I think I had read that Apple is locked into a deal with Intel for several more years, so I wouldn't expect to see any AMD processors soon.
Unless AMD has changed, Apple will never invest in an AMD processor.
The reason is simple. It's why Apple is using Intel these days after abandoning PowerPC. Besides PowerPC performance issues, Motorola and IBM both failed to deliver on their commitments - shortages of Macs were well known in the PowerPC days, because Apple just could not get their hands on enough PowerPC chips to make computers. The best machines were sold out constantly as people wanted them Apple wanted to supply them, but IBM and Motorola decided Apple wasn't big enough a player to get them.
AMD has the same problem. Even at the enthusiast level, they still have problems supplying enthusiasts with the parts they want. Part shortages are well known. AMD just doesn't have sufficient resources to be able to supply Apple with all the chips it wants.
Hell, it might get so bad Apple would just buy the design outright from AMD and fab it themselves, which means AMD gets frozen out of the fabs they need in order to produce parts. There is no scenario where Apple using AMD is good for AMD - either they'd be forced to supply Apple at the expense of everyone else, or Apple would be forced to fab it themselves and force AMD to fight for fab capacity.
Intel has fab capacity - they can make Apple's order of millions of parts easily without jeopardizing their product line or other customer orders.
Apple has a lot of purchasing clout - the DRAM and flash memory markets are almost single-handledly decided by Apple. When an iPhone sells slower than normal, the price ripple is felt by a glut of parts on the market.
As for Apple buying AMD? Won't happen. Intel will make sure of it - Intel just cannot have AMD be brought in and have Apple's level of resources behind it. Such a deal would benefit Apple a lot (access to AMD's and Intel's patents would help a lot for their SoCs), and AMD would stop having to go from feast and famine by having the resources of a more profitable company behind it.
Because you have DHCP and you have inherited the IP address of someone who was into that sort of thing? Using the reverse location lookup based on IP address, I've lived in the Tower of London, under London Bridge, the Yorkshire Moors, Newcastle-upon-Tyme and Leeds.
Advertisers have gone beyond IP addresses, because like the lawsuits have stated, an IP address doesn't identify a person. Especially at companies where you can have hundreds of people behind 1 IP address and it becomes important to identify the right people. It's why they have so many pervasive tracking measures.
Or someone might be at a WiFi hotspot, and thus that person may travel between 5-10 different IPs a day (home, work, school, coffeeshop, mobile data etc).
IP addresses have turned into the least reliable form of person identification ever - sometimes there are lots of people behind 1 IP, and people change IPs often enough.
And how much is your peace of mind worth? Or your time spent cleaning up after that Seagate drive blows up on you?
Good components cost more up front, but save you time and energy over their lifespan. I'm IT for a satellite office of a US multinational and unlike the parent company our workstations, dev servers and datacenter servers are all spec'd and scratchbuilt by me with decent components instead of being cheap and cheerful mass purchased crap from the 2nd lowest bidder. As a result my equipment failure rate is about 1/10th that of my US counterparts. It costs a little more up front, but the back end savings in time and productivity are definitely worth it.
You know what I find to be the better predictor of drive longevity? The store I buy it from.
I buy it online, and a lot of "computer" stores ship hard drives with little more than bubblewrap on it in the box. Or you buy a laptop hard drive, and it's shipped in a bubblewrap mailer. If you know how any shipping service works, you know that's not sufficient packaging to survive normal shipment.
Even worse, buying multiple drives is often risky - some have the gall to bundle up the drives together as a massive block and then bubble wrap the entire thing. And it's no surprise a good chunk of them are *dead* when you get them. Some of the better shops cut up a multi-drive package and use the foam inserts, but then... that's it. It gets stuffed in the box with drives in the slots and left to fend for themselves. It's a surprise of all the times it's happened, one hasn't fallen out. (No, they're not taped down).
Amazon I found had the best packaging - each drive was individually packaged in its own box with those plastic endcaps suspending the drive in the middle - what a drive manufacturer makes you use when you return a drive for warranty purposes. Even if you stuff multiple boxes in a bigger shipping box, the suspension keeps the drives from banging into each other. Basically, it's second to retail packaging (which is designed to really take a lot of abuse - not just in shipping, but when stocking and distribution at the store. It can fall from the shelf onto the floor while still protecting the drive inside).
It doesn't matter if Seagates are more prone to failure if most of the damage to the drive happens in shipping from the store to you. You'd think people who work at companies that sell computer parts would be more careful, but no. Yes, they can take a lot of abuse, but really, they shouldn't have most of their life used up before the customer even gets their hands on it.
This has become such a recurring theme with Nintendo that I can no longer believe it's anything but an intentional campaign to drive up hype with false shortages. Its not like they could be having hardware yield issues. It's been ages since Nintendo's hardware was anywhere near cutting edge. The NES Classic especially was just a bog-standard ARM with an emulator tacked on... the sort of kit that could easily be sourced by the hundred million from China. So there's no excuse for a production constraint. A failure in demand forecasting could be understandable once or twice. But after a few shortages, someone should and would have been fired for incompetence and replaced if said shortages were anything but intentional.
Basically, Nintendo is just screwing with us intentionally at this point. If I ever develop an insatiable desire for classic Mario; RetroPi looks the way to go. I'm certainly not going to go stand in their stupid lines.
Actually, you're not wrong. Nintendo is famously known for under-supplying product, and this goes all the way back to the NES.
Yes, even in the NES days Nintendo deliberately short-produced product and rationed it to retailers. It was one way they put retailers on short leashes - if anyone decided to do something Nintendo didn't like, they'd cut what the retailer got.
Hell, even in the NES days Nintendo even deliberately short-produced cartridges! They claimed it was a production problem, but one that only seemed to have developers on a short leash (who were required to buy their cartridges from Nintendo).
Nintendo lives off the hype produced by short-selling. In fact, the only times I noted that Nintendo didn't actually short-ship was when there was actual competition. The Wii was easy to get on launch day - it was only the hype generated a week or two later with everyone and their grandma wanting one that ti became hard to get (Wii having launched on same day as PS3). And the later part of the Nintendo DS, when Sony was pushing their PSP as well as later on the PS Vita, it was easy to get Nintendo DSi, DSi XL, 3DS, etc units. Only when the PS VIta imploded did stock of the 3DS actually start diminishing.
The hype of selling out runs out pretty damn quick though - eventually people migrate to other systems, and you can bet Sony and Microsoft will be very aggressive this holiday season. Especially Microsoft, who saw how fast XBOX preorders went that they committed to extra production and thus opened preorders up again (only to have them go even quicker) - they know those XBOX buyers will sell their old consoles so this is a way to flood the market with cheaper consoles and cause serious competition.
Microsoft's doing it because people who want an XBOX and can't get one may buy a PS4 Pro instead, so ensuring people get what they want is key.
Nintendo's shortchanging the consumer, and they've been doing it for years. Though I'm surprised Switch availability is still hard, since in my shopping travels, if you can wait up to a week, I'll find a switch in a store somewhere without lining up - just on my walk or other regular shopping trip. Heck on Saturday evening I was at Wal-mart, and they had 4 new Switches. (They had 1 a couple of weeks ago, but in the intervening time, I saw Best Buy and others got Switches too).
Nintendo's thinking on the SNES Classic I don't get. Unless there were license limits (i.e., they could only sell 2.5M units total because the license holders let them sell that many) they could easily made twice that number. Or even bump up the price to $100 and still sell. And was there really any harm letting a few units sit on store shelves? Being able to pick one up even if they were out of production means they will move and it also means you produced just enough.
The problem with that is one created of success: if you want to include a new feature on iPhone, it needs to be a feature you can manufacture 200 million of, or you just get tagged by pundits with being unable to follow through, can't execute, overly ambitious, etc.
So, reduce the market by raising the price tag. Now they only need to manufacture 60 million of them, which may be more reasonable for a cutting-edge hardware widget of some kind until the yields come up, at which point they can drop the price to increase demand.
I'm not saying that is what they are doing - they could just be amazingly greedy fuckers that want to bleed customer wallets of every drop they can. But it is a problem that you can't be as agile as a smaller competitor when you require the volume that Apple does, and can't multiple-source because of the lead time of building part factories. You can only manufacture completed products as fast as your supply line can get you the scarcest component.
None of your reasons are actually mutually exclusive, actually. The iPhone sells easily 50+M units, and there's very few Android phones that actually scale up to that quantity (Samsung's flagships, actually come close).
So yes,e very technology they use has to be manufacturable. It's why they haven't really gone OLED - the production isn't there (the production is all Samsung, and I bet until recently, Samsung was not able to commit to Apple to supply effectively 100% of their current production run).
It's why every launch day gets plagued by activation failures as cell phone provider servers are inundated with activation requests. Or why iOS updates can bring down portions of the Internet. (And the bane of every IT admit out there who finds their corporate network flooded with updates).
So yes, they are pricing it high to meet demand. Remember, this is Apple and they hate scalpers. Pricing it high removes scalpers by reducing demand and also allowing first day sales to go to people who actually will use the product. An ideal launch for Apple would be that the last iPhones were sold just as stores closed on Sunday - that they made enough so on Monday, they'll have a new shipment to sell through. Because running out on Friday afternoon means you have no product and no sales to make on Saturday and Sunday, and turning away people at the door is bad for business (they may purchase a competitor's phone instead).
Oh yes, there's a greed element to it too - I mean, $100 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB is pure greed. Things are better now it's 32-64-128 or even 32-128-256, but there was greed involved too.
That's not to say there isn't demand for cheaper iPhones. The iPhone SE proved unexpectedly popular, even though the higher end configurations rivaled the price points of the other new iPhones. But more importantly, it also showed there was demand for smaller high end phones - not everyone wanted huge phones.
Fucking iPhones... Give us decent Mac mini and MacBook Air updates, PLEASE!
Godamn idiot CEO who thinks everyone should use a fucking iPad. Some of us need REAL computers and I'm not just talking about processing power.
So get yourself a real computer then. Apple concentrates on what sells, and Mac Minis are a miracle they're even still on the market. Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the two WORST selling Mac products out there - and this has always been since the beginning. In fact, Apple considered dropping the Mac Mini completely because it sold so poorly. Mac Pros sell so badly they can be made reasonably in the US, presumably because it's actually uneconomic to make them in China (i.e., too small a production run).
Macbook Airs are also on their way out, given the Macbook itself looks to be taking over that confusing part of the product line.
Even still, Apple is only putting minimal effort in Mac products because the profit and money just isn't there. They may still sell millions of them, but at narrowing profit margins (the Apple tax is gone), especially because there's not much to innovate on the PC market these days to differentiate yourself from your PC competition.
There's still plenty of old school restaurants around banging out orders on cash registers, but they seem to be giving up because you need to have computers in house anyway to support web orders. Web ordering is becoming very common now; virtually nobody is handling it in-house but pizza chains.
Well, most restaurants use a POS system - the waiter/waitress enters the order onto the system, and it's automatically zapped to the back of the house for them to prepare you order. Only very small restaurants still use the paper chit method.
They use this for order tracking as well as inventory control - if you order alcohol, they will track to make sure the amount of inventory and amount ordered somewhat match. Usually the first sign of something going wrong is the inventory not matching the order - usually to a large degree. For example, if your alcohol order to suppliers goes up, but you're not seeing an increase in alcohol receipts, then there's something strange going on. Likewise, if your food inventory has you ordering more food but you're not seeing anymore food orders.
These are basic analytics you can do - sometimes you might you have an increase in food orders, but overall receipts have increased, but food receipts have not. None of it requires big data from your customers - just basic data. It's also the kind of information you need to run a well managed restaurant so you can spot trends and order accordingly (e.g., if some kind of alcohol is going quicker, you can order much more of it so you don't run out).
And yes, you catch fraud and theft that way - there are companies that specialize in discovering why receipt and inventory discrepancies exist and who's the cause (some of the more dramatic ones even make it on TV).
As for web orders, most of them are just taken by hand - the web order companies specialize in making it easy for the restaurant, so they often either manually phone up the restaurant and place ht order manually, or send an email or other method that can be punched into the POS system. This minimizes the investment the restaurant needs to make and lets the web order companies work with companies from the very small hole in the wall with just chits and a cash register to even larger companies who will not want you to integrate into their POS for security reasons.
There won't be a HL3, but yes they are still making new games. Valve released a teaser for a god damn Card Game based on Dota2 universe, that will be available in 2018. Valve has no interest in releasing HL3, and that's why they never, ever spoke about it. I hope I'm wrong, but probably not.
There will probably never, ever be a HL3, or a conclusion to the Half-Life series.
Pretty much all the writers for Valve have left in the past year. At least, all the writers for Half-Life. There is a very unique writing style to it that unless the new writers "get it", they're not going to duplicate. (E.g., Gordon Freeman NEVER speaks, because you're playing him. And yet, the characters act completely natural and having conversations with you, despite you never replying. That takes skill to write, especially if you want to avoid cheesy word plays around the fact you can't speak).
I also would be surprised if there weren't assets already created - plots, storylines etc - this is not a production "make it up as you go along" but is well planned out already, so HL2E3 would be a solid follow-up and probably lead to HL3. Given the writers have stayed on this long, I wouldn't be surprised if it was all laid out and ready to produce, if they ever got the OK to start development.
It really makes you wonder what's going on at Valve - you have all these game development resources available and sitting around - what are they doing? You're paying a bunch of employees to create,...?
I imagine Steam probably takes up a lot of time, and given some of the coding blunders of recent past it probably grew a bit too big too fast for them, but I can't imagine it grew so big it consumed all their coding resources (plus, I'm sure the coders were there to create games, not what is effectively a web application, so I can't imagine they'd be happy doing that for very long). And I'm assuming the writers and everyone else wasn't sitting there doing nothing but coming up with creative ways to do the next sale event.
They have a Design Patent (not to be confused with Utility Patent) for a device with rounded corners AND a grid of icons AND a sub grid of icons that remains static. (Which matches no default Android device ever - the home screen may have a static sub-grid, but it lacks a grid of icons (it has widgets and icons), while the app launcher may be a grid of icons, but lacks the sub grid.).
Yes, you work around design patents by not doing something actually `specified in the patent - it only covers you when all those things are true. Unfortunately for Samsung, TouchWiz back in those days actually copied the form and function of SpringBoard - the only difference being that instead of a row of dots indicating pages, the dots had a page number in them.
Jesus, what country do you live in? That's some of the worst product packaging I've ever seen. I'm looking at a bottle of chili sauce in that link and have absolutely no interest in buying it despite the fact that I love chili sauce.
In answer to your question though, I've never seen that brand in the US.
Of course you wouldn't/ "No Name" is the store brand for the Loblaws group, which owns a bunch of grocery and drug stores in Canada, including Real Canadian Superstore, Shoppers Drug Mart, T&T Supermarket (Asian supermarket), etc.
And the minimal design on the package is intentional.
It's just a private store label, though all the stores owned by them carry it.
No, no, NO.. there is NO commercial vehicle on the market that would EVER sell any significant number of units if the ONLY thing they can get is a measly 200 to 300 miles a charge.
Your average OTR trucker will drive at LEAST about 500 to 600 miles a day, I know. I was one. And there will NEVER be enough time for a trucker to just stop for a day to recharge this hunk of over engineered trash. It is just flat out incompatible with the entirety of the US's commercial logistics infrastructure. In fact most of the large carriers specially try to get team drivers on the go, just so they don't have to waste any time. Most of these trucks, at best, will have all of 4 hours a day where they are NOT running.
These aren't long-haul trucks. They're inter-city trucks, often used to go between ports and their destinations, inside the city.
Sure they may be limited in that you can't take them between cities, but inter-city trucks have their purposes.And there are plenty of delivery trucks out there that run between stores and distribution warehouses where the store can't accept a trailer load. (They are sometimes called lorries).
Of course, none of those uses may call for the stereotypical "trucker" type, but yes, they're driving trucks and need all the requisite licensing and all that. And these trucks DO sit around a fair bir, so if you can even retrofit the loading bays and such with electric chargers, that's the best way to make sure of the loading and unloading times.
Yeah yeah yeah, "trucks" are big rigs that run on the interstates, they aren't "light trucks" (aka SUVs), or the cube vans and the like doing local deliveries. Though port cities also have a need for the big style trucks that really don't do much other than travel through the city delivering between the port and the customer warehouses (because they need to deliver the 20 and 40 foot containers).
And yes, some truck drivers do like inter-city driving. Because it also means they're sleeping in their own beds at night, see their families all the time, not worry about logbook checks or weigh stations, etc. And again, those port lineups, if you can put them in charging stations, well, more opportunities to charge up.
It's also why the article mentions the trucks will not come with sleeper cabs.
The problem with the cheerios claim is there are already heaps of direct competitors using a yellow box, which makes me think they were trying to create problems for competitors more than they were trying to protect their brand. Theoretically they could have trademarked it back in 1945 (if they were first) but since they didn't and have left it for over half a century before deciding to claim it, they miss out.
No, that's why General Mills lost the ability to trademark the yellow color. A yellow cereal box on the shelf does NOT mean Cheerios, because competition also started using yellow boxes.
So it's not a trademark because it's not distinct - if people don't associate the color with Cheerios, you can't trademark it. Especially if there are other yellow boxes on the supermarket shelf.
And the color is quite narrow - I'm certain a shade of orange is trademarked to a certain peanut butter cup candy. They use it on their candy and on some associated products, like peanut butter. But i'm certain if you see it on say, a box of pasta, you won't associate that pasta with the peanut butter cups, so they would have it for foods that involve peanut butter in some form. but someone else can use it for pasta, or cheese puffs, or whatever because you don't see them and think peanut butter pasta, or peanut butter cheese puffs.
.. the people who text and drive were too distracted to answer the survey.
The fact that people are more engrossed by their phones show they do not want to drive, period. Driving is a chore, and they're distracting themselves because really, they want to do anything but drive.
Of course in a lot of places if you don't want to drive, you don't. You simply take public transit and diddle on your phone the whole way
And those who love to drive, won't let the phone interrupt their pleasure. (And I'm sure those that love to drive hate distracted drivers too, because they just take away all the fun when you're dodging them.)
Meanwhile, in Canada, Amazon.ca doesn't even sell their own Amazon Fire tablets.
That's because it would be useless.
The Fire tablets are basically to sell content from Amazon - movies, TV shows, books, music, etc. Of those, the only things available in Canada are books, some TV shows (prime video exclusives) and apps. There's no enough there to sustain Amazon or justify the extra costs.
If you wanted it because you would root it to install Google Play and have a cheap tablet, well, Amazon's not exactly wanting that use case.
A bigger question is why some "Fulfilled by Amazon" items can't be shipped to Canada, I tried ordering stuff and it was either by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon, and the fulfilled by Amazon item refused to be shipped.
I like my electronic toys. Have a lot of fun playing with them, but why all this integration? Why have televisions, something that should be nothing but a passive interface for signals to be made visible with, get turned into weird hybrids that have operating systems, computer parts, and memory?
Is it a matter of people not understanding what they're getting anymore? Is it a matter of perceived value? Oh, my TV is three hundred dollars more expensive than yours! That must mean it's better. Somehow.
Because they were going to anyways.
My TV (about 10 years old now) has a 166MHz processor and runs LInux. The only reason it has a processor is for controlling the display - the onscreen menus, configurations, etc. It even has basic "smart TV" features that I've never tried (it has a 10/100 Ethernet port), though with a 166MHz processor, I don't expect much.
These days, a TV SoC has benefited from the smartphone revolution - instead of a 166MHz processor, you can get 1GHz+ in single/dual/quad core configurations. And they don't cost a whole lot more than going with a "basic' controller. In fact, once it's all said and done, the advanced SoC most likely is cheaper
So now you've got a processor that's way more powerful than you need because sticking in a slower one costs more money in the end. What do you do with it? You add smart features because well, it can add value - either in increased sales (consumer has a choice of buying a smart TV or a dumb one for the same price) or the "value add" in increased price and margin (will the consumer pay $100 more to pick up a smart TV than a dumb one?).
That's the reason why. Low to midrange controller processors just aren't cost effective.
I love its large display capabilities, but the "smart" in it, it ain't that smart (same goes to most, if not all smart TVs.)
The problem with smart TVs is software, and it's not going to change.
A Smart TV only came about because the control chips for TVs inherited the advances made by smartphones. My TV (a 55" Sharp Aquos, before HiSense) features a 166MHz ARM processor on it and actually runs an embedded Linux. Its sole purpose is to do the UI and other parts of the control aspect of the screen. It has the beginnings of "Smart" features though I've never bothered hooking it up to the network to try them. Back before the iPhone days, 166MHz processors were common for ARM, and decent enough.
These days, using a 165MHz processor for the control part makes no sense - it's not going to be significantly cheaper - the license fees for the low end ARMs may be cheaper, but the marginal cost to pretty much do a custom ASIC eats up any potential savings. Better to just use available off the shelf processors which include a fast ARM code of 1GHz or more off the shelf. Even if you only need a tiny fraction of it.
So what do you do with the spare processor power? You make it smart. But now your "smart" software is being written by people who don't really have a clue how to do UIs beyond what they normally do, and whose idea of a firmware update updates everything. It's like people who code in the Linux kernel all day are suddenly tasked with doing a UI and apps middleware layer - they're not going to do a great job because the skill set is so different.
Normally at this point you'd go "so buy a middleware layer and use that" (which is what LG did when they bought WebOS), and what Google does with Android TV, or Roku. But that's time and money as well and you have to learn how to use the middleware layer. So you just annoy the existing devs who think UI is easy.
Why does Chrome allow extensions that can hijack proxy settings?
Presumably, to allow VPN apps to exist for Chrome. Sure you can get traditional VPN apps that use your system VPN clients, but often those may require elevated priviledges. Client VPNs often use the browser to host the VPN session and route all traffic through it for the browser. Not as useful (because they only route traffic for the browser) but are quick and simple to use and require no system reconfiguration.
The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?
It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a time, and even the people pushing BTC realize that now. When was the last time you heard BitPay brag about how many new merchants were using their service? The idea of BTC as money has all kind of faded away. It simply won't scale, regardless of the supposed "solution" of SegWit.
Now it's all about the speculative frenzy, and the different factions within the Bitcoin ecosystem fighting for control of the blockchain with hard forks. BTC is useful for moving large sums of currency across borders without government control (many wealthy Chinese like that), but as far as being used as "money", that ship has long sailed.
The problem is why Bitcoin forked. Before the fork, the entire network can handle a whopping 7 transactions per second. That's it. As an example, Visa and Mastercard themselves handle a million or more transactions every second. And that's not peak - peak shopping times can easily reach tens of millions of transactions per second.
Try that with Bitcoin and your confirmation time may move from days to years in a short span of time - in short, it doesn't scale. That's why they forked - because they needed a way to scale and there were two competing methods. But even then the scaling... doesn't scale - post fork I don't think either can handle a mere 100 transactions per second.
Before Bitcoin can become mainstream, it's going to have to solve the scalability problem first. And if you think things are bad now, imagine if you were getting paid in bitcoin - and while your company may pay you on time, the network confirmation may day takes to arrive. Considering a good chunk of the population live paycheque to paycheque, even a couple of days delay can send them over the edge. A sound investment might be in the scum known as payday loan companies whose predatory lending practices ensure you stay in debt to them forever no matter how much you pay. Because a lot more people are going to need it if Bitcoin becomes the payment of choice .
Except (at least for the last 2 boats I saw) they were hit midship. If they had been hacked I'd have expected the GPS hacking to steer the ships INTO other ships - not vice versa - which would require a higher level of control.
No no no, it's not hacking the ship itself. That's hard. You hack the wetware, because that's easier.
You cyberattack the crew instead - perhaps sending messages to their phones that their girlfriend is about to break up with them. Or you invent some new addictive game so their eyes are on their phone screens more than any other screen.
That's how you do it. Hacking GPS is hard. Hacking humans is much easier.
Yeah yeah yeah, navy, phones, illegal, etc. etc. etc.
FOIA requests are particularly sucky because most federal agencies have rather poor records retention. All the problems that people talk about related to big data are the same sorts of problems that exist with FOIA. In addition to that, agencies who wish to undertake certain activities and ensure that those activities escape official notice by the public can engage in strategies that result in records being misclassified, improperly destroyed, or even never kept in the first place (Hillary Clinton's home email server was a good example of this). So, if you are the person tasked with going around to a bunch of people and departments who think they are too busy to keep proper records (because none of these records are stored in a central, properly indexed, easy to access repository) then the suck factor will make your every day rather miserable.
That said, nobody forces people to work for the government and if they don't like the job they should quit and let someone else do the job who takes the responsibility seriously enough to it properly. The proper application of lawsuits by the EFF and other watchdogs is sadly a necessary component to ensure that the government remains compliant with the law.
They suck even worse for large departments like NASA, because if you want a specific contract, then it may involve searching all of NASA's campuses for a copy of it. Either that FOIA employee gets a huge expanse account to fly to various NASA campuses to search, or you have to farm out the search to many people. And as anyone who's been bounced around between companies for a support issue knows, it turns what is supposed to be a relatively easy search into a tedious one involving the coordination of easily 10 or more people. Add to that NASA issues tons of contracts all the time, and it's likely the one you want is in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door marked "Beware of the Leopard". in the cellar where the lights have gone as had the stairs.
Add to it that NASA is full of geeks and all that who probably don't really give a hoot about filing or other bureaucratic issues so that contract you fine may be missing pages because they were used to wipe up spilled ketchup.
Consider that the next time you balk at documenting something.
In the EU / australia / etc Consumers have rights that we don't get in the usa.
TINSTAAFL
Yes, consumers in Europe and Australia get consumer protections. But do you know what their biggest complaint is? Everything costs more! Everyone complains how a $500 item in s the US costs around $750US after conversion or more in Europe or Australia. Hell, Australia even encouraged consumers to bypass their local distributors and import stuff from the US.
Of course, part of it is gouging, but another part of it is the law. When the law says you must give 3 years of warranty to a product, that's the same as buying an extended warranty. So your $500 item will probably be dinged another $100 for the extended warranty, just like you could choose to pay Best Buy $100 to purchase the same extended warranty. Other sources include taxes (EU/AU prices include sales tax in the price itself, while US prices do not, which in our example can be another 20%)'
The good news is that most companies have not priced in the cost of arbitration versus a lawsuit so that has little to no impact on price of a product. This is especially true in a country like Canada, where the courts have ruled that despite arbitration clauses, you never give up your right to seek redress through the judicial system. So you may go through the process, and if you are unhappy, you are free to file a lawsuit and a company cannot hide behind arbitration clauses. You are also free to appeal your arbitration ruling in court
Heck, NIST removed its recommendation of using a phone number for two-factor authentication earlier this year.
Of course, the thinking was that criminals would hijack SS7 and use that to intercept SMS messages, not wholesale takeover of the phone number.
I'm guessing NIST didn't think that they would hijack people's phones instead, but the recommendation is still there - a phone number is not sufficient for two-factor authentication.
I can't remember the last time I paid $80 for a console game. You can either: 1) wait for the game to get cheaper or 2) pre-order games during E3 and get some for 20% off, or some bigger named titles for $50. This E3 I pre-ordered Battlefront 2 and a few others for $50 (CAD) from Amazon. In Canada new PC games are now priced the same as the console versions for the most part.
Or play the games that come free with Xbox Live Gold.
Sorry, I have PS+ and since the PS4 came out, Sony's been offering lamer and lamer games on PS+. (PS+ games used to be good and people would get excited every month to see what games were new. Now it's more of a "meh").
At least Microsoft's offering is decent still (they still need to compete, and while Sony's resting on its laurels faking in PS4 cash, Microsoft's being the underdog and actually competing again). Even the 360 games are decent (and unlike the PS4, Microsoft ensures the free 360 games also play on Xbone).
Microsoft was resting on their laurels for the Xbox360, but since their Xbone's doing not as well (understatement), Microsoft's been trying to claw back some userbase. It is really annoying, because Sony and Microsoft do well competing, but it's more of a "if I'm winning, I'm going to just coast".
But apparently, we are now preparing for a population that becomes illiterate. Sure, expiry dates have some leeway, but people figure these out. Also, sensors can only tell when it is already bad and standard human sensors do a pretty good job of that as well.
Sounds like yet another product that nobody needs and that will just serve to create more garbage.
Expiry dates have a LOT of leeway. Inf act, there's a reason most foods don't have expiry dates anymore - they have "Best before" dates, and that's not an expiry date. It's generally used as a sell-by date - if the store hasn't sold the product by then, it should be tossed.
In fact, a lot of foods have an expiry or best before date that's legally mandated - the law states that after manufacture a certain food item has a date 3 months in the future, regardless of when it really goes bad. And there are a maximums - for most foods, it's 1 year from date of manufacture.
About the only thing that had a real expiry date is most dairy products, where instead of "Best before" it says "Use by".
Stuff like meat and all that is where this has real usefulness - there's no real test for whether or not it's "off", especially given some techniques of preparation intentionally "spoil" it. Plus since it's usually sold fresh at the store or buther's shop, there may be no real expiry date on it and there's no test you can do to see if ti's still good or not.
I think this is at least the third "secret posting" I've heard about recently. I'm also thinking about the: - "Searches for Python leads to Google job application" thing (https://thehustle.co/the-secret-google-interview-that-landed-me-a-job) - "IT job postings for Hillary Clinton's campaign in campaign site source code" thing (http://cybertical.com/assets/docs/Hack_All_The_Candidates_Thotcon_2016_Jonathan_Lampe_InfoSec_Institute.pdf)
I worry that these kind of "secret postings" might violate some "equal opportunity" regulations, but they do seem like a clever idea.
No, the reason you have these "secret opportunity" postings is because the job's already been filled. Yes, filled.
This is one of those "hidden job market" things everyone talks about - where there are jobs that aren't posted on any job site, but you have to know people in order to find out about them. The group wanting the person doesn't actually have a job opening posted, but they want to hire the guy. Company policy usually restricts such off-the-record hiring so the group simply posts a narrowly-targeted job posting for the minimum amount of time to fulfill HR requirements of "open competition", where the only intent is to hire that one guy, but as a formality, they have to do an open contest.
The other reason is simple - it gets around anti-poaching agreements. Suppose you want to poach someone but you have an anti-poaching agreement with the company. What you do instead is you post a job opportunity and then notify the person to it on an off-the-record way (e.g., phone call from personal phone, meeting in the park, etc). This way you can hire the guy and if the other company comes calling saying you poached them, you show them the job posting and that the employee voluntarily applied for the job.
(It's why people who believe anti-poaching laws keep employees down are wrong - if you were wanted by some other company, they'd have hired you already. The only thing an anti-poach does is keep the company from directly contacting you - but if they wanted you, they'd make you apply for the job "through the normal channels". And yes, I've been "poached" before despite anti-poaching agreements. If someone wants you, there's always a way around it. Basically, it's not poaching if you approach them for a job and not they approach you, hence the use of off-the-record notification mechanisms).
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Unless AMD has changed, Apple will never invest in an AMD processor.
The reason is simple. It's why Apple is using Intel these days after abandoning PowerPC. Besides PowerPC performance issues, Motorola and IBM both failed to deliver on their commitments - shortages of Macs were well known in the PowerPC days, because Apple just could not get their hands on enough PowerPC chips to make computers. The best machines were sold out constantly as people wanted them Apple wanted to supply them, but IBM and Motorola decided Apple wasn't big enough a player to get them.
AMD has the same problem. Even at the enthusiast level, they still have problems supplying enthusiasts with the parts they want. Part shortages are well known. AMD just doesn't have sufficient resources to be able to supply Apple with all the chips it wants.
Hell, it might get so bad Apple would just buy the design outright from AMD and fab it themselves, which means AMD gets frozen out of the fabs they need in order to produce parts. There is no scenario where Apple using AMD is good for AMD - either they'd be forced to supply Apple at the expense of everyone else, or Apple would be forced to fab it themselves and force AMD to fight for fab capacity.
Intel has fab capacity - they can make Apple's order of millions of parts easily without jeopardizing their product line or other customer orders.
Apple has a lot of purchasing clout - the DRAM and flash memory markets are almost single-handledly decided by Apple. When an iPhone sells slower than normal, the price ripple is felt by a glut of parts on the market.
As for Apple buying AMD? Won't happen. Intel will make sure of it - Intel just cannot have AMD be brought in and have Apple's level of resources behind it. Such a deal would benefit Apple a lot (access to AMD's and Intel's patents would help a lot for their SoCs), and AMD would stop having to go from feast and famine by having the resources of a more profitable company behind it.
Advertisers have gone beyond IP addresses, because like the lawsuits have stated, an IP address doesn't identify a person. Especially at companies where you can have hundreds of people behind 1 IP address and it becomes important to identify the right people. It's why they have so many pervasive tracking measures.
Or someone might be at a WiFi hotspot, and thus that person may travel between 5-10 different IPs a day (home, work, school, coffeeshop, mobile data etc).
IP addresses have turned into the least reliable form of person identification ever - sometimes there are lots of people behind 1 IP, and people change IPs often enough.
You know what I find to be the better predictor of drive longevity? The store I buy it from.
I buy it online, and a lot of "computer" stores ship hard drives with little more than bubblewrap on it in the box. Or you buy a laptop hard drive, and it's shipped in a bubblewrap mailer. If you know how any shipping service works, you know that's not sufficient packaging to survive normal shipment.
Even worse, buying multiple drives is often risky - some have the gall to bundle up the drives together as a massive block and then bubble wrap the entire thing. And it's no surprise a good chunk of them are *dead* when you get them. Some of the better shops cut up a multi-drive package and use the foam inserts, but then... that's it. It gets stuffed in the box with drives in the slots and left to fend for themselves. It's a surprise of all the times it's happened, one hasn't fallen out. (No, they're not taped down).
Amazon I found had the best packaging - each drive was individually packaged in its own box with those plastic endcaps suspending the drive in the middle - what a drive manufacturer makes you use when you return a drive for warranty purposes. Even if you stuff multiple boxes in a bigger shipping box, the suspension keeps the drives from banging into each other. Basically, it's second to retail packaging (which is designed to really take a lot of abuse - not just in shipping, but when stocking and distribution at the store. It can fall from the shelf onto the floor while still protecting the drive inside).
It doesn't matter if Seagates are more prone to failure if most of the damage to the drive happens in shipping from the store to you. You'd think people who work at companies that sell computer parts would be more careful, but no. Yes, they can take a lot of abuse, but really, they shouldn't have most of their life used up before the customer even gets their hands on it.
Actually, you're not wrong. Nintendo is famously known for under-supplying product, and this goes all the way back to the NES.
Yes, even in the NES days Nintendo deliberately short-produced product and rationed it to retailers. It was one way they put retailers on short leashes - if anyone decided to do something Nintendo didn't like, they'd cut what the retailer got.
Hell, even in the NES days Nintendo even deliberately short-produced cartridges! They claimed it was a production problem, but one that only seemed to have developers on a short leash (who were required to buy their cartridges from Nintendo).
Nintendo lives off the hype produced by short-selling. In fact, the only times I noted that Nintendo didn't actually short-ship was when there was actual competition. The Wii was easy to get on launch day - it was only the hype generated a week or two later with everyone and their grandma wanting one that ti became hard to get (Wii having launched on same day as PS3). And the later part of the Nintendo DS, when Sony was pushing their PSP as well as later on the PS Vita, it was easy to get Nintendo DSi, DSi XL, 3DS, etc units. Only when the PS VIta imploded did stock of the 3DS actually start diminishing.
The hype of selling out runs out pretty damn quick though - eventually people migrate to other systems, and you can bet Sony and Microsoft will be very aggressive this holiday season. Especially Microsoft, who saw how fast XBOX preorders went that they committed to extra production and thus opened preorders up again (only to have them go even quicker) - they know those XBOX buyers will sell their old consoles so this is a way to flood the market with cheaper consoles and cause serious competition.
Microsoft's doing it because people who want an XBOX and can't get one may buy a PS4 Pro instead, so ensuring people get what they want is key.
Nintendo's shortchanging the consumer, and they've been doing it for years. Though I'm surprised Switch availability is still hard, since in my shopping travels, if you can wait up to a week, I'll find a switch in a store somewhere without lining up - just on my walk or other regular shopping trip. Heck on Saturday evening I was at Wal-mart, and they had 4 new Switches. (They had 1 a couple of weeks ago, but in the intervening time, I saw Best Buy and others got Switches too).
Nintendo's thinking on the SNES Classic I don't get. Unless there were license limits (i.e., they could only sell 2.5M units total because the license holders let them sell that many) they could easily made twice that number. Or even bump up the price to $100 and still sell. And was there really any harm letting a few units sit on store shelves? Being able to pick one up even if they were out of production means they will move and it also means you produced just enough.
None of your reasons are actually mutually exclusive, actually. The iPhone sells easily 50+M units, and there's very few Android phones that actually scale up to that quantity (Samsung's flagships, actually come close).
So yes,e very technology they use has to be manufacturable. It's why they haven't really gone OLED - the production isn't there (the production is all Samsung, and I bet until recently, Samsung was not able to commit to Apple to supply effectively 100% of their current production run).
It's why every launch day gets plagued by activation failures as cell phone provider servers are inundated with activation requests. Or why iOS updates can bring down portions of the Internet. (And the bane of every IT admit out there who finds their corporate network flooded with updates).
So yes, they are pricing it high to meet demand. Remember, this is Apple and they hate scalpers. Pricing it high removes scalpers by reducing demand and also allowing first day sales to go to people who actually will use the product. An ideal launch for Apple would be that the last iPhones were sold just as stores closed on Sunday - that they made enough so on Monday, they'll have a new shipment to sell through. Because running out on Friday afternoon means you have no product and no sales to make on Saturday and Sunday, and turning away people at the door is bad for business (they may purchase a competitor's phone instead).
Oh yes, there's a greed element to it too - I mean, $100 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB is pure greed. Things are better now it's 32-64-128 or even 32-128-256, but there was greed involved too.
That's not to say there isn't demand for cheaper iPhones. The iPhone SE proved unexpectedly popular, even though the higher end configurations rivaled the price points of the other new iPhones. But more importantly, it also showed there was demand for smaller high end phones - not everyone wanted huge phones.
So get yourself a real computer then. Apple concentrates on what sells, and Mac Minis are a miracle they're even still on the market. Mac Mini and Mac Pros are the two WORST selling Mac products out there - and this has always been since the beginning. In fact, Apple considered dropping the Mac Mini completely because it sold so poorly. Mac Pros sell so badly they can be made reasonably in the US, presumably because it's actually uneconomic to make them in China (i.e., too small a production run).
Macbook Airs are also on their way out, given the Macbook itself looks to be taking over that confusing part of the product line.
Even still, Apple is only putting minimal effort in Mac products because the profit and money just isn't there. They may still sell millions of them, but at narrowing profit margins (the Apple tax is gone), especially because there's not much to innovate on the PC market these days to differentiate yourself from your PC competition.
Well, most restaurants use a POS system - the waiter/waitress enters the order onto the system, and it's automatically zapped to the back of the house for them to prepare you order. Only very small restaurants still use the paper chit method.
They use this for order tracking as well as inventory control - if you order alcohol, they will track to make sure the amount of inventory and amount ordered somewhat match. Usually the first sign of something going wrong is the inventory not matching the order - usually to a large degree. For example, if your alcohol order to suppliers goes up, but you're not seeing an increase in alcohol receipts, then there's something strange going on. Likewise, if your food inventory has you ordering more food but you're not seeing anymore food orders.
These are basic analytics you can do - sometimes you might you have an increase in food orders, but overall receipts have increased, but food receipts have not. None of it requires big data from your customers - just basic data. It's also the kind of information you need to run a well managed restaurant so you can spot trends and order accordingly (e.g., if some kind of alcohol is going quicker, you can order much more of it so you don't run out).
And yes, you catch fraud and theft that way - there are companies that specialize in discovering why receipt and inventory discrepancies exist and who's the cause (some of the more dramatic ones even make it on TV).
As for web orders, most of them are just taken by hand - the web order companies specialize in making it easy for the restaurant, so they often either manually phone up the restaurant and place ht order manually, or send an email or other method that can be punched into the POS system. This minimizes the investment the restaurant needs to make and lets the web order companies work with companies from the very small hole in the wall with just chits and a cash register to even larger companies who will not want you to integrate into their POS for security reasons.
There will probably never, ever be a HL3, or a conclusion to the Half-Life series.
Pretty much all the writers for Valve have left in the past year. At least, all the writers for Half-Life. There is a very unique writing style to it that unless the new writers "get it", they're not going to duplicate. (E.g., Gordon Freeman NEVER speaks, because you're playing him. And yet, the characters act completely natural and having conversations with you, despite you never replying. That takes skill to write, especially if you want to avoid cheesy word plays around the fact you can't speak).
I also would be surprised if there weren't assets already created - plots, storylines etc - this is not a production "make it up as you go along" but is well planned out already, so HL2E3 would be a solid follow-up and probably lead to HL3. Given the writers have stayed on this long, I wouldn't be surprised if it was all laid out and ready to produce, if they ever got the OK to start development.
It really makes you wonder what's going on at Valve - you have all these game development resources available and sitting around - what are they doing? You're paying a bunch of employees to create, ...?
I imagine Steam probably takes up a lot of time, and given some of the coding blunders of recent past it probably grew a bit too big too fast for them, but I can't imagine it grew so big it consumed all their coding resources (plus, I'm sure the coders were there to create games, not what is effectively a web application, so I can't imagine they'd be happy doing that for very long). And I'm assuming the writers and everyone else wasn't sitting there doing nothing but coming up with creative ways to do the next sale event.
Nope. Never did, either.
They have a Design Patent (not to be confused with Utility Patent) for a device with rounded corners AND a grid of icons AND a sub grid of icons that remains static. (Which matches no default Android device ever - the home screen may have a static sub-grid, but it lacks a grid of icons (it has widgets and icons), while the app launcher may be a grid of icons, but lacks the sub grid.).
Yes, you work around design patents by not doing something actually `specified in the patent - it only covers you when all those things are true. Unfortunately for Samsung, TouchWiz back in those days actually copied the form and function of SpringBoard - the only difference being that instead of a row of dots indicating pages, the dots had a page number in them.
Of course you wouldn't/ "No Name" is the store brand for the Loblaws group, which owns a bunch of grocery and drug stores in Canada, including Real Canadian Superstore, Shoppers Drug Mart, T&T Supermarket (Asian supermarket), etc.
And the minimal design on the package is intentional.
It's just a private store label, though all the stores owned by them carry it.
These aren't long-haul trucks. They're inter-city trucks, often used to go between ports and their destinations, inside the city.
Sure they may be limited in that you can't take them between cities, but inter-city trucks have their purposes .And there are plenty of delivery trucks out there that run between stores and distribution warehouses where the store can't accept a trailer load. (They are sometimes called lorries).
Of course, none of those uses may call for the stereotypical "trucker" type, but yes, they're driving trucks and need all the requisite licensing and all that. And these trucks DO sit around a fair bir, so if you can even retrofit the loading bays and such with electric chargers, that's the best way to make sure of the loading and unloading times.
Yeah yeah yeah, "trucks" are big rigs that run on the interstates, they aren't "light trucks" (aka SUVs), or the cube vans and the like doing local deliveries. Though port cities also have a need for the big style trucks that really don't do much other than travel through the city delivering between the port and the customer warehouses (because they need to deliver the 20 and 40 foot containers).
And yes, some truck drivers do like inter-city driving. Because it also means they're sleeping in their own beds at night, see their families all the time, not worry about logbook checks or weigh stations, etc. And again, those port lineups, if you can put them in charging stations, well, more opportunities to charge up.
It's also why the article mentions the trucks will not come with sleeper cabs.
No, that's why General Mills lost the ability to trademark the yellow color. A yellow cereal box on the shelf does NOT mean Cheerios, because competition also started using yellow boxes.
So it's not a trademark because it's not distinct - if people don't associate the color with Cheerios, you can't trademark it. Especially if there are other yellow boxes on the supermarket shelf.
And the color is quite narrow - I'm certain a shade of orange is trademarked to a certain peanut butter cup candy. They use it on their candy and on some associated products, like peanut butter. But i'm certain if you see it on say, a box of pasta, you won't associate that pasta with the peanut butter cups, so they would have it for foods that involve peanut butter in some form. but someone else can use it for pasta, or cheese puffs, or whatever because you don't see them and think peanut butter pasta, or peanut butter cheese puffs.
.. the people who text and drive were too distracted to answer the survey.
The fact that people are more engrossed by their phones show they do not want to drive, period. Driving is a chore, and they're distracting themselves because really, they want to do anything but drive.
Of course in a lot of places if you don't want to drive, you don't. You simply take public transit and diddle on your phone the whole way
And those who love to drive, won't let the phone interrupt their pleasure. (And I'm sure those that love to drive hate distracted drivers too, because they just take away all the fun when you're dodging them.)
That's because it would be useless.
The Fire tablets are basically to sell content from Amazon - movies, TV shows, books, music, etc. Of those, the only things available in Canada are books, some TV shows (prime video exclusives) and apps. There's no enough there to sustain Amazon or justify the extra costs.
If you wanted it because you would root it to install Google Play and have a cheap tablet, well, Amazon's not exactly wanting that use case.
A bigger question is why some "Fulfilled by Amazon" items can't be shipped to Canada, I tried ordering stuff and it was either by Amazon or fulfilled by Amazon, and the fulfilled by Amazon item refused to be shipped.
Because they were going to anyways.
My TV (about 10 years old now) has a 166MHz processor and runs LInux. The only reason it has a processor is for controlling the display - the onscreen menus, configurations, etc. It even has basic "smart TV" features that I've never tried (it has a 10/100 Ethernet port), though with a 166MHz processor, I don't expect much.
These days, a TV SoC has benefited from the smartphone revolution - instead of a 166MHz processor, you can get 1GHz+ in single/dual/quad core configurations. And they don't cost a whole lot more than going with a "basic' controller. In fact, once it's all said and done, the advanced SoC most likely is cheaper
So now you've got a processor that's way more powerful than you need because sticking in a slower one costs more money in the end. What do you do with it? You add smart features because well, it can add value - either in increased sales (consumer has a choice of buying a smart TV or a dumb one for the same price) or the "value add" in increased price and margin (will the consumer pay $100 more to pick up a smart TV than a dumb one?).
That's the reason why. Low to midrange controller processors just aren't cost effective.
The problem with smart TVs is software, and it's not going to change.
A Smart TV only came about because the control chips for TVs inherited the advances made by smartphones. My TV (a 55" Sharp Aquos, before HiSense) features a 166MHz ARM processor on it and actually runs an embedded Linux. Its sole purpose is to do the UI and other parts of the control aspect of the screen. It has the beginnings of "Smart" features though I've never bothered hooking it up to the network to try them. Back before the iPhone days, 166MHz processors were common for ARM, and decent enough.
These days, using a 165MHz processor for the control part makes no sense - it's not going to be significantly cheaper - the license fees for the low end ARMs may be cheaper, but the marginal cost to pretty much do a custom ASIC eats up any potential savings. Better to just use available off the shelf processors which include a fast ARM code of 1GHz or more off the shelf. Even if you only need a tiny fraction of it.
So what do you do with the spare processor power? You make it smart. But now your "smart" software is being written by people who don't really have a clue how to do UIs beyond what they normally do, and whose idea of a firmware update updates everything. It's like people who code in the Linux kernel all day are suddenly tasked with doing a UI and apps middleware layer - they're not going to do a great job because the skill set is so different.
Normally at this point you'd go "so buy a middleware layer and use that" (which is what LG did when they bought WebOS), and what Google does with Android TV, or Roku. But that's time and money as well and you have to learn how to use the middleware layer. So you just annoy the existing devs who think UI is easy.
Presumably, to allow VPN apps to exist for Chrome. Sure you can get traditional VPN apps that use your system VPN clients, but often those may require elevated priviledges. Client VPNs often use the browser to host the VPN session and route all traffic through it for the browser. Not as useful (because they only route traffic for the browser) but are quick and simple to use and require no system reconfiguration.
The problem is why Bitcoin forked. Before the fork, the entire network can handle a whopping 7 transactions per second. That's it. As an example, Visa and Mastercard themselves handle a million or more transactions every second. And that's not peak - peak shopping times can easily reach tens of millions of transactions per second.
Try that with Bitcoin and your confirmation time may move from days to years in a short span of time - in short, it doesn't scale. That's why they forked - because they needed a way to scale and there were two competing methods. But even then the scaling ... doesn't scale - post fork I don't think either can handle a mere 100 transactions per second.
Before Bitcoin can become mainstream, it's going to have to solve the scalability problem first. And if you think things are bad now, imagine if you were getting paid in bitcoin - and while your company may pay you on time, the network confirmation may day takes to arrive. Considering a good chunk of the population live paycheque to paycheque, even a couple of days delay can send them over the edge. A sound investment might be in the scum known as payday loan companies whose predatory lending practices ensure you stay in debt to them forever no matter how much you pay. Because a lot more people are going to need it if Bitcoin becomes the payment of choice .
No no no, it's not hacking the ship itself. That's hard. You hack the wetware, because that's easier.
You cyberattack the crew instead - perhaps sending messages to their phones that their girlfriend is about to break up with them. Or you invent some new addictive game so their eyes are on their phone screens more than any other screen.
That's how you do it. Hacking GPS is hard. Hacking humans is much easier.
Yeah yeah yeah, navy, phones, illegal, etc. etc. etc.
They suck even worse for large departments like NASA, because if you want a specific contract, then it may involve searching all of NASA's campuses for a copy of it. Either that FOIA employee gets a huge expanse account to fly to various NASA campuses to search, or you have to farm out the search to many people. And as anyone who's been bounced around between companies for a support issue knows, it turns what is supposed to be a relatively easy search into a tedious one involving the coordination of easily 10 or more people. Add to that NASA issues tons of contracts all the time, and it's likely the one you want is in a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door marked "Beware of the Leopard". in the cellar where the lights have gone as had the stairs.
Add to it that NASA is full of geeks and all that who probably don't really give a hoot about filing or other bureaucratic issues so that contract you fine may be missing pages because they were used to wipe up spilled ketchup.
Consider that the next time you balk at documenting something.
TINSTAAFL
Yes, consumers in Europe and Australia get consumer protections. But do you know what their biggest complaint is? Everything costs more! Everyone complains how a $500 item in s the US costs around $750US after conversion or more in Europe or Australia. Hell, Australia even encouraged consumers to bypass their local distributors and import stuff from the US.
Of course, part of it is gouging, but another part of it is the law. When the law says you must give 3 years of warranty to a product, that's the same as buying an extended warranty. So your $500 item will probably be dinged another $100 for the extended warranty, just like you could choose to pay Best Buy $100 to purchase the same extended warranty. Other sources include taxes (EU/AU prices include sales tax in the price itself, while US prices do not, which in our example can be another 20%)'
The good news is that most companies have not priced in the cost of arbitration versus a lawsuit so that has little to no impact on price of a product. This is especially true in a country like Canada, where the courts have ruled that despite arbitration clauses, you never give up your right to seek redress through the judicial system. So you may go through the process, and if you are unhappy, you are free to file a lawsuit and a company cannot hide behind arbitration clauses. You are also free to appeal your arbitration ruling in court
Heck, NIST removed its recommendation of using a phone number for two-factor authentication earlier this year.
Of course, the thinking was that criminals would hijack SS7 and use that to intercept SMS messages, not wholesale takeover of the phone number.
I'm guessing NIST didn't think that they would hijack people's phones instead, but the recommendation is still there - a phone number is not sufficient for two-factor authentication.
Or play the games that come free with Xbox Live Gold.
Sorry, I have PS+ and since the PS4 came out, Sony's been offering lamer and lamer games on PS+. (PS+ games used to be good and people would get excited every month to see what games were new. Now it's more of a "meh").
At least Microsoft's offering is decent still (they still need to compete, and while Sony's resting on its laurels faking in PS4 cash, Microsoft's being the underdog and actually competing again). Even the 360 games are decent (and unlike the PS4, Microsoft ensures the free 360 games also play on Xbone).
Microsoft was resting on their laurels for the Xbox360, but since their Xbone's doing not as well (understatement), Microsoft's been trying to claw back some userbase. It is really annoying, because Sony and Microsoft do well competing, but it's more of a "if I'm winning, I'm going to just coast".
Expiry dates have a LOT of leeway. Inf act, there's a reason most foods don't have expiry dates anymore - they have "Best before" dates, and that's not an expiry date. It's generally used as a sell-by date - if the store hasn't sold the product by then, it should be tossed.
In fact, a lot of foods have an expiry or best before date that's legally mandated - the law states that after manufacture a certain food item has a date 3 months in the future, regardless of when it really goes bad. And there are a maximums - for most foods, it's 1 year from date of manufacture.
About the only thing that had a real expiry date is most dairy products, where instead of "Best before" it says "Use by".
Stuff like meat and all that is where this has real usefulness - there's no real test for whether or not it's "off", especially given some techniques of preparation intentionally "spoil" it. Plus since it's usually sold fresh at the store or buther's shop, there may be no real expiry date on it and there's no test you can do to see if ti's still good or not.
No, the reason you have these "secret opportunity" postings is because the job's already been filled. Yes, filled.
This is one of those "hidden job market" things everyone talks about - where there are jobs that aren't posted on any job site, but you have to know people in order to find out about them. The group wanting the person doesn't actually have a job opening posted, but they want to hire the guy. Company policy usually restricts such off-the-record hiring so the group simply posts a narrowly-targeted job posting for the minimum amount of time to fulfill HR requirements of "open competition", where the only intent is to hire that one guy, but as a formality, they have to do an open contest.
The other reason is simple - it gets around anti-poaching agreements. Suppose you want to poach someone but you have an anti-poaching agreement with the company. What you do instead is you post a job opportunity and then notify the person to it on an off-the-record way (e.g., phone call from personal phone, meeting in the park, etc). This way you can hire the guy and if the other company comes calling saying you poached them, you show them the job posting and that the employee voluntarily applied for the job.
(It's why people who believe anti-poaching laws keep employees down are wrong - if you were wanted by some other company, they'd have hired you already. The only thing an anti-poach does is keep the company from directly contacting you - but if they wanted you, they'd make you apply for the job "through the normal channels". And yes, I've been "poached" before despite anti-poaching agreements. If someone wants you, there's always a way around it. Basically, it's not poaching if you approach them for a job and not they approach you, hence the use of off-the-record notification mechanisms).