The quality of removable storage media, especially SD cards (and derivative formats) varies drastically. Apple likes to ensure a consistent ecosystem so that all users have as consistent an experience as possible.

Apple wants to avoid cases where users blame Apple for sluggish application performance, skipping music/video, bugs, etc... that are a result of something that Apple can't control or exert influence over.

It's not possible to do any of those.

1. The mechanism that this uses doesn't provide for deterministic results. At worst, rewriting the same row numerous times may result in some of the bits in spatially related rows being corrupted.

2. Address spaces are highly randomized and virtual to physical translation makes it incredibly difficult to obtain even an educated guess as to the layout.

This exploit just allows an attacker to possibly corrupt nearby data. It's a troll tool, nothing else.

Defamation law is substantially different in Canada compared to other common-law countries, especially the USA.

In Canada there is a substantial onus on the defendant to either justify the defamatory remarks (factual truth, fair comment, responsible reporting, etc...) or challenge the defamatory nature of the statement. Probable truth is not sufficient to justify defamation. This contrasts sharply with other common law jurisdictions that place the onus on the plaintiff to prove that the defamatory statement was factually false or malicious.

You're right, it's not a revolutionary step in security. Amplifying and cascading samples of thermal noise is good, but sampling radioactive decay is better. Presumably it would also shift additional security into the warhead itself rather than relying on an external and potentially fallible component.

You're not going to get any argument from me on whether or not these kinds of people exist, because they certainly do. I was just ranting.

Terminating employees often isn't free, nor is hiring new ones. Training existing employees to handle new tools is often the preferred method. I personally would be reluctant to hire someone in the first place if they know jQuery but not Javascript. That tells me that the individual may not be particularly interested in their profession, and may not take their job seriously. I'd be even more concerned if they show no interest in fundamentals.

Knowing what tool to use for a particular job is almost never a part of any job description. It is however a crucial skill to have when it comes to problem solving and failing to demonstrate it can make oneself look like an idiot. An individual that is only capable of performing the bare minimum and is not interested in doing anything else is not an individual that I would be intent on hiring. It's people like these that manage to make the most powerful microprocessor on the market feel like an 80386.

If someone doesn't know more than just JQuery they will be unable to cope when their code doesn't produce the desired result. If the project's requirements change in such a way that it can no longer be completed in baby's first development library, that "developer" then becomes a liability to his or her employer. Furthermore, even if it's all that he or she needs to know, he or she will be unable to assess situations in which JQuery is not used yet may be appropriate, or in which JQuery is used but would not be appropriate. It's an ignorant form of tunnel vision.

We'll end up with more brainless "web developers" who will be able to copy and paste code snippets in Javascript and Python without having any clue about how anything else actually works.

Indeed. Many of the web developers that I know are high-school dropouts.

OP is right though, discrete algorithmic problems are always a fun exercise to solve and implement in any programming language.

You're absolutely right. I'm not defending the company in the slightest. I'm just pointing out that the case at hand is not a clear case of a broken system and not "clear permission to employers to violate all labour standards". The company got caught and fined. The punative fine is not substantial and I'd love to know how they managed to argue it down so much but they won't be able to make the same argument if they get caught again.

It's not entirely unusual. Many regions have exemptions in their labour laws to deal with workers that are only in the jurisdiction temporarily, usually to perform short-term contract work.

Imagine if the roles were reversed. An American company sends a couple of technicians to India to fix some machinery and tries to pay them minimum wage in Indian Rupees rather than American Dollars.

It's obvious that there was some sort of abusive employer-employee relationship (eight employees working up to 122 hours a week for over three months and they only helped install computers? Yeah, sure), but what's not clear from the article is how these employees were retained by the company in question and whom was ultimately responsible for negotiating and paying their wages (it's not clear if it's the same employer, but I assume that it is).

While I'm sure that this particular instance is an example of straight up labour abuse, it's not always quite so simple.

Direct3D 10 is very different from Direct3D 9.

Direct3D 11 is a superset of Direct3D 10.

The compositor is the program that stitches the framebuffers for each element on the screen together into the final image. It is usually a part of, or closely related to, the window manager.

Modern drawing APIs typically work by allowing the application to ask the windowing system for a buffer (may be hardware accelerated) to which the application will perform all of its draw calls. The compositor then gathers all of the frame buffers and uses attributes to draw the final image into its own frame buffer that is then sent to the graphics adapter's swap chain. The compositor handles things like window order, overlapping, decoration, translation (movement), projection, magnification, resizing, rotation, etc...

The advantage of using a compositor is that an application need not worry about competing with other applications for screen space. Each application renders to its own buffer while remaining blissfully unaware of the existence of other applications.

Yes! My thoughts exactly.

HP's ProLiant servers are built to withstand a nuclear blast. Their consumer printers probably break down in a clean room.

You're right.

About 6 years ago some girl named Amanda got her own number confused with mine (I imagine that it was pretty close) and started giving it out to all of her friends. I would constantly get text messages meant for her and no matter how many times I told them that they had the wrong number it took about a year for them to end. This was in the days before MMS became affordable and the cameras on phones became non-shit so I didn't get any pictures but I imagine that if the same thing were to happen today that may not be true.

damn near impossible if the source code is not available or has been lost