The one thing I love about the Switch is it's both a home console and a semi-portable console.
The problem I have with both the Xbox One and PS4 is they're home consoles - basically I have to be sitting in front of my TV to enjoy the games, making it a distinct activity I have to block out time for. Great, yes, but I find I can't really block out the couple of hours to play so easily these days.
With the switch, not so much. If I can't play in front of the TV, you eject it, and boom, play on the small screen. Got a few minutes waiting in the car? Out comes the Switch. Basically, you can play the nice in-depth games like you have at home, on the go, and instead of pulling out your phone, you pull out the Switch.
For time-starved adults, this is an incredible console because of it. I can enjoy Mario and other games without having to invest the time in front of the TV. And instead of whipping out my phone or tablet and playing those games, I can play Switch.
For those lucky ones that can carve out hours in the mancave playing PS4 or Xbone, congratulations. For the rest of us who maybe get a half hour in front of the TV, well, I'll take the Switch for that, and for all those little breaks in the day. Funny how it's easy to find an idle 15-30 minute block randomly through the day than to be able to concentrate it into one big block in front of the TV.
Anything that increases the cost of spam scams relative to the returns is worth investigating to see if it's practical, because ultimately you have to attack the economics to kill the beast.
I'd actually like to see this run on my local system, though.
There was an older tool that was basically an automated version of FormF*cker. Basically it went to the spam web pages and filled in the forms with crap. After all, back then spam sent you a link to get more information from you, so the tools would fill in the data with plausible looking but crap data.
It apparently worked so well the companies behind it got DDoS'd because it completely corrupted the marketing databases when they realized 90% or more of it was pure made up data. And since a human had to go through it all, it turned the spam campaigns completely useless since they ended up with databases full of useless data.
Their security claim is bullshit, you can't tell me they shipped a device without a way to upgrade firmware.
Oh, they intended to. But business things happen.
They could have a falling out with the technology provider (who provided the base hardware). The end result is the technology provider withdrew their software licenses and Logitech can no longer produce a firmware update - they have no license to use the tools.
So even if they wanted to update the certificate, they couldn't.
Or, perhaps the technology provider went bankrupt and doesn't exist anymore. When Logitech went to update the certificate and generate new firmware, the tools couldn't talk to the license server and they ended up with the same problem.
Think about it this way - if they just wanted to kill the devices, they could just keep quiet and let the devices die on their own. Instead they decided to publish a notice about it, and even do a make-good offer at the same time by offering the current hardware (which is unrelated to the hardware that's being obsoleted) to users.
It's not a decision anyone takes likely - even if they stuck to their guns and offered free ugprades to those with units in warranty, it still costs money to do, and you're getting an upgrade to current hardware.
There aren't many competitors to what Harmony does - you can have a universal remote control, but those are generally pretty terrible without significant customizations, and the higher end remotes cost a significant amount of money (thousands). So offering free upgrades isn't something you take likely
By splitting the season long enough that they hope people won't cancel it since the next half is just around the corner.
True, however, it's also true that it's around the time of the winter haitus most TV shows undergo mid-season. In a typical TV season it starts around August or September, runs until November sweeps and a few episodes beyond, but by December all shows go on haitus until mid January or so when they all resume normal programming again.
I know Netflix has distorted the idea of a season, but the traditional reason for this is the episode filming pipeline is typucally 8-9 days or so, so you're burning through a summer's worth of episodes. Come winter haitus they have a few episodes left and are simply catching up on filming for the rest of the season.
There's often a spring haitus as well - something after February sweeps. Then it resumes late March and continues until June or so for the season finale.
Apple is a company that wants to make money. They also need to do things like, you know, pay people, rent/own/lease buildings/stores, pay for electricity, pay for marketing, bandwidth, servers, turn a profit, that sort of thing. It's almost as if they are selling phones in a capitalist society where they can set a price and people can choose to buy it or not. Gasp, they are selling their top of the line phone for significantly more than the parts required to make it cost!
Plus, Apple has to do demand-management. The iPhone X is neat, it's got a lot of neat stuff in it, but Apple has to price it right because they can't make enough to satisfy demand. Sure they could sell it at $800, but demand will outstrip supply so much that everyone will complain about it being constantly out of stock.
Add in scalpers and the price might very well be $1500.
Apple can only make so many of the things - there are parts that are just hard to make (e.g., the screen, the 3D camera) and Samsung cannot produce any more than they're already producing. Samsung might be able to revert one of their other lines for iPhone X screen production instead of Galaxy S/Note 8 production, but that only adds a fractional more amount of screens to the market. Ditto the 3D camera which is apparently the bottleneck at the moment.
There in lies the challenge - where do you price it so demand is high, but not too high (or you send people to the competition and leave money to scalpers), but it's also not so high that once you satisfy initial demand that you're forced to drop the price.
If you're investing in something because it's continued to climb and you're convinced it can't go down, you're simply wrong. It can, and it will. Maybe not tomorrow, but eventually. Bitcoin is a bit more insulated because it's designed to become harder to acquire over time (which coincidentally enriches early adopters), so the supply constriction enhances an increase in value (e.g. imagine what would've happened to home prices if the more people bought homes, the fewer homes builders were allowed to build). So its crash won't happen until enough people realize how stupid a trait that is for "currency" or something with no intrinsic value.
No, it will happen like all bubbles do - it pops when people start cashing out. It's worse with Bitcoin because its very low transaction rate means it can be extra volatile.
Even more volatile will be the exchanges - if someone were to convert more than a few bitcoins, will exchanges have the liquidity to perform the exchange? If you have say, 100 bitcoin and it reaches $10,000/BTC, you're looking at a million bucks. Will the exchange you use have the liquidity to cash it?
This could easily lead to a run as people trying to cash out run into exchanges unable to cash out - they simply run out of cash.
That's the likely scenario that will crash it - someone starts selling, exchanges stop being able to exchange and everyone is locked into bitcoins because there is no liquidity to convert it. The exchange rate falls sharply because exchanges with money will realize they will run out of it fast as the thunderous crowd of people trying to cash out come knocking.
shut down a cloud based service, forcing all your customers who paid for the products that depend on it to buy something else. Offer them a discount on your new cloud based service
The problem is SSL. The Harmony Link (not to be confused with the Harmony Hub) has a built-in SSL certificate that expires in 2018. Presumably, Logitech tried all they could to update the certificate, but given the age of the product, it likely wasn't possible. Those who are still in warranty will get a Harmony Hub for free, while those without have to contend with a discount.
I believe the Link was supposed to be a friendly thing - you went to the web site and set it up and it downloaded the configuration (hence needing the SSL certificate) to work. The Hub relies on the older style operation where you download a new configuration firmware to it, and thus eliminate the whole internet connection required aspect.
IoT gets more fun when you toss SSL and 30 day certificates into the mix - imagine needing to update your firmware every 30 days just to keep it working.
As for why Harmony requires a web service - it's how the devices will always have the latest device support - it doesn't matter how new it is, there will always be a command code that works. While general categories of things usually have similar sets (anyone with one of those One For All remotes know to have to try 3-4 codes to see if it works properly), the Harmony avoids that since it can get the exact command set.
Plus, you can get discrete codes into Harmony, something One For All type remotes don't have. And if you have new devices, it's nice to be able to have support immediately (Harmony was the only one to support remote controlled fans, for example). So it doesn't matter if someone invents a super new widget, if it uses standard consumer IR, Harmony will have support for it,even if the remote you have predates it by 20 years.
Side note, DTV customer service SUCKS since the AT&T takeover. We made a small change to our service, they screwed it up, then they screwed up the billing for it, and it has taken about 5-10 so far to try to get it fixed, and (as of right now) it's still not fixed. DTV was never perfect, but if there was a problem (and that was rare), it was usually fixed with a call or two. The current problem is not even the first we've had in the couple years since the takeover.
Your mistake is believing it's accidental. If it's a billing error, it means it was a billing "error" in their favor (or you wouldn't be calling them about it).
Think about it this way - if they can screw maybe 10% of their subscriber base out a few extra bucks a month, that's a few million in the bank. Sure they'll call and bitch, but eventually they'll give up of the 2 hour + times on the phone dealing with a $3 overcharge
And heck, they probably know what phone numbers you call from, so they can "all agents are currently busy andd we'll handle your call in priority order" you for an extra half hour or more.
The goal is to make it not worth your time to call them to fix it so they can keep dinging you an extra few bucks a month.
Same with the "you'll see a credit on your next bill". They hope you'll forget about the money by then, too.
Of course, all it takes is a few plug-in attempts to create kernel panics...or is that moral panics?
I've had it happen to me while I was developing a USB device. Plugged it into a Linux machine and it kernel panics immeidately. No, plug it into Windows and nothing happens.
It turned out I screwed up the USB descriptors I was returning - Linux didn't like that I set the descriptor type wrong.
Granted, this is something I did many many many years ago (around the time of the great east cost blackout) so I expect that it would be somewhat more robust now.
It's also interesting to see how different OSes reacted - the USB descriptor is a fixed size, but some OSes (Windows, notably) only do a partial request - I think it was 5 bytes - in order to get the USB descriptor type and length bytes, then it re-ran the request with the proper size. Linux at the time simply did a proper sized request - the descriptor size is fixed and unchanging so what Windows did was completely unnecessary unless it was to ensure that devices responded properly.
This really only applies to the mobile web, and in the mobile web, there are only two browsers: Chrome (at 60% of all users) and Safari (30%). Sure, Firefox has a mobile version, but no one uses it (less than 1%).
The only reason Safari has so many users is because you can't use any other browser on iOS, which means that 30% above is basically "all iOS users."
So they may have "broken their own product" but it's not like there's a lot of choice in mobile browsers, and your choice is effectively dictated by platform.
Well, they all use WebKit internally - though perhaps Google broke something in their fork to make it terrible. It's funny how the article doesn't say if Safari suffers the same problem, indicating a problem within WebKit itself.
As for iOS, you're only forced to use the built in web rendering engine - everything else is changable. In fact, it's trivial to create a webview that has your own user-agent header. So anyone using Safari is using Safari - anyone using Chrome on iOS will be seen as a Chrome user because you're supposed to set the user-agent appropriately.
The only thing Safari can do that a webview cannot is JIT for javascript - and that's because Safari on iOS runs at an even lower permission level than an app.
Apple has one major release stream. Android have several with security updates backported back to version 4.4.
There is more of a requirement to run the latest shiny for iOS, whereas in Android the requirement is not there and the shiny is reserved for customers paying for updated devices.
That's because on iOS, more users will be on the latest shiny OS than on Android, where you have the majority of users still on 3-4 year old OSes because that's all they ever will get.
And 4.4 security updates stopped as of October. 5 updates will stop soon enough.
If you're an iOS developer, you can target iOS 11 for your apps because a good chunk of the population will be using it. If you're an Android developer, targeting Oreo will net you a minuscule part of the Android userbase. You'd want to target Android 6 or so to capture the majority of Android users.
The pathetic part is realizing that this bullshit no-reservation policy works. If we want to change this, then we have to get rid of the fucking stupid mentality that queues are somehow hip and cool.
It doesn't help that since the invention of online reservations, actual reservation fulfillment has dropped - instead of people making one reservation ahead of time and going to that restaurant, they make 10 reservations through OpenTable and then pick one of those and screw the other 9.
So restaurants have two options - one is to take a credit card and have a "no-show" fee for reserving a table you're not going to occupy (but it costs the restaurant a table and creates a queue outside), or simply not take reservations at all.
And yes, no-shows are a big deal, because they occupy a table that could otherwise be used to serve a walk-in guest. Instead, that guest is now sitting waiting for a table, creating a queue. Yes, there are restaurants who hate queues too - they want guests in and eating and out so t hey can serve the next round - high throughput for high profits.
Well, I don't use facebook much at all - maybe I login a total of once a month (on average - I usually go 6+ months without logging in at all - enough so Facebook sends me emails about how to get back online). I don't have any photos up other my profile photo, which is a scan of an actual photo that was taken ages ago. I didn't have an electronic copy of it.
I didn't install the facebook app on my phone (I don't use it often enough to justify it), neither my iPhone, nor my iPad, nor any of the Android phones I have (which are Nexus models and thus do not come preloaded with it).
And yet, earlier this year, it came up with a really uncanny recommendation - it actually found my flight instructor, someone who I lost contact with about a decade and a half ago when he went on to pursue an airline career (typical pilot career progression - you're a student, then you get your private, you work on your commercial license, then you become a flight instructor until you can get hired by a regional, etc).
Sure, he's active on Facebook, but not only am I not, we have absolutely nothing in common - no mutual friends, etc. Heck, I'm pretty sure I didn't even put the name of the flight school I went to in my facebook profile. And the scanned photo has no geolocation information so it was a scan.
Yet one day I get an email saying he was the top #1 pick of someone I might know.
The photo I have was of my solo - so it's just me, in front of a Cessna 172 (i.e., one of the most generic airplanes out there). I'm not really sure how Facebook put us together, but given the limited data set it can be fairly shocking.
If it's that easy then why doesn't a Samsung phone have the the best smartphone display according to DisplayMate? Maybe there might have been some improvements made by Apple. Also it might be the case that Samsung as very large corporation with different markets and divisions might not have total synergy and cooperation across different divisions.
Actually, it's because Samsung prefers to have a vibrant display over an accurate one. OLEDs are known for awesome saturated colors, and Samsung capitalizes heavily on that.
The problem is, if you go for that, while images "pop", they also get horribly inaccurate - reds can be too red, for example. Likewise, it's also often too blue. So Samsung may make the displays, but they don't really calibrate them on their devices. They pretty much exploit it to give you those super-saturated colors at the expense of color accuracy and gamut.
So a Samsung phone will "pop", but take a few photos and things look off. You can set them into sRGB mode, but then they look horrible.
Apple chose to make the Samsung display less saturated, and more accurate. Since OLEDs naturally have an increased color gamut, they enabled switching between sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, so you can have your wide HDR video gamuts but not sacrifice color accuracy.
Add to that decreased reflectance (i.e., how much glare), and color shift/color decrease as you increase viewing angle and those measures are what is being objectively measured. Samsung may very well have all those attributes, but their color inaccuracy is what killed them.
I would expect if you compared an iPhone X and an Samsung S8 together, the S8 screen will seem more "vibrant" and "pop" over the iPhone's screen. It'll be very pretty but super-saturated colors can make photos look unrealistic so a few photos will leave something to be desired.
And yes, Samsung has had OLED screens for years. The problem for Apple has always been availability - Samsung likely could not handle the volume of iPhone orders until this year - it takes time to ramp up, and the iPhone X will pretty much demand Samsung produce twice as many screens as they ever needed. (There aren't many manufacturers of OLED screen making equipment, and of them, they can only produce about 3 machines a year. Apple probably has had to purchase their entire output for several years running so Samsung would be able to even have the manufacturing capacity to make another 80+M screens a year, up from 80+M screens a year).
Most thieves just want to break open the door, grab a TV and run out. I know someone this happened to while she was in her back yard. Knowing exactly how your house is laid out before hand will help them immensely. Sure thre are thieves that are after jewelry but that's not necessarily the kind of thief we're talking about here.
No, inexperienced thieves are after TVs. TVs are big, bulky and once you get one, you're stuck carrying it.
Experienced thieves avoid the TV, go for the more portable stuff - cash, jewelry, and other stuff they can march out with quickly and without the bulk. This lets them get in and out faster, not be hindered by something big nor be completely obvious what your intentions were. I mean, if you're carrying a TV down the street, that's pretty unusual. But if you have a small bag and stuff, not so unusual.
The goal is to blend in, so stealing lots of small but valuable items is far better than stealing a TV. Likewise, DVD players and such are worthless items. Maybe if you had a recent game console or something, but even then they're not worth much.
Laptops are crimes of opportunity and still pretty worthless if you have an entire house to pick. In fact, in general, thieves will avoid electronics as the payout's quite low.
Interestingly, this is one of the things that turned me off. Amazon are increasingly defaulting to Amazon Logistics to deliver rather than UPS/FedEx/USPS. Now, instead of getting a driver in a uniform with a union job, decent benefits and a pension plan, I get a guy that owns a white van. Where previously there was a large incentive not to go rogue, that is markedly diminished if the folk delivering are self-employed in the gig economy with less income and stability.
I believe most of Amazon Logistics people (at least in Canada) are actually Amazon employees. Sure they may not be paid as well as a UPS/FedEx/Canada Post driver, but they are employees (probably part-time) so they get at least some benefits. They aren't "gig economy" folks who Amazon hires to do deliveries - these are full fledged drivers with a bunch of packages to deliver daily. We keep seeing the same person every day (because there's usually someone who ordered a package from Amazon).
I mean, they're not generally stupid.....Do all the people at Amazon working on this "solution" freely admit strangers into their homes when they are away?
Could be a millennial thing who basically lives on Amazon purchases but is often not around to wait for them and doesn't want to leave boxes of Amazon stuff on the front porch.
So they would love for Amazon to have the driver drop the stuff off inside the house rather than wait for the delivery themselves.
Wait a sec. You 'hated' (rather strong word there) the option of being able to have a spare battery because you couldn't remember to keep it charged? And your ancient iPhone has lint in the headphone jack because you didn't use it? Removable batteries are extremely useful for many. Some of us go camping, or find ourselves in situations where charging is not an option. Also, regardless of use habits lithium ion batteries only last a few years. What kind of battery life are you getting out of that iPhone 4 these days? The battery you can't replace. As far as the headphone jack goes, some of us have nice gear and want to hear our music losslessly. Bluetooth has come a long way for sure, but the audio is still compressed. Not trying to pick your post apart, but you sort of came across as saying those features are useless or outdated or something simply because you don't have any use for them.
Yes, I coudln't keep the batteries charged because I have to swap the batteries out - unplug the phone, turn it off, take out the battery, swap in the dead battery, put the cover on, put it back on charge, turn it on and let it boot up again.
It's not that I couldn't remember to keep them charged, it was the effort keeping them charged. I put the phone in the charger, then you'd have to wait 4-5 hours for it to charge then swap the battery to charge the spares.
In the old days of the DynaTAC and such, the chargers had extra docking bays which automatically charged the extra batteries after charging the phone battery. I think even when I had the StarTAC (which was the phone before the one I was talking about) it had the same ability
As for my iPhone 4s, it gets me through, using it more than that old phone ever did (which I replaced with the original iPhone). And if I run short, I have an external USB battery pack, which I can charge at the same time as the phone, so it's always charged.
For lossless audio, the 30 pin dock works great - it's got a line output, and I believe you can even plug a USB DAC into it for even better lossless connectivity. Why use the weedy headphone amp on the phone when you can use the nice line out for analog to your nice amp, or USB to get real lossless audio.
It sounds like a problem with the carrier servers not the phone. But what the heck Iâ(TM)ll say Apple is Bad and people who buy the product are idiots, to help reinforce your confirmation bias to make you feel good. Because a person choice in a phone that they will have on their person for the next few years, has to be based purely on price, removal battery and a headphone jack.
It's both, actually. Apple's servers have been known to overload on release days.
The reason for activation is simple - every iPhone manufactured is identical in programming. The modems are unlocked and are free to accept any programming blob you give them. When Apple sells an iPhone, the serial numbers are recorded on Apple's internal database - who Apple sold the iPhone to and on what terms. The "who" can be an individual if you bought it from Apple direct, or it can be a carrier if you bought it through them, or subsidized through them. The terms are easy - either the phone was sold fully unlocked, or locked to a carrier (or realistically, lock-to-sim, which means the baseband will lock to whatever SIM is installed).
If the phone was sold as a contract phone, then it's lock-to-sim or lock-to-carrier, which means the baseband will SIM-lock to whatever SIM is in there (regardless if it's the right carrier), or lock itself to a particular carrier. If it's unlocked, it will stay unlocked.
This is done so Apple doesn't program the modem firmware at the factory - they make millions of them, and it lets them dynamically allocate it - if a carrier doesn't want them, it's trivial to reallocate a batch of iPhones to a new carrier by updating the serial number database.
And if, like the thieves who stole a bunch of iPhones from UPS, the phones are marked as stolen, well, Apple can refuse to activate them at all, so the thieves have units they can sell to iFixit because it's only good for parts.
The secondary purpose of activation is to finish the OS signing process to ensure you can't roll the OS back.
As for removable battery and headphone jack, the last time I had a phone with removable battery, I hate it. Sure it needed it because every time you used the camera, you had to reboot the phone or the battery would be dead in 3 hours. So it was handy then, but then I had to carry 2 or 3 batteries all the time, because I'd forget to charge them up aferwards. You know, you have to charge them up, then unplug them, remove the battery, swap them, charge it up again, etc. Annoying to do especially in the middle of the night. How you can maintain a fleet of 2 of more batteries ready to go escapes me if you have to keep swapping the phone battery every few hours. (Perhaps that's why people charge in the office? They charge one battery overnight, then swap them at the office and charge their spare?)
And I looked at the headphone jack on my iPhone 4s (the phone I'm replacing), it's full of pocket lint and fluff. Tells you how often I actually used it.
And at least so far you are right that Apple does appear to in general be responsible with customer data and privacy. So far... And the reason they can do that is that they haven't needed to get into the ad business to maintain their margins. It's actually one of the reasons I have an iPhone instead of Android. It's not that I think the Android system is bad (it's better in many ways) but Google develops Android specifically so that they can continue to make money with their core advertising business which does not and cannot respect my privacy and data. It's a built in conflict of interest that is not in my favor. I'm actually willing to pay Apple a more to avoid that issue. Your mileage may vary of course.
No, Apple had an ad business. It was called iAds, though I suspect it was created at the behest of Google, for iAds was never terribly good, yet the DoJ deemed it a worthy enough competitor to allow Google to buy up AdMob and other mobile ad networks. Given it's relatively high buy in, iAds never drew much advertiser interest, and Apple was forced to open it up to developers to promote their apps, otherwise there was literally no ad content on iAds. A couple of years ago, Apple killed iAds.
But I still think Google propped it up just to have "competition".
Tim Cook saw a strategic opening for Apple when he saw Android rise in popularity - privacy. Given Snowden and everything else, he realized Apple was in a very unique position, especially given Google's recent privacy policy update allowing sharing of all data amongst Google. (This is different from the recent privacy policy update allowing all data to be shared among Alphabet - the Google one meant stuff like YouTube and Search shared information, while Alphabet included the ad networks too). He realized that he should focus iOS on the one thing Google cannot do - data protection and privacy. No point doing anything else - any UI element will get implement on Android in short order.
But what Google cannot copy into Android is privacy - because of the way Google works. Apple can, because Apple's need for the user information is minimal. It's why every Apple keynote stresses what happens on-device, or what data never leaves the device and other things. It also helps that with the government doing data requests, Apple can say "we do not have that information as it's not something we collect". Get access to iCloud, for example, and you will not get access to the keychain passwords because iOS refuses to back those up to iCloud. And Apple cannot hand over what they don't have, so access to the iCloud information is strictly reserved to the few things iCloud does.
"Jcbsera did not catch the bug during development because he tested his app's new version only inside the Android emulator provided by the Android Studio application. The bug did not manifest in the same way in the emulator as on a real device. It was only after the developer pushed the update to his users that he noticed and discovered the bug after users started flooding his Play Store page with crash complaints and bad reviews."
He didn't even try the app on a real device. That's "move fast and break things" in action.
Well, that's the problem with android - "fragmentation". You can't expect every developer to own every single Android device out there, so somewhere along the line they have to take the leap that it works. And if you don't own an Android 8 device, well, the emulator is all you have. Given the emulator is running a real Android 8 image you would expect it to be faithfully reproduce the Android 8 experience.
If developers only set their apps to devices that were actually tested, then the Play Store would be dreadfully bare if you were running anything other than maybe the top 3-4 handsets.
The article points to Apple's support site that states clearly "When you search your photos, all of the face recognition and scene and object detection are done completely on your device."
It is great that the AI is finally moving off the cloud and onto the device. This is where it belongs. We should be highly praising any software that implements personal assistance features like this locally. They have the potential of eventually supporting personal clouds made up of nothing but my devices with cradle to grave encryption.
Yes, Tim Cook has been saying this for at least a year now - all the recognition happens on your phone or on your computer. It's why if you have the same photos, but multiple devices, they will come up with different conclusions. They run independently of each other.
I suppose they could also share system state through iCloud, again encrypted so Apple can't get at the information, but it's easier to show it's all on-device when multiple devices come to different conclusions.
And remember, Apple doesn't want that information. Every bit of data Apple stores or has on you is data that's subject to government inquiry. It costs Apple money to look up that information, so if they can avoid storing it, they will. It's why iCloud backups of iDevices never include passwords - Apple cannot provide what they never had. (To backup passwords requires iTunes and an encrypted backup - Apple doesn't want it, so you have to do local backups).
The downside is of course, it's poorer. Google, Microsoft, etc., can run powerful servers on their huge data sets for learning and categorizing. All Apple can do is what they have in public data sets and what each device learns from each user. It's a far smaller data set, and thus it's classification will be less good. It's why Siri has more issues than Google Assistant or Cortana - the Siri team can do AI only on what limited data you agreed to, while Google and Microsoft can run it against their entire data set (especially since Alphabet's privacy policy allows sharing of data among all Alphabet companies)..
In Canada, a jury trial is an option the defense has for criminal cases. You can choose - go against a judge, or a jury. It's not mandatory you use a jury, and in general, it's a lot less showy.
General wisdom is you don't generally want a jury trial - you're already starting off with jurors who you pulled from their daily routine, and in general, the Crown only puts up charges they have a reasonable chance of succeeding with. So the record for jury trials isn't generally good, in fact, it can often be worse. With a judge-only trial the judge is forced to be objective (it can be appealed, of course) and generally judges are more factual and less tolerant of "showy" moves (less of the "jury will disregard the evidence" since the judge will simply exclude it).
Unlike typical Japanese media enterprises that exert their draconian copyright laws to squash usage of IP (including what Americans consider to be "fair use"), the creative forces that started Hatsune Miku put her design as part of the Creative Commons, thus freeing her design to amateur and professional artists alike for reuse. As a result, the original rights holder receive even greater recognition for their voice synthesizer software line from the artists creating all the derivative visual works involving her likeness.
Or, perhaps, the original rights holder was simply trying to sell their vocoder?.
Create the character, release it for free, run a few fan expos and you've built up thousands to hundreds of thousands of people spending $200+ for your vocoder. That's quite a few millions of dollars. The alternative is to sell maybe a thousand copies of it to those professionals who use vocoders.
Nothing to do with fandom or freedom, but a simple marketing campaign. Like the Asterisk PBX software - its creators simply wrote software to sell their phone line interface hardware and released it.
No, the vocoder is the furthest thing from "free" you can get, it's proprietary, commercially licensed software (that runs on Windows), available in English and Japanese versions. Want Miku to sing your song? Buy the vocoder and you're done. But how did you hear about it? Probably from one of the many Miku-fests around full of neat artwork that people created.
That's not to say it isn't good - it's actually a pretty damn nice vocoder. (I found out from a TV science news magazine show (Daily Planet - for all you Discovery Canada viewers) when they went to Japan and they demonstrated it.). That said, it's apparently one of the best-selling pieces of software on Amazon.co.jp.
Hey, that's some great customer feedback from someone who wants a robust and secure management engine on their machine. but -
> Even if you ignore the "it's an NSA backdoor" FUD,... I would like to ask you if this is FUD then why is it fucking impossible to buy a modern CPU **without** these back doors (oh, sorry, "management interfaces" if you insist), despite persistent calls for them and despite the intensity with which they are loathed?
Because that management firmware is involved in... managing the processor.
Think about all the features it does - at a basic level, you can power on and reset the machine. That means the firmware must be able to turn on and turn off the PC, as well as reset it. Plus sleep modes - entering sleep and exiting out of sleep (and the various conditions to wake it up - network, for exaple).
Modern CPUs are complex beasts - even the little ARM SoC in your phone often has a management CPU on it handling power. It boots up when the chip powers up and manages the entire system power state. When you boot the main CPU cores (the one that runs your OS, like Android or Linux), the little management CPU (typically an ARM core, usually an ARM7, ARM9 or Cortex-M series - you want a CPU that sips power because it's running anytime there's power in the system) turns on the power rails while holding the main CPU cores in reset. It also often sets up the pre-boot environment - writing a simple start program to the CPU cores to run - usually load memory address X, if it's Y, then address Z has the boot code address, else wait and loop). Once the rails come up, it triggers the first CPU core to begin the boot.
Likewise, the Intel ME firmware does the same - preparing the power supplies in order to boot the main CPU, handling sleep conditions (including setting boot code addresses on wakeup, etc).
Disabling the firmware means you disable the chip's ability to boot itself - the ME processor is required in order to boot the processor, prepare it for sleep, wake it up, etc.
The NSA may have disabled versions of it, but it's really using the firmware flag to disable it (which is how Purism "disables" it as well).
Long gone are the days where you just applied power, a clock, and the CPU ran - modern CPUs are complex and with complex power needs (driven by their complex power schedules when coupled with frequency changing, turbo modes, etc).
Hell, I remember when I used to do frequency and voltage scaling on old SoCs - there was a "leap of faith" moment where you issued the change instruction and hoped everything came out on the other side. But this case only required one main power rail (Core voltage) which you adjusted, waited for confirmation (raise voltage before ramping frequency up, lower voltage once frequency ramped down). When your CPU has multiple rails, hundreds of power pins, and 3-6 voltage regulators to control, the main system software is inadequate. You want a sub-processor that can halt the main CPU, tweak all the voltages and rails, then once stable, re-start the CPUs again , otherwise you're just risking a main system crash.
Slashdot Mirror
The one thing I love about the Switch is it's both a home console and a semi-portable console.
The problem I have with both the Xbox One and PS4 is they're home consoles - basically I have to be sitting in front of my TV to enjoy the games, making it a distinct activity I have to block out time for. Great, yes, but I find I can't really block out the couple of hours to play so easily these days.
With the switch, not so much. If I can't play in front of the TV, you eject it, and boom, play on the small screen. Got a few minutes waiting in the car? Out comes the Switch. Basically, you can play the nice in-depth games like you have at home, on the go, and instead of pulling out your phone, you pull out the Switch.
For time-starved adults, this is an incredible console because of it. I can enjoy Mario and other games without having to invest the time in front of the TV. And instead of whipping out my phone or tablet and playing those games, I can play Switch.
For those lucky ones that can carve out hours in the mancave playing PS4 or Xbone, congratulations. For the rest of us who maybe get a half hour in front of the TV, well, I'll take the Switch for that, and for all those little breaks in the day. Funny how it's easy to find an idle 15-30 minute block randomly through the day than to be able to concentrate it into one big block in front of the TV.
There was an older tool that was basically an automated version of FormF*cker. Basically it went to the spam web pages and filled in the forms with crap. After all, back then spam sent you a link to get more information from you, so the tools would fill in the data with plausible looking but crap data.
It apparently worked so well the companies behind it got DDoS'd because it completely corrupted the marketing databases when they realized 90% or more of it was pure made up data. And since a human had to go through it all, it turned the spam campaigns completely useless since they ended up with databases full of useless data.
Oh, they intended to. But business things happen.
They could have a falling out with the technology provider (who provided the base hardware). The end result is the technology provider withdrew their software licenses and Logitech can no longer produce a firmware update - they have no license to use the tools.
So even if they wanted to update the certificate, they couldn't.
Or, perhaps the technology provider went bankrupt and doesn't exist anymore. When Logitech went to update the certificate and generate new firmware, the tools couldn't talk to the license server and they ended up with the same problem.
Think about it this way - if they just wanted to kill the devices, they could just keep quiet and let the devices die on their own. Instead they decided to publish a notice about it, and even do a make-good offer at the same time by offering the current hardware (which is unrelated to the hardware that's being obsoleted) to users.
It's not a decision anyone takes likely - even if they stuck to their guns and offered free ugprades to those with units in warranty, it still costs money to do, and you're getting an upgrade to current hardware.
There aren't many competitors to what Harmony does - you can have a universal remote control, but those are generally pretty terrible without significant customizations, and the higher end remotes cost a significant amount of money (thousands). So offering free upgrades isn't something you take likely
True, however, it's also true that it's around the time of the winter haitus most TV shows undergo mid-season. In a typical TV season it starts around August or September, runs until November sweeps and a few episodes beyond, but by December all shows go on haitus until mid January or so when they all resume normal programming again.
I know Netflix has distorted the idea of a season, but the traditional reason for this is the episode filming pipeline is typucally 8-9 days or so, so you're burning through a summer's worth of episodes. Come winter haitus they have a few episodes left and are simply catching up on filming for the rest of the season.
There's often a spring haitus as well - something after February sweeps. Then it resumes late March and continues until June or so for the season finale.
Plus, Apple has to do demand-management. The iPhone X is neat, it's got a lot of neat stuff in it, but Apple has to price it right because they can't make enough to satisfy demand. Sure they could sell it at $800, but demand will outstrip supply so much that everyone will complain about it being constantly out of stock.
Add in scalpers and the price might very well be $1500.
Apple can only make so many of the things - there are parts that are just hard to make (e.g., the screen, the 3D camera) and Samsung cannot produce any more than they're already producing. Samsung might be able to revert one of their other lines for iPhone X screen production instead of Galaxy S/Note 8 production, but that only adds a fractional more amount of screens to the market. Ditto the 3D camera which is apparently the bottleneck at the moment.
There in lies the challenge - where do you price it so demand is high, but not too high (or you send people to the competition and leave money to scalpers), but it's also not so high that once you satisfy initial demand that you're forced to drop the price.
No, it will happen like all bubbles do - it pops when people start cashing out. It's worse with Bitcoin because its very low transaction rate means it can be extra volatile.
Even more volatile will be the exchanges - if someone were to convert more than a few bitcoins, will exchanges have the liquidity to perform the exchange? If you have say, 100 bitcoin and it reaches $10,000/BTC, you're looking at a million bucks. Will the exchange you use have the liquidity to cash it?
This could easily lead to a run as people trying to cash out run into exchanges unable to cash out - they simply run out of cash.
That's the likely scenario that will crash it - someone starts selling, exchanges stop being able to exchange and everyone is locked into bitcoins because there is no liquidity to convert it. The exchange rate falls sharply because exchanges with money will realize they will run out of it fast as the thunderous crowd of people trying to cash out come knocking.
The problem is SSL. The Harmony Link (not to be confused with the Harmony Hub) has a built-in SSL certificate that expires in 2018. Presumably, Logitech tried all they could to update the certificate, but given the age of the product, it likely wasn't possible. Those who are still in warranty will get a Harmony Hub for free, while those without have to contend with a discount.
I believe the Link was supposed to be a friendly thing - you went to the web site and set it up and it downloaded the configuration (hence needing the SSL certificate) to work. The Hub relies on the older style operation where you download a new configuration firmware to it, and thus eliminate the whole internet connection required aspect.
IoT gets more fun when you toss SSL and 30 day certificates into the mix - imagine needing to update your firmware every 30 days just to keep it working.
As for why Harmony requires a web service - it's how the devices will always have the latest device support - it doesn't matter how new it is, there will always be a command code that works. While general categories of things usually have similar sets (anyone with one of those One For All remotes know to have to try 3-4 codes to see if it works properly), the Harmony avoids that since it can get the exact command set.
Plus, you can get discrete codes into Harmony, something One For All type remotes don't have. And if you have new devices, it's nice to be able to have support immediately (Harmony was the only one to support remote controlled fans, for example). So it doesn't matter if someone invents a super new widget, if it uses standard consumer IR, Harmony will have support for it,even if the remote you have predates it by 20 years.
Your mistake is believing it's accidental. If it's a billing error, it means it was a billing "error" in their favor (or you wouldn't be calling them about it).
Think about it this way - if they can screw maybe 10% of their subscriber base out a few extra bucks a month, that's a few million in the bank. Sure they'll call and bitch, but eventually they'll give up of the 2 hour + times on the phone dealing with a $3 overcharge
And heck, they probably know what phone numbers you call from, so they can "all agents are currently busy andd we'll handle your call in priority order" you for an extra half hour or more.
The goal is to make it not worth your time to call them to fix it so they can keep dinging you an extra few bucks a month.
Same with the "you'll see a credit on your next bill". They hope you'll forget about the money by then, too.
I've had it happen to me while I was developing a USB device. Plugged it into a Linux machine and it kernel panics immeidately. No, plug it into Windows and nothing happens.
It turned out I screwed up the USB descriptors I was returning - Linux didn't like that I set the descriptor type wrong.
Granted, this is something I did many many many years ago (around the time of the great east cost blackout) so I expect that it would be somewhat more robust now.
It's also interesting to see how different OSes reacted - the USB descriptor is a fixed size, but some OSes (Windows, notably) only do a partial request - I think it was 5 bytes - in order to get the USB descriptor type and length bytes, then it re-ran the request with the proper size. Linux at the time simply did a proper sized request - the descriptor size is fixed and unchanging so what Windows did was completely unnecessary unless it was to ensure that devices responded properly.
Well, they all use WebKit internally - though perhaps Google broke something in their fork to make it terrible. It's funny how the article doesn't say if Safari suffers the same problem, indicating a problem within WebKit itself.
As for iOS, you're only forced to use the built in web rendering engine - everything else is changable. In fact, it's trivial to create a webview that has your own user-agent header. So anyone using Safari is using Safari - anyone using Chrome on iOS will be seen as a Chrome user because you're supposed to set the user-agent appropriately.
The only thing Safari can do that a webview cannot is JIT for javascript - and that's because Safari on iOS runs at an even lower permission level than an app.
That's because on iOS, more users will be on the latest shiny OS than on Android, where you have the majority of users still on 3-4 year old OSes because that's all they ever will get.
And 4.4 security updates stopped as of October. 5 updates will stop soon enough.
If you're an iOS developer, you can target iOS 11 for your apps because a good chunk of the population will be using it. If you're an Android developer, targeting Oreo will net you a minuscule part of the Android userbase. You'd want to target Android 6 or so to capture the majority of Android users.
It doesn't help that since the invention of online reservations, actual reservation fulfillment has dropped - instead of people making one reservation ahead of time and going to that restaurant, they make 10 reservations through OpenTable and then pick one of those and screw the other 9.
So restaurants have two options - one is to take a credit card and have a "no-show" fee for reserving a table you're not going to occupy (but it costs the restaurant a table and creates a queue outside), or simply not take reservations at all.
And yes, no-shows are a big deal, because they occupy a table that could otherwise be used to serve a walk-in guest. Instead, that guest is now sitting waiting for a table, creating a queue. Yes, there are restaurants who hate queues too - they want guests in and eating and out so t hey can serve the next round - high throughput for high profits.
Well, I don't use facebook much at all - maybe I login a total of once a month (on average - I usually go 6+ months without logging in at all - enough so Facebook sends me emails about how to get back online). I don't have any photos up other my profile photo, which is a scan of an actual photo that was taken ages ago. I didn't have an electronic copy of it.
I didn't install the facebook app on my phone (I don't use it often enough to justify it), neither my iPhone, nor my iPad, nor any of the Android phones I have (which are Nexus models and thus do not come preloaded with it).
And yet, earlier this year, it came up with a really uncanny recommendation - it actually found my flight instructor, someone who I lost contact with about a decade and a half ago when he went on to pursue an airline career (typical pilot career progression - you're a student, then you get your private, you work on your commercial license, then you become a flight instructor until you can get hired by a regional, etc).
Sure, he's active on Facebook, but not only am I not, we have absolutely nothing in common - no mutual friends, etc. Heck, I'm pretty sure I didn't even put the name of the flight school I went to in my facebook profile. And the scanned photo has no geolocation information so it was a scan.
Yet one day I get an email saying he was the top #1 pick of someone I might know.
The photo I have was of my solo - so it's just me, in front of a Cessna 172 (i.e., one of the most generic airplanes out there). I'm not really sure how Facebook put us together, but given the limited data set it can be fairly shocking.
Actually, it's because Samsung prefers to have a vibrant display over an accurate one. OLEDs are known for awesome saturated colors, and Samsung capitalizes heavily on that.
The problem is, if you go for that, while images "pop", they also get horribly inaccurate - reds can be too red, for example. Likewise, it's also often too blue. So Samsung may make the displays, but they don't really calibrate them on their devices. They pretty much exploit it to give you those super-saturated colors at the expense of color accuracy and gamut.
So a Samsung phone will "pop", but take a few photos and things look off. You can set them into sRGB mode, but then they look horrible.
Apple chose to make the Samsung display less saturated, and more accurate. Since OLEDs naturally have an increased color gamut, they enabled switching between sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, so you can have your wide HDR video gamuts but not sacrifice color accuracy.
Add to that decreased reflectance (i.e., how much glare), and color shift/color decrease as you increase viewing angle and those measures are what is being objectively measured. Samsung may very well have all those attributes, but their color inaccuracy is what killed them.
I would expect if you compared an iPhone X and an Samsung S8 together, the S8 screen will seem more "vibrant" and "pop" over the iPhone's screen. It'll be very pretty but super-saturated colors can make photos look unrealistic so a few photos will leave something to be desired.
And yes, Samsung has had OLED screens for years. The problem for Apple has always been availability - Samsung likely could not handle the volume of iPhone orders until this year - it takes time to ramp up, and the iPhone X will pretty much demand Samsung produce twice as many screens as they ever needed. (There aren't many manufacturers of OLED screen making equipment, and of them, they can only produce about 3 machines a year. Apple probably has had to purchase their entire output for several years running so Samsung would be able to even have the manufacturing capacity to make another 80+M screens a year, up from 80+M screens a year).
No, inexperienced thieves are after TVs. TVs are big, bulky and once you get one, you're stuck carrying it.
Experienced thieves avoid the TV, go for the more portable stuff - cash, jewelry, and other stuff they can march out with quickly and without the bulk. This lets them get in and out faster, not be hindered by something big nor be completely obvious what your intentions were. I mean, if you're carrying a TV down the street, that's pretty unusual. But if you have a small bag and stuff, not so unusual.
The goal is to blend in, so stealing lots of small but valuable items is far better than stealing a TV. Likewise, DVD players and such are worthless items. Maybe if you had a recent game console or something, but even then they're not worth much.
Laptops are crimes of opportunity and still pretty worthless if you have an entire house to pick. In fact, in general, thieves will avoid electronics as the payout's quite low.
I believe most of Amazon Logistics people (at least in Canada) are actually Amazon employees. Sure they may not be paid as well as a UPS/FedEx/Canada Post driver, but they are employees (probably part-time) so they get at least some benefits. They aren't "gig economy" folks who Amazon hires to do deliveries - these are full fledged drivers with a bunch of packages to deliver daily. We keep seeing the same person every day (because there's usually someone who ordered a package from Amazon).
Could be a millennial thing who basically lives on Amazon purchases but is often not around to wait for them and doesn't want to leave boxes of Amazon stuff on the front porch.
So they would love for Amazon to have the driver drop the stuff off inside the house rather than wait for the delivery themselves.
Yes, I coudln't keep the batteries charged because I have to swap the batteries out - unplug the phone, turn it off, take out the battery, swap in the dead battery, put the cover on, put it back on charge, turn it on and let it boot up again.
It's not that I couldn't remember to keep them charged, it was the effort keeping them charged. I put the phone in the charger, then you'd have to wait 4-5 hours for it to charge then swap the battery to charge the spares.
In the old days of the DynaTAC and such, the chargers had extra docking bays which automatically charged the extra batteries after charging the phone battery. I think even when I had the StarTAC (which was the phone before the one I was talking about) it had the same ability
As for my iPhone 4s, it gets me through, using it more than that old phone ever did (which I replaced with the original iPhone). And if I run short, I have an external USB battery pack, which I can charge at the same time as the phone, so it's always charged.
For lossless audio, the 30 pin dock works great - it's got a line output, and I believe you can even plug a USB DAC into it for even better lossless connectivity. Why use the weedy headphone amp on the phone when you can use the nice line out for analog to your nice amp, or USB to get real lossless audio.
It's both, actually. Apple's servers have been known to overload on release days.
The reason for activation is simple - every iPhone manufactured is identical in programming. The modems are unlocked and are free to accept any programming blob you give them. When Apple sells an iPhone, the serial numbers are recorded on Apple's internal database - who Apple sold the iPhone to and on what terms. The "who" can be an individual if you bought it from Apple direct, or it can be a carrier if you bought it through them, or subsidized through them. The terms are easy - either the phone was sold fully unlocked, or locked to a carrier (or realistically, lock-to-sim, which means the baseband will lock to whatever SIM is installed).
If the phone was sold as a contract phone, then it's lock-to-sim or lock-to-carrier, which means the baseband will SIM-lock to whatever SIM is in there (regardless if it's the right carrier), or lock itself to a particular carrier. If it's unlocked, it will stay unlocked.
This is done so Apple doesn't program the modem firmware at the factory - they make millions of them, and it lets them dynamically allocate it - if a carrier doesn't want them, it's trivial to reallocate a batch of iPhones to a new carrier by updating the serial number database.
And if, like the thieves who stole a bunch of iPhones from UPS, the phones are marked as stolen, well, Apple can refuse to activate them at all, so the thieves have units they can sell to iFixit because it's only good for parts.
The secondary purpose of activation is to finish the OS signing process to ensure you can't roll the OS back.
As for removable battery and headphone jack, the last time I had a phone with removable battery, I hate it. Sure it needed it because every time you used the camera, you had to reboot the phone or the battery would be dead in 3 hours. So it was handy then, but then I had to carry 2 or 3 batteries all the time, because I'd forget to charge them up aferwards. You know, you have to charge them up, then unplug them, remove the battery, swap them, charge it up again, etc. Annoying to do especially in the middle of the night. How you can maintain a fleet of 2 of more batteries ready to go escapes me if you have to keep swapping the phone battery every few hours. (Perhaps that's why people charge in the office? They charge one battery overnight, then swap them at the office and charge their spare?)
And I looked at the headphone jack on my iPhone 4s (the phone I'm replacing), it's full of pocket lint and fluff. Tells you how often I actually used it.
No, Apple had an ad business. It was called iAds, though I suspect it was created at the behest of Google, for iAds was never terribly good, yet the DoJ deemed it a worthy enough competitor to allow Google to buy up AdMob and other mobile ad networks. Given it's relatively high buy in, iAds never drew much advertiser interest, and Apple was forced to open it up to developers to promote their apps, otherwise there was literally no ad content on iAds. A couple of years ago, Apple killed iAds.
But I still think Google propped it up just to have "competition".
Tim Cook saw a strategic opening for Apple when he saw Android rise in popularity - privacy. Given Snowden and everything else, he realized Apple was in a very unique position, especially given Google's recent privacy policy update allowing sharing of all data amongst Google. (This is different from the recent privacy policy update allowing all data to be shared among Alphabet - the Google one meant stuff like YouTube and Search shared information, while Alphabet included the ad networks too). He realized that he should focus iOS on the one thing Google cannot do - data protection and privacy. No point doing anything else - any UI element will get implement on Android in short order.
But what Google cannot copy into Android is privacy - because of the way Google works. Apple can, because Apple's need for the user information is minimal. It's why every Apple keynote stresses what happens on-device, or what data never leaves the device and other things. It also helps that with the government doing data requests, Apple can say "we do not have that information as it's not something we collect". Get access to iCloud, for example, and you will not get access to the keychain passwords because iOS refuses to back those up to iCloud. And Apple cannot hand over what they don't have, so access to the iCloud information is strictly reserved to the few things iCloud does.
Well, that's the problem with android - "fragmentation". You can't expect every developer to own every single Android device out there, so somewhere along the line they have to take the leap that it works. And if you don't own an Android 8 device, well, the emulator is all you have. Given the emulator is running a real Android 8 image you would expect it to be faithfully reproduce the Android 8 experience.
If developers only set their apps to devices that were actually tested, then the Play Store would be dreadfully bare if you were running anything other than maybe the top 3-4 handsets.
Yes, Tim Cook has been saying this for at least a year now - all the recognition happens on your phone or on your computer. It's why if you have the same photos, but multiple devices, they will come up with different conclusions. They run independently of each other.
I suppose they could also share system state through iCloud, again encrypted so Apple can't get at the information, but it's easier to show it's all on-device when multiple devices come to different conclusions.
And remember, Apple doesn't want that information. Every bit of data Apple stores or has on you is data that's subject to government inquiry. It costs Apple money to look up that information, so if they can avoid storing it, they will. It's why iCloud backups of iDevices never include passwords - Apple cannot provide what they never had. (To backup passwords requires iTunes and an encrypted backup - Apple doesn't want it, so you have to do local backups).
The downside is of course, it's poorer. Google, Microsoft, etc., can run powerful servers on their huge data sets for learning and categorizing. All Apple can do is what they have in public data sets and what each device learns from each user. It's a far smaller data set, and thus it's classification will be less good. It's why Siri has more issues than Google Assistant or Cortana - the Siri team can do AI only on what limited data you agreed to, while Google and Microsoft can run it against their entire data set (especially since Alphabet's privacy policy allows sharing of data among all Alphabet companies)..
In Canada, a jury trial is an option the defense has for criminal cases. You can choose - go against a judge, or a jury. It's not mandatory you use a jury, and in general, it's a lot less showy.
General wisdom is you don't generally want a jury trial - you're already starting off with jurors who you pulled from their daily routine, and in general, the Crown only puts up charges they have a reasonable chance of succeeding with. So the record for jury trials isn't generally good, in fact, it can often be worse. With a judge-only trial the judge is forced to be objective (it can be appealed, of course) and generally judges are more factual and less tolerant of "showy" moves (less of the "jury will disregard the evidence" since the judge will simply exclude it).
Or, perhaps, the original rights holder was simply trying to sell their vocoder?.
Create the character, release it for free, run a few fan expos and you've built up thousands to hundreds of thousands of people spending $200+ for your vocoder. That's quite a few millions of dollars. The alternative is to sell maybe a thousand copies of it to those professionals who use vocoders.
Nothing to do with fandom or freedom, but a simple marketing campaign. Like the Asterisk PBX software - its creators simply wrote software to sell their phone line interface hardware and released it.
No, the vocoder is the furthest thing from "free" you can get, it's proprietary, commercially licensed software (that runs on Windows), available in English and Japanese versions. Want Miku to sing your song? Buy the vocoder and you're done. But how did you hear about it? Probably from one of the many Miku-fests around full of neat artwork that people created.
That's not to say it isn't good - it's actually a pretty damn nice vocoder. (I found out from a TV science news magazine show (Daily Planet - for all you Discovery Canada viewers) when they went to Japan and they demonstrated it.). That said, it's apparently one of the best-selling pieces of software on Amazon.co.jp.
Because that management firmware is involved in... managing the processor.
Think about all the features it does - at a basic level, you can power on and reset the machine. That means the firmware must be able to turn on and turn off the PC, as well as reset it. Plus sleep modes - entering sleep and exiting out of sleep (and the various conditions to wake it up - network, for exaple).
Modern CPUs are complex beasts - even the little ARM SoC in your phone often has a management CPU on it handling power. It boots up when the chip powers up and manages the entire system power state. When you boot the main CPU cores (the one that runs your OS, like Android or Linux), the little management CPU (typically an ARM core, usually an ARM7, ARM9 or Cortex-M series - you want a CPU that sips power because it's running anytime there's power in the system) turns on the power rails while holding the main CPU cores in reset. It also often sets up the pre-boot environment - writing a simple start program to the CPU cores to run - usually load memory address X, if it's Y, then address Z has the boot code address, else wait and loop). Once the rails come up, it triggers the first CPU core to begin the boot.
Likewise, the Intel ME firmware does the same - preparing the power supplies in order to boot the main CPU, handling sleep conditions (including setting boot code addresses on wakeup, etc).
Disabling the firmware means you disable the chip's ability to boot itself - the ME processor is required in order to boot the processor, prepare it for sleep, wake it up, etc.
The NSA may have disabled versions of it, but it's really using the firmware flag to disable it (which is how Purism "disables" it as well).
Long gone are the days where you just applied power, a clock, and the CPU ran - modern CPUs are complex and with complex power needs (driven by their complex power schedules when coupled with frequency changing, turbo modes, etc).
Hell, I remember when I used to do frequency and voltage scaling on old SoCs - there was a "leap of faith" moment where you issued the change instruction and hoped everything came out on the other side. But this case only required one main power rail (Core voltage) which you adjusted, waited for confirmation (raise voltage before ramping frequency up, lower voltage once frequency ramped down). When your CPU has multiple rails, hundreds of power pins, and 3-6 voltage regulators to control, the main system software is inadequate. You want a sub-processor that can halt the main CPU, tweak all the voltages and rails, then once stable, re-start the CPUs again , otherwise you're just risking a main system crash.