My favorite part is where the updater tells you that a new update is ready, but it won't install it automatically because Adobe needs another ad impression or something and you have to download and install it yourself. This is why I don't have Flash or Java installed anymore. I especially like when they try to sideload some crapware toolbar with their security update too. I can kind of understand this sort of behavior from a sketchy freeware app being hosted by J. Random Guy, but Oracle and Adobe are multimillion dollar corporations. Do they really care so little about their brand?

Yes, this.

I don't get it - I mean Flash used to have an auto-updater that popped up when you rebooted and installed the latest version after getting permission. Now they make you visit their damn web page to download the updated installer which you then must run.

At least Oracle is slightly better in that it downloads and runs the updater automatically. Only slightly because they both want you to install Symantec or McAfee or Chrome or Ask or whatever.

But Flash updates are useless as they just point you to their website. And it used to work just fine by itself.

As soon as sites stop putting in 40 freaking ad networks each page perhaps we will sTop. They are getting worse and worse with MOST SHOCKING

Ironically, they're all owned by Google, those ad networks. Maybe if you went to shadier sites you'll find the 2% (Google has around 98% marketshare in online advertising thanks to ownership of such fine ad networks like DoubleClick and other purveyors of pop ups and pop unders) that Google doesn't have.

Case in point, Clash of Clans makes $500,000 per day and it is well known that Apple commands the overwhelming majority of mobile app $$$ volume. If you add in the revenue from the top 100 "freemium" pay-to-play games that $10 billion figure is going to shrink very, very quickly.

It depends, actually.

On iOS, a developer is far better off making an ad-free app and selling it for money in the App Store.

On Android, though, the situation is a developer will not make money this way - instead, the better way to make money is to give away your app for free and pay for it via in-app ads. You'll make far more money this way, and be able to rape your customer's devices for information (something iOS asks permission for - an app can't access the contact list without the user knowing).

So on IOS, sell your app to make money, no ads.
On Android, give away your app and sell ads.

I don't have statistics on in-app purchases though if I had to guess, I would say Android makes more money because of bigger audience.

A game like Clash of Clans may make half a million a day, but the split is probably 1:3 iOS:Android because there would be more Android users, and assuming they're just as likely to pay up.

He also discovered electron tunneling, though he gave it as evidence of how nonsensical quantum mechanics was. He was correct on the derivation, but wrong on the interpretation.

Well, it IS nonsensical - I mean, by what means should an electron be able to go from point A to point B without acquiring the necessary energy to get over the energy barrier? Granted, the uncertainty principle means there's a chance it could "borrow" the energy temporarily, but that's a random event. What happened is we have a controllable way to tunnel electrons.

These days we use electron tunnelling every day - the NAND flash chip relies on the floating gate to hold electrons and influence the transistor's parameters which is how it stores bits. And to get those electrons to the gate, we merely bias the transistor in such a way that electrons magically disappear and reappear on the floating gate, without shooting the electrons through the insulation.

We don't get why or how they do it, but we can exploit it.

Entanglement communicates state by some mechanism that has no measurable latency. Making a computing device based on entanglement would be amazing.

Sorry, that doesn't happen because information doesn't transfer faster than the speed of light.

What happens Is you have two entangled particles. If you measure the state of one, the other one flips to the opposite state instantaneously.

However, you cannot control what you measure. Perhaps you were measuring if the particle was up spin or down spin. Well, you measure it, and find it up spin. The only information you have is you know the other one is down spin.

The other side measuring will find yes, it's down spin (if they measure it after you) but they only know that means your particle is up-spin.

You have no idea what it means - it's not like you can say "if you measure up-spin on your particle, I won" then send the particles on their way, because the result of the measurement is non-deterministic. If you won, your measurement will produce a 50-50 chance it will measure as down-spin for you. For all you know, you run the measurement and it comes up as up-spin.

No real information has been transferred because you cannot control the result of the measurement.

It is also worth noting here that there is more to this market equation than *just* Tablet vs. Smartphone.

Indeed.

Steve Jobs didn't envision in a "Post PC" world that the PC would be dead - he noted there will always be a PC, just that they would do things more suited to a PC than trying to clunkily adapt when forced into situations they were not designed for.

You have a smartphone, you have a tablet, and you have the PC. The deal is that each does stuff better than the others. What we used to do clumsily on PCs we did better with tablets and smartphones.

I mean, people like to watch TV away from the TV - pre-iPad, that meant having to watch on a laptop or a phone. The phone was too small, the laptop too big and heavy and uncomfortable.

Or read a book - you could use a Kindle which works, except when you need color Read it on your phone or laptop is not very appealing.

There is not one device that's perfect for all tasks. There are things a smartphone will do better than either a tablet or laptop. There are things a tablet will do better than a smartphone or laptop. And there are plenty of things a laptop will do better than a tablet or smartphone. Sure you can substitute one for the other, but the end result is often sub-par.

Jobs even did the mandatory car analogy - the PC is a truck - a very versatile vehicle that can do tons of things, but to be honest, there are times when a car is far better. And it's why we have a variety of vehicles out on the roads - each has their own place. Sure they could all be replaced with trucks, but the truck can be quite subpar in some respects over a car. Doesn't mean in a "post-truck" world you get rid of all trucks - no, that's stupid. It just means you now have vehicles more suited to different activities.

2: SMS

I don't SMS. Sorry. I don't even have a texting plan at all because I've never used it, never had a reason to use it, and all the texts I've received over the years were all spam. Maybe only a couple were legitmate, one when I was keeping a number alive via Google Voice, and another when Google or someone texted me a confirmation code (I think it may have been my carrier to confirm a purchase).

Now, I too only answer the phone when I recognize the number. However, I admit, I have a landline as well and expect people to call that and leave a voicemail (did I mention I don't have voicemail on my phone, either?).

And yes, I've also been caught by my own filter - I did happen to forget my phone one day and had to use a payphone. I left a message.

I never have to pay for incoming calls (unless I am roaming in another country) here in Europe. So there is no cost. Yet I have NEVER received a cold call on my phone.
Not once in the probably 10 years I have the number.

That's because in Europe, the caller pays, and to help differentiate the call rates, cellphones have a different prefix so you can tell when you're going to pay.

So of course people won't robocall a cellphone in Europe - why would you when it'll cost you 10 cents to make the call? Calling a landline is free, calling a cellphone is not. Naturally forcing people to pay will get them to not pay in the end.

Of course, in North America that's not feasible since a phone number can be a landline or a cellphone and there's no way to tell just by looking. Especially since numbers can go between the two for number portability.

Though, the carriers can implement caller pays by simply stating the called number is a cellphone and do they want to pay for the call.

I absolutely agree that curiosity (along with a willingness to actually RTFM) go a long way to making one indispensable in a team. However, that brings its own risks with it: If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. How do you balance the benefits to your career (in terms of increased productivity, reputation etc) against the risks (stagnation, either because they can't manage without you, or because they realise how productive you are and aren't prepared to lose your utility)?

Even the go-to guy can be promoted - he becomes the technical guru (sometimes referred to as system architect or system analyst, even).

There are two career tracks, after all - you could go up through management, or the technical track. You may know the entire system, but as you go up, what you do is you teach - even I find my job consists less and less coding and more and more architecting, solving problems, and thinking, evaluating and reporting.

Hell, by knowing the system you know you can make reasonable estimates - if someone says it's simple but you know it's a hairy mess, that makes your life so much easier.

And anyhow, as you rise, there will be new know-it-alls as well and what makes you good is you all learn from each other (one of the biggest problems is ego, and learning to eat crow and to respect that someone may actually know more than you makes you even better still.

Of course, there's also a laziness aspect - I hate writing pages of code if I can think about it a little more and turn out something more concise, so what little coding I do often starts with a lot of pre-planning to what I do write is simple and not complicated.

You have to have a free pool to get a 5 star rating. Too bad the ratings companies around the world haven't required decent and free Wi-Fi. Major hotel chains would change their offers in a hurry when they are down rated to a 4 star hotel.

Then they give you free wifi with a paid upgrade.

I stayed at a hotel with free wifi. The "free" part was true, it was free, for 4 devices at 1Mbps each. Yes, 1Mbps.

Oh, they were more than happy to sell you different rate plans - perhaps you want 5Mbps for $20/day? Or perhaps if you want more devices on your account. (4 devices is a lot, if you're an individual traveller. But two people starts being limiting when you have 2 laptops, 2 smartphones and perhaps something else, and it's keyed to your stay - you can't shut down one and free up a slot - it's the first 4 devices to log in).

Oh yeah, there was competition too - hotels nearby that had pure paid wifi had free offerings as well, all similarly crippled.

However, it's not like gethostbyname() is a rare call. I suspect that well over 99% of net-aware applications are still using it. This affects just about everything that's talking over the internet.

True, but gethostbyname() is ancient and if the program wants to support IPv6, you can't use gethostbyname(). So I think the number of programs actually vulnerable is far lower. Remember, gethostbyname() only works with AF_INET - while getaddrinfo() works with AF_INET, AF_INET6 and any other protocol that uses sockets (since it returns

struct sockaddr*

making life really easy).

So a lot of older code is vulnerable, newer code less so. it's been around about 15 years or so.

The affected call is gethostbyname() and friends, which have been deprecated by the more protocol-transparent getaddrinfo()/getnameinfo() set of APIs. If you use IPv6, getaddrinfo() is the only way (gethostbyname() and friends are AF_INET (IPv4) functions only), but they're protocol transparent ways to do DNS lookups (they can return AF_INET, AF_INET6 and any other valid address supported by the system and DNS).

Deep down, if you look closely, they mention that code using getaddrinfo() is not vulnerable to the bug.

Shortly after learning about getaddrinfo() I stuck to using it - far easier to use than gethostbyname() and less messy in the end. The only complication is having to call freeaddrinfo() when you're done.

The purpose of the elastic pricing was to make sure that there was always a nice supply of drivers. Cap the prices, and you won't have as many drivers available to drive you around in the snow. Econ 101, right?

More like "don't piss off people".

More than one person has taken Uber only to be gouged in the end and realize that catching a regulated cab (who aren't allowed to charge more beyond what's posted on the pricing sheet) would save them half or more off the trip.

And considering Uber's business model seems to be to piss off as many people as possible, in the few areas where they've been allowed to operate it seems wise to not try to push one's luck and generate even more publicity that links them with the reasons why taxis were regulated in the first place!

I mean, news of people getting gouged from surge pricing is a nice soft story that'll make the nightly news and all over the web. And it'll associate rapidly "Uber == ripoff" in people's minds. Doesn't matter that they're normally cheaper or better than taxis, once people think Uber is a ripoff, that meme spreads far quicker than any effort to dispel the notion could.

And beyond personal safety issues, it was issues of gouging and markups that were the reasons taxis were regulated to begin with. Since Uber's business model relies on them skirting that part of the law, they don't want legislators getting wise to the history behind taxi legislation.

Would IPv6 not solve that? OTOH, why would providers go from IPv4 to IPv6 when soon there will be a shortage of numbers and they can charge (even more) extra for those who want a fixed IP with the excuse that they had with dial up.

IPv6 will, ironically, make the situation worse.

Because SIP assumes complete connectivity between hosts, but if you have a firewall in the way, that model breaks. And IPv6 firewalls will probably be the norm, so you'll end up with situations like the days of early NAT gaming - everyone will get on, they'd click "start", and either nothing happens, or a few people connect and the rest get stuck at the "waiting for host" dialog.

At least with NAT, you can generally assume if you have a private IP (or your external IP doesn't match the internal IP) that yes, connectivity is broken and you can display a message prior to actually trying to work. With IPv6 everything can SEEM to work (IP is seen by world? Check. IP is not private IP space? Check), but when it comes time to making or receiving a call, strange things happen. Like it rings, but doesn't connect. Or you can make outgoing calls but not receive incoming ones. Or calls aborting midway through.

And hell, you can be ISPs would do stuff like this - perhaps the first IP they see gets full access, while all other IPs are firewalled "for your safety". Oh, you can pay for additional prefixes, they're happy to sell you that...

Worse yet, you may not even know whose firewall is causing problems.

If enough people understood properly how to command their computer, productivity would would increase by orders of magnitude and our lives would change again. Most of the produced code would be very utilitarian, poorly structured, utterly mundane but incredibly useful.

So why do we treat "using a computer" specially?

Shouldn't we also teach them about say, cars? And we should add in the legal system. Perhaps IP law, since the majority of /.'s seem to be so intelligent about IT things but completely illiterate about basic IP law like the differences between trademarks, copyright and patents (both kinds).

Heck, I'm sure we should add shop skills (plumbing, basic carpentry, basic electrical, safety, power tools, cooking, finance) to the list. Truth is, there are plenty of skills we need that aren't taught - computers being just one of many. Hell, given it's the US, add guns to the list - doesn't matter if you're pro or anti gun control, providing a basic education in gun safety and handling will probably be extremely handy given the amount of rather idiotic gun accidents out there.

There comes a point where it's not really useful to give everyone the specialization because everyone then claims why their specialization wasn't part of the core education program in the end.

I mean, your mechanic doesn't need to know about how to compile a kernel - unless you really WANT to pay your mechanic $200/hr to muck around with his diagnostics machine when he's supposed to be fixing your car. (Today, said mechanic will say his computer is down, and hand it over to IT who will fix it, on the shop's dime, not yours).

Together, the others release dozens, and different companies share different responsibilities. Nice for consumer choice, but not so nice for support, since nobody wants to maintain a software stack nor wrestle with the politics involved in updating so many different devices.

You're off by an order of magnitude.

Samsung, in 2014, released about 3 smartphones per week. Yes, they have over 150 smartphones released in 2014. Tablet wise, I think it was over 1 tablet a week (it was over 50 around October).

It seems a lot of Android manufacturers see Android more as a "fire and forget" style of releases - just get a version of Android, stick it on, sell it, move on.

I mean, supporting 200 brand new Android devices (ignoring 2013 releases and prior) ...