A long time ago somebody wise said that the long term success of every tech company depends on building your own competition. If you don't create the product that out-competes your cash cow, someone else will. Instead of trying to defend their little castle of Ads, Google must try to come up with products that make the ad revenue model obsolete, because a lot of other companies are trying to do that very thing. Google must continuously re-invent itself every couple of years from now on, or fall behind.
One of the fun things about tech markets is that you must essentially always be in that near-panic flop sweat to figure out how to get to the next step before your most recent success turns old and fails. And the more successful that success was, the harder others are working to turn it to failure. How's that song go? "What have you done for me lately?" That's the customer's refrain.
That person wouldn't be Steve Jobs, would it? After all, it seems like the past 10 years, he's done just that. The iPod Nano basically killed the iPod mini. The iPod Touch and iPhone are basically killing all the iPods - the remaining sales are for niches (Classic for those who want their entire library, Nano for the gym and exercise folks). Heck, the iPod Nano's basically killing the iPod shuffle.
The iPad's starting to eat into low-end portable Mac sales.
And I remember Jobs saying a year or so ago that yes, the fact that Apple's selling products that compete and possibly steal sales away from Apple's other products is a good thing. And Apple's not afraid to actually go and create a new product even if it kills another product line.
Very much not a lawyer, but I thought that was kind of the whole point of incorporating... turning the business into a seperate entity with it's own assets and protecting the owner.
Personally I think this sucks in situations like this. Righthaven will just die, and spring up as something else and keep right on going..
True, but the courts have determined rules for "piercing the corporate veil" as it's known - the best known reason is if the whole purpose of a company was to commit fraud. Because the point of an incorporated business is NOT to break the law with impunity.
And no, it's not "protecting the owner" but producting the owner's non-corporate assets. Basically if a corporation shuts down, all the owners (shareholders and the like) lose their investment. However, those owner's non-corporate assets (e.g., their house, car, cash in bank, etc) are safe. So if your business goes bankrupt, if it's incorporated, the bank can't go after your house or other assets as they could for non-incorporated businesses.
In Linux, a kernel exploit from an application is also known as a "priviledge escalation" bug. Basically, a non-root user exploits the kernel in some way and gets root priviledges.
And yes, there have been many of those - usually some combination of oddball flags and little used options leading to an overflow.
And no, forcing the user to do the escalation for you don't count.
Play is the best way to learn. If you get a new tool, and your first reaction isn't "Sweet, let's see what this thing can do!", you're probably dumb. If you learn a tool, any tool, by simple rote memorization of the tasks you need to do, instead of understanding the theory behind the usage, then you're dumb.
It depends, because no one has time to check out the features of their new "toys". If work gives you a cellphone, 99% of the population won't got and check out the features it has, because they don't care. Work required them to have a cellphone, they were given one, end of story. The cellphone is not their job, it's just a tool to facilitate doing their job. This isn't true if your job is to sell cellphones, but if you're hawking widgets to other companies, you don't care if your cellphone is has 3 Gees or 10Gees or has Flash or whatever. It just makes calls and possibly lets you send and receive emails.
Just like a car is used to facilitate transportation, it doesn't mean people go out onto the highways to go full throttle to see what it can do - most people don't care about their cars - other than it gets them from point A to point B.
It's like how some people go into a store, and buy the first shirt they find, while others spend hours agonizing over two shirts.
Of course, the hope is if some tool is helpful to the task at hand, and said task happens often, curiousity to explore the tool would develop. Of course, we can also blame many IT departments for slapping anyone who even tries to do anything fancy to the point where diverging from "recommended steps" leads to fears of dismissal or reprimand...
That said, you are right wrt to an iPhone or iPod Touch - since those are rarely bought as tools meant to accomplish some other task but be a means to themselves. Which is why Apple advertises both as not just a phone or music player, but as gateways to entertainment, fun, and exploration.
Back in the Dark Old Days when PCs cost a pretty penny, fixing it yourself was a necessity. When a TV cost a year's disposable income, if it broke down, you called a repairman. Ditto when your car broke down, or when other appliances broke down.
These days, most people don't bother because a new TV is barely a month's disposable income, or much less on sale, an oil change can be had for a twenty and be done in 20 minutes, and fixing a PC costs as much as a new PC at current labor rates. People didn't bother and these appliances became throwaway purely because it's cheaper to buy the latest and greatest than fix last year's model.
I think this "maker" trend is more because what were once isolated islands of geeks have coalesced - the Internet has made it possible for those groups to interact and realize that they're bigger than they thought, as well as make it possible to share, build and get built stuff - once hard to get services are now a click away.
The Internet has done a LOT towards helping socially awkward people interact, and interact they have, which is a Good Thing as it gets them safely to be more social and interacting with the rest of the world.
I think they offer a free "net install" CD, and many others have put together offline install versoins.
But yeah, that's the OpenBSD way - they sell the One True Install media to ensure you're getting a pristine copy and not something potentially hacked up with hidden vulnerabilities and such. After all, OpenBSD is about security - and having a way to distribute unmodified CDs is quite hard.
If you're testing, fine, netinstall or "unofficial offline install" CDs and DVDs work. But if you're wanting a secure installation, you probably sould buy the official blessed media.
It seems to me that a well edited summary of the story might give us an idea of what Spear Phishing is.. at least, why is it different than normal phishing?
It's a form of highly targeted phishing. Think back earlier this year to the RSA hack - how was it done? It was done by someone pretending to be the HR firm RSA uses and writing a pretty damn plausible e-mail that they might get in their inbox and not have second thoughts about (it was sent to their HR person about a list of potential hires).
Basically, instead of spamming millions with "your bank account has been accessed by a third party! Click to change your password" emails and hoping a few take the bait, spear phishing is sending only a few emails to select individuals with plausible subjects, heaaders and content that they might receive during the day.
All the usual precautions apply, but if they send you a Word document by e-mail, chances are way better if it came from the customer with something like "Requirements review with comments.doc" that someone will blindly open it. Especially if the customer just signed on and an initial requirements doc was just sent out.
Another example would be Sales receiving an infected Word document disguised as a PO from someone claiming to be an existing customer. Heck, it might be a plausible looking PO as well so no one suspects anything.
You can go to a tradeschool and do one of their "Computer programming in Java" courses and graduate into a job doing Java programming. Or you can do Computer Science or Computer Engineering at a college or university, who may have a "standard language" but is really just to facilitate learning. Along the way other languages will be taught and written in the course of a semester - so you only have a couple of weeks to learn it and become proficient enough to understand simple but non-trivial programs.
Once you understand the concepts of computer programming, it's all syntax - whether you program in assembly, C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, etc. It's much easier to pick up new languages when you realize they're all the same and have the same limitations (bubblesort will always be slow, even if you write it in hand-tuned cycle-counted assembly watching your caches).
And hell, having a lot of languages under your belt lets you pick the right one for the right situation, and even if it falls into disuse, it can be rapidly picked up again. Sometimes all it takes is a simpel cheat sheet.
About the hardest part of learning any language is the standard library.
Apple but clearly competing companies are making massive profits from Android
Or... Apple took 2/3rds of the profits of the entire mobile sector (including featurephones and "dumbphones"). Samsung, HTC, and others may have shipped more phones, but they're making far less money per phone than Apple.
Like how Apple can sell 1/10th the number of computers Dell does, but yet rake in far more revenue from computers alone than Dell does.
And Android's huge in China. Shipments from HTC/ZTE/others won't show it, but it's because most Android phones run AOSP. AOSP is pretty big - anyone with design chops can plop in a cheap processor, some memory, and do the Android build for it. Doesn't matter if it's 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 - whichever works well enough to ship. Sure they won't have Google apps, but there's alternative marketplaces, and many of them (besides serving up all the Android malware) offer "free" apps.
Heck, the Chinese might be more familiar with AOSP and their marketplaces than official Android. Hell, the first complaint of Android malware came from "unofficial Chinese marketplaces" - that should give you an indication just how big Android is. HTC and others might actually have a harder time because they have to compete against AOSP phones with preloaded marketplaces and stuff.
They were probably 90 days from going to the point of no return where if they continued on their current path, then yes, Apple was heading towards the drain. At which point investors and everyone else would give up - even if Apple released an "insanely great" product then, no one would pay attention to it as they believe Apple would be dead.
Fact is, Steve Jobs joined Apple in 1997. The iMac came out in 1998. More than 90 days elapsed, so technically, Apple should've gone into bankruptcy. Instead, Jobs made some significant changes - of which Apple could sustain because they had a big bankroll. Hell, Apple just bought NeXT for $400M!
That $150M Microsoft investment was a drop in the bucket compared to cash on hand (Apple was still quite debt-free).
In fact, that $150M was the shrewdest business move in the world. Microsoft was flush with cash, Apple was in "dire straits" with investors. What better way to show investors that "Apple is alive and well" by having Microsoft put in a token sum of money into Apple? It's basically Gates' pocket change for Microsoft, and Apple gets an itty-bitty bump in stock price. BUT, it signalled to people that yes, if MICROSOFT was willing to put up money (a tiny amount of money) into Apple, perhaps they should as well.
Investors are lemmings. If they see someone doing something interesting, they follow. Seeing Microsoft put money into Apple? Sure, they'll hand over cash to Apple as well. And that was the whole business move behind that $150M. It wasn't a "rescue" package of case - it was a rescue package of investor confidence in Apple.
The problem is that your solution requires us to trust the client. Not only should you never trust the client, you should assume the client is hostile and act accordingly.
So put timer inside a box with serially numbered seals. Timers are issued at start of event and must be returned at end. If seal has been tampered, vehicle it was tracking is disqualified.
If necessary, issue them on start line and collect them at finish line. Have simple loops at start and finish line to automatically start and stop timer. A simple Arduino board should be good for this. Make it so the seals must be opened in order to extract timing data, reset the board, then re-seal timer. Include in timing data number of times it was started and stopped, too, or if it was attempted to be started while already running, or stopped while already stopped.
No. Apple easily sells every single unit the make (also, they release SALES numbers, not shipped numbers). I suspect there's a reason Samsung doesn't release sales numbers.
Apple tries to prevent channel stuffing - but they also tend to sell everything they make.
Additionally, Apple's profitshare of the mobile sector (including dumbphones and the like) was a whopping 66%. Yes, two thirds of all profits made went to Apple. Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, RIM, Nokia, etc. are fighting over the remaining pie, with smartphones, featurephones (which still outsell smartphones) and other things.
It's crazy.
And Apple doesn't like to channel stuff - they drop production as sales drop, and when a new model is being introduced, will often not fulfill orders for the old inventory, rather letting them dry up. It's a rather fragile balancing act - Apple hates shortages (they want everyone who wants one to walk out with one), but also needs to ensure expensive inventory doesn't pile up. And it's even harder when your quantities are in the millions.
ARM isn't a microcontroller. A microcontroller is something with 1K RAM and 16K flash, and a set of pins useful for talking to external devices, like a serial port, digital outputs with PWM and integrated AD converters.
ARM is a low power CPU and if they're smart they'll do like x86 and require the unused bits to be all set to 1 or 0 so that they can't be repurposed.
Depends on the project. There are ARM-based microcontrollers out there with 128k flash and maybe 256k of RAM. And with onchip peripherals, having ADCs, DACs, timers, and other stuff is quite trivial, as well as requisite GPIO.
ARM scales everywhere - it's probably one of the most widely shipped architectures out there - your PC alone may have several ARM cores in it (for WiFi, Bluetooth, maybe the optical drive). Your smartphone and tablet may have several as well - besides the main processor, there's probably one (or two!) driving the 3G, Bluetooth, WiFi and the like.
The deal is, not all ARMs have to be the latest and greatest - there's still ARM9 processors used in lightweight applications (v5), ARM11s (v6), and Cortex A (applications), and M (microcontroller) series (v7).
Ryan Air is doing the "low bottom line, ding 'em on the extras" business model. Most other airlines do the "give them some service" model.
Which one is better? Who's to say. If all you want is to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible and know you won't need bathroom, food or drink or other amenities, Ryan Air is perfect. If you want some of that stuff, pay more for another airline where it's thrown in "for free".
That's all it is. Many discount carriers got started that way (e.g. Southwest, WestJet) by offering little amenities in exchange for cheaper airfare. Ryan Air just took it to the extreme. Hell, if it was legal, they'd probably just dump everyone on some road near the airport and pick people up there too.
Also, why is it that only Apple laptops have a trackpad which has seen any progress in a decade?
Hell, why is it Apple can offer trackpads on their laptops that are 3 times the surface area of most laptops?
Sure trackpads are iffy, but why do most PCs have itty-bitty ones that barely can scroll 1/3rd of the screen at full accelleration? Hell, most PCs don't have ones bigger than my netbook. Apple seems to be able to stuff a huge one in their smallest of laptops. Hell, the Apple ones have acreage compared to PCs.
I wonder though what happens to all those iPhone 3GS users who are still picking them up when it's getting long in the tooth. Does it perform okay with iOS 5? Are they going to feel shafted if they just bought it and all the sudden the iPhone 5 comes out and iOS 6 follows? At least with the iPhone 2G and 3G they only sold about a year and the next update was after it was discontinued so you felt like you got good value out of it.
If we take the Geek view, the 3GS has a few things going for it that'll lead to its longevity.
First, processor. The iPhone and iPhone 3G use ARM11 processors. The 3GS uses a Cortex-A8 (the A4 is Cortex-A8 and the A5 is Cortex-A9). Thus the 3GS has the advantage of being a current processor in use. The iPad has a Cortex-A8, while the iPad2 with its A5 is the Cortex-A9.
Second, RAM. The iPhone and iPhone 3G have 128MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256MB. iPhone 4 and 4S have 512MB of RAM. The iPad has 256MB, and iPad2 has 512MB.
So the 3GS sports the current ARMv7 architecture and as much RAM as the iPad1, which should mean it has a lot of life left into it. It's a bit long in the tooth, yes, but it's still a powerful enough platform.
The 3G's problem was basically IOS4 didn't have enough memory - most of the slowdowns, delays, stalls, crashes were because the memory manager was busy killing tasks and freeing memory.
It's also why iPhones are lousy with Android - the hardware required for Android just isn't there.
In fact, in IOS, it's one of the top reasons apps "crash" - they don't crash, but are closed because the OS is making space in memory and decided it was ripe for killing. It's how apps like Safari can crash but still remember browsing history and such - sometimes they crash because they really crash (it is a webbrowser), and sometimes the OS decides it needs RAM and closes the apps gracefully. Either way though, it looks the same to the user.
Well, you can always use webmail:). Since it has Flash, it'll give you True Web Experience(tm)!
(Unfortunately, like the HP touchPad, it runs Flash all the time...).
As for BBM, apparently the problem is that BBM makes the assumption of one PIN per member, and I don't think Playbooks have PINs (and now you have a problem of two PINs if it's also linked to a blackberry). BBM being an extension of what used to be "free" messaging by PIN that goes all the way back to the original mobitex blackberries.
Makes sense to me; we won't be cooling the core at any usage level below 30TW. If we were directly tapping the core, and there were no radioactive replenishment, the thermal energy comes to about 20,000,000,000 years at current usage levels. I'm not sure where along the line we would run into magnetic field problems, but it will be way after I'm dead, so it doesn't matter. Still, not a fart in a hurricane.;-)
The sun is going to die first before we extract all the heat out of the Earth, basically (I think the Sun has what, 6-9 billion years left?). And when it becomes a red giant, it's going to expand so big it'll encompass earth's orbit. Even then, as we get close the sun will make the earth rather hot to live on.
Basically, it's a free for all - the planet will be long uninhabitable before the core cools down... though the magnetic field is a still a question.
So again why would a Sony Entertainment division want to keep Netflix around as the toll collector on the great movie streaming highway of the future? Where's the value added step?
The value-add is that the more services, the less control each service has. The movie industry, after seeing how iTunes has basically got the music industry by the balls, has decided the best way to prevent that is to ensure that there are several (not many, not one) services, each of which will have to beg and submit to get its content.
Hence, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and a few other sites.
Steve Jobs basically did a coup against the music industry (where in the world would a Mac's (at the time) pathetic 5% marketshare be considered a positive selling point? Yet, the music industry was relieved it was to be Mac-only in the beginning). Of course, the iPod and iTunes Fairplay DRM basically ensured that Apple controlled the music industry. The endgame was Amazon was allowed to sell music DRM-free, and Apple renegotiated.
The movie industry sees this as a far worse outcome - they would rather have people pirate their movies than be under the thumb of Netflix or iTunes or whoever becomes the dominant player. They want control.
Unfortunately for BeOS, they didn't have Steve Jobs.
Be had Gassee, a former Apple exec. The big problem though, was that Be felt Apple needed them far more than Apple felt they needed Be. As a result, Be refused to sell itself for less than $200M, while Apple refused to pay more than $125M for it.
Steve Jobs also mentioned that BeOS had a few limitations (lack of printing), and did a sell job to get NeXT sold for $429M.
If it wasn't for Gassee's greed, Apple might've gone with BeOS instead of NeXTStep. In the end, Be Inc. was acquired by Palm for $11M.
Likewise, you can opt out of using Google's services by blocking traffic to their servers and refusing to do business with their partners.
You also forgot to "forgo the smartphone". A lot of apps (Android especially, but also iOS) use AdMob, which is owned and operated by Google now. (Ironically, it was Apple's iAds that let the DoJ to approve Google's purchase of AdMob - and iAd's failure could spell antitrust issues ("Even APPLE couldn't compete against Google") over it). AdMob is a company specializing in in-app advertising. and able to tell which app, and other usage statistics.
Plus, location awareness on Android sends tracking data to Google, but at least that's epecified.
NAT decouples the internal private network from the external network - and I'm sure any IT admin who has had to renumber their internal network would agree it's a huge PITA on IPv4. Luckily though they don't have to do it when their ISP gives them a new range of IPv4 addresses except for the few machines that are using them (DNS servers mostly - other servers can often hide behind NAT).
They see the IPv6 transition as hard because no one makes NATv6 boxes (though it does exist, and heck, NAT-PT makes it possible to isolate the internal network's protocol from the external network - start IPv4, NAT-PT translates to IPv6 for the internet, etc.). They see the ISP giving them a prefix and changing that prefix willy-nilly causing lots of fun for everyone inside. They'd rather do it the IPv4 way - give everyone a private IPv6 address (FC00::/64) and worry on the few border routers and such.
Even worse - home users, who most likely do NOT have a working DNS setup and have to type the damn things in. And just when my parents have gotten used to typing the long string of nonsense garbage to hit the printer, the ISP changes their prefix and they have to learn a new set of IPs.
If we break the concept of true-end-to-end connectivity (already broken thanks to firewalls), the IPv6 transition could've been done years ago - everyone replaces their Linksys or Cisco router and go on their way, while the router does NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT as appropriate. It just works, my parents don't have to learn anything new (and I don't have to fiddle with their machines and everything), etc. etc.
IPv6 is sorely needed, yes. But the assumptions made 20 years ago when it was designed just aren't true today and no one wants to play network admin for their entire extended family and neighbourhood. And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
We can probably switch a good chunk of the Internet to IPv6 by haivng a transition plan of home users replacing their routers with ones that do NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT - they're used to stuff like that and it makes life easy. Ditto enterprise customers - most businesses will probably just switch if they only have to replace one box and not have to learn the ins and outs of IPv6 and getting every PC to have a routable address it doesn't need.
I was under the impression that Slashdot had cut back on the number of NYT links that it posts per month due to the NYT's limit of 20 articles per free user per month. Even one a day would run up into the paywall.
There are enough ways around the paywall that anyone in the/. crowd ought to easily get around it with just minor amount of hassle. Especially if one doesn't limit themselves (it's on a referrer basis - other blogs linking to the same article don't count. And if push comes to shove, really, you can't take the headline and Google it? Google News does count as an alternate source).
It isn't a hard paywall - the NYT did it smartly to ensure casual users can view content, and hard core viewers have to pay for it. Of course, good on you if you can read the NYT completely for free using the various (supported) ways around it.
Slashdot Mirror
On first look at the title of the article, I would've blamed Apple (though I have to admit the whole "Apple bans another app" meme is getting old).
Except this time it's Google pulling their app. And just a few weeks ago the same thing happened with the Google Voice app.
I wonder if the Android versions of those apps are that bad...
That person wouldn't be Steve Jobs, would it? After all, it seems like the past 10 years, he's done just that. The iPod Nano basically killed the iPod mini. The iPod Touch and iPhone are basically killing all the iPods - the remaining sales are for niches (Classic for those who want their entire library, Nano for the gym and exercise folks). Heck, the iPod Nano's basically killing the iPod shuffle.
The iPad's starting to eat into low-end portable Mac sales.
And I remember Jobs saying a year or so ago that yes, the fact that Apple's selling products that compete and possibly steal sales away from Apple's other products is a good thing. And Apple's not afraid to actually go and create a new product even if it kills another product line.
True, but the courts have determined rules for "piercing the corporate veil" as it's known - the best known reason is if the whole purpose of a company was to commit fraud. Because the point of an incorporated business is NOT to break the law with impunity.
And no, it's not "protecting the owner" but producting the owner's non-corporate assets. Basically if a corporation shuts down, all the owners (shareholders and the like) lose their investment. However, those owner's non-corporate assets (e.g., their house, car, cash in bank, etc) are safe. So if your business goes bankrupt, if it's incorporated, the bank can't go after your house or other assets as they could for non-incorporated businesses.
In Linux, a kernel exploit from an application is also known as a "priviledge escalation" bug. Basically, a non-root user exploits the kernel in some way and gets root priviledges.
And yes, there have been many of those - usually some combination of oddball flags and little used options leading to an overflow.
And no, forcing the user to do the escalation for you don't count.
It depends, because no one has time to check out the features of their new "toys". If work gives you a cellphone, 99% of the population won't got and check out the features it has, because they don't care. Work required them to have a cellphone, they were given one, end of story. The cellphone is not their job, it's just a tool to facilitate doing their job. This isn't true if your job is to sell cellphones, but if you're hawking widgets to other companies, you don't care if your cellphone is has 3 Gees or 10Gees or has Flash or whatever. It just makes calls and possibly lets you send and receive emails.
Just like a car is used to facilitate transportation, it doesn't mean people go out onto the highways to go full throttle to see what it can do - most people don't care about their cars - other than it gets them from point A to point B.
It's like how some people go into a store, and buy the first shirt they find, while others spend hours agonizing over two shirts.
Of course, the hope is if some tool is helpful to the task at hand, and said task happens often, curiousity to explore the tool would develop. Of course, we can also blame many IT departments for slapping anyone who even tries to do anything fancy to the point where diverging from "recommended steps" leads to fears of dismissal or reprimand...
That said, you are right wrt to an iPhone or iPod Touch - since those are rarely bought as tools meant to accomplish some other task but be a means to themselves. Which is why Apple advertises both as not just a phone or music player, but as gateways to entertainment, fun, and exploration.
Back in the Dark Old Days when PCs cost a pretty penny, fixing it yourself was a necessity. When a TV cost a year's disposable income, if it broke down, you called a repairman. Ditto when your car broke down, or when other appliances broke down.
These days, most people don't bother because a new TV is barely a month's disposable income, or much less on sale, an oil change can be had for a twenty and be done in 20 minutes, and fixing a PC costs as much as a new PC at current labor rates. People didn't bother and these appliances became throwaway purely because it's cheaper to buy the latest and greatest than fix last year's model.
I think this "maker" trend is more because what were once isolated islands of geeks have coalesced - the Internet has made it possible for those groups to interact and realize that they're bigger than they thought, as well as make it possible to share, build and get built stuff - once hard to get services are now a click away.
The Internet has done a LOT towards helping socially awkward people interact, and interact they have, which is a Good Thing as it gets them safely to be more social and interacting with the rest of the world.
I think they offer a free "net install" CD, and many others have put together offline install versoins.
But yeah, that's the OpenBSD way - they sell the One True Install media to ensure you're getting a pristine copy and not something potentially hacked up with hidden vulnerabilities and such. After all, OpenBSD is about security - and having a way to distribute unmodified CDs is quite hard.
If you're testing, fine, netinstall or "unofficial offline install" CDs and DVDs work. But if you're wanting a secure installation, you probably sould buy the official blessed media.
It's a form of highly targeted phishing. Think back earlier this year to the RSA hack - how was it done? It was done by someone pretending to be the HR firm RSA uses and writing a pretty damn plausible e-mail that they might get in their inbox and not have second thoughts about (it was sent to their HR person about a list of potential hires).
Basically, instead of spamming millions with "your bank account has been accessed by a third party! Click to change your password" emails and hoping a few take the bait, spear phishing is sending only a few emails to select individuals with plausible subjects, heaaders and content that they might receive during the day.
All the usual precautions apply, but if they send you a Word document by e-mail, chances are way better if it came from the customer with something like "Requirements review with comments.doc" that someone will blindly open it. Especially if the customer just signed on and an initial requirements doc was just sent out.
Another example would be Sales receiving an infected Word document disguised as a PO from someone claiming to be an existing customer. Heck, it might be a plausible looking PO as well so no one suspects anything.
(posting to undo error in moderation... grr).
Exactly.
You can go to a tradeschool and do one of their "Computer programming in Java" courses and graduate into a job doing Java programming. Or you can do Computer Science or Computer Engineering at a college or university, who may have a "standard language" but is really just to facilitate learning. Along the way other languages will be taught and written in the course of a semester - so you only have a couple of weeks to learn it and become proficient enough to understand simple but non-trivial programs.
Once you understand the concepts of computer programming, it's all syntax - whether you program in assembly, C, C++, Java, Python, Perl, etc. It's much easier to pick up new languages when you realize they're all the same and have the same limitations (bubblesort will always be slow, even if you write it in hand-tuned cycle-counted assembly watching your caches).
And hell, having a lot of languages under your belt lets you pick the right one for the right situation, and even if it falls into disuse, it can be rapidly picked up again. Sometimes all it takes is a simpel cheat sheet.
About the hardest part of learning any language is the standard library.
Or... Apple took 2/3rds of the profits of the entire mobile sector (including featurephones and "dumbphones"). Samsung, HTC, and others may have shipped more phones, but they're making far less money per phone than Apple.
Like how Apple can sell 1/10th the number of computers Dell does, but yet rake in far more revenue from computers alone than Dell does.
And Android's huge in China. Shipments from HTC/ZTE/others won't show it, but it's because most Android phones run AOSP. AOSP is pretty big - anyone with design chops can plop in a cheap processor, some memory, and do the Android build for it. Doesn't matter if it's 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, 2.2 or 2.3 - whichever works well enough to ship. Sure they won't have Google apps, but there's alternative marketplaces, and many of them (besides serving up all the Android malware) offer "free" apps.
Heck, the Chinese might be more familiar with AOSP and their marketplaces than official Android. Hell, the first complaint of Android malware came from "unofficial Chinese marketplaces" - that should give you an indication just how big Android is. HTC and others might actually have a harder time because they have to compete against AOSP phones with preloaded marketplaces and stuff.
They were probably 90 days from going to the point of no return where if they continued on their current path, then yes, Apple was heading towards the drain. At which point investors and everyone else would give up - even if Apple released an "insanely great" product then, no one would pay attention to it as they believe Apple would be dead.
Fact is, Steve Jobs joined Apple in 1997. The iMac came out in 1998. More than 90 days elapsed, so technically, Apple should've gone into bankruptcy. Instead, Jobs made some significant changes - of which Apple could sustain because they had a big bankroll. Hell, Apple just bought NeXT for $400M!
That $150M Microsoft investment was a drop in the bucket compared to cash on hand (Apple was still quite debt-free).
In fact, that $150M was the shrewdest business move in the world. Microsoft was flush with cash, Apple was in "dire straits" with investors. What better way to show investors that "Apple is alive and well" by having Microsoft put in a token sum of money into Apple? It's basically Gates' pocket change for Microsoft, and Apple gets an itty-bitty bump in stock price. BUT, it signalled to people that yes, if MICROSOFT was willing to put up money (a tiny amount of money) into Apple, perhaps they should as well.
Investors are lemmings. If they see someone doing something interesting, they follow. Seeing Microsoft put money into Apple? Sure, they'll hand over cash to Apple as well. And that was the whole business move behind that $150M. It wasn't a "rescue" package of case - it was a rescue package of investor confidence in Apple.
So put timer inside a box with serially numbered seals. Timers are issued at start of event and must be returned at end. If seal has been tampered, vehicle it was tracking is disqualified.
If necessary, issue them on start line and collect them at finish line. Have simple loops at start and finish line to automatically start and stop timer. A simple Arduino board should be good for this. Make it so the seals must be opened in order to extract timing data, reset the board, then re-seal timer. Include in timing data number of times it was started and stopped, too, or if it was attempted to be started while already running, or stopped while already stopped.
Apple tries to prevent channel stuffing - but they also tend to sell everything they make.
Additionally, Apple's profitshare of the mobile sector (including dumbphones and the like) was a whopping 66%. Yes, two thirds of all profits made went to Apple. Samsung, LG, Motorola, HTC, RIM, Nokia, etc. are fighting over the remaining pie, with smartphones, featurephones (which still outsell smartphones) and other things.
It's crazy.
And Apple doesn't like to channel stuff - they drop production as sales drop, and when a new model is being introduced, will often not fulfill orders for the old inventory, rather letting them dry up. It's a rather fragile balancing act - Apple hates shortages (they want everyone who wants one to walk out with one), but also needs to ensure expensive inventory doesn't pile up. And it's even harder when your quantities are in the millions.
Depends on the project. There are ARM-based microcontrollers out there with 128k flash and maybe 256k of RAM. And with onchip peripherals, having ADCs, DACs, timers, and other stuff is quite trivial, as well as requisite GPIO.
ARM scales everywhere - it's probably one of the most widely shipped architectures out there - your PC alone may have several ARM cores in it (for WiFi, Bluetooth, maybe the optical drive). Your smartphone and tablet may have several as well - besides the main processor, there's probably one (or two!) driving the 3G, Bluetooth, WiFi and the like.
The deal is, not all ARMs have to be the latest and greatest - there's still ARM9 processors used in lightweight applications (v5), ARM11s (v6), and Cortex A (applications), and M (microcontroller) series (v7).
It's called "you get what you pay for".
Ryan Air is doing the "low bottom line, ding 'em on the extras" business model. Most other airlines do the "give them some service" model.
Which one is better? Who's to say. If all you want is to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible and know you won't need bathroom, food or drink or other amenities, Ryan Air is perfect. If you want some of that stuff, pay more for another airline where it's thrown in "for free".
That's all it is. Many discount carriers got started that way (e.g. Southwest, WestJet) by offering little amenities in exchange for cheaper airfare. Ryan Air just took it to the extreme. Hell, if it was legal, they'd probably just dump everyone on some road near the airport and pick people up there too.
Hell, why is it Apple can offer trackpads on their laptops that are 3 times the surface area of most laptops?
Sure trackpads are iffy, but why do most PCs have itty-bitty ones that barely can scroll 1/3rd of the screen at full accelleration? Hell, most PCs don't have ones bigger than my netbook. Apple seems to be able to stuff a huge one in their smallest of laptops. Hell, the Apple ones have acreage compared to PCs.
If we take the Geek view, the 3GS has a few things going for it that'll lead to its longevity.
First, processor. The iPhone and iPhone 3G use ARM11 processors. The 3GS uses a Cortex-A8 (the A4 is Cortex-A8 and the A5 is Cortex-A9). Thus the 3GS has the advantage of being a current processor in use. The iPad has a Cortex-A8, while the iPad2 with its A5 is the Cortex-A9.
Second, RAM. The iPhone and iPhone 3G have 128MB of RAM. The 3GS has 256MB. iPhone 4 and 4S have 512MB of RAM. The iPad has 256MB, and iPad2 has 512MB.
So the 3GS sports the current ARMv7 architecture and as much RAM as the iPad1, which should mean it has a lot of life left into it. It's a bit long in the tooth, yes, but it's still a powerful enough platform.
The 3G's problem was basically IOS4 didn't have enough memory - most of the slowdowns, delays, stalls, crashes were because the memory manager was busy killing tasks and freeing memory.
It's also why iPhones are lousy with Android - the hardware required for Android just isn't there.
In fact, in IOS, it's one of the top reasons apps "crash" - they don't crash, but are closed because the OS is making space in memory and decided it was ripe for killing. It's how apps like Safari can crash but still remember browsing history and such - sometimes they crash because they really crash (it is a webbrowser), and sometimes the OS decides it needs RAM and closes the apps gracefully. Either way though, it looks the same to the user.
Well, you can always use webmail :). Since it has Flash, it'll give you True Web Experience(tm)!
(Unfortunately, like the HP touchPad, it runs Flash all the time...).
As for BBM, apparently the problem is that BBM makes the assumption of one PIN per member, and I don't think Playbooks have PINs (and now you have a problem of two PINs if it's also linked to a blackberry). BBM being an extension of what used to be "free" messaging by PIN that goes all the way back to the original mobitex blackberries.
The sun is going to die first before we extract all the heat out of the Earth, basically (I think the Sun has what, 6-9 billion years left?). And when it becomes a red giant, it's going to expand so big it'll encompass earth's orbit. Even then, as we get close the sun will make the earth rather hot to live on.
Basically, it's a free for all - the planet will be long uninhabitable before the core cools down... though the magnetic field is a still a question.
The value-add is that the more services, the less control each service has. The movie industry, after seeing how iTunes has basically got the music industry by the balls, has decided the best way to prevent that is to ensure that there are several (not many, not one) services, each of which will have to beg and submit to get its content.
Hence, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and a few other sites.
Steve Jobs basically did a coup against the music industry (where in the world would a Mac's (at the time) pathetic 5% marketshare be considered a positive selling point? Yet, the music industry was relieved it was to be Mac-only in the beginning). Of course, the iPod and iTunes Fairplay DRM basically ensured that Apple controlled the music industry. The endgame was Amazon was allowed to sell music DRM-free, and Apple renegotiated.
The movie industry sees this as a far worse outcome - they would rather have people pirate their movies than be under the thumb of Netflix or iTunes or whoever becomes the dominant player. They want control.
Be had Gassee, a former Apple exec. The big problem though, was that Be felt Apple needed them far more than Apple felt they needed Be. As a result, Be refused to sell itself for less than $200M, while Apple refused to pay more than $125M for it.
Steve Jobs also mentioned that BeOS had a few limitations (lack of printing), and did a sell job to get NeXT sold for $429M.
If it wasn't for Gassee's greed, Apple might've gone with BeOS instead of NeXTStep. In the end, Be Inc. was acquired by Palm for $11M.
My parents deprived me when I was a child. I can prove it now since it's all recorded in my DNA!
(yes, this is a joke. laugh.)
You also forgot to "forgo the smartphone". A lot of apps (Android especially, but also iOS) use AdMob, which is owned and operated by Google now. (Ironically, it was Apple's iAds that let the DoJ to approve Google's purchase of AdMob - and iAd's failure could spell antitrust issues ("Even APPLE couldn't compete against Google") over it). AdMob is a company specializing in in-app advertising. and able to tell which app, and other usage statistics.
Plus, location awareness on Android sends tracking data to Google, but at least that's epecified.
Best to stick with a dumb phone though.
That's the big problem.
NAT decouples the internal private network from the external network - and I'm sure any IT admin who has had to renumber their internal network would agree it's a huge PITA on IPv4. Luckily though they don't have to do it when their ISP gives them a new range of IPv4 addresses except for the few machines that are using them (DNS servers mostly - other servers can often hide behind NAT).
They see the IPv6 transition as hard because no one makes NATv6 boxes (though it does exist, and heck, NAT-PT makes it possible to isolate the internal network's protocol from the external network - start IPv4, NAT-PT translates to IPv6 for the internet, etc.). They see the ISP giving them a prefix and changing that prefix willy-nilly causing lots of fun for everyone inside. They'd rather do it the IPv4 way - give everyone a private IPv6 address (FC00::/64) and worry on the few border routers and such.
Even worse - home users, who most likely do NOT have a working DNS setup and have to type the damn things in. And just when my parents have gotten used to typing the long string of nonsense garbage to hit the printer, the ISP changes their prefix and they have to learn a new set of IPs.
If we break the concept of true-end-to-end connectivity (already broken thanks to firewalls), the IPv6 transition could've been done years ago - everyone replaces their Linksys or Cisco router and go on their way, while the router does NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT as appropriate. It just works, my parents don't have to learn anything new (and I don't have to fiddle with their machines and everything), etc. etc.
IPv6 is sorely needed, yes. But the assumptions made 20 years ago when it was designed just aren't true today and no one wants to play network admin for their entire extended family and neighbourhood. And enterprise is slow because they're worried about end-to-end connectivity for security reasons. NAT breaks that, so it's a nice secondary layer beyond the firewall at ensure they don't accidentally leave their customer database exposed (it might be protected on IPv4, but exposed on IPv6).
We can probably switch a good chunk of the Internet to IPv6 by haivng a transition plan of home users replacing their routers with ones that do NATv6/NATv4/NAT-PT - they're used to stuff like that and it makes life easy. Ditto enterprise customers - most businesses will probably just switch if they only have to replace one box and not have to learn the ins and outs of IPv6 and getting every PC to have a routable address it doesn't need.
There are enough ways around the paywall that anyone in the /. crowd ought to easily get around it with just minor amount of hassle. Especially if one doesn't limit themselves (it's on a referrer basis - other blogs linking to the same article don't count. And if push comes to shove, really, you can't take the headline and Google it? Google News does count as an alternate source).
It isn't a hard paywall - the NYT did it smartly to ensure casual users can view content, and hard core viewers have to pay for it. Of course, good on you if you can read the NYT completely for free using the various (supported) ways around it.