Did you even glance at the tech? This replaces your existing credit cards - it's not more crap to carry around. In theory, it can even reduce the number of cards you have to carry, since it can combine (at least) two cards into a single physical device of the same size and functionality.
It's not tied into your cell phone (something that, believe it or not, not everyone with a credit card has) because no POS terminals in the country allow you to pay with your cell phone, where all of them allow you to swipe a credit card. Replacing the nation's payment infrastructure isn't going to happen, and adding more stuff to it would require a MASSIVE benefit to both consumers and sellers - such as a great rewards program AND a 90% price drop in processing fees. I also trust a minimum-wage clerk to not break a credit card a lot more than I trust him to not break my phone (the chance of it being misused/mischarged is the same, and is thus irrelevant), and the company behind this tech claims their replacement is just as durable as a normal credit card.
It probably is. Granted I'm usually in WiFi range, but my iPhone data usage tends to come in under 300mb/month and I use it for quite a bit of browsing and such. I wouldn't consider myself a heavy user, but my bandwidth usage always comes in lower than I expect for how frequently I'm using the thing.
Then again, the walmart crowd probably wastes a ton of time on youtube and other low-value, high-bandwidth stuff.
I took cash (or prepaid meal tickets) to elementary school - I wasn't five, but maybe seven or eight during the period when I wasn't bringing a lunch from home. Plenty of other students my age did the same. It's really not that complicated. Of course a few years later they switched to some bar-coded cards instead, but those were really just makeshift prepaid cards, not some sort of crazy tracking system. Adding a PIN to something like that just makes it a little harder to use other kids' cards (it's not like the minimum wage lunch ladies would give a damn).
Anyway, it's not like the school would gain anything from knowing who's eating what. And if that kind of thing bothers you, I'd suggest you only ever use cash for purchases.
Hardware can certainly be the correct answer to the problem. Are you disk-bound? Then you need faster disks. Can't fix that in software. Saturating your pipe? You need more bandwidth.
Yes, you can do things to try and cut back on your use of those resources, but that's ultimately going to produce much less effective results unless you're at massive scale (read: you have your own datacenter) where a 1% performance gain frees up the equivalent of several hundred servers.
Hardware is also a good way to buy yourself a bit more time while you're working on fixing the real bottleneck, such as reworking an expensive database query. Sometimes you just need a couple extra weeks.
Don't read this post as advice to write bad software and only focus on vertical scaling, as that's not what I'm saying at all. But solutions that take you from 1-10k users are very different than going from 10k-1m users, and different still from 1m-10m. Trying to code for 10m when you don't have any users a) is a waste of time, b) is expensive (they rely on the assumption that you have lots of hardware anyways), c) won't work at all, and d) won't help you get users. Don't do dumb things, but users don't give a damn how well your software can scale if it sucks, and if they think it sucks you'll never find out how well it scales.
As a web app developer, I welcome IE9 with open arms. I'm certainly not going to be switching to it for personal use, but it promises to at least catch IE up with the browsers of three years ago.
Perfect? Not even close. Acceptable? Sure. Any time I spend fighting with it will be over minor CSS3 graphical enhancements, not basic rendering. And yes, I'd prefer if MS just bit the bullet and switched to an open rendering platform like Webkit, but if IE9 ends up living up to the claims, it's as good as I can hope for.
Fined? Violation of AML laws can result in arrest, with some pretty severe punishments. Same with failure to follow the Know-Your-Customer guidelines. Anti-terrorism, and all that.
As a heads-up, I just tried this and ended up having to return the system. There appears to be some bug with their HDMI which can cause the machine to kernel panic, apparently when powering on either the display or receiver it's plugged into*. A damn shame, as it's otherwise very well suited to that kind of use. A compact, quiet, and fairly cool system that doesn't use a whole lot of power but still has no problem playing back HD video. Hooking the tower back up to the TV just sucks, as it uses about 50x the energy** and is massively overkill for that kind of use, and is certainly not compact by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe I'll dig out an old unused laptop instead.
* I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it was as close as I ever got to diagnosing the issue. And this was after exchanging the system for a full replacement. If only only happened to one machine I'd blame the hardware, but two systems with identical problems tells me something else is at play. Of course, it could be specific to my TV+receiver combo too.
**Which only bothers me because of the power bill. Effing hippies.
The idea is to get you to click "buy" after visiting the page. From my (limited) understanding, the seller is supposed to somehow communicate to the advertiser that the ad is no longer relevant to the user (signed up for the service, bought the product, etc), but that step in the process is rather flaky.
Is there any reason that a store should be forbidden from using the information it knows about you to make targeted advertisements? If so, why?
Generally speaking, cookies contain no personally identifying information. The most you're likely to get is an IP address, which gives you location with thirty miles or so. And the "victims" here have previously shown interest in a certain product or service (or have at least visited the page, which is as close to sure as you can get). If example.com gets a visit from a user at 10.0.0.1, is it harmful or in violation of anyone's privacy to have their advertisers push their services more heavily when requests are made from 10.0.0.1?
Granted, I'm not sure if that's how it actually works, but I'm confident it's along those lines. Why is this any worse than, for example, PC hardware companies advertising in magazines that have a readership of 18-30 males with disposable income? It's a bit more specific, but ultimately it's not giving away your name, address, or any other actual personal information (and if that is happening, then by all means, put a stop to it - because that I do feel is unquestionably a violation of your privacy)
Maybe it's more a matter of my usage patterns, but I'd say that my iPhone functions far better as a gaming device than as an actual phone. I don't have huge dropped call issues (but I'm rarely talking on the phone), but I'll use my iPhone to kill a bit of time very often throughout the day.
The original iPhone was definitely not a device designed for gaming, though it became quite capable at doing so with the second version of the OS which allowed third-party software. As noted above, the hardware improvements to the last two generations are clearly pushing that side of its capabilities. Or I should at least say that of all the apps I have that DO take advantage of the new tech in the latest devices, most of them are games. Somewhat more importantly, it's the only device I own that I ALWAYS have on me, which would not be the case for a PSP or Nintendo's latest handheld if I owned either of those.
It's certainly not a dedicated gaming console like Sony or Nintendo's offerings, but it's extremely capable. Having said that, I wouldn't say no to a hardware d-pad addon for more traditional games.
While I generally agree, it's not a technical issue - it's a matter of optimizing the air time to when the market is available to consume the programming. But between DVRs and Hulu (etc), that's also quickly becoming irrelevant.
This is worse than the Denon cables. At least with those things, you're streaming data across the line so cutting back on interference and lowering the rate at which you need to error correct is theoretically helpful*. With a hard drive cable and an MP3, the whole thing is read at once and stuck in memory, and either you read the file correctly or you didn't. It's not like your audio playback software is streaming the file off the drive at 256kbps.
And of course in either case, you'd get a playback glitch (skipping, etc), not altered quality.
* Yes, I know that the cables are still complete bullshit.
I wouldn't recommend stripping out the authentication layer either, I merely said it's been done. That being said, if your app can suffer from SQL injection, you've got bigger problems. If your app is to the point of needing to strip out DB authentication for some extra performance (and if it is, you should probably be taking a different approach... such as memcache, the point of this whole discussion), you damn well better have all sorts of tests in place to make sure that you don't introduce problems that severe.
Memcache's one purpose in life is to be as fast as possible. It makes perfect sense for it to drop the overhead of authentication and leave it on the server operator's head to not make it publicly accessible. It's not rare to strip out MySQL's authentication layer (and presumably the same for other DBs) for a speedup when your DB server is sitting behind a firewall.
While your claim is completely true as far as legality goes, there are plenty of incidents that show the system works very differently in practice. Then again, when the government is being charged with the crime and following the letter of the law says innocent, you bet they will be. Double-standards, and all that.
Yes and no. There are limitations to how quickly and accurately the physical IS systems can work. Overall they're fantastic and well worth the premium if you're a serious shooter, but this could provide a much cheaper alternative that could be nearly as effective. Also, provided you have sufficiently accurate accelerometer data, you could reprocess the RAWs as deblurring algorithms improve for better results (check out the difference in noise reduction in the latest version of Adobe Camera RAW). This could also be really effective to fine-tune the IS done in-lens.
I imagine that if this tech does make it into higher-end cameras (namely SLRs), the accelerometer data will in fact be saved as extra data in the RAW file. In fact due to the nature of RAW files, I think it would have to be done that way. Naturally if you're shooting jpegs (phones, P&S, foolish SLR users), then you just take what you get and that's it. It will probably just become another part of RAW "development" for higher-end shooters.
Ultimately, the concept isn't very different than the image stabilization we already have. It's just cheaper to implement and probably somewhat less effective. Instead of moving the lens elements or sensor to counteract shaky hands and record a clean image in the first place, this just says how you moved and runs some smart algorithms to try undoing the damage you caused.
Huh? Canvas is canvas. Hardware-accelerated canvas is just faster and smoother to interact with. As a web developer I'm all for hating on IE, but Microsoft has made IE8 fully tolerable and it's looking like IE9 might actually be on the same level of other modern browsers.
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Well, there's also the case when you live below sea level.
Well there's your problem.
They can already do that with a $200 mag-stripe programmer. The hard part is getting the data to clone (which is not just the card number).
Did you even glance at the tech? This replaces your existing credit cards - it's not more crap to carry around. In theory, it can even reduce the number of cards you have to carry, since it can combine (at least) two cards into a single physical device of the same size and functionality.
It's not tied into your cell phone (something that, believe it or not, not everyone with a credit card has) because no POS terminals in the country allow you to pay with your cell phone, where all of them allow you to swipe a credit card. Replacing the nation's payment infrastructure isn't going to happen, and adding more stuff to it would require a MASSIVE benefit to both consumers and sellers - such as a great rewards program AND a 90% price drop in processing fees. I also trust a minimum-wage clerk to not break a credit card a lot more than I trust him to not break my phone (the chance of it being misused/mischarged is the same, and is thus irrelevant), and the company behind this tech claims their replacement is just as durable as a normal credit card.
How about IE performance? Too bad to even mention?
It probably is. Granted I'm usually in WiFi range, but my iPhone data usage tends to come in under 300mb/month and I use it for quite a bit of browsing and such. I wouldn't consider myself a heavy user, but my bandwidth usage always comes in lower than I expect for how frequently I'm using the thing.
Then again, the walmart crowd probably wastes a ton of time on youtube and other low-value, high-bandwidth stuff.
I took cash (or prepaid meal tickets) to elementary school - I wasn't five, but maybe seven or eight during the period when I wasn't bringing a lunch from home. Plenty of other students my age did the same. It's really not that complicated. Of course a few years later they switched to some bar-coded cards instead, but those were really just makeshift prepaid cards, not some sort of crazy tracking system. Adding a PIN to something like that just makes it a little harder to use other kids' cards (it's not like the minimum wage lunch ladies would give a damn).
Anyway, it's not like the school would gain anything from knowing who's eating what. And if that kind of thing bothers you, I'd suggest you only ever use cash for purchases.
Hardware can certainly be the correct answer to the problem. Are you disk-bound? Then you need faster disks. Can't fix that in software. Saturating your pipe? You need more bandwidth.
Yes, you can do things to try and cut back on your use of those resources, but that's ultimately going to produce much less effective results unless you're at massive scale (read: you have your own datacenter) where a 1% performance gain frees up the equivalent of several hundred servers.
Hardware is also a good way to buy yourself a bit more time while you're working on fixing the real bottleneck, such as reworking an expensive database query. Sometimes you just need a couple extra weeks.
Don't read this post as advice to write bad software and only focus on vertical scaling, as that's not what I'm saying at all. But solutions that take you from 1-10k users are very different than going from 10k-1m users, and different still from 1m-10m. Trying to code for 10m when you don't have any users a) is a waste of time, b) is expensive (they rely on the assumption that you have lots of hardware anyways), c) won't work at all, and d) won't help you get users. Don't do dumb things, but users don't give a damn how well your software can scale if it sucks, and if they think it sucks you'll never find out how well it scales.
As a web app developer, I welcome IE9 with open arms. I'm certainly not going to be switching to it for personal use, but it promises to at least catch IE up with the browsers of three years ago.
Perfect? Not even close. Acceptable? Sure. Any time I spend fighting with it will be over minor CSS3 graphical enhancements, not basic rendering. And yes, I'd prefer if MS just bit the bullet and switched to an open rendering platform like Webkit, but if IE9 ends up living up to the claims, it's as good as I can hope for.
Fined? Violation of AML laws can result in arrest, with some pretty severe punishments. Same with failure to follow the Know-Your-Customer guidelines. Anti-terrorism, and all that.
As a heads-up, I just tried this and ended up having to return the system. There appears to be some bug with their HDMI which can cause the machine to kernel panic, apparently when powering on either the display or receiver it's plugged into*. A damn shame, as it's otherwise very well suited to that kind of use. A compact, quiet, and fairly cool system that doesn't use a whole lot of power but still has no problem playing back HD video. Hooking the tower back up to the TV just sucks, as it uses about 50x the energy** and is massively overkill for that kind of use, and is certainly not compact by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe I'll dig out an old unused laptop instead.
* I'm not 100% sure that's the cause, but it was as close as I ever got to diagnosing the issue. And this was after exchanging the system for a full replacement. If only only happened to one machine I'd blame the hardware, but two systems with identical problems tells me something else is at play. Of course, it could be specific to my TV+receiver combo too.
**Which only bothers me because of the power bill. Effing hippies.
The idea is to get you to click "buy" after visiting the page. From my (limited) understanding, the seller is supposed to somehow communicate to the advertiser that the ad is no longer relevant to the user (signed up for the service, bought the product, etc), but that step in the process is rather flaky.
I'll go ahead and play devil's advocate here:
Is there any reason that a store should be forbidden from using the information it knows about you to make targeted advertisements? If so, why?
Generally speaking, cookies contain no personally identifying information. The most you're likely to get is an IP address, which gives you location with thirty miles or so. And the "victims" here have previously shown interest in a certain product or service (or have at least visited the page, which is as close to sure as you can get). If example.com gets a visit from a user at 10.0.0.1, is it harmful or in violation of anyone's privacy to have their advertisers push their services more heavily when requests are made from 10.0.0.1?
Granted, I'm not sure if that's how it actually works, but I'm confident it's along those lines. Why is this any worse than, for example, PC hardware companies advertising in magazines that have a readership of 18-30 males with disposable income? It's a bit more specific, but ultimately it's not giving away your name, address, or any other actual personal information (and if that is happening, then by all means, put a stop to it - because that I do feel is unquestionably a violation of your privacy)
Maybe it's more a matter of my usage patterns, but I'd say that my iPhone functions far better as a gaming device than as an actual phone. I don't have huge dropped call issues (but I'm rarely talking on the phone), but I'll use my iPhone to kill a bit of time very often throughout the day.
The original iPhone was definitely not a device designed for gaming, though it became quite capable at doing so with the second version of the OS which allowed third-party software. As noted above, the hardware improvements to the last two generations are clearly pushing that side of its capabilities. Or I should at least say that of all the apps I have that DO take advantage of the new tech in the latest devices, most of them are games. Somewhat more importantly, it's the only device I own that I ALWAYS have on me, which would not be the case for a PSP or Nintendo's latest handheld if I owned either of those.
It's certainly not a dedicated gaming console like Sony or Nintendo's offerings, but it's extremely capable. Having said that, I wouldn't say no to a hardware d-pad addon for more traditional games.
While I generally agree, it's not a technical issue - it's a matter of optimizing the air time to when the market is available to consume the programming. But between DVRs and Hulu (etc), that's also quickly becoming irrelevant.
It's easy for credit card processors to block prepaid cards. There's also several different types of them, so that's not necessarily relevant anyways.
This is worse than the Denon cables. At least with those things, you're streaming data across the line so cutting back on interference and lowering the rate at which you need to error correct is theoretically helpful*. With a hard drive cable and an MP3, the whole thing is read at once and stuck in memory, and either you read the file correctly or you didn't. It's not like your audio playback software is streaming the file off the drive at 256kbps.
And of course in either case, you'd get a playback glitch (skipping, etc), not altered quality.
* Yes, I know that the cables are still complete bullshit.
If your users aren't testing your code, then you don't have users.
Of course, they shouldn't be the first people to test your code...
So I can write 1 test that asserts 1 == 1 and I'm godlike? Awesome!
Sounds a bit more practical either on the road to achieving 100% code coverage, or once you already have a solid test suite in place.
2. If it's a position where you interface with the public, you create the appearance of wasteful/incompetent behavior.
Appearance? That implies that what you're doing doesn't actually qualify as such.
I wouldn't recommend stripping out the authentication layer either, I merely said it's been done. That being said, if your app can suffer from SQL injection, you've got bigger problems. If your app is to the point of needing to strip out DB authentication for some extra performance (and if it is, you should probably be taking a different approach... such as memcache, the point of this whole discussion), you damn well better have all sorts of tests in place to make sure that you don't introduce problems that severe.
Memcache's one purpose in life is to be as fast as possible. It makes perfect sense for it to drop the overhead of authentication and leave it on the server operator's head to not make it publicly accessible. It's not rare to strip out MySQL's authentication layer (and presumably the same for other DBs) for a speedup when your DB server is sitting behind a firewall.
While your claim is completely true as far as legality goes, there are plenty of incidents that show the system works very differently in practice. Then again, when the government is being charged with the crime and following the letter of the law says innocent, you bet they will be. Double-standards, and all that.
Yes and no. There are limitations to how quickly and accurately the physical IS systems can work. Overall they're fantastic and well worth the premium if you're a serious shooter, but this could provide a much cheaper alternative that could be nearly as effective. Also, provided you have sufficiently accurate accelerometer data, you could reprocess the RAWs as deblurring algorithms improve for better results (check out the difference in noise reduction in the latest version of Adobe Camera RAW). This could also be really effective to fine-tune the IS done in-lens.
I imagine that if this tech does make it into higher-end cameras (namely SLRs), the accelerometer data will in fact be saved as extra data in the RAW file. In fact due to the nature of RAW files, I think it would have to be done that way. Naturally if you're shooting jpegs (phones, P&S, foolish SLR users), then you just take what you get and that's it. It will probably just become another part of RAW "development" for higher-end shooters.
Ultimately, the concept isn't very different than the image stabilization we already have. It's just cheaper to implement and probably somewhat less effective. Instead of moving the lens elements or sensor to counteract shaky hands and record a clean image in the first place, this just says how you moved and runs some smart algorithms to try undoing the damage you caused.
Huh? Canvas is canvas. Hardware-accelerated canvas is just faster and smoother to interact with. As a web developer I'm all for hating on IE, but Microsoft has made IE8 fully tolerable and it's looking like IE9 might actually be on the same level of other modern browsers.