That's not the same web devs making those same mistakes. Developers with some experience do not write code that fails against easy sql-injection. But companies prefer to hire younger inexperienced devs for the reasons that have been discussed here on/. many times.
Well that pretty much applies to practically every job these days. The companies pursue money above all else, to the detriment of themselves - assuming everyone (and everything) is a swappable interchangeable part.
Nothing can be further from the truth - sure some things can be swapped around with little issues (printers, paper, pens, etc), but other things require considerable effort to swap around - things like servers and people. Servers need to be set up, software and data transferred, configured, and added to the network and then everything else needs configuration to use the new server. Sure there's redundancy and all that, but you still had to set it all up and it's a ton of effort to do so. It's why the best we have is putting them in VMs so they can migrate around which is a ton less work than configuring new machines. But even then it's no panacea, since OSes get outdated and you need to upgrade them as they fall out of support.
People are the same. They embody knowledge, and often what you're paying for is not the actual work output, but the knowledge of how the systems work inside the company. Even if everything is documented and you fire the sysadmin and hire some junior guy in his place, there's going to be a ramp up time to acquire basic working knowledge, and then to replicate the institutional knowledge lost by firing the old sysadmin. Sure the documentation is there, but it takes time to digest.
Plus, the documentation may cover "what", but not "why". Why are systems set up the way they are?
The other thing is, replacing something means the team has to readjust to new team dynamics. Not a problem if they were bad and you removed the problem person, but if they were quite gelled and work well together, you risk breaking up what works well. Seems like a great way to add risk to a project - will the replacement work well within the team, or will everything fall to pieces?
I don't know that Apple wouldn't be around or be around in a different form or not, I suspect that Jobs overstated the importance of Sir Crunch, but I wasn't involved so what do I know...
Not really.
Before the Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" came out, blue boxes were really just known among phreaks. When the article came out, it exploded.
Jobs read the article, and got Woz to design a digital blue box. And sell it. (Woz the engineer, Jobs the salesman). This was all prior to Apple. Woz's blue box was considered among many to be the finest - it didn't require tuning (most blue boxes were using analog contraptions and part tolerances weren't good, so many had tuning functions to trim the frequencies in)(, and it's digital (or rather, using digital ICs and not computerized) made for a very accurate box.
But this was officially the first Jobs+Woz collaboration, Woz made them, Jobs sold them, and they made decent coin from it. Enough that Jobs decided to start Apple with Woz.
Chances are, Jobs and Woz would've started Apple anyways (they've worked together before and were good friends), but Draper and his blue box got them to actually make money selling a product.and proved that Jobs and Woz could together work and make money.
Fun fact - every blue box came with a warranty from Woz - in the form of a paper slip inside that guaranteed Woz will fix anything that broke, valid as long as the slip was there. Woz removed the slip from warranty serviced boxes, of course. And those boxes with the slip inside them are worth some major money today. And Woz has stated that yes, he'll still honor the warranty.
Final anecdote - Woz and Jobs were stranded after Woz's VW bus broke down. They went to the nearest phone booth and was trying to call for assistance (using their blue box, of course, they barely had money for the phone call), when cops came around. They took the box, and asked what it was. Woz said it was a music box, you push buttons and it makes sounds. Cop responds it needs tuning, and that someone named Moog already created one a few years earlier. (Yes, the original Moog synthesizer)
Now, I don't know if Draper, Jobs and Woz actually knew of each other's existence at the time - Jobs read the article and convinced Woz to make the box.
There are two purposes for Tor. One is to prevent third parties from tracing you by monitoring your traffic. That is unchanged.
But another purpose is to prevent the SECOND party (FB, or NYT in this case) from tracing you, which having to log in completely defeats.
I don't know, so I'm asking. Is there a javascript function that could appear on a web page served via Tor from NYT or FB that would cause the browser to reach out to another website directly (not via Tor) and disclose the user's actual source IP address? Something like the one pixel images used to track users reading an email. Does the system of the Tor user force all IP traffic through Tor no matter what destination, or can stuff slip out the side, so to speak?
Technically, the Tor browser prohibits such access for obvious reasons.
But having Tor block others from observing your traffic is often Good Enough - they don't care for the anonymity Tor can provide. Indeed, perhaps there's a chance you want the former but not the latter - let's say you come across a bunch of "interesting" documents. You want the former to prevent people from seeing what you did, but you want the latter to validate that you were the source and by reputation either a source for made up crap, or a source for authentic information people would rather kept hidden.
Facebook and the NYT believe some people really do not want others to know what articles they read or what they post about. Perhaps you're homosexual in a country where homosexuals are put to death - it would certainly be nicer to read those kinds of articles off of Tor.
OR you could live in a country that has decent consumer protection laws.
For a "fault" in NZ with an iPhone I would expect that you could claim under the consumer guarantees act for 3-4 years If you drop it, thats what household insurance is for, excess for me would be NZ$100.
You think it isn't already baked into the price of the phone? Trust me, you're already paying for the "optional" extended warranty. They just built it into the price.
It's why everyone complains prices are so high - after currency conversions, VAT and extended warranties, it turns out the prices end up being more comparable to the US prices.
TINSTAAFL. If your laws say you have 10 years of warranty service, don't be surprised when you're paying jacked up prices for goods. It's just building in the cost of extended warranties into the price of the good itself.
Grey market goods also generally don't have a warranty outside their zone - well, the manufacturer will honor it, but you have to ship it back to the country it was sold for.
I don't think that's true that OLED burn in is not permanent. I was very surprised to learn it is even possible in this day and age - OLED seemed to be the end-all technology for displays, as the contrast ratio is extremely high and the colors are vivid. I guess everything comes with a downside. Search for OLED burn in on Samsung phones, and you will see it's a serious problem. OLED pixels have a lifespan, and they will gradually wear out and dim over time. It's quite simple - if you have pixels that are consistently at a higher brightness than other pixels, they will wear out sooner and will look different.
No, OLEDs always wore out. It's just these days the lifetimes have been lengthened considerably from the early days, though blue has always been somewhat vulnerable for wearing out the quickest.
You have to remember that Samsung AMOLED is the most mature technology, having been around for a few years now. Sony tried with the SED OLED (used in their OLED TVs years ago), while LG has their own.
The holy grail for screen technology isn't OLED though - ti's micro-LED. Micro LED displays are similar to OLED, except instead of an organic material being used, it's standard miniaturized LEDs. Since it's the organic part is what wears out, micro LEDs would theoretically last longer
It was never just for graphics cards. It's a replacement for the PCI bus. It just happened to also replace AGP, which was a dedicated graphics port. It's commonly used for network cards, audio cards, storage (NVMe is PCIe), etc. Thunderbolt is PCIe + DisplayPort
AGP is a modified form of PCI - the only real difference is it's optimized for data transfers from the computer to the card (since video cards are output devices, there's not as much need to have a truly bidirectional, link). The other difference is it can run a lot faster than the 33-MHz 32-bit PCI bus. There were attempts to try to get it to 66MHz and 64-bit but a lot of PCI cards didn't like it. So AGP allowed the video card to use a faster bus without running into limitations caused by legacy PCI hardware. Remember PCI is a shared bus topology, so you can only run as fast as the slowest device.
From a software perspective, AGP looked just like another PCI bus in the system.
You have to remember PCI was from the 90s, and PCI video cards replaced VLB and ISA video cards. But it wasn't too long before the plethora of PCI devices forced video out because of bandwidth.
It's not as likely to happen with PCIe since PCIe isn't a shared bus. It consists of multiple links called lanes, and each lane can be assigned to either an individual card, or aggregated with other lanes to offer more bandwidth.
With dedicated links, slow devices will simply run its link at slower speeds, while faster devices can run faster since they have dedicated links.
I'm sure the Tesla PowerWalls take solar, store the power in a battery, then convert it to 110AC so it can just be converted back to 5V/12V DC in the power supplies of all the equipment that needs power.
It's actually not. Line losses are known as IIR losses, and they increase at the square of the current. So a line carrying 2A will have 4 times the losses as one carrying 1A.
It's why high current applications are typically run at high voltages - to reduce the current. The PowerWall internally would probably be running at least 48V, though I wouldn't be surprised if it ran closer to 120V or so. Current is the enemy of power transistors too so if you can reduce the current through them, you can make them much more efficient.
1500W at 5V is 300A. You know what runs at 300A? Welders. Not only do you have huge cables (cables are rated by ampacity - voltage limits are governed only by insulation thickness), but any flaw in the cabling and you'll be unable to unplug them as they would've welded themselves together.
The losses, added cost from bulkier cabling, etc., make it much more efficient and cheaper to use power supplies and converters, especially since a modern DC-DC converter is 95+% efficient.
A prerequisite of this system is a camera, so presumably you'd be able to tell if they were spending an inordinate amount of time in your house
Define inordinate amount of time, because before making a delivery, I can simply set my cellphone camera to record (in 4K!) video, put it in my front pocket, and then unlcok your door and presumably deliver the package to someplace, like maybe your dining room table or something which will require me to do some basic exploration.
I nearly hit a jaywalker with his face buried in his cell phone maybe a week or two ago. He walked out into the street from behind an SUV and I hit the horn and slammed on the brakes. I would have expected him to look up and then crap himself but he didn't look up or even miss a step.
Yes, the jaywalker stepped out right in front of a cyclist who nearly hit her. She didn't consider how lucky she was that at worst, it was only a cyclist instead of 2 tons of metal (injuries would be far lower) or perhaps she should return back to the days of her youth and remember when she was taught to look both ways before crossing the street.
You know it's bad when the texters really do think they own the road.
No. Preorders for the iPhone X start this Friday (the 27th). So Apple has not actually taken any pre-orders yet. Carriers might have, but that's a carrier problem, not Apple. Apple has said pre-orders open October 27.
Kinect was superior over Nintendo's and Sony's offerings (I've used them all in the XBox 360 era). My complain also rests on the game side of things - some were too Kinect-reliant - eg. navigating menus only with Kinect when using D-pad would be a lot more efficient. But as a technology I thought Kinect was great. Zumba World Party - lots of fun.
That's because Kinect actually did proper depth sensing. The Xbox360 Kinect used structured light fields (which Apple is using for the iPhone X Face ID "3D mapping" technology). The Xbox One Kinect is probably far more interesting, as it uses true time-of-flight measurements to get depth information.
But as usual the problems are usually on the developer side. It's not really a wonder though, since Sony and Nintendo suffered the same problems with their motion controls - lack of developer support. The only thing Nintendo had was strong first party support for their platform,
Or unless it has sat in queues or greylists on various intermediate MTAs for a total of several minutes.
Or hours, even. I've seen it happen - even on time-senstiive emails (someone sent me a meeting request. I never got it until hours later which left me completely confused. Turned out some MTA held onto it for 3-4 hours because of ???)
It can also take time from a backup MX to actually deliver the email to the recipient as well - especially if the backup MX is set to only hold mail and forward it onto the main MX when it comes back up. Crappy architecture, but it happens.
I might argue the more appropriate quote would be this: "I have a Right to Repair my stuff, and HE has an obligation to NOT HINDER me in do so"
In many of these cases, they are putting extra things in place to make it difficult to track down and solve issues.
The question is, what does hinder mean?
Does using special screws count? Because there's a range of hinderances that range from "any idiot with a butter knife must be able to get in and attempt to fix it" to "if you can open this, we trust you're actually intelligent enough to do so" to "ok, we really don't want you to get in, so you'll have to be super creative".
The real reason we have such difficulties is simple - warranties. People are idiots - just imagine the person you've had to tell how to double-click the browser icon for the 10th time today wanting to fix their phone. And if you think I was kidding with the butter knife, it's happened - the mentality is basically anything in the house is fair game in order to fix your piece of precision made high technology.
Hell, you try dealing with a customer who's claiming their device stopped working because of water damage. Even when said device is creating a giant lake on the counter top - the customer will demand you fix it, no it did not fall into water, your counter was already flooded with the 2 feet of water pouring out and maybe your counter broke the device so fix it.
The end result is simple - stuff gets more expensive because for everyone who has the capabilities of fixing the thing, you have to deal with the hundreds more who think a large baseball sized metal ball is all they need to fix their device.
Parts are easy to get - how do you think ifixit gets their parts? They cannibalize it from other devices. So it doesn't matter if the manufacturer refuses to sell you replacement parts - as long as there is a device you can cannibalize, there's always a source of parts. And heck, it seems even the Chinese are making replacement parts as well - given the recent story about how Apple accidentally broke 3rd party LCD screens.
What needs to happen first is to fix the idiot problem.
This is all about consolidation of our media to a more "centralized" structure. You know the precursor to the state run that we always point to about OTHER countries that lack our "freedoms" This administration is openly hostile to free press, so any move they make will be filtered through that lens.
Of course. If there are local market stations, it's a lot harder for Trump to cancel "NBC's broadcast license". Trump can't do it, neither can the FCC. What they CAN do is cancel every NBC affiliate's broadcast license. But with so many affiliates, it's a lot of work.
The hope is that the networks will consolidate their stations to reduce costs, which means instead of having to cancel say, 500 NBC broadcast licenses, they can hope consolidation makes it say, 10 big stations. Much less work to cancel 10 licenses when the president feels he's been offended.
Well, to be fair, Google's support has traditionally been crap. This has been true since Google started selling non-electronic stuff.
Google, it seems, can sling electrons around like the best of them. But atoms? forget it. Heck, I've ordered stuff through Google, and had it take far longer to arrive to me than someone who went to the store and bought it.
Getting someone on the phone is a novelty to Google - I still remember when your (only) support option was Google Groups.
And as much as you fault Apple, you have to remember Apple's support has traditionally been among the best of everyone. Perhaps not as good as Amazon where it seems everyone is empowered to do anything to make you happy, but still seemingly non-useless (aside from the few incidents that get well-reported because well, Apple news is money making news).. Not that Apple is a saint in the support department - they only recently opened an official Apple Support twitter account, which is like 10 years after everyone else. And they have a nasty habit with the delete button on their forums.
But Google? Well, old school support options they generally suck at. For stuff like this, you're actually better off waiting for the official Google blog to announce something than trust what support says.
It's pretty easy Microsoft. STOP collecting data from us without our consent. There you go, nothing of interest for the government to secretly get from you.
But the problem is the government is going after data you already consented to having Microsoft store for you. You know, like emails (through Hotmail/Outlook), chats and stuff (through Skype/messenger) and other services. Microsoft stopping that collection would mean shutting down those services, and I'm sure there's probably going to be pushback from that.
I don't know why you think virtualising a console to be "easy". The problem is not emulating the instruction set but getting the timing of both the CPU and GPU correct. The GPU is especially hard since the game is going to feed it broken shaders and use GL extensions that have to be emulated with the new GPU. And mapping the firmware calls (for audio, video, controls, achievments, copy protection, storage, chat / music, resolution negotiation) to their equivalents in the new console, or stubs. I expect also that some libraries such as Unreal, Havok, PhysX etc. are so prevalent in games that emulators will have special cases for when they encounter that code.
Cycle counting died out once the 32-bit era started, pretty much. There was no need to.
So your old 8 and 16-bit consoles and computers require cycle-accurate emulation because everyone programming them was cycle counting in the first place. The Apple II is an extreme example of this, because of the way it operates and how the display DMA basically hijacked the data bus when the CPU wasn't using it between instructions. Plus, with 8 and 16 bit comptuers and consoles, you had a set number of clocks between events - usually between a horizontal retrace and the vertical retrace.
Pre-crash consoles and computers were particularly troublesome because they didn't have a framebuffer, and on something like the ATari 2600, a good 70% of the CPU is used for screen updates (the TIA only worked on a line by line basis, so it had to be reloaded with new line data every horizontal retrace).
But around the PS2/original Xbox era, it all changed. The addition of caches and other things to the processors completely changed how consoles were programmed. No longer did you have to cycle count (because it was all single-cycle these days), but even worse, the cache added timing variability to the whole thing. Even today, getting a simulator that is cycle accurate is actually quite expensive because they include cache modelling in order to retain cycle accuracy.
Granted, the Xbox360 and PS3 got rid of some caches in an attempt to be more deterministic, but by then no one really cared - they were powerful enough that the games were basically programmed like their PC counterparts.
As such, these days emulating an older console is rather easy - high level emulation will get you far. This is especially true for the Xbox, since it's Microsoft and the DirectX API has been pretty stable. Since every game would've been programmed to the DirectX API, accurate GPU timings are no longer necessary (and chances are, there was always going to be slight variability between consoles, but you never cared since you wrote your code against the API). And given the rest of the API is basically Windows APIs, all the high level API work is done. All you need to emulate is the CPU and possibly rewrite shader programs
Long and short of it, Microsoft is probably in a good spot w.r.t. emulating old consoles
I have to disagree on "we all have our cameras they're pretty easy to use" I personally saw Spectacles as a more fun and more "social" and actually more fashionable way of gopros. they actually warn people around if theyre recording since they have blinking light but 1st not everyone has to know and second first news I read after they've became available was "how to hide the record light". For me this is a situation of we are the reason we cant have nice things. this was same with google glasses, creeps recording everything. and in google glasses case, those are just INSANELY obvious
The glasses are made to be insanely obvious. If you wanted to record surreptitiously, there are dozens of spy cam glasses available that are far more discrete. These are intentionally loud, basically to combat the glasshole syndrome. You aren't going to miss someone wearing them , especially indoors.
The real problem was marketing. At first, they were marketed only to the top users as a special privilege thing (and even so they ran out of stock quickly). I'm guessing they never announced it was generally available so everyone thought they were still highly limited and hard to get.
And people were not buying it for the creepiness - since there are far better solutions for that (and probably sold on Amazon).
It's quite recent that universities have moved away from print copies of theses and dissertations in favor of electronic copies. I believe it has always been free, just as a print copy. I suspect that nobody has gone back to scan in most printed theses and dissertations, so they just sit in a library somewhere. Because of the demand for Hawking's dissertation, the university has scanned a copy and posted online. It was probably free the whole time, just in print form. I doubt there's interest in scanning most of the other theses and dissertations, so they will just remain as printed copies.
Correct.Heck, 60,000 downloads of Hawking's dissertation is probably 20 or 30 times as many downloads as the university was expecting - the next highest download count for a paper was under 2000 downloads.
Chances are, that record is going to stand for a really long time, too.
No seriously though, the UK and colonies tend to eat cuts of bacon with the loin and back, whereas in America and continental Europe they tend to go for the streaky cut. There is far less fat in the loin and it is (in my opinion) more delicious.
Well, it's called streaky bacon in the UK apparently.
Anyhow, what I've never understood is why Americans take the fatty bacon cuts then basically cook off all the fat - leaving the bacon hard and crispy, but lacking all the fat that the cut had. Granted, good chefs save the bacon fat that's now on the pan for further cooking, so flavoring the stuff cooked afterwards, but it always struck me as odd.
Yes, I don't particularly like hard crispy bacon - when I get bacon (the streaking american kind) I always halve the cooking time so it gets nice and hot and fat just starts to run out, but the slices are nice and moist and limp and oh-so-tasty. Bacon bits never really appealed to me - it's just like jerky.
So if I see a desk lamp in an antique store with bulbous "on" switch, and another antique lamp in a different store with a leopard pattern, and I combine the ideas to make and sell a leopard pattern lamp with a bulbous switch, I'd be infringing on another (non-antique) lamp that happened to do the same? Just about every fricken product in existence is a combination of at least 2 existing design ideas.
Only if a design patent was filed AND still valid.
Here's the thing - design patents are not utility patents. Everything you know about utility patents is wrong with respect to design patents. It's actually an important point, because a design patent is quite a different beast from a utility patent.
Another important point - design patents are only covered for 5 years. That's it. Heck, I've seen iPod Mini clones way back in the day - they came out pretty much 5 years to the day after the original iPod Mini came out. Right when the design patent expired. It's also why Apple changed up the designs periodically - once the patents were expiring, it was up to Apple to design a new design so it can get a design patent on the new design (because presumably tons of knockoffs will use the old design). One does sort of wonder how many times things are changed because the design was expiring.
Yeah, you might as well wait. Everyone outside the US gets a better deal.
Canadians get it through the Space channel with surround sound. Everyone else gets it through Netflix, presumably with surround sound.
Americans get it through a streaming service with crappy stereo sound.
I'm presuming there's actually a lot of viewers outside the US that's causing a lot of the interest, though I know of a few people who really did sign up for just one show.
All of these existed in other prior products, just not together. In my opinion, there should be more than just 3 (potentially existing) concepts to be considered a valid design patent. Three is weak.
This is a design patent. To be infringing, you need to violate ALL the elements. It's an AND, not an OR. It doesn't matter if other designs had parts of it.
This fact alone makes Samsung's case weaker, because Google actually has all those elements in Android, just not together. The grid of icons on iOS is not replicated by the home screen on Android (because the home screen has... widgets!). The App Launcher on Android again is not a grid, because it lacks the "tray" of apps at the bottom. Thus, Google deftly avoids infringing on the patent.
Samsung though pretty much copied it part and parcel - all they had to do was change an element. That's it. Change one thing so the patent isn't completely covered and Apple would lose.
Design patents are the easiest things in the world to work around... unless your goal is to basically copy the design of someone else. Hell, Google by default avoided the patent.
How about just NOT using face or print to open, and just keep using a fairly complex password.
That actually leads to less security. Because prior to fingerprint sensors, about 50+% of phones had no passcode system enabled whatsoever.
The reason? It turns out passcodes are the antithesis to how these devices are operated - often glanced at (unlocked) hundreds of times a day, with each interaction lasting a few seconds, tops. Entering a passcode is enough of a bother that people don't actually... bother.
That's why they have biometric sensors - the goal is to turn that 50% of devices with no lock into a very low percentage - the biometric allows for quick and easy unlocking of the phone (basically without getting in the way) but have the benefits of a locked phone.
You see this in real life too - next time, check out the password your retail guy uses when they check you out - because the checkout kioss are typically locked, you'll find they have a quick password they can enter so they can get your transaction done quickly.
no different than print unlocks. You can be compelled to give your print (face) so just turn it off.
What I wish is that there was a stock way to program a panic print, such that you enter that print and the phone locks requiring a PIN to unlock. Set your middle finger to be the panic print and when you pull your phone out of your pocket near a risk situation just touch the sensor on the way out. A distinct vibrate could let you know it took.
1) On iOS, pressing the power button 5 times quickly will disable biometrics and require the PIN/password/etc authentication. ("Emergency mode" it's called)
2) Face ID requires you to look at it. If you're not looking at it it will refuse to do a recognition attempt (but still count as one of the 5 tries). If you failed to do step 1 when handing over your phone, looking everywhere else (or closing your eyes) is sufficient to fail scanning. This also means pointing the phone at your face from a distance will fail it. (And as well, it will probably scan whoever's got your phone as well, reducing the count before mandatory passcode).
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Well that pretty much applies to practically every job these days. The companies pursue money above all else, to the detriment of themselves - assuming everyone (and everything) is a swappable interchangeable part.
Nothing can be further from the truth - sure some things can be swapped around with little issues (printers, paper, pens, etc), but other things require considerable effort to swap around - things like servers and people. Servers need to be set up, software and data transferred, configured, and added to the network and then everything else needs configuration to use the new server. Sure there's redundancy and all that, but you still had to set it all up and it's a ton of effort to do so. It's why the best we have is putting them in VMs so they can migrate around which is a ton less work than configuring new machines. But even then it's no panacea, since OSes get outdated and you need to upgrade them as they fall out of support.
People are the same. They embody knowledge, and often what you're paying for is not the actual work output, but the knowledge of how the systems work inside the company. Even if everything is documented and you fire the sysadmin and hire some junior guy in his place, there's going to be a ramp up time to acquire basic working knowledge, and then to replicate the institutional knowledge lost by firing the old sysadmin. Sure the documentation is there, but it takes time to digest.
Plus, the documentation may cover "what", but not "why". Why are systems set up the way they are?
The other thing is, replacing something means the team has to readjust to new team dynamics. Not a problem if they were bad and you removed the problem person, but if they were quite gelled and work well together, you risk breaking up what works well. Seems like a great way to add risk to a project - will the replacement work well within the team, or will everything fall to pieces?
Not really.
Before the Esquire article "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" came out, blue boxes were really just known among phreaks. When the article came out, it exploded.
Jobs read the article, and got Woz to design a digital blue box. And sell it. (Woz the engineer, Jobs the salesman). This was all prior to Apple. Woz's blue box was considered among many to be the finest - it didn't require tuning (most blue boxes were using analog contraptions and part tolerances weren't good, so many had tuning functions to trim the frequencies in)(, and it's digital (or rather, using digital ICs and not computerized) made for a very accurate box.
But this was officially the first Jobs+Woz collaboration, Woz made them, Jobs sold them, and they made decent coin from it. Enough that Jobs decided to start Apple with Woz.
Chances are, Jobs and Woz would've started Apple anyways (they've worked together before and were good friends), but Draper and his blue box got them to actually make money selling a product.and proved that Jobs and Woz could together work and make money.
Fun fact - every blue box came with a warranty from Woz - in the form of a paper slip inside that guaranteed Woz will fix anything that broke, valid as long as the slip was there. Woz removed the slip from warranty serviced boxes, of course. And those boxes with the slip inside them are worth some major money today. And Woz has stated that yes, he'll still honor the warranty.
Final anecdote - Woz and Jobs were stranded after Woz's VW bus broke down. They went to the nearest phone booth and was trying to call for assistance (using their blue box, of course, they barely had money for the phone call), when cops came around. They took the box, and asked what it was. Woz said it was a music box, you push buttons and it makes sounds. Cop responds it needs tuning, and that someone named Moog already created one a few years earlier. (Yes, the original Moog synthesizer)
Now, I don't know if Draper, Jobs and Woz actually knew of each other's existence at the time - Jobs read the article and convinced Woz to make the box.
Personally, I'm fascinated by this stuff.
Technically, the Tor browser prohibits such access for obvious reasons.
But having Tor block others from observing your traffic is often Good Enough - they don't care for the anonymity Tor can provide. Indeed, perhaps there's a chance you want the former but not the latter - let's say you come across a bunch of "interesting" documents. You want the former to prevent people from seeing what you did, but you want the latter to validate that you were the source and by reputation either a source for made up crap, or a source for authentic information people would rather kept hidden.
Facebook and the NYT believe some people really do not want others to know what articles they read or what they post about. Perhaps you're homosexual in a country where homosexuals are put to death - it would certainly be nicer to read those kinds of articles off of Tor.
You think it isn't already baked into the price of the phone? Trust me, you're already paying for the "optional" extended warranty. They just built it into the price.
It's why everyone complains prices are so high - after currency conversions, VAT and extended warranties, it turns out the prices end up being more comparable to the US prices.
TINSTAAFL. If your laws say you have 10 years of warranty service, don't be surprised when you're paying jacked up prices for goods. It's just building in the cost of extended warranties into the price of the good itself.
Grey market goods also generally don't have a warranty outside their zone - well, the manufacturer will honor it, but you have to ship it back to the country it was sold for.
No, OLEDs always wore out. It's just these days the lifetimes have been lengthened considerably from the early days, though blue has always been somewhat vulnerable for wearing out the quickest.
You have to remember that Samsung AMOLED is the most mature technology, having been around for a few years now. Sony tried with the SED OLED (used in their OLED TVs years ago), while LG has their own.
The holy grail for screen technology isn't OLED though - ti's micro-LED. Micro LED displays are similar to OLED, except instead of an organic material being used, it's standard miniaturized LEDs. Since it's the organic part is what wears out, micro LEDs would theoretically last longer
AGP is a modified form of PCI - the only real difference is it's optimized for data transfers from the computer to the card (since video cards are output devices, there's not as much need to have a truly bidirectional, link). The other difference is it can run a lot faster than the 33-MHz 32-bit PCI bus. There were attempts to try to get it to 66MHz and 64-bit but a lot of PCI cards didn't like it. So AGP allowed the video card to use a faster bus without running into limitations caused by legacy PCI hardware. Remember PCI is a shared bus topology, so you can only run as fast as the slowest device.
From a software perspective, AGP looked just like another PCI bus in the system.
You have to remember PCI was from the 90s, and PCI video cards replaced VLB and ISA video cards. But it wasn't too long before the plethora of PCI devices forced video out because of bandwidth.
It's not as likely to happen with PCIe since PCIe isn't a shared bus. It consists of multiple links called lanes, and each lane can be assigned to either an individual card, or aggregated with other lanes to offer more bandwidth.
With dedicated links, slow devices will simply run its link at slower speeds, while faster devices can run faster since they have dedicated links.
It's actually not. Line losses are known as IIR losses, and they increase at the square of the current. So a line carrying 2A will have 4 times the losses as one carrying 1A.
It's why high current applications are typically run at high voltages - to reduce the current. The PowerWall internally would probably be running at least 48V, though I wouldn't be surprised if it ran closer to 120V or so. Current is the enemy of power transistors too so if you can reduce the current through them, you can make them much more efficient.
1500W at 5V is 300A. You know what runs at 300A? Welders. Not only do you have huge cables (cables are rated by ampacity - voltage limits are governed only by insulation thickness), but any flaw in the cabling and you'll be unable to unplug them as they would've welded themselves together.
The losses, added cost from bulkier cabling, etc., make it much more efficient and cheaper to use power supplies and converters, especially since a modern DC-DC converter is 95+% efficient.
Define inordinate amount of time, because before making a delivery, I can simply set my cellphone camera to record (in 4K!) video, put it in my front pocket, and then unlcok your door and presumably deliver the package to someplace, like maybe your dining room table or something which will require me to do some basic exploration.
Consider yourself lucky then. A local mayor was cycling, nearly hit a jaywalker, and was scolded by said jaywaker (who was texting) for not looking where he was going..
Yes, the jaywalker stepped out right in front of a cyclist who nearly hit her. She didn't consider how lucky she was that at worst, it was only a cyclist instead of 2 tons of metal (injuries would be far lower) or perhaps she should return back to the days of her youth and remember when she was taught to look both ways before crossing the street.
You know it's bad when the texters really do think they own the road.
No. Preorders for the iPhone X start this Friday (the 27th). So Apple has not actually taken any pre-orders yet. Carriers might have, but that's a carrier problem, not Apple. Apple has said pre-orders open October 27.
That's because Kinect actually did proper depth sensing. The Xbox360 Kinect used structured light fields (which Apple is using for the iPhone X Face ID "3D mapping" technology). The Xbox One Kinect is probably far more interesting, as it uses true time-of-flight measurements to get depth information.
But as usual the problems are usually on the developer side. It's not really a wonder though, since Sony and Nintendo suffered the same problems with their motion controls - lack of developer support. The only thing Nintendo had was strong first party support for their platform,
Or hours, even. I've seen it happen - even on time-senstiive emails (someone sent me a meeting request. I never got it until hours later which left me completely confused. Turned out some MTA held onto it for 3-4 hours because of ???)
It can also take time from a backup MX to actually deliver the email to the recipient as well - especially if the backup MX is set to only hold mail and forward it onto the main MX when it comes back up. Crappy architecture, but it happens.
The question is, what does hinder mean?
Does using special screws count? Because there's a range of hinderances that range from "any idiot with a butter knife must be able to get in and attempt to fix it" to "if you can open this, we trust you're actually intelligent enough to do so" to "ok, we really don't want you to get in, so you'll have to be super creative".
The real reason we have such difficulties is simple - warranties. People are idiots - just imagine the person you've had to tell how to double-click the browser icon for the 10th time today wanting to fix their phone. And if you think I was kidding with the butter knife, it's happened - the mentality is basically anything in the house is fair game in order to fix your piece of precision made high technology.
Hell, you try dealing with a customer who's claiming their device stopped working because of water damage. Even when said device is creating a giant lake on the counter top - the customer will demand you fix it, no it did not fall into water, your counter was already flooded with the 2 feet of water pouring out and maybe your counter broke the device so fix it.
The end result is simple - stuff gets more expensive because for everyone who has the capabilities of fixing the thing, you have to deal with the hundreds more who think a large baseball sized metal ball is all they need to fix their device.
Parts are easy to get - how do you think ifixit gets their parts? They cannibalize it from other devices. So it doesn't matter if the manufacturer refuses to sell you replacement parts - as long as there is a device you can cannibalize, there's always a source of parts. And heck, it seems even the Chinese are making replacement parts as well - given the recent story about how Apple accidentally broke 3rd party LCD screens.
What needs to happen first is to fix the idiot problem.
Of course. If there are local market stations, it's a lot harder for Trump to cancel "NBC's broadcast license". Trump can't do it, neither can the FCC. What they CAN do is cancel every NBC affiliate's broadcast license. But with so many affiliates, it's a lot of work.
The hope is that the networks will consolidate their stations to reduce costs, which means instead of having to cancel say, 500 NBC broadcast licenses, they can hope consolidation makes it say, 10 big stations. Much less work to cancel 10 licenses when the president feels he's been offended.
Well, to be fair, Google's support has traditionally been crap. This has been true since Google started selling non-electronic stuff.
Google, it seems, can sling electrons around like the best of them. But atoms? forget it. Heck, I've ordered stuff through Google, and had it take far longer to arrive to me than someone who went to the store and bought it.
Getting someone on the phone is a novelty to Google - I still remember when your (only) support option was Google Groups.
And as much as you fault Apple, you have to remember Apple's support has traditionally been among the best of everyone. Perhaps not as good as Amazon where it seems everyone is empowered to do anything to make you happy, but still seemingly non-useless (aside from the few incidents that get well-reported because well, Apple news is money making news).. Not that Apple is a saint in the support department - they only recently opened an official Apple Support twitter account, which is like 10 years after everyone else. And they have a nasty habit with the delete button on their forums.
But Google? Well, old school support options they generally suck at. For stuff like this, you're actually better off waiting for the official Google blog to announce something than trust what support says.
But the problem is the government is going after data you already consented to having Microsoft store for you. You know, like emails (through Hotmail/Outlook), chats and stuff (through Skype/messenger) and other services. Microsoft stopping that collection would mean shutting down those services, and I'm sure there's probably going to be pushback from that.
Cycle counting died out once the 32-bit era started, pretty much. There was no need to.
So your old 8 and 16-bit consoles and computers require cycle-accurate emulation because everyone programming them was cycle counting in the first place. The Apple II is an extreme example of this, because of the way it operates and how the display DMA basically hijacked the data bus when the CPU wasn't using it between instructions. Plus, with 8 and 16 bit comptuers and consoles, you had a set number of clocks between events - usually between a horizontal retrace and the vertical retrace.
Pre-crash consoles and computers were particularly troublesome because they didn't have a framebuffer, and on something like the ATari 2600, a good 70% of the CPU is used for screen updates (the TIA only worked on a line by line basis, so it had to be reloaded with new line data every horizontal retrace).
But around the PS2/original Xbox era, it all changed. The addition of caches and other things to the processors completely changed how consoles were programmed. No longer did you have to cycle count (because it was all single-cycle these days), but even worse, the cache added timing variability to the whole thing. Even today, getting a simulator that is cycle accurate is actually quite expensive because they include cache modelling in order to retain cycle accuracy.
Granted, the Xbox360 and PS3 got rid of some caches in an attempt to be more deterministic, but by then no one really cared - they were powerful enough that the games were basically programmed like their PC counterparts.
As such, these days emulating an older console is rather easy - high level emulation will get you far. This is especially true for the Xbox, since it's Microsoft and the DirectX API has been pretty stable. Since every game would've been programmed to the DirectX API, accurate GPU timings are no longer necessary (and chances are, there was always going to be slight variability between consoles, but you never cared since you wrote your code against the API). And given the rest of the API is basically Windows APIs, all the high level API work is done. All you need to emulate is the CPU and possibly rewrite shader programs
Long and short of it, Microsoft is probably in a good spot w.r.t. emulating old consoles
The glasses are made to be insanely obvious. If you wanted to record surreptitiously, there are dozens of spy cam glasses available that are far more discrete. These are intentionally loud, basically to combat the glasshole syndrome. You aren't going to miss someone wearing them , especially indoors.
The real problem was marketing. At first, they were marketed only to the top users as a special privilege thing (and even so they ran out of stock quickly). I'm guessing they never announced it was generally available so everyone thought they were still highly limited and hard to get.
And people were not buying it for the creepiness - since there are far better solutions for that (and probably sold on Amazon).
Correct.Heck, 60,000 downloads of Hawking's dissertation is probably 20 or 30 times as many downloads as the university was expecting - the next highest download count for a paper was under 2000 downloads.
Chances are, that record is going to stand for a really long time, too.
Well, it's called streaky bacon in the UK apparently.
Anyhow, what I've never understood is why Americans take the fatty bacon cuts then basically cook off all the fat - leaving the bacon hard and crispy, but lacking all the fat that the cut had. Granted, good chefs save the bacon fat that's now on the pan for further cooking, so flavoring the stuff cooked afterwards, but it always struck me as odd.
Yes, I don't particularly like hard crispy bacon - when I get bacon (the streaking american kind) I always halve the cooking time so it gets nice and hot and fat just starts to run out, but the slices are nice and moist and limp and oh-so-tasty. Bacon bits never really appealed to me - it's just like jerky.
Only if a design patent was filed AND still valid.
Here's the thing - design patents are not utility patents. Everything you know about utility patents is wrong with respect to design patents. It's actually an important point, because a design patent is quite a different beast from a utility patent.
Another important point - design patents are only covered for 5 years. That's it. Heck, I've seen iPod Mini clones way back in the day - they came out pretty much 5 years to the day after the original iPod Mini came out. Right when the design patent expired. It's also why Apple changed up the designs periodically - once the patents were expiring, it was up to Apple to design a new design so it can get a design patent on the new design (because presumably tons of knockoffs will use the old design). One does sort of wonder how many times things are changed because the design was expiring.
Yeah, you might as well wait. Everyone outside the US gets a better deal.
Canadians get it through the Space channel with surround sound.
Everyone else gets it through Netflix, presumably with surround sound.
Americans get it through a streaming service with crappy stereo sound.
I'm presuming there's actually a lot of viewers outside the US that's causing a lot of the interest, though I know of a few people who really did sign up for just one show.
This is a design patent. To be infringing, you need to violate ALL the elements. It's an AND, not an OR. It doesn't matter if other designs had parts of it.
This fact alone makes Samsung's case weaker, because Google actually has all those elements in Android, just not together. The grid of icons on iOS is not replicated by the home screen on Android (because the home screen has ... widgets!). The App Launcher on Android again is not a grid, because it lacks the "tray" of apps at the bottom. Thus, Google deftly avoids infringing on the patent.
Samsung though pretty much copied it part and parcel - all they had to do was change an element. That's it. Change one thing so the patent isn't completely covered and Apple would lose.
Design patents are the easiest things in the world to work around... unless your goal is to basically copy the design of someone else. Hell, Google by default avoided the patent.
That actually leads to less security. Because prior to fingerprint sensors, about 50+% of phones had no passcode system enabled whatsoever.
The reason? It turns out passcodes are the antithesis to how these devices are operated - often glanced at (unlocked) hundreds of times a day, with each interaction lasting a few seconds, tops. Entering a passcode is enough of a bother that people don't actually... bother.
That's why they have biometric sensors - the goal is to turn that 50% of devices with no lock into a very low percentage - the biometric allows for quick and easy unlocking of the phone (basically without getting in the way) but have the benefits of a locked phone.
You see this in real life too - next time, check out the password your retail guy uses when they check you out - because the checkout kioss are typically locked, you'll find they have a quick password they can enter so they can get your transaction done quickly.
1) On iOS, pressing the power button 5 times quickly will disable biometrics and require the PIN/password/etc authentication. ("Emergency mode" it's called)
2) Face ID requires you to look at it. If you're not looking at it it will refuse to do a recognition attempt (but still count as one of the 5 tries). If you failed to do step 1 when handing over your phone, looking everywhere else (or closing your eyes) is sufficient to fail scanning. This also means pointing the phone at your face from a distance will fail it. (And as well, it will probably scan whoever's got your phone as well, reducing the count before mandatory passcode).