If a CPU failed QA to run at higher speeds but is fully functional at lower speeds or with less cores then it's an inferior, lower quality product and deserves to be sold at a lower price point. If you choose to unlock it, you run the risk that it won't work at all, or won't work reliably. Your unlocked product is still going to be inferior to the higher priced option. If you paid extra for a higher performing CPU then you get a superior product, it may have started out the same but the manufacturing process is not perfect and you're paying to get the top percentage. It's the same with most things, you pay extra for prime meat, extra for the best vegetables etc.
That may be true for manufacturers like AMD which have yield problems, but for Intel, it's often the opposite.
Sure, yes, they use binning to help sell parts that don't quite make the grade - the old Celeron series had half the L1/L2 cache because Intel detected errors in the cache memory, so Intel disabled half the cache lines that fail to generate a part they can still sell for less.
But Intel often has high yields - they may be able to make the top end i7 in such huge quantities that the bins for the lower end i3/i5 run out - retailers and OEMs want the lower cost cheap product. So what does a company like Intel do? Simply re-mark the high end part as a lower end part - they're making way more than they need. They can easily cripple fully functional parts, which they do and then they use the high end parts to refill the bins of the lower end parts.
Intel COULD reduce the price, but it likely wouldn't be as cheap as OEMs and retailers want for the lower end parts, so they just cripple the high end parts to sell them cheaper without cannibalizing the high end part sales.
Yes, historically, Intel parts can achieve a higher overclock than AMD parts, and it's often because Intel intentionally bins full spec parts into lower tiers to fulfill demand. Of course, you never know if the part you got is simply a part that couldn't be binned at the higher tiers, or is a re-binned part that was crippled in order to fulfill demand.
Anyhow, let's remember IBM was really the start of all this - when you leased a mainframe (when you couldn't buy a computer), you leased a certain amount of storage and a certain amount of processor and memory. IBM overprovisioned them, so if you needed more storage or more processor or more memory, you called IBM, paid the increased fee, and IBM flipped a few switches that enabled the hard drive to give you more storage, told the OS to initialize more processors or that it can use more RAM.
Software unlocks are common these days. It allows manufacturers to make lower spec goods using the same hardware as higher spec goods, with the intent that lower spec goods will be cheaper and sell more. That increased volume can lower production costs so much it's cheaper to use one part for both models than have multiple parts.
Tesla used to have a 60kWh battery. When purchasing patterns generally favored the midrange to high end models, the low end model was cost reduced, and it was cheaper to provide the same battery as the higher end 75kWh model than maintain two separate battery pack SKUs. So they limit it in software so there's a low end option available for the few people who buy it - either due to budget, or they don't need the higher end version, so why force them to pay for something they didn't want in the first place?
Hell, software is the same - Windows, Office, etc. It's basically the same software image, just which one you purchased is what gets activated. And lots of osftware does it - you can pay for the "basic" edition that disables the demo mode, or pay more for the "pro" edition that has the basic edition and gives you more stuff, in the same download package.
Smartphones have nothing to do with it. I see three things impeding the mass acceptance of VR:
1) It's expensive 2) You have to wear it 3) There's no use case compelling enough to overcome 1 and 2 (unless, perhaps, you're a hardcore gamer)
No, it's not expensive - your smartphone can do it with a cheap addon. VR purists may scoff, but it is an economical way to get into VR.
There are other reasons for VR's non-popularity.
First - the goggles. People hate 3D because they have to wear glasses. Now you want to strap on their heads a heavy piece of gear? They weren't willing to wear glasses to see 3D, I don't see them willing to put something heavier and more massive on their heads. Unless you can get "glasses free VR" working, it'll be a problem.
Second, the space. People hated Kinect for the space it required, and they hate moving in the space - see the failure of Kinect.
That's two hits - you're combining the worst of two failing technologies - 3D and Kinect and you expect success?
This third one is interesting - while wearing VR goggles, you can't pick up your smartphone and quickly check out facebook or a tweet or something. Or even change the radio station you're listening to.
Are you sure about that? Apple makes some profit on the hardware and a big chunk on iAds and on their 30% cut from the App Store. Google takes a similar cut from the Play store, and a lot more from their mobile advertising platform, without having to be in the low-margin hardware business.
No, they don't. They do not reap much from the 30% cut - i think the last thing Apple reported last year was they handed out $6B or so to developers. That means Apple earned about $3B since the App Store opened. I realize $3B may be a large amount of money for you, but remember, Apple has $250B in the bank.
You can see how much money Apple makes from the 30% cut. It's listed as online revenue, which includes other sources of 30% cut including music, movies and books, as well as Apple Radio and iCloud. Most of the money goes back into paying the payment processor (30% was carefully chosen to pay for 99 cent stuff, pay the payment processor and pay for the equipment).
iAds is dead. Apple killed it when Google told them they didn't need the competition anymore. It never made any significant amount of money. (Department of Justice deemed Google could buy AdMob (mobile advertising company) because iAds provided competition).
30% cut may seem excessive to you, but if you consider how much it costs to host content, handle payment providers, handle user PII data (payment information, user information and passwords) as well as ongoing maintenance, it isn't that much. Especially trying to keep systems up to date from the latest hacks, trying to keep up with sales tax changes worldwide and all that. You, the developer get all that for free, and if you don't charge for stuff, the hosting's free too. And you don't need to bother with "redownloads" and other stuff - because Apple handles that too.
Apple's primary business is hardware. It's why they're emphasizing privacy over all else now. They make money on hardware, not selling your data. iOS is extremely hard to exfiltrate information from these days - access to contacts and other sensitive information pops up a system dialog allowing a user to deny access to the information, so unlike an Android app, users are alerted when apps need to steal their information.
Any other studio wouldn't try this because of the potential backlash from upset consumers. Disney thinks they can get away with it because kids are going to bug their parents into getting a subscription so they can watch the Disney stuff, principles be damned. And I suspect they're right.
Yes, you're right.
Think about it. Disney is the #1 entertainment company in the world. They make a crap load of money selling entertainment.
What Disney makes pretty much turns the rest of Hollywood as a rounding error.
It's why they can co-opt the public domain, get "mickey mouse" laws passed and all sorts of other things. And they've carefully crafted their image as a family friendly child-safe zone, so billions of people happily hand over trillions of dollars.
Browsers engines are hugely complicated, and forking then will always be hard, very hard. Mozilla Firefox is and will remain the best option... with the work being put into servo and features being ported over to firefox we're seeing dramatic performance improvements coming up...
No, they're not. Well designed browser engines have been forked. The best known might be KHTML, which Apple forced to produce WebKit. WebKit is now the foundation for many different web browsers, like Chrome (using Blink, a fork of WebKit), Safari, practically every mobile web browser out there now (Apple ported it to ARM, Google ported it to Android) and even KDE dumped KHTML and incorporated WebKit into its web browser.
It's not that Apple created a really easy to use browser engine, they chose KHTML as their base because it was the easiest to fork and use to create WebKit. Apple apparently kept that for WebKit which allowed Apple and Google and Opera and others to take that create their own forks of it.
All it means is KHTML and WebKit are nicely structured pieces of code. Heck, Steam uses WebKit as its embedded browser as well, switching away from Trident/IE embedding when it went multi-platform.
Actually several add-on where found to leak memory, crash the browser, change settings, spy the user, steal passwords, relay cookies, add fake CA. all those that where found, where blocked, but the current API is dangerous. Mozilla already disabled several features to try to make it safer, but that broke many add-on and the reality is that add-on have access to almost everything in the browser, they can workaround those limits.
WebExtensions isn't going to help in that department, if looking at Chrome extensions is any clue where extensions are also doing the same thing!. Hell, attacking Chrome extensions is a popular thing - either by buying out a popular extension from a developer (and then stuffing it full of adware and stuff) or even just flat out trying to hack the developer.
Movie receipts are down because Hollowood continues to dig itself deeper in the same hole of crap it started digging years ago.
Box office receipts are only down in the US. Movies have been doing quite well internationally. Hollywood has discovered that there is more than the domestic market, and if you look at a few of the movies, you'll find Chinese production companies at least partnering in the movies. Why? China is a huge market, and they WANT US movies. There is a really strong demand for foreign movies in China, and I'm sure the Chinese production companies are there to get easy and fast approval into China.
Anyhow, the new iPhones will be expensive purposely to curb demand - supposedly Samsung is having production problems with the OLED screens - remember, Samsung basically has to produce double the number of OLED screens as they normally do. Apple may be late to the party, but even years after OLED hits the market, the #1 top producer cannot make them in Apple iPhone quantities (it's one thing to produce 10M, 20M, 50M screens, but now with the iPhone, you're going to have to produce 100M+ - 50M for all your phones, and Apple will probably buy another 50M for an iPhone). It's entirely possible the production capacity simply isn't there. Apple simply waited until Samsung is making enough phones with OLED that they could order OLED screens in sufficient quantities (50-75M units).
I've always wondered. What mechanisms are in place to prevent someone taking high-res photos of their ballot while voting, going home and duplicating large quantities of them, mark the candidates they want to win, and passing them off to co-conspirators who palm them and drop them into the ballot box at the same time they're dropping in their real ballot?
Absolutely nothing.
But, you have to be careful because boxes are often serialized, and how many people put votes in a box is tallied. If the count gets out, then fraud has happened. I mean, if a box is supposed to have 1000 votes in it, and it has 1010, you know something is screwy.
They count votes box by box, recording the votes in each box, then sealing it back up. Thus "ballot stuffing" a box happens only on a small scale (depending on the voting system, ballots vary by region - you may not get the same ballot across a province or a state).
Electronic voting systems generally aren't as robust - if you can alter the vote, you can make sure the audit trail stays perfect - you can bump up the vote of your candidate and then subtract a vote for another candidate, and the counts still match. And since these are often done by computers talking to computers, you can alter the vote over a wide region very easily, whereas ballot stuffing is generally on a small scale.
Plus, most electronic voting systems don't have a paper trail, so if you need to recount, there's no way to do it. Paper ballots are an audit mechanism too. And security paper used on ballots can render even high-res scans invalid (just inserting random colored fibers can fingerprint a ballot, so you need to digitally edit it out and print it on similar paper.
But the fact that we don't really need to generally shows the incidents are usually quite tiny and quite isolated, even in the most corrupt of countries where they send international observers to observe the voting.
In general though, the easiest way to influence the vote is voter intimidation, and you actually see this even in the most developed of first world nations - it's happened in the US (think Jim Crow laws, voter identification laws, etc), Canada (phone calls - "robocall scandal"), and many other places where voters can be shuffled around to wrong voting locations (dress up in a nice suit and say you're from the election authority and you can redirect people to non-existent locations - especially people you don't want voting).
So less than an hour after the automatic disconnect, it was fixed. And they wiped the balance, thus eating the cost increase. Plus the time spent trying to reach her ahead of time.
Such a bullshit nonstory, such a bullshit headline. Fuck you, Beau.
No, the story is how much it costs for 12 cents. Most companies have policies that forgive certain amounts, as well as absorb certain amounts. For example, if you look closely, your taxes are probably marked as "paid" if they're +/- $20 or so, because the tax office knows pursuing people, as well as cutting a cheque, would cost more than that. Either the amount is rolled over internally or it's simply forgiven. Or if it's refund, it's usually just held - the cost of issuing the cheque would cost more.
For 12 cents, they disconnect an account. User calls in, and over the course of time, it costs Google way more money to handle the support call and reconnect the user than 12 cents. Sorry, even the cheapest of call centers charges more in labour. Hell, even the phone call itself would be a good chunk of that money owed.
The business practice of assuming down to every last penny needs to stop - it's just a genuine waste of time and money to pursue such trivial amounts.
Heck, I remember a credit card was sending past due notices on around... $2 or so. The cost of the letters themselves were exceeding the amount, and even the collect call costed more in the end. In the pursuit of $2, the company probably spent close to $20 in mailing and phone calls and labour. Hell, it would be amusing if they decided to engage their lawyer too, waste even more money.
Hell, some companies send such small amounts to collections. I'm surprised the collections people even bother buying up such small amounts because it's going to cost them more money to try to collect it than write it off.
Heck, Google should's just asked for a credit card. Yes, I've seen companies do that - they'd charge you the 12 cents despite it costing them probably 30 cents in total in fees.
Trust me, for most companies, collecting down to the last $20 or so is negative returns - the cost of labour and notifications and all that will generally be way more money
Replying to my post, why would the software bother sampling voice at that kind of rate? Ultrasonic voice overtones adding to fidelity?
I don't think it's sampling that high - perhaps 48kHz or so. And it's only doing that because that's the default sampling rate of the codec or digital microphone in use. Changing the rate, especially of modern digital microphones can be complicated so it's usually easier to resample it later.
And its probably not ultrasonic - if you simply move human speech of around 500-4kHz to 16kHz or so, you'd produce something that a good chunk of the population cannot hear.
But yes, the easiest way is to simply low-pass filter the audio prior to recognition - 6kHz should cover the vast majority of human voice. and be well within the range of human hearing, even degraded.
So, at work, you need Facebook, match.com, and you need to use your work email to forward photos you took with your digital camera?
Don't need facebook or match.com, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone needed to do their job (social media and the like).
But digital camera to computer? Yes. Because you wouldn't believe how many support cases are simplified if the client simply takes a photo of the problem. Or in our case, we often photograph circuit boards and point out certain things. Like serial numbers (some people get confused so a photo pointing out where to look for the label solves the problem in 10 seconds versus a day of back and forth emails). Or maybe they blew something up - a photo of the exploded part works wonders.
I've also seen it the other way - a company was so paranoid about IP, they installed spyware on everyone's PC. Yes, they even emphasized it - from the VP who was let go because he played a movie on his work laptop (let's say not entirely legally obtained), to where there were dire warnings to never copy source code files (.c,.cpp,.h, etc) to a USB drive. If you need files on USB stick for testing, use PDFs and the like.
I got lucky - I didn't really work for them - I was contracted to them so I had my company's laptop with me over VPN to which I did my "normal" stuff and the company's PC which I did all the work with. Things sucked even worse when they decided that instead of having a generate gateway at that office in Canada, they would be directing all office traffic to headquarters in California, so were upgrading the links. It added some delay to the VPN that was noticable. They also blocked everything other than 80, 443 and some other ports (I had an SSL VPN which meant everything I did worked over 443). About 6 months before the end of my contract there they created a guest WiFi.
Oh yeah, the spyware caused lots of issues. We just ended up blaming slowdowns and stalls on it - but hey, I guess they were used to such inefficiency if it takes twice as long to compile.
They've been saying that bit torrent is on it's last legs since not long after I started to use it in about 2003. But yet it's still going. They apparently didn't know what they were talking about. Happens quite regularly on the internet. Once you see the humor of it, it's quite enjoyable.
Well, traffic on the internet has shown that the biggest user is no longer Bittorrent in the US - it's Netflix. Bittorrent downloads has been displaced for years now (it's still #2). Of course, upload traffic is still Bittorrent, but who knows, in the near future that may be displaced by live streamers.
It really goes to show that what you really need to do is offer legal alternatives and people will flock to them.
Torrents are unlikely to die, but they are getting harder - if you have a private torrent site, it's almost pointless to download unless you have a seedbox because you're going to compete with people with 1Gbps+ upload speeds with seedboxes so you can never get a 1:1 ratio required to maintain your account.
And if you're using public torrent sites, it's up to the variable quality.
I've given up on private torrent sites - it's too much work and really, when I add up the costs, in the end it'll be cheaper to buy the damn movie in the first place.
I think you're wrong. People in poverty have always had kids. Financial insecurity doesn't preclude kids. We are seeing this trend in mostly Western countries where people are told that they should wait until they are financially secure before having kids. During that time the wife's fertility drops substantially and they end up have a couple of kids late. This will continue as long as there is the message, "wait until you're financially secure until you have kids." Unfortunately there are real problems with having kids late. Further, it doesn't need to stop - immigration (which I have no problem with) will take the place. But there are consequences to that - demographic changes and a change in cultural values.
Actually, it's really about healthcare.
Back when medicine was a dark art, people had a half dozen to a dozen kids. Because you needed them to work the fields and survive - the high mortality rates pretty much ensured you needed lots of kids. You also needed a lot of kids to have enough labour to produce food and all that.
But then medicine became a science and as general health and wealth increases, birth rate drops substantially. You don't need as many kids to sustain yourself - or need as many kids because they're going to live to old age.
This has been seen time and time again - as countries go from impoverished sustenance to growth, the birth rate drops dramatically, and it happens within a short span of time.
In the western world, we've taken it to the next level - because parents are now supposed to raise kids and kids are not supposed to help bring wealth in the family by working. So parents generally delay kids because if you can't maintain housing and other basic necessities, having a kid won't help matters any, and you'll end up having to raise a kid with nothing. Still a mouth to feed and most parents wouldn't dare think of trying to panhandle with a kid. Or even worse, teenage pregnancy, so now try to juggle school, job, and a kid all at once.
And kids are expensive, because you also got to put them through school - the the impoverished cultures, you put them to work on the farms the moment they can walk, school is optional. (It's a big problem in Africa where parents prevent their kids from going to school because they need to work the farms)
Gift cards suck. Get a reloadable visa debit card for them instead. Unlike a gift card that ends up with some fractional amount of a dollar left on it that the company just pockets because you never ever spend it, the card can be reloaded with more cash, and used as a buffer for online purchases. (EG, rather than risk exposure from your retailer's delicious store of credit cards getting hacked and leaked, your real card number is safe. The retailer has the reloadable visa, and when it gets drained, it just gets denied. You dont end up with thousands of dollars of debt that you have to dispute.)
If you are gonna give something, give something with some actual utility yo.
Visa/MasterCard gift cards are terrible gifts.
First, the fees are terrible - you usually get a year, then after that they cost anywhere from $2.50-5/month "account maintenance charge", regardless of whether you actually use it or not. (That's a $30-60 annual fee).
You're also stuck with fractions you can't spend - most places that accept gift cards will accept multiple gift cards as payment so you can drain them all to 0 (and pay with a credit card or cash for the remaining balance). Though some places (Google was one of them a while ago - I couldn't use my $2 credit to buy $3 worth of stuff because it had to be single-funded) are still brain dead in that way.
It is a lot rarer to find places that will accept multiple charge cards at once - at best, you can do credit-and-cash payment but rarely can you do two or more cards at once. This is because obviously the fee is doubled since they have multiple cards.
I have lots of drained gift cards - I use them all up and pay the difference in cash or credit. The remaining balance on my Visa gift cards usually drains away because of the fees so it is really hard to drain them to zero.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how do you record videos without storing them?
There's several problems. A lot of "fast" SD cards are really quite slow - they let you write maybe 16MB or so really quickly, then they transfer that to the slower larger flash array. So if you're a photographer, they will start writing really quickly but then it slows down if you're doing a motor-drive shorts. If you're a casual user and snap a photo now and again, the card appears fast.
The problem is large cards can be slower, but people buy them because you need to store large photos and videos and need high sustained transfer rates, and because the files themselves are large, you want the big card so you can store more before swapping.
Sandisk is claiming you can probably use this as your shooting card - it is fast enough for motor drive shots or high end 4K video recording.
The iPhone SE technically should be a flop. It has a tiny screen, and everyone knows you must have a huge screen.... right? I mean if you can't hold it, the better.
But no, Apple was caught off guard because everyone was chanting the "big screen big screen big screen" mantra that they overlooked the need for a smaller screen phone, but with nice high end guts to take great photos and be usable single-handedly.
The market does exist but no one wants to go for it because they see the big screen gigantic phones selling millions and want in on that action rather than try to innovate and see if you can design a high end phone with features those popular phones may be missing. To find your own niche. I don't care about removable batteries (I have an iPhone 4s that still gets me through the day, and the last phone I had with removable batteries was a PITA to manage the spare batteries because you had to remember to change the batteries while they were charging, or you ended up with 3 dead spare batteries), but yes, some people do. Lots of people don't care for huge screens, but want high end cameras and processors and memory for the tasks they do.
Maybe if you're not taking labs. I graduated from there a long time ago and had science semesters over that amount.
This number is deceivingly low. Add a couple chem or bio labs that most science programs require and you'll easily hit 10k. Engineering or any professional degree is significantly more.
It's even cheaper if you're in-province, actually. I think I paid just about $100/credit, and a typical engineering load was 36-39 credits a semester. So it was under $8K Canadian a year. Arts and Sciences with 20-30 credits a semester is even cheaper.
My labs were included - they are billed by credits as well. Books were a significant part of the cost.
Out of province Canadians were charged a little more, probably around $200/credit. Out of country people were really billed a lot - a few of my friends were out of Canada students and they were paying the $20K/semester fees.
And yes, if you're wondering, taxes pay for a lot of it. Though I'm sure I've repaid them a few times over already. Government also gives a huge incentive to save up for education - Registered Education Savings Plans (RESP) are tax-free (you're taxed when you withdraw), and the government contributes 20% of what you contribute every year up to $500. Put in $2500 and the government/taxpayers kick in $500 so it grows by $3000 a year. You can't withdraw it until you're at least 18 and it has to be used on a recognized educational program - otherwise the government will want their contribution back and you lose the tax-free status.
Canadian universities are cheap, and a lot of them great. Most provinces should actually have world class university so really, one shouldn't need to study out of province, or even out of Canada.
We've already seen how Slack is a POS because it consumes resources like nobody's business - they just can't code crap.
I mean, I hated it because it consumed 30% of the CPU - both in the browser and the "app" (which was just a browser on its own), showing me they can't code for the web worth crap.
Doubly so when Discord I can have it open in a browser and it idles at 0%.
So all you need to do is make it friendly on lower end machines and consume few resources and you will wonder how Slack gets away with their cpu and memory guzzling web site.
People wonder why Apple is so hard up on developers, forcing them to run through hoops to get apps up. It's because developers always seem to, given an inch, take a mile.
I wouldn't be surprised if Uber was the #1 cause for Apple to implement a "Location services while app is open" option in the OS (before it was location services whenever requested). By default, when you close an app, the app stops getting location information at all. (You can always override this for GPS apps so they can run in the background)
In other words, by default, once you close the Uber app, the app stops getting location information. Doesn't matter that the app wanted to track users indefinitely, or for 5 minutes afterwards - once you close it, it's gone.
Uber is just spinning it because Apple slapped them down for misuse.
PalmOS, and later WebOS, is what made Palm devices unique. If it's just another Android phone maker, big deal?
Problem is, they have nothing.
PalmOS was sold to Access Limited (Japan) who carried it on as Garnet OS. For a time, they had the Garnet OS VM which ran on Nokia tablets, and this was classic PalmOS all the way. (Garnet was one of the internal names of the legacy PalmOS). Sadly, I don't know what happened to it.
Then Palm developed WebOS and that got sold (with Palm) to HP. HP sold WebOS to LG after failing at selling phones (which had a Garnet emulator inside them at one point), and then the tablet.
Palm being revived now... unless they licensed something seems pointless.
The pushback might have something to do with it being Best Buy, one of the most notoriously terrible chains of its kind.
You know, I was thinking and I might not mind it. Because I'd be happy if they could sell me a SNES Classic. Or a dozen other items that's hard to preorder and sell out so quickly you have to reload the website 24/7 to catch the 2 minutes where it goes on sale again.
If a salesdrone can help me purchase those items and do it coming to my house, I'd take them up on the offer. It's all too easy for them in the store to say to me "sorry, we don't sell that anymore" but now if they're hungry for the sale to come to my house, perhaps they'll work hard to get those items I want.
Isn't this the same type of conditions that Google applies for Android on the PlayStore? I am not saying this makes Apple innocent, just that this seems to be generally the same across mobile platforms.
Which is why Google Play is not available in China.
What is available in China are tons of app stores, and practically all of them are infested with crap. Not just pirated apps, but pirated apps laced with all sorts of malware.
You look up the next Android malware thing, and even if it doesn't affect the Play store, you can bet it's rampant on Chinese Android devices because the Chinese app stores are even worse at patrolling their stores. Hell, outside of the Play store, China is probably where all the malware lives (no Play store, everyone uses crappy app stores...).
Usually has been the best bet for USB sticks you don't know where they will be used. That's what I have always told my Mac-owning friends, if they think there is event the slightest possiblity that there USB stick will end up in a computer other than a Mac.
That's not Apple's fault. FAT is just the lowest-common-denominator Filesystem.
You can use NTFS if you're willing to install something on your Mac. Most drives (I know seagate does, and I assume WD does too) are NTFS formatted, and the "mac software" they provide (either on disk or downloadable) include the Paragon NTFS driver which will get you read-write access to NTFS partitions.
It's not the cleanest driver in the world (Paragon really created a FUSE-like driver and plugins for it - so you can read NTFS and ext3/4 too) but commercially supported and easily had for free.
More daring individuals can use MacFUSE and ntfs-3g, which I hear is really stable nowadays as well. And at one point, Apple actually supported ext3 as a mountable filesystem type.
if you declare on your tax return that your annual income is $30,000....Bermuda, etc., as well as photos taken from your first class seat in the airplane, then they have good reason to audit you.
False.... your vacation can very well be funded from savings or by someone else. IRS audits the WAY those work is too serious an injury to inflict upon someone from some idle observation that isn't a reasonable cause to suspect a thing.
Well, they'd take into account those things. At the very least, they'd send someone to investigate how you can have such a lifestyle without earning much money, and they can look into your savings accounts.
And yes, they do look at your assets as part of the investigation. An audit is very resource intensive, so they need to see if there's reasonable grounds to do so before they would initiate one.
They know your age, so if you're in your 70s and you're doing this, they're going to assume you have a pension and savings, and yes, those financial institutions do talk to the IRS about it - they will say you have a million dollars in the bank and you spent $100K of it in the past year.
But they will also look at those who live in multi-million dollar mansions, are not of retirement age and only claim to earn $30K. The IRS knows the cost of living, and the cost of upkeep, and know that there's no way a student earning $30k can afford to live there and will choose to audit that person because there's no way they can afford to live, maintain the house and all that stuff on $30k. Especially if the bank accounts say the student only has a few hundred bucks. It usually means someone is bankrolling it and the student is not properly reporting that income. Or if there's someone else claiming to be there and not filing tax returns.
The IRS has access to your financial accounts, so they know if you're merely financing a lavish vacation with savings and/or debt, or if you're actually living a lifestyle that's a bit rich for your income that's not financed with debt. (A lot of people are living beyond their means, but their debts show that so the IRS won't audit).
The IRS knows that people love to brag, and will post on facebook and other social media very incriminating evidence of being a tax cheat. And this is AFTER doing a simple filtering of how they could live such a lifestyle.
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That may be true for manufacturers like AMD which have yield problems, but for Intel, it's often the opposite.
Sure, yes, they use binning to help sell parts that don't quite make the grade - the old Celeron series had half the L1/L2 cache because Intel detected errors in the cache memory, so Intel disabled half the cache lines that fail to generate a part they can still sell for less.
But Intel often has high yields - they may be able to make the top end i7 in such huge quantities that the bins for the lower end i3/i5 run out - retailers and OEMs want the lower cost cheap product. So what does a company like Intel do? Simply re-mark the high end part as a lower end part - they're making way more than they need. They can easily cripple fully functional parts, which they do and then they use the high end parts to refill the bins of the lower end parts.
Intel COULD reduce the price, but it likely wouldn't be as cheap as OEMs and retailers want for the lower end parts, so they just cripple the high end parts to sell them cheaper without cannibalizing the high end part sales.
Yes, historically, Intel parts can achieve a higher overclock than AMD parts, and it's often because Intel intentionally bins full spec parts into lower tiers to fulfill demand. Of course, you never know if the part you got is simply a part that couldn't be binned at the higher tiers, or is a re-binned part that was crippled in order to fulfill demand.
Anyhow, let's remember IBM was really the start of all this - when you leased a mainframe (when you couldn't buy a computer), you leased a certain amount of storage and a certain amount of processor and memory. IBM overprovisioned them, so if you needed more storage or more processor or more memory, you called IBM, paid the increased fee, and IBM flipped a few switches that enabled the hard drive to give you more storage, told the OS to initialize more processors or that it can use more RAM.
Software unlocks are common these days. It allows manufacturers to make lower spec goods using the same hardware as higher spec goods, with the intent that lower spec goods will be cheaper and sell more. That increased volume can lower production costs so much it's cheaper to use one part for both models than have multiple parts.
Tesla used to have a 60kWh battery. When purchasing patterns generally favored the midrange to high end models, the low end model was cost reduced, and it was cheaper to provide the same battery as the higher end 75kWh model than maintain two separate battery pack SKUs. So they limit it in software so there's a low end option available for the few people who buy it - either due to budget, or they don't need the higher end version, so why force them to pay for something they didn't want in the first place?
Hell, software is the same - Windows, Office, etc. It's basically the same software image, just which one you purchased is what gets activated. And lots of osftware does it - you can pay for the "basic" edition that disables the demo mode, or pay more for the "pro" edition that has the basic edition and gives you more stuff, in the same download package.
No, it's not expensive - your smartphone can do it with a cheap addon. VR purists may scoff, but it is an economical way to get into VR.
There are other reasons for VR's non-popularity.
First - the goggles. People hate 3D because they have to wear glasses. Now you want to strap on their heads a heavy piece of gear? They weren't willing to wear glasses to see 3D, I don't see them willing to put something heavier and more massive on their heads. Unless you can get "glasses free VR" working, it'll be a problem.
Second, the space. People hated Kinect for the space it required, and they hate moving in the space - see the failure of Kinect.
That's two hits - you're combining the worst of two failing technologies - 3D and Kinect and you expect success?
This third one is interesting - while wearing VR goggles, you can't pick up your smartphone and quickly check out facebook or a tweet or something. Or even change the radio station you're listening to.
No, they don't. They do not reap much from the 30% cut - i think the last thing Apple reported last year was they handed out $6B or so to developers. That means Apple earned about $3B since the App Store opened. I realize $3B may be a large amount of money for you, but remember, Apple has $250B in the bank.
You can see how much money Apple makes from the 30% cut. It's listed as online revenue, which includes other sources of 30% cut including music, movies and books, as well as Apple Radio and iCloud. Most of the money goes back into paying the payment processor (30% was carefully chosen to pay for 99 cent stuff, pay the payment processor and pay for the equipment).
iAds is dead. Apple killed it when Google told them they didn't need the competition anymore. It never made any significant amount of money. (Department of Justice deemed Google could buy AdMob (mobile advertising company) because iAds provided competition).
30% cut may seem excessive to you, but if you consider how much it costs to host content, handle payment providers, handle user PII data (payment information, user information and passwords) as well as ongoing maintenance, it isn't that much. Especially trying to keep systems up to date from the latest hacks, trying to keep up with sales tax changes worldwide and all that. You, the developer get all that for free, and if you don't charge for stuff, the hosting's free too. And you don't need to bother with "redownloads" and other stuff - because Apple handles that too.
Apple's primary business is hardware. It's why they're emphasizing privacy over all else now. They make money on hardware, not selling your data. iOS is extremely hard to exfiltrate information from these days - access to contacts and other sensitive information pops up a system dialog allowing a user to deny access to the information, so unlike an Android app, users are alerted when apps need to steal their information.
Yes, you're right.
Think about it. Disney is the #1 entertainment company in the world. They make a crap load of money selling entertainment.
What Disney makes pretty much turns the rest of Hollywood as a rounding error.
It's why they can co-opt the public domain, get "mickey mouse" laws passed and all sorts of other things. And they've carefully crafted their image as a family friendly child-safe zone, so billions of people happily hand over trillions of dollars.
No, they're not. Well designed browser engines have been forked. The best known might be KHTML, which Apple forced to produce WebKit. WebKit is now the foundation for many different web browsers, like Chrome (using Blink, a fork of WebKit), Safari, practically every mobile web browser out there now (Apple ported it to ARM, Google ported it to Android) and even KDE dumped KHTML and incorporated WebKit into its web browser.
It's not that Apple created a really easy to use browser engine, they chose KHTML as their base because it was the easiest to fork and use to create WebKit. Apple apparently kept that for WebKit which allowed Apple and Google and Opera and others to take that create their own forks of it.
All it means is KHTML and WebKit are nicely structured pieces of code. Heck, Steam uses WebKit as its embedded browser as well, switching away from Trident/IE embedding when it went multi-platform.
WebExtensions isn't going to help in that department, if looking at Chrome extensions is any clue where extensions are also doing the same thing!. Hell, attacking Chrome extensions is a popular thing - either by buying out a popular extension from a developer (and then stuffing it full of adware and stuff) or even just flat out trying to hack the developer.
Box office receipts are only down in the US. Movies have been doing quite well internationally. Hollywood has discovered that there is more than the domestic market, and if you look at a few of the movies, you'll find Chinese production companies at least partnering in the movies. Why? China is a huge market, and they WANT US movies. There is a really strong demand for foreign movies in China, and I'm sure the Chinese production companies are there to get easy and fast approval into China.
Anyhow, the new iPhones will be expensive purposely to curb demand - supposedly Samsung is having production problems with the OLED screens - remember, Samsung basically has to produce double the number of OLED screens as they normally do. Apple may be late to the party, but even years after OLED hits the market, the #1 top producer cannot make them in Apple iPhone quantities (it's one thing to produce 10M, 20M, 50M screens, but now with the iPhone, you're going to have to produce 100M+ - 50M for all your phones, and Apple will probably buy another 50M for an iPhone). It's entirely possible the production capacity simply isn't there. Apple simply waited until Samsung is making enough phones with OLED that they could order OLED screens in sufficient quantities (50-75M units).
Absolutely nothing.
But, you have to be careful because boxes are often serialized, and how many people put votes in a box is tallied. If the count gets out, then fraud has happened. I mean, if a box is supposed to have 1000 votes in it, and it has 1010, you know something is screwy.
They count votes box by box, recording the votes in each box, then sealing it back up. Thus "ballot stuffing" a box happens only on a small scale (depending on the voting system, ballots vary by region - you may not get the same ballot across a province or a state).
Electronic voting systems generally aren't as robust - if you can alter the vote, you can make sure the audit trail stays perfect - you can bump up the vote of your candidate and then subtract a vote for another candidate, and the counts still match. And since these are often done by computers talking to computers, you can alter the vote over a wide region very easily, whereas ballot stuffing is generally on a small scale.
Plus, most electronic voting systems don't have a paper trail, so if you need to recount, there's no way to do it. Paper ballots are an audit mechanism too. And security paper used on ballots can render even high-res scans invalid (just inserting random colored fibers can fingerprint a ballot, so you need to digitally edit it out and print it on similar paper.
But the fact that we don't really need to generally shows the incidents are usually quite tiny and quite isolated, even in the most corrupt of countries where they send international observers to observe the voting.
In general though, the easiest way to influence the vote is voter intimidation, and you actually see this even in the most developed of first world nations - it's happened in the US (think Jim Crow laws, voter identification laws, etc), Canada (phone calls - "robocall scandal"), and many other places where voters can be shuffled around to wrong voting locations (dress up in a nice suit and say you're from the election authority and you can redirect people to non-existent locations - especially people you don't want voting).
No, the story is how much it costs for 12 cents. Most companies have policies that forgive certain amounts, as well as absorb certain amounts. For example, if you look closely, your taxes are probably marked as "paid" if they're +/- $20 or so, because the tax office knows pursuing people, as well as cutting a cheque, would cost more than that. Either the amount is rolled over internally or it's simply forgiven. Or if it's refund, it's usually just held - the cost of issuing the cheque would cost more.
For 12 cents, they disconnect an account. User calls in, and over the course of time, it costs Google way more money to handle the support call and reconnect the user than 12 cents. Sorry, even the cheapest of call centers charges more in labour. Hell, even the phone call itself would be a good chunk of that money owed.
The business practice of assuming down to every last penny needs to stop - it's just a genuine waste of time and money to pursue such trivial amounts.
Heck, I remember a credit card was sending past due notices on around... $2 or so. The cost of the letters themselves were exceeding the amount, and even the collect call costed more in the end. In the pursuit of $2, the company probably spent close to $20 in mailing and phone calls and labour. Hell, it would be amusing if they decided to engage their lawyer too, waste even more money.
Hell, some companies send such small amounts to collections. I'm surprised the collections people even bother buying up such small amounts because it's going to cost them more money to try to collect it than write it off.
Heck, Google should's just asked for a credit card. Yes, I've seen companies do that - they'd charge you the 12 cents despite it costing them probably 30 cents in total in fees.
Trust me, for most companies, collecting down to the last $20 or so is negative returns - the cost of labour and notifications and all that will generally be way more money
I don't think it's sampling that high - perhaps 48kHz or so. And it's only doing that because that's the default sampling rate of the codec or digital microphone in use. Changing the rate, especially of modern digital microphones can be complicated so it's usually easier to resample it later.
And its probably not ultrasonic - if you simply move human speech of around 500-4kHz to 16kHz or so, you'd produce something that a good chunk of the population cannot hear.
But yes, the easiest way is to simply low-pass filter the audio prior to recognition - 6kHz should cover the vast majority of human voice. and be well within the range of human hearing, even degraded.
Don't need facebook or match.com, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone needed to do their job (social media and the like).
But digital camera to computer? Yes. Because you wouldn't believe how many support cases are simplified if the client simply takes a photo of the problem. Or in our case, we often photograph circuit boards and point out certain things. Like serial numbers (some people get confused so a photo pointing out where to look for the label solves the problem in 10 seconds versus a day of back and forth emails). Or maybe they blew something up - a photo of the exploded part works wonders.
I've also seen it the other way - a company was so paranoid about IP, they installed spyware on everyone's PC. Yes, they even emphasized it - from the VP who was let go because he played a movie on his work laptop (let's say not entirely legally obtained), to where there were dire warnings to never copy source code files (.c, .cpp, .h, etc) to a USB drive. If you need files on USB stick for testing, use PDFs and the like.
I got lucky - I didn't really work for them - I was contracted to them so I had my company's laptop with me over VPN to which I did my "normal" stuff and the company's PC which I did all the work with. Things sucked even worse when they decided that instead of having a generate gateway at that office in Canada, they would be directing all office traffic to headquarters in California, so were upgrading the links. It added some delay to the VPN that was noticable. They also blocked everything other than 80, 443 and some other ports (I had an SSL VPN which meant everything I did worked over 443). About 6 months before the end of my contract there they created a guest WiFi.
Oh yeah, the spyware caused lots of issues. We just ended up blaming slowdowns and stalls on it - but hey, I guess they were used to such inefficiency if it takes twice as long to compile.
So what these business should've done is use not-a-bank Paypal instead, amirite?
</sarcasm>
Or apparently, being a bank doesn't shield you from the screwage Paypal does...
Well, traffic on the internet has shown that the biggest user is no longer Bittorrent in the US - it's Netflix. Bittorrent downloads has been displaced for years now (it's still #2). Of course, upload traffic is still Bittorrent, but who knows, in the near future that may be displaced by live streamers.
It really goes to show that what you really need to do is offer legal alternatives and people will flock to them.
Torrents are unlikely to die, but they are getting harder - if you have a private torrent site, it's almost pointless to download unless you have a seedbox because you're going to compete with people with 1Gbps+ upload speeds with seedboxes so you can never get a 1:1 ratio required to maintain your account.
And if you're using public torrent sites, it's up to the variable quality.
I've given up on private torrent sites - it's too much work and really, when I add up the costs, in the end it'll be cheaper to buy the damn movie in the first place.
Actually, it's really about healthcare.
Back when medicine was a dark art, people had a half dozen to a dozen kids. Because you needed them to work the fields and survive - the high mortality rates pretty much ensured you needed lots of kids. You also needed a lot of kids to have enough labour to produce food and all that.
But then medicine became a science and as general health and wealth increases, birth rate drops substantially. You don't need as many kids to sustain yourself - or need as many kids because they're going to live to old age.
This has been seen time and time again - as countries go from impoverished sustenance to growth, the birth rate drops dramatically, and it happens within a short span of time.
In the western world, we've taken it to the next level - because parents are now supposed to raise kids and kids are not supposed to help bring wealth in the family by working. So parents generally delay kids because if you can't maintain housing and other basic necessities, having a kid won't help matters any, and you'll end up having to raise a kid with nothing. Still a mouth to feed and most parents wouldn't dare think of trying to panhandle with a kid. Or even worse, teenage pregnancy, so now try to juggle school, job, and a kid all at once.
And kids are expensive, because you also got to put them through school - the the impoverished cultures, you put them to work on the farms the moment they can walk, school is optional. (It's a big problem in Africa where parents prevent their kids from going to school because they need to work the farms)
Visa/MasterCard gift cards are terrible gifts.
First, the fees are terrible - you usually get a year, then after that they cost anywhere from $2.50-5/month "account maintenance charge", regardless of whether you actually use it or not. (That's a $30-60 annual fee).
You're also stuck with fractions you can't spend - most places that accept gift cards will accept multiple gift cards as payment so you can drain them all to 0 (and pay with a credit card or cash for the remaining balance). Though some places (Google was one of them a while ago - I couldn't use my $2 credit to buy $3 worth of stuff because it had to be single-funded) are still brain dead in that way.
It is a lot rarer to find places that will accept multiple charge cards at once - at best, you can do credit-and-cash payment but rarely can you do two or more cards at once. This is because obviously the fee is doubled since they have multiple cards.
I have lots of drained gift cards - I use them all up and pay the difference in cash or credit. The remaining balance on my Visa gift cards usually drains away because of the fees so it is really hard to drain them to zero.
There's several problems. A lot of "fast" SD cards are really quite slow - they let you write maybe 16MB or so really quickly, then they transfer that to the slower larger flash array. So if you're a photographer, they will start writing really quickly but then it slows down if you're doing a motor-drive shorts. If you're a casual user and snap a photo now and again, the card appears fast.
The problem is large cards can be slower, but people buy them because you need to store large photos and videos and need high sustained transfer rates, and because the files themselves are large, you want the big card so you can store more before swapping.
Sandisk is claiming you can probably use this as your shooting card - it is fast enough for motor drive shots or high end 4K video recording.
That's the thing, you don't have to copy.
The iPhone SE technically should be a flop. It has a tiny screen, and everyone knows you must have a huge screen.... right? I mean if you can't hold it, the better.
But no, Apple was caught off guard because everyone was chanting the "big screen big screen big screen" mantra that they overlooked the need for a smaller screen phone, but with nice high end guts to take great photos and be usable single-handedly.
The market does exist but no one wants to go for it because they see the big screen gigantic phones selling millions and want in on that action rather than try to innovate and see if you can design a high end phone with features those popular phones may be missing. To find your own niche. I don't care about removable batteries (I have an iPhone 4s that still gets me through the day, and the last phone I had with removable batteries was a PITA to manage the spare batteries because you had to remember to change the batteries while they were charging, or you ended up with 3 dead spare batteries), but yes, some people do. Lots of people don't care for huge screens, but want high end cameras and processors and memory for the tasks they do.
It's even cheaper if you're in-province, actually. I think I paid just about $100/credit, and a typical engineering load was 36-39 credits a semester. So it was under $8K Canadian a year. Arts and Sciences with 20-30 credits a semester is even cheaper.
My labs were included - they are billed by credits as well. Books were a significant part of the cost.
Out of province Canadians were charged a little more, probably around $200/credit. Out of country people were really billed a lot - a few of my friends were out of Canada students and they were paying the $20K/semester fees.
And yes, if you're wondering, taxes pay for a lot of it. Though I'm sure I've repaid them a few times over already. Government also gives a huge incentive to save up for education - Registered Education Savings Plans (RESP) are tax-free (you're taxed when you withdraw), and the government contributes 20% of what you contribute every year up to $500. Put in $2500 and the government/taxpayers kick in $500 so it grows by $3000 a year. You can't withdraw it until you're at least 18 and it has to be used on a recognized educational program - otherwise the government will want their contribution back and you lose the tax-free status.
Canadian universities are cheap, and a lot of them great. Most provinces should actually have world class university so really, one shouldn't need to study out of province, or even out of Canada.
We've already seen how Slack is a POS because it consumes resources like nobody's business - they just can't code crap.
I mean, I hated it because it consumed 30% of the CPU - both in the browser and the "app" (which was just a browser on its own), showing me they can't code for the web worth crap.
Doubly so when Discord I can have it open in a browser and it idles at 0%.
So all you need to do is make it friendly on lower end machines and consume few resources and you will wonder how Slack gets away with their cpu and memory guzzling web site.
People wonder why Apple is so hard up on developers, forcing them to run through hoops to get apps up. It's because developers always seem to, given an inch, take a mile.
I wouldn't be surprised if Uber was the #1 cause for Apple to implement a "Location services while app is open" option in the OS (before it was location services whenever requested). By default, when you close an app, the app stops getting location information at all. (You can always override this for GPS apps so they can run in the background)
In other words, by default, once you close the Uber app, the app stops getting location information. Doesn't matter that the app wanted to track users indefinitely, or for 5 minutes afterwards - once you close it, it's gone.
Uber is just spinning it because Apple slapped them down for misuse.
Problem is, they have nothing.
PalmOS was sold to Access Limited (Japan) who carried it on as Garnet OS. For a time, they had the Garnet OS VM which ran on Nokia tablets, and this was classic PalmOS all the way. (Garnet was one of the internal names of the legacy PalmOS). Sadly, I don't know what happened to it.
Then Palm developed WebOS and that got sold (with Palm) to HP. HP sold WebOS to LG after failing at selling phones (which had a Garnet emulator inside them at one point), and then the tablet.
Palm being revived now... unless they licensed something seems pointless.
You know, I was thinking and I might not mind it. Because I'd be happy if they could sell me a SNES Classic. Or a dozen other items that's hard to preorder and sell out so quickly you have to reload the website 24/7 to catch the 2 minutes where it goes on sale again.
If a salesdrone can help me purchase those items and do it coming to my house, I'd take them up on the offer. It's all too easy for them in the store to say to me "sorry, we don't sell that anymore" but now if they're hungry for the sale to come to my house, perhaps they'll work hard to get those items I want.
Which is why Google Play is not available in China.
What is available in China are tons of app stores, and practically all of them are infested with crap. Not just pirated apps, but pirated apps laced with all sorts of malware.
You look up the next Android malware thing, and even if it doesn't affect the Play store, you can bet it's rampant on Chinese Android devices because the Chinese app stores are even worse at patrolling their stores. Hell, outside of the Play store, China is probably where all the malware lives (no Play store, everyone uses crappy app stores...).
You can use NTFS if you're willing to install something on your Mac. Most drives (I know seagate does, and I assume WD does too) are NTFS formatted, and the "mac software" they provide (either on disk or downloadable) include the Paragon NTFS driver which will get you read-write access to NTFS partitions.
It's not the cleanest driver in the world (Paragon really created a FUSE-like driver and plugins for it - so you can read NTFS and ext3/4 too) but commercially supported and easily had for free.
More daring individuals can use MacFUSE and ntfs-3g, which I hear is really stable nowadays as well. And at one point, Apple actually supported ext3 as a mountable filesystem type.
Well, they'd take into account those things. At the very least, they'd send someone to investigate how you can have such a lifestyle without earning much money, and they can look into your savings accounts.
And yes, they do look at your assets as part of the investigation. An audit is very resource intensive, so they need to see if there's reasonable grounds to do so before they would initiate one.
They know your age, so if you're in your 70s and you're doing this, they're going to assume you have a pension and savings, and yes, those financial institutions do talk to the IRS about it - they will say you have a million dollars in the bank and you spent $100K of it in the past year.
But they will also look at those who live in multi-million dollar mansions, are not of retirement age and only claim to earn $30K. The IRS knows the cost of living, and the cost of upkeep, and know that there's no way a student earning $30k can afford to live there and will choose to audit that person because there's no way they can afford to live, maintain the house and all that stuff on $30k. Especially if the bank accounts say the student only has a few hundred bucks. It usually means someone is bankrolling it and the student is not properly reporting that income. Or if there's someone else claiming to be there and not filing tax returns.
The IRS has access to your financial accounts, so they know if you're merely financing a lavish vacation with savings and/or debt, or if you're actually living a lifestyle that's a bit rich for your income that's not financed with debt. (A lot of people are living beyond their means, but their debts show that so the IRS won't audit).
The IRS knows that people love to brag, and will post on facebook and other social media very incriminating evidence of being a tax cheat. And this is AFTER doing a simple filtering of how they could live such a lifestyle.