Slashdot Mirror

Find another router with 600Mbps AC for under $399.

How about this one for $199: http://store.apple.com/us/product/ME918LL/A/airport-extreme

I realize it's from a somewhat obscure company, so I'm not sure how easy it is to find one near you...

I'm pretty sure iTunes has most/all of their discography.

You can get the News, too!

Thanks SlashDot - where else could I get the weather report?

I'm pretty sure iTunes has most/all of their discography.

Part of educating is creating, messing up, creating some more. Tinkering. Ipads(and all tablets really) SUCK at creation. They are content consumption devices. They are nothing more than smart TVs in your hand. Stop giving them to kids!

Errr wha? Get a bluetooth keyboard and you can use them to write essays, fiction, music. Amazing portraits have been made with iPhones, much less iPads. $5 gets you a fully functional painting program, saving on art supplies and even the educational price of Illustrator.

Can I code on a tablet? No thank you.

Dig out the bluetooth keyboard again and get an SSH app. Then connect to the linux box running on an old celeron at the school.

Can I pick one up in shop class and do the math to figure out the angle of a roof beam? No thank you.

Okay gramps, slow down before your hurt yourself and forget to mow that lawn. A $5 app can get you an A or a B in a Calc I course and maybe pass Calc II. Differential and integral calculus, 3d cartesian and poloar graphing, linear algebra, and even equation solving:

fsolve(exp(x)2x2= 0;x=10::10)
-> [0:53983527690282;1:4879620654982;2:6178666130668]

There are three TB2 busses. See: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5918?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

That guide actually makes the device NSA safe. It's pretty comprehensive and when applied in full should please even most paranoid and security conscious users.

And do check out rest of the ImageMagick: ...

And if you happen to be using OS X, also check out sips(1). It does much of what ImageMagick + DCRaw does, but a lot faster.

Others have already pointed out how bizarre the original story is, but there seems to be no mention of AppleScript. If you're on OS X, you get the Unix command line plus scriptable applications through AppleScript with raw scripts or GUI-built actions through Automator. It's all built in to a clean installation of the OS. Amiga afficionados should be familiar with the concept via ARexx.

Many third party application support AppleScript, though as the environment seems to gain more and more inexperienced and/or lazy programmers, proper integration into the OS X framework environment seems to get worse and worse. That includes code from Apple. Given the extremely sharp decline in Apple's software quality over the last couple of years across all of their platforms, it's currently rather hard to recommend any of it. Probably needs to be filed under "a very good idea, destroyed by the incompetence of the modern software industry".

OS X sandboxes everything.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Security/Conceptual/cryptoservices/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011172-CH1-SW1
Cryptographically strong random number generation
Encryption and decryption (both general-purpose and special-purpose)

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/security/conceptual/cryptoservices/cryptoservices.pdf
[Page 10]
"elliptic curve encryption",

RSA random number generator = keys to palace...

.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Security/Conceptual/cryptoservices/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011172-CH1-SW1
Cryptographically strong random number generation
Encryption and decryption (both general-purpose and special-purpose)

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/security/conceptual/cryptoservices/cryptoservices.pdf
[Page 10]
"elliptic curve encryption",

RSA random number generator = keys to palace...

.

Actually, the price I quoted also applies to non-retina MBPs (even new ones). http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=United_States&product=Macnotebooks

As for keeping an old battery around to extend battery power for longer trips, this isn't rarely an issue on modern MBPs because they have crazy battery life.

Check out https://itunes.apple.com/en/app/myscript-calculator/id578979413 . I have installed this app, I do use it with my finger, and it works very well, IMO. Children's fingers are quite a bit thinner. But one can also buy a stylus for the iPad. But I haven't needed one, so far, for this App. Moreover, zooming in (in my experience) often solves the "must have a stylus" thing in apps that seem to require less blunt instruments at first.

Haha, of course you can you big liar!

As long as you stick to free apps, there's no need to hand over your credit card details. And there's dozens of iPad apps that do SMB or FTP, including free ones (though I'm partial to the $5 Files Connect). For direct device-to device sharing, Feem for iOS and Feem for Android are great and free.

Haha, of course you can you big liar!

As long as you stick to free apps, there's no need to hand over your credit card details. And there's dozens of iPad apps that do SMB or FTP, including free ones (though I'm partial to the $5 Files Connect). For direct device-to device sharing, Feem for iOS and Feem for Android are great and free.

There was no coupon code. Those discounts are bog-standard; vendors mark up the "retail price" but discount it. This is a fairly well established retail trick; JC Penny famously attempted to buck that trend by simply setting the price at what it should be, and they paid the price for it.

Youre really not going to convince me that half the ram, $1000 more, a slower CPU, and a slower GPU are all OK because the case is made of aluminum and a very very slightly better screen (1440 by 900 vs 1368 by 768). (SOURCE) This is the very definition of moving the goalposts: there will never be a perfect match spec / build wise, but I presented something that was clearly superior in technical specs, and $1000 cheaper, and youre ready to dismiss it by re-prioritizing the case as more important than the other specs. Meanwhile, with the Mac Pro, people have given very valid criticisms of the case (lack of expandability, inability to rack the thing, inability to upgrade), but in this case the technical specs are shouted up (which they should be-- but be consistent about it).

All you've shown here is a crappy HP laptop that made several compromises to get to $1650.

The selling price was $1150. Those coupons are handed out like candy-- I could give you ton of examples right now of coupon codes like this (check techbargains, newegg, HP's store, Dell Premier, etc). That just happened to be the best match I could find in a 30 minute span on that particular day.

Thats some kind of funny math where the advertised price is more relevant than the price you actually pay at the register, but no, the laptop cost $950 less (plus or minus for shipping) once you pay.

I wasn't talking about what 'the tools do, under the hood' (dammit, typical windows speak), my point was that your operating system is a black box. dammit there isn't even source code available.

Darwin source code no longer exists? This link no longer works? In an education environment you can also get access to the NT source code. Either way, it's all irrelevant to most programmers even those on Linux.

IOW, windows experts know how to use windows, unix experts know how unix work (and therefore, due to the openness and clarity, a lot more about how their computers work).

So OS X is no longer Unix? No longer bundles all the Unix utilities? No longer uses POSIX?

Depends.

If most of your customers are not going to add any PCIe cards into the machine, then it does make sense.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2836?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

According to this, the previous mac pro idled at 167W.

This mac pro idles at only 44W. Not only that but it has a lower temperature when the CPUs and GPUs peg. This all being said, I'm not shocked that Apple went this way.

Same goes for the loss of ExpressCard slots on the MacBook Pro line. I spent the better part of three years on my current machine trying to find something to put in there(I settled this year on a super cheap memory card reader).

OS X Server has Caching Service to alleviate this exact problem.

Install the OS X Server package on any Mac running the latest OS X and turn on Caching Service. Then any iOS devices and Macs on the same subnet will automatically download updates from the Caching Service if available. Basically zero configuration and it takes care of a bunch of devices for you.

Mavericks Server has Caching Server 2, which I haven't personally used but their blurb for it sounds like exactly what you want, at least as far as Apple devices.

Huh? I thought only 4 and older models had slow issues with iOS7. I was told 4S did not have slow down issues with iOS7 like in http://discussions.apple.com/thread/5659915 and http://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/misc.phone.mobile.iphone/3UPe-U0c1CM ...

If you are running Lion or earlier you can download old versions of XCode here:

https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action?name=Xcode

If you've upgraded to Mavericks you're going to have to run Lion in a VPN or compile on an older machine.

Roku 3

also:
Chromecast

AppleTV

http://www.apple.com/server/docs/MacOSX_Server_TO_300195.pdf

From the horses mouth: "The power and simplicity of Mac OS X Server are a reflection of Apple’s operating system strategy, one that favors open industry standards over proprietary technologies. It begins with a UNIX-based foundation with Mach 3, FreeBSD 4.8, and the latest advances from FreeBSD 5 at the core."

Also, why would Apple have hired the founder of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard?

If you include the encryption key with the backup, it doesnt matter either way. If you dont, its not a terribly useful backup.

Apple's Time Machine can use full disk encryption. You need a password/passphrase to be able to read from the disk later, which is rather useful. If someone steals my iMac and my onsite backup, they can not access any data - the system, as well as the backup, are both encrypted.

Without launching at boot, how would an application designed to connect to an Internet service notify you of things relevant to your account on that service? For example, if an app store doesn't launch at boot, then you won't get notified about security updates to your existing apps until you happen to look for new apps, which might not be for weeks.

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/NetworkingInternet/Conceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/Chapters/ApplePushService.html

tl;dr;

If you have 20 apps that allowed to send notifications, all 20 apps don't need to be in memory. All the apps send the notification to Apple and Apple sends all the notifications to your device. When you click on the notification, it opens the app.

Maybe Mr. Hates "pretentious douches" thinks everyone uses Mac Pros.

The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone)

You would be correct in that assumption

(Although I found the Doom2 RPG to be far more enjoyable game; FPS games and touchscreens are not a good combination)

But you are right about how widespread Doom has become in the computing world. According to Wikipedia, the following platforms had official versions of Doom ported to them

Computers: MS DOS, NextStep, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux, MS Windows, Acorn RISC OS
Consoles: Atari Jaguar, Sega32x, Playstation, SNES, 3DO, Sega Saturn, Game Boy Advance, XBox, XBox360, Playstation 3
Other: Tapwave Zodiac, IPhone/IPod Touch/IPad

Unofficial ports include: BeOS, Amiga, ZX Spectrum 128K, Commodore VIC-20, Nintendo DS, iPod, Android, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Zune, TI-Nspire

Doom was also ported to Adobe Flash and Java, so any device that can run those languages can also play Doom. I seem to remember some company once released a "smart" refrigerator that used Java; it's possible you could have played Doom on that too.

Doom. It's everywhere.

The fact that DOOM is available for practically every platform there is (although I have no bothered to confirm, I'm sure I can even play on an iPhone)

You would be correct in that assumption

(Although I found the Doom2 RPG to be far more enjoyable game; FPS games and touchscreens are not a good combination)

But you are right about how widespread Doom has become in the computing world. According to Wikipedia, the following platforms had official versions of Doom ported to them

Computers: MS DOS, NextStep, IRIX, Solaris, MacOS, Linux, MS Windows, Acorn RISC OS
Consoles: Atari Jaguar, Sega32x, Playstation, SNES, 3DO, Sega Saturn, Game Boy Advance, XBox, XBox360, Playstation 3
Other: Tapwave Zodiac, IPhone/IPod Touch/IPad

Unofficial ports include: BeOS, Amiga, ZX Spectrum 128K, Commodore VIC-20, Nintendo DS, iPod, Android, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Zune, TI-Nspire

Doom was also ported to Adobe Flash and Java, so any device that can run those languages can also play Doom. I seem to remember some company once released a "smart" refrigerator that used Java; it's possible you could have played Doom on that too.

Doom. It's everywhere.

This story just seems like a blatant ad...

But since it's here, a well-reviewed alternative is Photo Mosaica for iPhone/iPad. I have a poster on the wall of my living room that was made using it, and it looks great.

I just gave my 70-something mother my old iPad2 and fifty bucks on the app store. She's loving it.

I'm hanging out at her place for a week or so as a Christmasish kind of thing, so I've been available to answer her questions and tell her how to do basic stuff. We'll probably go get her a cover with a keyboard in it before I go - she's a touch-typist so she kinda hates the screen keyboard.

Admittedly she's fairly tech-savvy for an old lady - her vcr has never blinked 12:00, she's got an aging Windows laptop that she does stuff on - but if your father's still mostly got it together, you should be able to teach him a lot about how to use it and have an excuse to hang out with him. Don't show him how to do stuff, tell him how to do stuff while you're sitting next to him, and be patient. Then grin happily once he gets it and spends a whole day doing nothing but playing Fairway Solitaire or something.

Hell, I had a good time sitting next to my mom this morning playing a hidden object/adventure game based on A Christmas Carol with her. The iPad mostly stayed in her lap, with me poking at it now and then for some of the kinds of puzzles I'm a lot better at than she is.

No. Bullshit. The profit is minimal.

Y'know, I sometimes wonder about this.

According to Apple, users buy 15,000 songs every minute. That would be 21,600,000 songs per day. Just for laughs, we'll say each song is 99 cents and that's $21,384,000 in revenue that just the music store brings in every day. Forget the movies, forget the TV shows, forget the Apps.

$21 million per day. Wow.

Now we have some accounting to do. Yes, the music companies get about 2/3rds of that. But when does Apple transfer that 2/3rds? I doubt it's every day. Every week? Every month? Apple can make pretty good interest on $21 million dollars a day, I would imagine. If they give the money to the music companies every month, that gives Apple 30 days to play with that revenue. I'm sure they can get some pretty good rates on that.

Yes, Apple claims that they end up making about 1 cent of profit from an iTunes sale. But do they count the interest that they accumulate from holding onto that money in their 1 cent of profit?

Really? Apples IAD network is driven by data culled from users of Itunes, Iradio etc. Iad is sold as "targeted by exclusive consumption data exclusive to Apple." Buy you joining their network, you are buying this data, ergo Apple is selling it. You might want to read up on it. http://advertising.apple.com/ Microsoft also has their own ad network, where the data they sell is gleaned from their own sources. http://advertise.bingads.microsoft.com/en-us/sign-up?mkt=en-us

As far as tablets go, iOS is way ahead for accessibility because they put a lot of resources into it. There is some decent voice command with Siri, and the screen reader VoiceOver, speaks what is on the screen, reads text, web pages, etc. There is still a learning curve, but it makes things possible. There are braille displays for iOS devices too. http://www.apple.com/accessibility/ios/

For Smart phones, last time I checked what my blind friends were using they said the best thing at the time was a specialized operating system and app for a Nokia phone and it worked really well. But they also said iOS was improving fast and that several years ago.

For dumbphones it's a lot easier, you can get fairly easy to use talking phones, check what the associations for the blind recommend now. Or check http://www.blindbargains.com/

For desktops and laptops I think Windows is still ahead a little because the software packages available for it, JAWS and WindowEyes are built for it and have been around a long time. The learning curve is so steep for them though that they said unless you needed windows, then apple with it's built in, free, screen reader was a cheaper and almost as good option and a lot of blind people do use it.

Clueless much?

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MC531ZM/A/apple-ipad-camera-connection-kit

Nexus 10 is the SAME PRICE as a base ipad and the same specs.

Same price, yes. But otherwise, TOTAL BULLSHIT. You could, you know, actually educate yourself by looking at Nexus 10 specs vs. Apple iPad specs, but here are some highlights:

Processor:
Nexus 10: CPU: Dual-core A15, GPU: Quad-core Mali TS04
iPad: Dual-core A5 Chip (CPU and GPU combined, ugh)

Display:
Nexus 10: 2560 x 1600 (300 ppi)
iPad: 1024-by-768 resolution at 132 pixels per inch (ppi)

RAM: Nexus 10: 2GB
iPad: 512MB (actually had to look that one up on Wikipedia ... can't imagine why Apple doesn't want to advertise that).

There's more, but you can see (if you take your Apple blinders off) that the iPad isn't even in the same ballpark as the Nexus 10.

It's like the USB OTG adapters of the Android world but in case the AC comes back to read this, be sure to check the reviews at http://store.apple.com/us/reviews/MC531ZM/A/apple-ipad-camera-connection-kit

It's about 50-50 between 5 stars and 1 stars ratings. It doesn't work for everybody.

A hierarchical display, like the column browser?

As for search, the full-library keyword search is more than enough 99% of the time I'm looking to jump to an artist/album, but if you want to get more complex, smart playlists let you search your library for files using just about any criteria and combination you can imagine (no regex though, not that I've ever found need to regex search my music). Smart playlists are seriously iTunes' most powerful feature and I've never seen it satisfactorily duplicated in any other music player.

iTunes' database/spreadsheetness is it's most powerful feature - you're not limited to just one set folder hierarchy for navigating your music. iTunes gives the user a myriad ways to look at their data; sometimes too many, really. TBH, all the newer UI views that make iTunes "pretty" instead of looking like a spreadsheet are simply more silly and time-consuming to navigate. Fortunately they've left the spreadsheet-style views available for people who aren't afraid of data.

iTunes certainly has lots of issues, especially on Windows where it's buggy and (from what I hear) slow, and it suffers terribly from a decade of feature-creep and try-to-be-everything-for-interfacing-with-iOS, but if you simply use it as a music library/player it can be fantastic.

Did you turn off locations services when using Wifi?

Does "turn off" mean the NSA doesn't get the information or just you?

You're accusing OP of "obfuscating it"? That's pretty damn rich of you. How hard did you have to Google to find the most overpriced way to buy an iphone in the USA?

There is no need for an "EU import." Apple sells unlocked iphones in its regular store.

$650 for a 16GB 5s:
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s/16gb-space-gray-unlocked
or $550 for a 15GB 5c:
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5c/16gb-white-unlocked

Nevermind the fact that TFA is about a USA phenomenon (Black Friday) and pretty much everyone in the USA buys phones with subsidy on contract, so all phones pretty much cost the same.

You're accusing OP of "obfuscating it"? That's pretty damn rich of you. How hard did you have to Google to find the most overpriced way to buy an iphone in the USA?

There is no need for an "EU import." Apple sells unlocked iphones in its regular store.

$650 for a 16GB 5s:
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s/16gb-space-gray-unlocked
or $550 for a 15GB 5c:
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5c/16gb-white-unlocked

Nevermind the fact that TFA is about a USA phenomenon (Black Friday) and pretty much everyone in the USA buys phones with subsidy on contract, so all phones pretty much cost the same.

10% of the market?

I concur. Last quarter MS said Surface sales doubled, but they haven't given any solid numbers and last quarter they had a $0.9 billion write-off in order to dump their old inventory. One estimate suggests that sales can't be more than 1 million at best, more likely something like 850k. Now, compare that to Apple's 14.1 million units over the same quarter and that Apple is something like 30% of the tablet market, you realize that any projections of MS Surface capturing any substantial part of the market are just silly.

On the bright side, I did just see my first Surface being used in the wild recently. Granted, we didn't actually use it for anything, but I finally did meet someone who bought one. Maybe MS can do what they did with Xbox and just continue dumping money into it until they out-subidize their competitors (a.k.a. stereotypical monopolist behavior).

You utterly fucking fail at understanding security. [...] The only known threats on iOS devices have come to jailbroken phones and the jailbreaks themselves.

It ain't just a river in Egypt.

And that's not even considering threats that come from Apple itself, without any need to install apps or change settings. Something magical happens and things just work.

So what you've got is malware requiring physical access to the device, a dodgy app that slipped through the accreditation process but was subsequently pulled and a theoretical vulnerability that Apple have patched.

If you thing that compares to the privacy sham or security shambles that is Android then you really must be a Google or Samsung shill. (It was obvious from the links you included in your post.)

Know how many people get viruses or malware on their iPhone (without jailbreaking) ... 0.

Looks like you don't know enough people. It has been done, without jailbreaking, and we only know because the developers publicized that fact themselves.. If you want to keep the same answer, perhaps you could rephrase the question as "How many times that Apple admit that they served up viruses or malware in their App Store?"

So you think its better to run extra software, waste more ram, cpu and storage space ... so that you don't get something that iOS users just aren't going to get in the first place?

But what if I don't _want_ a misplaced sense of security based on faulty assumptions?

You utterly fucking fail at understanding security. [...] The only known threats on iOS devices have come to jailbroken phones and the jailbreaks themselves.

It ain't just a river in Egypt.

And that's not even considering threats that come from Apple itself, without any need to install apps or change settings. Something magical happens and things just work.

Until then [I] just make it obvious [I'm] nothing more than a fanboy.

No argument here.

Get a refurbished pre-retina display version from Apple. They are still available, cheaper than a new one, and come with the same warranty. You can even get AppleCare for them last time I checked.

This is the non-ultrabook style that is very easily upgraded.

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro

that's probably because the compiler used to compile the application has got the code to check for benchmark tests and optimisation for it. This is old hat...

Here is the source code for the compiler used to compile iOS apps. Point out where that functionality is.

White trash, eh? I know a few high-tech companies that would disagree with you.

You know, small companies that you've probably never heard of, like:
Google ( the Lenoir NC data center is featured: https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/streetview/ )
Apple (Their Maiden, NC, data center is a model for green data centers: https://www.apple.com/environment/renewable-energy/ )
EMC (Not only do they have a huge datacenter/Center of Excellence in Durham, which earned LEED Gold status ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/2013/20130314-01.htm ) but they also manufacture storage arrays in their Apex plant ( http://www.emc.com/about/news/press/us/2006/08082006-4543.htm ) and have a significant R&D presence in RTP)
Facebook ( The Forest City Data Center: https://www.facebook.com/ForestCityDataCenter ) Oh, and Rutherford County is very rural.

Further, North Carolina has one of the world's premier research and education networks, NCREN ( http://ncren.net/ ), which just underwent significant expansion over the last two years.

And the list of high-tech and higher education excellence goes on and on.

North Carolinians even know about Slashdot. :-)

Having read the actual article, and not the biased summary, it seems a reasonable decision for the director to make. There is a place for that type of documentary; and it would certainly be a good thing to show in the right venue. And I'm sure the director had a difficult time with the decision.

But, then again, just exactly what does Slashdot commentary have to do with the scientific process anyway? (Yes, I do understand real science, and I also don't have any need to prove that to anyone).

Sadly, they seem to have gone with the low-frequency PWM route for their laptop screens.