I am really talking about the owners, who a board would normally represent. If they're too small to have a board, then it is the primary owners or investors. If the management bankrolled the company 100% themselves, then they can do what they wish. Nevertheless, it's still monumentally stupid to mix your business with politics rather than take a neutral stance and appeal to a broad audience unless you have concrete data that your revenue will be impacted less by not developing for VR than from the customers that you would lose if you did.
What is astonishing to me is the level of rhetoric and the stretch of logic that has come into place since our Alien vs. Predator presidential race (i.e. whoever wins, we lose). Now we have a situation just like the Mozilla debacle with Brendan Eich except that it is much much flimsier an argument this time around.
But here's the thing, Insomniac and Polytron management: your job is to make money for the investors of your company, not to use them as some political tool because you disagree with the politics of one of the employees of Oculus. Period.
These decisions will only harm these companies financially because of diminished interest from people who own an Oculus. Unless the management has concrete data that their continued support of the Oculus will harm their sales due to the political connection (and I'll bet diamonds to dollars that they don't), then the boards of directors of all of these companies should direct the executive management of the companies that withdrew support for Oculus to reverse their decision or be terminated for breach of fiduciary duty.
Enough of this SJW bullshit, especially when investor money and returns are at stake and the backlash from these actions could be worse. E McNeill is totally correct - if you want to fight a Trump supporter, put your own money up rather than trying to suppress others as if you were some Soviet-era state enterprise licking the boots of the party you support.
There is an entire body of stealth antennas that have been developed for legally and space-constrained homes, such as flagpole antennas, magnetic loops, folded attic dipoles, and even tuned metal gutters! Yet these are all compromise antennas due to their limited height from the ground , proximity to metal objects and wiring, and size (for the 40m band on HF, you need at least a 10m/33ft vertical plus one or more counterpoises of that length on the ground). Some HOAs are even more draconian and allow nothing outside of a strict approved list of items per the HOA contract. This means that even a 1/4 wavelength vertical wire antenna that is barely visible to the eye is disallowed. Ironically, it's these same antennas that contribute to RFI issues for neighbors, increase RF exposure and worsen problems that would not be present with a properly deployed non-compromise antenna. HOA agreements have a disproportionate impact on hams who tend to be older and often use ham radio to communicate with their friends. Some of these are ex-military and civilian volunteers who are part of the Military Auxiliary Radio System or Civil Air Patrol, or participate in volunteer civil safety services such as Amateur Radio Emergency Service, Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service and Skywarn that use HF frequencies as well.
The HOAs have been vociferously opposed to this act as an infringement of civil liberties and have written both to the FCC and to congress opposing this. Yet there are already FCC-mandated requirements for such things as satellite antennas on HOA-governed properties that supersede any restrictions that may be contained in HOA contracts on spectrum which is technically regulated by the FCC. The intent is not to replicated a nearly 200' tall antenna tower with stacked Yagis, but to provide reasonable accommodation. A 1/4 wavelength vertical wire antenna barely visible to the eye can literally communicate with the entire world, yet somehow the HOA board fanatics claim that even these should be restricted. Even one of the trapped multiband vertical antennas in a back yard can make a big difference in getting out and participating in radio, but they again want no part of it.
There is bias against what we don't know or don't want to know. Heck, people think that there is an environmental impact to these antennas. I'm hopeful this will get passed and withstand scrutiny in the inevitable court battle that will ensue over it. But in a country turning its back on science for sports, maybe even the discussion with the non-ham folks might actually activate a few brain cells.
There is no excuse to eliminate an audio jack from a phone, much less a Macbook. Too many complications with wireless headphones and microphones, and peripherals to add the functionality back just add to clutter for a portable device.
This isn't edgy, or brave, or futuristic. It's simply the beginning of the end for a once-innovative company who is practically trying to alienate its customer base. I really wonder if the same idiots who were in charge of the Final Cut Pro 10 transition were the same ones involved in these decisions.
I seriously have never seen an astroturf campaign so far gone for a candidate as for Hillary. It actually doesn't matter what your political preferences are, just that they shove as much pro-Hillary shit into your feed. They honestly believe they can influence people's preferences by bashing or censoring all of the other candidates, and I do actually mean Gary Johnson and Jill Stein here more than the obvious bashing of Trump since Johnson and Stein are a million times more honest than the two front-runners.
People need to realize that Facebook (or Twitter, or any other social or non-social media) is not a news source any more, but a reflection of the political will of those who own it. My greatest concern is that so many people are too ignorant to realize it because of the funny pictures and friends' photos in their feed.
It depends on what point in the solar cycle, but the higher HF bands from ~14-15MHz up through 30MHz are far better during the day for skip due to D-layer and E-layer ionization and also more readily absorbs lower frequencies. At night, ~10MHz and lower works because there is still ionization in the F-layer which is more amenable to those frequencies, and why AM has to typically reduce power. Bear in mind that AM is technically an MF band (0.3-3MHz), which doesn't quite follow the same skywave propagation rules so strictly for a number of reasons such as auroral zone, ducting, and electron gyrofrequency that don't affect HF quite as severely.
You can still get near-vertical incidence skywave propagation during the day on the lower HF bands, but these are only good for a few hundred miles and can be subject to a higher than normal noise floor in the summer due to phenomena such as regional lightning.
The whole purpose of this is to facilitate non-satellite transmission of signals using ionospheric skywave propagation. This is the most common over-the-horizon communication method for HF frequencies (3-30MHz) and below. The military uses HF for tactical communications using radios like the Harris Falcon series manpacks. HF is also used for the Military Auxiliary Radio Service as well as Civil Air Patrol. None of these uses have dependence on satellites which are, in any event, potentially prone to attack, jamming and failure by natural phenomena, and where end user equipment is expensive and potentially tricky to deploy.
In order for HF communications to work effectively and consistently, the sun needs to ionize the atmosphere. It normally goes in the same eleven year cycles, but this year has seen very bad conditions with insufficient consistency to rely on HF. The shortwave and amateur radio community has similarly been affected adversely by this phenomenon. Ionizing the atmosphere through this proposal is one way to make this happen without relying on satellites.
Intel needs to be viewed as several businesses, one of which is their discrete CPU business, another being their flash memory, yet another being the McAfee software acquisition, and yet another something called the foundry business.
Foundry refers to having a business where you are simply the manufacturer of chips for other companies for their specific purpose without selling into the end market. These other companies contract to Intel to be able to build anything from a network chip to a graphics chip to a microcontroller or virtually anything else (besides memory), either as a standard product off-the-shelf, or as an application-specific integrated circuit. In order for Intel to make that happen, they need to provide the know-how to these manufacturers of chips either directly or through providers of chip intellectual property. This includes logic libraries (standard cells, hence my name), memory cells and compilers for SRAMs, analog I/O cells, mixed-signal like ADCs and DACs, PLLs, non-volatile storage, design rule decks for the process rules, and a few other things that constitute the building blocks of any chip.
Other foundries such as TSMC, Global Foundries, etc. have the same model, though Intel's foundry manufactures more of their own CPU (and other) products than for other folks. Intel decided to farm out some of that capacity to third parties and make additional money on any spare capacity they might have, particularly with their leadership in logic processes over other rivals in the discrete CPU business. One of the key aforementioned building blocks is the IP offered by ARM for CPUs, GPUs and bus interconnect. This ARM IP needs to be validated to work in their silicon process, and this is the essence of the deal - Intel's foundry customers would not do business with Intel without basic blocks like the CPU since ARM is essentially the most important embedded CPU architecture in chip design currently.
The way the summary comes out makes it sound like Intel is manufacturing chips for its competitor, but it isn't necessarily so since the Intel microarchitecture is very highly vertically integrated as a business with their discrete CPU division whereas ARM itself is just a provider of IP with their microarchitecture. Yes, in theory Intel foundry customers could be making chips to compete in some segments of the Intel discrete CPU business, but that business is still largely dominated in the server and desktop markets by Intel and its associated software ecosystem. In the same way, ARM dominates the handheld device markets where Intel has had very little comparative presence.
I can guarantee that Mr. Krzanich and the Intel board would never allow their foundry business to cannibalize their current core discrete CPU business for a "competitor" if they felt it was detrimental to their overall financial and operating picture. This ARM deal is a piece of a larger plan of maximizing their ROI on their very very expensive chip fabs in a market where they have typically had a lead in logic process technology at least one node ahead of their competitors historically. That advantage can be very important in mobile due to the cost and power savings vertical transistor process nodes now offer along with superior manufacturing capabilities as the scale of their other businesses has long demonstrated.
The recently publicized vulnerabilities in connected vehicles are examples of vehicle designers not understanding security threat models correctly (which also applies to IoT in general). In the rush for convenience and connectivity it is mind boggling that they wouldn't make more effort if for no other reason than to avoid the negative publicity.
The easiest thing to do in these critical vehicle systems systems is to outright air gap them. There is no reason that there should be any network connection to the autopilot or auto-parking or braking system of a vehicle unless the threat model and the subsequent design of security was sufficiently thorough. Until that happens, it should literally be a discrete action by the driver through a physical interface inside the vehicle and at most have a one-way reporting interface that can be picked up by a network interface.
The other thing that can be done is to hardware-interlock the network connection. For example, the steering motor controllers for automatic parking should have a logic AND control to the speed of the vehicle so that anything above a certain speed disables the motor control at a hardware level. At that point, one would have to physically tamper with the vehicle to overcome this safeguard, but if you could do that there's a lot more mayhem you could create anyway.
The police in Edmonton have been doing this to the press since the 90s when they wiretapped newspaper and TV reporters working on a story of police corruption with ties to organized crime. But that was just the old fashioned wire taps, and there have been many corruption scandals since. There is no press freedom in Edmonton and all communication should be considered compromised by the police there unless there is a cryptographically secure way with a Certificate Authority not controlled within Canadian or US borders.
The countermeasures used in cryptography to fight differential power analysis can be used here if necessary.
In DPA, the dynamic power consumption is measured on a hardware device such as a smart card that performs crypto operations so that, when the challenge-response is begun, the card's regular crypto operations for asymmetric and symmetric encryption can be captured and analyzed using statistical correlation over many challenges and other means so that the correct keys for the device can be determined. The primary countermeasure is to introduce false operations in parallel with the actual operation at different times and with different power consumption patterns such that the correlation takes far too long for the number of challenge-response cycles.
Similarly, a countermeasure to this and for all VPN traffic is to accomplish the same thing by having an application that actively monitors the bandwidth across the physical interface used by the iPlayer and ensures that additional sources of bandwidth consumption via internal or external servers/clients are programmed. Even if the WiFi packets are monitored, the packet analysis could be much more difficult to conduct. In addition, one could randomly force routes across multiple physical interfaces at random to hop across multiple inexpensive routers that are bridged, further frustrating such efforts. In combination with a VPN, could defeat this outrageous and intrusive de facto taxation enforcement scheme.
4K resolution is hard to notice at typical living room viewing distances of 8-10' with anything smaller than a 65" TV. 8K is going to only really make a difference in something larger than 80-90". Most people, even with 20/20 vision, have insufficient visual acuity to resolve such a resolution under these conditions. The vast majority of the public does not buy displays this big, and much less so in Japan where living spaces are tiny. 8K is a great resolution for large venue screens and for mezzanine/master files, but has little to no value for the consumer and imposes substantial costs on content creators, distributors and CE companies. As a point of comparison, some of my colleagues at a major movie studio were talking about scanning old film stock with 6K resolution and content with it. 8K is 4x as much storage as 4K, and we haven't even begun to talk about far more tangible technologies of importance like HDR and wide color gamut.
As for this 22.2 business, it is an infernal waste of time. The extra LFE channel (the ".2" in 22.2) is completely redundant because low frequencies should not be able to be located by the human ear in a properly set up theater, home, small or large venue. The 22 channels is an anachronism in the era of emergent object-based audio coding as found in AC-4 and MPEG-H audio. There, an arbitrary number of objects has position location information recorded in 3D space and relies on the playback rendering device to place the sounds in whatever speaker configuration may actually exist, from a single mono speaker in front of the viewer to dozens of speakers in an array as you'll find in a Dolby Atmos enabled theater. By channelizing audio, NHK not only forces an arbitrary speaker configuration on the viewer, but substantially complicates the job of downmixing to more traditional configurations such as 5.1 or 7.1, or even some of the newer configurations like 5.1+4 and 7.1+4 (the +4 indicating four height speakers over the listener/viewer), and is a complete waste of bandwidth, assuming they even carry the metadata and publish how the downmixing will be accomplished AND will be QC'd by a real person. Again, the producers, distributors and CE companies are behind the eight ball trying to support this nonsense in an era where only a very small fraction of people have 7.1 in the home, much less in Japan where premium audio solutions as you'll find in Akihabara consist almost exclusively of sound bars with speaker arrays that can do the same job.
Sorry to be so cynical about this, but there comes a point where this gets out of control for the average viewer and for the people who are in the industry making and distributing and playing back this content. NHK long jumped the shark even as nice as their jumbo display every broadcast show I have gone to may be.
Let me first be very clear here - when the Clinton's are smiling with Trump at Trump's first wedding, I don't trust ANY of these bastards. NOT ONE. Trump and Clinton are statists with different agendas, but statists nonetheless. Madam Clinton is, despite her horrendous dishonesty, is a far more eloquent and disciplined speaker with far fewer gaffes.
That said, the headline implies that Trump approves of the hacking that Russia allegedly accomplished, when the obvious context from the video is that he doesn't approve of any of it and is talking sarcastically about Madam Clinton's 30k+ still-missing e-mails being recovered by Russia. This goes precisely and correctly to the point about the current executive branch's lackadaisical enforcement of security of the e-mail within established government structures where I or anyone else would be permanently disqualified from any secret clearance had I engaged in such egregiously negligent or wilful behavior. He implies as much only a few seconds later in his speech, and he is definitely not joking then, but using the hyperbole (i.e. "joke") as a vehicle to establish a critical point because he feels fed up with this nonsense. I really believe that this is serious to him as well because the same weapons that were used against his opponent can definitely be used against him at any time.
So please, don't put words in my mouth the way the Clinton-oriented press is doing to Trump here. That the message should have been delivered differently (in a much more serious way) is obvious and would've prevented this ridiculous debate and the opportunity for mudslingers like Gawker to even attempt such a false characterization of the statement itself. But I never said I approved of how he did it nor implied it, nor anything else Trump or Clinton says or does.
It was not only obviously a joke, but he suggested the hack could also be China or some other private hacker.
He also said that Russia and China have no respect for the United States.
Finally, fuck any link to Gawker. Slashdot deserves much better than this, even if such a ridiculous leading headline will falsely stoke the Hillary supporters without any further context. I mean, what's next? "Hillary shit herself regularly..." (...at one year old)?
Google should have created an OS architecture that allowed for it to push its own security updates while leaving the aesthetic aspects and third party apps of the phone vendors and carriers alone (unless they were fundamental to the security problem). This whole circus over Android updates would be a moot point if they would at least do that.
I just quit without notice from a job at an established old and large corporation after less than three months. The main reasons were:
* Being told our group was in a "startup" mode and a huge red flag at any established company, especially with a paltry sum of shares barely above $5k.
* The first week I was there I was told the Tier 2 customer care person was leaving and that I'd be taking over their duties in addition to mine - a position that consumed >55 hours/week, but was not told this at the interview and was completely different than the job description I was given.
* When I asked about a product roadmap, I was told not to worry about it and to focus on the next six months of work (which didn't matter since the product was obviously not going anywhere and was severely underfunded while architected around a third-party solution that was insanely expensive).
* Complete disorganization to the point where development was accused of slipping but there was no product feature backlog nor user acceptance testing, despite being called an "Agile" development environment; just trying to put together a backlog and some processes that remotely resembled a proper development environment was a 60 hour/week job and they wanted to scale!
* A micro-manager who gave ZERO positive feedback about ANYTHING, claimed that they were not, who would change their mind on a whim (too much this time, too little next time, too little the following time, etc. etc.) and throw everyone under the bus, indicating a lack of empathy and self-awareness; also the first time I had ever worked somewhere where my office mates had thrown some item at a desk or on the floor out of frustration.
* Horrendously long commute which would've been tolerable if it was a good job with good treatment.
The last day I showed up to work, I was thrown under the bus by the manager in front of our VP and the rest of the team for a lie to cover up the manager's incompetence. I went home, got up the next day, went to my doctor for a note to get the rest of the week off, and marched in on the following Monday to the reception desk with a letter of resignation and dropping off all of the company equipment. Didn't even talk to my manager, and didn't answer any of the manager's phone calls or e-mails, nor anyone else on the team after the day I got thrown under the bus. I, quite literally, disappeared.
Why did I quit like this, especially without another source of income or health care coverage? Because leaving a gaping hole with a giant question mark in my wake was the only bit of power I had left to send a message for all of the misrepresentation, incompetence, unreasonable expectations and malice of the team that I had experienced . My mental and physical health has improved substantially since quitting, and so has the relationship with my loved ones. That team was screwed either way, but royally so with some of their deadlines that I had left the gaping hole in their roster for. I would've loved to have worked for another part of the company and was more than qualified to do so, but corporate rules prevent changes in position for the first year, and I had no expectation of a good review despite having been a high performing employee at other companies.
In the end, these issues point directly to the utter contempt that technology employers have for their employees, particularly their low-to-mid-tier individual contributors. What else should they expect when they themselves give no notice to employees when they terminate them? What else should they expect when they treat their employees like trash, expect them to work startup hours while receiving established company pay and bonuses, change job descriptions at a whim, and don't have the decency to form any kind of coherent team environment or structure?
The real message to HR departments and upper management on this phenomenon is this: if employees are quitting without notice more frequently, your problem is with your current corporate structure, management, and business, not with the employee that quits without notice, and you ignore this problem at your own peril.
The idiocy surrounding IoT is mind boggling at nearly all levels in the chain. Ease of use and security are almost always at odds with each other, and the former typically wins at the expense of the latter. Secure device enrollment, VLANs, air gapping...who needs this crap when you can download an app, put the device on your home network with a button press on the router, and go?
In this case, we have a bunch of designers without a real background in and/or regard for infosec putting out products that use the "security by obscurity" model and get called out on it. To top it off, it is also the model of personally identifiable information being shipped overseas for who knows how many violations of privacy, and subject to violations of rights by governmental entities monitoring the same information. That this is now common with so many Chinese-made products (especially web cams!) is particularly galling. Even better, the "threats" against this man would normally result in automatic termination of the threatening employee in most Western countries. I suspect this company is like the uncountable numbers of cockroaches on Alibaba, Ebay and Amazon hocking their trash - they'll sell it until they can't, then they'll re-form under a different name and do it again, and think that they're right until they get called out like these idiots did.
Last year a recruiter presented me for a job at a lighting company in Eastern Pennsylvania for their IoT product efforts with my background in security and cryptography as well as electronics. They passed on me because I didn't have enough of lighting background (which is a hell of a lot easier to pick up than security). When I countered to the recruiter that security was the most important thing for them, he agreed wholeheartedly but said there was nothing he could do to convince them otherwise.
If this is the future of IoT, I want no part of it.
The recent admissions by Facebook and Twitter for politically slanting/altering their feeds combined with the average idiot's inability to obtain information from multiple sources indicates one of the most dangerous times for this and many other countries.
Even worse, the attention-mongering media that can't be trusted either now uses the most outrageous social media posts to create controversial news stories and attract viewers/listeners/clicks.
The real failure is in the system of education. Few people are taught to view all sources of media rather than surround themselves with a conglomerate echo chamber of someone else's view of the world. I have even less faith that there will be any meaningful change to alleviate that problem either.
I had my first taste of network gaming with Snipes on some old PCs back in the 80s, and later on Netrek, but nothing compares to the leap with LAN gaming (or even dialup) with the first Doom. Such a blast playing with friends. Even though the network code and graphics got prettier, there hasn't been such a big jump in the type of gameplay as with multiplayer Doom.
The other big thing Doom brought was community-contributed mods, from individual maps to total conversion mods like the very well done Aliens Doom. All of a sudden, whole new worlds were opened up beyond the core game and there was nothing like it. Many happy times including being a play tester for some of these levels. Yet nothing will compare to recording ridiculous voices and mapping them over the Doom event sounds when you're drunk. Burps, insults, snippets of political ads, assholes we hated on campus and any other ridiculous crap that only college kids would find funny. We had whole themes done for various things, especially professors in lectures and the odd photo that made certain college classes tolerable.
P.S. The Aliens Doom conversion mod led to the Aliens Quake conversion mod which was the best Aliens game that ever came out (if a bit buggy) until Fox killed it with a cease and desist.
You hit the nail on the head - it's all about the app ecosystem. What killer Windows phone apps ever made any waves? None. Even BlackBerry got the message about Android apps though far too late to save them. If the developers aren't there, the apps won't be there and the customers won't use your platform.
I'm sorry sir, but I don't want to destroy my shoulder joints which have been injured during years of manual labor and could cause an immediate medical event. Please make sure that you pat me down instead. Thank you.
What are they supposed to do at that point? Risk a federal lawsuit for discriminating against disabled individuals?
Who the hell is going to derive any value from this scheme for their company? You can't build core competencies around ongoing development with a la carte development unless your product is just that cookie cutter simple, in which case you're probably already too late to the game.
It's crap like this that to me sounds like the beginning of the end for Dotcom bubble 2.0. People think that outsourcing grunt work is some new thing and that it will solve all problems.
Slashdot Mirror
I am really talking about the owners, who a board would normally represent. If they're too small to have a board, then it is the primary owners or investors. If the management bankrolled the company 100% themselves, then they can do what they wish. Nevertheless, it's still monumentally stupid to mix your business with politics rather than take a neutral stance and appeal to a broad audience unless you have concrete data that your revenue will be impacted less by not developing for VR than from the customers that you would lose if you did.
What is astonishing to me is the level of rhetoric and the stretch of logic that has come into place since our Alien vs. Predator presidential race (i.e. whoever wins, we lose). Now we have a situation just like the Mozilla debacle with Brendan Eich except that it is much much flimsier an argument this time around.
But here's the thing, Insomniac and Polytron management: your job is to make money for the investors of your company, not to use them as some political tool because you disagree with the politics of one of the employees of Oculus. Period.
These decisions will only harm these companies financially because of diminished interest from people who own an Oculus. Unless the management has concrete data that their continued support of the Oculus will harm their sales due to the political connection (and I'll bet diamonds to dollars that they don't), then the boards of directors of all of these companies should direct the executive management of the companies that withdrew support for Oculus to reverse their decision or be terminated for breach of fiduciary duty.
Enough of this SJW bullshit, especially when investor money and returns are at stake and the backlash from these actions could be worse. E McNeill is totally correct - if you want to fight a Trump supporter, put your own money up rather than trying to suppress others as if you were some Soviet-era state enterprise licking the boots of the party you support.
There is an entire body of stealth antennas that have been developed for legally and space-constrained homes, such as flagpole antennas, magnetic loops, folded attic dipoles, and even tuned metal gutters! Yet these are all compromise antennas due to their limited height from the ground , proximity to metal objects and wiring, and size (for the 40m band on HF, you need at least a 10m/33ft vertical plus one or more counterpoises of that length on the ground). Some HOAs are even more draconian and allow nothing outside of a strict approved list of items per the HOA contract. This means that even a 1/4 wavelength vertical wire antenna that is barely visible to the eye is disallowed. Ironically, it's these same antennas that contribute to RFI issues for neighbors, increase RF exposure and worsen problems that would not be present with a properly deployed non-compromise antenna. HOA agreements have a disproportionate impact on hams who tend to be older and often use ham radio to communicate with their friends. Some of these are ex-military and civilian volunteers who are part of the Military Auxiliary Radio System or Civil Air Patrol, or participate in volunteer civil safety services such as Amateur Radio Emergency Service, Radio Amateur Civil Emergency Service and Skywarn that use HF frequencies as well.
The HOAs have been vociferously opposed to this act as an infringement of civil liberties and have written both to the FCC and to congress opposing this. Yet there are already FCC-mandated requirements for such things as satellite antennas on HOA-governed properties that supersede any restrictions that may be contained in HOA contracts on spectrum which is technically regulated by the FCC. The intent is not to replicated a nearly 200' tall antenna tower with stacked Yagis, but to provide reasonable accommodation. A 1/4 wavelength vertical wire antenna barely visible to the eye can literally communicate with the entire world, yet somehow the HOA board fanatics claim that even these should be restricted. Even one of the trapped multiband vertical antennas in a back yard can make a big difference in getting out and participating in radio, but they again want no part of it.
There is bias against what we don't know or don't want to know. Heck, people think that there is an environmental impact to these antennas. I'm hopeful this will get passed and withstand scrutiny in the inevitable court battle that will ensue over it. But in a country turning its back on science for sports, maybe even the discussion with the non-ham folks might actually activate a few brain cells.
There is no excuse to eliminate an audio jack from a phone, much less a Macbook. Too many complications with wireless headphones and microphones, and peripherals to add the functionality back just add to clutter for a portable device.
This isn't edgy, or brave, or futuristic. It's simply the beginning of the end for a once-innovative company who is practically trying to alienate its customer base. I really wonder if the same idiots who were in charge of the Final Cut Pro 10 transition were the same ones involved in these decisions.
I seriously have never seen an astroturf campaign so far gone for a candidate as for Hillary. It actually doesn't matter what your political preferences are, just that they shove as much pro-Hillary shit into your feed. They honestly believe they can influence people's preferences by bashing or censoring all of the other candidates, and I do actually mean Gary Johnson and Jill Stein here more than the obvious bashing of Trump since Johnson and Stein are a million times more honest than the two front-runners.
People need to realize that Facebook (or Twitter, or any other social or non-social media) is not a news source any more, but a reflection of the political will of those who own it. My greatest concern is that so many people are too ignorant to realize it because of the funny pictures and friends' photos in their feed.
It depends on what point in the solar cycle, but the higher HF bands from ~14-15MHz up through 30MHz are far better during the day for skip due to D-layer and E-layer ionization and also more readily absorbs lower frequencies. At night, ~10MHz and lower works because there is still ionization in the F-layer which is more amenable to those frequencies, and why AM has to typically reduce power. Bear in mind that AM is technically an MF band (0.3-3MHz), which doesn't quite follow the same skywave propagation rules so strictly for a number of reasons such as auroral zone, ducting, and electron gyrofrequency that don't affect HF quite as severely.
You can still get near-vertical incidence skywave propagation during the day on the lower HF bands, but these are only good for a few hundred miles and can be subject to a higher than normal noise floor in the summer due to phenomena such as regional lightning.
The whole purpose of this is to facilitate non-satellite transmission of signals using ionospheric skywave propagation. This is the most common over-the-horizon communication method for HF frequencies (3-30MHz) and below. The military uses HF for tactical communications using radios like the Harris Falcon series manpacks. HF is also used for the Military Auxiliary Radio Service as well as Civil Air Patrol. None of these uses have dependence on satellites which are, in any event, potentially prone to attack, jamming and failure by natural phenomena, and where end user equipment is expensive and potentially tricky to deploy.
In order for HF communications to work effectively and consistently, the sun needs to ionize the atmosphere. It normally goes in the same eleven year cycles, but this year has seen very bad conditions with insufficient consistency to rely on HF. The shortwave and amateur radio community has similarly been affected adversely by this phenomenon. Ionizing the atmosphere through this proposal is one way to make this happen without relying on satellites.
Intel needs to be viewed as several businesses, one of which is their discrete CPU business, another being their flash memory, yet another being the McAfee software acquisition, and yet another something called the foundry business.
Foundry refers to having a business where you are simply the manufacturer of chips for other companies for their specific purpose without selling into the end market. These other companies contract to Intel to be able to build anything from a network chip to a graphics chip to a microcontroller or virtually anything else (besides memory), either as a standard product off-the-shelf, or as an application-specific integrated circuit. In order for Intel to make that happen, they need to provide the know-how to these manufacturers of chips either directly or through providers of chip intellectual property. This includes logic libraries (standard cells, hence my name), memory cells and compilers for SRAMs, analog I/O cells, mixed-signal like ADCs and DACs, PLLs, non-volatile storage, design rule decks for the process rules, and a few other things that constitute the building blocks of any chip.
Other foundries such as TSMC, Global Foundries, etc. have the same model, though Intel's foundry manufactures more of their own CPU (and other) products than for other folks. Intel decided to farm out some of that capacity to third parties and make additional money on any spare capacity they might have, particularly with their leadership in logic processes over other rivals in the discrete CPU business. One of the key aforementioned building blocks is the IP offered by ARM for CPUs, GPUs and bus interconnect. This ARM IP needs to be validated to work in their silicon process, and this is the essence of the deal - Intel's foundry customers would not do business with Intel without basic blocks like the CPU since ARM is essentially the most important embedded CPU architecture in chip design currently.
The way the summary comes out makes it sound like Intel is manufacturing chips for its competitor, but it isn't necessarily so since the Intel microarchitecture is very highly vertically integrated as a business with their discrete CPU division whereas ARM itself is just a provider of IP with their microarchitecture. Yes, in theory Intel foundry customers could be making chips to compete in some segments of the Intel discrete CPU business, but that business is still largely dominated in the server and desktop markets by Intel and its associated software ecosystem. In the same way, ARM dominates the handheld device markets where Intel has had very little comparative presence.
I can guarantee that Mr. Krzanich and the Intel board would never allow their foundry business to cannibalize their current core discrete CPU business for a "competitor" if they felt it was detrimental to their overall financial and operating picture. This ARM deal is a piece of a larger plan of maximizing their ROI on their very very expensive chip fabs in a market where they have typically had a lead in logic process technology at least one node ahead of their competitors historically. That advantage can be very important in mobile due to the cost and power savings vertical transistor process nodes now offer along with superior manufacturing capabilities as the scale of their other businesses has long demonstrated.
The recently publicized vulnerabilities in connected vehicles are examples of vehicle designers not understanding security threat models correctly (which also applies to IoT in general). In the rush for convenience and connectivity it is mind boggling that they wouldn't make more effort if for no other reason than to avoid the negative publicity.
The easiest thing to do in these critical vehicle systems systems is to outright air gap them. There is no reason that there should be any network connection to the autopilot or auto-parking or braking system of a vehicle unless the threat model and the subsequent design of security was sufficiently thorough. Until that happens, it should literally be a discrete action by the driver through a physical interface inside the vehicle and at most have a one-way reporting interface that can be picked up by a network interface.
The other thing that can be done is to hardware-interlock the network connection. For example, the steering motor controllers for automatic parking should have a logic AND control to the speed of the vehicle so that anything above a certain speed disables the motor control at a hardware level. At that point, one would have to physically tamper with the vehicle to overcome this safeguard, but if you could do that there's a lot more mayhem you could create anyway.
The police in Edmonton have been doing this to the press since the 90s when they wiretapped newspaper and TV reporters working on a story of police corruption with ties to organized crime. But that was just the old fashioned wire taps, and there have been many corruption scandals since. There is no press freedom in Edmonton and all communication should be considered compromised by the police there unless there is a cryptographically secure way with a Certificate Authority not controlled within Canadian or US borders.
...this security issue will affect very few /.ers...
The countermeasures used in cryptography to fight differential power analysis can be used here if necessary.
In DPA, the dynamic power consumption is measured on a hardware device such as a smart card that performs crypto operations so that, when the challenge-response is begun, the card's regular crypto operations for asymmetric and symmetric encryption can be captured and analyzed using statistical correlation over many challenges and other means so that the correct keys for the device can be determined. The primary countermeasure is to introduce false operations in parallel with the actual operation at different times and with different power consumption patterns such that the correlation takes far too long for the number of challenge-response cycles.
Similarly, a countermeasure to this and for all VPN traffic is to accomplish the same thing by having an application that actively monitors the bandwidth across the physical interface used by the iPlayer and ensures that additional sources of bandwidth consumption via internal or external servers/clients are programmed. Even if the WiFi packets are monitored, the packet analysis could be much more difficult to conduct. In addition, one could randomly force routes across multiple physical interfaces at random to hop across multiple inexpensive routers that are bridged, further frustrating such efforts. In combination with a VPN, could defeat this outrageous and intrusive de facto taxation enforcement scheme.
Secretly We Are Google And yes, welcome to OpenID circa a decade ago...
4K resolution is hard to notice at typical living room viewing distances of 8-10' with anything smaller than a 65" TV. 8K is going to only really make a difference in something larger than 80-90". Most people, even with 20/20 vision, have insufficient visual acuity to resolve such a resolution under these conditions. The vast majority of the public does not buy displays this big, and much less so in Japan where living spaces are tiny. 8K is a great resolution for large venue screens and for mezzanine/master files, but has little to no value for the consumer and imposes substantial costs on content creators, distributors and CE companies. As a point of comparison, some of my colleagues at a major movie studio were talking about scanning old film stock with 6K resolution and content with it. 8K is 4x as much storage as 4K, and we haven't even begun to talk about far more tangible technologies of importance like HDR and wide color gamut.
As for this 22.2 business, it is an infernal waste of time. The extra LFE channel (the ".2" in 22.2) is completely redundant because low frequencies should not be able to be located by the human ear in a properly set up theater, home, small or large venue. The 22 channels is an anachronism in the era of emergent object-based audio coding as found in AC-4 and MPEG-H audio. There, an arbitrary number of objects has position location information recorded in 3D space and relies on the playback rendering device to place the sounds in whatever speaker configuration may actually exist, from a single mono speaker in front of the viewer to dozens of speakers in an array as you'll find in a Dolby Atmos enabled theater. By channelizing audio, NHK not only forces an arbitrary speaker configuration on the viewer, but substantially complicates the job of downmixing to more traditional configurations such as 5.1 or 7.1, or even some of the newer configurations like 5.1+4 and 7.1+4 (the +4 indicating four height speakers over the listener/viewer), and is a complete waste of bandwidth, assuming they even carry the metadata and publish how the downmixing will be accomplished AND will be QC'd by a real person. Again, the producers, distributors and CE companies are behind the eight ball trying to support this nonsense in an era where only a very small fraction of people have 7.1 in the home, much less in Japan where premium audio solutions as you'll find in Akihabara consist almost exclusively of sound bars with speaker arrays that can do the same job.
Sorry to be so cynical about this, but there comes a point where this gets out of control for the average viewer and for the people who are in the industry making and distributing and playing back this content. NHK long jumped the shark even as nice as their jumbo display every broadcast show I have gone to may be.
Let me first be very clear here - when the Clinton's are smiling with Trump at Trump's first wedding, I don't trust ANY of these bastards. NOT ONE. Trump and Clinton are statists with different agendas, but statists nonetheless. Madam Clinton is, despite her horrendous dishonesty, is a far more eloquent and disciplined speaker with far fewer gaffes.
That said, the headline implies that Trump approves of the hacking that Russia allegedly accomplished, when the obvious context from the video is that he doesn't approve of any of it and is talking sarcastically about Madam Clinton's 30k+ still-missing e-mails being recovered by Russia. This goes precisely and correctly to the point about the current executive branch's lackadaisical enforcement of security of the e-mail within established government structures where I or anyone else would be permanently disqualified from any secret clearance had I engaged in such egregiously negligent or wilful behavior. He implies as much only a few seconds later in his speech, and he is definitely not joking then, but using the hyperbole (i.e. "joke") as a vehicle to establish a critical point because he feels fed up with this nonsense. I really believe that this is serious to him as well because the same weapons that were used against his opponent can definitely be used against him at any time.
So please, don't put words in my mouth the way the Clinton-oriented press is doing to Trump here. That the message should have been delivered differently (in a much more serious way) is obvious and would've prevented this ridiculous debate and the opportunity for mudslingers like Gawker to even attempt such a false characterization of the statement itself. But I never said I approved of how he did it nor implied it, nor anything else Trump or Clinton says or does.
It was not only obviously a joke, but he suggested the hack could also be China or some other private hacker.
He also said that Russia and China have no respect for the United States.
Finally, fuck any link to Gawker. Slashdot deserves much better than this, even if such a ridiculous leading headline will falsely stoke the Hillary supporters without any further context. I mean, what's next? "Hillary shit herself regularly..." (...at one year old)?
Google should have created an OS architecture that allowed for it to push its own security updates while leaving the aesthetic aspects and third party apps of the phone vendors and carriers alone (unless they were fundamental to the security problem). This whole circus over Android updates would be a moot point if they would at least do that.
The last day I showed up to work, I was thrown under the bus by the manager in front of our VP and the rest of the team for a lie to cover up the manager's incompetence. I went home, got up the next day, went to my doctor for a note to get the rest of the week off, and marched in on the following Monday to the reception desk with a letter of resignation and dropping off all of the company equipment. Didn't even talk to my manager, and didn't answer any of the manager's phone calls or e-mails, nor anyone else on the team after the day I got thrown under the bus. I, quite literally, disappeared.
Why did I quit like this, especially without another source of income or health care coverage? Because leaving a gaping hole with a giant question mark in my wake was the only bit of power I had left to send a message for all of the misrepresentation, incompetence, unreasonable expectations and malice of the team that I had experienced . My mental and physical health has improved substantially since quitting, and so has the relationship with my loved ones. That team was screwed either way, but royally so with some of their deadlines that I had left the gaping hole in their roster for. I would've loved to have worked for another part of the company and was more than qualified to do so, but corporate rules prevent changes in position for the first year, and I had no expectation of a good review despite having been a high performing employee at other companies.
In the end, these issues point directly to the utter contempt that technology employers have for their employees, particularly their low-to-mid-tier individual contributors. What else should they expect when they themselves give no notice to employees when they terminate them? What else should they expect when they treat their employees like trash, expect them to work startup hours while receiving established company pay and bonuses, change job descriptions at a whim, and don't have the decency to form any kind of coherent team environment or structure?
The real message to HR departments and upper management on this phenomenon is this: if employees are quitting without notice more frequently, your problem is with your current corporate structure, management, and business, not with the employee that quits without notice, and you ignore this problem at your own peril.
The idiocy surrounding IoT is mind boggling at nearly all levels in the chain. Ease of use and security are almost always at odds with each other, and the former typically wins at the expense of the latter. Secure device enrollment, VLANs, air gapping...who needs this crap when you can download an app, put the device on your home network with a button press on the router, and go?
In this case, we have a bunch of designers without a real background in and/or regard for infosec putting out products that use the "security by obscurity" model and get called out on it. To top it off, it is also the model of personally identifiable information being shipped overseas for who knows how many violations of privacy, and subject to violations of rights by governmental entities monitoring the same information. That this is now common with so many Chinese-made products (especially web cams!) is particularly galling. Even better, the "threats" against this man would normally result in automatic termination of the threatening employee in most Western countries. I suspect this company is like the uncountable numbers of cockroaches on Alibaba, Ebay and Amazon hocking their trash - they'll sell it until they can't, then they'll re-form under a different name and do it again, and think that they're right until they get called out like these idiots did.
Last year a recruiter presented me for a job at a lighting company in Eastern Pennsylvania for their IoT product efforts with my background in security and cryptography as well as electronics. They passed on me because I didn't have enough of lighting background (which is a hell of a lot easier to pick up than security). When I countered to the recruiter that security was the most important thing for them, he agreed wholeheartedly but said there was nothing he could do to convince them otherwise.
If this is the future of IoT, I want no part of it.
Two-thirds of customers who challenge credit card fraud, improper fees or late charges lose in binding arbitration. All of this arose when the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act was extended to consumers and employees in 1985.
By the way, Google and Comcast force their employees to sign binding arbitration agreements. Now you know who you're dealing with.
The recent admissions by Facebook and Twitter for politically slanting/altering their feeds combined with the average idiot's inability to obtain information from multiple sources indicates one of the most dangerous times for this and many other countries.
Even worse, the attention-mongering media that can't be trusted either now uses the most outrageous social media posts to create controversial news stories and attract viewers/listeners/clicks.
The real failure is in the system of education. Few people are taught to view all sources of media rather than surround themselves with a conglomerate echo chamber of someone else's view of the world. I have even less faith that there will be any meaningful change to alleviate that problem either.
I had my first taste of network gaming with Snipes on some old PCs back in the 80s, and later on Netrek, but nothing compares to the leap with LAN gaming (or even dialup) with the first Doom. Such a blast playing with friends. Even though the network code and graphics got prettier, there hasn't been such a big jump in the type of gameplay as with multiplayer Doom.
The other big thing Doom brought was community-contributed mods, from individual maps to total conversion mods like the very well done Aliens Doom. All of a sudden, whole new worlds were opened up beyond the core game and there was nothing like it. Many happy times including being a play tester for some of these levels. Yet nothing will compare to recording ridiculous voices and mapping them over the Doom event sounds when you're drunk. Burps, insults, snippets of political ads, assholes we hated on campus and any other ridiculous crap that only college kids would find funny. We had whole themes done for various things, especially professors in lectures and the odd photo that made certain college classes tolerable.
P.S. The Aliens Doom conversion mod led to the Aliens Quake conversion mod which was the best Aliens game that ever came out (if a bit buggy) until Fox killed it with a cease and desist.
You hit the nail on the head - it's all about the app ecosystem. What killer Windows phone apps ever made any waves? None. Even BlackBerry got the message about Android apps though far too late to save them. If the developers aren't there, the apps won't be there and the customers won't use your platform.
I'm sorry sir, but I don't want to destroy my shoulder joints which have been injured during years of manual labor and could cause an immediate medical event. Please make sure that you pat me down instead. Thank you. What are they supposed to do at that point? Risk a federal lawsuit for discriminating against disabled individuals?
Who the hell is going to derive any value from this scheme for their company? You can't build core competencies around ongoing development with a la carte development unless your product is just that cookie cutter simple, in which case you're probably already too late to the game.
It's crap like this that to me sounds like the beginning of the end for Dotcom bubble 2.0. People think that outsourcing grunt work is some new thing and that it will solve all problems.