Same as with candy bar machines. They frequently fail to give you your candy bar, but they almost never accidentally give you 2 candy bars. They're obviously engineered to "fail" in a way that benefits the "house"....
Depends on the machine. At one place, two of the 5 had special sensors that ensured something fell down into the chute (I think the machines called it "seeing eye" or something). It's just a little optical sensor whose beam gets broken by the item.
Once, it DID fail on me - the item was still stuck on the loop. The machine detected this and spun it around again, so I ended up with two.
I noticed that those machines were also better engineered - one item common to all had a habit of falling the wrong way and getting wedged in the chute such that the door was stuck shut. (or get caught on a lip in the chute) The seeing eye machines didn't have lips that could catch the item nor did the item ever fall the wrong way to get stuck - they were engineers to prevent the item from flipping around and tended to have the items slide down rather than tumble.
Also, keeping the existing system has a 100% chance of being a nagging pain in the ass; but a pretty minimal chance of failing catastrophically in some novel way that the IT minions aren't already familiar with.
If we start development on a new system, it has a decent chance of being better; but a nonzero chance of going down in a firestorm of project-management failure, buck-passing, and overpriced Accenture code monkeys, which will make us look like total fuckups...
Not to mention the pushback from the people who have to use the new system who have to suffer from things that don't work, their jobs made harder because the new system doesn't work like the old, misses some obscure feature that really does make their life easier (some obscure database query, for example, that's no longer possible because the schema doesn't allow it), etc.
Or even worse, that to generate the X report on Friday, ti now takes 8 hours instead of 1 hour like it used to because things changed so much there's no way to munge the data together without a lot of TheDailyWTF style hacking.
(I've known people who suffered through this - the old system generated the report just fine, they went through it to double check and verify the numbers, but the new system generates something close in multiple views, requiring now a manual cross-reference and collating and retyping).
30 year old software tends to have "workflows" that people have optimized to produce the output. The problem is very often when upgrading, the requirements gathering process fails to take into account the users and their use cases and opportunities for optimization. The latter is interesting since the "old way" should work until the new optimized way is trustworthy. Optimizations have a habit of accidentally dropping things that would get caught before, after all.
(And no, you can't ask the user what they use the system for because that'll only get the common case. They will often forget about other things they do with the system because it's done so often or mechanically that they don't think about it).
Yes, but apparently if you profit off a glitch, it is your fault and yu are a bad person however if you simply write a buggy poker machine slot machine game thingy, you are just A-Okay.
To me, this is exactly like charging a person who uses a buggy phone that gives them free calls every other call with fraud. They bought the phone as is, made no changes to it and they are being charged. These guys didn't change the code in the poker machine, they just knew what buttons to press after putting money in. If anything, they should be celebrated as the folks that beat the gaming industry.
Except most casinos have a very specific clause that says all winnings are scrutinized and may be denied if the winnings are as a result of a machine fault.
Yes, a casino is NOT a way to make money - if you treat them as a form of entertainment rather than money making, you're closer to the actual reality of what a casino actually is.
You cannot win. It's why if you do win a jackpot, the machine you used is immediately isolated and wheeled away to confirm the win, verify there's no shenanigans with the machine, and to verify there's no faults with the machine. And yes, if they forget to update the game firmware, that counts as a fault and your winnings will be denied.
In fact, all that really has to happen is the guy gets billed for all his winnings due to faulty machines. No muss, no fuss, no criminal charges. Just a big ass bill having to repay every single dollar won.
Also, all planes have some at least 2 highly trained professionals sitting in the cabin overseeing everything. People who have to log a minimum number of flight hours in order to keep their skills sharp. In the event of a pre "burning wreckage" moment, they can take control if necessary.
False. Many planes require only one crewmember - the pilot. This is true whether the pilot is flying for himself and friends (e.g., private pilot) or doing it as part of a charter (air taxi).
And even the dinky little Cessnas that fly around have autopilots as well. Though, many an accident has been cause by relying a bit TOO much on automation...
IPV6 addresses are in no way scarce, so why would they invest any money in that?
Providers can make them scarce quite easily.
Provide a/64, but route only::1 to that address. If they want more, provide another/64.
And they can call it "security" or "privacy" or other thing, as well because they aren't exposing everyone's PC to the big bad internet, but firewalling them off. (Something which NAT provides just as a side effect. Not a great firewall, but better than nothing).
They set the default home page as their own search page? Surprised? Or that the default search is Bing? What's the default search in Chrome? Again, easily changed, they never try to force or change your choice if you change it and controllable via Policy across multiple PCs.
IE actually helpfully asks if you want to customize it on startup, and one of the customizations is search providers, to which you click, check "Use as default" and boom, Google is default. Sucks that you just click "use defaults" and expect Microsoft to promote a competitor's product.
Heck, I think the default homepage isn't Bing, but MSN.
I very much doubt 40% of Android devices in Russia are infected, although I can well believe the rates of infection are much higher in countries which have a culture of piracy over those that don't.
Chinese Android phones as well, because the only way to get apps is third party stores, which often host said infected apps (most new discoveries of Android malware come from China). Of course, whether or not it's pirated or not is very hard to tell - the legit stores don't do a very good job themselves.
And Play isn't available in China, either.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of stuff on Play gets pirated because it isn't available elsewhere - if there's a game you want and it's only available via Play, then one really doesn't have much choice other than to pirate it if Play isn't available.
And yet you go to any business conference nowadays, and the place is littered with iPads and other tablets. How odd it is that, whatever your advice might be, businesses are buying tablets and they are being seen out in the field.
You can certainly argue that business are wrong, but you can't argue with the fact that the tablet has made major inroads into the enterprise world.
Probably because of a few things.
1) Tablets are generally light and very portable and easily held in one hand. If you're at a gathering where everyone is standing, it's easy to whip out a tablet and show people stuff - while still having your other hand free to gesture and communicate and other things. One-handed use is quite important when you do not have a surface to use as a stand. Holding a laptop in one hand is often awkward, clumsy, and until the recent touch screen ones, interactions are terrible.
2) Tablets have great battery life. An iPad or Android tablet will generally last all day even if you're showing lots of people your brochures and screenshots and stuff. PCs with such battery life usually have external batteries, making them really heavy and unwieldy, especially single-handed carry.
3) There is very little need to compose long documents while at the conference - you may need to type some stuff up quickly (like entering contact and calendar stuff), but that generally is quite minimal. If a document need does come up, it's often better to do it in a private hotel room to draft it and review it (only an idiot tries to compose it right then and there to get it signed - these things normally have to be drawn up and agreed upon and other things).
4) The most common use will probably be fulfilled by the tablet's default gallery application - load up product photos, slides, etc as images and then swipe through them. Add a bit more for product brochures and stuff and that's it.
5) Said gallery app is often useful to automatically run a slide show when placed on the booth, similar to digital photo frames.
Gates is probably looking for a reason to not justify releasing Office for iOS (and Android). I mean, his criticisms apply to every tablet as well, including Surface. That, and a touch screen demands a different user interaction than a keyboard/mouse, so UIs have to change to accommodate both. E.g., touchscreens, resistive or capacitive or inductive are imprecise (resistives can use styluses, but even then the point's inaccurate) making small targets hard to hit. A mouse is a lot more precise. A touchscreen doesn't have "right click", and likewise, Fitt's law doesn't apply to touchscreens. In fact, hitting edges and corners is harder on a touchscreen.
My impression is that the TrueType guys obsessed about file size. Every table has its own structure, which is more compact than CFF's "one size fits all" approach.
Well, when TrueType was conceived by Apple and Microsoft way back in the late 80s and early 90s (yes, Apple and Microsoft worked on something together despite both being blood enemies at that time), your average PC had perhaps around a megabyte of RAM and a handful of megabytes for a hard drive, if any (Macs could boot off of floppies). So disk space and memory consumption was VERY critical, because there wasn't a lot of it.
Of course, we've also standardized on the TTF file format promoted by Microsoft on this (OS X uses TTFs, no more "suitcase" fonts).
These days, memory is not so much of a constraint when even the crappiest of smartphones has 256MB and storage in the handful of gigabytes - that's more than enough.
No shit...it's obvious that not doing anything at all isn't going to fix the problem.
Yeah, the battle cry of clueless managers!
1. We must do something 2. Here is something 3. Let's do it!
You must also think that Carly did a great job as a CEO, at least she DID something!
"Doing something" also can include "doing a helluva lot of science and research to figure out our options.
Like what the EU has done - as an experiment. If there are many factors, why not test each one to see which has greatest impact?
Right now, we have no data, other than CCD is happening. Why not "do something" by getting the data we need? We certainly won't have it when the bees are gone.
I've always found it hypocritical that the companies that engage in this sort of small-scale monopolistic and anti-competitive tactic - and there are thousands of them - are left completely alone by the regulatory agencies that are supposed to be preventing it.
2 things.
1) It's not monopolistic if the company doesn't have a monopoly. Their business model is the same printer business model - cheap printer (it's 30% cheaper than a Makerbot), expensive filament. If you don't want this, go buy a Makerbot or other competing 3D printer - you'll pay more initially, but after a little while you'll break even.
2) The solution is worse than the cure. If you want to enforce everyone sticks to standards, where do you draw the line? Do you block OS X and Linux because it doesn't conform to the Windows "standard"? Do you block innovations in 3D graphics because OpenGL ARB hasn't gotten around to certifying the feature? After all, vendor-specific extensions are, well, vendor specific, anti-competitive and monopolistic. Do you prevent smaller cellphones from being made because the new USB cable, even if it's standard, isn't "standard" enough and costs $50 each?
And yes, de-facto standards do matter. Also, what kind of standards? Many aren't free at all - do you give up removable storage because SD cards aren't an open standard?
In the end, your choice is to not buy this and buy a competitor's product. Or buy this and hack it.
I know what you mean. Gaming was so great for a number of years, and then this upstart company called Nintendo came in with their Mario and Donkey Kong and ruined things after the blessed time we had with Atari.
Actually, until the NES came out, gaming was DEAD.
You may have forgotten about the video game crash of the 80s where after the Atari 2600 came out, everyone and their dog was creating games for it, leading to a huge massive glut of really crappy games that everyone got tired of buying and effectively killed video games.
In fact, it was Nintendo that effectively revived it - except to prevent unlicensed third parties from producing crappy games they added DRM (the NES-001 chip) and made everyone who wanted to release a NES game go through a licensing and approval process.
And this is how we ended up with consoles where you have to pay license fees and stuff. Or how Apple decided they wanted to approve all apps for the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.
Sure, it won't cause a problem if everything always goes according to plan. Perhaps we should save money and remove the interlocks from airplane doors too. After all, it's nothing to get up in arms about, unless you regularly open the door in flight.
You could and nothing would happen. Because while in flight, the cabin is pressurized, and doors open inwards so they're propped shut by air pressure. There aren't many doors that open outward other than cargo ones, and even then they're a rarity because of the immense forces while pressurized (you're looking at ton of force bearing down the door - that's a lot for a latch).
Even when you're below 10,000 feet, the cabin still maintains a positive pressure over the outside - the cabin altitude is scheduled to reach airport altitude when the plane touches down, and not track the plane's altitude as the plane descends faster than most passengers would prefer (and would cause a lot of discomfort in pressure equalization).
This actually makes perfect sense. On a modern PC it will involve the user learning about virtualisation (to run XP) and then also learning how to configure windows (to not run updates). This is great way of preparing dole claimants for an IT job so by the time you have gained enough skills to claim any dole money you have enough skills to go straight into a job as and IT support worker for the dole office and their crappy old IT systems.
What to configure? Microsoft provides you with Windows XP Mode which is a virtualized preconfigured environment for those few applications that need XP. I believe IE6 was also one of them as it's one of the few things that XP mode was needed for.
I don't know how their system works but years ago when sites demanded xp and ie for use I would tell my browser to lie to them. I set my user agent string to XP and IE although I was actually running linux with konqueror and 8 times out of 10 the site worked fine. Some I had to do from work since they actually used something specific to the systems they demanded.
Given they need XP and IE6, it would imply they use some ActiveX crap that only works in IE6 (since I think IE7 redid ActiveX in order to be more secure). No amount of emulation can get crappy insecure ActiveX to work. It's partly why IE6 is still around because IE7 broke a lot in the name of security. From IE7 onwards, things aren't so bad.
The nooks have a Bluetooth chip, but no antenna. That's why you can't recognize the headphones.
False. They use a combo WiFi-Bluetooth chip, which, since both WiFi and Bluetooth use the 2.4ISM band, use the same antenna.
In fact, there's actually a protocol call Coexistence that combo chips use to help prevent Bluetooth and WiFi from interfering with each other (they're both aware of each other and what frequencies they use and actively avoid trying to interfere).
This is how most embedded devices do it - unlike PCs where the WiFI and Bluetooth boards are typically separate chips connected to separate antennas.
The big problem is the Bluetooth part isn't calibrated so its signal is terrible (radios typically need calibration to ensure they're on spec frequency wise and power wise so they're not attempting to overdrive the amps or emit tons of crap lowering signal quality immensely).
You missed out USB thumbdrives which are the de facto replacement for floppies.
True, though back in the 90s, USB was unheard of, and whatever flash storage was available, was impractically expensive compared to zip disks (when you pay $200 for 32MB...).
It's why one of the more popular digital cameras at the time was the Sony Mavica, because it stored images on floppy drives. Pay $200 for 32MB, or $10 for a box of 10 disks. And with USB being a rarity and slow, card readers were equally difficult and espensive and even slower (parallel/serial ports were common).
True, those people are widespread in many countries, but they usually don't run them.
False. A lot of countries are run by religious groups. We usually call them "Theocracies" (as opposed to democracies or communist, etc). You may know it from places like the Middle East and Asia, where a number of countries are known as Islamic countries because the principal religion is Islam, and the government is run by practicing Muslims. Islam is sort of special because it also dictates how an Islamic government is to be run.
Christianity doesn't have have such dictates, so Christian countries tend to organize in various ways.
And yes, the Founding Fathers put in separation of church and state because they know what happens when they intermix.
I pretty much despised zip disks, I'm not sure what the deal was, but they were always getting corrupted. And they weren't particularly cheap at the time either.
The Zip drives were handy for a while, but soon replaced in my world by having real network connections to real servers.
The thing is, back in the 90s, files were getting big enough that they weren't fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. And CD burners were rare (with CD-R's costing dollars each and buffer underruns ruining $5 worth of discs). So the Zip disks were a reasonably economical and common way of transporting large files.
They continued a bit until the late 90s when CD burners became pricey but common accessories with discs heading south of $1 each, with CD-RWs becoming commonplace. They were dead by the 2000s because everyone moved to CDs.
These days, large files are transported over home networks and WiFi, Ethernet and DVD burners are ubiquitous..
This is critical for Intel since they need to make their chips cheaper than everyone else and be seen as a reliable supplier of parts.
Intel doesn't want to put the hurt on AMD - because AMD is keeping the government off their back in the name of competition. (If AMD fails, the government will probably force AMD's patents that Intel licenses to be distributed to everyone else, and the government may split Intel up into foundry and design).
And Intel's a reliable supplier - they don't have shortages of parts, and have enough spare capacity that if you're wanting huge quantities (like an OEM like Apple), they'll customize you a chip to your specs (like how Apple's Macs all come with Intel VT, even if the chip used typically doesn't).
Flash and Silverlight are dying on their own because they don't run, or run barely, on the current generation of smart phones, tablets, and... wait for it... smart TV's. The content distributors desperately need standardisation because supporting hundreds of device types and dozens of plug-in technologies is a pain in the neck. The problem is they've chosen to outsource the problem by making browser vendors write the proprietary DRM plug-ins for them. Instead of simply adopting the existing specifications for Internet video formats and protocols. Everything they want to do can already be done with AVI/MP4/etc together with HTTP/RTP and a "video" tag in HTML. Everything that is except spy on users and take away people's ability to enjoy the content on a whim. If we resist DRM, they'll either have to adopt open standards or they'll have no business model at all.
Flash is dying because one platform refused to support it. Given said platform's popularity in the early days, and being it's use in the majority of mobile web traffic (despite Android outselling iOS 3 or 4 to 1, iOS accounts for the majority of web traffic - by 2 to 1 over Android. It seems MOST Android users aren't surfing the web on their phones. Note - high end phones like SGS3 and SGS4 are NOT the majority of Androids sold - by far. Largest chunk (SGS3 is around 10% of all Androids), but not majority).
So Flash on the web is mostly dead and everyone moved onto HTML5. The main use of Flash was YouTube, and the iPhone had a YouTube app for that reason.
Silverlight had a resurgence thanks to Netflix. But it's dying because Netflix realized people watched movies on TVs, and put their client on every set top box and Blu-ray player out there, rendering the web the minority way of watching a movie. Even on the go - with smartphone and tablet apps.
But what if Google decided they wanted more YouTube content and partnered up to make DRM'd videos? Google could easily make it Flash-only, thus creating demand for Flash again. If it proves popular, then webmasters will assume that everyone has it installed and code to it again.
Replace YouTube with say, Hulu and you get the picture.
All it takes is one popular site to require DRM video and a plugin required to watch it. Platform vendors like Adobe would throw money at being selected because it would mean more sales of tools and more plugin downloads and more webmasters using that plugin for their sites as more people would have it installed.
Hell, if YouTube started up 10 years ago, you probably would expect it to use... QuickTime because practically everyone had an iPod and iTunes and thus QuickTime.
With this spec in HTML5, it specifies ONLY a DRM handling plugin. Which can't be leveraged in any other form to be an "alternative" to HTML5.
Now, you can argue that content producers should put their stuff up DRM-free, which is fine, but the content belongs to the producers and it's up to them to choose. You can lobby for them to do so, but until they do, there will be demand for DRM, and the users will install the plugins.
Heck, it's funny that RMS argues against DRM by using Flash as the example. Because if HTML5 doesn't have it, then people ARE going to use Flash. They aren't going to go DRM-free. RMS may wish for them to do so, but until they do, they'll just ask for alternatives. Which could mean closing off the web like Flash did.
There we go, playing the race card. Sigh. What does a kid with a BB gun have to do with this? Nothing, but it "creates the narrative". We all know what the narrative is, race race race.
Well, on one hand, we have a model student doing a science experiment that could've turned badly basically being expelled and prosecuted as a terrorist. On the other hand, we have a 5 year old kid, with a BB gun killing his younger brother who gets off scot-free.
So in one case, we have an over-the-top punishment that basically ends a promising student's career (she's being tried as an adult, so will have a permanent record of "creating a bomb"), while another kid kills and is let go. The only relation is that the same assistant state attorney recommended charges on one, and not the other. I suppose it helps that the arresting officer was related as well.
That probably has a lot of do with it, actually - Ketchikan isn't a huge place, and people end up really knowing each other. Especially parents (since there's probably only one class for the grade). So it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of people knew each other.
You really can't expel them, and the community will provide any necessary punishment above and beyond what punishment is meted out. In small towns, it can easily lead to shunning and exclusion (where the only remedy is moving).
Contrast this with most places where the populations are higher, and people really don't know their neighbours. There the only justice is whatever was handed out by the authorities because if it wasn't your kid, it was someone else who probably you don't know nor attends your school, etc. Just some anonymous kid.
Basically the administrators knew this and acted appropriately - community justice is often quite a bit harsher and softies are quickly discovered. So whatever legal penalties can be applied really won't matter in the end - the punishment of "that's Joe's kid, he's the one who did it" being known to the community is harsh enough.
Do it in a particularly spectacular fashion and you'll be the town legend.
the Hot Hardware link confirms DisplayPort 1.2, which is the only thing I/really/ care about. The others are nice, but 4K out of the laptop means my next mid-range laptop can be my primary desk machine as well. This should push along the display manufacturers after their decade of stalling (perhaps soon we'll see screens in the 20-24" range with more resolution than our 5" displays have).
Know what else supports 4K? HDMI.
And I'm fairly sure that if you're willing to pay $10K for a 4K screen (the current cheapest on the market - some Chinese knockoff), display manufacturers are willing to give you the 4K display you want.
Or you could pay $1K and get high res 27-30" screens as well just as you always could. You won't be able to find a 4K screen for $100 until 4KTVs are down in the under-$1000 range like HDTVs are now.
The only reason display resolutions "stalled" was because everyone was attracted to cheap cheap cheap - cheap laptops, cheap LCD monitors, etc. You could always have paid more and gotten better - 2560x1440 offerings for 27"+ have been around for years. Of course, they cost more, and everyone says "why did you pay so much when you could've gotten one for $200!" (See the last Apple monitor/. article where people assumed it was a 1080p screen when it wasn't).
Ditto laptops - we aren't seeing revolutions because of ultrabooks - just that ultrabooks have managed to pull an Apple and command extra money, and thus give what laptops in that price range have always given - better specs. If you skipped past the $300 laptops on display and upped it to $1000+, you'd find laptops with discrete GPUs, screens higher than 1366x768, and other niceties.
What's happened is good products have price floors. Races to the bottom means cutting out stuff to save money so you get crappy products cheaper.
Apple on the other hand IS KNOWN to use tax avoidance, and we KNOW they made huge profits on which they paid very little tax, cheating people in countries all over the world.
I believe your favourite mega corporation right now famously borrowing money specifically to avoid paying tax:) iBonds I believe they are calling them.
Don't confuse revenue with profits, even though there's some horrible scheming going on. First, Apple UK had revenue of £1B, and a profit of £81.3M. They paid £14.4M in taxes, for a tax rate of 17.8% (because it's paid from profits). Of course, the scheme is Apple Ireland is overcharging Apple UK for product, so all the profits are hidden inside Apple Ireland.
As for iBonds - yes, that's because the interest rate on bonds is so low, borrowing is cheaper than repatriating the cash. First, Apple's one of the few companies with zero debt, so they can take on debt and be like most other companies. Second, interest rates are horrendously low. Third, repatriating the cash would mean paying taxes on that money, and the tax rate is higher than the interest rate. Thus it's cheaper in the long run for Apple to take on debt and pay a piddly amount of interest, than the repatriate the cash and pay more to remain out of debt than what they'd pay on interest.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to fix it - most companies do this because it is cheaper in the long run to take on debt in the US than to repatriate cash.
It would be better though, if all the legitimate big players in the patent games would just declare a truce, get together, and lobby for patent reform - along with copyright reform.
There's a saying of "be careful what you wish for" because you can bet Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung would love to do this. But the patent reform they want would ensure that no one else can enter the market.
Ditto copyright - they're going to ensure that the big companies can take copyright with a token payment and anyone else can't.
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Depends on the machine. At one place, two of the 5 had special sensors that ensured something fell down into the chute (I think the machines called it "seeing eye" or something). It's just a little optical sensor whose beam gets broken by the item.
Once, it DID fail on me - the item was still stuck on the loop. The machine detected this and spun it around again, so I ended up with two.
I noticed that those machines were also better engineered - one item common to all had a habit of falling the wrong way and getting wedged in the chute such that the door was stuck shut. (or get caught on a lip in the chute) The seeing eye machines didn't have lips that could catch the item nor did the item ever fall the wrong way to get stuck - they were engineers to prevent the item from flipping around and tended to have the items slide down rather than tumble.
Not to mention the pushback from the people who have to use the new system who have to suffer from things that don't work, their jobs made harder because the new system doesn't work like the old, misses some obscure feature that really does make their life easier (some obscure database query, for example, that's no longer possible because the schema doesn't allow it), etc.
Or even worse, that to generate the X report on Friday, ti now takes 8 hours instead of 1 hour like it used to because things changed so much there's no way to munge the data together without a lot of TheDailyWTF style hacking.
(I've known people who suffered through this - the old system generated the report just fine, they went through it to double check and verify the numbers, but the new system generates something close in multiple views, requiring now a manual cross-reference and collating and retyping).
30 year old software tends to have "workflows" that people have optimized to produce the output. The problem is very often when upgrading, the requirements gathering process fails to take into account the users and their use cases and opportunities for optimization. The latter is interesting since the "old way" should work until the new optimized way is trustworthy. Optimizations have a habit of accidentally dropping things that would get caught before, after all.
(And no, you can't ask the user what they use the system for because that'll only get the common case. They will often forget about other things they do with the system because it's done so often or mechanically that they don't think about it).
Except most casinos have a very specific clause that says all winnings are scrutinized and may be denied if the winnings are as a result of a machine fault.
Yes, a casino is NOT a way to make money - if you treat them as a form of entertainment rather than money making, you're closer to the actual reality of what a casino actually is.
You cannot win. It's why if you do win a jackpot, the machine you used is immediately isolated and wheeled away to confirm the win, verify there's no shenanigans with the machine, and to verify there's no faults with the machine. And yes, if they forget to update the game firmware, that counts as a fault and your winnings will be denied.
In fact, all that really has to happen is the guy gets billed for all his winnings due to faulty machines. No muss, no fuss, no criminal charges. Just a big ass bill having to repay every single dollar won.
False. Many planes require only one crewmember - the pilot. This is true whether the pilot is flying for himself and friends (e.g., private pilot) or doing it as part of a charter (air taxi).
And even the dinky little Cessnas that fly around have autopilots as well. Though, many an accident has been cause by relying a bit TOO much on automation...
Providers can make them scarce quite easily.
Provide a /64, but route only ::1 to that address. If they want more, provide another /64.
And they can call it "security" or "privacy" or other thing, as well because they aren't exposing everyone's PC to the big bad internet, but firewalling them off. (Something which NAT provides just as a side effect. Not a great firewall, but better than nothing).
IE actually helpfully asks if you want to customize it on startup, and one of the customizations is search providers, to which you click, check "Use as default" and boom, Google is default. Sucks that you just click "use defaults" and expect Microsoft to promote a competitor's product.
Heck, I think the default homepage isn't Bing, but MSN.
Chinese Android phones as well, because the only way to get apps is third party stores, which often host said infected apps (most new discoveries of Android malware come from China). Of course, whether or not it's pirated or not is very hard to tell - the legit stores don't do a very good job themselves.
And Play isn't available in China, either.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of stuff on Play gets pirated because it isn't available elsewhere - if there's a game you want and it's only available via Play, then one really doesn't have much choice other than to pirate it if Play isn't available.
Probably because of a few things.
1) Tablets are generally light and very portable and easily held in one hand. If you're at a gathering where everyone is standing, it's easy to whip out a tablet and show people stuff - while still having your other hand free to gesture and communicate and other things. One-handed use is quite important when you do not have a surface to use as a stand. Holding a laptop in one hand is often awkward, clumsy, and until the recent touch screen ones, interactions are terrible.
2) Tablets have great battery life. An iPad or Android tablet will generally last all day even if you're showing lots of people your brochures and screenshots and stuff. PCs with such battery life usually have external batteries, making them really heavy and unwieldy, especially single-handed carry.
3) There is very little need to compose long documents while at the conference - you may need to type some stuff up quickly (like entering contact and calendar stuff), but that generally is quite minimal. If a document need does come up, it's often better to do it in a private hotel room to draft it and review it (only an idiot tries to compose it right then and there to get it signed - these things normally have to be drawn up and agreed upon and other things).
4) The most common use will probably be fulfilled by the tablet's default gallery application - load up product photos, slides, etc as images and then swipe through them. Add a bit more for product brochures and stuff and that's it.
5) Said gallery app is often useful to automatically run a slide show when placed on the booth, similar to digital photo frames.
Gates is probably looking for a reason to not justify releasing Office for iOS (and Android). I mean, his criticisms apply to every tablet as well, including Surface. That, and a touch screen demands a different user interaction than a keyboard/mouse, so UIs have to change to accommodate both. E.g., touchscreens, resistive or capacitive or inductive are imprecise (resistives can use styluses, but even then the point's inaccurate) making small targets hard to hit. A mouse is a lot more precise. A touchscreen doesn't have "right click", and likewise, Fitt's law doesn't apply to touchscreens. In fact, hitting edges and corners is harder on a touchscreen.
Well, when TrueType was conceived by Apple and Microsoft way back in the late 80s and early 90s (yes, Apple and Microsoft worked on something together despite both being blood enemies at that time), your average PC had perhaps around a megabyte of RAM and a handful of megabytes for a hard drive, if any (Macs could boot off of floppies). So disk space and memory consumption was VERY critical, because there wasn't a lot of it.
Of course, we've also standardized on the TTF file format promoted by Microsoft on this (OS X uses TTFs, no more "suitcase" fonts).
These days, memory is not so much of a constraint when even the crappiest of smartphones has 256MB and storage in the handful of gigabytes - that's more than enough.
"Doing something" also can include "doing a helluva lot of science and research to figure out our options.
Like what the EU has done - as an experiment. If there are many factors, why not test each one to see which has greatest impact?
Right now, we have no data, other than CCD is happening. Why not "do something" by getting the data we need? We certainly won't have it when the bees are gone.
2 things.
1) It's not monopolistic if the company doesn't have a monopoly. Their business model is the same printer business model - cheap printer (it's 30% cheaper than a Makerbot), expensive filament. If you don't want this, go buy a Makerbot or other competing 3D printer - you'll pay more initially, but after a little while you'll break even.
2) The solution is worse than the cure. If you want to enforce everyone sticks to standards, where do you draw the line? Do you block OS X and Linux because it doesn't conform to the Windows "standard"? Do you block innovations in 3D graphics because OpenGL ARB hasn't gotten around to certifying the feature? After all, vendor-specific extensions are, well, vendor specific, anti-competitive and monopolistic. Do you prevent smaller cellphones from being made because the new USB cable, even if it's standard, isn't "standard" enough and costs $50 each?
And yes, de-facto standards do matter. Also, what kind of standards? Many aren't free at all - do you give up removable storage because SD cards aren't an open standard?
In the end, your choice is to not buy this and buy a competitor's product. Or buy this and hack it.
Actually, until the NES came out, gaming was DEAD.
You may have forgotten about the video game crash of the 80s where after the Atari 2600 came out, everyone and their dog was creating games for it, leading to a huge massive glut of really crappy games that everyone got tired of buying and effectively killed video games.
In fact, it was Nintendo that effectively revived it - except to prevent unlicensed third parties from producing crappy games they added DRM (the NES-001 chip) and made everyone who wanted to release a NES game go through a licensing and approval process.
And this is how we ended up with consoles where you have to pay license fees and stuff. Or how Apple decided they wanted to approve all apps for the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.
You could and nothing would happen. Because while in flight, the cabin is pressurized, and doors open inwards so they're propped shut by air pressure. There aren't many doors that open outward other than cargo ones, and even then they're a rarity because of the immense forces while pressurized (you're looking at ton of force bearing down the door - that's a lot for a latch).
Even when you're below 10,000 feet, the cabin still maintains a positive pressure over the outside - the cabin altitude is scheduled to reach airport altitude when the plane touches down, and not track the plane's altitude as the plane descends faster than most passengers would prefer (and would cause a lot of discomfort in pressure equalization).
What to configure? Microsoft provides you with Windows XP Mode which is a virtualized preconfigured environment for those few applications that need XP. I believe IE6 was also one of them as it's one of the few things that XP mode was needed for.
Given they need XP and IE6, it would imply they use some ActiveX crap that only works in IE6 (since I think IE7 redid ActiveX in order to be more secure). No amount of emulation can get crappy insecure ActiveX to work. It's partly why IE6 is still around because IE7 broke a lot in the name of security. From IE7 onwards, things aren't so bad.
False. They use a combo WiFi-Bluetooth chip, which, since both WiFi and Bluetooth use the 2.4ISM band, use the same antenna.
In fact, there's actually a protocol call Coexistence that combo chips use to help prevent Bluetooth and WiFi from interfering with each other (they're both aware of each other and what frequencies they use and actively avoid trying to interfere).
This is how most embedded devices do it - unlike PCs where the WiFI and Bluetooth boards are typically separate chips connected to separate antennas.
The big problem is the Bluetooth part isn't calibrated so its signal is terrible (radios typically need calibration to ensure they're on spec frequency wise and power wise so they're not attempting to overdrive the amps or emit tons of crap lowering signal quality immensely).
True, though back in the 90s, USB was unheard of, and whatever flash storage was available, was impractically expensive compared to zip disks (when you pay $200 for 32MB...).
It's why one of the more popular digital cameras at the time was the Sony Mavica, because it stored images on floppy drives. Pay $200 for 32MB, or $10 for a box of 10 disks. And with USB being a rarity and slow, card readers were equally difficult and espensive and even slower (parallel/serial ports were common).
False. A lot of countries are run by religious groups. We usually call them "Theocracies" (as opposed to democracies or communist, etc). You may know it from places like the Middle East and Asia, where a number of countries are known as Islamic countries because the principal religion is Islam, and the government is run by practicing Muslims. Islam is sort of special because it also dictates how an Islamic government is to be run.
Christianity doesn't have have such dictates, so Christian countries tend to organize in various ways.
And yes, the Founding Fathers put in separation of church and state because they know what happens when they intermix.
The thing is, back in the 90s, files were getting big enough that they weren't fitting on a reasonable number of floppy disks. And CD burners were rare (with CD-R's costing dollars each and buffer underruns ruining $5 worth of discs). So the Zip disks were a reasonably economical and common way of transporting large files.
They continued a bit until the late 90s when CD burners became pricey but common accessories with discs heading south of $1 each, with CD-RWs becoming commonplace. They were dead by the 2000s because everyone moved to CDs.
These days, large files are transported over home networks and WiFi, Ethernet and DVD burners are ubiquitous..
Intel doesn't want to put the hurt on AMD - because AMD is keeping the government off their back in the name of competition. (If AMD fails, the government will probably force AMD's patents that Intel licenses to be distributed to everyone else, and the government may split Intel up into foundry and design).
And Intel's a reliable supplier - they don't have shortages of parts, and have enough spare capacity that if you're wanting huge quantities (like an OEM like Apple), they'll customize you a chip to your specs (like how Apple's Macs all come with Intel VT, even if the chip used typically doesn't).
Flash is dying because one platform refused to support it. Given said platform's popularity in the early days, and being it's use in the majority of mobile web traffic (despite Android outselling iOS 3 or 4 to 1, iOS accounts for the majority of web traffic - by 2 to 1 over Android. It seems MOST Android users aren't surfing the web on their phones. Note - high end phones like SGS3 and SGS4 are NOT the majority of Androids sold - by far. Largest chunk (SGS3 is around 10% of all Androids), but not majority).
So Flash on the web is mostly dead and everyone moved onto HTML5. The main use of Flash was YouTube, and the iPhone had a YouTube app for that reason.
Silverlight had a resurgence thanks to Netflix. But it's dying because Netflix realized people watched movies on TVs, and put their client on every set top box and Blu-ray player out there, rendering the web the minority way of watching a movie. Even on the go - with smartphone and tablet apps.
But what if Google decided they wanted more YouTube content and partnered up to make DRM'd videos? Google could easily make it Flash-only, thus creating demand for Flash again. If it proves popular, then webmasters will assume that everyone has it installed and code to it again.
Replace YouTube with say, Hulu and you get the picture.
All it takes is one popular site to require DRM video and a plugin required to watch it. Platform vendors like Adobe would throw money at being selected because it would mean more sales of tools and more plugin downloads and more webmasters using that plugin for their sites as more people would have it installed.
Hell, if YouTube started up 10 years ago, you probably would expect it to use... QuickTime because practically everyone had an iPod and iTunes and thus QuickTime.
With this spec in HTML5, it specifies ONLY a DRM handling plugin. Which can't be leveraged in any other form to be an "alternative" to HTML5.
Now, you can argue that content producers should put their stuff up DRM-free, which is fine, but the content belongs to the producers and it's up to them to choose. You can lobby for them to do so, but until they do, there will be demand for DRM, and the users will install the plugins.
Heck, it's funny that RMS argues against DRM by using Flash as the example. Because if HTML5 doesn't have it, then people ARE going to use Flash. They aren't going to go DRM-free. RMS may wish for them to do so, but until they do, they'll just ask for alternatives. Which could mean closing off the web like Flash did.
Well, on one hand, we have a model student doing a science experiment that could've turned badly basically being expelled and prosecuted as a terrorist. On the other hand, we have a 5 year old kid, with a BB gun killing his younger brother who gets off scot-free.
So in one case, we have an over-the-top punishment that basically ends a promising student's career (she's being tried as an adult, so will have a permanent record of "creating a bomb"), while another kid kills and is let go. The only relation is that the same assistant state attorney recommended charges on one, and not the other. I suppose it helps that the arresting officer was related as well.
That probably has a lot of do with it, actually - Ketchikan isn't a huge place, and people end up really knowing each other. Especially parents (since there's probably only one class for the grade). So it wouldn't be surprising if a lot of people knew each other.
You really can't expel them, and the community will provide any necessary punishment above and beyond what punishment is meted out. In small towns, it can easily lead to shunning and exclusion (where the only remedy is moving).
Contrast this with most places where the populations are higher, and people really don't know their neighbours. There the only justice is whatever was handed out by the authorities because if it wasn't your kid, it was someone else who probably you don't know nor attends your school, etc. Just some anonymous kid.
Basically the administrators knew this and acted appropriately - community justice is often quite a bit harsher and softies are quickly discovered. So whatever legal penalties can be applied really won't matter in the end - the punishment of "that's Joe's kid, he's the one who did it" being known to the community is harsh enough.
Do it in a particularly spectacular fashion and you'll be the town legend.
Know what else supports 4K? HDMI.
And I'm fairly sure that if you're willing to pay $10K for a 4K screen (the current cheapest on the market - some Chinese knockoff), display manufacturers are willing to give you the 4K display you want.
Or you could pay $1K and get high res 27-30" screens as well just as you always could. You won't be able to find a 4K screen for $100 until 4KTVs are down in the under-$1000 range like HDTVs are now.
The only reason display resolutions "stalled" was because everyone was attracted to cheap cheap cheap - cheap laptops, cheap LCD monitors, etc. You could always have paid more and gotten better - 2560x1440 offerings for 27"+ have been around for years. Of course, they cost more, and everyone says "why did you pay so much when you could've gotten one for $200!" (See the last Apple monitor /. article where people assumed it was a 1080p screen when it wasn't).
Ditto laptops - we aren't seeing revolutions because of ultrabooks - just that ultrabooks have managed to pull an Apple and command extra money, and thus give what laptops in that price range have always given - better specs. If you skipped past the $300 laptops on display and upped it to $1000+, you'd find laptops with discrete GPUs, screens higher than 1366x768, and other niceties.
What's happened is good products have price floors. Races to the bottom means cutting out stuff to save money so you get crappy products cheaper.
Don't confuse revenue with profits, even though there's some horrible scheming going on. First, Apple UK had revenue of £1B, and a profit of £81.3M. They paid £14.4M in taxes, for a tax rate of 17.8% (because it's paid from profits). Of course, the scheme is Apple Ireland is overcharging Apple UK for product, so all the profits are hidden inside Apple Ireland.
As for iBonds - yes, that's because the interest rate on bonds is so low, borrowing is cheaper than repatriating the cash. First, Apple's one of the few companies with zero debt, so they can take on debt and be like most other companies. Second, interest rates are horrendously low. Third, repatriating the cash would mean paying taxes on that money, and the tax rate is higher than the interest rate. Thus it's cheaper in the long run for Apple to take on debt and pay a piddly amount of interest, than the repatriate the cash and pay more to remain out of debt than what they'd pay on interest.
Unfortunately, there's no easy way to fix it - most companies do this because it is cheaper in the long run to take on debt in the US than to repatriate cash.
There's a saying of "be careful what you wish for" because you can bet Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung would love to do this. But the patent reform they want would ensure that no one else can enter the market.
Ditto copyright - they're going to ensure that the big companies can take copyright with a token payment and anyone else can't.