It's not just Android. Even with PC's and Windows, many pieces of hardware now require a "cloud account". These included security web cameras with internet connection. In order to use the PC and Android application, you need a cloud account. Even to control the camera from a Smartphone. These days virtual machine applications require internet access to "keep up to date".
I bought a telephone handset for my mobile... and of course it requires cloud services because it needs voice recognition in order to activate smartphone applications. It's getting ridiculous.
The problem is that everyone who was involved in the creation of a particular track; the lead singers, backing vocals, musicians (individual royalties), orchestras (collective royalties), plus any sampled sounds (other tracks), recording studios, directors, all get a percentage of the actual royalty. Sometimes people get subcontracted by movie companies, recording studios and bands. But then the problem is that the publisher collects the profits from the sales and marketing, sends them down to their subcontractors, but the whole chain of financial distribution breaks down, leading to unpaid artists. The distribution of payments is done through individual agreements between separate financial entities.
What if the entire chain of royalty percentages could be stored in a blockchain. Every contributor has an account number, their percentage is stored as well, and all the publisher has to do is go through the blockchain and send the money directly to their account. Because of the encoding process, it's impossible for anyone to fiddle the royalty percentages afterwards.
Because El Nino / El Nina is a long-term oscillationg due to a build up of heat in the Pacific. A lot of these ocean and air currents operate like air conditioner thermostats. When heat builds up, ocean and air currents start gaining speed. Eventually they start cooling the water faster than it gains heat, then the currents slow down. Then the heat builds up again. This can take a decade to complete one cycle.
The Sun is delivering 2 kilowatts of energy onto every square meter of the ocean every hour.
There's always a trade-off between complex processing and energy consumption. Using simple bitmaps scaled to integer multiples only requires the 2D pixelblitter chip logic.
Even then text fonts are defined as Unicode subsets using TrueType and which have every glyph defined from spline curves and then rasterized using a pixel engine (even the font has it's own little shader to handle those literal corner cases at concave points). Then the pixelmap is processed so that compensation is applied due to the RGB structure of the screen.
Some GPU text rendering techniques actually make use of distance field functions to handle scaling, but that consumes a bit more power.
That's been the trend for 20+ years for the general consumer market. First there were 8-bit home computers (1980's), desktop PC (1990's). Once 3D graphics took off (1999 onwards), the mass market trend was for sub $600 desktop PC's (2000's) as vendors faced ever tighter profit margins. These were replaced by laptops and netbooks and smartphones (2005+) with wireless broadband. Back then, people in SF were complaining that they didn't see everyone else carrying laptops with them to the cafes, just their smartphones.
There are always going to people who are going to buying their first smartphone, or they've dropped their current one into the bay. The semiconductor companies are constantly innovating their technology from optimizing the silicon layouts to reduce power, small transistor sizes, better compression algorithms, antennae designs, higher resolution camera CCD's, screens. Ultimately they'll move to 3D digital photography, augmented reality and holographic displays.
I remember those years. I made a wall poster with the front cover of every BYTE magazine. It's strange to see each magazine cover and know that was one month of your life at high-school and college.
The early 1970's magazines covered electronics, circuit boards and home brew electronics as home computers weren't around then. Everyone had to make their own S-100 rack based systems. Having a graphics card was an optional extra for those systems. In the late 1970's, micro-processors came along, and there were articles on implement LISP in assembly language. Mid 1980's, IBM PC clones appear, and it was CGA/EGA/VGA programming Everything was still DOS based then. Command line Borland Pascal, Turbo C/C++ appeared and supported 43/50 line DOS screens. Having a true-color graphics board was a luxury as much as having a second monitor.
All during this time, BYTE always had these beautiful front covers that were hand drawn cartoons or sketches; everything from Star Trek to Shakespeare to Newton. Almost what you would see in a Youtube animation today.
Around the 1990's, with electronics advancing beyond the point of home assembly, it just went all corporate IT with product reviews. Nobody was writing their own spreadsheets, text editors or file systems any more.
BYTE magazine was the dominant magazine for electronic and software engineers from the mid 1970's until the mid 1990's (when they went all pastel coloured and corporate IT). It was published each month and articles on everything from building your own home security system to software simulations and making your own VGA graphics card.
Early issues covered everything from cellular automata like John Conway's game of Life to fractals and networking with TCP/IP.
If you look around, you can find old scans of BYTE magazine online as PDF files.
You want to either disrupt the wind currents, or reduce evaporation of water. Either way you have to cover the entire surface of the hurricane or ocean. You can take advantage of the rotating nature of the hurricane, but you would need something to fly across the hurricane.
Before the 1960's, they didn't have weather satellites able to take a photograph of the oceans in a single shot. Instead, they had to depend on weather stations and reports from shipping and harbours. Usually if the seas got choppy with white peaks that was a good indication that bad weather was coming.
There is an upper limit on how much sunlight the ocean surfaces can absorb. The maximum amount is sunlight on clear skies all Summer. But once water starts to evaporate, clouds form and reflect back sunlight.
There is a measurement called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines together the strengths of all hurricanes for that year:
Undoubtably someone else gained. It's like those third party allopeninghours.com websites that spring up when you use google maps. They are full of useful advice like the opening hours of store, bar, restaurant or pharmacist. Except for one thing, the hours that they present are not accurate - they ignore late night opening hours. Sometimes they say the shop is open 24-hours all week when it's 9 to 5 business. That ends up with business going elsewhere.
When I'm in discussions with friends I used to work with in person and now talk to occasionally via Linkedin, on occasions they would suddenly talk as if they were possesed and say things they would never normally say. Things like "why don't you give up working in software etc... "?
Sometimes I've seen comments that only appear on my smartphone and not my desktop. I've seen this happen on forums as well.
This time it would appear to be a genuine SNAFU with their servers. But it may also be a social experiment to see how the population reacts when their mailing lists are disrupted.
Like the way LinkedIn experiments with people by inserting fake messages into their personal communications or "recommended articles".
Because in the past, wars were fought over resources ands "lebensraum"; farmland, living space, resources. At the national level, these wars could be avoided if countries cooperated and agreed to share resources (fishery stocks, mineral resources, farmland, river waterflow). So the EU seemed a good idea for 50 years after World War II.
We're still having those fights but now but on a smaller scale; affordable housing, green spaces, rights of way along new property developments.
The EU managed to grind along, until one country decided unilaterally they they would invite millions of people in from the South Mediterranean, they discovered that they didn't have the resources to handle this, and would the rest of Europe please take their fair share. At the same time, it's getting increasingly obvious that the EU is one giant gravy train for ex-national politicians (MEP's) lobbyists and euro-corporations, especially through alternative media like forums and blogs.
When the population starts seeking their news from alternative sources where everyone can join in the discussion, the incumbents suddenly decide that this is "fake news" and start to campaign to have it blocked. Then nationalist parties are starting to question all the money being sent to the EU in return for economic policies being decided hundreds of miles away that have no benefit for the local population. That is then labelled "populism" and a return to the 1930's.
Then some smartass post grad will discover you can do all of that with the thermal noise of the electrons going through the silicon and than all you then needed was a pure source of randomness and that could be achieved by placing a USB cable into a hot cup of coffee. Confounding the senior big-science researchers who had been trying to solve that problem for decades.
In those days (late 1980's - early 1990's), you were lucky to have a 1024x768x256 color display. Windows only went up to 16-bit. Even a true-color graphics board like a Hercules Graphics Station Card only did 512x480x16 million colors. Those modes were only accesible using custom applications. Fonts were all bitmaps. There were no TrueType fonts with pixel engines. Everything was designed around CRT's.
It depends on the part of the country you are in. The financial city of London pays twice as much as any other industry. Once you start moving outside of London, the rates drop down. £45K - to £50K doesn't get you very far in London. A basic B&B is £25/night. Staying at a Travelodge is £50/night.
You have to be careful about London jobs. Sometimes they'll just want a "senior" person to train up a team of interns from abroad, who are actually paying £1000/month for the experience. A good guide to the general rates are here:
Anything to do with big data or real-time trading commands salaries three times those. Salaries are more related to the cost of renting an apartment or buying a house in a safe area.
Dentists decided to set up private practises because they weren't being able to provide advanced treatments to patients on the NHS. Plus of course, in Scotland, they decided to close Edinburgh dental school because "it looked a bit tatty" (according to Labour MP's).
Their "evidence of fraud" was companies sending money overseas in small amounts to places in Europe and China without reporting the transactions to the authorities. Which looked like money laundering. When added together, all those small amounts looked like large amounts. But the bank never gave customers any warning or questioning about the risk of accounts being frozen. So that makes them liable for business losses.
I always thought those click-and-explore DOS games were the inspiration for modern GUI. You used to frantically click objects on each screen to see if it had any purpose. Now we have websites that have the same functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just Android. Even with PC's and Windows, many pieces of hardware now require a "cloud account". These included security web cameras with internet connection. In order to use the PC and Android application, you need a cloud account. Even to control the camera from a Smartphone. These days virtual machine applications require internet access to "keep up to date".
I bought a telephone handset for my mobile ... and of course it requires cloud services because it needs voice recognition in order to activate smartphone applications. It's getting ridiculous.
So far it hasn't been hacked by someone giving themselves 2000,000,000 bitcoins. That happened to Lyonesse, a Facebook game.
The problem is that everyone who was involved in the creation of a particular track; the lead singers, backing vocals, musicians (individual royalties), orchestras (collective royalties), plus any sampled sounds (other tracks), recording studios, directors, all get a percentage of the actual royalty. Sometimes people get subcontracted by movie companies, recording studios and bands. But then the problem is that the publisher collects the profits from the sales and marketing, sends them down to their subcontractors, but the whole chain of financial distribution breaks down, leading to unpaid artists. The distribution of payments is done through individual agreements between separate financial entities.
What if the entire chain of royalty percentages could be stored in a blockchain. Every contributor has an account number, their percentage is stored as well, and all the publisher has to do is go through the blockchain and send the money directly to their account. Because of the encoding process, it's impossible for anyone to fiddle the royalty percentages afterwards.
Because El Nino / El Nina is a long-term oscillationg due to a build up of heat in the Pacific. A lot of these ocean and air currents operate like air conditioner thermostats. When heat builds up, ocean and air currents start gaining speed. Eventually they start cooling the water faster than it gains heat, then the currents slow down. Then the heat builds up again. This can take a decade to complete one cycle.
The Sun is delivering 2 kilowatts of energy onto every square meter of the ocean every hour.
Missing a SCART connector as well.
There's always a trade-off between complex processing and energy consumption. Using simple bitmaps scaled to integer multiples only requires the 2D pixelblitter chip logic.
Even then text fonts are defined as Unicode subsets using TrueType and which have every glyph defined from spline curves and then rasterized using a pixel engine (even the font has it's own little shader to handle those literal corner cases at concave points). Then the pixelmap is processed so that compensation is applied due to the RGB structure of the screen.
Some GPU text rendering techniques actually make use of distance field functions to handle scaling, but that consumes a bit more power.
That's been the trend for 20+ years for the general consumer market. First there were 8-bit home computers (1980's), desktop PC (1990's). Once 3D graphics took off (1999 onwards), the mass market trend was for sub $600 desktop PC's (2000's) as vendors faced ever tighter profit margins. These were replaced by laptops and netbooks and smartphones (2005+) with wireless broadband. Back then, people in SF were complaining that they didn't see everyone else carrying laptops with them to the cafes, just their smartphones.
There are always going to people who are going to buying their first smartphone, or they've dropped their current one into the bay. The semiconductor companies are constantly innovating their technology from optimizing the silicon layouts to reduce power, small transistor sizes, better compression algorithms, antennae designs, higher resolution camera CCD's, screens. Ultimately they'll move to 3D digital photography, augmented reality and holographic displays.
and compromises had to be made, the iPhone would look like this:
https://i.redditmedia.com/i2AK...
I remember those years. I made a wall poster with the front cover of every BYTE magazine. It's strange to see each magazine cover and know that was one month of your life at high-school and college.
The early 1970's magazines covered electronics, circuit boards and home brew electronics as home computers weren't around then. Everyone had to make their own S-100 rack based systems. Having a graphics card was an optional extra for those systems. In the late 1970's, micro-processors came along, and there were articles on implement LISP in assembly language.
Mid 1980's, IBM PC clones appear, and it was CGA/EGA/VGA programming Everything was still DOS based then. Command line Borland Pascal, Turbo C/C++ appeared and supported 43/50 line DOS screens. Having a true-color graphics board was a luxury as much as having a second monitor.
All during this time, BYTE always had these beautiful front covers that were hand drawn cartoons or sketches; everything from Star Trek to Shakespeare to Newton. Almost what you would see in a Youtube animation today.
Around the 1990's, with electronics advancing beyond the point of home assembly, it just went all corporate IT with product reviews. Nobody was writing their own spreadsheets, text editors or file systems any more.
BYTE magazine was the dominant magazine for electronic and software engineers from the mid 1970's until the mid 1990's (when they went all pastel coloured and corporate IT). It was published each month and articles on everything from building your own home security system to software simulations and making your own VGA graphics card.
Early issues covered everything from cellular automata like John Conway's game of Life to fractals and networking with TCP/IP.
If you look around, you can find old scans of BYTE magazine online as PDF files.
You want to either disrupt the wind currents, or reduce evaporation of water. Either way you have to cover the entire surface of the hurricane or ocean. You can take advantage of the rotating nature of the hurricane, but you would need something to fly across the hurricane.
Before the 1960's, they didn't have weather satellites able to take a photograph of the oceans in a single shot. Instead, they had to depend on weather stations and reports from shipping and harbours. Usually if the seas got choppy with white peaks that was a good indication that bad weather was coming.
There is an upper limit on how much sunlight the ocean surfaces can absorb. The maximum amount is sunlight on clear skies all Summer. But once water starts to evaporate, clouds form and reflect back sunlight.
There is a measurement called Accumulated Cyclone Energy, which combines together the strengths of all hurricanes for that year:
https://www.wunderground.com/h...
They just need to cover the surface of the Atlantic ocean with trillions of shade balls:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech...
That would prevent all that water evaporating into the atmosphere. Though I do wonder where the water evaporating from the reservoirs would have gone.
Undoubtably someone else gained. It's like those third party allopeninghours.com websites that spring up when you use google maps. They are full of useful advice like the opening hours of store, bar, restaurant or pharmacist. Except for one thing, the hours that they present are not accurate - they ignore late night opening hours. Sometimes they say the shop is open 24-hours all week when it's 9 to 5 business. That ends up with business going elsewhere.
When I'm in discussions with friends I used to work with in person and now talk to occasionally via Linkedin, on occasions they would suddenly talk as if they were possesed and say things they would never normally say. Things like "why don't you give up working in software etc... "?
Sometimes I've seen comments that only appear on my smartphone and not my desktop. I've seen this happen on forums as well.
This time it would appear to be a genuine SNAFU with their servers. But it may also be a social experiment to see how the population reacts when their mailing lists are disrupted.
Like the way LinkedIn experiments with people by inserting fake messages into their personal communications or "recommended articles".
Because in the past, wars were fought over resources ands "lebensraum"; farmland, living space, resources. At the national level, these wars could be avoided if countries cooperated and agreed to share resources (fishery stocks, mineral resources, farmland, river waterflow). So the EU seemed a good idea for 50 years after World War II.
We're still having those fights but now but on a smaller scale; affordable housing, green spaces, rights of way along new property developments.
https://www.wired.com/2017/04/...
The EU managed to grind along, until one country decided unilaterally they they would invite millions of people in from the South Mediterranean, they discovered that they didn't have the resources to handle this, and would the rest of Europe please take their fair share. At the same time, it's getting increasingly obvious that the EU is one giant gravy train for ex-national politicians (MEP's) lobbyists and euro-corporations, especially through alternative media like forums and blogs.
When the population starts seeking their news from alternative sources where everyone can join in the discussion, the incumbents suddenly decide that this is "fake news" and start to campaign to have it blocked. Then nationalist parties are starting to question all the money being sent to the EU in return for economic policies being decided hundreds of miles away that have no benefit for the local population. That is then labelled "populism" and a return to the 1930's.
Then some smartass post grad will discover you can do all of that with the thermal noise of the electrons going through the silicon and than all you then needed was a pure source of randomness and that could be achieved by placing a USB cable into a hot cup of coffee. Confounding the senior big-science researchers who had been trying to solve that problem for decades.
If you want to activate someone's digital smartphone camera and make it take a picture, just shout "cheese" or "whiskey".
In those days (late 1980's - early 1990's), you were lucky to have a 1024x768x256 color display. Windows only went up to 16-bit. Even a true-color graphics board like a Hercules Graphics Station Card only did 512x480x16 million colors. Those modes were only accesible using custom applications. Fonts were all bitmaps. There were no TrueType fonts with pixel engines. Everything was designed around CRT's.
It depends on the part of the country you are in. The financial city of London pays twice as much as any other industry. Once you start moving outside of London, the rates drop down. £45K - to £50K doesn't get you very far in London. A basic B&B is £25/night. Staying at a Travelodge is £50/night.
You have to be careful about London jobs. Sometimes they'll just want a "senior" person to train up a team of interns from abroad, who are actually paying £1000/month for the experience. A good guide to the general rates are here:
http://www.computerweekly.com/...
Anything to do with big data or real-time trading commands salaries three times those. Salaries are more related to the cost of renting an apartment or buying a house in a safe area.
Dentists decided to set up private practises because they weren't being able to provide advanced treatments to patients on the NHS. Plus of course, in Scotland, they decided to close Edinburgh dental school because "it looked a bit tatty" (according to Labour MP's).
Their "evidence of fraud" was companies sending money overseas in small amounts to places in Europe and China without reporting the transactions to the authorities. Which looked like money laundering. When added together, all those small amounts looked like large amounts. But the bank never gave customers any warning or questioning about the risk of accounts being frozen. So that makes them liable for business losses.
I always thought those click-and-explore DOS games were the inspiration for modern GUI. You used to frantically click objects on each screen to see if it had any purpose. Now we have websites that have the same functionality.