to be the one universal charger. Youc an convert a standard USB charging charger to an Apple one with a few resistors, and an Apple one to a standard just as e
Actually there is. Though it's unlikely to ever happen in the US.
And the thing to do is change the culture of violence - the US is defined around guns - it started through war, it propagated through war. War is basically in every American's blood because the entire US history is filled with it. Even in peace times we hark back to the days of the wild west where it was you and your gun.
Basically the gun has been gloried as this magnificent thing, instead of the hunk of metal and wood that's really just a plain old ordinary tool. Heck, you guys put the right to own a gun in your Constitution!
It's why Canada, for example, does have gun control laws, yet is also awash with loads of guns (both legal and illegally smuggled from the US) but doesn't have as high a per-capita shooting rate as the US. It also helps that the laws mean long guns are legal, but handguns tend to be more heavily restricted.
It's a purely cultural thing - Americans end up believing guns are cool and awesome to have and one is powerful with a gun. Canadians get taught to respect the gun, because it's useful as a tool for gathering food. Plus I suppose, the less violent nature (for many Americans resorting to violence is the first thing to do, while other countries it's usually very last thing).
Then there's the whole "self" thing Americans are fond of, while other countries are more "community" oriented. The former is good in that everyone is self-reliant and not dependent, while the latter is that people can rely on others and that no, you don't have to hunt, defend, and do everything yourself, when you can delegate out the defense to one group, the hunting to another, etc.
In the end, the problem is social, and probably unfixable because the US has a history of violence and has grown up believing violence is a good thing.
And yes, I'm saving up for the rifle I want, after understanding that yes, it's perfectly legal to own and use in Canada. Once I get my license.
Wow, that is so wrong.
RSA is an asymmetric (aka publick key) cipher - because it requires two keys - one to encrypt, one to decrypt. AES, DES, 3DES are symmetric ciphers because you use the same key to encrypt and decrypt.
RSA and EC (elliptic curve) encryption is useful if you want to send data to someone without the hassles of secretly sharing the key ahead of time - e.g., I can encrypt a message using the public key and only the private key can decrypt it. Or I can use my private key to encrypt a message, and the public key can be used to decrypt it (the latter is often used to sign stuff, except the message is typically a hash instead of the original message).
The reason you use AES, DES, 3DES is because public key encryption is hideously slow. In the case of RSA, you're exponentiating one horrendously large number with other horrendously large numbers. (If your message is long, that horrendously large number Is big).
That's why what every public key encryption thing does is it encrypts the message with a fast symmetric cipher like AES, then encrypts the key (much shorter) with RSA or EC. If I want to send you a document, I encrypt it with AES, then use your public key to encrypt the AES key I used.
It's also why signing uses a hash - it's easier to encrypt the hash than the message. And verification just means recomputing the hash, and then decrypting the encrypted hash with the public key, producing the original hash to which can be compared to the just computed one.
The breakthrough in math would be a way to factor a large number quickly - which is what RSA relies on for security - it's easy to multiply two big numbers, but it's very time consuming to factor it.
Yes, there was. It was rejected on the grounds it would do harm to your device.
Though I think there were others as well.
I'm not sure how I should feel about the rejection. Angry because they rejected it, or pleased because it was a stupid app that honestly would probably result in a very negative user reaction as thousands of people drop and break their phones.
Correct. But that discounts the importance of polish and timing.
Polish is very important - a technical feature is completely pointless if people don't use it, can't use it, or are unable to figure it out.
Timing is important in business because, as Apple will see this year, people get bored. Releasing product all at once in the fall seems like a great idea but damn the other 3 quarters where everyone bitches about "not innovating".
The iPod is an example of both - polish in that it was a player with tons of storage, in a formfactor that was convenient for a lot of people. At a time when MP3 players were JUST taking off, Apple produces something that has a slick UI (the wheel makes navigating through huge lists quickly), slick syncing (firewire, when most computers sported USB1.1) and iTunes (making it stupidly easy to manipulate your music library and convert your CDs to MP3s). A couple of years later they tossed in the iTunes store, bringing the music industry into the 21st century, kicking and screaming.
The iPhone brought polish to smartphones. In the name of Mobile Safari. Because until then, most mobile browsers were crap (I had one with Opera Mobile - the better ones, but it was slow and was showing its age).
The iPad brought polish to tablets - because instead of crappy lets-run-Windows, it ran iOS which was more adapted to touchscreens than even OS X is. Sure you could run OS X on a tablet, but the experience was mediocre at best - GUI concepts and designs for mouse and keyboard just don't translate well to pen and touches.
Hell, the iPhone wasn't considered revolutionary - Apple hoped it would maybe get 1% of the market, or 1 million phones. (It took 77 days to hit 1 million). Of course, the 3G sold 1 million opening weekend, despite well know problems.
The iPad was universally panned - it was so bad, Jobs even said they'd cut the price if it didn't sell well.
And the iPod, well. The millionth iPod sold in 2003, and by then it was the 3rd gen iPod with dock connector.
Don't discount polish. When people say things look "inconsistent" or "work poorly", it doesn't matter how big the numbers are on the spec sheet - the user ends up forgoing those features. Open source is primarily bad at this (often because non-programmers are discounted - this includes technical writers, designers, and testers - yes, it's your itch, but when users complain something works badly and could be better, perhaps it could go from "your itch" to "everyone's itch" and not "try this alternative").
That's a different form of whiskering. The true tin whiskers form spontaneously without any input at all - it's a natural phenomenon that tin tends to do. Presumably it's to relieve stress in the lattice. There's also two kinds of tin - bright and dull. Bright tin is well, shiny, but it's also the most prone to whiskering, while dull tin doesn't tend to whisker as much.
In fact, when tin whiskers, it forms a crystal with atoms drawn from throughout the bulk - there's no depression near the whisker where the atoms were, so it's a very peculiar attribute of it.
Lead with tin controls whiskering the best to our knowledge (but we stopped experimenting when we found it). In fact, use of bright tin decreased when it was discovered that it was a leading cause of whickering, though you can find bright-tin-finished component leads. The biggest culprit though is tin hardware used for mounting components and other things. That stuff whiskers wildly (mostly bright tin because we all like shiny), and it just does it out of natural tin behavior.
If tin whiskers because of electric fields or electrochemical interactions, that's not true whiskering. Tin will always whisker, no matter the alloy.
Anyhow, this whole lead debate is getting interesting - mostly because the environmentalists have finished going after the last source of leaded fuel - avgas. (And trust me, the aviation industry WANTS to get rid of leaded avgas because it's more expensive to process (lead contamination means there's only one refinery in North America that can handle it, we have to import tetraethyl lead from the UK, and the refinery only runs one day a year to make all the avgas needed for that year. Imagine how much of the cost is maintaining the leaded refinery the rest of the year).
Yes, it's one thing that makes Unicode annoying to deal with - the fact you can copy one character of text, but actually end up copying a half dozen or more because Unicode codepoints encompass decorations to said characters as well (many non-printing).
And yes, UTF-8 is an annoyance to deal with because you can only parse it unidirectionally. If you need to go backwards through text, you're better off converting it first to UTF-16 or UTF-32.
My router had a perfect solution to that.
The passwords and everything were written on the router itself. The WPA key that it defaults to on reset. The password the admin interface defaults to. The PIN code if you use it. All printed on the label at the bottom of the router.
No "do not throw away this card" crap. For all I know, all that stuff is derived from the serial number and printed during manufacturing to save some EEPROM space, but the information is there, it's somewhat secure (unless they derive it from the WiFi MAC), and if I lose it, well, it doesn't matter because I've lost the router.
There's a checkbox that says "Sold by" and you can check "Amazon" to show you stuff Amazon sells. If you want "fulfilled by Amazon" as well, check "Prime eligible".
Personally, I never do a zShop - they're just like eBay except hiding behind Amazon's name. And it seems I've found zShops that also do Buy It Now on eBay and who run their own web store, all with differing prices. On the same item.
Obviously said by someone who didn't use PCs much in the past.
Laptops were notorious for having proprietary bits in their BIOS - some won't even boot unless you put in their specific version of MS-DOS.
Hell, even these days you find laptops that complain on bootup when they don't find an "approved" hard drive .
Anyhow, it's time to move away from the crap that is BIOS - besides 16-bit issues, the MBR's had its day (it can't support >2TiB drives), and booting by loading 128kiB of code that randomly hooks the BIOS is always calling for trouble. Like how you could boot form internal disk, onboard disk controller, external disk controller, NIC, or CD, but only one of them because the BIOS ROM hooks would get overridden and strangeness ensues. At least with everything integrated the BIOS could be written without needing ROM expansions so you can boot off floppy, CD, NIC, USB and then internal disk controllers without having to enable individual ones.
Hell, a better BIOS that enumerates things properly would be a dream - having disks that initialize the same way every time in whatever OS you use so the first disk in the system would be the first disk Linux and Windows sees.
Yeah, I hate opening a bunch of Youtube tabs and having them autoplay is the most annoying thing.
It makes flashblock have an essential utility beyond just the practical.
Except Apple isn't the problem. Apple makes sure that when it sells a product to a country, that country has an App Store at the very least. And since Apple controls it all, it does a fairly good job at ensuring that if you're buying an iSomething, you got the App Store. Many countries also have music and movies, but not all.
The deal with Android is that it is sold in many places where Google Play is not allowed or where Google Play does not support payment (when Android launched, it only supported payment from the US - so only free apps were shown in other countries).
Of course, since Android makes it easy to sideload apps, people realized that they needed to pirate apps in order to get any good ones that required payment, so all sorts of "app stores" came into existence.
Of course, that checkbox is quite useless in Android because there are plenty of legitimate app stores as well - Amazon being one, but Humble Bundle sells a few as well.