http://blog.ptsecurity.com/2017/08/disabling-intel-me.html
I put quotes around "disables" because the ME is not fully disabled. The blog's analysis does show how it is in a "safe" state, i.e. forced to ignore the outside world very early in its code path. Also, not likely to brick your computer, assuming unscrewing your case and using a SPI flash programmer hasn't already bricked your computer.
Edit: "backdoor" in quotes too.
One could argue that its surprising they havent already.
The engineers probably thought something like this when deciding to use minix.
Now it might achieve the opposite result by associating it with a worst-case scenario of computing freedom and security.
(BadBIOS was lax on details, but people were remarkably resistant to the idea that it was even possible in theory.)
Whoa! So wait, every recent desktop and laptop is actually running a tiny MINIX in it? Or am I reading that wrong?
If I'm reading it right, then it means that we've totally leapfrogged Linux to usher in the Year of the MINIX Desktop.
Okay, so this effects 11.x, but I wanted to clarify that there seem to always have been circumventions floating around out there.
I stumbled on https://www.reddit.com/r/onions/comments/5i6qa3/can_the_nsaf... (mirror: http://archive.is/T8yVz) some months ago. It reads a little like a skiddie (a well-connected one) strutting a bit, and I think some of this person's views on ME as a viable attack vector are slightly careless and un-thought-through, but whoever this person is, they seem to be very confident about some of the things they said, particularly the following quotes (to be completely clear, I've removed first-person references):
> [This person] know[s] that at least up to firmware version 8 is traded underground, and version 11 (the latest) is available without difficulty to people who know how to find it. [This person has] access to version 8's signing keys [themselves] ...
> It's certainly not common but it is absolutely something that FVEY and related contractors (Raytheon, Leidos, half the people you'll see at ISS, etc) will be able to get their hands on, if they haven't already.
> [This person has] an enterprise ThinkPad that proudly boasts having WiMax support, requiring extensive configuration. It was expensive. If you don't have a BMC card (and you do not), then it is not possible to remotely control your system. Even if you did have a BMC, simply having the signing keys and toolchain for the ME would not be sufficient to get in. An attacker would need either a 0day, or your credentials.
.....Well then. Oops.
> Having the signing key allows nothing more than writing malicious firmware over SPI and allowing it to persist. It's just a little more powerful than the UEFI kits cr4sh can write, and just as easily detectable by reading your flash chip.
That's still bad! (And I have no idea who cr4sh is.)
> But it's not like you're analyzing your microcode (of which there are likely signing keys being traded as well), which can also be installed on a large number of systems, considering the BIOS functions to load the latest microcode it has into the CPU.
The above bit is unrelated, but I couldn't leave it out, because that's worth filing away too (...ouch).
--
Sources/past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15187540
You'd best offer us the firmware to completely and finally eliminate this giant, ossified, ticking timebomb software stack you've dumped into the world's computers. And I want it ALL out, even the trusted path garbage!
As if you don't have enough troubles already, Intel. Let's take this one off your plate. How's about doing the right thing and earn back a little respect from the consumers.
I'm more than mesmerized by his work; just stunning, I'm in complete awe!
Reminds me of Wilson Bentley's old photos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_Bentley
The motive appears to be bitcoin, based on the people contacted via facebook.
Is it possible the initial PIN that was sent by Tmobile was intercepted via SS7? I am trying to find out if my phone (android) is compromised as well.
The accounts and phone number are back under my control but I want to find out the vector as soon as possible -I don't trust tmobile to honor requests not to allow porting.
The newest scam is: flight comparison websites show you a low price, but only if you pay with a VISA. Switch to MasterCard and it's an additional 20-30. But then you invested in the whole booking process already.
Amazon Prime: Try to cancel it. They make it sound as if you lose Prime right away. There's an option "remind me 3 days before next payment" that suggests you should think more about your decision. Only after you cancelled, they tell you that you lose your benefits only after your Prime subscription expires.
Like I say with all recruiters, I said I was interested. I thought about it and everything was a red flag. Sure I'd get to live in Amsterdam and stay in Europe with my girlfriend, but ... that sounds like the ultimate shit job. I'd have to endure that until I worked out whatever visa contract they'd have or find someone else to sponsor me with a non-shit job.
So I just ignore the recruiter when he calls .. and ignore him .. and ignore him. Dude calls every fucking day for like four weeks straight; after I had already moved back to America. Most recruiters would take the hint after three failed calls. I can't imagine how desperate they must be. Then I heard from a former co-worker one of our other buddies, a Kiwi, had taken a job with them .. leaving NZ to go work there. He's still there ... hope it's not shit.
Dark patterns may help profits in the short-term, but they're terrible for your brand. Just ask TicketMaster.
It isn't just tech-savvy users that will catch on to this either. If an everyday user uses Booking.com, reads reviews and thinks their room will be great, but then has a bad experience, they're going to stop trusting Booking.com's reviews, and stop trusting their brand. It will only take a few bad experiences to go elsewhere.
The last time this website came up on HN (same issue), I conducted an experiment. The annoyances and manipulation described by the blogger sounded like it relied on Javascript and graphics. I wanted to see how far I could get without using a graphical browser.
I was able to
1. search hotels,
2. return a list of properties in CSV/JSON/TXT,
3. return prices and
4. book.
It required only a shell script of 107 lines, 308 characters, 2934 bytes. This could be further reduced.
I used only a command line http client, sed and tmux send-key (optional). Further optional: Fully customized HTTP headers, including randomized User-Agent if desired.
I had to store a session cookie for getting price or booking but no cookies were required for searching.
I used no Javascript.
I was able to eliminate all the annoyances and manipulation cited by the blogger.
Conclusion: At least for booking.com all these annoyances can easily be avoided by choosing the right browser.
(I did occasionally see the "Only ___ rooms left" message as this is returned in plain text. I did not however see the number change over repeated searches for the same hotel. In any event, I just deleted that line in the output, assuming it is untruthful.)
I understand it's not new to have the retail price be higher than the 'sale' price (for example, clothes and furniture), but even at clearance outlets, the price difference while large is rarely as dramatic nor as prolonged.
"Only 13% of listings are left for these dates. We recommend booking a place soon."
As a random example, apparently Kamloops, BC is filling up fast for Dec 3-6 (midweek in the middle of winter). And so is Flint, MI on Feb 19th, a Tuesday.
I will caveat that I've had some excellent experiences with Booking, but always with very careful cross-referencing with other sites.
I used to think these techniques were "dirty." But humanity evolved to be responsive to this type of manipulation. It seems the web has accelerated this process with the ability to A/B test on a massive scale. All the big websites exploit cognitive biases to drive engagement - facebook, google, twitter, instagram, netflix, youtube.
This is one of the reasons I'm convinced knowledge of behavioral economics is one of the most critical pieces of knowledge to have in the early 21st century - not only can you use it to drive engagement on your own platforms, but you can learn what tell-tales you are biased to react to, and resist accordingly.
I have also heard the tech stack is kind of old and so learning-wise it might be an issue. Any tips on surviving and keeping the learning curve straight from a current/former employee?
My guess is this: Booking.com already knows that they are fighting a losing battle against AirBnB. So instead of trying to win it seriously, they go to make the biggest profit they can out of their situation by strongly focussing on the idiots. With idiots you have two advantages:
(a) they stay anyways no matter how shitty you treat them. They have different reasons but one of them is that they are simply used to your service and don't want to learn a new one.
(b) they believe at least some of the stuff you put on these websites.
(c) in exchange for not feeling like a total loser for a moment they are willing to pay more.
For an observant booker this website is really less and less useful. For once you can try the alternative and get a much better experience, and on the other you can often just book a room on-site after you arrive. When Booking.com just hands out a reserveration without prepayment don't think the hotel wouldn't give your room to someone else if enough customers arrive at their desk first. Money now is better than (maybe) money later. The only exception may be when you go to the big fair of your industry and the whole town is booked out.
Whenever it's possible, I use something else, like HostelWorld.Their interface is clean, to the point, and the reviews and ratings can actually be trusted.
I'm happy someone did this website. I just came back from a long trip and every time somebody asked me why I hate Booking.com, I pointed exactly to some of the points that were made there. The fake sense of urgency, the cluttered UI.And the cherry on top: The fact they display the "total cost of all nights" in the results, instead of the per-night cost. That's not a misleading UX, it's just a bad UX decision.
But because of it's popularity amongst accommodation owners and travelers, its fall is unlikely.
Seems great, until you realise that literally almost every day, they have a similar sale. There's always massive discounts for something in store. I have literally never paid full price, or anything close to it.
After a day they outright DENIED to honor this "Lowest Price Guarantee" with some lame excuse. When I told them that I'll go to the small claims court I never heard back from them. Don't believe a word on this site.
I travel a lot and have used Booking.com to save myself quite a bit of money over the years. I still regularly compare their prices with other sites and they are pretty consistently cheaper than competing sites.
The "hurry" parts of their site do induce a little anxiety but I tend to also appreciate the real time information so I know I get the room I want.
It made the news a few years back[1] but you can still see it sometimes in a few different industries. You can get into arguments with people about whether marketing as a whole is an enterprise built on manipulation, but this is quite clearly manipulative.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2010/aug/07/computer-...
Are there any trusted review services for travel locations? Something like Consumer Report, but for travel. Although I don't know where their quality levels stand nowadays, I know my parents used to swear by em 10 to 20 years ago.
But instead published after the fact as an additional update:https://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2017/Sep/... and https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208112
Why delay the announcement? And why remove the original "APPLE-SA-2017-09-19-1 iOS 11" with "Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2017 -0700" from the apple-security email archive?
Also, are Macbooks vulnerable to the same bug until next monday when macOS 10.13 drops?
Also, there are about 6 other similar issues recently posted to Google Project Zero: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/list?can=1&q...
Similarly, would it make sense to have to mine the ledger or transactions? Similar to gas, depending on how secure you want you could adjust the complexity/duration to mine. Perhaps involved parties could mine at a great discount given their transaction to seed the mining where a 3rd party could take months or more.
These thoughts have been bouncing around in my head for a while. Thought Id pass along for whatever theyre worth.
> At the same time, it could mean working, for the first time, with investors who are not accredited, meaning high-net-worth investors an idea that appeals to Altman.
I guess he sees blockchains as a vehicle to getting the regulatory framework he wants for securities, and (I assume) doesn't feel he can get for traditional stock.
> Added Altman of the appeal of ICOs in particular, People are watching their friends get really rich and its making them [frustrated and wanting to get rich, too].
> One of the trends that bothers me about Silicon Valley, he continued, is that more and more of the wealth creation here is not available to most people, and I think thats very bad in a society with already so much wealth inequality. If theres a way that new technology can make it practical and possible to democratize this, I think thatd be great.
I mean, he just said he recognizes it's a bubble. Doesn't a bubble usually suggest wealth transfer instead of creation? Of course it's frustrating to not get in on that money. It's even more frustrating when you see the situation as ethically gray, and here's Sam signaling that YC should jump on board.
So I've looked in other jurisdictions but I've had huge problems finding the right country to do it in.
The last time I tried I got scammed by a Corporate Service Provider in the Isle of Mann that went out of business about a month after I sent them $$.
If anyone is looking for a co-founder in this space, and is interested in having a chat, email is in my profile.
Uptime: Trading hours are a 19th century anachronism. Distributed infrastructure is more reliable.
Management incentive: By removing annual and quarterly investor relations milestones businesses are incentivized to move more quickly by creating a more fluid and transparent management and investor relations style.
National access: Being 'listed' on a 'market' is a huge hassle and comes with fiscal protection mechanisms such as requisite auditing which essentially (not completely) amounts to a mafia-esque pay to play fee. Why not just go international and skip the hassle?
Regulation: Of course, the financial services establishment will cry "Regulators! Consumers need protection! Only we, the few, the humble, the experienced, can save their financial souls!" but alas their track record is pretty shocking and regulators with any guts should encourage innovation with some oversight and involvement. The thing is, since blockchains are international regulators are nominally sidelined in a default approach. There should be a middle ground where they can perform basic services such as corporate registration, legal good standing, fair taxation and IP asset attestation, for example, without becoming intimately involved in day to day business.
Transparency: Instead of occasional, high level audits, if transparency is required why not require that in order to be blockchain listed, companies must either use a public blockchain or otherwise effectively real time (eg. daily batched reporting) to transparently manage their financial assets? This would provide superior transparency than the establishment, potentially with crypto levels of trust (thus auditors cannot be bought/make mistakes).
Fiscal restructuring: Being able to do stock splits and so forth could work very well on chains.
Conventional asset financial connectivity: Sooner or later you have to interact with the off-blockchain world. Gatekeeper financial institutions need to validate inbound capital by showing things like source of funds. This is nontrivial with anonymous blockchain inflows, and requires setting up a significant KYC process as per larger crypto exchanges.
Of course there are issues. If there is a gatekeeper to enforce due diligence then is it truly blockchain anymore or are you just doing rebranded ICO 2.0 and issuing your own tokens? I fear the latter. We must find a middle ground. The devil is in the details.
I'd like to see this applied to puzzles with unique pieces like the ones here (https://libertypuzzles.com/about)
Two main reasons (1) If you disable Wi-Fi its re-enabled when you goto a new location. Very often I disable wifi to temporarily get off a bad network in an area, and then curse when I get home and stream a 1GB video over 3G
(2) Much more user friendly for initiated actions
(3) You can still fully disable it by going into settings, but the quick-off is more like you expect.
Great work, Apple.
For what it is worth, this is a big privacy violation. I am really surprised you can't at least force touch on the control center and turn these things off. I hope someone at Apple is reading this and adds that back in.
> "here" --> https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/donald-trump-peter-t...
Can someone describe corruption and help me understand how it differs from this situation?
Is that because he invested in Facebook early on?
FedEx Ground Cons: - No benefits, no overtime pay, no sick time, no insurance - Drivers pay for vehicle, gas, supplies, insurance, and everything else - No company retirement, seemingly less stable environment - No Teamsters contract or collective bargaining - Drivers have only one client: FedExI don't know whether this has anything to do with the contractor vs employee nature of these companies, but I do know that UPS is way better at actually doing their job.
This is all hearsay from the UPS driver that worked the route while I was clerking in a warehouse. He also seemed much happier than the FedEx drivers, both of which were pretty grumpy. He was also a lot more helpful and we often asked him to delay our pickup for last minute orders, which was something the FedEx drivers would never do.
As a contractor style, at the start it seems fun there are potential rewards, etc.. but you need to manage yourself a lot more, and there is less of a safety net or any kind of belonging.
As an employee style you are more of a robot at the start and have to submit to the company as it were, but later on you are looked after much better and there are teams within the company that can focus on efficiency and making life better, etc.
As someone who has a fairly split career in doing both I can fully understand the merits of both but I worry about the long term trajectory of the majority of people becoming independent as it were.
In theory, both are therefore one major legal decision away from a very bad set of financials. In practice, hoards of lawyers and lobbyists undoubtedly man the wall (and keep winter at bay).
[1] http://reason.com/reasontv/2010/10/22/whiteboardhttp://reason.com/archives/2009/09/28/using-unions-as-weapon...
I guess there is technically no collusion, but it doesn't seem like there is much competition either.
It makes it difficult for smaller companies to do well because only the biggest companies get reasonable shipping rates.
This is one space where I won't shed any tears if Amazon hands them their ass.
-I feel like I used to see DHL trucks and ads much more often. Did they abandon some of the residential delivery market?
One particularly cool (and surprising, to me at least) trick is defining interpreters that carry out composable optimization passes on a DSL without needing an intermediate representation: http://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/optimizations.html
I've wasted so much energy feeling stupid when reading texts that I don't understand. But most of the time not understanding is not about "intelligence" but simply not having the right meaning assigned to the right amount of words.
You're not stupid, you just don't have enough structured data yet. I wish I had that kind of insight and believed in it when I started out in university. Not that I'm completely convinced even now.
Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well.
Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.
This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.
Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own neighborhood.
It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up feeling kind of close.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-revea...
But giving a blank slate to a user and having them input a text query when they open the App might not be the best idea. In my head I remember the places around me using landmarks; the blank screen at the start makes me impatient.
It's nice to see real thought, study and execution into new ways of portraying things that have the possibility of becoming stale. While maps and their functionalities are very much "still in development" with many developers adding new features to them... most of these "new features" don't try to rethink how we see and use them. They just extend the feature set instead of stopping and trying to re-think what a map is and what it is supposed to do.
- Going a few miles east (on the light rail line) is much, much faster than the same distance plus a mile north or south.
- Some places on the inner east side of the river take me longer to get to than places further out that are on a bus line.
- Going to the northwest part downtown takes me longer than going to the north part, even though they're both the same distance from home, because the transit lines run in an shape.
The author thinks that the time-only maps address the root concern, which is "how fast can I get somewhere." But that's not entirely true: there are areas where I live that I would rather go to than others. If I search for sushi and I see one place in a crime-ridden neighborhood, a second place in the middle of nowhere, and a third place in the "trendy" section of my city where most of the rest of the food is good, I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent).
Is it possible to present a resized version of the route to each path underneath each target? (or perhaps show that on hover)
I understand that this would mean having overlapping map snippets of different sizes (with different centres), but some visual representation of the route to take could be nice.
Currently, the UX of having to click each target to see the path reduces the usability (having to go back and forth between the suggestions is tedious).
I've always wondered even further about this - how you take this and extend it to 3 dimensions + time. In terms of maps, that would also help you with elevation or other obstacles that might slow you down from a straight line path.
Certainly, with the processing power and capacity today, we have the capability of knowing not only the two dimensional direction and the time it takes, but even the three dimensional position plus time.
I like to think of this crazy idea like a 3-D video recorder (maybe)... something that records positions of all objects in the specified space in slices of time, and can reconstruct any such slice and analyze the relative position of objects in space over time to each other.
I am not sure how such a technology would be made... capturing all the positions of everything in slices of time. I think we can do it with 3-D simulations, but not sure how we could record such data for the real world without modeling it in the virtual.
Still, this is such a cool direction and I for one like seeing people experimenting with something that we take for granted so easily, the map. I feel like everything that is amazing about time and space is somehow embodied by maps - astronomy, time, geography, relativity, etc.
In city centers with a lot of walking traffic, you may see maps overlaid with progressively larger circles, to estimate travel time based on simple physical distance. But this assumes that people move like crows fly: that theres a straight-line road for anywhere we want to go, through concrete walls and over lakes, without traffic ever to slow us down. In an urban setting, none of these are practical assumptions to make.
That isn't limited to urban settings. They are not practical assumptions to make in any setting.
When I search for "sandwich", my neighborhood Subway should show up, even though the word doesn't appear in the name.
When I search for "convenience" or "store", my neighborhood convenience store should show up, even though those words do not appear in the name.
But I did discover a Whole Foods location that is even closer to my house than the three others in town that I knew of. Cool!
It pretty much makes a isochrone maps all over the city, and gets google public transport and driving times and creates a ratio.I've started to work on a better version 2, but so far not much work.
Oh my.... They just invented the 'list'. Or better yet a list that drives map interactions....oh my and an ordered list too! I could swear I did that like 10 years ago on google maps, but I guess it must have just been a dream.
Seriously, adding a fancy radius dial overlay doesn't really improve much over a plain old ordered list.
But distance isn't the only important geospatial factor. Frequently I want to find a place to eat/drink that's on the way to another destination (such as a movie theater). This kind of chrono map would be more useful in a new city in which I don't know that a place 0.2 mi away to the west involves crossing an interstate. In a setting I'm familiar with, it's probably not particularly useful on mobile (given the limited dimensions for showing points and text labels), but could be great on print displays. It'd allow designers to show geospatial/time info without also having to render a full map.
On the topic of Yelp and other listing services, maybe some refinements could be made to make lists more geospatially useful. No reason why the list view has to show just distance, rather than time traveled. Or to include a filter option for direction, so that I can just see things west or south of me. It's pretty frustrating sometimes having to switch back and forth between list and map.
The bottom line is that you can't just throwaway physical maps. One way to marry your idea in physical may might be to color code places according to how far they are.
However this map idea also reflects my core impression. Really smart people that provide constant high quality content (just look at the blog itself, how it's designed, and the other posts), but not really a disruptive spirit.
Sie sind nicht der Elefant im Porzelanladen, you could say. That is their strength and their weakness.
Very useful in constraining a search area based on how far you're willing to commute when looking for a home.
What would be cool is instead of time you have a score that takes into account time, cost (do I need an uber or will a bus do?) and variance (traffic delay probability)
Any suggestions for the best (open) software to achieve this?
By that, I mean.. think of isobars.
But I was never smart enough to implement it. This goes a bit along the way but hopefully someone comes along and implements that, I think I would find it very useful.
Nonetheless, an interesting concept!
http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html
MySociety Travel Time Maps
Interactive maps of travel time and housing prices in London
MySociety, an NGO which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, came to Stamen with a remit to explore two fascinating datasets: median prices of homes throughout London, and the time it takes to travel from one place to another throughout the city.
https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-a...
https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/
Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot
Sometimes, its more useful to know a journey time than it is to know the distance.
Thats why people often refer to an hours commute rather than 40 miles.
Mapumental is a beautiful tool to show public transport travel times, from or to a chosen postcode, on a timebanded map. These can be embedded in websites, apps or online tools, or used for internal research purposes.
Transit-time maps, also known as isochrone maps, are not a new idea: there are examples dating back hundreds of years. But the online technologies behind Mapumental are new and have unleashed a great many possibilities for all kinds of users.
https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/
Mapumental developed the project (site currently down for maintainance):
Stamen Design has done lots of really cool stuff with maps:
For an example, go to https://groups.do , create an account (can be fake) and then click New Group, select some Dining activity and see the restaurants pop up sorted by distance. Done.
If you center on the Central West End in St. Louis, you can clearly see that development has mostly happened in the western suburbs:
I.e. I appreciate radius from center as a very useful representation of travel time.
But I would liberate X and Y to be things such as rating and cost (to give two likely examples).
Once you distort space so you might as well go all-in (in this view) and let it pack in two more dimensions.
The resulting clusterings would be very interesting and useful I imagine.
This thing would need a second motor to adjust the speed change, with an encoder, plus encoders on the input and output ends of the transmission. Something has to control all that.
If you need sudden bursts of high torque, overload the motor while monitoring temperature. You can run electric motors far above their continuous rating for brief periods, and if temperature is monitored, this is safe. That's how Tesla's "launch mode" works.
Not seeing the use case for this thing in robotics.
For those saying it has too many moving parts, consider the number of parts found in an 11-speed internally geared hub on a bicycle [1]
I would be really curious to see if this inception drive could be an alternative to internally geared bike hubs.
I suspect if you went to the room of clockwork/gears in Musee des arts et metiers in paris, you could find much of this there, but the point is, you might not find all of it, as one composition.
Thats what I love about mecha: its often like rotational lego, you add it in the right combinations and it does stuff.
(the one which gets me, is the use of diagonally mounted rotators as 'wheels' which can drive sideways: you see that on some forklifts. Its like michael jackson moonwalking for machinery...)
The responsiveness probably wouldn't be there for this application, but I'm also curious about whether this could be made to work for a longer range gas/hybrid quadcopter.
Unfortunately my search has yielded nothing but the same topological(?) traps over and over again to the point where now I just listen to podcasts and entertain my wife with seemingly unprovoked laughter as I chase my grass mulcher around the yard.
The inner pulley wobbles inside the flexible V-belt and is induced into rotating by precession.
Separation of the inner pulleys controls the effective precession cylinder's inner diameter, the variation of which is accomodated by flexing of the belt: how far it is "squeezed off" and displaced from its outer mount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_(mechanical)
Note in the precession animation here how the fast spinning green arrow can be regarded as an input (the wiggle), and the slow spinning of the square-centered blue wheel as an output: there is a many-to-one reduction here, effectively forming a transmission.
Not to be confused with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession
As the article correctly states, this is an issue of trust, but trust can only be earned with experience, which is lacking in such a complex environment.
This is just my personal opinion with no more knowledge than anyone else, but this HTC acquisition looks different than Motorola. It has the hallmarks of an acqui-hire, and which implies Google may no longer be content to just sit by as a cornucopia of OEMs ship commodity HW using off the shelf stuff and small tweaks, as that's never going to pull the market forward like Apple can do with vertical integration.
The problem now is that HTC has been sinking for so long that most of its famous engineers and personnel have long since jumped ship, so I'm not even sure Google will get much out of this acqui-hire. I would assume that none of this involves the Vive, as that seems too profitable right now for HTC to sell.
Don't get me wrong, if we got another HTC Google Play Edition phone using an HTC 10 successor (really don't like the U11, go back to the HTC One design template, please), that would be awesome. But I'm not holding my breath.
The $330M price is so low none of the HTC investors are going to make any money on it. HTC's mobile phone business has been unprofitable for years and Google won't make any money on it either.
Who knows maybe Google is planning on using the HTC business unit as a sort of an R&D lab for Android hardware, with no real plan on making it a traditionally profitable business.
Wonder if that deal came with a poison pill. I doubt Apple wants to be a counterparty to a mobile licensing deal with Google at this point.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2012/11/10/apple-htc-patent-settlem...
It seems to me that Google are intentionally sabotaging the success of their Pixel phone lineup. I would hate for the Nexus 6P to be my last Google phone.
This could greatly enhance android and they can start selling SoC along with software. If not they are dependent on Qualcomm to catch up with apple.
Still, an open question is why would they feel the need to buy an exisiting company? Couldnt they simply recreate a hardware company from scratch with their resources? HTC is not exactly a world leader or some unique innovator here.
I have an iPhone 6+ -- and it is 90% great. (some UX choices suck on a bigger device, I cant hit certain buttons when one-handing the device)
I really like the essential....
I hear good things about the Pixels.
I would only up to the iPhone X for water resistence...
They are all nearly $1K
(I worked in Intel's game developer relations lab in the 90s when they were trying to prove that a <$1k computer was even possible (Celeron's with SIMD)...
Now its like a phreaking phone is going to be hitting/pushing the ~$1K mark....
Should I get a new phone, and if so, of those three, which would be best?
Then I made a subway-style map of the Taiwanese train network, where the distance between each station corresponds to the number of minutes it takes a train to travel that distance.
http://peterburk.github.io/tra/
I could do the same for high-speed trains, but there was no interest from the train company so I kind of left the project behind. I still use it for myself though, because other maps are worse.
Just as an additional data point in Tokyo you can guarantee the time it takes to change platforms as the distance is measured, Im not sure anyone has the walking distance between the Victoria and Central lines at Oxford Street (etc.).
> A final thing about SPACs is that they are so expensive. Banks charge a rack rate of about 7 percent for initial public offerings, though big sexy tech IPOs tend to be done more cheaply. SPAC sponsors compensate themselves rather more lavishly. Hedosophia's sponsor -- a Cayman Islands company owned by Palihapitiya and his co-founder -- invested $25,000 to found the SPAC. In exchange for that nominal payment, and their work on finding a company to take public, they get 20 percent of the SPAC's stock. (They are also are putting in another $12 million or so to buy warrants in connection with its IPO.) A 20 percent fee for taking a company public is just ... more ... than a 7 percent fee. And that's not even counting the 5.5 percent fee that Credit Suisse charged for taking Hedosophia public! Something like a quarter of every dollar that investors are putting into Hedosophia is going to compensate financiers for doing the work of (ultimately) taking a unicorn public, which is a funny way to make that process more efficient.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-15/icos-vcs-...
This is really a poorly thought out idea that's hugely counter-productive. You own your shares for 10 years and have mucho voting rights, but need to sell them. Now you have to sell them to someone who will get virtually no voting rights at the time of purchase. So all this does is make your shares way less valuable. It will end up creating "phantom sale" markets where you continue to serve as the shareholder of record, but agree to vote your mucho votes the way the purchaser wants you to.
The real problem isn't short term holders. The real problem is that shareholders aren't owners. The SEC won't let shareholders pick the boards of their own companies. Companies are owned by their managers now, and they are the short term thinkers using their incentive stock options to drive their decisions.
It's far from easy to bootstrap, but you basically solve all the problems these guys are talking about if you can survive it. The problem, of course, is that your unit economics have to work, you have to have the personal patience and resources to get to profitability, and you have to survive a potential funded competitor using their financial leverage to sell at or near a loss and torch your position in the market.
So a lot of folks take the money, but you take the money, you gotta pay it back. An IPO is ultimately just kicking the can down the road, and taking on a new set of guys that are going to cash out your venture debt for public debt. Who also expect to be paid back. I don't see a way out of this devil's bargain short of, you know, delivering on the milestones you talked about in your pitch deck, or in your roadshow.
But spare me the crocodile tears, huh? You took the money, you gotta pay back the money. Plus interest. And a lot of these IPOs, they had to make big promises when they went public-- big multiples, big projections, to support big valuations. Now you are sitting on a big pile of teachers' pension money and you have to deliver.
What makes the tech echosystem thrive is the flexible capital and labor model. Anyone can get a little money to chase their idea. The small ideas get starved for capital and labor until they get market validation. Then the capital and labor chases them. And that's how great companies grow so quickly in a land of startups.
Anything that restricts mobility of labor hinders this and should be fought. (Example: Non-competes, cost-prohibitive real estate, etc)
Anything that restricts mobility of capital should be fought too. To have capital available for great ideas, it should be easy to flee ideas that aren't working out. (This is also why share buybacks from mature companies are fine - the capital get recycled)
Or is that too rad for Silicon Valley?
I know that we're all supposed to live off pension funds, but the idea is that is after retirement not before through selling over inflated stock to them.
I haven't seen anyone comment about this down market scenario this past week and wondering if someone smarter than me had any thoughts?
There are many things companies can do to encourage long term, stockholder engagement - starting a random new stock exchange seems to be a long way down the list
https://equityzen.com/?utm_source=news.ycombinator.com%2Fite...
Why would you want to business by the rules in the US when the rules only exist to prop up rent seekers and the ruling elite?
Why no mention of Motorola in 2011? Google bought it for $12.5B, and sold it 2014 for $3B.
I think it would have made the blog post better to give some explanation for why Things Are Different This Time.
> Thats why weve signed an agreement with HTC, a leader in consumer electronics, that will fuel even more product innovation in the years ahead. With this agreement, a team of HTC talent will join Google as part of the hardware organization. These future fellow Googlers are amazing folks weve already been working with closely on the Pixel smartphone line, and we're excited to see what we can do together as one team. The deal also includes a non-exclusive license for HTC intellectual property.
- HTC's stock price has been going down for the past 5 years, and EPS was down sharply recently. Does this make HTC more or less viable on its own going forward?
- Apple finally made a VR push with the upcoming macOS High Sierra and iMac Proalong with the HTC Vive. Google didn't fully acquire HTC here, and HTC's trajectory was already tied to Android, but still seems an interesting wrinkle there.
- Samsung continues to hedge their bets, most recently with Bixby. Really wonder if Google's continued hardware investment will make them seek more of their own path.
- Why would Google acquire just a team from HTC? Seems like the oddest of acquihires yet.
> HTC will continue to have best-in-class engineering talent, which is currently working on the next flagship phone, following the successful launch of the HTC U11 earlier this year. HTC will also continue to build the virtual reality ecosystem to grow its VIVE business, while investing in other next-generation technologies, including the Internet of Things, augmented reality and artificial intelligence.
http://www.htc.com/us/about/newsroom/2017/2017-09-21-htc-goo...
Unfortunately that ultimately matters little to stock value and market share.
another nexus 7
god, i hope so.