the vast majority of calls I receive are clearly fraudulent and coming from another country.
A good number of calls are coming from overseas (India - is there nothing that they won't outsource?), however they often acquire local telephone numbers.
You'd think they'd be able to go after the redialer or something since I don't think Caller ID goes across the border very well (at least outside of North America). So some company is out there spoofing the number and providing some North American dialout..
Sometimes I wonder why we are so quick to discard the PC. I certainly hope it won't become a symbol of lost opportunity.
We aren't discarding the PC. Just the same way, we aren't discarding pickup trucks. They're extremely general use devices - they can do lots of things and have lots of capabilities, but they aren't necessarily the best thing for all purposes. Just like you can use a pickup as your "go around town" vehicle, or to haul cargo, or other tasks, doesn't mean it's necessarily the best vehicle for the job - there's fuel consumption, other vehicles that could do the job better, parking, etc.
The PC is the same - instead of needing multiple PCs to do things, you consolidate down because there are other better devices to do things. Need to look up data on the go? A smartphone does that without the awkwardness of having to dig out your laptop, wake it up, and look up the information. (Try looking up prices online while shopping doing this, for example). The smartphone is smaller, more portable, and has better battery life for going about your day - something no laptop really has.
Likewise, a tablet is a nice companion to your living room - a big screen to complement your big screen TV, able to quickly look up information that crops up ("didn't this actor do...", look up TV listings, control your DVR, serve as an alternate stream, game controller, etc).
Or for streaming services - it's sure easier to plug in a Roku and watch Netflix than it is to have a PC in the room, boot it up, start your web browser, type Netflix and click here, there. Even with remote controls and UIs.
Network file servers are nice as well to hold your movies, music and photos to share to everything without being stuck on one PC.
And there's the PC, for the other things that I didn't mention - everything else. It can do everything I said you can do with other devices so it will remain a staple of computing because not everyone can justify a need. If you don't look up information online while going about your day, you don't need a smartphone, But you probably want a web browser still, so your PC can do it quite wonderfully. If you don't watch much streaming services, you don't have one of those Rokus, but you may want to watch the occasional YouTube video, on your PC.
Basically, instead of PCs in every room to serve every need, devices specialized - being simpler to use appliances that did their jobs very well, while the PCs stayed useful doing other jobs.
That's what the post-PC era is - we'll always need a PC, but what we need it for has changed from "everything" to "everything else".
And really, faster than light doesn't mean violating causality. E.g., if we have something separated one light-second apart, if we send it at twice light speed, it arrives in half a second instead of a second. The fastest we'll get is instantaneous transmission where the packet arrives the moment it's sent...
This particular implementation isn't real - where would they put the luggage?
But with planes being built with more composite materials these days, I wonder if any of them can be made transparent, or at least translucent? Full side-windows and a skylight, maybe?
Then again, there's insulation to consider. It is very cold at 40,000ft (near space).
You put the luggage where no one likes to sit - the middle seat, and the middle aisle. Those passengers could sit below or above the luggage compartment, which sits in the middle of the plane. Of course, it doesn't have to be too big because really, with airlines dinging you on checked baggage, you're not going to have much baggage to check.
40,000 feet is nowhere near space. You may be in the tropopause near the equator, but the polar regions you're still in the troposphere. Most airliners fly higher - 50-60,000 feet isn't unusual. Even then you're really just in the tropopause.
Of course, at 40,000 feet, there's not much to look at - the tops of clouds I suppose?
Dearest HBO, I'd like to buy Game Of Thrones but you leave no option open to me as an Australian.
You could buy the Blu-Ray and import a US Blu-Ray player. (given they're like $50, I'm sure you can probably even find them in Asia). Also assuming that they're region-locked.
You could buy the DVDs and use a region free DVD player. Something I'm told a lot of Aussies have already.
Amazon will ship you the Blu-Rays and DVDs. The player you'll have to come up with yourself, but I'm sure you can either find one or import it from North America easily.
"The only thing it's been connected to since 2004 has been my personal computer (laptop)." - so while impressive, for the last 9 years it has not seen production use.
He also says that he works in a big financial institution with big-ass central UPS system and that explains the lack of reboots due to power outages.
Great so this guy has been running this server for the past 9 years sucking down $30 / month in power for what purpose exactly?
Perhaps it was still running some ancient legacy application? Given its age, it could've been running who knows what and no one knows if it's even critical anymore. Or even how often it's used (it could be some application forgotten about because it's only every used once every few years).
Especially in an institution like finance which has been around a number of years and accumulated significant amounts of legacy infrastructure. No one expects the software to run as long as it does, but it happens. Ask everyone who found themselves with significant COBOL assets a decade and a half ago.
That security is just designed to let Apple spend less effort curating the App Store. Most commercial applications are not trying to do bad things to customer's computers and most commercial applications do not have wide enough distribution to be an effective attack vector. All of that security is just there so that it is hard for people to use the App Store as a malware distribution platform. It doesn't actually provide much benefit for software users and it is a royal pain in the ass for software developers.
And who says the sandbox is secure? Java has had a "secure" sandbox for years - now that it's getting some attention it turns out to be full of holes. The OS X sandbox is not as simple as a chroot'd jail and has lots of "magic" in it to make things happen. There will turn out to be a massive exploit in there somewhere, just watch.
The sandbox is there as an additional production. It's primary purpose is iCloud though, and if you're take off your blinders, you'll see a potential security flaw in all "cloud" or "cloud-backed" services.
Let's say you buy a brand new PC. You install your usual apps, let's say Office which is cloud-backed. Now some malware comes around via a Word document and infects your default template. That template si now synced to the cloud. You clear the malware (the payload was a dropper) and you reformat the machine. You reinstall Office and it syncs to get your documents from backup... and it syncs your template as well. Thus reinfecting your newly cleaned PC.
With a sandbox, it's a lot less pervasive as the infected document can only infect the app. It can't interact with the rest of the system without breaking out of it.
The OS X sandbox is a capability based one - you need to specify what capabilities you need, and simply saying "all" is discouraged (in fact, you need to structure your program in the form of helpers - each of which has only the capabilities it needs. If you look at QuickTime on OS X, it does this - it has helpers to read files off the filesystem, another one to actually play the video (isolating the filesystem from the codecs), etc.
Yes, they are a pain - ask anyone who wants to set up SELinux properly (also a capability-based system). Going through endless binaries and figuring out what needs to be done is no trivial job, and having to refactor code so it works is long, boring and tedious (e.g., think of servers that operate on "low" powers needing root - sure most will drop root after acquiring the port, but it's probably safer if they didn't even try - just give the daemon the right to use a low port without root, or even better, the daemon could use only ONE SPECIFIC port).
As for software developers - well, it's time they buck up as well and quit bitching about "how hard it is to code securely". Security is not an easy job, it's also a really, really, really boring one. And taking care of things like Dancing Pigs is very difficult. Far too many are "cowboy coders" or "Give me the codez" from Stack Overflow who just want to get someone else to do their work, security be damned.
Hell, it's one reason why Windows has been wide open until Vista - far too many applications assumed admin priviledges and didn't properly go and figure out WHAT they needed or WHY. (When Vista decided that admin was optional with UAC, it lead to all sorts of breakage. These days, most apps are better behaved because developers took time to see if they really needed admin).
OS X has the same problem, though less so as apps already had to contend with multiple users. Still things often broke, like fast user switching because the apps weren't designed to be instantiated multiple times and often made global what was supposed to be private. Of course, Apple generally decided decades ago that they will not stoop to backwards compatibility at all costs (unlike Microsoft, where we still have "Program Manager" (explorer.exe creates a window with this title) and other legacy crap because apps break), so they break
Well, I know that a "pop-up store" is, roughly, a very small, temporary, and in some sense "unofficial" (or, unofficial seeming) store where a limited selection of merchandise is sold out of a space not normally used for the purpose. I assume a pop-up museum is analogous.
More genreally speaking, a pop-up store is an extremely temporary store. Not like say, your calendar kiosk that's only there 3 months of the year temporary, but REALLY temporary - the longest they're around is a week, more commonly, 2-4 days.
They do occupy storefronts that are otherwise empty so they can be selling from what was a store.
They are often run by the affiliated companies wanting to "break in" or do some exclusive thing (e.g., sell their goods in a new market). Usually only good for clothing stores by exclusive brands - they can attract huge crowds are basically are only published on social networks and such. Miss it and it's gone.
Likewise, a pop-up museum would be similar - something that's done extremely temporarily.
Yay for reading media that diversifies interest - deadtree newspapers (I only know because the headline and photo looked interesting. I wouldn't have clicked it online, but since it was there on the page...).
name.witheld.for.obvious.reasons à March 29, 2013 1:07 PM
"Surveillance, more specifically acts carried out by officials on persons without proper legal standing, is an illegal act. I, as a private citizen, cannot endlessly trail behind someone day and night, I'd be guilty of stalking. There is no inherent right of the government to stalk citizens (and quite possible persons) just because the government has the capability. There is another issue regarding prima facia, evidence or data collected by "authorities" must be testable, and not just by a judge, but by a jury as well. If the government is the accuser and the prosecuted then the balance and subjective nature of the evidence comes into question. The United States government has lost the rationale basis for prosecution, not just by tepid reasoning but by the false assumption that it is the government that must protect itself from the I consenting governed. It is by virtue of the people, the suspect, that the government is given any weight in respecting the person/individual. It's asking the rape victim to consent to being guilty of inducing the act and denying the production of evidence at trail. "Just trust us, you're guilty of involuntarily F'ing yourself."
The problem with stuff like Google Glass is NOT government surveillance, but just ordinary users spying on everyone else (and Google making it easily searchable by person and location - between facial recognition and geotagging, every image of you will be tagged).
Sure, the government is hamstrung by evidence laws, and such, but NOT the court of public opinion. You might be tried for something, but all it takes is some busybody (or a government leak) showing you walking out of less-than-church-moral places and turning your publicity against you.
Just ask anyone what happens when they're accused of sexual harassment - they may be completely vindicated in front of a judge, but the public starts to whisper all sorts of mistruths that a lifetime will never clear up. And you'll never be able to convince anyone otherwise.
Google Glass and the like aren't for the government, they're for busybodies who have nothing better to do with their lives than to ensure everyone upholds their kind of moral upstanding.
I've worked in companies where every project was required to pay internal IT dept bills for services rendered, so what?
This is an accounting mechanism that forces projects to account for all costs Bourne by the corporation in support of the project. I suspect internal projects are also billed at an equal amount, but the bills remain internal.
It helps facilities lose the stigma of being a cost to the organization and instead it is funded by the internal groups that consume their resources.
One company I did work for had a quarterly "disk space forecast" they asked people to use. Basically some of the things people did could run into the hundreds of gigabytes (I think) so they wanted to know and be prepared for large allocations of disk space on the servers (as well as the backups).
Forecast is free - though I presume it's limited so you can't say you'll need 1TB every quarter and not use it. But the projects aren't charged for the disk space - they're in the unallocated queue until claimed. When a project claims them, they're charged for that storage. If someone who didn't fill out a forecast runs out of space, they could ask and see if there are people not using theirs and claim them (though it's low priority allocation at this point - and if you really need it and they're all out, you have to pay for emergency procurement).
People seem to think personal microcomputing started wtih Jobs, Wozniak and Apple and want to adorn history with misinformation. Yeah, the old Apples were pretty revolutaionary however The Home Brew Computer Club[1] was where it all started. With the Altair 88[0] and many other people besides Jobs and Wozniak.
It depends how you define personal computing. You're correct if you're referring to a computer people can own. If you want to talk about computers that are, well, computers with keyboards and screens rather than something you attach a terminal to, Woz pretty much invented that. The Apple 1 is basically a computer mashed together with a terminal, resulting in an integrated unit (the Apple 1 started as a headless computer that Woz was playing around with, but he then realized regular people wanted a keyboard and screen, not to plug it into another box). The Apple II refined it to have the screen and keyboard integrated into its design, and not as a tacked on addition.
Woz basically created the interface that lets a computer hook to a TV directly (not completely new as Ralph Baer did it with the brown box, but Woz did it with a proper character generator and everything).
Yes, she does this often. And, she's EVERYFRIGGINGWHERE!! People who normally drive sensibly and without distractions often fail to see a motorcycle. Such people are rarer and rarer all the time.
Current research actually indicates that this is true - drivers in 4 wheeled vehicles are typically looking for drivers in other 4-wheeled vehicles and they will miss those in smaller 2-wheeled vehicles because they're not expecting to see them (their typically smaller profile doesn't help, either). And it also is perfectly normal human behavior, either. It's why car drivers fail to spot motorcyclists and cyclists, why cyclists get doored, etc.
It's the same reason why someone can be looking for something despite said item being right in front of them, or if you're coding, failing to see an obvious bug in the code.
There's very little that can be done about it, either. Sometimes with training it can be alleviated somewhat, but not eliminated (it's part of the brain's way to cope with the deluge of optical information that comes in - it's filtered before processing).
Short of making your motorcycle look like a car, there's very little you can do other than be proactive and assume you're invisible. Even loud pipes doesn't solve the problem (the brain filters out rhythmic audio as well - as anyone who's realized that their playlist ended hours earlier can attest).
Try to be where people expect vehicles (people expect vehicles to be in lanes, not between them), assume no one can see you or hear you which means if you see someone turning left, be cautious and be prepared to stop, horn, or make an unexpected detour. And where merging happens as well - it's easy to spot someone who looks like they've got a plan and assume you'll be cut off.
Being wronged is far better than dead right. Or even injured - you may have right of way, but still better to be intact and uninjured than assert your rights and have to end up in the hospital and deal with insurance and other time-consuming issues.
No, the only thing the USPS needs to fix is its budget: They need to pare-down their offerings and focus on what they're still needed for: envelopes, small packages, and letter delivery services. Their problem is that they bloated up while companies like FedEx and UPS took over the lucrative markets of large package delivery and organized to provide rapid package services worldwide. Now they need a strategic refocusing... but to say they're dead because of Walmart?
No, it's because George W. Bush signed a law that stated that USPS must prepay the pension 75 years in advance. Yes, USPS is paying into the coffers of wall street the pensions of people who are not even of working age yet (who of course, aren't employed by USPS yet).
Until then, USPS was pulling in some pretty hefty profits ($1B or so). Of course, all that and more has to go to Wall Street to manage the pension.
I'm not sure, but it certainly sounds like "cloud gaming" is basically companies that provide the heavy hardware to stream games to PCs, for people who can't afford good gaming rigs. I wouldn't have guessed there's that big a market there yet to warrant special graphics cards though.
Well, they're special for two reasons. First, they have to support multiple users - it's inefficient if one person playing monopolizes the entire server. So the GPU has to be sharable, and in order to do so at decent framerates and resolutions, it has to be really powerful. nVidia's offering only allows something like 16 people per server, which is considered low. Since servers have reduce requirements to cooling and power consumption, you can stick in super powerful power gobbling cards that wouldn't quite work out in a desktop PC due to noise and power constraints (considering a 1300W power supply is probably the max you can have on a 110V15A circuit, and most people are NOT going to rewire their house to run a dedicated power socket for their PC... but a server doesn't need such restrictions). So the more powerful the card, the more users per server you can have.
Second, the rendered output has to be recompressed to be sent over the internet. Would be handy if there was dedicated hardware to compress the video output and send it back
This could be the killer app for the "Killer NIC" - the compressed video from the GPU gets sent directly to the NIC to be sent to the player directly without involving the CPU at all - the whole IP stack handed on board for each connection.
Would it not make sense to alter your AV scan and backup scripts to do their thing, then put the machines to sleep afterwards?
If the goal is truly to "go green", using less electricity is the only way. If you're not looking to go green, but are instead looking to offset some of the money that you're spending now on electricity, turning the machines off will be orders of magnitude more effective than trying to offset the cost by mining and selling BitCoins.
Plus, running 18,000 desktop machines at 100% will put an extra heat load on your HVAC systems, which aren't free to run from either environmental or monetary costs.
Exactly. Leaving the PC on overnight for a weekly AV scan and twice-a-week backups? Far more efficient would be to have the AV scan the PC Friday evening after the user leaves for the weekend, then runs a backup, then shuts down for the weekend. Likewise, do the same Wednesday evening.
Same with your HPC - do you really use it fully all the time? Considering you can spend 30% of it while it's used for bitcoin implies you can shut down 30% of them immediately because even at full load you can spare 30% of its capacity. Or even reconsider the business case for having it - you might have a perfect reason to migrate it (partially or fully) to the cloud like EC2 if you only need it sporadically enough that its only half utilized and the rest are kept for overflow.
Best way to go green is to not use the resources you don't need to. Might also want to consider "full cycle" costs - running laptops to 20% might still cost more than keeping them plugged in constantly, especially if you can adjust the charger thresholds so they don't charge the battery until it hits some value like 60-70%. Running a laptop with the charger idling takes less power than running the laptop with the charger having to charge the battery (and there are losses with charging, as well).
Pointing the finger at under-achieving projects as evidence of some kind of peak is silly - under-publicity is more likely to be the cause there, especially for projects that get nothing at all. I seem to recall iTunes have a similar problem for a lot of it's artists, I can't find a link for it but a huge % of tracks on iTunes were reported at one time as having 0 purchases. IIRC it was something like a third. Looks like people are prematurely worrying this is a bubble, which is understandable considering the economic damage we've suffered over the past 15-20 years thanks to bubbles.
Exactly. People don't seem to respect that there's few "gold rushes" out ther eand if you're not the first, you're joining everyone else.
Everything requires marketing, and marketing is a skill few engineers or other people have. If you know of a community to which your project helps, you have to reach out and engage it. You can't just put up a page and assume "if you build it, they will come" - no they won't. And unlike a store which may have drive-by traffic bringing people in, the Internet doesn't - unless you're specifically searching for something, you aren't likely to come across it by chance.
I've done maybe 8-10 kickstarters, and of them, only two weren't funded. The others were funded just fine - not terribly overfunded, but met the threshold. Three of them came by some special interest forums, and three others via email (you could call it spam, except I'd dealt with the companies involved and am interested in their product so I do read their newsletters. They weren't from places unknown, but people I've dealt with earlier). The others I've found via blogs.
I wouldn't call a high rate of failures a problem of kickstarter. I'd call it a failure of the project promoters to well, promote. Or to release something interesting - if it's something few people are interested in, well, don't be surprised when few people actually pay for it.
This project smacks of BPL, (Broadband over Power Line) who's promoters seemed to think that you could impress Radio signals onto Power lines without interference to other services, and other services would not interfere with BPL..
BPL tried to use a bunch of frequencies modulated over the power line. Of course, BPL proponents never considered that power lines were excellent antennas. That resulted in interference to the airwaves. This is a problem as power lines are NOT shielded.
The lowest Television channels, in the VHF portion of the band, are known as the "magic" band by Amateur radio operators, because the frequencies some times act like much lower frequencies, with long distance propagation, and some times like higher frequencies, with strictly line of sight distances. And there is noise also. The old school TV stations used a lot of power for a reason. Get that signal to noise ration as high as possible. And a meteor burst noise is going to disrupt digital immensely, and they happen all the time.
What ever could go wrong? There is a reason why those Gigahertz frequencies in use work for wireless. They are much more quiet, they specifically have much shorter range, which keeps everyone from interfering with everyone else, and the bandwidth is inherently higher at those higher frequencies. Look up Shannon's limit, and spare me the phase modulation infinite bandwidth bs, because the bandwidth become infinite - but the power need is also infinite. This is probably a Government Grant make some money for failing trick.
Except that "white space" uses unused TV channels. A vast swatch of the VHF and UHF spectrum has been allocated to TV. Since not everywhere has all channels in use (most places probably are lucky to have single digits channels available OTA), that gives a wide swath of unused spectrum available. White space won't interfere with 6m or 2m or 440 operations because TV isn't there.
Indeed, it's why white space is trialed outside of the US - the FCC has been trying to encourage white space development, but the problem is stepping on legitimate broadcasters. Proposals have included a GPS database (Google has agreed to host it), but the problem is how to bootstrap it - a fixed database will get old quickly (and products may sit on shelves or unused). And you need a data connection to get an update. And you can't just blindly transmit because it could interfere when you try to get the update.
1. It has most definitely been the cause of the Samsung bricks, but it also bricks running Windows. It's an implementation-of-the-spec
issue, but more importantly, it proves that UEFI is still Alpha stage, and a bad idea all around. Let's face it, Windows is frustrating
enough to run, now this added to the consumers' woes, and we're talking serious hurt here. I can't wait to see some update/virus
break the Windows boot - I hope that granite palace has an electrified fence because the pitchforks a-be-a flying when that happens.
You do realize UEFI has been around a LONG time now, right? Heck, your PC, if you bought it in the past 7+ years, is probably already running UEFI. Intel used to provide both UEFI and BIOS code, but they stopped at the Core 2 Duo or so in providing BIOS code - it's been UEFI all the way. Prior to that, they've shipped both.
The problem is that some implementations are bad. But BIOS had issues as well - back in the late 90s there was a virus (CIH?) that wiped the BIOS if it could. Heck, BIOS updates were always a tricky affair since many didn't have backup BIOSes yet. Or some updaters didn't check that the BIOSes were compatible (and some STILL don't - you can flash a bad BIOS). And BIOS has been around over 30 years.
And notice how it's only been Samsung laptops? Last I checked, there were Asus, Acer, Sony, Dell, HP, Apple, Lenovo and many more manufacturers of laptops. None of which have reported issues. (And what broke it? Using the EFI storage area to store crash data for post-mortem debugging. Something EFI-enabled OSes have done, like OS X, and I think Windows as well)
Samsung probably tried to do something smart by putting something else - perhaps a quick media loader or something.
If someone is stupid enough to install a program they receive in email and they weren't expecting one? C'mon!
It's called spear phishing. Where instead of blasting a million messages to everyone at random, you send a very plausible message to someone who ought to know the sender.
Basically, what happened here is someone hacked an activiist's email account, and used it to send a plausible looking message to their contacts, like say, something about an upcoming human rights conference. The recipient sees it's from someone they trust and the message is appropriate to their relationship (i.e., it came from a human rights activist and is about a human rights conference).
Yes, you probably should not be clicking links from anyone, even those of your trusted friends and relatives, but for most people, they believe it's authentic. Hell, the RSA hack happened the same way - a faked email coming from the hiriing company RSA uses went to the HR coordinator claiming to be a list of new hires.
Hardware hackers can also pop down to the nearest gun shop, pick up a.30-06 hunting rifle, and start potting away at airplanes, injuring or killing the pilot, hitting a fuel line, or otherwise causing it to fall down go boom.
People generally don't because it's understood that (a) doing so is malicious and destructive, and (b) there are laws prohibiting it with very severe punishment as consequences.
There are a lot of things in this world that are potentially dangerous weapons, including high-powered lasers. Banning them isn't the answer, but making it very clear that they're dangerous and that you're not to treat them like toys definitely is.
Problem is, while guns it's fairly obvious that they're dangerous, laser pointers is a lot harder. Plus, unless you're close to an airport, the distance between the airplane and the gun is generally a lot larger and short of full auto, it's really damn hard to shoot and hit an aircraft when you only can do it one shot at a time. Of course, one could pick up a nice sniper rifle, but presumably if you're putting that much money down on a gun, you're probably not going to use it to shoot at random targets.
First, we keep referring to them as laser pointers, when they're really just plain old lasers. Most of the public thinks a laser pointer is the cheap $20 harmless thing you use during presentations. Their size and shape doesn't help, either - they look just like large flashlights - pretty harmless stuff.
They're also incredibly cheap for what they are.
So most people don't actually realize they hold a weapon in their hands and that they really are quite dangerous. After all, they see all the cool balloon popping on YouTube and they buy 'em to replicate that.
About the only way to correct this is to basically convince people that these handheld cheap lasers aren't toys. Heck, most of the people buying them probably skip the laser safety goggles as well (unless included for free) - they're just cheap harmless toys, after all, right? If they were dangerous, they'd be more expensive, right?
Exactly. The problem with Android is that for every flagship nexus or SGS4 sold, dozens more crappy low end ones are sold.
The free phones. The ones with crap screens, crap processors, and/or diddly squat for RAM (though for Android these days, that applies for anything smaller than 4.5" screen, annoyingly). After all, Google claims about 1.3M daily Android activations, while the most popular Android flagship phone, the SGS3, has sold around 40M units in all its various combinations. That's barely a month's worth of Android phone sales.
And possibly, ancient OS versions (heads up - Gingerbread is no longer the majority! Though it is by far the largest slice). So you can have apps that use all the power of the device (I've seen special edition apps restricted to certain devices), but most devs don't have the resources to maintain and test two or three separate sets of code bases and/or assets. Especially as a lot of the exclusives are often comissioned by the manufacturer who just pays for the port and no maintenance.
So devs have to keep in mind the vast majority of phones out there don't have 2GB, or even 1GB of RAM, and have 1GHz processors if they're lucky. And maybe 320x480 screens. Or 5" 480x800 screens.
Yes, Android has basically wiped out featurephones (more profitable, and carriers get to sell a very profitable data plan to someone who probably will be lucky to use 1MB out of their 100MB). (And stats show this - despite Android outselling iOS 3+:1, iOS data usage still beats Android 2+:1).
It's like PCs these days - you can get a top notch PC with the latest graphics, but end up finding most PC games assume an Intel graphics accellerator or are ported from consoles. It just isn't that big a market.
Then again, there's something to be said that the people who buy the flagship phones tend to be the heavier users, so ignoring the low end isn't that bad a strategy either. Why go for the 80% market when fewer than 10% of those probably would even see your app, but go after the 20% when 50% or more will probably buy it? (Generally speaking, it's the reasoning behind developing for iOS first).
This trend of making all things that exist wireless can have pretty bad consequences if companies aren't held accountable for what they produce. I'm sorry, it's not hard. It just takes code correctness and some discipline to not take a route only cause it's easy. I'm not naive; I understand being first out of the gate matters, but making that a priority at the cost of some basic security is unacceptable.
Digital cameras are a commodity. For under $150-200 these days (under $100 on sale), you get a pretty decent one, brand name even. It'll take generally fine photos that most people won't complain about. Given the complexity of what's inside, there's not much money to be made (and reparing them when they break's pretty pointless when the latest and greatest also costs under $150-200).
Effectively, the race to the bottom has reached its conclusion and manufacturers are seeking ways to differentiate and have higher-priced offerings where they can make money on, because they aren't making them on those cheap ones.
So if they can add wireless and sell it for 50% more ($300), that makes far more money. But of course, it's built to a price, so things have to be skimped, including proper software development.
Take any other commodity product and you'll see the same - cellphones - Androids come in all shapes and sizes, but they're all generally crap (meant to satisfy the free phone crowd), except for the flagships. But the flagships have to justify their cost, so they throw in everything in them, because today's flagship is next year's high end free phone (see SGS3 going for free with contract).
Generally speaking, races to the bottom are good for consumers, but they come at a cost of losing the intangibles that people don't pay as much attention to - like security. Why waste a man-month hardening down the firmware when you can release it now, save the man-month of labor and make more profit? The public doesn't value a "more secure" camera of a lesser one (even if they could tell the difference).
Other things you may have noticed - 1366x768 screens, Intel integrated graphics in laptops (reversed recently with the push towards ultrabooks and things to make them command the premium pricing).
Well, you can buy a damn nice DVR from Lorex that has it all including hard drive recorder, 4-6 cameras, night lights, and cabling for around $600 all together, or much less. Including PC software to access it over a network, and with the first firewall configuration, using apps on iOS and Android.
And they're nicer higher-definition color cameras at that. Hell, our company replaced an old camera system using Panasonic NTSC cameras and a Windows 98 PC being a DVR (total cost - tens of thousands back in the day) with a $500 Lorex you can get at Costco. Which gives better picture quality, easier access, is more maintainable (that Win98 system was stuck on 98 because it's all that was supported, and couldn't be remotely accessed, etc)., and remotely accessible on the network.
They're dirty cheap.
Oh, and USB has a max cable length of 5m or around 15'. This limit is not signal integrity, but bit timing. The only way around it is active repeaters (i.e., single-port hubs). Even then it's pretty nasty as it's increasing your isochronous latency (cameras are typically isochronous devices that demand fixed bandwidth), so don't be utterly surprised if it completely fails and is touchy and finicky and plugging in another one causes it to go one and come up in pieces.
Since you gotta install the damn thing anyways, getting one from Costco or other retailer saves a lot of time and money.
Yeah, just jailbreak. And enjoy the cat and mouse game with Apple as they try to stuff you back in the box with each update.
Then don't. You don't HAVE to jailbreak to do personal development - if you don't mind spending $99/year, you can sign up for a dev certificate and write your own programs. You can have up to 100 devices as well.
Run your own code, no need to jailbreak.
Not that Apple has ever forced anyone to upgrade. You're free to NOT upgrade. iOS just pops up a dialog ONCE saying an update is available. It hasn't yet gotten to the point where Apple forces someone to update. You can ignore every update request and continue to run old versions of iOS.
No, rebooting your phone will NOT force an update, either. Nor will waiting a week mandate an update. Just ignore it and it won't force it.
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A good number of calls are coming from overseas (India - is there nothing that they won't outsource?), however they often acquire local telephone numbers.
In Canada, it's a huge problem - enough so that CBC Marketplace hired an undercover Indian freelance journalist to get hired by one of these telemarketing firms calling Canada from India. They show up as Canadian calls, but originate overseas.
You'd think they'd be able to go after the redialer or something since I don't think Caller ID goes across the border very well (at least outside of North America). So some company is out there spoofing the number and providing some North American dialout..
We aren't discarding the PC. Just the same way, we aren't discarding pickup trucks. They're extremely general use devices - they can do lots of things and have lots of capabilities, but they aren't necessarily the best thing for all purposes. Just like you can use a pickup as your "go around town" vehicle, or to haul cargo, or other tasks, doesn't mean it's necessarily the best vehicle for the job - there's fuel consumption, other vehicles that could do the job better, parking, etc.
The PC is the same - instead of needing multiple PCs to do things, you consolidate down because there are other better devices to do things. Need to look up data on the go? A smartphone does that without the awkwardness of having to dig out your laptop, wake it up, and look up the information. (Try looking up prices online while shopping doing this, for example). The smartphone is smaller, more portable, and has better battery life for going about your day - something no laptop really has.
Likewise, a tablet is a nice companion to your living room - a big screen to complement your big screen TV, able to quickly look up information that crops up ("didn't this actor do ...", look up TV listings, control your DVR, serve as an alternate stream, game controller, etc).
Or for streaming services - it's sure easier to plug in a Roku and watch Netflix than it is to have a PC in the room, boot it up, start your web browser, type Netflix and click here, there. Even with remote controls and UIs.
Network file servers are nice as well to hold your movies, music and photos to share to everything without being stuck on one PC.
And there's the PC, for the other things that I didn't mention - everything else. It can do everything I said you can do with other devices so it will remain a staple of computing because not everyone can justify a need. If you don't look up information online while going about your day, you don't need a smartphone, But you probably want a web browser still, so your PC can do it quite wonderfully. If you don't watch much streaming services, you don't have one of those Rokus, but you may want to watch the occasional YouTube video, on your PC.
Basically, instead of PCs in every room to serve every need, devices specialized - being simpler to use appliances that did their jobs very well, while the PCs stayed useful doing other jobs.
That's what the post-PC era is - we'll always need a PC, but what we need it for has changed from "everything" to "everything else".
Yeah, I don't get the part about it arriving before its sent. After all, we've been able to send things faster than light today.
And really, faster than light doesn't mean violating causality. E.g., if we have something separated one light-second apart, if we send it at twice light speed, it arrives in half a second instead of a second. The fastest we'll get is instantaneous transmission where the packet arrives the moment it's sent...
You put the luggage where no one likes to sit - the middle seat, and the middle aisle. Those passengers could sit below or above the luggage compartment, which sits in the middle of the plane. Of course, it doesn't have to be too big because really, with airlines dinging you on checked baggage, you're not going to have much baggage to check.
40,000 feet is nowhere near space. You may be in the tropopause near the equator, but the polar regions you're still in the troposphere. Most airliners fly higher - 50-60,000 feet isn't unusual. Even then you're really just in the tropopause.
Of course, at 40,000 feet, there's not much to look at - the tops of clouds I suppose?
You could buy the Blu-Ray and import a US Blu-Ray player. (given they're like $50, I'm sure you can probably even find them in Asia). Also assuming that they're region-locked.
You could buy the DVDs and use a region free DVD player. Something I'm told a lot of Aussies have already.
Amazon will ship you the Blu-Rays and DVDs. The player you'll have to come up with yourself, but I'm sure you can either find one or import it from North America easily.
Hell... Game of Thrones Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3. On itunes. Downloadable now.
Those are the easist options and available now, legally. No torrents required.
Perhaps it was still running some ancient legacy application? Given its age, it could've been running who knows what and no one knows if it's even critical anymore. Or even how often it's used (it could be some application forgotten about because it's only every used once every few years).
Especially in an institution like finance which has been around a number of years and accumulated significant amounts of legacy infrastructure. No one expects the software to run as long as it does, but it happens. Ask everyone who found themselves with significant COBOL assets a decade and a half ago.
The sandbox is there as an additional production. It's primary purpose is iCloud though, and if you're take off your blinders, you'll see a potential security flaw in all "cloud" or "cloud-backed" services.
Let's say you buy a brand new PC. You install your usual apps, let's say Office which is cloud-backed. Now some malware comes around via a Word document and infects your default template. That template si now synced to the cloud. You clear the malware (the payload was a dropper) and you reformat the machine. You reinstall Office and it syncs to get your documents from backup... and it syncs your template as well. Thus reinfecting your newly cleaned PC.
With a sandbox, it's a lot less pervasive as the infected document can only infect the app. It can't interact with the rest of the system without breaking out of it.
The OS X sandbox is a capability based one - you need to specify what capabilities you need, and simply saying "all" is discouraged (in fact, you need to structure your program in the form of helpers - each of which has only the capabilities it needs. If you look at QuickTime on OS X, it does this - it has helpers to read files off the filesystem, another one to actually play the video (isolating the filesystem from the codecs), etc.
Yes, they are a pain - ask anyone who wants to set up SELinux properly (also a capability-based system). Going through endless binaries and figuring out what needs to be done is no trivial job, and having to refactor code so it works is long, boring and tedious (e.g., think of servers that operate on "low" powers needing root - sure most will drop root after acquiring the port, but it's probably safer if they didn't even try - just give the daemon the right to use a low port without root, or even better, the daemon could use only ONE SPECIFIC port).
As for software developers - well, it's time they buck up as well and quit bitching about "how hard it is to code securely". Security is not an easy job, it's also a really, really, really boring one. And taking care of things like Dancing Pigs is very difficult. Far too many are "cowboy coders" or "Give me the codez" from Stack Overflow who just want to get someone else to do their work, security be damned.
Hell, it's one reason why Windows has been wide open until Vista - far too many applications assumed admin priviledges and didn't properly go and figure out WHAT they needed or WHY. (When Vista decided that admin was optional with UAC, it lead to all sorts of breakage. These days, most apps are better behaved because developers took time to see if they really needed admin).
OS X has the same problem, though less so as apps already had to contend with multiple users. Still things often broke, like fast user switching because the apps weren't designed to be instantiated multiple times and often made global what was supposed to be private. Of course, Apple generally decided decades ago that they will not stoop to backwards compatibility at all costs (unlike Microsoft, where we still have "Program Manager" (explorer.exe creates a window with this title) and other legacy crap because apps break), so they break
More genreally speaking, a pop-up store is an extremely temporary store. Not like say, your calendar kiosk that's only there 3 months of the year temporary, but REALLY temporary - the longest they're around is a week, more commonly, 2-4 days.
They do occupy storefronts that are otherwise empty so they can be selling from what was a store.
They are often run by the affiliated companies wanting to "break in" or do some exclusive thing (e.g., sell their goods in a new market). Usually only good for clothing stores by exclusive brands - they can attract huge crowds are basically are only published on social networks and such. Miss it and it's gone.
Likewise, a pop-up museum would be similar - something that's done extremely temporarily.
Yay for reading media that diversifies interest - deadtree newspapers (I only know because the headline and photo looked interesting. I wouldn't have clicked it online, but since it was there on the page...).
It has a battery though, and it could be lithium-ion based...
The problem with stuff like Google Glass is NOT government surveillance, but just ordinary users spying on everyone else (and Google making it easily searchable by person and location - between facial recognition and geotagging, every image of you will be tagged).
Sure, the government is hamstrung by evidence laws, and such, but NOT the court of public opinion. You might be tried for something, but all it takes is some busybody (or a government leak) showing you walking out of less-than-church-moral places and turning your publicity against you.
Just ask anyone what happens when they're accused of sexual harassment - they may be completely vindicated in front of a judge, but the public starts to whisper all sorts of mistruths that a lifetime will never clear up. And you'll never be able to convince anyone otherwise.
Google Glass and the like aren't for the government, they're for busybodies who have nothing better to do with their lives than to ensure everyone upholds their kind of moral upstanding.
One company I did work for had a quarterly "disk space forecast" they asked people to use. Basically some of the things people did could run into the hundreds of gigabytes (I think) so they wanted to know and be prepared for large allocations of disk space on the servers (as well as the backups).
Forecast is free - though I presume it's limited so you can't say you'll need 1TB every quarter and not use it. But the projects aren't charged for the disk space - they're in the unallocated queue until claimed. When a project claims them, they're charged for that storage. If someone who didn't fill out a forecast runs out of space, they could ask and see if there are people not using theirs and claim them (though it's low priority allocation at this point - and if you really need it and they're all out, you have to pay for emergency procurement).
It depends how you define personal computing. You're correct if you're referring to a computer people can own. If you want to talk about computers that are, well, computers with keyboards and screens rather than something you attach a terminal to, Woz pretty much invented that. The Apple 1 is basically a computer mashed together with a terminal, resulting in an integrated unit (the Apple 1 started as a headless computer that Woz was playing around with, but he then realized regular people wanted a keyboard and screen, not to plug it into another box). The Apple II refined it to have the screen and keyboard integrated into its design, and not as a tacked on addition.
Woz basically created the interface that lets a computer hook to a TV directly (not completely new as Ralph Baer did it with the brown box, but Woz did it with a proper character generator and everything).
Current research actually indicates that this is true - drivers in 4 wheeled vehicles are typically looking for drivers in other 4-wheeled vehicles and they will miss those in smaller 2-wheeled vehicles because they're not expecting to see them (their typically smaller profile doesn't help, either). And it also is perfectly normal human behavior, either. It's why car drivers fail to spot motorcyclists and cyclists, why cyclists get doored, etc.
It's the same reason why someone can be looking for something despite said item being right in front of them, or if you're coding, failing to see an obvious bug in the code.
There's very little that can be done about it, either. Sometimes with training it can be alleviated somewhat, but not eliminated (it's part of the brain's way to cope with the deluge of optical information that comes in - it's filtered before processing).
Short of making your motorcycle look like a car, there's very little you can do other than be proactive and assume you're invisible. Even loud pipes doesn't solve the problem (the brain filters out rhythmic audio as well - as anyone who's realized that their playlist ended hours earlier can attest).
Try to be where people expect vehicles (people expect vehicles to be in lanes, not between them), assume no one can see you or hear you which means if you see someone turning left, be cautious and be prepared to stop, horn, or make an unexpected detour. And where merging happens as well - it's easy to spot someone who looks like they've got a plan and assume you'll be cut off.
Being wronged is far better than dead right. Or even injured - you may have right of way, but still better to be intact and uninjured than assert your rights and have to end up in the hospital and deal with insurance and other time-consuming issues.
No, it's because George W. Bush signed a law that stated that USPS must prepay the pension 75 years in advance. Yes, USPS is paying into the coffers of wall street the pensions of people who are not even of working age yet (who of course, aren't employed by USPS yet).
Until then, USPS was pulling in some pretty hefty profits ($1B or so). Of course, all that and more has to go to Wall Street to manage the pension.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/email-isnt-killing-the-post-office
Well, they're special for two reasons. First, they have to support multiple users - it's inefficient if one person playing monopolizes the entire server. So the GPU has to be sharable, and in order to do so at decent framerates and resolutions, it has to be really powerful. nVidia's offering only allows something like 16 people per server, which is considered low. Since servers have reduce requirements to cooling and power consumption, you can stick in super powerful power gobbling cards that wouldn't quite work out in a desktop PC due to noise and power constraints (considering a 1300W power supply is probably the max you can have on a 110V15A circuit, and most people are NOT going to rewire their house to run a dedicated power socket for their PC... but a server doesn't need such restrictions). So the more powerful the card, the more users per server you can have.
Second, the rendered output has to be recompressed to be sent over the internet. Would be handy if there was dedicated hardware to compress the video output and send it back
This could be the killer app for the "Killer NIC" - the compressed video from the GPU gets sent directly to the NIC to be sent to the player directly without involving the CPU at all - the whole IP stack handed on board for each connection.
Exactly. Leaving the PC on overnight for a weekly AV scan and twice-a-week backups? Far more efficient would be to have the AV scan the PC Friday evening after the user leaves for the weekend, then runs a backup, then shuts down for the weekend. Likewise, do the same Wednesday evening.
Same with your HPC - do you really use it fully all the time? Considering you can spend 30% of it while it's used for bitcoin implies you can shut down 30% of them immediately because even at full load you can spare 30% of its capacity. Or even reconsider the business case for having it - you might have a perfect reason to migrate it (partially or fully) to the cloud like EC2 if you only need it sporadically enough that its only half utilized and the rest are kept for overflow.
Best way to go green is to not use the resources you don't need to. Might also want to consider "full cycle" costs - running laptops to 20% might still cost more than keeping them plugged in constantly, especially if you can adjust the charger thresholds so they don't charge the battery until it hits some value like 60-70%. Running a laptop with the charger idling takes less power than running the laptop with the charger having to charge the battery (and there are losses with charging, as well).
Exactly. People don't seem to respect that there's few "gold rushes" out ther eand if you're not the first, you're joining everyone else.
Everything requires marketing, and marketing is a skill few engineers or other people have. If you know of a community to which your project helps, you have to reach out and engage it. You can't just put up a page and assume "if you build it, they will come" - no they won't. And unlike a store which may have drive-by traffic bringing people in, the Internet doesn't - unless you're specifically searching for something, you aren't likely to come across it by chance.
I've done maybe 8-10 kickstarters, and of them, only two weren't funded. The others were funded just fine - not terribly overfunded, but met the threshold. Three of them came by some special interest forums, and three others via email (you could call it spam, except I'd dealt with the companies involved and am interested in their product so I do read their newsletters. They weren't from places unknown, but people I've dealt with earlier). The others I've found via blogs.
I wouldn't call a high rate of failures a problem of kickstarter. I'd call it a failure of the project promoters to well, promote. Or to release something interesting - if it's something few people are interested in, well, don't be surprised when few people actually pay for it.
BPL tried to use a bunch of frequencies modulated over the power line. Of course, BPL proponents never considered that power lines were excellent antennas. That resulted in interference to the airwaves. This is a problem as power lines are NOT shielded.
Except that "white space" uses unused TV channels. A vast swatch of the VHF and UHF spectrum has been allocated to TV. Since not everywhere has all channels in use (most places probably are lucky to have single digits channels available OTA), that gives a wide swath of unused spectrum available. White space won't interfere with 6m or 2m or 440 operations because TV isn't there.
Indeed, it's why white space is trialed outside of the US - the FCC has been trying to encourage white space development, but the problem is stepping on legitimate broadcasters. Proposals have included a GPS database (Google has agreed to host it), but the problem is how to bootstrap it - a fixed database will get old quickly (and products may sit on shelves or unused). And you need a data connection to get an update. And you can't just blindly transmit because it could interfere when you try to get the update.
You do realize UEFI has been around a LONG time now, right? Heck, your PC, if you bought it in the past 7+ years, is probably already running UEFI. Intel used to provide both UEFI and BIOS code, but they stopped at the Core 2 Duo or so in providing BIOS code - it's been UEFI all the way. Prior to that, they've shipped both.
The problem is that some implementations are bad. But BIOS had issues as well - back in the late 90s there was a virus (CIH?) that wiped the BIOS if it could. Heck, BIOS updates were always a tricky affair since many didn't have backup BIOSes yet. Or some updaters didn't check that the BIOSes were compatible (and some STILL don't - you can flash a bad BIOS). And BIOS has been around over 30 years.
And notice how it's only been Samsung laptops? Last I checked, there were Asus, Acer, Sony, Dell, HP, Apple, Lenovo and many more manufacturers of laptops. None of which have reported issues. (And what broke it? Using the EFI storage area to store crash data for post-mortem debugging. Something EFI-enabled OSes have done, like OS X, and I think Windows as well)
Samsung probably tried to do something smart by putting something else - perhaps a quick media loader or something.
It's called spear phishing. Where instead of blasting a million messages to everyone at random, you send a very plausible message to someone who ought to know the sender.
Basically, what happened here is someone hacked an activiist's email account, and used it to send a plausible looking message to their contacts, like say, something about an upcoming human rights conference. The recipient sees it's from someone they trust and the message is appropriate to their relationship (i.e., it came from a human rights activist and is about a human rights conference).
Yes, you probably should not be clicking links from anyone, even those of your trusted friends and relatives, but for most people, they believe it's authentic. Hell, the RSA hack happened the same way - a faked email coming from the hiriing company RSA uses went to the HR coordinator claiming to be a list of new hires.
Problem is, while guns it's fairly obvious that they're dangerous, laser pointers is a lot harder. Plus, unless you're close to an airport, the distance between the airplane and the gun is generally a lot larger and short of full auto, it's really damn hard to shoot and hit an aircraft when you only can do it one shot at a time. Of course, one could pick up a nice sniper rifle, but presumably if you're putting that much money down on a gun, you're probably not going to use it to shoot at random targets.
First, we keep referring to them as laser pointers, when they're really just plain old lasers. Most of the public thinks a laser pointer is the cheap $20 harmless thing you use during presentations. Their size and shape doesn't help, either - they look just like large flashlights - pretty harmless stuff.
They're also incredibly cheap for what they are.
So most people don't actually realize they hold a weapon in their hands and that they really are quite dangerous. After all, they see all the cool balloon popping on YouTube and they buy 'em to replicate that.
About the only way to correct this is to basically convince people that these handheld cheap lasers aren't toys. Heck, most of the people buying them probably skip the laser safety goggles as well (unless included for free) - they're just cheap harmless toys, after all, right? If they were dangerous, they'd be more expensive, right?
Exactly. The problem with Android is that for every flagship nexus or SGS4 sold, dozens more crappy low end ones are sold.
The free phones. The ones with crap screens, crap processors, and/or diddly squat for RAM (though for Android these days, that applies for anything smaller than 4.5" screen, annoyingly). After all, Google claims about 1.3M daily Android activations, while the most popular Android flagship phone, the SGS3, has sold around 40M units in all its various combinations. That's barely a month's worth of Android phone sales.
And possibly, ancient OS versions (heads up - Gingerbread is no longer the majority! Though it is by far the largest slice). So you can have apps that use all the power of the device (I've seen special edition apps restricted to certain devices), but most devs don't have the resources to maintain and test two or three separate sets of code bases and/or assets. Especially as a lot of the exclusives are often comissioned by the manufacturer who just pays for the port and no maintenance.
So devs have to keep in mind the vast majority of phones out there don't have 2GB, or even 1GB of RAM, and have 1GHz processors if they're lucky. And maybe 320x480 screens. Or 5" 480x800 screens.
Yes, Android has basically wiped out featurephones (more profitable, and carriers get to sell a very profitable data plan to someone who probably will be lucky to use 1MB out of their 100MB). (And stats show this - despite Android outselling iOS 3+:1, iOS data usage still beats Android 2+:1).
It's like PCs these days - you can get a top notch PC with the latest graphics, but end up finding most PC games assume an Intel graphics accellerator or are ported from consoles. It just isn't that big a market.
Then again, there's something to be said that the people who buy the flagship phones tend to be the heavier users, so ignoring the low end isn't that bad a strategy either. Why go for the 80% market when fewer than 10% of those probably would even see your app, but go after the 20% when 50% or more will probably buy it? (Generally speaking, it's the reasoning behind developing for iOS first).
Digital cameras are a commodity. For under $150-200 these days (under $100 on sale), you get a pretty decent one, brand name even. It'll take generally fine photos that most people won't complain about. Given the complexity of what's inside, there's not much money to be made (and reparing them when they break's pretty pointless when the latest and greatest also costs under $150-200).
Effectively, the race to the bottom has reached its conclusion and manufacturers are seeking ways to differentiate and have higher-priced offerings where they can make money on, because they aren't making them on those cheap ones.
So if they can add wireless and sell it for 50% more ($300), that makes far more money. But of course, it's built to a price, so things have to be skimped, including proper software development.
Take any other commodity product and you'll see the same - cellphones - Androids come in all shapes and sizes, but they're all generally crap (meant to satisfy the free phone crowd), except for the flagships. But the flagships have to justify their cost, so they throw in everything in them, because today's flagship is next year's high end free phone (see SGS3 going for free with contract).
Generally speaking, races to the bottom are good for consumers, but they come at a cost of losing the intangibles that people don't pay as much attention to - like security. Why waste a man-month hardening down the firmware when you can release it now, save the man-month of labor and make more profit? The public doesn't value a "more secure" camera of a lesser one (even if they could tell the difference).
Other things you may have noticed - 1366x768 screens, Intel integrated graphics in laptops (reversed recently with the push towards ultrabooks and things to make them command the premium pricing).
Well, you can buy a damn nice DVR from Lorex that has it all including hard drive recorder, 4-6 cameras, night lights, and cabling for around $600 all together, or much less. Including PC software to access it over a network, and with the first firewall configuration, using apps on iOS and Android.
And they're nicer higher-definition color cameras at that. Hell, our company replaced an old camera system using Panasonic NTSC cameras and a Windows 98 PC being a DVR (total cost - tens of thousands back in the day) with a $500 Lorex you can get at Costco. Which gives better picture quality, easier access, is more maintainable (that Win98 system was stuck on 98 because it's all that was supported, and couldn't be remotely accessed, etc)., and remotely accessible on the network.
They're dirty cheap.
Oh, and USB has a max cable length of 5m or around 15'. This limit is not signal integrity, but bit timing. The only way around it is active repeaters (i.e., single-port hubs). Even then it's pretty nasty as it's increasing your isochronous latency (cameras are typically isochronous devices that demand fixed bandwidth), so don't be utterly surprised if it completely fails and is touchy and finicky and plugging in another one causes it to go one and come up in pieces.
Since you gotta install the damn thing anyways, getting one from Costco or other retailer saves a lot of time and money.
Then don't. You don't HAVE to jailbreak to do personal development - if you don't mind spending $99/year, you can sign up for a dev certificate and write your own programs. You can have up to 100 devices as well.
Run your own code, no need to jailbreak.
Not that Apple has ever forced anyone to upgrade. You're free to NOT upgrade. iOS just pops up a dialog ONCE saying an update is available. It hasn't yet gotten to the point where Apple forces someone to update. You can ignore every update request and continue to run old versions of iOS.
No, rebooting your phone will NOT force an update, either. Nor will waiting a week mandate an update. Just ignore it and it won't force it.