As specialized as that work is, re-sorting items in a warehouse that are initially sorted into appropriate-sized bins seems like a no-brainer. Worst-case a human has to manually load the bins and then put them onto a conveyor-belt system that finds storage space and parks them, and then when a human fulfills an order the same machine retrieves the correct bins so that the picker can grab what's needed and sort into boxes. In a more highly automated scenario the common bulk items are sorted into bins by machine with only human supervision over multiple simultaneous sorting operations, and even most of the retrieval and picking for shipment is automated and multiple packing operations are simultaneously supervised or spot-checked to ensure that they're fulfilled properly.
Either way, if humans don't need to go into the warehouse storage area then that storage area can be designed with much narrower aisles and much less lighting. It still may be necessary to conduct manual audits of merchandise and obviously maintenance and reconfiguration must be allowed for, but if a warehouse has to shut down quarterly for a day for those tasks then that may still allow for proper worker safety while still making the place run much more efficiently and without as much problem with employee theft or injury.
Actually, the whole storage is treated as a managed unit. Not only are the shelves narrower (you only need enough space for the bin of products and the picker robot that pulls the bins and brings them out), but they're a lot taller as well. A human powered warehouse has a height limitation because they can only reach so high up. A robotic one can be easily a few storeys high thus making extensive use of the space.
And there's a "cache" area that holds bins that have popular product so it doesn't have to be fetched from the main storage area all the time.
In fact, it's all computer controlled. When new product comes in, the receiver tells the computer to send them an empty bin (they all have IDs), and the receiver simply loads the bin up with product, scanning them as they're put on the bin. Once done, the computer moves the bin into the storage area and manages where it'll put the items. All that needs to be done is someone telling the computer what product is being put in and the computer manages it from there.
This also means the storage is organized somewhat randomly - since the computer knows where all the bins are (and thus, where products are) it doesn't have to arrange the stock by any particular system. In fact, it probably does it by popularity - the more popular items are in locations that can be retrieved quickly while least popular items will require more time to fetch.
independent contractors do they set there own rates or they forced to take the apps rates and the apps' parts rates?
Probably a rate set by the mechanic themselves when they sign up for the service.
There's no such thing as a "mechanic" - they all specialize. Some are generalists and will be able to do basic tasks like brakes, tires, oil changes, etc. Common everyday tasks. Then there would be more specialized mechanics - one may only work on transmissions, another on electrical systems, etc.
And by their nature, they all have varying rates. This app is really more of a way to get people's car fixed in a convenient way.
Hell, there has to be provisions for when the mechanic may need more help, or to bring it to a garage, etc.
It may be a great way to also not get completely bamboozled by your garage - it's rather common for women to be preyed upon by their lack of car knowledge into signing away for expensive unnecessary repairs. If this app can help screen out the shady, then people may even be willing to pay more knowing they'd get an honest guy over taking a chance.
It's pretty sad that in this day and age, only one person has highlighted the relevance of ZFS here, and they're an AC. Someone mod parent up. RAID is borderline necessary if you don't have multiple backups, (to recover from in the event of random corruption caused by gamma rays from outer space or a butterfly flapping their wings on another continent or whatever) but so far as I know, only ZFS has built-in checksumming to detect/prevent the data corruption in the first place.
No, RAID Is not sufficient to prevent bit-rot. In fact, RAID can accelerate it. You see, using a redundant mode like 1, 5, 6, most controllers (software and hardware) will only read enough disks to get the data, 1 drive in the case of RAID1, N-1 for RAID5 and N-2 for RAID6 (the non-parity ones, to save a parity calculation). But the drives can return bit errors - it's rare, but it does happen (there's a undetectable fault error rate, something along the lines of 1 in 10^20 bytes read or so will have an undetected error). And this the RAID controller will happily return to you since it didn't check the redundant drives to verify correctness. And it's possible it gets written back corrupted, thus causing corruption.
You really need something like ZFS which puts a checksum on every file and verifies it, so if it does get an error it can resolve it.
I applaud the effort, but are they really qualified to be doing this, or are they going to limit it to basic "best practices?" I can see picking up that there is an open port, but backdoor accounts, phoning home, etc are equally important.
They're probably not qualified, in that it's consumer reports.
They review stuff for the masses - if you're an expert in the field, you already know what to look for and thus they don't contribute anything. However, if you're not already in the know, they test things as "Joe Average" would test them. So some of the tests they do are downright silly, but then again, if the design of the product enables downright silly use, then they'll test it and report on it. They also won't recommend the best if the best is hard to get (e.g., requires going to a store on a Sunday on the 4th day of the lunar rise). They are regular people and going to do regular stuff and visit the stores regular people visit. They aren't going to go into an audio specialty store to get headphones to review - they'll review what you can find at Best Buy.
Now, they'll probably do basic security checks - does the product work without a password? Does the product make you select a password before you can use it (this eliminates a lot of vulnerabilities relying on default passwords)? Or even at the very least, if you don't have to change the password, is it unique per device? (A few devices come with stickers with the default password that vary by the device). And if so, how unique is it? It's not useful if it's limited to a range of 256 different passwords, after all.
Backdoors are harder to test, but if they can test for even the basics...
Most of the time, when the "display" is bad, it's actually the driving electronics that are bad. Remember, CRT displays are pure analog devices - full of things that drift and die over time (i.e., electrolytic capacitors).
The only thing not being made anymore are the CRT tubes themselves, which only consist of the screen and electron gun. The deflection coils are electromagnets mounted outside the tube. So as long as the electron gun works, the actual tube part is working. The rest of the electronics driving it are just electronics that can be fixed.
Oh yeah, I'm going to install iOS 10 on my iPhone 4 - NOT!
Considering the iPhone 4 was released sometime in... 2010, it might be worthwhile to upgrade. 7 years of improvements (there's more years ahead of it than behind it - as the first iPhone came out in 2007).
And last I saw, 90% of users were running some form of iOS 10, with 9.5+% using iOS9 The remaining 0.5% were left as "other" (iOS 8 and below).
That's why it's called Write Once, Debug Everywhere!
I was involved in a major open source project using a cross platform solution, XULrunner. I have also worked with Java apps for many years. Neither has made me want to give up native solutions. All the little details you mention are why these things don't work. Well, up until now. You need a cross platform language and a universal API as well. And although you may get the languages, I've never seen the API
I know you're ashamed of it, given recent versions being worse and worse, but really, you could just say you worked at Mozilla on Firefox (or Thunderbird, back in the day).
XULrunner is basically the runtime behind both those projects and used little else (nevermind it's supposed to be replaced, too).
Anyhow, these days we have limited forms for this. We do have run-anywhere languages (Java,.NET), but we also have the ability to run programs on other platforms. though emulation. Not fast, but it's been done.
Games is the big one, since emulators have basically let you run every older console game on any machine these days, and old PC games use DOSBox, which runs on practically every platform too.
So we do have limited forms already. And even some Windows apps support running under WINE (though limited to x86 compatibles)
I admire your passion, but the world of media doesn't work that way. If the content distributors (Netflix, Amazon, HBO GO/NOW and the also-rans) weren't able to use standardized DRM, they would use... and standardize... on a non-standard platform. One that, being non-standard, would probably be very closed-source and proprietary. And consumers would flock to it Resulting in a huge, unverified surface for exploits and attacks.
This has happened before. Remember Flash?
Actually, what happens now is... Apps.
Want Netflix? Use an App. Want Amazon? Use an App. Want Hulu? Use an App.
The web is universal yes. But with people with specific needs not being addressed, well, the App Platform is now king. And people are drawn to making apps which are websites encoded into apps (Google's got loads of apps. Despite having web interfaces for all their services).
So you want to use a web browser to get information, or to simply be an Appl Distribution Mechanism? Or more correctly, a way to get a link to load up your App Store to get the app you need to see the content?
After all, instead of owner's manuals in cars, now you have apps with the same content. They could've made a PDF or HTML with the same content, but... Apps!
You can win the battle on DRM on the web, only to lose the war as the internet gets sectioned off into apps, with the web browser being now an app discovery mechanism, where every site you visit is now "install the app for the content".
And before you say it, Netflix does still support web browsers, but only stereo audio and 720p. 1080p requires the app. 4K requires the app. Surround sound requires the app.
Seriously though, I would not buy food online. Food is one of those things that is always better seen and checked first hand before buying. Depending on what foods look like (freshness/color) I change my recipe planning on the fly. Long ago I went to culinary school for 3 years and I love to cook. I'm very picky about what I cook and eat.
I think we'll see a split. Those too lazy to walk out the door and show for groceries will probably have their food delivered. Considering you can get a lot of it (nonperishables) online already, this doesn't really change going to the store versus getting it delivered. (And face it, most people not going to grocery stores are getting the prepackaged stuff).
Those who care about their food will be going for the fresh produce and meats and stuff and they'd going to their grocery stores to pick out their food.
Since Google chose to split their code base off from WebKit, my fear is we'll start seeing this with Chrome if it becomes too ubiquitous.
I understand that the stated reason for doing this was to drive development of web standards forward... but, back in the day, Microsoft used similar language. It's not like anyone ever says "we're doing everything we can to force you to remain within our control".
Thankfully though, even though Chrome forked WebKit, there's still active development on both and I'm sure neither Google nor Apple will want Blink and Webkit to diverge too much from each other. And while there's no major WebKit browser on desktop anymore (except on Macs, but that's decreasing), WebKit is still huge on mobile.
The real problem is for Trident and Gecko to keep up.
did they get a court order from the NSA, because they need time to exploit it? Apple has done the same in the past, waiting up to 10 months fixing flaws that were critical, but had trivial solutions.
Because patches need to be tested to make sure they don't break things. Trivial solutions may introduce side effects that break other things unexpectedly.
For an example, take Linux. You'd think everyone who uses Linux would install every update immediately (and there are lots that come out daily). But at work, we disable updates, because you know what happens? Some update happens and then your installation is broken. Sure it boots, sure you can log in. But all of a sudden the build breaks because a minor tool stopped working. And now you're down a developer for a week who has to figure out why they can't compile their code anymore.
And that's Linux with the free patching policy where updates are applied willy-nilly. Sure the bugs are fixed, but no one does a bigger integration test to make sure it didn't break something else. (And yes, we occasionally run into the whole "X stops working" style bugs as well. But at least for those we give the user a replacement hard drive with a clean Linux install. They keep the old drive to migrate their user data and then it's returned and wiped. And if they update and screw up the install again, we make a note to not go further than that via updates.)
So we simply disable all updates leaving all Linux installs vulnerable.
Of course, Apple and Microsoft don't have such luxuries so even a 5 minute fix needs extensive regression testing and even sometimes full system tests to make only reasonably sure that it won't break much. (There will always be someone with a strange configuration that breaks.)
Open source helps a little bit, only because if it's a particularly bad system break there's going to be a lot of people debugging it for you.so the original developer gets a lot of (free) help.
Debugging and fixing bugs, especially deep bugs in core systems like kernel or graphics systems is just a tiny part of the entire development time. Most of it is spent in testing because an error in the fix will propagate into the strangest of bugs in the higher levels of the stack.
I might be an old fuddy-duddy, but is it odd that I'm still irked when people email more than 1-2mb? Especially given how many file-share options exist? Until a few years ago I'd be fine with uploading a larger file to my own FTP site and sending a link to a URL, and it's so much easier now with GoogleDocs, Dropbox, etc...maybe I'm just old.
What irked me more were people who used the old RapidShare etc. to do this, back when those file services gave you barely any speed and made it take hours to download a few megabytes. Oh yeah, and the 15minute delays between files didn't help matters, either...
Luckily these days we have DropBox and GDrive and all that that give full speed file transfers so when you do send large files, the person at the other end get it at full speed... but back in the old days, it was painful.
The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.
If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).
Um, no, technically he wasn't in the country yet, he had yet to clear immigration and customs. There are a LOT of people who transit though a US airport who are never technically IN the United States even if they are on US soil. They are afforded the privilege of "passing though" to change planes as they move on to another destination and we don't require visa's. Not everybody is granted this, but for the most part we don't care who you are if you are not staying.
Many countries allow this at major airports. Technically you don't legally enter the country (and don't have to meet their entry requirements) but you must stay within the designated area of the airport until you clear immigration. It's how Snowden got stuck at the Moscow airport in transit after the USA pulled his passport. He got stuck because he couldn't (and didn't want to) get on a plane w/o a passport, couldn't enter Russia unless they let him in.
The US is one of those "exception" countries since 9/11. If your flight stops over in the US for any reason, you will be counted as entering the US. Thus you must have a visa or be from a country that the US doesn't require a visa from, not be on the US no-fly list, etc.
This applies to flights over US airspace as well. If the airline is carrying anyone on the US no-fly list AND overflying the US (not landing at a US airport), the plane will not be allowed to enter US airspace without handing that person over.
Most "reasonable" countries do allow transiting without entry. The US is not one of them - landing on US soil counts as entry, even if everyone stays on the plane.
In fact, Boeing's plans for flights include being able to fly from Canada to Mexico without crossing US airspace (i.e., they have enough fuel to go around).
Trump is a slimy politician just like all the Career politicians.
Not one of them give a flying fuck about the constitution.
To be fair, Trump only promised to "drain" the swamp. He didn't actually say he'd clean up the muck.
And truth is, he did. He drained the swamp and exposed all the corruption happening (usually by who he installs). Better to be corrupt in public, it's the Trump way!
Subway has done a lot to distance themselves from fast food and have chosen to represent themselves as a healthier choice. The whole Jared losing weight by eating only at Subway thing. I don't really consider them a fast food restaurant, they are a sandwich shop.
Unfortunately, it's a second strike for them. It was found their "whole wheat" bread was actually white bread with molasses added for coloring, and a sprinkling of whole wheat to give you a bit of the grains. It's actually a big concern if you're diabetic and choose the brown bread option since it looks like whole wheat, and is advertised as such. But the refined enriched white flour it's made of (nevermind the sugar and molasses used to color it) will shoot your blood sugar levels up.
Honestly the sooner they drop lightning and other proprietary connectors the better
If we stuck to "standard connectors" we'd still be using micro USB. The creation of lightning showed that it's possible to make a more convenient connector for users, and thus we have USB C, whose biggest claim to fame is it goes in either way. Unlike say, a certain 4th dimensional rectangular connector at the other end that doesn't go in until the 3rd or 4th try.
No, proprietary isn't as good, but sometimes if you want innovation, you have to allow it. If people didn't care about connector orientation, then we wouldn't have USB-C today.
It's unfortunate that a lot of the marketing for drones highlights their ability to fly in risky places. Over water, over cliffs, over crowds, through fireworks, around tall buildings.
Well, drones are GREAT for flying into risky places. Places in general where you don't want to send a human because of the risk in either traveling to the location, the risk of photographing at that location, or other issues.
But those risky places are places where if the drone fails, you lose a piece of hardware - it falls into the woods and maybe breaks a branch of two. There's generally no risk to people underneath (because there aren't any).
Flights over crowds and fireworks aren't "risky flights", they're flights meant to attract people to the hobby without considering risk ot people on the ground.
Manufacturers prefer to show their drones doing things that human normally can't do - like take video of people doing stunts, but this video is done safely away from crowds so failure is just loss of hardware.
If it truly was an accident and everyone was acting in good faith I think this is a rather severe overreach by the sentencing party.
Even if it was, it was highly preventable. The risk of failure of these things is well known - the battery can run out and it can plummet and fall on someone's head. Or in this case, a poor pilot can crash the thing into a wall and have it fall on someone's head.
In other words, avoid flying the things above crowds of people because the high risk of injury. The FAA and the drone's instruction manual should make that pretty damn clear.
It's one thing if it was an open park and it happened it hit the only person there. But the guy was flying it over crowds of people where if it failed, it would've definitely hurt someone. The risk was entirely obvious.
And he was lucky the girl didn't suffer more for her boyfriend caught her falling and thus prevented her from hitting her head on the ground.
I think an advantage for Netflix is their ability to produce niche content.
Studios have to aim for a broader appeal for any given film since they can produce and distribute fewer titles which usually have a higher budget and thus greater risk, and to hedge against risk they have gotten in the habit of re-doing what was popular before with the idea that it will be popular again. So they make a picture that's only of average quality to an average audience.
By aiming at niche audiences, Netflix makes content that may have a smaller audience but provides better than average satisfaction to the audience. I think I've heard more people talk about Stranger Things than any of the Oscar nominated films or most of movies released this year period.
I'd also wager that a 10 episode Netflix serial, even at near-movie quality production values, has some economies of scale and has a cost per running hour that is less than a Hollywood film, providing more content at aggregate cost. The difference between a 10 hour series and a 2 hour movie is often more expository scenes that make more efficient use of the cast and crew since you're getting more mileage out of costumes, settings and locations.
Netflix only has to produce content that cater to one demographic - their subscribers. They are basically a huge analytics company, constantly analyzing what their subscribers are doing with the service - what kind of programming they watch - movies, original netflix, tv, etc. They use all the Buzzword Compliant analysis to distill what their audience likes.
From this they can figure out what they subscribers like, what they're going to like, and who they want to attract next to their service.
So Netflix' programming reflects their subscriber base - they need programming to keep their existing subscribers, and programming that attracts new subscribers.
Netflix is also producing TV-style programming, which is different from Hollywood movies. The economics are different, the production values are different, etc. A TV-style episode is generally produced over a few weeks (pipelined - everyone gets about 8 days - conceptualization to writing a script, set preparation, filming, and post-production), while a movie is generally over two years - from writers taking a treatment or proto-script and completing it (several months), while site discovery and preparation happen, then set production, then filming (3-6 months), and post-production and audio work.
When exactly did chip and package definitions change? I've been calling chips, well chips for over 20 years.
Is there a guide to this, because it's making NAND discussion quite confusing online in general the last 18 months.
A chip is a die. A package is a collection of 1 or more dice/dies enclosed together and exposed as a set of pins. Memory these days often consist of multiple dice in a single package - the PoP (package on package) memory you see on a modern SoC is often a few dice in a package - there will be two or more memory dies for volatile storage, and some also include non-volatile storage in the package as well (eMMC, NAND flash, etc).
Usually they were referred to in the past as "Multi-Chip Packages" or MCPs. The most famous might be the Pentium Pro processor which had the main CPU and cache as two separate chips wired together into one giant package.
It's just that we've perfected the MCP process where dice can be shaved down extremely thinly and effectively glued together in a rudimentary 3D-like structure without being excessively thick.
Oh, it's even better than that. They call themselves "international", but they don't actually have a *single* scheduled international flight at this time. They do have an agreement with Norwegian to start flying from there to Europe, but with only three flights per day. (And Norwegian's website won't even let you select Stewart as a destination or point of departure, yet).
And courtesy of the Bureau of Transportation, as of November 2016 they have only *eight* scheduled flights per day in *total* to any destination, and average just 48 passengers per flight.
How about this. Lots of airports are "international" and have NO scheduled files OR full time customs services!
You see, the only reason an airport is marked "international" is that it has customs and immigration services. It doesn't have to be 24/7 (and at a lot of them, you need to call them at least 2 hours ahead of time so someone can drive to the airport).
There are plenty of airports that are not international either, who do not have customs service available.
When flying from another country (Canada, Bermuda, Mexico are common origins for flights entering the US) all planes must stop at an international airport to clear customs. For commercial jets, that's why they fly into international airports. For small planes (GA) you generally fly to the nearest airport with customs services (because oddly, there aren't many inland).
"international" is just a designation as a point of entry for flights into the country. You can very well overfly the entire country.
"airport" is also just a designation for an aerodrome (the place planes actually take off and land) that's certified. (the literal definition of airport is... a certified aerodrome).
If developers with write access to your repo are malicious, you have much worse problems. This is not a serious threat, it is just an edge case that the future will prevent.
What if they aren't malicious? I mean, WebKit SVN is down not because a developer wanted to try it, but because they were submitting a test case. A test case meant to verify that WebKit's caching algorithms aren't vulnerable to a SHA-1 collision.
And in checking in this test case, he inadvertently broke the entire repository. It's completely possible he wasn't aware how SVN works internally that such a test case could break the repo as well.
There's right now a worry that the master repository is irrepairable - that because of this checkin, you cannot repair it - the only way to recover is to restore it from a backup.
Both happened in 2005. And SHA-2 was published 4 years earlier. So yes, the sky is not falling, and git can be made secure, but it also wasn't really wise to use SHA-1 when git was implemented, first.
As a hash function, SHA-1 was perfectly adequate for how Git works.
All Git uses SHA-1 for internally is to hash the contents of a file to turn it into a unique number. SHA-1 is a nice fast algorithm to do that, and 160 bits offers plenty of space to uniquely identify stuff. It's so good that all the other things are hashed like commits and such and then a Git repository is merely a collection of hashes. A hash at the top we call "head" which contains the SHA-1 hash representing a commit object (it's the SHA-1 hash of said object, actually). That commit object points to a few other objects, the commit before it (the old head) and the SHA1 hash of the tree object. The tree object contains a list of SHA1 hashes that represent files in the source tree, specifically the list of changed files.
What happens when there's a collision? Interestingly enough, not much. If you're trying to check in a file that collides, chances are git won't let you because a file already in the repo has the same hash. If you force the matter (you can chop your history down so a conflict isn't immeidately apparent), then remote repos that pull from you or you push to will simply ignore the conflicting file as they will just assume it references the file already in the repo (you can check out an old version and check it back in - guess what? The hashes will be identical!. You often do this if you revert).
Now, perhaps Git could be made to handle the issue a bit more gracefully if you do happen to check in a file that differs but hashes the same, but in reality it's a rare occurance. Even Linux itself which has a huge history hasn't experienced the issue.
If you want fun, see WebKit, because SVN uses SHA-1 internally and someone corrupted the master repo checking in a test case consisting of two files with the same hash (the test case was to test for SHA-1 collisions in WebKit caching code). Ironically, that repo is offline at the moment.
has anyone seen a torrent link for Trainspotting II I can't afford a cinema ticket
Then just wait. If you can't afford a cinema ticket, you can wait until it hits the video rental places and then rent it. If that's too expensive, and you have Netflix, you can wait for that too. If you still can't afford that, wait for it to be shown on TV for free.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the whole storage is treated as a managed unit. Not only are the shelves narrower (you only need enough space for the bin of products and the picker robot that pulls the bins and brings them out), but they're a lot taller as well. A human powered warehouse has a height limitation because they can only reach so high up. A robotic one can be easily a few storeys high thus making extensive use of the space.
And there's a "cache" area that holds bins that have popular product so it doesn't have to be fetched from the main storage area all the time.
In fact, it's all computer controlled. When new product comes in, the receiver tells the computer to send them an empty bin (they all have IDs), and the receiver simply loads the bin up with product, scanning them as they're put on the bin. Once done, the computer moves the bin into the storage area and manages where it'll put the items. All that needs to be done is someone telling the computer what product is being put in and the computer manages it from there.
This also means the storage is organized somewhat randomly - since the computer knows where all the bins are (and thus, where products are) it doesn't have to arrange the stock by any particular system. In fact, it probably does it by popularity - the more popular items are in locations that can be retrieved quickly while least popular items will require more time to fetch.
And it's all dynamic.
Probably a rate set by the mechanic themselves when they sign up for the service.
There's no such thing as a "mechanic" - they all specialize. Some are generalists and will be able to do basic tasks like brakes, tires, oil changes, etc. Common everyday tasks. Then there would be more specialized mechanics - one may only work on transmissions, another on electrical systems, etc.
And by their nature, they all have varying rates. This app is really more of a way to get people's car fixed in a convenient way.
Hell, there has to be provisions for when the mechanic may need more help, or to bring it to a garage, etc.
It may be a great way to also not get completely bamboozled by your garage - it's rather common for women to be preyed upon by their lack of car knowledge into signing away for expensive unnecessary repairs. If this app can help screen out the shady, then people may even be willing to pay more knowing they'd get an honest guy over taking a chance.
No, RAID Is not sufficient to prevent bit-rot. In fact, RAID can accelerate it. You see, using a redundant mode like 1, 5, 6, most controllers (software and hardware) will only read enough disks to get the data, 1 drive in the case of RAID1, N-1 for RAID5 and N-2 for RAID6 (the non-parity ones, to save a parity calculation). But the drives can return bit errors - it's rare, but it does happen (there's a undetectable fault error rate, something along the lines of 1 in 10^20 bytes read or so will have an undetected error). And this the RAID controller will happily return to you since it didn't check the redundant drives to verify correctness. And it's possible it gets written back corrupted, thus causing corruption.
You really need something like ZFS which puts a checksum on every file and verifies it, so if it does get an error it can resolve it.
They're probably not qualified, in that it's consumer reports.
They review stuff for the masses - if you're an expert in the field, you already know what to look for and thus they don't contribute anything. However, if you're not already in the know, they test things as "Joe Average" would test them. So some of the tests they do are downright silly, but then again, if the design of the product enables downright silly use, then they'll test it and report on it. They also won't recommend the best if the best is hard to get (e.g., requires going to a store on a Sunday on the 4th day of the lunar rise). They are regular people and going to do regular stuff and visit the stores regular people visit. They aren't going to go into an audio specialty store to get headphones to review - they'll review what you can find at Best Buy.
Now, they'll probably do basic security checks - does the product work without a password? Does the product make you select a password before you can use it (this eliminates a lot of vulnerabilities relying on default passwords)? Or even at the very least, if you don't have to change the password, is it unique per device? (A few devices come with stickers with the default password that vary by the device). And if so, how unique is it? It's not useful if it's limited to a range of 256 different passwords, after all.
Backdoors are harder to test, but if they can test for even the basics...
Most of the time, when the "display" is bad, it's actually the driving electronics that are bad. Remember, CRT displays are pure analog devices - full of things that drift and die over time (i.e., electrolytic capacitors).
The only thing not being made anymore are the CRT tubes themselves, which only consist of the screen and electron gun. The deflection coils are electromagnets mounted outside the tube. So as long as the electron gun works, the actual tube part is working. The rest of the electronics driving it are just electronics that can be fixed.
Considering the iPhone 4 was released sometime in ... 2010, it might be worthwhile to upgrade. 7 years of improvements (there's more years ahead of it than behind it - as the first iPhone came out in 2007).
And last I saw, 90% of users were running some form of iOS 10, with 9.5+% using iOS9 The remaining 0.5% were left as "other" (iOS 8 and below).
I know you're ashamed of it, given recent versions being worse and worse, but really, you could just say you worked at Mozilla on Firefox (or Thunderbird, back in the day).
XULrunner is basically the runtime behind both those projects and used little else (nevermind it's supposed to be replaced, too).
Anyhow, these days we have limited forms for this. We do have run-anywhere languages (Java, .NET), but we also have the ability to run programs on other platforms. though emulation. Not fast, but it's been done.
Games is the big one, since emulators have basically let you run every older console game on any machine these days, and old PC games use DOSBox, which runs on practically every platform too.
So we do have limited forms already. And even some Windows apps support running under WINE (though limited to x86 compatibles)
Actually, what happens now is... Apps.
Want Netflix? Use an App. Want Amazon? Use an App. Want Hulu? Use an App.
The web is universal yes. But with people with specific needs not being addressed, well, the App Platform is now king. And people are drawn to making apps which are websites encoded into apps (Google's got loads of apps. Despite having web interfaces for all their services).
So you want to use a web browser to get information, or to simply be an Appl Distribution Mechanism? Or more correctly, a way to get a link to load up your App Store to get the app you need to see the content?
After all, instead of owner's manuals in cars, now you have apps with the same content. They could've made a PDF or HTML with the same content, but... Apps!
You can win the battle on DRM on the web, only to lose the war as the internet gets sectioned off into apps, with the web browser being now an app discovery mechanism, where every site you visit is now "install the app for the content".
And before you say it, Netflix does still support web browsers, but only stereo audio and 720p. 1080p requires the app. 4K requires the app. Surround sound requires the app.
I think we'll see a split. Those too lazy to walk out the door and show for groceries will probably have their food delivered. Considering you can get a lot of it (nonperishables) online already, this doesn't really change going to the store versus getting it delivered. (And face it, most people not going to grocery stores are getting the prepackaged stuff).
Those who care about their food will be going for the fresh produce and meats and stuff and they'd going to their grocery stores to pick out their food.
Thankfully though, even though Chrome forked WebKit, there's still active development on both and I'm sure neither Google nor Apple will want Blink and Webkit to diverge too much from each other. And while there's no major WebKit browser on desktop anymore (except on Macs, but that's decreasing), WebKit is still huge on mobile.
The real problem is for Trident and Gecko to keep up.
Because patches need to be tested to make sure they don't break things. Trivial solutions may introduce side effects that break other things unexpectedly.
For an example, take Linux. You'd think everyone who uses Linux would install every update immediately (and there are lots that come out daily). But at work, we disable updates, because you know what happens? Some update happens and then your installation is broken. Sure it boots, sure you can log in. But all of a sudden the build breaks because a minor tool stopped working. And now you're down a developer for a week who has to figure out why they can't compile their code anymore.
And that's Linux with the free patching policy where updates are applied willy-nilly. Sure the bugs are fixed, but no one does a bigger integration test to make sure it didn't break something else. (And yes, we occasionally run into the whole "X stops working" style bugs as well. But at least for those we give the user a replacement hard drive with a clean Linux install. They keep the old drive to migrate their user data and then it's returned and wiped. And if they update and screw up the install again, we make a note to not go further than that via updates.)
So we simply disable all updates leaving all Linux installs vulnerable.
Of course, Apple and Microsoft don't have such luxuries so even a 5 minute fix needs extensive regression testing and even sometimes full system tests to make only reasonably sure that it won't break much. (There will always be someone with a strange configuration that breaks.)
Open source helps a little bit, only because if it's a particularly bad system break there's going to be a lot of people debugging it for you.so the original developer gets a lot of (free) help.
Debugging and fixing bugs, especially deep bugs in core systems like kernel or graphics systems is just a tiny part of the entire development time. Most of it is spent in testing because an error in the fix will propagate into the strangest of bugs in the higher levels of the stack.
What irked me more were people who used the old RapidShare etc. to do this, back when those file services gave you barely any speed and made it take hours to download a few megabytes. Oh yeah, and the 15minute delays between files didn't help matters, either...
Luckily these days we have DropBox and GDrive and all that that give full speed file transfers so when you do send large files, the person at the other end get it at full speed... but back in the old days, it was painful.
Already covered in Marshall Brain's book "Manna".
The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.
If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).
The US is one of those "exception" countries since 9/11. If your flight stops over in the US for any reason, you will be counted as entering the US. Thus you must have a visa or be from a country that the US doesn't require a visa from, not be on the US no-fly list, etc.
This applies to flights over US airspace as well. If the airline is carrying anyone on the US no-fly list AND overflying the US (not landing at a US airport), the plane will not be allowed to enter US airspace without handing that person over.
Most "reasonable" countries do allow transiting without entry. The US is not one of them - landing on US soil counts as entry, even if everyone stays on the plane.
In fact, Boeing's plans for flights include being able to fly from Canada to Mexico without crossing US airspace (i.e., they have enough fuel to go around).
To be fair, Trump only promised to "drain" the swamp. He didn't actually say he'd clean up the muck.
And truth is, he did. He drained the swamp and exposed all the corruption happening (usually by who he installs). Better to be corrupt in public, it's the Trump way!
Unfortunately, it's a second strike for them. It was found their "whole wheat" bread was actually white bread with molasses added for coloring, and a sprinkling of whole wheat to give you a bit of the grains. It's actually a big concern if you're diabetic and choose the brown bread option since it looks like whole wheat, and is advertised as such. But the refined enriched white flour it's made of (nevermind the sugar and molasses used to color it) will shoot your blood sugar levels up.
If we stuck to "standard connectors" we'd still be using micro USB. The creation of lightning showed that it's possible to make a more convenient connector for users, and thus we have USB C, whose biggest claim to fame is it goes in either way. Unlike say, a certain 4th dimensional rectangular connector at the other end that doesn't go in until the 3rd or 4th try.
No, proprietary isn't as good, but sometimes if you want innovation, you have to allow it. If people didn't care about connector orientation, then we wouldn't have USB-C today.
Well, drones are GREAT for flying into risky places. Places in general where you don't want to send a human because of the risk in either traveling to the location, the risk of photographing at that location, or other issues.
But those risky places are places where if the drone fails, you lose a piece of hardware - it falls into the woods and maybe breaks a branch of two. There's generally no risk to people underneath (because there aren't any).
Flights over crowds and fireworks aren't "risky flights", they're flights meant to attract people to the hobby without considering risk ot people on the ground.
Manufacturers prefer to show their drones doing things that human normally can't do - like take video of people doing stunts, but this video is done safely away from crowds so failure is just loss of hardware.
Even if it was, it was highly preventable. The risk of failure of these things is well known - the battery can run out and it can plummet and fall on someone's head. Or in this case, a poor pilot can crash the thing into a wall and have it fall on someone's head.
In other words, avoid flying the things above crowds of people because the high risk of injury. The FAA and the drone's instruction manual should make that pretty damn clear.
It's one thing if it was an open park and it happened it hit the only person there. But the guy was flying it over crowds of people where if it failed, it would've definitely hurt someone. The risk was entirely obvious.
And he was lucky the girl didn't suffer more for her boyfriend caught her falling and thus prevented her from hitting her head on the ground.
Netflix only has to produce content that cater to one demographic - their subscribers. They are basically a huge analytics company, constantly analyzing what their subscribers are doing with the service - what kind of programming they watch - movies, original netflix, tv, etc. They use all the Buzzword Compliant analysis to distill what their audience likes.
From this they can figure out what they subscribers like, what they're going to like, and who they want to attract next to their service.
So Netflix' programming reflects their subscriber base - they need programming to keep their existing subscribers, and programming that attracts new subscribers.
Netflix is also producing TV-style programming, which is different from Hollywood movies. The economics are different, the production values are different, etc. A TV-style episode is generally produced over a few weeks (pipelined - everyone gets about 8 days - conceptualization to writing a script, set preparation, filming, and post-production), while a movie is generally over two years - from writers taking a treatment or proto-script and completing it (several months), while site discovery and preparation happen, then set production, then filming (3-6 months), and post-production and audio work.
A chip is a die. A package is a collection of 1 or more dice/dies enclosed together and exposed as a set of pins. Memory these days often consist of multiple dice in a single package - the PoP (package on package) memory you see on a modern SoC is often a few dice in a package - there will be two or more memory dies for volatile storage, and some also include non-volatile storage in the package as well (eMMC, NAND flash, etc).
Usually they were referred to in the past as "Multi-Chip Packages" or MCPs. The most famous might be the Pentium Pro processor which had the main CPU and cache as two separate chips wired together into one giant package.
It's just that we've perfected the MCP process where dice can be shaved down extremely thinly and effectively glued together in a rudimentary 3D-like structure without being excessively thick.
How about this. Lots of airports are "international" and have NO scheduled files OR full time customs services!
You see, the only reason an airport is marked "international" is that it has customs and immigration services. It doesn't have to be 24/7 (and at a lot of them, you need to call them at least 2 hours ahead of time so someone can drive to the airport).
There are plenty of airports that are not international either, who do not have customs service available.
When flying from another country (Canada, Bermuda, Mexico are common origins for flights entering the US) all planes must stop at an international airport to clear customs. For commercial jets, that's why they fly into international airports. For small planes (GA) you generally fly to the nearest airport with customs services (because oddly, there aren't many inland).
"international" is just a designation as a point of entry for flights into the country. You can very well overfly the entire country.
"airport" is also just a designation for an aerodrome (the place planes actually take off and land) that's certified. (the literal definition of airport is... a certified aerodrome).
What if they aren't malicious? I mean, WebKit SVN is down not because a developer wanted to try it, but because they were submitting a test case. A test case meant to verify that WebKit's caching algorithms aren't vulnerable to a SHA-1 collision.
And in checking in this test case, he inadvertently broke the entire repository. It's completely possible he wasn't aware how SVN works internally that such a test case could break the repo as well.
There's right now a worry that the master repository is irrepairable - that because of this checkin, you cannot repair it - the only way to recover is to restore it from a backup.
As a hash function, SHA-1 was perfectly adequate for how Git works.
All Git uses SHA-1 for internally is to hash the contents of a file to turn it into a unique number. SHA-1 is a nice fast algorithm to do that, and 160 bits offers plenty of space to uniquely identify stuff. It's so good that all the other things are hashed like commits and such and then a Git repository is merely a collection of hashes. A hash at the top we call "head" which contains the SHA-1 hash representing a commit object (it's the SHA-1 hash of said object, actually). That commit object points to a few other objects, the commit before it (the old head) and the SHA1 hash of the tree object. The tree object contains a list of SHA1 hashes that represent files in the source tree, specifically the list of changed files.
What happens when there's a collision? Interestingly enough, not much. If you're trying to check in a file that collides, chances are git won't let you because a file already in the repo has the same hash. If you force the matter (you can chop your history down so a conflict isn't immeidately apparent), then remote repos that pull from you or you push to will simply ignore the conflicting file as they will just assume it references the file already in the repo (you can check out an old version and check it back in - guess what? The hashes will be identical!. You often do this if you revert).
Now, perhaps Git could be made to handle the issue a bit more gracefully if you do happen to check in a file that differs but hashes the same, but in reality it's a rare occurance. Even Linux itself which has a huge history hasn't experienced the issue.
If you want fun, see WebKit, because SVN uses SHA-1 internally and someone corrupted the master repo checking in a test case consisting of two files with the same hash (the test case was to test for SHA-1 collisions in WebKit caching code). Ironically, that repo is offline at the moment.
Then just wait. If you can't afford a cinema ticket, you can wait until it hits the video rental places and then rent it. If that's too expensive, and you have Netflix, you can wait for that too. If you still can't afford that, wait for it to be shown on TV for free.