Nope, they already excluded out many simple factors like that. Heat, light, position, etc. But I don't know if they ever came up with a definitive conclusion.
It is reported that the "radiation-damaged" plants had laptops placed quite close to them, while the others had not. Most laptops create quite a bit of heat. I don't know about other models, but any MacBook would create a zone of warm air in the area just behind it, which would remove the water in the earth around the plants more quickly.
It's worse than that. They're using the word "random" to describe the behavior of a digitally based, computationally deterministic system. One. Zero. Off. On. Yes. No. This is all a computer understands. It cannot be "random" in any meaningful sense.
In the 68020 processor manual, it says that determining the exact execution time of an instruction is very difficult, even if you know all the details of the processor implementation. That was 20 years ago. Today, precise timing is basically unpredictable. Then you have multi-threading, where the order of operations is basically unpredictable. Then your code is waiting for external events that are totally unpredictable. Anything that has anything to do with timing is essentially random.
Speaking as a parent, a pamphlet called "Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wi-Fi in Schools" implies that there were schools with *UNSAFE* WiFi.
If WiFi can be unsafe, I don't want it in my school. My snowflake deserves a cancer-free life.
So if I sent you a pamphlet "Guidelines for the Safe Use of Food and Drink", you would let your snowflake die of hunger and thirst?
I know some authors protest that seven years is too long, and the majority of income is made in the first three years and after five it would be advantageous to have the works available in the public domain (but the publishers don't want the competition from previously released works), but I think that varies from author to author, so doing a compromise of seven seems reasonable - we can experiment with shortening it further after having seen what happen when we cut it to seven.
I've never heard of _any_ author protesting that any length of copyright for their own work is too long. Dune didn't take off at all in the first five years. And I'd like to see the argument why something that I write being in the public domain would be beneficial for society, with the exception of works that are being neglected and therefore neither available for free nor available for money.
Obviously, if you don't want the NSA to read your data, make sure they can't read them. Make sure your data is not stored outside your control by someone who could at least in theory read it (like Lavabit). Make sure the data is not stored in the USA at all if you can avoid it.
Of course they have legal redress. Well, maybe not totally legal, but accepted in the current environment. You tell the customer to pay what you think they owe, even though they have the product. If they don't pay, you can file with the local courts, which cost money, or stick it on their credit report. It may be dirty, but not illegal. They'll get a world of bad press from it though.
The company most definitely has no right to get more money. Depending on the country and it's laws and what exactly happened, they may be able to void the contract and take the goods back, but the buyer never, ever, entered a contract to buy goods at a higher price and therefore never, ever can be forced to pay a higher price.
"Customer satisfaction" is a core principle of capitalism, although many capitalists (to their own disadvantage) still refuse to understand that fact.
That's nonsense. It's not a core principle of capitalism. It is _often_ a good strategy, but not always. And there are people whom a company cannot satisfy while still making money; those people should just be avoided as customers.
However, is this just Texas? I always thought these were FTC rules, but I'm not sure it really is or how it is enforced. Most retailers are cooperative. If they forgot to take signage down, didn't switch out their price tags, or stocked something on the wrong shelf without identifying the product the price applies to, I've always gotten the deal they didn't mean to offer.
It will all depend on the country, and on the situation. In the UK, the company makes an offer, you accept the offer by ordering, the company finalises the contract by delivering. They cannot be forced to deliver, except that knowingly offering lower than they wish to sell is misleading the customer and has consequences.
Now if the item is delivered, they can say this was al a mistake. They might say they want the item back, in which case it is up to the company to get it back, and if you unpacked it, or in the case of consumables if you consumed some, that's just tough for the company. You don't have to help them get the items back, and you'd never be obliged in any way to pay more than you ordered for. You _can_ claim that there was no mistake and refuse to let go of the item and things would then go to court.
In practice, what they and you would do would depend on the amount of error. If the item usually is sold for £500, and you paid £400, I wouldn't bother trying to get it back. If you paid £50, I'd probably try to get it back and a court would probably believe that it was a mistake.
If you entice a customer with low prices, and then rescind those prices after the sale, it feels basically the same as a bait-and-switch fraud.
In the UK, it is quite clear: The customer has no right to get a deal that is offered. However, if an item is intentionally displayed at a lower price than it is sold at, that would be something that Trading Standards would be interested in. So if you see it offered cheap, they refuse to sell it, and then don't change the displayed price as soon as possible, then the store is in trouble.
1. There should be a "cache flush" command. If that doesn't work properly then a database _will_ eventually get corrupted. I assume "cache flush" means all writes before the cache flush are performed before any writes after the cache flush.
2. There is a test program available. If it runs too fast, then you can be sure that "cache flush" doesn't work correctly.
3. You should run the test program and pull the plug in the middle of the test, then check the data. Do it repeatedly. Failure means your drives are not safe. Success doesn't mean you are guaranteed to be safe.
What this doesn't quite say is what exactly happens between two cache flushes. Seems obvious that any number of writes may have executed or not. Not sure at which level you can have writes that made a block unreadable, or damaged a block, or produced a block that doesn't contain either old or new data.
And? I never understood why this so called "IP" deserves to be treated differently than regular property. Does Ford get a cut of every used Ford ever sold? Does Joe the carpenter get a cut every time a house he built changes hands for decades?
Let me explain. If you write for example a book, there are in theory two ways to get paid for your work: A. Find someone who is willing to buy the book, copyright and everything, and pay you a fair value for the work. You are not going to see a penny after that. Or you get a little bit of money from everyone who buys it, forever. It's a different business model. Not one sale for big money, but many sales each giving you a tiny amount.
But look at it in a different way: Either you want a book, or a video, or a music performance, or you don't. If you don't want it, you shouldn't care whether it's for sale or free. And if you want it, then surely you should agree that it is _worth_ paying for. You can't seriously argue that you want it but it's not worth money.
HDDs, even the cheapest ones nowadays, allow the software to enforce the order in which pending data is written to safe permanent storage and software to known that pending data has indeed been safely committed to permanent storage.
Basically, adding up every OSX install since Tiger (April 2005) that are in use, you still end up quite short of the Windows 8/8.1 installs (about 14 months into availability). OSX continues to be a niche player in the desktop OS market, with Windows commanding ~88% of the entire market.
"OSX" is an operating system, not a "player in the desktop OS market". Apple on the other hand _could_ be a "player in the desktop OS market" (except there is no such market, only a "desktop and laptop OS market"), but chooses not to play. Apple only ships an OS together with its computers to support it's hardware sales. You can't buy MacOS X except as an upgrade of a previous version of MacOS X on an Apple computer. And the latest version isn't even sold anymore, you get it for free.
Conclusion: Microsoft outsells Apple in a market where Apple doesn't even try to compete. Just like Apple massively outsells Microsoft in the desktop and laptop computer market, where Microsoft doesn't even try to compete. On the other hand, Apple also beats Microsoft in several other markets where Microsoft does try very hard to compete.
Who cares? My eBooks are all in EPUB [wikipedia.org] format, and if for some bizarre reason no "eBook reader device" in 10 years supports this open format, the actual text of the book is nothing more than HTML and CSS.
ePub 2 seems to be not much more than xhtml (a bit of table of contents, title picture, but nothing hard). Writing your own ePub reader say for MacOS X isn't very hard. ePub 3 seems a lot harder, but then you can do things with it that go way beyond ePub 2.
Don't confuse the issue. The problem is that Apple believes it's illegal to root your own device. The italicized portion is the important part. It is perfectly legal to exploit a root vulnerability on hardware you own. Exploiting software on your own devices is often used in penetration testing, among other things.
Apple doesn't believe that. Apple definitely doesn't _like_ that you can root your own devices, and possibly believes it _should_ be illegal, but doesn't believe it _is_ illegal. Otherwise a jailbroken iPhone would just stop working.
Two things I don't see mentioned: 1. Nobody except Apple or the legitimate ownere can currently read data on a locked + not jailbroken device (except that you can try ten different passcodes for a one in thousand chance to get in) (and Apple needs the phone and a court order to do so, and even then a random ten digit passcode is unbreakable). That changes with a jailbreak. 2. If you worked for the NSA and had a ten million dollar budget to break into many iPhones, how would you do that? Waiting for a jailbreak and making the jailbreakers an offer that they can't or won't refuse seems an excellent plan to me.
The last one seems remarkable to me. There is so much paranoia about Microsoft, Google, Apple co-operating with the NSA, when this is clearly against their business objectives, but nobody thinks that a handful of jailbreakers couldn't be swayed by the choice between a few million dollars and jail time? (Jail time would probably be illegal, but to the paranoid mind definitely a possibility).
They aren't going to. 17" macbook didn't sell well. There isn't the demand.
17" MacBook was a product that everybody wanted, but nobody actually bought. When it was cancelled, it took Apple in the UK almost a year to sell the remaining units as "refurbished" at a hugely reduced price.
Apple's success is in marketing, and they deilberately market their products to the most vulnerable, least technically-informed demographic so that they can use Foxconn boards and other low-end hardware without their customers realizing the extent of the ripoff.
Now compare to Samsung, which spends three times as much on marketing, and just recently has been found cheating on benchmarks, banned frrom some benchmark publications, and fined for paying people to write fake bad reviews of competitor products.
To replace the gpus in a Mac Pro, buy a new one with the requisite gpus & sell the old one. Macs have resale value PC owners don't even dream of & time machine + external storage makes moving data trivial.
It's not only the MacPro. Most Macs, as well as other Apple products, are absolutely easy and efficient to upgrade even for the most technically challenged person by making eBay part of the upgrade operation.
Fuck the British government of Christmas past for what they did to him. Here you have a genius, a war hero, one of the greatest people of the twentieth century, and your fucking idiocy runs him straight into the ground. Fuck you forever.
He was convicted for something that was a crime when he was convicted. The judge didn't know that he was a war hero, and nobody who knew could tell him because it was top secret at the time. What you are complaining about, nobody knew about that until it was thirty years too late to do anything about it.
Now some questions: If something becomes illegal after you do it, should you be convicted retroactively? And if something becomes legal after you do it, should you be "unconvicted" retroactively? And consider that things change all the time; what you do today might be a crime in twenty years time. For example, it's not unthinkable that you would get convicted for assault for smoking in a pub in twenty years time. And that everyone talking about it would say that you fully deserve it.
The other: If you are a war hero and commit a crime, should you be convicted, or should the law not be applied because you are a war hero? Is that answer simply yes or no, or is it "depends on what kind of war hero and what kind of crime"? In that case, does it apply to war heroes only? Or to football heroes? Or entertainment heroes?
Apple desperately needs to stay relevant with its continues to drop behind in market share worldwide, and is soon to retain relevant only in the relatively small market of the US (UK and Japan maybe) where the high subscription masks the overpriced midrange iPhone. China Mobile does not have high subscription rates
Apple's share of the phone market has grown year after year after year without fail. There is a sub-market called smartphones, that's different.
on a 1080p, 15 inches monitor you can see the fonts aliasing from a viewing distance of 76cm? superman, is that you?
Just saying: I have both a MacBook and a Retina MacBook, and while I cannot see _what_ the difference is from normal distance, I know that the Retina display is better for my eyes over many hours. It is definitely easier to read. It's like 128 KBit and 256 KBit compressed music: The 256 KBit _does_ sound better, even though many or even most people cannot consciously hear what the difference is.
The real problem is that the OSes are terrible at rescaling to take advantage of the increased ppi. OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
What parts of the OS look bad? And what parts of apps that have been written in the last two years? "Bitmap based" doesn't matter if the bitmap is a 1,024 x 1,024 pixel icon.
Slashdot Mirror
Does it include APIs for the NSA backdoors?
Bloody idiot.
Nope, they already excluded out many simple factors like that. Heat, light, position, etc. But I don't know if they ever came up with a definitive conclusion.
It is reported that the "radiation-damaged" plants had laptops placed quite close to them, while the others had not. Most laptops create quite a bit of heat. I don't know about other models, but any MacBook would create a zone of warm air in the area just behind it, which would remove the water in the earth around the plants more quickly.
It's worse than that. They're using the word "random" to describe the behavior of a digitally based, computationally deterministic system. One. Zero. Off. On. Yes. No. This is all a computer understands. It cannot be "random" in any meaningful sense.
In the 68020 processor manual, it says that determining the exact execution time of an instruction is very difficult, even if you know all the details of the processor implementation. That was 20 years ago. Today, precise timing is basically unpredictable. Then you have multi-threading, where the order of operations is basically unpredictable. Then your code is waiting for external events that are totally unpredictable. Anything that has anything to do with timing is essentially random.
We absolutely test all boundary conditions, on both sides. This is standard practice where I work, for just that reason.
How do your testers about those boundary conditions? And how do they know about all of them? And how do they know that they know about all of them?
Speaking as a parent, a pamphlet called "Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wi-Fi in Schools" implies that there were schools with *UNSAFE* WiFi.
If WiFi can be unsafe, I don't want it in my school. My snowflake deserves a cancer-free life.
So if I sent you a pamphlet "Guidelines for the Safe Use of Food and Drink", you would let your snowflake die of hunger and thirst?
I know some authors protest that seven years is too long, and the majority of income is made in the first three years and after five it would be advantageous to have the works available in the public domain (but the publishers don't want the competition from previously released works), but I think that varies from author to author, so doing a compromise of seven seems reasonable - we can experiment with shortening it further after having seen what happen when we cut it to seven.
I've never heard of _any_ author protesting that any length of copyright for their own work is too long. Dune didn't take off at all in the first five years. And I'd like to see the argument why something that I write being in the public domain would be beneficial for society, with the exception of works that are being neglected and therefore neither available for free nor available for money.
Obviously, if you don't want the NSA to read your data, make sure they can't read them. Make sure your data is not stored outside your control by someone who could at least in theory read it (like Lavabit). Make sure the data is not stored in the USA at all if you can avoid it.
Of course they have legal redress. Well, maybe not totally legal, but accepted in the current environment. You tell the customer to pay what you think they owe, even though they have the product. If they don't pay, you can file with the local courts, which cost money, or stick it on their credit report. It may be dirty, but not illegal. They'll get a world of bad press from it though.
The company most definitely has no right to get more money. Depending on the country and it's laws and what exactly happened, they may be able to void the contract and take the goods back, but the buyer never, ever, entered a contract to buy goods at a higher price and therefore never, ever can be forced to pay a higher price.
"Customer satisfaction" is a core principle of capitalism, although many capitalists (to their own disadvantage) still refuse to understand that fact.
That's nonsense. It's not a core principle of capitalism. It is _often_ a good strategy, but not always. And there are people whom a company cannot satisfy while still making money; those people should just be avoided as customers.
However, is this just Texas? I always thought these were FTC rules, but I'm not sure it really is or how it is enforced. Most retailers are cooperative. If they forgot to take signage down, didn't switch out their price tags, or stocked something on the wrong shelf without identifying the product the price applies to, I've always gotten the deal they didn't mean to offer.
It will all depend on the country, and on the situation. In the UK, the company makes an offer, you accept the offer by ordering, the company finalises the contract by delivering. They cannot be forced to deliver, except that knowingly offering lower than they wish to sell is misleading the customer and has consequences.
Now if the item is delivered, they can say this was al a mistake. They might say they want the item back, in which case it is up to the company to get it back, and if you unpacked it, or in the case of consumables if you consumed some, that's just tough for the company. You don't have to help them get the items back, and you'd never be obliged in any way to pay more than you ordered for. You _can_ claim that there was no mistake and refuse to let go of the item and things would then go to court.
In practice, what they and you would do would depend on the amount of error. If the item usually is sold for £500, and you paid £400, I wouldn't bother trying to get it back. If you paid £50, I'd probably try to get it back and a court would probably believe that it was a mistake.
If you entice a customer with low prices, and then rescind those prices after the sale, it feels basically the same as a bait-and-switch fraud.
In the UK, it is quite clear: The customer has no right to get a deal that is offered. However, if an item is intentionally displayed at a lower price than it is sold at, that would be something that Trading Standards would be interested in. So if you see it offered cheap, they refuse to sell it, and then don't change the displayed price as soon as possible, then the store is in trouble.
Nice information. Summary:
1. There should be a "cache flush" command. If that doesn't work properly then a database _will_ eventually get corrupted. I assume "cache flush" means all writes before the cache flush are performed before any writes after the cache flush.
2. There is a test program available. If it runs too fast, then you can be sure that "cache flush" doesn't work correctly.
3. You should run the test program and pull the plug in the middle of the test, then check the data. Do it repeatedly. Failure means your drives are not safe. Success doesn't mean you are guaranteed to be safe.
What this doesn't quite say is what exactly happens between two cache flushes. Seems obvious that any number of writes may have executed or not. Not sure at which level you can have writes that made a block unreadable, or damaged a block, or produced a block that doesn't contain either old or new data.
And? I never understood why this so called "IP" deserves to be treated differently than regular property. Does Ford get a cut of every used Ford ever sold? Does Joe the carpenter get a cut every time a house he built changes hands for decades?
Let me explain. If you write for example a book, there are in theory two ways to get paid for your work: A. Find someone who is willing to buy the book, copyright and everything, and pay you a fair value for the work. You are not going to see a penny after that. Or you get a little bit of money from everyone who buys it, forever. It's a different business model. Not one sale for big money, but many sales each giving you a tiny amount.
But look at it in a different way: Either you want a book, or a video, or a music performance, or you don't. If you don't want it, you shouldn't care whether it's for sale or free. And if you want it, then surely you should agree that it is _worth_ paying for. You can't seriously argue that you want it but it's not worth money.
HDDs, even the cheapest ones nowadays, allow the software to enforce the order in which pending data is written to safe permanent storage and software to known that pending data has indeed been safely committed to permanent storage.
Any sources where this is reliably documented?
Basically, adding up every OSX install since Tiger (April 2005) that are in use, you still end up quite short of the Windows 8/8.1 installs (about 14 months into availability). OSX continues to be a niche player in the desktop OS market, with Windows commanding ~88% of the entire market.
"OSX" is an operating system, not a "player in the desktop OS market". Apple on the other hand _could_ be a "player in the desktop OS market" (except there is no such market, only a "desktop and laptop OS market"), but chooses not to play. Apple only ships an OS together with its computers to support it's hardware sales. You can't buy MacOS X except as an upgrade of a previous version of MacOS X on an Apple computer. And the latest version isn't even sold anymore, you get it for free.
Conclusion: Microsoft outsells Apple in a market where Apple doesn't even try to compete. Just like Apple massively outsells Microsoft in the desktop and laptop computer market, where Microsoft doesn't even try to compete. On the other hand, Apple also beats Microsoft in several other markets where Microsoft does try very hard to compete.
Who cares? My eBooks are all in EPUB [wikipedia.org] format, and if for some bizarre reason no "eBook reader device" in 10 years supports this open format, the actual text of the book is nothing more than HTML and CSS.
ePub 2 seems to be not much more than xhtml (a bit of table of contents, title picture, but nothing hard). Writing your own ePub reader say for MacOS X isn't very hard. ePub 3 seems a lot harder, but then you can do things with it that go way beyond ePub 2.
Don't confuse the issue. The problem is that Apple believes it's illegal to root your own device. The italicized portion is the important part. It is perfectly legal to exploit a root vulnerability on hardware you own. Exploiting software on your own devices is often used in penetration testing, among other things.
Apple doesn't believe that. Apple definitely doesn't _like_ that you can root your own devices, and possibly believes it _should_ be illegal, but doesn't believe it _is_ illegal. Otherwise a jailbroken iPhone would just stop working.
Two things I don't see mentioned: 1. Nobody except Apple or the legitimate ownere can currently read data on a locked + not jailbroken device (except that you can try ten different passcodes for a one in thousand chance to get in) (and Apple needs the phone and a court order to do so, and even then a random ten digit passcode is unbreakable). That changes with a jailbreak. 2. If you worked for the NSA and had a ten million dollar budget to break into many iPhones, how would you do that? Waiting for a jailbreak and making the jailbreakers an offer that they can't or won't refuse seems an excellent plan to me.
The last one seems remarkable to me. There is so much paranoia about Microsoft, Google, Apple co-operating with the NSA, when this is clearly against their business objectives, but nobody thinks that a handful of jailbreakers couldn't be swayed by the choice between a few million dollars and jail time? (Jail time would probably be illegal, but to the paranoid mind definitely a possibility).
They aren't going to. 17" macbook didn't sell well. There isn't the demand.
17" MacBook was a product that everybody wanted, but nobody actually bought. When it was cancelled, it took Apple in the UK almost a year to sell the remaining units as "refurbished" at a hugely reduced price.
Apple's success is in marketing, and they deilberately market their products to the most vulnerable, least technically-informed demographic so that they can use Foxconn boards and other low-end hardware without their customers realizing the extent of the ripoff.
Now compare to Samsung, which spends three times as much on marketing, and just recently has been found cheating on benchmarks, banned frrom some benchmark publications, and fined for paying people to write fake bad reviews of competitor products.
To replace the gpus in a Mac Pro, buy a new one with the requisite gpus & sell the old one. Macs have resale value PC owners don't even dream of & time machine + external storage makes moving data trivial.
It's not only the MacPro. Most Macs, as well as other Apple products, are absolutely easy and efficient to upgrade even for the most technically challenged person by making eBay part of the upgrade operation.
Six times Thunderbolt. You can buy a 32TB Thunderbolt RAID drive off the shelf; six of them are 192TB.
Fuck the British government of Christmas past for what they did to him. Here you have a genius, a war hero, one of the greatest people of the twentieth century, and your fucking idiocy runs him straight into the ground. Fuck you forever.
He was convicted for something that was a crime when he was convicted. The judge didn't know that he was a war hero, and nobody who knew could tell him because it was top secret at the time. What you are complaining about, nobody knew about that until it was thirty years too late to do anything about it.
Now some questions: If something becomes illegal after you do it, should you be convicted retroactively? And if something becomes legal after you do it, should you be "unconvicted" retroactively? And consider that things change all the time; what you do today might be a crime in twenty years time. For example, it's not unthinkable that you would get convicted for assault for smoking in a pub in twenty years time. And that everyone talking about it would say that you fully deserve it.
The other: If you are a war hero and commit a crime, should you be convicted, or should the law not be applied because you are a war hero? Is that answer simply yes or no, or is it "depends on what kind of war hero and what kind of crime"? In that case, does it apply to war heroes only? Or to football heroes? Or entertainment heroes?
Apple desperately needs to stay relevant with its continues to drop behind in market share worldwide, and is soon to retain relevant only in the relatively small market of the US (UK and Japan maybe) where the high subscription masks the overpriced midrange iPhone. China Mobile does not have high subscription rates
Apple's share of the phone market has grown year after year after year without fail. There is a sub-market called smartphones, that's different.
on a 1080p, 15 inches monitor you can see the fonts aliasing from a viewing distance of 76cm? superman, is that you?
Just saying: I have both a MacBook and a Retina MacBook, and while I cannot see _what_ the difference is from normal distance, I know that the Retina display is better for my eyes over many hours. It is definitely easier to read. It's like 128 KBit and 256 KBit compressed music: The 256 KBit _does_ sound better, even though many or even most people cannot consciously hear what the difference is.
The real problem is that the OSes are terrible at rescaling to take advantage of the increased ppi. OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
What parts of the OS look bad? And what parts of apps that have been written in the last two years? "Bitmap based" doesn't matter if the bitmap is a 1,024 x 1,024 pixel icon.