We're talking about the HP that sold hundreds of thousands of laptops to consumers knowing that they had defective chipsets on the motherboard. They didn't discover this after shipping the laptops, they were aware of the problem before the first one was shipped and they had a choice: rework or repair the defective units before shipping, or ship them in defective condition and screw the customer.
Being the HP that we know - the one that didn't see a problem with "pretexting" - no, let's call it spying / eavesdropping on journalists reporting on their products - they decided to just go ahead and ship the defective products and let customer service deal with them. They stonewalled for as long as they could and insisted that there was nothing wrong with those products - even though they KNEW that they were defective. Finally, they "resolved" the problem by issuing a BIOS patch that caused the system fan to run at full speed constantly - this conveniently postponed the inevitable failure until after the warranty ran out.
They also extended the warranty for those units who had already failed - or so they said, but when owners of those products tried to get them fixed under warranty they were either given a repair consisting of replacing their defective motherboard with another defective motherboard - or more commonly, they refused to honor the warranty on these products. I have personal knowledge here; I had one of their defective products that was completely dead and they refused to repair it under warranty.
So while I would like to see a tablet running WebOS, I would never consider buying it if it was running on HP hardware. They've already proven to me that they'll build substandard products and refuse to repair them under warranty - they fooled me once but never again. If you want to buy one of these, keep this warning in mind.
While you're doing that "see for yourself" stuff, take a close look at the data on how the files were encoded. I mean a really close look; put on your scientist hat and pay close attention. See for yourself that the test was staged to support the view that they're espousing.
Maybe VP8 is comparable to H.264 or maybe not - but it's very hard to tell when the comparisons are so biased. I suspect that the real truth is that they're both about equivalent; either one is equally good at encoding video.
In any event, the choice between these codecs will be made in many locations and often the consideration is going to be which is "legally solid" and which is "legally risky". With the continuing media campaign being waged to make VP8 seem to be infringing all kinds of patents, the outcome here isn't certain.
What's with all the people blaming Obama for the failure of BP to contain or control their oil spill / environmental disaster? He's the President and he has an opinion - but he doesn't have any control over the spill itself or the folks at BP. About the only thing he could do would be to send the Army Corps of Engineers in to take care of the problem and that's not an easy choice to make. If they succeed, it'd be a big win. But if they failed then not only would BP escape blame but the ACofE and Obama would have to explain why their plan failed.
It's a big clusterfuk because in our wisdom we let British Petroleum (BP) do business in our country but they're a foreign corporation. Do you want to punish them or make them pay for all the damage they've done and continue to do? Sure, now how would you propose to do that? For extra credit, accomplish this goal without interrupting the flow of gasoline to all the BP (Arco and probably other) stations in this country and also avoid a diplomatic incident with our (for now) friends in the British Empire.
But that's not likely; instead we have some idiots who see this as a chance to promote their political agenda and a bunch of others who feel their sense of entitlement being threatened. Get a clue: if you want your toaster waffle to be piping hot, it requires energy. If you insist that nuclear is too dangerous, coal is too dirty, and oil is too dangerous and expensive then you're going to have to deal with cold frozen waffles while you huddle in the dark. There's no happy energy unicorn that's going to descend from the sky to save all of us. The solutions to these problems aren't clean and pretty and they don't make the forest animals happy. But if we don't solve the problems then life is going to be much less than it is now in a third-world kind of way. There's still some time but you can't wait forever for something that's never going to happen.
Buy / build a model rocket and shoot it off - never to come back. That was lots of fun when I was a child; supposedly they'd come back down on a parachute but that wasn't necessarily going to happen. We'd send all kinds of interesting balsa and cardboard creations into the sky and it was big fun.
The kids at the Air Force never got over it. Now their toys are bigger and much more expensive - but they're still fun to shoot off in a blaze of glory - never to be recovered. I love this country - and how our tax dollars get used.
Google has been building a database of wireless access point / physical location pairs for quite a while. This is how Google Maps on cell phones and such can find its current location - if a wi-fi access point is in range it can look it up and find the physical location. iPhones and their ilk also find their current location in the same way; Apple builds their database when you sync up to iTunes. Since you gave Apple your address when you registered your iThingie - all it has to do is look for an access point when it's syncing the iThingie and add that pair to the database.
These location schemes aren't perfect but they do provide "location aware" services to devices that don't include a GPS receiver - or allow even more accuracy when a GPS receiver is present. I've always wondered if doing this secretly and not letting people know what they were doing and why was a little creepy - but maybe it makes more sense now. If you're scanning for wi-fi access point identification you just might be violating some broadly written anti-hacking law.
Just set these people up with a huge portfolio of patents and they'll look after you. Yeah, right - would you like a bridge to go along with that?
This kind of deal is how trusts / cartels are born. It always sounds like a good idea at first, but once the combination is established it does what every other combination of this type has always done. Power corrupts, and the leaders of this cartel will have a large amount of power. They'll use it for their own benefit - not ours.
So Apple sees this Hyper-Card clone that already has a good sized institutional market lined up and decides not to approve it. Rather than hyperventilate about DRM and lockin, why not just go with the simpler explanation of greed.
It would be so simple for Apple to come out with their own Hyper Card for the iWhatever; they've got the background and the copyrights. With an already existing market this would be a easy win; I'll bet that there's Apple developers at work on this right now.
It's not all about control, guys - it's about money. If you follow the money you won't have to pull out that old "reality distortion field" handwave to explain what's going on.
I pondered on that for a bit and there's a couple of problems with the worm gear drive concept. This would put the torque path through the worm thrust bearing; not an insurmountable problem but it might be tricky in implementation. The real problem would be in a worm drive set that was strong enough to handle the torque and RPM; once again it's possible, but the size and weight of the practical unit would be significant.
Brush off that calculator / slide rule and work out the torque loads on this design if it was handling 200 ft. lbs. of torque and 7,000 RPM at the input shaft - that's a typical sized passenger car unit. You'll see why this old design still isn't practical. The real problem in automotive transmissions is not to come up with a tricky design, it's to come up with a practical design that is manufacturable.
There's not really any way for the suspect to find out about a search warrant before it's served. Sure, it's public information unless sealed - but it won't make it into the public eye before the warrant is served. As you note, a search warrant is a time-sensitive document and they're issued and almost immediately served in cases like this one. Really; if a search warrant for your home was being signed right now, how long would it take for you to find out about it, and how would you accomplish that? Those warrants along with all kinds of other legal proceedings aren't instantaneously available upon signing - it'll sit in a basket on the court clerk's desk until it and the other proceedings get checked in and filed - if it's signed during regular session. If the judge was called upon after hours, the court copy won't even make it to the clerk until the next morning. Unless you've got a mole in the court clerk's office at the right court the first thing you'll know about a search warrant is when the nice officer knocks at / down your door.
Something else to think about: sealed documents tend to stay sealed unless the court is asked to release the information - and if the document was sealed for good and sufficient reason these requests are commonly denied. It's not uncommon for the investigating officers to bend the truth just a bit to insure they get the warrant they desire, either. What is unusual this time is that the suspect is a news reporter and it's not exactly legal for the police to rummage through their files looking for evidence - and the warrant was written in a overly broad (take everything)way. If the warrant was more narrowly and properly written to just cover the evidence of the alleged crime - but it wasn't, and because of that the warrant is arguably defective. When the suspect is a reporter and the people asking for the warrant to be unsealed are also reporters - the wise judge deals with the situation very, very carefully. He's now shown everyone what was presented to him and that the warrant he issued was properly issued given the information he received.
I think Mark Twain said it best: "Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel."
The largest value of this device is in its "wow, how does that thing work?" design. By baffling the onlooker and also describing the widget very carefully the illusion of a wonderfully useful device can be created.
It has a problem in the real world, though. The reaction torque is equal to the working torque - and the reaction torque path runs through that "secondary control shaft." This will become obvious as soon as he tries to transmit some significant power through his device. What he's showing isn't a new invention at all, it's just a mechanical "summer" that adds the inputs from two input shafts. All that's new here is some fancy handwaving and creative description.
It might be good enough to fool some people but Mother Nature and those who paid attention in school aren't fooled. Maybe if / when he actually tries to transmit some power through his "invention" and the control motor just spins backwards he'll "discover" a source of electrical energy?
This move looks to be intended to deflect some unwanted attention from the court - the judge got some bad information that he based the search warrants on and now he wants the truth to be known. While the existence of the crimes alleged are arguable - some of the items listed on the search warrant aren't remotely related to any crime; they're intended to cause the suspect as much inconvenience as possible. Yeah, grab his credit cards and driver's licence while you're at it.
Normally, the corporate / police connection would trash the suspect's life and see him convicted on a whole laundry list of crimes - mess with Apple (or a number of other SV corporations) and they'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget. But this time the press got involved; the target was a reporter and a whole bunch of other reporters felt insecure because of it and now they're going to defend themselves and their occupation - and they won't stop until they feel they've made a difference.
This is going to be interesting to watch as it plays out - as the truth emerges the police and the folks at Apple are going to be revealed as the lying assholes they really are and it'll be reported by the media over and over again. That "say something negative and you'll never get another press release from us" stuff only works when you're targeting one reporter. When the whole news media turns against them, they won't have anything to use to defend themselves.
What Jason Chen and the other players in this little drama did was a little less than ethical - but Apple screwed up big time when they decided to attack a reporter. That corporate arrogance that leads to great products also produces a big blind spot that doesn't let them see that they're just a small part of a big system. Now they'll get to come to the understanding that the media's opinion of them does indeed matter and they'll get to measure the losses as their education proceeds. They were worried about the marketing loss from the premature showing of the new phone? That's nothing compared to what they bought for themselves when they overreacted. We'll just have to wait and see how long it takes them to realize their stupidity.
Maybe when Steve has his big reveal of the new products and the media doesn't slobber over them he might get a clue? Or maybe it'll take longer for him to realize that in the big picture he's just a bit player and there's others that have even more power than he does - and he's pissed them off. It won't be blatant but Apple's luck has changed for the worse and all the marketing money they can throw at it won't change a thing.
I think we can all agree that the iPad isn't magical. I've got one and it doesn't support any kind of magical function that I can find. But the claim that it's revolutionary or world-changing seems to gain some support from the subject of this article. If it's nothing special, why is a detailed analysis of its CPU important or interesting?
One thing that my fellow Slashdotters aren't paying attention to is that this is an Infoworld story. If you don't know what that means, spend a few minutes at their web site reading stories and it should become apparent to you. If you're going to troll, you should know who you're trolling for.
Once you've done that, observe that it's the major players in the cell phone market all suing each other - this isn't a story about multitouch or GPS or anything like that, it's a story about how patents are used as weapons against competitors. There's a few mouth breathers making this into an "Apple hate" story but it's not - it's a "patent malfunction" story.
Maybe this one will be the one that catches the Patent Office's attention - or maybe not. But making it into anything more than a patent abuse story is intellectually dishonest and not worthy of a Nerd.
HP is going to compete with the iPad one of these days. That "slate" thing never made it past the vaporware stage but their next vaporware device will do it. Yeah, right.
Here's my prediction: they'll be a day late and a dollar short and finally ship something that isn't really even competitive. It'll be unreliable, and their customer support will be typically useless. These devices will end up being sold at a big discount on Woot! as refurbs.
This is the company that knowingly shipped defective laptops and refused to fix or replace them - if they can do that with a well-defined category of product, just wait until you see what they do with a tablet.
Wow. Since you've specified the intensity of light - would you like to hazard a guess of how long "long enough" would be to change its orbit in any measurable amount? For extra credit, describe how much quicker this would be than just waiting for the orbit to decay on its own.
I think a better story here would be in two parts: the first about how it is that the editors of InfoWorld have inserted themselves into a situation that they don't have any part in. Did Apple or Adobe (or both) ask them to mediate? No. It's just a me-too technology rag trying to create a story that they can fit between the advertisements. The second part: Who thought this was news for nerds / stuff that matters?
Saying that the current cameras and monitors are three color is only partly relevant - expanding that to the assumption that cameras and monitors use the SAME three colors is not a true statement. Some devices use color filters and others use colored phosphors or LEDs or even plasma tubes.
This is how devices are said to have a color gamut - any (necessarily) different set of three colors will not be able to reproduce all possible colors. Now, when your camera and monitor have different color gamuts, the result is that you'll only be able to see the colors that are present in both of those gamuts. This has a lot to do with why people see HDTV as having better color than their old CRT set. The monitors have different color gamuts and the HDTV panel can display colors that the CRT can not. The reverse is true, too - while you're loving your new HDTV keep an eye out for a brilliant yellow / green color; a bright lime green. Can't find it? Now you know why.
Could adding a fourth color to the display improve color reproduction? It would increase the color gamut of the display and if that increased gamut covered more of the gamut of the source camera then yes, it would improve the color. There's no simple yes or no answer here: it depends on the camera's capabilities and those are both variable and unknown to the end user.
Much nonsense has been committed to text by people comparing the iPad to some other class of device that they know. Then they complain because it doesn't do what their pet netbook / notebook / tablet PC does and use that as proof that the iPad is doomed to fail.
There's plenty of examples of that kind of thinking here, too. The need to fit the iPad into some existing class of device is strong. Enlightenment can be found by simply accepting that the iPad represents a new / different class of device; it's a useful tool and it's very well suited for some tasks. Other tasks are better handled by a notebook / netbook / tablet PC or whatever.
Each will discover the truth in their own way one day. It could be in an airport waiting room - there's all those people sitting around, some are reading a book, some are getting scorched laps from sitting there with their laptop / netbook and surfing the web or reading some email. And then there's those other folks who are watching a movie - or checking email / surfing the web on their iPad. Horses for courses, guys - don't unnecessarily limit your options.
I'm curious - where is this lockdown you speak of? Is it in the Fairplay DRM that Apple uses on some of their digital media? Something that the nay-sayers conveniently ignore is a simple little iTunes trick. Create a playlist of your DRM encrusted tunes and burn it to a CD. Presto, no more DRM and the CD is unprotected.
Or is it that you have to use iTunes to load media? That's not exactly true; there are other alternatives that perform the task. And you could download a bunch of pirated MP3 files and iTunes (or one of the alternatives like DoubleTwist) will happily load them up and play them for you. This doesn't seem to be locked down either.
Maybe these unhappy people would be happier if they put their iPod in disc mode. Then they could copy files to and from it with ease; it would appear as another drive letter on their Windows PC.
Something I suspect many don't realize or understand is that those RIAA members won't let you handle their tunes unless your player meets their requirements. They don't want you to buy a tune then turn around and give everyone else a copy. What this means in the real world is that there is NO music player that can obtain legal copies of RIAA company tunes that doesn't include DRM. Apple has done an amazing job of meeting those requirements and at the same time making their devices as free and open as possible. Part of those requirements is that the players be secure and any breaches of that security be patched promptly - so when people point at how Apple blocked Real or Palm what was really happening was Apple complying with those contracts.
Something that people don't seem to understand is that the RIAA and MPAA companies aren't trying to control the distribution of their media as much as they want to control the players that you access that media through. Remember how much fuss was kicked up over DeCSS? Here's some insight for you: you can make a bitwise copy of a encrypted DVD and it'll play just fine - you don't need to remove the DRM to copy it. What DeCSS threatened was the MPAA's control of DVD players; you can't play a DVD without a decryption key and keys are only available to players that meet the design requirements of the MPAA. Strangely, nobody seems to be whining about how their DVD player is locked down
Unfortunately, you've linked to a opinion piece that trashes Apple products using false and misleading claims. I see that he's corrected some of them but there's still plenty of blatantly false "facts" in that piece.
Did the IT department decide on its own to install this monitoring software? No, the school administration did. Were the IT workers free to do whatever they wanted? No, they were required to perform jobs assigned by the school administration. Who suspended a student because the picture showed him taking drugs? Yup, the school administration.
Do we believe what the lawyers are saying? Of course not; they're paid to lie and their "you can't prove it" comment shows how they feel about the truth here. It's no surprise that the school administrators are worried - because they've jumped into the same pit as many other child molesters and kiddie porn vendors with both feet. They're even worse because their victims didn't even know they were being filmed.
Justice would require that their occupation and standing be disregarded and the mere facts of their crimes be considered: secretly installing video monitoring in the bedrooms of hundreds of minor children and using that equipment to take at least 60,000 pictures of those minors in various states of undress. These are serious crimes and the excuses they are offering are just the same sort of excuses other felons who have been caught would offer in their own defense. Considering the number of offenses, it would be multiple life sentences - if the law works the way it is supposed to.
You'd better believe that if one of us were secretly taking pictures of hundreds of minors they'd put us in prison and throw away the key. Let's see what happens when school administrators do that same thing. If they don't draw long prison sentences, I'd be asking loudly why not.
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We're talking about the HP that sold hundreds of thousands of laptops to consumers knowing that they had defective chipsets on the motherboard. They didn't discover this after shipping the laptops, they were aware of the problem before the first one was shipped and they had a choice: rework or repair the defective units before shipping, or ship them in defective condition and screw the customer.
Being the HP that we know - the one that didn't see a problem with "pretexting" - no, let's call it spying / eavesdropping on journalists reporting on their products - they decided to just go ahead and ship the defective products and let customer service deal with them. They stonewalled for as long as they could and insisted that there was nothing wrong with those products - even though they KNEW that they were defective. Finally, they "resolved" the problem by issuing a BIOS patch that caused the system fan to run at full speed constantly - this conveniently postponed the inevitable failure until after the warranty ran out.
They also extended the warranty for those units who had already failed - or so they said, but when owners of those products tried to get them fixed under warranty they were either given a repair consisting of replacing their defective motherboard with another defective motherboard - or more commonly, they refused to honor the warranty on these products. I have personal knowledge here; I had one of their defective products that was completely dead and they refused to repair it under warranty.
So while I would like to see a tablet running WebOS, I would never consider buying it if it was running on HP hardware. They've already proven to me that they'll build substandard products and refuse to repair them under warranty - they fooled me once but never again. If you want to buy one of these, keep this warning in mind.
While you're doing that "see for yourself" stuff, take a close look at the data on how the files were encoded. I mean a really close look; put on your scientist hat and pay close attention. See for yourself that the test was staged to support the view that they're espousing.
Maybe VP8 is comparable to H.264 or maybe not - but it's very hard to tell when the comparisons are so biased. I suspect that the real truth is that they're both about equivalent; either one is equally good at encoding video.
In any event, the choice between these codecs will be made in many locations and often the consideration is going to be which is "legally solid" and which is "legally risky". With the continuing media campaign being waged to make VP8 seem to be infringing all kinds of patents, the outcome here isn't certain.
What's with all the people blaming Obama for the failure of BP to contain or control their oil spill / environmental disaster? He's the President and he has an opinion - but he doesn't have any control over the spill itself or the folks at BP. About the only thing he could do would be to send the Army Corps of Engineers in to take care of the problem and that's not an easy choice to make. If they succeed, it'd be a big win. But if they failed then not only would BP escape blame but the ACofE and Obama would have to explain why their plan failed.
It's a big clusterfuk because in our wisdom we let British Petroleum (BP) do business in our country but they're a foreign corporation. Do you want to punish them or make them pay for all the damage they've done and continue to do? Sure, now how would you propose to do that? For extra credit, accomplish this goal without interrupting the flow of gasoline to all the BP (Arco and probably other) stations in this country and also avoid a diplomatic incident with our (for now) friends in the British Empire.
But that's not likely; instead we have some idiots who see this as a chance to promote their political agenda and a bunch of others who feel their sense of entitlement being threatened. Get a clue: if you want your toaster waffle to be piping hot, it requires energy. If you insist that nuclear is too dangerous, coal is too dirty, and oil is too dangerous and expensive then you're going to have to deal with cold frozen waffles while you huddle in the dark. There's no happy energy unicorn that's going to descend from the sky to save all of us. The solutions to these problems aren't clean and pretty and they don't make the forest animals happy. But if we don't solve the problems then life is going to be much less than it is now in a third-world kind of way. There's still some time but you can't wait forever for something that's never going to happen.
Buy / build a model rocket and shoot it off - never to come back. That was lots of fun when I was a child; supposedly they'd come back down on a parachute but that wasn't necessarily going to happen. We'd send all kinds of interesting balsa and cardboard creations into the sky and it was big fun.
The kids at the Air Force never got over it. Now their toys are bigger and much more expensive - but they're still fun to shoot off in a blaze of glory - never to be recovered. I love this country - and how our tax dollars get used.
Google has been building a database of wireless access point / physical location pairs for quite a while. This is how Google Maps on cell phones and such can find its current location - if a wi-fi access point is in range it can look it up and find the physical location. iPhones and their ilk also find their current location in the same way; Apple builds their database when you sync up to iTunes. Since you gave Apple your address when you registered your iThingie - all it has to do is look for an access point when it's syncing the iThingie and add that pair to the database.
These location schemes aren't perfect but they do provide "location aware" services to devices that don't include a GPS receiver - or allow even more accuracy when a GPS receiver is present. I've always wondered if doing this secretly and not letting people know what they were doing and why was a little creepy - but maybe it makes more sense now. If you're scanning for wi-fi access point identification you just might be violating some broadly written anti-hacking law.
Just set these people up with a huge portfolio of patents and they'll look after you. Yeah, right - would you like a bridge to go along with that?
This kind of deal is how trusts / cartels are born. It always sounds like a good idea at first, but once the combination is established it does what every other combination of this type has always done. Power corrupts, and the leaders of this cartel will have a large amount of power. They'll use it for their own benefit - not ours.
So Apple sees this Hyper-Card clone that already has a good sized institutional market lined up and decides not to approve it. Rather than hyperventilate about DRM and lockin, why not just go with the simpler explanation of greed.
It would be so simple for Apple to come out with their own Hyper Card for the iWhatever; they've got the background and the copyrights. With an already existing market this would be a easy win; I'll bet that there's Apple developers at work on this right now.
It's not all about control, guys - it's about money. If you follow the money you won't have to pull out that old "reality distortion field" handwave to explain what's going on.
I pondered on that for a bit and there's a couple of problems with the worm gear drive concept. This would put the torque path through the worm thrust bearing; not an insurmountable problem but it might be tricky in implementation. The real problem would be in a worm drive set that was strong enough to handle the torque and RPM; once again it's possible, but the size and weight of the practical unit would be significant.
Brush off that calculator / slide rule and work out the torque loads on this design if it was handling 200 ft. lbs. of torque and 7,000 RPM at the input shaft - that's a typical sized passenger car unit. You'll see why this old design still isn't practical. The real problem in automotive transmissions is not to come up with a tricky design, it's to come up with a practical design that is manufacturable.
There's not really any way for the suspect to find out about a search warrant before it's served. Sure, it's public information unless sealed - but it won't make it into the public eye before the warrant is served. As you note, a search warrant is a time-sensitive document and they're issued and almost immediately served in cases like this one. Really; if a search warrant for your home was being signed right now, how long would it take for you to find out about it, and how would you accomplish that? Those warrants along with all kinds of other legal proceedings aren't instantaneously available upon signing - it'll sit in a basket on the court clerk's desk until it and the other proceedings get checked in and filed - if it's signed during regular session. If the judge was called upon after hours, the court copy won't even make it to the clerk until the next morning. Unless you've got a mole in the court clerk's office at the right court the first thing you'll know about a search warrant is when the nice officer knocks at / down your door.
Something else to think about: sealed documents tend to stay sealed unless the court is asked to release the information - and if the document was sealed for good and sufficient reason these requests are commonly denied. It's not uncommon for the investigating officers to bend the truth just a bit to insure they get the warrant they desire, either. What is unusual this time is that the suspect is a news reporter and it's not exactly legal for the police to rummage through their files looking for evidence - and the warrant was written in a overly broad (take everything)way. If the warrant was more narrowly and properly written to just cover the evidence of the alleged crime - but it wasn't, and because of that the warrant is arguably defective. When the suspect is a reporter and the people asking for the warrant to be unsealed are also reporters - the wise judge deals with the situation very, very carefully. He's now shown everyone what was presented to him and that the warrant he issued was properly issued given the information he received.
I think Mark Twain said it best: "Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel."
Cats everywhere wish the laser a happy birthday!
The largest value of this device is in its "wow, how does that thing work?" design. By baffling the onlooker and also describing the widget very carefully the illusion of a wonderfully useful device can be created.
It has a problem in the real world, though. The reaction torque is equal to the working torque - and the reaction torque path runs through that "secondary control shaft." This will become obvious as soon as he tries to transmit some significant power through his device. What he's showing isn't a new invention at all, it's just a mechanical "summer" that adds the inputs from two input shafts. All that's new here is some fancy handwaving and creative description.
It might be good enough to fool some people but Mother Nature and those who paid attention in school aren't fooled. Maybe if / when he actually tries to transmit some power through his "invention" and the control motor just spins backwards he'll "discover" a source of electrical energy?
This move looks to be intended to deflect some unwanted attention from the court - the judge got some bad information that he based the search warrants on and now he wants the truth to be known. While the existence of the crimes alleged are arguable - some of the items listed on the search warrant aren't remotely related to any crime; they're intended to cause the suspect as much inconvenience as possible. Yeah, grab his credit cards and driver's licence while you're at it.
Normally, the corporate / police connection would trash the suspect's life and see him convicted on a whole laundry list of crimes - mess with Apple (or a number of other SV corporations) and they'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget. But this time the press got involved; the target was a reporter and a whole bunch of other reporters felt insecure because of it and now they're going to defend themselves and their occupation - and they won't stop until they feel they've made a difference.
This is going to be interesting to watch as it plays out - as the truth emerges the police and the folks at Apple are going to be revealed as the lying assholes they really are and it'll be reported by the media over and over again. That "say something negative and you'll never get another press release from us" stuff only works when you're targeting one reporter. When the whole news media turns against them, they won't have anything to use to defend themselves.
What Jason Chen and the other players in this little drama did was a little less than ethical - but Apple screwed up big time when they decided to attack a reporter. That corporate arrogance that leads to great products also produces a big blind spot that doesn't let them see that they're just a small part of a big system. Now they'll get to come to the understanding that the media's opinion of them does indeed matter and they'll get to measure the losses as their education proceeds. They were worried about the marketing loss from the premature showing of the new phone? That's nothing compared to what they bought for themselves when they overreacted. We'll just have to wait and see how long it takes them to realize their stupidity.
Maybe when Steve has his big reveal of the new products and the media doesn't slobber over them he might get a clue? Or maybe it'll take longer for him to realize that in the big picture he's just a bit player and there's others that have even more power than he does - and he's pissed them off. It won't be blatant but Apple's luck has changed for the worse and all the marketing money they can throw at it won't change a thing.
You've tried to use those stable APIs across major releases? I thought not...
I think we can all agree that the iPad isn't magical. I've got one and it doesn't support any kind of magical function that I can find. But the claim that it's revolutionary or world-changing seems to gain some support from the subject of this article. If it's nothing special, why is a detailed analysis of its CPU important or interesting?
One thing that my fellow Slashdotters aren't paying attention to is that this is an Infoworld story. If you don't know what that means, spend a few minutes at their web site reading stories and it should become apparent to you. If you're going to troll, you should know who you're trolling for.
Once you've done that, observe that it's the major players in the cell phone market all suing each other - this isn't a story about multitouch or GPS or anything like that, it's a story about how patents are used as weapons against competitors. There's a few mouth breathers making this into an "Apple hate" story but it's not - it's a "patent malfunction" story.
Maybe this one will be the one that catches the Patent Office's attention - or maybe not. But making it into anything more than a patent abuse story is intellectually dishonest and not worthy of a Nerd.
HP is going to compete with the iPad one of these days. That "slate" thing never made it past the vaporware stage but their next vaporware device will do it. Yeah, right.
Here's my prediction: they'll be a day late and a dollar short and finally ship something that isn't really even competitive. It'll be unreliable, and their customer support will be typically useless. These devices will end up being sold at a big discount on Woot! as refurbs.
This is the company that knowingly shipped defective laptops and refused to fix or replace them - if they can do that with a well-defined category of product, just wait until you see what they do with a tablet.
When comparing Apples and Oranges, it's all fruit.
Wow. Since you've specified the intensity of light - would you like to hazard a guess of how long "long enough" would be to change its orbit in any measurable amount? For extra credit, describe how much quicker this would be than just waiting for the orbit to decay on its own.
I think a better story here would be in two parts: the first about how it is that the editors of InfoWorld have inserted themselves into a situation that they don't have any part in. Did Apple or Adobe (or both) ask them to mediate? No. It's just a me-too technology rag trying to create a story that they can fit between the advertisements. The second part: Who thought this was news for nerds / stuff that matters?
Saying that the current cameras and monitors are three color is only partly relevant - expanding that to the assumption that cameras and monitors use the SAME three colors is not a true statement. Some devices use color filters and others use colored phosphors or LEDs or even plasma tubes.
This is how devices are said to have a color gamut - any (necessarily) different set of three colors will not be able to reproduce all possible colors. Now, when your camera and monitor have different color gamuts, the result is that you'll only be able to see the colors that are present in both of those gamuts. This has a lot to do with why people see HDTV as having better color than their old CRT set. The monitors have different color gamuts and the HDTV panel can display colors that the CRT can not. The reverse is true, too - while you're loving your new HDTV keep an eye out for a brilliant yellow / green color; a bright lime green. Can't find it? Now you know why.
Could adding a fourth color to the display improve color reproduction? It would increase the color gamut of the display and if that increased gamut covered more of the gamut of the source camera then yes, it would improve the color. There's no simple yes or no answer here: it depends on the camera's capabilities and those are both variable and unknown to the end user.
Much nonsense has been committed to text by people comparing the iPad to some other class of device that they know. Then they complain because it doesn't do what their pet netbook / notebook / tablet PC does and use that as proof that the iPad is doomed to fail.
There's plenty of examples of that kind of thinking here, too. The need to fit the iPad into some existing class of device is strong. Enlightenment can be found by simply accepting that the iPad represents a new / different class of device; it's a useful tool and it's very well suited for some tasks. Other tasks are better handled by a notebook / netbook / tablet PC or whatever.
Each will discover the truth in their own way one day. It could be in an airport waiting room - there's all those people sitting around, some are reading a book, some are getting scorched laps from sitting there with their laptop / netbook and surfing the web or reading some email. And then there's those other folks who are watching a movie - or checking email / surfing the web on their iPad. Horses for courses, guys - don't unnecessarily limit your options.
I'm curious - where is this lockdown you speak of? Is it in the Fairplay DRM that Apple uses on some of their digital media? Something that the nay-sayers conveniently ignore is a simple little iTunes trick. Create a playlist of your DRM encrusted tunes and burn it to a CD. Presto, no more DRM and the CD is unprotected.
Or is it that you have to use iTunes to load media? That's not exactly true; there are other alternatives that perform the task. And you could download a bunch of pirated MP3 files and iTunes (or one of the alternatives like DoubleTwist) will happily load them up and play them for you. This doesn't seem to be locked down either.
Maybe these unhappy people would be happier if they put their iPod in disc mode. Then they could copy files to and from it with ease; it would appear as another drive letter on their Windows PC.
Something I suspect many don't realize or understand is that those RIAA members won't let you handle their tunes unless your player meets their requirements. They don't want you to buy a tune then turn around and give everyone else a copy. What this means in the real world is that there is NO music player that can obtain legal copies of RIAA company tunes that doesn't include DRM. Apple has done an amazing job of meeting those requirements and at the same time making their devices as free and open as possible. Part of those requirements is that the players be secure and any breaches of that security be patched promptly - so when people point at how Apple blocked Real or Palm what was really happening was Apple complying with those contracts.
Something that people don't seem to understand is that the RIAA and MPAA companies aren't trying to control the distribution of their media as much as they want to control the players that you access that media through. Remember how much fuss was kicked up over DeCSS? Here's some insight for you: you can make a bitwise copy of a encrypted DVD and it'll play just fine - you don't need to remove the DRM to copy it. What DeCSS threatened was the MPAA's control of DVD players; you can't play a DVD without a decryption key and keys are only available to players that meet the design requirements of the MPAA. Strangely, nobody seems to be whining about how their DVD player is locked down
Unfortunately, you've linked to a opinion piece that trashes Apple products using false and misleading claims. I see that he's corrected some of them but there's still plenty of blatantly false "facts" in that piece.
Did the IT department decide on its own to install this monitoring software? No, the school administration did. Were the IT workers free to do whatever they wanted? No, they were required to perform jobs assigned by the school administration. Who suspended a student because the picture showed him taking drugs? Yup, the school administration.
Do we believe what the lawyers are saying? Of course not; they're paid to lie and their "you can't prove it" comment shows how they feel about the truth here. It's no surprise that the school administrators are worried - because they've jumped into the same pit as many other child molesters and kiddie porn vendors with both feet. They're even worse because their victims didn't even know they were being filmed.
Justice would require that their occupation and standing be disregarded and the mere facts of their crimes be considered: secretly installing video monitoring in the bedrooms of hundreds of minor children and using that equipment to take at least 60,000 pictures of those minors in various states of undress. These are serious crimes and the excuses they are offering are just the same sort of excuses other felons who have been caught would offer in their own defense. Considering the number of offenses, it would be multiple life sentences - if the law works the way it is supposed to.
You'd better believe that if one of us were secretly taking pictures of hundreds of minors they'd put us in prison and throw away the key. Let's see what happens when school administrators do that same thing. If they don't draw long prison sentences, I'd be asking loudly why not.
Thanks for that but I get all the ads I want from Television.