Well. There wasn't much designing to do anyway. The Ipad had the same design as the Ipod touch and Iphone. Any "Ipad-clone" can easily have been in the works for a long time before Apple went public with the Ipad. Since it's simply a larger version of the Ipod with an added 3G-modem, it's not a long shot to think that some competitor to Apple already had thought of developing something similar. The actual electronics inside can even be reused from the smaller device if one wants to press the schedule a bit.
But has Apple stooped to assimilating other people's technology?
Well, they do have a history of buying other companies in order to assimilate their technology into the Apple. Like, say, buying Emagic in order to add Logic Pro into the Apple software portfolio (and canceling development of drivers and Logic Pro for Windows at the same time).
That is true. I pay 31% income-tax, which is quite a lot... On the other hand, I don't need a private health-insurance, which is a good thing since it would be hard to find one that covers complications involving my psoriasis (like arthritis), my nut and almond allergy or my skydiving-hobby at a reasonable cost, if at all... Most private health-insurances I've seen have clauses that specifically exclude coverage of high-risk activities or of already present conditions or health-risks.
Anyhow, most people simply think what they've been taught to think. In the US, people have been taught that socialism is bad. Here, we've been taught that socialism is good. Hence, people in the US tend to think that socialism is bad and over here we tend to think that it is good... In general that is. There are, of course, people who don't fall into the "mainstream" way of thinking everywhere. =)
And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.
That's why Americans don't want to live that way.
I have a hard time believing that US citizens get to decide exactly how their government spend their tax-money. That the government decides what to do with taxes isn't unique to socialist countries.
A major infection-vector for Vundo is MSN Messenger (Or Live, or whatever MS has renamed it to recently) and other IM-applications. If you allow your users to use such applications, you might consider withdrawing that privilege if Vundo is a regular problem.
I've experienced a similar story but about a Wimax-tower. The exact day that a Wimax-service went active in the neighbourhood of my girlfriends parents, a couple with "electro-allergy" in the area started having headaches and feeling nauseous. The funny thing was, the tower had already been active at full power for several months while they measured coverage and did trial-runs.
When installing 64-bit Win 7, I even had Bootcamp specifically state that I couldn't run a 64-bit system on my (in Apples eyes) old Core 2 Duo Imac. Bypassing the Bootcamp installer and installing all the 64-bit drivers manually instead got everything working though... It irks me when Apple tries to artificially limit what versions of Windows I can run on my machine, when it is both technically and on a driver level compatible with all versions of both XP, Vista and 7. =P
And the statement that Bootcamp with Windows 7 requires OS X 10.6 is absolutely false. It requires some of the Apple-specific drivers that comes with Bootcamp 3.1, that's all. Running Windows on a Mac doesn't require you to ever have had OS X on it at all...
If you pay for it, you'll probably end up with a binary. In the best cases, you get binaries for a whole bunch of different architectures and systems, like with Matlab... In the worst cases, you end up with a binary that will run on only one architecture.
Well, since I've recently had to wrestle with getting a binary-only proprietary 32-bit application to run on a 64-bit linux, I'd really have appreciated at least a unified binary for both 64 and 32 bit x86...
Well, since the US government has a tendency to not follow the treaties they sign and at the same time get very upset when others don't follow signed treaties, it's mainly us in the other treaty members that should be worried if this comes to pass.
No, this is a case of deliberately disabling a working feature for the express purpose of forcing you to buy their hardware over another's.
Of course Apple want you to buy their hardware. Apple is a hardware company and all the software they make have lock-downs and tie-ins whose only purpose is to restrict you to Apple-hardware. I agree that Apple should sell licenses of OS X for non-Apple hardware, even though I personally think it's a rather mediocre OS, but as long as they don't they are well within their right to try and make it hard for people to violate their licenses. Software companies regularly do this, but they try to make their money on selling the actual software-licenses, not super-expensive hardware-locks.
But when buying a ARM computer, you don't have to choose Linux as the OS. It is chosen for you when you select that product. The problem isn't those who doesn't know that they can choose to run Linux and/or Open Office on their Intel/AMD computers, the problem is those who buy a ARM computer and then goes back to the store complaining about how it can't run Office (MS Office) or Internet (Internet Explorer. MS did a really slick move when they managed to equal "Internet"=="Internet Explorer" in the minds of the masses).
Wacom has a few cheap low end tablets that are not marketed as graphics-tools and if you want to go really cheap there's always the tablets made by Trust. But if you are going to use a tablet to make your notes you will probably find that it is easier, faster and result in higher quality to use a good pen, a blank (no lines or grid) paper and then scan it. That also has the benefit that you don't have to set up your computer during lecture.
Seems like Linux will fill the bill with a browser, maybe a PostScript app and a media player. Text editing isn't such an elaborate thing these days. And only a few people even know what to do with Excel.
And most peoples "MS Office needs" can be met with Open Office. That people "require" MS Office has mostly to do with laziness (too much work learning a new program) and myths (you must have MS Office, otherwise you're not compatible). The funny thing is, going from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 has a steeper learning curve than going MS Office 2003 to Open Office and has more or less the same compatibility issues.
But the "encryption will make it difficult for us to monitor terrorists" argument is fundamentally flawed. The people who does hard crimes over the internet already uses encryption, unless their stupid. If they're stupid, they'll keep going without encryption even if non-criminal people start using it.
There is one big plus when using external power-adapters; When the original one dies outside of warranty, you can simply get another.
What's really needed, though, is to get the producers of wall warts to give them a cord and a hole for wall-mounting. The really annoying thing about most wall warts today is that you can't use all the outlets, since most are too bulky.
The best usage is playing piano on a laptop keyboard? You mean, those things that have like 1 millimetre of travel and that have a really awful layout for playing music? lol:D
Most of the time when I'm somewhere with my laptop, I don't bring my rather large and heavy MIDI keyboard. I'm not saying that it would be good, I'm saying that it would be better than nothing and I also didn't say that it was the "best" usage, only an obvious one. I'm sure there are more suitable uses.
The most obvious usage is for working with music on a laptop. It would be nice to have this technology while away from home, like sitting in an airport and wanting to kill some time. Today I have to lug around a NanoKey in order to have a pressure-sensitive keyboard when I don't have access to my midi-keyboard. It's roughly the size of a laptop keyboard, uses the same kind of button mechanics but adds pressure sensitivity.
It's good that the OEMs offer you to purchase an installation DVD to go with your free Vista to 7 upgrade. It's bad that Microsoft doesn't offer you to download an ISO of an installation DVD to go with your free Vista to 7 upgrade. If they did, that free upgrade would be almost costless for those who could download it.
The strange thing is, MS do offer ISO downloads of their software. Not only to volume-license customers, but also, for instance, via MSDN Academic Alliance, where you can download the standard, non-volume license DVD and acquire a standard license number for personal home use, if your university or college offer MSDN-AA for their students.
If they can offer online ISO download and license acquirement for some via MSDN-AA, why can't they offer the same for all their customers? It would definitely make it easier to acquire a Windows license.
The real question is; Why leave the checkpoint "unmanned" if you have the resources to keep it under surveillance and the resources to keep at least four police officers on standby to strike down on anyone who don't want to wait until some idiot actually takes the time to come and clear them for passage?
If the checkpoint is unmanned, that should mean "Go ahead, you're welcome to pass."
The biggest difference would be that the kind of device used to annoy people with good hearing is so low effect that it is still harmless even to the people who are most affected by it. If the supposedly "non-lethal" torture weapons was also harmless to 100% of the population, they'd be useless against lots of people. If you're going to construct a useful torture weapon, it will have to be made to permanently harm, or possibly kill, a fair percentage of the victims.
Regardless of how you initialize your hardware, the minimum time for an optimized init should be the same with both Coreboot and a vendor BIOS. The main thing that a Coreboot with an integrated kernel can cut down on is waiting for spin up of the boot-drive. If you're going to load your kernel via a boot-loader, you can't start reading it until the drive has spun up. If you start loading the kernel from BIOS-flash, you can start before the disk is ready.
One of the main thing standard BIOS can cut down on is showing logos, reporting BIOS-version, product name, drives, amount of RAM, etc, etc that is usually shown for at least 0.5 seconds each. And, of course, they could suppress any logos, firmware-versions, product names, etc, etc of graphics-cards and such.
If the time from power on to start of boot-loader can be shortened so that the drive spin up is the main limit, there shouldn't have to be much difference between a Coreboot and a regular boot.
The smartest thing they could do is to put the optical connectors integrated into a USB3-plug. That way, you can steal power from the already existing USB-connector, since most computers will have them, and you can also make composite-devices that use both Light Peak and USB3 via the same cable.
There's also a big difference between the BIOS on most "bare" mainboards and the ones in laptops and complete systems. For instance, my mainboards BIOS takes a few seconds... Not much to swear about unless I enable AHCI, which loads some damn Intel option-BIOS that takes forever finding my drives. The HP machines at work spend around a third as much time in POST as my own home built system. My laptop is even faster.
The laptop I can understand, since they know exactly what hardware to expect and thus can cut corners, but why should my Giga-Byte mainboard be so much slower than HP's one? They both have to be able to handle any kind of hardware. They both have to initialize more or less the same kind of minimum hardware.
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Well. There wasn't much designing to do anyway.
The Ipad had the same design as the Ipod touch and Iphone.
Any "Ipad-clone" can easily have been in the works for a long time before Apple went public with the Ipad. Since it's simply a larger version of the Ipod with an added 3G-modem, it's not a long shot to think that some competitor to Apple already had thought of developing something similar.
The actual electronics inside can even be reused from the smaller device if one wants to press the schedule a bit.
But has Apple stooped to assimilating other people's technology?
Well, they do have a history of buying other companies in order to assimilate their technology into the Apple.
Like, say, buying Emagic in order to add Logic Pro into the Apple software portfolio (and canceling development of drivers and Logic Pro for Windows at the same time).
That is true. I pay 31% income-tax, which is quite a lot...
On the other hand, I don't need a private health-insurance, which is a good thing since it would be hard to find one that covers complications involving my psoriasis (like arthritis), my nut and almond allergy or my skydiving-hobby at a reasonable cost, if at all...
Most private health-insurances I've seen have clauses that specifically exclude coverage of high-risk activities or of already present conditions or health-risks.
Anyhow, most people simply think what they've been taught to think.
In the US, people have been taught that socialism is bad.
Here, we've been taught that socialism is good.
Hence, people in the US tend to think that socialism is bad and over here we tend to think that it is good... In general that is. There are, of course, people who don't fall into the "mainstream" way of thinking everywhere. =)
And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.
That's why Americans don't want to live that way.
I have a hard time believing that US citizens get to decide exactly how their government spend their tax-money.
That the government decides what to do with taxes isn't unique to socialist countries.
A major infection-vector for Vundo is MSN Messenger (Or Live, or whatever MS has renamed it to recently) and other IM-applications.
If you allow your users to use such applications, you might consider withdrawing that privilege if Vundo is a regular problem.
I've experienced a similar story but about a Wimax-tower.
The exact day that a Wimax-service went active in the neighbourhood of my girlfriends parents, a couple with "electro-allergy" in the area started having headaches and feeling nauseous.
The funny thing was, the tower had already been active at full power for several months while they measured coverage and did trial-runs.
When installing 64-bit Win 7, I even had Bootcamp specifically state that I couldn't run a 64-bit system on my (in Apples eyes) old Core 2 Duo Imac.
Bypassing the Bootcamp installer and installing all the 64-bit drivers manually instead got everything working though...
It irks me when Apple tries to artificially limit what versions of Windows I can run on my machine, when it is both technically and on a driver level compatible with all versions of both XP, Vista and 7. =P
And the statement that Bootcamp with Windows 7 requires OS X 10.6 is absolutely false.
It requires some of the Apple-specific drivers that comes with Bootcamp 3.1, that's all. Running Windows on a Mac doesn't require you to ever have had OS X on it at all...
And most other commercial software too...
If you pay for it, you'll probably end up with a binary. In the best cases, you get binaries for a whole bunch of different architectures and systems, like with Matlab...
In the worst cases, you end up with a binary that will run on only one architecture.
Well, since I've recently had to wrestle with getting a binary-only proprietary 32-bit application to run on a 64-bit linux, I'd really have appreciated at least a unified binary for both 64 and 32 bit x86...
Well, since the US government has a tendency to not follow the treaties they sign and at the same time get very upset when others don't follow signed treaties, it's mainly us in the other treaty members that should be worried if this comes to pass.
No, this is a case of deliberately disabling a working feature for the express purpose of forcing you to buy their hardware over another's.
Of course Apple want you to buy their hardware. Apple is a hardware company and all the software they make have lock-downs and tie-ins whose only purpose is to restrict you to Apple-hardware.
I agree that Apple should sell licenses of OS X for non-Apple hardware, even though I personally think it's a rather mediocre OS, but as long as they don't they are well within their right to try and make it hard for people to violate their licenses.
Software companies regularly do this, but they try to make their money on selling the actual software-licenses, not super-expensive hardware-locks.
But when buying a ARM computer, you don't have to choose Linux as the OS. It is chosen for you when you select that product.
The problem isn't those who doesn't know that they can choose to run Linux and/or Open Office on their Intel/AMD computers, the problem is those who buy a ARM computer and then goes back to the store complaining about how it can't run Office (MS Office) or Internet (Internet Explorer. MS did a really slick move when they managed to equal "Internet"=="Internet Explorer" in the minds of the masses).
Wacom has a few cheap low end tablets that are not marketed as graphics-tools and if you want to go really cheap there's always the tablets made by Trust.
But if you are going to use a tablet to make your notes you will probably find that it is easier, faster and result in higher quality to use a good pen, a blank (no lines or grid) paper and then scan it. That also has the benefit that you don't have to set up your computer during lecture.
Seems like Linux will fill the bill with a browser, maybe a PostScript app and a media player. Text editing isn't such an elaborate thing these days. And only a few people even know what to do with Excel.
And most peoples "MS Office needs" can be met with Open Office. That people "require" MS Office has mostly to do with laziness (too much work learning a new program) and myths (you must have MS Office, otherwise you're not compatible).
The funny thing is, going from MS Office 2003 to MS Office 2007 has a steeper learning curve than going MS Office 2003 to Open Office and has more or less the same compatibility issues.
On the other hand, NASA is a quite small part of the US national budget, something along the lines of 0.5%.
But the "encryption will make it difficult for us to monitor terrorists" argument is fundamentally flawed.
The people who does hard crimes over the internet already uses encryption, unless their stupid.
If they're stupid, they'll keep going without encryption even if non-criminal people start using it.
There is one big plus when using external power-adapters; When the original one dies outside of warranty, you can simply get another.
What's really needed, though, is to get the producers of wall warts to give them a cord and a hole for wall-mounting.
The really annoying thing about most wall warts today is that you can't use all the outlets, since most are too bulky.
The best usage is playing piano on a laptop keyboard? You mean, those things that have like 1 millimetre of travel and that have a really awful layout for playing music? lol :D
Most of the time when I'm somewhere with my laptop, I don't bring my rather large and heavy MIDI keyboard.
I'm not saying that it would be good, I'm saying that it would be better than nothing and I also didn't say that it was the "best" usage, only an obvious one.
I'm sure there are more suitable uses.
In other words, so what's this thing good for?
The most obvious usage is for working with music on a laptop.
It would be nice to have this technology while away from home, like sitting in an airport and wanting to kill some time.
Today I have to lug around a NanoKey in order to have a pressure-sensitive keyboard when I don't have access to my midi-keyboard.
It's roughly the size of a laptop keyboard, uses the same kind of button mechanics but adds pressure sensitivity.
It's good that the OEMs offer you to purchase an installation DVD to go with your free Vista to 7 upgrade.
It's bad that Microsoft doesn't offer you to download an ISO of an installation DVD to go with your free Vista to 7 upgrade.
If they did, that free upgrade would be almost costless for those who could download it.
The strange thing is, MS do offer ISO downloads of their software. Not only to volume-license customers, but also, for instance, via MSDN Academic Alliance, where you can download the standard, non-volume license DVD and acquire a standard license number for personal home use, if your university or college offer MSDN-AA for their students.
If they can offer online ISO download and license acquirement for some via MSDN-AA, why can't they offer the same for all their customers?
It would definitely make it easier to acquire a Windows license.
The real question is; Why leave the checkpoint "unmanned" if you have the resources to keep it under surveillance and the resources to keep at least four police officers on standby to strike down on anyone who don't want to wait until some idiot actually takes the time to come and clear them for passage?
If the checkpoint is unmanned, that should mean "Go ahead, you're welcome to pass."
The biggest difference would be that the kind of device used to annoy people with good hearing is so low effect that it is still harmless even to the people who are most affected by it.
If the supposedly "non-lethal" torture weapons was also harmless to 100% of the population, they'd be useless against lots of people.
If you're going to construct a useful torture weapon, it will have to be made to permanently harm, or possibly kill, a fair percentage of the victims.
Regardless of how you initialize your hardware, the minimum time for an optimized init should be the same with both Coreboot and a vendor BIOS.
The main thing that a Coreboot with an integrated kernel can cut down on is waiting for spin up of the boot-drive.
If you're going to load your kernel via a boot-loader, you can't start reading it until the drive has spun up. If you start loading the kernel from BIOS-flash, you can start before the disk is ready.
One of the main thing standard BIOS can cut down on is showing logos, reporting BIOS-version, product name, drives, amount of RAM, etc, etc that is usually shown for at least 0.5 seconds each.
And, of course, they could suppress any logos, firmware-versions, product names, etc, etc of graphics-cards and such.
If the time from power on to start of boot-loader can be shortened so that the drive spin up is the main limit, there shouldn't have to be much difference between a Coreboot and a regular boot.
The smartest thing they could do is to put the optical connectors integrated into a USB3-plug.
That way, you can steal power from the already existing USB-connector, since most computers will have them, and you can also make composite-devices that use both Light Peak and USB3 via the same cable.
There's also a big difference between the BIOS on most "bare" mainboards and the ones in laptops and complete systems.
For instance, my mainboards BIOS takes a few seconds... Not much to swear about unless I enable AHCI, which loads some damn Intel option-BIOS that takes forever finding my drives.
The HP machines at work spend around a third as much time in POST as my own home built system.
My laptop is even faster.
The laptop I can understand, since they know exactly what hardware to expect and thus can cut corners, but why should my Giga-Byte mainboard be so much slower than HP's one?
They both have to be able to handle any kind of hardware.
They both have to initialize more or less the same kind of minimum hardware.