I don't find that ridiculous. What's ridiculous is that some people thought it was comparable to the wiimote. Kinect won't displace gamepads, but cheap depth-field sensing is too useful to go away.
And that was Kinect's main advantage. Wiimote, Move, they use special controllers and your games are limited to that.
Microsoft is proving that you can combine Kinect AND controllers. Some games use Kinect's microphone array for voice commands (which does noise and audio cancellation to enable long-range voice recognition). Other suse the cameras to achieve enhanced gameplay. Either way, you can use regular controllers with Kinect.
So games can be Kinect-required and do everything with motion, or Kinect-assisted, where gameplay is augmented with Kinect features but players use normal controllers. That's what makes Kinect special for games.
For hackers, Kinect is a really cheap 3D depth sensing sensor. Equipment like that used to cost in the high 4 digits or low 5 digits, so casual experimentation was not possible. These days, a trip to Best Buy and $150 will get you a decent 3D sensor to play with. Cheap!
A couple of my gamer customers have gone through like 4 of the things each in the past two years, and these ain't the cheap ones either, its whatever scored highest on the benches which is usually the top dollar stuff.
That's the problem.
If you want the new hotness in SATA3 OMGWTFBBQ speeds, you're going to risk crappy firmware. It's because the firmware writers are under pressure to deliver software so the SSD manufacturers can deliver SSDs a month earlier than the competition with their new fast SSD.
So yeah, there will be lots of bugs if you're constantly going cutting edge.
On the other hand, OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and notably, Apple, are shipping millions of SSD-equipped computers every year. If there was a massive failure rate, we'd hear about it - especially Apple, which shipped millions of SSD-equipped MacBook Airs and Macbook Pros and others. Hell, you'd hear of petitions asking to recall every SSD-equipped Mac if they were dropping like flies. Hell, if even 1,000 of them failed, you'd probably hear of a recall petition
The difference? The OEMs are using SSDs that are more conservative - sure they're not going to push 250+MB/sec (probably 150MB/sec or so), but they're far more reliable. The controllers have long matured and the firmware is stable and major data loss bugs are now squashed.
Perhaps rather than caring about 150/200/250/300 MB/sec transfer rate (you're talking about seconds in difference at that point), your friends should've bought what was last-generation and stable. Perhaps even see what's in stores like Best Buy because they take so long to get product that all the first adopters would've been burned that by the time retail stores have 'em, they're all stable.
The OEMs usually buy Samsung or Toshiba (with Samsung or Toshiba controllesr, respectively) SSDs. They'd probably use Intel if they could, if it wasn't for the fact every generation, Intel has some SSD problem in the early firmware. The original G1s had a speed degradation issue. The G2's had a massive data loss bug. The G3's also had a dataloss bug. These new ones? Probably a data loss bug as well. Sure they get fixed, but buying a last-gen will probably be a good idea. Or wait 6 months to see what issues arise.
When I was in the job market, I lost potential jobs for not having a FB account.
With the fact that there is concern about deleted stuff not really being deleted, people searching profiles for anything (where a bad joke reposted can get someone flagged as a racist or gun nut for 7 years), using FB as a communication tool for anything other than the latest cat meme is out of the question.
So use Facebook as I use it - very carefully.
I put up a very minimal profile (Facebook may ask for a ton of information, but they require very little). Put up a neutral profile pic, and don't bother uploading any more photos.
Then accept friends with caution. There is no law saying you have to friend every real life friend on Facebook. I don't - in fact, I have probably 8-10 people on my "requesting to friend you" list. They are people I know in real life, but to whom I don't really care about. No one said you have to have a million "friends" in your friend list, or accept every invitation.
I also set all the controls so my friends can't do anything like tag me or such. And I don't post my every whim/though/status update there. Actually, I don't bother posting at all - it's just a token account I use to control my online identity. (I also don't spend more than a few minutes every few months).
There's no reason one can't have a facebook account, nor any law requiring one spend hours on the site - just set up a minimal profile, carefully choose your friends, and watch what you post (remember that everything you post online the entire world can see, regardless of privacy settings - so treat every post as a public blog post or comment on a website that everyone can see).
The real challenge though is the dancing pigs problem, which most people on facebook seem vulnerable to.
Of course they didn't use that poor a cipher, but the cipher they did use was running in software on a dsp, so it had to be simple, so for GMR-1, they chose to XOR the data with a jittered LFSR (similar to GSM encryption). The techniques used to break GSM encryption apparently work great for GMR as well. I don't yet know many details about GMR-2, but it appears to have different weaknesses than GMR-1 (something related to being based on 8-bit math and incomplete key-data mixing).
Well, here are the problems.
First, the equipment and standards were designed in the 1990's with 1990's level embedded processors (think 386 and lower). You had a battery that had to last a pretty decent time because a lot of people carry satphones for emergency use (hikers, pilots, sailors, etc), so your processor has to basically be a fleapower one. This is especially considering the satellite is far away and you have to use a fair bit of power to reach it, which means a lot of battery power and less power for the electronics.
Oh yeah, the final bitstream is probably operating at 9600bps, and your encryption routine must work in real time on the embedded processor. This was also before dedicated cryptographic processors and accellerator hardware were readily available in embedded processors. So you must do it in software whilst handling all the other tasks at the same time.
GSM has the same problem. These algorithms were designed for computational efficiency and simplicity more than absolute protection. Reason being that once the call is over, it's over. The key won't be used again, the location of the phone is moving so people can't really capture long stretches of signal, etc.
For a satphone, receiving one end is easy due to the large footprint compared to a cellphone.
The simple solution would be a curtain behind the corrals. Thus people who want to watch porn can go right ahead with some privacy. (It also keeps shoulder-surfers down).
In general, libraries either have curtains, or they have a set of computers which are in a more secluded area. You don't have to filter it, just point the patron to one of those other PCs which should satisfy everyone involved.
Though, I suspect we're going to see some busybody sue the heck out of the library and that patron for "contributing to the deliquency of children".
The largest filesystem I admin is just shy of 1/2 petabyte. And its one in number. Backing up everything on that filesystem is simply not feasible. To put it in perspective 1 stream @ 200 MiB/s would take almost 28 days to backup the whole thing. I would imagine a restore would take about the same order. Telling hundreds of users their files are unavailable for reading or writing for 30 days is not really an option, so I run fsck.
Which means You're Doing It Wrong(tm).
Two words: volume snapshot.
What it does is give you a view of the filesystem as it exists at that the time the snapshot is taken. The frozen image is mounted in another mountpoint (read-only), while the snapshotted voume is still accessible (read-write). Changes to the volume since the snapshot was taken won't be in the snapshot (obviously).
Your backup points to that snapshot which won't change and that's copied to tape. Once you're done backing up 30 days later, you delete the snapshot.
Since your backup takes so long, you'd immediately then make another snapshot and being the backup again.
If it's a database, the database backup tools work on a database snapshot - it will be correct and consistent as of when the snapshot was taken while the database remains available for reading and writing outside of the snapshot.
Having to take a system down to back it up is a dead concept on modern OSes as they all tend to have snapshot capability.
I've worked for Bloomberg, and I can tell you they're not doing it for the philanthropy. They're most certainly in it for the money. So they give you the API to build plug-ins or more create a tight Bloomberg feed to your own product. Big deal. I didn't see anything about giving the data away.
Of course.
The whole point is to get people to write apps and programs against the API. Then a bunch of programs will be "supports Bloomberg!" as a feature item. This means people will then pay Bloomberg for access to the feed.
Right now, if you want their feed, you have to buy their terminal, something most of us won't be able to acquire or afford.
WIth this move, we can have apps for smartphones and our PCs (and portfolio management apps) that can use the Bloomberg feed. All of a sudden, the number of people who can purchase the Bloomberg feed increases, which means even if only 1% purchase a subscription, the number of subscribers they have increases.
Keep the API proprietary - they can sell hardware to a few folks. Make it open, people will write software against it, and they can sell the feed data to many more people, hopefully.
How about they link to my credit card so I get charged for the length of time I'm parked NO MATTER HOW LONG IT IS. Never happen, because the tickets are a gold mine.
The point of street/meter parking is short term parking. You park, go into the store, finish, leave, done. It's not designed for long-term parking (it's why it's very punitively priced - you wouldn't want to park there for 8+ hours unless you like paying $1000/month or more for parking). If you want to park for hours (i.e., work), you're better off finding a parking garage. Plus, the store owners you park in front of may not take kindly to you parking in front of their store day after day since they like that spot for customers.
But there are two problems with credit card meters. First, they need to put a hold on your card. If you're paying for a set time (e.g., 4 hours) then the hold and charge is the same. If you want it to be indeterminate, then they need to apply a huge hold (e.g., a day's worth of parking) and you'll end up with people who can't pay because their remaining credit limit isn't enough. Like we have nowadays with people who can't buy gas with credit because the pumps are now putting holds of $200 or more.
That's the main problem facing perception systems today. Humans have these two simple exteroceptive eyeballs and yet we can do incredible things. That's thanks to the amazing computational power of our brain, which we hardly understand. Thus, when we try to replicate our cognitive abilities we end up with algorithms that are completely intractable. I think this is in a large part due to computer scientists tendency to approach things with an engineering perspective instead of a biological perspective.
Well, stuff like that isn't "wow".
The problem is well, we treat computers as automation. We let computers do stuff we find hard or boring. The stuff we find easy, it turns out, is very hard to do on computers - natural language processing (face it - a lot of people went "so what?" when they saw Watson last year), vision processing (object recognition, character/word recognition), and hearing.
It's stuff we don't think about - and it's boring to most people who can't comprehend how we can do stuff like read printed text, but the computer can't do a reliable job of it.
It's probably one of the ironies in life. We have computers doing stuff easily that we find hard, and stuff we do easily computers find hard.
1) A huge personal data sink where I could put all of my information in one basket to be sold to the highest bidder, analyzed, and then acted upon with absolutely no benefit to me.
You do realize you don't have to put in lots of information, don't you? There's very, very, very little that Facebook actually requires you to enter.
But that's us techies. Regular users don't know that, and they keep posting away.
In fact, to encourage people to post lots of personal information, even more than they would tell a normal stranger or neighour etc, Facebook implements so-called "privacy" controls.
There's no privacy, and the old "don't post online what you don't want the world to know" adage still applies. In fact, everyone cries out when Facebook adjusts their privacy controls yet don't realize that they're entrusting Facebook to hold their secrets for them.
The only real privacy is the "only me" setting, but that's useless because the best way to ensure it's only you is to not post it. As long as one of your friends can see it, it's out in the open. All it takes is someone to repost it, do a comment about it, or something else that all THEIR friends can see (or if they don't care, the world), and it's out in the open.
Hell, even in real life it happens - you mention to a friend you went through a divorce and THEY announce it to all their facebook friends, and boom.
A lot of XDA Devs used MU to host legally questionable materials - modded ROMs and such that weren't strictly AOSP compiles. They're technically infringements since they contain stuff not licensed with AOSP, but the files are really only useful to those who already have a license to that stuff (though no attempt was made to separate the "legal" downloaders from the "illegal" ones.
Just one of those grey areas of copyright infringement. It's technically true, but those who can make use of it already have a license...
There are other services much more suitable for piracy. Megaupload is really not something you would want to use for downloading large amounts of data, or multiple files. I doubt they have that many pirates.
Well, MU is quite suited for piracy - sure there were delays and such if you were a free user, but honestly, if you were grabbing a dozen files, you'd copy the links into JDownloader and let it do the waiting for you.
HTTP downloaders were used as a response to the lawsuits over bittorrent - as the users were purely downloading, they couldn't be sued for uploading or sharing - only the hosting provider (i.e., MegaUpload) or the original poster.
P2P is out of the question, and if people were downloading lots from MU, they'd buy a premium account for unlimited access.
I didn't lose anything I didn't have backed up locally but what I did lose was the service I was using to send clients the photos I took for them. Plenty of alternatives, obviously, but how do I know which one would be next?
Why not host it yourself?/. users are constantly harping on people to host their own email services, and hosting files for your clients seems like an easier task. Sure youc an go all fancy and the like with CGI filemanagers, or you can just make a directory on your webhost for your client, disable indexing and give them the direct links.
Unless you were using MU as a way to have clients send files back (in which case you'd need to implement something like an FTP drop box or something).
Heck, maybe you can go fancier with WebDAV or something if you can secure it.
What exactly did you mean by this statement? What are you calling an implementation detail with which the user shouldn't be bothered?
Why should the user be bothered with it? There aren't many real-life instances where a user creates and it isn't "autosaved".
It's one of the things that OS X Lion is doing - it's asking "why do we still do this?". Lion-aware apps automatically autosave in the background, and have a time-machine like feature that lets them view their document as it existed in the past. If they write a brilliant paragraph a day ago, then deleted it in the morning, they can view the document as it existed yesterday, copy the paragraph back out, and be done with it.
Heck. Lion is trying to get away from the whole "You need to manage your application's state" as well - the OS can manage its resources.
Right now, most apps implement some form of autorecovery. Word keeps crashing on me so I'm thankful when it seems to only lose a few minutes work. Ditto vim. And that's because people forget to save - why not have the OS do it for them? (And with Lion's autosave, it won't commit unrecoverable changes so you can always go back to an earlier revision).
Maybe I'm from the old school but email for me are meant to be only text. no html code, no attachment, no file...just plain text from beginning to end. less risk in the first way. And wtf is wrong with them, opening emails with attachments anyway ?
All it takes is the right email. Since this isn't a mass attempt at phishing, it'll take some research.
First, find out a subcontractor (not hard to do if you read press releases), and a project they're working on.
Then, you find out someone who would have something to do with said project (not too hard, a bit of social engineering and a phone can get you in really quickly).
Finally, craft a very plausible looking email. If it's in the early stages of a project, round up something like "New specifications for project X". Or something like "Update to specifications", or "Question about specifications". Direct it to the project manager and maybe add something like "Here are our updated specifications - could you please review them?" with a corrupt attachment. The PM may simply forward it to the engineering team thinking they should look into it, and an engineer sees it's from the PM, double-clicks, and boom.
For everybody using email, there are emails they will always open. Project emails especially. Forge plausible looking headers and it'll be especially easy.
Heck, remember the RSA hack? It was forged by sending the RSA HR person an email they expect - a list of candidates from the recruitment firm they use. Except that list was designed to spread malware. Customers are also a prime candidate for forged emails.
Think of the last email you viewed and read. And then ask "why did I open this email? Could it be forged in any way?" Heck, think of the last attachment you didn't delete from you email. Maybe it was a photo from a company event? Hell, if you're in the consumer electronics industry, you probably received some attachments from people at CES - friends who went, etc.
These aren't your typical phish emails. They are highly targeted ones sent to a few people with a much higher chance of being read and acted on.
Do you honestly think every single feature of every single product Apple releases comes from the top?
Exactly. One of the neat features in 10.3 was Expose, which started as a simple hack to Quartz Extreme (the GPU windowing system at the time, which didn't include GPU-based compositing). It was kind of a basic thing - since the windows were just textures in memory, they could certainlly be manipulated like a normal 3D scene. All Expose did was rearrange and rescale the windows around, letting the GPU handle the details of scaling and video processing (it's why you could still see the movie playing while it was invoked - the GPU was doing all the heavy lifting).
Steve Jobs saw that and made it a priority feature. Of course, the initial implementation he saw probably was nowhere near as what came out in 10.3, but still.
Of course, not every idea or feature makes it in, especially those that don't work very well or are clunky at best - Apple's got a habit of dumping features that they couldn't get working right until someone can come up with a way to do it properly.
The Judge has received some re-election funds from the MPAA
Technically this case was more of the agreement between DVD Forum and Kaleidascope. The DVD Forum runs a licensing agency (DVD CCA) that handles all the patents/technology/etc licensing so if you want to implement the DVD standard, you apply for a license and get access to the spec, the patents, etc.
The licensing agreement states fundamentally that a movie DVD data may not be copied to another medium except for temporary storage. It also states other things (wonder why you can't ever get more than 480p out of the analog outputs? Same reason - of course, HDMI hadn't quite been invented yet, so it's really just a loophole).
And that's where the company lost - they made a DVD media server that "ripped" DVDs to hard drive and didn't require the disc to play, in contravention to the licensing agreement they signed.
The DVD Forum is not the MPAA's bitch, though. Their next gen HD spec was dropped because the movie studios hated the fact that it lacked region protection, letting people in other countries import HD-DVDs before the movie even hit theatres. (It was one reason why the studios started releasing HD-DVDs long after the DVD and Blu-Ray versions came out... lots of people were doing this before the movies hit their local theatres months later).
Oh, and the hollow sphere thing was what we call an "example". Ping pong balls are made in two halves, and have a significant weakness across the seam. If you can't think of any uses for being able to print objects within other objects with no assembly required (fully assembled ball bearings being a cool example), or being able to print a single piece item with a single piece external skin and an internal lattice structure, etc, that is entirely your own lack of imagination at fault. Feel free to never utilise 3D printing.
You do realize that not all 3D printers can do your fully-realized ping-pong ball, right? In fact, there's two major methods of additive manufacturing - sintering and extrusion.
Sintering is one of two methods - a laser can scan across the surface, bonding the powder together with the beam, or using what amounts to an inkjet printer squirting bonding agent to bind the powder together. The latter method may also have dyes available to color the bonding agent allowing for colored parts to be produced right from the printer. The parts these produce tend to be very nice - practically molded parts. Also expensive - you're looking at the low-to-mid 5 digits for such a machine.
The other method is extrusion, where a plastic is heated and squirted out a nozzle. The nozzle is moved around the platform layering down the plastic. It's cheaper (it's how the Thing-o-matic and RepRap operate), but the final output can have the tell-tale marks of the process since it was basically formed with a thin strip of plastic. These machines are very cheap because there's nothing to them - just an X/Y/Z platform (3 linear actuators, which can be trivially built at home), a heated nozzle and the ability to control it all.
The sintering method cannot produce a hollow object - the powder serves two purposes of being the bulk material as well as the supports, so hollows cannot exist as there's no way to "blow out" the powder from the middle. The extrusion process can, but cannot produce round parts due to the lack of supports to keep it from rolling around during printing (unless supports are designed into the object, or the platform incorporates its own supports). It can certainly try though.
End result though is each tool has its purpose and there's no way a 3D printer can do everything a CNC mill can (it can come close, but there are tasks the CNC mill is just more efficient at), just like a CNC mill can't replace an additive process like a 3D printer. And even amongst 3D printers you need both as there are tasks better suited for one or the other.
The problem with the "decline" of manufacturing is that American workers are crazy productive. We can produce all that we need with far less than full employment. This should be a good thing, but because of our idiotic love affair with the failed "trickle down" theory of economics, we end up punishing millions of people, not because they're unwilling to work, but because we simply don't need them to.
Well, the reason for that is because the American worker is EXPENSIVE. So if you're manufacturing in the US, you want to minimize your labour costs. So what you do is automate the hell out of your production line - design for manufacturing. You redesign parts so they can be put together with robots, you redesign circuitboards so there's fewer of them and fewer fussy connectors that have to be hand-inserted and hand-closed, etc.
So the average American worker is damn productive because robots are doing 99% of the work, while he's doing the 1% that couldn't be automated reliably.
Contrast this with China, where automation is very few (labour is cheaper than automation) so the only thing keeping you from making lots of fussy parts is it takes longer to build (== costs more people and takes longer to assemble). Speeding up your testing by 1 minute can save a ton of money in China as that worker saves 1 minute per device they test. For a robot, it doesn't matter too much.
China's at the "labour intensive" part of industrialization - where goods require lots of manpower to manufacture. The US is at the "capital intensive" part of industrialization, where goods don't require much manpower, just a lot of seed money (robots are expensive, upfront designing for robots is more expensive in time and money, etc), but manufacturing requires very few people and is highly automated.
Of course, Steve Jobs was also wrong in that you don't need 30,000 factory workers to make your product because you'd only need 1/10th of that or less as robots are doing all the work of the 30,000, and the fewer Americans are just overseeing the production line and minor assembly.
Of course, the Chinese model is a bit more nimble in that a design change means re-teaching 30,000 people and a day to get back to full production. Reprogramming all the robots with the updated design and steps takes far longer (both in updating the designs and roles of each robot, and training each robot in its new role and then testing the final result), but with enough technicians (bit pricey) it can be done relatively quickly.
I live in NYC and rarely have any problems getting a signal on AT&T. Actually getting any data or calls to my phone over that signal, however, is a distinct challenge.;-)
I often experience dropped calls and slow data rates while my phone happily shows "5 bars" of signal.
That's because AT&T is suffering from the same problem NTT DoCoMo is suffering from - control channel congestion. You're getting 5 bars alright, but the big problem is stuff like dialing and establishing data connections consume control channel bandwidth. Dropped calls happen because your phone's trying to switch towers and can't because it can't get a word in edgewise on the control channel.
Slow data ditto - the phone on 3G needs to establish multiple PDP data sessions to get 3G speeds, and if it can't talk to the tower because the control channel is busy, well, it suffers.
Control channel congestion (caused by all this plus texting) is why AT&T service can be horrible, despite having plenty of free channels available for data and voice. It's what took T-mobile down once (a bad IM app overloaded the control channel).
Think of it as the old-timey POTS phone days where you lifted the handset and told the operator who you wanted to talk to. And now have lots of people do the same and the operator's now overloaded trying to establish and tear down connections, leading to phone calls not going through, the operator not responding to you, etc.
It is news in that this has now been brought up to the credit card companies in a manner which cannot be easily ignored.
I remember seeing it on the news - they demonstrated someone with a cheap RFID reader and a laptop can bump into people, grab their cards, and run off. It was impressive enough that my parents got worried and checked their cards for that paypass logo.
Of course, having it more in the news isn't a bad thing. Add in a few elaborations (attackers can read your credit card without having to be close to you!) and you'll find great retraction on this. Especially when considering that it applies to debit cards as well. (Anyone with $50 worth of equipment can drain your bank account!).
And yes, while it's a bit of hyperbole, it makes a nice soundbite to get people to change.
Then Linux and its utilities and all the desktop stuff must be full of malware, right?
Because nobody ever looks at code, right?
So Linux must be the most secure kernel around with NO priviledge escalation bugs since 1991, right? Oh wait, there was one that was fixed a couple of weeks ago that was being exploited.
And surely there wasn't a 30+ year old bug in BSD, I mean, everyone's looked through it so many times.
Even having a ton of eyes on the same code, bugs/holes/vulnerabilities are still glossed over. Open source's record may be better than closed source, but it's still not a surefire way of guaranteeing code quality or that the code's been reviewed and bug-free.
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And that was Kinect's main advantage. Wiimote, Move, they use special controllers and your games are limited to that.
Microsoft is proving that you can combine Kinect AND controllers. Some games use Kinect's microphone array for voice commands (which does noise and audio cancellation to enable long-range voice recognition). Other suse the cameras to achieve enhanced gameplay. Either way, you can use regular controllers with Kinect.
So games can be Kinect-required and do everything with motion, or Kinect-assisted, where gameplay is augmented with Kinect features but players use normal controllers. That's what makes Kinect special for games.
For hackers, Kinect is a really cheap 3D depth sensing sensor. Equipment like that used to cost in the high 4 digits or low 5 digits, so casual experimentation was not possible. These days, a trip to Best Buy and $150 will get you a decent 3D sensor to play with. Cheap!
That's the problem.
If you want the new hotness in SATA3 OMGWTFBBQ speeds, you're going to risk crappy firmware. It's because the firmware writers are under pressure to deliver software so the SSD manufacturers can deliver SSDs a month earlier than the competition with their new fast SSD.
So yeah, there will be lots of bugs if you're constantly going cutting edge.
On the other hand, OEMs like Dell, Lenovo, and notably, Apple, are shipping millions of SSD-equipped computers every year. If there was a massive failure rate, we'd hear about it - especially Apple, which shipped millions of SSD-equipped MacBook Airs and Macbook Pros and others. Hell, you'd hear of petitions asking to recall every SSD-equipped Mac if they were dropping like flies. Hell, if even 1,000 of them failed, you'd probably hear of a recall petition
The difference? The OEMs are using SSDs that are more conservative - sure they're not going to push 250+MB/sec (probably 150MB/sec or so), but they're far more reliable. The controllers have long matured and the firmware is stable and major data loss bugs are now squashed.
Perhaps rather than caring about 150/200/250/300 MB/sec transfer rate (you're talking about seconds in difference at that point), your friends should've bought what was last-generation and stable. Perhaps even see what's in stores like Best Buy because they take so long to get product that all the first adopters would've been burned that by the time retail stores have 'em, they're all stable.
The OEMs usually buy Samsung or Toshiba (with Samsung or Toshiba controllesr, respectively) SSDs. They'd probably use Intel if they could, if it wasn't for the fact every generation, Intel has some SSD problem in the early firmware. The original G1s had a speed degradation issue. The G2's had a massive data loss bug. The G3's also had a dataloss bug. These new ones? Probably a data loss bug as well. Sure they get fixed, but buying a last-gen will probably be a good idea. Or wait 6 months to see what issues arise.
So use Facebook as I use it - very carefully.
I put up a very minimal profile (Facebook may ask for a ton of information, but they require very little). Put up a neutral profile pic, and don't bother uploading any more photos.
Then accept friends with caution. There is no law saying you have to friend every real life friend on Facebook. I don't - in fact, I have probably 8-10 people on my "requesting to friend you" list. They are people I know in real life, but to whom I don't really care about. No one said you have to have a million "friends" in your friend list, or accept every invitation.
I also set all the controls so my friends can't do anything like tag me or such. And I don't post my every whim/though/status update there. Actually, I don't bother posting at all - it's just a token account I use to control my online identity. (I also don't spend more than a few minutes every few months).
There's no reason one can't have a facebook account, nor any law requiring one spend hours on the site - just set up a minimal profile, carefully choose your friends, and watch what you post (remember that everything you post online the entire world can see, regardless of privacy settings - so treat every post as a public blog post or comment on a website that everyone can see).
The real challenge though is the dancing pigs problem, which most people on facebook seem vulnerable to.
And remember, if it's TOO high resolution, it'll just scream "PHOTOSHOP!" because the lander photo will be less blurry than the moon photos beside it.
Well, here are the problems.
First, the equipment and standards were designed in the 1990's with 1990's level embedded processors (think 386 and lower). You had a battery that had to last a pretty decent time because a lot of people carry satphones for emergency use (hikers, pilots, sailors, etc), so your processor has to basically be a fleapower one. This is especially considering the satellite is far away and you have to use a fair bit of power to reach it, which means a lot of battery power and less power for the electronics.
Oh yeah, the final bitstream is probably operating at 9600bps, and your encryption routine must work in real time on the embedded processor. This was also before dedicated cryptographic processors and accellerator hardware were readily available in embedded processors. So you must do it in software whilst handling all the other tasks at the same time.
GSM has the same problem. These algorithms were designed for computational efficiency and simplicity more than absolute protection. Reason being that once the call is over, it's over. The key won't be used again, the location of the phone is moving so people can't really capture long stretches of signal, etc.
For a satphone, receiving one end is easy due to the large footprint compared to a cellphone.
The simple solution would be a curtain behind the corrals. Thus people who want to watch porn can go right ahead with some privacy. (It also keeps shoulder-surfers down).
In general, libraries either have curtains, or they have a set of computers which are in a more secluded area. You don't have to filter it, just point the patron to one of those other PCs which should satisfy everyone involved.
Though, I suspect we're going to see some busybody sue the heck out of the library and that patron for "contributing to the deliquency of children".
Which means You're Doing It Wrong(tm).
Two words: volume snapshot.
What it does is give you a view of the filesystem as it exists at that the time the snapshot is taken. The frozen image is mounted in another mountpoint (read-only), while the snapshotted voume is still accessible (read-write). Changes to the volume since the snapshot was taken won't be in the snapshot (obviously).
Your backup points to that snapshot which won't change and that's copied to tape. Once you're done backing up 30 days later, you delete the snapshot.
Since your backup takes so long, you'd immediately then make another snapshot and being the backup again.
If it's a database, the database backup tools work on a database snapshot - it will be correct and consistent as of when the snapshot was taken while the database remains available for reading and writing outside of the snapshot.
Having to take a system down to back it up is a dead concept on modern OSes as they all tend to have snapshot capability.
Soon we'll have ot worry about getting papercuts from our non-paper tablets!.
Of course.
The whole point is to get people to write apps and programs against the API. Then a bunch of programs will be "supports Bloomberg!" as a feature item. This means people will then pay Bloomberg for access to the feed.
Right now, if you want their feed, you have to buy their terminal, something most of us won't be able to acquire or afford.
WIth this move, we can have apps for smartphones and our PCs (and portfolio management apps) that can use the Bloomberg feed. All of a sudden, the number of people who can purchase the Bloomberg feed increases, which means even if only 1% purchase a subscription, the number of subscribers they have increases.
Keep the API proprietary - they can sell hardware to a few folks. Make it open, people will write software against it, and they can sell the feed data to many more people, hopefully.
The point of street/meter parking is short term parking. You park, go into the store, finish, leave, done. It's not designed for long-term parking (it's why it's very punitively priced - you wouldn't want to park there for 8+ hours unless you like paying $1000/month or more for parking). If you want to park for hours (i.e., work), you're better off finding a parking garage. Plus, the store owners you park in front of may not take kindly to you parking in front of their store day after day since they like that spot for customers.
But there are two problems with credit card meters. First, they need to put a hold on your card. If you're paying for a set time (e.g., 4 hours) then the hold and charge is the same. If you want it to be indeterminate, then they need to apply a huge hold (e.g., a day's worth of parking) and you'll end up with people who can't pay because their remaining credit limit isn't enough. Like we have nowadays with people who can't buy gas with credit because the pumps are now putting holds of $200 or more.
Well, stuff like that isn't "wow".
The problem is well, we treat computers as automation. We let computers do stuff we find hard or boring. The stuff we find easy, it turns out, is very hard to do on computers - natural language processing (face it - a lot of people went "so what?" when they saw Watson last year), vision processing (object recognition, character/word recognition), and hearing.
It's stuff we don't think about - and it's boring to most people who can't comprehend how we can do stuff like read printed text, but the computer can't do a reliable job of it.
It's probably one of the ironies in life. We have computers doing stuff easily that we find hard, and stuff we do easily computers find hard.
But that's us techies. Regular users don't know that, and they keep posting away.
In fact, to encourage people to post lots of personal information, even more than they would tell a normal stranger or neighour etc, Facebook implements so-called "privacy" controls.
There's no privacy, and the old "don't post online what you don't want the world to know" adage still applies. In fact, everyone cries out when Facebook adjusts their privacy controls yet don't realize that they're entrusting Facebook to hold their secrets for them.
The only real privacy is the "only me" setting, but that's useless because the best way to ensure it's only you is to not post it. As long as one of your friends can see it, it's out in the open. All it takes is someone to repost it, do a comment about it, or something else that all THEIR friends can see (or if they don't care, the world), and it's out in the open.
Hell, even in real life it happens - you mention to a friend you went through a divorce and THEY announce it to all their facebook friends, and boom.
Good point.
A lot of XDA Devs used MU to host legally questionable materials - modded ROMs and such that weren't strictly AOSP compiles. They're technically infringements since they contain stuff not licensed with AOSP, but the files are really only useful to those who already have a license to that stuff (though no attempt was made to separate the "legal" downloaders from the "illegal" ones.
Just one of those grey areas of copyright infringement. It's technically true, but those who can make use of it already have a license...
Well, MU is quite suited for piracy - sure there were delays and such if you were a free user, but honestly, if you were grabbing a dozen files, you'd copy the links into JDownloader and let it do the waiting for you.
HTTP downloaders were used as a response to the lawsuits over bittorrent - as the users were purely downloading, they couldn't be sued for uploading or sharing - only the hosting provider (i.e., MegaUpload) or the original poster.
P2P is out of the question, and if people were downloading lots from MU, they'd buy a premium account for unlimited access.
Why not host it yourself? /. users are constantly harping on people to host their own email services, and hosting files for your clients seems like an easier task. Sure youc an go all fancy and the like with CGI filemanagers, or you can just make a directory on your webhost for your client, disable indexing and give them the direct links.
Unless you were using MU as a way to have clients send files back (in which case you'd need to implement something like an FTP drop box or something).
Heck, maybe you can go fancier with WebDAV or something if you can secure it.
Why should the user be bothered with it? There aren't many real-life instances where a user creates and it isn't "autosaved".
It's one of the things that OS X Lion is doing - it's asking "why do we still do this?". Lion-aware apps automatically autosave in the background, and have a time-machine like feature that lets them view their document as it existed in the past. If they write a brilliant paragraph a day ago, then deleted it in the morning, they can view the document as it existed yesterday, copy the paragraph back out, and be done with it.
Heck. Lion is trying to get away from the whole "You need to manage your application's state" as well - the OS can manage its resources.
Right now, most apps implement some form of autorecovery. Word keeps crashing on me so I'm thankful when it seems to only lose a few minutes work. Ditto vim. And that's because people forget to save - why not have the OS do it for them? (And with Lion's autosave, it won't commit unrecoverable changes so you can always go back to an earlier revision).
All it takes is the right email. Since this isn't a mass attempt at phishing, it'll take some research.
First, find out a subcontractor (not hard to do if you read press releases), and a project they're working on.
Then, you find out someone who would have something to do with said project (not too hard, a bit of social engineering and a phone can get you in really quickly).
Finally, craft a very plausible looking email. If it's in the early stages of a project, round up something like "New specifications for project X". Or something like "Update to specifications", or "Question about specifications". Direct it to the project manager and maybe add something like "Here are our updated specifications - could you please review them?" with a corrupt attachment. The PM may simply forward it to the engineering team thinking they should look into it, and an engineer sees it's from the PM, double-clicks, and boom.
For everybody using email, there are emails they will always open. Project emails especially. Forge plausible looking headers and it'll be especially easy.
Heck, remember the RSA hack? It was forged by sending the RSA HR person an email they expect - a list of candidates from the recruitment firm they use. Except that list was designed to spread malware. Customers are also a prime candidate for forged emails.
Think of the last email you viewed and read. And then ask "why did I open this email? Could it be forged in any way?" Heck, think of the last attachment you didn't delete from you email. Maybe it was a photo from a company event? Hell, if you're in the consumer electronics industry, you probably received some attachments from people at CES - friends who went, etc.
These aren't your typical phish emails. They are highly targeted ones sent to a few people with a much higher chance of being read and acted on.
Exactly. One of the neat features in 10.3 was Expose, which started as a simple hack to Quartz Extreme (the GPU windowing system at the time, which didn't include GPU-based compositing). It was kind of a basic thing - since the windows were just textures in memory, they could certainlly be manipulated like a normal 3D scene. All Expose did was rearrange and rescale the windows around, letting the GPU handle the details of scaling and video processing (it's why you could still see the movie playing while it was invoked - the GPU was doing all the heavy lifting).
Steve Jobs saw that and made it a priority feature. Of course, the initial implementation he saw probably was nowhere near as what came out in 10.3, but still.
Of course, not every idea or feature makes it in, especially those that don't work very well or are clunky at best - Apple's got a habit of dumping features that they couldn't get working right until someone can come up with a way to do it properly.
Technically this case was more of the agreement between DVD Forum and Kaleidascope. The DVD Forum runs a licensing agency (DVD CCA) that handles all the patents/technology/etc licensing so if you want to implement the DVD standard, you apply for a license and get access to the spec, the patents, etc.
The licensing agreement states fundamentally that a movie DVD data may not be copied to another medium except for temporary storage. It also states other things (wonder why you can't ever get more than 480p out of the analog outputs? Same reason - of course, HDMI hadn't quite been invented yet, so it's really just a loophole).
And that's where the company lost - they made a DVD media server that "ripped" DVDs to hard drive and didn't require the disc to play, in contravention to the licensing agreement they signed.
The DVD Forum is not the MPAA's bitch, though. Their next gen HD spec was dropped because the movie studios hated the fact that it lacked region protection, letting people in other countries import HD-DVDs before the movie even hit theatres. (It was one reason why the studios started releasing HD-DVDs long after the DVD and Blu-Ray versions came out... lots of people were doing this before the movies hit their local theatres months later).
You do realize that not all 3D printers can do your fully-realized ping-pong ball, right? In fact, there's two major methods of additive manufacturing - sintering and extrusion.
Sintering is one of two methods - a laser can scan across the surface, bonding the powder together with the beam, or using what amounts to an inkjet printer squirting bonding agent to bind the powder together. The latter method may also have dyes available to color the bonding agent allowing for colored parts to be produced right from the printer. The parts these produce tend to be very nice - practically molded parts. Also expensive - you're looking at the low-to-mid 5 digits for such a machine.
The other method is extrusion, where a plastic is heated and squirted out a nozzle. The nozzle is moved around the platform layering down the plastic. It's cheaper (it's how the Thing-o-matic and RepRap operate), but the final output can have the tell-tale marks of the process since it was basically formed with a thin strip of plastic. These machines are very cheap because there's nothing to them - just an X/Y/Z platform (3 linear actuators, which can be trivially built at home), a heated nozzle and the ability to control it all.
The sintering method cannot produce a hollow object - the powder serves two purposes of being the bulk material as well as the supports, so hollows cannot exist as there's no way to "blow out" the powder from the middle. The extrusion process can, but cannot produce round parts due to the lack of supports to keep it from rolling around during printing (unless supports are designed into the object, or the platform incorporates its own supports). It can certainly try though.
End result though is each tool has its purpose and there's no way a 3D printer can do everything a CNC mill can (it can come close, but there are tasks the CNC mill is just more efficient at), just like a CNC mill can't replace an additive process like a 3D printer. And even amongst 3D printers you need both as there are tasks better suited for one or the other.
Well, the reason for that is because the American worker is EXPENSIVE. So if you're manufacturing in the US, you want to minimize your labour costs. So what you do is automate the hell out of your production line - design for manufacturing. You redesign parts so they can be put together with robots, you redesign circuitboards so there's fewer of them and fewer fussy connectors that have to be hand-inserted and hand-closed, etc.
So the average American worker is damn productive because robots are doing 99% of the work, while he's doing the 1% that couldn't be automated reliably.
Contrast this with China, where automation is very few (labour is cheaper than automation) so the only thing keeping you from making lots of fussy parts is it takes longer to build (== costs more people and takes longer to assemble). Speeding up your testing by 1 minute can save a ton of money in China as that worker saves 1 minute per device they test. For a robot, it doesn't matter too much.
China's at the "labour intensive" part of industrialization - where goods require lots of manpower to manufacture. The US is at the "capital intensive" part of industrialization, where goods don't require much manpower, just a lot of seed money (robots are expensive, upfront designing for robots is more expensive in time and money, etc), but manufacturing requires very few people and is highly automated.
Of course, Steve Jobs was also wrong in that you don't need 30,000 factory workers to make your product because you'd only need 1/10th of that or less as robots are doing all the work of the 30,000, and the fewer Americans are just overseeing the production line and minor assembly.
Of course, the Chinese model is a bit more nimble in that a design change means re-teaching 30,000 people and a day to get back to full production. Reprogramming all the robots with the updated design and steps takes far longer (both in updating the designs and roles of each robot, and training each robot in its new role and then testing the final result), but with enough technicians (bit pricey) it can be done relatively quickly.
That's because AT&T is suffering from the same problem NTT DoCoMo is suffering from - control channel congestion. You're getting 5 bars alright, but the big problem is stuff like dialing and establishing data connections consume control channel bandwidth. Dropped calls happen because your phone's trying to switch towers and can't because it can't get a word in edgewise on the control channel.
Slow data ditto - the phone on 3G needs to establish multiple PDP data sessions to get 3G speeds, and if it can't talk to the tower because the control channel is busy, well, it suffers.
Control channel congestion (caused by all this plus texting) is why AT&T service can be horrible, despite having plenty of free channels available for data and voice. It's what took T-mobile down once (a bad IM app overloaded the control channel).
Think of it as the old-timey POTS phone days where you lifted the handset and told the operator who you wanted to talk to. And now have lots of people do the same and the operator's now overloaded trying to establish and tear down connections, leading to phone calls not going through, the operator not responding to you, etc.
I do. It was the last time I swiped my card - you hand your card to the cashier, they swipe it, and then they looked at the back and key in the CVV.
I know this because I've seen them and know my CVV so I can tell what keys they're hitting.
Actually, it was a bit more involved. The cashier had to enter in the last 4 digits AND the CVV.
I remember seeing it on the news - they demonstrated someone with a cheap RFID reader and a laptop can bump into people, grab their cards, and run off. It was impressive enough that my parents got worried and checked their cards for that paypass logo.
Of course, having it more in the news isn't a bad thing. Add in a few elaborations (attackers can read your credit card without having to be close to you!) and you'll find great retraction on this. Especially when considering that it applies to debit cards as well. (Anyone with $50 worth of equipment can drain your bank account!).
And yes, while it's a bit of hyperbole, it makes a nice soundbite to get people to change.
So Linux must be the most secure kernel around with NO priviledge escalation bugs since 1991, right? Oh wait, there was one that was fixed a couple of weeks ago that was being exploited.
And surely there wasn't a 30+ year old bug in BSD, I mean, everyone's looked through it so many times.
Even having a ton of eyes on the same code, bugs/holes/vulnerabilities are still glossed over. Open source's record may be better than closed source, but it's still not a surefire way of guaranteeing code quality or that the code's been reviewed and bug-free.