In the end I cannot believe how bad Lync was and Skype for Business is, compared to any other alternative, including GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.
Or even just plain old Skype.
Yes, Skype for Business is rebranded Lync, and it has NOTHING to do with the normal Skype you and I use.
It's even worse when you use Skype because the two don't interoperate well - we had plenty of issues when we had a meeting we normally conduct using Skype and they switched to Skype for Business. Suddenly lots of things broke, including screen sharing. We worked around it by having everyone use their regular Skype account instead of Skype for Business accounts. Even worse is you can't tell when it happens - just that it happened when you get complaints.
The only reason we knew was they mentioned that they had to switch from their work-personal Skype accounts to Skype for Business accounts that was set up for them.
Reminds me of the days of Outlook and Outlook Express - two separate products whose only commonality was the word "Outlook". They worked differently, they acted differently, they had different feature sets and they were not interchangeable.
Or Windows CE. Microsoft is one of the few places where things can be named similarly to refer to two completely different products. Made all the worse during the.NET era where everything took on.NET branding even though their relation to what.NET is was tenuous at best.
My $600 graphics card can barely handle 4K. And they're going to do it in a $400 console. Sure.
Does anyone really believe this will be anything but a glorified 1080p upscaler?
Well, look at the wording. "Play 4K resolution content". No where does it say it can play video games in 4K, but it can play 4K content. Streaming or likely, 4K UHD Blu-Rays (which require drive capable of reading UHD BDs). And adding PSVR support into it.
Plus, it's not necessarily $400. Sony may very well keep the PS4 at $400 and release the PS4K at $600 or $700 or more.
Though it's more likely they're adding UHD support than anything since that won't interfere with games and piss off a good chunk of the existing PS4 user base. Nintendo's tried with their "New 3DS" thing and they've only got one game out of it.
Unfortunately, it has become such common practice to request "kitchen sink" permissions that it's nigh impossible to find useful apps that don't do so. And the sad fact is that users have become so jaded to it that the money that app makers lose from people who value privacy is less than the money they make from people just clicking through on ever "OK" button they see to get their new shiny.
It stems from two problems.
First, the permissions weren't granular enough and common tasks and notifications end up requiring permissions that are potentially scary. Stuff like "Phone state" seems scary, but a practical reason is so a media player can pause playback when you get a phone call. Or pause if you attempt to make a phone call so the audio doesn't drown out the other side of the conversation.
Of course, if an app asks for you rcontacts, that's because the advertising component of it wants to rape your phone's personal information. It's a sad fact that the vast majority of Android users don't pay for apps, requiring the use of ads to pay for it.
Isn't uTorrent adware verging on malware? Maybe I'm confusing it with another product, but a lot of the bittorrent software that has been available over the years has had problems with that kind of thing.
Well, uTorrent is adware, and even they found problems - which is why they run their ads as a separate process (the ads were crashing uTorrent!)
The easiest way to get rid of it is to find the "Updates" directory, then use NTFS permissions to deny yourself access to the utorrentie.exe file. (I delete all the permissions and disable inheritance - so the file exists, but the only thing I can do with it is twiddle file permissions as owner).
There are only a few countries that use meters, and most of them (e.g. Russia and China) aren't countries many people fly in and out of...
ICAO uses meters, except in North America where it's feed due to existing convention.
Pressure is in Pascals everywhere outside of North America as well (where it's inches of mercury). Likewise weather reports uses miles (both statute and nautical!), again only in this region.
Modern airliners have a metric/imperial switch to switch the instruments between the two measurements. The rest of the world uses the metric measurements.
It's actually all standardized so even in Canada you use the same units everywhere (though they do provide a metric conversion for sea level pressure for your altimeter setting. Though most altimeters here are, of course, in imperial.)
The confusion happens because trade is done in metric, and a rather famous aircraft incident happened because of a poorly done imperial/metric conversion.
Windows EXEs and DLLs have the MS-DOS EXE header so if you try to run them in MS-DOS, MS-DOS can try to run them. Typically this stub just prints out "This program cannot be run in DOS mode." and exits. Some apps could even run in both Windows and DOS (though this was back during the 3.1 days when both were in common use)... both versions were crammed into the same EXE. You could probably still do it today.
Yes, you can. The PE header (which is a lot like the MZ header) has a spot for the DOS stub executable - this is the executable that runs if you're not' in Windows, and the PE header looks enough like the regular MZ EXE header that DOS will run the stub (since DOS doesn't know about PE executables).
So a Windows program consists of two executables - a regular DOS mode 16-bit executable and a Windows executable. Both of which are completely independent binaries. Granted, the default Windows compilers give you a DOS stub that says "This program requires Windows" but that's not a given - you can certainly put two separate binaries in it. One application would be self-extracting archives - it would have a DOS mode SFX and a Windows mode SFX.
* siri sounds like a 50's robot, or a 90's speech synthesized robot. Apple has been surpassed here by goog, waze, alexa, pretty much anything I have heard.
From what I've read, that actually was intentional. Apple's actually done a ton of work with respect to text to speech, and even in the 90s they were able to do natural sounding voices. Heck, MacInTalk could *sing*. (And this was the mid-90s). Or heck, do a robotic voice impression. And this was on a 68K Mac.
Apparently the reason is Apple wants you think it's a high-tech thing, and high-tech things have robotic voices, not natural ones.
I would vomit over every square inch of that car if I tried to code while moving. Am I in the minority here?
If I ever meet the guy who decided to put TVs (that are impossible to turn off) in the back of every NYC cab I am going to vomit on him.
Maybe into adulthood, but getting nauseous in a moving vehicle isn't too uncommon (usually most people outgrow it). It's why there are plenty of gadgets, gizmos, drugs, patches and other things that help one through it.
I used to get carsick all the time - airplane trips were torture, and unless I get a window seat I nthe car... vomit city. I've mostly outgrown it, but that doesn't mean I don't get queasy from time to time (at which point I have to basically settle myself down to prevent it from progressing).
This is, incidentally, also why the current VR bubble will burst just as the ones before have: Too many people get real problem unless the content and VR equipment is done exceptionally well (at exceptional cost that all these morons that waste their lives trying to get rich will not be willing to spend).
It's less about that, but that VR combines the worst of 3D and things like Kinect - instead of glasses, now you're strapping these big, bulky and heavy contraptions to your head, and now you practically have to walk around. (People were complaining the arm movements for Kinect was too much effort!). And you need some clear space so you're not bumping into walls. (Tomorrowland played this to hilarious effect).
Seems like you should be using official zoning maps from the city for something like this...
Obviously the demolisher uses Android, because Apple Maps and MapQuest actually have the right location for it. (No, Google Maps isn't perfect, and Apple Maps is way better now than a few years ago. In fact, Google Maps is just "good enough" but there are plenty of errors on it still).
This is steam. If you're paying full price for ANYTHING on it, you're an idiot.
Just wait for a sale and within 6 months you'll probably be able to get it for $10, maybe under $5 by the holidays.
Paying full price for Steam stuff... who does that? And sometimes, it can be cheaper when it goes on sale not during a Steam global sale. One of my games was 33% off during a Steam sale, went 40% off the day after the sale ended.
By law, individual machines generally need to maintain a guaranteed payout rate. As a result, they need to know whether the player will win or not. When the numbers are computer-generated, then it can be exploited via software. If it's a roll of tickets it is distributing, then the roll is already configured with a specific payback rate.
What happened was stupider. They basically requested the machine print a bunch of tickets, and for some stupid reason or other, the machine reveals the winners to the reatiler's screen. The software doing the displaying halted display updates (froze the screen because there was too much to display) so the non-winning tickets were refunded, while the winning ones cashed.
So basically the retailers knew which tickets were winners the moment they printed them.
And you can't just rig your machine to print only winning tickets - all the tickets report back to the lottery commission for verification and tracking purposes.
Of course, the real thing is to make the lottery mainframe the one who creates tickets for the terminal so the lottery commission knows what tickets are winners before the tickets are printed, and the terminals don't get such information. Maintaining payout rate is easy, just a trivial database access and bookkeeping.
No, I see it. I've had similar thoughts. It used to be that you could go to Netflix and type in the name of a semi-recent (say, from last summer) popular movie that you didn't see in theaters, and there was a better than even chance that it was right there, ready for you to watch. It made impromptu Friday-night movie nights with the kids easy. Nowadays? Well, the last two times we tried this, literally nothing of interest was available.
Go try it yourself. Inside Out? Nope. Big Hero 5? Nope. Age of Ultron? Nope. Fury Road? Nope. Tomorrowland? Nope. Jurassic world? Nope. Terminator: Genisys? Nope. Minions? Ant-Man? Fantastic Four? Nope. Nope. Nope.
That's because Netflix can't get access to the streaming rights for those movies.
Netflix is the last to get them for streaming - that's why Netflix has older stuff and indie stuff.
The rough order for a movie is Theatres (first-run, then long-tail into the cheap theatres), then Digital Rental/Download (CinemaNow, etc), Disc Rental(Physical)/DVD/Blu-Ray, Premium TV networks, Cable TV, Network TV, and finally, Netflix.
Heck, the content providers even impose a 30 day period for Netflix - Netflix is not allowed to offer disc rentals until 30 days after it goes oh sale.
I don't know, GCC has a lot of quirks that make it a pretty poor standard to code by. By making it compile with VC++ they open the door to elminiting the GCC workarounds, and possibly open the door for more platforms. As someone who has tried to port software in the past, GCC is really a thorn in my side.
Another benefit is using multiple compilers helps find tricky bugs due to assumptions in the programming language.
Enabling all warnings can easily help find those parts of code that are iffy but look normal, but the compiler knows something may be an issue. Using a different compiler produces a different set of messages that can reveal all sorts of bugs.
But the big elephant in the room is the switch to VC2015 means the death of XP and Vista.
Is Chrome dropping support for XP finally? Will these users get ransomware from using an unpatched and unsupported browser now if Chromium (the foundation of Chrome) is not compatible?
Well, Chrome has been warning XP users that support for XP is stopping "shortly". The stupid thing is, the "Learn more" link the pop up shows leads to the "Download Chrome" page instead of a page explaining why. So yes, they're stopping support for XP and VIsta, but they aren't telling you why, other than to "Download Chrome".
In any case, why would the person owning 1.7% doing the visible fighting, shouldn't the people who own larger blocks do that?
Finally, it is one thing to say "we don't like you" or "we don't think you're the right person for the job", but then the question is, "who would be right for it?"
I'm not at all convinced that anyone could do it, why you would invest in Yahoo is beyond me, so perhaps I'm the wrong person to ask.:)
You don't have to have 1.7%. You can own one share and declare you want the board changed.
Granted, with 1 share it's a bit harder, but if you speak in a way that resonates with the other shareholders to demand something be changed, then if a majority agree, then something has to be changed.
At 1.7%, all they can do is make noise and hope everyone else agrees with them.
And it happens to every company - some minority shareholder wants to put forward a motion, and it has to be listened to. Apple went through this a few years ago when some shareholder wanted Apple to give up their environment action plans because they cost money and aren't maximizing profit. All Tim Cook could do was put it up for a vote, with the caveat that Apple does this because it's part of the Apple culture.
The vote ended up being lopsided against the investor.
Shareholders own the company. Their interests are represented by the Board, who tell the CEO to accomplish it. The CEO delates to the executives and everyone else. If a shareholder disagrees with the way the company is run, they are obliged to make it known, and it's up to the rest of the shareholders to agree or disagree.
Granted, the little shareholders are often called "activist" because they make a lot of noise.
So why is someone plugging a USB drive with FIREFOX into an "air gapped" computer?
You can create isolated airgapped networks with their own set of web browsers and all that as well, you know.
These networks are often on the classified side of things and there is no connection to the Internet or other network. Properly set up SCADA systems are supposed to be on airgapped networks, for example. But there's often documentation and other things that end up as HTML and you need a browser to view it, and it can be no surprise when they only work on Firefox, say.
If not this, what is the best way to do responsible disclosure?
a 20-day lead time gives criminals plenty of time to tear Samba apart
Indeed, but it's a trade-off between the bad guys getting time to rediscover the bug, and the good guys needing time to schedule repairs.
Well, you first give both Microsoft and Samba the vulnerability a heads up privately so they can try to fix the bug on their own, not announce to the world that there's a super major bug that won't be fixed or announced for 20 more days.
And 20 days might not be enough - the bug can easily lie deep within the code in multiple modules, requiring a good redesign in order to fix it properly rather than a bunch of half-fixes (see shellshock), enough so that discovering the location of all the code might take 20 days. The fix itself might take longer since the integration of various modules means one has to be careful of fixing one bug and introducing 10 more variants. And then there's all the QA to ensure that the module wasn't broken in some way.
Google tried it with a fixed 120 day delay. Microsoft requested a few more days so Patch Tuesday would pass first, but Google refused.
Here, 20 days might be a good heads up and if you don't hear anything then release it. But if there's a fix, especially a deep one, it may require a lot longer to fix. Or you get things like Shellshock, where there were a bunch of quick fixes released daily because they wanted the fix now, rather than a properly designed, well tested fix.
And by doing what this guy did, he basically announced the bug - now every bad guy is looking to exploit it - they've been given a 20 day head start. We're not even talking 0-day here...
This isn't a government mandated block. A private company took the largest ISPs to court and got an injunction requiring them to block a long list of web sites. Smaller ISPs are unaffected.
The correct course of action would for that company to now ask for an injunction against this guy, asking the court to make him stop providing proxies to bypass the other blocks. Instead, they got their private police force, the City of London Police, to treat him as a criminal. If you were not aware, the City of London is a small area in London that is basically run by corporations. Corporations get to vote on their elected officials, and the City of London Police basically work for them.
This is extreme abuse of power by the City of London Police.
City of London != London.
The City of London is a small area dominated by business. Historically, it IS London, founded by time immemorial (no one knows when it was founded), and basically existed when England was formed, so the monarchy never could really control them. There is basically an uneasy tension - the City of London agreed to certain terms in order to get certain benefits but they pretty much have autonomy. Later monarchies didn't like this, and they created Westminster to be the power center. Westminster expanded and expanded, encompassing London, to become what we know today as London (Greater London), while the original London is known as the City of London. I'm pretty sure the original intent was to basically have the whole area called Westminster and thus getting rid of London, but history.
And because of the way things were, the City of London has around 30,000 residents, but over 2M people actually work there This results in companies actually having voting rights and control over the governance.
Even today, the City of London is really an autonomous entity inside of England.
Here's some nice YouTube videos showing how messed up it all is. It goes through the history, and the really, really, screwed up governance structure.
Long answer: Even Panasonic is building their CCTV products in China these days.
Different answer: These days, buying anything and hanging it on a network is inviting problems. Everything is sloppier than it used to be.
You have to realize how things are done.
TVT makes a surveillance system setup - cameras, DVR, etc. They make it a turnkey system they can sell to people to build and sell. This is known as an "Original Design Manufacturer", or ODM.
A company comes and buys the design, builds the circuit boards and gets the firmware source code and builds that and ships it. These guys are the Original Equipment Manufacturer or OEM. Some people may take the design and build it as is with minimal changes, others may put in better lenses and redo the UI, etc.
Then there are companies like Panasonic who do their own designs and build them, who don't typically buy other people's designs.
The problem here is that Swann, Lorex and other cheap surveillance system companies bought the system from TVT, did their branding and that's it.
Companies like TVT don't deal with customers other than whoever buys their design. Their goal is to sell designs, so software is but a minor part of it, and when you're asked to kick out of a firmware you do it as quick as possible, security warts and all.
The fact that the ROCKEFELLER fund came to the conclusion is the news. Rockefeller made his money by creating the modern oil industry. He monopolized oil, beating up anyone that refused to sell their oil wells to him.
Yes, Standard Oil (S.O.) became a monopoly and it was how the anti-monopoly laws came into being.
Standard Oil's retail chain still remains today. The oil distribution network became Exxon, while the retail chain kept its name SO, somewhat - Esso. (Which is where that funny name came from)
And there simply is no competition anymore. Tick-tock was designed to hammer, hammer and keep on hammering against AMD until they were dead, deAD, DEAD! (for those that don't know AMD used to compete against Intel)
AMD is still around, and I'm sure Intel is keeping them alive because they serve as "competition".
Should AMD disappear, Intel would be in a world of hurt from government regulators (the EU has found Intel to be in violation of anti-monopoly laws). So AMD right now is right where Intel wants them - strong enough to provide competition in the markets, weak enough to not really challenge them.
What you are forgetting is that to keep processor fabs paid for they keep shrinking everything else. While CPUs are 14nm most gpus are not. Ram is not.
In time expect to see ram, gpus, and the other components shrink as well. In 10 years you will buy a computer where all transistors inside it are at 14nm or less and it is Using a fraction of the power.
Memory almost certainly is at 14nm, if not smaller (they're usually a half-node ahead).
Memory is the most transistor-dense device you could make - of the billions of transistors on a chip, 90% of them would be memory related, and all together, they take up less area than the 10% "random logic" used in a CPU/GPU/chipset.
Modern VLSI logic has it that in random logic parts (i.e., everything that's not memory), you can stash in lots of additional unconnected transistors, so if there's an issue, they're there so you only need to remake a few masks instead of the entire set. (With each mask costing $100K, and a 10 metal process requiring easily 15-20 masks, that's $1.5-2M in startup costs.).
If you look at a revision label (aka stepping), they go like A0/A1/B0/etc. The number represents metal revisions - the first chip would be A0. They find bugs, fix them by re-laying out the metal traces using those spare transistors and increment the value to A1 )and this may only require producing 4-5 new masks). But then they find a critical bug that can't be fixed with the existing diffusion set (either requires too many transistors, or they missed some block they need, or there are too many revisions), so they remake the diffusion set of masks as well and bump it up to B0.
Anyhow - memory is very dense. Moore's law is basically targeting memory - and this is all memory - SRAMs, DRAMs, flash, etc. If it holds a bit, the arrays are made as dense as possible. Whole legions of logic went into the production - the NAND flash array is by design way more dense than a NOR flash array purely because of wiring. (This is why random logic is very not-dense - the wiring is what takes up all the space).
Memory arrays are very regular, and technologies like DRAM and NAND flash have optimized transistor layouts ensuring that the spacing between transistors is minimal by keeping the wiring required to a minimum by sharing the wires with adjacent cells so wiring is a minimum. (NAND cells share a common gate line - the page select, and the drain of one is connected the source of another so you have 32-128 transistors connected in series, making for a very tight 2D array. NOR flash requires every transistor have access to power, row select and the data lines, and routing the power lines means the density drops because transistors are now further apart).
In fact, random logic parts, because of their irregularity, use transistors that are larger than minimum size because there is space to spare, and the fanout is unknown, so you want larger transistors to drive potentially higher loads or large fanouts. A memory array uses smallest transistors because you want density, and the fanout and loads are predictable.
GP is right - an open-source version of the Lightning connector would rock, since it isn't dependent on orientation, and the female side of the plug is much easier to reinforce without sacrificing as much weight or space in order to do it.
it's called USB-C, and is standard. Rumor has it that Apple actually designed it for the USB forum guys.
Of course, the question is what do you need new tablets for? Other than the screen, the tablets run Netflix and Hulu and all the other content consumption apps just fine (you don't need a 10GHz processor for Netflix to run over last year's 9GHz model etc).
That's the problem - the use cases for the tablets don't require faster processors or more RAM.
iAd failed because they were unable to get user information.
The only information Apple was going to give marketers? How many people viewed the ad. No IDs, no counts, not even an anonymous ID they could use to track people.
Marketers obviously balked because they could get far more information using AdMob than iAd. The iAd people even wanted to mine iTunes data but was refused, three times. This would allow them to target the ads to individual users, but that request was denied - it was basically just advertise and you'll get back a count of how many people viewed it.
iBeacons are Bluetooth LE devices that transmit an ID code. Your device, on getting an ID code with a suitably equipped app, could display extra information. All an iBeacon does is transmit - it could collect who it talked to, but that would require it also be able to offload that information somehow.
Yes, Apple could make Siri and iAd better if they allowed data sharing like Google. But they deliberately chose not to, even though it costs money (iAd opportunities lost because marketers went elsewhere), and performance (Siri being more useful). Tell me why would Apple deliberately leave money on the table and make their products perform worse on purpose?
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Or even just plain old Skype.
Yes, Skype for Business is rebranded Lync, and it has NOTHING to do with the normal Skype you and I use.
It's even worse when you use Skype because the two don't interoperate well - we had plenty of issues when we had a meeting we normally conduct using Skype and they switched to Skype for Business. Suddenly lots of things broke, including screen sharing. We worked around it by having everyone use their regular Skype account instead of Skype for Business accounts. Even worse is you can't tell when it happens - just that it happened when you get complaints.
The only reason we knew was they mentioned that they had to switch from their work-personal Skype accounts to Skype for Business accounts that was set up for them.
Reminds me of the days of Outlook and Outlook Express - two separate products whose only commonality was the word "Outlook". They worked differently, they acted differently, they had different feature sets and they were not interchangeable.
Or Windows CE. Microsoft is one of the few places where things can be named similarly to refer to two completely different products. Made all the worse during the .NET era where everything took on .NET branding even though their relation to what .NET is was tenuous at best.
Well, look at the wording. "Play 4K resolution content". No where does it say it can play video games in 4K, but it can play 4K content. Streaming or likely, 4K UHD Blu-Rays (which require drive capable of reading UHD BDs). And adding PSVR support into it.
Plus, it's not necessarily $400. Sony may very well keep the PS4 at $400 and release the PS4K at $600 or $700 or more.
Though it's more likely they're adding UHD support than anything since that won't interfere with games and piss off a good chunk of the existing PS4 user base. Nintendo's tried with their "New 3DS" thing and they've only got one game out of it.
It stems from two problems.
First, the permissions weren't granular enough and common tasks and notifications end up requiring permissions that are potentially scary. Stuff like "Phone state" seems scary, but a practical reason is so a media player can pause playback when you get a phone call. Or pause if you attempt to make a phone call so the audio doesn't drown out the other side of the conversation.
Of course, if an app asks for you rcontacts, that's because the advertising component of it wants to rape your phone's personal information. It's a sad fact that the vast majority of Android users don't pay for apps, requiring the use of ads to pay for it.
Well, uTorrent is adware, and even they found problems - which is why they run their ads as a separate process (the ads were crashing uTorrent!)
The easiest way to get rid of it is to find the "Updates" directory, then use NTFS permissions to deny yourself access to the utorrentie.exe file. (I delete all the permissions and disable inheritance - so the file exists, but the only thing I can do with it is twiddle file permissions as owner).
ICAO uses meters, except in North America where it's feed due to existing convention.
Pressure is in Pascals everywhere outside of North America as well (where it's inches of mercury). Likewise weather reports uses miles (both statute and nautical!), again only in this region.
Modern airliners have a metric/imperial switch to switch the instruments between the two measurements. The rest of the world uses the metric measurements.
It's actually all standardized so even in Canada you use the same units everywhere (though they do provide a metric conversion for sea level pressure for your altimeter setting. Though most altimeters here are, of course, in imperial.)
The confusion happens because trade is done in metric, and a rather famous aircraft incident happened because of a poorly done imperial/metric conversion.
Yes, you can. The PE header (which is a lot like the MZ header) has a spot for the DOS stub executable - this is the executable that runs if you're not' in Windows, and the PE header looks enough like the regular MZ EXE header that DOS will run the stub (since DOS doesn't know about PE executables).
So a Windows program consists of two executables - a regular DOS mode 16-bit executable and a Windows executable. Both of which are completely independent binaries. Granted, the default Windows compilers give you a DOS stub that says "This program requires Windows" but that's not a given - you can certainly put two separate binaries in it. One application would be self-extracting archives - it would have a DOS mode SFX and a Windows mode SFX.
From what I've read, that actually was intentional. Apple's actually done a ton of work with respect to text to speech, and even in the 90s they were able to do natural sounding voices. Heck, MacInTalk could *sing*. (And this was the mid-90s). Or heck, do a robotic voice impression. And this was on a 68K Mac.
Apparently the reason is Apple wants you think it's a high-tech thing, and high-tech things have robotic voices, not natural ones.
Maybe into adulthood, but getting nauseous in a moving vehicle isn't too uncommon (usually most people outgrow it). It's why there are plenty of gadgets, gizmos, drugs, patches and other things that help one through it.
I used to get carsick all the time - airplane trips were torture, and unless I get a window seat I nthe car... vomit city. I've mostly outgrown it, but that doesn't mean I don't get queasy from time to time (at which point I have to basically settle myself down to prevent it from progressing).
It's less about that, but that VR combines the worst of 3D and things like Kinect - instead of glasses, now you're strapping these big, bulky and heavy contraptions to your head, and now you practically have to walk around. (People were complaining the arm movements for Kinect was too much effort!). And you need some clear space so you're not bumping into walls. (Tomorrowland played this to hilarious effect).
Obviously the demolisher uses Android, because Apple Maps and MapQuest actually have the right location for it. (No, Google Maps isn't perfect, and Apple Maps is way better now than a few years ago. In fact, Google Maps is just "good enough" but there are plenty of errors on it still).
This is steam. If you're paying full price for ANYTHING on it, you're an idiot.
Just wait for a sale and within 6 months you'll probably be able to get it for $10, maybe under $5 by the holidays.
Paying full price for Steam stuff... who does that? And sometimes, it can be cheaper when it goes on sale not during a Steam global sale. One of my games was 33% off during a Steam sale, went 40% off the day after the sale ended.
What happened was stupider. They basically requested the machine print a bunch of tickets, and for some stupid reason or other, the machine reveals the winners to the reatiler's screen. The software doing the displaying halted display updates (froze the screen because there was too much to display) so the non-winning tickets were refunded, while the winning ones cashed.
So basically the retailers knew which tickets were winners the moment they printed them.
And you can't just rig your machine to print only winning tickets - all the tickets report back to the lottery commission for verification and tracking purposes.
Of course, the real thing is to make the lottery mainframe the one who creates tickets for the terminal so the lottery commission knows what tickets are winners before the tickets are printed, and the terminals don't get such information. Maintaining payout rate is easy, just a trivial database access and bookkeeping.
That's because Netflix can't get access to the streaming rights for those movies.
Netflix is the last to get them for streaming - that's why Netflix has older stuff and indie stuff.
The rough order for a movie is Theatres (first-run, then long-tail into the cheap theatres), then Digital Rental/Download (CinemaNow, etc), Disc Rental(Physical)/DVD/Blu-Ray, Premium TV networks, Cable TV, Network TV, and finally, Netflix.
Heck, the content providers even impose a 30 day period for Netflix - Netflix is not allowed to offer disc rentals until 30 days after it goes oh sale.
Another benefit is using multiple compilers helps find tricky bugs due to assumptions in the programming language.
Enabling all warnings can easily help find those parts of code that are iffy but look normal, but the compiler knows something may be an issue. Using a different compiler produces a different set of messages that can reveal all sorts of bugs.
Well, Chrome has been warning XP users that support for XP is stopping "shortly". The stupid thing is, the "Learn more" link the pop up shows leads to the "Download Chrome" page instead of a page explaining why. So yes, they're stopping support for XP and VIsta, but they aren't telling you why, other than to "Download Chrome".
You don't have to have 1.7%. You can own one share and declare you want the board changed.
Granted, with 1 share it's a bit harder, but if you speak in a way that resonates with the other shareholders to demand something be changed, then if a majority agree, then something has to be changed.
At 1.7%, all they can do is make noise and hope everyone else agrees with them.
And it happens to every company - some minority shareholder wants to put forward a motion, and it has to be listened to. Apple went through this a few years ago when some shareholder wanted Apple to give up their environment action plans because they cost money and aren't maximizing profit. All Tim Cook could do was put it up for a vote, with the caveat that Apple does this because it's part of the Apple culture.
The vote ended up being lopsided against the investor.
Shareholders own the company. Their interests are represented by the Board, who tell the CEO to accomplish it. The CEO delates to the executives and everyone else. If a shareholder disagrees with the way the company is run, they are obliged to make it known, and it's up to the rest of the shareholders to agree or disagree.
Granted, the little shareholders are often called "activist" because they make a lot of noise.
You can create isolated airgapped networks with their own set of web browsers and all that as well, you know.
These networks are often on the classified side of things and there is no connection to the Internet or other network. Properly set up SCADA systems are supposed to be on airgapped networks, for example. But there's often documentation and other things that end up as HTML and you need a browser to view it, and it can be no surprise when they only work on Firefox, say.
You're off by an order of magnitude.
The bug bounty for a zero-day iOS9 bug is $1,000,000 with up to $3,000,000 paid out in total.
So yes, even if Apple offered $100K, when people are willing to spend millions on a bug, it's just an arms race.
Well, you first give both Microsoft and Samba the vulnerability a heads up privately so they can try to fix the bug on their own, not announce to the world that there's a super major bug that won't be fixed or announced for 20 more days.
And 20 days might not be enough - the bug can easily lie deep within the code in multiple modules, requiring a good redesign in order to fix it properly rather than a bunch of half-fixes (see shellshock), enough so that discovering the location of all the code might take 20 days. The fix itself might take longer since the integration of various modules means one has to be careful of fixing one bug and introducing 10 more variants. And then there's all the QA to ensure that the module wasn't broken in some way.
Google tried it with a fixed 120 day delay. Microsoft requested a few more days so Patch Tuesday would pass first, but Google refused.
Here, 20 days might be a good heads up and if you don't hear anything then release it. But if there's a fix, especially a deep one, it may require a lot longer to fix. Or you get things like Shellshock, where there were a bunch of quick fixes released daily because they wanted the fix now, rather than a properly designed, well tested fix.
And by doing what this guy did, he basically announced the bug - now every bad guy is looking to exploit it - they've been given a 20 day head start. We're not even talking 0-day here...
City of London != London.
The City of London is a small area dominated by business. Historically, it IS London, founded by time immemorial (no one knows when it was founded), and basically existed when England was formed, so the monarchy never could really control them. There is basically an uneasy tension - the City of London agreed to certain terms in order to get certain benefits but they pretty much have autonomy. Later monarchies didn't like this, and they created Westminster to be the power center. Westminster expanded and expanded, encompassing London, to become what we know today as London (Greater London), while the original London is known as the City of London. I'm pretty sure the original intent was to basically have the whole area called Westminster and thus getting rid of London, but history.
And because of the way things were, the City of London has around 30,000 residents, but over 2M people actually work there This results in companies actually having voting rights and control over the governance.
Even today, the City of London is really an autonomous entity inside of England.
Here's some nice YouTube videos showing how messed up it all is. It goes through the history, and the really, really, screwed up governance structure.
https://www.youtube.com/playli...
You have to realize how things are done.
TVT makes a surveillance system setup - cameras, DVR, etc. They make it a turnkey system they can sell to people to build and sell. This is known as an "Original Design Manufacturer", or ODM.
A company comes and buys the design, builds the circuit boards and gets the firmware source code and builds that and ships it. These guys are the Original Equipment Manufacturer or OEM. Some people may take the design and build it as is with minimal changes, others may put in better lenses and redo the UI, etc.
Then there are companies like Panasonic who do their own designs and build them, who don't typically buy other people's designs.
The problem here is that Swann, Lorex and other cheap surveillance system companies bought the system from TVT, did their branding and that's it.
Companies like TVT don't deal with customers other than whoever buys their design. Their goal is to sell designs, so software is but a minor part of it, and when you're asked to kick out of a firmware you do it as quick as possible, security warts and all.
Yes, Standard Oil (S.O.) became a monopoly and it was how the anti-monopoly laws came into being.
Standard Oil's retail chain still remains today. The oil distribution network became Exxon, while the retail chain kept its name SO, somewhat - Esso. (Which is where that funny name came from)
AMD is still around, and I'm sure Intel is keeping them alive because they serve as "competition".
Should AMD disappear, Intel would be in a world of hurt from government regulators (the EU has found Intel to be in violation of anti-monopoly laws). So AMD right now is right where Intel wants them - strong enough to provide competition in the markets, weak enough to not really challenge them.
Memory almost certainly is at 14nm, if not smaller (they're usually a half-node ahead).
Memory is the most transistor-dense device you could make - of the billions of transistors on a chip, 90% of them would be memory related, and all together, they take up less area than the 10% "random logic" used in a CPU/GPU/chipset.
Modern VLSI logic has it that in random logic parts (i.e., everything that's not memory), you can stash in lots of additional unconnected transistors, so if there's an issue, they're there so you only need to remake a few masks instead of the entire set. (With each mask costing $100K, and a 10 metal process requiring easily 15-20 masks, that's $1.5-2M in startup costs.).
If you look at a revision label (aka stepping), they go like A0/A1/B0/etc. The number represents metal revisions - the first chip would be A0. They find bugs, fix them by re-laying out the metal traces using those spare transistors and increment the value to A1 )and this may only require producing 4-5 new masks). But then they find a critical bug that can't be fixed with the existing diffusion set (either requires too many transistors, or they missed some block they need, or there are too many revisions), so they remake the diffusion set of masks as well and bump it up to B0.
Anyhow - memory is very dense. Moore's law is basically targeting memory - and this is all memory - SRAMs, DRAMs, flash, etc. If it holds a bit, the arrays are made as dense as possible. Whole legions of logic went into the production - the NAND flash array is by design way more dense than a NOR flash array purely because of wiring. (This is why random logic is very not-dense - the wiring is what takes up all the space).
Memory arrays are very regular, and technologies like DRAM and NAND flash have optimized transistor layouts ensuring that the spacing between transistors is minimal by keeping the wiring required to a minimum by sharing the wires with adjacent cells so wiring is a minimum. (NAND cells share a common gate line - the page select, and the drain of one is connected the source of another so you have 32-128 transistors connected in series, making for a very tight 2D array. NOR flash requires every transistor have access to power, row select and the data lines, and routing the power lines means the density drops because transistors are now further apart).
In fact, random logic parts, because of their irregularity, use transistors that are larger than minimum size because there is space to spare, and the fanout is unknown, so you want larger transistors to drive potentially higher loads or large fanouts. A memory array uses smallest transistors because you want density, and the fanout and loads are predictable.
it's called USB-C, and is standard. Rumor has it that Apple actually designed it for the USB forum guys.
Of course, the question is what do you need new tablets for? Other than the screen, the tablets run Netflix and Hulu and all the other content consumption apps just fine (you don't need a 10GHz processor for Netflix to run over last year's 9GHz model etc).
That's the problem - the use cases for the tablets don't require faster processors or more RAM.
Actually, it turns out that it was not Apple's fault - it was the result of a massive phishing attack.
It wasn't an attack on iCloud security, it was just social engineering, which explains why "the fappening" was limited to only a few accounts.
iAd failed because they were unable to get user information.
The only information Apple was going to give marketers? How many people viewed the ad. No IDs, no counts, not even an anonymous ID they could use to track people.
Marketers obviously balked because they could get far more information using AdMob than iAd. The iAd people even wanted to mine iTunes data but was refused, three times. This would allow them to target the ads to individual users, but that request was denied - it was basically just advertise and you'll get back a count of how many people viewed it.
iBeacons are Bluetooth LE devices that transmit an ID code. Your device, on getting an ID code with a suitably equipped app, could display extra information. All an iBeacon does is transmit - it could collect who it talked to, but that would require it also be able to offload that information somehow.
Yes, Apple could make Siri and iAd better if they allowed data sharing like Google. But they deliberately chose not to, even though it costs money (iAd opportunities lost because marketers went elsewhere), and performance (Siri being more useful). Tell me why would Apple deliberately leave money on the table and make their products perform worse on purpose?