Whoever it was that decided to shutdown their secure email service instead of hand over info to the feds.
That was because they had no choice. Their system of encryption was so stupidly done, it was all or nothing. There was no way they could hand over just user X's data without potentially handing over everyone else's as well.
So when the FBI went after their encryption key (singular) for that user, the only key can hand over was the main encryption key for everyone. Oops.
Them shutting down was a good thing, because their security was mostly for show. Yes it was encrypted, but they didn't partition their users such that it was possible to legally comply with lawful orders and not hand over the keys to the kingdom. It was only a matter of time before their insecurity would be exposed.
They shouldn't be eating any "crops" except what they can graze. If you feed animals corn, soy, etc. they will become just as unhealthy as people who eat that kind of food.
Most corn harvested in the US goes to feed for animals, actually. Free range animals graze and are often "grass fed", but the vast majority of meat is at factory farms where the cows don't graze but are fed troughs of corn to fatten them up quickly and slaughter.
The demand for meat is high enough that free range beef will not satisfy demand and would case prices to spike (not that beef is cheap these days - it's still hitting all time high prices)
I'm curious how Seagate screwed things up so badly. They bought Samsung's HDD division some years ago and I found that Samsung produced some incredibly reliable drives (I've actually still got a few running in older machines that have been going for over a decade at this point) for that time period.
I also remember a time when Seagate was thought of as one of the more reliable brands, at least compared to some other ones (Maxtor) that had burned a lot of people I knew. I think Seagate also bought them at any earlier point though, so perhaps that's when the troubles started.
Easy - Seagate is cheap. Stupidly cheap. And because they're built to a price, they will use inferior parts to achieve that low bottom line.
And when you think about it, for commodity items, that's really all the consumer looks for. Price price price price. If you can be $20 cheaper than the next guy, you will get the sale. Everyone knows it, and they still buy anyways because face it, everyone is cheap.
And companies like Backblaze factor it into account - it's still cheaper to have Seagate drives powering their systems (which the data is redundant anyways0 and replacing them than spending more money on better drives and replacing them less.
For personal use it's clear HGST is the way to go. Sure you pay a few extra bucks, but I don't have a massive data farm with redundant data spread out all over the place.I can't afford multiple drive failures.
Don't you have backups? You know, in case one of the dozens of other ways to lose data other than hard drive failure happen? (Crypto malware, filesystem corruption, bad power, software bugs, etc).
A good backup system mitigates a lot of it, and given the pricing for HGST drives (they were nearly double the price of a Seagate, for not much more reliability) in the end it was hard to justify except in very limited circumstances. For me, that was the main disk of my network backup server (Windows Home Server) - it's a critical disk and I spent extra for it. I can easily rebuild it if necessary (I've done it before) so it's not super critical, but while I do that it's offline. So that drive is super critical and I use an HGST drive for it for uninterrupted service. The other disks are not as critical (they hold the data redundantly) so cheaper drives are used there.
That being said, I wonder how much these stats are caused by poor shipping and handling of drives? I've pretty much stopped buying hard drives online except from Amazon because Amazon uses proper shipping containers. Far too often I've ran across "high tech stores" (computer component companies, especially) who really ship drives in questionable ways - the worst was one who stuck a drive in a padded mailing envelope and sent it like that. No surprise it failed quickly. But others stack drives together and bubble wrap the whole thing, which pretty much ensures most are dead when it hits your doorstep. Sometimes I get lucky and they cut up one of the drive shipping containers and put drives in those, then wrap it up. Better than nothing, but still not great. Even in store I've had employees carry drives and thump them all on the counter in a heap. Scary.
Only Amazon put them in boxes with endcaps so the drive floats inside - you know, like how every drive manufacturer says you have to ship the drives for RMA. Either that or you buy retail package drives where they're protected because they know how clueless employees can be.
One wonders how much damage is caused by poor packaging of hard drives which leads to a shortened service life.
When that proved to be problematic, such as when there were different applications that depended on different versions of the same shared library, we started seeing a move toward this "containerization" nonsense. There are different approaches used, but again they all have one thing in common: they're a complex way of imitating static linking.
I hope that someday soon the industry at large wakes up to the fact that static linking is just the most sensible thing to do. Yes, the binaries might be slightly larger, but that's well worth it if it means we can avoid "DLL hell" or the "shared object shitshow", and if we can avoid complex package managers, and most important of all, if we can avoid this goddamn "containerization" bullshit.
Now there may be problems when it comes to certain libraries, because they use highly restrictive licenses like the LGPL that effectively force the use of dynamic linking if you don't want your code to be infected by a viral license. The solution to this is simple: don't use poorly licensed libraries. Stick with libraries that use static-linking-friendly licenses like the MIT or BSD licenses, for example.
A whole lot of problems would be solved if we stopped with all of this dynamic stupidity and just went back to static linking.
No, because dynamic linking, even with non-shared shared libraries is still better. Static linking hides important information like library versions which may be important.
With dynamic libraries, even inside containers, you can still validate the library version to see if it's a vulnerable library. You can run tests against the library to determine if it's vulnerable (just because it's inside a container doesn't mean you can't extract it and test it). This way when a vulnerability happens, you can verify whether or not the copies of the libraries you have are vulnerable since a scanner can go inside containers and check. Users can then either not use the app until it gets an update with a fixed library, try to fix it themselves by replacing the library, use the app understanding its vulnerable, etc.
When you static link, you lose those benefits - for what? Just to have one file? That's not going ot happen ever - it's why we have containers to begin with.
This is a real fucking issue. At some point we are going to have to force them both to allow ANY legal app or we have a real censorship problem. Google and Apple should NOT be gatekeepers of 'inappropriate'.
Actually, for Apple it's quite easy. If the app is 18+, go right ahead. Most apps that are online communications app are simply marked as 18+ and don't bother censoring.
If the app is not marked 18+, then you better not allow any form of penis or other thing to be sent to anyone not over 18. For a messaging app, that's pretty much impossible, which is why they get denied for inappropriate content.
Basically, if you want your app to be open and uncensored, it has to be 18+ (and OS parental controls can restrict apps from running).
The big problem is a lot of apps like SnapChat etc require tweens/teens to be able to use them (marketing reasons of course), so it forces those companies to censor.
So you don't have to censor a single thing, it just means Apple will refuse it unless you set the age restriction to 18+. Many apps have fallen afoul of this over the years and some have basically fallen afoul so badly they had to be removed before they were fixed. I think there was one where the reviewer got a screenful of porn on running the app which did not go over well.
Because the Steam ports of console games are often messy, buggy, unplayable shit.
They were, until something called Denuvo came out and pretty much turned the PC gaming industry on its head because it meant you game wasn't pirated within 2 seconds of release. (Nowadays, it's hours, but in the past it was a couple of weeks, which is huge), which meant PC games could branch beyond online RPGs,, MOBAs and FPSs where an online server could check you paid for your stuff.
It's really brought out a lot of better games on PC. Before PC ports were basically garbage - meant to extract every last dollar by doing a crappy port and releasing it and hoping you made up the porting costs before it was massively pirated.
These days though, the gravy train is pretty much over again as Denuvo is cracked and we're back to massive piracy as par for the course. Which means back to crappy-ass ports years after the game was released.
Sure, Microsoft can promise games like Forza and all that making it over, but you know it's only because of the online authentication and verification - if you can't play Forza online, and the online stuff is disabled, you don't really have much left.
I seem to remember that Kodak, who as I understand it had the first digital camera and buried it, did the same thing with their R&D and that was *in* Rochester. this isn't a new pattern.
New York was the technology hub before Silicon Valley. It was the technology innovation hub led at the time, no doubt, by an "Edison" who claims to have invented something called a "light bulb".
Technology moved west with the whole Silicon Valley thing - i.e., once the transistor and IC were developed.
The old big tech firms were once (or still are) head quartered in New York. (And if you really wanted, everyone wore shirts and ties, none of this laid back t-shirt and jeans of today)
It's rather cowardly how we default to publicly shaming people as well, but I guess it's more socially acceptable these days to possibly ruin someone's life because they made you feel uncomfortable or acted like an asshole to you, and then call others cowards for not wanting to take such a risk.
Except in this case, there is plenty of evidence, provided by the Nolan Bushnell himself in his books.
The only thing is that now the women behind it decided to come forward and what were just a few lines in a few pages in a book now have real ramifications. People say "why didn't you come forward earlier" when in fact, it was practically impossible to because it becomes a whole he-said-she-said thing and for the most part, the system guarantees the woman is not believed. That was, until Weinstein happened and actually lead to women being believed when they weren't before and the whole #MeToo movement).
Anyhow, the interesting point is how it seems all the people with "liberal" descent like Hollywood pretty much just up and admit to their mistakes, while those of "conservative" descent circle the wagons and deny deny deny? I wonder why that is...
It's a monopoly system. And yes, it also makes it impossible for Tesla to open dealerships that won't be owned by the same dealerships that will screw you over right now, which is another reason why Tesla won't franchise - the laws make it so you can't just arbitrarily open a new dealership.
Nonsense. If companies decide that the standard isn't good enough, they can improve the standard, just like the USB consortium did with USB-C.
Yeah, but how are you going to tell if it's better?
USB-C didn't come out of thin air. And I'm pretty sure there was zero need for it - after all, all the cables had USB 3.0 versions of them.
You can invent USB-C but then you have to prove it's much better than the existing standard which is well entrenched - you're convincing an entire industry to change to something new and require all new cables and connectors, after all.
And likely, without the fact that Lightning was around, there would've been zero incentive to even invent USB-C. There aren't many cables that go in either way (maybe the odd power cable but taht's about it). There is a rumor that Apple was the source of the USB-C's design purely because they were fed up of micro USB's limitations - hoping someone would take up what Lightning has done and make a USB equivalent. When that didn't happen, Apple did it and bound together various USB standards no one was using, too (USB-PD existed long before USB-C but was rarely implemented).
Of course, it's also a reason why USB-C is a bit of a mess, since Apple designed it and gave it away and pretty much defined everything about it so it would fit with their use case of laptops...
...is there are so many to choose from. We had a standard connector for charging phones: microUSB. Apple and Samsung chose to go with a proprietary connector instead. The lighting cable is at least available from third parties; the Apple version cost $22 at BestBuy. The Samsung Galaxy S8 and presumably the S9 as well use a proprietary cable, only available from Samsung as far as I know. Apple sells a $99 Apple Pen; what monetary interest could they have in supporting a universal stylus?
The problem is then you get no innovation. Micro USB sucks in various ways, being a single orientation connector is one of them. Yet, if everyone stuck to the standard, we'd all be... stuck with the standard.
Proprietary connectors generally suck, unless they're generally better, like Lightning is compared to micro USB. Like being orientation-independent so it goes in either way. That's a very nice feature to have, and why USB-C is much nicer. But such things don't generally happen on their own unless we have something different to compare them to.
It's also way too easy to say "micro USB is it, everyone has to use it" and then run into problems when someone better comes along, like things with USB-C now upsetting the cart of "micro USB everywhere".
Incidentally, the official Apple lightning stuff is waterproof from the get-go (because it's machined and then injection molded) while the third party stuff isn't (two piece sheet metal pressed together). It'z why Apple gets away with using it as a structural element.
A blue moon, super moon and blood moon all coinciding on the same day is a truly rare event. Last time that happened was 156 years ago. We won't live to see it happen again.
You may not, but a lot of people will. It's predicted to be in 2030-something where it will happen again.
It's always interesting to have a look back at the environment when Apple started with their tight controls over everything on the iPhone. Many people derided this heavy-handedness and wanted something which they could do anything to. Enter the Android-based smartphones which would allow people to install anything from anywhere. The dangers of such a platform for a smartphone became evident over the years and the push for users towards using Google's official source for apps (the Google Play Store) increased. Things which people have often criticized Apple for doing often got implemented soon afterwards. I'm not saying Apple is perfect or makes the best decisions and this isn't about singing their praises. Apple knew the importance around keeping tight control over what is allowed to be installed onto the iOS devices, particularly as it relates to security and stability. (yes, I know they also stand to benefit from these decisions as well). So, here we are with Google screening apps and rejecting apps before they get to the Google Play Store, much like Apple did and does with iOS. I tend to thing that any security-conscious Android user urges those they know to only use apps from the Google Play Store for security reasons and to save users from installing malware riddled apps on their phones.
And the funny thing is, Apple has loosened the policies over the years - Apple was really heavy handed in the past. And now, you can even sideload apps onto iOS devices. Granted, it takes a Mac to sideload, but you can do it. So you can run a lot of "banned" apps just as well too. (They just have to be open-source since the policy is really for developers to test apps, but as long as you compile it, you can load it on your device.).
And that's the thing - if you start out strict, you can loosen up later on. If you start out permissive, you'll end up locking things up.
:I would never invest in something where the value could drop by 2% in a single day.
That really limits your investment options, because even stocks and index funds can drop by 2% in a single day. (On the Dow Jones, that's only a 200-300 point drop, which happens often enough). And without equities, you're investing in only guaranteed investments which at best only give you what you put back in after inflation.
That's because they don't "replace" the battery in iPhones. They copy the data from the old one on to a new one, hand your that, and then ship your old one to be "refurbished" (which is, of course, basically just replacing the battery).
Because they can't do the battery replacements in-store (because the phone is glued shut and impossible to open without special tools), that's the best they can do to enable a "quick" repair. (Still takes a couple of hours to do the copy.)
Why are haters always the latest to get the news? I mean, if you're gonna parry some "facts". at least let it be recent enough to be true.
The last iPhone to be glued shut was the iPhone 3GS. Circa 2009. The iPhone 4 (from 2010) and onwards are not glued shut and can be opened by removing 2 screws. Yes, 2 screws. Granted, replacing a battery in an iPhone 4 is a royal PITA, but the iPhone 5 and onwards is easy.
Apple does it all in-store nowadays - takes 15 minutes. And since the affected iPhones so far are the iPhone 6 and similar, it's not too hard.
Hell, that cellphone repair shop in every mall ought to be able to do it as well for $30 long before Apple offered it. And even iFixit will sell you a kit to replace your battery for $20.
It ain't hard. And the battery has been easier to change for most of the iPhone's history, too. There's plenty of true things you can use to hate about Apple, so stick with true facts, not what's fake news today.
I can't believe Apple thinks that price of entry into the iPhone ecosystem should be north of $300. Every convert they make with a budget iPhone is somebody who starts buying apps and becomes a potential upgrade opportunity. Everybody who gives up and buys a $150 Android phone is somebody who starts buying apps and is a lost upgrade opportunity.
Even the iPhone SE is too expensive, frankly.
Unfortunately, that hasn't shown to be the case, otherwise Android developers would be making hand over fist instead of having to stick ads everywhere and siphoning all your personal data off your phone.
Cheap phone buyers simply don't buy apps. They're cheap. They just wanted something cheap to begin with, and it turns out, they're not keen on spending money (otherwise they'd have bought something better).
The iPhone SE was never designed to be the low end phone. It's designed to be a phone for those of us who prefer a modern day phone in a smaller form factor without all the dick-waving of bigger screen sizes. It's amusing to watch people try to manhandle some of the larger Android phones out there - they have to carry it in two hands and don't seem concerned they can't really use the phone while they're carrying it.Of course, I won't suggest they buy a more practical phone - for those people, screen size was the #1 reason and it's why they bought the phone.
I believe Apple will keep the SE alive - they were taken aback by how popular it was - turns out there's a market for smaller phones that are decent, so an iPhone SE 2 with iPhone 8 guts will probably be a worthwhile upgrade. The iPhone SE sold out the first day despite not being heavily promoted, or Apple even preparing for a big lineup of sales. It just went.
Could his Computer be a hair faster, or the timer a bit slower? I mean it is a 2600, not quite a Real Time system. If the CPU was clocked up (even by accident) 1/20th of a second, difference is possible.
No, it was physically impossible. To determine if it was real, they went so far as to disassemble the cartridge ROM and calculate what are the possible numbers that are valid for the time. That was how it was determined it was not possible - there was no way to score lower than 5.57 using the code.
And no, PAL/NTSC makes little difference - these systems do not have a real time clock at all, so the "time" is really calculated by cycle counting at best. (The 2600 worked by "chasing the beam" - i.e., it only worked as a 1D system so the CPU is only just a bit quicker than the CRT in preparing the line of graphics. During the horizontal blanking, it would then prepare the next line of graphics. There was no framebuffer so everything was handled pretty much as a 1D graphic system. Sprites and the ball you had to update them every line including disabling the sprite hardware when you weren't drawing it that line.
The impressive part is someone basically executed the code manually and was able to give the precise timing to generate a list of all the possible times (you can empirically do it using a tool for tool assisted speedruns, but they calculated the exact numbers that come out if you hit the button at the exact time, which in a simulation by executing the code manually you can do.
No other site has this problem. Slashdot advertises UTF-8 support in the meta tags in their HTML, but then doesn't support UTF-8. Other sites either don't advertise UTF-8 support, or actually support unicode (you know, the thing that's been the standard text encoding for 15-20 years).
It is correct. Slashdot supports UTF-8 since circa 2003 or so. It's just that thanks to a lot of unicode abuse (and think of it this way, even Apple can't get it right) every character is put through a whitelist of allowed characters, which basically consists of only the first 127 printable unicode characters (i.e., ASCII).
I do believe intenrally all messages are stored as unicode, since for a long time you could retrieve the stories with the broken unicode support but I believe that's gone now and the display of comments is forced through the whitelist.
Unicode is already hard enough without people deliberately trying to mess up the comment pages with 2000+ pixel tall characters, directional overrides, etc.
If you think the officer will go to jail over this you need to look at the seemingly constant stream of stories of police shootings of unarmed people being either not charged or acquitted. I would bet 1000 dollars he wont be convicted of anything. Probably wont even get fired.
I would treat this as the officer's lucky day. Any other killing and he'd be charged, but because it was a hoax, he should go free.
This means the charge filters to the actual gamers themselves.
You may think "but what about the cop? He'll just kill again!" Well, the cop got lucky. He killed, and was given a once-in-a-lifetime mulligan.after the fact. No way to tell if his next call he'll be so lucky to get off scot-free again , so he's smart, he'll transfer out of the location and keep his nose squeaky clean. Extremely lucky, lotto-winning opportunity he got.
And yes, murder by proxy/cop should still filter down as a premeditated murder charge. Sorry, but if you're calling it like this, it is murder. It never was a joke, there's no "ha ha just kidding the cops aren't real". Then we can also start treating swatting that don't result in someone getting killed as attempted murders - why else would you call the cops on them? (Sorry, calling the cops eliminates the "it was just a joke". Let's treat it as a the non-joke everyone says it is).
The location of Tesla's factory actually makes a lot of sense. It's an area with relatively low cost of living, which means they can pay workers less. It is not too far from their manufacturing plant (in Fremont), so transportation is minimized. That manufacturing plant in Fremont, in turn, is where it is because most of the people who want EVs live in California.
Actually, the factory is in Fremont because that was the location of an old Toyota factory. Tesla simply scooped it up and got rewarded with an almost turnkey automobile manufacturing plant. I believe the only reason Toyota stopped using it was it was insufficient for their needs - it just could not produce enough cars fast enough.
Of course, Tesla is not using it at full capacity right now.
The difficulty is that a lot of people's idea of a "fair" price is wildly out of proportion to average production costs and returns, particularly if you're looking at smaller markets or more niche products and not just the top end Hollywood blockbusters, top-of-charts music, this season's must-have game that are the unicorns in this business.
Read any Slashdot discussion on this subject, and after a few hundred comments you'll find no shortage of people who think that because the marginal cost of online distribution is close to zero, the price should be as well. Go talk to real world customers about your library of original content, and you'll find plenty of people who say they'd buy it if it were a $3 app for the whole thing instead of $10/month. Of course they would like it cheap/free, but that's probably not a fair price unless you have a very large market or very low production costs.
And sometimes, people don't believe just how cheap the regular mechanism is. Everyone says ebooks should be really cheap, but the marginal cost of the actual physical bok itself (trees, paper, binding, printing, warehousing, etc) is extremely efficient. Over the centuries, we've come up with a system to very efficiently move books around. So much so that the real cost of the physical distribution is at most, $2. Yes, it's that low for the paper, printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution, etc.
The vast majority of costs of books isn't in the physical, it's in the editing, the artwork, the typesetting, etc. Things that are shared with the ebook.
If demand can be increased by reducing price such that more profit can be made, suppliers would be better off. Unfortunately many suppliers are afraid of upsetting existing markets by changing strategies. And of course some take the alternative tactic and increase price (and profit) per unit [cough] Apple [cough] while reducing overall demand for a product. This, however, makes very little sense in a market with near zero marginal cost unless you have totally inelastic demand.
Apple does it because they often know they cannot meet demand. If you know you can only make a million units s month, it's best to price your stuff so demand is about a million units a month. You may wish to price it lower, but if that causes demand to soar to 3 million units a month, you end up with a perpetually sold out thing, unhappy customers, and scalpers.
Apple had trouble with the iPhone X. They knew it, so they priced it high to temper demand I'm sure they didn't want to price it so high, but given the difficulty in manufacturing, better to price it high and lower demand (and potentially drive sales to lower cost units like the iPhone 8) than anger customers who can't find it and storm off.
Most give mediocre stuff, but occasionally you get something cool. You are not required to purchase loot boxes. Some games give them randomly as prizes just for playing with the option to purchase more.
I don't see the big deal, but I'm not inclined to buy them either.
No, the problem is the loot boxes require you to buy them to continue the game. That's why there's a big uproar - if you want to progress through the game, these purchases are no longer optional, but required or you cannot proceed. Oh sure, you can try, but it'll take you an ungodly long time.
And that's the issue. There's no problem when loot boxes were merely cosmetic touches you could apply to your player - completely optional, purchasing does nothing to your progress in the game. But when certain modes and certain games require you to purchase them to acquire maybe a few uncommon items, then things have gone too far.
A CCG like MtG has the odds already posted - a pack of 10 booster cards will have 7 commons, 2 uncommons and 1 rare card. Whether or not the latter are useful to you, or worth money, are unknown, but you know you won't pull up a booster of 10 commons worth zilch (e.g., you pull up a booster of 10 lands).
But gaming lootboxes, that's entirely possible. And if you need the Golden Foobuster to proceed, it might be worthwhile to know if they're something you'll get every 2 lootboxes or so, or 100.
It used to be you could pay to get ahead (pay $X for 100 gold coins to buy something). Loot boxes have turned that into pure gambling - spend $Y to open up Z lootboxes so you may score the 100 gold. They've actually made in-app purchases be even worse. And it didn't take a mobile game company to do this, but established game companies. (I believe Halo 5 was one of the worst offenders because you had to buy booster packs to get the equipment you need to do some of the multiplayer levels. You could try without it, but nah. And some of them weren't really all that good - it lets you start with weapon X instead of the default crappy one you'll start with, for example).
My phone allows an arbitrarily long passphrase. That isn't the problem. However if I set one, then I have to enter it before I can send my wife a text like "I'm running late", or look up where the nearest gas station is. That makes the phone unusable to me.
That's why it was discovered over 50% of people did not put a PIN on their phones - because having to enter it to do those things was a huge PITA.
It's why we have fingerprint scanners and pattern unlocks etc. to make it easier and quicker to unlock.
And face-unlock. Yeah... apple *sort* of has that shit worked out... very sort of. Touchid has law enforcement issues since its less decided whether they can compel you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, and face-unlock is even worse... plus it doesn't work with sunglasses, doesn't work with a headset with a mic and has the same law enforcement issues. I just have that stuff disabled most of the time.
That's why there is emergency mode. Click the power button 5 times (it's trivially easy to do in under a second and you can do it while the phone is in your pocket) and poof, biometric authentication is disabled until someone successfully uses the passcode.
And it can work with sunglasses, if they allow IR through. Suprisingly, most do, since IR is at the opposite end of the spectrum that is blocked. Ditto headsets.
AT&T opposes net neutrality... Slashdot whines incessantly. AT&T supports net neutrality... Slashdot whines incessantly.
Let's be honest. This isn't about net neutrality at all. It's about Slashdot looking for an excuse to whine about anything and everything.
No, it's because we see through AT&T's schemes. They don't want net neutrality at all. They campaigned hard to get it revoked. Then they realized they created a hydra - with it revoked federally, all of a sudden states and cities were enacting their own regulations. Granted, the FCC might have prevented states and cities from creating their own laws, but the FCC didn't restrict states and cities requiring net neutrality for their own procurement decisions (i.e., the FCC prevents states from legislating it for their citizens, but the FCC doesn't prevent how the states and other governing agencies procure their access).
This means hundreds of individual laws and possibly the loss of very lucrative state and city government contracts when they come up for renewal. And it's not like they can opt-out since state and government contracts are lucrative enough that a company can be formed just to provide them access.
So AT&T realized they may have won the battle, but now they're facing a far more ruinous war of attrition - being bogged down in tons of paperwork because every law is slightly different
They're basically wanting the FCC to legislate something so they have one set of rules to follow instead of the half dozen and rising laws.
It's the law of unintended consequences. AT&T is no saint, they don't want net neutrality because they can't profit by selling special access. They want it simply to stem the losses of the excess paperwork they've created.
I have a Motorola 360 Smart Watch - first generation. When the battery got old, it began shutting down at anything below about 30% battery capacity. This was often provoked by any action that would turn the screen on - a significant battery draw - along with extra radio and processor operation.. I wonder if Apple was trying to prevent this issue by reducing processor power draw. I might have appreciated a similar feature that made my Moto 360 more useful as the battery got weaker.
Of course this would also cause sluggish performance which would also motivate users to upgrade to the latest and greatest H/W.
If you believe Apple, that's what Apple has said. They slowed down the main CPU to reduce power draw to extend battery life, and prevent premature shutdown. The thorttling gets more aggressive as the battery gets more aged and is unable to supply the power required to keep the phone alive.
Apple has said that things like the cellular modem are not throttled in any way - they will get full power when needed so you will not lose connectivity. As in, if you need to make that 911 call, the phone will slow the main CPU and all that so you can make the call.
So yes, it's good and bad. Good in that maximizing how much time you can run on battery means if you really needed it to make that phone call, it'll at least try to keep itself alive as long as possible. Bad in that your phone slows down.
The real question is, if it gets to the point where the phone cannot run on full power without emergency shutdown, will the setting revert to throttled mode so you can at least still use it? Because it would really suck if you switched throttling off, only to have the battery die immediately because it's just that worn out.
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That was because they had no choice. Their system of encryption was so stupidly done, it was all or nothing. There was no way they could hand over just user X's data without potentially handing over everyone else's as well.
So when the FBI went after their encryption key (singular) for that user, the only key can hand over was the main encryption key for everyone. Oops.
Them shutting down was a good thing, because their security was mostly for show. Yes it was encrypted, but they didn't partition their users such that it was possible to legally comply with lawful orders and not hand over the keys to the kingdom. It was only a matter of time before their insecurity would be exposed.
Most corn harvested in the US goes to feed for animals, actually. Free range animals graze and are often "grass fed", but the vast majority of meat is at factory farms where the cows don't graze but are fed troughs of corn to fatten them up quickly and slaughter.
The demand for meat is high enough that free range beef will not satisfy demand and would case prices to spike (not that beef is cheap these days - it's still hitting all time high prices)
Easy - Seagate is cheap. Stupidly cheap. And because they're built to a price, they will use inferior parts to achieve that low bottom line.
And when you think about it, for commodity items, that's really all the consumer looks for. Price price price price. If you can be $20 cheaper than the next guy, you will get the sale. Everyone knows it, and they still buy anyways because face it, everyone is cheap.
And companies like Backblaze factor it into account - it's still cheaper to have Seagate drives powering their systems (which the data is redundant anyways0 and replacing them than spending more money on better drives and replacing them less.
Don't you have backups? You know, in case one of the dozens of other ways to lose data other than hard drive failure happen? (Crypto malware, filesystem corruption, bad power, software bugs, etc).
A good backup system mitigates a lot of it, and given the pricing for HGST drives (they were nearly double the price of a Seagate, for not much more reliability) in the end it was hard to justify except in very limited circumstances. For me, that was the main disk of my network backup server (Windows Home Server) - it's a critical disk and I spent extra for it. I can easily rebuild it if necessary (I've done it before) so it's not super critical, but while I do that it's offline. So that drive is super critical and I use an HGST drive for it for uninterrupted service. The other disks are not as critical (they hold the data redundantly) so cheaper drives are used there.
That being said, I wonder how much these stats are caused by poor shipping and handling of drives? I've pretty much stopped buying hard drives online except from Amazon because Amazon uses proper shipping containers. Far too often I've ran across "high tech stores" (computer component companies, especially) who really ship drives in questionable ways - the worst was one who stuck a drive in a padded mailing envelope and sent it like that. No surprise it failed quickly. But others stack drives together and bubble wrap the whole thing, which pretty much ensures most are dead when it hits your doorstep. Sometimes I get lucky and they cut up one of the drive shipping containers and put drives in those, then wrap it up. Better than nothing, but still not great. Even in store I've had employees carry drives and thump them all on the counter in a heap. Scary.
Only Amazon put them in boxes with endcaps so the drive floats inside - you know, like how every drive manufacturer says you have to ship the drives for RMA. Either that or you buy retail package drives where they're protected because they know how clueless employees can be.
One wonders how much damage is caused by poor packaging of hard drives which leads to a shortened service life.
No, because dynamic linking, even with non-shared shared libraries is still better. Static linking hides important information like library versions which may be important.
With dynamic libraries, even inside containers, you can still validate the library version to see if it's a vulnerable library. You can run tests against the library to determine if it's vulnerable (just because it's inside a container doesn't mean you can't extract it and test it). This way when a vulnerability happens, you can verify whether or not the copies of the libraries you have are vulnerable since a scanner can go inside containers and check. Users can then either not use the app until it gets an update with a fixed library, try to fix it themselves by replacing the library, use the app understanding its vulnerable, etc.
When you static link, you lose those benefits - for what? Just to have one file? That's not going ot happen ever - it's why we have containers to begin with.
Actually, for Apple it's quite easy. If the app is 18+, go right ahead. Most apps that are online communications app are simply marked as 18+ and don't bother censoring.
If the app is not marked 18+, then you better not allow any form of penis or other thing to be sent to anyone not over 18. For a messaging app, that's pretty much impossible, which is why they get denied for inappropriate content.
Basically, if you want your app to be open and uncensored, it has to be 18+ (and OS parental controls can restrict apps from running).
The big problem is a lot of apps like SnapChat etc require tweens/teens to be able to use them (marketing reasons of course), so it forces those companies to censor.
So you don't have to censor a single thing, it just means Apple will refuse it unless you set the age restriction to 18+. Many apps have fallen afoul of this over the years and some have basically fallen afoul so badly they had to be removed before they were fixed. I think there was one where the reviewer got a screenful of porn on running the app which did not go over well.
They were, until something called Denuvo came out and pretty much turned the PC gaming industry on its head because it meant you game wasn't pirated within 2 seconds of release. (Nowadays, it's hours, but in the past it was a couple of weeks, which is huge), which meant PC games could branch beyond online RPGs,, MOBAs and FPSs where an online server could check you paid for your stuff.
It's really brought out a lot of better games on PC. Before PC ports were basically garbage - meant to extract every last dollar by doing a crappy port and releasing it and hoping you made up the porting costs before it was massively pirated.
These days though, the gravy train is pretty much over again as Denuvo is cracked and we're back to massive piracy as par for the course. Which means back to crappy-ass ports years after the game was released.
Sure, Microsoft can promise games like Forza and all that making it over, but you know it's only because of the online authentication and verification - if you can't play Forza online, and the online stuff is disabled, you don't really have much left.
New York was the technology hub before Silicon Valley. It was the technology innovation hub led at the time, no doubt, by an "Edison" who claims to have invented something called a "light bulb".
Technology moved west with the whole Silicon Valley thing - i.e., once the transistor and IC were developed.
The old big tech firms were once (or still are) head quartered in New York. (And if you really wanted, everyone wore shirts and ties, none of this laid back t-shirt and jeans of today)
Except in this case, there is plenty of evidence, provided by the Nolan Bushnell himself in his books.
The only thing is that now the women behind it decided to come forward and what were just a few lines in a few pages in a book now have real ramifications. People say "why didn't you come forward earlier" when in fact, it was practically impossible to because it becomes a whole he-said-she-said thing and for the most part, the system guarantees the woman is not believed. That was, until Weinstein happened and actually lead to women being believed when they weren't before and the whole #MeToo movement).
Anyhow, the interesting point is how it seems all the people with "liberal" descent like Hollywood pretty much just up and admit to their mistakes, while those of "conservative" descent circle the wagons and deny deny deny? I wonder why that is...
Let's just leave the essential "Adam Ruins Everything" on cars which explains it all very nicely.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's a monopoly system. And yes, it also makes it impossible for Tesla to open dealerships that won't be owned by the same dealerships that will screw you over right now, which is another reason why Tesla won't franchise - the laws make it so you can't just arbitrarily open a new dealership.
Yeah, but how are you going to tell if it's better?
USB-C didn't come out of thin air. And I'm pretty sure there was zero need for it - after all, all the cables had USB 3.0 versions of them.
You can invent USB-C but then you have to prove it's much better than the existing standard which is well entrenched - you're convincing an entire industry to change to something new and require all new cables and connectors, after all.
And likely, without the fact that Lightning was around, there would've been zero incentive to even invent USB-C. There aren't many cables that go in either way (maybe the odd power cable but taht's about it). There is a rumor that Apple was the source of the USB-C's design purely because they were fed up of micro USB's limitations - hoping someone would take up what Lightning has done and make a USB equivalent. When that didn't happen, Apple did it and bound together various USB standards no one was using, too (USB-PD existed long before USB-C but was rarely implemented).
Of course, it's also a reason why USB-C is a bit of a mess, since Apple designed it and gave it away and pretty much defined everything about it so it would fit with their use case of laptops...
The problem is then you get no innovation. Micro USB sucks in various ways, being a single orientation connector is one of them. Yet, if everyone stuck to the standard, we'd all be ... stuck with the standard.
Proprietary connectors generally suck, unless they're generally better, like Lightning is compared to micro USB. Like being orientation-independent so it goes in either way. That's a very nice feature to have, and why USB-C is much nicer. But such things don't generally happen on their own unless we have something different to compare them to.
It's also way too easy to say "micro USB is it, everyone has to use it" and then run into problems when someone better comes along, like things with USB-C now upsetting the cart of "micro USB everywhere".
Incidentally, the official Apple lightning stuff is waterproof from the get-go (because it's machined and then injection molded) while the third party stuff isn't (two piece sheet metal pressed together). It'z why Apple gets away with using it as a structural element.
You may not, but a lot of people will. It's predicted to be in 2030-something where it will happen again.
And the funny thing is, Apple has loosened the policies over the years - Apple was really heavy handed in the past. And now, you can even sideload apps onto iOS devices. Granted, it takes a Mac to sideload, but you can do it. So you can run a lot of "banned" apps just as well too. (They just have to be open-source since the policy is really for developers to test apps, but as long as you compile it, you can load it on your device.).
And that's the thing - if you start out strict, you can loosen up later on. If you start out permissive, you'll end up locking things up.
That really limits your investment options, because even stocks and index funds can drop by 2% in a single day. (On the Dow Jones, that's only a 200-300 point drop, which happens often enough). And without equities, you're investing in only guaranteed investments which at best only give you what you put back in after inflation.
Why are haters always the latest to get the news? I mean, if you're gonna parry some "facts". at least let it be recent enough to be true.
The last iPhone to be glued shut was the iPhone 3GS. Circa 2009. The iPhone 4 (from 2010) and onwards are not glued shut and can be opened by removing 2 screws. Yes, 2 screws. Granted, replacing a battery in an iPhone 4 is a royal PITA, but the iPhone 5 and onwards is easy.
Apple does it all in-store nowadays - takes 15 minutes. And since the affected iPhones so far are the iPhone 6 and similar, it's not too hard.
Hell, that cellphone repair shop in every mall ought to be able to do it as well for $30 long before Apple offered it. And even iFixit will sell you a kit to replace your battery for $20.
It ain't hard. And the battery has been easier to change for most of the iPhone's history, too. There's plenty of true things you can use to hate about Apple, so stick with true facts, not what's fake news today.
Unfortunately, that hasn't shown to be the case, otherwise Android developers would be making hand over fist instead of having to stick ads everywhere and siphoning all your personal data off your phone.
Cheap phone buyers simply don't buy apps. They're cheap. They just wanted something cheap to begin with, and it turns out, they're not keen on spending money (otherwise they'd have bought something better).
The iPhone SE was never designed to be the low end phone. It's designed to be a phone for those of us who prefer a modern day phone in a smaller form factor without all the dick-waving of bigger screen sizes. It's amusing to watch people try to manhandle some of the larger Android phones out there - they have to carry it in two hands and don't seem concerned they can't really use the phone while they're carrying it.Of course, I won't suggest they buy a more practical phone - for those people, screen size was the #1 reason and it's why they bought the phone.
I believe Apple will keep the SE alive - they were taken aback by how popular it was - turns out there's a market for smaller phones that are decent, so an iPhone SE 2 with iPhone 8 guts will probably be a worthwhile upgrade. The iPhone SE sold out the first day despite not being heavily promoted, or Apple even preparing for a big lineup of sales. It just went.
No, it was physically impossible. To determine if it was real, they went so far as to disassemble the cartridge ROM and calculate what are the possible numbers that are valid for the time. That was how it was determined it was not possible - there was no way to score lower than 5.57 using the code.
And no, PAL/NTSC makes little difference - these systems do not have a real time clock at all, so the "time" is really calculated by cycle counting at best. (The 2600 worked by "chasing the beam" - i.e., it only worked as a 1D system so the CPU is only just a bit quicker than the CRT in preparing the line of graphics. During the horizontal blanking, it would then prepare the next line of graphics. There was no framebuffer so everything was handled pretty much as a 1D graphic system. Sprites and the ball you had to update them every line including disabling the sprite hardware when you weren't drawing it that line.
The impressive part is someone basically executed the code manually and was able to give the precise timing to generate a list of all the possible times (you can empirically do it using a tool for tool assisted speedruns, but they calculated the exact numbers that come out if you hit the button at the exact time, which in a simulation by executing the code manually you can do.
It is correct. Slashdot supports UTF-8 since circa 2003 or so. It's just that thanks to a lot of unicode abuse (and think of it this way, even Apple can't get it right) every character is put through a whitelist of allowed characters, which basically consists of only the first 127 printable unicode characters (i.e., ASCII).
I do believe intenrally all messages are stored as unicode, since for a long time you could retrieve the stories with the broken unicode support but I believe that's gone now and the display of comments is forced through the whitelist.
Unicode is already hard enough without people deliberately trying to mess up the comment pages with 2000+ pixel tall characters, directional overrides, etc.
I would treat this as the officer's lucky day. Any other killing and he'd be charged, but because it was a hoax, he should go free.
This means the charge filters to the actual gamers themselves.
You may think "but what about the cop? He'll just kill again!" Well, the cop got lucky. He killed, and was given a once-in-a-lifetime mulligan.after the fact. No way to tell if his next call he'll be so lucky to get off scot-free again , so he's smart, he'll transfer out of the location and keep his nose squeaky clean. Extremely lucky, lotto-winning opportunity he got.
And yes, murder by proxy/cop should still filter down as a premeditated murder charge. Sorry, but if you're calling it like this, it is murder. It never was a joke, there's no "ha ha just kidding the cops aren't real". Then we can also start treating swatting that don't result in someone getting killed as attempted murders - why else would you call the cops on them? (Sorry, calling the cops eliminates the "it was just a joke". Let's treat it as a the non-joke everyone says it is).
Actually, the factory is in Fremont because that was the location of an old Toyota factory. Tesla simply scooped it up and got rewarded with an almost turnkey automobile manufacturing plant. I believe the only reason Toyota stopped using it was it was insufficient for their needs - it just could not produce enough cars fast enough.
Of course, Tesla is not using it at full capacity right now.
And sometimes, people don't believe just how cheap the regular mechanism is. Everyone says ebooks should be really cheap, but the marginal cost of the actual physical bok itself (trees, paper, binding, printing, warehousing, etc) is extremely efficient. Over the centuries, we've come up with a system to very efficiently move books around. So much so that the real cost of the physical distribution is at most, $2. Yes, it's that low for the paper, printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution, etc.
The vast majority of costs of books isn't in the physical, it's in the editing, the artwork, the typesetting, etc. Things that are shared with the ebook.
Apple does it because they often know they cannot meet demand. If you know you can only make a million units s month, it's best to price your stuff so demand is about a million units a month. You may wish to price it lower, but if that causes demand to soar to 3 million units a month, you end up with a perpetually sold out thing, unhappy customers, and scalpers.
Apple had trouble with the iPhone X. They knew it, so they priced it high to temper demand I'm sure they didn't want to price it so high, but given the difficulty in manufacturing, better to price it high and lower demand (and potentially drive sales to lower cost units like the iPhone 8) than anger customers who can't find it and storm off.
No, the problem is the loot boxes require you to buy them to continue the game. That's why there's a big uproar - if you want to progress through the game, these purchases are no longer optional, but required or you cannot proceed. Oh sure, you can try, but it'll take you an ungodly long time.
And that's the issue. There's no problem when loot boxes were merely cosmetic touches you could apply to your player - completely optional, purchasing does nothing to your progress in the game. But when certain modes and certain games require you to purchase them to acquire maybe a few uncommon items, then things have gone too far.
A CCG like MtG has the odds already posted - a pack of 10 booster cards will have 7 commons, 2 uncommons and 1 rare card. Whether or not the latter are useful to you, or worth money, are unknown, but you know you won't pull up a booster of 10 commons worth zilch (e.g., you pull up a booster of 10 lands).
But gaming lootboxes, that's entirely possible. And if you need the Golden Foobuster to proceed, it might be worthwhile to know if they're something you'll get every 2 lootboxes or so, or 100.
It used to be you could pay to get ahead (pay $X for 100 gold coins to buy something). Loot boxes have turned that into pure gambling - spend $Y to open up Z lootboxes so you may score the 100 gold. They've actually made in-app purchases be even worse. And it didn't take a mobile game company to do this, but established game companies. (I believe Halo 5 was one of the worst offenders because you had to buy booster packs to get the equipment you need to do some of the multiplayer levels. You could try without it, but nah. And some of them weren't really all that good - it lets you start with weapon X instead of the default crappy one you'll start with, for example).
That's why it was discovered over 50% of people did not put a PIN on their phones - because having to enter it to do those things was a huge PITA.
It's why we have fingerprint scanners and pattern unlocks etc. to make it easier and quicker to unlock.
That's why there is emergency mode. Click the power button 5 times (it's trivially easy to do in under a second and you can do it while the phone is in your pocket) and poof, biometric authentication is disabled until someone successfully uses the passcode.
And it can work with sunglasses, if they allow IR through. Suprisingly, most do, since IR is at the opposite end of the spectrum that is blocked. Ditto headsets.
No, it's because we see through AT&T's schemes. They don't want net neutrality at all. They campaigned hard to get it revoked. Then they realized they created a hydra - with it revoked federally, all of a sudden states and cities were enacting their own regulations. Granted, the FCC might have prevented states and cities from creating their own laws, but the FCC didn't restrict states and cities requiring net neutrality for their own procurement decisions (i.e., the FCC prevents states from legislating it for their citizens, but the FCC doesn't prevent how the states and other governing agencies procure their access).
This means hundreds of individual laws and possibly the loss of very lucrative state and city government contracts when they come up for renewal. And it's not like they can opt-out since state and government contracts are lucrative enough that a company can be formed just to provide them access.
So AT&T realized they may have won the battle, but now they're facing a far more ruinous war of attrition - being bogged down in tons of paperwork because every law is slightly different
They're basically wanting the FCC to legislate something so they have one set of rules to follow instead of the half dozen and rising laws.
It's the law of unintended consequences. AT&T is no saint, they don't want net neutrality because they can't profit by selling special access. They want it simply to stem the losses of the excess paperwork they've created.
If you believe Apple, that's what Apple has said. They slowed down the main CPU to reduce power draw to extend battery life, and prevent premature shutdown. The thorttling gets more aggressive as the battery gets more aged and is unable to supply the power required to keep the phone alive.
Apple has said that things like the cellular modem are not throttled in any way - they will get full power when needed so you will not lose connectivity. As in, if you need to make that 911 call, the phone will slow the main CPU and all that so you can make the call.
So yes, it's good and bad. Good in that maximizing how much time you can run on battery means if you really needed it to make that phone call, it'll at least try to keep itself alive as long as possible. Bad in that your phone slows down.
The real question is, if it gets to the point where the phone cannot run on full power without emergency shutdown, will the setting revert to throttled mode so you can at least still use it? Because it would really suck if you switched throttling off, only to have the battery die immediately because it's just that worn out.