Any store like this would be one that I would not shop in. A Minority Report-type world makes me want to live off the grid.
So where do you shop? Online? Where every retailer online is getting analytics data already? This is offline retailers gathering analytics.
And yes, online retailers ALL capture analytics. Even if you don't order anything, they're tracking what you looked at, what you clicked more information on, what you clicked add to cart, what else you looked for, etc.
No, when I say "you" I don't mean YOU you. I mean "a shopper" - most of the analytics they get online and off are only for a shopping session and unless you let them, most end up treating it an an anonymous shopper because they cannot link it to an actual person, just someone shopped for A, B and C. Someone else shopped for A, B, C and D.
It's how places like Amazon gather the "shoppers also looked at" style things on every item page. Or "frequently bought together".
Not all this information needs to be personally identifiable to be useful - just figuring out what people get together is useful enough. Even figuring out what people buy on major events is valuable for store displays and placement of items.
Of course, making it personally identifiable makes it even more valuable, like how Target identifies parents who are expecting so can use it to give them coupons. It can be freaky too - like the father who got angry when Target sent his daughter coupons for baby stuff, only to learn that yes, his daughter WAS pregnant and expecting. Or like how Google detected the Chinese car scammers.
If you want to avoid analytics, then when you're in a store, make sure you walk all aisles in a simple pattern (up one, down the adjacent, etc) and stop at random items. Online, do the same thing - click around at random items.
Just that in the retail world, it's easier to be anonymous - you can do all your shopping and generate all the analytical data, and pay cash in the end so they won't even be able to associate a name with it.
Old fart here - I reserve a copy of the paper when I get breakfast at the cafe near work (twice a week), I come back and read it during lunch then leave it on the free magazine rack for others. If I don't reserve a copy then they are usually sold out by lunchtime. Of course the web is a much deeper and broader source of news than a city newspaper, but the morning paper and a frothy coffee is still a better way to relax.
I find the physical paper a better way to get a summary of news I didn't care to seek out yesterday, to better myself and learn more about the world.
Online news is a pull medium - you have to see it out, then pull the articles you want. This results in people really reading just the articles that interest them. Other articles get passed by the wayside because they're not interesting enough.
A newspaper though presents both articles side by side so you can read the interesting ones, then skim the other ones just to see what's going on in the rest of the world. You can't really do this online - because skimming the news would require opening the uninteresting articles as well which most people don't do. It's certainly more work than just skimming the page. And sometimes an interesting photo draws your attention that you'd miss online.
Hell, I find it harder to find news online - it takes a lot more work. The only reasonable way I've found is news aggregators like/. and other sites, but they don't cover outside the field type articles.
Yes and no, because what customers really don't need right now is another under appreciated app store. Or do we really want to go down the road where apps start costing a small fortune because every developer has to fork out $30 to every manufacturer for the privilege of listing their app in yet another store?
Ironically, it's what led to the popularity of the Apple App Store. The concept isn't new - app stores have been around before (Xbox Live Marketplace, on the original Xbox, and Steam, for example, both have been around longer).
But even dumb featurephones have had apps - they usually had a java section where you play some preloaded games and buy more. Of course, the real issue becomes that an app developer has to negotiate with various carriers to carry their app, and even then, it would only run on some phones.
That's why developers flocked to the Apple App Store - one place to sell apps on all phones, no need to negotiate with AT&T (at the time) to do business, or other carriers worldwide. Instead, they just deal with Apple (whose terms were far better as well) and it was available worldwide.
Most of the big guys in the mobile app genre (Glu, etc) rapidly abandoned their old business because it was much easier to deal with Apple and appear on iPhones worldwide than to deal with 100 individual carriers and 10s of phones on each.
Of course, Samsung also commands like 80% of the Android marketshare (note - while the popular flagships like the S3 and S4 are the largest proportion of them, they're still only about 10-15% of phones Samsung sells. Given how many phones Samsung makes, the sales drift that way - something like for every S3 or S4 sold, Samsung sells 8 other Android phones).
And Samsung is aggressively pushing for developers as well - they've been heavily promoting a 0% take for indie developers. Yes, 0%.
Yes, Google paid ABP to whitelist their ads. And since they take payments to be put on their whitelist... it's conceivable other ad networks are there as well. And who knows where Google will go next - considering they own the vast majority of advertising companies out there, who knows if Google is pushing for their other companies to be added...
they have no business demanding, or even asking, for its removal. period....
Technically, trademarks have to be enforced - otherwise you end up with escalators and the like.
Basically, a trademark owner has to do two things - use it or lose it, and defend the mark. The first means you cannot register something you're not going to use - in fact, if you don't use it, you can lose it (it was one of the arguments Apple put up for iPhone - because Cisco wasn't actively using it - which forced Cisco to slap "Iphone" stickers on their voip boxes). The second means when you see someone else using your trademark, you have to defend it or risk it being genericized (like escalator).
The latter you see all the time - when Apple sues someone for using Apple or the logo, or when someone copied the Johnny Walker design on their movie, etc. Of course, the response varies, the usual MO is a C&D letter which can either demand a full take down, or some licensing terms.
Usually all you need is a response saying no, it doesn't apply, blah blah blah and do nothing. Because of the legal requirements of defense, usually the takedowns are sent far and wide to show that they are doing it, and it usually hits everyone who incidentally uses the mark in passing.
There are lots of "third-party" Android chargers out there -- ordinary MicroUSB things. If "counterfeit" (i.e. non-Samsung, or whatever) chargers were a problem, wouldn't this happen all the time with Androids?
It does on the ultra cheap chargers - the usual symptom is you can't use the touchscreen while it's plugged in.
In fact, the quality of fake Apple chargers is shockingly bad (pun intended) - the outsides look damn real as well.
Ken Shirriff has taken apart and analyzed many power supplies. Here's a writeup on a fake charger and a writeup on the real thing. The real one stuffs a lot of protection, uses higher quality parts, and keeps to clearance and creepage distances.
And he goes through a dozen other chargers to show that the good stuff is quite good (Apple's not the best - the Samsung cube charger is better), but the fake stuff is downright shoddy.
And think of it this way - a few of those fake chargers have the USB port a couple of millimeters away from the AC - it doesn't take much for the AC line voltage to jump the gap, especially on a more humid day.
General consensus seems to be to stick to name brand real stuff.
30C (86F) is stifling heat? We laugh at that in the Northern US. True, it would be a little uncomfortable indoors without A/C or at least good ventilation, but you would have to start talking at least 35C or maybe 40C before making US southerners uncomfortable outside. (OK, you'd have to talk 95F to 104F, since they would mostly just look at you funny and wonder what planet you're from if you talk Celsius.)
Depends on the location and average temperatures - take that same southerner and put them on the US-Canada border and they'd probably freeze while everyone else goes about their daily business.
Even here in Canada A/C is optional - most houses have heating, but cooling is optional. Of course, it also gets to be 28-30C in the summer (or higher - 35C isn't unusual for a week), and without A/C, at that it's considered unbearable. Especially indoors when you have to shut your windows as well (because it doesn't cool off until 11pm at night).
If at any time during execution of unsigned code your network connection drops, or you sign out of Xbox Live, the hypervisor/debugger forcefully resets the console.
Well that sounds really un-appealing, I have to say... I develop a lot of times in places where I have spotty connectivity. I'll for sure wait and see what reports are like in developing for the system before I spring for one...
It's no different than if you sign into Xbox Live and play a game you bought there - if your network connection drops, boom you're kicked out of the game as your license requires either playing on the original console you downloaded it on (or annual transfer), or being signed into the same Xbox Live account that purchased it.
It's one of the few times where the daily checkin was better - as long as you were signed in, dropping your connection didn't do a thing to your game - you could continue playing to your heart's content until it re-establishes. If you've got a spotty connection, as long as it could check in once a day, you're golden versus having to pray your connection doesn't drop while playing on another console.
It's not to save space. Other manufacturers do thinner, lighter laptops with real RAM sockets. NEC's LaVie ultrabook range, for example.
Most however, don't. The ones that do tend to be a fair bit thicker (I think the height of an SODIMM slot is what, 4mm?). Or larger, like a 15" model.
But the Dells, Lenovos and other units you can actually buy tend to have soldered on RAM as well.
But to be honest, other than upgrading it once, does anyone really upgrade the RAM in their PC? Most people I bet don't, and it's not too much more to overbuy at the beginning given how fast things change.
Sometimes standalone units are much better. I have a TomTom mobile app on my phone and a builtin GPS. Alot of times I prefer the directions the app gives.
Generally standalones are better.
The only real difference is that If you want a larger screen, yes, the center console one will generally be bigger, neater and all around better looking. But when it comes to using them, the standalones generally fare better (or your phone).
Firstly, they're far quicker to get map updates and updates tend to be much cheaper (getting that OEM map update disc is $ARM and $LEG a lot of the time), plus there's the trim level thing (it's probably integrating everything together, rather than just a GPS), etc. etc. etc.
Me too. I see cops all the time by abandoned roadside gas stations in the desert. Do they really think they are incospicuous there? I don't intentionally speed, but I know if I see a car a mile up the road at the deserted gas station that it is a cop, and I double-check my speedometer.
Perhaps that's the point - instead of handing out tickets, they could park conspicuously and therefore force everyone to slow down so everyone's doing the limit on that stretch of road.
Some people have gotten just as creative - one guy hated all the people using his neighbourhood streets to bypass traffic jams and basically took a pair of coveralls (blue), stuffed it, put a reflective vest on it, and put it in a lawn chair holding a coffee can (painted black) with a stick on it. He put it on the sidewalk parallel to traffic. Had the desired effect of calming traffic down as people slowed down for the "cop".
It is (or should be) well known that signs like these are a lie. All my life I have seen these "speed limit enforced by aircraft" signs, which tells me that there is no speed enforcement on that road at all.
If there was actual speed enforcement on the road, they wouldn't jeopardize the revenue stream by putting up signs.
Sometimes they have to do it because it's the law. Like why do cops put up notices of where they're going to erect speed traps? Hell, there are plenty of apps (on every platform, including iOS) that scrape these public notices of speed traps and pop up alerts when you approach one.
And believe it or not, people STILL get caught. Either stupidity, ignorance, or what. Or probably texting and didn't see the cop.
What I would like to know is what (if anything) can be done to verify keys without a CA? I don't know that much about crypto, so am genuinely curious. Are there techniques to do this? (Diffie-Hellman-Merkle?)
Well, you can always fingerprint a key and verify with the owner of the site that the fingerprint is correct.
The CA model is called a "web of trust" model - it relies on you trusting someone and then seeing if a key you've been given was signed by someone you trust. In the CA model, the CA signs public keys with their private key. Your browser looks at the certificate and sees if it can verify it against the pre-stored CA public key (you presumably trust the browser vendor to give you good keys - though you're able to import the CA cert yourself if you don't trust them). If so, it's considered "trusted".
It's called a web of trust because it starts with someone. A more personal example would be your friend gives you his public key - you trust it because he physically handed it to you and for the most part, he appears to be himself. Now, your friend sends you some public keys online. You verify those keys against your trusted key you got earlier. If they match, you trust your friend has given you good keys. (This is the weakest link - which is why CAs get compromised).
Of course, you can always verify the keys yourself - you can choose to meet with those people and compare the public keys you got (or a subset, i.e., the fingerprint).
Basically, for public key encryption, the weakest link has always been trusting that the key you have is legit.
Nexus devices don't have sd slots because Google doesn't want Microsoft making any more money off them. SD requires an exFAT licence.
Only if you want to support SD cards > 64GB (aka SD XC). SDHC cards need a FAT license though. Though I'm fairly certain you can probably reformat 64GB SDXC cards with FAT32 and have it still work fine in everything.
Google doesn't want SD slots and gives pitifully low storage because they're a cloud (advertising) company. You put your music on Google Music, stream your Google Play videos you bought, etc.
What exactly is the problem this legislation is trying to solve? I have seen all sorts of weird stuff on the internet in my years (plus had a few friends that *loved* to send me really wacky things) and yet, somehow, I ended up not being some sort of crazy deviant. But wait - One in a hundred thousand million will be! We must protect the children by censoring half of the internet for the entire nation's population!
Hacking is bad. Censoring the internet for the entire population of your country? Much, much, MUCH worse.
Easy. The problem of parents wanting a babysitter that's basically free and keeps them from actually having to parent their children. So they can plop them in front of a computer or tablet and be done with their child rearing duties.
And yes, I blame lazy parents - most of whom probably have children because "it's trendy" and social pressures to well, have kids they don't really have the will to take care of properly.
Tablets are Entertainment Consumption devices. Reading, Music, playing games, surfing the internet, youtube etc etc etc.
They pretty much suck as content creation devices. You can create using them, but if your business is creation of content, you're not going to be served well by a tablet. iPad with Keyboard and case is 2/3 as expensive as a low end MacBook. Guess which one works better for which?
iPad $500 + $100 professional style case w/keyboard = $600
Macbook = $930
If the price difference for a general computing device isn't worth $300, then chances are you aren't creating content.
Guess what? Most people are NOT content creators. Unless you mean by content creators Grandma who posts a photo on Flickr every once in a while.
And a laptop is a great tool, but there are times it may not be the most appropriate tool - because its formfactor gets in the way (if you want to read a book, it's easier on a tablet than a laptop, ditto a movie - the keyboard on both gets in the way).
In fact, the ultimate in content creation people often use tablets! Check out any filmmaker and you'll see them often using tablets - to hold scripts, storyboards, animatics, and dailies.
And yes, sometimes if you only need a minor fixup, a tablet beats waking up the laptop and fixing it there (unless you use an Apple one where Apple seems to be turning them into instant-on devices - Windows still seems to want to take 30 seconds or so to settle down after waking up).
Microsoft of all companies set the expectation here. Your $500 laptop from 2000 running XP STILL gets security updates every patch Tuesday. And certainly Android can't hold a candle to Wintel when it comes to fragmentation.
Actually, fragmentation on Wintel's a lot less than on ARM. The basic PC architecture is still the same as it was back in 1981 - you have memory at 0, BIOS starts 1MB in, video is somewhere between 640k-1MB, etc.
And when Windows came around, fragmentation decreased further still - there's only three video graphics providers - Intel (the largest by far), NVidia and AMD. For CPUs, there's two big ones and smaller ones (Intel, AMD, Via and others).
Think of it this way... A company like Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Asus, etc., produce the hardware. The OS is completely produced by someone else - Apple, Microsoft, Canonical (Linux), RedHat, etc.. The OS vendors sell a product that runs on a PC produced by a third party.
But on a smartphone, the vendor produces the OS as well as the hardware. So Samsung, LG, HTC, Apple, produce hardware and then they take what they have (either internally or what Google provides as a base) and then adapt it for the platform - adding their own stuff to the code, modifying the code so it works on the hardware, etc. Then doing a final build that gets shipped out. Google mandates a minimum level of compatibility, but that's it. In effect, the OS is completely customized per device and you cannot use a Gnex Android image on a Galaxy S4.
It's gotten so bad that Linus has spoken up about how crummy the ARM branch of Linux is because of the way it ends up being and he wants one Linux kernel to rule them all. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen due to individual SoC differences (where RAM is, where a serial port is, where ROM is, where other peripherals are). Though it's getting there with Device Tree and having vendor specific kernels able to boot up multiple vendor SoCs. (RAM is a tricky one because kernel startup requires running from it, until the MMU is turned on and the memory map is homogenized).
For people in China, it probably was, until this news!
Problem is, the Play Store is not available in China. In fact, it's not available in a lot of places.
And even in the US there are many legitimate reasons WHY you'd want to "allow non-marketplace apps" to be checked. Say, the Amazon App Store. Or Humble Bundle for Android. Or many legitimate sellers of Android apps who refuse to use the Play Store.
The problem with Android is it's an "all or none" proposition - you can choose the safety of the Play Store, or you can have it all. You can't choose the safety of the Play Store and other stores you trust (though there is legitimate reason why it's not necessarily a good idea).
The legitimate reason? It doesn't really protect anything - thanks to the dancing pigs (or rabbits) issue, even if you made it so a user could "approve" a store, guess what? They'll approve illegitimate ones because they want the app.
Being a software engineer myself I understand the sense of excitement accomplishment after completing internal testing. But as with many projects, as soon as this leaves the controlled "lab testing" environment it's a whole different ball game. Until then it's still a white paper product and I'd suggest remaining cautiously optimistic...
It probably has been well tested "in the real world" - check out Google Goggles sometime (which is available for Android and iOS).
In fact, this probably came out of the stuff that Goggles does - where you snap a photo and Goggles figures out what's in it. If you snap a QR code, it'll decode it, a barcode, it'll pop up a Google search for that product. Other items it'll attempt to either OCR it or perform object recognition. Basically it gives a list of things (snap a sign and it'll probably try to OCR it, offer you a translation, tell you what kinds of cars it sees, etc).
"Atari Games" (the arcade division) existed under that name until well into the nineties, and after that as "Midway Games West", though as Midway left the arcade market in the early-noughties, that's now dead.
Midway Games was owned by Williams since the late 80s so Midway Games West would've been an absorption by Midway into the Williams fold (Atari Games became Midway Games West to avoid trademark disputes with Hasbro). As part of the restructuring in the late 90s, Williams spun off Midway as a semi-independent company which created a pile of problems when in 1999, Williams shut down their pinball division.
In a series of incredibly complex deals, Midway picked up Williams' video game assets, while giving Williams its pinball assets.
Today, Midway is dead (bankruptcy) since 2009. But technically, they've owned Atari Games until 2003 when they closed Midway games West.
And Atari Games became Time Warner Interactive, which was acquired completely by Midway in the early 90s, though it continued to operate under the Atari Games label for obvious reasons (brand recognition).
End result is a huge mess as coin-op giants like Williams/Bally picked up arcade games then spun them off and closed down everything but slot machines. (These days, arcade gaming is dead because of well, the iPhone. Pinball though, is seeing a resurgence).
You get the same thing on other media as well - even analog. (Example: Macrovision, which plays with the sync and saturation levels, so that analog TVs intended for over-the-air reception (usually) correct the distortion as if it were a fading signal, while videotape machines copy the "fading" picture and regenerate a non-fading sync, so the copy isn't corrected when viewed.)
Actually, Macrovision played havoc with the sync pulses - it would produce a deliberately too weak one (but enough that most VCRs could lock on) and then produce a strong one, etc..
What happens is the TV is looking for a sync pulse and sees it, even though it's non-standard (it's a case of basically seeing what you expect - the TV is looking for a pulse, it sees the beginnings and locks on).
A VCR though wants to ensure that what gets recorded on tape (which has a poor dynamic range) is as strong as possible, so the weak pulse causes the VCR's AGC circuits to kick up the gain for the frame. The strong pulse causes the AGC to kick it down. The fact that the video signal is otherwise normal means the AGC has now made it clip in the first case, and suppressed it in the second.
And in fact, it was technology (and pressure from Macrovision) that really resulted in it working - older VCRs had slower AGC circuits and could play it just fine as the AGC never messed with the signal before the pulses reset themselves. But as technology and Macrovision pressure increased, the AGC circuits got better and produced this artifacting.
It's why the simplest cure was a signal regenerator - it normalized the pulses back to standard.
Other formats are usually readable by a device with fairly closed firmware that is designed to spec. Nobody gives you a CD-ROM drive with access to head positioning servo loop and access to the raw bitstream after clock recovery. Yet this is almost what you has on Apple ][ - that's why the floppy controller hardware was so simple (a couple stock TTL chips, maybe a PAL or two). The magic was in the software (firmware). Same goes for a modern CD-ROM drive, but the firmware is not really easily amenable to hacking, and you can't really replace it as a matter of normal operation of the equipment. On Apple ][ it was trivial, since the firmware ran on the main CPU. On a CD-ROM, or really any other media access device, there's a dedicated CPU - these days it's most often a proprietary SoC with documentation available under an NDA only if you commit to a certain purchase volume. Never mind that the amount of code is orders of magnitude beyond what was routine in Apple ][ days.
You can still do enough to mess with the disc - a modern CD-ROM or DVD-ROM supports standard cd-ripping, and on data CDs, the first track can be reset back into playing as audio for ripping. Or you could embed a fake audio track on a CD that actually has data on it. There's enough flexibility in the CD-ROM spec because it was designed for audio first - data was a hack.
DVDs are a bit trickier, but I'm sure all the copyprotection tricks movies use can be employed for regular data as well. Blu-Ray likewise, though it has some tricks of its own embedded in the firmware.
They could try selling them without warranty or with a very simple 30 day exchange warranty for defective products, but that could leave them with a PR problem when people run into problems
Plus it would be outright illegal in most of the world, most importantly the EU, which is the biggest market for tech products (considerably larger than the US, sorry dudes).
No, you can still sell 'em without warranty. Some people will want one and buy a warranty. EU folks just don't get a choice in the matter - they're forced to buy the warranty.
(Which is why when people say "warranties are bette in the EU and it's so consumer friendly" - you have to realize that if you want EU style warranties, just say "yes" to an extended warranty when the salesguy asks. It's the same thing and one factor In why stuff costs more in the EU).
So if a warranty-less Surface costs $250 in the US, and you can pay $75 for a 2-year warranty, it'll be $325 in the EU (warranty included). Of course, given the size of the EU, perhaps they could cut the warranty cost down some since everyone's buying it and make it $300.
This is a software implementation. Commercial companies must license necessary patents separately, just as they do when they implement MPEG-2, H.264, etc.
No, companies doing MPEG-2, h.264, etc just buy a blanket patent license from MPEG-LA - a set fee schedule basically means you pay like 25 cents per device and you've licensed all the patents.
Problem is. h.265's patent pool is still being created and rates negotiated (and how much out of that fee does everyone get).
So it's similar to implementing say a cellphone, where you must strike separate deals with everyone in order to license all the patents. But in a year or two, it'll probably be a patent pool which makes life easier.
Of course, it also shows how much marketing (yes, marketing) needs to go into VP9 - h.264 is too established for VP8 to be of any threat. But the next-gen codec field is wide open - will it be h.265? Or VP9? Or something else? (All it would take is Google to heavily promote and advertise VP9, and grease enough people so that MPEG-5 can include VP9 as a codec in part of the standard).
Ok, let's be fundamental about this. Isn't it strange that we should consider "software" as different from other intellectual property? If X hours of work have been invested into the invention of a clever software routine, then, it would be strange if a patent could not be granted for that work while a patent would be granted for some physical apparatus that also took X hours to develop.
Fundamentally, software is already different from other intellectual property as it also has copyright protection. Why should one body of work be allowed to be protected under two completely different IP regimes? Copyright protection is enough to encourage the advancement of the arts and sciences of software. Patents appear to be a hindrance.
Which is why we should abolish software from copyrights AND patents.
Because prior to software, the world was simple. You wrote something creative, and it got copyrighted and enjoyed.
You make something useful (as opposed to write), and that thing gets patent protection.
Copyright applied to written works (not just books, but music, movies, etc). Patents applied to "stuff" that did something.
But then software comes around and screws it all up. First, it's written. But it can also do stuff. It can be used to replace a mechanical apparatus with something simpler (a software controller replacing hardware). It can "be" stuff - e.g., the software you write for an FPGA or ASIC gets boiled down to actual hardware. And now, with 3D printers, it can "create" stuff.
And yet, it's also a form of mathematics.
Perhaps it's time to reform it - software can neither be copyrighted, nor patented (you can't copyright an ASIC, after all). At the same time, get rid of all the wrangling and stuff we did to copyright and patent law to accommodate what really shouldn't be accommodated. From copyright law, we excise the right to make a necessary copy to run the program (it was always pretty hazy) among others. From patents, we excise its mathematical capabilities.
At the same time, we add IP protection for software, because we need it - FOSS or commercially licensed software can't live without it. But instead of seeking patents or copyrights, we create a new category - software. This protection applies to all software in its original source form. As whether the final output is an executable binary, a netlist, a set of masks, whatever, going from the source to the output is a mechanical translation (using manual or automated tools) and the output can be derived from the input, which means only the input needs protection. (Yet another way software is different since it takes on so many intermediary forms).
This software protection will apply for a duration more appropriate for software. And it covers all software code. We can debate about stuff like algorithms and implementations separately (right now, that's where patents and copyright clash, respectively) and take a more holistic view of doing things.
This way things get saner. It doesn't make sense that some complex machine can get patents, but if you replace much of the complexity with software to do the same thing, that software cannot be patented. Or what actually is copyrighted when you copyright software - the source code, the binary output? Both?
The reality is, well, we've created a new form of IP that's quite unlike all the previous forms of IP that we've been accustomed to for hundreds of years. It's completely unique to software, and it and its unique properties should be respected. Trying to shoehorn software into copyright and patent law leads to the current mess we're in now.
And yes, it could mean something gets protected multiple times. If you have a complex electromechanical machine that's highly patented, then replace its innards with stuff that's much simpler and put that complexity in software, well, the simpler innards may not be patentable anymore, but the software controlling it certainly can be si
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So where do you shop? Online? Where every retailer online is getting analytics data already? This is offline retailers gathering analytics.
And yes, online retailers ALL capture analytics. Even if you don't order anything, they're tracking what you looked at, what you clicked more information on, what you clicked add to cart, what else you looked for, etc.
No, when I say "you" I don't mean YOU you. I mean "a shopper" - most of the analytics they get online and off are only for a shopping session and unless you let them, most end up treating it an an anonymous shopper because they cannot link it to an actual person, just someone shopped for A, B and C. Someone else shopped for A, B, C and D.
It's how places like Amazon gather the "shoppers also looked at" style things on every item page. Or "frequently bought together".
Not all this information needs to be personally identifiable to be useful - just figuring out what people get together is useful enough. Even figuring out what people buy on major events is valuable for store displays and placement of items.
Of course, making it personally identifiable makes it even more valuable, like how Target identifies parents who are expecting so can use it to give them coupons. It can be freaky too - like the father who got angry when Target sent his daughter coupons for baby stuff, only to learn that yes, his daughter WAS pregnant and expecting. Or like how Google detected the Chinese car scammers.
If you want to avoid analytics, then when you're in a store, make sure you walk all aisles in a simple pattern (up one, down the adjacent, etc) and stop at random items. Online, do the same thing - click around at random items.
Just that in the retail world, it's easier to be anonymous - you can do all your shopping and generate all the analytical data, and pay cash in the end so they won't even be able to associate a name with it.
I find the physical paper a better way to get a summary of news I didn't care to seek out yesterday, to better myself and learn more about the world.
Online news is a pull medium - you have to see it out, then pull the articles you want. This results in people really reading just the articles that interest them. Other articles get passed by the wayside because they're not interesting enough.
A newspaper though presents both articles side by side so you can read the interesting ones, then skim the other ones just to see what's going on in the rest of the world. You can't really do this online - because skimming the news would require opening the uninteresting articles as well which most people don't do. It's certainly more work than just skimming the page. And sometimes an interesting photo draws your attention that you'd miss online.
Hell, I find it harder to find news online - it takes a lot more work. The only reasonable way I've found is news aggregators like /. and other sites, but they don't cover outside the field type articles.
Because the walk-in line is a mile long so unless you want to wait hours to eat, it's not an option.
The other options are take out, or eating at a less busy time - I don't know what the "good times" are, but perhaps eating earlier would be better.
Ironically, it's what led to the popularity of the Apple App Store. The concept isn't new - app stores have been around before (Xbox Live Marketplace, on the original Xbox, and Steam, for example, both have been around longer).
But even dumb featurephones have had apps - they usually had a java section where you play some preloaded games and buy more. Of course, the real issue becomes that an app developer has to negotiate with various carriers to carry their app, and even then, it would only run on some phones.
That's why developers flocked to the Apple App Store - one place to sell apps on all phones, no need to negotiate with AT&T (at the time) to do business, or other carriers worldwide. Instead, they just deal with Apple (whose terms were far better as well) and it was available worldwide.
Most of the big guys in the mobile app genre (Glu, etc) rapidly abandoned their old business because it was much easier to deal with Apple and appear on iPhones worldwide than to deal with 100 individual carriers and 10s of phones on each.
Of course, Samsung also commands like 80% of the Android marketshare (note - while the popular flagships like the S3 and S4 are the largest proportion of them, they're still only about 10-15% of phones Samsung sells. Given how many phones Samsung makes, the sales drift that way - something like for every S3 or S4 sold, Samsung sells 8 other Android phones).
And Samsung is aggressively pushing for developers as well - they've been heavily promoting a 0% take for indie developers. Yes, 0%.
Are you sure Facebook didn't pay off the the ABP folks like Google did?.
Yes, Google paid ABP to whitelist their ads. And since they take payments to be put on their whitelist... it's conceivable other ad networks are there as well. And who knows where Google will go next - considering they own the vast majority of advertising companies out there, who knows if Google is pushing for their other companies to be added...
Technically, trademarks have to be enforced - otherwise you end up with escalators and the like.
Basically, a trademark owner has to do two things - use it or lose it, and defend the mark. The first means you cannot register something you're not going to use - in fact, if you don't use it, you can lose it (it was one of the arguments Apple put up for iPhone - because Cisco wasn't actively using it - which forced Cisco to slap "Iphone" stickers on their voip boxes). The second means when you see someone else using your trademark, you have to defend it or risk it being genericized (like escalator).
The latter you see all the time - when Apple sues someone for using Apple or the logo, or when someone copied the Johnny Walker design on their movie, etc. Of course, the response varies, the usual MO is a C&D letter which can either demand a full take down, or some licensing terms.
Usually all you need is a response saying no, it doesn't apply, blah blah blah and do nothing. Because of the legal requirements of defense, usually the takedowns are sent far and wide to show that they are doing it, and it usually hits everyone who incidentally uses the mark in passing.
It does on the ultra cheap chargers - the usual symptom is you can't use the touchscreen while it's plugged in.
In fact, the quality of fake Apple chargers is shockingly bad (pun intended) - the outsides look damn real as well.
This guy tears apart a few $10 chargers he was given, very Apple-like adapters.
Ken Shirriff has taken apart and analyzed many power supplies. Here's a writeup on a fake charger and a writeup on the real thing. The real one stuffs a lot of protection, uses higher quality parts, and keeps to clearance and creepage distances.
And he goes through a dozen other chargers to show that the good stuff is quite good (Apple's not the best - the Samsung cube charger is better), but the fake stuff is downright shoddy.
And think of it this way - a few of those fake chargers have the USB port a couple of millimeters away from the AC - it doesn't take much for the AC line voltage to jump the gap, especially on a more humid day.
General consensus seems to be to stick to name brand real stuff.
Depends on the location and average temperatures - take that same southerner and put them on the US-Canada border and they'd probably freeze while everyone else goes about their daily business.
Even here in Canada A/C is optional - most houses have heating, but cooling is optional. Of course, it also gets to be 28-30C in the summer (or higher - 35C isn't unusual for a week), and without A/C, at that it's considered unbearable. Especially indoors when you have to shut your windows as well (because it doesn't cool off until 11pm at night).
It's no different than if you sign into Xbox Live and play a game you bought there - if your network connection drops, boom you're kicked out of the game as your license requires either playing on the original console you downloaded it on (or annual transfer), or being signed into the same Xbox Live account that purchased it.
It's one of the few times where the daily checkin was better - as long as you were signed in, dropping your connection didn't do a thing to your game - you could continue playing to your heart's content until it re-establishes. If you've got a spotty connection, as long as it could check in once a day, you're golden versus having to pray your connection doesn't drop while playing on another console.
Most however, don't. The ones that do tend to be a fair bit thicker (I think the height of an SODIMM slot is what, 4mm?). Or larger, like a 15" model.
But the Dells, Lenovos and other units you can actually buy tend to have soldered on RAM as well.
But to be honest, other than upgrading it once, does anyone really upgrade the RAM in their PC? Most people I bet don't, and it's not too much more to overbuy at the beginning given how fast things change.
Generally standalones are better.
The only real difference is that If you want a larger screen, yes, the center console one will generally be bigger, neater and all around better looking. But when it comes to using them, the standalones generally fare better (or your phone).
Firstly, they're far quicker to get map updates and updates tend to be much cheaper (getting that OEM map update disc is $ARM and $LEG a lot of the time), plus there's the trim level thing (it's probably integrating everything together, rather than just a GPS), etc. etc. etc.
Perhaps that's the point - instead of handing out tickets, they could park conspicuously and therefore force everyone to slow down so everyone's doing the limit on that stretch of road.
Some people have gotten just as creative - one guy hated all the people using his neighbourhood streets to bypass traffic jams and basically took a pair of coveralls (blue), stuffed it, put a reflective vest on it, and put it in a lawn chair holding a coffee can (painted black) with a stick on it. He put it on the sidewalk parallel to traffic. Had the desired effect of calming traffic down as people slowed down for the "cop".
Sometimes they have to do it because it's the law. Like why do cops put up notices of where they're going to erect speed traps? Hell, there are plenty of apps (on every platform, including iOS) that scrape these public notices of speed traps and pop up alerts when you approach one.
And believe it or not, people STILL get caught. Either stupidity, ignorance, or what. Or probably texting and didn't see the cop.
Well, you can always fingerprint a key and verify with the owner of the site that the fingerprint is correct.
The CA model is called a "web of trust" model - it relies on you trusting someone and then seeing if a key you've been given was signed by someone you trust. In the CA model, the CA signs public keys with their private key. Your browser looks at the certificate and sees if it can verify it against the pre-stored CA public key (you presumably trust the browser vendor to give you good keys - though you're able to import the CA cert yourself if you don't trust them). If so, it's considered "trusted".
It's called a web of trust because it starts with someone. A more personal example would be your friend gives you his public key - you trust it because he physically handed it to you and for the most part, he appears to be himself. Now, your friend sends you some public keys online. You verify those keys against your trusted key you got earlier. If they match, you trust your friend has given you good keys. (This is the weakest link - which is why CAs get compromised).
Of course, you can always verify the keys yourself - you can choose to meet with those people and compare the public keys you got (or a subset, i.e., the fingerprint).
Basically, for public key encryption, the weakest link has always been trusting that the key you have is legit.
Only if you want to support SD cards > 64GB (aka SD XC). SDHC cards need a FAT license though. Though I'm fairly certain you can probably reformat 64GB SDXC cards with FAT32 and have it still work fine in everything.
Google doesn't want SD slots and gives pitifully low storage because they're a cloud (advertising) company. You put your music on Google Music, stream your Google Play videos you bought, etc.
Easy. The problem of parents wanting a babysitter that's basically free and keeps them from actually having to parent their children. So they can plop them in front of a computer or tablet and be done with their child rearing duties.
And yes, I blame lazy parents - most of whom probably have children because "it's trendy" and social pressures to well, have kids they don't really have the will to take care of properly.
Oh, and apparently, the idea is infectious. Conservative MP Joy Smith (Manitoba) has said she wants Canada to adopt the same thing.
Once this applies to NFC, things will get interesting as just reading NFC gets you the track2 information of a credit card.
Or take two smartphones and "pay" using the smartphone while you bill it to someone else without having to bump them. (NFC proxy).
Guess what? Most people are NOT content creators. Unless you mean by content creators Grandma who posts a photo on Flickr every once in a while.
And a laptop is a great tool, but there are times it may not be the most appropriate tool - because its formfactor gets in the way (if you want to read a book, it's easier on a tablet than a laptop, ditto a movie - the keyboard on both gets in the way).
In fact, the ultimate in content creation people often use tablets! Check out any filmmaker and you'll see them often using tablets - to hold scripts, storyboards, animatics, and dailies.
And yes, sometimes if you only need a minor fixup, a tablet beats waking up the laptop and fixing it there (unless you use an Apple one where Apple seems to be turning them into instant-on devices - Windows still seems to want to take 30 seconds or so to settle down after waking up).
Actually, fragmentation on Wintel's a lot less than on ARM. The basic PC architecture is still the same as it was back in 1981 - you have memory at 0, BIOS starts 1MB in, video is somewhere between 640k-1MB, etc.
And when Windows came around, fragmentation decreased further still - there's only three video graphics providers - Intel (the largest by far), NVidia and AMD. For CPUs, there's two big ones and smaller ones (Intel, AMD, Via and others).
Think of it this way... A company like Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Acer, Asus, etc., produce the hardware. The OS is completely produced by someone else - Apple, Microsoft, Canonical (Linux), RedHat, etc.. The OS vendors sell a product that runs on a PC produced by a third party.
But on a smartphone, the vendor produces the OS as well as the hardware. So Samsung, LG, HTC, Apple, produce hardware and then they take what they have (either internally or what Google provides as a base) and then adapt it for the platform - adding their own stuff to the code, modifying the code so it works on the hardware, etc. Then doing a final build that gets shipped out. Google mandates a minimum level of compatibility, but that's it. In effect, the OS is completely customized per device and you cannot use a Gnex Android image on a Galaxy S4.
It's gotten so bad that Linus has spoken up about how crummy the ARM branch of Linux is because of the way it ends up being and he wants one Linux kernel to rule them all. Unfortunately, that's unlikely to happen due to individual SoC differences (where RAM is, where a serial port is, where ROM is, where other peripherals are). Though it's getting there with Device Tree and having vendor specific kernels able to boot up multiple vendor SoCs. (RAM is a tricky one because kernel startup requires running from it, until the MMU is turned on and the memory map is homogenized).
Problem is, the Play Store is not available in China. In fact, it's not available in a lot of places.
And even in the US there are many legitimate reasons WHY you'd want to "allow non-marketplace apps" to be checked. Say, the Amazon App Store. Or Humble Bundle for Android. Or many legitimate sellers of Android apps who refuse to use the Play Store.
The problem with Android is it's an "all or none" proposition - you can choose the safety of the Play Store, or you can have it all. You can't choose the safety of the Play Store and other stores you trust (though there is legitimate reason why it's not necessarily a good idea).
The legitimate reason? It doesn't really protect anything - thanks to the dancing pigs (or rabbits) issue, even if you made it so a user could "approve" a store, guess what? They'll approve illegitimate ones because they want the app.
It probably has been well tested "in the real world" - check out Google Goggles sometime (which is available for Android and iOS).
In fact, this probably came out of the stuff that Goggles does - where you snap a photo and Goggles figures out what's in it. If you snap a QR code, it'll decode it, a barcode, it'll pop up a Google search for that product. Other items it'll attempt to either OCR it or perform object recognition. Basically it gives a list of things (snap a sign and it'll probably try to OCR it, offer you a translation, tell you what kinds of cars it sees, etc).
Midway Games was owned by Williams since the late 80s so Midway Games West would've been an absorption by Midway into the Williams fold (Atari Games became Midway Games West to avoid trademark disputes with Hasbro). As part of the restructuring in the late 90s, Williams spun off Midway as a semi-independent company which created a pile of problems when in 1999, Williams shut down their pinball division.
In a series of incredibly complex deals, Midway picked up Williams' video game assets, while giving Williams its pinball assets.
Today, Midway is dead (bankruptcy) since 2009. But technically, they've owned Atari Games until 2003 when they closed Midway games West.
And Atari Games became Time Warner Interactive, which was acquired completely by Midway in the early 90s, though it continued to operate under the Atari Games label for obvious reasons (brand recognition).
End result is a huge mess as coin-op giants like Williams/Bally picked up arcade games then spun them off and closed down everything but slot machines. (These days, arcade gaming is dead because of well, the iPhone. Pinball though, is seeing a resurgence).
Actually, Macrovision played havoc with the sync pulses - it would produce a deliberately too weak one (but enough that most VCRs could lock on) and then produce a strong one, etc..
What happens is the TV is looking for a sync pulse and sees it, even though it's non-standard (it's a case of basically seeing what you expect - the TV is looking for a pulse, it sees the beginnings and locks on).
A VCR though wants to ensure that what gets recorded on tape (which has a poor dynamic range) is as strong as possible, so the weak pulse causes the VCR's AGC circuits to kick up the gain for the frame. The strong pulse causes the AGC to kick it down. The fact that the video signal is otherwise normal means the AGC has now made it clip in the first case, and suppressed it in the second.
And in fact, it was technology (and pressure from Macrovision) that really resulted in it working - older VCRs had slower AGC circuits and could play it just fine as the AGC never messed with the signal before the pulses reset themselves. But as technology and Macrovision pressure increased, the AGC circuits got better and produced this artifacting.
It's why the simplest cure was a signal regenerator - it normalized the pulses back to standard.
You can still do enough to mess with the disc - a modern CD-ROM or DVD-ROM supports standard cd-ripping, and on data CDs, the first track can be reset back into playing as audio for ripping. Or you could embed a fake audio track on a CD that actually has data on it. There's enough flexibility in the CD-ROM spec because it was designed for audio first - data was a hack.
DVDs are a bit trickier, but I'm sure all the copyprotection tricks movies use can be employed for regular data as well. Blu-Ray likewise, though it has some tricks of its own embedded in the firmware.
No, you can still sell 'em without warranty. Some people will want one and buy a warranty. EU folks just don't get a choice in the matter - they're forced to buy the warranty.
(Which is why when people say "warranties are bette in the EU and it's so consumer friendly" - you have to realize that if you want EU style warranties, just say "yes" to an extended warranty when the salesguy asks. It's the same thing and one factor In why stuff costs more in the EU).
So if a warranty-less Surface costs $250 in the US, and you can pay $75 for a 2-year warranty, it'll be $325 in the EU (warranty included). Of course, given the size of the EU, perhaps they could cut the warranty cost down some since everyone's buying it and make it $300.
No, companies doing MPEG-2, h.264, etc just buy a blanket patent license from MPEG-LA - a set fee schedule basically means you pay like 25 cents per device and you've licensed all the patents.
Problem is. h.265's patent pool is still being created and rates negotiated (and how much out of that fee does everyone get).
So it's similar to implementing say a cellphone, where you must strike separate deals with everyone in order to license all the patents. But in a year or two, it'll probably be a patent pool which makes life easier.
Of course, it also shows how much marketing (yes, marketing) needs to go into VP9 - h.264 is too established for VP8 to be of any threat. But the next-gen codec field is wide open - will it be h.265? Or VP9? Or something else? (All it would take is Google to heavily promote and advertise VP9, and grease enough people so that MPEG-5 can include VP9 as a codec in part of the standard).
And yes, the opportunity to strike is NOW.
Which is why we should abolish software from copyrights AND patents.
Because prior to software, the world was simple. You wrote something creative, and it got copyrighted and enjoyed.
You make something useful (as opposed to write), and that thing gets patent protection.
Copyright applied to written works (not just books, but music, movies, etc). Patents applied to "stuff" that did something.
But then software comes around and screws it all up. First, it's written. But it can also do stuff. It can be used to replace a mechanical apparatus with something simpler (a software controller replacing hardware). It can "be" stuff - e.g., the software you write for an FPGA or ASIC gets boiled down to actual hardware. And now, with 3D printers, it can "create" stuff.
And yet, it's also a form of mathematics.
Perhaps it's time to reform it - software can neither be copyrighted, nor patented (you can't copyright an ASIC, after all). At the same time, get rid of all the wrangling and stuff we did to copyright and patent law to accommodate what really shouldn't be accommodated. From copyright law, we excise the right to make a necessary copy to run the program (it was always pretty hazy) among others. From patents, we excise its mathematical capabilities.
At the same time, we add IP protection for software, because we need it - FOSS or commercially licensed software can't live without it. But instead of seeking patents or copyrights, we create a new category - software. This protection applies to all software in its original source form. As whether the final output is an executable binary, a netlist, a set of masks, whatever, going from the source to the output is a mechanical translation (using manual or automated tools) and the output can be derived from the input, which means only the input needs protection. (Yet another way software is different since it takes on so many intermediary forms).
This software protection will apply for a duration more appropriate for software. And it covers all software code. We can debate about stuff like algorithms and implementations separately (right now, that's where patents and copyright clash, respectively) and take a more holistic view of doing things.
This way things get saner. It doesn't make sense that some complex machine can get patents, but if you replace much of the complexity with software to do the same thing, that software cannot be patented. Or what actually is copyrighted when you copyright software - the source code, the binary output? Both?
The reality is, well, we've created a new form of IP that's quite unlike all the previous forms of IP that we've been accustomed to for hundreds of years. It's completely unique to software, and it and its unique properties should be respected. Trying to shoehorn software into copyright and patent law leads to the current mess we're in now.
And yes, it could mean something gets protected multiple times. If you have a complex electromechanical machine that's highly patented, then replace its innards with stuff that's much simpler and put that complexity in software, well, the simpler innards may not be patentable anymore, but the software controlling it certainly can be si