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Except it does. It requires internet connection to work even for basic phone functions and sends about 10kB per second of your voice up to Apple's servers for actual processing and then gets the recognized results.

$18.6B NT is about $600M USD. Apple's total profit is about $7B over the same time, with about $5-6B from the iPhone.

It's great to see Apple competitors (especially Android-based) making a healthy profit... but still... in another league...

I would love to see where you get these figures from http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/despite-record-mac-sales-70-of-apples-revenue-comes-from-ios.ars I am to believe that Apple from 41% revenue makes makes 86% of its profit. I suspect you are exagerating just a tad :)

Big announces like :
- the wayland/unity stuff, 1 year ago ( http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/551 ), still nothing despites "this should be ready in one year".
- the android compatibility, 2 year and half ago ( http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/canonical-developers-aim-to-make-android-apps-run-on-ubuntu.ars )

Interesting article, Climate skeptics perform independent analysis, finally convinced Earth is getting warmer our Climate skeptic, Richard Muller, that would be Richard Muller, also President and Chief Scientist of Muller & Associates a consultancy providing GreenGov services to Governments, International Organizations, non profits; not exactly good for skeptic cred. I also found this interesting

Watts had written, "Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant 'global warming' in the 20th century." Now, after Berkeley Earth's release, he claims to have never questioned that the Earth had warmed. Other prominent skeptics are saying similar things.

apparently the author, John Timmer doesn't understand that saying that something can't be proven by the evidence presented isn't the same as saying an event did or didn't occur. Then there is the shenanigans surround the release of the non-peer reviewed drafts, that Judith Curry, one of the BEST Co-Authors not only didn't know in advance that the paper while being reviewed by many people most likely to be critical of the paper were still under non-disclosure agreements as reviewers, that the paper was going to be released to the public as a draft

It would have been smart to consult me.’ She (Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers) said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment. Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague

  furthermore

he (Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California) admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’,

they still can't determine whether or not the warming of the past few decades is still occurring or not!

WASHINGTON -- Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126102247889095011.html

Predator drones use less encryption than your TV, DVDs

Cybersecurity Issues with Predators, Reapers, and Unmanned Aerial Systems

Not Just Drones: Militants Can Snoop on Most U.S. Warplanes

U.S. was Warned of Predator Drone Hacking contains information indicating that the US knew their UAVs had insufficient security as early as 1996.

On the bright side, the command and control systems are not the same as the video output stream... but I still wouldn't rule out some enterprising hacker deciding to fling a few Predators south of the border and see what happens.

iTunes can send crash reports to Apple and app developers (it's opt-in.) Since those crash reports collect data on the phone that might be what they refer to.

It's *Thomas* DiBiase running that website? Oh sorry, we thought it was "Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase running it. Sorry. - Righthaven.

Oh no, we don't target the big guys, we were right all along because we DO only target little guys. Remember that Ars Technica "clerical error"? Sorry. - Righthaven.

Actually, they anticipated these losses. Ars reported that they expected to lose 1,000,000 people after the change. Assuming they were planning to still be profitable after those losses, losing only 80% of that is actually good news. Well, at least for them...

It's utterly amazing that the patent system in the US is still this bad. Where is the reform we keep hearing about?

The financial industry cut a deal and got a partial reform that only fixed the situation for them. No, really, I'm not joking! [arstechnica]

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/jobs-i-will-spend-my-last-breath-fighting-android-a-stolen-product.ars

AT&T DSL

Normally I dont agree with that kind of defeatism, but Verizon keeps doing this at every turn: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/10/solved-verizon-to-pay-25-million-fine-over-mystery-fees.ars. They are just up to the same old unethical behavior as before. Add uninstallable bloatware nagging you to buy things or use in app billing, they are really biting the hand that feeds them. Android phones are their bread and butter, making them cash hand over fist. Add insane data charges and it's really obvious how badly distorted the wireless market is. The ironic part? Google is who bid the c-block up to the open-access provision level. Forcing the winner to accept open access.

The thing that bothers me about all this is that Google hasn't stepped into the courts really very much at all yet.

ORLY?

Fairly good article explaing the Royalties: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/10/microsoft-collects-license-fees-on-50-of-android-devices-tells-google-to-wake-up.ars

Quote:"Microsoft didn’t specifically reference that post, but today said “For those who continue to protest that the smartphone patent thicket is too difficult to navigate, it’s past time to wake up.” Microsoft doesn’t just collect money from other companies, it also pays out plenty to protect itself, Microsoft’s legal team notes.

“Over the past decade we’ve spent roughly $4.5 billion to license in patents from other companies,” Microsoft said. “These have given us the opportunity to build on the innovations of others in a responsible manner that respects their IP rights. Equally important, we've stood by our customers and partners with countless agreements that contain the strongest patent indemnification provisions in our industry. These ensure that if our software infringes someone else's patents, we'll address the problem rather than leave it to others.” /endquote

Fair use has allowed entire copyrighted works to be used even without modifications under certain circumstances (a recent Righthaven lawsuit had them lose a suit despite the accused reposting the entire article .

As for the frames part, I was just having fun with your odd mention of 'making video frames' and that you were technically wrong about it. I was not debating that the source material was copyrighted.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/02/mediasentry-role-in-riaa-lawsuit-comes-under-scrutiny.ars

Idiot huh? Nice response.

Well, it wasn't easy to develop for until about year after launch, since they had no SDK at launch. Excellent spit and polish though on the software and hardware. Apple always nails that last 10%.

Apple originally didn't intend for Jane Q. Developer to actually write applications for the iPhone - she was supposed to use only html5 and javascript for "web apps" in Safari. Jobs idea was that only companies like Google would develop real applications (and pay a big fat fee).

It was only after people began jailbreaking their iPhones that Apple gave in and created the App Store.

Neglected to source the quote in my haste to post. It's from here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/10/biographer-steve-jobs-regretted-not-having-cancer-surgery-earlier.ars

If you have wireless, think of a fed with a laptop in the street - that will get into most OS X, Linux people of interest enjoying modern ethernet free computing.
If your a Mac or Linux setup is wired, the feds might chat with your isp and go direct down your isp network next time you connect.
Windows is well understood from a security admin ~ protective tools view. Its wide open and easy to slip something in on most versions.
Some new, unknown, different, exotic outgoing Mac/Linux software firewall/log might just alert the user, then they ring smart friends.. the press...
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/mac-trojan-pretends-to-be-flash-player-installer-to-get-in-the-door.ars
Its wonderful if the users enters their "Unix" pw for you and you can alter all you need.

Rig the computer remotely to blow the lithium battery up in the jerk's face!!!

It's a Macbook, the battery will explode eventually. But if you want to speed things along..."

Seeing how using text speak seems to be standard operating procedure for high ranking goverment officials . I would suspect "like 15-year-old children talking" would qualify you to hold a nice cushy post in goverment. Perhaps the goverment can look inward first before critiquing illegally seized evidence. Better yet why not just stop performing illegal search and seizures. Oh right, they are above the law, silly me.

As did I. My first thought was that they finally FTFF, although one OS too late :)

Looks like the whole thing is bunk http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/the-giant-prehistoric-squid-that-ate-common-sense.ars

Pretty much nothing is factually true in that 'research' other than that octopi live in the ocean. For example, modern octopi do NOT arrange bones into 'art' gardens as Mark McManmin asserts. Arstechica sums it up best with the article 'The giant, prehistoric squid that ate common sense' at http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/the-giant-prehistoric-squid-that-ate-common-sense.ars The best quote from Ars is "We have a serious problem with science journalism. A big one, in fact, and today that problem takes the form of a giant, prehistoric squid with tentacles so formidable that it has sucked the brains right out of staff writers’ heads."

Mrr, it's kinda sad, but I sort of rely on ArsTechnica more than /. for my gaming news for nerds nowadays.

Binding of Isaac

The foundation of the story was posted on the linked blog on September 23rd, and most blogs and news outlets covered it then (e.g. ars technica).

Good job being timely, slashdot. At one point I could come here for breaking information. Those days are long gone.

I got a blackberry playbook a couple weeks back (a present, or I wouldn't have it). I have to say, I'm underwhelmed with the 3rd party applications. It could just be the playbook and maybe an Android tablet would have programs that are more mature, but I doubt it. The stuff I see on my playbook feels like throw backs to the old applications you could get for PDAs (remember those?) Yes, there's a way to do whatever you want to do on it, but you've got to 'manage expectations'...

You mean there're no such apps like GhostGuitar for the PlayBook? Who would have thought that.

I thought Yahoo search was now powered by Bing, so there shouldn't be any major differences in queries: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/08/yahoo-transition-to-bing-finalized-in-us-canada.ars

Of course, if you don't agree you can always go start your ISP.

Sure, just as soon as I get the same billion dollar check from our government they all did to put in their networks back in the Clinton years.

You think they'd even let you do it if you could? Not likely.

That is exactly the type of corporate centralism which has been flourishing in the U.S. for the past decade (though you can see it's roots going much deeper). The frightening thing is that the groups responsible for establishing the 'legality' of these martinet policies have also been attempting to push them into other countries, replacing their decidedly more liberal laws with their own. If this seems familiar, it's because these are the same cold war era tactics that have been going on for the past century. The same ones that were supposed to have stopped back in 1991. What's frightening about this type of action isn't so much that it is still happening, since it never really stopped, but who is perpetuating it. Namely, the companies that profit by holding the keys to an intellectual monopoly or the tools to extort money from others by claiming 'rights' of ownership over the other's products.

No longer does this insanity take place in the rarified atmosphere of internation politics. Now, with the RIAA and then MPAA[1] [2] lawsuits and the recent incident of a patent troll going after small businesses, this sort of thing is quite literally at your doorstep.

On a political level, both local and national, this plays out as aggravation of class struggle with McCarthyism and the "you're either with us or against us" mindset. On the streets, we've got good old fashioned union busting (carried out by our police forces no less). The political pundits in America are right about one thing, like the Communists and National-Socialists before, there are fascists/communists/terrorists in your midst but they aren't who you think they are.



/Godwinned in 3

They do?

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/05/adobe-seeks-to-extend-reach-of-flash-nukes-licensing-fees.ars

An article on Ars Technia stated that:

"The intrusion was reported to kernel.org users earlier this week by site administrator John Hawley. The attack is believed to have occurred on August 12 but wasn't detected until August 28. The attack vector isn't known for certain, but it is thought that the attacker somehow obtained a legitimate user's login credentials and then exploited an unknown privilege escalation vulnerability. The attack was discovered when an Xnest error message was found in the system logs on a server that did not have Xnest installed."

I approve of damburger's rant. Morons like IWantMoreSpamPlease need to be abused for that kind of idiocy. Sadly, it'll probably just reinforce his mistaken beliefs.

At the risk of sounding like a hypocrite, I might agree with the OP's assertion that liberals have taken over the education system. Were it up to conservatives, there would probably be no system. They'd cut all the funding for education and keep talking about how free markets and "job makers" would solve the problem of educating our populace. Then, when you went to Macdonald's or the department of motor vehicles, you'd be dealing with total imbecile rather than an impertinent little twat.

You can already get really cheap chinese android tablets on EBay, and they're almost usable.

And some at Walgreen's (Walgreen's? Yes, Walgreen's) that are not.

Bugger off, shitstain. You're APK and we all know it. You are the only person I have ever known to use the phrase "geek angst" - Google has less than 5000 results for that exact phrase. But here's one that might interest you: lose some weight, fatty.

Intel in its infinite wisdom disabled VT-d in the i5 2500K and i7 2600K.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/08/what-processor-should-i-buy-intels-crazy-pricing-makes-my-head-hurt.ars
If that wasn't the case I would have shelled out the money for an i7 2600K and a motherboard a few months ago. As it is, I procrastinated and now the Bulldozer desktop CPUs are just around the corner so I'd rather wait for them.

you're forgetting that these people aren't honest, they buy judges and politicians, and eventually the lawyers they hire become the judges who rule on cases. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/riaa-lobbyist-becomes-federal-judge-rules-on-file-sharing-cases.ars These people aren't bound by the same rules you and I are. They know the people they need to know, and they buy their way into anything they need to buy. In Canada the new conservative majority is tabling a canadian DMCA, even though its absolutely terrible for canadians. The governments no longer fear the people, and they're outright bought out by various corporations and lobby groups.

You're exactly right. Market cap changes rapidly over the years and says mostly something about how "hot" or fashionable a company is a certain time, not about how profitable or anything else really. Ars Technica had a nice article about this a while back and mainly says you can't measure a company by its market cap at all.

But still... think a few years back. If someone would have said to me "In about 10 years IBM will be worth more than Microsoft, but Apple will be worth more than both of them" in 2001, I would have laughed at that person.

The last two came with MagSafe power connectors.

Which are a female dog and a half to find replacements for should they break, or to find external batteries for. For a very long time, Apple flat-out refused to license its patented MagSafe connector to a maker of external batteries. In fact, one company bought authentic Apple power supplies just for the authentic MagSafe connectors and soldered them onto its external batteries, and Apple still sued.

Well, one can't blame NOKIA (or at least the sane management/engineers still left) blame for not trying: Say hello to "Meltemi" - NOKIA's new LInux-based OS for feature phones: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/is-nokias-s40-replacement-os-a-defense-against-android-feature-phones.ars

It looked to me from Ars take on it that they're compiling JS server-side but running it client-side. Timing shouldn't factor into that. It should decrease the time it takes JS to start running because the code's already been parsed and I would think poorly coded animation will run smoother. In a perfect world this feature would make litte difference.

The story claims that this is about copyright, and then links another slashdot story that doesn't mention copyright once.

Every story I can find about this says that it is a trademark dispute, not copyright.

How can anyone take "cloud computing" seriously? It's really just a much less efficient version of the age old distributed computing paradigm. All it does is enable people who cannot wrap their heads around complex clustering topics to write extremely wasteful applications, and give management a new buzz-word dejour.

I take cloud computing pretty fucking seriously...

http://www.cloudcomputingzone.com/2011/04/amazon-builds-top-500-supercomputer-in-the-cloud/

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2011/040611-linux-supercomputer.html

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/09/30000-core-cluster-built-on-amazon-ec2-cloud.ars

That means... you need a 30k core supercomputer for a workday? You don't shell out hundreds of
thousands of dollars... you just pay the tidy sum of $10,232

Know what is the best thing about that?

Let's say you get 2 hrs into your sim and you realize you made a mistake in coding, forgot something,
saw initial results and realized you could trim things up to make it run better or turn out better results...

YOU TURN IT OFF AND SPEND NO MORE MONEY UNTIL YOU TURN IT BACK ON

Maybe all u cloud naysayers don't get it.

Tell ya what... http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ there is a free tier, 750 hours per month.
IF you're a numbers person you'll recognize that as safely above the 744 hours that are in a month.
However you can slice that 750 however you like... which means... you can run:
750 instances for an hour
1500 instances for a half hour or
3000 instances for 15 minutes
(you're not charged the first 10 minutes of running an instance [unless they've changed that])

try it... spark up a lamp instance, clone it a few hundred times, and hit it with a load tester,
or run something on it, see how fast you can calculate primes or find numbers in pi... I don't
care, but before saying... "I don't see how you can take it seriously... use it"

Maybe the naysayers are such because they cannot conceive of what you would use the cloud for?

-@|

You realize that OS X is a certified Unix ?

Or cutting off your nose to spite your face is fair play bitch. Samsung makes more money selling iPhones than Samsung phones

Citation? Samsung is making a huge profit right now through their smartphone sales, whilst their profits from most other components is falling. In Q2 of this year, Samsung sold way more phones than Apple. Phone sales, right now, are top dollar for Samsung.

And if Apple's sales of an iPhone5 gets blocked, what do think will happen to Samsung's sales? Do you think they might just happen to rise even further?

So lets see: Samsung still makes more profits from components than from smartphones, they sell more phones than Apple sells smartphones (but less smartphones - oops). And all these facts are in your sources.

Actually, according to Ars Technica, Fermilab got a similar result, but threw it out because the margin of error was too large. I'm guessing a lot of attention will be focused on neutrinos now.

That's a whole lot of assertions based on precisely no evidence. No statements from Microsoft. No actions by Microsoft, other than their intention to use UEFI. In fact, if one can disable UEFI in hardware after boot, that would render the issue moot. Is MS also going to strongarm manufacturers to exclude that feautre?

The Ars article was a lot less 'chicken little':

And while it is still a rumor it can probably be taken as a fact that disabling this feature (if made possible by the manufacturers) will likely cause Windows to not star

According to this post on msdn.com, that would appear to not be true. MS claims to support legacy BIOS as well as allow dual booting. They don't specifically mention Linux, but I don't think that was an intentional slight.

Not to mention which, since the last round of DOJ suits, MS has seemed to stay away from blatantly anticompetitive tactics. And this would probably be the most blatant they've ever done, if they were to do it.

Basically, while I like to bash MS as much as the next guy (as long as you're not the next guy, apparently), do you have absolutely ANYTHING to back up some rather bold claims?

Or cutting off your nose to spite your face is fair play bitch. Samsung makes more money selling iPhones than Samsung phones

Citation? Samsung is making a huge profit right now through their smartphone sales, whilst their profits from most other components is falling. In Q2 of this year, Samsung sold way more phones than Apple. Phone sales, right now, are top dollar for Samsung.

And if Apple's sales of an iPhone5 gets blocked, what do think will happen to Samsung's sales? Do you think they might just happen to rise even further?

I've seen no indication yet that they're doing the US's (actually RIAA/MPAA) bidding.

Really??

The virtual graphics adapter may not be all that powerful, but it looks like people have been having success with VMware and doing a hardware passthrough for the video card.

I'd bet that in a couple of years this becomes a standardized feature of other VM systems as well.