I wonder what that French agency which likes to create French words instead of using ones derived from other languages will coin to name the Streissand effect.
Only if it happens in Quebec. In France, they just tend to incorporate it as-is. Stop signs in France say "Stop". Stop signs in Quebec say "Arret". And the French words for e-mail and such... originated in Quebec.
So Quebec will have to come up with a new name "to keep French pure" while the France French will probably just call it whatever seems appropriate.
Obscurity isn't the only way to enhance security. Seems to me something like wikipedia, where anonymous people all over the world can edit entries, would be a great way to sow misinformation.
And it probably was. Hell, that article wasn't even a very popular one until now. It was residing as a relatively unknown location on French Wikipedia until attention was called to it.
It's a trick people used to confirm Apple rumors - basically if someone had photos of the next-gen hardware, Apple would issue take downs within a day. Turns out everyone started using it as a mechanism to confirm the rumors (as Apple doesn't takedown false photos). So Apple quit issuing takedowns for rumor photos to leave everyone guessing.
Sort of. If you look closely, you see that the Ubuntu is $100 cheaper list-price but has a $100 discount there. The Windows one has a $200 discount. So the final price comes to the same for each, $1049. The only hardware difference I see is the hard drive: Windows has 2TB, Ubuntu has 1TB. Which explains why the latter is $100 cheaper: Not license fee difference, but just that it has a cheaper drive. I'm not sure why this is, but perhaps Microsoft specifies 2TB as a minimum for a Windows 8 desktop. Just to speculate.
Here's a hint. The cost to Dell for Windows licenses is zero, or negative.
Yes, Dell (and every other OEM) end up having to pay nothing or get free money for Windows. You know all that trialware the comes on the PC? Symantec, Roxio, etc., pay Dell to put it on there. Enough so that the license fee Dell pays Microsoft is well covered. And then the extra fees above and beyond go into profit and pay for extras like a larger hard drive, discounts, etc.
And no, Microsoft doesn't demand a 2TB hard drive, because you can find Windows 8 installed on a 64GB SSD machine.
So the Microsoft Studios Creative Director's views have no impact on what he does at work? He has nothing to do with Microsoft. Wow. Then why is he a director? These Microsoft Corp. Comm. people are more disconnected from reality than I expected.
By the way, the new Windows 360 Office for 2013 ( or whatever it is called ) is moving towards always on cloud connectivity. And directors at Microsoft are actually idiots who have no impact on product direction. Give me a break. First, fire the Creative Director for speaking the truth. Next fire the Microsoft Corp. Comm. for regurgitating canned responses that makes the company look dumb.
Or perhaps he was speaking what HE wants to see. Microsoft Studios is Microsoft's first party games publisher - so he's speaking what he'd like to see in the Xbox. Which will probably be similar to what other people at EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. wants.
They want always-on DRM. They don't see the bigger picture. They run independent of Entertainment and Devices (who go under the Microsoft label). They don't speak for anyone's interest except their own as a game publisher.
Larry Hyrb ("Major Nelson") works for the Xbox division, so he knows what is probably in the next Xbox. And he also knows that division is having to balance a ton of competing interests - some publishers (like Microsoft Studios) will want always-on DRM. Some will want one-time codes. Others want an easy way to be indie. And then there's the other competing interests - the Online division wants web browsers, Bing, and other services in by default. The Windows group would want Windows Media Center extender.
So yes, the director is speaking frankly. Because he runs that group, which is pretty much isolated from the core Xbox team. Even more so at Microsoft because of the way it's run - Microsoft is a HEAVILY silo'd operation - the people from one team rarely speak with people from another team - and sometimes the lines of communications rise from the engineer through a half-dozen managers (probably a couple of steps below Ballmer), over to the counterpart in the other division, then down a half-dozen managers, to the responsible engineer. I've known people who got in trouble for trying to speak directly to their counterpart.
It's why the various divisions often have their own toolsets - Windows team have their own compilers and maintain their own compilation tools (and may pull now and again from the Visual Studio team but never are allowed to contribute nor ask about stuff like bugs). Likewise, the Xbox team probably have cloned a copy of the compilers as well and have inhouse people maintaining them as well (because the Xbox director would get a serious chewing out if they even asked a question about the compiler code - as far as the development tools team go - they've done Xbox a favor by giving them a code drop).
Fiefdoms, is probably the better word. And the Xbox team probably haven't decided how the DRM is supposed to work.
After all, the tweet was about why he felt always-on DRM was good and didn't see why people would care otherwise. The Xbox team simply said "we can't comment because we've not announced anything". It's likely yes, there will be the option. Or maybe it'll be like the Xbox is now - if you download it, the DRM license is for that console, or if you're signed into Xbox Live (the latter is "always on" as disconnecting will end the game).
At Microsoft, one hand literally does not know what the other hand is doing.
Re:BSD folks must have even more terrible problem.
on
The 'Linux Inside' Stigma
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Why the heck Apple has OS-X and no BSD inside stickers, for many years now?;-)
They did, however for a short time do the whole "UNIX Inside" thing. Even got as far as certifying one version of OS X.
Tell that to all the "scientists" and "researchers" paying money for _and_ investing lifetimes worth of effort into writing libraries for Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, LabView and other proprietary environments
Depends on who they're doing it for, it seems. It's a time vs. money balance.
In a commercial environment, Matlab tends to win out purely because of the toolboxes - especially current ones where Matlab has real-world interfaces so after modelling, you can prototype your control system with real hardware. Then after that, you compile your Matlab code down to your controller hardware. So instead of having to learn one thing for simulation (Matlab), then learn how to prototype your controller directly in hardware (new tools, C, etc) you just keep the same Matlab implementation and compile it down to something you integrate rather than try to debug pesky translated code.
LabView is similar - a horrible mess if you want to program with it, but scientists and the like love it because it means not having to mess with code.
Basically the goal to achieve the results in a certain timeframe - cost tends to be secondary. If you cannot get X done in Y months, it's a huge problem.
Pure scientific research paid for by universities and governments typically have a lot more time but a lot less money to spend - if it takes you Z more months but you can save W dollars, it's worth it.
It's why companies rarely fund pure research initiatives - things like Microsoft Research (and Bell labs) still are curiosities.
Pure engineer view leads to products that can do impossible things, but are hard to use and look bad( Nokia anyone? ). Pure marketing leads to products that look good, are easy to use, easy to sell, but don't really do anything right ( iPhone, i'm looking at you ). Pure bean counters will keep doing the last thing the company did and do it better, faster, cheaper, with more profits. For a while, or untill competition kills them off with new products.
Except that pure marketing won't get you beyond the first step.
Just like pure engineering won't get you beyond the first step as well.
Because we have this thing called "feedback" - if the product is pure crap and only sells due to marketing, it'll come out pretty damn quick (see any overhyped movie) and sales will falter.
Likewise, anything that's hard to use will be noted as such "great product, but you must put time into learning how it works. As it is, it isn't recommended".
Nokias had great hardware, but the software did stink. However, unlike many Japanese cellphones, they were still usable phones. iPhones likewise - if it really was pure marketing hype and didn't work, then sales would've collapsed a few weeks after release in 2007 (think of the headlines - "Apple's iPhone - all flash, no substance").
Though, one aspect to consider is that engineers in general don't consider the arts side as being very important - designers, marketing, sales are all undervalued by engineers as frills.
Designers serve to make their lives difficult by insisting on buttons being like this and that order and having this sort of flow, etc - just let me code it my way. Marketing - that's spamming and exist only to sell you crap you don't want - my product is so good people will want it instantly (failing to note that if the public doesn't know about it, they won't discover it). Sales - they just exist to sell crap that doesn't exist and make onerous demands on engineering teams.
On the flip side, most of those people DO realize that engineering is required, though a bit more universally is they underestimate the effort involved. Of course, communications is generally the issue - the better the arts side can interact with engineering (so sales and marketing better understand what the product is, what it does, and other things, including what customers and needs it can fulfill), the better the overall result.
Why does the site need to be able to decrypt the e-mail address for any other reason than marketing or opt-in notifications? A salted/hashed e-mail address could be used just fine for logging in and sending password reset e-mails (in fact, I plan to do exactly that to avoid exactly this from happening).
So how do you notify someone that you've been hacked? And what if you have two people whose emails hash to the same value? (It does happen, and while it's SUPPOSED to be unlikely, "unlikely" has a nasty chance of being "will definitely happen" in short order).
The latter part is particularly important during password reset emails - if you chose a system where the email hash and password hash have to be identical (leaving out the possibility that you can have users whose emails and passwords both hash the same), how do you differentiate? You could inadvertently reset the wrong account since you have two identical email hashes. (Try to be smart and concatenate both email and password and hash that? well, how do you do password recovery when you only have half the input data?).
No, the only way to do it is to encrypt the email addresses. Use asymmetric encryption like RSA or ECC (though obey limitations of ECC since you can inadvertently reveal the key - a la PS3 hack). The server holds the public key, you hold the private.
To verify emails, you encrypt the address with the public key and compare the ciphertext with what's in the database. Then just do a lookup with the enciphered email and hashed password.
If the admin needs access to the email, they have the private key and can decrypt the email address. The server never stores the private key.
If a password recovery is needed, you encrypt the email with the public key and compare in the database
My discrete math course did that - it had a bunch of web pages and tools you need to use to solve the problems. They never worked right at all.
OTOH, I can see the system being used in those massively online open courses (MOOCs) where a lecture can admit easily 3000+ or more students in a term. This seems like a way for them to have homework in the course and to do tests so it closes the loop. The prof then gets back a summary of how many people get a question wrong, etc.
So it has its uses and if we're going to embrace online learning, we've got to embrace automated testing and evaluation as well, because evaluating 3000+ answers and essays is no longer feasible. And I'm sure the students doing these MOOCs would like to know how well they do as well - while they may not be paying too much money, they are investing a lot of time.
I've heard people mention that the Ouya won't really be all that - but I disagree. For the first time in a while, we have a console designed for the tinkerer and independent developer in mind, and it should be interesting to see what it brings to the table. Sure, when it launches, it won't be all that exciting - but given the resources available to Android developers of late, there is a lot of potential.
Of course, potential and five bucks gets you a coffee at Starbucks - but perhaps the Big Three need to feel the nipping of an indie console at their heels to get their butts in gear on new genres, new stories, and fresh ideas.
While that's the ideal situation, I'm thinking a good chunk of Ouyas will probably just end up running emulators like MAME and such. After all, instead of playing on a PC or using touch controls, you now have a real controller and can play pac-man on your big screen.
Because really, what's the usual thing modded consoles run by homebrewers? Emulators.
Compromised in the sense that Apple does a certain amount of data collection/spying and limits what you can do with it. To be fair unless you install Cyanogen then Android does allow Google to collect some data as well.
It's a very responsible attitude. Guests didn't click "I agree" to the privacy violations and you can't expect them to research all that stuff when visiting. You should do them a favor and set them up with a more respectful OS, just like you wouldn't immediately open up the browser after they left and see if they forgot to log out of their email account.
Most guests don't care. And if they're asking to borrow your computer/tablet/whatever they really don't give a damn.
Honestly, I see that as a bullshit excuse - if you don't want them to use your computers or provide them a means for them to do their internet stuff, then don't. Just. Say. No. They can provide their own devices.
If they really cared about privacy, they wouldn't ask you in the first place! I mean, you could very legitimately have installed a keylogger on the PC you're providing them, and they obviously don't care that you know their email password or other thing because of it.
To be honest, most guests asking will probably think you're nuts if you give them that excuse, and if you go onto a tirade about walled gardens, you'll find their eyes glaze over. Hell, if they have an Android, they'd probably install apps without caring about permissions (you can bet most Android users do).
Google will NOT attempt to close source it's effort
Google can't close the source for a simple reason - WebKit's LGPL!
See, WebKit was derived from KHTML, which was a LGPL'd rendering library. Apple took it to create WebKit. Apple released the source under their LGPL obligations. Apple got roasted for 1) not releasing the logs, and 2) not providing history, so KHTML guys were furious because they couldn't take the changes back. Apple relented and released it completely.
All throughout, the core KHTML stuff has been LGPL, and it makes WebKit (and WebKit2) LGPL as well.
Google could try to be a dick and do an Apple by releasing just the code without logs or history, making it difficult to reincorporate back to WebKit. Of course, given the backlash when Apple did it, I expect Google to get the same.
A few years ago, I was in the market for a simple html rendering engine for an embedded project. There were only a couple of options: webkit, presto and one more engine that I dont remember the name of. The licensing fees that opera wanted were astronomical and only the likes on Nintendo could afford it. Needless to say, I used webkit even though Presto was more desirable.
Anyhow, they should have open-sourced a few years back and snatched up a large portion of embedded market (which is actually quite big if you think about it)
The problem was, a few years ago, Opera was making big money selling Opera Mobile (not to be confused with Opera Mini - Mobile is a portable version of Opera, and basically the best mobile browser). Until WebKit was ported to mobile, Opera Mobile was the browser to have on your phone.
So naturally, Opera was riding high because well, being the best browser meant you also were embedded in a LOT of devices (I have many devices with Opera embedded in it).
Of course, Apple just HAD to port WebKit and install it on the newfangled "iPhone" and ruin it for Opera...
This is easily avoided by simply refusing to participate in facebook and other social media. Actually, that solves a lot of really stupid problems. I highly recommend it.
Well, there are advantages to participating - but just because you have an account, it doesn't mean you have to post your life on it. You can keep it bare and plain. Make it look like you did some work to it, so add some generic boring crap - a professional profile photo, that's it. If you have friend requests, be very selective - perhaps accept those you personally know well and who don't really go nuts with.
Just something that shows it's not a fake account, but also well, that you don't do stupid stuff. No one said you have to spend hours and hours every day, or even do what everyone else does. Just maintain a simple, basic profile.
We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android -- now, that will no longer be the case, and I guarantee you there will be instances where Google uses the inevitable differences between "Blink" and WebKit (which is also the core rendering engine for Mac OS X and Safari) for competitive advantage with Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, al la Microsoft and IE...:-/
Well, Blink's license is still LGPL as WebKit is LGPL, so source has to be available.
Now, it depends on how hard Google wants to make Blink vs. WebKit. Like how Apple got scolded for releasing the source to WebKit for making it impossible to integrate with KHTML, then not releasing the logs of the changes, then for not releasing the history.
Of course, it would be interesting to see if Google does the same, or if they make changes that WebKit can easily re-integrate.
Companies have been free to choose not to use it, and do try to drive people to web sites for purchasing for as long as there have been iOS apps. It's a simple decision, really. If you would lose more than 30% of your sales due to the "friction" you use Apple's in-store and in-app purchasing. And if you think that you would lose less than 30% of your sales you sell access to service/content through the web site, and give the app away for free.
Don't forget if you want to "go it alone" as well, you need to have a payment infrastructure. If you're a company that sells services via the web, no big deal, you already have it. If not, well, Apple's 30% cut (and Google's as well - since they ban using alternate services if Google Wallet is available) is looking mighty handy.
Though, at least Google gives the seller your email and other nice information. Use Apple's infrastructure and you don't get diddly - your app would have to go and sync with the site account to get a hint as to who may have just spent money via Apple.
10K was typically an enterprise thing. Enterprise has generally moved to either SSDs or to 2.5" drives (currently available in 10K and 15K).
The increased areal density gives decent capacity for the 2.5" drives, and the smaller platter means it's more robust, causes less vibration, and uses less power. It also takes up less space in a server.
Most 10K 3.5" drives used 2.5" platters because at the speeds they spun at, there was no way a 3.5" platter would survive the rotational induced stresses. (Most of the additional bulk was used by cooling fins to help cool the platters - a good chunk of the heat a hard drive produces comes from friction... with air!)
In fact, the latest desktop 10K drives were 2.5" drives bolted to a huge heatsink (it was recommended to NOT remove the heatsink).
Due to their temperature sensitivity (they had to have good cooling) they were a limited market (servers, mostly, there were a few desktops that had it but they were limited by case designs), and relatively low capacity versus the more contemporary 7200RPM drives.
With SSDs, low capacity high speed drives were basically extinct - why buy a 320GB 10K drive when a 512GB SSD would often be cheaper (and faster, to boot).
Data Protection Act (1984) UK, subsequently revised several times to clarify its intent.
You can write to ANY company, entity or organisation (even a website) and DEMAND all information they are storing on you. They may charge you only a reasonable administrative cost. Even applies to CCTV of yourself (but, obviously, in that case you have to give them enough information to determine who you are on their CCTV systems and can't just expect them to trawl years of video looking for your left arm).
How can you know whether a company is distributing incorrect / damaging information about yourself without the right to demand to see that information, the right to change it where it is erroneous, and the ability to control what they are allowed to do with it.
I believe the California law goes one further in not just saying what the business knows about you, but who they sold the information to as well. And it's ongoing - as long as your information is passed to a third party, the company has an obligation to notify you of what they passed on.
My issue is that the price difference per pound isn't going to be more than a few cents is it? Passenger weight is fairly insignificant compared to the weight of the plane itself. There might be standard 50 tons of people/luggage on a jumbo (250 lbs combined * 400 ppl). The 'heavier' people are going to add maybe a few tons, I'd guess 10 at most. So I'm betting that 10 tones is far less than a 5% increase in overall weight. So the increase in costs divided among the passengers is going to get pretty small pretty quickly.
Passenger weight (and distribution) is actually quite important, depending on the equipment.
Samoa airlines runs smaller aircraft - 12 passenger ones are common. The deal is that weight and balance are VERY important in ALL aircraft, but especially so on smaller ones.
The deal is, if you flew larger equipment with a hundred or more passengers, you can get away using standard weights for passengers (this varies by country - and the FAA has I believe been conducting a study to see how much they have to be revised for ever-growing waistlines). After all, the more people you have, the closer to the average they would be. The baggage carts aren't actually randomly loaded - they're weighed and loaded, and they're actually put on the plane in a specific order to keep CG in check and the plane balanced.
For a smaller plane, though, averages don't work too well - one big guy can throw your whole calculation off. Or if your passengers are all skinny.
So now you have a problem of weight and balance - if your plane is too heavy, it can be illegal to take off (you have to remove cargo and/or passengers). And these planes weren't made for super-heavy passengers - they were probably designed for standard weight people plus some baggage. Too heavy or too much baggage and you exceed designed payload, which means you either unload cargo and passengers, or take on less fuel (and there's an absolute minimum fuel that has to be carried per the aircraft design (Zero Fuel Weight - the maximum payload that can be carried with no fuel - the rest of available payload must be fuel). Never mind the necessary fuel to make it to the destination and required reserves.
And if your average passenger weight has wide deviations (as you would with only 12 passengers), then assuming the wrong weights could put your plane outside the CG envelope VERY easily.
A plane outside of CG is dangerous - it means the controllability is compromised as the controls may not have sufficient authority to overcome the out-of-CG condition.
So yes, the passenger weights do matter, and I wouldn't be surprised if seating order is changed once everyone's weighed to keep everything in check.
As to whether this is the right way to do it? Well, a lot of aviation administrations are starting to demand actual weights of passengers be used for smaller aircraft because MANY have crashed due to potentially out-of-average people being carried.
Re:Collateralized vs Non-Collateralized Loans
on
Let Them Eat Teslas
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No one underwrites the losses. That's what the interest and fees are for. Or do you think that 4% + 7.9% should be entirely risk free for the lender?
Yeah, but college students usually have very little In the way of a credit history, which usually means that the risk is higher so the interest will be way more.
Part of the interest rate is due to the risk - and students don't have enough of a history to tell you if they're likely to default or not. In fact, the government typically underwrites the loan in order to reduce the interest rate - otherwise a student loan would be fairly high risk.
Think about it - you're loaning something easily $150K, and they have little to no credit history, and they won't even BEGIN to repay the loan until 4 or 5 years down the road. AND there's no collateral. It's an unsecured loan for a fairly large sum of money for a long period of time with nothing to judge who likely the person you're loaning money to will repay you.
All for a 4% fee and 7.9% ROI (that often begins accumulating only AFTER the education is over - so it's interest free while enrolled). Most lenders won't touch that with a 10 foot pole.
Credit cards don't loan out that much money (probably 5% of what a student loan would have) and they still charge high rates of interest.
Student loans are risky from the investor point of view - there are way better investments one could put that sum of money in and earn similar returns.
If a lender were to "free market" a student loan, 30+% APR would probably be the norm given the risks, putting education in the hands of the rich (who can probably avoid needing a loan).
And that's why the government underwrites the loan - the lender is only out the interest should the student default - the principle is protected. Otherwise they won't readily put up what a house costs (for the most part) on something so risky - they'd probably make more money buying and selling houses with less risk.
You would think a carrier could easily block VOIP originating calls to emergency services.
Unless that information is lost by the time the call arrives at the carrier.
There has to be an originating caller id - as this is who is charged for the call,
certainly if the destination is not an emergency services number.
The question is - how do you know that VoIP call isn't from a local person needing 911 services? After all, a lot of people have dumped landlines in favor of VoIP lines. And stuff like Vonage make the house phone lines look a lot like landlines.
And in fact, until recently, 911 wasn't really handled properly by VoIP providers. And there's lots of VoIP providers out there - who's to say what's a legit VoIP emergency call and what's not?
If you think the car door lock or ignition lock stops a motivated thief you are as clueless when it comes to car security as the PC owners are about computer security.
Depends what you're trying to protect. The contents of a car? Not really - most thieves do smash-and-grabs (annoying to spend hundreds to fix when the thief made off with $20 worth of change and CDs).
The vehicle? Most modern ones have immobilizers (a lot of places make them mandatory - where I am in BC, Canada, all new cars sold must have immobilizers to get insured). In general, it's why carjacking became popular because hotwiring a car was no longer feasible, at least unless you weren't picky and went for an older model before the immobilizers were standard.
Yeah, there are car proxies that let you bypass the immobilizer, but that's pretty much saying unless you have perfect security, it's pointless. (Especially since most people really only need "good enough").
Okay, thanks for the info. But where exactly is the link for and where exactly is the source code for the "open source" API to this proprietary firmware code blob? I agree that open sourcing the interface is useful alone: knowing what the hooks are lets you access more of the capabilities of the card.
I would think the APIs would be "documented" by the source code that was released. After all, the code would show how to load a program onto the GPU, get it running (it's not a trivial operation considering all the things that have to be set up so the GPU can run your code amidst everything else it does).
Then the driver will have to interface between userspace and get the video data to the card, which the code will show as well. The firmware being loaded is specific to video decode, so there wouldn't be much to it - just grab the block of video data, somehow point the card at it via bus mastering (DMA), and kick the firmware into decoding it at the right time.
You won't access more capabilities because the firmware you loaded only does one thing - it's a program that configures the card to do hardware video decoding. Depending on the video, it may demand so much GPU resources that the GPU can't do 3D rendering as well, kicking the system into 2D mode (on Windows, it would be switching from Aero to Basic). Or maybe not (e.g., a DVD won't do it, but a Blu-Ray will), if the load is small.
There's very little the firmware offers software - just enough hooks to be able to decode the video. You can't use it to render triangles or mine bitcoins or whatever with that firmware - you have to load in your bitcoin mining firmware or 3D render pipeline firmware to do those things (these things are normally done by asking the driver to compile and load your GPGPU code).
At best, you'll learn how the IPC works between the host CPU and the GPU.
And the submitter carried on their side of the tradition by failing to use the full version of an obscure acronym at least once in the summary.
Technically, BBM isn't that obscure - I'm sure if you query upper management folks, they know what it means just fine. Even a startling number of the general public - it's been around for a LONG time. Prior to the iPhone it was fairly popular as well.
Heck, it was also one of the things that caused the UAE and India to force RIM (err.. Blackberry) to install servers in their country.
The only reason BBM might be obscure to technical folks are those who shutter themselves into their little tech world and do very little interaction with others.
Heck, the building maintenance guys were given Blackberries so head office to BBM them. They don't like it (they much prefer their radios), but even they know how to use it.
The App bubble has already popped. The only people that make money writing apps are contractors building them for companies that insist they need an app (even though they probably don't...), employees at companies like that drawing a salary, and the 1 in a million that comes up with the ugly meter. Eventually the marketing departments will realize that "Billy Bob's horse feed insurance" doesn't need a mobile app and all of that will dry up pretty quickly.
No, the gold rush is over. Slight difference.
The app market has matured - enough so that "build it and they will come" does NOT apply. Writing an app is not enough - you must also MARKET it. Because simply appear on a store isn't enough to get people to download it - you have to get people to know about it.
And yes, it applies to all the other "app stores" out there, including Steam Greenlight (which if you're unknown, means you probably won't get onto the first widely available app store), Xbox Indie arcade, etc.
There will be lots of opportunities for apps still - after all, there's still new PC software coming out, and it's been around, even when there's competition in the form of open-source software.
The deal is the market has matured significantly. Come up with a great idea for a program and market it so people know about it and solves a problem, and you can make money. Write some crap, release it without fanfare, and it'll do poorly. I'm almost certain far too many people believe you don't have to market - but you do. Same goes for every other mature market out there - even open-source software. You may release something that scratches your itch, and maybe someone else's as well. But fail to properly market it and that someone else may assume no on eels has his problem. (And that marketing would be to ensure Google can find your site and understand the problem space, and getting users and communities to talk about using your software to solve problems so it shows up in Google better amidst the results).
The only part of the bubble that popped would be the easy money part, i.e., the gold rush. Now you'll have to be in it for the long haul and understanding you're writing a commodity that has to differentiate itself and make itself known.
The question is - the driver (the part that Linux runs) is open sourced. It just interfaces with parts that aren't (the firmware).
A modern graphics card is programmable - they run various programs (and you know them for doing stuff like GPGPU and CUDA, and even LLVM). So the firmware files are there to load the hardware decoder blocks onto the GPU.
For AMD cards, the card does the whole video decode chain - you feed it in h.264 or VC-1, and it parses the stream, decodes it and renders it all on the chip. nVidia cards require CPU assistance - they do the IDCTs and YUV transforms and other acceleration, but not the entire stream on card.
So they open-sourced the part your CPU runs, while the GPU part is still a binary blob that the driver loads onto the GPU so it can start feeding it the encoded stream and have the GPU decode and display it.
There's not much else to it - they could open source the firmware, but that's often highly proprietary and may contain licensed code from elsewhere. Plus, there may be a bunch of other technologies involved (i.e. the compiler) that they can't open-source. And most people won't have use for that code anyhow - it's firmware. It's just like the firmware that runs your WiFi card, your NIC, etc. - they often make the interface public and leave the rest of it proprietary.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if it happens in Quebec. In France, they just tend to incorporate it as-is. Stop signs in France say "Stop". Stop signs in Quebec say "Arret". And the French words for e-mail and such... originated in Quebec.
So Quebec will have to come up with a new name "to keep French pure" while the France French will probably just call it whatever seems appropriate.
And it probably was. Hell, that article wasn't even a very popular one until now. It was residing as a relatively unknown location on French Wikipedia until attention was called to it.
It's a trick people used to confirm Apple rumors - basically if someone had photos of the next-gen hardware, Apple would issue take downs within a day. Turns out everyone started using it as a mechanism to confirm the rumors (as Apple doesn't takedown false photos). So Apple quit issuing takedowns for rumor photos to leave everyone guessing.
Here's a hint. The cost to Dell for Windows licenses is zero, or negative.
Yes, Dell (and every other OEM) end up having to pay nothing or get free money for Windows. You know all that trialware the comes on the PC? Symantec, Roxio, etc., pay Dell to put it on there. Enough so that the license fee Dell pays Microsoft is well covered. And then the extra fees above and beyond go into profit and pay for extras like a larger hard drive, discounts, etc.
And no, Microsoft doesn't demand a 2TB hard drive, because you can find Windows 8 installed on a 64GB SSD machine.
Or perhaps he was speaking what HE wants to see. Microsoft Studios is Microsoft's first party games publisher - so he's speaking what he'd like to see in the Xbox. Which will probably be similar to what other people at EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc. wants.
They want always-on DRM. They don't see the bigger picture. They run independent of Entertainment and Devices (who go under the Microsoft label). They don't speak for anyone's interest except their own as a game publisher.
Larry Hyrb ("Major Nelson") works for the Xbox division, so he knows what is probably in the next Xbox. And he also knows that division is having to balance a ton of competing interests - some publishers (like Microsoft Studios) will want always-on DRM. Some will want one-time codes. Others want an easy way to be indie. And then there's the other competing interests - the Online division wants web browsers, Bing, and other services in by default. The Windows group would want Windows Media Center extender.
So yes, the director is speaking frankly. Because he runs that group, which is pretty much isolated from the core Xbox team. Even more so at Microsoft because of the way it's run - Microsoft is a HEAVILY silo'd operation - the people from one team rarely speak with people from another team - and sometimes the lines of communications rise from the engineer through a half-dozen managers (probably a couple of steps below Ballmer), over to the counterpart in the other division, then down a half-dozen managers, to the responsible engineer. I've known people who got in trouble for trying to speak directly to their counterpart.
It's why the various divisions often have their own toolsets - Windows team have their own compilers and maintain their own compilation tools (and may pull now and again from the Visual Studio team but never are allowed to contribute nor ask about stuff like bugs). Likewise, the Xbox team probably have cloned a copy of the compilers as well and have inhouse people maintaining them as well (because the Xbox director would get a serious chewing out if they even asked a question about the compiler code - as far as the development tools team go - they've done Xbox a favor by giving them a code drop).
Fiefdoms, is probably the better word. And the Xbox team probably haven't decided how the DRM is supposed to work.
After all, the tweet was about why he felt always-on DRM was good and didn't see why people would care otherwise. The Xbox team simply said "we can't comment because we've not announced anything". It's likely yes, there will be the option. Or maybe it'll be like the Xbox is now - if you download it, the DRM license is for that console, or if you're signed into Xbox Live (the latter is "always on" as disconnecting will end the game).
At Microsoft, one hand literally does not know what the other hand is doing.
They did, however for a short time do the whole "UNIX Inside" thing. Even got as far as certifying one version of OS X.
Depends on who they're doing it for, it seems. It's a time vs. money balance.
In a commercial environment, Matlab tends to win out purely because of the toolboxes - especially current ones where Matlab has real-world interfaces so after modelling, you can prototype your control system with real hardware. Then after that, you compile your Matlab code down to your controller hardware. So instead of having to learn one thing for simulation (Matlab), then learn how to prototype your controller directly in hardware (new tools, C, etc) you just keep the same Matlab implementation and compile it down to something you integrate rather than try to debug pesky translated code.
LabView is similar - a horrible mess if you want to program with it, but scientists and the like love it because it means not having to mess with code.
Basically the goal to achieve the results in a certain timeframe - cost tends to be secondary. If you cannot get X done in Y months, it's a huge problem.
Pure scientific research paid for by universities and governments typically have a lot more time but a lot less money to spend - if it takes you Z more months but you can save W dollars, it's worth it.
It's why companies rarely fund pure research initiatives - things like Microsoft Research (and Bell labs) still are curiosities.
Except that pure marketing won't get you beyond the first step.
Just like pure engineering won't get you beyond the first step as well.
Because we have this thing called "feedback" - if the product is pure crap and only sells due to marketing, it'll come out pretty damn quick (see any overhyped movie) and sales will falter.
Likewise, anything that's hard to use will be noted as such "great product, but you must put time into learning how it works. As it is, it isn't recommended".
Nokias had great hardware, but the software did stink. However, unlike many Japanese cellphones, they were still usable phones. iPhones likewise - if it really was pure marketing hype and didn't work, then sales would've collapsed a few weeks after release in 2007 (think of the headlines - "Apple's iPhone - all flash, no substance").
Though, one aspect to consider is that engineers in general don't consider the arts side as being very important - designers, marketing, sales are all undervalued by engineers as frills.
Designers serve to make their lives difficult by insisting on buttons being like this and that order and having this sort of flow, etc - just let me code it my way. Marketing - that's spamming and exist only to sell you crap you don't want - my product is so good people will want it instantly (failing to note that if the public doesn't know about it, they won't discover it). Sales - they just exist to sell crap that doesn't exist and make onerous demands on engineering teams.
On the flip side, most of those people DO realize that engineering is required, though a bit more universally is they underestimate the effort involved. Of course, communications is generally the issue - the better the arts side can interact with engineering (so sales and marketing better understand what the product is, what it does, and other things, including what customers and needs it can fulfill), the better the overall result.
So how do you notify someone that you've been hacked? And what if you have two people whose emails hash to the same value? (It does happen, and while it's SUPPOSED to be unlikely, "unlikely" has a nasty chance of being "will definitely happen" in short order).
The latter part is particularly important during password reset emails - if you chose a system where the email hash and password hash have to be identical (leaving out the possibility that you can have users whose emails and passwords both hash the same), how do you differentiate? You could inadvertently reset the wrong account since you have two identical email hashes. (Try to be smart and concatenate both email and password and hash that? well, how do you do password recovery when you only have half the input data?).
No, the only way to do it is to encrypt the email addresses. Use asymmetric encryption like RSA or ECC (though obey limitations of ECC since you can inadvertently reveal the key - a la PS3 hack). The server holds the public key, you hold the private.
To verify emails, you encrypt the address with the public key and compare the ciphertext with what's in the database. Then just do a lookup with the enciphered email and hashed password.
If the admin needs access to the email, they have the private key and can decrypt the email address. The server never stores the private key.
If a password recovery is needed, you encrypt the email with the public key and compare in the database
My discrete math course did that - it had a bunch of web pages and tools you need to use to solve the problems. They never worked right at all.
OTOH, I can see the system being used in those massively online open courses (MOOCs) where a lecture can admit easily 3000+ or more students in a term. This seems like a way for them to have homework in the course and to do tests so it closes the loop. The prof then gets back a summary of how many people get a question wrong, etc.
So it has its uses and if we're going to embrace online learning, we've got to embrace automated testing and evaluation as well, because evaluating 3000+ answers and essays is no longer feasible. And I'm sure the students doing these MOOCs would like to know how well they do as well - while they may not be paying too much money, they are investing a lot of time.
While that's the ideal situation, I'm thinking a good chunk of Ouyas will probably just end up running emulators like MAME and such. After all, instead of playing on a PC or using touch controls, you now have a real controller and can play pac-man on your big screen.
Because really, what's the usual thing modded consoles run by homebrewers? Emulators.
Most guests don't care. And if they're asking to borrow your computer/tablet/whatever they really don't give a damn.
Honestly, I see that as a bullshit excuse - if you don't want them to use your computers or provide them a means for them to do their internet stuff, then don't. Just. Say. No. They can provide their own devices.
If they really cared about privacy, they wouldn't ask you in the first place! I mean, you could very legitimately have installed a keylogger on the PC you're providing them, and they obviously don't care that you know their email password or other thing because of it.
To be honest, most guests asking will probably think you're nuts if you give them that excuse, and if you go onto a tirade about walled gardens, you'll find their eyes glaze over. Hell, if they have an Android, they'd probably install apps without caring about permissions (you can bet most Android users do).
Kilomile = 1000 miles.
megametre = 1000 km.
Last I checked, a kilometre is much shorter than a mile...
Google can't close the source for a simple reason - WebKit's LGPL!
See, WebKit was derived from KHTML, which was a LGPL'd rendering library. Apple took it to create WebKit. Apple released the source under their LGPL obligations. Apple got roasted for 1) not releasing the logs, and 2) not providing history, so KHTML guys were furious because they couldn't take the changes back. Apple relented and released it completely.
All throughout, the core KHTML stuff has been LGPL, and it makes WebKit (and WebKit2) LGPL as well.
Google could try to be a dick and do an Apple by releasing just the code without logs or history, making it difficult to reincorporate back to WebKit. Of course, given the backlash when Apple did it, I expect Google to get the same.
The problem was, a few years ago, Opera was making big money selling Opera Mobile (not to be confused with Opera Mini - Mobile is a portable version of Opera, and basically the best mobile browser). Until WebKit was ported to mobile, Opera Mobile was the browser to have on your phone.
So naturally, Opera was riding high because well, being the best browser meant you also were embedded in a LOT of devices (I have many devices with Opera embedded in it).
Of course, Apple just HAD to port WebKit and install it on the newfangled "iPhone" and ruin it for Opera...
Well, there are advantages to participating - but just because you have an account, it doesn't mean you have to post your life on it. You can keep it bare and plain. Make it look like you did some work to it, so add some generic boring crap - a professional profile photo, that's it. If you have friend requests, be very selective - perhaps accept those you personally know well and who don't really go nuts with.
Just something that shows it's not a fake account, but also well, that you don't do stupid stuff. No one said you have to spend hours and hours every day, or even do what everyone else does. Just maintain a simple, basic profile.
Well, Blink's license is still LGPL as WebKit is LGPL, so source has to be available.
Now, it depends on how hard Google wants to make Blink vs. WebKit. Like how Apple got scolded for releasing the source to WebKit for making it impossible to integrate with KHTML, then not releasing the logs of the changes, then for not releasing the history.
Of course, it would be interesting to see if Google does the same, or if they make changes that WebKit can easily re-integrate.
Don't forget if you want to "go it alone" as well, you need to have a payment infrastructure. If you're a company that sells services via the web, no big deal, you already have it. If not, well, Apple's 30% cut (and Google's as well - since they ban using alternate services if Google Wallet is available) is looking mighty handy.
Though, at least Google gives the seller your email and other nice information. Use Apple's infrastructure and you don't get diddly - your app would have to go and sync with the site account to get a hint as to who may have just spent money via Apple.
Most 10K 3.5" drives used 2.5" platters because at the speeds they spun at, there was no way a 3.5" platter would survive the rotational induced stresses. (Most of the additional bulk was used by cooling fins to help cool the platters - a good chunk of the heat a hard drive produces comes from friction... with air!)
In fact, the latest desktop 10K drives were 2.5" drives bolted to a huge heatsink (it was recommended to NOT remove the heatsink).
Due to their temperature sensitivity (they had to have good cooling) they were a limited market (servers, mostly, there were a few desktops that had it but they were limited by case designs), and relatively low capacity versus the more contemporary 7200RPM drives.
With SSDs, low capacity high speed drives were basically extinct - why buy a 320GB 10K drive when a 512GB SSD would often be cheaper (and faster, to boot).
I believe the California law goes one further in not just saying what the business knows about you, but who they sold the information to as well. And it's ongoing - as long as your information is passed to a third party, the company has an obligation to notify you of what they passed on.
Passenger weight (and distribution) is actually quite important, depending on the equipment.
Samoa airlines runs smaller aircraft - 12 passenger ones are common. The deal is that weight and balance are VERY important in ALL aircraft, but especially so on smaller ones.
The deal is, if you flew larger equipment with a hundred or more passengers, you can get away using standard weights for passengers (this varies by country - and the FAA has I believe been conducting a study to see how much they have to be revised for ever-growing waistlines). After all, the more people you have, the closer to the average they would be. The baggage carts aren't actually randomly loaded - they're weighed and loaded, and they're actually put on the plane in a specific order to keep CG in check and the plane balanced.
For a smaller plane, though, averages don't work too well - one big guy can throw your whole calculation off. Or if your passengers are all skinny.
So now you have a problem of weight and balance - if your plane is too heavy, it can be illegal to take off (you have to remove cargo and/or passengers). And these planes weren't made for super-heavy passengers - they were probably designed for standard weight people plus some baggage. Too heavy or too much baggage and you exceed designed payload, which means you either unload cargo and passengers, or take on less fuel (and there's an absolute minimum fuel that has to be carried per the aircraft design (Zero Fuel Weight - the maximum payload that can be carried with no fuel - the rest of available payload must be fuel). Never mind the necessary fuel to make it to the destination and required reserves.
And if your average passenger weight has wide deviations (as you would with only 12 passengers), then assuming the wrong weights could put your plane outside the CG envelope VERY easily.
A plane outside of CG is dangerous - it means the controllability is compromised as the controls may not have sufficient authority to overcome the out-of-CG condition.
So yes, the passenger weights do matter, and I wouldn't be surprised if seating order is changed once everyone's weighed to keep everything in check.
As to whether this is the right way to do it? Well, a lot of aviation administrations are starting to demand actual weights of passengers be used for smaller aircraft because MANY have crashed due to potentially out-of-average people being carried.
Yeah, but college students usually have very little In the way of a credit history, which usually means that the risk is higher so the interest will be way more.
Part of the interest rate is due to the risk - and students don't have enough of a history to tell you if they're likely to default or not. In fact, the government typically underwrites the loan in order to reduce the interest rate - otherwise a student loan would be fairly high risk.
Think about it - you're loaning something easily $150K, and they have little to no credit history, and they won't even BEGIN to repay the loan until 4 or 5 years down the road. AND there's no collateral. It's an unsecured loan for a fairly large sum of money for a long period of time with nothing to judge who likely the person you're loaning money to will repay you.
All for a 4% fee and 7.9% ROI (that often begins accumulating only AFTER the education is over - so it's interest free while enrolled). Most lenders won't touch that with a 10 foot pole.
Credit cards don't loan out that much money (probably 5% of what a student loan would have) and they still charge high rates of interest.
Student loans are risky from the investor point of view - there are way better investments one could put that sum of money in and earn similar returns.
If a lender were to "free market" a student loan, 30+% APR would probably be the norm given the risks, putting education in the hands of the rich (who can probably avoid needing a loan).
And that's why the government underwrites the loan - the lender is only out the interest should the student default - the principle is protected. Otherwise they won't readily put up what a house costs (for the most part) on something so risky - they'd probably make more money buying and selling houses with less risk.
The question is - how do you know that VoIP call isn't from a local person needing 911 services? After all, a lot of people have dumped landlines in favor of VoIP lines. And stuff like Vonage make the house phone lines look a lot like landlines.
And in fact, until recently, 911 wasn't really handled properly by VoIP providers. And there's lots of VoIP providers out there - who's to say what's a legit VoIP emergency call and what's not?
Depends what you're trying to protect. The contents of a car? Not really - most thieves do smash-and-grabs (annoying to spend hundreds to fix when the thief made off with $20 worth of change and CDs).
The vehicle? Most modern ones have immobilizers (a lot of places make them mandatory - where I am in BC, Canada, all new cars sold must have immobilizers to get insured). In general, it's why carjacking became popular because hotwiring a car was no longer feasible, at least unless you weren't picky and went for an older model before the immobilizers were standard.
Yeah, there are car proxies that let you bypass the immobilizer, but that's pretty much saying unless you have perfect security, it's pointless. (Especially since most people really only need "good enough").
I would think the APIs would be "documented" by the source code that was released. After all, the code would show how to load a program onto the GPU, get it running (it's not a trivial operation considering all the things that have to be set up so the GPU can run your code amidst everything else it does).
Then the driver will have to interface between userspace and get the video data to the card, which the code will show as well. The firmware being loaded is specific to video decode, so there wouldn't be much to it - just grab the block of video data, somehow point the card at it via bus mastering (DMA), and kick the firmware into decoding it at the right time.
You won't access more capabilities because the firmware you loaded only does one thing - it's a program that configures the card to do hardware video decoding. Depending on the video, it may demand so much GPU resources that the GPU can't do 3D rendering as well, kicking the system into 2D mode (on Windows, it would be switching from Aero to Basic). Or maybe not (e.g., a DVD won't do it, but a Blu-Ray will), if the load is small.
There's very little the firmware offers software - just enough hooks to be able to decode the video. You can't use it to render triangles or mine bitcoins or whatever with that firmware - you have to load in your bitcoin mining firmware or 3D render pipeline firmware to do those things (these things are normally done by asking the driver to compile and load your GPGPU code).
At best, you'll learn how the IPC works between the host CPU and the GPU.
Technically, BBM isn't that obscure - I'm sure if you query upper management folks, they know what it means just fine. Even a startling number of the general public - it's been around for a LONG time. Prior to the iPhone it was fairly popular as well.
Heck, it was also one of the things that caused the UAE and India to force RIM (err.. Blackberry) to install servers in their country.
The only reason BBM might be obscure to technical folks are those who shutter themselves into their little tech world and do very little interaction with others.
Heck, the building maintenance guys were given Blackberries so head office to BBM them. They don't like it (they much prefer their radios), but even they know how to use it.
No, the gold rush is over. Slight difference.
The app market has matured - enough so that "build it and they will come" does NOT apply. Writing an app is not enough - you must also MARKET it. Because simply appear on a store isn't enough to get people to download it - you have to get people to know about it.
And yes, it applies to all the other "app stores" out there, including Steam Greenlight (which if you're unknown, means you probably won't get onto the first widely available app store), Xbox Indie arcade, etc.
There will be lots of opportunities for apps still - after all, there's still new PC software coming out, and it's been around, even when there's competition in the form of open-source software.
The deal is the market has matured significantly. Come up with a great idea for a program and market it so people know about it and solves a problem, and you can make money. Write some crap, release it without fanfare, and it'll do poorly. I'm almost certain far too many people believe you don't have to market - but you do. Same goes for every other mature market out there - even open-source software. You may release something that scratches your itch, and maybe someone else's as well. But fail to properly market it and that someone else may assume no on eels has his problem. (And that marketing would be to ensure Google can find your site and understand the problem space, and getting users and communities to talk about using your software to solve problems so it shows up in Google better amidst the results).
The only part of the bubble that popped would be the easy money part, i.e., the gold rush. Now you'll have to be in it for the long haul and understanding you're writing a commodity that has to differentiate itself and make itself known.
The question is - the driver (the part that Linux runs) is open sourced. It just interfaces with parts that aren't (the firmware).
A modern graphics card is programmable - they run various programs (and you know them for doing stuff like GPGPU and CUDA, and even LLVM). So the firmware files are there to load the hardware decoder blocks onto the GPU.
For AMD cards, the card does the whole video decode chain - you feed it in h.264 or VC-1, and it parses the stream, decodes it and renders it all on the chip. nVidia cards require CPU assistance - they do the IDCTs and YUV transforms and other acceleration, but not the entire stream on card.
So they open-sourced the part your CPU runs, while the GPU part is still a binary blob that the driver loads onto the GPU so it can start feeding it the encoded stream and have the GPU decode and display it.
There's not much else to it - they could open source the firmware, but that's often highly proprietary and may contain licensed code from elsewhere. Plus, there may be a bunch of other technologies involved (i.e. the compiler) that they can't open-source. And most people won't have use for that code anyhow - it's firmware. It's just like the firmware that runs your WiFi card, your NIC, etc. - they often make the interface public and leave the rest of it proprietary.