We are trying desperately to copy Apple for 3+ years and now we have mastered it. Now you can pay with Google Pay with as much ease as Apple Pay. You also get the benefit that we will associate your payment with your gmail, hangout chat messages, location, search, android phone unique id and others. Eventually, we will be able to create your clone who knows more about you than you and will pass the remote identity test better than you can. Good luck if ever our data is compromised either by internal employees or external hack.
Funny, but Google's been doing the payment thing far longer than Apple - Google Wallet's been around since Android's been around and Google's been doing NFC payments before NFC hit the iPhone (at least for years before).
The only thing is, Apple Pay is based on standards - EMV. It's really at the very bottom an implementation (ignoring extra Apple pay frilly things for now). That's why It Just Worked at a lot of merchants - if they supported tap (NFC), they implicitly supported Apple Pay as well. The only hard part was getting banks enrolled, but that was more of an Apple and bank thing.
Google Wallet was based on a debit card - you paid, Google was told about the transaction and Google then charged you. This double-billing meant it was easy to get funding sources (Google even ate the transaction fees), but it required retailer support.
Google wanted to insert themselves into every transaction. Apple Pay was a more secure credit card.
The only thing that's going wierdly is all the frilly stuff, like Apple pay being used to outdo paypal by offering person-to-person funding transfers as well. Those things aren't likely to take off.
1. Release a "New Switch" that all future games require. This would shut out a huge number of legitimate existing purchasers who have no interest in the hacking though, and Nintendo probably wouldn't want to institute a voluntary recall program. That'd be a mess.
No, you go and fix the SoC, and update the switch to use it for now. You leave the original 10M or whatever they sold alone - 90% of the users will be blissfully unaware, and the 5% you just leave it as the cost of doing business.
It's too early for a "new switch", so that option is out. Maybe in 2020 Nintendo might release a New Switch.
Nintendo is about to offer an online gaming thing, and if you do it right, you can actually detect modified systems. After all, the Xbox360 was modded to support pirated games, but you can never put that console online because Xbox Live would detect the modified system and ban you. This got to be a big problem because it meant a lot of used systems were unable to go online. So it's possible to have a compromised system that's still able to be secure.
Of course, if Nintendo were better, they'd realize they are doing what Microsoft did on the original Xbox - by not cooperating with the Linux folks, the inadvertently caused a team effect - the Xbox Linux folks, the Homebrew folks, and the piracy folks all gathered together to figure out ways to break into the Xbox. Microsoft realized this, and realized the Homebrew folks are probably the most technically oriented of the lot (if they can code against something they have no documentation for, they will have the skills to break your security systems), which is why they did the whole XNA thing and now UWP. If you want to homebrew for Xbox, Microsoft is more than willing to let you do it and provide the official channels. And if it's good, Microsoft will let you officially sell it.
Sony learned this the hard way when they closed off their PS3 Linux support - suddenly homebrewers were left out and quickly got to work breaking the new PS3 security systems. And now they're close to breaking the PS4 - they've already got an old firmware broken (and heavily exploited for piracy).
If Nintendo was smart, they'd embrace the hacking, thank them for their work, and have a semi-official way to do that. If they were really good, they'd toss a way for people to write Switch games too. Doing this will basically sap all the knowledgeable people into doing their thing, leaving the piracy folks starved for talent.
All of these problems are because Unicode to highly inconsistent and seemingly designed to cause these kinds of bugs and denial-of-service attacks.
Unicode should have focused just on encoding characters. No modifier characters - Unicode uses them inconsistently in some scripts but not others - which would fix the need for an impossibly complex set of crash-proofing, anti-trolling and grammar rules.
The problem is, as usual, other cultures. What is inconsistent to us may be completely consistent to them - "That character is really X, plus Y and Z modifiers" and "That character is X, but has two A modifiers applied to it", with the result being "Both are X in our language, but you use the first when the phase of moon is waxing, and the second is when your spouse committed adultery".
And then there's no real "capital" representation for languages with case - if you represent everything as characters, capitals are separate and distinct from lowercase, and when you need to do a case-insensitive search, you have to handle both. Or rely on Unicode-aware versions of tolower/toupper that don't always work on all languages and encodings.
Unicode has turned into a giant monster. It's primary goal now is to be the one code that you can then translate into other codes - so you can take any script in the world, and it'll map into Unicode. You can do the reverse too - take Unicode and map it out into a script, handling non-script characters as appropriate. Then you process your text in the chosen script.
At least, that was the justification for including emoji into Unicode as well - because the Japanese scripts include emoji, Unicode needs to as well so you can continue to map Japanese script into Unicode without having issues where some characters will not map into Unicode.
We discussed this last week. It doesn't just protect Google AdSense but rather blocks ads that don't meet a code of conduct which AdSense happens to abide by. This isn't a money grab, it's cleaning up the internet in the hope that users scale back ad blocking this ensuring internet ad companies don't go out of business.
by "ad companies" you mean Alphabet. Remember, most of the legitimate ad companies are owned by Alphabet. The ones that don't typically are the ones that serve ads for torrent sites, porn sites and file locker sites (with plenty of the fake download button ads).
It also isn't a coincidence that those ads are also more likely to serve up malware and popups and all sorts of other crap.
And finally, it serves as a last ditch effort in case DoubleClick (An Alphabet Company!(tm)) or AdMob (An Alphabet Company!(tm)) or one of the dozen other ad companies Alpha bet owns serve up a bad ad - sure it's blocking themselves, but they're also helping you, the user from getting crapware from an ad they didn't catch.
It really is time to replace Unicode with something more robust. These errors due to things like combinational characters and tricks like using the text flow control characters to mask file extensions keep coming up.
Programmers aren't language experts, there are no good libraries for handling Unicode, can't even agree on one sane encoding for it... And it's so bad that it's avoided in east Asia for the most part, or just some incompatible subset is used.
The problem is, text is hard. The rules for text make no sense. Western text is easy - we're used to it, and have a generally controllable amount of characters. We can choose to encode it as individual letters (so accented characters are stored as individual characters) because there are a limited number of them.
But other cultures, not so much. Arabic can be hard and most are decorations that affect a base character. Plus, character pairings don't make sense - adding a character can make the entire word being displayed shorter and more compact than without that character (instead of longer).
It's bad enough that people keep wondering when/. will support Unicode. Internally, it already does, and has for over a decade (and probably since the turn of the millennium). Problem was, people realized the potential for chaos and trolls spent absurd amounts of time crafting Unicode text bombs that would cause the comment section to be displayed incorrectly or overwritten by characters that were thousands of pixels tall and unreadable. In the end it got so bad the only solution was a approved character whitelist - the only accepted characters for comments were on a whitelist, and basically was what you could represent n ASCII. Eventually they added a display filter that killed the crap comments in affected articles as well so the archives were usable.
Unicode is composed of codepoints. A character may be composed of one or more codepoints. Trolls have managed to generate characters that are composed of thousands of codepoints (imagine using 10kB of data which represents one character - how will you program that?).
Of course, I suppose it disappoints lots of people who were hoping to embed the character everywhere to crash iOS devices...
Definitely. However in the book the owners of the Manna systems network them and share data. Wouldn't that put them at a competitive disadvantage, it would also most likely be illegal given how little you can ask former employers about workers.
Well, the owners of more and more places are consolidating into ever larger conglomerates, so two companies that you think may be competing against each other may actually have the same parent company. This is especially true in the quick-service food industry where there are really only a few companies controlling quite a few brands. In this case, sharing data might be quite doable and not hurt them competitively. And you might end up having a "conglomerate ID" when you get a job at one of these companies.
Right now, FedEx and UPS are separate companies, but who knows in the future. Outside of North America, FedEx and UPS are bit players - everyone uses DHL if they want to mean anything
The era of huge companies is here, and granted, most of them have been allowing their subsidiaries pretty much complete control management wise to keep each brand having their own separate and distinct identities but they are still controlled by one head honcho at the top.
Without the dongle the Chinese would have gray market PCI cards for cheap.
Embed the dongle on the card. That's all you have to do. The software reads the license key off the card and operates appropriately.
We have USB analyzers and other hardware where the license was embedded in the hardware itself. This mean it could be moved between people's computers and used as needed. When you bought a software upgrade, you ran a program and it programmed the nice license into the hardware, and was available to everyone who used that hardware.
Better yet, without the device attached, the software worked in view-only mode so you can work on saved captured while someone else is debugging.
And sometimes, it makes no sense - if the software works with a specific piece of hardware, so be in, drop all the dongles and other crap because the software and that piece of hardware go together - one is useless without the other. Heck, it's also far easier to convince people to add support if you toss in hardware support as well - I bought your half million dollar piece of equipment, you bet I will buy extra warranty for it, then just bury the software support in that.
It annoys me to no end, especially how electronics EDA tools all use FlexLM or something and getting the right combination just right is annoying.
Actually, based on some of my experiences with Quality Managers, the purpose of the Diversity Officer is to find a way to cover up the ways in which you discriminate against certain groups. I have recently discovered that the purpose of a Quality Manager is NOT to ensure the quality of your production. Rather their purpose is to put into place systems and procedures designed to disguise the fact that you don't give a crap about quality. I saw a situation where the Quality Manger did not CARE that the products going out the door were terrible as long as all of the boxes on the proper forms were checked and the right people had signed them. The fact that following those procedures failed to catch the quality defects was irrelevant. It was the Sales and Marketing guys who insisted that people change what they were doing in order to make sure that the stuff going out the door would perform as the customer expected. The Quality Manager fought them on those changes because they would make it harder to pass the Quality Standards audits.
A lot of quality systems aren't about producing "high quality" product. Because believe it or not, that doesn't matter.
What matters most is consistency. Lot of people will chose a consistently crap product over one where one item might work great, but the next 3 are marginal, and 1 fail completely. Or even one where 90 out of 100 are up to spec but 10 are complete fails spec wise.
Easier to design around the flaws of a consistently bad item than have to implement part screening to filter out the bad ones from a bunch of good ones, or having to loosen your specifications so the bad ones also work fine
And that's really what quality systems measure - how consistent is your product. Not that your product has an excellent set of specifications that will pass everything you throw at it.
But there are significant limitations on what is downloadable compared to OSM
A big one is the inability to find an address. I had tried to use Google Maps, and had downlaoded my local area and it was up to date. But it refused to search for an address - it gave me suggestions of a few addresses, but not the one I was looking for.
The inability to find addresses offline (If it could navigate, bonux, but let's just stick with something so basic...) makes it useless. It's good for a "You are here" pointer, but if it can't even drop a pin given an address (and granted, it can say "approximate location" if it's a calculated address) it turns it into something completely useless. It's just a fancy digital paper map at that point.
It is surprising that slashdot makes no reference to the Advanced Mobile Location system, given that it already wrote about it in an article. Because we would like to compare the pros and cons of those different systems.
AML is neat, but it would be problematic implementing it in North America. Basically, AML works because Europe doesn't have E911 (Enhanced 911) services that support GPS. In E911, which is mandated on all phones, and works even if the phone cannot do data (dumbphones included - remember, this was implemented as part of 9/11 so the smartphone craze hasn't happened yet) the phone has a simple GPS receiver (generally A-GPS) inside the phone stack. That GPS receiver works alongside the towers to get your position, and the location is transmitted to the 911 operator on the control plane - it's metadata.
AML is implemented differently and reflects that Europe did not have an E911 mandate and thus does not have the functionality baked into their network to send GPS information through the control plane and have it reach emergency services. So instead of using the control plane, it uses the user plane (user plane is where "billable" happens). It opens up a data connection and sends the location information that way.
The problem is well, AML is user plane and if you're unaware, that can mean bills for its use. In an emergency, this might not matter, but you may not be aware of this and may not be able to use data. After all, most carriers in North America let you block data roaming, or if you exceed say $50, they will automatically disable all data services to keep you from running up your bill. AML will not work - the network will have to be smart enough to realize it needs to re-enable data connectivity, and then tell the phone that data works again for that data to transfer
And then you have the case where a phone is in "emergency call only" mode - i.e., there is no SIM card. This means there is no data connection because the modem doesn't have any of the required data parameters that would be stored on the SIM card. In North America, it's very common for phones to be recycled in this manner - they have no service, but are useful for emergency calls, and with E911, at least they will get location data. But there is no data service because it cannot be configured.
For those wondering how the system decides if it's emergency or not, you may not realize that ANY emergency number works! The phones do not actually dial 911 or 999 or whatever. They could, and it will reach emergency services, but it's treated as a normal phone call. When you dial 911, the software stack realizes it's emergency and goes into an emergency state - the modem is told to make an emergency call (it's a special dial command - dial emergency). This puts the modem in an emergency state - if it is not attached to a tower or has no service, it will immediately use the first one it finds, and a control message is sent to set up an emergency call. The modem doesn't have to know the emergency number, it tells the network "connect me to emergency services" and the network routes the call to the local emergency call center, regardless of the actual number you're supposed to call.
The emergency state may cause the modem to use a higher power transmit setting to make a connection, and it will tell the network that since the call is emergency, if the tower overloads then it will drop non-emergency calls. Emergency calls also get priority during handoffs so you're less likely to get cut off.
Hasn't Apple quit making the iPhone X because it didn't sell? And only now they're telling App Developers that they must support a discontinued device?
Given Apple sold 77M phones last quarter, I'm sure the failure of the iPhone Z would be loved by practically every other phone manufacturer out there. They'd love to have a phone that fails like the iPhone X.
No, the iPhone X is not discontinued. What it means is that the "cheap iPhone" will be the iPhone 8, when the iPhone 9 is introduced this year. The iPhone X will be discontinued, probably with the introduction of the iPhone X-2 or whatever. Basically, the iPhone X series will not become the "cheap iPhone" line that Apple sells to get people in the door. Like you can buy an iPhone 7 still from Apple - Apple made the iPhone 7 the cheap iPhone, positioning the iPhone 8 as the cutting edge and the iPhone X as the ultimate luxury.
Demand for the iPhone X is softer than expected, likely because in China, the screen is not big enough for a status symbol. If you cannot require 3 hands to just hold it, and 5 hands to use it, it is a useless phone. And yes, I've seen people hold a phone using both hands because it was too big for one of them.
I've seen conversations on it too. "Oh, you got a new iPhone! Cool, how big is the screen?" "5.7" "Oh, that sucks, it's too small".
As for developer support, it's for new apps only - so they can start from scratch with the windowing model properly supported - the old one works just fine but if you're starting anew, it makes sense to add support for it since you're not dealing with legacy code.
To be fair, some of these people are so glued to their phones that they would walk into a very obvious brick wall. For the people I view who are walking around oblivious to the world while checking their smartphone, they do seem to rely on peripheral vision and will stop just a foot or two short of bumping into stuff. Ie, the carpet pattern changed, they can see the base of the wall, etc. But if there was a clear glass wall that went to the floor without any wall base, I could easily see these people smacking into the glass.
It's really an extension of what everyone knows - you can't walk and text. If you think driving and cellphones were bad, walking and texting is worse - people don't seem to think it's as dangerous, but it does lead to injuries and even deaths.
Yes, deaths - distracted pedestrians continually dart into traffic and get run over,. It's not usually a huge amount - most metropolitan areas typically see around 5-10 deaths per year. Injuries are usually much higher - because the people are walking into walls, street furniture (benches, planters, etc), lamp posts and other things on the sidewalk.
The end result is typically they walk a lot slower and often obstruct traffic - hence the jokes about "texting lanes" where they can keep to their slow pace while other traffic goes around them.
One wonders though if it would simply be faster to walk at a normal pace, arrive at your destination, then stop and do all your testing and crap in a safe spot. Seems like a risky thing to try to multitask walking.
There's nothing wrong with using either unicode or UTF8 in the 21st century, but if a particular subsystem isn't prepared to cope with input, it should reject any attempt to submit input it cannot properly handle. Even rendering unknown characters each in a small box with the unicode value written in it is an entirely reasonable coping mechanism. Rendering the wrong thing, or worse, crashing, is a result of either poor QA or lazy developers or both.
The problem is Unicode is complex. A "character" can be composed of multiple codepoints, which is why they're named such. It's entirely possible to have a character take many kilobytes of space because someone decided to apply many decorations to it.
Or, even, for something composed of say, 5 codepoints to occupy more space on the screen than 6 codepoints because the language says iif A is followed by B, it is a Foo, but if it's A followed by B followed by C, it's a Bar. And bars character is less wide than a Foo character.
For more fun, check out the flag characters. They are designed that if the font lacks those characters, then it would appear in the text as the country code. So you could ask for the US flag, and if the font you chose didn't have it, you'd actually end up with "US" instead. But if you did have it, you'd get the US flag. The strange thing is, you have to realize you have to treat both as a single character for text purposes, so deleting one character doesn't leave you with a U and half a flag, but removes it all.
Squares work only in the simple renderer that treats almost all codepoints as individual characters, but these days that's far too simplistic.
And trolls love making 100K worth of codepoints to become a huge black blob 1000 pixels high, 1000 pixels wide or more that gets rendered as a huge black blob on your application or web page.
Is that so? I don't think GSM phones (with SIM) can see their own phone number, similar to how you can't see your IP address when you're behind a NAT.
My (EU, SIM) Android phone, in settings / about phone / status shows "phone number: unknown".
Yes they can. It's a basic command to the modem, actually. Most phones will retrieve and show the local phone number as a convenience (because there are people who do not know their own phone number - after all, how often are you calling yourself?).
Every phone I've had, from the lowliest Nokia dumbphone back in the days to modern smartphones show your phone number. Heck, I remember it documented in the manual because well, you forget.
If you want to know, the command is "AT+CNUM" to get the local subscriber number. It is optional, and it depends on the SIM. Optional in the modem does not have to support the command (it may just return OK), and depends on the SIM to have your number programmed into the phonebook (normally done during activation). Sometimes during SIM activation the phone number isn't programmed in by the operator in which case it too will return just OK. Otherwise you get +CNUM="+phonenumber"\r\nOK\r\n
Exactly. If you're doing something the Chinese government would be interested in, sure, I can see avoiding their stuff. However, since most US citizens don't engage in anything that's of interest to a foreign power, it seems to me that using something one's own government hates is actually a good thing.
Most Americans don't work? Because what most Americans do at work might be of interest to foreign nations. It's called industrial espionage, after all. Let's say you work at Tesla, on the line putting screw A into hole B all day. You think that might not be of interest to the Chinese? For starters, it can reveal production rate - how often are you putting screw A into hole B? Perhaps the sound of a machine in the background might be moderately interesting - knowing what production equipment is used.
Perhaps you work at an engineering office. I'm sure the Chinese would like to know what you're building and overhearing your conversations with everyone else on the project. At the very least, they'd be interested in hearing about problems and maybe the solutions.
Maybe you work at McD's, knowing the crowd and other things might be useful to judge patronage.
Truth is, there is lots of proprietary information companies have, and sometimes, knowing you can make X widgets a day is valuable, or when you are busy, etc.
Dude. Read the last line of the summary: "While Valve has ended its business relationship with Insel Games, users who previously purchased the company's games on Steam will still be able to use them."
Dude. Read.
For how long?
It sounds like it was an online game, and those are updated frequently. Is the company able to still update the Steam version, because if they can't, owners are screwed. And DLC? If they can't ge the new DLC through stream, will their steam copy work with whatever new mechanism they use?
This is only true if you get a seat, not if you have to stand up the whole time. Most transit is packed during rush hour and making it free only compounds that problem. Free transit might be a great idea for many reasons, but I don't know how many people it will get out of cars. Now if standing were free but a seat cost money, that may work nicely.
Then trade in your gigantaphone for a more reasonably sized one. One that can be operated single handedly, so you can put your bag between your feet, one hand on the hand hold, and your other hand on your phone where you can read, watch a movie or TV show, listen to music, surf the web, etc.
And yes, everyone already IS doing it, which is why gigantic phones really don't sell as much outside of Asia (where size is more of a status thing and less a practicality thing - the more hands you need just to hold your phone, the more elevated your social status). Plus, bigger screens just mean more eyes overlooking what you're doing and reading what you're reading (including texts).
After a certain density, you can even not hold onto the handholds anymore because it's so packed you're just one mass of people anyways so you can even two-hand your phone.
Reading a book is a bit harder, so opt for a paperback or your arm will tire.
If they start blocking competitors for anti-competition reasons then they will be breaking laws. They have a near monopoly situation and the European Union, as one example of places where laws are still enforced, has already made judgements against them.
The reason that Google is doing this is simple. The advertising industry has become so dangerous and dirty, serving malware and other garbage, that a computer without an ad-blocker installed is a clear security risk and most major companies are coming to realise that. In recent years malvertising has become one of the leading methods to attack companies. As other ad-blockers go mainstream Google's main business, selling advertising space, is being threatened. This is more or less the last throw of the dice for the advertising industry
You do realize that Alphabet owns around 95% of the online ad market, right? At least the legitimate ones - we're not talking about those ads that appear on more questionable sites (the ones that are fake download buttons, fake error messages, etc).
I suspect thing is more of a face-saving move - Google/Alphabet knows their ad networks host "bad ads" all the time, so by adding this feature, they hope to have a last minute way of stopping them. After all, there's a good chance if they don't, their ad networks will suffer, and thus, Google's revenue sources.
So it's meant to be a last line of defense from bad ads that creep onto one of their many ad networks before it takes them down.
As for people complaining about ad supported sites - if people are wiling to pay for websites, then why are people complaining they ened to subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Viacom, and dozens of other online TV streaming services? It's going to be the same thing - everyone will complain about having to pay for/., the NYT, Reddit, Google, etc. etc. etc.
If you think there are too many streaming services now wanting your money, take away the ads and you'll soon be paying for hundreds of subscriptions to websites.
Then you'll find some aggregator that will bundle a bunch of them so instead of 100 bills a year, you'll have 50, but now have access to a pile of sites you don't care about... etc. etc. etc. If people are balking at paying for 4-5 streaming services monthly, how will they feel at paying for dozens of websites? Same issue.
Also, Porsche charges astronomical licensing fees for anything associated with their brand. Just look at video games for example.. Many times you will see RUF cars instead of actual Porsches in games because they want too much for licensing.
Actually, that's not the reason why. The reason was EA had an exclusive license to use Porsche in its games Need for Speed and Real Racing. Exclusive, as in no one else was allowed.
This agreement ended in 2016, after a 16 year exclusivity deal, which means you are now free to license Porsche for real, and I believe Forza and several others have in 2017.
(The recipe isn't actually that much a secret. e.g.: In several markets, local food and beverage law require the content to be explicitly stated on the label).
And in practically every market, you have to disclose the ingredients. But knowing the ingredients doesn't give you the recipe - it just gets you what goes into the recipe. You don't know quantities, relationships between ingredients, what gets combined with what and cooked at what temperature and for how long (process).
The basic ingredients on a can of Coke will, in the right proportions get you to a cola perhaps (or not). but a lot of the time the secret's in the production process.
I never see ads in the middle of YouTube videos, Anonymous Coward.
At the beginning? For sure - But never in the middle. Maybe it's a regional thing. (I'm in Canada, eh?)
I get them in Canada all the time. Look at the timeline, and see the yellow dots on it? Those are POTENTIAL ad slots. Sometimes on some videos, it will fade out, play the ad, then resume where it paused (a few seconds back,. so you can get the context).
It depends on the monetization model - content creators can choose to have no monetization, monetization with a banner ad (the yellow spots will indicate when one will pop up on the screen), monetization with a pre-roll ad (most common, an ad plays before the video), and pre-roll and intertitial ads with breaks. These are more for longer form videos of 10 or so minutes or more - short videos only have pre-roll and banner ads.
I have seen demonetized videos, and those are sweet - no ads anywhere.
Also smartphones have more than enough power to do it too (look at the realtime video image recognition they can do for example) and so I can only assume the reason Siri (and whatever android has) send the speech to be processed in the cloud is for data capture purposes, not because the devices themselves are not up to i
Google and Amazon yes, Siri less so. Google and Amazon sell your data, so having more of it is beneficial for them. Apple doesn't, and having your data is a liability (law enforcement). Siri nowadays does as much as possible on-device (especially with things like SiriKit so apps can hook into local device recognition). The distinction isn't completely clear when Siri will reach out for cloud support and when it wouldn't (some queries will go out regardless, and I suppose the hard to recognize voices will be saved on Apple's server per the privacy policy to improve recognition support).
I think Apple spies a lot less - because Siri is quite... bad. The HomePod listens to you well, but Siri doesn't understand you.
Most of it is because the people who work on Siri have limited data - read the Siri privacy policy and you'll find it doesn't actually have much data to use. Unlike Alphabet (whose privacy policy allows sharing all data with all Alphabet companies) and Amazon. Which is why Google Assistant and Alexa pretty much reign supreme - if SIri had access to the data set Google has on you, it better work great. (And Siri could have access to a lot of data, if Apple would allow internal divisions, but it seems like every division has its own privacy policy and heaven forbid breaking it).
Heck, Siri works a lot locally - it's doing a lot of it on-device.
Finally, Apple doesn't want your data. It really doesn't. Because the data it has means it's data government may want. And the best way to avoid that is to simply avoid having that data to begin with. Better to tell law enforcement their request can't be done because the data doesn't exist than to have to cock-block them because it's outside the country or other thing. Law enforcement just needs the right case to get the right heart strings pulled to cause general public opinion to turn against you
Anyhow, I'm not getting one, as it doesn't have basic things. But it's Apple - their first-gen products often lack common things because Apple wants to get the stuff it does right. After all, the first-gen iPhone didn't have 3G, video recording, MMS, and dozens of other features. The first-gen iPad lacked a camera (seemed obvious at the time, but cameras make life more convenient, and there turns out there's a small contingent who actually do take photos with tablets).
Apple generally is a "do it well, even if it means not having every feature imaginable. I'm sure the second gen HomePod will start adding common jacks, or a third party will make an AirPlay sender box. (Given the code exists and until ChromeCast, was the most popular way on Android to send audio, I expect dozens of Chinese boxes start offering AirPlay sending functionality).
For what itâ(TM)s worth, Apple has had a policy where any developer has access to nearly all of the source code for their non-secret projects. I donâ(TM)t know if that is true to this day, but it was definitely true as of a couple years ago.
Probably true, and probably still exists.
After all, the goal of this is not that the developer should leak code out, it's so code can be shared. If you're working on some project and you need an asset used by something else, having full access means you can just reference the asset instead of having to get approval to get access to the asset (paperwork in getting access to their source code and copying it), do your own version of the asset (money to pay someone to do it) and having to keep the asset update as time goes on.
Worries about code theft and leaks are probably on the last of their mind - because basically your career would be ruined, it has little commercial value because no one would dare use that code (except maybe in China). In this case, operational efficiency is probably paramount and being able to share and reuse code even more so.
If this was MIcrosoft, yes, the code is probably silo'd, which means you end up with a million implementations of the same thing because it's often just easier to reimplement something than to actually go through the process of getting access to the needed code.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, but Google's been doing the payment thing far longer than Apple - Google Wallet's been around since Android's been around and Google's been doing NFC payments before NFC hit the iPhone (at least for years before).
The only thing is, Apple Pay is based on standards - EMV. It's really at the very bottom an implementation (ignoring extra Apple pay frilly things for now). That's why It Just Worked at a lot of merchants - if they supported tap (NFC), they implicitly supported Apple Pay as well. The only hard part was getting banks enrolled, but that was more of an Apple and bank thing.
Google Wallet was based on a debit card - you paid, Google was told about the transaction and Google then charged you. This double-billing meant it was easy to get funding sources (Google even ate the transaction fees), but it required retailer support.
Google wanted to insert themselves into every transaction. Apple Pay was a more secure credit card.
The only thing that's going wierdly is all the frilly stuff, like Apple pay being used to outdo paypal by offering person-to-person funding transfers as well. Those things aren't likely to take off.
No, you go and fix the SoC, and update the switch to use it for now. You leave the original 10M or whatever they sold alone - 90% of the users will be blissfully unaware, and the 5% you just leave it as the cost of doing business.
It's too early for a "new switch", so that option is out. Maybe in 2020 Nintendo might release a New Switch.
Nintendo is about to offer an online gaming thing, and if you do it right, you can actually detect modified systems. After all, the Xbox360 was modded to support pirated games, but you can never put that console online because Xbox Live would detect the modified system and ban you. This got to be a big problem because it meant a lot of used systems were unable to go online. So it's possible to have a compromised system that's still able to be secure.
Of course, if Nintendo were better, they'd realize they are doing what Microsoft did on the original Xbox - by not cooperating with the Linux folks, the inadvertently caused a team effect - the Xbox Linux folks, the Homebrew folks, and the piracy folks all gathered together to figure out ways to break into the Xbox. Microsoft realized this, and realized the Homebrew folks are probably the most technically oriented of the lot (if they can code against something they have no documentation for, they will have the skills to break your security systems), which is why they did the whole XNA thing and now UWP. If you want to homebrew for Xbox, Microsoft is more than willing to let you do it and provide the official channels. And if it's good, Microsoft will let you officially sell it.
Sony learned this the hard way when they closed off their PS3 Linux support - suddenly homebrewers were left out and quickly got to work breaking the new PS3 security systems. And now they're close to breaking the PS4 - they've already got an old firmware broken (and heavily exploited for piracy).
If Nintendo was smart, they'd embrace the hacking, thank them for their work, and have a semi-official way to do that. If they were really good, they'd toss a way for people to write Switch games too. Doing this will basically sap all the knowledgeable people into doing their thing, leaving the piracy folks starved for talent.
The problem is, as usual, other cultures. What is inconsistent to us may be completely consistent to them - "That character is really X, plus Y and Z modifiers" and "That character is X, but has two A modifiers applied to it", with the result being "Both are X in our language, but you use the first when the phase of moon is waxing, and the second is when your spouse committed adultery".
And then there's no real "capital" representation for languages with case - if you represent everything as characters, capitals are separate and distinct from lowercase, and when you need to do a case-insensitive search, you have to handle both. Or rely on Unicode-aware versions of tolower/toupper that don't always work on all languages and encodings.
Unicode has turned into a giant monster. It's primary goal now is to be the one code that you can then translate into other codes - so you can take any script in the world, and it'll map into Unicode. You can do the reverse too - take Unicode and map it out into a script, handling non-script characters as appropriate. Then you process your text in the chosen script.
At least, that was the justification for including emoji into Unicode as well - because the Japanese scripts include emoji, Unicode needs to as well so you can continue to map Japanese script into Unicode without having issues where some characters will not map into Unicode.
by "ad companies" you mean Alphabet. Remember, most of the legitimate ad companies are owned by Alphabet. The ones that don't typically are the ones that serve ads for torrent sites, porn sites and file locker sites (with plenty of the fake download button ads).
It also isn't a coincidence that those ads are also more likely to serve up malware and popups and all sorts of other crap.
And finally, it serves as a last ditch effort in case DoubleClick (An Alphabet Company!(tm)) or AdMob (An Alphabet Company!(tm)) or one of the dozen other ad companies Alpha bet owns serve up a bad ad - sure it's blocking themselves, but they're also helping you, the user from getting crapware from an ad they didn't catch.
The problem is, text is hard. The rules for text make no sense. Western text is easy - we're used to it, and have a generally controllable amount of characters. We can choose to encode it as individual letters (so accented characters are stored as individual characters) because there are a limited number of them.
But other cultures, not so much. Arabic can be hard and most are decorations that affect a base character. Plus, character pairings don't make sense - adding a character can make the entire word being displayed shorter and more compact than without that character (instead of longer).
It's bad enough that people keep wondering when /. will support Unicode. Internally, it already does, and has for over a decade (and probably since the turn of the millennium). Problem was, people realized the potential for chaos and trolls spent absurd amounts of time crafting Unicode text bombs that would cause the comment section to be displayed incorrectly or overwritten by characters that were thousands of pixels tall and unreadable. In the end it got so bad the only solution was a approved character whitelist - the only accepted characters for comments were on a whitelist, and basically was what you could represent n ASCII. Eventually they added a display filter that killed the crap comments in affected articles as well so the archives were usable.
Unicode is composed of codepoints. A character may be composed of one or more codepoints. Trolls have managed to generate characters that are composed of thousands of codepoints (imagine using 10kB of data which represents one character - how will you program that?).
Of course, I suppose it disappoints lots of people who were hoping to embed the character everywhere to crash iOS devices...
Well, the owners of more and more places are consolidating into ever larger conglomerates, so two companies that you think may be competing against each other may actually have the same parent company. This is especially true in the quick-service food industry where there are really only a few companies controlling quite a few brands. In this case, sharing data might be quite doable and not hurt them competitively. And you might end up having a "conglomerate ID" when you get a job at one of these companies.
Right now, FedEx and UPS are separate companies, but who knows in the future. Outside of North America, FedEx and UPS are bit players - everyone uses DHL if they want to mean anything
The era of huge companies is here, and granted, most of them have been allowing their subsidiaries pretty much complete control management wise to keep each brand having their own separate and distinct identities but they are still controlled by one head honcho at the top.
Embed the dongle on the card. That's all you have to do. The software reads the license key off the card and operates appropriately.
We have USB analyzers and other hardware where the license was embedded in the hardware itself. This mean it could be moved between people's computers and used as needed. When you bought a software upgrade, you ran a program and it programmed the nice license into the hardware, and was available to everyone who used that hardware.
Better yet, without the device attached, the software worked in view-only mode so you can work on saved captured while someone else is debugging.
And sometimes, it makes no sense - if the software works with a specific piece of hardware, so be in, drop all the dongles and other crap because the software and that piece of hardware go together - one is useless without the other. Heck, it's also far easier to convince people to add support if you toss in hardware support as well - I bought your half million dollar piece of equipment, you bet I will buy extra warranty for it, then just bury the software support in that.
It annoys me to no end, especially how electronics EDA tools all use FlexLM or something and getting the right combination just right is annoying.
A lot of quality systems aren't about producing "high quality" product. Because believe it or not, that doesn't matter.
What matters most is consistency. Lot of people will chose a consistently crap product over one where one item might work great, but the next 3 are marginal, and 1 fail completely. Or even one where 90 out of 100 are up to spec but 10 are complete fails spec wise.
Easier to design around the flaws of a consistently bad item than have to implement part screening to filter out the bad ones from a bunch of good ones, or having to loosen your specifications so the bad ones also work fine
And that's really what quality systems measure - how consistent is your product. Not that your product has an excellent set of specifications that will pass everything you throw at it.
A big one is the inability to find an address. I had tried to use Google Maps, and had downlaoded my local area and it was up to date. But it refused to search for an address - it gave me suggestions of a few addresses, but not the one I was looking for.
The inability to find addresses offline (If it could navigate, bonux, but let's just stick with something so basic...) makes it useless. It's good for a "You are here" pointer, but if it can't even drop a pin given an address (and granted, it can say "approximate location" if it's a calculated address) it turns it into something completely useless. It's just a fancy digital paper map at that point.
AML is neat, but it would be problematic implementing it in North America. Basically, AML works because Europe doesn't have E911 (Enhanced 911) services that support GPS. In E911, which is mandated on all phones, and works even if the phone cannot do data (dumbphones included - remember, this was implemented as part of 9/11 so the smartphone craze hasn't happened yet) the phone has a simple GPS receiver (generally A-GPS) inside the phone stack. That GPS receiver works alongside the towers to get your position, and the location is transmitted to the 911 operator on the control plane - it's metadata.
AML is implemented differently and reflects that Europe did not have an E911 mandate and thus does not have the functionality baked into their network to send GPS information through the control plane and have it reach emergency services. So instead of using the control plane, it uses the user plane (user plane is where "billable" happens). It opens up a data connection and sends the location information that way.
The problem is well, AML is user plane and if you're unaware, that can mean bills for its use. In an emergency, this might not matter, but you may not be aware of this and may not be able to use data. After all, most carriers in North America let you block data roaming, or if you exceed say $50, they will automatically disable all data services to keep you from running up your bill. AML will not work - the network will have to be smart enough to realize it needs to re-enable data connectivity, and then tell the phone that data works again for that data to transfer
And then you have the case where a phone is in "emergency call only" mode - i.e., there is no SIM card. This means there is no data connection because the modem doesn't have any of the required data parameters that would be stored on the SIM card. In North America, it's very common for phones to be recycled in this manner - they have no service, but are useful for emergency calls, and with E911, at least they will get location data. But there is no data service because it cannot be configured.
For those wondering how the system decides if it's emergency or not, you may not realize that ANY emergency number works! The phones do not actually dial 911 or 999 or whatever. They could, and it will reach emergency services, but it's treated as a normal phone call. When you dial 911, the software stack realizes it's emergency and goes into an emergency state - the modem is told to make an emergency call (it's a special dial command - dial emergency). This puts the modem in an emergency state - if it is not attached to a tower or has no service, it will immediately use the first one it finds, and a control message is sent to set up an emergency call. The modem doesn't have to know the emergency number, it tells the network "connect me to emergency services" and the network routes the call to the local emergency call center, regardless of the actual number you're supposed to call.
The emergency state may cause the modem to use a higher power transmit setting to make a connection, and it will tell the network that since the call is emergency, if the tower overloads then it will drop non-emergency calls. Emergency calls also get priority during handoffs so you're less likely to get cut off.
Given Apple sold 77M phones last quarter, I'm sure the failure of the iPhone Z would be loved by practically every other phone manufacturer out there. They'd love to have a phone that fails like the iPhone X.
No, the iPhone X is not discontinued. What it means is that the "cheap iPhone" will be the iPhone 8, when the iPhone 9 is introduced this year. The iPhone X will be discontinued, probably with the introduction of the iPhone X-2 or whatever. Basically, the iPhone X series will not become the "cheap iPhone" line that Apple sells to get people in the door. Like you can buy an iPhone 7 still from Apple - Apple made the iPhone 7 the cheap iPhone, positioning the iPhone 8 as the cutting edge and the iPhone X as the ultimate luxury.
Demand for the iPhone X is softer than expected, likely because in China, the screen is not big enough for a status symbol. If you cannot require 3 hands to just hold it, and 5 hands to use it, it is a useless phone. And yes, I've seen people hold a phone using both hands because it was too big for one of them.
I've seen conversations on it too. "Oh, you got a new iPhone! Cool, how big is the screen?" "5.7" "Oh, that sucks, it's too small".
As for developer support, it's for new apps only - so they can start from scratch with the windowing model properly supported - the old one works just fine but if you're starting anew, it makes sense to add support for it since you're not dealing with legacy code.
It's really an extension of what everyone knows - you can't walk and text. If you think driving and cellphones were bad, walking and texting is worse - people don't seem to think it's as dangerous, but it does lead to injuries and even deaths.
Yes, deaths - distracted pedestrians continually dart into traffic and get run over,. It's not usually a huge amount - most metropolitan areas typically see around 5-10 deaths per year. Injuries are usually much higher - because the people are walking into walls, street furniture (benches, planters, etc), lamp posts and other things on the sidewalk.
The end result is typically they walk a lot slower and often obstruct traffic - hence the jokes about "texting lanes" where they can keep to their slow pace while other traffic goes around them.
One wonders though if it would simply be faster to walk at a normal pace, arrive at your destination, then stop and do all your testing and crap in a safe spot. Seems like a risky thing to try to multitask walking.
The problem is Unicode is complex. A "character" can be composed of multiple codepoints, which is why they're named such. It's entirely possible to have a character take many kilobytes of space because someone decided to apply many decorations to it.
Or, even, for something composed of say, 5 codepoints to occupy more space on the screen than 6 codepoints because the language says iif A is followed by B, it is a Foo, but if it's A followed by B followed by C, it's a Bar. And bars character is less wide than a Foo character.
For more fun, check out the flag characters. They are designed that if the font lacks those characters, then it would appear in the text as the country code. So you could ask for the US flag, and if the font you chose didn't have it, you'd actually end up with "US" instead. But if you did have it, you'd get the US flag. The strange thing is, you have to realize you have to treat both as a single character for text purposes, so deleting one character doesn't leave you with a U and half a flag, but removes it all.
Squares work only in the simple renderer that treats almost all codepoints as individual characters, but these days that's far too simplistic.
And trolls love making 100K worth of codepoints to become a huge black blob 1000 pixels high, 1000 pixels wide or more that gets rendered as a huge black blob on your application or web page.
Yes they can. It's a basic command to the modem, actually. Most phones will retrieve and show the local phone number as a convenience (because there are people who do not know their own phone number - after all, how often are you calling yourself?).
Every phone I've had, from the lowliest Nokia dumbphone back in the days to modern smartphones show your phone number. Heck, I remember it documented in the manual because well, you forget.
If you want to know, the command is "AT+CNUM" to get the local subscriber number. It is optional, and it depends on the SIM. Optional in the modem does not have to support the command (it may just return OK), and depends on the SIM to have your number programmed into the phonebook (normally done during activation). Sometimes during SIM activation the phone number isn't programmed in by the operator in which case it too will return just OK. Otherwise you get +CNUM="+phonenumber"\r\nOK\r\n
Most Americans don't work? Because what most Americans do at work might be of interest to foreign nations. It's called industrial espionage, after all. Let's say you work at Tesla, on the line putting screw A into hole B all day. You think that might not be of interest to the Chinese? For starters, it can reveal production rate - how often are you putting screw A into hole B? Perhaps the sound of a machine in the background might be moderately interesting - knowing what production equipment is used.
Perhaps you work at an engineering office. I'm sure the Chinese would like to know what you're building and overhearing your conversations with everyone else on the project. At the very least, they'd be interested in hearing about problems and maybe the solutions.
Maybe you work at McD's, knowing the crowd and other things might be useful to judge patronage.
Truth is, there is lots of proprietary information companies have, and sometimes, knowing you can make X widgets a day is valuable, or when you are busy, etc.
For how long?
It sounds like it was an online game, and those are updated frequently. Is the company able to still update the Steam version, because if they can't, owners are screwed. And DLC? If they can't ge the new DLC through stream, will their steam copy work with whatever new mechanism they use?
Then trade in your gigantaphone for a more reasonably sized one. One that can be operated single handedly, so you can put your bag between your feet, one hand on the hand hold, and your other hand on your phone where you can read, watch a movie or TV show, listen to music, surf the web, etc.
And yes, everyone already IS doing it, which is why gigantic phones really don't sell as much outside of Asia (where size is more of a status thing and less a practicality thing - the more hands you need just to hold your phone, the more elevated your social status). Plus, bigger screens just mean more eyes overlooking what you're doing and reading what you're reading (including texts).
After a certain density, you can even not hold onto the handholds anymore because it's so packed you're just one mass of people anyways so you can even two-hand your phone.
Reading a book is a bit harder, so opt for a paperback or your arm will tire.
You do realize that Alphabet owns around 95% of the online ad market, right? At least the legitimate ones - we're not talking about those ads that appear on more questionable sites (the ones that are fake download buttons, fake error messages, etc).
I suspect thing is more of a face-saving move - Google/Alphabet knows their ad networks host "bad ads" all the time, so by adding this feature, they hope to have a last minute way of stopping them. After all, there's a good chance if they don't, their ad networks will suffer, and thus, Google's revenue sources.
So it's meant to be a last line of defense from bad ads that creep onto one of their many ad networks before it takes them down.
As for people complaining about ad supported sites - if people are wiling to pay for websites, then why are people complaining they ened to subscribe to Hulu, Netflix, CBS, Viacom, and dozens of other online TV streaming services? It's going to be the same thing - everyone will complain about having to pay for /., the NYT, Reddit, Google, etc. etc. etc.
If you think there are too many streaming services now wanting your money, take away the ads and you'll soon be paying for hundreds of subscriptions to websites.
Then you'll find some aggregator that will bundle a bunch of them so instead of 100 bills a year, you'll have 50, but now have access to a pile of sites you don't care about... etc. etc. etc. If people are balking at paying for 4-5 streaming services monthly, how will they feel at paying for dozens of websites? Same issue.
Actually, that's not the reason why. The reason was EA had an exclusive license to use Porsche in its games Need for Speed and Real Racing. Exclusive, as in no one else was allowed.
This agreement ended in 2016, after a 16 year exclusivity deal, which means you are now free to license Porsche for real, and I believe Forza and several others have in 2017.
And in practically every market, you have to disclose the ingredients. But knowing the ingredients doesn't give you the recipe - it just gets you what goes into the recipe. You don't know quantities, relationships between ingredients, what gets combined with what and cooked at what temperature and for how long (process).
The basic ingredients on a can of Coke will, in the right proportions get you to a cola perhaps (or not). but a lot of the time the secret's in the production process.
I get them in Canada all the time. Look at the timeline, and see the yellow dots on it? Those are POTENTIAL ad slots. Sometimes on some videos, it will fade out, play the ad, then resume where it paused (a few seconds back,. so you can get the context).
It depends on the monetization model - content creators can choose to have no monetization, monetization with a banner ad (the yellow spots will indicate when one will pop up on the screen), monetization with a pre-roll ad (most common, an ad plays before the video), and pre-roll and intertitial ads with breaks. These are more for longer form videos of 10 or so minutes or more - short videos only have pre-roll and banner ads.
I have seen demonetized videos, and those are sweet - no ads anywhere.
Google and Amazon yes, Siri less so. Google and Amazon sell your data, so having more of it is beneficial for them. Apple doesn't, and having your data is a liability (law enforcement). Siri nowadays does as much as possible on-device (especially with things like SiriKit so apps can hook into local device recognition). The distinction isn't completely clear when Siri will reach out for cloud support and when it wouldn't (some queries will go out regardless, and I suppose the hard to recognize voices will be saved on Apple's server per the privacy policy to improve recognition support).
I think Apple spies a lot less - because Siri is quite... bad. The HomePod listens to you well, but Siri doesn't understand you.
Most of it is because the people who work on Siri have limited data - read the Siri privacy policy and you'll find it doesn't actually have much data to use. Unlike Alphabet (whose privacy policy allows sharing all data with all Alphabet companies) and Amazon. Which is why Google Assistant and Alexa pretty much reign supreme - if SIri had access to the data set Google has on you, it better work great. (And Siri could have access to a lot of data, if Apple would allow internal divisions, but it seems like every division has its own privacy policy and heaven forbid breaking it).
Heck, Siri works a lot locally - it's doing a lot of it on-device.
Finally, Apple doesn't want your data. It really doesn't. Because the data it has means it's data government may want. And the best way to avoid that is to simply avoid having that data to begin with. Better to tell law enforcement their request can't be done because the data doesn't exist than to have to cock-block them because it's outside the country or other thing. Law enforcement just needs the right case to get the right heart strings pulled to cause general public opinion to turn against you
Anyhow, I'm not getting one, as it doesn't have basic things. But it's Apple - their first-gen products often lack common things because Apple wants to get the stuff it does right. After all, the first-gen iPhone didn't have 3G, video recording, MMS, and dozens of other features. The first-gen iPad lacked a camera (seemed obvious at the time, but cameras make life more convenient, and there turns out there's a small contingent who actually do take photos with tablets).
Apple generally is a "do it well, even if it means not having every feature imaginable. I'm sure the second gen HomePod will start adding common jacks, or a third party will make an AirPlay sender box. (Given the code exists and until ChromeCast, was the most popular way on Android to send audio, I expect dozens of Chinese boxes start offering AirPlay sending functionality).
Lots of stores don't take headphones, earbuds and other things back anymore as a hygiene thing, so if your store does, good for you.
The only reason to go to the store is to try them before buying them, because after they're bought, unless they're still sealed, most will refuse.
Probably true, and probably still exists.
After all, the goal of this is not that the developer should leak code out, it's so code can be shared. If you're working on some project and you need an asset used by something else, having full access means you can just reference the asset instead of having to get approval to get access to the asset (paperwork in getting access to their source code and copying it), do your own version of the asset (money to pay someone to do it) and having to keep the asset update as time goes on.
Worries about code theft and leaks are probably on the last of their mind - because basically your career would be ruined, it has little commercial value because no one would dare use that code (except maybe in China). In this case, operational efficiency is probably paramount and being able to share and reuse code even more so.
If this was MIcrosoft, yes, the code is probably silo'd, which means you end up with a million implementations of the same thing because it's often just easier to reimplement something than to actually go through the process of getting access to the needed code.