I can hear the booo and hisses already, but this is a large reason why I fucking hate Windows. Let's be real here, everyone getting hacked by these knuckleheads are idiots themselves (to a degree) AND running windows. But what about this: I just imaged and updated my Windows 7 64 system, only use Firefox, and have Microsoft AV (free) enabled. I was minding my own business surfing the web in what I thought was a fairly secure setup, some random popup or link injected code through what I believe was a flash vulnerability (again the box was only a month old) and installed some fucked up rootkit that MS AV actually found the next day. WTF? 0-day exploits CRUSH windows, despite the UAV etc, some how this shit still gets through. Yes, I could have done probably xyz things to protect myself, which I would believe if I were running XP, but this is a 1Mo old version of 7, automatic updates, and I only use firefox. FML.
That's the problem, you used Firefox. Firefox runs as local user on all Windows systems, while IE and I believe Chrome can run in "low integrity mode" on Windows Vista and higher.
Yes, IE and Chrome end up more secure than Firefox, as hard as it is to believe.
Low integrity mode is a sandbox mode where Windows will disallow all access to the filesystem (except to one well known restricted spot), the registry is virtualized (thorugh UAC), interaction is limited through certain IPC (low integrity processes cannot send window messages to higher integrity processes nor keystrokes/mouse movements) and all processes creates are also low-integrity. Basically, it's the same as running your browser as nobody on Linux.
IE has to jump through hoops in order to download a file - it doesnloads it then kicks off a helper program through IPC to move the file (IE proper only has access to the sandbox filesystem - it cannot read nor write anywhere else and requires a helper to download and upload files). The helper is the one that displays the dialog boxes for the download (and the low-integrity process as no say - keeping drive by downloads from happening).
Your second problem is Flash. The buggiest and most insecure plugin for a browser. It's so bad Firefox has to run it as a separate process, Chrome started the process separation thing, etc. Even worse, there's nothing to prevent that Flash drive-by from infecting a Mac, Android or Linux box.
you'd be wise not to trust random code, but if you look carefully it uses only echo, tr and sed, none of which have programmable IO and only piping, so it is safe.
Funny enough, I sorta figured out what it did by careful inspection of the line.
So PS1 gets set to "C:", then the current working directory. Hrm... then TR is used to change all lowercase to upper case, followed by a very peculiar sed. All the while it seems the / are being replaced with \ (\\ for the escaping).
Since the word "evil" was attached to it, well, there could only really be one trick evil enough to do on a UN*X user... especially one involving the command prompt line.
It might be nice to get rid of the space between the directory and the > though. It is C:\>, not C:\ >.
and my daughters use her computer. I have little doubt it has been hacked as I've had to re-image it several times. I can not convince my wife to use a live CD for online banking. I guess it will take us getting wiped out to drive home this point. There is an inflection point between prudence and convenience. Woman are especially non prudent (I want to access my bank when I need it, I am not going to reboot) This is a larger problem of identity that needs solving. It is big bucks now. We need a secure solution. As as a professional coder, I do not see one. Anything on the net can be hacked. Voting machines? On the net, consider the election stolen. Heck, just electronic voting, consider the election stolen. Nothing electronic is immune and all of it is vulnerable. Stinks, but that is reality.
Computers are cheap. Buy a cheap one. Do whatever you can to lock it down. And use it ONLY for banking.
A cheapass notebook without flash (gets rid of gaming and crap) and too slow to run anything other than a browser makes a great banking computer. And it's cheap, and thus, you can make it an appliance. Make the default homepage the bank site and have it load the browser on boot.
Have a general "screwing around" computer for games and all that. Then have a nice PC used strictly for banking and only banking.
Rebooting is a pain. Having another PC to conveniently do a bank transaction instead of having to reboot, and she can see her spreadsheets and accounting packages and banking on separate screens? Priceless.
And while you're at it, get some computers for the kids.
Looks like they're pulling the same shit Ubuntu pulled with upstart (init replacement). "Let's replace something simple and elegant with something complex, incomplete, and very difficult to fix when it goes wrong".
One could make that argument about solid-state electronics, the move away from punch-cards, the move from paper-based filing, the move to journaled filesystems, etc.
Sometimes progress means letting go of the past, and sometimes it takes a while to fully bake; thats why RedHat doing the QA, testing, and development for the rest of us is a good thing. If it sucks, it will die, and noone really has to acknowledge that it ever existed.
Doesn't have to be that way. After all, take a look at OS X - it replaced init with launchd to manage system startup daemons. It later on (around 10.4) replaced syslog with a different version that doesn't quite use text files anymore - it's stored in a database. Console then loads that database and presents it in plain-text style, letting you see it as a regular log or manipulate it.
I suppose we can blame Apple for influencing LInux?
Never underestimate the power of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN" marketing. It will take a while, maybe even a couple years, but a lobbyist and/or marketing firm will find some kid who played a violent video game and shoots up a school or sees porn or something and the media will get involved, there will be a Congressional hearing, and Apple/Google will cave.
Except Apple (and probably Android, but I haven't looked deeply into it) already do have content ratings and parental controls.
And Apple's parental rating system is more fine grained than what the ESRB is proposing. So at the next Congressional hearing, Apple would simply point out that it's supported it from Day 1 (2008) and it's a better system than what the ESRB is proposing.
And any law has to provide an "or equivalent" type in it - they can't write into the law that the ESRB system MUST be used.
Apple's already underwent "think of the children" many times. Like removal of objectionable screenshots, leading to the removal of apps containing "objectional" (both senses) content. And the locking down of the App Store purchasing (including options to restrict purchasing altogether) to prevent kids from racking up $1000 smurfberries.
At best, Apple and Google will allow use of ESRB ratings if developers choose, but probably with the restriction that it maps to the highest level possible (e.g., M game gets 18+ with all content specifiers checked).
It's one of the problems with self-checkouts. I can go to Home Depot and pick up several hundreds of bucks worth of tools and just swipe my card on the way out and be done with it. On the off chance it's too busy and I go through the checkout, the clerks check my signature maybe 50% of the time. While it's on the backs of the merchants, it's obviously not enough of an impact to force signature checks.
That signature on the slip isn't for comparison purposes or even proving it's you.
It's basically a contract that states by signing it, you agree to pay it. If you look at the slip, it'll say "Cardholder agrees to pay this outstanding charge" or words to that effect.
It's also why things like "CHECK ID" are not valid in the signature panel of your card, and the retailer should call their credit card processor to decide what to do. Which may mean confiscation or destruction of the card. A retailer which doesn't risks losing the transaction in a dispute. (At the very least, they can refuse to accept it as it isn't valid).
The signature panel on the card is used to show acceptance of the cardholder agreement (which a retailer should check to ensure the card is actually valid for the charge to be put on it). The signature on the slip is retailer's proof that you accepted the charge.
While I don't really agree with this op, if you think about it logically and follow the money trail, it isn't going to come out of the pockets of the middle class. It will come out of the insurance companies - who are more likely to be mainly owned by the rather rich.
Yeah, but you think the rich are going to lose money over this?
The insurance companies pay. Guess where that extra money comes from? Yes, it comes from everyone. If the insurance premium goes up for banks. banks go and raise their fees, affecting everyone (especially the poor).
Thinking the rich will be hurt by this is just like thinking a credit card company will be hurt by all the chargebacks.
In fact, this op can go against the very people they're trying to help! If the charities get hit with chargebacks, that's a TON of extra paperwork they have to handle (they are probably not equipped to handle it), plus loss of the money (and maybe a little bit extra transaction fee). So now the charity is out the donation and had to have volunteers deal with the bank rather than work on charitable work.
Even though charities get special rates to handle credit cards (often no transaction fees), the extra paperwork involved still takes time and energy away from doing the charitable work.
I've never been to a "LAN party". What do they do there? Are they playing a LAN game or just sitting in a big room surfing the web or is it something more...sinister?
Seriously, please tell me what goes on at a LAN party. I'm genuinely curious, though not enough to actually go to one.
It's "offline" multiplayer gaming. Basically instead of everyone sitting at home playing online, they gather up their stuff (PC (usually a desktop), monitor, keyboard, mouse, headphones) and drive to a mutually agreed location. Usually a friend's house, and they set up on a table somewhere (basement/kitchen/etc) and they all go nuts playing multiplayer games.
The only console to really be a part of this would be the Xbox (original) prior to Live. People would haul their Xbox and their TV to a friend's house to enjoy a weekend of gaming (with the Xbox, it was slightly easier as one console and one TV handled 4 people).
They were extremely popular just a decade ago. These days, everyone prefers to sit in their privacy of their own home and play online.
It was so popular that people would build computers designed just for this - portable ones with powerful CPUs and graphics cards and LCD monitors (people used to haul 21" CRTs...). For those who visited the large parties, they often added stuff that let them lock up mice and keyboards and headphones because those had a nasty tendency to walk.
Unfortunately, Hypercard gave way to Hypercard Player, which then became a specialized commercial product, and at that point Hypercard as phenomenon was dead.
It's funny as Hypercard died way before iOS did.
Hypercard Player was something that came out early 90s. It basically limited the access to what you could do with Hypercard. Earlier revisions simply hid the options, so you could enable it in the Home stack through a secret command or by manually setting the level and removing the rectangle covering the options.
Hypercard died again in early 2000's as it remained a Classic app and every Mac shipped with OS X by default, running Classic. Then Classic was basically killed by the Intel transition (no Classic available on Intel - Classic was basically a VM that required PowerPC), and finally killed for good as of 10.5 (Leopard) which didn't include Classic at all.
Basically Hypercard was killed in many different ways, but they all happened prior to the walled garden cropping up in iOS. But Hypercard pretty much died after OS X became standard - it was a Classic app that never got ported forwards.
Let's say AMD is planning - or thinking about, at least - stopping the manufacture of x86 processors. What's a responsible company spokesperson going to say? "Yes, we're working on an exit strategy and are hoping to be out of the business by 2014" - does anyone believe that would be stated? If it was, their x86 business would tank immediately, and all employees working on x86 now would update their resumes and get while the getting is good.
I'd be willing to bet that one of AMD's investors is Intel, and while AMD may want to get rid of the x86 business, Intel won't let it.
Intel needs AMD. And AMD's weakened state is ideal for Intel. However, if AMD dies, Intel also suffers (think anti-trust). But with AMD alive, Intel's scrutiny is lowered and they can sell more chips easily.
Heck, I'm willing to bet Intel has next-gen chips ready, but they want to keep AMD viable and are holding off the release. There's no benefit to Intel other than a few percent marketshare if AMD dies, and there's a huge downside of EU regulators, US regulators and very close scrutiny.
I'm curious to know why Apple is never implicated in such privacy and tracking discussions considering how they lock you down to their own software and services. IIRC, they were involved in a GPS tracking furore a few months ago which came to naught. CarrierIQ doesn't develop for the iOS. But if carriers want all phones to return "diagnostic" information, presumably the iPhone is also doing so.
Well, the location tracking database furor was because iOS used it as a cache. What it does is it notes the towers it sees, the WiFi APs it sees, and asks Apple "I'm seeing towers X, Y and Z, and see these WiFi MACs. Where am I?". Apple responds with "Here's a list of WiFI APs and Towers and locations near you".
Since the database can be big and changes often, it's not transferred in entirety to an iOS device, but only bits and pieces of it - where it is now and nearby places. As it goes out of the cached area, it'll just request more data.
In dense urban areas, this can be quite fine grained (street level) due to sheer amount of data. In rural parts, it'll cover larger areas (10+mile radius), hence hte variability in the recorded data regions.
Unfortunately, the real problem is it's difficult to tell if it's a cache or really tracking you.
As for CarrierIQ - they'd have to get at some lowlevel access to iOS. Jailbreaking can do it, but as an app in the App Store, there's not enough priviledges for it. Unless apps bundle it in like they do with AdMob ads and such.
SSDs typically have large memory caches, where as HDDs are still stuck around the 32MB mark. With RAM so cheap these days even the lowest end graphics cards are coming with 1GB, but not HDDs for some reason.
Actually, SSDs don't have that big of a cache. Just maybe a few MB or so. Most of it is used to hold the working memory for the controller and for garbage collection purposes, but the data is basically streamed to and from the flash chips themselves.
A large RAM cache would be disasterous for an SSD - you'd see it as very fast performance for a little bit, then performance collapses once you reach a certain size.
GIven modern SSDs have easily 16 flash controllers working in parallel, achieving 250+MB/sec speeds isn't out of the question (it's only 16MB/sec per chip, which is well within what a NAND flash chip can do).
That's because one of the previous humble bundles included a source code release, and it was ported to iOS and sold by another team as though they'd made it.
It's even worse than that. That game was also pirated to the Mac App Store!
Which is why I'm not buying books from Amazon or B&N at this point
B&N's DRM is actually quote lenient. It doesn't limit devices (and if you can get at the epub, you can move it around).
In fact, the only thing that unlocks a B&N ePub is... your name and credit card number. It's the distribution of the latter that basically keeps people honest. If you change your credit card, then B&N re-encrypts the books with the new credit card. But if you keep meticulous records, it's possible to keep the file forever.
If you don't decrypt it, just providing those two keys will unlock all your books.
None of this "5 device" crap or other thing (for B&N, that would be a higher level lock).
On the other hand, this once again proves that it's far easier to just do something contractually and ethically questionable yet massively profitable and wiggle out of the consequences later (especially if you've the money for a squadron of lawyers) than to do things above the board from the get go.
Well, if the users of facebook are stupid enough to hand over all that personal information to a website they don't really know (sure everyone uses it, but how do you trust them?), it's their fault.
Facebook doesn't demand you fill in your phone number when you log in (unlike say a search giant). Facebook's not saying you have to update your status everytime something interesting happens, or you must post every photo you take to it. Or share every thought with it.
Hell, the moment you hand over information, it's not your information anymore. Or like the old adage goes, "never post online what you don't want the world to know". "Privacy" settings are bogus on all sites - they're a marketing gimmick used to tempt people into revealing more to a stranger than they would normally (really, would you tell some guy on the street your life story?).
Especially since the notion of a social network is to share information. Once someone else knows a secret, it's no longer a secret. And a person can easily repost/retweet/resend/forward anything and everything, overriding your privacy settings.
Insisting on Facebook having privacy controls is like implementing DRM on a website. And we know how that goes.
In reading everyone's replies though, I have to ask why everyone is so quick to dismiss alternative medicine altogether. Sure, I'm willing to admit there are lots of people trying to turn a quick buck by selling you sugar pills, but that doesn't mean we should immediately dismiss everything without an FDA seal stamped on it.
Easy, because most alternative medicine is bumpkus. Especially cancer remedies (I'm sure a certain Steven P. Jobs can attest to that).
If this system really works, then anyone who's not an idiot would patent and publish it. The publishing part is fairly important because you want others in the field to critique it in case it has "bad science" in it.
Ignoring the FDA trials and what not, you'll find Big Pharma does lots of tests themselves to make sure it's the medicine that's doing the job and nothing else, and that the result is... repeatable.
That's the problem. Not too many alternative medicine methods have been subject to proper studies and research and science. In fact, most are anecdotal in nature. And the thing is - most don't want to be subject to it because even if it heals say, 5% of all patients studied, it owuld mean the other 95% would probably just walk away.
Homeopathy, chiropractors, etc. All they need is to perform a study and have others replicate the results. Of course, if it turns out it really works, then it wouldn't really be alternative medicine now, would it?
B&N is the one who locked the Nook Tablet's bootloader, tivoizing it. Not Amazon.
I love how the article points out how easily hackable the Nook Touch was while ignoring the fact that B&N has made a major move towards lockdown with the Tablet - locked bootloader, plus it is partitioned so you can only use 1GB of the storage for sideloaded content. The rest is "B&N Content" only.
It's apparently a requirement for Netflix.
Sure every Android device can get Netflix, but what they stream is the SD version of the video. If you want the HD version, your device needs to be locked down.
Compare Netflix on the old Color and the new Tablet and you'll see a difference in video quality. It's another reason why I wrote off the "Netflix on Fire is blurrier on Fire" comparison reviews - of course it is if Amazon didn't qualify for Netflix HD. (And yes, the Amazon version was noticiably blurrier as it was scaled up to the screen, whilst the Tablet was scaling down a higher-quality stream).
And the Nook tablet having 1GB of user content - big whoop. Do what you do with every other Android device and stick an SD card in it.
B&N feels more people would want higher-quality Netflix than the small crowd who wants to hack the device (they're a nice bunch, but not as big a group as those who just want to consume stuff).
I think Google looked at the vast Linux ecosystem and GPL community and decided very wisely they'd keep the kernel but write their own non GPL userland.
Exactly. Same reason why Apple chopped down OS X to make iOS for the iPhone and iPad.
Usability of desktop OSes on handheld and tablet devices is awful, even though compatibility is great. You can buy phones running Windows XP and Windows 7 (they're on the market), but we're talking about Windows UI on a 4" screen. And we know how Microsoft did with nearly two decades of trying to sell tablet-ized Windows (Pen Windows, XP tablet, Origami (XP), now Windows 7).
Right-click is hard enough on a touchscreen already - I can't imagine trying to simulate a middle click And then there's the typing.
It's why there are QT environments for pocket devices, as well as Maemo/MeeGo and other UIs around - what works on the desktop does not work on a touch-enabled tablet nor phone necessarily.
well some windows updates still need reboots it's less then it was in the past but still more then with linux.
Also a lot of NON OS software updates / installers at least say they need a reboot.
It's because Microsoft doesn't support replacing in-use DLL's. The primary reason for that is DLL's don't implement binary-compatible interfaces - an in-use DLL may have a different ABI than that of the new one.
The "reboot" requirement comes from this - to allow replacing of in-use DLL's, the system has a special registry entry that allows listing files in use to be moved by the kernel on reboot.
It affects Linux less as the main libraries are typically not only binary compatible, but binary compatible with previous versions that may have incompatible interfaces. Plus IPC tends to happen across sockets with well-defined interfaces, unlike that for random DLL's that interact through things like COM.
Anyhow, it's always good practice to after doing an update, rebooting the system twice. The first one applies afl the updates and makes sure things work. The second is to ensure things come up *again* in a normal reboot, and not one that did stuff like update DLLs and such.
Well, hard drives are commodities, like orange juice, gas, oil, etc.
Prices are inflated now simply because everyone's got the "OMG I NEED A DRIVE NOW!!!" fever. Then again, drives today aren't any more expensive than they were just a year ago.
So if you have no need for a spare hard drive, don't be a sucker and buy now. If you find a sale, great, if not, hold off.
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
I'm guessing everyone's in a frenzy, but they'll recover in a few months and if it's been sitting on the shelf the whole time while you "stocked up", you'll look silly.
In short - buy if you really need it (and take notice in that drive prices really aren't sky high - they're just where they were last year or the year before). If you don't, just wait it out.
We thought we'd be stuck with $150 barrels of oil. They dropped under half that a year later.
Well, on my GFs IPhone you can not slide the "switches".
You sure it's an iPhone? I hear the Samsung Galaxy Android phones with TouchWiz look a LOT like an iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they copied that bit of the UI as well. (Gripe #1 - Google spent a LOT of time ensuring nothing in Android looked even remotely like the iPhone, and Samsung goes and throws it all away with their TouchWiz crap. It's not even a good imitation.)
Or is it one specific app? There's also a few web pages for iPhone that attempt to replicate the UI and do things like that. Then again, I suppose maybe it's a crappy theme applied to a jailbroken phone?
Sure, iOs and Android is "nicer" but how long did you need to figure that the "sliders" on iOs to switch stuff on or off are no sliders but fancy looking radio buttons (or check boxes even). In other words: you can not slide them from off to on and vice versa, you have to click/touch them. Even worth: by looking at one you can not judge if it is in the on or off state. At least I mix them up all the time. Thinking an option is off (because it shows the neat little "o" to the left, and the slider is moved to the right) but in fact it is on (the little "o" is ment to indicate to move the slider to the left to switch it off. But that slider is no slider, ARRRRRRG!!!!)
I don't know about you, but iOS has always put "On" and "Off" in the little toggles. They're done that way for two reasons. First, it's a larger surface to tap on (checkboxes can be painfully small). Second, its state is readable at a glance.
I believe iOS also puts the "off" in a dimmed-grey while "on" is white-on-blue, making it more obvious what it means ("current state" rather than "this will be its new state when you tap me").
So there's two clues, and it only took me a few seconds to figure it out. iOS 5 improved its readability even more by making the flipping part smaller so there's more space for "On" and "Off".
I'm guessing you're complaining about Android, since the iOS toggle buttons can be tapped OR swiped since the beginning. In which case I can't really help you on that. (iOS has always said "On and Off" and never "o").
A really basic algorithm (if you have the full maze map and not a partial one) is to do the flood-fill algorithm.
You start at the goal, and give it value 0. For all the cells you can reach from the goal, you give it 1. For the cells reachable by the 1 cell(s), you give them value 2. If a cell already has a number, you don't renumber it. Repeat until you end up at the beginning.
To traverse maze - At the beginning, search reachable cells for the lowest number. Keep going in by following the path with the smallest number - it'll get you there the quickest.
It's extra meaningless since the robot was allowed to map out the maze ahead of time. You might as well say "robot is capable of moving at x m/s where x = length of path / 3.921 s."
And extra hard because the faster you go, the greater chance of something mechanical slipping and you'll be crashing into walls.
It's a 16x16 cell grid, and traversing it quickly means having to move accurately within the grid and hoping your tires don't slip and make you lose your place.
Oh yeah, you have to turn, too, and turning at speed is just as fun because you can easily lose your spot that way.
Of course, this mouse is (looking at the web page) probably the 15th or 16th generation robot he's built.
IP over power lines is a horrible idea! The noise it creates across multiple bands is, quite frankly, illegal. Vendors made promises about keeping the noise within certain limits and they failed across the board. That's why IP over power lines is almost completely gone now.
The sad thing is that it took the HAMs pointing out the violations to get the authorities to act.
It depends. A smart meter can do data over poewr lines just fine - it's not sending too much data too often, so it can use a low datarate. The lower the datarate, the lower the bandwidth required (thanks Shannon).
The lower the bandwidth required, the lower the frequency spectrum needed. Heck, if it's particularly good, it can try to signal around 60Hz or so
Anyhow, I just wish the people opposed to smart meters stopped using the "EMF HARMS BABIES" arguments. It's disingenuous (I bet 99.9% of them have a microwave, and probably 95% are near WiFi or Bluetooth transmitters continually).
Hell, I've seen someone say "these people are the canary!" No, they aren't. If you're EMF sensitive, you can't live near any civilization at all. See the guy in Europe - he's basically a hermit. Sensitivity is not that frequency specific.
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That's the problem, you used Firefox. Firefox runs as local user on all Windows systems, while IE and I believe Chrome can run in "low integrity mode" on Windows Vista and higher.
Yes, IE and Chrome end up more secure than Firefox, as hard as it is to believe.
Low integrity mode is a sandbox mode where Windows will disallow all access to the filesystem (except to one well known restricted spot), the registry is virtualized (thorugh UAC), interaction is limited through certain IPC (low integrity processes cannot send window messages to higher integrity processes nor keystrokes/mouse movements) and all processes creates are also low-integrity. Basically, it's the same as running your browser as nobody on Linux.
IE has to jump through hoops in order to download a file - it doesnloads it then kicks off a helper program through IPC to move the file (IE proper only has access to the sandbox filesystem - it cannot read nor write anywhere else and requires a helper to download and upload files). The helper is the one that displays the dialog boxes for the download (and the low-integrity process as no say - keeping drive by downloads from happening).
Your second problem is Flash. The buggiest and most insecure plugin for a browser. It's so bad Firefox has to run it as a separate process, Chrome started the process separation thing, etc. Even worse, there's nothing to prevent that Flash drive-by from infecting a Mac, Android or Linux box.
Funny enough, I sorta figured out what it did by careful inspection of the line.
So PS1 gets set to "C:", then the current working directory. Hrm... then TR is used to change all lowercase to upper case, followed by a very peculiar sed. All the while it seems the / are being replaced with \ (\\ for the escaping).
Since the word "evil" was attached to it, well, there could only really be one trick evil enough to do on a UN*X user... especially one involving the command prompt line.
It might be nice to get rid of the space between the directory and the > though. It is C:\>, not C:\ >.
Computers are cheap. Buy a cheap one. Do whatever you can to lock it down. And use it ONLY for banking.
A cheapass notebook without flash (gets rid of gaming and crap) and too slow to run anything other than a browser makes a great banking computer. And it's cheap, and thus, you can make it an appliance. Make the default homepage the bank site and have it load the browser on boot.
Have a general "screwing around" computer for games and all that. Then have a nice PC used strictly for banking and only banking.
Rebooting is a pain. Having another PC to conveniently do a bank transaction instead of having to reboot, and she can see her spreadsheets and accounting packages and banking on separate screens? Priceless.
And while you're at it, get some computers for the kids.
It's the best use for netbooks, really.
Doesn't have to be that way. After all, take a look at OS X - it replaced init with launchd to manage system startup daemons. It later on (around 10.4) replaced syslog with a different version that doesn't quite use text files anymore - it's stored in a database. Console then loads that database and presents it in plain-text style, letting you see it as a regular log or manipulate it.
I suppose we can blame Apple for influencing LInux?
Except Apple (and probably Android, but I haven't looked deeply into it) already do have content ratings and parental controls.
And Apple's parental rating system is more fine grained than what the ESRB is proposing. So at the next Congressional hearing, Apple would simply point out that it's supported it from Day 1 (2008) and it's a better system than what the ESRB is proposing.
And any law has to provide an "or equivalent" type in it - they can't write into the law that the ESRB system MUST be used.
Apple's already underwent "think of the children" many times. Like removal of objectionable screenshots, leading to the removal of apps containing "objectional" (both senses) content. And the locking down of the App Store purchasing (including options to restrict purchasing altogether) to prevent kids from racking up $1000 smurfberries.
At best, Apple and Google will allow use of ESRB ratings if developers choose, but probably with the restriction that it maps to the highest level possible (e.g., M game gets 18+ with all content specifiers checked).
That signature on the slip isn't for comparison purposes or even proving it's you.
It's basically a contract that states by signing it, you agree to pay it. If you look at the slip, it'll say "Cardholder agrees to pay this outstanding charge" or words to that effect.
It's also why things like "CHECK ID" are not valid in the signature panel of your card, and the retailer should call their credit card processor to decide what to do. Which may mean confiscation or destruction of the card. A retailer which doesn't risks losing the transaction in a dispute. (At the very least, they can refuse to accept it as it isn't valid).
The signature panel on the card is used to show acceptance of the cardholder agreement (which a retailer should check to ensure the card is actually valid for the charge to be put on it). The signature on the slip is retailer's proof that you accepted the charge.
Yeah, but you think the rich are going to lose money over this?
The insurance companies pay. Guess where that extra money comes from? Yes, it comes from everyone. If the insurance premium goes up for banks. banks go and raise their fees, affecting everyone (especially the poor).
Thinking the rich will be hurt by this is just like thinking a credit card company will be hurt by all the chargebacks.
In fact, this op can go against the very people they're trying to help! If the charities get hit with chargebacks, that's a TON of extra paperwork they have to handle (they are probably not equipped to handle it), plus loss of the money (and maybe a little bit extra transaction fee). So now the charity is out the donation and had to have volunteers deal with the bank rather than work on charitable work.
Even though charities get special rates to handle credit cards (often no transaction fees), the extra paperwork involved still takes time and energy away from doing the charitable work.
It's "offline" multiplayer gaming. Basically instead of everyone sitting at home playing online, they gather up their stuff (PC (usually a desktop), monitor, keyboard, mouse, headphones) and drive to a mutually agreed location. Usually a friend's house, and they set up on a table somewhere (basement/kitchen/etc) and they all go nuts playing multiplayer games.
The only console to really be a part of this would be the Xbox (original) prior to Live. People would haul their Xbox and their TV to a friend's house to enjoy a weekend of gaming (with the Xbox, it was slightly easier as one console and one TV handled 4 people).
They were extremely popular just a decade ago. These days, everyone prefers to sit in their privacy of their own home and play online.
It was so popular that people would build computers designed just for this - portable ones with powerful CPUs and graphics cards and LCD monitors (people used to haul 21" CRTs...). For those who visited the large parties, they often added stuff that let them lock up mice and keyboards and headphones because those had a nasty tendency to walk.
And yes, they were extremely social events.
It's funny as Hypercard died way before iOS did.
Hypercard Player was something that came out early 90s. It basically limited the access to what you could do with Hypercard. Earlier revisions simply hid the options, so you could enable it in the Home stack through a secret command or by manually setting the level and removing the rectangle covering the options.
Hypercard died again in early 2000's as it remained a Classic app and every Mac shipped with OS X by default, running Classic. Then Classic was basically killed by the Intel transition (no Classic available on Intel - Classic was basically a VM that required PowerPC), and finally killed for good as of 10.5 (Leopard) which didn't include Classic at all.
Basically Hypercard was killed in many different ways, but they all happened prior to the walled garden cropping up in iOS. But Hypercard pretty much died after OS X became standard - it was a Classic app that never got ported forwards.
I'd be willing to bet that one of AMD's investors is Intel, and while AMD may want to get rid of the x86 business, Intel won't let it.
Intel needs AMD. And AMD's weakened state is ideal for Intel. However, if AMD dies, Intel also suffers (think anti-trust). But with AMD alive, Intel's scrutiny is lowered and they can sell more chips easily.
Heck, I'm willing to bet Intel has next-gen chips ready, but they want to keep AMD viable and are holding off the release. There's no benefit to Intel other than a few percent marketshare if AMD dies, and there's a huge downside of EU regulators, US regulators and very close scrutiny.
Well, the location tracking database furor was because iOS used it as a cache. What it does is it notes the towers it sees, the WiFi APs it sees, and asks Apple "I'm seeing towers X, Y and Z, and see these WiFi MACs. Where am I?". Apple responds with "Here's a list of WiFI APs and Towers and locations near you".
Since the database can be big and changes often, it's not transferred in entirety to an iOS device, but only bits and pieces of it - where it is now and nearby places. As it goes out of the cached area, it'll just request more data.
In dense urban areas, this can be quite fine grained (street level) due to sheer amount of data. In rural parts, it'll cover larger areas (10+mile radius), hence hte variability in the recorded data regions.
Unfortunately, the real problem is it's difficult to tell if it's a cache or really tracking you.
As for CarrierIQ - they'd have to get at some lowlevel access to iOS. Jailbreaking can do it, but as an app in the App Store, there's not enough priviledges for it. Unless apps bundle it in like they do with AdMob ads and such.
Actually, SSDs don't have that big of a cache. Just maybe a few MB or so. Most of it is used to hold the working memory for the controller and for garbage collection purposes, but the data is basically streamed to and from the flash chips themselves.
A large RAM cache would be disasterous for an SSD - you'd see it as very fast performance for a little bit, then performance collapses once you reach a certain size.
GIven modern SSDs have easily 16 flash controllers working in parallel, achieving 250+MB/sec speeds isn't out of the question (it's only 16MB/sec per chip, which is well within what a NAND flash chip can do).
It's even worse than that. That game was also pirated to the Mac App Store!
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/02/03/1335213/pirated-app-sold-on-mac-app-store
B&N's DRM is actually quote lenient. It doesn't limit devices (and if you can get at the epub, you can move it around).
In fact, the only thing that unlocks a B&N ePub is ... your name and credit card number. It's the distribution of the latter that basically keeps people honest. If you change your credit card, then B&N re-encrypts the books with the new credit card. But if you keep meticulous records, it's possible to keep the file forever.
If you don't decrypt it, just providing those two keys will unlock all your books.
None of this "5 device" crap or other thing (for B&N, that would be a higher level lock).
Well, if the users of facebook are stupid enough to hand over all that personal information to a website they don't really know (sure everyone uses it, but how do you trust them?), it's their fault.
Facebook doesn't demand you fill in your phone number when you log in (unlike say a search giant). Facebook's not saying you have to update your status everytime something interesting happens, or you must post every photo you take to it. Or share every thought with it.
Hell, the moment you hand over information, it's not your information anymore. Or like the old adage goes, "never post online what you don't want the world to know". "Privacy" settings are bogus on all sites - they're a marketing gimmick used to tempt people into revealing more to a stranger than they would normally (really, would you tell some guy on the street your life story?).
Especially since the notion of a social network is to share information. Once someone else knows a secret, it's no longer a secret. And a person can easily repost/retweet/resend/forward anything and everything, overriding your privacy settings.
Insisting on Facebook having privacy controls is like implementing DRM on a website. And we know how that goes.
Easy, because most alternative medicine is bumpkus. Especially cancer remedies (I'm sure a certain Steven P. Jobs can attest to that).
If this system really works, then anyone who's not an idiot would patent and publish it. The publishing part is fairly important because you want others in the field to critique it in case it has "bad science" in it.
Ignoring the FDA trials and what not, you'll find Big Pharma does lots of tests themselves to make sure it's the medicine that's doing the job and nothing else, and that the result is... repeatable.
That's the problem. Not too many alternative medicine methods have been subject to proper studies and research and science. In fact, most are anecdotal in nature. And the thing is - most don't want to be subject to it because even if it heals say, 5% of all patients studied, it owuld mean the other 95% would probably just walk away.
Homeopathy, chiropractors, etc. All they need is to perform a study and have others replicate the results. Of course, if it turns out it really works, then it wouldn't really be alternative medicine now, would it?
It's apparently a requirement for Netflix.
Sure every Android device can get Netflix, but what they stream is the SD version of the video. If you want the HD version, your device needs to be locked down.
Compare Netflix on the old Color and the new Tablet and you'll see a difference in video quality. It's another reason why I wrote off the "Netflix on Fire is blurrier on Fire" comparison reviews - of course it is if Amazon didn't qualify for Netflix HD. (And yes, the Amazon version was noticiably blurrier as it was scaled up to the screen, whilst the Tablet was scaling down a higher-quality stream).
And the Nook tablet having 1GB of user content - big whoop. Do what you do with every other Android device and stick an SD card in it.
B&N feels more people would want higher-quality Netflix than the small crowd who wants to hack the device (they're a nice bunch, but not as big a group as those who just want to consume stuff).
Exactly. Same reason why Apple chopped down OS X to make iOS for the iPhone and iPad.
Usability of desktop OSes on handheld and tablet devices is awful, even though compatibility is great. You can buy phones running Windows XP and Windows 7 (they're on the market), but we're talking about Windows UI on a 4" screen. And we know how Microsoft did with nearly two decades of trying to sell tablet-ized Windows (Pen Windows, XP tablet, Origami (XP), now Windows 7).
Right-click is hard enough on a touchscreen already - I can't imagine trying to simulate a middle click And then there's the typing.
It's why there are QT environments for pocket devices, as well as Maemo/MeeGo and other UIs around - what works on the desktop does not work on a touch-enabled tablet nor phone necessarily.
It's because Microsoft doesn't support replacing in-use DLL's. The primary reason for that is DLL's don't implement binary-compatible interfaces - an in-use DLL may have a different ABI than that of the new one.
The "reboot" requirement comes from this - to allow replacing of in-use DLL's, the system has a special registry entry that allows listing files in use to be moved by the kernel on reboot.
It affects Linux less as the main libraries are typically not only binary compatible, but binary compatible with previous versions that may have incompatible interfaces. Plus IPC tends to happen across sockets with well-defined interfaces, unlike that for random DLL's that interact through things like COM.
Anyhow, it's always good practice to after doing an update, rebooting the system twice. The first one applies afl the updates and makes sure things work. The second is to ensure things come up *again* in a normal reboot, and not one that did stuff like update DLLs and such.
Well, hard drives are commodities, like orange juice, gas, oil, etc.
Prices are inflated now simply because everyone's got the "OMG I NEED A DRIVE NOW!!!" fever. Then again, drives today aren't any more expensive than they were just a year ago.
So if you have no need for a spare hard drive, don't be a sucker and buy now. If you find a sale, great, if not, hold off.
And yes, drive supplies will rebound because of one fact - a 2TB spinning rust costs way less than a 2TB SSD, and since drives are going 3TB+, I don't see SSDs catching up until drive size expansion slows below Moore's law. (SSD's fundamental capacity is driven by Moore's law - double the transistors in 18 months - double the capacity - SLC or MLC).
I'm guessing everyone's in a frenzy, but they'll recover in a few months and if it's been sitting on the shelf the whole time while you "stocked up", you'll look silly.
In short - buy if you really need it (and take notice in that drive prices really aren't sky high - they're just where they were last year or the year before). If you don't, just wait it out.
We thought we'd be stuck with $150 barrels of oil. They dropped under half that a year later.
You sure it's an iPhone? I hear the Samsung Galaxy Android phones with TouchWiz look a LOT like an iPhone. I wouldn't be surprised if they copied that bit of the UI as well. (Gripe #1 - Google spent a LOT of time ensuring nothing in Android looked even remotely like the iPhone, and Samsung goes and throws it all away with their TouchWiz crap. It's not even a good imitation.)
Or is it one specific app? There's also a few web pages for iPhone that attempt to replicate the UI and do things like that. Then again, I suppose maybe it's a crappy theme applied to a jailbroken phone?
I don't know about you, but iOS has always put "On" and "Off" in the little toggles. They're done that way for two reasons. First, it's a larger surface to tap on (checkboxes can be painfully small). Second, its state is readable at a glance.
I believe iOS also puts the "off" in a dimmed-grey while "on" is white-on-blue, making it more obvious what it means ("current state" rather than "this will be its new state when you tap me").
So there's two clues, and it only took me a few seconds to figure it out. iOS 5 improved its readability even more by making the flipping part smaller so there's more space for "On" and "Off".
I'm guessing you're complaining about Android, since the iOS toggle buttons can be tapped OR swiped since the beginning. In which case I can't really help you on that. (iOS has always said "On and Off" and never "o").
A really basic algorithm (if you have the full maze map and not a partial one) is to do the flood-fill algorithm.
You start at the goal, and give it value 0. For all the cells you can reach from the goal, you give it 1. For the cells reachable by the 1 cell(s), you give them value 2. If a cell already has a number, you don't renumber it. Repeat until you end up at the beginning.
To traverse maze - At the beginning, search reachable cells for the lowest number. Keep going in by following the path with the smallest number - it'll get you there the quickest.
There are more advanced algorithms out there.
And extra hard because the faster you go, the greater chance of something mechanical slipping and you'll be crashing into walls.
It's a 16x16 cell grid, and traversing it quickly means having to move accurately within the grid and hoping your tires don't slip and make you lose your place.
Oh yeah, you have to turn, too, and turning at speed is just as fun because you can easily lose your spot that way.
Of course, this mouse is (looking at the web page) probably the 15th or 16th generation robot he's built.
It depends. A smart meter can do data over poewr lines just fine - it's not sending too much data too often, so it can use a low datarate. The lower the datarate, the lower the bandwidth required (thanks Shannon).
The lower the bandwidth required, the lower the frequency spectrum needed. Heck, if it's particularly good, it can try to signal around 60Hz or so
Anyhow, I just wish the people opposed to smart meters stopped using the "EMF HARMS BABIES" arguments. It's disingenuous (I bet 99.9% of them have a microwave, and probably 95% are near WiFi or Bluetooth transmitters continually).
Hell, I've seen someone say "these people are the canary!" No, they aren't. If you're EMF sensitive, you can't live near any civilization at all. See the guy in Europe - he's basically a hermit. Sensitivity is not that frequency specific.