And by annoyance I mean like some stupid software, I don't remember what would prefer the IPv6 address over the IPv4 address then leading to a delay before it would connect via IPv4. I couldn't be arsed to find some other solution, so IPv6 is completely disabled on my machine. And so far I've had zero reason to change that. The only people feeling the hurt are those not getting an IPv4 address.
That would probably be your resolver, since most programs use getaddrinfo() to do a DNS lookup (which returns a linked list of addrinfo structures containing the addresses (in very convenient sockaddr format, so no more pesky casting of sockaddr_in/sockaddr_in6/sockaddr_whatever to sockaddr anymore). It's protocol independent and gets you IPv6 support "for free" (getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() were created to extend gethostbyname and the like for IPv6). Of course, it doesn't help as DNS records are often returned by IPv4 only so IPv6 connectivity cannot be verified even though that DNS query returned IPv6 records.
I suppose the biggest issue I have with IPv6 is having to have the network renumbered whenever my ISP decides it's time to renumber the network (roughly annually), and since the ISP gives you your prefix, it means every host has to get a new address. Sure IPv6 gives you the ability to add more addresses (like the private address space) per host, but you lose out in the convenience of being able to ping the router and know you can get traffic through it (because you'll ping the router's private address (or worse yet, link-local) without realizing some software somewhere screwed up and either handed out bad internet-accessible DHCPv6 addresses, or a rogue device is sending bad router solicitations. So no connectivity with connectivity.
It's one of the niceties of NAT - that your inner network is isolated from the outer network so the whims of the outer network provider don't impact your inner network (or minimally - reboot the damn router).
Yes I know IPv6 is better, but I'm sure a lot of people don't really care to have end-to-end connectivity (and more will APPEAR to have it, but it doesn't work because of firewalls and such), and just want a simple box that they can plug in and replace their existing Linksys router with and not worry about a thing - router hands out DHCPv6/router solicitations, hosts configure themselves, and router NATs the inner network from the outer. If you can ping the router, you can get connectivity and not have to figure out if it's because you're using the link-local or private or the actual internet-routable address. (Try explaining that concept to your parents).
Great. Now all you have to do is prove your system wasn't at fault in a court of law--against the sweet old lady who's suing, with the driver testifying that it was your system and not him that caused the accident, and a jury that hates big corporations. And you have to do it over and over again, in a constant barrage of lawsuits--almost one for every accident one of your cars ever gets in.
Well, given most automated car systems have a TON of sensors - including several cameras looking forward, backwards, and the sides (for complete 360 car coverage with effectively no blind spots), and radar and other sensors, recreation of the incident would be much easier because the data's there. The testimony would be minor compared to the evidence the system has purely because it needs to crunch all that data to make the "best" decision.
Of course, the decision is between running them over (which has happened with regular human drivers to pedestrians who walk and text and get killed), braking suddenly (which given autonomous vehicles probably can communicate with cars behind them who are travelling at safe distances, can stop safely as well), or swerving (which given communications systems, can also enable the car in the next lane as well to be able to react to that event as well).
Of course, if the autonomous car stops, and the human following too close behind fails and crashes, it's not the autonomous system's fault anymore (the video and sensor data would reveal said human driver was following too close and the car stopped to avoid a pedestrian).
Part of what makes autonomous vehicles safer would be the instant communications between cars - like "I'm turning" or "avoiding pedestrian!" or other messages so other cars can adjust and compensate. Hell, knowing what other drivers are doing would help human drivers a lot as well.
How are they stopping US residents? I assume they will just block US IP addresses. If that is the case, then the US is acting on InTrade (probably indirectly) in order to stop business from happening directly between the US and InTrade. It does not stop US residents currently outside of the US or those using proxies outside the US. So no, it likely isn't a US law being applied to US residents. It is a law being applied to foreign governments, which are applying their laws to domestic companies, which are then blocking US traffic, whether the traffic is from a US resident or non-US resident.
The most obvious would be to simply prevent payment to or from a US address or US card. After all, they're effectively a betting site, so they have to take money in for bets and be able to pay out money.
Easiest way is ot lock out people whose billing and/or payout address is in the US. Probably easiest is just refuse to send the winnings to any US address so the money's stuck there.
Yeah, I suppose one could open a Swiss bank account and do thing sthat way to get at your money... but there aren't many places that make it easy to do so without appearing in person.
Easy - as a low end option - we're talking $100 here. A price point no one else can match (the Wii's $250 price point was matched and beaten by Sony and Microsoft, and even $200 you can get a basic Xbox. So now Nintendo's uncompetitive so they need to have a lower price still - $100 in this case. The Wii U is still "novel" enough to be able to command $300-350, but the Wii is uncompetitive at its current price point.
Hell, at $100 it's cheap enough for experimentation or to toss in the car for car trips.
Just get a black sheet of construction paper and tape it to your forehead over your eyes. For the big spender purchase a sleeping mask. Both are far cheaper than the Oculus Rift and will give you the same DOOM3 experience.
Not sure about the sleeping mask, but the construction paper method at least is compatible with glasses. It's the only one reason why I never participated in the kickstarter - they had a notice that said it was not glasses compatible in its current form, but the retail version will be.
Btw. anyone know what happened to above tech? Seemed very promising, has been a while since announced, but so far I haven't seen any commercial products built around this...?
Probably very small very niche market. It sounds like a great heatsink and fan combination, but considering you can get them quite cheaply nowadays, licensing this technology doesn't appear to get you much over a traditional heatsink and fan. At least not for commodity PCs and such.
I'm sure there's a niche somewhere where people will pay $100 or $200 for it, but the PC market is not it. Heck, even the popular overclocking websites haven't done many heatsink/fan reviews as they once did with all the big names releasing new heatsinks and fans practically daily. After all, there's very little reason to do so nowadays other than kicks.
If a user clicks on support, do you offer free support options like a community-based forums and/or mailing list? Knowledgebase? Wiki?
Then below it show what premium support options are. You may even have to do it on your download page, or add a big "buy support contract" button.
Does your software make any sort of note that no support is provided (but as a courtesy, there are free self-support options they could try), or the ability to buy a support contract.
Also, if it's client-server based, allow the IT guy to enter details about the support contract into the server so users have an easy way to access it. Perhaps when it comes close to running out (say 6 months), display warning message in the dialog. With a month left, have it display a popup warning that the contract will expire (with a server option to disable it once it pops up in case they don't want to renew), then auto-remove the support contract information once past expiry.
Maybe even have it in the menu item "Free support" or "Buy a support contract".
What sites are so damned slow? It's not the Javascript in most cases, it's the asset loading. The tubes are still the bottleneck on the web.
If anything, Javascript is speeding things up. AJAX content updates without a full page refresh are commonplace now, and there are more and more sites that are mostly client-side, using frameworks like Backbone.
Well, let's see. Go to a site like Engadget and make sure your javascript allow settings are set to show the page comments. Now open 24 hour's worth of news postings in tabs. After about halfway through, your browser will start to lag with CPU pegged. It's not loading content off the Internet if your CPU is pegged. But it's just all the instances.
Or you can replicate it with a busy thread like one of their "post a comment to enter in a draw), where it gets around 200 comments a minute. You'll find the browser noticably slows down as the javascript is constantly running.
Repeat same with a site like Gizmodo (probably an even worse offender). I can't open more than 10 tabs at a time before the browser locks up for a few minutes at 100% CPU.
Latest firefox and Chrome. Websites just gobble up the Javascript processing. Those sites are unusable on weaker javascript engines.
That's exactly what I'm saying. It's not Microsoft's place to tell Company XYZ how to package and present the product that Company XYZ sells. If you don't like the way Company XYZ presents the product, don't buy it . Buy your computers from Company CBA which is known for having very clean OS installs.
That's what I did with my Android devices. I bought from the Nexus line so I would get the cleanest default OS installation available.
The Microsoft Store sells "Premium PCs" which are regular stock PCs you can find at Best Buy etc., with one restriction - nothing other than Windows and essential utilities (to make recovery discs and manage stuff like special keys and functions) are allowed to be installed. No trial software (I don't think even Microsoft Office Trial is allowed). It's basically Windows + drivers.
Heck, someone should send this journalist a Mac that's been bootcamped - nothing installed but Windows and the Apple support drivers (which... manage the clock (MacOS/Linux use UTC on the RTC, while Windows puts local time on the RTC - if you swap OSes, having to change the clock will be annoying), startup options (boot Mac or Windows?), keyboard and a few other things). He's probably argue that's crapware as well (what, people should hold down keys to boot?).
Everyone knows about the holes, including the manufacturers. They're designed to operate on controlled, private networks. Every time someone gets hacked, they should go after the implementors, not the vendors as they should factor security onto their site designs. I'm not excusing the manufacturers, just people need to know this is engineering and not infosec - people buy black boxes which do stuff and that's all that matters to them.
The problem is even airgapped networks can be broken into. See stuxnet and flame - they exploited several machanisms to install themselves onto airgapped networks. It also went to show that even airgaps can be broken into if you don't need much in the way of return information - you just need to get onto the network, and not send data back out. Heck, the USAF had their UAV computers infected with a virus.
The weakest part of an airgapped network is the maintenance thereof - add some new PLCs to the network? Well, they have to be configured to work with everything else, so someone has to plug something into it to configure it. And that something is unknown - it could be a technician's laptop, it could be a thumb drive, etc.
The thing is, an airgapped network has to be maintained, and it's really hard to do so without at some point having to plug something in-between the gap. (For Stuxnet, it was a software update or other thing, for the USAF, it was... map updates). And at some point, data has to be transported across
Heck, even the thumbdrive isn't invulnerable - it could for example be infected during manufacturing.
In the end, all networks are interconnected. Some less so than others, but eventually they will have to be in some shap or form.
Why is Homeland Security dealing with counterfeit product sales?
Are sales of fake professional sports jerseys jeopardizing our national security now?
If you believe the hype, yes.
Because a sale of a fake jersey funnels money into terroristist organizations who sell the stuff to raise cash to do more attacks on America.
Counterfeit goods have traditionally been a way for gangs and mobsters to raise money for their operations in the past, and modern era fundraising for terrorist organizations also involves the same.
If this story is really true, it seems a very odd strategic move from Intel at a time when they're dominant in their markets. It's opening the door for people like gamers, geeks and small businesses to move to a competitor (AMD being the obvious candidate) in order to keep their flexibility, and the people I mentioned there are trend-setters for a very significant chunk of the desktop PC industry. And anyone who thinks desktop PCs are dead because everyone is using tablets, laptops, etc. these days just isn't paying attention.
Or a smart one.
Think about it for a few moments. AMD's in serious trouble. Without help, they run the real risk of going bankrupt. And without AMD, Intel's the "last one left" (other than minor bit players like Via and NatSemi). Which means the EU and US government will be seriously looking at Intel for possible anti-trust. And they've been found guilty before. Last thing Intel would want is to be forced to make several decisions to avoid issues like opening up the spec of their processors and such to compeitors, and forced licensing of patents to everyone and everyone (they aren't FRAND yet).
Plus having to ensure that every move they make won't be found to be anti-trust (think the compiler fiasco - they may be forced to ensure that everyone who makes a compatible chip gets the optimizations). As well, any business decisions they make will get scrutinized - if they want to acquire a company for some technology, for example.
By forcing the enthusiasts (who make up a tiny percent of the market) to AMD, it gives AMD the much needed injection they need, without giving up much of the market (Intel's sales to Dell, HP, Apple, etc. are far greater).
Desktop PCs aren't dying, but they're not exactly being replaced in huge quantities - even laptop sales are affected by smartphones and tablets. Businesses will buy desktop PCs (though they're increasingly buying laptops), but they're never upgraded so Intel is fine with that. The other buyer of desktops would be enthusiasts, who are likely to pay more and buy top tier stuff. And even then AMD isn't getting a lot - the high end AMD processors are always in short supply.
And hell, by giving AMD the entusiast market, they can point to all the negative Intel sentiment saying "these people have vowed not to buy Intel and they're buying our competitor's products, so we're not a monopoly".
Of course, the practical reason is sockets suck - impedance matching problems, bad connections (your PC depends on the working of nearly 1200 pieces of metal pressing against 1200 other pieces of metal. If one of those is slightly oxidized or doesn't exert enough pressure, your PC can crash), and plenty more other things. Solder joints are far more reliable.
But if Apple can license their patents to HTC, Samsung can ask the courts for a license at the same amount. It is possible that the court will grant that, as Apple clearly thought it was fair for a very similar competitor.
Only if said patents are FRAND. At which point they MUST. But for non-FRAND patents, they don't have to.
If they aren't, then it's perfectly fine for Apple to not license to Samsung at all - because the "ND" part doesn't apply. Hell, the "F" part doesn't have to apply as well.
And Samsung has stated clearly they are NOT willing to form any sort of agreement.
Heck, Microsoft has licensed patents with Apple (cross-licensed). Apple doesn't have to charge HTC the same rates that Microsoft is paying.
For the FRAND patents, Microsoft and Apple are arguing the rates specified by Samsung and Motorola are unfair. Unfortunately, the big issue there is no one really said what fair was as a lot of the rates include cross-licensing. And Samsung wants injunctions because Apple's violating their FRAND patents, while Samsung's arguing that since Apple licensed patents to HTC, Apple cannot force an injunction on Samsung products (the problem being that Samsung is, by FRAND forced to license, so they can't argue that they deserve an injunction for licensable patents while Apple doesn't for other potentially licensable patents).
Of course, the business case may be that it's very helpful to license it because if HTC is paying, and Samsung is paying, so should LG, Motorola/Google, ZTE and everyone else (who may include Amazon and B&N).
Being able to avoid sales tax in many cases is certainly beneficial to online retailers, but anybody who believes that sales tax is the primary force moving retail transactions online simply has not been paying attention. If all 50 states suddenly started collecting sales tax on Amazon sales today, Amazon would take a hit, but they would not suddenly collapse.
brick and mortar companies are trying to force online companies to pay sales tax in the believe people will return to their stores. Well, that is not going to happen and if there is an alternative online that does not charge sales tax that is something I consider as well when making a purchase.
Well, today it won't, but it can certain stem the growth of online shopping.
Take Canada, for example. Online shopping hasn't grown as fast, nor is it as prevalent as in the US. In fact, many B&M retailers often have more stuff in the retail stores because increasingly larger numbers of people still visit the store.
It doesn't help that "free shipping" didn't come until recently, so the fact you had to pay tax AND shipping meant that the prices were often equivalent to retail, so you might as well just buy it locally and get the benefit of immediate satisfaction and cheaper returns.
Hell, even Amazon.ca isn't that great - the discounts are awful and you can find stuff cheaper at a B&M than Amazon. Quite commonly, too.
Hell, the retailers are the ones trying ot push online shopping.
The pattern of the 'self taught programmer who makes millions and shows all those ivory tower intellectuals how it is done!' is a powerful myth that people latch on to.
Well, people do latch onto them because they're big and famous. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the two biggest and well known examples. And there are probably dozens of others as well in tech, and thousands if you include other fields.
Problem is, the population of the western world is in the hundreds of millions. For every Gates or Zuckerberg, there's thousands more who don't succeed, but no one thinks about them. It's like winning the lottery - you have to be really, really, really lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
And just like the lottery, it's a very compelling myth to hang on to. Tech may be more prone to it as it's seen as "anticonformist" and such, plus that a lot of people in tech can ignore the "soft skills" that make the world go around - just be the grungy dingy smelly geek who sits in front of the screen 24/7 who only speaks in jargon and RTFM's people who dare come up to them and you'll still be successful.
Hell, you see it in the app stores - people assume they put it up, they'll make money, screw sales and marketing - that's old school.
problem is the "fiscal cliff" wasnt supposed to be logical. it was just across the board, lets put a gun to heads and threaten to pull the trigger and kill the economy, type cuts.
and the further problem is that its a weak threat, beucase the congress, red or blue it doesnt matter, will gladly drive this bus over the cliff without hesitation.
Why? Because it doesnt affect them; they get paid regardless. And they'll reelected regardless because they will all just blame it entirely on the other side, taking no resposnibility themselves, and the people who voted for them will all buy it and also blame it all on the evil other side (again, red blue, whichever it is for that person, doesnt matter), andhappily reelect the same people back into congress again.
The fiscal cliff was designed like that because it was assumed when it was passed that the two sides would agree to set aside their differences and hammer something out. Instead, it seems each side decided digging in was better.
And yes, it does hurt them indirectly because the budget custs are especially deep for the bigger spending - I think defense gets slashed a whopping $1T across the board - a lot of contracts and such in a lot of states will probably get delayed and cancelled. And a lot of those military contractors pay a lot of money to their representatives.
The big problem though is the politicians have dug in for ideological reasons (no tax increase for the rich! no cuts to social services!) and are basically unwilling to compromise at all. And yes, taxes will be going up because the tax break stimulus is also part of the fiscal cliff - it's gone.
Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.
That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.
Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.
The thing is, the chip used in the Pi was designed for media streamers (and smart TVs and such) - the things you hook onto your TV to watch stuff off the network or internal storage. As such, it actually has a remarkably powerful GPU. The only reason there's a weak ARM there is for low-cost products - they can take advantage of the ARM for their UI duties while the GPU handles the video and graphical processing (you can talk to the GPU over a high speed bus if you don't want to use the built in CPU).
And that's what people forget - the CPU is weak because it's designed for low-cost, and saving having to add a chip (and stuff like RAM, etc) means they only need a single chip that does it all. The ARM handles UI/network/USB, the GPU handles media (and the ARM is more than powerful enough for that role). The chip's a GPU-first, CPU second meant to shave $5 off the BOM for an external ARM processor.
Even iOS is actually small compared to the overall marketshare of Android. And that's because it's a single manufacturer trying to push its own OS in the days of smartphones largely dependent on their app ecosystem, etc to thrive.
And why did Android come out of nowhere to be the market leader? Because it works, and it's *free* - so it's not one company making up that 70% share, it's a dozen or more. And unlike Apple, most of the other manufacturers have a relatively tight margin and so their choice is either develop their own OS or license one. (Apple is still kicking ass because they were first, and they make a high quality, high end, high margin product with amazing marketing that will ensure them a profitable 15-20% of the market).
Two problems.
1) Depending on who you ask, either iOS or BlackBerry App World makes the most money (they apparently jockey for #1 and #2 spots in developer revenue).
2) #3 spot is apparently owned by Amazon.
So Apple is "hanging on" because developers make money from the platform, despite being only 20% (of smartphone sales - they make a killing on tablets and ipods as well, which are compatible).
The other problem is well, Android is available for dozens of manufacturers, most of which are still releasing pieces of crap runngin 2.3 (or less!).
In fact, what's happened in the smartphone world has happened before for PCs - you've got a few top-end phones, but the market is spiralling down in a race to the bottom of crappy Androids (which wouldn't surprise me are outselling even the top tier Galaxy SIII in remarkable quantities - "free" helps). And there's Apple sitting on the premium phone market, barely competing on the low end market while everyone kills each other down there. (And I don't think users of free Androids do much in the way of app spending.).
Heck, Gingerbread's been out how many years now and it's still over 50% of the Android market?
Ofr course, I will admit both Google Play and Apple App Store are full of crap and need a bit of pruning... and that devs need to learn that they need to market their apps.
Man...remember when ALL the boards were like that? Nice big boards, with big traces, everything was so damned easy to work on, its sooooo nice. Now they overpack the shit out of everything, you get even at ATX board where you think "Sure with THIS much space they won't cram" and NOPE, its cram city! Hell back in the day things started to look even slightly crammed it was daughterboard time, now you have to seriously watch 'em because the cramming makes it hell to insure that all the chips get decent airflow.
The reason you have to cram is high-speed signals. Back in the days of the Apple 1 where DRAM (Apple 1 was one of the first to use DRAM over SRAM), speeds were slow enough that signal integrity and such were plenty fast, and gate delays from buffers were negligible. (After all, the main memory bus didn't run that fast - 1-5MHz or so, which leaves quite a bit for open designs).
These days with memory running at GHz speeds and expansion busses running that fast, trace lengths become extremely important, especially matching them. If you look closely, the match traces are also rounded curves, not sharp corners (which cause signal reflections).
Spreading out the layout can often mean the bus has to run slower - not too big a problem for memory busses (slower memory is cheaper at slight cost to performance), but fixed speed buses like SATA, PCIe, USB3 and such often demand exacting impedances and trace length matching. And the clock can't be skewed too badly, either.
You can easily tell how fast stuff runs by the density of components. Northbridge, CPU and RAM are only spaced out because of heatsink requirements otherwise they'd be crammed next to each other. Slow parts are located far far away.
That's where the FBI's case is going to go. Everything I've read tells me that the FBI, their Australian exponents, and the other parties involved broke too many regs to be able to bring a real case against Megaupload. This is just one more nail in the coffin.
Even so, that's all they need to do. Even if they drop the entire case, they've shut down MegaUpload for a year and put an incredible scare on everyone else. And former MU customers have files of much less value.
Digital data loses its value quick - if you're working on the next version of something and a competitor can get your computers seized for a year, that basically puts you out of business for that year, and probably completely out of business.
Likewise, all of MU's customers have been stuck without their files. All the legit files are a year older and probably not as relevant today as it was a year ago, thus worth a lot less.
Basically all that's happening is all of the MU assets are getting rapidly devalued, and a year or two down the road, even if it's returned untouched, plenty of irreparable harm has occurred. And that's all that matters.
Then we had our student led parent teacher meeting/conference. Turns out, he doesn't do jack in class because he finds it all too boring.
You found out how to make learning interesting for your kid, and because he can't do well in what is ignorantly a boring and mediocre environment, your plan is to dumb down his learning until he can be pacified with the rest of the sheep?
Or maybe to teach his children that in life, there WILL be boring parts, and that's perfectly OK? We've basically gotten to the point where if something's not stimulating, it's not worthwhile to do, which is not only a bad attitude, it's positively dangerous as there are many boring tasks that need doing throughout life (think mundane stuff - chores, boring paperwork and stuff at work, etc., you can get away with a lot by skipping it, but eventually you'll have to pay it back).
Life is not always fun and interesting. And there's a potential fear of overstimulation (probably that combined with diet may make up a bunch of ADHD cases - if you don't achieve a level of stimulation, people's minds wander).
Sure the kid's not old enough yet to have much discipline or know about stuff like that, but sometimes boredom IS a wonderful thing that can lead to enhanced creativity.
Heck, most first time jobs will be pretty boring, repetitive and utterly dull, but it's a way to get some spending money
There propably is a technical way around this. How about an ad blocker that downloard the damn ad, but the browser just doesn't put it on the screen. Even ads requiring that they report back to the website that they are being displayed could be taken care of. Simply have the browser lie to the ad and say it it being displayed when actually it is not. Of course the browser would also have to deny the existance of the ad blocker.
Well, they could resort to using everyone's favorite tool - flash player (after all, until it was abandoned, it was the reason to get Android). Simply display content and ads in a Flash window. ABP and NoScript can't block it (Flash player bypasses though - another reason to go HTML5). Or write their web page to interact with a flash movie in order to do anything. Like say, a file locker service could require you to run the flash video in order to download files and at the same time display all the ads while you wait.
Plus, since Flash Player can easily open new windows, it'll be the return of the popup! And to get the site content, you have to run the player itself, so no ads mean no content. And the browser can't hide the window because it's required in order to read the content.
And it's the return of the Flash site! It if wasn't for iOS and Steve Jobs' refusal to put Flash on that stuff, we'd see plenty more flash these days!
She is not disrupting other children's educations nor being violent of otherwise harmful, so the public education system does not have grounds for expulsion.
Well, technically by not being "in attendance" they do, because thanks to some stupid laws (NCLB, I think?) high school funding is based on attendance. If a student is absent more than X days, the school is denied funding for that student (and it's easier ot just expel them and wipe their hands clean than anything).
Which leads to solutions like this, where they don't care if one student swipes 10 RFID cards entering a class - they just want the record to state that said student was "present" at that class for that money.
And of course, if a parent wonders where their kid is, they can always point to the RFID record, oh-you-mean-someone-else-stole-their-ID-not-our-problem.
If Apple licensed some of its unique user experience patents, Samsung argues, then Cupertino is clearly fine with competitors using that IP as long as it receives money in return Ã" and since Apple will be receiving a payout in connection with the verdict, the extra step of an injunction isn't justified."
This could be bad though, not just for Apple, but Motorola AND Samsung.
Remember, Motorola and Samsung are arguing for injunctions against iDevices for violating FRAND patents. If Samsung is indeed arguing that if you're willing to license the patents, then you can't ask for an injunction, then it blows away Motorola and Samsung's injunctions against Apple as well.
And there's an added twist - FRAND patents must be licensed to anyone and everyone who asks. Apple's patents aren't FRAND, and they can demand Samsung pay twice as much for them as HTC is paying. Or probably close to 10 times as much, given the relative marketshare of Samsung vs. HTC. Or not at all, since Apple is free to not want to license to Samsung but license to HTC and others as Apple's patents aren't FRAND and the "ND" part doesn't apply.
That money might be much better spent if you find someone in need and help them out. Keep the kids as involved as possible.
How is it any more generous to gift money to random strangers instead of your children? And how is this supposed to teach said children anything except that generosity means they don't get anything?
Really? Has it come down to tihs where people really don't give a hoot about the less fortunate? That the world consists solely of "stuff" and material goods, and that happiness is the sole sum of your toys? That one cannot feel happy from helping others be happy?
There is more to life than material goods, and being socially conscious is generally a good thing - to be more worldly and appreciate what you have, and to build community.
Hell, you don't always have to go down into the dumps to help people if you're afraid of touching "icky" - given the number of out of work Americans, I'm sure even doing something as simple of inviting a family whose breadwinner(s) have been laid off over for Thanksgiving dinner helps them feel better for themselves and helps you get to know others better.
Of course, the real lesson is not just randomly giving to charity, but to follow through with time and see how genuinely appreciative the less fortunate are when given a helping hand - even if it's just a slice of turkey and gravy on a paper plate.
With children, it's probably better to volunteer time over money so they get to see the effect it has on others.
Perhaps the natives should've just let the Pilgrims starve.
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That would probably be your resolver, since most programs use getaddrinfo() to do a DNS lookup (which returns a linked list of addrinfo structures containing the addresses (in very convenient sockaddr format, so no more pesky casting of sockaddr_in/sockaddr_in6/sockaddr_whatever to sockaddr anymore). It's protocol independent and gets you IPv6 support "for free" (getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() were created to extend gethostbyname and the like for IPv6). Of course, it doesn't help as DNS records are often returned by IPv4 only so IPv6 connectivity cannot be verified even though that DNS query returned IPv6 records.
I suppose the biggest issue I have with IPv6 is having to have the network renumbered whenever my ISP decides it's time to renumber the network (roughly annually), and since the ISP gives you your prefix, it means every host has to get a new address. Sure IPv6 gives you the ability to add more addresses (like the private address space) per host, but you lose out in the convenience of being able to ping the router and know you can get traffic through it (because you'll ping the router's private address (or worse yet, link-local) without realizing some software somewhere screwed up and either handed out bad internet-accessible DHCPv6 addresses, or a rogue device is sending bad router solicitations. So no connectivity with connectivity.
It's one of the niceties of NAT - that your inner network is isolated from the outer network so the whims of the outer network provider don't impact your inner network (or minimally - reboot the damn router).
Yes I know IPv6 is better, but I'm sure a lot of people don't really care to have end-to-end connectivity (and more will APPEAR to have it, but it doesn't work because of firewalls and such), and just want a simple box that they can plug in and replace their existing Linksys router with and not worry about a thing - router hands out DHCPv6/router solicitations, hosts configure themselves, and router NATs the inner network from the outer. If you can ping the router, you can get connectivity and not have to figure out if it's because you're using the link-local or private or the actual internet-routable address. (Try explaining that concept to your parents).
Well, given most automated car systems have a TON of sensors - including several cameras looking forward, backwards, and the sides (for complete 360 car coverage with effectively no blind spots), and radar and other sensors, recreation of the incident would be much easier because the data's there. The testimony would be minor compared to the evidence the system has purely because it needs to crunch all that data to make the "best" decision.
Of course, the decision is between running them over (which has happened with regular human drivers to pedestrians who walk and text and get killed), braking suddenly (which given autonomous vehicles probably can communicate with cars behind them who are travelling at safe distances, can stop safely as well), or swerving (which given communications systems, can also enable the car in the next lane as well to be able to react to that event as well).
Of course, if the autonomous car stops, and the human following too close behind fails and crashes, it's not the autonomous system's fault anymore (the video and sensor data would reveal said human driver was following too close and the car stopped to avoid a pedestrian).
Part of what makes autonomous vehicles safer would be the instant communications between cars - like "I'm turning" or "avoiding pedestrian!" or other messages so other cars can adjust and compensate. Hell, knowing what other drivers are doing would help human drivers a lot as well.
The most obvious would be to simply prevent payment to or from a US address or US card. After all, they're effectively a betting site, so they have to take money in for bets and be able to pay out money.
Easiest way is ot lock out people whose billing and/or payout address is in the US. Probably easiest is just refuse to send the winnings to any US address so the money's stuck there.
Yeah, I suppose one could open a Swiss bank account and do thing sthat way to get at your money... but there aren't many places that make it easy to do so without appearing in person.
Not sure about the sleeping mask, but the construction paper method at least is compatible with glasses. It's the only one reason why I never participated in the kickstarter - they had a notice that said it was not glasses compatible in its current form, but the retail version will be.
Probably very small very niche market. It sounds like a great heatsink and fan combination, but considering you can get them quite cheaply nowadays, licensing this technology doesn't appear to get you much over a traditional heatsink and fan. At least not for commodity PCs and such.
I'm sure there's a niche somewhere where people will pay $100 or $200 for it, but the PC market is not it. Heck, even the popular overclocking websites haven't done many heatsink/fan reviews as they once did with all the big names releasing new heatsinks and fans practically daily. After all, there's very little reason to do so nowadays other than kicks.
What do you currently offer for support?
If a user clicks on support, do you offer free support options like a community-based forums and/or mailing list? Knowledgebase? Wiki?
Then below it show what premium support options are. You may even have to do it on your download page, or add a big "buy support contract" button.
Does your software make any sort of note that no support is provided (but as a courtesy, there are free self-support options they could try), or the ability to buy a support contract.
Also, if it's client-server based, allow the IT guy to enter details about the support contract into the server so users have an easy way to access it. Perhaps when it comes close to running out (say 6 months), display warning message in the dialog. With a month left, have it display a popup warning that the contract will expire (with a server option to disable it once it pops up in case they don't want to renew), then auto-remove the support contract information once past expiry.
Maybe even have it in the menu item "Free support" or "Buy a support contract".
Well, let's see. Go to a site like Engadget and make sure your javascript allow settings are set to show the page comments. Now open 24 hour's worth of news postings in tabs. After about halfway through, your browser will start to lag with CPU pegged. It's not loading content off the Internet if your CPU is pegged. But it's just all the instances.
Or you can replicate it with a busy thread like one of their "post a comment to enter in a draw), where it gets around 200 comments a minute. You'll find the browser noticably slows down as the javascript is constantly running.
Repeat same with a site like Gizmodo (probably an even worse offender). I can't open more than 10 tabs at a time before the browser locks up for a few minutes at 100% CPU.
Latest firefox and Chrome. Websites just gobble up the Javascript processing. Those sites are unusable on weaker javascript engines.
The Microsoft Store sells "Premium PCs" which are regular stock PCs you can find at Best Buy etc., with one restriction - nothing other than Windows and essential utilities (to make recovery discs and manage stuff like special keys and functions) are allowed to be installed. No trial software (I don't think even Microsoft Office Trial is allowed). It's basically Windows + drivers.
Heck, someone should send this journalist a Mac that's been bootcamped - nothing installed but Windows and the Apple support drivers (which... manage the clock (MacOS/Linux use UTC on the RTC, while Windows puts local time on the RTC - if you swap OSes, having to change the clock will be annoying), startup options (boot Mac or Windows?), keyboard and a few other things). He's probably argue that's crapware as well (what, people should hold down keys to boot?).
The problem is even airgapped networks can be broken into. See stuxnet and flame - they exploited several machanisms to install themselves onto airgapped networks. It also went to show that even airgaps can be broken into if you don't need much in the way of return information - you just need to get onto the network, and not send data back out. Heck, the USAF had their UAV computers infected with a virus.
The weakest part of an airgapped network is the maintenance thereof - add some new PLCs to the network? Well, they have to be configured to work with everything else, so someone has to plug something into it to configure it. And that something is unknown - it could be a technician's laptop, it could be a thumb drive, etc.
The thing is, an airgapped network has to be maintained, and it's really hard to do so without at some point having to plug something in-between the gap. (For Stuxnet, it was a software update or other thing, for the USAF, it was... map updates). And at some point, data has to be transported across
Heck, even the thumbdrive isn't invulnerable - it could for example be infected during manufacturing.
In the end, all networks are interconnected. Some less so than others, but eventually they will have to be in some shap or form.
If you believe the hype, yes.
Because a sale of a fake jersey funnels money into terroristist organizations who sell the stuff to raise cash to do more attacks on America.
Counterfeit goods have traditionally been a way for gangs and mobsters to raise money for their operations in the past, and modern era fundraising for terrorist organizations also involves the same.
Or a smart one.
Think about it for a few moments. AMD's in serious trouble. Without help, they run the real risk of going bankrupt. And without AMD, Intel's the "last one left" (other than minor bit players like Via and NatSemi). Which means the EU and US government will be seriously looking at Intel for possible anti-trust. And they've been found guilty before. Last thing Intel would want is to be forced to make several decisions to avoid issues like opening up the spec of their processors and such to compeitors, and forced licensing of patents to everyone and everyone (they aren't FRAND yet).
Plus having to ensure that every move they make won't be found to be anti-trust (think the compiler fiasco - they may be forced to ensure that everyone who makes a compatible chip gets the optimizations). As well, any business decisions they make will get scrutinized - if they want to acquire a company for some technology, for example.
By forcing the enthusiasts (who make up a tiny percent of the market) to AMD, it gives AMD the much needed injection they need, without giving up much of the market (Intel's sales to Dell, HP, Apple, etc. are far greater).
Desktop PCs aren't dying, but they're not exactly being replaced in huge quantities - even laptop sales are affected by smartphones and tablets. Businesses will buy desktop PCs (though they're increasingly buying laptops), but they're never upgraded so Intel is fine with that. The other buyer of desktops would be enthusiasts, who are likely to pay more and buy top tier stuff. And even then AMD isn't getting a lot - the high end AMD processors are always in short supply.
And hell, by giving AMD the entusiast market, they can point to all the negative Intel sentiment saying "these people have vowed not to buy Intel and they're buying our competitor's products, so we're not a monopoly".
Of course, the practical reason is sockets suck - impedance matching problems, bad connections (your PC depends on the working of nearly 1200 pieces of metal pressing against 1200 other pieces of metal. If one of those is slightly oxidized or doesn't exert enough pressure, your PC can crash), and plenty more other things. Solder joints are far more reliable.
Only if said patents are FRAND. At which point they MUST. But for non-FRAND patents, they don't have to.
If they aren't, then it's perfectly fine for Apple to not license to Samsung at all - because the "ND" part doesn't apply. Hell, the "F" part doesn't have to apply as well.
And Samsung has stated clearly they are NOT willing to form any sort of agreement.
Heck, Microsoft has licensed patents with Apple (cross-licensed). Apple doesn't have to charge HTC the same rates that Microsoft is paying.
For the FRAND patents, Microsoft and Apple are arguing the rates specified by Samsung and Motorola are unfair. Unfortunately, the big issue there is no one really said what fair was as a lot of the rates include cross-licensing. And Samsung wants injunctions because Apple's violating their FRAND patents, while Samsung's arguing that since Apple licensed patents to HTC, Apple cannot force an injunction on Samsung products (the problem being that Samsung is, by FRAND forced to license, so they can't argue that they deserve an injunction for licensable patents while Apple doesn't for other potentially licensable patents).
Of course, the business case may be that it's very helpful to license it because if HTC is paying, and Samsung is paying, so should LG, Motorola/Google, ZTE and everyone else (who may include Amazon and B&N).
Well, today it won't, but it can certain stem the growth of online shopping.
Take Canada, for example. Online shopping hasn't grown as fast, nor is it as prevalent as in the US. In fact, many B&M retailers often have more stuff in the retail stores because increasingly larger numbers of people still visit the store.
It doesn't help that "free shipping" didn't come until recently, so the fact you had to pay tax AND shipping meant that the prices were often equivalent to retail, so you might as well just buy it locally and get the benefit of immediate satisfaction and cheaper returns.
Hell, even Amazon.ca isn't that great - the discounts are awful and you can find stuff cheaper at a B&M than Amazon. Quite commonly, too.
Hell, the retailers are the ones trying ot push online shopping.
Well, people do latch onto them because they're big and famous. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are the two biggest and well known examples. And there are probably dozens of others as well in tech, and thousands if you include other fields.
Problem is, the population of the western world is in the hundreds of millions. For every Gates or Zuckerberg, there's thousands more who don't succeed, but no one thinks about them. It's like winning the lottery - you have to be really, really, really lucky to be in the right place at the right time.
And just like the lottery, it's a very compelling myth to hang on to. Tech may be more prone to it as it's seen as "anticonformist" and such, plus that a lot of people in tech can ignore the "soft skills" that make the world go around - just be the grungy dingy smelly geek who sits in front of the screen 24/7 who only speaks in jargon and RTFM's people who dare come up to them and you'll still be successful.
Hell, you see it in the app stores - people assume they put it up, they'll make money, screw sales and marketing - that's old school.
The fiscal cliff was designed like that because it was assumed when it was passed that the two sides would agree to set aside their differences and hammer something out. Instead, it seems each side decided digging in was better.
And yes, it does hurt them indirectly because the budget custs are especially deep for the bigger spending - I think defense gets slashed a whopping $1T across the board - a lot of contracts and such in a lot of states will probably get delayed and cancelled. And a lot of those military contractors pay a lot of money to their representatives.
The big problem though is the politicians have dug in for ideological reasons (no tax increase for the rich! no cuts to social services!) and are basically unwilling to compromise at all. And yes, taxes will be going up because the tax break stimulus is also part of the fiscal cliff - it's gone.
The thing is, the chip used in the Pi was designed for media streamers (and smart TVs and such) - the things you hook onto your TV to watch stuff off the network or internal storage. As such, it actually has a remarkably powerful GPU. The only reason there's a weak ARM there is for low-cost products - they can take advantage of the ARM for their UI duties while the GPU handles the video and graphical processing (you can talk to the GPU over a high speed bus if you don't want to use the built in CPU).
And that's what people forget - the CPU is weak because it's designed for low-cost, and saving having to add a chip (and stuff like RAM, etc) means they only need a single chip that does it all. The ARM handles UI/network/USB, the GPU handles media (and the ARM is more than powerful enough for that role). The chip's a GPU-first, CPU second meant to shave $5 off the BOM for an external ARM processor.
Two problems.
1) Depending on who you ask, either iOS or BlackBerry App World makes the most money (they apparently jockey for #1 and #2 spots in developer revenue).
2) #3 spot is apparently owned by Amazon.
So Apple is "hanging on" because developers make money from the platform, despite being only 20% (of smartphone sales - they make a killing on tablets and ipods as well, which are compatible).
The other problem is well, Android is available for dozens of manufacturers, most of which are still releasing pieces of crap runngin 2.3 (or less!).
In fact, what's happened in the smartphone world has happened before for PCs - you've got a few top-end phones, but the market is spiralling down in a race to the bottom of crappy Androids (which wouldn't surprise me are outselling even the top tier Galaxy SIII in remarkable quantities - "free" helps). And there's Apple sitting on the premium phone market, barely competing on the low end market while everyone kills each other down there. (And I don't think users of free Androids do much in the way of app spending.).
Heck, Gingerbread's been out how many years now and it's still over 50% of the Android market?
Ofr course, I will admit both Google Play and Apple App Store are full of crap and need a bit of pruning... and that devs need to learn that they need to market their apps.
The reason you have to cram is high-speed signals. Back in the days of the Apple 1 where DRAM (Apple 1 was one of the first to use DRAM over SRAM), speeds were slow enough that signal integrity and such were plenty fast, and gate delays from buffers were negligible. (After all, the main memory bus didn't run that fast - 1-5MHz or so, which leaves quite a bit for open designs).
These days with memory running at GHz speeds and expansion busses running that fast, trace lengths become extremely important, especially matching them. If you look closely, the match traces are also rounded curves, not sharp corners (which cause signal reflections).
Spreading out the layout can often mean the bus has to run slower - not too big a problem for memory busses (slower memory is cheaper at slight cost to performance), but fixed speed buses like SATA, PCIe, USB3 and such often demand exacting impedances and trace length matching. And the clock can't be skewed too badly, either.
You can easily tell how fast stuff runs by the density of components. Northbridge, CPU and RAM are only spaced out because of heatsink requirements otherwise they'd be crammed next to each other. Slow parts are located far far away.
Even so, that's all they need to do. Even if they drop the entire case, they've shut down MegaUpload for a year and put an incredible scare on everyone else. And former MU customers have files of much less value.
Digital data loses its value quick - if you're working on the next version of something and a competitor can get your computers seized for a year, that basically puts you out of business for that year, and probably completely out of business.
Likewise, all of MU's customers have been stuck without their files. All the legit files are a year older and probably not as relevant today as it was a year ago, thus worth a lot less.
Basically all that's happening is all of the MU assets are getting rapidly devalued, and a year or two down the road, even if it's returned untouched, plenty of irreparable harm has occurred. And that's all that matters.
Or maybe to teach his children that in life, there WILL be boring parts, and that's perfectly OK? We've basically gotten to the point where if something's not stimulating, it's not worthwhile to do, which is not only a bad attitude, it's positively dangerous as there are many boring tasks that need doing throughout life (think mundane stuff - chores, boring paperwork and stuff at work, etc., you can get away with a lot by skipping it, but eventually you'll have to pay it back).
Life is not always fun and interesting. And there's a potential fear of overstimulation (probably that combined with diet may make up a bunch of ADHD cases - if you don't achieve a level of stimulation, people's minds wander).
Sure the kid's not old enough yet to have much discipline or know about stuff like that, but sometimes boredom IS a wonderful thing that can lead to enhanced creativity.
Heck, most first time jobs will be pretty boring, repetitive and utterly dull, but it's a way to get some spending money
Well, they could resort to using everyone's favorite tool - flash player (after all, until it was abandoned, it was the reason to get Android). Simply display content and ads in a Flash window. ABP and NoScript can't block it (Flash player bypasses though - another reason to go HTML5). Or write their web page to interact with a flash movie in order to do anything. Like say, a file locker service could require you to run the flash video in order to download files and at the same time display all the ads while you wait.
Plus, since Flash Player can easily open new windows, it'll be the return of the popup! And to get the site content, you have to run the player itself, so no ads mean no content. And the browser can't hide the window because it's required in order to read the content.
And it's the return of the Flash site! It if wasn't for iOS and Steve Jobs' refusal to put Flash on that stuff, we'd see plenty more flash these days!
Well, technically by not being "in attendance" they do, because thanks to some stupid laws (NCLB, I think?) high school funding is based on attendance. If a student is absent more than X days, the school is denied funding for that student (and it's easier ot just expel them and wipe their hands clean than anything).
Which leads to solutions like this, where they don't care if one student swipes 10 RFID cards entering a class - they just want the record to state that said student was "present" at that class for that money.
And of course, if a parent wonders where their kid is, they can always point to the RFID record, oh-you-mean-someone-else-stole-their-ID-not-our-problem.
This could be bad though, not just for Apple, but Motorola AND Samsung.
Remember, Motorola and Samsung are arguing for injunctions against iDevices for violating FRAND patents. If Samsung is indeed arguing that if you're willing to license the patents, then you can't ask for an injunction, then it blows away Motorola and Samsung's injunctions against Apple as well.
And there's an added twist - FRAND patents must be licensed to anyone and everyone who asks. Apple's patents aren't FRAND, and they can demand Samsung pay twice as much for them as HTC is paying. Or probably close to 10 times as much, given the relative marketshare of Samsung vs. HTC. Or not at all, since Apple is free to not want to license to Samsung but license to HTC and others as Apple's patents aren't FRAND and the "ND" part doesn't apply.
Really? Has it come down to tihs where people really don't give a hoot about the less fortunate? That the world consists solely of "stuff" and material goods, and that happiness is the sole sum of your toys? That one cannot feel happy from helping others be happy?
There is more to life than material goods, and being socially conscious is generally a good thing - to be more worldly and appreciate what you have, and to build community.
Hell, you don't always have to go down into the dumps to help people if you're afraid of touching "icky" - given the number of out of work Americans, I'm sure even doing something as simple of inviting a family whose breadwinner(s) have been laid off over for Thanksgiving dinner helps them feel better for themselves and helps you get to know others better.
Of course, the real lesson is not just randomly giving to charity, but to follow through with time and see how genuinely appreciative the less fortunate are when given a helping hand - even if it's just a slice of turkey and gravy on a paper plate.
With children, it's probably better to volunteer time over money so they get to see the effect it has on others.
Perhaps the natives should've just let the Pilgrims starve.