Even worse, the minute you switch your smartphone off, it will decide that it needs to "auto-update". Thereby bricking, scrambling and wiping off any data you may have had on your phone, particularly hotel booking numbers, itenaries and other information.
With certain file encryption algorithms, they asked that the salt and/or hashed password were tacked on at the end of the file. That sped up decryption enough that their resources could decrypt the file, but not so much that anyone else could figure out it was compromised.
Third, the main reason consumer robotics hasn't taken off is because the devices don't work very well. None of the robotic vacuums are very good vacuum cleaners. Even the expensive Willow Robotics robot the article mentions isn't capable of doing very much. Progress is being made, but slowly.
Perhaps a turtle is the wrong shape for a powerful vacuum cleaner, but the perfect shape to covertly fiim turtles underwater.
A better shape for a powerful vacuum cleaner would be a python. Some homes had a centralized vacuum cleaning system with the suction fan and collection bin in the basement, Then the home owner just had to connect up a hose to a wall socket in a particular room. If that were replaced by a snake like robot with some vision recognition, it might be even better.
Technically, your programmable washing machine and spin-dryer are robots. Maybe even the toaster, oven and microwave. A sewing machine with downloadable patterns comes close. They do have moving parts, but all the dangerous bits are usually hidden away.
Stereoscopic images are even better - especially when viewed using those polarized filter or shutter glasses:
http://lcni.uoregon.edu/~dow/Marks_photos/stereo_pairs/Apollo_moon/Stereo_pairs_of_moon.html
Then the Western powers signed "The Lima Declaration of 1975" and gave away 30% of our manufacturing capability in order to keep OPEC happy.
Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.
Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.
You don't want a hardware driver author, you want a technical writer. They will have the experience to draw pretty diagrams, organize and lay-out information clearly. A hardware engineer would just give you a list of register blocks, what each register did, and expected values. That gives you a more or less horizontal view of the hardware level, what pixel formats that textures, color, depth and stencil attachments can theoretically use. Then it's during testing that you find that some oddball reversed eleven and a half bit texture format doesn't work with some prime number bit sized framebuffer format because nobody thought they would ever be used together, until somebody decided to port Tetchy Squirrels to their smartwatch.
It's not the code that is kept secret from the patent trolls, executable code can always be disassembled, precompiled shaders can be disassembled - usually there's even a free disassembler thrown in with most development kits. The secret bits are the comments; explanations of techniques, todos, for-the-future, optimize this, that will be done in the next cycle. It's enough to mention two buzzwords together in one line, and the patent-trolls will be jumping up and down shout patent violation and wanting payment. It will be up to the company to disprove that violation. Just think of pairs of keywords: "shadows" and "stencils" or "floating-point" and "image-buffers".
They offer to give the homeless food and shelter, but these bills end up costing more than the homeless earn, so they end up in debt. Now the homeless are realizing they are better off on the street that at Fukushima.
If you are designing an API, there are dozens of different error codes (invalid value, invalid enumator, run out of memory, invalid handle). Sometimes one bad input could generate three or more errors. But it is the specification which states which error takes priority.
To make sure everything works as expected, you do all sorts of things:
Positive testing - making sure things do what they are supposed to do. You look up all the input parameters, work out which combinations are critical and need to be tested together.
Negative testing - making sure things handle incorrect input. Test every single wrong input one at a time, then move onto pairs of wrong input, and finally all inputs bad.
Then there are random code and data tests, which just generate random streams of commands. These can pick out things. That method was used to test network device drivers. You just blasted the poor device with a random stream of packets of all values and sizes, and investigate whenever something goes wrong. Unfortunately, randomly generated code usually ends up more like the entry of an obfuscated coding competition.
Getting real-world data is the best test, especially when it is multi-threaded, then all sorts of weird stuff can appear.
The
I'd imagine they are running animation or CAD applications like Maya or PTC Creo Parametric for the design of cars and aeroplanes. In which case the purchase of the hardware is factored into the budget of the project. The PC's have to be officially approved by the software vendor for support reasons. So you then have to make a purchase of a several thousand PC's to make sure everything remains consistent for the engineers.
Where do you start explaining? You have a huge stack of software going from the GUI applications with plugins at the top, going all the way down to the NIC device drivers and firmware at the bottom. You can easily inspect network device drivers, they don't do much except read and write data out to ring buffers, but even then they had some issue with automatic scattering of data via virtual memory (an optimization that kernel security people didn't like). You can add hardware firewalls to your system, but then this article says they can be tunneled through.
Some PC hardware even has a wake-up feature using magic packets. The network card remains powered up even though the rest of the PC is powered down:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN
You can disable all the server applications that open listening ports on your PC, but it's easy enough for hackers to tunnel network traffic through essential procotols like Ping and DHCP via a remote proxy server. Since the BIOS itself can be rewritten, any built-in system monitoring software could be compromised as well (game PC motherboards have a hardware based network traffic monitoring overlay that shows upload/download times).
Malware doesn't even need to be any particularly sophisticated. There are dozens of Linux applications that allow you to set up your own server for personal data (your video library available across the Internet) and are script controlled. It only takes one mis configured variable such as the root directory and anyone can take control of your PC. Even if an application is clean and has no bugs, the availabilty of a plugin service, allows anyone to write malware.
From what I remember, Samsung disk drives didn't implement SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology)
It would tell you useful things like how many times your disk drive had been powered up and down, longest seek time, number of bad sectors, highest temperature, longest spin-up time. Just about everything a sys-admin would ever want to know.
That's what they were used to doing. Waiting for technology to advance in several generations in every aspect of computer technology, so they could combine them together and have a completely new, unique and distinctive product that no-one had seen before. Just about every creative person dreams of doing that. When it was Apple vs. Microsoft/Intel, they only had to worry about the OS and CPU, desktop cases were more or less the same; gray box under the monitor.or mini-tower unit.
The shrinking size of components let them design new and distinctive looking cases. But when you have new Android systems being rolled out every quarter at all market levels from wearable devices to netbooks, that becomes impossible for them. So the only option is to take legal action.
Sometimes it's just a random evolutionary combination of features. Some mobile phones have a high performance GPU,others just offer basic graphics. Other have a stereoscopic cameras that can make 3D movies, others don't. Some have a super-large screen that just does basic 2D, others have the parallax view 3D screen. Others have a secondary camera. Then there's battery life, memory size, the shape and color of the case. Some colors go with certain applications and markets. Customers will view certain combinations as "too girly". As all the different components have different prices, the price/performance ratio can vary.
BLISS is ignorance.
