In a sense, this practice is already taking place via certain insurance vendors that are offering in-car devices for tracking driving data. That's strictly opt-in. So the current mentality seems to respect your point.
Consumers would do well to pressure the manufacturers to adopt a similar practice.
Didn't Obama recently sign into law making it mandatory for car manufacturers to insert black boxes into all their vehicles sold? (Most do already, but there are a few that don't).
Now, granted, the law also states that the information in that black box is the property of the owner, and may not be forfeited without permission (to say, an insurance company).
No, it is laziness... sorry. It's an unwillingness for H.R. recruiters to see people as individuals and not a commodity.
The very term "Human Resources" specifies that. Compared to what it used to be called - Personnel and you'll notice the difference. The old term referred to people as persons and individiuals. HR, well, they're just a replacable cog in a machine - depersonalized. You're just a Resource of type Human (others could be transportation, logistics, supplies, etc). Like other resources a company needs - they just go with whatever meets their requirements and is lowest cost.
Paid by whom? Looking at the Zendesk website, it looks pretty clear that their marketing target is "organizations", so I'm presuming that Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest are outsourcing user support to Zendesk. I don't use Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, so I don't know...do you have to pay for support? And does anyone actually do that?
More like companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest outsourced their customer support to Zendesk. Basically, they pay Zendesk to provide support services. You might have seen some support websites hosted by other companies to provide stuff like knowledgebase and other support information, including stuff like ticket tracking and such if you require support.
For stuff like that, you have to create an account so your tickets and issues can be resolved.
Yes, companies can do it themselves, but it's often trickier if you want to support stuff like downloads, knowledgebases (which require extensive search capabilities), support ticketing, etc. A lot of companies farm it out to let someone else worry about the software and hosting.
Doh, because the spam bots weren't configured/programmed to solve math problems.
Not necessarily - most CAPTCHAS are solved by human labor. Perhaps as a fake entry to "free porn" and other things. Doing this is ridiculously easy - user signs up and the webserver registers for an account on some web site, captures the CAPTCHA and presents it as its own. It then asks the user to do it, and forwards the response.
Sometimes there are even farms of people who do this - just solving them day in and day out (for like $1/1000 solved).
It's a lot harder to scrape a math problem, or even one that goes to say "What is the name of this web site?" (becauase naturally, that information is lost when it's proxied).
Two things never discussed in the ebook / paper costs debate are the costs of warehousing and taxes on unsold inventory and availability of "out of print" books. One of the reasons it's nearly impossible to get older works is they are purposefully allowed to go out of print. No publisher wants to do another run of 40,000 copies of "Pride of Chanur" and then hold onto them as they trickle out to bookstores and buyers. Publishers want the latest flavor of Teen Paranormal Romance which is selling NOW. They want to print 10,000 copies and then move on to the next latest Zombie Teen Paranormal Werewolf Romance.
There are no warehousing costs. Once the publisher does a print run, that's it. The book is shipped to the retailers and the publisher may retain a tiny amount of stock, but most likely not. Excess is either sent to the author or pulped. The stores themselves only send the publisher back torn off covers to claim refunds - those unsold books are pulped as well. It's why you see in most books a warning about buying a book without its cover.
It's the reason why the physical paper cost of a book is really only 10-20% the cover price
Ever since I first got involved in fighting the RIAA's litigation campaign, and blogging about it, in 2005 [that's almost 8 years ago] I've been arguing that it is not a sufficient basis to bring a lawsuit against someone that an internet access account for which he or she pays the bill was used by someone for a copyright infringement. Even though I, and lots of other lawyers, and lots of other techies, and lots of other people from all walks of life knew this, I have never -- until this ruling -- seen a JUDGE dismiss a complaint because of this.
How would this be affected by the rollout of IPv6 where now an IP address can be used to identify an individual computer (assuming no NATv6)? Would it mean that if you used IPv6, you could have one of your PCs siezed and forensically analyzed (to see if it was a bot doing it or someone at the console)?
After all, I'm pretty sure if any of my PCs were analyzed for activity, it could be determined that yes, I was the user.
At least with IPv4, it's shared between so many devices that to nail down which one of them would be impractical especially with WiFi. With IPv6 being able to identify an individual machine... and even if it was done by someone off premises using WiFi (i.e., the machine no longer exists on the network).
Would the media industry suddenly be pushing for mass IPv6 deployments so instead of only identifying a subscriber, you can identify a subscriber's device (PC, laptop, smartphone, etc) as the culprit and use that to identify the real owner?
Hey, it's an x86 PC, even if it runs a crappy OS. I suspect most of these will eventually wind up running Windows, unless there's something about the hardware that prevents this.
For people who liked the Retina hardware on the new MacBooks but couldn't justify the price (and don't care about or don't want OSX), this could be a good alternative. I'll wait a while, though: I don't see this price point lasting very long.
You can't run Windows on a Chromebook. The BIOS doesn't exist - just a small loader that can boot Linux and that's it. You can flip a hidden switch into "developer mode" where it'll let you have a command prompt, but that's really all there is. You can modify ChromeOS at that point to have a Linux system (there are instructions for installing Ubuntu, but it involves a bit of work with DD).
In regular non-developer mode, ChromeOS is quite locked down.
I never had a problem with packages from USPS, or FedEx. But UPS... Oh holy god. I ordered something online, and waited. And waited. I checked the tracking only to see it was labelled as "undeliverable address" or something like that. I drove to some distribution point way out of my way to pick it up. I thought somehow I must have typed in a bad zip code or something, but when I picked it up, everything was correct. The driver just couldn't find it.
When it happenned a second time, I decided never to use UPS again, and damn the cost.
Better yet, I order stuff from Amazon.ca all the time. A couple of years ago they switched from Canada Post to UPS. Not having changed the address I used (my work address), I had many things sent there. Then all of a sudden, UPS starting screwing up. First was invalid address - Amazon asked if I typed the wrong address - of course not, I clicked "ship to this address" like I always did for YEARS.
Then the next one I got was "Found the building, could not locate recipient in directory". Which makes no sense, since the address was "10th Floor" You don't need the freaking directory - just go to the 10th floor and drop it off at reception!
The biggest one yet was when I preordered the iPad 3. I knew it was coming, and checked the tracking. All of a sudden it changed from "On vehicle from delivery" to "Exception - recipient not in". Of course, there was somebody there that whole time - though we're not even sure if the truck bothered to even drive up - perhaps the driver just marked it undeliverable without even stopping. Of course it got redelivered in the evening by a not very happy driver who probably could've just delivered it earlier...
Sure, but just to make sure we're clear on this point, when I sign that two-year contract, I actually bought the phone. I'm required to pay sales tax on the full, unsubsidized price of the phone up front. And if I bought the phone, I should be free to use it how I want. The contract is in place to make sure I don't jump carriers without adequately compensating my current one, and it already suffices. Why we need to add an additional technological roadblock that increases friction between switching carriers is beyond me.
Actually, no, it's not. What the carriers want is to increase friction so that they can lock you in even after your contract is up, so it's no surprise things are this way. But the government stepped in a few years back to help ensure that phone numbers can be transferred between carriers, and they need to do the same here, ensuring that phones themselves can be transferred between carriers, barring any legitimate technological limitations.
Technically, the reason carriers do it even though you're on contract is easy - because you're forced to use that phone with that carrier. What it really means is if you travel, instead of being able to plug in a local SIM and have cheap calls, you'll be forced into using the extortionate roaming rates. (FYI - roaming fees are very lucrative for BOTH carriers. It's why who you roam with is actually predetermined beforehand and those who have better roaming agreements get preference).
Of course, the way is to have legislation saying the instant your contract expires, the carrier MUST give you the unlock code. No $50 crap. If the carriers want to charge you $250+ to unlock it during the contract, fine, but the moment the contract is terminated (which includes upgrades since you usually sign a new contract for a new phone), the phone bought on that old contract should have its unlock code given, for free..
They told me that legally they, as a carrier, had priority on the cell spectrum and I had no choice but to turn off or be fined. So if someone's booster is interfering with public cell use, they WILL hunt you down and pry it from your cold, dead hands.
Your booster is technically transmitting illegally on a licensed band and it was discovered to be interfering with a licensed user.
AT&T did a very friendly thing by asking you to turn it off. They could've gotten the FCC involved at which point not only will you be forced to turn it off, but also subject to possible fines for interference since you were illegally transmitting on their frequencies.
That's the reason for the approval requirement - you're using frequencies licensed to someone else, and if you don't have approval, you are basically violating the law.
The thing is, most people don't really interact with licensed services much, but I'm fairly certain you would be pissed off if someone set up a big ass transmitter near you that wiped out your cellphone reception. Or a pirate FM station decided they would co-opt a popular radio station frequency to spout end of the world BS.
There's no reason why the government should ever be able to get a warrant just to see what's in your cellphone, only to verify if something they think is in there is in fact in there. They can already get your communications logs by warrant by getting them from your telecoms provider, who already knows who you called when and for how long.
You're confusing a cellphone with a cellphone.
Thing is, if your phone is a dumbphone that makes calls and texts, yes, the police can get the information from the carrier becaues that's all the device can do.
However, these days phones can also be data storage devices and carry things that your carrier will NOT have access to. Like say, your calendar. Or your games. Or your notes or other documents you may have stored. In which case the phone part is easy, but the rest of your data is a "container" like a briefcase or suitcase or safe.
If you have only the default lock, that container is like a shopping bag where anyone can clearly see into it. But if it has a lock, it's more like a briefcase or something with a cheap (or good) lock on it which requires a warrant to search.
Which is probably proper. Things like your addressbook or contact list are murkier - they may fall under the container side of things (it's your data) or be obtained from logs.
Basically, it really depends what they're going for. If it's just who you talked to or texted to, fine, it's easy, get it from the carrier. If it's data you may have on the phone unrelated to its telephony capabilities, then it may require a warrant.
Just once in the last year, I had a bank that really understood the problem. When I balked, they allowed that I could call back in on the customer service number *on my credit card*. So I did. From the reactions of the people who answered, I got the impression that few of their customers do this.
I do that whenever I get a warning that my card may be compromised. I call the number on the card. If it's on security lockout the computer recognizes this and immediately routes me to the security department. (Because either they couldn't get me, or I may be calling because I need to do a transaction and it failed).
Saves me having to write down their callback number and I still reach them in the end. Win-win. Even if they don't reroute me, one quick message of "I got this message saying my card was blocked" usually gets me forwarded immediately.
You are completely, utterly wrong. The people who bought WII's on a whim are casual gamers. A lot of wii players are not casual gamers, and certainly a lot of PS3 and XBOX gamers are generally not casual gamers, most of them are pretty hardcore players. That is why the PC will never resurge. It has a respectable audience and will keep that, and the marketing of games and the advance of gaming tech will continue to be dictated by the console market because thats where the money is.
Gaming on the PC has NEVER died out. The PC market on games is still larger than any console out there.
The thing is, it's shifted. The PC games these days are fewer AAA titles, and more indie titles. Games that take advantage of the fact that most common GPU is by Intel by far (ATI/^H^HMD and nVidia are fighting for just a puny part of the market) and can be played by basically anyone at the PC. Some you don't even need to install - flash games, webGL ones, even unity ones.
The AAA guys moved to consoles and give token consideration to the PC. In the meantime, the indie guys have taken over the market, and hae branched out to platforms like mobile. Some, like Apple, offer a near-console-like development process as well (If you think Apple's walled garden is bad, try Steam. And if you think Steam is bad, try console development).
What's likely to make or break the consoles this time around isn't the AAA games, but their willingness to bend the rules for indie development, "Apple style" with looser restrictions than have been tradition for consoles, faster updates (the approval process for all consoles is still way too long - think 2 weeks for Apple/Amazon is bad? It's at least a month or more for consoles, and Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo probably see less than 1% of the volume that Apple/Amazon see). Especially with updates - QA testing isn't something a lot of indies even do (heck, given what I've seen from developers, I wouldn't bet against many just seeing "0 errors" in the build and submitting that without even running it).
There will always be an absolute hard core set on the PC, but their numbers are far smaller, and indies have done what Nintendo did and basically realized there's the ability to play into a market that's underserved and grow the entire gaming market. Hell, the AAA PC guys might be forced to adapt and realize that they can't make games exclusively for gamers with high end PCs, and may have to start optimizing for Intel as well.
answer is easy, stop selling locked phone at $20 with a footnot with a 70 years contract. Or include a condition in the 2 year contract that there is a huge fee per remaining month if you decide to cancel your contract. But why keep it locked?
Because subscriber revenue stinks. Carriers want to have that juicy roaming revenue. And they know if you're on contract, and you unlock your phone, they're denied that revenue as you'd just buy a local SIM.
No, the best way would be to force carriers at the end of a contract (which includes upgrades if you keep your old phone) to give you the unlock code as part of the contract expiration. Same goes if you decide to buy it outright with no contract - the carrier must give you the code ot unlock it.
And yes, I know many stores who will NOT sell you a phone without a contract - if you march in and try to pay the "no contract" price, they'll refuse to sell it to you. Even if you have a valid reason like you want to upgrade but are outside of the upgrade window - they won't sell you the phone without you paying the ETF and signing onto a new contract.
I believe that's the lower weight limit set by the FAA. If your aircraft is lighter than 55 lbs, then it's not classified as an aircraft and merely a hobby aircraft that doesn't need or regulation (e.g., RC aircraft). If it's heavier, then it falls under FAA experimental aircraft rules and is regulated.
And yes, there have been model aircraft heavier than 55lbs which have undergone such testing.
As for privacy and security? Well, I think the bigger implication right now is Google Glass which when it's a lot cheaper, will suddenly put a lot more cameras in a lot more places. Law enforcement won't need drones for surveillance anymore when your fellow citizen will do it all for them.
It does highlight a major problem with our education system: the reason TI-84s cost so much is because they're required in so many high school math classes. As the summary states, they're antiquated and overpriced. Of course, the cost is negligible to middle class and well off families, so it's just one more factor that holds back those in poverty. [...] Hopefully one day Sal Khan kills textbooks as we know them today and FOSS/ODF just flat out kills MS Office.
So you're replacing one expense with another? After all, if you want to encourage Khan Academy, we have to fix the digital divide first where kids have to go to McDonalds in order to actually view the losson. Nevermind actually being able to afford a $100 calculator.
I don't know about ACT, but the math sections of the SAT Reasoning Test require the student to provide a scientific or graphing calculator, and this graphing calculator cannot have a touch screen or QWERTY-arranged keyboard.
The latter two restrictions are to prevent the use of PDAs and PDA-like devices which can do more than just calculate (like hold pages of notes), and to prevent use of laptop computers.
The former is interesting because in this day and age, it also blocks the use of cameras to record test material - either ot bring out or to cheat with (I'm not quite sure they thought of using a cellphone camera to send the question directly to someone outside... but it does cover the senario).
The laptop thing should be fairly obvious as well - after all, who can argue with someone wanting ot use their laptop as a graphing calculator?
At a guess, in order to compress them further so that the mobile device (which is always relatively short of bandwidth) doesn't run into problems if browsing a site with lots of large images. "Rendering" in this case doesn't have to mean displaying them on a screen, of course...
Don't forget to also conserve memory, processor and storage space on the device. If you're going to view an image on a tiny QVGA or HVGA screen, do you really need to send down the entire 16MP image? Or just have the server downscale the image so you're not stuck downloading megabytes of images over a potentially slow and high-latency link.
The other thing is the software on the mobile side can be lighter weight - it only has to decode a few formats while the server converts many more down to the few supported.
How many of you stupid fucks still do not realize that Firefox's release cycle is the same as Chrome's? And that they have an enterprise version with slightly longer time between updates so that if you don't want the new features, you can have the security fixes?
The problem with Firefox's releases is they keep screwing with the UI. Little things here and there - like day I suddenly found muscle memory broken because the awesomebar stopped autocompleting full URLs and only did domains? (It's fine for the most part, but if you have URLs that are fairly deep... or say to get directly to a forum...).
If Mozilla updated firefox like chrome - where they don't mess with UI things at all (or default them to "off" for upgrade installs so it behaves exactly the same as it did pre-update) then a lot less people would care. But they don't. I don't care what version Chrome is at because it works the same today as it did yesterday. But every new update to Firefox brings trepidatoin in the form "what did they screw with now? And can I disable it?"
Ars Technica periodically runs browser wars charts that show how each version of a browser is adopted. Consistently while a large number of people update, a significant number of people don't, much more than Chrome.
If you can compromise computers across so many companies, including defense contractors which obviously would have access to classified/sensitive information, why would you waste it by attacking Facebook?
Because spamming has relatively low penalties.
Attack a defense contractor and you have several problems. First is network security - classified stuff is probably on the airgapped network that you can get on, but it's difficult to get off of. Second, you have people monitoring such things and the likelihood of being detected is greater. Finally, well, you have the government.
Attack Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.,and the repercussions are much lower. First, they're less likely to have airgapped networks, so getting information out is a lot easier. Second, the monitoring equipment is less advanced and may not catch what you're doing. Third, potential embarassment may mean your attack goes unannounced for a while.
And what do they want? The usual - contact lists and ways to turn your machine into a zombie. Contact lists make it easier to send spam to friends coming from you (required if you want to phish or do the "I'm overseas and got robbed" scam). Zombies because botnets can command some good amount of money.
Likewise, compromise a bunch of family PCs is a lot safer as well.
Unless you want defense information, you don't bother with government and government contractors because the risk is high. The money is made elsewhere and it's a lot easier and safer as well.
It doesn't matter as it's further than 100 meters away.
That limit is because of how long it takes for a minimum sized packet to traverse the network for collision detection. If you can guarantee there won't be collisions (a switch does this) then you're pretty much not limited by length anymore other than signal strength. All you need is a bunch of switches to boost the signal up and you're golden.
Back in ye olde days of hubs, they were half duplex because the transmitting NIC would send bits down the line and read the bits off the received end. If the bits didn't match, it was a collision and the detecting card jammed the link to tell everyone to back off. As the minimum packet was 64 bytes, the length limit came into play to allow the packet to reach the other end before transmitting stopped so if it sent the packet with no collisions, it was reasonably confident the packet made it intact. If it was too long, the NIC could send the packet out and another host could transmit, causing the packet to be corrupted, and the host wouldn't see that its packet got corrupted.
In this day and age of full duplex and switches everywhere, it's less of an issue.
Something marked NEXUS should get much quicker updates. Provided you are buying it from the play store and not a carrier branded version. All carrier branded phones lag behind though.
You can buy your nexus phone from the carrier. Just remember after opening the box to flash in the official Google factory image and it'll get updates that way.
The carrier image points updates at the carrier, while the official factory image points to google. It's just a little work with fastboot.
7.1B transistors in 551mm^2? That's atrociously low transistor density.
Most of us probably use things that are probably 1/8th the size with 16B+ transistors on it. You probably know them as little 32GB+ memory cards.
The thing is - memory devices (all memory - flash (NOR/NAND), RAM (SRAM/DRAM) etc) are the most transistor-dense things around - their sheer density makes it so that they're limited by how much silicon area they can use - if you double the silicon area, you double the storage. Moore's law helps here because you can stick twice as many transistors on for twice the storage, but the same silicon area.
Even silicon area isn't that impressive - a good dSLR will have a camera sensor with a large silicon area. Hell, there are FPGAs with just as big silicon dies as well.
In fact, that chip, the vast majority of those 7.1B transistors will probably occuply less than 25% of the entire area - being used for onchip caches and temporary buffers and memory, which are extremely dense structures. The rest of the area is taken up by very few transistors. Instead, what takes up the silicon area is... wiring. Even with 10 layer metal, there's miles of wiring inside the cihp - typically around the logic parts. The reason for this is logic is often called "random" because there isn't generally a regular rhythm to the blocks (sure each processor is regular, but within each one it isn't).
Finally - you can fab a chip up to the size of the water you use - it'll be uneconomic because every wafer is flawed, so the yield you get goes down exponentially as the size ramps up. Those FPGAs I mentioned? Easily $30K a pop. Yes, $30,000 for ONE CHIP. Because yields are horrendously low due to how big they are (if you're lucky, you'll get one good one per wafer. Which has to pay for all the bad ones).
Yield is a huge issue - the bigger the chip, the greater the chance of it encountering the imperfect part of the wafer, which cuts yield down. In addition, a larger die means you can fit less on a wafer, so you have less chips to pay for the fixed costs of a wafer and processing.
551mm^2 is probably the limit for economic production of this chip, but it's hardly stressing the technology.
I'm not seeing any particular reason that the time spent searching could not be supervised
I'm not seeing any particular reason it would need to be supervised. The phone calls aren't. The last time I was arrested, I spent about four hours in a holding cell, and there was a row of phones along the wall. There were no restrictions on who we could call, or how long we could talk. There was no indication that the phone calls were being monitored, and it is illegal to record calls without notification.
Well, the thing is, a phone on the wall will likely be used for priviledged conversation - they are legally not allowed to monitor that. And it's possibly legally dodgy to monitor them and disconnect the monitor when priviledged conversation is detected.
OTOH, if you're using Google to find a lawyer, chances are you're going to have to call them up to begin with, so the "looking up" part isn't really priviledged at all. Monitoring is necessary just to ensure that it's being used to lookup counsel and not just to hang out on Facebook. (And it's not wise to engage in priviledged conversations anyhow - even if law enforcement isn't monitoring, someone else might be).
Newer NAND flash can sustain maybe 3000 writes per cell, and if it's TLC NAND, maybe 500 to 1000 writes.
Actually, NAND flash doesn't "die" when you try to do the N+1 erase-write cycle (it's cycles, not writes. A cycle consists of flipping bits from 1 to 0 (aka write), and then from 0 to 1 (aka erase)). In practically all controllers, you do partial writes. With SLC NAND, it's fairly easy - you can write a page at a time, or even half pages. MLC lets you do page at a time as well - given typical MLC "big block" NAND of 32 4k pages, a block can be written 32 times before it's erased (once per page - you cannot do less than a page at a time).
And... other dirty little secret - the quoted cycle life is guaranteed. It means your part will be able to be written and erased 3000 times. Most typically, they're an order of magnitude more conservative - so a 3000 cycle flash can really get you 30,000 with proper care and tolerance.
Of course, a really big problem with cheap SSDs is lame firmware because what you need is a good flash translation later (FTL) which does wear levelling, sector translations, etc. These things are VERY proprietary and HEAVILY patented. A dirt cheap crappy controller you might find on low end thumbdrives and memory cards may not even DO translation or wear levelling. The other problem is the flash translation table must be stored somewhere so the device can find your data (because of wear levelling, where your data is actually stored versus where your PC thinks it is different - again, the FTL handles this). For some things, it's possible to just scan the entire array and generate the table live, but generally it's impractical at the large scale because it requires time to perform the scan. So usually the table is stored in flash as well, which of course is not protected by the FTL. Depending on how things go, this part could corrupt itself easily leading to an unmountable device or basically, a dead SSD.
Some of those SSDs are actually still going strong.
The best bet is to buy from people who know what they're doing - the likes of Samsung (VERY popular with the OEM crowd - Dell, Lenovo, Apple, etc.), Toshiba, and Intel - who all make NAND memory and thus actually do have experience on how to best balance speed and reliability. Everyone else is just using the datasheet and just assembling them together like they would any other PC part.
I think they'd take over the linux graphics-card market. Maybe not much of a market now, but potentially could be big enough to justify doing it.
Why? To gain what, an extra % of marketshare?
Intel's already the largest GPU vendor out there by quantity. With very little exception, if you have an Intel CPU, you probably have Intel graphics coming along for the ride - companies like ATi^H^H^HAMD and nVidia are going after the leftovers.
Intel's gotten there by being good enough to most people - their GPUs are adequate (Ivy Bridge is pretty decent) for basically what people buy PCs for these days. PC gaming is huge, but the games that demand the big GPU powers aren't - most of the PC gaming market goes to the smaller "indies" where having a fast GPU is less important (if it's required at all).
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Didn't Obama recently sign into law making it mandatory for car manufacturers to insert black boxes into all their vehicles sold? (Most do already, but there are a few that don't).
Now, granted, the law also states that the information in that black box is the property of the owner, and may not be forfeited without permission (to say, an insurance company).
The very term "Human Resources" specifies that. Compared to what it used to be called - Personnel and you'll notice the difference. The old term referred to people as persons and individiuals. HR, well, they're just a replacable cog in a machine - depersonalized. You're just a Resource of type Human (others could be transportation, logistics, supplies, etc). Like other resources a company needs - they just go with whatever meets their requirements and is lowest cost.
More like companies like Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest outsourced their customer support to Zendesk. Basically, they pay Zendesk to provide support services. You might have seen some support websites hosted by other companies to provide stuff like knowledgebase and other support information, including stuff like ticket tracking and such if you require support.
For stuff like that, you have to create an account so your tickets and issues can be resolved.
Yes, companies can do it themselves, but it's often trickier if you want to support stuff like downloads, knowledgebases (which require extensive search capabilities), support ticketing, etc. A lot of companies farm it out to let someone else worry about the software and hosting.
Not necessarily - most CAPTCHAS are solved by human labor. Perhaps as a fake entry to "free porn" and other things. Doing this is ridiculously easy - user signs up and the webserver registers for an account on some web site, captures the CAPTCHA and presents it as its own. It then asks the user to do it, and forwards the response.
Sometimes there are even farms of people who do this - just solving them day in and day out (for like $1/1000 solved).
It's a lot harder to scrape a math problem, or even one that goes to say "What is the name of this web site?" (becauase naturally, that information is lost when it's proxied).
There are no warehousing costs. Once the publisher does a print run, that's it. The book is shipped to the retailers and the publisher may retain a tiny amount of stock, but most likely not. Excess is either sent to the author or pulped. The stores themselves only send the publisher back torn off covers to claim refunds - those unsold books are pulped as well. It's why you see in most books a warning about buying a book without its cover.
It's the reason why the physical paper cost of a book is really only 10-20% the cover price
How would this be affected by the rollout of IPv6 where now an IP address can be used to identify an individual computer (assuming no NATv6)? Would it mean that if you used IPv6, you could have one of your PCs siezed and forensically analyzed (to see if it was a bot doing it or someone at the console)?
After all, I'm pretty sure if any of my PCs were analyzed for activity, it could be determined that yes, I was the user.
At least with IPv4, it's shared between so many devices that to nail down which one of them would be impractical especially with WiFi. With IPv6 being able to identify an individual machine... and even if it was done by someone off premises using WiFi (i.e., the machine no longer exists on the network).
Would the media industry suddenly be pushing for mass IPv6 deployments so instead of only identifying a subscriber, you can identify a subscriber's device (PC, laptop, smartphone, etc) as the culprit and use that to identify the real owner?
You can't run Windows on a Chromebook. The BIOS doesn't exist - just a small loader that can boot Linux and that's it. You can flip a hidden switch into "developer mode" where it'll let you have a command prompt, but that's really all there is. You can modify ChromeOS at that point to have a Linux system (there are instructions for installing Ubuntu, but it involves a bit of work with DD).
In regular non-developer mode, ChromeOS is quite locked down.
Better yet, I order stuff from Amazon.ca all the time. A couple of years ago they switched from Canada Post to UPS. Not having changed the address I used (my work address), I had many things sent there. Then all of a sudden, UPS starting screwing up. First was invalid address - Amazon asked if I typed the wrong address - of course not, I clicked "ship to this address" like I always did for YEARS.
Then the next one I got was "Found the building, could not locate recipient in directory". Which makes no sense, since the address was "10th Floor" You don't need the freaking directory - just go to the 10th floor and drop it off at reception!
The biggest one yet was when I preordered the iPad 3. I knew it was coming, and checked the tracking. All of a sudden it changed from "On vehicle from delivery" to "Exception - recipient not in". Of course, there was somebody there that whole time - though we're not even sure if the truck bothered to even drive up - perhaps the driver just marked it undeliverable without even stopping. Of course it got redelivered in the evening by a not very happy driver who probably could've just delivered it earlier...
Technically, the reason carriers do it even though you're on contract is easy - because you're forced to use that phone with that carrier. What it really means is if you travel, instead of being able to plug in a local SIM and have cheap calls, you'll be forced into using the extortionate roaming rates. (FYI - roaming fees are very lucrative for BOTH carriers. It's why who you roam with is actually predetermined beforehand and those who have better roaming agreements get preference).
Of course, the way is to have legislation saying the instant your contract expires, the carrier MUST give you the unlock code. No $50 crap. If the carriers want to charge you $250+ to unlock it during the contract, fine, but the moment the contract is terminated (which includes upgrades since you usually sign a new contract for a new phone), the phone bought on that old contract should have its unlock code given, for free..
Your booster is technically transmitting illegally on a licensed band and it was discovered to be interfering with a licensed user.
AT&T did a very friendly thing by asking you to turn it off. They could've gotten the FCC involved at which point not only will you be forced to turn it off, but also subject to possible fines for interference since you were illegally transmitting on their frequencies.
That's the reason for the approval requirement - you're using frequencies licensed to someone else, and if you don't have approval, you are basically violating the law.
The thing is, most people don't really interact with licensed services much, but I'm fairly certain you would be pissed off if someone set up a big ass transmitter near you that wiped out your cellphone reception. Or a pirate FM station decided they would co-opt a popular radio station frequency to spout end of the world BS.
You're confusing a cellphone with a cellphone.
Thing is, if your phone is a dumbphone that makes calls and texts, yes, the police can get the information from the carrier becaues that's all the device can do.
However, these days phones can also be data storage devices and carry things that your carrier will NOT have access to. Like say, your calendar. Or your games. Or your notes or other documents you may have stored. In which case the phone part is easy, but the rest of your data is a "container" like a briefcase or suitcase or safe.
If you have only the default lock, that container is like a shopping bag where anyone can clearly see into it. But if it has a lock, it's more like a briefcase or something with a cheap (or good) lock on it which requires a warrant to search.
Which is probably proper. Things like your addressbook or contact list are murkier - they may fall under the container side of things (it's your data) or be obtained from logs.
Basically, it really depends what they're going for. If it's just who you talked to or texted to, fine, it's easy, get it from the carrier. If it's data you may have on the phone unrelated to its telephony capabilities, then it may require a warrant.
I do that whenever I get a warning that my card may be compromised. I call the number on the card. If it's on security lockout the computer recognizes this and immediately routes me to the security department. (Because either they couldn't get me, or I may be calling because I need to do a transaction and it failed).
Saves me having to write down their callback number and I still reach them in the end. Win-win. Even if they don't reroute me, one quick message of "I got this message saying my card was blocked" usually gets me forwarded immediately.
Gaming on the PC has NEVER died out. The PC market on games is still larger than any console out there.
The thing is, it's shifted. The PC games these days are fewer AAA titles, and more indie titles. Games that take advantage of the fact that most common GPU is by Intel by far (ATI/^H^HMD and nVidia are fighting for just a puny part of the market) and can be played by basically anyone at the PC. Some you don't even need to install - flash games, webGL ones, even unity ones.
The AAA guys moved to consoles and give token consideration to the PC. In the meantime, the indie guys have taken over the market, and hae branched out to platforms like mobile. Some, like Apple, offer a near-console-like development process as well (If you think Apple's walled garden is bad, try Steam. And if you think Steam is bad, try console development).
What's likely to make or break the consoles this time around isn't the AAA games, but their willingness to bend the rules for indie development, "Apple style" with looser restrictions than have been tradition for consoles, faster updates (the approval process for all consoles is still way too long - think 2 weeks for Apple/Amazon is bad? It's at least a month or more for consoles, and Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo probably see less than 1% of the volume that Apple/Amazon see). Especially with updates - QA testing isn't something a lot of indies even do (heck, given what I've seen from developers, I wouldn't bet against many just seeing "0 errors" in the build and submitting that without even running it).
There will always be an absolute hard core set on the PC, but their numbers are far smaller, and indies have done what Nintendo did and basically realized there's the ability to play into a market that's underserved and grow the entire gaming market. Hell, the AAA PC guys might be forced to adapt and realize that they can't make games exclusively for gamers with high end PCs, and may have to start optimizing for Intel as well.
Because subscriber revenue stinks. Carriers want to have that juicy roaming revenue. And they know if you're on contract, and you unlock your phone, they're denied that revenue as you'd just buy a local SIM.
No, the best way would be to force carriers at the end of a contract (which includes upgrades if you keep your old phone) to give you the unlock code as part of the contract expiration. Same goes if you decide to buy it outright with no contract - the carrier must give you the code ot unlock it.
And yes, I know many stores who will NOT sell you a phone without a contract - if you march in and try to pay the "no contract" price, they'll refuse to sell it to you. Even if you have a valid reason like you want to upgrade but are outside of the upgrade window - they won't sell you the phone without you paying the ETF and signing onto a new contract.
I believe that's the lower weight limit set by the FAA. If your aircraft is lighter than 55 lbs, then it's not classified as an aircraft and merely a hobby aircraft that doesn't need or regulation (e.g., RC aircraft). If it's heavier, then it falls under FAA experimental aircraft rules and is regulated.
And yes, there have been model aircraft heavier than 55lbs which have undergone such testing.
As for privacy and security? Well, I think the bigger implication right now is Google Glass which when it's a lot cheaper, will suddenly put a lot more cameras in a lot more places. Law enforcement won't need drones for surveillance anymore when your fellow citizen will do it all for them.
So you're replacing one expense with another? After all, if you want to encourage Khan Academy, we have to fix the digital divide first where kids have to go to McDonalds in order to actually view the losson. Nevermind actually being able to afford a $100 calculator.
The latter two restrictions are to prevent the use of PDAs and PDA-like devices which can do more than just calculate (like hold pages of notes), and to prevent use of laptop computers.
The former is interesting because in this day and age, it also blocks the use of cameras to record test material - either ot bring out or to cheat with (I'm not quite sure they thought of using a cellphone camera to send the question directly to someone outside... but it does cover the senario).
The laptop thing should be fairly obvious as well - after all, who can argue with someone wanting ot use their laptop as a graphing calculator?
Don't forget to also conserve memory, processor and storage space on the device. If you're going to view an image on a tiny QVGA or HVGA screen, do you really need to send down the entire 16MP image? Or just have the server downscale the image so you're not stuck downloading megabytes of images over a potentially slow and high-latency link.
The other thing is the software on the mobile side can be lighter weight - it only has to decode a few formats while the server converts many more down to the few supported.
The problem with Firefox's releases is they keep screwing with the UI. Little things here and there - like day I suddenly found muscle memory broken because the awesomebar stopped autocompleting full URLs and only did domains? (It's fine for the most part, but if you have URLs that are fairly deep... or say to get directly to a forum...).
If Mozilla updated firefox like chrome - where they don't mess with UI things at all (or default them to "off" for upgrade installs so it behaves exactly the same as it did pre-update) then a lot less people would care. But they don't. I don't care what version Chrome is at because it works the same today as it did yesterday. But every new update to Firefox brings trepidatoin in the form "what did they screw with now? And can I disable it?"
Ars Technica periodically runs browser wars charts that show how each version of a browser is adopted. Consistently while a large number of people update, a significant number of people don't, much more than Chrome.
Because spamming has relatively low penalties.
Attack a defense contractor and you have several problems. First is network security - classified stuff is probably on the airgapped network that you can get on, but it's difficult to get off of. Second, you have people monitoring such things and the likelihood of being detected is greater. Finally, well, you have the government.
Attack Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.,and the repercussions are much lower. First, they're less likely to have airgapped networks, so getting information out is a lot easier. Second, the monitoring equipment is less advanced and may not catch what you're doing. Third, potential embarassment may mean your attack goes unannounced for a while.
And what do they want? The usual - contact lists and ways to turn your machine into a zombie. Contact lists make it easier to send spam to friends coming from you (required if you want to phish or do the "I'm overseas and got robbed" scam). Zombies because botnets can command some good amount of money.
Likewise, compromise a bunch of family PCs is a lot safer as well.
Unless you want defense information, you don't bother with government and government contractors because the risk is high. The money is made elsewhere and it's a lot easier and safer as well.
That limit is because of how long it takes for a minimum sized packet to traverse the network for collision detection. If you can guarantee there won't be collisions (a switch does this) then you're pretty much not limited by length anymore other than signal strength. All you need is a bunch of switches to boost the signal up and you're golden.
Back in ye olde days of hubs, they were half duplex because the transmitting NIC would send bits down the line and read the bits off the received end. If the bits didn't match, it was a collision and the detecting card jammed the link to tell everyone to back off. As the minimum packet was 64 bytes, the length limit came into play to allow the packet to reach the other end before transmitting stopped so if it sent the packet with no collisions, it was reasonably confident the packet made it intact. If it was too long, the NIC could send the packet out and another host could transmit, causing the packet to be corrupted, and the host wouldn't see that its packet got corrupted.
In this day and age of full duplex and switches everywhere, it's less of an issue.
You can buy your nexus phone from the carrier. Just remember after opening the box to flash in the official Google factory image and it'll get updates that way.
The carrier image points updates at the carrier, while the official factory image points to google. It's just a little work with fastboot.
No reason not to flash the official image either.
7.1B transistors in 551mm^2? That's atrociously low transistor density.
Most of us probably use things that are probably 1/8th the size with 16B+ transistors on it. You probably know them as little 32GB+ memory cards.
The thing is - memory devices (all memory - flash (NOR/NAND), RAM (SRAM/DRAM) etc) are the most transistor-dense things around - their sheer density makes it so that they're limited by how much silicon area they can use - if you double the silicon area, you double the storage. Moore's law helps here because you can stick twice as many transistors on for twice the storage, but the same silicon area.
Even silicon area isn't that impressive - a good dSLR will have a camera sensor with a large silicon area. Hell, there are FPGAs with just as big silicon dies as well.
In fact, that chip, the vast majority of those 7.1B transistors will probably occuply less than 25% of the entire area - being used for onchip caches and temporary buffers and memory, which are extremely dense structures. The rest of the area is taken up by very few transistors. Instead, what takes up the silicon area is... wiring. Even with 10 layer metal, there's miles of wiring inside the cihp - typically around the logic parts. The reason for this is logic is often called "random" because there isn't generally a regular rhythm to the blocks (sure each processor is regular, but within each one it isn't).
Finally - you can fab a chip up to the size of the water you use - it'll be uneconomic because every wafer is flawed, so the yield you get goes down exponentially as the size ramps up. Those FPGAs I mentioned? Easily $30K a pop. Yes, $30,000 for ONE CHIP. Because yields are horrendously low due to how big they are (if you're lucky, you'll get one good one per wafer. Which has to pay for all the bad ones).
Yield is a huge issue - the bigger the chip, the greater the chance of it encountering the imperfect part of the wafer, which cuts yield down. In addition, a larger die means you can fit less on a wafer, so you have less chips to pay for the fixed costs of a wafer and processing.
551mm^2 is probably the limit for economic production of this chip, but it's hardly stressing the technology.
Well, the thing is, a phone on the wall will likely be used for priviledged conversation - they are legally not allowed to monitor that. And it's possibly legally dodgy to monitor them and disconnect the monitor when priviledged conversation is detected.
OTOH, if you're using Google to find a lawyer, chances are you're going to have to call them up to begin with, so the "looking up" part isn't really priviledged at all. Monitoring is necessary just to ensure that it's being used to lookup counsel and not just to hang out on Facebook. (And it's not wise to engage in priviledged conversations anyhow - even if law enforcement isn't monitoring, someone else might be).
Actually, NAND flash doesn't "die" when you try to do the N+1 erase-write cycle (it's cycles, not writes. A cycle consists of flipping bits from 1 to 0 (aka write), and then from 0 to 1 (aka erase)). In practically all controllers, you do partial writes. With SLC NAND, it's fairly easy - you can write a page at a time, or even half pages. MLC lets you do page at a time as well - given typical MLC "big block" NAND of 32 4k pages, a block can be written 32 times before it's erased (once per page - you cannot do less than a page at a time).
And... other dirty little secret - the quoted cycle life is guaranteed. It means your part will be able to be written and erased 3000 times. Most typically, they're an order of magnitude more conservative - so a 3000 cycle flash can really get you 30,000 with proper care and tolerance.
Of course, a really big problem with cheap SSDs is lame firmware because what you need is a good flash translation later (FTL) which does wear levelling, sector translations, etc. These things are VERY proprietary and HEAVILY patented. A dirt cheap crappy controller you might find on low end thumbdrives and memory cards may not even DO translation or wear levelling. The other problem is the flash translation table must be stored somewhere so the device can find your data (because of wear levelling, where your data is actually stored versus where your PC thinks it is different - again, the FTL handles this). For some things, it's possible to just scan the entire array and generate the table live, but generally it's impractical at the large scale because it requires time to perform the scan. So usually the table is stored in flash as well, which of course is not protected by the FTL. Depending on how things go, this part could corrupt itself easily leading to an unmountable device or basically, a dead SSD.
For some REAL analysis, some brave souls have been stressing cheap SSDs to their limits until failure - http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm
Some of those SSDs are actually still going strong.
The best bet is to buy from people who know what they're doing - the likes of Samsung (VERY popular with the OEM crowd - Dell, Lenovo, Apple, etc.), Toshiba, and Intel - who all make NAND memory and thus actually do have experience on how to best balance speed and reliability. Everyone else is just using the datasheet and just assembling them together like they would any other PC part.
Why? To gain what, an extra % of marketshare?
Intel's already the largest GPU vendor out there by quantity. With very little exception, if you have an Intel CPU, you probably have Intel graphics coming along for the ride - companies like ATi^H^H^HAMD and nVidia are going after the leftovers.
Intel's gotten there by being good enough to most people - their GPUs are adequate (Ivy Bridge is pretty decent) for basically what people buy PCs for these days. PC gaming is huge, but the games that demand the big GPU powers aren't - most of the PC gaming market goes to the smaller "indies" where having a fast GPU is less important (if it's required at all).