However also from TFA this new site is meant as a revenue generating source - most likely for himself ("a guys gotta eat") so I am more inclined to believe that he is on more of an egotistical/screw you stance than flowers and cute ponies [wielding AK-47's].
Since he's selling affiliate links to people who can make it for you or other things, things would get murky very fast.
Forget guns - they'll quickly become just a tiny part of the site - it's the other stuff that people upload that'll become popular and mainstream. For every person who'll want to download some AK-47 part, there'll be dozens of others who want the plans to make some Bieber bobble head or something.
It wasn't just "cool and hip" to use Palm's new writing style - it was also fast and more reliable - e.g., when writing A just write an upside-down V and don't write the middle line.
I remember a conference I attended in 1999, where for 3 days I sat and wrote notes on my Palm V. Palm's writing technique was very fast, very convenient (the device was very small, and I could write without looking at the screen all the time - which you can't do on today's smartphones) and also - after 3 days of writing, I still had half my battery left!
You can still get it on Android. Access (which purchased PalmOS) has put Graffiti (1, not the horrendous abomination that was 2) as an input method.
The only downside is the input box is a bit small on the Gnex - if they could make it larger, it would be much better.
However a lot of Siberia and Canada would become very habitable, and the higher temperatures, precipitation and carbon dioxide levels should in theory lead to an increase in the overall size and diversity of the biosphere, more rainforests basically, as long as we don't cut them all down again.
Warming is an average
So yes, what used to be only 10C in the summer may climb to 25C during the summer. Of course, the average temperature rise is (worst case), 4C. Which means the winter just got 11C colder to make the average fit.
That's the problem with global warming. It's not "making cold parts more temperate", but making more wild swings in temperature. That 25C summer can consist of regular 10C days, except for August where it sears up to 35C (and let's not forget that places like this, air conditioning is usually optional if you're only going to use it 1 month a year).
And a quick addendum - a hurricane like Sandy cools the ocean about 3-4 degrees.
they just yank the glasses off first, then ground them into the dirt with their boot
nothing changes
Except you can't yank the glasses off everyone looking in your direction as well.
It's really back to the old days when Google Street View captured people walking out of porn shops and other "undesirables" causing Google to have to censor everyone's faces to prevent recognition.
OTOH, the killer app for Google Glass would be bible thumpers - think about it - they could just situate a bunch of people around stores they see selling undesirable "filth" and record everyone going in and out. Think prositution is morally evil?Well, just patrol up and down and see who the johns are. Likewise, same for those who find abortion objectionable, or those baby dropoffs at hospitals (where a mother who feels she can't take care of a newborn can drop her baby off anonymously). Or whoever buys contraception.
Or whoever wants to teach evolution. Or anything else controversial. Like smoking. Or gun control
Polite and lawful society, perhaps, but one more reminicent of an authoritarian regime where everyone really is keeping tabs on everyone else. And every neighbourhood has a busybody who makes it their goal in life to expose the misdoings of everyone else.
That is because this is NOT about DRM--this is about killing the Used PC Game market. The server connection is to verify first-install. After that, the game will not work on any other machine (or be whittled down to Demo functionality). That being said, all EA PC games will have this "feature" from this time forward as they and every other major game developer/publisher are all involved in a major assault on First Sale doctrine.
There are very little used PC game sales anymore. It's already dead - and not just by EA, but everyone as well.
Take a look at practically any boxed PC game on the shelf, and they're either using Origin or Steam. Neither of which currently allow reselling used games.
All that's left are indie games, really, or kickstarters.
These days, if a big patent holder in a related field (e.g. MPEG-LA) says they are going to gather all their patents and attack you, then they can do serious damage regardless of what any experts might say about actual infringement.
A company deciding to license patents that it believes it hasn't infringed it pretty common-place unfortunately.
MPEG-LA isn't a patent holder. They are a licensing authority
What happens is all the patent holders of various standards like h.264 got together, negotiated a fee schedule and split up the payments such that if you wanted to license everything related to h.264, you basically paid a fee per device or implementation. That licensed you all the patents you need (they're FRAND).
It's a little better than what we have in 3GPP which results in having to license patents from individual patent holders - if you need to negotiate with 10 or 20 or 50 of them, your legal feels rise substantially versus just go and paying the fixed fee.
All Google did here was negotiate with all the patent holders together through the MPEG-LA. So now as long as you paid the fee, (or in this case, it's royalty free), no patent holder in the pool can go after you for that implementation (if you didn't pay for h.264, you can be sued for that, even if the patent was granted for VP8 - it's only valid for VP8 and not for technologies related).
I don't understand the attraction of those old IBMish keyboards. You wore out your fingers with all the pressure they take to type on, and you feel self conscious typing on them because they're so noisy. What really is the attraction?
Well, you can get modern quiet ones that use the same buckling spring, but aren't sounding like a machinegun when you type on them (and really, in an office environment, it's a great way to drive your coworkers to go postal on you. So unless you've got an office...).
But I suppose it's also great if you have kids - put it on the family PC and you can tell someone's using it. If they're older and have their own computer in the room, give them that and you can tell when they're doing homework or just surfing Facebook.
Or if you don't want your significant other to use your computer... well, it's just hard to discreetly use one now.
I suspect I'll also be looking at a unicomp keyboard or a USB adapter, though I've read the USB adapters are sort of hit and miss.
Of all the PS/2 to USB adapters I've tried (a LOT of them), they all... suck. The most common problem I find is they don't do typematic properly - if you hold a key down, they type anywhere from 4-8 characters and that's it. If you're doing some random typing, not an issue. But if you code, or want to play a game that requires holding down a key, forget about it. Others I've seen go nuts if they're hooked to a KVM (either before or after).
It's strange, too, it's like they all refuse to send keydown and key up reports (like regular USB keyboards) and just emulate the behavior. Some I've seen simulate typematic by issuing keydown and key up commands. Needless to say, gaming was a miss with that one. Especially on games that required you to hold down a key to to modify behavior (e.g., run).
The silliness of a patent doesn't enter into the equation. It's not about silliness, common sense or reality when it comes to the patents most of these companies seem to try and get. It's more along the lines of patent everything in sight, imaginable or possible. Do this as broadly as possible and then sue the shit out of anyone that steps on their toes. You can also be assured that if Apple allows for reselling through iTunes, they'll be taking a slice of every transaction made.
Well, there are plenty of DRM'd formats out there that let you resell them. Like say, DVDs and Blu-Ray. They're DRM'ed, but they allow easy reselling through a different method than the patent...
And really, other than OTA TV, most video IS already DRM'd. Hell, they had analog video DRM as well.
Theyll get there tomorrow-- they havent failed to breach OSX yet. The shocker this year is that OSX / Safari didnt fall on day one-- the question is whether thats due to actual security, perceived difficulty, or lower prize money.
That is an interesting shocker. Because usually pwn2own, the Mac goes first (because beating it got you a nice MacBook Pro), followed by Windows (normally some nice Sony laptop), and then Linux (some generic Dell). The lower prize money typically reflects that - everyone normally attacks OS X first, while the Windows and Linux ones typically are less attacked. One strategy has alwys been to go after Windows and Linux becaues everyone else is concentrating on OS X.
And normally, OS X is not only cracked on day 1, but cracked first, followed by Windows and then Linux (usually because of the desirability of the hardware).
Lowered prize money is a possibility, but you'd think given the range was anywhere from $110K for Windows 8 to $65K for OS X (and the range in-between - I think the next one was $75K) that it wouldn't be a huge difference. I don't think increased security is the reason as Mountain Lion has more security, but it's just like Windows 7/8 - the browser is sandboxed (just like IE and Chrome - they all run LUA). Gatekeeper is easily defeated (it only applies to files that are tagged as coming from the Internet - as an extended filesystem attribute that you can use standard tools to set and clear as long as you have permission to edit the file - and yes, those tools ship in the default config) - files originating from local media or elsewhere do not trigger it (e.g., compiler).
Isn't there a lot of precious metal in E-waste? AFAIK harvesting that can be quite lucrative as well. It surprises me that one needs initiatives such as this, one would think that the firms would want to recycle electronics anyway...
Tons. So much so many mining companies actually prefer it - it's a LOT easier to mine e-waste for valuables than it is to actually extract them from the ground - the concentration of valuable minerals is so much higher that it's way more profitable. It's why you never really have to "pay" much to recycle electronics (maybe a token recycling fee) - most of the cost of the recycling is paid for by reselling the materials.
The problem has been there usually is no direct way to link the two - miners rarely are present where e-waste is, and for a lot of folks, it's just easier to dump the old PC in the dumpster than take it to a facility (because while the individual quantity of valuable material is small, when aggregated in the quantities miners like, it's much more valuable). When dumping 1000 servers, sure, its easy. When dumping 1, not so much.
I suspect the reason most nerds are bad at social etiquette simply because they don't see the point and don't care. It's a waste of time and/or something beneath their intellectual pursuits. If you are on the verge of a breakthrough in a new black hole theory, or revolutionary AI algorithm, everything else might seem unimportant by comparison.
If they started caring, picking up proper social etiquette is really not that hard. You don't need a school a class or an instructional manual... Just mirror whatever other "smooth" and "cool" people are doing. (The hard part is to hold an engaging social conversation talking about nothing, but that's a story for another day.)
So the key is to convince the nerd of the importance of social etiquette. Ironically, those who do go to this school probably don't really need it, and those who really need it haven't realized what they are missing... but sooner or later, they will do.
The deal is, if you only intend to deal with your peers, lacking social etiquette is fine. However, that also limits your interactions - if you ever intend to communicate your ideas to others who you consider "lesser" (less educated, the general public, whatever), then not conforming to what they expect discounts you as an "expert" in their eyes.
After all, just like everyone on/. thinks people should learn more about the computer that they use because they're smarter than the general population. Of course, the general population easily says the reverse - if these computer geeks are so intelligent that they should tell us what to do and know, why aren't they smart enough to look, act and play the part?
As much as everyone loves to say to not judge a book by its cover, it's what happens. Dress sharply, and people will listen. Dress like a slob, and people will think your thoughts and ideas are the same and refuse to listen.
And if you have to ever deal with customers (travelling, say) - even if they're engineers themselves - it doesn't hurt to be extra polite and show you do know your way around a dinner (especially with bosses and managers present).
It's why a properly fitted suit is often the ideal garment - it's one of the easier get-ups to instantly add credibility in the eyes of others.
Hell, look at scams out there. You'll find the perpetrator in confidence moves always dresses up because people typically let their guard down. If a slob approached you trying to sell you some hot investment, you'd turn them away. If a sharply dressed person did it, a lot of people drop their guard and listen. Same goes for pick-pockets.
Yes, except how much information comes not from what you PUT on the internet, but what you LOOK AT on the internet?
In which case Google should be the bigger offender than Facebook because Google is literally everywhere. Facebook's like buttons are on popular sites and such. Google's tentacles are everywhere, and gather data through practically everyone using Google Analytics, or a Google-owned ad service (not just AdWords, but DoubleClick, AdMob, and other advertising agencies). Or YouTube videos which are embedded everywhere as well. And soon, Google Glass will be there to capture your every movement in public by everyone else.
Facebook's base of information comes from what people put on it mostly. And Like buttons are in a lot of places, but generally speaking, not on the seedier side of the 'net (hell, even TPB had a hard time getting on Facebook). But who knows where those free pr0n companies are getting their ads from (probably Google-owned in the end).
I agree. But I think the simple axiom is this: if you use a free service, assume that any information can be sold to anyone for any purpose at any time. If people could be made to understand that, the specifics would almost be uninteresting.
An even simpler one dates way back to when we were connecting computers together by modems. "Don't post online what you don't want the world to know." Because anything posted online IS pretty much available for the world.
Yes, even with privacy settings. Privacy settings are a way to extract even more personal information from people than they otherwise would give. They're the ultimate in marketing - people mistakenly believe they're one thing but they're really something else.
The only real way to have privacy is to not put that information online in the first place.
The hazards of low salt are immediate and deadly. The hazards of high salt are hard to detect.
The average American consumes over 50% the recommended daily intake of salt. Recommendation is 2000mg (2g) of salt. The average American is consuming over 3000mg per day.
I believe there's a HUGE room to cut salt intake without actually running into low salt intake problems.
The salt comes mostly from processed and prepared foods (check out the nutrition label sometime - a small bag of chips can easily be 30%, or 600mg). Nevermind if you go out for dinner - most sit down restaurants can easily have 5000+mg or more of salt in an entree, though most hover around 2500mg or so (that's more than a day's worth of salt in just one dish).
If you ever wonder why McD's is forced to publish nutritional info, but a non-fast food place isn't (and actively resist all calls to do so, even just calorie information on the menus), that's one reason. They really don't want you to know because it really is genuinely scary. Or how a Big Mac can be "healthier".
There is no need for everything to live on the server in order to have the game be multiplayer, no matter what anyone tells you. That might be the only way the simcity team could get it to work, though.
It's really DRM. Online gaming is really the only way to have a pretty robust DRM scheme that can't be cracked.
Games saved on server? Means they can leave out code ot save games locally. It doesn't matter if you crack the game - unless someone writes local game save code, pirates can't save their games (which is a pretty big restriction).
Likewise, the server can require everyone have unique issued serial numbers. Hell, all you need to do is prevent two people from using the same serial number at the same time (you can transfer the serial number for used game sales, if any company REALLY cared for that - though buyers would have to worry about the original owner depriving them of the game by continuing to play it)..
Even better is such a DRM scheme requires zero intervention on the user's computer - you don't need any spyware installed or anything. The only real danger is someone trying to reverse engineer the server a la Bnetd. And we know how that turned out.
I'm not so bothered by the Desktop market. I'm more wondering - how can the App store model of Apple have a leg to stand on in the same court system that would allow this?
Easy. First, Microsoft was a convicted monopolist, Apple wasn't. (That's an important point).
Second, the App Store belongs to a phone that competes with other phones in a very competitive market. If the iPhone held 95% of the market, then it's a different matter. When it's around 18% of the entire mobile market (including featurephones and such - Android is closer to 40%), there's plenty of competition. Especially as it's not the dominant platform.
The only time Apple came dangerously close to monopoly status was in the heyday of the iPod and iTunes Music Store sales (with DRM) were basically dominating all music sales, period. Couple that with dominance in iPods and it was close (iPods sold iTunes, and iTunes kept people on iPods). The only real thing keeping it from becoming reality was well, competition in the form of the Zune and many of the bit players like Walmart and such. Plus you need to show abuse - having a monopoly isn't illegal, abusing it is (the eventual goal of a completely free market is monopoly status). Then Amazon came in and with DRM-free music, the whole threat passed as it wasn't limited to iPods anymore. And once all music is DRM-free, the issue was completely moot.
The mobile market has lots of competition, so it's not a big deal, yet. The multitude of app stores on Android isn't really much of an argument though - given there are really only two competitors that are viable - the Play store and Amazon App Store. The rest just tend to be a sad imitiation. It can, however, happen with Android. Let's take the current big player (by a long shot) - Samsung. Samsung plans to open their own store (with a 0% thing for indie devs). If that gains enough traction that developers prefer it and keeps their apps and such off of other stores and only keeps it on Samsung phones, then it gets to be like the iTunes situation - market dominance (Samsung IS Android) being used to abuse aother market (apps - only the best are for Samsung).
But it's unlikely to happen - the mobile smartphone market has matured, and even though 0% sounds tempting, the Play Store (and Apple App Store) can make it possible as well if you consider it's 0% for free apps and the developer keeps all the ad cash like they do now. And most devs are loathe to have to keep signing agreements with more app stores for marginal returns.
A lot of Stack overflow questions I see are along the form of "I need to do X, how do i do it?".
Basically they want a HOWTO of which APIs to string together in order to accomplish their task, if not someone else to completely code it for them. This is often referred to as "task based" documentaiton - to do X, you do A, B, C, and D. This often fails if you need more details on individual API calls.
Official documentation like MSDN exist to document all the APIs, but often lack what's known as "task-based" documentation.
They're both required pieces - task based is often used to learn how to do things (e.g., how to create a window on Windows), while the API documentation serves to comprehensively adjust various settings (do you want a scroll bar? A resize box? etc). Unfortunately, putting in extensive examples inside such documentation often serves to confuse (you won't believe how many people assume you can copy and paste it into a program and have it run).
Unfortunately, Stack overflow also suffers from developers merely copying and pasting code and expecting others to do their work for them (see thedailywtf), as well as many "give me the codez" stuff posted by students wanting others to do their homework.
But when used properly, the two complement each other. Its like man pages versus HOWTOs on Linux - one documents the commands and APIs, while the other tells you how to properly string them together to accomplish things.
the question is idiotic. sounds more like "asking a question just to ask it". Why should even intel kill x86? Would anyone even WANT to kill his cash cow ? It sounds more like wishful thinking from the camp across the atlantic ( arm *wink* *wink* ). Sure they would like to initiate or induce an inception of such an idea, but Intel has no reason at all to abandon such a successful platform.
Because x86 as an ISA is a lousy one?
32-bit code still relies on 7 basic registers with dedicated functionality, when others sport 16, 32 or more general purpose registers that can be used mostly interchangably (most do have a "special" GPR used for things like zero and whatnot).
64-bit extension (x64, amd64, x86-64 or whatever you call it) fixes this by increasing the register count and turns them into general registers.
In addition, a lot of transistors are wasted doing instruction decoding because x86 instructions are variable length. Great when you needed high code density, but now it's legacy cruft that serves little other than complicate instruction caches, inflight tagging and complicate instruction processing as instructions require partial decoding to figure out their length.
Finally, the biggest thing nowadays leftover from the RISC vs CISC wars is the load/store architecture (where operands work on registers only, while you have ot do loads/stores to access memory). A load/store architecture makes it easier on the instruction decoder as no more transistors need to be wasted trying to figure out if operands need to be fetched in order to execute the instruction - unless it's a load/store, the operand will be in the register file.
The flip side though, is a lot of the tricks used to make x86 faster also means that other architectures benefit as well. Things like out-of-order execution, register renaming, and even the whole front end/back end thing (where front end is what's presented to the world, e.g., x86), and back end is the internal processor itself, (e.g., custom RISC on most Intel and AMD x86 parts).
After all, ARM picked up OOO in the Cortex A series (starting with the A8). Register renaming came into play around then as well, though it really exploded in the Cortex A15. And the next gen chips are taking superscalar to the extreme. (Heck, PowerPC had all this first, before ARM. Especially during the great x86 vs. PowerPC wars).
The good side though is that x86 is a well studied architecture, so compilers and such for x86 generally produce very good code and are very mature. Of course, they also have to play into the internal microarchitecture to produce better code by taking advantage of register renames and OOO, and knowing how to do this effectively can boost speed.
And technically, with most x86 processors using a frontend/backend deal, x86 is "dead". What we have from Intel and AMD are processors that emulate x86 in hardware.
So just visit their website and lie about everything. Make the information offensive, even, or obviously false (all except the address, I guess, which they have to have). 99% of the mail I get is junk mail anyway, so much so that I rarely look at it and just use automatically it for fire starter, animal bedding, etc.
Never give up privacy, even under duress. When this kind of thing happens, meet them on a level playing field and corrupt their database with junk info.
Technically, you shouldn't lie about your address, otherwise they won't know where they SHOULDN'T deliver a phone book to!
You're free to lie about everything else, though.
The PII that seems irrelevant though is name, email address and phone number. Name is completely irrelevant, email might be nice for a confirmation in case you still get them and want to complain. Phone number is irrelevant. (Even worse, they say they need ot call to confirm... I guess it's to keep mass unsubscribe bots away in case there is someone who wants one?).
Imagine for a second I'm a poor bastard that has been travelling for the last 30 hours. Between flights, security, check-in-delays, etc...I'm fucking BEAT.
I just want to get in my fucking hotel room as fast as is humanly possible.
In other words, you're the perfect person who the kiosk can go and say "Check me in now" where I can add a whole pile of addons to your room (with charge, of course) and you'll happily pay for it because you agreed to it.
Just like how some things (like Java installer) can go and bundle in Chrome and other crap with your software installation, you can bet the kiosk will too - knowing people will be too tired to bother reading it out. Of course, if you use the clerk, they'll have asked you, but if you use the kiosk, it's just a checkmark you'll probalby miss.
Sounds like a great business model to have, actually - I wonder why kiosks don't do it now...
As for not wanting to interact - remember that next time you have something slightly out of the ordinary you need. Like maybe trying to dispute the charges because of the failure to decline kiosk offers - it's a lot harder to convince a machine than a human. Or want something special done to your mean that's not offered.
Humans are flexible, machines are not. The problem with kiosks is, while 90% of the time the defaults suit your needs, the 10% is when you'll need a human. And if that's the case, 0% will there be one to actually assist you when the time comes because management feels the clerk was redundant. (Like say the credit card terminal goes down - the clerk will probably do everything else (like get you your key) and charge it later, while the kiosk will sit there staring back at you with "Authorization Failure").
I really like the OSX system, I feel it's a stronger OS overall, but Microsoft will win because they have a strong platform in one crucial area: backwards compatibility. If you write something for OSX, there is no reason to believe that it will still work in five years. On Microsoft's platform, it has a good chance of working as compiled. This is even more important to businesses than to home users.
That's because most programmers suck.
OS X is actually quite compatible. Provided you stick to the public APIs. Do anything funny and yes, things will break. The presence of private headers though makes it way too easy to use a private API to do so something (as part of "get-it-working") that leads to OS version dependency.
Oh yeah, it happens on Windows too. Next time you run Process Explorer, look at the window title for explorer.exe. You'll see it's called "Program Manager". Because despite it being 2013, there are applications that STILL hard code it. Or apparently some apps hardcode resource IDs or DLL export IDs (you normally export by name, but you can export by ID) in their apps, forcing what was one auto-assigned IDs to be hardcoded IDs. (And let's not forget the apps that instead of calling an API to get the user's home directory, program files, or windows directories, they hardcode "C:\Document and Settings", "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Windows", breaking installs on computers that didn't install Windows on C drive, use localized (non-English) Windows, or... use Windows Vista and above. It's why Vista+ have symlinks to C:\Users and various directories within. Or why UAC broke everything in Vista. Or why 64-bit Windows is complex because it has to rename/virtualize C:\Program Files to C:\Program Files (x86) at runtime.
Yes, Windows is great because it's backwards compatible. However, it also makes it extremely crufty with a lot of hacks having to stay in purely because some app needed it. (And I think WinSxS was a partial solution to that) Vista is proof - Microsoft tried a "new start" with it, and broke so many apps that it was Vista being blamed because they got rid of a lot of compatibility cruft.
The only reason this policy is getting attention is that nobody important (read: major corporations) stands to lose much by changing the policy. It's not an important issue, when compared to drug reform, single payer health care, drone strikes, or jailing bankers. It's just a shiny bauble Obama can use to misdirect us away from these important issues.
Actually, they do. Local in-network service is practically provided on a at-cost basis (except for data, which is pretty much the only profit center available). What makes them money is roaming - when you roam and pay the expensive roaming fees that can easily be $1/minute+, $0.50/text, $1/MB, etc., that is split up between the foriegn carrier and your carrier.
It's why carriers offer "travel packages" - hoping you'd go over, as well as being able to charge you a little more.
An unlocked phone, even on contract, using another SIM deprives them of this revenue source.
Instead of getting an entire channel, what if you just subscribed to individual programs, delivered to your set-top box each week, waiting for you to watch them at your convenience?
Already exists for a lot of shows. Check out iTunes and other places - most often "subscription passes" to TV shows and usually have it day of or the day after at a couple of bucks per show.
If it's network TV, it's often even better, as it's often either on Hulu or the website of the network (e.g., CBS), especially since they're usually FREE (with ads). They're day after service but it's not bad for the price you pay (FREE!). Granted you don't have much in the way of timeshifting, but less ads (though more repetitive...) and the price is definitely good.
Are we talking a temporary issue that can be resolved by re-flashing the memory in question or is one of the cells damaged in some un-recoverable way? Either way there are solutions but the latter is far more serious.
It's most likely NAND flash, in which case damaged cells are a natural occurance anyways (most have up to 2% bad to begin with, even when "new"). Even if it's damaged, it's where the flash translation layer goes and marks it as bad and avoids using it.
The only question is - is the rest of the array damaged and the entire flash chip unusable...?
Slashdot Mirror
Which gets interesting because DMCA takedowns have already occurred.
Since he's selling affiliate links to people who can make it for you or other things, things would get murky very fast.
Forget guns - they'll quickly become just a tiny part of the site - it's the other stuff that people upload that'll become popular and mainstream. For every person who'll want to download some AK-47 part, there'll be dozens of others who want the plans to make some Bieber bobble head or something.
You can still get it on Android. Access (which purchased PalmOS) has put Graffiti (1, not the horrendous abomination that was 2) as an input method.
The only downside is the input box is a bit small on the Gnex - if they could make it larger, it would be much better.
Warming is an average
So yes, what used to be only 10C in the summer may climb to 25C during the summer. Of course, the average temperature rise is (worst case), 4C. Which means the winter just got 11C colder to make the average fit.
That's the problem with global warming. It's not "making cold parts more temperate", but making more wild swings in temperature. That 25C summer can consist of regular 10C days, except for August where it sears up to 35C (and let's not forget that places like this, air conditioning is usually optional if you're only going to use it 1 month a year).
And a quick addendum - a hurricane like Sandy cools the ocean about 3-4 degrees.
Except you can't yank the glasses off everyone looking in your direction as well.
It's really back to the old days when Google Street View captured people walking out of porn shops and other "undesirables" causing Google to have to censor everyone's faces to prevent recognition.
OTOH, the killer app for Google Glass would be bible thumpers - think about it - they could just situate a bunch of people around stores they see selling undesirable "filth" and record everyone going in and out. Think prositution is morally evil?Well, just patrol up and down and see who the johns are. Likewise, same for those who find abortion objectionable, or those baby dropoffs at hospitals (where a mother who feels she can't take care of a newborn can drop her baby off anonymously). Or whoever buys contraception.
Or whoever wants to teach evolution. Or anything else controversial. Like smoking. Or gun control
Polite and lawful society, perhaps, but one more reminicent of an authoritarian regime where everyone really is keeping tabs on everyone else. And every neighbourhood has a busybody who makes it their goal in life to expose the misdoings of everyone else.
There are very little used PC game sales anymore. It's already dead - and not just by EA, but everyone as well.
Take a look at practically any boxed PC game on the shelf, and they're either using Origin or Steam. Neither of which currently allow reselling used games.
All that's left are indie games, really, or kickstarters.
10 miles is only 52,800 feet, which isn't terribly high. Heck, a lot of airliners these days are pushing that regularly. 100 mile high, now...
MPEG-LA isn't a patent holder. They are a licensing authority
What happens is all the patent holders of various standards like h.264 got together, negotiated a fee schedule and split up the payments such that if you wanted to license everything related to h.264, you basically paid a fee per device or implementation. That licensed you all the patents you need (they're FRAND).
It's a little better than what we have in 3GPP which results in having to license patents from individual patent holders - if you need to negotiate with 10 or 20 or 50 of them, your legal feels rise substantially versus just go and paying the fixed fee.
All Google did here was negotiate with all the patent holders together through the MPEG-LA. So now as long as you paid the fee, (or in this case, it's royalty free), no patent holder in the pool can go after you for that implementation (if you didn't pay for h.264, you can be sued for that, even if the patent was granted for VP8 - it's only valid for VP8 and not for technologies related).
Well, you can get modern quiet ones that use the same buckling spring, but aren't sounding like a machinegun when you type on them (and really, in an office environment, it's a great way to drive your coworkers to go postal on you. So unless you've got an office...).
But I suppose it's also great if you have kids - put it on the family PC and you can tell someone's using it. If they're older and have their own computer in the room, give them that and you can tell when they're doing homework or just surfing Facebook.
Or if you don't want your significant other to use your computer... well, it's just hard to discreetly use one now.
Of all the PS/2 to USB adapters I've tried (a LOT of them), they all... suck. The most common problem I find is they don't do typematic properly - if you hold a key down, they type anywhere from 4-8 characters and that's it. If you're doing some random typing, not an issue. But if you code, or want to play a game that requires holding down a key, forget about it. Others I've seen go nuts if they're hooked to a KVM (either before or after).
It's strange, too, it's like they all refuse to send keydown and key up reports (like regular USB keyboards) and just emulate the behavior. Some I've seen simulate typematic by issuing keydown and key up commands. Needless to say, gaming was a miss with that one. Especially on games that required you to hold down a key to to modify behavior (e.g., run).
Well, there are plenty of DRM'd formats out there that let you resell them. Like say, DVDs and Blu-Ray. They're DRM'ed, but they allow easy reselling through a different method than the patent...
And really, other than OTA TV, most video IS already DRM'd. Hell, they had analog video DRM as well.
That is an interesting shocker. Because usually pwn2own, the Mac goes first (because beating it got you a nice MacBook Pro), followed by Windows (normally some nice Sony laptop), and then Linux (some generic Dell). The lower prize money typically reflects that - everyone normally attacks OS X first, while the Windows and Linux ones typically are less attacked. One strategy has alwys been to go after Windows and Linux becaues everyone else is concentrating on OS X.
And normally, OS X is not only cracked on day 1, but cracked first, followed by Windows and then Linux (usually because of the desirability of the hardware).
Lowered prize money is a possibility, but you'd think given the range was anywhere from $110K for Windows 8 to $65K for OS X (and the range in-between - I think the next one was $75K) that it wouldn't be a huge difference. I don't think increased security is the reason as Mountain Lion has more security, but it's just like Windows 7/8 - the browser is sandboxed (just like IE and Chrome - they all run LUA). Gatekeeper is easily defeated (it only applies to files that are tagged as coming from the Internet - as an extended filesystem attribute that you can use standard tools to set and clear as long as you have permission to edit the file - and yes, those tools ship in the default config) - files originating from local media or elsewhere do not trigger it (e.g., compiler).
Tons. So much so many mining companies actually prefer it - it's a LOT easier to mine e-waste for valuables than it is to actually extract them from the ground - the concentration of valuable minerals is so much higher that it's way more profitable. It's why you never really have to "pay" much to recycle electronics (maybe a token recycling fee) - most of the cost of the recycling is paid for by reselling the materials.
The problem has been there usually is no direct way to link the two - miners rarely are present where e-waste is, and for a lot of folks, it's just easier to dump the old PC in the dumpster than take it to a facility (because while the individual quantity of valuable material is small, when aggregated in the quantities miners like, it's much more valuable). When dumping 1000 servers, sure, its easy. When dumping 1, not so much.
The deal is, if you only intend to deal with your peers, lacking social etiquette is fine. However, that also limits your interactions - if you ever intend to communicate your ideas to others who you consider "lesser" (less educated, the general public, whatever), then not conforming to what they expect discounts you as an "expert" in their eyes.
After all, just like everyone on /. thinks people should learn more about the computer that they use because they're smarter than the general population. Of course, the general population easily says the reverse - if these computer geeks are so intelligent that they should tell us what to do and know, why aren't they smart enough to look, act and play the part?
As much as everyone loves to say to not judge a book by its cover, it's what happens. Dress sharply, and people will listen. Dress like a slob, and people will think your thoughts and ideas are the same and refuse to listen.
And if you have to ever deal with customers (travelling, say) - even if they're engineers themselves - it doesn't hurt to be extra polite and show you do know your way around a dinner (especially with bosses and managers present).
It's why a properly fitted suit is often the ideal garment - it's one of the easier get-ups to instantly add credibility in the eyes of others.
Hell, look at scams out there. You'll find the perpetrator in confidence moves always dresses up because people typically let their guard down. If a slob approached you trying to sell you some hot investment, you'd turn them away. If a sharply dressed person did it, a lot of people drop their guard and listen. Same goes for pick-pockets.
An interesting study also shows that "clothes make the man" - how the simple act of wearing say, a lab coat can increase attentiveness and carefulness of anyone who wears them.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200 (paywall)
http://www.psmag.com/science/the-brain-focusing-power-of-the-lab-coat-40108/
In which case Google should be the bigger offender than Facebook because Google is literally everywhere. Facebook's like buttons are on popular sites and such. Google's tentacles are everywhere, and gather data through practically everyone using Google Analytics, or a Google-owned ad service (not just AdWords, but DoubleClick, AdMob, and other advertising agencies). Or YouTube videos which are embedded everywhere as well. And soon, Google Glass will be there to capture your every movement in public by everyone else.
Facebook's base of information comes from what people put on it mostly. And Like buttons are in a lot of places, but generally speaking, not on the seedier side of the 'net (hell, even TPB had a hard time getting on Facebook). But who knows where those free pr0n companies are getting their ads from (probably Google-owned in the end).
An even simpler one dates way back to when we were connecting computers together by modems. "Don't post online what you don't want the world to know." Because anything posted online IS pretty much available for the world.
Yes, even with privacy settings. Privacy settings are a way to extract even more personal information from people than they otherwise would give. They're the ultimate in marketing - people mistakenly believe they're one thing but they're really something else.
The only real way to have privacy is to not put that information online in the first place.
The average American consumes over 50% the recommended daily intake of salt. Recommendation is 2000mg (2g) of salt. The average American is consuming over 3000mg per day.
I believe there's a HUGE room to cut salt intake without actually running into low salt intake problems.
The salt comes mostly from processed and prepared foods (check out the nutrition label sometime - a small bag of chips can easily be 30%, or 600mg). Nevermind if you go out for dinner - most sit down restaurants can easily have 5000+mg or more of salt in an entree, though most hover around 2500mg or so (that's more than a day's worth of salt in just one dish).
If you ever wonder why McD's is forced to publish nutritional info, but a non-fast food place isn't (and actively resist all calls to do so, even just calorie information on the menus), that's one reason. They really don't want you to know because it really is genuinely scary. Or how a Big Mac can be "healthier".
It's really DRM. Online gaming is really the only way to have a pretty robust DRM scheme that can't be cracked.
Games saved on server? Means they can leave out code ot save games locally. It doesn't matter if you crack the game - unless someone writes local game save code, pirates can't save their games (which is a pretty big restriction).
Likewise, the server can require everyone have unique issued serial numbers. Hell, all you need to do is prevent two people from using the same serial number at the same time (you can transfer the serial number for used game sales, if any company REALLY cared for that - though buyers would have to worry about the original owner depriving them of the game by continuing to play it)..
Even better is such a DRM scheme requires zero intervention on the user's computer - you don't need any spyware installed or anything. The only real danger is someone trying to reverse engineer the server a la Bnetd. And we know how that turned out.
Easy. First, Microsoft was a convicted monopolist, Apple wasn't. (That's an important point).
Second, the App Store belongs to a phone that competes with other phones in a very competitive market. If the iPhone held 95% of the market, then it's a different matter. When it's around 18% of the entire mobile market (including featurephones and such - Android is closer to 40%), there's plenty of competition. Especially as it's not the dominant platform.
The only time Apple came dangerously close to monopoly status was in the heyday of the iPod and iTunes Music Store sales (with DRM) were basically dominating all music sales, period. Couple that with dominance in iPods and it was close (iPods sold iTunes, and iTunes kept people on iPods). The only real thing keeping it from becoming reality was well, competition in the form of the Zune and many of the bit players like Walmart and such. Plus you need to show abuse - having a monopoly isn't illegal, abusing it is (the eventual goal of a completely free market is monopoly status). Then Amazon came in and with DRM-free music, the whole threat passed as it wasn't limited to iPods anymore. And once all music is DRM-free, the issue was completely moot.
The mobile market has lots of competition, so it's not a big deal, yet. The multitude of app stores on Android isn't really much of an argument though - given there are really only two competitors that are viable - the Play store and Amazon App Store. The rest just tend to be a sad imitiation. It can, however, happen with Android. Let's take the current big player (by a long shot) - Samsung. Samsung plans to open their own store (with a 0% thing for indie devs). If that gains enough traction that developers prefer it and keeps their apps and such off of other stores and only keeps it on Samsung phones, then it gets to be like the iTunes situation - market dominance (Samsung IS Android) being used to abuse aother market (apps - only the best are for Samsung).
But it's unlikely to happen - the mobile smartphone market has matured, and even though 0% sounds tempting, the Play Store (and Apple App Store) can make it possible as well if you consider it's 0% for free apps and the developer keeps all the ad cash like they do now. And most devs are loathe to have to keep signing agreements with more app stores for marginal returns.
A lot of Stack overflow questions I see are along the form of "I need to do X, how do i do it?".
Basically they want a HOWTO of which APIs to string together in order to accomplish their task, if not someone else to completely code it for them. This is often referred to as "task based" documentaiton - to do X, you do A, B, C, and D. This often fails if you need more details on individual API calls.
Official documentation like MSDN exist to document all the APIs, but often lack what's known as "task-based" documentation.
They're both required pieces - task based is often used to learn how to do things (e.g., how to create a window on Windows), while the API documentation serves to comprehensively adjust various settings (do you want a scroll bar? A resize box? etc). Unfortunately, putting in extensive examples inside such documentation often serves to confuse (you won't believe how many people assume you can copy and paste it into a program and have it run).
Unfortunately, Stack overflow also suffers from developers merely copying and pasting code and expecting others to do their work for them (see thedailywtf), as well as many "give me the codez" stuff posted by students wanting others to do their homework.
But when used properly, the two complement each other. Its like man pages versus HOWTOs on Linux - one documents the commands and APIs, while the other tells you how to properly string them together to accomplish things.
Because x86 as an ISA is a lousy one?
32-bit code still relies on 7 basic registers with dedicated functionality, when others sport 16, 32 or more general purpose registers that can be used mostly interchangably (most do have a "special" GPR used for things like zero and whatnot).
64-bit extension (x64, amd64, x86-64 or whatever you call it) fixes this by increasing the register count and turns them into general registers.
In addition, a lot of transistors are wasted doing instruction decoding because x86 instructions are variable length. Great when you needed high code density, but now it's legacy cruft that serves little other than complicate instruction caches, inflight tagging and complicate instruction processing as instructions require partial decoding to figure out their length.
Finally, the biggest thing nowadays leftover from the RISC vs CISC wars is the load/store architecture (where operands work on registers only, while you have ot do loads/stores to access memory). A load/store architecture makes it easier on the instruction decoder as no more transistors need to be wasted trying to figure out if operands need to be fetched in order to execute the instruction - unless it's a load/store, the operand will be in the register file.
The flip side though, is a lot of the tricks used to make x86 faster also means that other architectures benefit as well. Things like out-of-order execution, register renaming, and even the whole front end/back end thing (where front end is what's presented to the world, e.g., x86), and back end is the internal processor itself, (e.g., custom RISC on most Intel and AMD x86 parts).
After all, ARM picked up OOO in the Cortex A series (starting with the A8). Register renaming came into play around then as well, though it really exploded in the Cortex A15. And the next gen chips are taking superscalar to the extreme. (Heck, PowerPC had all this first, before ARM. Especially during the great x86 vs. PowerPC wars).
The good side though is that x86 is a well studied architecture, so compilers and such for x86 generally produce very good code and are very mature. Of course, they also have to play into the internal microarchitecture to produce better code by taking advantage of register renames and OOO, and knowing how to do this effectively can boost speed.
And technically, with most x86 processors using a frontend/backend deal, x86 is "dead". What we have from Intel and AMD are processors that emulate x86 in hardware.
Technically, you shouldn't lie about your address, otherwise they won't know where they SHOULDN'T deliver a phone book to!
You're free to lie about everything else, though.
The PII that seems irrelevant though is name, email address and phone number. Name is completely irrelevant, email might be nice for a confirmation in case you still get them and want to complain. Phone number is irrelevant. (Even worse, they say they need ot call to confirm... I guess it's to keep mass unsubscribe bots away in case there is someone who wants one?).
In other words, you're the perfect person who the kiosk can go and say "Check me in now" where I can add a whole pile of addons to your room (with charge, of course) and you'll happily pay for it because you agreed to it.
Just like how some things (like Java installer) can go and bundle in Chrome and other crap with your software installation, you can bet the kiosk will too - knowing people will be too tired to bother reading it out. Of course, if you use the clerk, they'll have asked you, but if you use the kiosk, it's just a checkmark you'll probalby miss.
Sounds like a great business model to have, actually - I wonder why kiosks don't do it now...
As for not wanting to interact - remember that next time you have something slightly out of the ordinary you need. Like maybe trying to dispute the charges because of the failure to decline kiosk offers - it's a lot harder to convince a machine than a human. Or want something special done to your mean that's not offered.
Humans are flexible, machines are not. The problem with kiosks is, while 90% of the time the defaults suit your needs, the 10% is when you'll need a human. And if that's the case, 0% will there be one to actually assist you when the time comes because management feels the clerk was redundant. (Like say the credit card terminal goes down - the clerk will probably do everything else (like get you your key) and charge it later, while the kiosk will sit there staring back at you with "Authorization Failure").
That's because most programmers suck.
OS X is actually quite compatible. Provided you stick to the public APIs. Do anything funny and yes, things will break. The presence of private headers though makes it way too easy to use a private API to do so something (as part of "get-it-working") that leads to OS version dependency.
Oh yeah, it happens on Windows too. Next time you run Process Explorer, look at the window title for explorer.exe. You'll see it's called "Program Manager". Because despite it being 2013, there are applications that STILL hard code it. Or apparently some apps hardcode resource IDs or DLL export IDs (you normally export by name, but you can export by ID) in their apps, forcing what was one auto-assigned IDs to be hardcoded IDs. (And let's not forget the apps that instead of calling an API to get the user's home directory, program files, or windows directories, they hardcode "C:\Document and Settings", "C:\Program Files" and "C:\Windows", breaking installs on computers that didn't install Windows on C drive, use localized (non-English) Windows, or... use Windows Vista and above. It's why Vista+ have symlinks to C:\Users and various directories within. Or why UAC broke everything in Vista. Or why 64-bit Windows is complex because it has to rename/virtualize C:\Program Files to C:\Program Files (x86) at runtime.
Yes, Windows is great because it's backwards compatible. However, it also makes it extremely crufty with a lot of hacks having to stay in purely because some app needed it. (And I think WinSxS was a partial solution to that) Vista is proof - Microsoft tried a "new start" with it, and broke so many apps that it was Vista being blamed because they got rid of a lot of compatibility cruft.
Actually, they do. Local in-network service is practically provided on a at-cost basis (except for data, which is pretty much the only profit center available). What makes them money is roaming - when you roam and pay the expensive roaming fees that can easily be $1/minute+, $0.50/text, $1/MB, etc., that is split up between the foriegn carrier and your carrier.
It's why carriers offer "travel packages" - hoping you'd go over, as well as being able to charge you a little more.
An unlocked phone, even on contract, using another SIM deprives them of this revenue source.
Already exists for a lot of shows. Check out iTunes and other places - most often "subscription passes" to TV shows and usually have it day of or the day after at a couple of bucks per show.
If it's network TV, it's often even better, as it's often either on Hulu or the website of the network (e.g., CBS), especially since they're usually FREE (with ads). They're day after service but it's not bad for the price you pay (FREE!). Granted you don't have much in the way of timeshifting, but less ads (though more repetitive...) and the price is definitely good.
It's most likely NAND flash, in which case damaged cells are a natural occurance anyways (most have up to 2% bad to begin with, even when "new"). Even if it's damaged, it's where the flash translation layer goes and marks it as bad and avoids using it.
The only question is - is the rest of the array damaged and the entire flash chip unusable...?