Why would anyone steal credit card details, and then use them to buy mp3s? It boggles the mind, given that mp3s are so much easier to steal and harder to trace. It would lead me to a conspiracy theory if it weren't for the fact that I really don't care enough about the issue to waste my time thinking one up.
Easy, to test credit cards.
Say you've just broken into a CC processor and gotten a list of names, addresses, CC numbers and CVV codes. You need to find out if those numbers are working, and the easiest way is to run charges through them. Now, you need to find something that most people won't bat an eye about seeing on their bills - after all, a fraudulent charge to some company in the Azores will bring up scrutiny.
So you need someplace that charges small amounts (easier to be missed), and appears legitimate. iTunes fits both - a 99 cent song or app is easily missed in a bill, and a lot of people have iTunes accounts and would overlook an iTunes charge.
As Amazon and Google Marketplace get more prominent (i.e., more people buy Android apps/music/movies), you can bet they'll be targets next for 99 cent digital thing.
Cards that don't work (either because the user noticed something odd and cancelled, or expired, or foreign) are simply discarded. When you have a list of millions, losing 30% is no big deal, especially if you can verify the rest.
Check you spam sometimes. You see people spamming spamming services ("32000000 Euro accounts $200!") and "verified credit cards+CVV".
Interesting that you show no concern for the consumers who get to pay less
They pay less because Wal-Mart bullies suppliers to sell at significantly lower prices.
Either the prices aren't cheaper (they can be more expensive), or they're cheaper by a few pennies. In fact, you can tell margins by looking at how Wal-Mart discounts. Toys are huge margines, so getting 30% off is common (as do books and magazines - the discounts can rival Amazon)
The ones that are cheap, have corners cut. Suppliers often do special "Wal-Mart" runs of products, using much cheaper lower-quality raw materials that break quicker. So yeah, the consumer can save $100 off some tool, but basically it breaks quicker and they go and buy the same tool again, another $100 off. This is a common thing for tools - the Wal-Mart one may have a brand name, but be of lower quality.
Check out the stories of Vlassic and Snapper Mowers if you want.
Apple is being compromised, Apple hasn't reported as required.
[citation needed]
Apple being compromised would be a big deal, as it would basically reveal probably 200+M accounts and credit card details. That's a huge breach, probably the largest to date, outdoing Sony.
Problem is, is it true? Or is it because almost everyone has an account with Apple that there will always be some group compromised?
And there are people who find iTunes charges without ever using iTunes Store or buying a single thing at Apple. I like to know how Apple being compromised people get charged without ever having an account...
After all, people use easy passwords, reuse passwords, or fall for some really interesting phishes. Like one I got for Adobe Photoshop being on sale at the Apple Store. Which phished your Apple ID and password.
Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out). And nevermind that installing FlashBlock was essential to prevent your PC from slowing to a crawl when browsing the web.
Now we have hardware accellerated video decoding, full flash on mobile devices that actually runs half-decently, etc.
I'm not getting it because of my battle.net 2.0 experience with StarCraft 2.
And I nearly considered putting a deposit down for Diablo 3 when I picked up SC2, too. Little did I know it would become a huge clusterf*** of small print and other crap that basically ruined all the enjoyment out of SC2. I was so bad I considered just break out the stuff from the SC2 Collector's Edition I had and putting it on eBay to recover some of the money back.
It got resolved eventually (a month after release) at which point I gave up and played other games (SC2 was to tide me to Halo Reach. In the end, I ended up playing 3 levels in SC2, and a lot of indie games).
Sorry, been there done that. Not gonna risk another good game ruined by the crap that is battle.net support and other hiding behind fine print.
Yeah, and see how many websites built in the last eight or nine years work without Javascript... Hell, for real security, go back to using Gopher!
For quite a while, Apple's actually worked decently without javascript. Heck it even renders pretty much the same (it was only until I noticed things were a bit "off" that I realized NoScript was blocking it).
I think though the iTunes pages have completely broken now as have a few others. But until recently, they had a site that worked and acted pretty good without Javascript.
Micro-USB, though, IIRC, has those spring-loaded clips to make a strong connection, but the parts are very small, and hard to ruggedize very well with the very small form factor they have to deal with. My first Droid had it fail within a week of owning it, meaning that if I just tilted the phone on its side while it was plugged in, the charging cable would just fall out. It was pretty irritating, especially since it more than once fell out in the middle of the night, leaving me with a minimal charge on my phone for the next day.
The main problem is the little plastic tongue inside the connector is trivial to break off. Heck, I've broken a few of them off of full size USB connectors as well, but the tiny size of that slip of plastic doesn't lend much confidence in the connector. Especially since it's trivial to insert it upside down with the only thing holding it back being that tongue.
And there's enough play that yes, it's possible with a bit of jiggling to insert it upside down.
Also, contributing issues include the wide aspect ratio - it's as wide as a mini-USB connector, but half as thick, and most of the time the plug doesn't lie flush with the surface it's on. An accidental bump on the connector puts a huge amount of stress o nthe connector inside - either the tongue can break, or it can rip the connector off the board.
And that's the final issue - the connector is surface mount and the only mechanical fixing is it's soldered to the board through large tabs. Full size plugs have mechanical through-hole legs, mini plugs usually have large spades for mechanical support.
And only 500,000 a month? When Apple has to buy them for their iDevices (to comply with regulation - it'll probably just be a micro-to-dock adapter), they're going to need millions a month.
Wow, neat! At what payment level do I get to have my personal information stolen? I'm so excited, I can't wait to have my credit card number sold to the Russian mafia and my username and password hash posted on 4chan!
And don't forget, you can't form a class-action lawsuit, AND can only submit to arbitration!
(Those PSN terms are coming to all Sony online services near you, if they haven't already).
Spam is a losing game these days and only stupid managers send spam or hire spammers to do it for them.
Spamming is a losing game for the goods/service being spammed. But a great service for those doing the spamming. I think I got an email awhile back advertising such services, and 32,000,000 European inboxes were available for $200 or so. The spammer gets his $200, fires off 32M emails, and who cares if even 100% of it is blocked - he's been paid.
Also, most companies have a third party manage their mailing lists - remember that big one that got its email address database stolen earlier this year? These companies do have their due diligence and everything.
Finally, remember that filling out those forms usually counts as "prior business relationship" so yeah, technically it allows them to spam you. But if they use one of the legit third parties, it's trivial to black hole the from address.
real mode, I/O instructions, etc. can't possibly take up that much of the transistor budget. Especially not when they can cram several cores + 30 MB of cache on one die.
Transistors, no, but die area, yes. Caches consume a huge number of transistors, but relatively small amount of die area for those transistors - 30MB of cache (180M transistors!) may occupy around 50-75% of the available die space. The rest of the transistors are the general logic, where it's the wiring that determines how dense the transistors are.
And the x86 compatibility stuff is known to take up to half of the available space. x86 is terrible logic-wise since instructions are variable sized (which means the instruction fetcher needs to cross cache line boundaries and instructions may cross cache lines), and since it isn't load/store, instructions that reference memory has to decode into several instructions - one or more to calculate memory address (depending on addressing mode), and to do the actual load/store.
So no, the x86 front end doesn't take a lot of transistors, but the ones it does take, do take a lot of space. Space that can be used for more cache or more logic blocks. Or just make a smaller die (which lowers cost when you can shove more onto a wafer).
Crack down on GApps licensing, and you can exert control over the Android ecosystem without hiding away the source for the rest of the OS stack.
That only controls Android OHA. AOSP Android stuff already ships without GApps - Archos was one of the well-known vendors of Android media players. The alternative marketplace that I think Archos started (because they can't get GApps) was AppsLib.
Of course, there are tons of devices out there running AOSP, and many run GApps because like all the other Marketplace stuff, there's no DRM on APKs. Just configure your device correctly and boom, you have full market access on your AOSP device. (E.g., nook Color). And I'm sure most of the providers using AOSP probably pirate GApps anyhow. Or provide access to alternate firmware with it built in, or simple steps to install it.
So not only has Google effectively "lost control" of putting Android on shitty hardware,they've also "lost control" of GApps. Legit vendors have to run through the hoops, but AOSP vendors just do whatever. And hell, you can bet the first thing the community does (usually on xda-developers) is how to get GApps on the latest AOSP-running device.
All Google can do is ask that devices be locked down and unrootable (to prevent easy access to the APKs), and not provide source so AOSP vendors can't do a thing. Then again, AOSP vendors have access to Android 2.3, which they're sticking on tablets with aplomb and show up in the tablet aisle.
Well, my wallet got stolen recently. So I've lost a couple hundreds of dollars, several bank cards, my driving license and several club cards....snip...
I won't mind replacing all those subway passes and loose change with NFC and an app on my phone. Sure, I'll lose some privacy - but it's not like I care much (Google already knows what I purchase and I also use Google Latitude). It won't replace my credit card and I'll keep some money just in case, but everything that helps to get rid of clutter is welcome.
Stupid question - and what happens when your PHONE is stolen? Or you left it behind? Or you dropped it?
So now you've lost your wallet and your phone. And now you're stuck because you have no cash, and no way to call for help.
That being said, I hope NFC enforces user confirmation. Walking around with a mobile NFC terminal, just like those RFID readers would be great fun...
There was a gizmodo (?) article which described the results of running this service on their staff; iirc, it picked up only the illegal stuff like drug use. They explicitly don't report on things like "normal" partying and even pregnancy (which some companies discriminate).
In fact, if you look at his report (he posted the entire thing online), they did a good job redacting stuff that doesn't matter, and stuff that employers should not know about (like ethnicity, sex, etc). They blacked out his face and his hands to hide his skin color, blacked out irrelevant things, etc.
Truth is, a company is probably more likely to use these services because they ensure privacy - stuff that cannot be asked, is hidden. This benefits the company by sparing a possible discrimination lawsuit (always a big problem) than if some HR lackey used Google.
In effect, it's more of a safe search for Google - they tell you why they think this guy matches the description (e.g., address match), and hide the details that could prejudice the issue.
Of course, another issue is unscrupulous companies...
And always - if you don't want the world to know, don't post it online. This was true in the 70s, it's still true today. There's no such thing as privacy - "privacy" is a social networking term to get marks to reveal more information to strangers than they normally would.
What I can't believe is how they just danced around the whole "it's a mech" term. It's amusing to watch in its own right as the host just refuses to call it what it is.
Oh yeah, it has guns, too! And yes, it's from a company that makes farm equipment.
Canadian ISPs tried to fix that with UBB. Their approach may have been deeply flawed, but it was an acknowledgement that billing needs to be based upon consumption. The people who consume a lot pay more for the network infrastructure, and those who do not consume as much pay less for the network infrastructure. The problem is people were screaming bloody murder about that because they basically want everything for free.
One of the problems with UBB (besides the common one if forcing everyone on it, regardless of if you use Bell/Telus/Rogers/Shaw or some third party like Teksavvy) is that people can "steal" from you.
All of a sudden, that spam you downloaded costs you real money. If you get pinged, you're dinged. Imagine getting pingflooded - that's easily $10 a day extra at the rates they wanted to charge ($5/GB or more).
AND YOU CANNOT CONTROL IT.
If I wanted to reduce my electricity usage, I turn off stuff. My neighbours or someone on the other side of the globe can't make me pay for electricity. If I throw the main breaker in my house, I use nothing.
But if I unplug the modem from my router, I'm still dinged for all the ARPs, pings and other crap coming down the line. It's not a lot, but I think it was easily at least 2GB a month. And this is background traffic you have to get.
Finally, the last reason - everything you're billed usage on - your electric meter, your gas meter, your water meter, are calibrated by a third party (and you can often call up and request a new meter if you suspect yours is off calibration).
With UBB, guess who's counting the bytes? Yes, your ISP. Using some sort of magic formula of calculating usage. Do they count DOCSIS/DSL headers (some do)? Do they count in GiB or GB? Are they adding a 10% fudge factor that you can't argue with (claim it as "background necessary traffic"?)? There's no third party oversignt into how the traffic is counted. Oh yeah, and you have to use their web site - unlike your gas and electric meter which have a user-visible display to which one can monitor their usage.
It's like going to a gas station whose owner "calibrates" the pumps - are you really sure that litre of gas is really 1000mL? And not say, 900mL? In Canada, we have a division of Industry Canada for that - called Measurement Canada that standardizes measurements and the tools used to ensure proper operation (in the US, it's NIST). Perhaps the ISP should pay to have a third party calibrated meter installed on the modem so users can easily see their usage at any point.
If you think it's harsh - cellphones are the concept here. How many people have you heard with those $1000+ phone bills because they roamed? Or that the billing now happens from the moment you hit "send" to the moment you hit "end", and not when the call actually connects? (This can add another 30 seconds or more in time to connect plus ringing, which if you bill per minute, means a 31 second conversation now costs 2 minutes). Or data... where it's MB, 1000 bytes, and oh yeah, the OTA headers count (+10%). All quietly so you don't notice and thus can't break your contract.
Why should an application decide the best way to split a load over multiple cpu cores? How does it know what else is going on in the OS to balance this load? Shouldn't the OS handle this behind the scenes?
It depends on a lot of factors.
Advantages for doing it in application space include the application knowing what it's doing, and if the OS is saying there's a shortage of CPU time, the application can decide what load to shed more effectively than submitting work and hoping it gets done on time.
Disadvantages include well, most programmers are idiots and will misuse such functionality. Parallel programming is hard, high-performance parallel programming even more so.
Advantage of the OS management includes isolation from idiocy and general fairness. But disadvantages include the OS not knowing what work can be pushed off and what work is critical, leading to situations where things can stutter when you don't want them to. All decisions the OS makes are in a vacuum, and have to be balanced between background processes and foreground applications. Also, applications are unaware of how much CPU time they can actually get, so they may create 100 threads and assume that at any time, all 100 can be kicked off.
In the end, it's a mix of both worlds - you can do it all in the OS with the application submitting high level jobs (threads and processes model, with OS managing both),
It's sort of the model of Grand Central Dispatch in OS X and ported to BSD - the OS manages the processors, the applications submit work that can be parallelized and the OS decides based on the current load and idleness how many tasks to run together for optimum utilization of the processors. So instead of Photoshop deciding you have a 16-processor system and creating 16 threads to process a filter, while oblivious to the fact that the video encoder task in the background has done the same thing (and resulting in thrashing), the OS can simply decide to run Photoshop on 8 processors and the encoder on the other 8, resulting in more efficient utilization since the scheduler doesn't have to schedule all 16 Photoshop threads then context switch to 16 encoder threads (which cause lots of overhead).
And if the user runs another program, the OS adjusts the workload accordingly. The applications stop caring about the number of processors and creating the optimum workload, and the OS avoids having to waste CPU time scheduling and context switching unnecessarily.
Good idea. But what if you have a group of inventors? Can a patent be shared? Can a patent be sold or transfered? If so, a corporation will always find a way to own it. Maybe the "stock holders" own it? Maybe the board of directors all share a slice? It's a good idea, but really needs to be thought out carefully.
Patents are owned by the inventors - the actual people who did actual work on the item in the patent. That patent is "owned" by the inventor in perpetuity. You can put it on your resume that you have N patents in your name.
The deal is, applying for patents is horrendously expensive. A company doesn't "own" the patent, but it basically obtains an exclusive license for the patent (owned by the inventor) as a result of the inventor's employment and investment in tools/equipment/materials to do the research, and finally, the patent resources.
What Google/Apple/Microsoft does instead when they "buy" patents, they're actually buying these licenses. The company, depending on the terma of the IP licensing, usually can sublicense the patent to other companies.
The inventor owns the patent, and can walk to the competitor. However, the inventor has exclusively licensed that patent to whomever, and thus is really powerless to re-license it (at least without violating the terms of the first license and $$$).
And yes. patents can be shared - inventions can be done by two or more people, and they all get the patent in their name. Since they're all part of the same company though, they've pretty much exclusively licensed it to the company. Patents can't be sold or transferred - they belong to the people named in the patent. However the licenses for the inventions can be sold.
In America, climatologists get sued and harassed for making public statements about global warming.
In this case though, the scientists were basically saying that there will NOT be an earthquake and to just go back and enjoy the day despite rumbling in the area.
So the local population was worried there might be an earthquake and maybe they should evacuate. The scientists said no, there was not going to be an earthquake, get back to your life, etc.
It's not predicting anything, but more like denying something is going to happen, then it happens killing many.
In the context of AGW, it would be basically saying if we could prove it and it happens because we believed the deniers, we could sue them because despite the data, they convinced us it was not going to happen. (This cannot happen, as the changes are too long term to be able to tell.)
As a car analogy, it's like your car making a funny noise from the engine. Your mechanic says everything is fine and it always makes that funny noise and he won't bother checking it out. On your way home, the engine blows up because that noise was from a faulty valve. The data was there to support it (it was making a noise it shouldn't), but the authorities (mechanic) said it wasn't an issue. And now you're stranded on the side of the road looking at a huge repair bill (new engine) over what could've been a much smaller bill (new valve + labor).
First to File has been used in a number of cases. It's why the inventor of the telephone in the US is disputed - Alexander Graham Bell got to the patent office a few hours earlier than the other guy, and thus he got the patent. There have been other equally important inventions patented by the guy who got to the office first as well.
Most of the world uses first to file (the US was the exception), and heck, I'm not sure if the 1-year grace to file is actually still available (another US patent oddity. In other countries, if you showed your device to the world, that invalidates any patents you may file on it as you've "published" it. In the US, you have 1 year to file from first publication. In fact it's even trickier if you cross-apply for patents since other countries may reject the patent simply because its filing date with the USPTO (which is inherited by the other countries) will be after the initial publication date.)
I read that as "we don't own all the patents on the interconnect hardware, and to produce it would cost us more than using our in-house patent base and patent-free copper connections. Surprisingly, it turns out we're somewhat incompetent at modeling electrical connections and the results don't match our simulations but they're better than we planned, so we'll patent what we have and plan on taking that to the bank."
Given Thunderbolt copper cables rely on active cables (the cables actually have circuitry in there to match impedance, regenerate the bits, and characterize the cable so they can pre-emphasize and attenuate as appropriate, I don't see the patent issues - there's tons to be patented there.
But the reality is, if you're going to transport power over the cables anyways, you're carrying copper around, and the cables are at fixed signaling rates anyhow (active cables, remembers), if copper is good enough, then it's good enough and cheap enough.
An optical solution would cost more - you'd have the same active ends, but now the complexity of copper. All to replace cheap copper that works just fine for no real identifiable benefit.
Not if they're running a vnc session on their home computer through an ssh tunnel.
If the purpose was for the NZ copyright law, then your subsequent questions don't matter as they're based on that premise.
You see, if the user is using their home PC to access the internet, any crap they do there goes to their IP. Less about pr0n, more about 3-strikes copyright. If the user torrents from their own connection, the company won't care because they won't get disconnected.
I hate the Facebook, try as I might I've had zero success in migrating my family and friends to superior services like twitter & google+.
Maybe they don't want to use Google+ because they don't consider a service superior if it doesn't have their friends on it?
Or people like me who know that the real purpose of G+ is to get even more people's information and to tie all your browsing habits to your google account.
Facebook has a lot of information, but it suffers because all that information has to be entered in voluntarily. Hence "privacy" controls - the number of people who would voluntarily input their information increases exponentially given privacy theatre (it's all that it is - that information exists to be sold).
Google, despite "do no evil", has amassed a huge quantity of information, and is so pervasive that the web would literally break if you were to block every Google-owned domain and service (we're not just talking about search, or services Google provides (ilke GMail or Docs or Apps), but all the other services as well - CDN, bad URLs, etc). And nevermind that, but Google knows all from the ads as well, the apps you use on your smartphone (Android apps that are ad-supported, iOS apps that use AdMob), etc.
Heck, it would be trivial (though creepy) if G+ simply added all the people you know automatically to circles from all the information they have on you. Probably even figuring out which circle they should go to automatically.
Personally, I'd like to see eBay's grip on the online auction market go away. I say if they did steal trade secrets, break eBay down so that another potential online auctioneer could conceivably get into the market.
Yes, I know, there are currently no competitors out there. But I am also positive that, give the opportunity, Google or Apple or even Yahoo! could make an investment into an online auctioneer OR develop an in-house alternative. Hell, it could be the one thing that saves Yahoo! - or at least reinvigorates it.
There are a lot of competitors. Most are smaller sites you never heard of (problem #1). But they offer better deals than eBay - cheaper fees, accept any payment (problem #2).
And we're not even getting to the whole almost-scammy pay-to-bid sites that advertise "get an iPad for $30" (which are actually legit - the winner did get an iPad for $30 ending bid... but getting to that point is scammy).
Problem is, eBay has critical mass. Sellers hate it, but sell there because there are lots of buyers. Buyers hate it because there are no deals, but go there because there are lots of sellers.
The smaller sites I've seen the most common complaints were "I've been lowballed", "eBay gets me higher bids and more money", "items never reach the reserve," and "buyers are cheapskates and bid half of what eBay gets." Which of course happen because fewer buyers, and the ones there are are looking for deals (probably to sell on eBay for a profit).
And that's the problem - the smaller sites use lower fees to attract sellers, but the sellers expect eBay style bids from the fewer bidders out there. The smaller sites can't attract bidders because the sellers refuse to sell below eBay pricing, and well, buyers would rather just visit eBay and pay eBay prices, than visit eBay and someone else for the same price.
(Anyone who doesn't know, eBay got big because they were well known for deals - cheap prices on all sorts of stuff. After the dotcom crash, eBay hit critical mass and the average selling prices went up and the deals were gone. Now it's practically full retail pricing.)
Earlier I mentioned that payments were a problem. They are. If you're a business, it's not too much of an issue since you can get a merchant account and accept credit cards. If you're a small time seller, merchant accounts are much harder to come by, and the end result is you pretty much have to accept Paypal. Because one sure way to discourage a buyer is forcing them to get off their ass, go to the bank or post office to get a cheque or money order, then mail it off and wait up to two weeks for you to get it. Then another couple of weeks for it to clear. Then the item ships and 6-8 weeks later you get the item. And this is the internet age, not mail order.
LLVM won't help anything be platform independent. Native code is platform specific, thats why its called native. Using LLVM to produce byte code that runs in an interpreter like Dalvik is not making native code platform independent.
The nice thing with LLVM is it can produce native and bytecode. The bytecode version has the advantage of being able to be natively compiled into a binary at runtime.
Apple does this with their GPGPU and OpenCL stuff - the code's compiled with LLVM and OS X figures out if it's more effficient to take the bytecode and execute it on the GPU or CPU, then compiling it for that target.
No reason the NDK can't do that as well. Or provide it as LLVM+x86+ARM "fat" binary.
You may notice that at the moment we include a limited number of U.S. cities and show results for round-trip economy-class flights only.
Oddly, I thought Google acquired ITA which was one of the premier sites for flight data so they should have that information at hand. If they were building from scratch then maybe they'd be excused, but they bought an entire company specializing in this.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy, to test credit cards.
Say you've just broken into a CC processor and gotten a list of names, addresses, CC numbers and CVV codes. You need to find out if those numbers are working, and the easiest way is to run charges through them. Now, you need to find something that most people won't bat an eye about seeing on their bills - after all, a fraudulent charge to some company in the Azores will bring up scrutiny.
So you need someplace that charges small amounts (easier to be missed), and appears legitimate. iTunes fits both - a 99 cent song or app is easily missed in a bill, and a lot of people have iTunes accounts and would overlook an iTunes charge.
As Amazon and Google Marketplace get more prominent (i.e., more people buy Android apps/music/movies), you can bet they'll be targets next for 99 cent digital thing.
Cards that don't work (either because the user noticed something odd and cancelled, or expired, or foreign) are simply discarded. When you have a list of millions, losing 30% is no big deal, especially if you can verify the rest.
Check you spam sometimes. You see people spamming spamming services ("32000000 Euro accounts $200!") and "verified credit cards+CVV".
They pay less because Wal-Mart bullies suppliers to sell at significantly lower prices.
Either the prices aren't cheaper (they can be more expensive), or they're cheaper by a few pennies. In fact, you can tell margins by looking at how Wal-Mart discounts. Toys are huge margines, so getting 30% off is common (as do books and magazines - the discounts can rival Amazon)
The ones that are cheap, have corners cut. Suppliers often do special "Wal-Mart" runs of products, using much cheaper lower-quality raw materials that break quicker. So yeah, the consumer can save $100 off some tool, but basically it breaks quicker and they go and buy the same tool again, another $100 off. This is a common thing for tools - the Wal-Mart one may have a brand name, but be of lower quality.
Check out the stories of Vlassic and Snapper Mowers if you want.
[citation needed]
Apple being compromised would be a big deal, as it would basically reveal probably 200+M accounts and credit card details. That's a huge breach, probably the largest to date, outdoing Sony.
Problem is, is it true? Or is it because almost everyone has an account with Apple that there will always be some group compromised?
And there are people who find iTunes charges without ever using iTunes Store or buying a single thing at Apple. I like to know how Apple being compromised people get charged without ever having an account...
After all, people use easy passwords, reuse passwords, or fall for some really interesting phishes. Like one I got for Adobe Photoshop being on sale at the Apple Store. Which phished your Apple ID and password.
Flash really only started getting good after iPhone came out. Flash lite sucked balls, and full Flash itself ran terrible on mobile devices prior to this (and even for a period after the iPhone came out). And nevermind that installing FlashBlock was essential to prevent your PC from slowing to a crawl when browsing the web.
Now we have hardware accellerated video decoding, full flash on mobile devices that actually runs half-decently, etc.
I'm not getting it because of my battle.net 2.0 experience with StarCraft 2.
And I nearly considered putting a deposit down for Diablo 3 when I picked up SC2, too. Little did I know it would become a huge clusterf*** of small print and other crap that basically ruined all the enjoyment out of SC2. I was so bad I considered just break out the stuff from the SC2 Collector's Edition I had and putting it on eBay to recover some of the money back.
It got resolved eventually (a month after release) at which point I gave up and played other games (SC2 was to tide me to Halo Reach. In the end, I ended up playing 3 levels in SC2, and a lot of indie games).
Sorry, been there done that. Not gonna risk another good game ruined by the crap that is battle.net support and other hiding behind fine print.
For quite a while, Apple's actually worked decently without javascript. Heck it even renders pretty much the same (it was only until I noticed things were a bit "off" that I realized NoScript was blocking it).
I think though the iTunes pages have completely broken now as have a few others. But until recently, they had a site that worked and acted pretty good without Javascript.
The main problem is the little plastic tongue inside the connector is trivial to break off. Heck, I've broken a few of them off of full size USB connectors as well, but the tiny size of that slip of plastic doesn't lend much confidence in the connector. Especially since it's trivial to insert it upside down with the only thing holding it back being that tongue.
And there's enough play that yes, it's possible with a bit of jiggling to insert it upside down.
Also, contributing issues include the wide aspect ratio - it's as wide as a mini-USB connector, but half as thick, and most of the time the plug doesn't lie flush with the surface it's on. An accidental bump on the connector puts a huge amount of stress o nthe connector inside - either the tongue can break, or it can rip the connector off the board.
And that's the final issue - the connector is surface mount and the only mechanical fixing is it's soldered to the board through large tabs. Full size plugs have mechanical through-hole legs, mini plugs usually have large spades for mechanical support.
And only 500,000 a month? When Apple has to buy them for their iDevices (to comply with regulation - it'll probably just be a micro-to-dock adapter), they're going to need millions a month.
And don't forget, you can't form a class-action lawsuit, AND can only submit to arbitration!
(Those PSN terms are coming to all Sony online services near you, if they haven't already).
Spamming is a losing game for the goods/service being spammed. But a great service for those doing the spamming. I think I got an email awhile back advertising such services, and 32,000,000 European inboxes were available for $200 or so. The spammer gets his $200, fires off 32M emails, and who cares if even 100% of it is blocked - he's been paid.
Also, most companies have a third party manage their mailing lists - remember that big one that got its email address database stolen earlier this year? These companies do have their due diligence and everything.
Finally, remember that filling out those forms usually counts as "prior business relationship" so yeah, technically it allows them to spam you. But if they use one of the legit third parties, it's trivial to black hole the from address.
Transistors, no, but die area, yes. Caches consume a huge number of transistors, but relatively small amount of die area for those transistors - 30MB of cache (180M transistors!) may occupy around 50-75% of the available die space. The rest of the transistors are the general logic, where it's the wiring that determines how dense the transistors are.
And the x86 compatibility stuff is known to take up to half of the available space. x86 is terrible logic-wise since instructions are variable sized (which means the instruction fetcher needs to cross cache line boundaries and instructions may cross cache lines), and since it isn't load/store, instructions that reference memory has to decode into several instructions - one or more to calculate memory address (depending on addressing mode), and to do the actual load/store.
So no, the x86 front end doesn't take a lot of transistors, but the ones it does take, do take a lot of space. Space that can be used for more cache or more logic blocks. Or just make a smaller die (which lowers cost when you can shove more onto a wafer).
That only controls Android OHA. AOSP Android stuff already ships without GApps - Archos was one of the well-known vendors of Android media players. The alternative marketplace that I think Archos started (because they can't get GApps) was AppsLib.
Of course, there are tons of devices out there running AOSP, and many run GApps because like all the other Marketplace stuff, there's no DRM on APKs. Just configure your device correctly and boom, you have full market access on your AOSP device. (E.g., nook Color). And I'm sure most of the providers using AOSP probably pirate GApps anyhow. Or provide access to alternate firmware with it built in, or simple steps to install it.
So not only has Google effectively "lost control" of putting Android on shitty hardware ,they've also "lost control" of GApps. Legit vendors have to run through the hoops, but AOSP vendors just do whatever. And hell, you can bet the first thing the community does (usually on xda-developers) is how to get GApps on the latest AOSP-running device.
All Google can do is ask that devices be locked down and unrootable (to prevent easy access to the APKs), and not provide source so AOSP vendors can't do a thing. Then again, AOSP vendors have access to Android 2.3, which they're sticking on tablets with aplomb and show up in the tablet aisle.
Stupid question - and what happens when your PHONE is stolen? Or you left it behind? Or you dropped it?
So now you've lost your wallet and your phone. And now you're stuck because you have no cash, and no way to call for help.
That being said, I hope NFC enforces user confirmation. Walking around with a mobile NFC terminal, just like those RFID readers would be great fun...
The Gizmodo article is http://gizmodo.com/5818774/this-is-a-social-media-background-check
In fact, if you look at his report (he posted the entire thing online), they did a good job redacting stuff that doesn't matter, and stuff that employers should not know about (like ethnicity, sex, etc). They blacked out his face and his hands to hide his skin color, blacked out irrelevant things, etc.
Truth is, a company is probably more likely to use these services because they ensure privacy - stuff that cannot be asked, is hidden. This benefits the company by sparing a possible discrimination lawsuit (always a big problem) than if some HR lackey used Google.
In effect, it's more of a safe search for Google - they tell you why they think this guy matches the description (e.g., address match), and hide the details that could prejudice the issue.
Of course, another issue is unscrupulous companies...
And always - if you don't want the world to know, don't post it online. This was true in the 70s, it's still true today. There's no such thing as privacy - "privacy" is a social networking term to get marks to reveal more information to strangers than they normally would.
Daily Planet (a Canadian science magazine show on Discovery Canada) had just a segment last week...
http://watch.ctv.ca/clip531934#clip531934
What I can't believe is how they just danced around the whole "it's a mech" term. It's amusing to watch in its own right as the host just refuses to call it what it is.
Oh yeah, it has guns, too! And yes, it's from a company that makes farm equipment.
One of the problems with UBB (besides the common one if forcing everyone on it, regardless of if you use Bell/Telus/Rogers/Shaw or some third party like Teksavvy) is that people can "steal" from you.
All of a sudden, that spam you downloaded costs you real money. If you get pinged, you're dinged. Imagine getting pingflooded - that's easily $10 a day extra at the rates they wanted to charge ($5/GB or more).
AND YOU CANNOT CONTROL IT.
If I wanted to reduce my electricity usage, I turn off stuff. My neighbours or someone on the other side of the globe can't make me pay for electricity. If I throw the main breaker in my house, I use nothing.
But if I unplug the modem from my router, I'm still dinged for all the ARPs, pings and other crap coming down the line. It's not a lot, but I think it was easily at least 2GB a month. And this is background traffic you have to get.
Finally, the last reason - everything you're billed usage on - your electric meter, your gas meter, your water meter, are calibrated by a third party (and you can often call up and request a new meter if you suspect yours is off calibration).
With UBB, guess who's counting the bytes? Yes, your ISP. Using some sort of magic formula of calculating usage. Do they count DOCSIS/DSL headers (some do)? Do they count in GiB or GB? Are they adding a 10% fudge factor that you can't argue with (claim it as "background necessary traffic"?)? There's no third party oversignt into how the traffic is counted. Oh yeah, and you have to use their web site - unlike your gas and electric meter which have a user-visible display to which one can monitor their usage.
It's like going to a gas station whose owner "calibrates" the pumps - are you really sure that litre of gas is really 1000mL? And not say, 900mL? In Canada, we have a division of Industry Canada for that - called Measurement Canada that standardizes measurements and the tools used to ensure proper operation (in the US, it's NIST). Perhaps the ISP should pay to have a third party calibrated meter installed on the modem so users can easily see their usage at any point.
If you think it's harsh - cellphones are the concept here. How many people have you heard with those $1000+ phone bills because they roamed? Or that the billing now happens from the moment you hit "send" to the moment you hit "end", and not when the call actually connects? (This can add another 30 seconds or more in time to connect plus ringing, which if you bill per minute, means a 31 second conversation now costs 2 minutes). Or data... where it's MB, 1000 bytes, and oh yeah, the OTA headers count (+10%). All quietly so you don't notice and thus can't break your contract.
It depends on a lot of factors.
Advantages for doing it in application space include the application knowing what it's doing, and if the OS is saying there's a shortage of CPU time, the application can decide what load to shed more effectively than submitting work and hoping it gets done on time.
Disadvantages include well, most programmers are idiots and will misuse such functionality. Parallel programming is hard, high-performance parallel programming even more so.
Advantage of the OS management includes isolation from idiocy and general fairness. But disadvantages include the OS not knowing what work can be pushed off and what work is critical, leading to situations where things can stutter when you don't want them to. All decisions the OS makes are in a vacuum, and have to be balanced between background processes and foreground applications. Also, applications are unaware of how much CPU time they can actually get, so they may create 100 threads and assume that at any time, all 100 can be kicked off.
In the end, it's a mix of both worlds - you can do it all in the OS with the application submitting high level jobs (threads and processes model, with OS managing both),
It's sort of the model of Grand Central Dispatch in OS X and ported to BSD - the OS manages the processors, the applications submit work that can be parallelized and the OS decides based on the current load and idleness how many tasks to run together for optimum utilization of the processors. So instead of Photoshop deciding you have a 16-processor system and creating 16 threads to process a filter, while oblivious to the fact that the video encoder task in the background has done the same thing (and resulting in thrashing), the OS can simply decide to run Photoshop on 8 processors and the encoder on the other 8, resulting in more efficient utilization since the scheduler doesn't have to schedule all 16 Photoshop threads then context switch to 16 encoder threads (which cause lots of overhead).
And if the user runs another program, the OS adjusts the workload accordingly. The applications stop caring about the number of processors and creating the optimum workload, and the OS avoids having to waste CPU time scheduling and context switching unnecessarily.
Patents are owned by the inventors - the actual people who did actual work on the item in the patent. That patent is "owned" by the inventor in perpetuity. You can put it on your resume that you have N patents in your name.
The deal is, applying for patents is horrendously expensive. A company doesn't "own" the patent, but it basically obtains an exclusive license for the patent (owned by the inventor) as a result of the inventor's employment and investment in tools/equipment/materials to do the research, and finally, the patent resources.
What Google/Apple/Microsoft does instead when they "buy" patents, they're actually buying these licenses. The company, depending on the terma of the IP licensing, usually can sublicense the patent to other companies.
The inventor owns the patent, and can walk to the competitor. However, the inventor has exclusively licensed that patent to whomever, and thus is really powerless to re-license it (at least without violating the terms of the first license and $$$).
And yes. patents can be shared - inventions can be done by two or more people, and they all get the patent in their name. Since they're all part of the same company though, they've pretty much exclusively licensed it to the company. Patents can't be sold or transferred - they belong to the people named in the patent. However the licenses for the inventions can be sold.
In this case though, the scientists were basically saying that there will NOT be an earthquake and to just go back and enjoy the day despite rumbling in the area.
So the local population was worried there might be an earthquake and maybe they should evacuate. The scientists said no, there was not going to be an earthquake, get back to your life, etc.
It's not predicting anything, but more like denying something is going to happen, then it happens killing many.
In the context of AGW, it would be basically saying if we could prove it and it happens because we believed the deniers, we could sue them because despite the data, they convinced us it was not going to happen. (This cannot happen, as the changes are too long term to be able to tell.)
As a car analogy, it's like your car making a funny noise from the engine. Your mechanic says everything is fine and it always makes that funny noise and he won't bother checking it out. On your way home, the engine blows up because that noise was from a faulty valve. The data was there to support it (it was making a noise it shouldn't), but the authorities (mechanic) said it wasn't an issue. And now you're stranded on the side of the road looking at a huge repair bill (new engine) over what could've been a much smaller bill (new valve + labor).
First to File has been used in a number of cases. It's why the inventor of the telephone in the US is disputed - Alexander Graham Bell got to the patent office a few hours earlier than the other guy, and thus he got the patent. There have been other equally important inventions patented by the guy who got to the office first as well.
Most of the world uses first to file (the US was the exception), and heck, I'm not sure if the 1-year grace to file is actually still available (another US patent oddity. In other countries, if you showed your device to the world, that invalidates any patents you may file on it as you've "published" it. In the US, you have 1 year to file from first publication. In fact it's even trickier if you cross-apply for patents since other countries may reject the patent simply because its filing date with the USPTO (which is inherited by the other countries) will be after the initial publication date.)
Given Thunderbolt copper cables rely on active cables (the cables actually have circuitry in there to match impedance, regenerate the bits, and characterize the cable so they can pre-emphasize and attenuate as appropriate, I don't see the patent issues - there's tons to be patented there.
But the reality is, if you're going to transport power over the cables anyways, you're carrying copper around, and the cables are at fixed signaling rates anyhow (active cables, remembers), if copper is good enough, then it's good enough and cheap enough.
An optical solution would cost more - you'd have the same active ends, but now the complexity of copper. All to replace cheap copper that works just fine for no real identifiable benefit.
If the purpose was for the NZ copyright law, then your subsequent questions don't matter as they're based on that premise.
You see, if the user is using their home PC to access the internet, any crap they do there goes to their IP. Less about pr0n, more about 3-strikes copyright. If the user torrents from their own connection, the company won't care because they won't get disconnected.
Or people like me who know that the real purpose of G+ is to get even more people's information and to tie all your browsing habits to your google account.
Facebook has a lot of information, but it suffers because all that information has to be entered in voluntarily. Hence "privacy" controls - the number of people who would voluntarily input their information increases exponentially given privacy theatre (it's all that it is - that information exists to be sold).
Google, despite "do no evil", has amassed a huge quantity of information, and is so pervasive that the web would literally break if you were to block every Google-owned domain and service (we're not just talking about search, or services Google provides (ilke GMail or Docs or Apps), but all the other services as well - CDN, bad URLs, etc). And nevermind that, but Google knows all from the ads as well, the apps you use on your smartphone (Android apps that are ad-supported, iOS apps that use AdMob), etc.
Heck, it would be trivial (though creepy) if G+ simply added all the people you know automatically to circles from all the information they have on you. Probably even figuring out which circle they should go to automatically.
There are a lot of competitors. Most are smaller sites you never heard of (problem #1). But they offer better deals than eBay - cheaper fees, accept any payment (problem #2).
And we're not even getting to the whole almost-scammy pay-to-bid sites that advertise "get an iPad for $30" (which are actually legit - the winner did get an iPad for $30 ending bid... but getting to that point is scammy).
Problem is, eBay has critical mass. Sellers hate it, but sell there because there are lots of buyers. Buyers hate it because there are no deals, but go there because there are lots of sellers.
The smaller sites I've seen the most common complaints were "I've been lowballed", "eBay gets me higher bids and more money", "items never reach the reserve," and "buyers are cheapskates and bid half of what eBay gets." Which of course happen because fewer buyers, and the ones there are are looking for deals (probably to sell on eBay for a profit).
And that's the problem - the smaller sites use lower fees to attract sellers, but the sellers expect eBay style bids from the fewer bidders out there. The smaller sites can't attract bidders because the sellers refuse to sell below eBay pricing, and well, buyers would rather just visit eBay and pay eBay prices, than visit eBay and someone else for the same price.
(Anyone who doesn't know, eBay got big because they were well known for deals - cheap prices on all sorts of stuff. After the dotcom crash, eBay hit critical mass and the average selling prices went up and the deals were gone. Now it's practically full retail pricing.)
Earlier I mentioned that payments were a problem. They are. If you're a business, it's not too much of an issue since you can get a merchant account and accept credit cards. If you're a small time seller, merchant accounts are much harder to come by, and the end result is you pretty much have to accept Paypal. Because one sure way to discourage a buyer is forcing them to get off their ass, go to the bank or post office to get a cheque or money order, then mail it off and wait up to two weeks for you to get it. Then another couple of weeks for it to clear. Then the item ships and 6-8 weeks later you get the item. And this is the internet age, not mail order.
The nice thing with LLVM is it can produce native and bytecode. The bytecode version has the advantage of being able to be natively compiled into a binary at runtime.
Apple does this with their GPGPU and OpenCL stuff - the code's compiled with LLVM and OS X figures out if it's more effficient to take the bytecode and execute it on the GPU or CPU, then compiling it for that target.
No reason the NDK can't do that as well. Or provide it as LLVM+x86+ARM "fat" binary.
Oddly, I thought Google acquired ITA which was one of the premier sites for flight data so they should have that information at hand. If they were building from scratch then maybe they'd be excused, but they bought an entire company specializing in this.