When a blockchain has all of its arbitrarily predetermined tokens mined, what keeps the miners from moving on to the next big 'coin'? Well heck for that matter when the rate of newly mined tokens falls below some rate or if its even getting close to the end of the number of tokens would some already start to migrate?
For Bitcoin, whenever you do a transaction, you specify how much you want to pay for the transaction. That money goes to the miner that locks the transaction into the blockchain. That's why the prices have been going up and up - if you want to be in the blockchain, the miners sort the outstanding transactions, and pick the ones that pay the most. Then they mine the block and lock it in, collecting all the btc that people have pledged for the transaction.
That's what keeps miners mining - people are paying the transaction fees in order to lock it int he blockchain.
The problem is actually not the SCADA system itself. It's the computer monitoring the SCADA equipment!
The meltdown and spectre patches that Microsoft released are apparently causing problems with the monitoring and configuration software that runs on the computers attached to the SCADA network. The equipment is fine.
Funny enough, but there was a similar app on iOS a few years ago (right when the App Store was new and novel on iOS).
At the time, piracy on iOS was big, and easily detected by apps who could see their application XML file was modified (it required an extra line to tell iOS it was unsigned, so apps would check for the element).
One developer of such an add simply offset the calendar 14 days in "pirated" mode. If you bought it, it gave correct dates. If you pirated it, you got erroneous dates.
Never mind that the wooden pallet eliminated 90% of the labor (jobs) associated with shipping an amount of goods in the first place.
It also made it much faster to load and unload a container. It used to take up to a week to manually hand carry out all the stuff in a container. If they were somewhat regular, it could be done in about a day.
Now you can load and unload an entire container within a few hours, so the truck instead of idling for a day can be back on the road hauling another load.
(It can take a week to load and unload a container filled with odd-shaped items as the items need to be secured within the container. With everyone standardizing on pallets, even odd-shaped items can be made to fit, and the item can be padded while the pallet is on the ground at the warehouse instead of doing it in the truck container. Much easier for everyone.).
Also, it saved a lot of people's backs in not having to carry heavy goods around
No, the problem is keeping all the seats full when the aircraft is flying. Loading and Unloading process times are not a huge issue. Load factors are the issue.
What's happening is that the large direct routes that warrant a 380 are relatively few and there are enough aircraft flying now to service them while keeping the load factors in profitable zones. Airlines thus are not buying 380's. They are not buying 747's either. The market is saturated with large capacity aircraft, so they have stopped building them.
Basically Boeing and Airbus bet on the air travel market going two ways. Airbus bet big on the hub and spoke model - travelers will travel to hub airports, then board an A380 who will bulk carry them to another hub airport halfway around the world, then another flight to their final destination.
Boeing bet big on the niche flight model - airlines operating flights out of smaller airports near where the big hubs are. This is the point to point model. This is an innovative model that requires a small plane that can go far, hence the 787 Dreamliner which can hold a mere 267 passengers, but go 8000 miles. This is considered innovative as in the past, small planes aren't used because most don't go far, so you needed larger jets like the 747 in order to go transcontinental. But with the 8000 mile range, a 787 departing London can basically fly to everywhere except Australia.
This model is appealing for another reason - cheap flights. With the rise of the ultra-low-cost-carrier, they can suddenly run reasonably priced flights from oddball places between the US and Europe, where the smaller airports are cheaper to operate. These smaller places will have less passengers, but it's a lot easier to have a high load factor with a 260-seat plane than a 680-seat plane.
That's not to say the A380 is useless. Japan uses 747 on short haul runs that last under an hour. So much so that Boeing has had to come up with a special table for their 747 flight manuals on the most efficient way to fly them short haul. It's not range, it's capacity - only in Japan could you have hourly flights in a 747 that fly within the nation.Given a maxed out configuration of an A380 is 800-odd seats, double that of a 747, that could help during the many times the planes are just packed.
like Microsoft trying to get rid of game ownership for the xbox and make every future game "always online" internet connected, aka getting rid of your customers rights to own their own games and be left the fuck alone
Microsoft only did what they see coming. Because digital downloads are exactly that, and are the biggest and fastest growing part of both Sony and Microsoft's stores.
At least the Xbox let you sell your games. But because everyone hated it so much, they got rid of it back to the old way, which meant digital downloads are stuck to your account. You can't sell them "used", unlike Microsoft's proposal.
The only thing Microsoft did was make discs worse, but that's irrelevant these days, since most games now either don't have a disc release, or they ship so few copies of discs that if you're the guy looking for it, you better have preordered it months in advance.
Back in the old days, if you wanted to "write code" you either were stuck with the BASIC your PC came with, or shelled out hundreds of dollars for a compiler, assembler, and linker toolset. These days, every platform has freely available tools. Granted, some tools require certain platforms, but for the most part it only costs a small download. This is in no part to the easily available nature of competent tools like GCC and the like, ported to every platform around. Granted these days, LLVM has helped modernize and improve the tools a lot.
This extends to a lot of hardware too - microcontroller tools used to be specialized things - you'd think selling a million devices the vendor would give you the compilers and assemblers and tools, but no, you often paid for those.
Ditto for embedded hardware - Linux on embedded systems is my specialty and it was what I was hired for, back when everything was immature. But it was competent and a very nice alternative to commercial operating systems which has poor documentation and questionable behavior. You could spend weeks debugging why something was, because once it hit the vendor code, there was no more symbols, no more source code, just disassembly. When Microsoft did their "shared source" thing, it was crap, but it gave away enough source code that now debugging was tons easier. And this was done only because open source was making life easier for developers.
Open source as a user philosophy though, hasn't really worked out - but that's because open source and free software assume a world where every user is a developer. This is a narrow minded view - thinking the toys they worked on wouldn't ever have mass appeal. Computers, it turns out, are so versatile that the person using them most often than not is not a developer, doesn't care to touch code, but are really grateful for what has happened to make computers so accessible, so reachable, and everywhere. The computer has embedded itself into society so much, it's hard to imagine how things were before it.
Even then, some effects are still positive - it was Mozilla/Firefox that broke the world of its IE6 attachment and moved us from a monoculture of a single browser into the rich web we have today that works on full standards, where you can code a website and have it work on many browsers with many different engines (not just WebKit and its derivatives).
Do I want to go back to the world of old? Hell no, open source has made today's world much better. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of issues, but I'd say we are better off with open source than without. I certainly don't want to go back to the days of paying $500 for a C compiler. Or a world without Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. And even without web technologies like asm.js/WebAssembly that let us do interesting things in web browsers (like DOSBox).
And let's not forget the open source applications that are so powerful, they can replace commercial offerings. Audacity is a competent audio editor. Wireshark. Vim and Emacs.
What I find so very interesting is that the judicial system doesn't seem to equate the overall amount of economic damage as being the same as if done to a single individual. Basically, you give everyone on the planet a paper cut and get a slap on the wrist but if you give one person 7 million paper cuts then it's somehow worse despite being far less damaging by three orders of magnitude.
That's because the criminal system only seeks to separate the criminal from the rest of society.
Economic recompense is done via the civil system. Given the minor amount of money, paid by each victim, unfortunately the scammer is likely to get away with this. This is the only reason we have class action lawsuits - because individually it is not worth the time and effort to pursue your own losses but it is if you can get several million to join your case.
Of course, people hate class actions because they get a tiny trinket out of it - but given the average loss most people experience it rarely makes sense to pursue individual lawsuits - just how much time and effort are you wiling to spend to recovery $50, say? Even in small claims, you're looking at a day off, and $35+ in court fees (which cannot be claimed back). Makes getting that $10 rebate doing absolutely zilch far more appealing. (Oh yeah, the company will just write you your cheque - far cheaper to do so than to show up in court, so you waste time, money and effort, while the company doesn't lift a finger).
People will buy them just because they can't be printed like the dollar is to infinity.
In other words, stall out the economy.
You want to know why every country moved away from the gold standard? Because it turns out, your economy is limited by how much gold you can find. Find no gold? Well, you economy will stagnate (not a good thing). Find a ton of gold? Well, your economy booms (again, not a good thing).
Say you were paid 1 oz of gold a month for your work. Well, what happens if the company can't get you 1oz of gold? Let's say they can get half an ounce. So you work half the month. But you still have to pay for all your stuff - do you buy half a month's worth of food and starve half a month? Or do you have to search for short term work to make up the missing half an ounce? Perhaps next month, they have an ounce and a half, and let you work 50% more to get it - do you? This uncertainty is what screws up economies.
Going from boom to bust dependent on how much you can mine turns out to destabilize economies. That's why every economy floats their currency (i.e., fiat). Economies in the past were fine - there was lots of gold easily available, and thus the economic output of a country wasn't really limited.
Bitcoin with its fixed supply seems like a great idea, but you then realize it's a static economy. It cannot grow. And economies need to grow. If you have a baby, you need money to pay for its needs. But in a static economy, you can't - you're stuck with what you're earning. You cannot earn more because the economy cannot support your added output - i.e., you work more, and are thus paid less per unit to keep your income the same, keeping the economy static.
As people join the economy (after all, there are people who don't use bitcoin), demand for bitcoins go up, creating an even worse situation - a deflationary one, where a bitcoin today is worth more tomorrow because more people want it. Or, put another way, you can put 8 hours of work today for me, but I won't ask you do that, because tomorrow, it will cost me less bitcoin for those same 8 hours because they're worth more. Deflationary economies can lead to complete economic stall - if you're getting richer by the day, why would you buy today what is cheaper tomorrow? (This is partly the reason why the Great Depression was as long and as hard as it was - yes, being on gold also hurts).
So inflation it is. But not too much - you destabilize the economy if there's too much - what was affordable today, is out of reach tomorrow (see hyperinflaction). You want to add just enough to match growth in the economy. In a trading world, you can benefit as well - print a bit more cash and devalue your currency making your country cheaper to buy from, hopefully increasing economic output (people are buying your stuff!), but don't grow too fast because then your currency goes up and people stop buying.
Bitcoin is like Wikipedia. Both are experiments that have or are going to show what everyone already knows, just taught to the next generation who always never sees history repeat itself. (Wikipedia is a great example of communism as government, and the whole "every animal is equal, but some are more equal than others" conclusion of Animal Farm).
The only good news is that Bitcoin is at least unlikely to affect the economy too badly, so it's only those heavily leveraged on it will suffer. So unlike the lessons we all had to learn during the Great Depression about economic growth, the actual scope of losses will likely just be a blip.
"We won't let the FBI see the iPhones of people who commit mass murder in the US, but the Secret Police of Communist China gets whatever they want."
I'm sure glad I don't use Apple, for multiple other reasons.
Nope. This only affects iCloud. And you can opt out of using iCloud too.
The FBI has full access to iCloud data, just like China will too (for Chinese accounts). This is due to Chinese law saying Chinese users of cloud services must have the data stored within China.
Chinese government only has access to those servers now, and you can opt-out like you always could of iCloud services - the iPhone is not tied to it in any way other than user convenience.
Data stored on phones only (and there's a lot that Apple isn't storing to the cloud, including passwords) remain stored on phones and the Chinese government will have to crack them same way the FBI does.
Trump didn't drain the swamp, he pumped an extra million gallons into it giving industry direct control over the government. Hell he proposed fuel requirements for power plants as a way to make all rate payer pay more to support coal which is no longer the cheapest source of power (that's wind, and solar is right behind wind with both cheaper than coal by a significant percentage) these days even with all the subsidies coal gets. Rolling back regulations that advantage small businesses would be the next step in corporate control over government and the head of the FCC that Trump put in position is just the man to do it.
No, Trump drained the swamp. What normally takes place behind closed doors now takes place out in the open. There's no longer any more need to hide it, and Trump is running a very openly visibly corrupt government.
Trump never promised he'd clean up the swamp. He'd just drain it. He sees no need to hide those activities anymore because what, you wanted to vote for the other guy?
Also, it would make excuses like "It wasn't me!" completely moot.
This is probably one of the biggest laments that happened when planes switched from 3 pilots in the cockpit to two. After all, with three, should the lower pressure environment cause one of them to make an emission, no one is quite sure who did it. With two pilots though...
Of course, things are worse since 9/11 forced the cockpit door to remain shut at all times. Now you know why pilots sometimes left the door open!
Many seniors engage in evidence-based-reasoning. If data shows SDCs are safe, and they have a lower accident rate than HDCs, then they will trust them.
No need. If a self-driving car lets a senior get around still, they will buy them in droves. Seniors can be fiercely independent, and often one of the hardest things a son or daughter must do is confiscate their parent's driver license, or write to the DOT saying their parents should have their license revoked.
Likewise, many seniors will go into depression if their doctor says they shouldn't drive anymore.
A self-driving car that lets them drive around still is a godsend as they're not dependent on taxies, public transport, uber/lyft/etc or family to drive them around.
Thus, they are more receptive of SDCs if it means they can still maintain a lifestyle of relative independence. Even in the early days, all it takes is one of the neighbours saying they are much happier being able to get around by themselves even though they were forced to give up their license to have everyone out car shopping the next day.
What about HD Radio? Does HD radio require the same kind of antenna as FM radio? I'd like to see HD radio on cell phones instead of vanilla FM, because there are a lot more station choices. I've got an old MP3 player that has HD radio and it gets all the local FM stations and a lot more. Great quality, too.
HD Radio requires the same antenna, it uses the same bands after all. But the problem is HD radio (it doesn't stand for "high definition", it stands for "hybrid digital" and refers to the fact that the station is sending both an analog and digital signal.).
The problem with HD radio is it requires a proprietary chip as it's using a proprietary codec (and is basically owned by a single company), which is why people are starting to shed HD radio reception to save on costs.
And audio quality used to be good - you get around 96kbps out of it, but many HD radio stations now are really using it as a way to serve up more ads by stacking 2-3 channels on that 96kbps stream.
As for general FM radio, I don't care. Most of the FM band is Clear Channel crap, which is generally why most people don't care for it. But adding an AM radio to the mix (where there are sports and news and other generally interesting things) to a cellphone is nigh-impossible because of all the interference. And because AM radio uses ferrite rods (headphone cords are too short) you can even use them with wireless headphones.
On top of that, GPUs don't run kernel code (so cannot leak it)
No, GPUs have access to kernel memory and can leak that. I don't care about the GPU memory contents. But the GPU has access, because of its design, to the OS kernel's memory, and potentially it has write access to that memory.
(The GPU drivers generally reside in the kernel, and for fast efficient transfers of data, the system may map the entire system RAM into PCIe memory space so the GPU can rapidly access all the buffers - the command buffers from the kernel, the texture and model buffers from the userspace application, etc.)
I wouldn't be surprised if other devices started having similar flaws, though the GPU one is particularly serious since a lot of the data comes from userspace applications - other devices like a sound card also have access to kernel memory, but the interface is usually much more limited with few soundcards having a programmable command interface directly controllable from userspace applications.
Earlier Xbox games could have used some better guidance or standards regarding distribution of points. Some games, like Enchanted Arms or King Kong, basically just gave you 1000 points spread out over the course of the main story. A little too easy, unless you're collecting points for their own sake. Other games like Blue Dragon were notoriously stingy, only giving you a paltry 150 points or so after beating the game which may have taken dozens of hours. The rest of the points were locked away behind ridiculously grindy tasks that didn't seem much like fun to me.
I've been playing through the Halo Master Chief collection recently, and they seems to have struck a good balance in that game, with lots of small achievements you expect to get for normal playthrough, but also fun achievements for doing interesting things, beating mission par times, and so on.
Microsoft gives 1000 points to "full games" and 150 points for "arcade games". At least that was the rule at first. It was up to the developer to decide how to divvy up those points. Some saw it as an annoyance and just sprinkled them however, others saw it as a challenge and made people work for them.
It's also something that people found interesting, because it was rapidly copied by everyone else - Sony with their trophies (it came out long after the PS3 was out, and the Xbox 360 had achievements from the get-go), Valve with Steam, even/. has achievements (as part of an april fool's update, but it's still around), and naturally, iOS, Android and everyone else added them.
Sometimes there's nice goals to try to achieve, other times they can reveal game content you might've missed the first time through or some weirder ones. Gone Home, for example , gives you 100 points for completing the game, but the other 900 are only available if you do odder things you might not have thought of, or if you weren't as careful and missed items.
Apple's "invention" isn't an IR dot projector. It's their algorithm that allows them to use an IR dot projector to securely recognize people's faces, even when obscured by scarves/beards/glasses. Who else has achieved that?
Nope, not new. In fact, you know it as the Kinect for the Xbox 360, which used the exact same technology (it's actually called structured light) to do depth sensing. The only difference is the Kinect was designed to detect room scale objects, while FaceID detects face scale objects (and is much smaller).
In fact, after Microsoft let go of the technology (the Xbox One Kinect uses real depth sensing via Time of Flight), PrimeSense, the company behind the IR dot projector and IR cameras, was acquired by Apple.
So technically, FaceID is a tiny version of the original Kinect, because the same company is behind it. Apple's innovation is in the miniaturization so instead of requiring a big bulky accessory, it fits inside the notch.
In addition, to save on costs, Microsoft got rid of the special PrimeSense hardware to perform the depth calculations, and instead did it on software. I'm sure Apple integrated the hardware inside the SoC for FaceID rather than do it in software. (They own the company, and adding another block to an SoC would be basically free, versus having to make an ASIC just for an accessory).
Like, if i wanted to pay for an internet package that only allowed Netflix and nothing else, but was drastically cheaper...why not?
Because you assume it's going to be cheaper, and the ISP will not make sure you're forced to buy a bunch of extras as well.
You assume it's cheaper because it's just one service. ISPs will ensure you're paying at least what you're paying now, just for less.
If you and everyone else wanted Netflix, your ISP will be happy to give you just Netflix. And have you pay exactly what you're paying now. They'll throw in Hulu for free, too. No YouTube, but you can have Dailymotion. OK, fine, if you agree to paperless billing, give us debit access to your bank account, and your soul, you can have a $2 a month discount.
I use the parental controls to limit my kids usage of Xbox, but there is no equivalent for my kids' iDevice usage.
There is some strange psychological difference that goes on. When the Xbox tells them their time is up, they shrug and turn it off. If instead they are watching an iDevice and I tell them to stop, they lose their ever f'ing minds.
Well, parental controls exists on iOS, but they're rather crude. (And they're better than Android, even, but still crude). The thing with Xbox is it's easy - after X minutes, it shuts down. The only reason for the Xbox is entertainment, and if you say you can play an hour and then do homework, they can play games, watch Netflix, etc for an hour, it shuts down, they need to do homework. Barring some exceptional circumstances, there is no reason to have the Xbox on while doing homework.
On iOS, the parental controls basically amount to age restrictions - you can block a lot of social media and web usage by setting the age restriction lower than 18+ (default setting). This is because Apple mandates that if you cannot control the content people are viewing on your system, you must set your app's age to 18+, and iOS can restrict the running of apps that are rated higher than the current age restriction. (Safari will do the same for websites as well - apparently there's some standard webmasters can use to rate their websites).
In addition, a smartphone has many uses that go beyond entertainment. It's all well and good to say to turn off the phone after half an hour to do homework, but there are valid uses for the phone during homework - calculators, notepads, even calling up a friend and asking for help.
So parental controls need to be way more robust and finer grained than on say the Xbox. You may disallow the use of Netflix during homework time, but allow the use of Skype or WhatsApp to allow your child to communicate with others, disallow facebook usage for more than 3 minutes at a time (so you can use messenger, but not read people's updates, etc).
And yes, your kinds will lose their minds because Xbox is easy - you don't need it during homework or other activity. But a smartphone can be quite useful for a lot of activities.
Of course, there's also FOMO symptoms to look out for
Cryptocurrency valuations are criticized for the simple math of point price times total supply. What about more traditional commodities such as gold or crude oil? Surely the price of gold will plummet if someone starts selling huge amounts?
It depends.
You see, the price you see quoted on a market is not average price or anything. It's "last traded price". As in, the last time someone bought (and thus, someone sold) that commodity, that was the price they agreed to. There is no "current price" of say, gold, or crude oil or anything. Instead, those are sold on markets. Buyers will place bids to buy X quantity of the commodity, and sellers will place asks to sell Y quantity of the same commodity. If a bidder's bid price is equal to or higher than the lowest ask price, the trade happens - either X or Y quantity is traded depending on who has a lower quantity. (If you're buying 10 bars of gold, and the seller is selling 7 bars, you will buy 7 bars of gold, and then your bid will be revised for the remaining 3 bars at the price you bid).
The bid-ask spread (the difference between the asks and bids) is how liquid the commodity is. Very liquid commodities will have very small spreads, while very illiquid commodities will have large bid-ask spreads. This makes sense intuitively - commodities trade more because bids are closer to asks so trades are more likely to happen
Thus, saying Bitcoin is at $19,000 is somewhat meaningless. It's more important to say that people want to buy bitcoin at $18,500, but people are wanting to sell bitcoin at $19,500, say.
A joke, for sure, since System 9 and lower only had partial/half-assed memory protection (if you could call it that, and only for PowerPC code. 68k systems had none, IIRC). However, it would be an interesting academic exercise to see whether PowerPC 603/604/750 have the same issues and to what extent.
68K didn't use memory protection, PowerPC used only just enough to get it to work.
In theory I believe the later PowerPCs did do OOO execution with branch preduction, but the early ones did not. It was deemed not necessary since it was a RISC processor and the instructions were very simple to not need such sophisticated techniques. Then we realized superscalar lets us do more than one instruction per clock and achieve even higher speeds.
Interestingly, Apple claims its Axx processors are also susceptible to Meltdown attacks - not just Intel. Though they're not fixing it via page table isolation (which their old 32-bit processors had - darwin was a 4G/4G system and the kernel always had its own memory map on 32-bit). Since Apple controls the whole stack, they're fixing Safari/Webkit to block that kind of javascript attack
You can only restrict some applications that come with the phone. There is no way to restrict instagram and snapshat specifically while allowing a third party alarm clock app or organizer app. Also this seems to have to be locked or unlocked from the phone directly. It's a weak effort by Apple so they can say they did *something* while probably not being of much use to most people.
Sure you can. Instagram and Snapchat are 18+ apps because none of those censor their content, and thus cannot guarantee that the content they show will be suitable for kids.
Third party alarm clocks and organizers (especially ones that don't sync to social media) have no such problem and can be rated at lower ages.
Apple's parental controls can prohibit access to inappropriate apps.
Now, I suppose you could ask Apple to add support for time limits and such - so if you want your kid to only use snapchat for 30 minutes a day, you could. Problem is now it's going to be tedious to configure limits on all the apps...
Sure. And people using it should have had an issue with using it when it kept climbing. That is why highly unstable currencies are bad. The smart people buy low and sell high, and that "people" includes businesses. Accepting a depreciating currency is a bad business decision. If offered to pay you for a product you are selling with a 25% margin in a currency that had a 50% chance of loosing half it's value before you could trade it for the stable local currency, would you do it? If you are smart, you would tell me to pay in the stable local currency.
The problem is not that - because they only accept bitcoin for the few minutes it takes to confirm a transaction - as far as Microsoft is concerned, they get US dollars either way.
The problem is Bitcoin takes forever to confirm transactions, or you start paying through the nose for it - and I'm sure the real reason is Microsoft is not going to pay the $50+ it takes to do a near-instant confirmation. And likely, because cheap confirmations can take over two weeks, I'm sure people don't like to wait either - only to find out they're still short in the end.
I'm guessing the real problem is the processor is unable to reflect the current bitcoin transaction fee status to the customer - and customers are refusing to pay the inflated fees.
You know, he's not wrong. This is, in impact, way bigger than Intel's FDIV fiasco and that ended up in recalls.
The question is what are they replacing the processors WITH?
Speculative execution and OOO execution and branch preduction goes back nearly 30 years (Intel Pentium), and it's likely been bugged ever since then.
And it's not like Intel will be able to fix the bug even in the next generation of processors they release this year - at the very earliest it would be 2019 or even 2020 before the bug is fixed. There are very long lead times.
FDIV was easy - the bug was fixed in silicon and it only affected certain lines of chips (the 60/66MHz notably, and by the time the recall happened, Intel was doing 100+MHz ones).
Meltdown, not so much, because it affects every processor and it's not something that can be fixed without a silicon revision quickly. I suppose Intel could replace everyone's i7 with the two processors that don't have the bug, but I'm pretty sure no one would be happy going from i7s to Atoms.
Some people wanted both small and cheap. These people are probably best served with a cheap Android tablet and a folding Bluetooth keyboard. If you want Windows, that's a problem.
There are plenty of cheap Windows tablets running on an Intel Atom z-something or other processor. And many have decent screens - the one I have (a NuVision something or other) came with a 1920x1080 screen in a 8" size. Cost me about $80, too. So with careful shopping you can get Windows 10, a decent screen (it's an IPS one I believe) and a bluetooth keyboard for $100. The only downside is charging and using the USB port at the same time, but there are OTG adapters that break out the USB-A and still can charge the device. I bought one for a Dell tablet that seems to work.
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For Bitcoin, whenever you do a transaction, you specify how much you want to pay for the transaction. That money goes to the miner that locks the transaction into the blockchain. That's why the prices have been going up and up - if you want to be in the blockchain, the miners sort the outstanding transactions, and pick the ones that pay the most. Then they mine the block and lock it in, collecting all the btc that people have pledged for the transaction.
That's what keeps miners mining - people are paying the transaction fees in order to lock it int he blockchain.
The problem is actually not the SCADA system itself. It's the computer monitoring the SCADA equipment!
The meltdown and spectre patches that Microsoft released are apparently causing problems with the monitoring and configuration software that runs on the computers attached to the SCADA network. The equipment is fine.
Funny enough, but there was a similar app on iOS a few years ago (right when the App Store was new and novel on iOS).
At the time, piracy on iOS was big, and easily detected by apps who could see their application XML file was modified (it required an extra line to tell iOS it was unsigned, so apps would check for the element).
One developer of such an add simply offset the calendar 14 days in "pirated" mode. If you bought it, it gave correct dates. If you pirated it, you got erroneous dates.
It also made it much faster to load and unload a container. It used to take up to a week to manually hand carry out all the stuff in a container. If they were somewhat regular, it could be done in about a day.
Now you can load and unload an entire container within a few hours, so the truck instead of idling for a day can be back on the road hauling another load.
(It can take a week to load and unload a container filled with odd-shaped items as the items need to be secured within the container. With everyone standardizing on pallets, even odd-shaped items can be made to fit, and the item can be padded while the pallet is on the ground at the warehouse instead of doing it in the truck container. Much easier for everyone.).
Also, it saved a lot of people's backs in not having to carry heavy goods around
Basically Boeing and Airbus bet on the air travel market going two ways. Airbus bet big on the hub and spoke model - travelers will travel to hub airports, then board an A380 who will bulk carry them to another hub airport halfway around the world, then another flight to their final destination.
Boeing bet big on the niche flight model - airlines operating flights out of smaller airports near where the big hubs are. This is the point to point model. This is an innovative model that requires a small plane that can go far, hence the 787 Dreamliner which can hold a mere 267 passengers, but go 8000 miles. This is considered innovative as in the past, small planes aren't used because most don't go far, so you needed larger jets like the 747 in order to go transcontinental. But with the 8000 mile range, a 787 departing London can basically fly to everywhere except Australia.
This model is appealing for another reason - cheap flights. With the rise of the ultra-low-cost-carrier, they can suddenly run reasonably priced flights from oddball places between the US and Europe, where the smaller airports are cheaper to operate. These smaller places will have less passengers, but it's a lot easier to have a high load factor with a 260-seat plane than a 680-seat plane.
A neat YouTube video that summarizes this is https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's not to say the A380 is useless. Japan uses 747 on short haul runs that last under an hour. So much so that Boeing has had to come up with a special table for their 747 flight manuals on the most efficient way to fly them short haul. It's not range, it's capacity - only in Japan could you have hourly flights in a 747 that fly within the nation.Given a maxed out configuration of an A380 is 800-odd seats, double that of a 747, that could help during the many times the planes are just packed.
Ditto. Open source has changed a lot.
Back in the old days, if you wanted to "write code" you either were stuck with the BASIC your PC came with, or shelled out hundreds of dollars for a compiler, assembler, and linker toolset. These days, every platform has freely available tools. Granted, some tools require certain platforms, but for the most part it only costs a small download. This is in no part to the easily available nature of competent tools like GCC and the like, ported to every platform around. Granted these days, LLVM has helped modernize and improve the tools a lot.
This extends to a lot of hardware too - microcontroller tools used to be specialized things - you'd think selling a million devices the vendor would give you the compilers and assemblers and tools, but no, you often paid for those.
Ditto for embedded hardware - Linux on embedded systems is my specialty and it was what I was hired for, back when everything was immature. But it was competent and a very nice alternative to commercial operating systems which has poor documentation and questionable behavior. You could spend weeks debugging why something was, because once it hit the vendor code, there was no more symbols, no more source code, just disassembly. When Microsoft did their "shared source" thing, it was crap, but it gave away enough source code that now debugging was tons easier. And this was done only because open source was making life easier for developers.
Open source as a user philosophy though, hasn't really worked out - but that's because open source and free software assume a world where every user is a developer. This is a narrow minded view - thinking the toys they worked on wouldn't ever have mass appeal. Computers, it turns out, are so versatile that the person using them most often than not is not a developer, doesn't care to touch code, but are really grateful for what has happened to make computers so accessible, so reachable, and everywhere. The computer has embedded itself into society so much, it's hard to imagine how things were before it.
Even then, some effects are still positive - it was Mozilla/Firefox that broke the world of its IE6 attachment and moved us from a monoculture of a single browser into the rich web we have today that works on full standards, where you can code a website and have it work on many browsers with many different engines (not just WebKit and its derivatives).
Do I want to go back to the world of old? Hell no, open source has made today's world much better. It's not perfect, and there are plenty of issues, but I'd say we are better off with open source than without. I certainly don't want to go back to the days of paying $500 for a C compiler. Or a world without Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. And even without web technologies like asm.js/WebAssembly that let us do interesting things in web browsers (like DOSBox).
And let's not forget the open source applications that are so powerful, they can replace commercial offerings. Audacity is a competent audio editor. Wireshark. Vim and Emacs.
That's because the criminal system only seeks to separate the criminal from the rest of society.
Economic recompense is done via the civil system. Given the minor amount of money, paid by each victim, unfortunately the scammer is likely to get away with this. This is the only reason we have class action lawsuits - because individually it is not worth the time and effort to pursue your own losses but it is if you can get several million to join your case.
Of course, people hate class actions because they get a tiny trinket out of it - but given the average loss most people experience it rarely makes sense to pursue individual lawsuits - just how much time and effort are you wiling to spend to recovery $50, say? Even in small claims, you're looking at a day off, and $35+ in court fees (which cannot be claimed back). Makes getting that $10 rebate doing absolutely zilch far more appealing. (Oh yeah, the company will just write you your cheque - far cheaper to do so than to show up in court, so you waste time, money and effort, while the company doesn't lift a finger).
In other words, stall out the economy.
You want to know why every country moved away from the gold standard? Because it turns out, your economy is limited by how much gold you can find. Find no gold? Well, you economy will stagnate (not a good thing). Find a ton of gold? Well, your economy booms (again, not a good thing).
Say you were paid 1 oz of gold a month for your work. Well, what happens if the company can't get you 1oz of gold? Let's say they can get half an ounce. So you work half the month. But you still have to pay for all your stuff - do you buy half a month's worth of food and starve half a month? Or do you have to search for short term work to make up the missing half an ounce? Perhaps next month, they have an ounce and a half, and let you work 50% more to get it - do you? This uncertainty is what screws up economies.
Going from boom to bust dependent on how much you can mine turns out to destabilize economies. That's why every economy floats their currency (i.e., fiat). Economies in the past were fine - there was lots of gold easily available, and thus the economic output of a country wasn't really limited.
Bitcoin with its fixed supply seems like a great idea, but you then realize it's a static economy. It cannot grow. And economies need to grow. If you have a baby, you need money to pay for its needs. But in a static economy, you can't - you're stuck with what you're earning. You cannot earn more because the economy cannot support your added output - i.e., you work more, and are thus paid less per unit to keep your income the same, keeping the economy static.
As people join the economy (after all, there are people who don't use bitcoin), demand for bitcoins go up, creating an even worse situation - a deflationary one, where a bitcoin today is worth more tomorrow because more people want it. Or, put another way, you can put 8 hours of work today for me, but I won't ask you do that, because tomorrow, it will cost me less bitcoin for those same 8 hours because they're worth more. Deflationary economies can lead to complete economic stall - if you're getting richer by the day, why would you buy today what is cheaper tomorrow? (This is partly the reason why the Great Depression was as long and as hard as it was - yes, being on gold also hurts).
So inflation it is. But not too much - you destabilize the economy if there's too much - what was affordable today, is out of reach tomorrow (see hyperinflaction). You want to add just enough to match growth in the economy. In a trading world, you can benefit as well - print a bit more cash and devalue your currency making your country cheaper to buy from, hopefully increasing economic output (people are buying your stuff!), but don't grow too fast because then your currency goes up and people stop buying.
Bitcoin is like Wikipedia. Both are experiments that have or are going to show what everyone already knows, just taught to the next generation who always never sees history repeat itself. (Wikipedia is a great example of communism as government, and the whole "every animal is equal, but some are more equal than others" conclusion of Animal Farm).
The only good news is that Bitcoin is at least unlikely to affect the economy too badly, so it's only those heavily leveraged on it will suffer. So unlike the lessons we all had to learn during the Great Depression about economic growth, the actual scope of losses will likely just be a blip.
Nope. This only affects iCloud. And you can opt out of using iCloud too.
The FBI has full access to iCloud data, just like China will too (for Chinese accounts). This is due to Chinese law saying Chinese users of cloud services must have the data stored within China.
Chinese government only has access to those servers now, and you can opt-out like you always could of iCloud services - the iPhone is not tied to it in any way other than user convenience.
Data stored on phones only (and there's a lot that Apple isn't storing to the cloud, including passwords) remain stored on phones and the Chinese government will have to crack them same way the FBI does.
No, Trump drained the swamp. What normally takes place behind closed doors now takes place out in the open. There's no longer any more need to hide it, and Trump is running a very openly visibly corrupt government.
Trump never promised he'd clean up the swamp. He'd just drain it. He sees no need to hide those activities anymore because what, you wanted to vote for the other guy?
This is probably one of the biggest laments that happened when planes switched from 3 pilots in the cockpit to two. After all, with three, should the lower pressure environment cause one of them to make an emission, no one is quite sure who did it. With two pilots though...
Of course, things are worse since 9/11 forced the cockpit door to remain shut at all times. Now you know why pilots sometimes left the door open!
No need. If a self-driving car lets a senior get around still, they will buy them in droves. Seniors can be fiercely independent, and often one of the hardest things a son or daughter must do is confiscate their parent's driver license, or write to the DOT saying their parents should have their license revoked.
Likewise, many seniors will go into depression if their doctor says they shouldn't drive anymore.
A self-driving car that lets them drive around still is a godsend as they're not dependent on taxies, public transport, uber/lyft/etc or family to drive them around.
Thus, they are more receptive of SDCs if it means they can still maintain a lifestyle of relative independence. Even in the early days, all it takes is one of the neighbours saying they are much happier being able to get around by themselves even though they were forced to give up their license to have everyone out car shopping the next day.
HD Radio requires the same antenna, it uses the same bands after all. But the problem is HD radio (it doesn't stand for "high definition", it stands for "hybrid digital" and refers to the fact that the station is sending both an analog and digital signal.).
The problem with HD radio is it requires a proprietary chip as it's using a proprietary codec (and is basically owned by a single company), which is why people are starting to shed HD radio reception to save on costs.
And audio quality used to be good - you get around 96kbps out of it, but many HD radio stations now are really using it as a way to serve up more ads by stacking 2-3 channels on that 96kbps stream.
As for general FM radio, I don't care. Most of the FM band is Clear Channel crap, which is generally why most people don't care for it. But adding an AM radio to the mix (where there are sports and news and other generally interesting things) to a cellphone is nigh-impossible because of all the interference. And because AM radio uses ferrite rods (headphone cords are too short) you can even use them with wireless headphones.
No, GPUs have access to kernel memory and can leak that. I don't care about the GPU memory contents. But the GPU has access, because of its design, to the OS kernel's memory, and potentially it has write access to that memory.
(The GPU drivers generally reside in the kernel, and for fast efficient transfers of data, the system may map the entire system RAM into PCIe memory space so the GPU can rapidly access all the buffers - the command buffers from the kernel, the texture and model buffers from the userspace application, etc.)
I wouldn't be surprised if other devices started having similar flaws, though the GPU one is particularly serious since a lot of the data comes from userspace applications - other devices like a sound card also have access to kernel memory, but the interface is usually much more limited with few soundcards having a programmable command interface directly controllable from userspace applications.
Microsoft gives 1000 points to "full games" and 150 points for "arcade games". At least that was the rule at first. It was up to the developer to decide how to divvy up those points. Some saw it as an annoyance and just sprinkled them however, others saw it as a challenge and made people work for them.
It's also something that people found interesting, because it was rapidly copied by everyone else - Sony with their trophies (it came out long after the PS3 was out, and the Xbox 360 had achievements from the get-go), Valve with Steam, even /. has achievements (as part of an april fool's update, but it's still around), and naturally, iOS, Android and everyone else added them.
Sometimes there's nice goals to try to achieve, other times they can reveal game content you might've missed the first time through or some weirder ones. Gone Home, for example , gives you 100 points for completing the game, but the other 900 are only available if you do odder things you might not have thought of, or if you weren't as careful and missed items.
Nope, not new. In fact, you know it as the Kinect for the Xbox 360, which used the exact same technology (it's actually called structured light) to do depth sensing. The only difference is the Kinect was designed to detect room scale objects, while FaceID detects face scale objects (and is much smaller).
In fact, after Microsoft let go of the technology (the Xbox One Kinect uses real depth sensing via Time of Flight), PrimeSense, the company behind the IR dot projector and IR cameras, was acquired by Apple.
So technically, FaceID is a tiny version of the original Kinect, because the same company is behind it. Apple's innovation is in the miniaturization so instead of requiring a big bulky accessory, it fits inside the notch.
In addition, to save on costs, Microsoft got rid of the special PrimeSense hardware to perform the depth calculations, and instead did it on software. I'm sure Apple integrated the hardware inside the SoC for FaceID rather than do it in software. (They own the company, and adding another block to an SoC would be basically free, versus having to make an ASIC just for an accessory).
Because you assume it's going to be cheaper, and the ISP will not make sure you're forced to buy a bunch of extras as well.
You assume it's cheaper because it's just one service. ISPs will ensure you're paying at least what you're paying now, just for less.
If you and everyone else wanted Netflix, your ISP will be happy to give you just Netflix. And have you pay exactly what you're paying now. They'll throw in Hulu for free, too. No YouTube, but you can have Dailymotion. OK, fine, if you agree to paperless billing, give us debit access to your bank account, and your soul, you can have a $2 a month discount.
Well, parental controls exists on iOS, but they're rather crude. (And they're better than Android, even, but still crude). The thing with Xbox is it's easy - after X minutes, it shuts down. The only reason for the Xbox is entertainment, and if you say you can play an hour and then do homework, they can play games, watch Netflix, etc for an hour, it shuts down, they need to do homework. Barring some exceptional circumstances, there is no reason to have the Xbox on while doing homework.
On iOS, the parental controls basically amount to age restrictions - you can block a lot of social media and web usage by setting the age restriction lower than 18+ (default setting). This is because Apple mandates that if you cannot control the content people are viewing on your system, you must set your app's age to 18+, and iOS can restrict the running of apps that are rated higher than the current age restriction. (Safari will do the same for websites as well - apparently there's some standard webmasters can use to rate their websites).
In addition, a smartphone has many uses that go beyond entertainment. It's all well and good to say to turn off the phone after half an hour to do homework, but there are valid uses for the phone during homework - calculators, notepads, even calling up a friend and asking for help.
So parental controls need to be way more robust and finer grained than on say the Xbox. You may disallow the use of Netflix during homework time, but allow the use of Skype or WhatsApp to allow your child to communicate with others, disallow facebook usage for more than 3 minutes at a time (so you can use messenger, but not read people's updates, etc).
And yes, your kinds will lose their minds because Xbox is easy - you don't need it during homework or other activity. But a smartphone can be quite useful for a lot of activities.
Of course, there's also FOMO symptoms to look out for
It depends.
You see, the price you see quoted on a market is not average price or anything. It's "last traded price". As in, the last time someone bought (and thus, someone sold) that commodity, that was the price they agreed to. There is no "current price" of say, gold, or crude oil or anything. Instead, those are sold on markets. Buyers will place bids to buy X quantity of the commodity, and sellers will place asks to sell Y quantity of the same commodity. If a bidder's bid price is equal to or higher than the lowest ask price, the trade happens - either X or Y quantity is traded depending on who has a lower quantity. (If you're buying 10 bars of gold, and the seller is selling 7 bars, you will buy 7 bars of gold, and then your bid will be revised for the remaining 3 bars at the price you bid).
The bid-ask spread (the difference between the asks and bids) is how liquid the commodity is. Very liquid commodities will have very small spreads, while very illiquid commodities will have large bid-ask spreads. This makes sense intuitively - commodities trade more because bids are closer to asks so trades are more likely to happen
Thus, saying Bitcoin is at $19,000 is somewhat meaningless. It's more important to say that people want to buy bitcoin at $18,500, but people are wanting to sell bitcoin at $19,500, say.
68K didn't use memory protection, PowerPC used only just enough to get it to work.
In theory I believe the later PowerPCs did do OOO execution with branch preduction, but the early ones did not. It was deemed not necessary since it was a RISC processor and the instructions were very simple to not need such sophisticated techniques. Then we realized superscalar lets us do more than one instruction per clock and achieve even higher speeds.
Interestingly, Apple claims its Axx processors are also susceptible to Meltdown attacks - not just Intel. Though they're not fixing it via page table isolation (which their old 32-bit processors had - darwin was a 4G/4G system and the kernel always had its own memory map on 32-bit). Since Apple controls the whole stack, they're fixing Safari/Webkit to block that kind of javascript attack
Sure you can. Instagram and Snapchat are 18+ apps because none of those censor their content, and thus cannot guarantee that the content they show will be suitable for kids.
Third party alarm clocks and organizers (especially ones that don't sync to social media) have no such problem and can be rated at lower ages.
Apple's parental controls can prohibit access to inappropriate apps.
Now, I suppose you could ask Apple to add support for time limits and such - so if you want your kid to only use snapchat for 30 minutes a day, you could. Problem is now it's going to be tedious to configure limits on all the apps...
The problem is not that - because they only accept bitcoin for the few minutes it takes to confirm a transaction - as far as Microsoft is concerned, they get US dollars either way.
The problem is Bitcoin takes forever to confirm transactions, or you start paying through the nose for it - and I'm sure the real reason is Microsoft is not going to pay the $50+ it takes to do a near-instant confirmation. And likely, because cheap confirmations can take over two weeks, I'm sure people don't like to wait either - only to find out they're still short in the end.
I'm guessing the real problem is the processor is unable to reflect the current bitcoin transaction fee status to the customer - and customers are refusing to pay the inflated fees.
The question is what are they replacing the processors WITH?
Speculative execution and OOO execution and branch preduction goes back nearly 30 years (Intel Pentium), and it's likely been bugged ever since then.
And it's not like Intel will be able to fix the bug even in the next generation of processors they release this year - at the very earliest it would be 2019 or even 2020 before the bug is fixed. There are very long lead times.
FDIV was easy - the bug was fixed in silicon and it only affected certain lines of chips (the 60/66MHz notably, and by the time the recall happened, Intel was doing 100+MHz ones).
Meltdown, not so much, because it affects every processor and it's not something that can be fixed without a silicon revision quickly. I suppose Intel could replace everyone's i7 with the two processors that don't have the bug, but I'm pretty sure no one would be happy going from i7s to Atoms.
There are plenty of cheap Windows tablets running on an Intel Atom z-something or other processor. And many have decent screens - the one I have (a NuVision something or other) came with a 1920x1080 screen in a 8" size. Cost me about $80, too. So with careful shopping you can get Windows 10, a decent screen (it's an IPS one I believe) and a bluetooth keyboard for $100. The only downside is charging and using the USB port at the same time, but there are OTG adapters that break out the USB-A and still can charge the device. I bought one for a Dell tablet that seems to work.