I used to work for a public university; when I started there, our passwords were auto-generated random strings of 8-12 alphanumerics and symbols, and we received new passwords every fiscal quarter. Our security team would run various password cracking apps on the systems, and only once did an auto-generated password get cracked.
Two years after I started there, they changed the password policy - users had to make up their own passwords. Still minimum 8 characters, at least 1 capitalized letter, 1 lower case letter, and 1 number, still changes every quarter.
With a faculty of about 150 users, we cracked approximately half of the user-defined passwords within 5 minutes of firing up JtR. My personal favorite was cracked in less than half a second:
Dolphin1
My experience is, it's less about how often the passwords change, and more an issue of users not having a good sense of what it takes to secure their data.
Or there's a mismatch between IT's perception of security with the user's. What did the password to your accounts control? If it was just access to a PC in the lab, most users would just go "meh" as they have their own PCs. And if it had any data, it would be schoolwork, work not regarded as super-secret.
OTOH, if it actually was important to them, say, it held the meal plan credit or something, they'd pick more secure passwords (if someone breaks in, I could starve).
Ditto grades and transcript - for a lot of people,they don't care if a determined hacker sees their grades - big whoop.
You'll find the same thing applies to corporate users as well - they feel the stuff they do isn't as important as the company makes it out to be, and thus end up going "why bother - what can a hacker do with my data?".
One of IT's jobs is to stress how important the data is, and why. The HR person may not care about the data (it's not THEIR data), but they should because all the employee information is in there. What IT needs to stress is that aspect - that so few people have access to that information, should it get out, suspicion would fall on them
2) Another way is to telnet (FREAKING telnet in 2012?) into the device and the MAC is in the MOTD. This means you're already dead because you've lost all network security. What kind of madman allows telnet traffic thru a firewall in 2012? What kind of a madman allows unrestricted internet access to an embedded control device?
From TFA - the MAC is displayed in the MOTD.
As for telnet - you don't need telnet through the firewall. You just need something on the other side of the firewall, like say, an infected computer. Which is good because most IDS's won't track traffic on the internal link (they can't unless they monitor the enitre network).
And having an owned PC on the network is easier if you don't need root priviledges. For this hack, you only need the same level of access that a secretary has - telnet is easily done with socket calls that don't require priviledges after all. If you need admin/root, it's a lot harder, but just getting someone to run a random file - much easier. Heck, I'm sure with a bit of careful crafting, you might even be able to do it with Javascript on a web page and faking same-origin using DNS tricks.
If a game is going to use my GPU to mine bitcoins for the other end, they should have to tell me. Because otherwise they're just taking money from me and having my electric utility do the billing for them.
Note that anyone who is on a pay-per-bandwidth internet plan is in the same boat with ad-supported software. You are paying the maker of the software, just your ISP is doing the billing for them.
I don't see that happening. I mean, if I write a game so inefficiently that it takes 100% CPU when I only really need 5%, if it's a good game, would you still play it? Ditto GPU, as well (and there are several games in the App Store that run *TERRIBLE* despite actually having very simple graphics).
How do you bill for that?
As for making money for the developer, they'll just claim "it makes you pay less for you game, so you win because we could've made it more expensive".
It's stupid, but really, how do you tell? Other than some blain-dead "bitcoin-miner.exe" process suddenly showing up in the task manager...
The initial lineup of Linux games will primarily be Valve's own recent titles, as well as whatever indie games already have Linux versions. Roughly one in four titles I own are Mac-compatible (fifty or so out of two hundred); I would anticipate seeing less than that for Linux, perhaps one in eight.
* For some reason, Valve's only ported Half-Life 2 and later to Mac, and I would expect the same on Linux. So no Half-Life 1 (there *is* Half-Life: Source, the port to the HL2 engine), no Opposing Force, no Counter-Strike 1.6, no Ricochet.
That's easy. The Mac version only has games for Mac - the indie devs who do a Mac port, the AAA games with a Mac port, etc. For Valve, anything that uess the Source engine (ported to Mac) automatically has a Mac port.
Half-Life 1 was done with a modified Quake engine. Half-Life 2 was done with Source, and Source is cross-platform. So not unusual at all.
Linux support will be the same - anything that supports Source (HL2+, including HL:S), plus whatever devs do a specific Linux port. There's no magic in Steam that magically makes games work cross platform, after all.
1) Would DRM stop people from doing this? Highly unlikely.
I admit I pirate books. BUT, I buy them in deadtree format first - that way I have a nice looking collection, a backup should poewr go out and batteries die (or if I want to get away from it all), the author gets paid, and DRM-free. Win-win.
Of course, my favorite publisher is Baen, who includes ebook copies of the books, but more books, and then encourages you to share them.
Those hundreds of thousands of $0.99 e-books on Amazon can't possibly exist.
Most are books being mass-spammed like private-works-reserved, or literal ebook version of Wikipedia pages, etc. Heck, there were some books that scammed off popular titles (say like a book entitled "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Thingamajig" by Steve Lawson). The 99 cent area is a mess.
A car update might have required a recall, but such problems were infrequent. Going forward, it seems they are going to be very frequent.
Reason being, the thinking will be "it's just software". Hardware gets tested till it works. Software gets tested (if at all) till it's time to ship.
Since "it's only software," it can always be updated. So there's not real discipline to get it right the first time.
Car updates require work on the dealer side paid for by the manufacturer, so they have a vested interest in keeping it stable (every warranty issue, including recalls, eat into the profits of the cars). So there's a vested interest in not having to do the updates. And aside from the Toyota one (which didn't really do much since it was fat-footwork to be the cause, but since the cars were going back anyways...).
Anyhow, I thought the open-source mantra was "release early, release often". We're just seeing the effects of it applied throughout since more and more stuff is software controlled.
And yes, we're better for it. Cars with electronic fuel injection are pretty much "twist and go" - you don't worry about chokes, flooding, or temperments (as long as the car is in reasonable mechanical shape). The computer does everything to ensure reliability. It doesn't matter that it's -20C or +35C. You get in, insert key, twist, engine runs and car is ready to go after a brief warmup. Doing the same in an old carburetted model tended to involve a lot more work - from choking in cold days to vapor lock on the hot.
Anyhow, the notion of having to do frequent updates is a recent one - I mean, EFI cars were standard by the 90s (20 years ago), and there were much fewer software updates required back then.
Perhaps the ease at which stuff can be updated, and the ease to which we're notified about updates is part of the cause. "Release early, release often" wouldn't work too well if one had to keep downloading over long-distance phones or floppy disks/CDs in the mail (by the time you got it, you were 3 releases out of date...).
If the code never can run on Mac OS X, how can Mac OS X be infected? To Mac OS X, it'd just be a useless file full of some kind of data.
The same way lots of people are infected with some very potent diseases. It's just they're immune to it, so they're really just carriers of the disease. Heck, isn't something like chickenpox able to hide for decades in people only to infect those who haven't had it yet?
Heck, I'd be the rates of Linux infection are the same - Linux is immune to practically all malware, but it certainly can be a carrier of them. Heck, if you think about it, Linux may cause the spread of it (via Linux-based email servers)
I can understand someone doing something stupid like deciding to forego certain medications (in this case Metformin, Insulin, whatever) in favor of some holistic thing, but skipping surgery based on what some random dude on a blog says? C'mon, you're flirting with argumentum ad absurdum there.
Um, I'm sure the late Steve Jobs has admitted to trying to practice holistic medicine in an attempt to cure his cancer, which delayed actual surgery so by the time he had it, it was too late.
Now, it may not be a random blog that advocated that, but I'd say that if Jobs wasn't willing to get cancer surgery for years, then it's not an absurd thought at all.
Hell, people believe in creationism/intelligent design/"scientific controversy", Obama wasn't born in the US (still), Obama is a Muslim, etc. Even idiotic blog posts from a no-name, as long as they confirm our beliefs, will have a higher "pull" than respected articles that contradict our beliefs.
It can help show trends though. I wouldn't put much stock in C and C++ recovering ether given the numbers. More likely Java has continued to take serious blows to its user base. Java mostly resembles C and C++ code so the fleeing away from Java is what I would attribute the increase in C and C++ coders. The market is basically ripe to have Java cut out of the market. Which is unfortunate, but I understand. Ever since Oracle put its doom cloud up I've had doubts about continuing projects in Java and have been flirting with other languages to see if something else could replace it for my personal uses. Otherwise I'm left with.net since that's what my work likes.
I'd say Java isn't doomed. Neither is C/C++.
Because while Android doesn't run Java, it's programmed in Java. And iOS' Objective-C interfaces nicely with C/C++. Hell, if you're writing an Android/iOS cross platform app, you'd do a lot of the backend in C/C++ and the front end in Obj-C/Java.
I believe the rise of those languages is due to the popularity of mobile platforms. C# probably holds its own based on traditional computing (Windows Phone not being a significant factor).
Or some old media is adapting. Newspapers, for example, publish daily or less so have no need to break a story out nanoseconds after it happened.
The extra time can be used to properly research things out and try to get more than one side of a story (in an attempt to publish first, the other side's story if often forgotten because it would mean publishing seconds later. Quel horreur!).
Or to report on things that don't make for quick soundbites or appear to matter. Or to which news changes so frequently (think war) that being bombarded with constant updates. I'm sure someone knows someone whos' experience sharing overload - their facebook/g+/twitter feed overflows with everything that happens on a second-by-second basis, and how they wish they just got a summary or overview (hey, like a newspaper!).
"That person would have found nothing odd at all about receiving the note."
Let's hope that many people used 'reply all' to vent their anger.
I've wondered how many mistakes have been made - I mean, practically every company has some sort of mailing list that goes out to employees - usually one for the entire company, another for each regional area and like. And since everyone gets them, the outlook contact list starts getting populated with them to be auto-completed.
So all you need is some joker with a name very close to it so the mailing list gets autocompleted first, and every email destined to him gets sent to everyone by force of habit... and it'll happen purely because no one realizes they send it to the wrong person or in this case, wrong persons.
I know I've mis-sent email to people with similar names, surely someone's mis-sent emails intended for one persont oa whole group, just because the group gets autocompleted/auto-suggested first...
So, Intel, a company with no real competition right now in the market, has produced a product that offers only a very slight performance boost, and relied on tons of marketing to drum up anticipation for this mediocre offering. And then priced it the same as existing offerings as an apology to those who waited. Actually, that sounds about par for the course these days. The only real news in cpus and motherboards has been that they've gone multicore and continue to increase bandwidth. And now that they can't squeeze any more performance out of the designs, they're working on decreasing energy consumption.
Or... perhaps it's a way for AMD to catch up.
Remember, Intel NEEDS AMD. Not to keep them honest, but to keep the government off their backs. They saw what happened to Microsoft, and they know that if AMD dies, they'll be put under a heavy-handed microscope and who knows what other conditions. Maybe even split up. They've been found guilty of many things before that has hurt AMD, so who knows what'll happen after AMD's demise.
AMD's in a precarious state - so Intel's only choice really is to hold back anything that might hurt AMD (even rightfully so) just to avoid government intervention.
Heck, the more people that see Ivy Bridge as a flop, maybe it's to compensate for Bulldozer. (And there's probably plans on how to rescue AMD should they get in real trouble - even if it involves buying up entire production runs through a fake computer company and burying the chips).
4a. Uninstall Java. 4b: If you must run Java, switch to a platform where java is controlled and updated by the first party, Oracle and not a third party, Apple to ensure you have the best security possible.
Basically, you mean upgrade your Mac.
OS X has stopped shipping Java for a little while now - I think Leopard was the last version to come with it by default, but later versions excluded it (like Flash). The main reason was to avoid reinstalls installing vulnerable versions again (Flash, notably). But for Java it was basically the end of a deprecation of the Java API as a first-class environment on OS X.
Now all updates are done through Oracle w.r.t. Java.
If nothing else, you'd learn that half a million users can be awfully demanding. You might find yourself mired in support requests, and have to decide whether or not you can support it yourself or if you want to sell it to a game company so they can manage it. If nothing else, you might be surprised when you discover you have to pay taxes on a whole lot more income than you thought. The point is that at some financial threshold, you will probably have to take it seriously. My threshold might be higher or lower than yours, but in this simulation, it doesn't really matter. It would change your personal view of profiting from your work.
Do remember that the Apple consoles (really, that's what they are, albeit touch-controlled, portable and small) don't have many variation out there. The iPod Touch has 4 different models, iPhone has 5, and iPad has 3. If you get rid of unsupported models (e.g., demanding latest OS, which doesn't actually limit your market too much - iOS users tend to upgrade pretty quickly), that number decreases quite substantially.
Compare this to Android where you get driver issues and old versions (it's been 6 months now - where are all the ICS running phones right now? Not upgrades, I mean comes-with-ICS?).
That's a support nightmare - half a million users with probably nearly 100 different Androids between them all (device/ROM/etc) versus maybe 6 or 7 or so iOS devices that are "current".
And unlike Android, iOS tends to be very monoculture - a reboot cleans things up, and iOS limited multitasking means there's no funny business messing you up (unless you jailbreak, but you can ignore those).
Maybe not agreements, but I'm sure many of the bigger companies keep a very close eye on the health of their smaller competitors.
I'm sure that Intel, for example, has many "AMD rescue" plans hidden in the upper eschelons of the company. Not really an agreement between Intel and AMD, but meant to maintain AMD as a viable company. After all, AMD keeps government regulators off Intel's back. If it means spending some money buying up loads of AMD chips and burying them, it's still far more desirable than having the government sniffing about.
I'm sure many competitors are also in similar positions - Microsoft and Apple, Google and Apple, etc.Hell, Google and Apple seem to have a far chummier relationship than appears - I mean, does Apple's iAds compare at all to AdMob (the largest mobile ad network)? Yet iAds allowed Google to purchase AdMob. I'd be willing to bet there would be some secret agreements there.
The proportion of open source projects using the GPL, LGPL and AGPL is declining, not the absolute number of projects.
I can believe it actually. Since the GPLv3 has come out, I've seen companies actually institute open-source policies that usually involve reviews of license by the legal department.
And one of them I worked with has explicitly forbade use of GPLv3 software. Basically, if it's GPLv3, it's not allowed at all, and don't even try to get approval for it (this includes purely internal use as well). Be interesting to see about GCC. All the others still require approval - even permissive onesl ike BSD and MIT.
Heck, it's probably the big reason for the move to Clang/llvm from GCC by more than a few vendors.
An interesting thing would be to separate GPLv2 from GPLv3 and see the proportional changes there. After all, GPLv2 is still a legal license to use (and can exclude code from being incorporated in GPLv3 by making it v2-only - v2 and v3 are incompatible)
You'll notice that "auditing every bit of software (you) install" is ridiculously easy. The installer tells you what rights the app needs when you install it. It's pretty easy to determine that a game does not need to capture your keystrokes, and if a cool tool to change the wall paper needs "access to your Google account" then there's obviously something odd going on.
FAIL.
That's an awful security measure, actually. For geeks, it might be OK, but it's as useful as the UAC dialog on Windows.
This is known as Dancing Pigs (or bunnies) - given a choice between dancing pigs and security, they'll choose dancing pigs a vast majority of the time.
On Android, people keep saying "third party market, meh" without analyzing WHY people use third party markets (hint: pirated apps). That laundry list of permissions? I just want the app dammit. (See: a user's PC infested with malware - probably from installing all those "codecs" to view their pr0n videos.).
By comparison, as I understand it, I only have Apple's (and a developer's) word that a particular tool for iOS doesn't contain malware. I'm not going to be told what parts of the system it needs to access, I just get a straight "Do you want the advertised features or not?" choice.
The flaw here is on Apple's side. Both systems require you audit the apps you install. Only Android actually lets you do that.
On Apple's side, they have a developer's billing account and address - a developer writing malware has his name and address attached to the app. At worst, the address information is a year old (because they have to renew after a year). Just knowing that Apple can trace you down already cuts out a lot of malware. (It's the basis of the "verified developer ID" thing in the next OS X).
As for apps like Path, are they malware? I mean, your Facebook app probably does the same thing, so how do you know it didn't take all your info? Hell, on Android, you can have pre-installed apps - see Carrier IQ.
Also - even on Android, knowing a social network app can access contacts and the internet - it doesn't mean a single thing since most people expect that for social networking.
So yeah, you can tell with Android what resources an app uses. But I can also bet that most users not only don't know what these resources do, but more importantly, no one knows why. And given that there are fake apps in there, it can be hard to tell if the legit app is the one requesting the resources or the fake one.
The US is just better at it. Harper controls everything, even information about falling snow. In theUS they know that you can let the scientists talk about snow. But not WMDs.
Harper is basically a climate change denier in a position of power. If snow studies indicate climate change, he'll have to suppress that sort of information. It's why he's cut budgets on Environment Canada, muzzled all government scientists (all requests to speak with one must go through a political officer first). Heck, there was one investigating some virus on salmon, and people were denied requests to talk to the scientist involved (it was interesting).
He's basically trying to sell off all the oil he can as quickly as possible - why, I don't know. The price of oil isn't going down, so it seems silly to sell so much now when selling it later can command much more money. (We aren't going to give up our oil habit that easily, but we'll transition to other fuels for our cars. And oil will become a hard to get speciality fuel - people want their old-timey muscle cars and the like).
Hell, he wants to ship Canada's oil to Asia. Why not keep it here, refine it here, and then make our gas prices cheap? Gas's $1.40 a litre (roughly $5.50/gal). And you want to sell our oil that could be made into gas locally to lower gas prices?
Hell, why not ship it eastward to the eastern refineries?
I will however agree on books. Publishers aren't going all crazy-talk about how used book stores are ruining the industry and a reason to sell the first-day hardcovers for double the price they should be.
That's because book publishers operate differently. Most books barely sell more than 1000 copies, so publishers already only do one print run and leave it to first-day sales. They make it up in volume though, as they can easily run through many books' entire printings in a day.
For a book - the day 1 sales are it. Used books aren't a problem because after they're all gone or returned, it's the only way to get the book.
Very few books end up on bestseller lists that demand multiple printings. It's even rarer to have new printings occur before the year is up (if you look at the numbers on the book - the ones that run back and forth - it identifies the printing and the year of it).
And there are so many books published yearly that the industry really doesn't care - the number of new unique titles published yearly is probably well into the 7 digits worldwide.
Couple with ebooks (which have no used sales), and book publishers are in a good spot. The only thing they complain about are pricing of ebooks (at least in the wholesale model).
I hope that Google plays hardball, and simply blacks out Youtube for Germany. The resulting user outcry would then be turned against Gema.
You don't have to go that far. Since they're only concerned about MUSIC, all Google has to do is give German viewers a different audio track. Maybe saying something like (in German and English):
"The audio for this video has been filtered by request of Gema, who may be contacted at <address (street, phone number, email)>."
Have it repeat the entire video length (in both languages). I'd say replacing the audio portion of the video with that message is an efficient filter. YouTube still serves up the video and blames Gema for the mess.
30 minutes isn't a big deal at an individual level, but when it takes *everyone* an order of magnitude longer to fill up, things don't scale too well anymore. Service centers and gas stations are basically designed around a certain throughput, and either they have to be drastically altered to allow for more cars being refuelled for longer periods of time or you face a many hour lineup to get your 30 minutes "on the plug".
Most people don't fill up every day - people usually can get 2-3 days or more worth of commute in before they have to fill up (ymmv, of course).
You're making the assumption that people "fill up" when necessary, when for the vast majority of cars, they're parked in only a few spots for significant periods of time. E.g., at home - plug car in when you get home and leave it charging until you leave in the morning. At work you can do the same as well - drive up, plug in, go to work. Forget to charge? no biggie (at 500km).
Going to the mall? Well, at 500km, just park it.
It's like people who demand that their cellphones get 14 day standby battery life - maybe if they're travelling I can see a possible need (in case you can't toss in a charger), but that's stretching it. Most people put down their phones and go to sleep, at which point it's a perfect time to charge the phone battery so it's full for the next day. (I can understand some frustration over the latest phones not making it through the day, however).
The long-distance drive family vacation and extended period away from power are exceptions to most driving and cellphone use. Hell, gas powered cars aren't going away anytime soon, and I'd expect there will still be rental places that can rent you a gas car for that long driving trip instead of packing it all in the family electric car.
Why comply? What would the US do, deny entrance to all EU citizens?
Anyone care to explain this?
The US is denying access to its airspace including the portions over the water. Which means flights have to go around.
If you're banned from the US it's tricky as going from Canada to Mexico would be impossible (the US considers overflights to be "in" the US and they will deny you boarding).
For those who are not aware, AFACT stands for 'Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft' yet most of the companies behind AFACT are American. It would be better named American Federation Against Copyright Theft.
I am not a lawyer, but I am surprised that no one has challenged the name of this business.. for example with the intent to force them to change it from 'Australian' to 'American' as right now they could well be deemed to be passing off in a deliberate attempt to deceive the public - which would be classified as a type of fraud.
Same in Canada. The Canadian equivalent of the RIAA is called CRIA - Canadian Recording Industry Association. However, all the Canadian labels left over fundamental disagreements on stuff like downloading... except the American labels. (And I'm using American as the traditional meaning of someone from the USA).
Even the big Canadian labels disagreed with lawsuits.
Other thing... white on black is hard on the eyes because of "black creep". If you're a typesetter, you know this - if you have light text on dark background, you have to increase the siez of the text in order to keep its apparent size the same. Also, thin fonts sink, so you may have to apply bolding to "fatten" them so they're still legible when the black background slims them down.
Slashdot Mirror
Or there's a mismatch between IT's perception of security with the user's. What did the password to your accounts control? If it was just access to a PC in the lab, most users would just go "meh" as they have their own PCs. And if it had any data, it would be schoolwork, work not regarded as super-secret.
OTOH, if it actually was important to them, say, it held the meal plan credit or something, they'd pick more secure passwords (if someone breaks in, I could starve).
Ditto grades and transcript - for a lot of people ,they don't care if a determined hacker sees their grades - big whoop.
You'll find the same thing applies to corporate users as well - they feel the stuff they do isn't as important as the company makes it out to be, and thus end up going "why bother - what can a hacker do with my data?".
One of IT's jobs is to stress how important the data is, and why. The HR person may not care about the data (it's not THEIR data), but they should because all the employee information is in there. What IT needs to stress is that aspect - that so few people have access to that information, should it get out, suspicion would fall on them
From TFA - the MAC is displayed in the MOTD.
As for telnet - you don't need telnet through the firewall. You just need something on the other side of the firewall, like say, an infected computer. Which is good because most IDS's won't track traffic on the internal link (they can't unless they monitor the enitre network).
And having an owned PC on the network is easier if you don't need root priviledges. For this hack, you only need the same level of access that a secretary has - telnet is easily done with socket calls that don't require priviledges after all. If you need admin/root, it's a lot harder, but just getting someone to run a random file - much easier. Heck, I'm sure with a bit of careful crafting, you might even be able to do it with Javascript on a web page and faking same-origin using DNS tricks.
I don't see that happening. I mean, if I write a game so inefficiently that it takes 100% CPU when I only really need 5%, if it's a good game, would you still play it? Ditto GPU, as well (and there are several games in the App Store that run *TERRIBLE* despite actually having very simple graphics).
How do you bill for that?
As for making money for the developer, they'll just claim "it makes you pay less for you game, so you win because we could've made it more expensive".
It's stupid, but really, how do you tell? Other than some blain-dead "bitcoin-miner.exe" process suddenly showing up in the task manager...
That's easy. The Mac version only has games for Mac - the indie devs who do a Mac port, the AAA games with a Mac port, etc. For Valve, anything that uess the Source engine (ported to Mac) automatically has a Mac port.
Half-Life 1 was done with a modified Quake engine. Half-Life 2 was done with Source, and Source is cross-platform. So not unusual at all.
Linux support will be the same - anything that supports Source (HL2+, including HL:S), plus whatever devs do a specific Linux port. There's no magic in Steam that magically makes games work cross platform, after all.
I admit I pirate books. BUT, I buy them in deadtree format first - that way I have a nice looking collection, a backup should poewr go out and batteries die (or if I want to get away from it all), the author gets paid, and DRM-free. Win-win.
Of course, my favorite publisher is Baen, who includes ebook copies of the books, but more books, and then encourages you to share them.
Most are books being mass-spammed like private-works-reserved, or literal ebook version of Wikipedia pages, etc. Heck, there were some books that scammed off popular titles (say like a book entitled "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo Thingamajig" by Steve Lawson). The 99 cent area is a mess.
Car updates require work on the dealer side paid for by the manufacturer, so they have a vested interest in keeping it stable (every warranty issue, including recalls, eat into the profits of the cars). So there's a vested interest in not having to do the updates. And aside from the Toyota one (which didn't really do much since it was fat-footwork to be the cause, but since the cars were going back anyways...).
Anyhow, I thought the open-source mantra was "release early, release often". We're just seeing the effects of it applied throughout since more and more stuff is software controlled.
And yes, we're better for it. Cars with electronic fuel injection are pretty much "twist and go" - you don't worry about chokes, flooding, or temperments (as long as the car is in reasonable mechanical shape). The computer does everything to ensure reliability. It doesn't matter that it's -20C or +35C. You get in, insert key, twist, engine runs and car is ready to go after a brief warmup. Doing the same in an old carburetted model tended to involve a lot more work - from choking in cold days to vapor lock on the hot.
Anyhow, the notion of having to do frequent updates is a recent one - I mean, EFI cars were standard by the 90s (20 years ago), and there were much fewer software updates required back then.
Perhaps the ease at which stuff can be updated, and the ease to which we're notified about updates is part of the cause. "Release early, release often" wouldn't work too well if one had to keep downloading over long-distance phones or floppy disks/CDs in the mail (by the time you got it, you were 3 releases out of date...).
The same way lots of people are infected with some very potent diseases. It's just they're immune to it, so they're really just carriers of the disease. Heck, isn't something like chickenpox able to hide for decades in people only to infect those who haven't had it yet?
Heck, I'd be the rates of Linux infection are the same - Linux is immune to practically all malware, but it certainly can be a carrier of them. Heck, if you think about it, Linux may cause the spread of it (via Linux-based email servers)
Um, I'm sure the late Steve Jobs has admitted to trying to practice holistic medicine in an attempt to cure his cancer, which delayed actual surgery so by the time he had it, it was too late.
Now, it may not be a random blog that advocated that, but I'd say that if Jobs wasn't willing to get cancer surgery for years, then it's not an absurd thought at all.
Hell, people believe in creationism/intelligent design/"scientific controversy", Obama wasn't born in the US (still), Obama is a Muslim, etc. Even idiotic blog posts from a no-name, as long as they confirm our beliefs, will have a higher "pull" than respected articles that contradict our beliefs.
I'd say Java isn't doomed. Neither is C/C++.
Because while Android doesn't run Java, it's programmed in Java. And iOS' Objective-C interfaces nicely with C/C++. Hell, if you're writing an Android/iOS cross platform app, you'd do a lot of the backend in C/C++ and the front end in Obj-C/Java.
I believe the rise of those languages is due to the popularity of mobile platforms. C# probably holds its own based on traditional computing (Windows Phone not being a significant factor).
Or some old media is adapting. Newspapers, for example, publish daily or less so have no need to break a story out nanoseconds after it happened.
The extra time can be used to properly research things out and try to get more than one side of a story (in an attempt to publish first, the other side's story if often forgotten because it would mean publishing seconds later. Quel horreur!).
Or to report on things that don't make for quick soundbites or appear to matter. Or to which news changes so frequently (think war) that being bombarded with constant updates. I'm sure someone knows someone whos' experience sharing overload - their facebook/g+/twitter feed overflows with everything that happens on a second-by-second basis, and how they wish they just got a summary or overview (hey, like a newspaper!).
I've wondered how many mistakes have been made - I mean, practically every company has some sort of mailing list that goes out to employees - usually one for the entire company, another for each regional area and like. And since everyone gets them, the outlook contact list starts getting populated with them to be auto-completed.
So all you need is some joker with a name very close to it so the mailing list gets autocompleted first, and every email destined to him gets sent to everyone by force of habit... and it'll happen purely because no one realizes they send it to the wrong person or in this case, wrong persons.
I know I've mis-sent email to people with similar names, surely someone's mis-sent emails intended for one persont oa whole group, just because the group gets autocompleted/auto-suggested first...
Actually, it's 12 characters long - 3 registers.
Intels report "GenuineIntel"
AMDs report "AuthenticAMD"
Vias say "CentaurHauls"
I don't remember what the other x86-clones report.
Or ... perhaps it's a way for AMD to catch up.
Remember, Intel NEEDS AMD. Not to keep them honest, but to keep the government off their backs. They saw what happened to Microsoft, and they know that if AMD dies, they'll be put under a heavy-handed microscope and who knows what other conditions. Maybe even split up. They've been found guilty of many things before that has hurt AMD, so who knows what'll happen after AMD's demise.
AMD's in a precarious state - so Intel's only choice really is to hold back anything that might hurt AMD (even rightfully so) just to avoid government intervention.
Heck, the more people that see Ivy Bridge as a flop, maybe it's to compensate for Bulldozer. (And there's probably plans on how to rescue AMD should they get in real trouble - even if it involves buying up entire production runs through a fake computer company and burying the chips).
Basically, you mean upgrade your Mac.
OS X has stopped shipping Java for a little while now - I think Leopard was the last version to come with it by default, but later versions excluded it (like Flash). The main reason was to avoid reinstalls installing vulnerable versions again (Flash, notably). But for Java it was basically the end of a deprecation of the Java API as a first-class environment on OS X.
Now all updates are done through Oracle w.r.t. Java.
Do remember that the Apple consoles (really, that's what they are, albeit touch-controlled, portable and small) don't have many variation out there. The iPod Touch has 4 different models, iPhone has 5, and iPad has 3. If you get rid of unsupported models (e.g., demanding latest OS, which doesn't actually limit your market too much - iOS users tend to upgrade pretty quickly), that number decreases quite substantially.
Compare this to Android where you get driver issues and old versions (it's been 6 months now - where are all the ICS running phones right now? Not upgrades, I mean comes-with-ICS?).
That's a support nightmare - half a million users with probably nearly 100 different Androids between them all (device/ROM/etc) versus maybe 6 or 7 or so iOS devices that are "current".
And unlike Android, iOS tends to be very monoculture - a reboot cleans things up, and iOS limited multitasking means there's no funny business messing you up (unless you jailbreak, but you can ignore those).
Maybe not agreements, but I'm sure many of the bigger companies keep a very close eye on the health of their smaller competitors.
I'm sure that Intel, for example, has many "AMD rescue" plans hidden in the upper eschelons of the company. Not really an agreement between Intel and AMD, but meant to maintain AMD as a viable company. After all, AMD keeps government regulators off Intel's back. If it means spending some money buying up loads of AMD chips and burying them, it's still far more desirable than having the government sniffing about.
I'm sure many competitors are also in similar positions - Microsoft and Apple, Google and Apple, etc.Hell, Google and Apple seem to have a far chummier relationship than appears - I mean, does Apple's iAds compare at all to AdMob (the largest mobile ad network)? Yet iAds allowed Google to purchase AdMob. I'd be willing to bet there would be some secret agreements there.
FAIL.
That's an awful security measure, actually. For geeks, it might be OK, but it's as useful as the UAC dialog on Windows.
This is known as Dancing Pigs (or bunnies) - given a choice between dancing pigs and security, they'll choose dancing pigs a vast majority of the time.
On Android, people keep saying "third party market, meh" without analyzing WHY people use third party markets (hint: pirated apps). That laundry list of permissions? I just want the app dammit. (See: a user's PC infested with malware - probably from installing all those "codecs" to view their pr0n videos.).
Harper is basically a climate change denier in a position of power. If snow studies indicate climate change, he'll have to suppress that sort of information. It's why he's cut budgets on Environment Canada, muzzled all government scientists (all requests to speak with one must go through a political officer first). Heck, there was one investigating some virus on salmon, and people were denied requests to talk to the scientist involved (it was interesting).
He's basically trying to sell off all the oil he can as quickly as possible - why, I don't know. The price of oil isn't going down, so it seems silly to sell so much now when selling it later can command much more money. (We aren't going to give up our oil habit that easily, but we'll transition to other fuels for our cars. And oil will become a hard to get speciality fuel - people want their old-timey muscle cars and the like).
Hell, he wants to ship Canada's oil to Asia. Why not keep it here, refine it here, and then make our gas prices cheap? Gas's $1.40 a litre (roughly $5.50/gal). And you want to sell our oil that could be made into gas locally to lower gas prices?
Hell, why not ship it eastward to the eastern refineries?
You don't have to go that far. Since they're only concerned about MUSIC, all Google has to do is give German viewers a different audio track. Maybe saying something like (in German and English):
"The audio for this video has been filtered by request of Gema, who may be contacted at <address (street, phone number, email)>."
Have it repeat the entire video length (in both languages). I'd say replacing the audio portion of the video with that message is an efficient filter. YouTube still serves up the video and blames Gema for the mess.
Do it for all videos seen by German viewers.
Most people don't fill up every day - people usually can get 2-3 days or more worth of commute in before they have to fill up (ymmv, of course).
You're making the assumption that people "fill up" when necessary, when for the vast majority of cars, they're parked in only a few spots for significant periods of time. E.g., at home - plug car in when you get home and leave it charging until you leave in the morning. At work you can do the same as well - drive up, plug in, go to work. Forget to charge? no biggie (at 500km).
Going to the mall? Well, at 500km, just park it.
It's like people who demand that their cellphones get 14 day standby battery life - maybe if they're travelling I can see a possible need (in case you can't toss in a charger), but that's stretching it. Most people put down their phones and go to sleep, at which point it's a perfect time to charge the phone battery so it's full for the next day. (I can understand some frustration over the latest phones not making it through the day, however).
The long-distance drive family vacation and extended period away from power are exceptions to most driving and cellphone use. Hell, gas powered cars aren't going away anytime soon, and I'd expect there will still be rental places that can rent you a gas car for that long driving trip instead of packing it all in the family electric car.
The US is denying access to its airspace including the portions over the water. Which means flights have to go around.
If you're banned from the US it's tricky as going from Canada to Mexico would be impossible (the US considers overflights to be "in" the US and they will deny you boarding).
Same in Canada. The Canadian equivalent of the RIAA is called CRIA - Canadian Recording Industry Association. However, all the Canadian labels left over fundamental disagreements on stuff like downloading... except the American labels. (And I'm using American as the traditional meaning of someone from the USA).
Even the big Canadian labels disagreed with lawsuits.
Other thing... white on black is hard on the eyes because of "black creep". If you're a typesetter, you know this - if you have light text on dark background, you have to increase the siez of the text in order to keep its apparent size the same. Also, thin fonts sink, so you may have to apply bolding to "fatten" them so they're still legible when the black background slims them down.