Unfortunately I and I suspect most here are in the camp of understanding *code*(especially if its well designed) over a *formal specification*, and had a working implementation. The whole point of Airplay is to replace it, because its a proprietary protocol stack/suite developed by the most litigious company on the planet.
But what part of the code is code, and what part is spec? That's the problem. If I decide that since I see a "2" that means the number of channels, can I insert "8" because I want to send a 7.1 stream? Or will I create an incompatible protocol because it was designed for 2.0 channel encoded L-R, and I tried to send it 7.1 as L-R-C-LS-RS-LP-RP-LFE ? Or if someone else had the same idea and decided it was best as L-R-LS-RS-LP-RP-C-LFE ?
And what if there's a security flaw? Is that a spec item, or an implementation bug? Do I have to write my implementation with the same bug?
One thing documentation does is it shows how you intended to do things. With code, you're not sure what was done for implementation and what was done per the spec.
Is the "1.0" sent in the header a magic number? A version? Should I send "1.1" if I want to upgrade it to send an upgraded stream? Unless it supports everything out of the bat, people will want to expand it. Without documentation, you'll have like what happened to DLNA - you end up with a dozen slightly incompatible implementations. This was resolved in a later revision (UPnP/DLNA 3.0) that harmonized everything once and for all.
I'm not so sure. He used to be a (higher-up) middle manager, now he's the CEO. If an already crumbling ship sinks, nobody will blame him, and the next job he'll be given will be a CEO position.
Well, he was president. Though, you're right that since he reported to the CEO, there's no way for him to advance to CEO job. And once you land in the coveted CEO spot, you're really in a little club - make your mark you're pretty much going to always be CEO.
"President" is a lower executive title - you can be a president today, a VP tomorrow, a middle manager the next. But once you reached the lofty CxO suite, you tend to always be there.
Network enough and you'll not only have golden parachuts, but a follow on job as well.
Provided they're free (with contract) phones, they'll be snapped up fairly quickly.
Android's outselling iPhones due to this - the top selling Android (SGS3) is barely 10% of phones sold since it was released. The vast majority of Android phones are free ones kicked out because people were upgrading. If Mozilla can produce a decent phone with decent specs that still goes for free with contract, it'll appeal to lots of people.
And yes, people buy Androids because upgrading their featurephones can cost just as much money for a new featurephone. But taking advantage of the "3 free Androids" deal that crops up constantly...
Sometimes the perception of conflict really works well because it draws media attention to those involved: almost like some free advertising. For the longest time, Coca Cola and Pepsi played up on the public's perception of bitter competition and conflict. In reality, the competition is a good bit friendlier with the executives at each company respecting their counterparts; If you recall, a few years ago someone tried to steal a recipe from Coke and hand it to Pepsi. Pepsi Co ended up reporting this to authorities.
That's not friendliness, that's clean business. Most companies will refuse to hire someone based on the secrets they hold. After all, if someone is willing to "defect" to you based on secrets they have, there's nothing stopping them from stealing your secrets and defecting as well.
That guy is effectively radioactive - do not even get close because he won't respect any NDA.
Also, the perception that you hired an employee from a competitor for the secrets has the potential to taint the entire company. In this case, if Pepsi decided to hire him for the secret formula, it taints ALL of Pepsi's products. And you can't prove a negative ("we did NOT use the recipe in this product! Honest!"). And tainted product can be the target or lawsuits, forced licensing or other nastiness.
Just like how the leak of source code for Windows was avoided by all OSS developers to avoid taint issues, Pepsi wished to avoid taint as well. Especially since the alternative route is easier - just get a damned mass spectrometer and analyze Coke. It'll be cheaper than multi-million or multi-billion dollar lawsuits any day.
Reporting it is also generally good business, again for NDA monitoring.
...they are bloody expensive! The consumer doesn't see most of this, but the merchants pay through the nose. A typical small business will pay around 3% of the total transaction to the credit card company, plus additional fees for payment processing, plus additional fees for certifications, plus...there's always another damned fee.
That could well represent the entire profit margin of a smaller business. Guess what, that means those costs are added into the price. Since most credit card contracts (at least in my country) explicitly prohibit giving a "cash discount" or anything else that would be to the disadvantage of credit card purchases, this means that there is no way out: everyone must pay the higher prices.
It's quite a racket, if you think about it: 3% of the top of a huge chunk of all consumer transactions. I dream of seeing some real competition in the payment processing market.
And handling cash is cost-free? Trust me, it's not.
Here's how cash handling costs you:
1) If you're a small business, you use those night-deposit wallets and envelopes to submit your day's takes. (I know of one person who makes a trip to the bank twice a day). While you're out, your shop is out that manpower - maybe a couple of bucks worth of time at minimum wage (prevailing retail wage) if you spend 15 minutes on the bank run during the day. At night, well, now you have the fun of potential robbery (LOTS of shady characters know this). If you get robbed once a quarter, that's a 1.25% loss right there, never mind any potential personal injuries or shock.
2) How do big stores do it? They hire armored trucks, which can cost hundreds per trip. For a take of $50,000, a $500 armored car is already a 1% cost.
3) How do you run an internet company with cash? You can take personal cheques, money orders, etc. but the inconvenience of the user doing this (and most places do NOT take personal cheques - because cashing those is expensive (can easily be $5-10)) means lowered sales - if you had to run to the post office every time you wanted to buy something from Amazon, would you do that?
For big retailers, monitoring the cash box is also required. You may wonder why when the servers go down, the business stops running. Well, it's because the cash register is not just recording transactions - it's recording how much is in the register. When a cashier logs in, they enter in how much their cash box contains (and they're required to count how much cash is in beforehand because they're responsible). The register routinely logs each transaction and counts the cash. At the end, the cashier signs out and gets the total that should be in the box. They're required to count this cash and it should agree within a few dollars. If you wondered why they come out with a tray with a lid, the lid's to keep the change from spilling as well as keep the bills from flapping around to prevent a miscount. This training is generally reserved for longer term employees - your retail summer vacation lackey generally doesn't get register duty, or if they do, it's with the credit and debit machine (which maintain their own logs).
A mom and pop store probably won't care too much about register contents or verifying the value is close, but the big guys do. If you ever see one ask for change, you'll know they always take $20 out of the register before exchanging it for a $20 roll of quarters - this keeps their count in check.
As for profit margins on small business? It depends. If it's a small shop, chances are they don't take credit cards because for small purchases under $25 or so, most people have sufficient cash for that, or debit (which dings both sides - it's only 1%, but it's a $0.25+$0.25 per transaction fee). If it's a big purchase of several hundred bucks, well, guess what? No one's carrying around that kind of cash (and cheques will eat into that profit as well).
In fact, guess what? Electronics is just like that - after everything is said and done, profit on a several hundred dollar item can be $5. Of course, these stores make it up with more profitable items along the way. (It's one reason why Best Buy is in trouble).
And it works. I saw a marine stand within 10 feet of the exhaust while the F117-A was prepping for takeoff at an airshow in Florida a few years back. You could see the heat coming out of the vents, but it was similar to the shimmer coming off a highway. It was nothing like the cone of pure fury coming out of the F-16's. In the air they run quite a bit hotter but still nothing compared to, say, flares. The F-177 was really quiet, too. Very impressive machine.
I believe the exhausts (which are classified, and the marine was standing there to enforce no-picture-taking) actually mix in a lot of ambient air which cool it down without impacting the flow (jet engines work by moving air very fast, while propellers move a lot of air very slowly).
This is, of course, to ensure that you can't simply target it with a standard heat-seeking missile or try to do a heat signature search.
And yes, it won't be full throttle - the jet blast will blow him away. But the point is to cool the hot air by simply moving a helluva lot of ambient air so the hot air is mixed in with the cooler ambient to reduce thermal signature.
This particular library is GPL'ed and therefore can not be used in iPhone Apps without violating the App Store terms of service agreement. So this library, and therefore your statement based on the vulnerability of this library, doesn't apply to iPhones.
Not necessarily. The GPLv2 is perfectly compatible with the App Store in all its terms. The only thing is the App Store requires that if you use anything that's not of your copyright, you are licensed to use it. Since the GPLv2 allows it as long as you provide source, it's perfectly legitimate.
GPLv3, by its nature is incompatible with all App Stores because of the "Anti-TiVoization" clause. In some App Store licenses, like Microsoft's, it's explicitly stated. In others, it's implicit (you aren't allowed to use GPLv3 because you'd violate the whole "licensed to use it" clause - if you can't fulfill the requirements of the GPLv3, you're not able to use its exemptions and thus copyright law says you can't use it).
Of course, this library, being a GNU one automatically falls under GPLv3+. But if it existed under the GPLv2 at any point, that is still legitimate and valid. And vulnerable.
If you think the VLC thing prohibited App Stores and GPL, it didn't. All it did was one contributor working under Nokia to send a copyright notice to Apple, who was patiently waiting for a resolution and who finally had enough and removed it. Apple will not wade into copyright issues and will remove your app if a copyright holder objects. The VLC iOS team did not provide sufficient counter notice and Apple after a month, gave up.
Arrangements like Apple's and Samsung's may sound strange at first but it happens a lot more than one might think. I work for a very large French company that has its own in-house IT services group, yet my subsidiary handles the majority of its IT operations on its own, including using external hosting companies and service providers that directly compete with them. We can get away with it because we execute faster, with better flexibility, higher quality, and for less money.
Actually, what's interesting is there's a huge interdependency on every company - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc., they're all interdependent. Everyone thinks it's "Apple vs. Samsung" or "Google vs. Apple", but the world isn't so black and white. In fact, I bet a lot of products contain a significant amount of, shall we say, incest, where competitors actually help build part of the product.
And things don't get easier as well - because these interdependencies ensure that the market stays interesting. Remove any one and things start collapsing. Apple and Google compete on a lot of things (and it allows Apple and Google to do a lot of things that if it wasn't for the other, it could be found as anti-competitive), but they also share a lot of things as well.
Hell, you can probably pick any silicon valley company to boycott, and any high-tech product, and find there's a connection between the two.
XP had a 64-bit version and supported multi-core since service pack 2:).
XP64 is a joke- there's very little driver support for it and things were wonky. It was more of a beta test by Microsoft than anything really significant.
The new driver model is much better - and if you're going to do a 64-bit driver, you might as well start afresh with the new driver model than to try to maintain a dead 64-bit port as well.
If I were Google, I'd bankroll efforts to develop software that would change MS office's default file formats to "something sensible", in addition to championing efforts to have this capability enabled in every office installation. That would surely produce interesting responses.
Google would clearly prefer to drop billions into stuff like balloon internet as opposed to fighting the endless war on Microsoft Office.
And why would Google do this?
Balloon internet means millions of people get Internet access. These people are essentially blank slates to imprint the Google brand to, and millions of new potential ad-viewers with whom Google can make money from.
Microsoft Office users? They already for the most part use Google. There's no extra money to be had making office formats "sane".
Unless you can convince people that sane office formats will let Google sell more ads, they won't bother. Perhaps if the sane office format showed Google ads every time you opened them?
I might go along with that except for the fact that the US Government is heavily involved with metadata. Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it. You may not like some of the things they do with that data.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA so that there's nothing treasonous that they can infer from the pictures once they use the metadata to get a FISA warrant to look at the actual data.
You realize that once the photos are up publicly (i.e, put online, because you can't have privacy on the Internet no matter what anyone says), the government can get that metadata just like everyone else.
Most people don't scrub their photos of EXIF information, after all, and many places can easily be recognized.
If you're worried about the government gathering data on you from purely public information that's accessible over the Internet, the best solution is to stop posting it on the Internet to begin with!
It is no harder for the government to get information on your trip to Cube from your photos whether you posted it to iCloud, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Azure, or your personal web site or your "personal cloud".
The fines for businesses that break the law need to be "the revenue earned during the period when the conduct was occurring" that would eliminate the sociopathic calculus that companies use to determine if the potential downside of breaking the law is less than the upside. Stating the penalty as "all revenue" instead of "all profit" would ensure that they lose more than they gain.
That really won't solve things - what will happen is like those "work from home" businesses. basically the companies will simply offer those people an opportunity to sell the insurance or whatever they're flogging instead.
FTC goes after them? The home business is what's at fault and gets fined. The company selling the stuff? Scot-free.
And yes, those "work from home" things tend to be horrendous scams - sure the company will "officially" say to follow all the laws, but the pressure to sell is so strong that no, you cannot.
To me the whole point of a playing a video game instead of going outside is that I can run like a world class athlete by pressing B. Kinect breaks that.
Who said Kinect required people to get their asses off the couch? There's certain a few games that do, but you'd be hard-pressed to accidentally buy "Dance Central" and expecting it to be a couch game. (Heck, I think Microsoft created a little box for the specs of the game called "activity level" to indicate how lazy you could be).
Kinect, even the original, is not like Move or Wii - it doesn't REQUIRE people to get off the couch. A game could use it for that purpose, but there are plenty of ways it can be used to augment the gaming experience on the couch.
What we've seen with a few games that are "Kinect enhanced" is just scratching the surface. We could add features like peering around walls simply by leaning. Or hiding behind cover simply by ducking a little bit (motions you probably *already* do involuntarily).
Heck, if you were playing a baseball game, Kinect could be used to read your finger motions to communicate to the pitcher.
And that's the beauty of Kinect over Move or other systems - it can be used at the same time as the controller. You'd use the controller for your main gaming, while Kinect adds to it.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to get Kinect to respond to a gesture to order a pizza while in game without breaking out of the game nor getting off the couch. Like say, sticking your hand in the air and saying "I want pizza!".
Don't forget another reason for resellers - manufacturers don't want to deal with 1 piece orders constantly - it's way too much overhead for them. It's cheaper for them to sell 100 units to one person, then that person to sell it to 100 people, than for the manufacturer to sell to those 100 people.
Also, resellers can handle warranty issues locally - manufacturers then can deal with the reseller to handle it - e.g., the reseller can exchange 5 units to customers, then the manufacturer can send 5 extra units as replacements. Less overhead for the manufacturer, and local sellers may know their market better.
There are exceptions - like Apple, who can handle it all vertically, but they tend to be the exception. Even then their ordering systems aren't as slick as say, Amazon's.
They already released a Kinect for XBox and Windows.
The Windows Kinect has a near-mode that the XBox one lacks.
Also, Kinect for Windows runs the IR at 640x480. The Xbox Kinect runs at 320x240 (even though its sensor is 640x480) because the Xbox360 does not have sufficient USB bandwidth to handle 4x audio streams, and 2x VGA 60fps streams.(in theory, the Xbox can do just under 40MB/sec over USB2, but in practice, it's only getting half that).
Kinect 2 for Windows requires USB3 because its cameras are high def, including the time-of-flight one.
No, it couldn't become standard. You know why? Because the entire point of this is to allow access to proprietary, vendor-specific DRM modules, and those DRM modules are intentionally not compatible with each other. (In fact they pretty much have to be in order to be effective as DRM.) As of this announcement, Netflix supports two mutually incompatible, single-platform DRM stacks for HTML5: Microsoft's PlayReady on IE11 and Windows 8.1, and Google's Widevine on non-rooted Chromebooks manufactured by Google partners. If you're not using one of those two stacks, it's both illegal and impossible to use the HTML5 version of Netflix. Firefox user? Forget it. Chrome user on the desktop? No way!
Suppose for instance that Apple decided to support this part of HTML5. You still wouldn't be able to watch Netflix on Apple platforms, even though they supported HTML5 EME, because they have their own DRM scheme which Netflix and Apple would have to negotiate a license for.
Obviously the problem is trying to do this in a web browser. Why should we play video in a web browser?
Why not just do it like we do on Android an iOS? Make it an app. Just download the Netflix app from the Windows/Mac app store and run it to organize your queues and what movies and such you want to watch. Videos play in the app.
No need to hassle with plugins, web browsers and all that. It's already an app everywhere else you go (including set top boxes and Blu-ray players, etc).
One app for Windows, one for OSX, another one for Chrome OS. No more battling between IE, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
I don't think that will stop anyone. I'm not familiar with movie prop collecting, but it seems it would be hard to probably prove most the stuff was actually a prop that was used.
Plus it's not like this guy just suddenly appeared and is claiming it's the computer. This guy was there from the beginning. Try reading this link: http://www.imsai.net/movies/wargames.htm
Depends on the prop. Special props made just for the show have distinguishing features that often show it's made for TV (usually poor quality, looks like crap up close, etc).
But without official paperwork showing it was used in the movie, or some way to tie it to the movie (if the prop has distinguishing marks that positively identify that one unit to the movie), it is effectively worthless.
At best, an undocumented prop should be sold as a "prop replica" if there's nothing to trace it directly back. Of course, unscrupulous sellers will sell it as a official prop.
The way to document it would be to have its serial number recorded by a third party which can be cross-correlated with this unit. Or an official purchase invoice that shows the buyer as the studio and the serial number. Alternatively, since he's kept it all this time, he could include shots and other stuff and a notarized letter saying it's from the movie and what his credentials are in relation to the movie.
All this only really matters if you want to resell it or send it to a museum and want to get more than what retail would get. It's all about provenance.
$2B in debt, $1B cash, lost $600M last year, sales dropped 30% last year. They have no assets (spun off their manufacturing facilities). If the next gen consoles do not sell well because of casual / tablet gaming and potential Apple TV games, AMD will be bankrupt in one year and shuttering in two. Spending money on open source drivers is a long term investment - it's not going to get them an additional $600M in revenue next year (>2M additional graphics cards or >5M systemic wins) when PC sales are on the decline.
It's unlikely to happen. And it's more than likely that Intel drove Microsoft and Sony to AMD at least to give them cashflow.
Remember, if AMD shutters, it means a world of hurt for Intel because they'd not only be barred from buying up AMD assets (including patents), but various governments have found Intel guilty of anti-trust and will probably begin tons of new investigations into Intel. Intel and its shareholders don't want that (a regulated Intel isn't good for profits, nor would having AMD's patent portfolio split up to everyone BUT Intel).
Intel will save AMD. The consoles are the first step at stemming the tide. If anything, it'll keep pesky government off of Intel.
ARM will license out their cores to whoever pays. Intel and AMD (and Via, but no one cares about them) are apparently the only ones allowed to make x86 chips. But what type of "IP" is relevant here? What is the legal basis for the restrictions? If someone decided to make their own x86 clone, for instance, what would they be violating? It can't be trademarks, since that could be circumvented simply by changing the wording on the product and literature. I don't see how it could be copyrights, unless the implementers actually copied the original die mask or made a derivative work of it. So that leaves patents. Can you patent opcodes? Or is it only specific methods of implementing the opcodes that are covered by the patents?
MIPS did it - they held patents on several things that were required in order to implement certain instructions. I'm sure ARM has some patents on CPU architecture as well.
As for implementing 20 year old architectures - nothing's wrong with that - there's plenty of use in embedded systems. They won't power your smartphone, but they'll do for small things.
And most vendors probably aren't worried - because the people using these open cores will generally be putting them on FPGAs, and excepting the newest and latest ones (which can cost $20-30k *each*, yes, some of the latest FPGAs are easily between $20,000 - $30,000 each. In quantities of 1,000.). So your design is already speed limited and you're really not going to be using very complicated newer designs anyways (it won't fit).
If you're trying to put it on an ASIC, well, the ARM licensing costs will end up being just a small part of the entire VLSI costs. After all, a single mask is still in the 6-figure range, and modern processes with 10 metals require close to 20 masks, which puts you in the couple of million dollar range.
It's why the MIPS clone was basically done with support of the Chinese government - any other fabless company would just ante up and pay the licensing fees because they're just a small part in the end.
I am not interested in supporting censorship, which is what you're doing when you pay your fees. See ya.
The fees are because Ham radio is a regulated, licensed service. Everyone who uses it must have a license and operate within the rules.
There are bands for people which are NOT licensed and anyone can use them. These include the CB band, FRS, ISM bands, etc. You're free to do whatever you want within the limits established (mostly on power output and spectral purity so you don't go and interfere with other licensed bands).
Of course, they're crowded and full of crap, but that's the price to be paid.
That said, if there was a way to do it,,it would be nice to have the option in order to facilitate encrypted communications research through radio. A lot of radio technology gets experimented with on the ham bands because the regulations tend to be a lot more lax to encourage experimentation. The big problem is of course how to do it while keeping it open, since they are opposing goals of each.
I"m very much against the govt. cameras, but a guy on the street not hassling anyone shouldn't be a problem.
I think maybe this is a side effect of social networking and facebook.
Probably - the news is filled with articles of how people have been "screwed over" by social networking - either some film that was obtained or some incriminating photo.
The funny thing with CCTVs is that for the most part, people don't do anything with the footage - it's usually wiped within a month, if not sooner. However, random joe photographer or glasshole or whatever? Who knows what he'll do with the video. Perhaps upload it to Facebook or Google and watch as FB or G+ auto-tags everyone based on facial recognition. And now, because their security settings are lax, that photo or video is now searchable by anyone.
I suppose it's the difference between remaining anonymous versus being identified publicly. I suppose that's why most people don't really have issues with CCTV - few people have access to the video that it's not likely to actually make it on the 'net. But surreptitious photos and videos taken and run through extensive databases seek to identify everyone In the image, and that scares people.
In the end, it boils down to - are there things you do in public that you wouldn't otherwise if everyone in the world knew you personally did those things? With CCTV, you're relatively anonymous to your neighbour, your significant other, etc., but with public videography, someone could Google you and end up with rather salacious details of your activities.
We're all afraid of the court of public opinion, and peer pressure. And perhaps being "called out" for doing stuff that's perfectly legal, but maybe of "please don't tell my wife/friend/colleague/etc I do this". (It could be something as innocent as sneaking in a cigarette, or going against your diet,...)
There should be a way for any person to contact any domain owner or domain-owning company.
Which is the current problem with WHOIS - because it's easily accessible by everyone, everyone abuses it. So the end result is that all information is now hidden by proxies. The fact alone pretty much makes WHOIS useless if you need to contact someone.
A more restricted service that prevents abuse and requires all information be accurate (i.e., no proxies) and pointing to real people would be much more useful.
Either that or ICANN can simply announce all domains are owned by the contacts listed in WHOIS - if you use a proxy service, the proxy service owns the domain and all domains as such have been handed to a third party.
"average" has many meanings, the simple median, mean, and mode among them. In this case, and in most others where you care about position within a distribution the median is the "average" that is actually relevant - the amount made "by the average Joe". The mean will almost always be biased significantly higher due to extreme income inequality.
Incorrect.
Mean - average Median - the center value Mode - the largest group.
Mean is a strict average, and is thrown off if the distribution isn't even. Median is the middle. Half the people are making more, half are making less.
Mode is what the majority of people belong to.
You can't derive "the average joe" from any of those figures. Mode might give the best guess, but if's just the population with the largest grouping.
Mean and Median can be fooled quite easy by large populations at the extreme - mean is easy to see why, Median just means the center value and it reveals nothing with the distribution.
What you really need is the income distribution curve and figure out what the standard deviation is. If everything is a nice gaussian distribution, the mean, median and mode will be identical. But once things get skewed, all three figures will be all over the place and the numbers are rather meaningless.
Probably because Amazon don't have one. They own far less of the e-book market now than they did a couple of years ago, and B&N's share has been falling in that time.
I sell e-books through various stores, and Apple and Kobo account for about as many sales as Amazon. B&N sells pretty much none.
The DoJ disagrees with you. In fact, they just wrapped up the case where Apple was the ringleader of a cartel with the publishers in order to raise e-book prices.
Of course, had Apple not done this whole monopoly thing, Amazon might still have their 80%+ marketshare. But hey, cheap ebooks!
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But what part of the code is code, and what part is spec? That's the problem. If I decide that since I see a "2" that means the number of channels, can I insert "8" because I want to send a 7.1 stream? Or will I create an incompatible protocol because it was designed for 2.0 channel encoded L-R, and I tried to send it 7.1 as L-R-C-LS-RS-LP-RP-LFE ? Or if someone else had the same idea and decided it was best as L-R-LS-RS-LP-RP-C-LFE ?
And what if there's a security flaw? Is that a spec item, or an implementation bug? Do I have to write my implementation with the same bug?
One thing documentation does is it shows how you intended to do things. With code, you're not sure what was done for implementation and what was done per the spec.
Is the "1.0" sent in the header a magic number? A version? Should I send "1.1" if I want to upgrade it to send an upgraded stream? Unless it supports everything out of the bat, people will want to expand it. Without documentation, you'll have like what happened to DLNA - you end up with a dozen slightly incompatible implementations. This was resolved in a later revision (UPnP/DLNA 3.0) that harmonized everything once and for all.
Looking at the list there, it's basically everyone in Silicon Valley, except... Apple? (I'd say Amazon, too, but they're not Silicon Valley).
All the big names are there, including Google and Microsoft, and various other ones.
Well, he was president. Though, you're right that since he reported to the CEO, there's no way for him to advance to CEO job. And once you land in the coveted CEO spot, you're really in a little club - make your mark you're pretty much going to always be CEO.
"President" is a lower executive title - you can be a president today, a VP tomorrow, a middle manager the next. But once you reached the lofty CxO suite, you tend to always be there.
Network enough and you'll not only have golden parachuts, but a follow on job as well.
Provided they're free (with contract) phones, they'll be snapped up fairly quickly.
Android's outselling iPhones due to this - the top selling Android (SGS3) is barely 10% of phones sold since it was released. The vast majority of Android phones are free ones kicked out because people were upgrading. If Mozilla can produce a decent phone with decent specs that still goes for free with contract, it'll appeal to lots of people.
And yes, people buy Androids because upgrading their featurephones can cost just as much money for a new featurephone. But taking advantage of the "3 free Androids" deal that crops up constantly...
That's not friendliness, that's clean business. Most companies will refuse to hire someone based on the secrets they hold. After all, if someone is willing to "defect" to you based on secrets they have, there's nothing stopping them from stealing your secrets and defecting as well.
That guy is effectively radioactive - do not even get close because he won't respect any NDA.
Also, the perception that you hired an employee from a competitor for the secrets has the potential to taint the entire company. In this case, if Pepsi decided to hire him for the secret formula, it taints ALL of Pepsi's products. And you can't prove a negative ("we did NOT use the recipe in this product! Honest!"). And tainted product can be the target or lawsuits, forced licensing or other nastiness.
Just like how the leak of source code for Windows was avoided by all OSS developers to avoid taint issues, Pepsi wished to avoid taint as well. Especially since the alternative route is easier - just get a damned mass spectrometer and analyze Coke. It'll be cheaper than multi-million or multi-billion dollar lawsuits any day.
Reporting it is also generally good business, again for NDA monitoring.
And handling cash is cost-free? Trust me, it's not.
Here's how cash handling costs you:
1) If you're a small business, you use those night-deposit wallets and envelopes to submit your day's takes. (I know of one person who makes a trip to the bank twice a day). While you're out, your shop is out that manpower - maybe a couple of bucks worth of time at minimum wage (prevailing retail wage) if you spend 15 minutes on the bank run during the day. At night, well, now you have the fun of potential robbery (LOTS of shady characters know this). If you get robbed once a quarter, that's a 1.25% loss right there, never mind any potential personal injuries or shock.
2) How do big stores do it? They hire armored trucks, which can cost hundreds per trip. For a take of $50,000, a $500 armored car is already a 1% cost.
3) How do you run an internet company with cash? You can take personal cheques, money orders, etc. but the inconvenience of the user doing this (and most places do NOT take personal cheques - because cashing those is expensive (can easily be $5-10)) means lowered sales - if you had to run to the post office every time you wanted to buy something from Amazon, would you do that?
For big retailers, monitoring the cash box is also required. You may wonder why when the servers go down, the business stops running. Well, it's because the cash register is not just recording transactions - it's recording how much is in the register. When a cashier logs in, they enter in how much their cash box contains (and they're required to count how much cash is in beforehand because they're responsible). The register routinely logs each transaction and counts the cash. At the end, the cashier signs out and gets the total that should be in the box. They're required to count this cash and it should agree within a few dollars. If you wondered why they come out with a tray with a lid, the lid's to keep the change from spilling as well as keep the bills from flapping around to prevent a miscount. This training is generally reserved for longer term employees - your retail summer vacation lackey generally doesn't get register duty, or if they do, it's with the credit and debit machine (which maintain their own logs).
A mom and pop store probably won't care too much about register contents or verifying the value is close, but the big guys do. If you ever see one ask for change, you'll know they always take $20 out of the register before exchanging it for a $20 roll of quarters - this keeps their count in check.
As for profit margins on small business? It depends. If it's a small shop, chances are they don't take credit cards because for small purchases under $25 or so, most people have sufficient cash for that, or debit (which dings both sides - it's only 1%, but it's a $0.25+$0.25 per transaction fee). If it's a big purchase of several hundred bucks, well, guess what? No one's carrying around that kind of cash (and cheques will eat into that profit as well).
In fact, guess what? Electronics is just like that - after everything is said and done, profit on a several hundred dollar item can be $5. Of course, these stores make it up with more profitable items along the way. (It's one reason why Best Buy is in trouble).
I believe the exhausts (which are classified, and the marine was standing there to enforce no-picture-taking) actually mix in a lot of ambient air which cool it down without impacting the flow (jet engines work by moving air very fast, while propellers move a lot of air very slowly).
This is, of course, to ensure that you can't simply target it with a standard heat-seeking missile or try to do a heat signature search.
And yes, it won't be full throttle - the jet blast will blow him away. But the point is to cool the hot air by simply moving a helluva lot of ambient air so the hot air is mixed in with the cooler ambient to reduce thermal signature.
Not necessarily. The GPLv2 is perfectly compatible with the App Store in all its terms. The only thing is the App Store requires that if you use anything that's not of your copyright, you are licensed to use it. Since the GPLv2 allows it as long as you provide source, it's perfectly legitimate.
GPLv3, by its nature is incompatible with all App Stores because of the "Anti-TiVoization" clause. In some App Store licenses, like Microsoft's, it's explicitly stated. In others, it's implicit (you aren't allowed to use GPLv3 because you'd violate the whole "licensed to use it" clause - if you can't fulfill the requirements of the GPLv3, you're not able to use its exemptions and thus copyright law says you can't use it).
Of course, this library, being a GNU one automatically falls under GPLv3+. But if it existed under the GPLv2 at any point, that is still legitimate and valid. And vulnerable.
If you think the VLC thing prohibited App Stores and GPL, it didn't. All it did was one contributor working under Nokia to send a copyright notice to Apple, who was patiently waiting for a resolution and who finally had enough and removed it. Apple will not wade into copyright issues and will remove your app if a copyright holder objects. The VLC iOS team did not provide sufficient counter notice and Apple after a month, gave up.
Actually, what's interesting is there's a huge interdependency on every company - Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, etc., they're all interdependent. Everyone thinks it's "Apple vs. Samsung" or "Google vs. Apple", but the world isn't so black and white. In fact, I bet a lot of products contain a significant amount of, shall we say, incest, where competitors actually help build part of the product.
And things don't get easier as well - because these interdependencies ensure that the market stays interesting. Remove any one and things start collapsing. Apple and Google compete on a lot of things (and it allows Apple and Google to do a lot of things that if it wasn't for the other, it could be found as anti-competitive), but they also share a lot of things as well.
Hell, you can probably pick any silicon valley company to boycott, and any high-tech product, and find there's a connection between the two.
XP64 is a joke- there's very little driver support for it and things were wonky. It was more of a beta test by Microsoft than anything really significant.
The new driver model is much better - and if you're going to do a 64-bit driver, you might as well start afresh with the new driver model than to try to maintain a dead 64-bit port as well.
And why would Google do this?
Balloon internet means millions of people get Internet access. These people are essentially blank slates to imprint the Google brand to, and millions of new potential ad-viewers with whom Google can make money from.
Microsoft Office users? They already for the most part use Google. There's no extra money to be had making office formats "sane".
Unless you can convince people that sane office formats will let Google sell more ads, they won't bother. Perhaps if the sane office format showed Google ads every time you opened them?
You realize that once the photos are up publicly (i.e, put online, because you can't have privacy on the Internet no matter what anyone says), the government can get that metadata just like everyone else.
Most people don't scrub their photos of EXIF information, after all, and many places can easily be recognized.
If you're worried about the government gathering data on you from purely public information that's accessible over the Internet, the best solution is to stop posting it on the Internet to begin with!
It is no harder for the government to get information on your trip to Cube from your photos whether you posted it to iCloud, Dropbox, Evernote, Amazon, Azure, or your personal web site or your "personal cloud".
That really won't solve things - what will happen is like those "work from home" businesses. basically the companies will simply offer those people an opportunity to sell the insurance or whatever they're flogging instead.
FTC goes after them? The home business is what's at fault and gets fined. The company selling the stuff? Scot-free.
And yes, those "work from home" things tend to be horrendous scams - sure the company will "officially" say to follow all the laws, but the pressure to sell is so strong that no, you cannot.
Who said Kinect required people to get their asses off the couch? There's certain a few games that do, but you'd be hard-pressed to accidentally buy "Dance Central" and expecting it to be a couch game. (Heck, I think Microsoft created a little box for the specs of the game called "activity level" to indicate how lazy you could be).
Kinect, even the original, is not like Move or Wii - it doesn't REQUIRE people to get off the couch. A game could use it for that purpose, but there are plenty of ways it can be used to augment the gaming experience on the couch.
What we've seen with a few games that are "Kinect enhanced" is just scratching the surface. We could add features like peering around walls simply by leaning. Or hiding behind cover simply by ducking a little bit (motions you probably *already* do involuntarily).
Heck, if you were playing a baseball game, Kinect could be used to read your finger motions to communicate to the pitcher.
And that's the beauty of Kinect over Move or other systems - it can be used at the same time as the controller. You'd use the controller for your main gaming, while Kinect adds to it.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there was a way to get Kinect to respond to a gesture to order a pizza while in game without breaking out of the game nor getting off the couch. Like say, sticking your hand in the air and saying "I want pizza!".
Don't forget another reason for resellers - manufacturers don't want to deal with 1 piece orders constantly - it's way too much overhead for them. It's cheaper for them to sell 100 units to one person, then that person to sell it to 100 people, than for the manufacturer to sell to those 100 people.
Also, resellers can handle warranty issues locally - manufacturers then can deal with the reseller to handle it - e.g., the reseller can exchange 5 units to customers, then the manufacturer can send 5 extra units as replacements. Less overhead for the manufacturer, and local sellers may know their market better.
There are exceptions - like Apple, who can handle it all vertically, but they tend to be the exception. Even then their ordering systems aren't as slick as say, Amazon's.
Also, Kinect for Windows runs the IR at 640x480. The Xbox Kinect runs at 320x240 (even though its sensor is 640x480) because the Xbox360 does not have sufficient USB bandwidth to handle 4x audio streams, and 2x VGA 60fps streams.(in theory, the Xbox can do just under 40MB/sec over USB2, but in practice, it's only getting half that).
Kinect 2 for Windows requires USB3 because its cameras are high def, including the time-of-flight one.
Obviously the problem is trying to do this in a web browser. Why should we play video in a web browser?
Why not just do it like we do on Android an iOS? Make it an app. Just download the Netflix app from the Windows/Mac app store and run it to organize your queues and what movies and such you want to watch. Videos play in the app.
No need to hassle with plugins, web browsers and all that. It's already an app everywhere else you go (including set top boxes and Blu-ray players, etc).
One app for Windows, one for OSX, another one for Chrome OS. No more battling between IE, Chrome, Firefox, etc.
Depends on the prop. Special props made just for the show have distinguishing features that often show it's made for TV (usually poor quality, looks like crap up close, etc).
But without official paperwork showing it was used in the movie, or some way to tie it to the movie (if the prop has distinguishing marks that positively identify that one unit to the movie), it is effectively worthless.
At best, an undocumented prop should be sold as a "prop replica" if there's nothing to trace it directly back. Of course, unscrupulous sellers will sell it as a official prop.
The way to document it would be to have its serial number recorded by a third party which can be cross-correlated with this unit. Or an official purchase invoice that shows the buyer as the studio and the serial number. Alternatively, since he's kept it all this time, he could include shots and other stuff and a notarized letter saying it's from the movie and what his credentials are in relation to the movie.
All this only really matters if you want to resell it or send it to a museum and want to get more than what retail would get. It's all about provenance.
It's unlikely to happen. And it's more than likely that Intel drove Microsoft and Sony to AMD at least to give them cashflow.
Remember, if AMD shutters, it means a world of hurt for Intel because they'd not only be barred from buying up AMD assets (including patents), but various governments have found Intel guilty of anti-trust and will probably begin tons of new investigations into Intel. Intel and its shareholders don't want that (a regulated Intel isn't good for profits, nor would having AMD's patent portfolio split up to everyone BUT Intel).
Intel will save AMD. The consoles are the first step at stemming the tide. If anything, it'll keep pesky government off of Intel.
MIPS did it - they held patents on several things that were required in order to implement certain instructions. I'm sure ARM has some patents on CPU architecture as well.
As for implementing 20 year old architectures - nothing's wrong with that - there's plenty of use in embedded systems. They won't power your smartphone, but they'll do for small things.
And most vendors probably aren't worried - because the people using these open cores will generally be putting them on FPGAs, and excepting the newest and latest ones (which can cost $20-30k *each*, yes, some of the latest FPGAs are easily between $20,000 - $30,000 each. In quantities of 1,000.). So your design is already speed limited and you're really not going to be using very complicated newer designs anyways (it won't fit).
If you're trying to put it on an ASIC, well, the ARM licensing costs will end up being just a small part of the entire VLSI costs. After all, a single mask is still in the 6-figure range, and modern processes with 10 metals require close to 20 masks, which puts you in the couple of million dollar range.
It's why the MIPS clone was basically done with support of the Chinese government - any other fabless company would just ante up and pay the licensing fees because they're just a small part in the end.
The fees are because Ham radio is a regulated, licensed service. Everyone who uses it must have a license and operate within the rules.
There are bands for people which are NOT licensed and anyone can use them. These include the CB band, FRS, ISM bands, etc. You're free to do whatever you want within the limits established (mostly on power output and spectral purity so you don't go and interfere with other licensed bands).
Of course, they're crowded and full of crap, but that's the price to be paid.
That said, if there was a way to do it, ,it would be nice to have the option in order to facilitate encrypted communications research through radio. A lot of radio technology gets experimented with on the ham bands because the regulations tend to be a lot more lax to encourage experimentation. The big problem is of course how to do it while keeping it open, since they are opposing goals of each.
Probably - the news is filled with articles of how people have been "screwed over" by social networking - either some film that was obtained or some incriminating photo.
The funny thing with CCTVs is that for the most part, people don't do anything with the footage - it's usually wiped within a month, if not sooner. However, random joe photographer or glasshole or whatever? Who knows what he'll do with the video. Perhaps upload it to Facebook or Google and watch as FB or G+ auto-tags everyone based on facial recognition. And now, because their security settings are lax, that photo or video is now searchable by anyone.
I suppose it's the difference between remaining anonymous versus being identified publicly. I suppose that's why most people don't really have issues with CCTV - few people have access to the video that it's not likely to actually make it on the 'net. But surreptitious photos and videos taken and run through extensive databases seek to identify everyone In the image, and that scares people.
In the end, it boils down to - are there things you do in public that you wouldn't otherwise if everyone in the world knew you personally did those things? With CCTV, you're relatively anonymous to your neighbour, your significant other, etc., but with public videography, someone could Google you and end up with rather salacious details of your activities.
We're all afraid of the court of public opinion, and peer pressure. And perhaps being "called out" for doing stuff that's perfectly legal, but maybe of "please don't tell my wife/friend/colleague/etc I do this". (It could be something as innocent as sneaking in a cigarette, or going against your diet, ...)
Which is the current problem with WHOIS - because it's easily accessible by everyone, everyone abuses it. So the end result is that all information is now hidden by proxies. The fact alone pretty much makes WHOIS useless if you need to contact someone.
A more restricted service that prevents abuse and requires all information be accurate (i.e., no proxies) and pointing to real people would be much more useful.
Either that or ICANN can simply announce all domains are owned by the contacts listed in WHOIS - if you use a proxy service, the proxy service owns the domain and all domains as such have been handed to a third party.
Incorrect.
Mean - average
Median - the center value
Mode - the largest group.
Mean is a strict average, and is thrown off if the distribution isn't even. Median is the middle. Half the people are making more, half are making less.
Mode is what the majority of people belong to.
You can't derive "the average joe" from any of those figures. Mode might give the best guess, but if's just the population with the largest grouping.
Mean and Median can be fooled quite easy by large populations at the extreme - mean is easy to see why, Median just means the center value and it reveals nothing with the distribution.
What you really need is the income distribution curve and figure out what the standard deviation is. If everything is a nice gaussian distribution, the mean, median and mode will be identical. But once things get skewed, all three figures will be all over the place and the numbers are rather meaningless.
The DoJ disagrees with you. In fact, they just wrapped up the case where Apple was the ringleader of a cartel with the publishers in order to raise e-book prices.
Of course, had Apple not done this whole monopoly thing, Amazon might still have their 80%+ marketshare. But hey, cheap ebooks!