Update Dec. 24 12:05 pm ET: Many more iPhone users have come forward on Twitter claiming that they are having connectivity issues related to iOS 12.1.2. Apple is advising some to try to update their carrier settings using this guide.
Source: iPhone Owners Irate After iOS Update Bricks Cellular Data
Those who live in areas with low levels of light pollution will most likely be able to see the comet with the naked eye. People who live in cities may need binoculars or a telescope to get a glimpse. Online charts can help pinpoint its location.
Source: A Bright Green ‘Christmas Comet’ Will Fly the Closest to Earth in Centuries – The New York Times
The best way to create a ram disk on linux is tmpfs. It’s a filesystem living in ram, so there is no need for ext2. You can create a tmpfs of 16Gb size with:
mount -o size=16G -t tmpfs none /mnt/tmpfs
Source: ramdisk – Creating a ram disk on Linux – Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
What we learned: Being loyal to Apple is getting expensive. Many Apple product prices are rising faster than inflation — faster, even, than the price of prescription drugs or going to college. Yet when Apple offers cheaper options for its most important product, the iPhone, Americans tend to take the more expensive choice. So while Apple isn’t charging all customers more, it’s definitely extracting more money from frequent upgraders.
Source: Are Apple products overpriced? – The Washington Post
DirecTV will continue offering satellite-TV service—it had nearly 20 million satellite video subscribers as of September, per company filings. But the company will focus on growing its online video business instead, Donovan said. It has a new set-top box, where people can get the same TV service they’d get with satellite, through an internet-connected box they can install themselves. It expects that box to become a greater share of its new premium-TV service installations in the first half of 2019. It also sells cheaper, TV packages with fewer channels through its DirecTV Now and WatchTV streaming services, which work with many smart TVs and streaming media players like Roku and Amazon Fire TV devices.
Source: AT&T just declared the end of the satellite-TV era in the US — Quartz
The federal government, under presidents of both parties, has largely surrendered to monopoly power. “The ‘anti’ in ‘antitrust’ has been discarded,” as the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it in his new book, “The Curse of Bigness.” Washington allows most megamergers to proceed either straight up or with only fig-leaf changes. The government has also done nothing to prevent the emergence of dominant new technology companies that mimic the old AT&T monopoly.
Source: Opinion | The Monopolization of America – The New York Times
In researchers’ own words “every system on which HeadSetup […] was installed at any time in the past […] remains vulnerable” until users manually review the Trusted Root Certificate Store and remove the two certificates, or until the certificates expire –which could be January 13, 2027, or July 27, 2037, respectively.
Source: Microsoft warns about two apps that installed root certificates then leaked the private keys | ZDNet
CeBIT was once considered the best barometer of technological trends, and during the dot-com boom in the late 90s and early 2000s, it boasted some 850,000 visitors a year. However, that number has been declining for years, despite cultivating a ‘fun fair’ atmosphere.
Source: Germany: CeBIT, world′s largest IT conference, canned | News | DW | 28.11.2018
In the prototype plane, wires at the leading edge of the wing have 600 watts of electrical power pumped through them at 40,000 volts. This is enough to induce “electron cascades”, ultimately charging air molecules near the wire. Those charged molecules then flow along the electrical field towards a second wire at the back of the wing, bumping into neutral air molecules on the way, and imparting energy to them. Those neutral air molecules then stream out of the back of the plane, providing thrust.
Source: First ever plane with no moving parts takes flight | Science | The Guardian
An operating system that runs on millions of different hardware configurations is not a service. It can’t be updated as easily, and you’ll run into issues with hardware, drivers, and software when you change things. The upgrade process isn’t instant and transparent—it’s a big download and can take a while to install.