If population shifts to more urban and thus expensive to live area's can not afford more than the basics. Oddly people might move back out of the squalor that is urban living. High density living is not really good for anything some people prefer it and that is there choice but we should not structure our society to cater to them.
Actually, as a society we're geared towards density living - it's only in the past 100 years or so have we "spread out" to create suburban sprawl.
Most older cities and towns are not designed for cars and narrow streets and what not were designed for human transportation (on foot or bicycles) and human propelled cargo movement.
Younger cities where cars are more common suffer from suburban sprawl where cars are required in order to do *anything*.
Naturally, it's also why places like Europe tend to have better public transportation systems because the old cities never grew to accommodate the car, so the only way to get people in and out is mass transport (London's Underground, for example...).
Newer places like the United States tend to have grown up around cars so they tend to be more spread out and less dense.
There are good and bad sides to both - the high density living has resulted in many plagues and diseases to prevail, and travel between places was long and difficult. Hell, Game of Thrones gets it quite right - your high density living would be inside the castle walls, but it also means you get stuff like incest because newcomers are quite rare when it takes days of travel between.
Of course, not having a car can easily save a TON of money between depreciation maintenance, gas and insurance - if you can get rid of one car, gas and insurance can easily be $2000 a year or more. If you're making $24K, that's an extra $175 or so per month, enough for half a month of groceries.
The big problem being, of course the supermarket requires a car thanks to sprawl.
why are we constantly seeing examples of companies misleading, blatantly lying, to their customers
If there's no standard, companies have to invent one. Or find a way to screw with the results such that it's favorable to them.
It's why spec sheets on a lot of things are completely meaningless (contrast ratio, response time on LCDs particularly are meaningless because there's so many ways to measure it that you really cannot compare it).
Hell, take battery life. Can you compare the battery life of the new MacBook Air to the latest ultrabook? Not really because Apple and everyone else have different ways of testing. Hell, you can't even do the "take half and that's what you expect" general rule, either (Surprisingly, you can get Apple's quoted battery life without sacrificing much to the point of unusability, and I think sites like Anand have been able to get beyond, as well).
Basically manufacturers want to reduce everything to a number because they can sell numbers. Perhaps it's speed. Or screen size. Or camera megapixels. Or cores. (Want fun? see how much trouble people have advertising without showing specs a la Apple).
Anyhow, it's only a matter of time before we see interesting things happen - like how you'll find "SGS4 Speed Booster.apk" that fakes those things to give you speed, and then have people complain of crap battery life. Or overheating phones.
The big problem here is that those who write well usually aren't good at math, and those good at math usually aren't that good with non-math written communication. You'll probably find few people skilled in both. Perhaps the scientist should write it up with the help of a professional editor. But at any rate, why NOT add the math? Those who can't understand the math can look it up or ignore it, those who are more numerate can gain insight they wouldn't get from mere words.
Or, besides writing down the equation, EXPLAIN the equation. And not just write down what the equation says, but what it means.
Let's take a simple one - E=mc^2.
It says the amount of energy something contains is related to its mass (or the amount of "stuff") it contains. The relation is a big one - it's equal to the speed of light squared, so a tiny amount of mass (stuff) produces a LOT of energy. This equation is fundamental to nuclear physics, including peaceful uses such as nuclear power plants, to destructive uses such as nuclear weapons.
Thus the paragraph put close to the equation helps those who can't read the equation to still understand what it says, and it also explains where it's used and what it means.
But you're correct on the fundamental problem - it's because those in the sciences (and engineering) put little weight on the "arts" side of things (including things like writing) as they believe that stuff is a lot of fluff. (I can't generalize this, but if you ask a lot of people in IT, they seem to look down on studying anything that isn't related to their field - like why should a computer scientist or engineer take courses in philosophy or logic, or take classes in English or writing or even home economics).
Likewise, a lot of people take arts because they want to avoid the math and science.
Which is terrible - and it leads to this gulf of communications problems where journalists (or any writer, really) misinterprets some scientific or technical thing because the writer and the technical person are failing to communicate effectively (a problem on BOTH sides). Or how technical people look upon sales, marketing and PR people with disdain, because those people know how to relate to the public, but often fail to relate to the technical staff.
Perhaps instead of the token math or science class for an arts degree, or the token arts/business class for a technical/science degree, the two should be combined more tightly to produce a more well-rounded person who may be technical, but understands the other side.
Why bother using the web, then? Most sites won't work with scripting disabled to any usable extent.
If you want to be safe from evil ad networks, just don't use the web. Problem solved.
But saying "just don't do it" in reference to things that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people need or want to do is not solving the problem, and is distracting to the need to actually solve the problem.
Most javascript that aren't site related are third-party. So you can allow the site level javascript to run without allowing the evil infected (and most likely from Google*) javascript through.
If it wasn't for the craziness of some websites (eBay, Amazon, Google (and its properties - YouTube, etc), most news sites), you could get a pretty decent experience with enabling first-party only JavaScript. But most sites also seem to need stuff like jquery and the like.
It's why Flash or plugins is a bad idea over HTML5 - you cannot get the same amount of control through the plugin. Like how I can prevent my browser from loading up Google-owned DoubleClick javascript but only through an HTML web page. If the webpage has an embedded Flash object then that flash object can pull in javascript from anywhere, including blocked sites.
* - Remember, Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks out there, and from a branding perspective, you won't see something like "DoubleClick - a Google-owned company", So it would eventually be Google the one serving up the ads via one of their companies.
We marvel that the runtime environment of the web browser can do things that we had working 25 years ago on the Mac.
Did the Mac, 25 years ago, allow people to load code from a remote server and execute it locally in a sandbox and in a platform independent manner all in a matter of a couple of seconds? No. No it did not.
All the pieces were there.
Load code from remote server - Macs supported AppleTalk - a very early primititve networking system (when Farallon changed the physical layer from serial cables to silver satin phone cable, it really took off - given it used the unused pair and thus was really cheap to network Macs together).
Loading code I na VM/Sandbox - well, I believe Macs had at one point supported the UCSD p-system, which if you remember your history was the output of the Pascal compiler. Though, I think Macs evolved a bit from that - the API was distinctly Pascal, but it was Pascal compiled down to native, not p-code.
I suppose if you think about it, there were two things. The concept and the implementation. I believe one of the goals of the p-system was to be platform independent - by being bytecode that was run on the target platform.
And networking was old hat - even the Xerox Alto which Apple examined supported networking when the Mac was still being developed. It was how the Alto and the Star system was supposed to operate.
(That's not to say the Mac wasn't without innovations - it supported... overlapping windows, something the Alto didn't. Woz had a patent on it, too.)
Of course, the other thing is well, we've been adding layers of abstractions ever since (something about how there's nothing that can't be solved by adding another layer of abstraction). The web runs on a web browser, which for some (e.g., Firefox) runs platform independent code (e.g., XUL) that runs on a runtime environment (e.g., xulrunner), which runs on top of an OS which abstracts out hardware and provides a virtual environment for the program to run in...
I wonder how this'll affect older PCs? Aren't SSL communications with larger keys more processor-intensive than when using a smaller key?
Hardly anything, actually. The actual amount of encryption and decryption done using the RSA2048 key is quite small - really only about 128 to 256 bits or so.
Public key encryption is horrendously slow, too slow for modern usage, so what happens is the bulk encryption is done via a symmetric cipher, typically AES these days (previously it was 3DES or DES). Of course, for symmetric ciphers to work, you need to share a key. So what happens is the client generates a key for AES, encrypts it with the RSA2048 public key, and sends it to the server. The server decrypts the key using its RSA2048 private key and then communications take place via AES and that shared key.
The change from RSA1024 to RSA2048 should have minimal impact since it's only done on session setup while the actual communications use the far faster and more secure AES algorithm.
(Yes, public key encryption is weaker - you need more bits for the key to have the same level of protection as a symmetric cipher using way less bits.).
The largest risk isn't during transmission, it is at the user's end... and Google's end. 2 million bit encryption wouldn't be enough if you had a keylogger, or if google got served a National Security Letter that it decided to honor.
Hush now, the NSA wants you to believe that they capture data in flight, therefore you are more protected using bigger keys.
More bits is always better and more unbreakable! Google's working hard to protect your privacy!
While I agree with what you're saying and I think the decision is correct, the problem is that when companies read articles such as this, all they see is, "If we use open source, we could get sued and screwed for something a third party did."
It makes the use of GPL licensed software appear unpredictably dangerous. And there's no getting around that.
To be honest, businesses should be putting open source under the same scrutiny they have for commercially licensed software as well.
Some actually have, imposing actual processes on the use of open-source code and auditing the code base to ensure proper adherence.
Any company dabbling should have a policy. One example would be that every OSS used - be it in a final code drop to the customer, or used for internal tools, must be approved by legal who can tell if using it will conflict with other licenses currently in use. Some things may be preapproved for external distribution (e.g., Linux kernel), others may be approved for internal use (build tools). Everything else must have approval to be used.
Sure it's "not as fun" because now if you want to use $COOL_NEW_SOFTWARE you need to submit requests to legal to review it and approve it, but it's the only way to stay "safe". And yes, I know legal teams that explicitly ban GPLv3 from their approval list - or rather, if it's GPLv3, unless you can make a really compelling case, it won't be approved (so you can use GCC, for example, which is GPLv3, but not other GPLv3 stuff).
Far too many companies have been getting away with the "it's free, we can do anything we want" mentality when they really should be imposing the same policies they have for commercial code.
Hell, half the products might accidentally be violating the GPL or the commercial license because someone linked a GPL'd library with commercially licensed code.
It's all in our heads. We choose to eat some animals (like cows) and not others (like cats) because of cultural reasons. Same with insects.
It's a cultural thing. Traditionally humans have associated insects with "dirty" and "rotten" food - flies and maggots and whatnot, so evolution has basically kept that alive that insects are bad since it's associated with bad food. Our cultural traits reinforce this belief and explains the general "yuckiness" of eating bugs.
Actually, that is possible given the ILS is NOTAM'd as non-operational. Just because it's non-operational doesn't mean "it doesn't work", it means "it doesn't work properly". There have been documented accidents where the primary cause has been reliance on an out-of-service navaid that just happened to be spewing navigational information.
And it's not to say the authorities don't TRY to warn people - first, the NOTAMs are part of every flight package on commercial carriers (even if it wasn't, it's still required reading for all pilots. The rule is to be familiar with all information regarding your flight, and NOTAMs generally are part of that (after all, there's a chance the airport can be closed!)).
But in the case of a navaid, the FAA also turns off the identifier beeper (morse code...) and sometimes even puts a voice on the frequency telling pilots the navaid they are using is out of service. The identifier is broadcast continually for positive identification that you're using the correct navaid - failure to hear the identifier or hearing the wrong one means you're probably not tuned corrected or it's broken. If there's a voice, well, you may want to listen since someone went through the trouble of recording it.
And yes, ILS is like any other navaid - you still have to tune and identify it to make sure you're not following the wrong one!
Actually, if you take a look at the entries, it's not really poor code, just highly skilled code.
Of course, if you've been in software development for any time, you'll realize that it's not the poor coders that do the crappiest hardest to maintain code, it's the prima donna ones that use all sorts of strange tricks that make code unreadable. At least poor coders generally produce bad code, but there's an honest effort that goes into it (like using the wrong sort, or not using an API that would've made life easier, etc.,). The hot shot coder would submit something like what you see in the IOCCC - it works like magic, but damn if you can figure it out.
And I believe one of the criteria has always been code aesthetics, hence why a lot of entries do a bunch of ASCII art stuff.
Kids are always curious about things their parents forbid. Adults are always curious about things their government forbid.
The Streisand effect on BitCoin is going to be huge.
Yeah, but what can you do with BitCoin? Without using any currency exchange, that is.
At some point, it's got to be converted to currency and that's where the government gets you. The US government isn't worried about BitCoin because they know that fact - that the exchanges are the weak point in any currency system. (And no, BitCoin isn't special - it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoins, ISK, WoW Gold, whatever).
Thailand can easily ban BitCoin, as they also know that exchanges matter. These countries have extremely tight controls on their currency and often limit the amount of exchanging done (e.g., if you want to change Thai Baht to US dollars, and the total is say, larger than US$100, you need a government permit. Of course, the limit the other way is much higher...).
And it also means that any bitcoin wallets they fine, they can seize. Like they do with anyone holding excessive amounts of non-Thai currency.
Given that this is only at two stores, I would bet heavily that this is two managers' policy, not Apple's.
You would probably lose. According to the complaint, "These personal package and bag searches"... are a uniform practice and policy in all Apple retail stores nationwide"
Except they're not mutually exclusive. Other Apple stores may have the same policy, but the search is done on company time (there's nothing to say the manager can't search the bags prior to shift end and then hand them to the employee as they leave).
The complaint isn't about bag searches (most places have them in retail). It's about being forced to wait half an hour after shift end, on unpaid time to leave. Yeah, it's only half an hour, but given Apple retail store pay, that's easily another $5-10 a day (Apple tends to pay on the higher end of the scale).
So either other Apple stores do it better with the same policy and it's just a couple of douchebag managers (way too common on retail - a "manager" in retail parlance doesn't pay much more than a floor salesperson but has more power so the Peter Principle is very strong), or there's been a recent policy change. It's definitely not something that's been around a while (or we'd have heard it much earlier - Apple may be secretive, but ex-employees tend to make injustices transparent).
And while I personally think it looks good, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think aesthetics should not be on that list either way.
Except cars are ALL ABOUT AESTHETICS!
Which is one reason why when I saw the Tesla, I liked it - it looked like a normal car. The Leaf and other cars all look distinct, and to an extent, a bit ugly since they tend to resemble well, an econobox. At not so econobox prices. The Volt looks nicer, but it still looks... different.
And yes, while looks are determined somewhat by aerodynamics, how it looks overall is a very important part of what normal people look for. It's why people lust after Apple products (including hackers - go see a Pwn to Own sometime - people want the sexy Apple (OS X), followed by the Sony (Windows), last to fall is usually the Dell (Linux). You'd get better results if they were all MacBook Pros, to be honest), instead of preferring some crappy plastic laptop that Best Buy sells. They may buy said crap plastic laptop, but they won't like it for anything more than price.
And there are ways to get better gas mileage if you're willing to put up with a butt-ugly car - dimples, coning the back (where you put a huge cone that tapers to a point out the back - makes your car look ugly, but the reduced turbulence does have a marked effect). Of course, you don't see many of 'em on the roads because people don't want butt-ugly.
And if you ask people, looks are really what drive a purchase - they find a budget, then look around for a car that looks good within said budget.
No one but Samsung is making any real money selling Android phones.
Only on Slashdot. In the real world, that's just old FUD, and the market is competitive amd dynamic.
And your proof is that Samsung made more profit than Apple?
Apple held the lead for over 5 years. Since the original iPhone, Apple's profits in the mobile sector (that included dumbphones and featurephones as well) has been over 50%, and at one point, 75%+. 3 out of every 4 dollars made went to Apple.
Now, Nokia was raking in tons more cash (revenue) than Apple, but after expenses (this is profits, remember) Apple made more money.
Combine Apple and Samsung and you're talking the vast majority of profits made (profit, not revenue) went between the two. Everyone else, including Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, LG, Motorola, ZTE, etc - are scrambling for the leftover dollars.
And other than Samsung (with like 90% Android marketshare - only 10-15% of which are due to the likes of the flagship models like the S3 and S4), HTC, LG, Motorola, etc., they ain't making much profit. (Most of the sales go towards the free Androids that are being pushed out - all those $0 phones, or where Samsung who releases a new non-flagship practically daily seems to thrive).
And market perception is turning soon that Android is Samsung (especially with Google's de-emphasis on the Android branding).
It's why it's no longer iOS vs. Android, it's TouchWiz Android vs. Stock Android. Or Google vs. Samsung. Or why everyone other than Samsung is really worried about Googorola (especially since it seems most Nexus devices are sold at cost - if Google can sell Motorola phones at practically cost, unless you're Samsung, it's going to be even harder to make money).
Anybody know what the fewest number of posts between the original and a dupe is?
One, I think.
Zero if you include the "dupe April Fool" joke (the one about the evil bit).
And last I checked, we're in July, which is the seventh month of a standard Gregorian calendar. April is the fourth month. And that Fourth and Seventh are not the same number/
It may be a dupe, but I distinctly remember reading post after post on that article from apparently knowledgeable people explaining in great detail how this whole "GPS spoofing" thing was supposedly nearly impossible or at least highly impractical. I am very much interested in having someone explain how these people have managed to accomplish something that is supposedly not doable.
Seems to me this represents a valid threat to the safety of using civil GPS navigation systems, on land or at sea. Most of the posts on the previous article seemed to indicate that GPS is NOT threatened at all. I am unable to rectify these two opposing points of view without further input from knowledgeable people.
Except well, you have to override the receiver of all satellites it can see. Like here, they had to overpower the GPS satellites (it's not hard), but they also had to maintain the lock.
It's a lot more difficult If you want to misdirect a whole fleet of vehicles because the satellite signal has to follow everyone and in a sensible fashion. If you really wanted to take down GPS, it's far easier to just do a blanket jamming of it than to try to follow each and every vehicle you want to misdirect and aim the antenna at them.
GPS works by sending a timing pulse from the satellite to the ground - the receiver gets 3 or 4 of these timing pulses, correlates them to figure out how far each satellite is and then uses the spheres to find its location. Each receiver should generally come to a unique solution for position (because well, no two objects can occupy the same space).
If you broadcast this fake signal out, eventually someone will notice when their GPS suddenly gets a fix hundreds of meters away from them (each unit gets a slightly different signal from the satellite - when they all get the same signal, they all show the same location,). So it works great if you're in a fleet of trucks following some route, but if you're a bit further spaced out, the solution doesn't work so well and each will need its own antenna and transmitter to come up with plausible location information.
And that's the problem - it doesn't scale. The technique works if you want to misdirect a ship, a drone, a plane, or whatever, but to misdirect multiple requires multiple transmitters in order to send plausible yet fake data to each individual unit. It still is far easier to simply broadcast garbage on the GPS band so no GPS receiver can get a lock.
In China, workers don't need unions, they just need to be an Apple supplier, and get China Labor Watch to give them a poor report on workplace conditions. Then, the world will force Apple to force the supplier to address the issues (or hide them better).
And then Apple will then take the world on and declare themselves to be the police on Chinese labor, and be able to shut down any factory that is not up to Apple's standards.
Apple will walk into whatever factory Samsung uses, conduct a surprise audit, and declare them to be not to Apple's standards and to be shut down until it's brought up to spec.
After all, the Foxconn lines making Apple products have improved, but the other Foxconn lines for HP and everyone else hasn't.
Consumer Prices in United States are 33.76% lower than in Australia Consumer Prices Including Rent in United States are 36.51% lower than in Australia Rent Prices in United States are 42.13% lower than in Australia Restaurant Prices in United States are 34.18% lower than in Australia Groceries Prices in United States are 28.26% lower than in Australia
How did the prices get compared? In Australia, your taxes are built in, so when it sells for $60, you pay the store $60. In the US, when you pay $40, you play tax on top of that (ditto Canada) - which for US and Canada can be anywhere from 5-15%.
The other thing is consumer law. In Australia, you have something like a minimum warranty of 2 years on durable goods, while in US and Canada it's 90 days or so, maybe the manufacturer offers 1 year. When you consider Best Buy and the like will happily sell you an extended warranty for 2 years for 15% of the cost, that too narrows the margin even more. The rest just comes to the cost of doing business.
And yes, anyone who thinks the EU and Australia consumer protection laws are free is free to get the extended warranty when offered. They'll be slightly cheaper in the EU and the like because everyone is forced to get them, so instead of say 20% of shoppers opting for it in the US and Canada, they have 100% of shoppers doing the same thing, so they can charge a little less and make it up on volume.
The other thing is well, Australia is out of the way - getting product there usually means an extra shipping stop through Asia (China/Singapore) in order to have sufficient volume.
For digital goods, all Australia has to do is simply disallow exclusive distributorship as had been the case before - you no longer need to go through an Australian company to sell to Australians. (Of course, you lose out on Australian protections and taxes, but such is how the cookie crumbles).
That explains why Apple is moving some Macs to be Made in the US. And not just "Assembled in the US" either - the new forthcoming Mac Pro is supposed to use a lot of US manufacturing. About the only Chinese components would be sold in component form - the PCB, chassis and assembly are all to be done in the US so it actually qualifies as "Made in the USA" and not just "Assembled in the USA".
To be fair SATA was developed at a time when faster speeds and smaller cables were required, but backwards compatibility and low cost were also primary considerations. PCI-e is a fundamentally different technology, designed mostly for throughput over short distances in an electrically controlled environment.
As was PCIe - it was designed in an environment where PCI was limiting - most PCI implementations were stuck with 32-bit 33MHz, despite enhancements to 100MHz (33/66/100), 64-bit, and other things. The problem was it wasn't scalable, and they needed a backwards-compatible mechanism for the next-generation of interconnect busses. (PCIe is logically compatible with PCI for legacy OSes)
In fact, PCIe was designed to be more forgiving than PCI, like how SATA is.
Multitasking: Swap. Notice that most applications on smartphones cease to execute when not actually on screen? The OS puts them onto flash to free up precious RAM. Not much RAM in a phone.
There's plenty of RAM in a phone - 1GB, 2GB are common now in the high end ones.
The reason mobile OSes suspend apps in the background is battery life - an app running in the background can easily gobble up enough CPU to drain the battery pretty darned quickly.
And most mobile developers are not power-aware enough to write good battery sparing code. It's far easier to suspend an app (even in RAM) than to keep it running. Those that need an app to run in the background can use the OS APIs to declare the intent to do so.
To not do so makes for a rather pathetic user experience - if they do nothing, their phone lasts all day. If they run some apps, suddnely they get 3 hours of battery life because one of those apps went wild. And they aren't going to investigate the issue - all they know is they have a crap phone where randomly one day you'll get great battery life and the next it'll die before noon.
This often happens when the simulation results are influenced by variations in the accuracy of the built-in functions. Every floating point unit (FPU) returns an approximation of the correct result to an arbitrary level of accuracy, and the accuracy level of these results varies considerably when built-in functions like sqrt(), sin(), cos(), ln(), and exp() are considered. Normally, the accuracy of these results is pretty high. However, the initial 8087 FPU hardware from Intel was pretty old, and it necessarily made approximations.
Floating point arithmetic is in itself a bunch of approximations. It's the least precise computation you can do, and if you're not careful, errors accumulate rather rapidly.
In fact, most people using floating point probably don't realize that they order in which they do computations matter, nor despite having a standard, most hardware floating point units are NOT fully compliant.
This is probably a lot harder on the sciences (whether it's computer, weather, climate, whatever) who assume their computation hardware is "perfect" because understanding the low level is more an implementation concern.
A must-read article is What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic (paywalled). A nice edited reprint is available as HTML (and PDF if you Google it - but Oracle seems to have it in HTML). This is one of those leaky abstractions - the hardware doing floating point is not precise at all and if you're not careful, you can lose significant figures very easily (you may think you're keeping 4 sigfigs throughout, but one error and you can be reduced to 1 due to approximations even when you really should have 4).
You are quite correct that all stores are collecting analytics on your movements
The problem is they have no clue as to what to do with them. Take amazon. They have a record of everything I have purchased from them for the last 15 years yet they still can't send me advertising that is relevant to my interests. Why?
if I buy something I generally don't need it again, exceptions are food and clothes. Clothes change styles so buying the same clothes 10 years later is worthless.
That's not the useful part of analytics - it's not useful to know what you bought so it can be suggested again.
It's useful to know what you however looked at, and bought. Lets say you bought a book from Amazon. Amazon knows they can't really suggest the book to you again, but they can see you bought the book, then see what else you bought nearby (either in the same cart or perhaps a few days before and after). Compare it with others who bought the same book and then recommend those items, or if someone else goes and looks it up, offers suggestions on those items.
Identification is useful, but not required for analytics. Perhaps a store notices that people are searching for a title suddenly - the analytical engine would be wise to bump that item to the front page. Or in a supermarket, where products are positioned is important as well. If the store notices chips and dip sales spike near superbowl day, well, the store will put out premium chips and dip near the checkout area so time-pressed people will just buy and go, spending more because they bought the expensive stuff. Likewise, they'll see sales of what kind of chips and dip are popular, and know to not put them on sale.
Oh, and there's always a very good chance analytics screws up - everyone is different and some people's tastes vary tremendously. If you're Amazon, you want to become the dominant online store people go to in order to capture an overall feel of a person's interests, rather than slices (e.g., some people go to Amazon for books and music, Newegg for computer parts, Dell for PCs, some electronics dealer for other stuff, etc - these stores get only partial analytics about you. But if you used Amazon to look up a lot of that stuff, even if you didn't buy, they build up a more complete profile). Like right now, Amazon.ca has a very incomplete profile on me because until recently, books, movies, music and games was all they sold, and I tended to purchase retail (it doesn't help that prices generally aren't better online for me).
I wonder if an IR LED baseball cap would over-expose and foil retina cameras? I don't remember the time frame but there was a Slashdot article (IIRC) in the last year or so that cited a study that showed that our retina patterns change over time. Polarized wrap-around glasses would take care of that and might also fox facial recognition cameras.
Except now they track you as the funny guy with the funny hate that specked the camera. They don't care about your identity. They care about what you do in the store. Do you walk straight to the item? Do you look at other items? Do you compare items? Do you ask for help? Do you have a hard time finding help? (Yes, people do leave if they can't find help and uncontrolled observation can see that).
If you already have reasonable security measures adding a layer of obscurity can make life a lot simpler.
For example, let's say you have a web application that's properly secured and only for internal use, but available externally because people need access to it. Would you put it on port 80? Or if you can, put it on another port, say 8181? People who need to use it know about it, and even if it's found accidentally, it still is secure. Just you've eliminated 99% of random hacks and other crap that people are using and thus can deal with the actual legitimate hack attacks.
You've "obscured" the actual port, but have actual security behind it. The obscurity just makes it harder to find, but it isn't the sole means of security around.
Or to avoid filling up your SSH logs with invalid access attempts from script kiddies, you could put your secured SSH system on another port, then you can review your authentication logs without the noise of script attacks and see if someone is trying to hack in.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, as a society we're geared towards density living - it's only in the past 100 years or so have we "spread out" to create suburban sprawl.
Most older cities and towns are not designed for cars and narrow streets and what not were designed for human transportation (on foot or bicycles) and human propelled cargo movement.
Younger cities where cars are more common suffer from suburban sprawl where cars are required in order to do *anything*.
Naturally, it's also why places like Europe tend to have better public transportation systems because the old cities never grew to accommodate the car, so the only way to get people in and out is mass transport (London's Underground, for example...).
Newer places like the United States tend to have grown up around cars so they tend to be more spread out and less dense.
There are good and bad sides to both - the high density living has resulted in many plagues and diseases to prevail, and travel between places was long and difficult. Hell, Game of Thrones gets it quite right - your high density living would be inside the castle walls, but it also means you get stuff like incest because newcomers are quite rare when it takes days of travel between.
Of course, not having a car can easily save a TON of money between depreciation maintenance, gas and insurance - if you can get rid of one car, gas and insurance can easily be $2000 a year or more. If you're making $24K, that's an extra $175 or so per month, enough for half a month of groceries.
The big problem being, of course the supermarket requires a car thanks to sprawl.
If there's no standard, companies have to invent one. Or find a way to screw with the results such that it's favorable to them.
It's why spec sheets on a lot of things are completely meaningless (contrast ratio, response time on LCDs particularly are meaningless because there's so many ways to measure it that you really cannot compare it).
Hell, take battery life. Can you compare the battery life of the new MacBook Air to the latest ultrabook? Not really because Apple and everyone else have different ways of testing. Hell, you can't even do the "take half and that's what you expect" general rule, either (Surprisingly, you can get Apple's quoted battery life without sacrificing much to the point of unusability, and I think sites like Anand have been able to get beyond, as well).
Basically manufacturers want to reduce everything to a number because they can sell numbers. Perhaps it's speed. Or screen size. Or camera megapixels. Or cores. (Want fun? see how much trouble people have advertising without showing specs a la Apple).
Anyhow, it's only a matter of time before we see interesting things happen - like how you'll find "SGS4 Speed Booster.apk" that fakes those things to give you speed, and then have people complain of crap battery life. Or overheating phones.
Or, besides writing down the equation, EXPLAIN the equation. And not just write down what the equation says, but what it means.
Let's take a simple one - E=mc^2.
It says the amount of energy something contains is related to its mass (or the amount of "stuff") it contains. The relation is a big one - it's equal to the speed of light squared, so a tiny amount of mass (stuff) produces a LOT of energy. This equation is fundamental to nuclear physics, including peaceful uses such as nuclear power plants, to destructive uses such as nuclear weapons.
Thus the paragraph put close to the equation helps those who can't read the equation to still understand what it says, and it also explains where it's used and what it means.
But you're correct on the fundamental problem - it's because those in the sciences (and engineering) put little weight on the "arts" side of things (including things like writing) as they believe that stuff is a lot of fluff. (I can't generalize this, but if you ask a lot of people in IT, they seem to look down on studying anything that isn't related to their field - like why should a computer scientist or engineer take courses in philosophy or logic, or take classes in English or writing or even home economics).
Likewise, a lot of people take arts because they want to avoid the math and science.
Which is terrible - and it leads to this gulf of communications problems where journalists (or any writer, really) misinterprets some scientific or technical thing because the writer and the technical person are failing to communicate effectively (a problem on BOTH sides). Or how technical people look upon sales, marketing and PR people with disdain, because those people know how to relate to the public, but often fail to relate to the technical staff.
Perhaps instead of the token math or science class for an arts degree, or the token arts/business class for a technical/science degree, the two should be combined more tightly to produce a more well-rounded person who may be technical, but understands the other side.
Most javascript that aren't site related are third-party. So you can allow the site level javascript to run without allowing the evil infected (and most likely from Google*) javascript through.
If it wasn't for the craziness of some websites (eBay, Amazon, Google (and its properties - YouTube, etc), most news sites), you could get a pretty decent experience with enabling first-party only JavaScript. But most sites also seem to need stuff like jquery and the like.
It's why Flash or plugins is a bad idea over HTML5 - you cannot get the same amount of control through the plugin. Like how I can prevent my browser from loading up Google-owned DoubleClick javascript but only through an HTML web page. If the webpage has an embedded Flash object then that flash object can pull in javascript from anywhere, including blocked sites.
* - Remember, Google owns the vast majority of online ad networks out there, and from a branding perspective, you won't see something like "DoubleClick - a Google-owned company", So it would eventually be Google the one serving up the ads via one of their companies.
All the pieces were there.
Load code from remote server - Macs supported AppleTalk - a very early primititve networking system (when Farallon changed the physical layer from serial cables to silver satin phone cable, it really took off - given it used the unused pair and thus was really cheap to network Macs together).
Loading code I na VM/Sandbox - well, I believe Macs had at one point supported the UCSD p-system, which if you remember your history was the output of the Pascal compiler. Though, I think Macs evolved a bit from that - the API was distinctly Pascal, but it was Pascal compiled down to native, not p-code.
I suppose if you think about it, there were two things. The concept and the implementation. I believe one of the goals of the p-system was to be platform independent - by being bytecode that was run on the target platform.
And networking was old hat - even the Xerox Alto which Apple examined supported networking when the Mac was still being developed. It was how the Alto and the Star system was supposed to operate.
(That's not to say the Mac wasn't without innovations - it supported... overlapping windows, something the Alto didn't. Woz had a patent on it, too.)
Of course, the other thing is well, we've been adding layers of abstractions ever since (something about how there's nothing that can't be solved by adding another layer of abstraction). The web runs on a web browser, which for some (e.g., Firefox) runs platform independent code (e.g., XUL) that runs on a runtime environment (e.g., xulrunner), which runs on top of an OS which abstracts out hardware and provides a virtual environment for the program to run in...
Hardly anything, actually. The actual amount of encryption and decryption done using the RSA2048 key is quite small - really only about 128 to 256 bits or so.
Public key encryption is horrendously slow, too slow for modern usage, so what happens is the bulk encryption is done via a symmetric cipher, typically AES these days (previously it was 3DES or DES). Of course, for symmetric ciphers to work, you need to share a key. So what happens is the client generates a key for AES, encrypts it with the RSA2048 public key, and sends it to the server. The server decrypts the key using its RSA2048 private key and then communications take place via AES and that shared key.
The change from RSA1024 to RSA2048 should have minimal impact since it's only done on session setup while the actual communications use the far faster and more secure AES algorithm.
(Yes, public key encryption is weaker - you need more bits for the key to have the same level of protection as a symmetric cipher using way less bits.).
Hush now, the NSA wants you to believe that they capture data in flight, therefore you are more protected using bigger keys.
More bits is always better and more unbreakable! Google's working hard to protect your privacy!
To be honest, businesses should be putting open source under the same scrutiny they have for commercially licensed software as well.
Some actually have, imposing actual processes on the use of open-source code and auditing the code base to ensure proper adherence.
Any company dabbling should have a policy. One example would be that every OSS used - be it in a final code drop to the customer, or used for internal tools, must be approved by legal who can tell if using it will conflict with other licenses currently in use. Some things may be preapproved for external distribution (e.g., Linux kernel), others may be approved for internal use (build tools). Everything else must have approval to be used.
Sure it's "not as fun" because now if you want to use $COOL_NEW_SOFTWARE you need to submit requests to legal to review it and approve it, but it's the only way to stay "safe". And yes, I know legal teams that explicitly ban GPLv3 from their approval list - or rather, if it's GPLv3, unless you can make a really compelling case, it won't be approved (so you can use GCC, for example, which is GPLv3, but not other GPLv3 stuff).
Far too many companies have been getting away with the "it's free, we can do anything we want" mentality when they really should be imposing the same policies they have for commercial code.
Hell, half the products might accidentally be violating the GPL or the commercial license because someone linked a GPL'd library with commercially licensed code.
It's a cultural thing. Traditionally humans have associated insects with "dirty" and "rotten" food - flies and maggots and whatnot, so evolution has basically kept that alive that insects are bad since it's associated with bad food. Our cultural traits reinforce this belief and explains the general "yuckiness" of eating bugs.
Actually, that is possible given the ILS is NOTAM'd as non-operational. Just because it's non-operational doesn't mean "it doesn't work", it means "it doesn't work properly". There have been documented accidents where the primary cause has been reliance on an out-of-service navaid that just happened to be spewing navigational information.
And it's not to say the authorities don't TRY to warn people - first, the NOTAMs are part of every flight package on commercial carriers (even if it wasn't, it's still required reading for all pilots. The rule is to be familiar with all information regarding your flight, and NOTAMs generally are part of that (after all, there's a chance the airport can be closed!)).
But in the case of a navaid, the FAA also turns off the identifier beeper (morse code...) and sometimes even puts a voice on the frequency telling pilots the navaid they are using is out of service. The identifier is broadcast continually for positive identification that you're using the correct navaid - failure to hear the identifier or hearing the wrong one means you're probably not tuned corrected or it's broken. If there's a voice, well, you may want to listen since someone went through the trouble of recording it.
And yes, ILS is like any other navaid - you still have to tune and identify it to make sure you're not following the wrong one!
Actually, if you take a look at the entries, it's not really poor code, just highly skilled code.
Of course, if you've been in software development for any time, you'll realize that it's not the poor coders that do the crappiest hardest to maintain code, it's the prima donna ones that use all sorts of strange tricks that make code unreadable. At least poor coders generally produce bad code, but there's an honest effort that goes into it (like using the wrong sort, or not using an API that would've made life easier, etc.,). The hot shot coder would submit something like what you see in the IOCCC - it works like magic, but damn if you can figure it out.
And I believe one of the criteria has always been code aesthetics, hence why a lot of entries do a bunch of ASCII art stuff.
Yeah, but what can you do with BitCoin? Without using any currency exchange, that is.
At some point, it's got to be converted to currency and that's where the government gets you. The US government isn't worried about BitCoin because they know that fact - that the exchanges are the weak point in any currency system. (And no, BitCoin isn't special - it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoins, ISK, WoW Gold, whatever).
Thailand can easily ban BitCoin, as they also know that exchanges matter. These countries have extremely tight controls on their currency and often limit the amount of exchanging done (e.g., if you want to change Thai Baht to US dollars, and the total is say, larger than US$100, you need a government permit. Of course, the limit the other way is much higher...).
And it also means that any bitcoin wallets they fine, they can seize. Like they do with anyone holding excessive amounts of non-Thai currency.
Except they're not mutually exclusive. Other Apple stores may have the same policy, but the search is done on company time (there's nothing to say the manager can't search the bags prior to shift end and then hand them to the employee as they leave).
The complaint isn't about bag searches (most places have them in retail). It's about being forced to wait half an hour after shift end, on unpaid time to leave. Yeah, it's only half an hour, but given Apple retail store pay, that's easily another $5-10 a day (Apple tends to pay on the higher end of the scale).
So either other Apple stores do it better with the same policy and it's just a couple of douchebag managers (way too common on retail - a "manager" in retail parlance doesn't pay much more than a floor salesperson but has more power so the Peter Principle is very strong), or there's been a recent policy change. It's definitely not something that's been around a while (or we'd have heard it much earlier - Apple may be secretive, but ex-employees tend to make injustices transparent).
Except cars are ALL ABOUT AESTHETICS!
Which is one reason why when I saw the Tesla, I liked it - it looked like a normal car. The Leaf and other cars all look distinct, and to an extent, a bit ugly since they tend to resemble well, an econobox. At not so econobox prices. The Volt looks nicer, but it still looks... different.
And yes, while looks are determined somewhat by aerodynamics, how it looks overall is a very important part of what normal people look for. It's why people lust after Apple products (including hackers - go see a Pwn to Own sometime - people want the sexy Apple (OS X), followed by the Sony (Windows), last to fall is usually the Dell (Linux). You'd get better results if they were all MacBook Pros, to be honest), instead of preferring some crappy plastic laptop that Best Buy sells. They may buy said crap plastic laptop, but they won't like it for anything more than price.
And there are ways to get better gas mileage if you're willing to put up with a butt-ugly car - dimples, coning the back (where you put a huge cone that tapers to a point out the back - makes your car look ugly, but the reduced turbulence does have a marked effect). Of course, you don't see many of 'em on the roads because people don't want butt-ugly.
And if you ask people, looks are really what drive a purchase - they find a budget, then look around for a car that looks good within said budget.
And your proof is that Samsung made more profit than Apple?
Apple held the lead for over 5 years. Since the original iPhone, Apple's profits in the mobile sector (that included dumbphones and featurephones as well) has been over 50%, and at one point, 75%+. 3 out of every 4 dollars made went to Apple.
Now, Nokia was raking in tons more cash (revenue) than Apple, but after expenses (this is profits, remember) Apple made more money.
Combine Apple and Samsung and you're talking the vast majority of profits made (profit, not revenue) went between the two. Everyone else, including Nokia, Blackberry, HTC, LG, Motorola, ZTE, etc - are scrambling for the leftover dollars.
And other than Samsung (with like 90% Android marketshare - only 10-15% of which are due to the likes of the flagship models like the S3 and S4), HTC, LG, Motorola, etc., they ain't making much profit. (Most of the sales go towards the free Androids that are being pushed out - all those $0 phones, or where Samsung who releases a new non-flagship practically daily seems to thrive).
And market perception is turning soon that Android is Samsung (especially with Google's de-emphasis on the Android branding).
It's why it's no longer iOS vs. Android, it's TouchWiz Android vs. Stock Android. Or Google vs. Samsung. Or why everyone other than Samsung is really worried about Googorola (especially since it seems most Nexus devices are sold at cost - if Google can sell Motorola phones at practically cost, unless you're Samsung, it's going to be even harder to make money).
One, I think.
Zero if you include the "dupe April Fool" joke (the one about the evil bit).
And last I checked, we're in July, which is the seventh month of a standard Gregorian calendar. April is the fourth month. And that Fourth and Seventh are not the same number/
Except well, you have to override the receiver of all satellites it can see. Like here, they had to overpower the GPS satellites (it's not hard), but they also had to maintain the lock.
It's a lot more difficult If you want to misdirect a whole fleet of vehicles because the satellite signal has to follow everyone and in a sensible fashion. If you really wanted to take down GPS, it's far easier to just do a blanket jamming of it than to try to follow each and every vehicle you want to misdirect and aim the antenna at them.
GPS works by sending a timing pulse from the satellite to the ground - the receiver gets 3 or 4 of these timing pulses, correlates them to figure out how far each satellite is and then uses the spheres to find its location. Each receiver should generally come to a unique solution for position (because well, no two objects can occupy the same space).
If you broadcast this fake signal out, eventually someone will notice when their GPS suddenly gets a fix hundreds of meters away from them (each unit gets a slightly different signal from the satellite - when they all get the same signal, they all show the same location,). So it works great if you're in a fleet of trucks following some route, but if you're a bit further spaced out, the solution doesn't work so well and each will need its own antenna and transmitter to come up with plausible location information.
And that's the problem - it doesn't scale. The technique works if you want to misdirect a ship, a drone, a plane, or whatever, but to misdirect multiple requires multiple transmitters in order to send plausible yet fake data to each individual unit. It still is far easier to simply broadcast garbage on the GPS band so no GPS receiver can get a lock.
And then Apple will then take the world on and declare themselves to be the police on Chinese labor, and be able to shut down any factory that is not up to Apple's standards.
Apple will walk into whatever factory Samsung uses, conduct a surprise audit, and declare them to be not to Apple's standards and to be shut down until it's brought up to spec.
After all, the Foxconn lines making Apple products have improved, but the other Foxconn lines for HP and everyone else hasn't.
How did the prices get compared? In Australia, your taxes are built in, so when it sells for $60, you pay the store $60. In the US, when you pay $40, you play tax on top of that (ditto Canada) - which for US and Canada can be anywhere from 5-15%.
The other thing is consumer law. In Australia, you have something like a minimum warranty of 2 years on durable goods, while in US and Canada it's 90 days or so, maybe the manufacturer offers 1 year. When you consider Best Buy and the like will happily sell you an extended warranty for 2 years for 15% of the cost, that too narrows the margin even more. The rest just comes to the cost of doing business.
And yes, anyone who thinks the EU and Australia consumer protection laws are free is free to get the extended warranty when offered. They'll be slightly cheaper in the EU and the like because everyone is forced to get them, so instead of say 20% of shoppers opting for it in the US and Canada, they have 100% of shoppers doing the same thing, so they can charge a little less and make it up on volume.
The other thing is well, Australia is out of the way - getting product there usually means an extra shipping stop through Asia (China/Singapore) in order to have sufficient volume.
For digital goods, all Australia has to do is simply disallow exclusive distributorship as had been the case before - you no longer need to go through an Australian company to sell to Australians. (Of course, you lose out on Australian protections and taxes, but such is how the cookie crumbles).
That explains why Apple is moving some Macs to be Made in the US. And not just "Assembled in the US" either - the new forthcoming Mac Pro is supposed to use a lot of US manufacturing. About the only Chinese components would be sold in component form - the PCB, chassis and assembly are all to be done in the US so it actually qualifies as "Made in the USA" and not just "Assembled in the USA".
As was PCIe - it was designed in an environment where PCI was limiting - most PCI implementations were stuck with 32-bit 33MHz, despite enhancements to 100MHz (33/66/100), 64-bit, and other things. The problem was it wasn't scalable, and they needed a backwards-compatible mechanism for the next-generation of interconnect busses. (PCIe is logically compatible with PCI for legacy OSes)
In fact, PCIe was designed to be more forgiving than PCI, like how SATA is.
There's plenty of RAM in a phone - 1GB, 2GB are common now in the high end ones.
The reason mobile OSes suspend apps in the background is battery life - an app running in the background can easily gobble up enough CPU to drain the battery pretty darned quickly.
And most mobile developers are not power-aware enough to write good battery sparing code. It's far easier to suspend an app (even in RAM) than to keep it running. Those that need an app to run in the background can use the OS APIs to declare the intent to do so.
To not do so makes for a rather pathetic user experience - if they do nothing, their phone lasts all day. If they run some apps, suddnely they get 3 hours of battery life because one of those apps went wild. And they aren't going to investigate the issue - all they know is they have a crap phone where randomly one day you'll get great battery life and the next it'll die before noon.
Floating point arithmetic is in itself a bunch of approximations. It's the least precise computation you can do, and if you're not careful, errors accumulate rather rapidly.
In fact, most people using floating point probably don't realize that they order in which they do computations matter, nor despite having a standard, most hardware floating point units are NOT fully compliant.
This is probably a lot harder on the sciences (whether it's computer, weather, climate, whatever) who assume their computation hardware is "perfect" because understanding the low level is more an implementation concern.
A must-read article is What every computer scientist should know about floating point arithmetic (paywalled). A nice edited reprint is available as HTML (and PDF if you Google it - but Oracle seems to have it in HTML). This is one of those leaky abstractions - the hardware doing floating point is not precise at all and if you're not careful, you can lose significant figures very easily (you may think you're keeping 4 sigfigs throughout, but one error and you can be reduced to 1 due to approximations even when you really should have 4).
That's not the useful part of analytics - it's not useful to know what you bought so it can be suggested again.
It's useful to know what you however looked at, and bought. Lets say you bought a book from Amazon. Amazon knows they can't really suggest the book to you again, but they can see you bought the book, then see what else you bought nearby (either in the same cart or perhaps a few days before and after). Compare it with others who bought the same book and then recommend those items, or if someone else goes and looks it up, offers suggestions on those items.
Identification is useful, but not required for analytics. Perhaps a store notices that people are searching for a title suddenly - the analytical engine would be wise to bump that item to the front page. Or in a supermarket, where products are positioned is important as well. If the store notices chips and dip sales spike near superbowl day, well, the store will put out premium chips and dip near the checkout area so time-pressed people will just buy and go, spending more because they bought the expensive stuff. Likewise, they'll see sales of what kind of chips and dip are popular, and know to not put them on sale.
Oh, and there's always a very good chance analytics screws up - everyone is different and some people's tastes vary tremendously. If you're Amazon, you want to become the dominant online store people go to in order to capture an overall feel of a person's interests, rather than slices (e.g., some people go to Amazon for books and music, Newegg for computer parts, Dell for PCs, some electronics dealer for other stuff, etc - these stores get only partial analytics about you. But if you used Amazon to look up a lot of that stuff, even if you didn't buy, they build up a more complete profile). Like right now, Amazon.ca has a very incomplete profile on me because until recently, books, movies, music and games was all they sold, and I tended to purchase retail (it doesn't help that prices generally aren't better online for me).
Except now they track you as the funny guy with the funny hate that specked the camera. They don't care about your identity. They care about what you do in the store. Do you walk straight to the item? Do you look at other items? Do you compare items? Do you ask for help? Do you have a hard time finding help? (Yes, people do leave if they can't find help and uncontrolled observation can see that).
And yes, analytical engines are hard.
Except the problem with the suit is water collecting in the helmet.
So not only are you farting in a spacesuit that's keeping the air in, you're going to drown after breathing in your ass-air the entire time.
Only if it's the only means of security you have.
If you already have reasonable security measures adding a layer of obscurity can make life a lot simpler.
For example, let's say you have a web application that's properly secured and only for internal use, but available externally because people need access to it. Would you put it on port 80? Or if you can, put it on another port, say 8181? People who need to use it know about it, and even if it's found accidentally, it still is secure. Just you've eliminated 99% of random hacks and other crap that people are using and thus can deal with the actual legitimate hack attacks.
You've "obscured" the actual port, but have actual security behind it. The obscurity just makes it harder to find, but it isn't the sole means of security around.
Or to avoid filling up your SSH logs with invalid access attempts from script kiddies, you could put your secured SSH system on another port, then you can review your authentication logs without the noise of script attacks and see if someone is trying to hack in.