I know Malaysia well (even though I live in the UK). I first went there in '97 and married a Malaysian-born woman. Some observations:
They really like and respect white people. They don't particularly like Chinese people (my wife is half Chinese so I see rampant discrimination against this large minority - about 25% of Malaysia's population - all the time). The weather is great (although sometimes a little too humid). Kuala Lumpur is a very advanced city that can compare to anything in the West. Broadband speeds are so-so according to my cousin-in-law. There appears to be a demand for good engineers (according to another cousin-in-law, a Chinese who studied IT in England). So, assuming you can get a visa, getting some interesting work shouldn't be too hard. The political situation there is... interesting. But I get the impression that if you don't cause trouble you will be left alone - especially if you are white.
HTH
The reason is that after the war or so, the first people to start running businesses and such were Chinese (most likely chased out from Singapore by the Japanese), and they got very rich doing so.
The government exploits the fact that a lot of Malaysians are jealous of the Chinese for being successful (which happens because they worked hard at building businesses and such) , so they put up huge campaigns of national identity and such to encourage hatred of the Chinese. However, they government doesn't really do anything about it (they can't - said Chinese businesses pay a good amount of tax and employ a lot of Malays). So basically the Chinese are demonized for being successful and "exploiting" Malays
If you're white, you're usually a tourist or an investor, so you're treated well to get at your $$$. If you're a Chinese investor with $$$, everyone eyes you like you're going to enslave them.
The government feeds off this sentiment and basically just fans the flames. There's no real democracy (there is voting, but the opposition is usually highly discredited, or even arrested if they have a chance of winning - being a Muslim state, there are plenty of "crimes" that one can accuse the Opposition of).
AFAIK, lights have two sets of circuits in them to prevent a change to greens in more than one direction. If it does happen, the light switches to "oh crap" mode and starts flashing yellow or green.
It's called a Conflict Monitor Unit and it's a required element for traffic lights per law. It basically does as you say - it looks at the outputs and if an invalid one crops up (two greens, say) then it immediately shuts down the traffic light and optionally returns a signal that could notify when this occurs.
They're a bit more complex than just detecting two greens - they can even monitor things like are the lights cycling properly (green-yellow-red), how long red/yellow/green lights have been on and if red wasn't actually on for some reason.
I was under the impression that Linus was inspired to "scratch his own itch" by creating Linux not because of "relaxed social safety" but because he had just gotten a new i386 computer and he wanted an OS that would take full advantage of all the features in the chip, and his then-current OS (MINIX) wouldn't do that, so he set about to implement a 80386 version of MINIX.
More like Linus got a fancy i386 computer and wanted access to netnews, which his computer did not have at the time (he used to use university computers for it). He could dialup and get it, but his computer lacked a terminal client.
So he wrote one using the i386 instruction set - a small kernel to help manage the send and receive "threads".
It went well enough until one day he dialed his hard drive, corrupting his Minix partition, and started implementing permissions. Gradually he added more and more until Linux 0.1 was born.
At least, this was according to the Linus biography written a decade ago or so.
A lot of Chinese companies are real s**ts, and a lot of Chinese companies make their own Android handsets.
IMHO, follow the money. It will be paid for troll turf from one of the China handset makers.
True, but a big part is companies like Apple making it unprofitable to manufacture in China anymore with their "supplier codes of conduct" and such.
One thing I've learned about Chinese companies is they're extremely capitalistic - screwing people over is just par for the course (if they were smarter, they won't let themselves be screwed, so since they're dumb, it's increased profits). (This applies to anyone they think they can screw over - employees, customers, regardless of race or anything). Likewise, they're extremely cheap - that 10 year old PC that barely runs? Still good! Run our latest business critical software on it and quit telling it needs upgrading.
So when Apple comes around on their high horse demanding fair wages and reasonable working conditions (not quite western style, but better than before), well, that increases the cost of business. And China's already seeing people move to Vietnam and other places because China's getting too expensive and the employees are becoming ungrateful at having jobs, now they're demanding benefits.
So screw Apple, they want more Samsungs who'll poison a bunch of workers (they're stupid, and replacable, who cares?). so only a cheap $1000 fine.
Also helps Apple is American, while Samsung etc. are well, Asian. Preference first for Chinese, but Asians are just as good.
The problem is not "people" recording as much as images sent to Google'a servers. We already know it automatically tries to identify people, so that information is STORED somewhere along with the whole camera frame, whatever might be in it. Like rob here says, the ENTIRE PURPOSE is for Google to gather those ancillary images and sounds and sell ads to the highest bidder. You walk into a bar, what beer is advertized? What song is playing while you're dancing? You can quickly see that turning into ad data sold to beer companies based on who saw their ads, and forwarding a list of bars that didn't pay ASCAP for the DJ last night.
Advertising is probably the LEAST invasive form of what Google Glass is that you should be worried about.
Think of stuff a bit more private and controversial. You know, like homosexuality. Or abortion. Or climate change. Or even your need to visit some porn store or other "sensitive" place. Or any of the bunch of other controversial things going on around the world today.
Homosexuality is an interesting one - what to make of people who are now tagged as entering known support groups (and with critical mass, your movements can be tracked constantly). Bible thumping is huge, and while it might be fun to expose some conservative's son or daughter as being a homosexual, it does little to help those who aren't quite ready to come out yet.
Likewise for abortion - do we really want to push mothers back into dark alleys again, just because some busybody decides to film, tag, and identify everyone who uses a clinic's services? It's a hard enough decision already.
While 100% full transparency will solve a lot of society's ills, society itself isn't ready to handle it. We're just not mature enough as a whole to handle people who are "different" (be it color, religion, associates (e.g., caste), what have you). Google Glass will not only be a tool to free those from injustice, but also one to enslave and oppress.
PLEASE please PLEASE let it be that the Samsung displays are just fine while LG displays are not. I really want to see Apple squirm over this issue.
It's not that I'm "Anti-Apple" here, but just the way we saw that it is clearly wrong for the music publishers to sue their customers, I see it as pretty damned stupid for Apple to sue its suppliers.
Apple sells things which are made of a whole lot of other things. When Apple started suing the supplier of their component things, they are attacking a part which they depend on. It makes me think of a bridge attacking the pillars it sits on. I just want to see incredibly stupid behavior rewarded.
You'll be in for a disappointment when you learn that it's not a black and white world then. Because even though it IS an LG screen having the problem, the relationships between companies like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, Google and Samsung is FAR more complex than simple "Apple hates Samsung" or "Apple hates Google" or "Intel is holding down AMD". When there's very little competition, you'll find a lot of what can best be described as incest. Competitors who purchase subassemblies from each other to sell products that compete on the open market (often the same products, at that). As well, you'll have competitor dependence - Samsung depends on Apple for a lot - namely to keep Very Expensive Fabs open (flash memory, ASICs) - a fab that's not running at full capacity is costing money in depreciation, and when technology nodes and equipment run into the multi-billion dollar investments every couple of years, idling is not an option. Likewise, Apple is dependent on Samsung for components (and is a very large part of Samsung's revenue). Google is dependent on Apple for many things - including ad revenue (iOS data usage is still much higher than Android (between 2 or 3 times), despite Android outselling iOS by 3:1 or more - Android users just don't like using mobile data), anti-trust (the joke that is iAd? Its what allowed Google to purchase AdMob), and a plethora of other things.
The interrelationships between companies is a tightly knit web. Even outright competitors often source and derive revenues from their competitors. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Not only that, a frequent argument used by Apple and Apple fans is that the quality of Apple gear is much higher than that of the typical PC. While I will not argue that point when it comes to the Mac Pro and all that -- their case designs are outstanding if not simply sexy -- the variable quality of devices within speaks differently
Build quality for one. You can pay Foxconn to make a piece of crap PC that's poorly assembled and built, or pay Foxconn to build one that meets tight specficiations and is built more solidly. It's just how much you're willing to pay.
Same goes for parts - you can pay more to get better quality parts or skimp and let the manufacturer figure it out. Or for some parts, it really doesn't matter at all - like hard drives (are there significant differences between a Seagate or Western Digital? Other than anecdotes, they're pretty much similar from the spec sheet. Though real life can say differently - I have seen 5400 RPM Samsung drives outclass an equivalent 7200RPM one from WD or Seagate).
Heck, back when the original Xbox was new, someone took apart the 8GB hard drive it contained and found tons of corners that have been cut to make it cheap. When you're buying hard drives by the millions, you can ask for your price and your build quality.
Hell, SSDs are an intersting one as well - if you note, most OEMs use either Toshiba or Samsung SSDs - not top end performers, but well regarded for their data stability and reliability. It means being more conservative in part choices so they're not going for the bleeding edge, but well tested ones that won't fail in a year's time and cause a warranty return. (Apple, like everyone else, hates warranty repairs because it costs money, so designing stuff to last beyond AppleCare warranty periods saves money).
No kidding! A person could talk for hours and hours with "unlimited long distance" and hear every waver in a person's breath with a crappy $5 telephone.
Currently, I'll get randomly dropped on my cell at least once a conversation while at home.
One could argue that dropped calls like that help carriers by forcing a maximum duration of phone calls. Plus it forces everyone to be briefer because the call may disconnect at any time, making for shorter calls.
Heck, it's probably a liveness test as well - drop your call and see if you're there to restart it.
With wireless, it's easy to force QoS on people who "use too much"...
Furthermore, if it turns out that a supplier claimed compliance with an open standard but did not deliver this, there should be serious penalties levied against the supplier (and not just a slap on the wrist that the supplier will see as merely "cost of doing business"). The penalties could include requiring the supplier to make their version of the standard open to all.
No, that's insufficient.
Make the penalty forced open-source, under a modified BSD license that includes patent licensing. Because you cannot be sure there's some oddball part of the spec they've overlooked (and EVERY standard that's complex has corner cases and little known side effects) or other thing. It's forcing the standard to be open by releasing reference code, effectively.
Why not GPL? Because the threat of BSD means that competitors are free to use that code in their closed-source implementation, and have patent licenses for that.
The loss of the crown jewels, forced patent licenses, AND breaking of 3rd party licensing agreements should put enough fear into closed source companies competing to be on the straight and narrow with respect to the standards.
Whichever side of the issue you stand on, it's worth noting that arguably the most prominent signatories to this letter and/or the companies they represent - Intel and Google - came under fire for allegedly secretly conspiring together to block worker mobility ("The no-hire paper trail Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt didn't want you to see"), so a cynic might suggest perhaps they're not quite as concerned with labor's free-and-natural-flow when it doesn't suit their needs. Also, Ireland seems to be finding that importing tech labor isn't quite the rising-tide-that-lifts-all-boats that it was cracked up to be ("Ireland too scared to tax big tech, Let the poor eat potatos"), "Google paid only £5.6m tax despite £10bn turnover").
To be honest, they're not no-hire policies, but no-poaching agreements.
The former means if you're currently employed at Company X, Company Y will not hire you regardless of the circumstances. The latter means that Company Y will not actively recruit you. The difference is the second one allows the employee to on their own free will to apply for the company (i.e., the employee has to make the first move, not the company).
Yes, it means you won't get calls from another company saying you can join them, and that you'll have to make first contact.
software is just a pile of algorithms. allowing patenting of math and logic is a very bad idea. we have copyright instead to protect specific written works of software, that's all that's needed as long as the copyright period isn't too long. 17 or 25 years is plenty.
Problem is where one ends and the other starts.
Let's say hypothetically that their patented low-cavitation jar relies on special software algorithms to operate efficiently. What do you patent - the jar? Not really - it doesn't do the job completely on its own. The software? Ditto. The jar and software? Quite possibly.
So the question becomes where does the patented invention stop because it's software...? It's a problem that's been vexing the courts for some time now. Especially since these days, embedded computers are mated with hardware, so general innovations come as a result of both hardware and software (firmware).
You're making the assumption that they thought about this. The people involved in the decision probably numbered in the dozens tops, with most of them marketing and finance people. With the way companies seem to be run to realize maximum profits in the short term these days, it's even possible they realized this but turned down the long term gain anyway.
Or they DID think about this.
Of the last gen consoles, two went ATi/AMD - Xbox360 and Wii. One went nVidia - PS3 (the RSX). nvidia was involved in the generation before that as well - the original Xbox used nVidia.
Perhaps they were speaking from experience already - they have been consistently screwed over on two generations of consoles, why should they suffer a third? On the original Xbox, they were forced to scrap a ton of chips when Microsoft revved the hardware. On the PS3, perhaps they didn't like how much support they were providing for the PS3 versus how much they were getting paid per PS3.
It's entirely possible nVidia ran the calculations and saw that for whatever long term benefit there was in having the PS4 around, it didn't give the required ROI and tied up developmental resources in supporting the PS3 that could've been better spent making whatever next gen hardware they are thinking of.
AMD, though, is desperate for any sort of cash - being chosen by the Wii-U and the PS4 gives them long term cash they could use to survive.
As for the Xbox Next, who knows? Rumor has it they're using AMD chips for the CPU. They could use an nVidia chip there as well if Microsoft felt they spent more time and effort on fighting the AMD GPU.
That said, GS3 specs were already higher than those of the iPhone 5, now with GS4 Samsung leaves Apple far behind.
EVERY Android phone has had better specs than the contemporary iPhone of the day. This goes all the way back to the original iPhone. The HTC G1 had more memory and a faster processor than the iPhone or iPhone 3G.
This has always been true.The iPhone has never had specs that held one lick to the flagship Android phones. Hell, the iPhone 5 was the first to have 1GB of memory. Or even a 1GHz processo (the iPhone 4/4S had 800MHz processors).
All I want is a decent smartphone with a battery life comparable to my "dumbphones" that I have been carrying for the last 7 years - I can charge on Sunday and go until Thursday with heavy (3 hours a day talktime) usage without needing a charge - they will go over a week with light talktime - and these "dumbphones" have video recorders, voice recognition, bluetooth, etc.
I've never understood the need to have a phone last weeks on a single charge. Have people evolved beyond the need for sleep? After all, it seems like it's the perfect time to charge your phone. Heck, I always charged my dumbphones every night anyways - I never even bothered trying to run it for weeks.
If I ever get my hands on the guy who had this crazy idea of taking lead out of solder... Huge mistake, even with the environmental issues.../P?
The problem in solder is not the lead. It's the tin.
Tin by itself forms whiskers spontaneously. Some of the worst culprits in this isn't the solder, it's the hardware - the tin in hardware used to mount PCBs etc seem to whisker the most and cause problems. And plenty of research have shown what combination of tin ("bright" tin is the worst - and it was only until recently did manufacturers stop using it) led to the worst problems.
Leaded solder suffers from whiskering as well. Anytime you use tin, you'll have whiskers. Its just a matter of time - use the wrong tin and it'll whisker quickly. Use the right tin and it'll whisker slowly. And it's not the result of electrochemistry, electromigration, or anything. It's just tin atoms wishing to migrate to relieve stress in the crystalline structure. They diffuse through the structure - the atoms aren't pulled locally, but from the entire bulk.
We knew this when the first solders were created for electronics. At the time, they experimented and found lead worked "well enough".They never went to find out if there's any other substitute. Massive amounts of R&D is going on in materials science to find alternatives.
Ah yes, the fad diet advice. Losing weight is fairly scientific--if you ingest more calories than you spend, you gain weight. To lose it, you have to do the other direction
True, however the other aspect of a diet is to maintain a sense of "fullness" so you're not hungry all the time. It's easy to just take in 500 calories a day and lose a ton of weight. It's a lot harder when you're constantly hungry and everything tempts you. Eventually you'll break down.
Carbs tend to be "bad" because of their higher GI - your blood sugar spikes, then crashes, causing you to feel drowsy and irritable and hungry again. Proteins are "better" because they have a lower GI - your blood sugar tends to be stable, they tend to be bulky and give you a sense of fullness that lasts and you tend not to be as hungry.
All diets have the identical goal - reduce caloric intake. The only way they differ is how research shows the best way to do it and to be able to keep on it and lose the weight off for good (I think about 90% of people regain the weight they lost within a few years).
True, but what's max traffic going to be 2 weeks after launch? A month? They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last. Don't get me wrong, they still screwed up, but this problem occurs on just about every MMO's launch too.
Isn't this the whole reason we have "the cloud" and such? You build for projected utilization in your data center, and have stuff like Amazon EC2 on standby to take overflow being that if you need to, you can spin them up basically instantly. Then when utilization falls you take your EC2 sessions offline and save the money that would've gone into overprovisioning. If it turns out that your projections were wrong, then you purchase additional hardware in your data center and then migrate the traffic.
This is supposed to be the ideal utilization for The Cloud. Handle peak loads without overprovisioning by being able to quickly bring up more to handle the load, then take them offline as traffic settles. Or for times when you need a burst of computing but only for short durations, so maintaining a whole set of datacenter racks for something used 1 month out of 12 doesn't make sense (same thing, really).
You can also predict launch day traffic - given how many people preordered the game (publishers can get this information from retailers quite easily), and pre-emptively spin off more cloud instances.
At least Android is open enough to allow installation from outside the Play Store.
Problem is, that openness is also what leads to malware attacks on Android.
The first few comments after "new malware for Android" is usually "only if you're not using the Play store". While it's true that there has been malware for Android found in the Play store (some even using Android not as a vector to steal data, but as a carrier so plugging your phone in with the app installed infects your PC), the large majority have been for apps not obtained via the Play store.
The checkbox is effectively worthless now - if you install apps from Humble Bundle, Amazon, or now, want an ad-blocker, that checkbox is unchecked, which disables any protection the Play store offers (since Android cannot differentiate apps from trusted non-Play store sources and apps obtained from sketchier sources).
First I see people using Change.org to complain about Electronic Arts and its DRM; now this, a "petition" to ask Google to keep a product?
To me it cheapens the notion of a "petition" to use it for this. The Change.org homepage spotlights domestic violence, migrant workers, firefighters, and more.
It just seems whiny and self-entitled to me to gear up and "petition" a private company on such trivial stuff as an RSS reader, or DRM. Just find another reader. But, if Change.org does not want to filter out this crap...
It is, however, a fascinating look at society as a whole. If you ever wonder why politicians can get away with what they want (drone strikes on citizens, enhanced spying, copyright non-reform, patent non-reform, climate change, etc), just take a look at what people feel is important to them.
Same goes for why the/. crowd won't seem to get through to the general populace.
Those whiny and self-serving petitions show what people really care about. Unfiltered, they're a really neat look into what people care about, and why "stuff that matters" get drowned out. Hell, given the petitions, it's obvious that the stuff government is doing against its people aren't something that matters.
Wal-Mart is only considered evil by a few hardcore leftists and a bunch of people who wouldn't be caught dead in there even if it paid high wages to its employees. Actual poor people love Wal-Mart, because it's so much less expensive and so much nicer in terms of quality and selection than the stores that preceded it.
From experience, Wal-Mart is no cheaper than regular stores. Well, unless you are at the point in your life where 13 cents off a $50 item is a big deal.
If Wal-Mart's regular prices are cheaper than everyone else - there's a difference somewhere - it could be quality (Wal-Mart is known to ask suppliers to cut corners to meet the price it wants to sell at - so two seemingly identical products can be made extremely differently. These could be cutting back on features (e.g., wireless vs. wired), general build quality, accessories, etc).
The only time Wal-Mart truly is cheaper is during sales, and only then on the high-margin items.
Though, Wal-Mart does have some things going for it - they are a big-box department store without the traditional department store pricing and thus tend to be more accessible - Wal-Mart eschews the higher end and pricier stuff.
MTP looks great on paper, in practice it is dog slow and buggy. Back to the drawing board please.
True, I had trouble copying files between my Nexus 7 tablet and my Xubuntu laptop. But other than MTP, what royalty-free protocol for transferring files is compatible with a Windows host without having to download drivers, become an administrator, and install them? FAT over MSC, the solution used in Android 2.x, was found not to be royalty-free; Microsoft has been winning lawsuits with its FAT patents.
The problem is NOT MTP. It's Android's implementation of MTP. Lots of things used MTP before (it's been around for years). And it worked fine then and works fine now.
I know a developer who worked on getting MTP working for a device using Android - he's been cursing the Android implementation because it implements the barest of the bare minimum to work - it doesn't support many features, and even doing things in the wrong order crashes it.
He's probably spent months writing a client that actually works decently with Android over MTP. Works fine on other MTP implementations, but plug in Android and things go wonky.
Its coded against Windows' MTP support. Use anything else and it breaks easily. Even Windows probably breaks, just Microsoft coded it to be robust enough to handle common faults without crashing. But I know if I don't wait for Windows to finish enumerating everything over MTP, the Android MTP gets in a weird state and you have unplug/plug to kick it.
I wouldn't be surprised that other MTP implementations have run into serious issues with it. Android's just horrible at MTP.
Beverly Hills, 90210. It's not just the name of a show, but a real city and zip. And if you can't guess the state, well, you probably don't deserve it!
And relying on a bloated 3d stack just to draw a damn window isn't a bottleneck?
Face it, the only people that want to replace X which works JUST FINE are people who want to play with their goddamn wobbly windows. We get enough of that garbage with compositing, thanks.
Thanks to modern hardware, "thinking in 2D" is a bottleneck. It's such a bottleneck that the modern video card is faster doing 2D operations in 3D mode than trying to do it in 2D only. Window management is an example - the traditional 2D method is extremely software based to handle overlaps and all that, while if you switch it to 3D (every window is now a texture applied to a rectangle), switching windows is now incredibly fast (z-buffer update) as is handling background updates (just update the texture and the 3D card handles the visible area).
Yes, it also means wobbly windows or things like Aero Peek and Expose (again, it's a s low end 3D operation), but it can be extremely useful.
Hell, even window composition can be done on-card using GPGPU techniques (LLVM is very useful here).
If you're stuck with a framebuffer, yes, 2D is fine. Of course, most graphics cards these days offer some accelleration, usually BitBlt, but perhaps also ones like linedraw and hardware cursors. Of course, given the prevalance of 3D accellerators, using it can increase the speed of everything rather than doing it all in software.
Hell, Android benefits greatly if you have an accellerator so the graphics stack and surface flinger don't have to do it all in software.
I'm not entirely sure what the advantage to the carrier is, however. The end-user is already tied to the carrier by a contract and the costs of said contract more than subsidize the cost of the phone. Is it the worry that at the end of the contract the end-user will take the (over)paid-for phone and switch to another carrier? The fact that the phone is already locked doesn't seem to be stopping this; anecdotally, I know people who purposely switch (or take a new contract with the same carrier) just to/get/ new phones. I'd reckon most people who stick with a carrier past the length of the initial contract do so because of a lack of viable options or because the inconvenience of switching outweighs the benefits.
Besides phone "exclusivity", it's profits. 10+ years ago, carriers made huge profits on voice calls, but competition eroded that, so texting was the large profit center. Then the iPhone came out with its insatiable desire for data (oddly, despite Android being 3:1 to iOS, iOS data usage is 2-3 times as much as Android - web, video, whatever), which gave carriers a whole new profit center to ding people with. So much so that unlimited voice/text plans have tumbled in price.
Of course, what has ALWAYS remained a nice profit center is roaming - $1/minute plus long distance charges (another $1/minute unless you have a long distance plan), roaming text and roaming data.
Guess what? If you have a locked phone and travel, you'll either have to buy and carry another phone, or put up with the roaming charges. If the carrier unlocks their phone, well, there goes that nice roaming revenue.
So yes, carriers do benefit because the number of people who roam is enough to make tidy profits off of. And yes, they make tidy profits - when you see them write off $20K+ data bills as if it was nothing...
I have to fully agree with this. Like one of those Final Fantasy music orchestra concert that have been held a few times for the last few years. Or maybe the Legend of Zelda anniversary concert. You can bet those who attend both of these concerts are younger audience. I'm afraid people who tries to preserve Classic music is actually oblivious to the fact that those musics DO exist in the minds of young people, it's just that they are delivered through a different media and experience.
Over the past 6 or so years since it started, a lot of video game symphonies have shown up - Video Games Live being one of the first, and now many spinoffs have also been created.
There's a lot of good symphonic music out there. The trick is that most "classical" music isn't relevant - either due to cultural bias (classical music is boring / for rich fogies who have too much time / too much etiquette / etc), or just plain disinterest (people want to hear the few bars they know of a few select pieces (perhaps ones that make up their ringtone?).
But it doesn't mean it HAS to be irrelevant - there is one concert that links popular tv, movie and video game scores with classical pieces since many composers draw inspiration from them. With great success, at that - people hear their favorite themes, then it segues to a similar classical piece.
Hell, most people are probalby exposed to far more orchestral music than they believe. It's just that classical music has been too ingrained in them as being not like stuff they like, so the connection isn't made.
Plus, I suppose, people believe you have to "appreciate" classical music. When it's really the same as today - if it's good, listen to it like you would any other music.
Do they sometime get stuck requiring quickly looking around to make sure no one is looking then banging the machine a few times?
Modern vending machines often have sensors now that detect if a product gets stuck and either choose to refund the money or try to issue said product. I've had it happen to me once - the candy bar didn't drop but hung on. The machine detected that nothing dropped so spun around again. I ended up getting a two-fer that time.
Of course, said machines rarely get stuck and generally are designed that even the worst product will fall down reliably without edges or other things that would catch products. Unlike machines that don't which often have internal edges to catch products. Several times I had one jam the door so you couldn't even push it open. If you applied enough force you could break the packaging and use it to bounce the product around to at least get the door opening again, and then maybe bounce it so it could fall properly.
Hell, you can replicate this quite easily without all this web nonsense.
Just play some poker. If the chips have no value (or the players have no "skin" in the game), then the play will be quite different than if every chip represented a penny and everyone won or lost accordingly. It turns out people will take risks they normally wouldn't.
If I were to play with "pretend" money, I'd do the 3c thing to sites I like (a lot, or personally know the guy behind it), 2c to sites that are generally good, 1c to sites that are OK, and nothing to sites I don't regularly visit.
If I were instead forced to pay up, instead of using 3c, I'd probably shift everything downwards so only the cream of the crop sites get 1c, and everyone else no tip.
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The reason is that after the war or so, the first people to start running businesses and such were Chinese (most likely chased out from Singapore by the Japanese), and they got very rich doing so.
The government exploits the fact that a lot of Malaysians are jealous of the Chinese for being successful (which happens because they worked hard at building businesses and such) , so they put up huge campaigns of national identity and such to encourage hatred of the Chinese. However, they government doesn't really do anything about it (they can't - said Chinese businesses pay a good amount of tax and employ a lot of Malays). So basically the Chinese are demonized for being successful and "exploiting" Malays
If you're white, you're usually a tourist or an investor, so you're treated well to get at your $$$. If you're a Chinese investor with $$$, everyone eyes you like you're going to enslave them.
The government feeds off this sentiment and basically just fans the flames. There's no real democracy (there is voting, but the opposition is usually highly discredited, or even arrested if they have a chance of winning - being a Muslim state, there are plenty of "crimes" that one can accuse the Opposition of).
It's called a Conflict Monitor Unit and it's a required element for traffic lights per law. It basically does as you say - it looks at the outputs and if an invalid one crops up (two greens, say) then it immediately shuts down the traffic light and optionally returns a signal that could notify when this occurs.
They're a bit more complex than just detecting two greens - they can even monitor things like are the lights cycling properly (green-yellow-red), how long red/yellow/green lights have been on and if red wasn't actually on for some reason.
More like Linus got a fancy i386 computer and wanted access to netnews, which his computer did not have at the time (he used to use university computers for it). He could dialup and get it, but his computer lacked a terminal client.
So he wrote one using the i386 instruction set - a small kernel to help manage the send and receive "threads".
It went well enough until one day he dialed his hard drive, corrupting his Minix partition, and started implementing permissions. Gradually he added more and more until Linux 0.1 was born.
At least, this was according to the Linus biography written a decade ago or so.
True, but a big part is companies like Apple making it unprofitable to manufacture in China anymore with their "supplier codes of conduct" and such.
One thing I've learned about Chinese companies is they're extremely capitalistic - screwing people over is just par for the course (if they were smarter, they won't let themselves be screwed, so since they're dumb, it's increased profits). (This applies to anyone they think they can screw over - employees, customers, regardless of race or anything). Likewise, they're extremely cheap - that 10 year old PC that barely runs? Still good! Run our latest business critical software on it and quit telling it needs upgrading.
So when Apple comes around on their high horse demanding fair wages and reasonable working conditions (not quite western style, but better than before), well, that increases the cost of business. And China's already seeing people move to Vietnam and other places because China's getting too expensive and the employees are becoming ungrateful at having jobs, now they're demanding benefits.
So screw Apple, they want more Samsungs who'll poison a bunch of workers (they're stupid, and replacable, who cares?). so only a cheap $1000 fine.
Also helps Apple is American, while Samsung etc. are well, Asian. Preference first for Chinese, but Asians are just as good.
Advertising is probably the LEAST invasive form of what Google Glass is that you should be worried about.
Think of stuff a bit more private and controversial. You know, like homosexuality. Or abortion. Or climate change. Or even your need to visit some porn store or other "sensitive" place. Or any of the bunch of other controversial things going on around the world today.
Homosexuality is an interesting one - what to make of people who are now tagged as entering known support groups (and with critical mass, your movements can be tracked constantly). Bible thumping is huge, and while it might be fun to expose some conservative's son or daughter as being a homosexual, it does little to help those who aren't quite ready to come out yet.
Likewise for abortion - do we really want to push mothers back into dark alleys again, just because some busybody decides to film, tag, and identify everyone who uses a clinic's services? It's a hard enough decision already.
While 100% full transparency will solve a lot of society's ills, society itself isn't ready to handle it. We're just not mature enough as a whole to handle people who are "different" (be it color, religion, associates (e.g., caste), what have you). Google Glass will not only be a tool to free those from injustice, but also one to enslave and oppress.
You'll be in for a disappointment when you learn that it's not a black and white world then. Because even though it IS an LG screen having the problem, the relationships between companies like Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD, Google and Samsung is FAR more complex than simple "Apple hates Samsung" or "Apple hates Google" or "Intel is holding down AMD". When there's very little competition, you'll find a lot of what can best be described as incest. Competitors who purchase subassemblies from each other to sell products that compete on the open market (often the same products, at that). As well, you'll have competitor dependence - Samsung depends on Apple for a lot - namely to keep Very Expensive Fabs open (flash memory, ASICs) - a fab that's not running at full capacity is costing money in depreciation, and when technology nodes and equipment run into the multi-billion dollar investments every couple of years, idling is not an option. Likewise, Apple is dependent on Samsung for components (and is a very large part of Samsung's revenue). Google is dependent on Apple for many things - including ad revenue (iOS data usage is still much higher than Android (between 2 or 3 times), despite Android outselling iOS by 3:1 or more - Android users just don't like using mobile data), anti-trust (the joke that is iAd? Its what allowed Google to purchase AdMob), and a plethora of other things.
The interrelationships between companies is a tightly knit web. Even outright competitors often source and derive revenues from their competitors. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Build quality for one. You can pay Foxconn to make a piece of crap PC that's poorly assembled and built, or pay Foxconn to build one that meets tight specficiations and is built more solidly. It's just how much you're willing to pay.
Same goes for parts - you can pay more to get better quality parts or skimp and let the manufacturer figure it out. Or for some parts, it really doesn't matter at all - like hard drives (are there significant differences between a Seagate or Western Digital? Other than anecdotes, they're pretty much similar from the spec sheet. Though real life can say differently - I have seen 5400 RPM Samsung drives outclass an equivalent 7200RPM one from WD or Seagate).
Heck, back when the original Xbox was new, someone took apart the 8GB hard drive it contained and found tons of corners that have been cut to make it cheap. When you're buying hard drives by the millions, you can ask for your price and your build quality.
Hell, SSDs are an intersting one as well - if you note, most OEMs use either Toshiba or Samsung SSDs - not top end performers, but well regarded for their data stability and reliability. It means being more conservative in part choices so they're not going for the bleeding edge, but well tested ones that won't fail in a year's time and cause a warranty return. (Apple, like everyone else, hates warranty repairs because it costs money, so designing stuff to last beyond AppleCare warranty periods saves money).
One could argue that dropped calls like that help carriers by forcing a maximum duration of phone calls. Plus it forces everyone to be briefer because the call may disconnect at any time, making for shorter calls.
Heck, it's probably a liveness test as well - drop your call and see if you're there to restart it.
With wireless, it's easy to force QoS on people who "use too much"...
No, that's insufficient.
Make the penalty forced open-source, under a modified BSD license that includes patent licensing. Because you cannot be sure there's some oddball part of the spec they've overlooked (and EVERY standard that's complex has corner cases and little known side effects) or other thing. It's forcing the standard to be open by releasing reference code, effectively.
Why not GPL? Because the threat of BSD means that competitors are free to use that code in their closed-source implementation, and have patent licenses for that.
The loss of the crown jewels, forced patent licenses, AND breaking of 3rd party licensing agreements should put enough fear into closed source companies competing to be on the straight and narrow with respect to the standards.
To be honest, they're not no-hire policies, but no-poaching agreements.
The former means if you're currently employed at Company X, Company Y will not hire you regardless of the circumstances. The latter means that Company Y will not actively recruit you. The difference is the second one allows the employee to on their own free will to apply for the company (i.e., the employee has to make the first move, not the company).
Yes, it means you won't get calls from another company saying you can join them, and that you'll have to make first contact.
Problem is where one ends and the other starts.
Let's say hypothetically that their patented low-cavitation jar relies on special software algorithms to operate efficiently. What do you patent - the jar? Not really - it doesn't do the job completely on its own. The software? Ditto. The jar and software? Quite possibly.
So the question becomes where does the patented invention stop because it's software...? It's a problem that's been vexing the courts for some time now. Especially since these days, embedded computers are mated with hardware, so general innovations come as a result of both hardware and software (firmware).
Or they DID think about this.
Of the last gen consoles, two went ATi/AMD - Xbox360 and Wii. One went nVidia - PS3 (the RSX). nvidia was involved in the generation before that as well - the original Xbox used nVidia.
Perhaps they were speaking from experience already - they have been consistently screwed over on two generations of consoles, why should they suffer a third? On the original Xbox, they were forced to scrap a ton of chips when Microsoft revved the hardware. On the PS3, perhaps they didn't like how much support they were providing for the PS3 versus how much they were getting paid per PS3.
It's entirely possible nVidia ran the calculations and saw that for whatever long term benefit there was in having the PS4 around, it didn't give the required ROI and tied up developmental resources in supporting the PS3 that could've been better spent making whatever next gen hardware they are thinking of.
AMD, though, is desperate for any sort of cash - being chosen by the Wii-U and the PS4 gives them long term cash they could use to survive.
As for the Xbox Next, who knows? Rumor has it they're using AMD chips for the CPU. They could use an nVidia chip there as well if Microsoft felt they spent more time and effort on fighting the AMD GPU.
EVERY Android phone has had better specs than the contemporary iPhone of the day. This goes all the way back to the original iPhone. The HTC G1 had more memory and a faster processor than the iPhone or iPhone 3G.
This has always been true.The iPhone has never had specs that held one lick to the flagship Android phones. Hell, the iPhone 5 was the first to have 1GB of memory. Or even a 1GHz processo (the iPhone 4/4S had 800MHz processors).
I've never understood the need to have a phone last weeks on a single charge. Have people evolved beyond the need for sleep? After all, it seems like it's the perfect time to charge your phone. Heck, I always charged my dumbphones every night anyways - I never even bothered trying to run it for weeks.
The problem in solder is not the lead. It's the tin.
Tin by itself forms whiskers spontaneously. Some of the worst culprits in this isn't the solder, it's the hardware - the tin in hardware used to mount PCBs etc seem to whisker the most and cause problems. And plenty of research have shown what combination of tin ("bright" tin is the worst - and it was only until recently did manufacturers stop using it) led to the worst problems.
Leaded solder suffers from whiskering as well. Anytime you use tin, you'll have whiskers. Its just a matter of time - use the wrong tin and it'll whisker quickly. Use the right tin and it'll whisker slowly. And it's not the result of electrochemistry, electromigration, or anything. It's just tin atoms wishing to migrate to relieve stress in the crystalline structure. They diffuse through the structure - the atoms aren't pulled locally, but from the entire bulk.
We knew this when the first solders were created for electronics. At the time, they experimented and found lead worked "well enough".They never went to find out if there's any other substitute. Massive amounts of R&D is going on in materials science to find alternatives.
True, however the other aspect of a diet is to maintain a sense of "fullness" so you're not hungry all the time. It's easy to just take in 500 calories a day and lose a ton of weight. It's a lot harder when you're constantly hungry and everything tempts you. Eventually you'll break down.
Carbs tend to be "bad" because of their higher GI - your blood sugar spikes, then crashes, causing you to feel drowsy and irritable and hungry again. Proteins are "better" because they have a lower GI - your blood sugar tends to be stable, they tend to be bulky and give you a sense of fullness that lasts and you tend not to be as hungry.
All diets have the identical goal - reduce caloric intake. The only way they differ is how research shows the best way to do it and to be able to keep on it and lose the weight off for good (I think about 90% of people regain the weight they lost within a few years).
Isn't this the whole reason we have "the cloud" and such? You build for projected utilization in your data center, and have stuff like Amazon EC2 on standby to take overflow being that if you need to, you can spin them up basically instantly. Then when utilization falls you take your EC2 sessions offline and save the money that would've gone into overprovisioning. If it turns out that your projections were wrong, then you purchase additional hardware in your data center and then migrate the traffic.
This is supposed to be the ideal utilization for The Cloud. Handle peak loads without overprovisioning by being able to quickly bring up more to handle the load, then take them offline as traffic settles. Or for times when you need a burst of computing but only for short durations, so maintaining a whole set of datacenter racks for something used 1 month out of 12 doesn't make sense (same thing, really).
You can also predict launch day traffic - given how many people preordered the game (publishers can get this information from retailers quite easily), and pre-emptively spin off more cloud instances.
Problem is, that openness is also what leads to malware attacks on Android.
The first few comments after "new malware for Android" is usually "only if you're not using the Play store". While it's true that there has been malware for Android found in the Play store (some even using Android not as a vector to steal data, but as a carrier so plugging your phone in with the app installed infects your PC), the large majority have been for apps not obtained via the Play store.
The checkbox is effectively worthless now - if you install apps from Humble Bundle, Amazon, or now, want an ad-blocker, that checkbox is unchecked, which disables any protection the Play store offers (since Android cannot differentiate apps from trusted non-Play store sources and apps obtained from sketchier sources).
It is, however, a fascinating look at society as a whole. If you ever wonder why politicians can get away with what they want (drone strikes on citizens, enhanced spying, copyright non-reform, patent non-reform, climate change, etc), just take a look at what people feel is important to them.
Same goes for why the /. crowd won't seem to get through to the general populace.
Those whiny and self-serving petitions show what people really care about. Unfiltered, they're a really neat look into what people care about, and why "stuff that matters" get drowned out. Hell, given the petitions, it's obvious that the stuff government is doing against its people aren't something that matters.
From experience, Wal-Mart is no cheaper than regular stores. Well, unless you are at the point in your life where 13 cents off a $50 item is a big deal.
If Wal-Mart's regular prices are cheaper than everyone else - there's a difference somewhere - it could be quality (Wal-Mart is known to ask suppliers to cut corners to meet the price it wants to sell at - so two seemingly identical products can be made extremely differently. These could be cutting back on features (e.g., wireless vs. wired), general build quality, accessories, etc).
The only time Wal-Mart truly is cheaper is during sales, and only then on the high-margin items.
Though, Wal-Mart does have some things going for it - they are a big-box department store without the traditional department store pricing and thus tend to be more accessible - Wal-Mart eschews the higher end and pricier stuff.
The problem is NOT MTP. It's Android's implementation of MTP. Lots of things used MTP before (it's been around for years). And it worked fine then and works fine now.
I know a developer who worked on getting MTP working for a device using Android - he's been cursing the Android implementation because it implements the barest of the bare minimum to work - it doesn't support many features, and even doing things in the wrong order crashes it.
He's probably spent months writing a client that actually works decently with Android over MTP. Works fine on other MTP implementations, but plug in Android and things go wonky.
Its coded against Windows' MTP support. Use anything else and it breaks easily. Even Windows probably breaks, just Microsoft coded it to be robust enough to handle common faults without crashing. But I know if I don't wait for Windows to finish enumerating everything over MTP, the Android MTP gets in a weird state and you have unplug/plug to kick it.
I wouldn't be surprised that other MTP implementations have run into serious issues with it. Android's just horrible at MTP.
Thanks to modern hardware, "thinking in 2D" is a bottleneck. It's such a bottleneck that the modern video card is faster doing 2D operations in 3D mode than trying to do it in 2D only. Window management is an example - the traditional 2D method is extremely software based to handle overlaps and all that, while if you switch it to 3D (every window is now a texture applied to a rectangle), switching windows is now incredibly fast (z-buffer update) as is handling background updates (just update the texture and the 3D card handles the visible area).
Yes, it also means wobbly windows or things like Aero Peek and Expose (again, it's a s low end 3D operation), but it can be extremely useful.
Hell, even window composition can be done on-card using GPGPU techniques (LLVM is very useful here).
If you're stuck with a framebuffer, yes, 2D is fine. Of course, most graphics cards these days offer some accelleration, usually BitBlt, but perhaps also ones like linedraw and hardware cursors. Of course, given the prevalance of 3D accellerators, using it can increase the speed of everything rather than doing it all in software.
Hell, Android benefits greatly if you have an accellerator so the graphics stack and surface flinger don't have to do it all in software.
Besides phone "exclusivity", it's profits. 10+ years ago, carriers made huge profits on voice calls, but competition eroded that, so texting was the large profit center. Then the iPhone came out with its insatiable desire for data (oddly, despite Android being 3:1 to iOS, iOS data usage is 2-3 times as much as Android - web, video, whatever), which gave carriers a whole new profit center to ding people with. So much so that unlimited voice/text plans have tumbled in price.
Of course, what has ALWAYS remained a nice profit center is roaming - $1/minute plus long distance charges (another $1/minute unless you have a long distance plan), roaming text and roaming data.
Guess what? If you have a locked phone and travel, you'll either have to buy and carry another phone, or put up with the roaming charges. If the carrier unlocks their phone, well, there goes that nice roaming revenue.
So yes, carriers do benefit because the number of people who roam is enough to make tidy profits off of. And yes, they make tidy profits - when you see them write off $20K+ data bills as if it was nothing...
Over the past 6 or so years since it started, a lot of video game symphonies have shown up - Video Games Live being one of the first, and now many spinoffs have also been created.
There's a lot of good symphonic music out there. The trick is that most "classical" music isn't relevant - either due to cultural bias (classical music is boring / for rich fogies who have too much time / too much etiquette / etc), or just plain disinterest (people want to hear the few bars they know of a few select pieces (perhaps ones that make up their ringtone?).
But it doesn't mean it HAS to be irrelevant - there is one concert that links popular tv, movie and video game scores with classical pieces since many composers draw inspiration from them. With great success, at that - people hear their favorite themes, then it segues to a similar classical piece.
Hell, most people are probalby exposed to far more orchestral music than they believe. It's just that classical music has been too ingrained in them as being not like stuff they like, so the connection isn't made.
Plus, I suppose, people believe you have to "appreciate" classical music. When it's really the same as today - if it's good, listen to it like you would any other music.
Modern vending machines often have sensors now that detect if a product gets stuck and either choose to refund the money or try to issue said product. I've had it happen to me once - the candy bar didn't drop but hung on. The machine detected that nothing dropped so spun around again. I ended up getting a two-fer that time.
Of course, said machines rarely get stuck and generally are designed that even the worst product will fall down reliably without edges or other things that would catch products. Unlike machines that don't which often have internal edges to catch products. Several times I had one jam the door so you couldn't even push it open. If you applied enough force you could break the packaging and use it to bounce the product around to at least get the door opening again, and then maybe bounce it so it could fall properly.