Since Verizon is the dominant CDMA carrier in the US, pretty much all CDMA phones work with Verizon. You would have to try very hard to find a model built for the US that doesn't. Sprint would be the big problem.
And the T-Mobile issues aren't completely gone. They are rolling out very extensive coverage on LTE band 12 using the spectrum they bought a few years ago. But phones older than a year or two often don't support band 12.
E.g., the Nexus 6 works everywhere on T-Mobile, but the iPhone 5C does not.
That would be my primary qualifier in recommending a carrier for anyone else---do you have a phone that support LTE band 12, or are you willing to buy one? If so, T-mobile all the way. Otherwise, you can only count on good coverage in cities and along major travel corridors.
They want to (not so) slowly move people to OS-as-a-service.
It's not even that.
Microsoft has discontinued OS sales and then support for years. Much longer than the OS-as-a-service concept has been on their radar.
With proprietary for-profit software, you will inevitably reach the point where new sales of the software will not cover the cost to maintain the software. And if you're a business, that means it's time to consider killing the product.
While users and developers both require a stable platform to do their work, the very stability of that platform eliminates the need for new purchases. Just reassign that perpetual license when the hardware dies and carry on. Meanwhile, the developer must support new hardware and new standards, and he must also fix any bugs or exploits.
Going OS-as-a-service and subsidizing the annual license fee to $0 through the use of analytic and advertising revenue... well, that's one solution. I don't like it, but if people are unwilling to pay for support one way then they will pay another. Microsoft has to make money, and users are generally not interested in paying cash for operating systems.
With most graphics cards, you can cut power consumption by 30%-50% if you're willing to lose 10%-20% performance. Just drop the frequency and voltage a bit.
Desktop parts are tuned toward the higher end of what the hardware can handle. You've got the power and cooling to support it, and you need to win the performance.
Most people are interested in overclocking, further showing that the chip and board designers are right in choosing to sacrifice efficiency for more performance. For the desktop market.
If they tune down a bit instead, they can probably fit into the massive gaming laptops without too many compromises. Gaming laptops usually have larger fans, thicker chassis, heatpipes for CPU and GPU, and extensive ventilation.
These full-sized GPUs will never fit into an ultrabook, but I know for a fact that the MSI and Asus gaming laptops move a lot of air. I think they move more than the Founder's Edition cooler, although they are cooling more than just the GPU and VRAM.
This is their answer to the Steam machines, I think.
You can decide how much you want to "buy in" to the gaming experience.
If you want 4K@120 Hz with 7.1 surround sound, there's a SKU for that. Meanwhile, if you're not interested in going that far, there is cheaper SKU that plays the same games with stereo audio at 1080p.
I feel like this is a good direction for consoles overall since they can continue to push the envelope at the high end, provide a consistent development platform, and remain accessible to gamers with limited budgets.
I fully expect Microsoft to screw something up somewhere down the road, but I actually want the industry as a whole to move in this direction.
The hardware for each model is known in advance and likely custom-built to be backward compatible. Same for the firmware/OS.
I imagine that developers can target Scorpio v1 or Scorpio v3.2 and the code will work with anything newer, similar to the Android SDK. If you want/need newer features, you will have to target the newer platforms that support them.
I don't see this as being very difficult to accomplish. Google managed it with their SDK, and they have no control over the hardware. Microsoft will presumably maintain full control over hardware, firmware, and OS. They can even order up custom hardware if they need it, making their comparatively simple task even easier.
So in 1995, we also saw SHA1 formally accepted as a standard. And SHA1 is now considered to weak to be secure against well-funded attackers.
The standard VW used had to be developed prior to 1995 if it was in production for the 1995 model year, so it's not surprising that it is more vulnerable. Compute capabilities have grown quite a bit.
The only real problem I see is that VW is still using 90s-era crypto in modern vehicles. I'm not surprised by this, and I'd be shocked if they were the only ones---but it is still a problem.
Cars with remote start and smartphone integration really need to have software support and upgrades over their anticipated lifespan. Sorry if it's a hassle, but cars are IT devices now.
Even enterprise wifi cannot hand off clients as cleanly as cellular when they physically move closer to another node. The bolted-on standards to allow it are much, much better than the default behavior, but they are leagues behind cell service.
Imagine having up to multi-second lags in connectivity during your call. Awful and unusable. That can happen with wifi handoffs. It's not the norm, but it can happen because wifi just isn't as tight as cellular.
If you're doing a lot of random database reads, a low-latency disk with decently high bandwidth is exactly what you want. (Patterned reads should end up cached or prefetched into RAM.)
A larger array of smaller-capacity SSDs would be better for an intensive write environment, but if you primarily need random bits of data very quickly then this will be of interest. (A database write generates more IOs than a read, plus writes often take longer to begin with---so having fewer IOPS is more likely to be acceptable for read-heavy loads.)
This product may appeal to enterprises as an economical purchase if they have a specific workload. Or, if they need as much high-performance storage as they can get, then this will deliver it using less rack space and power.
No, and the vulnerability from implementing it is actually worse than doing nothing at all.
Without RFC 5961 support, an attacker with visibility of your communication can DoS it with forged resets. With RFC 5961, an attacker without direct visibility can determine if two hosts are communicating and then tamper with the data---roughly 80% of the time, according to paper.
The RFC process follows essentially the same many-eyes approach, yet this vulnerability went undiscovered from draft to implementation.
Open vs closed development of specs and software had little or no effect on the end result---although with open software you could remove the offending code yourself if the developer is unwilling to change or remove it himself.
This isn't even news at all. Assange didn't make an outright allegation, and the police don't seem to take him seriously.
I want to read about the cool new NAND in development or the security implications of quantum computing, not get sideswiped by unsubstantiated conspiracy claims and political diatribes.
There are plenty of pro and con sites for every political issue. That ground is covered very thoroughly without Slashdot sticking its nose into it.
It looks to me that by having the source code available, these researchers - white hats - found the vulnerability before the bad guys did.
There is no indication in the paper that the researchers looked at the Linux source code to develop this attack. On the contrary, it looks like they designed the attack using methods devised from earlier research.
They also note that Windows, FreeBSD, and OS X are not vulnerable. In this case, being open source is not an indicator of security.
I mean, it's not like OpenSSL had a serious vulnerability in its production codebase for years that affected the numerous applications dependent on it.
It's not like major enterprise vendors such as Cisco and VMware included that code as part of their products.
Removable batteries can be inspected visually for defects that generally precede failure.
Typically, this means bulging, but unusual hot spots are also good indicators (assuming you've handled the battery enough to know how it feels normally).
It is also very easy to hard reboot a device with a removable battery and to ensure it is unpowered when opening it up to troubleshoot or upgrade.
Laptop batteries are capable of producing dangerous electric shocks, and it is the most basic safety measure to isolate all sources of energy before working on any equipment.
If you get rid of the pilot you probably could save some money on cockpit systems like ejection seats, oxygen etc. But the plane still needs lift and so on, so it needs wings and an engine.
A pilot costs you a lot more than that.
Humans are pretty much guaranteed to lose consciousness when maneuvers exceed 10 G. That's basically the limit. Without pressure suits and training, it's barely half of that. For comparison, the wildest rollercoasters are 2-3 G.
If you get rid of that body, your flight envelope can extend up to whatever the materials and design can physically withstand.
How much maneuverability is that? We had missiles accelerating at over 100 G back in the 1970s. Whether that magnitude of improvement can be brought to the entire range of aircraft maneuverability is questionable, but there is certainly a lot of potential once you remove the weakest link.
You're wrong---whether it is lying, ignorance, or missing details is beyond me to figure out.
If Microsoft required phone-home connectivity for Windows 7, you'd still have problems after entering the confirmation ID.
Also, network connectivity isn't restricted when the activation grace period expires. You get a black background and annoying prompts, but that's it.
You clearly know jack about Windows activation.
Windows, despite being both genuine and activated, was deactivating itself... I'm not sure what the timeout was but I assume 14 days.
Windows is not activated at the factory. A user must complete the activation process online or over the phone after acquiring it.
The activation grace period is 30 days from first boot.
Once a MAK-licensed system is activated, it stays activated unless someone resets the activation store or makes major changes to the hardware.
Since Windows looks and acts normally within the grace period, that "deactivation" was likely the expiration of the grace period.
But it was very clear that the laptops with frequent internet connections never deactivated themselves, only the ones that sat around offline had the problem.
I assume the frequently-connected laptops completed the activation online without fanfare. By default, they'll prompt the user and be done with it in less than a minute.
MS could start shipping in a mode that forbids anything but UWP by default, under some claim of improving the security of the platform.
That would actually be true. UWP supports much more granular permissions than plain Win32.
But they won't do it because everyone will turn it off. If UWP becomes a major player in the next decade or so, I might expect it.
you really have to let Google distribute it for you or else miss out on the market.
It is fairly simple to sync music and photos. It could be equally easy to sync Android apps onto a phone or tablet, but Google doesn't benefit from that.
The "universal" part doesn't matter, MS's phones and tablets are in their final dying moments so there's no need to make something that runs both on real Windows and Windows RT/Phone.
Universal apps run on the XBox One.
At this point Win32/64 programs run better and have less limitations
Unfortunately, they require porting to/from Microsoft's console. That will no longer be the case, and the XBox is setting up to be a flexible TV media device.
So it is a meaningless limitation for now. Programs using an API nobody uses won't work with Steam.
Being able to run the same code on XBox and Windows will be appealing, although AAA titles will always need access to a high-performance video API. Oh wait, UWP supports DirectX 11 and 12.
If Microsoft gets UWP working to the point where most XBox games use it, no one is going to port to Win32.
This is a doomsday prediction, and like most doomsday predictions it is based on what the predictor feels to be true, not actual evidence.
Not all doomsday predictions are equal.
End-of-the-world predictions require some powerful yet unknown phenomenon to occur.
This scenario only requires a single bad actor to successfully manipulate its own platform. And there is a history of success there.
Obviously, there can be no evidence unless internal Microsoft documents are leaked, but the scenario is credible based on known capabilities and past behavior.
Your question is vague, and what it implies is wrong.
Try opening the Disk Management tool on Windows without admin rights and see what happens. With default settings, it will not even load. If you tinker with it you might be able to open it, but you still can't make any changes.
Open up the time applet from the clock in the system tray. See the little shield on the "Change date and time..." button? That means it requires elevated privileges. If you're not an admin, you will be prompted for admin credentials.
Poorly-designed applications like Steam can work around this by running the UI in user mode while interacting with a privileged service in the background. Setting up the service requires admin rights, but you provide those during the initial Steam installation. After that, it only needs admin approval to update that particular service.
Got a Radeon 5000/6000 or older gen APU?... Your drivers are "legacy".
This is true for Windows too. The Radeon 6000 series is over 5 years old, which is positively ancient from a gaming perspective. The 5000 series is closer to 7 years.
Modern games require functionality that these cards simply do not have. This has been a part of PC gaming for a while---either get used to it or get off the bus.
Since Linux is receiving roughly the same duration of primary support, I don't see where the room for complaint is.
A video adapter should function for 5-10 years, true, but a gaming card has a useful life of 3-5 years at most.
Claims construction, research into case law, deposition, discovery/disclosure, and review of testimony and evidence all take place outside of the courtroom.
All of those tasks are performed and reviewed by peers prior to court appearance.
The actual court appearance is a miniscule fraction of the total billable hours for complex legal matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Verizon is the dominant CDMA carrier in the US, pretty much all CDMA phones work with Verizon. You would have to try very hard to find a model built for the US that doesn't. Sprint would be the big problem.
And the T-Mobile issues aren't completely gone. They are rolling out very extensive coverage on LTE band 12 using the spectrum they bought a few years ago. But phones older than a year or two often don't support band 12.
E.g., the Nexus 6 works everywhere on T-Mobile, but the iPhone 5C does not.
That would be my primary qualifier in recommending a carrier for anyone else---do you have a phone that support LTE band 12, or are you willing to buy one? If so, T-mobile all the way. Otherwise, you can only count on good coverage in cities and along major travel corridors.
They want to (not so) slowly move people to OS-as-a-service.
It's not even that.
Microsoft has discontinued OS sales and then support for years. Much longer than the OS-as-a-service concept has been on their radar.
With proprietary for-profit software, you will inevitably reach the point where new sales of the software will not cover the cost to maintain the software. And if you're a business, that means it's time to consider killing the product.
While users and developers both require a stable platform to do their work, the very stability of that platform eliminates the need for new purchases. Just reassign that perpetual license when the hardware dies and carry on. Meanwhile, the developer must support new hardware and new standards, and he must also fix any bugs or exploits.
Going OS-as-a-service and subsidizing the annual license fee to $0 through the use of analytic and advertising revenue... well, that's one solution. I don't like it, but if people are unwilling to pay for support one way then they will pay another. Microsoft has to make money, and users are generally not interested in paying cash for operating systems.
With most graphics cards, you can cut power consumption by 30%-50% if you're willing to lose 10%-20% performance. Just drop the frequency and voltage a bit.
Desktop parts are tuned toward the higher end of what the hardware can handle. You've got the power and cooling to support it, and you need to win the performance.
Most people are interested in overclocking, further showing that the chip and board designers are right in choosing to sacrifice efficiency for more performance. For the desktop market.
If they tune down a bit instead, they can probably fit into the massive gaming laptops without too many compromises. Gaming laptops usually have larger fans, thicker chassis, heatpipes for CPU and GPU, and extensive ventilation.
These full-sized GPUs will never fit into an ultrabook, but I know for a fact that the MSI and Asus gaming laptops move a lot of air. I think they move more than the Founder's Edition cooler, although they are cooling more than just the GPU and VRAM.
This is their answer to the Steam machines, I think.
You can decide how much you want to "buy in" to the gaming experience.
If you want 4K@120 Hz with 7.1 surround sound, there's a SKU for that. Meanwhile, if you're not interested in going that far, there is cheaper SKU that plays the same games with stereo audio at 1080p.
I feel like this is a good direction for consoles overall since they can continue to push the envelope at the high end, provide a consistent development platform, and remain accessible to gamers with limited budgets.
I fully expect Microsoft to screw something up somewhere down the road, but I actually want the industry as a whole to move in this direction.
The hardware for each model is known in advance and likely custom-built to be backward compatible. Same for the firmware/OS.
I imagine that developers can target Scorpio v1 or Scorpio v3.2 and the code will work with anything newer, similar to the Android SDK. If you want/need newer features, you will have to target the newer platforms that support them.
I don't see this as being very difficult to accomplish. Google managed it with their SDK, and they have no control over the hardware. Microsoft will presumably maintain full control over hardware, firmware, and OS. They can even order up custom hardware if they need it, making their comparatively simple task even easier.
*too weak
Dammit.
So in 1995, we also saw SHA1 formally accepted as a standard. And SHA1 is now considered to weak to be secure against well-funded attackers.
The standard VW used had to be developed prior to 1995 if it was in production for the 1995 model year, so it's not surprising that it is more vulnerable. Compute capabilities have grown quite a bit.
The only real problem I see is that VW is still using 90s-era crypto in modern vehicles. I'm not surprised by this, and I'd be shocked if they were the only ones---but it is still a problem.
Cars with remote start and smartphone integration really need to have software support and upgrades over their anticipated lifespan. Sorry if it's a hassle, but cars are IT devices now.
Even enterprise wifi cannot hand off clients as cleanly as cellular when they physically move closer to another node. The bolted-on standards to allow it are much, much better than the default behavior, but they are leagues behind cell service.
Imagine having up to multi-second lags in connectivity during your call. Awful and unusable. That can happen with wifi handoffs. It's not the norm, but it can happen because wifi just isn't as tight as cellular.
The partial implementation in FreedBSD is identified as not vulnerable. It's on p 15 of the research paper.
This is clearly an enterprise product.
If you're doing a lot of random database reads, a low-latency disk with decently high bandwidth is exactly what you want. (Patterned reads should end up cached or prefetched into RAM.)
A larger array of smaller-capacity SSDs would be better for an intensive write environment, but if you primarily need random bits of data very quickly then this will be of interest. (A database write generates more IOs than a read, plus writes often take longer to begin with---so having fewer IOPS is more likely to be acceptable for read-heavy loads.)
This product may appeal to enterprises as an economical purchase if they have a specific workload. Or, if they need as much high-performance storage as they can get, then this will deliver it using less rack space and power.
No, and the vulnerability from implementing it is actually worse than doing nothing at all.
Without RFC 5961 support, an attacker with visibility of your communication can DoS it with forged resets. With RFC 5961, an attacker without direct visibility can determine if two hosts are communicating and then tamper with the data---roughly 80% of the time, according to paper.
The RFC process follows essentially the same many-eyes approach, yet this vulnerability went undiscovered from draft to implementation.
Open vs closed development of specs and software had little or no effect on the end result---although with open software you could remove the offending code yourself if the developer is unwilling to change or remove it himself.
Can we have tech news please?
This isn't even news at all. Assange didn't make an outright allegation, and the police don't seem to take him seriously.
I want to read about the cool new NAND in development or the security implications of quantum computing, not get sideswiped by unsubstantiated conspiracy claims and political diatribes.
There are plenty of pro and con sites for every political issue. That ground is covered very thoroughly without Slashdot sticking its nose into it.
It looks to me that by having the source code available, these researchers - white hats - found the vulnerability before the bad guys did.
There is no indication in the paper that the researchers looked at the Linux source code to develop this attack. On the contrary, it looks like they designed the attack using methods devised from earlier research.
They also note that Windows, FreeBSD, and OS X are not vulnerable. In this case, being open source is not an indicator of security.
What about Heartbleed? That was pretty bad.
I mean, it's not like OpenSSL had a serious vulnerability in its production codebase for years that affected the numerous applications dependent on it.
It's not like major enterprise vendors such as Cisco and VMware included that code as part of their products.
Removable batteries can be inspected visually for defects that generally precede failure.
Typically, this means bulging, but unusual hot spots are also good indicators (assuming you've handled the battery enough to know how it feels normally).
It is also very easy to hard reboot a device with a removable battery and to ensure it is unpowered when opening it up to troubleshoot or upgrade.
Laptop batteries are capable of producing dangerous electric shocks, and it is the most basic safety measure to isolate all sources of energy before working on any equipment.
If you get rid of the pilot you probably could save some money on cockpit systems like ejection seats, oxygen etc. But the plane still needs lift and so on, so it needs wings and an engine.
A pilot costs you a lot more than that.
Humans are pretty much guaranteed to lose consciousness when maneuvers exceed 10 G. That's basically the limit. Without pressure suits and training, it's barely half of that. For comparison, the wildest rollercoasters are 2-3 G.
If you get rid of that body, your flight envelope can extend up to whatever the materials and design can physically withstand.
How much maneuverability is that? We had missiles accelerating at over 100 G back in the 1970s. Whether that magnitude of improvement can be brought to the entire range of aircraft maneuverability is questionable, but there is certainly a lot of potential once you remove the weakest link.
If there is an annual cycle where they tend to lose and gain subscribers at certain times of the year, then this makes sense.
I would be happy too if my down season was less pronounced than normal.
The article alone doesn't provide enough information to justify the snarky headline.
Fortunately, Comcast is a shitty enough company that they earn the snark simply by continuing to exist.
You're wrong---whether it is lying, ignorance, or missing details is beyond me to figure out.
If Microsoft required phone-home connectivity for Windows 7, you'd still have problems after entering the confirmation ID.
Also, network connectivity isn't restricted when the activation grace period expires. You get a black background and annoying prompts, but that's it.
You clearly know jack about Windows activation.
Windows, despite being both genuine and activated, was deactivating itself... I'm not sure what the timeout was but I assume 14 days.
Windows is not activated at the factory. A user must complete the activation process online or over the phone after acquiring it.
The activation grace period is 30 days from first boot.
Once a MAK-licensed system is activated, it stays activated unless someone resets the activation store or makes major changes to the hardware.
Since Windows looks and acts normally within the grace period, that "deactivation" was likely the expiration of the grace period.
But it was very clear that the laptops with frequent internet connections never deactivated themselves, only the ones that sat around offline had the problem.
I assume the frequently-connected laptops completed the activation online without fanfare. By default, they'll prompt the user and be done with it in less than a minute.
MS could start shipping in a mode that forbids anything but UWP by default, under some claim of improving the security of the platform.
That would actually be true. UWP supports much more granular permissions than plain Win32.
But they won't do it because everyone will turn it off. If UWP becomes a major player in the next decade or so, I might expect it.
you really have to let Google distribute it for you or else miss out on the market.
It is fairly simple to sync music and photos. It could be equally easy to sync Android apps onto a phone or tablet, but Google doesn't benefit from that.
You missed a few important things.
The "universal" part doesn't matter, MS's phones and tablets are in their final dying moments so there's no need to make something that runs both on real Windows and Windows RT/Phone.
Universal apps run on the XBox One.
At this point Win32/64 programs run better and have less limitations
Unfortunately, they require porting to/from Microsoft's console. That will no longer be the case, and the XBox is setting up to be a flexible TV media device.
So it is a meaningless limitation for now. Programs using an API nobody uses won't work with Steam.
Being able to run the same code on XBox and Windows will be appealing, although AAA titles will always need access to a high-performance video API. Oh wait, UWP supports DirectX 11 and 12.
If Microsoft gets UWP working to the point where most XBox games use it, no one is going to port to Win32.
This is a doomsday prediction, and like most doomsday predictions it is based on what the predictor feels to be true, not actual evidence.
Not all doomsday predictions are equal.
End-of-the-world predictions require some powerful yet unknown phenomenon to occur.
This scenario only requires a single bad actor to successfully manipulate its own platform. And there is a history of success there.
Obviously, there can be no evidence unless internal Microsoft documents are leaked, but the scenario is credible based on known capabilities and past behavior.
Your question is vague, and what it implies is wrong.
Try opening the Disk Management tool on Windows without admin rights and see what happens. With default settings, it will not even load. If you tinker with it you might be able to open it, but you still can't make any changes.
Open up the time applet from the clock in the system tray. See the little shield on the "Change date and time..." button? That means it requires elevated privileges. If you're not an admin, you will be prompted for admin credentials.
Poorly-designed applications like Steam can work around this by running the UI in user mode while interacting with a privileged service in the background. Setting up the service requires admin rights, but you provide those during the initial Steam installation. After that, it only needs admin approval to update that particular service.
Got a Radeon 5000/6000 or older gen APU?... Your drivers are "legacy".
This is true for Windows too. The Radeon 6000 series is over 5 years old, which is positively ancient from a gaming perspective. The 5000 series is closer to 7 years.
Modern games require functionality that these cards simply do not have. This has been a part of PC gaming for a while---either get used to it or get off the bus.
Since Linux is receiving roughly the same duration of primary support, I don't see where the room for complaint is.
A video adapter should function for 5-10 years, true, but a gaming card has a useful life of 3-5 years at most.
Claims construction, research into case law, deposition, discovery/disclosure, and review of testimony and evidence all take place outside of the courtroom.
All of those tasks are performed and reviewed by peers prior to court appearance.
The actual court appearance is a miniscule fraction of the total billable hours for complex legal matters.
They offered the unlimited plans when 3G phones were the norm. Those plans have been unavailable for a long time.
The 100 GB plan costs 5x what the old unlimited plan was. Mostly because of 4G and the prevalence of smartphones and streaming apps.
They *are* two-way.
Obviously. All contracts are two-way, or else it's not legally a contract.
You're missing a little detail though. Both parties must get something out of the contract, but they may have completely different obligations.
They agreed to sell you unlimited bandwidth, if they don't you can sue them in court.
Since unlimited plans haven't been available for years now, everyone on an unlimited plan is grandfathered.
Verizon is not legally obligated to continue offering the same plan after the contract expires.
People have taken cell phone companies to small-claims court for violating these contracts and have won continuation of their service.
That can happen during the original contract term.
Once the contract expires, Verizon does not have to offer the same terms anymore.
The people on unlimited plans can either put up with it or leave Verizon. They have no legal recourse.