Businesses should always be prepared for a system failure or power outage. I was in a local shop recently when the power failed. It took them less than a minute to get a box of paper based "kerchunkers" from the manager's office and put one at each register. Sales lost: $0.
That works for the mom and pop shops, but for bigger chains, the registers do a lot of the cash tracking because otherwise you'd have to train teenagers how to handle cash and cash tracking. It's also a lot easier when most of them can do credit card payments because they don't have to count cash or figure out counterfeits and other things.
Basically computers have made it so the cashier can be pretty dumb. There is no need to keep track of cash versus credit transactions, keep track of credit slips, keep track of cash in the cash box (if you ever wonder why a cashier would trade a bill for an equivalent amount of coins, it's so their cashbox comes up even - if the register says they should have $3,293 in there, then there has beter be close to $3,293 in there (and that includes the starting amount so you can make change).
If your cashiers are properly trained, yes, you can still maintain business, somewhat. Though it's usually easier to stop credit transactions because those can take an annoyingly long amount of time to ring up (if you're using the manual methods, some stores may require calling into the payment processor to obtain an authorization code).
... it just doesn't cost that much to build a house. Assuming you're happy with a basic design, and no frills fittings a house can be built for well under $100,000.
There's no way a pre-fab should cost more than that
True. The problem is, a lot of people are going pre-fab, because the modern pre-fab doesn't look like a pre-fab rectangular house of old. They can look like a modern stick-build home. The only way people know it's a pre-fab is well, one day there was an empty lot with a foundation, and the next day there's a house there.
And those people are paying a lot of money for those kind of pre-fabs that factories just aren't churning out the boxy modular homes of the past which are cheaper, but less profitable and less in demand.
You know, it's not really fair to expect the average citizen to be able to phrase his viewpoint in legal terms. Nor is it reasonable to expect that he would spend the money to hire a lawyer, simply to express his opinion. For example, constituents routinely make their views known to their elected representatives, using plain language. Why should the FCC require a higher standard? I'd really like to see Pai get sued over this.
Easy. If you can afford a lawyer, then you're rich enough that the FCC is interested. If you can only speak in plain language, then you're just a prole and can't possibly understand government. Government's too complicated for simple minded folks. Those who can afford lawyers, well those people understand how government works.
you're funny, people waste hours and days trying to twiddle and fiddle and solve wine issues, if they're solvable at all. If you want to play games from the 90s, install an old windows version and have a stable platform for playing with no fuss, the installation only needs to be done once after all.
Or support open-source and buy a support license from the commercial version of Wine - Crossover from Codewavers. These guys have made WINE setup and installation pretty damn easy. And they actually support the WINE project too, so it's all on the up and up.
I have a 16-bit program (originally run under Windows 3.0) which I believe the only way to run now is under Wine.
You can probably also run the program on 32 bit Windows 7 or possibly newer. I'm not sure how easy it is to get 32 bit versions now, though.
All consumer versions of Windows still have a 32 bit flavor. So Windows 10 32-bit can run 16-bit apps. Windows 8 and above don't have the ntvdm subsystem installed by default, but running your 16-bit app the first time will auto-install it.
The other option is use a VM - all VMs nowadays have a 16-bit emulator because practically every OS runs real mode code in the beginning and thus needs emulation to run on a 64-bit environment. Only when you transition to a 32-bit mode will the VM move from emulator to actual hardware.
The phrase "transforming the genome," although accurate, may be a little misleading to the non-science public. What this means is "selective breeding," not "genetic engineering."
It is interesting to compare farm-bred turkeys to the wild ones. We do get wild turkeys in our backyard-- they are quite impressive birds, not at all similar to the big-but-dumb coop-raised turkeys.
The other thing is the farm-raised turkeys can no longer reproduce naturally - they must all be artificially inseminated. They're just so big they cannot actually mate anymore.
Wild turkeys are different, because their survival requires the ability to reproduce naturally, so they've not been raised to be huge birds that can no longer survive on their own.
Okay, Foxconn, had a rep for inhumane human labor practices, including making people stand for 12 hours assembling iphones. Foxconn doesn't change it's stripes because of a little embarrassment, and Apple know it. Much like the Gap, Joe Fresh, Blue Navy (owned by the Gap), continue to use manufacturers that quietly hire child labor no matter how many times similar scandals come up. If Apple really cared, they would stop using Foxconn whose reputation for what we consider basic human decency let alone laws relating to it, is very poor. If WE really cared about any of these issues, we would stop buying iphones (we can always get used ones if it MUST be an iphone), or better yet get a phone with an open source android derivative (Replicant, Cyanogen, LinageOS), but as people with eager faces prepare to sign either a free phone for a 3 year contract or plot $700 USD for the newest iphone, it seems pretty clear where our priorities are. And no matter how many times we see stories like this, we'll keep buying iphones. So Apple will keep using Foxconnm, who will repeat profitable inhuman labor practices.
And who do you suggest Apple uses? All the other CMs are exactly the same - or worse. In fact, the Apple lines at Foxconn are generally the lines that are the most humane - Apple has forced changes in the way its products are build such that Foxconn's Apple lines really do behave quite ethically. Now, you might ask why Samsung, etc., aren't demanding the same of their CMs (who also include Foxconn), because every criticism of Apple's labour certainly applies to them.
You could ask Apple force Foxconn to clean things up, and I'm sure Apple would actually love to. Except well, it might not be so great if Apple finds problems with the lines making competitor's products just around launch time. Imagine Apple forcing Samsung to halt Galaxy S/Note production before launch because of bad labour practices.
And your "open source android" phone really just shows you're an android fanboy ranting, because like I said, except for very few phones out there, all the big ones have exactly the same problem. Even worse, because only Apple decided to clean house, much to the annoyance of a lot of workers (who wanted to work overtime for more money, but Apple's overtime limits prevent that).
As I understand it from the (rather loose) details that came out last time.. the idea is basically to force a flash on the firmware (which Apple can do whether the phone is locked or not) that disables the lockout after a failed unlock attempt. So it doesn't directly unlock the phone, but it means the FBI or whoever can then just go through all 10000 possibilities until they get it right without risking the phone permanently bricking itself and making the data truly unobtainable.
No, that's what the FBI wanted Apple to do.
In this case, though, Apple said if the shooter used TouchID, then you have 2 days to crack it. Since there are known flaws in TouchID (spoofed fingers work), it would be trivial for FBI to get a copy of the shooter's fingerprint, use one of their many labs to recreate a dummy finger, and then unlock the phone.
With the newer phones, Apple can not actually flash any firmware at all - at least, if you want to preserve the data. If you don't care for the data, you can use DFU mode which will reflash the entire firmware and regenerate all the security keys. If you want to preserve the data,you must unlock the phone first.
The depression isn't caused by the screen time, it is caused by people being unhappy with their lives, spiraling further when they become unhappy with their online lives, and then affecting their biology in their real lives. The problem is everybody is trying to make it out as an internet epidemic, rather than realizing it is a global sociological epidemic resulting from a combination of factors among the poor, middle, and upper class, as well as the policies and choices made in managing various countries for the past 40 or so years. What has made this MORE devastating is the effecient worldwide transportation network, which has made the world seem far bigger than most people can fathom, and the loss of personal interaction as the trees are lost amongst the forest.
Well, the biggest problem really is social media. Tell me any kid who reads about their friends going on fantastic vacations or having fun doing all sorts of things on Facebook daily or doing some other fun stuff, tell me they won't have any problems if all they see is their friends going out and having fun, while they're stuck at home.
The problem is social media encourages posting of this kind of crap - and generally discourages people from posting "oh well, just going to school again, teacher XXX is so boring", preferring the style of "Check out my new shoes! I'm going to school right now in these!".
In just the same way beauty magazines caused girls to have serious problems because the models they saw were photoshopped and fake and they trying to emulate them, social media does the same. No one's posting about humdrum life, but instead, everyone's comparing their humdrum life to an unrealistic expectation that their friends and everyone else are doing all sorts of "hip" and "happening" things.
Screen time is unfortunate, since for most teens, they're not playing games, they're surfing facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.
People are getting depressed because they're being exposed to an unrealistic lifestyle, one that they will never hope to match
No, it's not peculiar. Keeping control of a _canonical_ git repository is very useful for a critical security system. It's awkward, but feasible, to link a local, working git repository to multiple upstream repositories such as github, gitlab, or an internal business managed erpository. I've certainly done so and guided technology partners in doing so.
You know what's the best tool for that? Gerrit. It's also got a pretty damn nice web interface, and of course, integrates with every CI system out there Let it be the master repository and you can control who checks in what and review the code.
You can branch, work on branches, etc, and people can approve checkins into the mainline canonical tree. It only slightly complicates the command line (you can't do "git push origin", you must "git push origin HEAD:refs/for/branch_name"), but you give a good enough tutorial on how users check in and it'll be native in no time.
Granted, it also works well with repo which Google created to make submodule handling much easier..
No, the problem is they're trying to justify the purchase.
First off, the Pixel buds cost as much as the Apple AirPods. Granted, the AirPods don't do too much - they are somewhat decent earbuds with a decent microphone so you can chat with someone on the phone.
Second, they're not "wireless" - there's a wire that runs between the two earbuds. Unlike the AirPods, each of which is completely independent of the other, the pixel buds are attached to each other with a wire and cutting it breaks them. It's not a safety string like on some earplugs, it's actually needed.
So what do you do when you have a worse product that costs as much as the superior one? You need some hook to get people to buy it, and the whole "babelfish" thing seems neat. It's the only way you can justify charging $200 for them and have something that's not as convenient as your competitors, who had theirs out nearly a year before.
Perhaps Google should've just borrowed the Bluetooth technology from Apple and worked out a deal to OEM Apple's version cheaper.
Walmart has money to burn because they don't actually buy inventory until its sold at the register/cart level. Every other business faces requirement for predictable delivery on capital equipment purchases, largely because it all must be put into use quickly to break even as an option to better than the alternatives.
That is actually less true today than ever before. Walmart is just one of many companies who adapted to the Amazon effect by becoming real estate moguls and renting out the store shelves.
Basically a lot of stores now do consignment supply - the vendor supplies the goods to the store, and the store only pays the vendor when the good is actually sold, minus a store cut.
You might also see this termed as "Vendor Managed Inventory" - because it's the vendor who is providing the store stock. This is also coupled with contractual store rentals where companies may rent aisles of the store. This is easily seen when going to the electronics department, and looking at video games. You'll notice there are separate aisles of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony - each of these companies has basically contracted with the store to rent a certain amount of space. The store must provide the rented space, even though it seems silly. You may see racks and racks of empty shelves - or perhaps an entire rack is filled with a single game, 1 copy deep. This is because the rack is rented, and even if there's nothing to fill it, it still belongs to the renter. Employees often shuffle items to fill the racks because empty racks are ugly. Its also why for example there was an empty rack for PS Vita stuff - Sony dictated that rack was for PS Vita, and even though the Vita is dead, the store is obligated to maintain it.
Of course, you see that say, the PC Games section in the same store is non-existent - because that's actually the store's owned rack, so that's whatever games the store deems will sell and justify that rack's presence. Unless a big PC game publisher comes and rents a rack (which does happen, in which case it's filled with that publisher's games) the store's own inventory typically pales in comparison.
You might find the stores are often willing to price match online stores in this case as well - since the vendor is paid whatever the price is minus a store cut, if the store matches the online price, the vendor is paid less.
Note this applies to the big national chain stores. Mom and Pop stores still have to buy their inventory like normal, and rarely do vendors actually request to rent some space
Actually, now that employee discounts are considered a taxable benefit here, that's probably not so cut and dried anymore
Nope, employee discounts aren't a taxable benefit, still.
There was a proposal for it by the CRA to do so, but the Liberals shot it down. There are too many implications to actually make it workable, it would cost too much to administer, and it would end up hurting the low wage employees the most. For maybe a few hours it was implemented as CRA policy by the CRA administrators, but the government told them to shut it down.
And yes, it's complex. Because there are way too many fine lines - if an employee gets say, 10% discounts, but so do customers somehow, then it's no longer fair tot he employee (and really, at that point in time, the employee is the customer).
Some benefits ARE taxable - the ones where the business gives cash or a cash equivalent are still counted as income. So a company car, or a company parking spot (if the lot requires payment) is a taxable benefit because it's part of your compensation.
I call it the irresponsible musings of a CRA bureaucrat who's probably being compensated to try to squeeze more money from somewhere.
I'm not one to follow every little advance made by the various "digital assistants", but in what way is Siri not "really in the same class as Alexa or Google Assistant"? I thought Siri was quite advanced, and was the first, so has it lagged behind the competition? Or is Siri tuned more for phone use on demand and not the far more generic use required in the home, where it "listens in" continuously to filter for commands within all the ambient sound and conversations in a room?
Well, the problem is Apple and their privacy policy. Google and Amazon dominate the digital assistant world because well, they don't provide any. So Google's assistant is, by Alphabet's privacy policy, able to use anything and everything you ever did that involved an Alphabet company. All that is compiled and indexed and forms your personal profile, from how many DoubleClick ads you did not see, to what videos you saw on youTube, and your searches on Google. That makes Google's assistant much more powerful, because it "knows" you better. Ditto Alexa - when combined with everything you looked at on Amazon, or shopped elsewhere, Alexa can make suggestions.
Apple's privacy policy is different. Siri is only allowed to ask for narrow pieces of data. All spelled out in Siri's privacy policy. It doesn't matter that Apple may have more information about you, that privacy policy is king, and Siri is not allowed to touch any data that is not specified in that policy. So Siri might not be able to access your photos, even if you uploaded them to iCloud. Apple has it, but SIri cannot access it without breaking the policy, so it can't. (There's apparently a privacy czar at Apple, and if you want to violate privacy policy you better be able to justify it, because more often than not, requests are turned down).
It would not surprise me if Apple is trying to offload Siri onto the device as much as possible - first for privacy reasons (an always listening box? Well, if 99% of questions can be answered by onboard Siri and not through Apple, that's a major plus - it's also less data the government can ask from Apple). There's also likely going to have to be a lot of data sharing locally - perhaps if Siri can be on-device, it can query the Siri of everything else local to determine next steps, as long as all data stays local and not transmitted to Apple.
In short, Siri is hobbled because it cannot access as rich a dataset as Google and Amazon can, because Apple dictates what powers Siri has are limited and fully enumerated in the privacy policy.
But the larger problem is that if your dependencies aren't properly managed, you end up downloading the whole repository when you build anyway, so the only thing they've accomplished is delaying the build step rather than the clone step.
Which is generally fine, since you clone the code so you can dive into it - look at it, make changes, etc. If the first build takes longer because you have to grab the repository, I'm OK with that - I usually schedule the build to happen overnight anyways, so whether it finishes at 8pm after I leave or at 3AM, doesn't really matter to me. Heck, it can finish a moment before I get in the door. Or unlock my machine.
It was a great idea but they made you take a class to touch just about every tool so for makers like me with a decade or more of experience it was never really an option. It would have taken me months and hundreds of dollars just to get certified on all the tools I already use and own.
If you already have the tools, then why bother? Just use your own.
Take classes on the ones you want to use, the ones you don't own.
And then take classes on the stuff you do own, because perhaps there are differences between yours and theirs, and maybe there are new "best practices" you are not aware of. Leaning is not a bad thing, and keeping current on complex equipment isn't something to be ashamed of.
Hell, you might've learned something new and a trick that makes life easier. Or something you learned was an old wives tale.
Otherwise you end up sounding like those grumpy old people at work who refuse to learn and think they know everything. You know, the people we always stereotype when talking about ageism.
And here's a trick - if you are the hotshot you are, then it will be obvious on the first lesson. Help other people out in the class - the instructor will appreciate it as it means they only have to deal with half the class, while you're helping the other half learn the equipment. Getting on the instructor's good side can lead to great benefits including, well, not having to take anymore classes (under the assumption you will however ask for help).
There is nothing wrong with this. Lots of places ask for competency before letting you go on the equipment. Hell, think of a 50-year old career airline pilot who started in the military and few the fastest jet fighters. If he walks into an airport and wants to rent a plane, the company will request he get "checked out" (i.e., hit the books and pass a company-administered flight test) before he's let loose. Here he is, someone with decades of experience and tens of thousands of flight hours, entrusted with people's lives and hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment, having to go back to school even if all he wanted to do was rent a dinky Cessna 152 costing $20,000.
And even if that weren't a serious safety risk, that would still be the dumbest, most invasive possible approach to fixing the problem. The smartest, least invasive approach would be to permanently shut down the in-flight Wi-Fi on planes that can't be secured. No access to the network = no ability to crack into the systems.
Besides, anything you can do with a device on your person, you can also do with a device in the hold, using a timer or the built-in barometric pressure sensor. Banning devices from carry-on does nothing if the Wi-Fi network is still running, because the attack is still possible. And if the Wi-Fi network is not running, then banning the devices still does nothing because the attack wouldn't be possible either way. So no matter what, a ban does nothing but annoy passengers.
Why do you assume it's WiFi? It could be simple RF interference wreaking havoc. It affects older planes more than newer ones, which is a big clue, since older planes lack a lot of the high integration newer planes have. And newer planes are designed for a more modern world, where RF transmitters are common instead of rare - so modern planes can handle intentional RF transmitters much better (especially in an age with wireless headphones and such).
After all, cellphones have been documented to cause loss of GPS lock on aircraft, and there are plenty of anecdotes about stuff like PDAs and such in the "old days" causing navigation errors.
Yes, you can point out Mythbusters doing all sorts of cellphone tests causing no problems with aircraft, but on older ones, it actually is a problem. It's just that there are so many variables that no one's been able to definitely rule it out. (I know cellphones cause interference, because I've experienced it - it feeds back into the radios).
The cables carrying control signals run everywhere - a bunch run underneath the floor of the passenger compartment, while more still run just beside the passengers themselves, on the other side of the wall cladding.
On an older plane, they're probably not shielded, so perhaps controlled bursts of RF from a WiFi transmitter at the right spot can disrupt the communications between nodes and cause them to lock up.
And that is even harder to fix - shielding cables is going to be difficult to do since you have to tear down the aircraft to do so, and the older fleet is going to be very expensive to do this. You could update the flight software to be more tolerant, perhaps even changing the protocol to test link robustness, but that's expensive.
Fact is, aircraft are poorly shielded, especially older ones (they tested in a 757, that should tell you the age). You don't need WiFi to disrupt the aircraft. Heck, using one of those SDR dongles you can probably even use that to snoop on the communications traffic between avionics
The same scare tactics appeared when the Nintendo DS with Pictochat was released. "stalkers" could chat with your child! But what is the wireless range of the devices? 30ft or so? So basically already within visual and verbal range to begin with. But now its exactly the same thing "BUT WITH A COMPUTER" (wait, isn't this the new Slashdot meme for patents, to just take normal every day activities and items, slap "with a computer" on it, and patent it all over again..?)
Except two things.
1) Pictochat only works if you're in the application. Once you exit, you can no longer send nor receive. And on the NIntendo DS, that's trivially easy to do by doing something else on the DS.
2) Bluetooth has a range of 30' to 100'.
If these toys are disregarding basic Bluetooth security, then it's possible for someone to simply establish a Bluetooth connection and potentially listen in, too. Being able to connect to one of these devices and use it as a spy gadget is useful
At least Pictochat is controllable - it only works when it's running. But these toys, if you can commandeer them to listen in 24/7 are far more dangerous
It's VERY easy to fake GPS. Just download an app that overrides the GPS and put yourself wherever you want to be. Just for fun, I made it look like I was in London.
Two problems.
1) E911 services and the like don't use fake GPS. In fact, the reason your phone HAS GPS is because the E911 requirement, and the modem provides AGPS to the user. That AGPS can then be fed to a proper GPS chip (which can provide GPS information even without service, but the AGPS data is used to help prime the GPS by providing epheremis data). So anything involving the phone GPS is not at the user level.
2) It may only work in Europe. Europe uses AML (Advanced Mobile Location) instead of E911. E911 is implemented in the control and network planes, so GPS data is sent via the cellular modem to the towers and embedded in the control information. Because European cell towers aren't as advanced, they don't have this information, so E911 doesn't work. Instead, they use AML which is data plane based. Effectively it gets GPS information, creates a data connection and sends the GPS data via that side channel. You could quite possibly fool this method since it involves user code to do it.
I'm really interested in how they plan to deal with the water issue, it seems like a show-stopper. Maybe they can build something to recover water from the dry arid air - because otherwise they're going to have to pipe it in, and the Colorado River is already over used... They must have considered this issue when they bought the dry desert land...
Or you use water smartly and not waste it. Sure you have to truck some in now and again, but if they're envisioning a next-generation "smart city", smart water use would also be a part of it.
Our daily lives we waste enough water to make any third world country cry. Watering lawns is practically a complete waste of water unless you are using it wisely as a filter medium for example.
Lots of sunlight also means cheap solar stills for water purification.
And I'm sure Gates has considered the water issue. In fact, he may have bought it because of that - with climate changing, the real issue IS going to be access to water. (We are relatively fortunate in North America as we have almost half of the world's reserve of freshwater).
It could be a very smart play - get the technology used to recycle and conserve water working now, so when its really needed, you've just cornered the market in patents, and the technology has matured to be usable, while everyone else is scrambling to find fixes.
I think they whole reason FBI is whining is for political purposes. They want the laws to allow them to search more with fewer impediments. Thus they don't ask Apple for help since that removes the ability to whine about it.
That said, why the 48 hour time? Does that mean living people must use the fingerprint sensor every 2 days or they're locked out?
Oh, it's political all right. Apple offered the FBI help to unlock the phone. In fact, Apple reached out to the FBI for this - presuming the killer used Touch ID, it would be easy to unlock the phone! (Remember, there are a few ways to bypass a fingerprint sensor using fake fingerprints).
But the FBI stalled and stalled until the window closed. You can bet it's on purpose - Apple was offering, pre-emptively, to help them (probably conjuring up a fake finger to fool the sensor). Hell, I'm sure the FBI has access to PLENTY of labs that can do this, too!
So no, the FBI has INTENTIONALLY refused Apple's help. Why? Because the phone is not important at all. The FBI couldn't care less about the phone's contents. The political fight to remove encryption is the real target
The phone's data is unimportant. There is no evidence on the phone the FBI wants, guaranteed. Because if there was, why else would they refuse Apple's help? This is an emotional plea to get the public saying the evil phone companies are keeping them from doing their jobs.
Apple offered to help. The FBI deliberately ignored them. The FBI is who should account for the loss of evidence - they are the ones who deliberately destroyed it.
Do the writers realize for-profit museums are already a thing, most major corporations have one. Also, do they realize 2040 is about 20 years away, do they really think things are going to change that much? In the last 20 years we got the Matrix and higher speed Internets but not much changed in the fields of space exploration and health care.
Yeah, I don't get the for-profit museum thing. Because there are a LOT of them. Granted, they're not your typical museums - giant grand buildings holding a ton of exhibits, but most of the little ones running down the street (especially in rural America) are generally for-profit. A lot of them are just a room with a bunch of stuff run by the owner who's showing the stuff.
They may not be officially "sanctioned" things, but there are a lot of those. Hell, watch American Pickers some time and you'll see they pick a lot of these museums.
And things have changed a lot in 20 years. For starters, the way we communicate - 20 years ago the Internet was just coming into form, something you used a computer to view and interact with. These days, everything's on the internet and you access it in so many more ways such that it's always at your fingertips. Smartphones, tablets, wireless networking, we're basically able to tap into this resource anytime and anywhere. 20 years ago it was a mere curiosity. Today it's a part of life and living, enough so that it's practically a requirement (try finding a job without it).
Granted, you have downsides like Facebook and the like, but you also have upsides - Facebook has probably reunited plenty of families and far-flung friends who were once scattered to the breeze, now you can talk to them as if they were right next door.
And let's not forget entertainment - 20 years ago if you wanted to watch a movie on DVD, you'd go to the video store, now the movies come to you (Netflix discs), or you stream them online. No late fees, no rushing Friday afternoons hoping to score the latest releases before they run out, etc.
Even medical care has increased significantly - a lot of treatments are simply better these days than 20 years ago. HIV and AIDS is no longer a death sentence they used to be 20 years ago - people can actually live full lives with HIV. Cancer is still around, but care is often better - even in terminal cases.
Manufacturing is better - 3D printers and the like have revolutionized the way people prototype new gadgets and devices.
Yes, it's true some things haven't changed - we still don't have flying cars, traffic is still a nightmare, and a good chunk of us still trudge to work or school every day. Though space exploration is somewhat interesting, since private space companies have really taken off lately. 20 years ago it was a long shot, but today, there are quite a few active private space companies and even more vying for stuff like the X-Prizes including launching rovers on the moon.
I don't think we'll get teleporters, money will still be a thing people fight about, we'd still dread the commute and traffic jams. But you cannot discount that our lives have changed quite significantly as well. There was no big bang, but rapid evolution.
20 years, you could imagine we'd still drive cars, but more will probably be electric which leads to interesting environmental consequences (what, I can't say). Drone delivery might not be a big thing, but in some places mail comes in centralized mailboxes, so maybe we'll see a return to community gathering spots where you get your mail and your Amazon deliveries at the same time.
They literally have Facebook integration, scan all your files, and report back whatever they want from your machine. Starcraft 2 is the data mining of the web, in videogame form.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of cheaters. Cheat programs take all sorts of forms, and are probably one of hte biggest turn-offs in online gaming.
This is especially true in e-sports games, where if you can get away with it, y ou can end up making some big bucks. Considering real athletes do it in real life (using performance enhancing drugs), there's a certain appeal to cheating.
The future of PC gaming is turning this way - considering how high PC piracy is, online authentication methods (usually by making it a multiplayer game) are required, and those also require anti-cheat methods. They are getting quite invasive because naturally, cheat programs are trying to hide. It may eventually get to a point where no one does esports on PCs anymore - you're restricted to console plays running approved code. (Which would suck since you also would probably lose things like customizations and all that).
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That works for the mom and pop shops, but for bigger chains, the registers do a lot of the cash tracking because otherwise you'd have to train teenagers how to handle cash and cash tracking. It's also a lot easier when most of them can do credit card payments because they don't have to count cash or figure out counterfeits and other things.
Basically computers have made it so the cashier can be pretty dumb. There is no need to keep track of cash versus credit transactions, keep track of credit slips, keep track of cash in the cash box (if you ever wonder why a cashier would trade a bill for an equivalent amount of coins, it's so their cashbox comes up even - if the register says they should have $3,293 in there, then there has beter be close to $3,293 in there (and that includes the starting amount so you can make change).
If your cashiers are properly trained, yes, you can still maintain business, somewhat. Though it's usually easier to stop credit transactions because those can take an annoyingly long amount of time to ring up (if you're using the manual methods, some stores may require calling into the payment processor to obtain an authorization code).
True. The problem is, a lot of people are going pre-fab, because the modern pre-fab doesn't look like a pre-fab rectangular house of old. They can look like a modern stick-build home. The only way people know it's a pre-fab is well, one day there was an empty lot with a foundation, and the next day there's a house there.
And those people are paying a lot of money for those kind of pre-fabs that factories just aren't churning out the boxy modular homes of the past which are cheaper, but less profitable and less in demand.
Easy. If you can afford a lawyer, then you're rich enough that the FCC is interested. If you can only speak in plain language, then you're just a prole and can't possibly understand government. Government's too complicated for simple minded folks. Those who can afford lawyers, well those people understand how government works.
Or support open-source and buy a support license from the commercial version of Wine - Crossover from Codewavers. These guys have made WINE setup and installation pretty damn easy. And they actually support the WINE project too, so it's all on the up and up.
The other thing is the farm-raised turkeys can no longer reproduce naturally - they must all be artificially inseminated. They're just so big they cannot actually mate anymore.
Wild turkeys are different, because their survival requires the ability to reproduce naturally, so they've not been raised to be huge birds that can no longer survive on their own.
And who do you suggest Apple uses? All the other CMs are exactly the same - or worse. In fact, the Apple lines at Foxconn are generally the lines that are the most humane - Apple has forced changes in the way its products are build such that Foxconn's Apple lines really do behave quite ethically. Now, you might ask why Samsung, etc., aren't demanding the same of their CMs (who also include Foxconn), because every criticism of Apple's labour certainly applies to them.
You could ask Apple force Foxconn to clean things up, and I'm sure Apple would actually love to. Except well, it might not be so great if Apple finds problems with the lines making competitor's products just around launch time. Imagine Apple forcing Samsung to halt Galaxy S/Note production before launch because of bad labour practices.
And your "open source android" phone really just shows you're an android fanboy ranting, because like I said, except for very few phones out there, all the big ones have exactly the same problem. Even worse, because only Apple decided to clean house, much to the annoyance of a lot of workers (who wanted to work overtime for more money, but Apple's overtime limits prevent that).
No, that's what the FBI wanted Apple to do.
In this case, though, Apple said if the shooter used TouchID, then you have 2 days to crack it. Since there are known flaws in TouchID (spoofed fingers work), it would be trivial for FBI to get a copy of the shooter's fingerprint, use one of their many labs to recreate a dummy finger, and then unlock the phone.
With the newer phones, Apple can not actually flash any firmware at all - at least, if you want to preserve the data. If you don't care for the data, you can use DFU mode which will reflash the entire firmware and regenerate all the security keys. If you want to preserve the data,you must unlock the phone first.
Well, the biggest problem really is social media. Tell me any kid who reads about their friends going on fantastic vacations or having fun doing all sorts of things on Facebook daily or doing some other fun stuff, tell me they won't have any problems if all they see is their friends going out and having fun, while they're stuck at home.
The problem is social media encourages posting of this kind of crap - and generally discourages people from posting "oh well, just going to school again, teacher XXX is so boring", preferring the style of "Check out my new shoes! I'm going to school right now in these!".
In just the same way beauty magazines caused girls to have serious problems because the models they saw were photoshopped and fake and they trying to emulate them, social media does the same. No one's posting about humdrum life, but instead, everyone's comparing their humdrum life to an unrealistic expectation that their friends and everyone else are doing all sorts of "hip" and "happening" things.
Screen time is unfortunate, since for most teens, they're not playing games, they're surfing facebook, instagram, twitter, etc.
People are getting depressed because they're being exposed to an unrealistic lifestyle, one that they will never hope to match
You know what's the best tool for that? Gerrit. It's also got a pretty damn nice web interface, and of course, integrates with every CI system out there Let it be the master repository and you can control who checks in what and review the code.
You can branch, work on branches, etc, and people can approve checkins into the mainline canonical tree. It only slightly complicates the command line (you can't do "git push origin", you must "git push origin HEAD:refs/for/branch_name"), but you give a good enough tutorial on how users check in and it'll be native in no time.
Granted, it also works well with repo which Google created to make submodule handling much easier..
No, the problem is they're trying to justify the purchase.
First off, the Pixel buds cost as much as the Apple AirPods. Granted, the AirPods don't do too much - they are somewhat decent earbuds with a decent microphone so you can chat with someone on the phone.
Second, they're not "wireless" - there's a wire that runs between the two earbuds. Unlike the AirPods, each of which is completely independent of the other, the pixel buds are attached to each other with a wire and cutting it breaks them. It's not a safety string like on some earplugs, it's actually needed.
So what do you do when you have a worse product that costs as much as the superior one? You need some hook to get people to buy it, and the whole "babelfish" thing seems neat. It's the only way you can justify charging $200 for them and have something that's not as convenient as your competitors, who had theirs out nearly a year before.
Perhaps Google should've just borrowed the Bluetooth technology from Apple and worked out a deal to OEM Apple's version cheaper.
That is actually less true today than ever before. Walmart is just one of many companies who adapted to the Amazon effect by becoming real estate moguls and renting out the store shelves.
Basically a lot of stores now do consignment supply - the vendor supplies the goods to the store, and the store only pays the vendor when the good is actually sold, minus a store cut.
You might also see this termed as "Vendor Managed Inventory" - because it's the vendor who is providing the store stock. This is also coupled with contractual store rentals where companies may rent aisles of the store. This is easily seen when going to the electronics department, and looking at video games. You'll notice there are separate aisles of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony - each of these companies has basically contracted with the store to rent a certain amount of space. The store must provide the rented space, even though it seems silly. You may see racks and racks of empty shelves - or perhaps an entire rack is filled with a single game, 1 copy deep. This is because the rack is rented, and even if there's nothing to fill it, it still belongs to the renter. Employees often shuffle items to fill the racks because empty racks are ugly. Its also why for example there was an empty rack for PS Vita stuff - Sony dictated that rack was for PS Vita, and even though the Vita is dead, the store is obligated to maintain it.
Of course, you see that say, the PC Games section in the same store is non-existent - because that's actually the store's owned rack, so that's whatever games the store deems will sell and justify that rack's presence. Unless a big PC game publisher comes and rents a rack (which does happen, in which case it's filled with that publisher's games) the store's own inventory typically pales in comparison.
You might find the stores are often willing to price match online stores in this case as well - since the vendor is paid whatever the price is minus a store cut, if the store matches the online price, the vendor is paid less.
Note this applies to the big national chain stores. Mom and Pop stores still have to buy their inventory like normal, and rarely do vendors actually request to rent some space
Nope, employee discounts aren't a taxable benefit, still.
There was a proposal for it by the CRA to do so, but the Liberals shot it down. There are too many implications to actually make it workable, it would cost too much to administer, and it would end up hurting the low wage employees the most. For maybe a few hours it was implemented as CRA policy by the CRA administrators, but the government told them to shut it down.
And yes, it's complex. Because there are way too many fine lines - if an employee gets say, 10% discounts, but so do customers somehow, then it's no longer fair tot he employee (and really, at that point in time, the employee is the customer).
Some benefits ARE taxable - the ones where the business gives cash or a cash equivalent are still counted as income. So a company car, or a company parking spot (if the lot requires payment) is a taxable benefit because it's part of your compensation.
I call it the irresponsible musings of a CRA bureaucrat who's probably being compensated to try to squeeze more money from somewhere.
Well, the problem is Apple and their privacy policy. Google and Amazon dominate the digital assistant world because well, they don't provide any. So Google's assistant is, by Alphabet's privacy policy, able to use anything and everything you ever did that involved an Alphabet company. All that is compiled and indexed and forms your personal profile, from how many DoubleClick ads you did not see, to what videos you saw on youTube, and your searches on Google. That makes Google's assistant much more powerful, because it "knows" you better. Ditto Alexa - when combined with everything you looked at on Amazon, or shopped elsewhere, Alexa can make suggestions.
Apple's privacy policy is different. Siri is only allowed to ask for narrow pieces of data. All spelled out in Siri's privacy policy. It doesn't matter that Apple may have more information about you, that privacy policy is king, and Siri is not allowed to touch any data that is not specified in that policy. So Siri might not be able to access your photos, even if you uploaded them to iCloud. Apple has it, but SIri cannot access it without breaking the policy, so it can't. (There's apparently a privacy czar at Apple, and if you want to violate privacy policy you better be able to justify it, because more often than not, requests are turned down).
It would not surprise me if Apple is trying to offload Siri onto the device as much as possible - first for privacy reasons (an always listening box? Well, if 99% of questions can be answered by onboard Siri and not through Apple, that's a major plus - it's also less data the government can ask from Apple). There's also likely going to have to be a lot of data sharing locally - perhaps if Siri can be on-device, it can query the Siri of everything else local to determine next steps, as long as all data stays local and not transmitted to Apple.
In short, Siri is hobbled because it cannot access as rich a dataset as Google and Amazon can, because Apple dictates what powers Siri has are limited and fully enumerated in the privacy policy.
Which is generally fine, since you clone the code so you can dive into it - look at it, make changes, etc. If the first build takes longer because you have to grab the repository, I'm OK with that - I usually schedule the build to happen overnight anyways, so whether it finishes at 8pm after I leave or at 3AM, doesn't really matter to me. Heck, it can finish a moment before I get in the door. Or unlock my machine.
If you already have the tools, then why bother? Just use your own.
Take classes on the ones you want to use, the ones you don't own.
And then take classes on the stuff you do own, because perhaps there are differences between yours and theirs, and maybe there are new "best practices" you are not aware of. Leaning is not a bad thing, and keeping current on complex equipment isn't something to be ashamed of.
Hell, you might've learned something new and a trick that makes life easier. Or something you learned was an old wives tale.
Otherwise you end up sounding like those grumpy old people at work who refuse to learn and think they know everything. You know, the people we always stereotype when talking about ageism.
And here's a trick - if you are the hotshot you are, then it will be obvious on the first lesson. Help other people out in the class - the instructor will appreciate it as it means they only have to deal with half the class, while you're helping the other half learn the equipment. Getting on the instructor's good side can lead to great benefits including, well, not having to take anymore classes (under the assumption you will however ask for help).
There is nothing wrong with this. Lots of places ask for competency before letting you go on the equipment. Hell, think of a 50-year old career airline pilot who started in the military and few the fastest jet fighters. If he walks into an airport and wants to rent a plane, the company will request he get "checked out" (i.e., hit the books and pass a company-administered flight test) before he's let loose. Here he is, someone with decades of experience and tens of thousands of flight hours, entrusted with people's lives and hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment, having to go back to school even if all he wanted to do was rent a dinky Cessna 152 costing $20,000.
Why do you assume it's WiFi? It could be simple RF interference wreaking havoc. It affects older planes more than newer ones, which is a big clue, since older planes lack a lot of the high integration newer planes have. And newer planes are designed for a more modern world, where RF transmitters are common instead of rare - so modern planes can handle intentional RF transmitters much better (especially in an age with wireless headphones and such).
After all, cellphones have been documented to cause loss of GPS lock on aircraft, and there are plenty of anecdotes about stuff like PDAs and such in the "old days" causing navigation errors.
Yes, you can point out Mythbusters doing all sorts of cellphone tests causing no problems with aircraft, but on older ones, it actually is a problem. It's just that there are so many variables that no one's been able to definitely rule it out. (I know cellphones cause interference, because I've experienced it - it feeds back into the radios).
The cables carrying control signals run everywhere - a bunch run underneath the floor of the passenger compartment, while more still run just beside the passengers themselves, on the other side of the wall cladding.
On an older plane, they're probably not shielded, so perhaps controlled bursts of RF from a WiFi transmitter at the right spot can disrupt the communications between nodes and cause them to lock up.
And that is even harder to fix - shielding cables is going to be difficult to do since you have to tear down the aircraft to do so, and the older fleet is going to be very expensive to do this. You could update the flight software to be more tolerant, perhaps even changing the protocol to test link robustness, but that's expensive.
Fact is, aircraft are poorly shielded, especially older ones (they tested in a 757, that should tell you the age). You don't need WiFi to disrupt the aircraft. Heck, using one of those SDR dongles you can probably even use that to snoop on the communications traffic between avionics
I remember seeing it on a few things a few years ago... especially musician effects boxes. I think they called themselves Digital too...
The same scare tactics appeared when the Nintendo DS with Pictochat was released. "stalkers" could chat with your child! But what is the wireless range of the devices? 30ft or so? So basically already within visual and verbal range to begin with. But now its exactly the same thing "BUT WITH A COMPUTER" (wait, isn't this the new Slashdot meme for patents, to just take normal every day activities and items, slap "with a computer" on it, and patent it all over again..?)
Except two things.
1) Pictochat only works if you're in the application. Once you exit, you can no longer send nor receive. And on the NIntendo DS, that's trivially easy to do by doing something else on the DS.
2) Bluetooth has a range of 30' to 100'.
If these toys are disregarding basic Bluetooth security, then it's possible for someone to simply establish a Bluetooth connection and potentially listen in, too. Being able to connect to one of these devices and use it as a spy gadget is useful
At least Pictochat is controllable - it only works when it's running. But these toys, if you can commandeer them to listen in 24/7 are far more dangerous
Two problems.
1) E911 services and the like don't use fake GPS. In fact, the reason your phone HAS GPS is because the E911 requirement, and the modem provides AGPS to the user. That AGPS can then be fed to a proper GPS chip (which can provide GPS information even without service, but the AGPS data is used to help prime the GPS by providing epheremis data). So anything involving the phone GPS is not at the user level.
2) It may only work in Europe. Europe uses AML (Advanced Mobile Location) instead of E911. E911 is implemented in the control and network planes, so GPS data is sent via the cellular modem to the towers and embedded in the control information. Because European cell towers aren't as advanced, they don't have this information, so E911 doesn't work. Instead, they use AML which is data plane based. Effectively it gets GPS information, creates a data connection and sends the GPS data via that side channel. You could quite possibly fool this method since it involves user code to do it.
Only for encoding. There are open source ALAC decoders available, which is all you need to bring them into a more standard format.
Or you use water smartly and not waste it. Sure you have to truck some in now and again, but if they're envisioning a next-generation "smart city", smart water use would also be a part of it.
Our daily lives we waste enough water to make any third world country cry. Watering lawns is practically a complete waste of water unless you are using it wisely as a filter medium for example.
Lots of sunlight also means cheap solar stills for water purification.
And I'm sure Gates has considered the water issue. In fact, he may have bought it because of that - with climate changing, the real issue IS going to be access to water. (We are relatively fortunate in North America as we have almost half of the world's reserve of freshwater).
It could be a very smart play - get the technology used to recycle and conserve water working now, so when its really needed, you've just cornered the market in patents, and the technology has matured to be usable, while everyone else is scrambling to find fixes.
Oh, it's political all right. Apple offered the FBI help to unlock the phone. In fact, Apple reached out to the FBI for this - presuming the killer used Touch ID, it would be easy to unlock the phone! (Remember, there are a few ways to bypass a fingerprint sensor using fake fingerprints).
But the FBI stalled and stalled until the window closed. You can bet it's on purpose - Apple was offering, pre-emptively, to help them (probably conjuring up a fake finger to fool the sensor). Hell, I'm sure the FBI has access to PLENTY of labs that can do this, too!
So no, the FBI has INTENTIONALLY refused Apple's help. Why? Because the phone is not important at all. The FBI couldn't care less about the phone's contents. The political fight to remove encryption is the real target
The phone's data is unimportant. There is no evidence on the phone the FBI wants, guaranteed. Because if there was, why else would they refuse Apple's help? This is an emotional plea to get the public saying the evil phone companies are keeping them from doing their jobs.
Apple offered to help. The FBI deliberately ignored them. The FBI is who should account for the loss of evidence - they are the ones who deliberately destroyed it.
Yeah, I don't get the for-profit museum thing. Because there are a LOT of them. Granted, they're not your typical museums - giant grand buildings holding a ton of exhibits, but most of the little ones running down the street (especially in rural America) are generally for-profit. A lot of them are just a room with a bunch of stuff run by the owner who's showing the stuff.
They may not be officially "sanctioned" things, but there are a lot of those. Hell, watch American Pickers some time and you'll see they pick a lot of these museums.
And things have changed a lot in 20 years. For starters, the way we communicate - 20 years ago the Internet was just coming into form, something you used a computer to view and interact with. These days, everything's on the internet and you access it in so many more ways such that it's always at your fingertips. Smartphones, tablets, wireless networking, we're basically able to tap into this resource anytime and anywhere. 20 years ago it was a mere curiosity. Today it's a part of life and living, enough so that it's practically a requirement (try finding a job without it).
Granted, you have downsides like Facebook and the like, but you also have upsides - Facebook has probably reunited plenty of families and far-flung friends who were once scattered to the breeze, now you can talk to them as if they were right next door.
And let's not forget entertainment - 20 years ago if you wanted to watch a movie on DVD, you'd go to the video store, now the movies come to you (Netflix discs), or you stream them online. No late fees, no rushing Friday afternoons hoping to score the latest releases before they run out, etc.
Even medical care has increased significantly - a lot of treatments are simply better these days than 20 years ago. HIV and AIDS is no longer a death sentence they used to be 20 years ago - people can actually live full lives with HIV. Cancer is still around, but care is often better - even in terminal cases.
Manufacturing is better - 3D printers and the like have revolutionized the way people prototype new gadgets and devices.
Yes, it's true some things haven't changed - we still don't have flying cars, traffic is still a nightmare, and a good chunk of us still trudge to work or school every day. Though space exploration is somewhat interesting, since private space companies have really taken off lately. 20 years ago it was a long shot, but today, there are quite a few active private space companies and even more vying for stuff like the X-Prizes including launching rovers on the moon.
I don't think we'll get teleporters, money will still be a thing people fight about, we'd still dread the commute and traffic jams. But you cannot discount that our lives have changed quite significantly as well. There was no big bang, but rapid evolution.
20 years, you could imagine we'd still drive cars, but more will probably be electric which leads to interesting environmental consequences (what, I can't say). Drone delivery might not be a big thing, but in some places mail comes in centralized mailboxes, so maybe we'll see a return to community gathering spots where you get your mail and your Amazon deliveries at the same time.
Unfortunately, we live in an era of cheaters. Cheat programs take all sorts of forms, and are probably one of hte biggest turn-offs in online gaming.
This is especially true in e-sports games, where if you can get away with it, y ou can end up making some big bucks. Considering real athletes do it in real life (using performance enhancing drugs), there's a certain appeal to cheating.
The future of PC gaming is turning this way - considering how high PC piracy is, online authentication methods (usually by making it a multiplayer game) are required, and those also require anti-cheat methods. They are getting quite invasive because naturally, cheat programs are trying to hide. It may eventually get to a point where no one does esports on PCs anymore - you're restricted to console plays running approved code. (Which would suck since you also would probably lose things like customizations and all that).