What I don't understand is how companies can sell something that is already free. Windows remote desktop and putty have been free forever. Plus there are other alternatives that I don't feel like listing. If you are dumb enough to pay for something that is free, then you deserve to get jacked!
Ask Microsoft/Apple. I mean, Linux is free, why should anyone use Windows or macOS? Hell, why do people pay RedHat billions of dollars a year for Linux? It's all free, after all.
The answer is, the commercial tools have better support. GoToMyPC, TeamViewer, etc, are all very handy utilities if the person you're dealing with on the other end is having difficulty. If they can get on the internet, GoToMyPC and its ilk work great for remote support. No routers to fiddle with, no complex setup involved - all you have to do is get them to run an executable and enter in a few values and you can diagnose why they can't connect to the corporate LAN over VPN (remote desktop is unencrypted, and unless you port forward, if you can't VPN in, you can't use it).
Hell, paying for a yearly license at $144, that's pretty cheap. If you have to walk a user through the steps of downloading and using puTTY and Remote Desktop, that could easily take at least 2-3 hours in time and untold frustration. $144 is pretty cheap to turn an aggravating time into one that can get people on their way in 10 minutes
You're right, this is about fake viewers, aka viewbots. This makes a Twitch streamer appear more popular than they really are, which causes them to get a higher ranking in listings of popular streamers. I would argue that streamers that do this are defrauding Twitch and viewers by lying to them about how many *people* are watching their stream.
They also likely are defrauding Twitch - for Twitch pays them some of the ad revenue as well, I believe. So it's like a bunch of bots that click ads on websites so the operators get paid more. Here, it's a bunch of bots 'watch" the stream to jack up the ad revenue for the content creator.
"who recently admitted to secretly funding a campaign of third-party lawsuits to bankrupt Gawker Media"
Peter Thiel never admitted that, according to the articles linked. It was Jay Rosen, media critic and a professor of journalism at New York University who stated that opinion.
Also, half the links are from Gawker, which is obviously not an impartial actor in this spectacle.
I guess reporting on board positions isn't that exciting without spicing it up with gossipy speculation of a person's motives.
It's an article from a Gawker site (Gizmodo). ALL the Gawker sites are heavily Anti-Thiel, and they're playing up the whole "We're just a news organization who did no wrong but this big bad evil billionaire wants to bankrupt us to silence the press!" aspect.
They never acknowledge that it was a valid lawsuit, that they were found guilty, that they purposefully ignored court orders, etc. Just "First Amendment!" and "We're innocent!".
Always playing up to the "Evil billionaire wants to silence news organization" card. Ignoring their own transgressions.
The Hogan lawsuit was just as much as seeking revenge as slapping Gawker with the reality that no, news organizations are NOT above the law
It's really the only thing Gawker is writing about daily - and they're the only organization claiming this - everyone else has pretty much filed it away and isn't even taking sides, preferring a more balanced view.
The largest percentage of tickets sold do not go to the general public, they go to AMEX and are sold to card holders as rewards. Depending on the concert AMEX may get 50% of the tickets before they ever go on sale.
Actually, a lot more than 50%.
The promoter gets a share of the tickets. The artist gets a share of the tickets. The venue gets a share of tickets. Then credit cards, media, etc get a share of tickets. Etc.
It ends up being anywhere from 66-90% of tickets are sold before the general public gets them. A few places they do "VIP" tickets which are pre-registered members get to buy tickets (they get a password to buy tickets - usually they can get the best seats, but they can buy regular tickets as well).
Think of it this way - is it really so hard to sell tickets that venues go to people like Ticketmaster to handle their ticket selling?
I mean, if you want to embarrass a nation with high piracy (say, China),you can do it by basically insulting them.
I mean, by saying this, you're automatically saying a nation like the US has higher IQ than China (piracy rates of 50% and under, and over 90%, respectively).
Goal being that the Chinese are to be insulted so badly that they change their ways
I've seen many companies use GMail, even rather big outfits.
They go and use something along the lines of "companyname-name@gmail.com" as their correspondence address. And yes, this would be emblazoned on their packaging.
We've got suppliers that work like that - but considering we remove the packaging (it's just inside a tacky plastic bag when we pack our goods, no one really notices.
So, basically giving users the original OS disk? Like they did in the early days? I guess this is a good sign, moving away from the current model of "media free" on the HDD images, with no recourse to removing all of the crapware.
No, it's still media-free. Basically it downloads and installs a new copy of Windows in-place, so you don't have a chance to make a USB stick or anything first. It just downloads Windows and unpacks it.
I really want to understand why/if this is right or wrong, factually, and if it's something that makes a difference to people that have the "It's OK, as long as they don't make profit" mindset?
Basically it boils down to licensing.
"Fan films" and other fan-items are generally produced for free and given away, with no profit motive at all - they were created by fans who wanted to play in the universe. These are generally done as hobby projects and no expectation of cash is given, other than maybe a few bucks in donations and whatever you scrape up through YouTube donations.
This production is somewhat... different. First off, there is a grey area for the profit motive - because the film will not be released for all immediately for free, but instead given to backers who have first viewing, one could argue it's a profit motive as you sold exclusivity.
And then there's the whole "is it fandom" thing if you're hiring actors, post production, etc teams to do a lot of the work. Fan works generally have an aura of crappiness to them because they were shot with consumer grade camcorders and edited using whatever was available, though some can be quite well produced if given the time or the creators had a skilled person in their team.
This is made even more complex because CBS has a licensing arm who would gladly license you out the rights to Star Trek - though because they get so many, it costs around $55,000 to arrange a sit-down meeting with the licensing agents and lawyers. (Other CBS properties generally cost that much). This is just to get to a first meeting, not to hammer out a licensing deal - just to get you in the door and either laughed out of the room or they show interest in making a deal. It probably costs a lot more after that to get the lawyers involved and get a deal done
Who will prevail? In the end, being Hollywood and all, it will probably be settled, a license fee paid, and everyone walks away. If not, things will get very nasty very quickly - including difficult, if any of the production companies start getting blackballed
That's really not a good way to handle it though. It shouldn't issue the coupon code, only for it not to work for a customer, at all. Rather, a "spin the wheel to win a free pizza" system or similar would control the numbers of free pizzas being issued, whilst still maintaining customer goodwill and not exposing Dominos to the perception of having broken their promises. T-Mobile does, after all, not only know where you live, but where you ARE. (Even if you disable location services or deny access to the TMO app, they can still place you with a couple hundred meters via cell tower triangulation.) So they could easily have controlled the numbers going to any given Dominos location.
Better yet, just have the customer text T-Mo for the coupon code. LIke text the store number to a T-Mo number, and you'll get a coupon texted back for a free pizza. If there are no more coupons, it would say so "Sorry, all free pizzas at this location have been given out. Try again next week!"
And it's an incredible marketing opportunity - now you know where people go at what time Market it right and you could get other businesses involved too - after all, if you stopped by for a free pizza and didn't get a coupon, chances are you probably will go to a place nearby for food still. Not to far away, so neighbouring businesses can get in on the traffic. If a particular store runs out and gets 100 people wanting food, a nearby restaurant would pay to get that sort of information so they can target passed up users.
It goes the other way as well. If you go to court for a traffic violation and the officer who wrote the citation doesn't show up, the judge will toss it. Same thing if someone has sued you and fails to show up to court. The judge is there to preside over the trial, not to do the job of the prosecution of defense.
And that's really a bit of the shitty part of the whole thing. Because you end up wasting your whole day while the other side costs them nothing.
Take a small claims for example - let's say you're suing someone for $1000. The other guy knows he's in the wrong, so won't bother defending himself. So while you spend the day at the courthouse to get a default judgement, he's off doing whatever he does during the day, knowing he'll have to pay, and thus not wasting his time.
So yes, you get your $1000, minus all the time and effort in court. He was going to have to pay anyways, and all he spent was the 5 minutes writing you the cheque.
Traffic courts are the same way - you spend your whole day there, the cop won't bother showing up (it's cheaper for him to do his job than to waste a day in court). Judge tosses your ticket, you wasted a whole day and cop does whatever he normally does.
I got bad news for you, sunshine: Your carrying a smartphone at all is more or less equivalent to wearing an ankle monitor like the police would put on you while you're under house arrest. You want to be free of being tracked by your phone? Get rid of it and get the simplest wireless phone you can find, with no GPS at all, and with a battery you can physically remove to completely shut it off if need be. Then only turn it on when you need to use it. Then at least they'll only know where you are when you're actually using the phone.
All phones these days have GPS. It's part of E911 requirement caused by 9/11. Sure the crappiest voice-only phone may only have AGPS, but it can triangulate your position within 30 seconds or so.
My first instinct would be, people won't post as much if it's all video, because they often post from public places and they would be too self-conscious to talk out loud about personal stuff when surrounded with strangers.
But then I realize that people have no shame in taking selfies and suddenly I can tell that Facebook guy is probably right. Remove inhibitions and what's left is the path to convenience, and it's a lot easier to speak than it is to write.
Only roablock is search, and you can bet there's busy bees all over the world trying to solve that.
The problem with video is it's easy to do, but hard to do well.
Too many people on YouTube get by with the "microphone" that comes with their camera. Problem is, the camera may be good, but being so far away, it ends up shitty. Cellphone videos even more so.
Unless Facebook comes up with a magical algorithm that cleans up shitty audio, video will have a hard time replacing text - because when all you can see is a face with a moving mouth and nothing but noise on the audio, the appeal fades significantly.
The "professional" people on YouTube have all sorts of microphone arrangements from lapel mics to others to try to get better audio when they speak, and even then they often have cleanup sessions to re-record it.
Text however, is quick, easy and unless you're particularly bad at language, fairly easy to understand. Even if you're bad at it, you don't have to content with shitty background noise drowning you out.
They could say whatever they wanted about whomever because they were a $100 million conglomerate, immune to any consequence. Well, there's always a bigger fish and finally, they pissed off someone with the cash to beat them.
Actually, it was worse. They acted like they were above the law.
Media outlets are not, and they have to "stay in line" like the rest of us. When the judge gave a court order saying Gawker had to take the sex tape video offline, they not only refused to do so, but said they were purposefully disobeying it.
So Gawker themselves held themselves to be above the law - and disrespecting the judge to boot.
They not only acted like they were untouchable, they behaved like they were untouchable, because they were. Then a billionaire comes along and basically finds a valid case to try to smack some sense into them.
And if you look at the Gawker sites, the posts that try to defend Gawker are more... amusing, for how slanted they are. It was also telling they omitted the fact that they deliberately defied a court order in their painting themselves as angels.
The fact that it takes a billionaire to take down Gawker should be telling enough - they do wrong, and they not only don't care, but they thumb their noses at any attempt at justice, and act with impunity.
Oh, and every other media outlet, when they got the court order, took down the video.
So Apple which off-shores billions to avoid taxes, uses a majority of Chinese made parts and assembles in Mexico is a US company. Not to mention runs a proprietary OS and won't share the code so it can be audited. There is a reason the NSA prefers BSD, and rightfully chooses android over a closed OS, they can and do compile it themselves and check every line of code. I would trust all South Korean made hardware long before I would trust a hodgepodge of Chinese manufactured parts gathered and assembled in a lowest bidder fashion in several untrusted and known corrupt marketplaces, China and Mexico for example.
Said smartphone from "South Korea" is most likely manufactured in China. From a hodge-podge of parts sourced all over the world. And maybe even made in the same factory as Apple products. (And Foxconn's Taiwanese, actually, with major factories in China. Most other big CMs are also Taiwan based - China just has their workforce to put the stuff together).
As for auditing the phone - well, Android itself is open-source. But there's a lot of code that isn't, and runs in modes that are more priviledged than the Linux kernel Android uses. Such as the TrustZone monitor and the TZEE (TrustZone Execution Environment, where you can run "apps" in the secure world). TZEE is basically an OS unto itself to provide secure world services to the open world. Such things include access to encryption hardware and secured keys.
Then there's the hypervisor - used by Samsung's Knox. The hypervisor is just a hypervisor and it too runs like an operating system to schedule the various virtual machines. One of which would be the main Android OS, the other to run the Knox security stuff.
I've modified the message on one of those signed before. The box was unlocked and there was a manual inside with the default password for the device (which worked).
To be fair, the main problem was the box was unlocked.
A password is useless on a device like this - if you change it, then every sign needs to have the same password, and every employee who deals with them needs to have the password. Chances are if this is the case, the password is effectively public because someone will leak it out eventually (or someone overhears it accidentally).
After all, the road crews doing the signage probably don't want to figure it out every time, which is why the manual is there so they can quickly set up the sign and have it display the desired message. No road crew wants to go and fiddle and figure out how to use the damn sign, after all.
If they had their way, the boxes would have built in modems and such, and all they'd have to do is dump it by the side of the road and phone it in.to the traffic central so they can take control of it. In this case a unique password is useful (and something the traffic center computers can keep track of
Adios to tried and true package managers, hello dependency and network/firewall hell as you try to resolve conflicts between the different sources?
Well, snaps actually are trying to solve this.
Let's say you have a critical program you need for your work. And let's also say that it needs specific versions of software installed - you can't upgrade those dependencies or your risk breaking the program.
Now, all package managers have the ability to freeze a package - that is, prevent updating it. So you dutifully do it, and it works great - in the beginning. Slowly as time goes on the number of updates you get will slow to a trickle as you get more and more new packages dependent on newer versions of the dependencies. Eventually you'll get to a point where you can't install anything as what you want needs a newer version than what you have, or is dependent on things that need a newer version.
Snaps help solve that - your program can be made into a snap with the versions of libraries it needs, while the rest of your system marches forward
It doesn't matter what the application is - if it needs specific revisions of dependencies, holding back can lead to various DLL hells.
Snaps won't replace apt or yum - those tools are always going to be required. Snaps are useful for programs with a tricky set of dependencies to have them easily met
Maybe I'm being naive here, but I see little reason why we don't have SSD class storage in our phones at this point. Can someone please explain it to me? Does it require too much power? It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to have a phone with a 120 GB SSD in it. Maybe the phone would be a bit thicker, but I think it's a feature a lot of people would like to have. I really hope Samsung can find a way to put this SSD in their next phone.
Some phones do. I mean, they don't use eMMC like the rest of them, or UFS, the successor to eMMC. They use a real SSD controller.
Supposedly the SSD controller is similar to what Apple uses for their laptops, though it's single channel which limits the speed you can get since you can't parallelize across multiple NAND dice.
They don't see it that way; principled Republicans see a slippery slope now that the FCC is regulating the internet, which you may recall got to be what it is today largely because it was unregulated. Are such fears grounded in reality? Hard to say; come back in 20 years and let's see what the internet looks like then.
The FCC is regulating the internet to be fair - nothing more. The internet got the way it is because it was unregulated, but fair. It was only in the past decade that tit was possible to be unfair - that you could limit Netflix usage while keeping speeds up to your services, for example. Then you could bill Netflix some money so you could give them the bandwidth they had before.
Or an ISP could jitter VoIP packets to make their telephone offerings better and make competing solutions worse.
All the FCC has done was put an end to such practices by making it so you cannot prefer a provider over another. Imagine the fun that could be had by Comcast if Comcast decided to pit Sony and Microsoft against each other - perhaps it's Monday, so Microsoft gets to have low-lag online gaming. But not on Tuesdays, because Sony paid for Tuesdays.
I think I'd have more reservations about the OLED panel than anything else - mostly because of aging.
Ars Technica's review of the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S seems to really put a fear in the panel from the get-go - the screen dims quickly, uses screensavers, etc. All in a kinda-sorta nudging way to say it's going to be dead in a couple of years.
And the brighter you crank it up, the shorter its lifespan. I think in the end it feels like it'll be pock-marked from use in less time than an SSD takes to die, or before the batteries go.
On-line stores have to ask for the CVV. It's been a while since I ran my own business, but back then we were explicitly forbidden from capturing the CVV for in-person transactions. The idea is that nobody has it but the physical card holder.
I do admit to being puzzled by this story though. If the wireless conversation between a contactless card and any kind of reader carries enough information for the card to be cloned, then the design is terminally broken. It's not as if the necessary crypto techniques are not very well known.
The last time I swiped (years ago) the cashier swiped it into the POS and then entered the CVV into the POS as well. Though I admit a few years before that they were entering the last 4 digits on the card (I guess to verify that it wasn't a card with a rewritten magstripe).
Policies differ, I guess.
As for the second part, the NFC reader is just capturing what is publicly available - the number and expiry which is plainly visible from the card. This you can capture with almost any NFC capable phone - there are apps that will read it and show you the credit card number and expiry date (plenty on Android).
But transacting via contactless is similar to transacting via chip - the bank does a challenge and response code - it will not just read the numbers via NFC and assumed you swiped it. It reads the numbers to start the transaction with the bank, then the bank gives a challenge and the chip uses its secret to generate a response that the bank verifies (since it knows the secret).
There is/was a program called "NFC Proxy" that with two phones connected together (over WiFi or 3G) and a custom ROM, could be used to charge a contactless payment to someone else. Basically one phone is used at the terminal and captures and forwards the NFC request to a second phone which is near a payment card, the second phone then sends the request via NFC to the card, captures the response and sends it back.
When you read the card, you get the card number and expiry date. It's not good enough to actually do a chip/contact payment, but the information is enough to do a swipe transaction. If you can print a card, and have an old enough store that still uses a mechanical imprinter (the big thing that you put the card in, a slip and slide the slider back and forth that imprints the slip). Or of course, you use it for online shopping.
What happens then is up to the merchant and hits bank - if the bank is smart, they will realize the card used supports chip or contactless, and the terminal supports it, and rejects the transation wanting a chip or contactless.
Online stores and even in-person transactions often require the CVV if you swipe them, as well. (The CVV value is not stored on chip or in the magstripe - it's designed to verify that you have physical access to the card).
Actual payments require a challenge-response - the chip contains a secret only known to it and the bank which never leaves the card.
So you likely can use it for a few transactions which still do swipes and don't check CVVs, but that's about it.
That's not an option with many new TVs: they require network connectivity or else they won't even work as a TV or display monitor.
This is probably a good reason to buy your TV from Walmart actually: it's trivially easy to throw stuff back in the box (poorly) and get a full refund at your local Walmart. With Amazon, they'll probably require you to pay for return shipping costs.
I would be extremely surprised if a tv did this, as its a good way to get returns. Because there are many reasons why a network connection can't be made.
First, WiFi may require a password - not just a wpa key, but a captive portal. Second, Ethernet may not be available. Third, the user may just want to get something on the screen in a hurry (perhaps they bought the first TV they saw to replace a broken one for the big game). Finally, internet may not be available, period (e.g., trade show).
Or the user wants to have a TV to watch and wait for their kids to come over on the weekend to set up the wifi stuff.
How long before macOS be stuck with a walled garden in which we can't install non-approved "apps"?
Never, because the use cases are different.
And anyhow, Apple couldn't get Microsoft and Adobe on board to support it.
In fact, Apple's been loosening the restrictions - and in a weirdly RMS move, has made iOS open-source friendly. As in you can load in any app you can compile onto your iOS devices without Apple getting in the way.* Yes, you can "sideload" apps onto iOS, using Xcode.
So yes, lots of previously banned applications are making their way to iOS using this (most were open-source anyhow).
And yes, Adobe and Microsoft are huge companies who are affected if Apple made macOS a walled garden, so it's unlikely to happen. Also, it'll be trivial to jailbreak macOS - you can always boot the computer into Windows or Linux and edit the OS files manually, so locking down macOS is nigh-impossible.
* - From source code. Apple frowns on people using this way to load on binaries (which is what happened to f.lux - they gave people binaries only, no source code) Apple wants if you do this, that you ship source code that is built. Yes, people have done this to pirate apps, and it does work. In a weird way Apple is enforcing open-source.
Coding, like all forms of creative writing, is best done on tools and methods tailored to them. The terminal, or electronic typewriter, is an image of the best physical device we have created to do that so far, the mechanical typewriter. Second only to pencil/pen and paper it enables those with the messiest of hand writing to become published authors.
Not really.
Perhaps when producing the final work, yes, you need to sit down at the keyboard and be a secretary and punch code in.
But not during the analysis/breakdown/application stage. And writers don't often sit down and write, either.
There are plenty of graphical tools meant for arranging ideas - if you're writing a novel, then you need to arrange your notes first. For some, that's putting ideas to note cards and then sticking them on a wall, adding string and other accoutrements as they get linked together. Others write down ideas and draw little maps or bubbles or other thing to arrange their ideas.
Then the idea map is flattened into a linear story - usually by outlining. This is generally written, but in a way to allow for additions/removals and rearrangements later, so rarely typed out.
Once all that is done, THEN you can sit down at the typewriter and crank out the words or code. This is the final step.
And software is the same - unless it's something stupidly trivial, you don't start at int main() and code away. You break down the application in modules, figure out what each module does and so on and so on until there's a plan.
The logic part of this, the problem decomposition, can be done in a variety of ways, though the least effective is sitting there trying to type your way out of the problem. A lot of it can be figured out graphically, manipulating blocks of modules until things seem right.
Of course, unlike writing, there's a maintenance phase of software where things gets to grow organically and the design gets tossed due to new requirements, but the problem's still the same - how to fit a new feature into an existing design.
The logical part of programming doesn't need a computer. In fact, one could argue that programmers should start out away from the screen and to figure out their program first.
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Ask Microsoft/Apple. I mean, Linux is free, why should anyone use Windows or macOS? Hell, why do people pay RedHat billions of dollars a year for Linux? It's all free, after all.
The answer is, the commercial tools have better support. GoToMyPC, TeamViewer, etc, are all very handy utilities if the person you're dealing with on the other end is having difficulty. If they can get on the internet, GoToMyPC and its ilk work great for remote support. No routers to fiddle with, no complex setup involved - all you have to do is get them to run an executable and enter in a few values and you can diagnose why they can't connect to the corporate LAN over VPN (remote desktop is unencrypted, and unless you port forward, if you can't VPN in, you can't use it).
Hell, paying for a yearly license at $144, that's pretty cheap. If you have to walk a user through the steps of downloading and using puTTY and Remote Desktop, that could easily take at least 2-3 hours in time and untold frustration. $144 is pretty cheap to turn an aggravating time into one that can get people on their way in 10 minutes
They also likely are defrauding Twitch - for Twitch pays them some of the ad revenue as well, I believe. So it's like a bunch of bots that click ads on websites so the operators get paid more. Here, it's a bunch of bots 'watch" the stream to jack up the ad revenue for the content creator.
It's an article from a Gawker site (Gizmodo). ALL the Gawker sites are heavily Anti-Thiel, and they're playing up the whole "We're just a news organization who did no wrong but this big bad evil billionaire wants to bankrupt us to silence the press!" aspect.
They never acknowledge that it was a valid lawsuit, that they were found guilty, that they purposefully ignored court orders, etc. Just "First Amendment!" and "We're innocent!".
Always playing up to the "Evil billionaire wants to silence news organization" card. Ignoring their own transgressions.
The Hogan lawsuit was just as much as seeking revenge as slapping Gawker with the reality that no, news organizations are NOT above the law
It's really the only thing Gawker is writing about daily - and they're the only organization claiming this - everyone else has pretty much filed it away and isn't even taking sides, preferring a more balanced view.
Actually, a lot more than 50%.
The promoter gets a share of the tickets. The artist gets a share of the tickets. The venue gets a share of tickets. Then credit cards, media, etc get a share of tickets. Etc.
It ends up being anywhere from 66-90% of tickets are sold before the general public gets them. A few places they do "VIP" tickets which are pre-registered members get to buy tickets (they get a password to buy tickets - usually they can get the best seats, but they can buy regular tickets as well).
Think of it this way - is it really so hard to sell tickets that venues go to people like Ticketmaster to handle their ticket selling?
Or charge it to marketing.
I mean, if you want to embarrass a nation with high piracy (say, China),you can do it by basically insulting them.
I mean, by saying this, you're automatically saying a nation like the US has higher IQ than China (piracy rates of 50% and under, and over 90%, respectively).
Goal being that the Chinese are to be insulted so badly that they change their ways
I've seen many companies use GMail, even rather big outfits.
They go and use something along the lines of "companyname-name@gmail.com" as their correspondence address. And yes, this would be emblazoned on their packaging.
We've got suppliers that work like that - but considering we remove the packaging (it's just inside a tacky plastic bag when we pack our goods, no one really notices.
No, it's still media-free. Basically it downloads and installs a new copy of Windows in-place, so you don't have a chance to make a USB stick or anything first. It just downloads Windows and unpacks it.
Basically it boils down to licensing.
"Fan films" and other fan-items are generally produced for free and given away, with no profit motive at all - they were created by fans who wanted to play in the universe. These are generally done as hobby projects and no expectation of cash is given, other than maybe a few bucks in donations and whatever you scrape up through YouTube donations.
This production is somewhat... different. First off, there is a grey area for the profit motive - because the film will not be released for all immediately for free, but instead given to backers who have first viewing, one could argue it's a profit motive as you sold exclusivity.
And then there's the whole "is it fandom" thing if you're hiring actors, post production, etc teams to do a lot of the work. Fan works generally have an aura of crappiness to them because they were shot with consumer grade camcorders and edited using whatever was available, though some can be quite well produced if given the time or the creators had a skilled person in their team.
This is made even more complex because CBS has a licensing arm who would gladly license you out the rights to Star Trek - though because they get so many, it costs around $55,000 to arrange a sit-down meeting with the licensing agents and lawyers. (Other CBS properties generally cost that much). This is just to get to a first meeting, not to hammer out a licensing deal - just to get you in the door and either laughed out of the room or they show interest in making a deal. It probably costs a lot more after that to get the lawyers involved and get a deal done
Who will prevail? In the end, being Hollywood and all, it will probably be settled, a license fee paid, and everyone walks away. If not, things will get very nasty very quickly - including difficult, if any of the production companies start getting blackballed
Better yet, just have the customer text T-Mo for the coupon code. LIke text the store number to a T-Mo number, and you'll get a coupon texted back for a free pizza. If there are no more coupons, it would say so "Sorry, all free pizzas at this location have been given out. Try again next week!"
And it's an incredible marketing opportunity - now you know where people go at what time Market it right and you could get other businesses involved too - after all, if you stopped by for a free pizza and didn't get a coupon, chances are you probably will go to a place nearby for food still. Not to far away, so neighbouring businesses can get in on the traffic. If a particular store runs out and gets 100 people wanting food, a nearby restaurant would pay to get that sort of information so they can target passed up users.
And that's really a bit of the shitty part of the whole thing. Because you end up wasting your whole day while the other side costs them nothing.
Take a small claims for example - let's say you're suing someone for $1000. The other guy knows he's in the wrong, so won't bother defending himself. So while you spend the day at the courthouse to get a default judgement, he's off doing whatever he does during the day, knowing he'll have to pay, and thus not wasting his time.
So yes, you get your $1000, minus all the time and effort in court. He was going to have to pay anyways, and all he spent was the 5 minutes writing you the cheque.
Traffic courts are the same way - you spend your whole day there, the cop won't bother showing up (it's cheaper for him to do his job than to waste a day in court). Judge tosses your ticket, you wasted a whole day and cop does whatever he normally does.
All phones these days have GPS. It's part of E911 requirement caused by 9/11. Sure the crappiest voice-only phone may only have AGPS, but it can triangulate your position within 30 seconds or so.
The problem with video is it's easy to do, but hard to do well.
Too many people on YouTube get by with the "microphone" that comes with their camera. Problem is, the camera may be good, but being so far away, it ends up shitty. Cellphone videos even more so.
Unless Facebook comes up with a magical algorithm that cleans up shitty audio, video will have a hard time replacing text - because when all you can see is a face with a moving mouth and nothing but noise on the audio, the appeal fades significantly.
The "professional" people on YouTube have all sorts of microphone arrangements from lapel mics to others to try to get better audio when they speak, and even then they often have cleanup sessions to re-record it.
Text however, is quick, easy and unless you're particularly bad at language, fairly easy to understand. Even if you're bad at it, you don't have to content with shitty background noise drowning you out.
Sounds like a great nickname for him!
Do it enough and we can get it Google bombed!
Sanford "Spamford" Wallace
Actually, it was worse. They acted like they were above the law.
Media outlets are not, and they have to "stay in line" like the rest of us. When the judge gave a court order saying Gawker had to take the sex tape video offline, they not only refused to do so, but said they were purposefully disobeying it.
So Gawker themselves held themselves to be above the law - and disrespecting the judge to boot.
They not only acted like they were untouchable, they behaved like they were untouchable, because they were. Then a billionaire comes along and basically finds a valid case to try to smack some sense into them.
And if you look at the Gawker sites, the posts that try to defend Gawker are more... amusing, for how slanted they are. It was also telling they omitted the fact that they deliberately defied a court order in their painting themselves as angels.
The fact that it takes a billionaire to take down Gawker should be telling enough - they do wrong, and they not only don't care, but they thumb their noses at any attempt at justice, and act with impunity.
Oh, and every other media outlet, when they got the court order, took down the video.
Said smartphone from "South Korea" is most likely manufactured in China. From a hodge-podge of parts sourced all over the world. And maybe even made in the same factory as Apple products. (And Foxconn's Taiwanese, actually, with major factories in China. Most other big CMs are also Taiwan based - China just has their workforce to put the stuff together).
As for auditing the phone - well, Android itself is open-source. But there's a lot of code that isn't, and runs in modes that are more priviledged than the Linux kernel Android uses. Such as the TrustZone monitor and the TZEE (TrustZone Execution Environment, where you can run "apps" in the secure world). TZEE is basically an OS unto itself to provide secure world services to the open world. Such things include access to encryption hardware and secured keys.
Then there's the hypervisor - used by Samsung's Knox. The hypervisor is just a hypervisor and it too runs like an operating system to schedule the various virtual machines. One of which would be the main Android OS, the other to run the Knox security stuff.
To be fair, the main problem was the box was unlocked.
A password is useless on a device like this - if you change it, then every sign needs to have the same password, and every employee who deals with them needs to have the password. Chances are if this is the case, the password is effectively public because someone will leak it out eventually (or someone overhears it accidentally).
After all, the road crews doing the signage probably don't want to figure it out every time, which is why the manual is there so they can quickly set up the sign and have it display the desired message. No road crew wants to go and fiddle and figure out how to use the damn sign, after all.
If they had their way, the boxes would have built in modems and such, and all they'd have to do is dump it by the side of the road and phone it in.to the traffic central so they can take control of it. In this case a unique password is useful (and something the traffic center computers can keep track of
Well, snaps actually are trying to solve this.
Let's say you have a critical program you need for your work. And let's also say that it needs specific versions of software installed - you can't upgrade those dependencies or your risk breaking the program.
Now, all package managers have the ability to freeze a package - that is, prevent updating it. So you dutifully do it, and it works great - in the beginning. Slowly as time goes on the number of updates you get will slow to a trickle as you get more and more new packages dependent on newer versions of the dependencies. Eventually you'll get to a point where you can't install anything as what you want needs a newer version than what you have, or is dependent on things that need a newer version.
Snaps help solve that - your program can be made into a snap with the versions of libraries it needs, while the rest of your system marches forward
It doesn't matter what the application is - if it needs specific revisions of dependencies, holding back can lead to various DLL hells.
Snaps won't replace apt or yum - those tools are always going to be required. Snaps are useful for programs with a tricky set of dependencies to have them easily met
Some phones do. I mean, they don't use eMMC like the rest of them, or UFS, the successor to eMMC. They use a real SSD controller.
Apple's iPhone 6s uses a PCI-E/NVMe based controller using a TLC+SLC flash combination to give fairly impressive speeds for the storage system.
Supposedly the SSD controller is similar to what Apple uses for their laptops, though it's single channel which limits the speed you can get since you can't parallelize across multiple NAND dice.
The FCC is regulating the internet to be fair - nothing more. The internet got the way it is because it was unregulated, but fair. It was only in the past decade that tit was possible to be unfair - that you could limit Netflix usage while keeping speeds up to your services, for example. Then you could bill Netflix some money so you could give them the bandwidth they had before.
Or an ISP could jitter VoIP packets to make their telephone offerings better and make competing solutions worse.
All the FCC has done was put an end to such practices by making it so you cannot prefer a provider over another. Imagine the fun that could be had by Comcast if Comcast decided to pit Sony and Microsoft against each other - perhaps it's Monday, so Microsoft gets to have low-lag online gaming. But not on Tuesdays, because Sony paid for Tuesdays.
I think I'd have more reservations about the OLED panel than anything else - mostly because of aging.
Ars Technica's review of the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S seems to really put a fear in the panel from the get-go - the screen dims quickly, uses screensavers, etc. All in a kinda-sorta nudging way to say it's going to be dead in a couple of years.
And the brighter you crank it up, the shorter its lifespan. I think in the end it feels like it'll be pock-marked from use in less time than an SSD takes to die, or before the batteries go.
The last time I swiped (years ago) the cashier swiped it into the POS and then entered the CVV into the POS as well. Though I admit a few years before that they were entering the last 4 digits on the card (I guess to verify that it wasn't a card with a rewritten magstripe).
Policies differ, I guess.
As for the second part, the NFC reader is just capturing what is publicly available - the number and expiry which is plainly visible from the card. This you can capture with almost any NFC capable phone - there are apps that will read it and show you the credit card number and expiry date (plenty on Android).
But transacting via contactless is similar to transacting via chip - the bank does a challenge and response code - it will not just read the numbers via NFC and assumed you swiped it. It reads the numbers to start the transaction with the bank, then the bank gives a challenge and the chip uses its secret to generate a response that the bank verifies (since it knows the secret).
There is/was a program called "NFC Proxy" that with two phones connected together (over WiFi or 3G) and a custom ROM, could be used to charge a contactless payment to someone else. Basically one phone is used at the terminal and captures and forwards the NFC request to a second phone which is near a payment card, the second phone then sends the request via NFC to the card, captures the response and sends it back.
Well, what really happens is this.
When you read the card, you get the card number and expiry date. It's not good enough to actually do a chip/contact payment, but the information is enough to do a swipe transaction. If you can print a card, and have an old enough store that still uses a mechanical imprinter (the big thing that you put the card in, a slip and slide the slider back and forth that imprints the slip). Or of course, you use it for online shopping.
What happens then is up to the merchant and hits bank - if the bank is smart, they will realize the card used supports chip or contactless, and the terminal supports it, and rejects the transation wanting a chip or contactless.
Online stores and even in-person transactions often require the CVV if you swipe them, as well. (The CVV value is not stored on chip or in the magstripe - it's designed to verify that you have physical access to the card).
Actual payments require a challenge-response - the chip contains a secret only known to it and the bank which never leaves the card.
So you likely can use it for a few transactions which still do swipes and don't check CVVs, but that's about it.
I would be extremely surprised if a tv did this, as its a good way to get returns. Because there are many reasons why a network connection can't be made.
First, WiFi may require a password - not just a wpa key, but a captive portal. Second, Ethernet may not be available. Third, the user may just want to get something on the screen in a hurry (perhaps they bought the first TV they saw to replace a broken one for the big game). Finally, internet may not be available, period (e.g., trade show).
Or the user wants to have a TV to watch and wait for their kids to come over on the weekend to set up the wifi stuff.
Never, because the use cases are different.
And anyhow, Apple couldn't get Microsoft and Adobe on board to support it.
In fact, Apple's been loosening the restrictions - and in a weirdly RMS move, has made iOS open-source friendly. As in you can load in any app you can compile onto your iOS devices without Apple getting in the way.* Yes, you can "sideload" apps onto iOS, using Xcode.
So yes, lots of previously banned applications are making their way to iOS using this (most were open-source anyhow).
And yes, Adobe and Microsoft are huge companies who are affected if Apple made macOS a walled garden, so it's unlikely to happen. Also, it'll be trivial to jailbreak macOS - you can always boot the computer into Windows or Linux and edit the OS files manually, so locking down macOS is nigh-impossible.
* - From source code. Apple frowns on people using this way to load on binaries (which is what happened to f.lux - they gave people binaries only, no source code) Apple wants if you do this, that you ship source code that is built. Yes, people have done this to pirate apps, and it does work. In a weird way Apple is enforcing open-source.
Not really.
Perhaps when producing the final work, yes, you need to sit down at the keyboard and be a secretary and punch code in.
But not during the analysis/breakdown/application stage. And writers don't often sit down and write, either.
There are plenty of graphical tools meant for arranging ideas - if you're writing a novel, then you need to arrange your notes first. For some, that's putting ideas to note cards and then sticking them on a wall, adding string and other accoutrements as they get linked together. Others write down ideas and draw little maps or bubbles or other thing to arrange their ideas.
Then the idea map is flattened into a linear story - usually by outlining. This is generally written, but in a way to allow for additions/removals and rearrangements later, so rarely typed out.
Once all that is done, THEN you can sit down at the typewriter and crank out the words or code. This is the final step.
And software is the same - unless it's something stupidly trivial, you don't start at int main() and code away. You break down the application in modules, figure out what each module does and so on and so on until there's a plan.
The logic part of this, the problem decomposition, can be done in a variety of ways, though the least effective is sitting there trying to type your way out of the problem. A lot of it can be figured out graphically, manipulating blocks of modules until things seem right.
Of course, unlike writing, there's a maintenance phase of software where things gets to grow organically and the design gets tossed due to new requirements, but the problem's still the same - how to fit a new feature into an existing design.
The logical part of programming doesn't need a computer. In fact, one could argue that programmers should start out away from the screen and to figure out their program first.