Yes and no. Uber does not have a monopoly, and people can comparison shop to Lyft or even a taxi or public transit.
Except there are places where instead of public transit, they're considering Uber instead. And Uber has decimated the taxi industry (for better or worse) in a lot of places as well.
Which may have been the whole intention - get a bunch of juicy legislative amendments calling them a ride sharing and not a taxi service, run both public transit and taxis out of town, then jack up the price because you got rid of it all.
It's not a bad business model, other than the predatory nature. I mean, Chevy did the same in the early 20th century - they bought up all the public tram lines and killed them all so people would buy cars instead (and the tram lines will fall into disuse so no one could re-start the service).
Speaking to reporters last week, FCC chairman Ajit Pai hinted that the agency would likely honor those astroturfed comments, nonetheless.
Why not? He presumably paid good money for them.
Well, the more obvious reason is if you're counting comments for and against net neutrality, the astroturf means the count is solidly against.
Think about it - if the DDoS filed 1 billion spammed's comments against it, what hope is there for the pro side that filed proper comments?
Now the FCC can claim that that people were "overwhelmingly against" net neutrality - who can argue when the vote is a billion against versus 100,000 for? Is it not obvious where public sentiment is? It's democracy people, the most votes win!
Because the truth is if they didn't count the astroturf, it would be 100,000 votes for versus 1000 against, and we can't have the vote going the wrong nway.
The problem with optical counting machines (I assume you mean hand-filled ballots) is that people are more likely to make mistakes when filling them in. "Hanging chads" and all that.
Well, there are two ways.
First, don't punch ballots. You get hanging/pregnant/etc chads because you're punching a hole and the punching tool can fail.
Use a simple pen and paper. Or in Canada, we actually use pencil. You make a mark on the ballot and as long as it is distinct that one can infer your intent, it will be counted properly. So if you put an X, a check mark, or some other indication in the box on only ONE item, it's obvious what you meant. if you make a dot, and there's a dot on another space, then it is not obvious and it is not counted. If you make an X or checkmark and there are spurious dots, the X and check show you intended and those dots may have been dirt.
Plus, pens are cheap, and if the mark isn't clear or the pencil is dull, you can return your ballot where it is destroyed and a new one issued with a replacement writing utensil. (Technically the ballot isn't destroyed - it's kept but not counted since the number of serialized counter foils must match the number of ballots including intentionally "destroyed" ones, but once the serial number is detached, there is no link between the ballot and the voter).
They emphasize to make a clear mark to show intent - a checkmark and X are best because both require two distinct strokes which are better than a dot or other kind of mark. And we're talking about a huge mark - the circle to make your mark is roughly 0.75" in diameter and is a white spot surrounded by black. The only other white on the ballot is the name of the person you're voting for.
I think you'll see managed EV chargers out in places where there are a lot of chargers. And by managed, I mean EV chargers that cycle through banks of cars at a time - if everyone arrived at work at 8AM, there would be huge spike in demand around 7:45AM as everyone plugs in and their cars start fast-charging.
But you don't have to do that - the cars are going to most likely sit in the lot for 8-10+ hours straight, and you'll likely only need to provide a couple of hours of juice to get them to 80% charge and then lower power charging next.
So you manage it - the first X cars to plug in will get full rate charging for an hour then switch to slower charging while the next X cars that were slow charging get to charge at a faster rate, this so the first couple of hours everyone gets a boost charge to handle "oh sh*t I need to go somewhere" emergency. Then as the fleet batteries all charge up the later cars can fast charge for longer, evening out the load on the grid.
Is that what happens in the US? Less content because it has to be licensed for every state?
That's obtuse. It doesn't happen in the US because the distribution agreements cover the entire US. Whether or not they include US territories and protectorates, though, is a different question altogether.
But in the EU, each country has historically had their own distribution agreement - there would be one distributor for all of the UK, another one for France, another for Germany, etc. It helps that each country has (or had) differing rules on content which meant the country delineation works great. Ditto for the fact most UK residents would want it in English, French citizens want it in French, etc. So this makes historical distribution agreements easy to come up with.
Now the EU has decided that's not the case. Though the implementation is weaker than expected (it was expected that there would be true portability - you cannot geofence at all).
In fact, it's not too bad to implement - you need to add one field to it, maybe more if you don't already track other information. First, you need to track the last time someone used their account in-country. Then you'd need to track your content as to when it was first made available. All you do is present to the user the intersection of all content available prior to their last in-country visit and what content is available not. They only have to have access to what they had when they left, and nothing newer.
Michelin guides? Who needs a fucking guide to buy tires?
Well, Michelin created the guides to top restaurants so the French would go on road trips and thus wear out their Michelins a lot faster (and buy more tires).
That's the original reason why the Michelin guides exist Not unlike the reason why the Guinness Book of World Records exists (people would bet pints of Guinness over who did what).
The schematic for the TV set was inside the box. You pulled tubes and took them to the store to be tested. The companies made money hand over fist, and independent repair shops did OK too.
The companies that made those old TV sets *did* eventually go into decline, and in some cases Chapter 11. That had nothing to do with independent repair shops. It had everything to do with other countries making things more cheaply under an open trade policy, and other companies being more innovative.
So. Go ahead Apple. Try to lock yourself into the top spot. Go ahead. We dare you. Oh, and Cupertino? Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI might have some lessons to teach you. Enjoy your spaceship. These are the good ol' days.
The reason for this was a TV cost a year's salary. Which is why in the good old days, families were lucky to have A TV. Only the richest of the rich could afford to have more than 1 TV.
So families often spent years saving up for a TV. And after that, your TV breaks every couple of months (a tube usually blows). Imagine that - you spend 5 years saving for a TV, and the damn thing breaks within a couple of months. Usually a tube goes, so you take out all the tubes, go to the store, use the tube tester to figure out which ones were bad, and then pick up replacements, then take it all back and get your TV working again. And then you repeat this every month or so.
That's why TV repair shops did well - the damn things were unreliable as hell, and you only watched it from time to time!
Modern TVs are much cheaper - you can pick up a decent sized TV (larger than in the past) for a week's salary today, and it will work 24/7 for years.
Anyhow, the biggest problem today isn't broken products, because face it, modern technology is so reliable that failed products is extremely rare. The big problem is warranty fraud. And they can be brazen - taking an obviously water soaked product (it's dripping water on the counter) and claiming it's not water damaged
Or, you wouldn't believe how many people foul up the LCD screen replacement (we're not talking about the touch ID error, either) and still claim they didn't do anything.
Or think of it this way - why don't iFixit and other similar sites offer warranties? They're more than happy to sell you parts, show you how to do it, yet will not offer any warranty on any of it other than new stuff they sell (like tools). They know people screw up and they'll be on the hook for all the cock-ups the public does.
(Meanwhile, there are plenty of other independent Apple repair shops who do repair work, without help from Apple, too! They are not certified, but will repair Macs and all that...).
iCloud has 130 Million users.... So where are all the worms targetting iCloud devices?
Well, not worms, but emails... lots of phishes target iCloud daily (and Amazon, and Paypal, and other big sites).
Heck, remember "the fappening"? Same thing - iCloud phish, or other phish obtained iCloud credentials to accounts.
Apple attempts to get hacked probably thousands of times a second, but they secure their servers, so the only attacks that succeed are those that steal credentials. And it seems everytime someone claims iCloud/iTunes/etc was hacked, it was really either reused credentials or some phish - the actual service itself was not hacked.
This is the first compromise that I'm aware of Handbrake having this year, and they do sign their releases. They've done so for years, in fact. Updates that occur via the built in updater check that the signature matches what's expected. In this case, however, the user downloaded the file directly from the affected mirror without checking the signature, hence why it didn't matter.
How can you not check the signature? If it's not signed, macOS already puts up an unknown application dialog and refuses to run it unless you force it to. (And recent macOS even disabled the option to disable the check).
Unless you mean by sign they "put up a SHA hash" which is no where near a signature.
The problem is Handbrake isn't a signed app, period. (Developers can pay Apple $99 for a code signing certificate which will bypass Gatekeeper even though the app was not approved by Apple or sold in the Mac App Store).
Granted, there are probably some logistical reasons why they can't get a certificate from Apple, but still, the app was not signed, and you have to force Gatekeeper to ignore the unsigned nature of it in order to run it.
All in all, what really happened is the developer was too smart for his own good
As a point of interest, Trump supporters who comment on Scott Adams blog just this week were still bitching about Obama's "fake" birth certificate. How is that even rational any more? Even Trump himself when pinned down about it after winning the primary admitted Obama was born in the USA. But even if this certificate was faked, then we need to deal with the following. 1) Ted Cruz was born in Canada to one US citizen parent. How is that different to Obama being born in Kenya to one US citizen parent? Cruz was allowed to run for president. So even if Obama was born in Kenya, how does that disqualify him from being president? And if somebody is then going to argue that his mother gave up her US citizenship they have to prove it by providing US government records that show it happened.
Easy. It's because of the magic (R) beside the name that makes it all different and allowed. If you have anything else, like a (D) or such, it's really bad. But having an (R) means you have a free pass.
Second, Apple got less than you might think. For example, one Apple engineer saw overlapping windows at Xerox and implemented them. It turned out the overlapping windows on Xerox machines only existed in his imagination, and the Xerox guys were totally astonished that this was possible.
Said Apple engineer was actually an unknown person by the name of Steve Wozniak. He spend weeks trying to figure out how to do overlapping windows, and when he finally solved it (in a process he called "regions" - overlapping windows subdivided the overlapped window into rectangular regions that were updated independently).
Subsequently to this, Woz flew and crashed his plane. First thing he said to Jobs when Jobs visited him in the hospital was "Don't worry, I remember how to do regions".
Apple paid Xerox in Apple stock, too. Xerox promptly sold it for about $30,000.
And after figuring out regions, Woz learned that the Alto did not support overlapping windows at all. He had imagined it.
1) Is that instead of adding it, they replaced a row of perfectly serviceable physical keys.
On macOS, the function keys aren't really used. In fact, I don't recall any Mac app using any sort of function key F1..F15 (back when Apple keyboards had all the way to F15). They've always been the various media and system control keys (brightness, volume, eject, etc) and I've honestly always left them that way. Granted, it's completely different from the Windows world where you use the function keys constantly. But for pure Mac usage, I can see the touchbar being far more functional.
Hell, I'm still waiting for Mac GVim to turn that thing into one gigantic bar for rapid mode switching.
Any files the engineer may have do not need to be "returned" because that implies Waymo no longer has those files. The implication is the engineer took the files, as if they were some paper files in a file drawer somewhere, leaving Waymo without the files. This is 2017. The files were COPIED and don't need to be "returned to their rightful owner." The owner most likely has them. The MOST the judge should do is tell the engineer/Uber to provide the files so Waymo can just verify they have them and they weren't deleted from Waymo's servers. What am I missing here?
Legal terminology. What's being returned is a copy of the documents (for Waymo to see what was taken), rescinding all rights to those documents at Uber which means cleaning off all the servers of those files and off of all PCs at Uber and whatever the guy may have touched. And, as an added measure, a complete audit log of everyone who had access to the document, and to ensure that they too have destroyed all copies of the documents (Uber to ensure compliance even if the person does not wish to comply). Waymo to get the copy of all of the stolen documents by end of this month, and the full audit log by June 23.
Technically, by giving Waymo the files back and destroying the copies on Uber's computers, the documents are being "returned" because Uber no longer has them. Also, the term "returned" has a legal meaning that effectively says to deny Uber access to all of those files which may also mean scrubbing backups If Uber decides they would simply recover the documents off their backup tapes or Amazon glacier cloud, that would not count as fully "returning" the documents.
It could get very messy for this 22 year old online. Hacked social media accounts, DDOSed any personally managed online resources (web servers, etc.). And that's if it's a low-level script kiddie type trying to make some cash - and not some more malevolent group.
Online is the least of his troubles. He will have problems offline
You think malware groups are above harassment, robbery and/or thuggery? Hell, if the value is high enough, you can add attempted murder to the list. They are criminal organizations and they will not stoop to trying to get anyone hurting their business eradicated.
At the very least, he should get those tabloids to pay for his moving costs and for a new house.
I'm not sure I buy any of this. HW vendors couldn't afford to ignore Android. Its just to big.
An opportunity missed to force some level of driver GPL ing
Perhaps NOW they can't. But back in the Android 1.x days, Android could be ignored. And had Android been GPL then, it would've been like other GPL phone projects like OpenMoko and others.
The fact that Android allowed closed development was the main reason why it got so big. The GPL would never have worked in making Android popular.
Hell, I'm sure Google could try to ask for open drivers and the vendors will say "ha ha. thanks for the laugh".
But a shame as this would seem to remove a lever to help push hw vendors to GPL their drivers.
Why don't Google push vendors to open source if they want to be part of Android. Which is a pretty big stick.
First off, the reason Android is Apache and not GPL is simple - no hardware vendor in the world would bother with Android if it was GPL. If they did, Linux would be completely popular and available for all SoCs out there. (No, they aren't. And our company produces Linux BSPs for Qualcomm SoCs based on the Android releases. They lack a lot of features because none of the stuff is open-source. So stuff like Camera barely work, if they work at all.).
Hardware vendors don't like the GPL. They love Android though because it isn't GPL and they can do a lot of their "secret sauce" stuff as non-open-source code. GPU drivers, camera drivers, even things like sensors and GPS often have a lot of proprietary bits to them, and they don't want the hardware accelerated portions of such exposed.
Qualcomm makes it their business to have some of the best cameras in the business. Sure they use the same commodity sensor, but the real magic is in the image signal processor (ISP). In there it corrects for flaws in the sensor (gamma correction, lens correction, etc) to extract the best possible image out of a commodity sensor. Then there are blocks that process the image doing the 3As (auto exposure, auto white balance, auto focus) with the sensor. And naturally, all that is highly proprietary secret sauce stuff Qualcomm does to promote their chips. You can bet they aren't going to give any of the design of that away with the GPL, nor the more convenience functions like face detection, smile detection, etc.
Sensor fusion is another big thing - the "motion coprocessor" of Apple's iPhones to Sensor Hub in Android, the offline processing of sensor data without the main CPU being involved in huge. And how much is offloaded to a DSP and processed through the main CPU in the end is highly proprietary and no one is giving up their secret, wanting to be the one to capture your entire run without consuming a single miliwatt of power.
If Google had enforced open-source, vendors wouldn't have come, preferring to stick with their own operating systems and stacks.
And that's where this project is interesting - how do you modularize things to allow a hardware vendor to replace basically and entire image processing stack, but also allow a vendor to simply have a camera with no processing and doing it all in software? You try, but you really end up with a mess like Windows where you have to have software support for when hardware's lacking, but also software support for bypassing it all when hardware is supposed to do it.
Apple is an important customer, for sure, but far from their only customer. Corning was a leader in their industry long before Apple even existed. They wouldn't be going out of business without Apple, just R&Ding their next big thing. Just like Corningware was great for Corning for a while, then that levelled off.
Apple isn't an important customer to Corning. It's obvious since Apple never really published the fact they used Gorilla Glass since the original iPhone. There are lots of rumors and everyone inside knows it's Gorilla Glass, but Apple has never publicly stated they use Gorilla Glass. Granted, when Apple was glass shopping, Corning actually didn't have anything to show them - they had to dig out their Gorilla Glass prototypes they shelved decades earlier.
Everyone else made noise about using Gorilla Glass, Apple never did. The closest they got was they use ion-implanted glass
So they are using a Fail Unsafe system. If something fails, put the system in an unsafe state. Brilliant.
Love how they say they _designed_ it to work this way. Ah, no you didn't.
Actually, the sudden deployment of airbags and the seatbelt tensioner would be far more unsafe than to not deploy in an accident.
Beside the startle factor, it's a fairly violent event and it's far safer that in case of problems, the airbag does NOT deploy than deploys.
It's why we have airbag disable switches, and children sets are never allowed in the front seat anymore - because deployment has the chance to cause injury.
Movie theatres are digital now. There is no difference between showing a DRM'd watermarked big budget blockbuster on a big screen or hooking your xbox up to it (Halo was so freaking awesome that night!)
So, Netflix FR, rent an old movie theater, spend 35K on a digital projector, and charge a buck for admission to watch your movies. You need 2 employees, one to run the movies and clean between each show, the other to sell tickets. Don't even sell concessions, take it as a loss leader and meet all the requirements and make them fuckers fume and dance next year when they have to change the req's yet again if they want to keep you out.
Then again, I don't care about Cannes. I have Netflix.:)
The problem is the rules.
First, to be eligible in the Cannes film festival, your film must be shown in a theatre. Easy enough to do for anyone.
BUT, French law has it that no streaming service may show that film until three years after its theatrical debut. Now we have a problem since it disallows simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases, as well as many films that show at various film festivals and then head to digital distribution months after the showing.
I suspect part of the problem is the container formats not supporting synchronized lyrics and such. With MP3, as I understand it, the tagging was an afterthought and is a bit of a hack. It works well enough for tags, but has some significant limitations. I'm not an expert on music formats, so I can't say whether this is a general problem, or if the purveyors of digital music just aren't bothering to do anything beyond simply ripping the CD.
Well, MP3 is not a container format. A MP3 file is simply a stream of bytes. It's composed of smaller packets so a decoder can sync on to a MP3 packet for decoding, but other than that, there's no structure to it. You can take an MP3 file and chop it in the middle and have two playable parts (even if the cut was arbitrary).
ID3 tags really end up being a form of packet, with the special caveat that nothing in the packet can look like an MP3 sync header and anything that gets close must be padded. so an MP3 decoder will not lock onto a ID3 tag body by mistake.
Other formats like AAC are embedded in a QuickTime (or MPEG-4/MP4) container, which allows for metadata like lyrics and such to be added in and timestamped (QuickTime was designed for movies, so timestamping is a fundamental part of its format). There is no reason why you cannot create a lyric atom and embed that in a AAC for display by compatible players.
I'm actually in the market for a roof replacement in the next two years, and I'm interested in solar. I have a small house. An asphalt roof replacement is less than four grand.
Question is, how good is the roof?
Asphalt is usually warrantied for 25 years or so then it needs replacement. And replacing an asphalt roof is environmentally damaging - you can't really recycle the shingles at all - it's just landfill.
You could consider metal roofs, the metal is rated for 50-100 years, so instead of replacing your asphalt roof 4 times, you replace the metal roof once. Incidentally, it costs only about double an asphalt roof. And at the end of it, you can recycle the metal roof completely.
The question is - how good are these solar roofs? They're glass tile, so how long are they warrantied for? 50+ years? And how recyclable are they?
I have my doubts that Trump won because there are enough alt-right white supremacists out there. He won in large part because Clinton sucked, and probably with some help from Comey's interference in the election, not to mention helpful Russian hacking of the DNC and feeding it to Assange.
A bigger part is actually voter apathy. There's nothing worse than being the candidate in the lead - that immediately turns off a big chunk of voters who would vote for you. Simply because they think you're going to win anyways, they simply turn off and don't vote - you're going to win, what's their vote going to do?
Hell, some politicians have real grace - one who lost by a narrow margin (of around 200 votes) met with a bunch of voters after the election who told her "I thought you were going to win, that's why I didn't vote". I say grace because it takes real self-control to be told that and not smack the person in the head.
And face it, Hillary was always in the lead - no one would believe Trump would actually be president. So if Hillary's going to win, why should I bother to vote, because ooh shiny new thing! is more important. Trump had long odds that probably made everyone who would've voted democrat be complacent. And everyone's got better things to do on voting day than to actually vote.
Forcing people to get off their ass is about the only thing I support about mandatory voting. But personally, I don't believe in it, and I believe society is worse off if we're forced to vote than have the option of voting.
True, but often the savings doesn't justify the expense.
If it's 5 cents a gallon and you're putting in 10 gallons of gas, that's 50 cents. At $2.50 a gallon, that's $25 versus $24.50. Great if you have the cash on hand, but if you have to use the ATM to get it, well it'll cost you more at the station (gas station ATMs are the 3rd party ones that charge you $3 a transaction on TOP of the transaction fees). If you make a diversion, it'll probably cost more in time and gas to do it.
And given people do fill up with $100 or more of gas at a time, do you make the trip to somewhere to get cash to get the $2 savings? ($100 / $2.50/gallon for 40 gallons and I said 5 cents/gallon discount, for $2).
Also neverminding the fact that you probably have to go into the store to deposit the cash to unlock the pump, unless you're lucky and a big chain has a automated money depositor at the pumps.
So yes, cash is cheaper, but it's really meant for those who either plan ahead so well to have the cash on hand already, or are too stupid to realize that you're not saving diddly squat if you're using the gas station ATM and getting dinged with $5+ in fees to take out the cash.
It's not a conspiracy theory, it's called Planned Obsolescence, and it's been going on since the fifties. Point being, there's no upside for manufacturers to make anything that lasts more than a few years.
There's also not much point overdesigning something so it lasts forever, when most people will toss it in a few years, either. Sure it feels good, and you'll make the couple of people who use their devices until it's not just obsolete, but the company doesn't exist anymore.
Sure, somethings should last forever, like things that are no longer produced but have long utility lives (arcade games, pinball machines, etc), but high technology? I'm sure even with today's retro gaming kick you can still get access to plenty of 486 PCs to run DOS and your games for a long time coming;.
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Except there are places where instead of public transit, they're considering Uber instead. And Uber has decimated the taxi industry (for better or worse) in a lot of places as well.
Which may have been the whole intention - get a bunch of juicy legislative amendments calling them a ride sharing and not a taxi service, run both public transit and taxis out of town, then jack up the price because you got rid of it all.
It's not a bad business model, other than the predatory nature. I mean, Chevy did the same in the early 20th century - they bought up all the public tram lines and killed them all so people would buy cars instead (and the tram lines will fall into disuse so no one could re-start the service).
Well, the more obvious reason is if you're counting comments for and against net neutrality, the astroturf means the count is solidly against.
Think about it - if the DDoS filed 1 billion spammed's comments against it, what hope is there for the pro side that filed proper comments?
Now the FCC can claim that that people were "overwhelmingly against" net neutrality - who can argue when the vote is a billion against versus 100,000 for? Is it not obvious where public sentiment is? It's democracy people, the most votes win!
Because the truth is if they didn't count the astroturf, it would be 100,000 votes for versus 1000 against, and we can't have the vote going the wrong nway.
Well, there are two ways.
First, don't punch ballots. You get hanging/pregnant/etc chads because you're punching a hole and the punching tool can fail.
Use a simple pen and paper. Or in Canada, we actually use pencil. You make a mark on the ballot and as long as it is distinct that one can infer your intent, it will be counted properly. So if you put an X, a check mark, or some other indication in the box on only ONE item, it's obvious what you meant. if you make a dot, and there's a dot on another space, then it is not obvious and it is not counted. If you make an X or checkmark and there are spurious dots, the X and check show you intended and those dots may have been dirt.
Plus, pens are cheap, and if the mark isn't clear or the pencil is dull, you can return your ballot where it is destroyed and a new one issued with a replacement writing utensil. (Technically the ballot isn't destroyed - it's kept but not counted since the number of serialized counter foils must match the number of ballots including intentionally "destroyed" ones, but once the serial number is detached, there is no link between the ballot and the voter).
They emphasize to make a clear mark to show intent - a checkmark and X are best because both require two distinct strokes which are better than a dot or other kind of mark. And we're talking about a huge mark - the circle to make your mark is roughly 0.75" in diameter and is a white spot surrounded by black. The only other white on the ballot is the name of the person you're voting for.
I think you'll see managed EV chargers out in places where there are a lot of chargers. And by managed, I mean EV chargers that cycle through banks of cars at a time - if everyone arrived at work at 8AM, there would be huge spike in demand around 7:45AM as everyone plugs in and their cars start fast-charging.
But you don't have to do that - the cars are going to most likely sit in the lot for 8-10+ hours straight, and you'll likely only need to provide a couple of hours of juice to get them to 80% charge and then lower power charging next.
So you manage it - the first X cars to plug in will get full rate charging for an hour then switch to slower charging while the next X cars that were slow charging get to charge at a faster rate, this so the first couple of hours everyone gets a boost charge to handle "oh sh*t I need to go somewhere" emergency. Then as the fleet batteries all charge up the later cars can fast charge for longer, evening out the load on the grid.
Well, Michelin created the guides to top restaurants so the French would go on road trips and thus wear out their Michelins a lot faster (and buy more tires).
That's the original reason why the Michelin guides exist Not unlike the reason why the Guinness Book of World Records exists (people would bet pints of Guinness over who did what).
The reason for this was a TV cost a year's salary. Which is why in the good old days, families were lucky to have A TV. Only the richest of the rich could afford to have more than 1 TV.
So families often spent years saving up for a TV. And after that, your TV breaks every couple of months (a tube usually blows). Imagine that - you spend 5 years saving for a TV, and the damn thing breaks within a couple of months. Usually a tube goes, so you take out all the tubes, go to the store, use the tube tester to figure out which ones were bad, and then pick up replacements, then take it all back and get your TV working again. And then you repeat this every month or so.
That's why TV repair shops did well - the damn things were unreliable as hell, and you only watched it from time to time!
Modern TVs are much cheaper - you can pick up a decent sized TV (larger than in the past) for a week's salary today, and it will work 24/7 for years.
Anyhow, the biggest problem today isn't broken products, because face it, modern technology is so reliable that failed products is extremely rare. The big problem is warranty fraud. And they can be brazen - taking an obviously water soaked product (it's dripping water on the counter) and claiming it's not water damaged
Or, you wouldn't believe how many people foul up the LCD screen replacement (we're not talking about the touch ID error, either) and still claim they didn't do anything.
Or think of it this way - why don't iFixit and other similar sites offer warranties? They're more than happy to sell you parts, show you how to do it, yet will not offer any warranty on any of it other than new stuff they sell (like tools). They know people screw up and they'll be on the hook for all the cock-ups the public does.
(Meanwhile, there are plenty of other independent Apple repair shops who do repair work, without help from Apple, too! They are not certified, but will repair Macs and all that...).
Well, not worms, but emails... lots of phishes target iCloud daily (and Amazon, and Paypal, and other big sites).
Heck, remember "the fappening"? Same thing - iCloud phish, or other phish obtained iCloud credentials to accounts.
Apple attempts to get hacked probably thousands of times a second, but they secure their servers, so the only attacks that succeed are those that steal credentials. And it seems everytime someone claims iCloud/iTunes/etc was hacked, it was really either reused credentials or some phish - the actual service itself was not hacked.
How can you not check the signature? If it's not signed, macOS already puts up an unknown application dialog and refuses to run it unless you force it to. (And recent macOS even disabled the option to disable the check).
Unless you mean by sign they "put up a SHA hash" which is no where near a signature.
The problem is Handbrake isn't a signed app, period. (Developers can pay Apple $99 for a code signing certificate which will bypass Gatekeeper even though the app was not approved by Apple or sold in the Mac App Store).
Granted, there are probably some logistical reasons why they can't get a certificate from Apple, but still, the app was not signed, and you have to force Gatekeeper to ignore the unsigned nature of it in order to run it.
All in all, what really happened is the developer was too smart for his own good
Easy. It's because of the magic (R) beside the name that makes it all different and allowed. If you have anything else, like a (D) or such, it's really bad. But having an (R) means you have a free pass.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Alas, even the mosquito is a delicacy for some predators as well - bats and frogs I believe love them as do many other creatures (spiders?).
Said Apple engineer was actually an unknown person by the name of Steve Wozniak. He spend weeks trying to figure out how to do overlapping windows, and when he finally solved it (in a process he called "regions" - overlapping windows subdivided the overlapped window into rectangular regions that were updated independently).
Subsequently to this, Woz flew and crashed his plane. First thing he said to Jobs when Jobs visited him in the hospital was "Don't worry, I remember how to do regions".
Apple paid Xerox in Apple stock, too. Xerox promptly sold it for about $30,000.
And after figuring out regions, Woz learned that the Alto did not support overlapping windows at all. He had imagined it.
On macOS, the function keys aren't really used. In fact, I don't recall any Mac app using any sort of function key F1..F15 (back when Apple keyboards had all the way to F15). They've always been the various media and system control keys (brightness, volume, eject, etc) and I've honestly always left them that way. Granted, it's completely different from the Windows world where you use the function keys constantly. But for pure Mac usage, I can see the touchbar being far more functional.
Hell, I'm still waiting for Mac GVim to turn that thing into one gigantic bar for rapid mode switching.
Legal terminology. What's being returned is a copy of the documents (for Waymo to see what was taken), rescinding all rights to those documents at Uber which means cleaning off all the servers of those files and off of all PCs at Uber and whatever the guy may have touched. And, as an added measure, a complete audit log of everyone who had access to the document, and to ensure that they too have destroyed all copies of the documents (Uber to ensure compliance even if the person does not wish to comply). Waymo to get the copy of all of the stolen documents by end of this month, and the full audit log by June 23.
Technically, by giving Waymo the files back and destroying the copies on Uber's computers, the documents are being "returned" because Uber no longer has them. Also, the term "returned" has a legal meaning that effectively says to deny Uber access to all of those files which may also mean scrubbing backups If Uber decides they would simply recover the documents off their backup tapes or Amazon glacier cloud, that would not count as fully "returning" the documents.
Online is the least of his troubles. He will have problems offline
You think malware groups are above harassment, robbery and/or thuggery? Hell, if the value is high enough, you can add attempted murder to the list. They are criminal organizations and they will not stoop to trying to get anyone hurting their business eradicated.
At the very least, he should get those tabloids to pay for his moving costs and for a new house.
Perhaps NOW they can't. But back in the Android 1.x days, Android could be ignored. And had Android been GPL then, it would've been like other GPL phone projects like OpenMoko and others.
The fact that Android allowed closed development was the main reason why it got so big. The GPL would never have worked in making Android popular.
Hell, I'm sure Google could try to ask for open drivers and the vendors will say "ha ha. thanks for the laugh".
First off, the reason Android is Apache and not GPL is simple - no hardware vendor in the world would bother with Android if it was GPL. If they did, Linux would be completely popular and available for all SoCs out there. (No, they aren't. And our company produces Linux BSPs for Qualcomm SoCs based on the Android releases. They lack a lot of features because none of the stuff is open-source. So stuff like Camera barely work, if they work at all.).
Hardware vendors don't like the GPL. They love Android though because it isn't GPL and they can do a lot of their "secret sauce" stuff as non-open-source code. GPU drivers, camera drivers, even things like sensors and GPS often have a lot of proprietary bits to them, and they don't want the hardware accelerated portions of such exposed.
Qualcomm makes it their business to have some of the best cameras in the business. Sure they use the same commodity sensor, but the real magic is in the image signal processor (ISP). In there it corrects for flaws in the sensor (gamma correction, lens correction, etc) to extract the best possible image out of a commodity sensor. Then there are blocks that process the image doing the 3As (auto exposure, auto white balance, auto focus) with the sensor. And naturally, all that is highly proprietary secret sauce stuff Qualcomm does to promote their chips. You can bet they aren't going to give any of the design of that away with the GPL, nor the more convenience functions like face detection, smile detection, etc.
Sensor fusion is another big thing - the "motion coprocessor" of Apple's iPhones to Sensor Hub in Android, the offline processing of sensor data without the main CPU being involved in huge. And how much is offloaded to a DSP and processed through the main CPU in the end is highly proprietary and no one is giving up their secret, wanting to be the one to capture your entire run without consuming a single miliwatt of power.
If Google had enforced open-source, vendors wouldn't have come, preferring to stick with their own operating systems and stacks.
And that's where this project is interesting - how do you modularize things to allow a hardware vendor to replace basically and entire image processing stack, but also allow a vendor to simply have a camera with no processing and doing it all in software? You try, but you really end up with a mess like Windows where you have to have software support for when hardware's lacking, but also software support for bypassing it all when hardware is supposed to do it.
Apple isn't an important customer to Corning. It's obvious since Apple never really published the fact they used Gorilla Glass since the original iPhone. There are lots of rumors and everyone inside knows it's Gorilla Glass, but Apple has never publicly stated they use Gorilla Glass. Granted, when Apple was glass shopping, Corning actually didn't have anything to show them - they had to dig out their Gorilla Glass prototypes they shelved decades earlier.
Everyone else made noise about using Gorilla Glass, Apple never did. The closest they got was they use ion-implanted glass
Actually, the sudden deployment of airbags and the seatbelt tensioner would be far more unsafe than to not deploy in an accident.
Beside the startle factor, it's a fairly violent event and it's far safer that in case of problems, the airbag does NOT deploy than deploys.
It's why we have airbag disable switches, and children sets are never allowed in the front seat anymore - because deployment has the chance to cause injury.
The problem is the rules.
First, to be eligible in the Cannes film festival, your film must be shown in a theatre. Easy enough to do for anyone.
BUT, French law has it that no streaming service may show that film until three years after its theatrical debut. Now we have a problem since it disallows simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases, as well as many films that show at various film festivals and then head to digital distribution months after the showing.
That's the real problem
Well, MP3 is not a container format. A MP3 file is simply a stream of bytes. It's composed of smaller packets so a decoder can sync on to a MP3 packet for decoding, but other than that, there's no structure to it. You can take an MP3 file and chop it in the middle and have two playable parts (even if the cut was arbitrary).
ID3 tags really end up being a form of packet, with the special caveat that nothing in the packet can look like an MP3 sync header and anything that gets close must be padded. so an MP3 decoder will not lock onto a ID3 tag body by mistake.
Other formats like AAC are embedded in a QuickTime (or MPEG-4/MP4) container, which allows for metadata like lyrics and such to be added in and timestamped (QuickTime was designed for movies, so timestamping is a fundamental part of its format). There is no reason why you cannot create a lyric atom and embed that in a AAC for display by compatible players.
Question is, how good is the roof?
Asphalt is usually warrantied for 25 years or so then it needs replacement. And replacing an asphalt roof is environmentally damaging - you can't really recycle the shingles at all - it's just landfill.
You could consider metal roofs, the metal is rated for 50-100 years, so instead of replacing your asphalt roof 4 times, you replace the metal roof once. Incidentally, it costs only about double an asphalt roof. And at the end of it, you can recycle the metal roof completely.
The question is - how good are these solar roofs? They're glass tile, so how long are they warrantied for? 50+ years? And how recyclable are they?
A bigger part is actually voter apathy. There's nothing worse than being the candidate in the lead - that immediately turns off a big chunk of voters who would vote for you. Simply because they think you're going to win anyways, they simply turn off and don't vote - you're going to win, what's their vote going to do?
Hell, some politicians have real grace - one who lost by a narrow margin (of around 200 votes) met with a bunch of voters after the election who told her "I thought you were going to win, that's why I didn't vote". I say grace because it takes real self-control to be told that and not smack the person in the head.
And face it, Hillary was always in the lead - no one would believe Trump would actually be president. So if Hillary's going to win, why should I bother to vote, because ooh shiny new thing! is more important. Trump had long odds that probably made everyone who would've voted democrat be complacent. And everyone's got better things to do on voting day than to actually vote.
Forcing people to get off their ass is about the only thing I support about mandatory voting. But personally, I don't believe in it, and I believe society is worse off if we're forced to vote than have the option of voting.
True, but often the savings doesn't justify the expense.
If it's 5 cents a gallon and you're putting in 10 gallons of gas, that's 50 cents. At $2.50 a gallon, that's $25 versus $24.50. Great if you have the cash on hand, but if you have to use the ATM to get it, well it'll cost you more at the station (gas station ATMs are the 3rd party ones that charge you $3 a transaction on TOP of the transaction fees). If you make a diversion, it'll probably cost more in time and gas to do it.
And given people do fill up with $100 or more of gas at a time, do you make the trip to somewhere to get cash to get the $2 savings? ($100 / $2.50/gallon for 40 gallons and I said 5 cents/gallon discount, for $2).
Also neverminding the fact that you probably have to go into the store to deposit the cash to unlock the pump, unless you're lucky and a big chain has a automated money depositor at the pumps.
So yes, cash is cheaper, but it's really meant for those who either plan ahead so well to have the cash on hand already, or are too stupid to realize that you're not saving diddly squat if you're using the gas station ATM and getting dinged with $5+ in fees to take out the cash.
There's also not much point overdesigning something so it lasts forever, when most people will toss it in a few years, either. Sure it feels good, and you'll make the couple of people who use their devices until it's not just obsolete, but the company doesn't exist anymore.
Sure, somethings should last forever, like things that are no longer produced but have long utility lives (arcade games, pinball machines, etc), but high technology? I'm sure even with today's retro gaming kick you can still get access to plenty of 486 PCs to run DOS and your games for a long time coming;.