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Parent is correct. Admittedly this story is up to /. standards, but the editors should fix the post. Parent is wrong about "published". PCMag isn't in print anymore, but is still a busy web site. Disclosure: I have written for them for many years and run the Security Watch blog.

Well, as an online writer I use the word publish to mean anything published online or in print. Hell, I read all my books on the Kindle now. Anyway, I used to write for IDG so I noticed the error right away.

Parent is correct. Admittedly this story is up to /. standards, but the editors should fix the post. Parent is wrong about "published". PCMag isn't in print anymore, but is still a busy web site. Disclosure: I have written for them for many years and run the Security Watch blog.

Well, as an online writer I use the word publish to mean anything published online or in print. Hell, I read all my books on the Kindle now. Anyway, I used to write for IDG so I noticed the error right away.

Parent is correct. Admittedly this story is up to /. standards, but the editors should fix the post. Parent is wrong about "published". PCMag isn't in print anymore, but is still a busy web site. Disclosure: I have written for them for many years and run the Security Watch blog.

Parent is correct. Admittedly this story is up to /. standards, but the editors should fix the post. Parent is wrong about "published". PCMag isn't in print anymore, but is still a busy web site. Disclosure: I have written for them for many years and run the Security Watch blog.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2392422,00.asp

"Lenovo: Samsung Galaxy Tab Sales 20K, not 2 Million"

So, that is why Lenovo decided to deride Samsung...

Cheap, in many aspects.

What can I say, hmm, Ohhh Noess, the only touch screens or tablets in the world are on an Apple iPad. What this is not true, http://www.magictouch.com/large_resistive_touch.html and whoops http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2370090,00.asp. Ipad an overpriced little dinky toy reader pretending to be something it's not, to scam the iGullible for big profits. For portability smart phones, like the iPhone or the whole Android range work, once you go for greater usability, you are bound by physiological constraints, ergonomics and, haptic technology. Apple even ripped off a patent for auto-focusing for virtual reality glasses, which is the real direction for portable digital interaction.

I'm not kidding. Apple is being sued by a company that claims to have patented fast booting:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2390639,00.asp

Now to answer your question. I recently installed Apple's Lion which has a resume feature. when you boot it puts you right back to where you were when you turned it off. this means no more having to quit applications when you shut down!

The reason you leave your computer on now is in part because it was a chore to turn it off and it interrupted your work flow. this is no longer the case. There is very little reasons not to turn your work computer off when you leave now.

There are ruggedized phones. Apple just doesn't make one.

For what they charge, the screen should be sapphire, not glass. Sapphire sheet is neither rare nor expensive. Supermarket checkout scanners (and, especially, Home Depot) usually use sapphire windows. You can drag metal cans and tools across those for years without scratching them.

Then there's the whole silliness of needing a case to protect an iPhone. If the thing was designed right, you wouldn't need a case to protect it. There are phones that work fine after being run over by a car. There are rugged smartphones.

But none of them are made by Hon Hai, a/k/a Foxconn, a/k/a Apple.

There are ruggedized phones. Apple just doesn't make one.

For what they charge, the screen should be sapphire, not glass. Sapphire sheet is neither rare nor expensive. Supermarket checkout scanners (and, especially, Home Depot) usually use sapphire windows. You can drag metal cans and tools across those for years without scratching them.

Then there's the whole silliness of needing a case to protect an iPhone. If the thing was designed right, you wouldn't need a case to protect it. There are phones that work fine after being run over by a car. There are rugged smartphones.

But none of them are made by Hon Hai, a/k/a Foxconn, a/k/a Apple.

This happened a couple of years ago in Silicon Valley. Took out 911 and ATMs in some cases. Just happened to be during contract negotiations with the labor union.

Still got a htc universal and it was good at a few things , java in particular wasn't one of them, The 640x480 screen the auto rotation, mine doesn't have built in gps although some did. There have been a couple of versions of linux running on it to a greater or lesser extent the slide to unlock you see on most android phones is one of them.

my old toshiba E740 is still fairly respectable as a pda built in bluetooth and usb (wifi was optional but i have a cf wifi card). the optional dock a clip on expansion port brings a vga port to the base of the pda and a standard usb port 320 by 240 screen running the old 2003 version of windows mobile , no camera off course although if the linux port had been completed you could probably run a standard web cam.

The hardware on these devices was pretty good even if the microsoft operating systems did leave a lot to be desired.

Specifications have improved faster wifi higher performing processors and more ram and better operating systems. Even my old E740 is not that far removed from the ipad or itouch or iphone. If drivers were written you could probably use a 3g modem stick with the E740 and use it for voice and maybe video calls.

It is all evolutionary not revolutionary, If toshiba wanted to upgrade the E740 to a larger screen more ram faster cpu and a decent operating system you'd probably finish up with something like the galaxy tab or the ipad.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,361530,00.asp checkout this review from 2002

Tablets are not new and build upon the work done by other companies, Apple shouldn't be able to use the legal system to delay competitors devices. This court injunction is not justified.

For the price an Apple computer costs it SHOULD be good quality. Sadly just because something looks good quality doesn't mean it is. It's not hard to find a litany of faults which have affected MacBook computers over the years. Expanding batteries, cracked casings, yellowing casing, overheating CPUs, warping, MagSafe shorting and fires etc. It's not surprising in some respect because Apple do push the limits of industrial design. But what looks nice does not always equate into good build quality or reliability either.

By any quantitative survey done, Apple's failure rate is no worse, and often better, than any other company in the industry
http://www.pcworld.com/article/211402/reliability_and_service_laptops.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384243,00.asp

You can Google up "hp laptop crack..." or "dell screen..." and watch the autocomplete and you'll find the same things. Computers all fail in the same ways, big surprise. The question is how often.

If your failure rate is 15% and you sell ten million computers a year, you'll have 1,500,000 angry users on the Internet complaining. (Also, Apple gives all its computers the same name. So "macbook cracking" generates a lot more hits than "hp1337asdfqwerrtyuiop cracking")

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387436,00.asp. If OnLive can do decent gaming over the net, im sure remote desktop wont be a problem.

Stunning

What incentive does Microsoft have to ceding search (and search related ads) to Google? It has nearly 30% US marketshare and it's growing (combined with Yahoo, which uses Bing for its backend).

When Bing first launched, Bing scared Google and forced them to start innovating again. Competition is good after all. Even if Bing dies off, I see no advantage, as a consumer, to have Bing disappear. I also see no advantage, for (not as) an investor to cede that entire domain to one of their two biggest competitors. Throw away the entire investment that has signs of paying off in the future, and give a major investor even more money to play with to cut into your market? That's really the best idea?

Having some competition certainly helps spur production and innovation. After all, Windows Vista took so long because they had no serious competition until OS X started seriously stealing the spotlight. Apple gave them a good reason to produce faster, and at a higher quality (Windows 7).

Sorry, If it's not open source, compiled in house, and uses data encrypted BEFORE it leaves our network -- It's not a secure service. Also: I put it to you that a closed source program or OS is considered harmful in terms of security and transparency (read trust-ability) -- This goes for LockLizard, Symantec's PGP NetShare, and especially Windows -- The US, UK, Russian, Chinese and other governments have the Windows source code, why is that? Security, and also to look for exploit vectors... Being a security contentious individual, Why don't you insist on having the source of your software too?

Even if you can prove that a certain algorithm is being used to encrypt the data, how can I be sure that the program or OS doesn't contain a key-logger that sends the key and/or data where I don't want it to go (Perhaps via a update request)?

If your "SaaS service" (software as a service service?) has the keys to unlock your data -- Well, Your version of "done right" is very different from mine.

Let's not forget the "trust" we put in RSA tokens, letting RSA keep the root keys, and how hackers cracked the collective single point of failure, then used RSA's keys... If those who got hacked as a result of using RSA's "Security as a Service" had instead used Yubikey, they could have installed their own "seed" keys into their own tokens, thus eliminating the centralized key-store. (Additionally, if RSA wasn't using Windows internally they wouldn't have been vulnerable to the attack vector used against them; Google learned this lesson too.)

A true "Thin Client" or Dumb Client, won't be doing much work with your data, allowing data processing remotely means you have no control over your security. I opt for "Real Clients" and in-house services combined with a "Dumb Cloud" that just stores and fetches encrypted blobs.

In short: If someone else has the keys to your kingdom, how secure are you really? (Lockheed thought they could trust RSA in such a way -- Yep, they both got hacked).
--
Don't get me wrong, apply security as needed; Some systems don't need as much security as others (provided backups are made), but why call a less secure solution "done right"?

According to this, it currently costs about $1000000 per pound to send something to Mars (I'll be conservative and say $400/g). Picking the first hard drive that Google gave me, we have 16Tb of storage at 655g, or 4.1e-11 g/bit or 1.64e-8 $/bit, about $164 per gigabit.

Setting up lasers and shit has a lot of upfront cost, but once you get it set up, I'm assuming it's considerably cheaper than $164 per gigabit in the long run.

I know this because Apple has announced as much. Look at any of the multiple tech news sites putting up comparisons of the services.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386491,00.asp

There was a better one on one of the other sites that I can't seem to find.

Finally, there are indeed people already using iCloud as you can see evidence of here:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/06/20/if-you-use-all-your-icloud-storage-apple-sends-you-this-email/

Check this story out

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2349468,00.asp

So let DARPA do it instead of NASA?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA

Today's news for DARPA
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387672,00.asp - project ahead of schedule.

the author explains his study a little bit in TFAcomments.

the focus of the study was something like "how many support calls will end in an (expansive) hardware replacement".

"Because it runs the flash sites my daughter goes to"

Pretty much every single review I've seen of Flash on devices like the Xoom had the same conclusion - the Flash ads work great, but everything else sucks. Tried it myself on the Galaxy Tab less than a month ago. The entire Flash experience was horrible.

So you're basically saying that because the iPad doesn't work on a few sites for little kids, it's inferior to the Xoom, which you consider a 'real computer' because it has Flash.

Yeah. Got it.. *eyeroll*

Context Information Security has already tested WebGL implementations and demonstrated the sorts of bugs Microsoft warns about. In fact, it looks like maybe they got a tip about it from Redmond, but they do demonstrate it, and Mozilla has acknowledged the bugs for Firefox 4.

Apple bought iCloud.com from Xcerion on April 28, 2011 for $4.5 million. I assume they also bought the trademark as well.

See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bellas_Hess_v._Illinois
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2328647,00.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quill_Corp._v._North_Dakota

Although I agree with your assessment of the progressiveness of science, Tesla Predicted Mobile Messaging in 1909.

The posted url now 410's. here's a link to the article on PC mag and the wired source too...

I wonder if they've gone backwards in terms of performance?

Um, that would be a big "not hardly".

From PC Magazine:

At 3D tasks, the new iMac was in a class of its own. The iMac completed the Crysis test with a smoothly playable 70 frames per second (fps) at Medium quality and the Lost Planet 2 test with a respectable 32 fps at Middle quality. None of the other competitors could produce playable scores on either test. The new iMac also topped all other comers at the PCMark Vantage test (8,141 points) and at the 3DMark Vantage test (19,397 points). If you want to get things done quickly as well as stylishly, get the iMac.

There really isn't any comparison between the Apple iMac 21.5-inch (Thunderbolt) and other desktops in this price range. The new iMac trounces all at performance and styling. It's the class leader for non-touch all-in-one desktop PCs. The Asus ET2400IGTS-800SE has comparable multimedia performance, but the new iMac outclassed the Asus ET2400IGTS at 3D and day-to-day performance. Sure, the Asus ET2400IGTS has a few more features like a touch screen, Blu-ray, a larger hard drive, and HDMI-in, but the Asus' included software is nowhere near as integrated as that of the new iMac. The iMac is also $100 cheaper than the Asus ET2400IGTS, which dispells the myth of an "Apple tax" (i.e. Apple products are supposedly more expensive than Windows).

ITU relented. LTE is now officially 4G, according to them.

Lame, but what can you do? Their 4G definition would be nice, but it is impractical to have the next network naming standard be for a technology that is years off, and with at least one level of interim network speed technology between them.

AFAIK, it's not active censorship (i.e. silencing certain content), but rather the way the trending topics algorithm works, in that it will ditch topics after a sharp spike, to limit itself to 'breaking news'. You still find loads of tweets if you search for Ryan Giggs.

This would so much get them around how the cable companies are trying to screw them over for doing nothing more than providing programming that I want over a pipe THAT I PAID FOR.

Not all cable companies are throttling Netflix traffic. In fact, according to a comparison of ISPs in PC Mag, Charter Communications was measured to be the best ISP in the US for Netflix streaming throughput.

And have no audience.

What are you talking about? Android has the highest market share of any smartphone and shows no sign of slowing down.

If my game design includes a mode where multiple players share a screen, as opposed to always needing a separate device and copy of the game per player

So, you are saying I need to use mono to write Android games so that that same game can be run as split screen multi-player on xbox? What about when it is on the phone? First that doesn't even make sense and second, talk about the tail wagging the dog. And if I make a game that works on both platforms, which one do I gimp? The Xbox is obviously more powerful so do I dumb it down to a smartphone level? The phone has a touchscreen and myriad sensors like gps, accelerometer, ambient light, etc. How do I transate that? You have outlined a recipe for a crappy game. Plain and simple and I will have no part of it. At this point, I have to assume that you have run out of anything insightful to say and are arguing just for the sake of it.

I contend that not being on the same playing field as developers in the major cities is better than not having a playing field at all.

As I've illustrated, the Android "playing field" is plenty big.

Google vs. Windows?
Facebook vs. Google?


Since when did Slashdot become a posting for second-rate articles that are all FUD and gossip mongering when there are actually a whole lot more interesting and thought-engaging articles out there?

Slashdot eds please focus on posting real news again and leave the drivel aside. You are not digg.com and the /. rep does more for the site than your stupid clicks.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2374323,00.asp

Probably something such as this:

Chrome OS users get 100MB per month from Verizon Wireless for free.

Highlight of the day for me was the ability for an android app to connect to my home appliances termed Android@Home Anything from a light bulb to the sprinkler system outside. Of course the manufacturers of specific household items will have to work closely with android to deliver on the hardware side but as was demonstrated on live stream today, it can and has been done already. Kudos to those companies that are getting on board. Also to note, a lot of the tools like the movie rentals from the marketplace will be backward compatible in the coming months as well as the developer tools like fragments all the way back to Android 1.6. And unless i missed anything, everything will be open source.

Bravo! Now you can join Windows and iOS in this market.

Highlight of the day for me was the ability for an android app to connect to my home appliances termed Android@Home Anything from a light bulb to the sprinkler system outside. Of course the manufacturers of specific household items will have to work closely with android to deliver on the hardware side but as was demonstrated on live stream today, it can and has been done already. Kudos to those companies that are getting on board.

Also to note, a lot of the tools like the movie rentals from the marketplace will be backward compatible in the coming months as well as the developer tools like fragments all the way back to Android 1.6. And unless i missed anything, everything will be open source.

after Apple's exclusivity agreement with Intel is up in 2012, you may start to see it pop up in PCs as well (from Anandtech's article)

That's great and all if it were not completely wrong and based on unfounded speculation as pointed out in this article that quotes Dave Salvator, speaking on behalf of Intel. He states that exclusivity is, "not the case. Apple saw the potential of Thunderbolt, and worked with Intel to bring it to market. Other system makers are free to implement Thunderbolt on their systems as well, and we anticipate seeing some of those systems later this year and in early 2012."

There was a lawsuit filed against Sony just last week.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384523,00.asp

We'll see how the SCOTUS ruling comes into play here no doubt.

If there were ways to tap phones without doing this, using only the phone system, they would be common knowledge.

Like this? http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2367247,00.asp

I'd say something in PC Magazine is common knowledge

Just out of curiosity, what's the minimum geographical accuracy required before this behavior becomes "not OK", where it can be abused? The police are already using the current set of data to provide another point of evidence that you were in the area where they say you were.

Here's another question: if Apple could get a GPS location as efficiently as recording cell tower UIDs, is there any reason to believe they wouldn't?

I think they're build that internal network map exactly because they CAN'T get a GPS location in any way fast or efficiently. If they could, they wouldn't bother with all that and just have the phone get a GPS fix if the user wants to know where he is. Additionally, all this is usually just the first step of assisted GPS. Half a minute later the iPhone has a GPS fix. And still this precise location data gets not saved to this database. If this would be for evil purposes, they would save this precise data, but they don't. There is no log of true positions on your iPhone. There's only a database of cell towers.

Police will just go to the carrier who has much better data, because the carrier IS tracking you all the time.

Just out of curiosity, what's the minimum geographical accuracy required before this behavior becomes "not OK", where it can be abused? The police are already using the current set of data to provide another point of evidence that you were in the area where they say you were.

Here's another question: if Apple could get a GPS location as efficiently as recording cell tower UIDs, is there any reason to believe they wouldn't? It sounds like the only reason they store cell tower UIDs instead of GPS data is because it would kill the battery to continually get the position via GPS. Not because it's wrong, but because it's more power-expensive.

For bonus points, explain why anything that Google or Android does has any bearing at all on what Apple does (exonerates or vilifies).

Yep, just last week all the news outlets were reporting that Sony and Microsoft aren't releasing next-gen consoles anytime soon. They seem to have an informal(?) truce between them, but they're creating a big opening for Nintendo.

If you bought any of those for students, you should be fired.

Viewsonic gTablet?

http://www.laptopmag.com/review/tablets/viewsonic-g-tablet.aspx

Velocity Cruz?

http://tabletconnect.blogspot.com/2010/11/velocity-micro-cruz-tablet-t104-review.html

Superpad?

Couldn't find a review....

Archos 7?

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2364818,00.asp

No, the pitch could have been much, much faster. If they had a real catcher there, it would have made sense for them to send one in there pretty fast. But they had the stupid mascot there, who can't see very well, and so had to dial it down. See discussion at PCMag. There are numerous arm pitching machines that can throw ~100 mpg, though not as many as the wheel-based ones.

Are you willing to pay ~$65 a year just to hold on to that domain? Not even the porn industry likes .xxx

I'd not put it past the music/movie industry, or the government censors they support, to try to make it a felony to "broadcast" to music you haven't paid for.

Don't sell them short. They're working on it as we speak:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382048,00.asp

Apple opens up a new plant in Brazil. Production could start as early as November. Perhaps then, we could see the new IPad 3.

Source:
Report: Apple Part Maker Foxconn to Open Brazil Plant

no US taxes

Fixed that for you.
Please stop being mislead by media organizations. 60 minutes actually did a good investigation into the whole 0 % tax story. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/03/25/60minutes/main20046867.shtml The real reason for all tax "loop holes" is the US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world 35%. Did you know this tax rate is higher than even China and Russia, Britain .... it keeps going http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_rates_around_the_world .

Just few points of information about US corporate taxes.

• The US based companies didn't record a profit, there parent foreign owned companies did , they pay some taxes around 18-20% usually.
• There is a concept of a loss. If you house burnt down, and wouldn't is suck if Uncle Sam said pay me, and the State did too?
• The 35% tax rate encourages the companies to find loop holes or just plain move their entire operations overseas.
• Once the money gets sent overseas they can NEVER bring back the money into the US. So billions of dollars is stuck overseas, of which the companies reinvests into overseas operations. Cisco has 40 billion stuck overseas , that is billion with a B. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2382703,00.asp

That is just at the Federal level, the shit states pull on corporations is horrible. Many of the states owe companies tax refunds, are NOT allowing them to carry forward to the next year as a deduction, even though the state owes a company money. "Yeah I know we owe you money here is an IOU, but you cannot deduct it from taxable income. You have to still pay us; will get you that return someday. No you cannot amend your return either to deduct it". One state that is doing this is Illinois, and the shit Texas pulled about use tax is utter bullshit. In my wifes company Texas sent them a >100k bill , even though they had NO direct sales to end user, just vendors, of which the vendor is suppose to file the "use tax" return. Yeah her company just paid it because the threshold for challenging the amount was too low, just not worth the legal fees . Don't even get her started on the 1099 mess http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/1099-repeal-passes-senate-heads-to-white-house/ .
BTW my wife is corporate tax accountant for large company here in the US. She is in charge of all the state returns for every single state, all 50 of them( more than one company.

To quote her as an CPA Corporate Tax Accountant, "An absolute nightmare. "

Only good thing is she will always have a job, she is hot and she married me. I don't know why on that last one.

what are some of the more popular games you hear about these days? It's not Modern Warfare, or Call of Duty version whatever. It's Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, things like that.

These are the types of games people go crazy over. and like you said, there shouldn't be too much involved porting them to the wii, or offering them as DLC in the Nintendo Store. but can you??? I heard that they're finally planning on doing something like that but what took so long? The money makers these days are in the app store model. It works. People like it. It engages third parties and generates a nice % revenue for the platform maker. People have showed that they will shell out $5 ten times for ten little games, even though the same people won't shell out $50 for one new 'kickass' game. The wii has a huge installed base, and is networked.

So, I agree, they should really engage the indie crowd, and the appstore model would be a way to do that. My Wii gets used daily. But it's mostly by my kids. it's easy enough to get around the gimmicky control and just do the 'sideways wiimote' thing like they did for Super Mario Wii. it should be a viable outlet, but I think they might have missed their chance.

Linux has a lot of problems that has kept it (and likely will continue to keep it) a niche product

Define "Linux".