It sounds awfully like DRM. After all, the app is trying to put certain restrictions on you (the R in DRM), and you circumvent them. That's all.
The trial/full issue: that can be done because they are essentially the same version. To go from trial version to full version, only a configuration key needs to be changed, and you're good. The real solution to this issue is for the developer to have two versions - and upon upgrade to the full version, a different piece of software is installed. That's also what I see mostly in the Google Play Store, where the "pro" version is a different app than the "free" version.
The ads: well like above. Don't rely on checking a key, just display those ads in the trial version of your app. Having a simple key that is plain text to boot, that's easy to circumvent. It seems they're not even trying to protect this.
In-app purchases are a tougher nut, and indeed here some serious protection attempt obviously has been done by encrypting stuff.
That is a simple and extremely short-sighted statement.
To check a route, you use a map. Why would any map be more reliable than another? Because one is printed, and the other not? I for one have learned to trust on-line maps as much as printed maps. Google Maps, OSM, and many other maps are simply as reliable as printed maps - often even more so as they tend to get updated. To get an update on your paper map you have to actually go and get a new one, while the online map is always at the latest. There is no obvious reason why Apple's maps would not be as reliable as the rest that's out there already.
So you look at your map, look at your route, see it follows motorways where available and major secondary roads in other places - and off you go.
The problem is now that Apple's maps are mostly OK but sometimes simply totally wrong. They put this town 70 km away from the actual location. They obviously also have roads mapped that lead to and from this town, presumably existing roads, so people follow them, as they see on their map that the road will lead them to the town. The town is mapped there, after all, and not knowing any better - which is totally reasonable - people trust their maps.
So the GPS takes you to that location. Where you expect the town to be, only to find out that you're ending up somewhere totally different. And the only way to find that out, is if you carefully compare two maps. And, as maps are generally considered reliable, no-one will do that.
For at least a decade if not more, millions of drivers every day rely on their GPS navigation systems. I've done this too, and mostly it works great. It's guided me straight to people's front doors - without me having to worry on driving directions, searching for direction signs etc. It is mostly an enhancement of safety, as it allowed me to concentrate on the unfamiliar roads and busy, chaotic traffic, without having to figure out where to go as well. And then after everyone is so used to working, reliable satnav, suddenly one of the major offerings messes up. No wonder that's causing really serious problems.
I'm not ashamed at all. After all it took rocket scientists (the ones that actually studied the subject very thoroughly) many years to figure that one out.
That is 55 ms on some 16 hours, seven orders of magnitude less. And it's not measured by round trip, but by Doppler effect.
Then the calculations to where it is expected to be are so mighty accurate that we can actually know that this is an anomaly, and not within error. To be able to calculate where the craft should be, you must know very accurately the gravitational constant, the masses of the Sun and the respective planets, effects of the solar wind pushing the craft out (actually that's what they were trying to measure as well), the speed of the Earth relative to Voyager, and probably some relativistic effects. Probably I missed some variables that have to be taken into account here. That overall accuracy is simply mind boggling as there are so many variables involved that with the slightest error in some of them, you end up with a much larger error in the final result.
Hey, this is support for religion, particularly the intellectual design theory!
After all it must be some God or whatever that has designed the universe to such perfection that we can shoot stuff in space, and by the time it's out of our solar system can say "hey it's not where we expect it to be, it's a few meters off. Oh wait a moment, we forgot to account for some photons.".
Back in 2011 or so, during the Republican primaries spectacle, foreign media already commented on the sad state of the Republican party. That Romney was the best they could come up with. With the US economy still in tatters and for whatever reason not restarting, it's quite surprising Obama got such a relatively easy victory for a second term.
I always see conference calls as something private, like a closed meeting.
I suppose there are certain guidelines on specific channels that can be used to make information public - and whether Facebook is an appropriate channel is part of the issue here. The other part is whether or not the actual information is "material" for investors.
The most impressive thing is that we can actually measure this minute effect to such an accuracy that we know there is something unexpected going on. And then subsequently accurately explain this inaccuracy.
Interestingly, the Mythbusters have tried to ignite a fuel tank (following the Hollywood myth that when a car gets shot, it will explode in a huge fireball), and only with a lot of effort (using tracer rounds) they managed to get a fire. No big explosions there.
Hydrogen is small, helium is smaller! When testing for leaks, you use He as it's the smallest (so leaks most) and easiest detected (not normally present in the atmosphere). He is actually the hardest gas to contain.
2. I work with a team of people and we have group pickup which is extremely important (where's that function on a smart phone?)
That is probably the killer feature of office phones, and why they're still used big time. Sharing the lines with multiple people. When one is on the phone, someone else can pick up their call and either help the caller directly, or take a message, or whatever. Voice mail is no replacement for that. It's also not easy to pass a mobile call to someone else, as it requires physically handing over the phone (and hoping they remember to give you back instantly as you're out of a phone for the time).
Even high end phones like the iPhone or a Flagship Android phone has Crap call quality
That is because those phones are really pocket-sized tablets that have a phone function added as an afterthought. I really have the feeling that over the past few years general mobile phone call quality has gone down.
I don't think you really want to explode a whole balloon full of hydrogen+oxygen. At least not if you value your ears, and your windows. A 5-8 cm soap bubble of the stuff gives a pretty serious bang already...
The extra bang comes thanks to the quick burning of the hydrogen - when the balloon bursts, the hydrogen is like a cloud in the air, and for a short while can be ignited. Which is exactly what that blowtorch does. When the balloon bursts the hydrogen will instantly ignite, and burn really rapidly, causing the louder "boom" you hear.
The Mythbusters did an episode on the Hindenburg. Indeed because what you see burn is the outer hull. Hydrogen burns, burns fast, and is gone fast. It doesn't explode unless mixed with air - the Hindenburg didn't explode, it just burned really fast.
Well long story short: the Mythbusters found out that the hull of the Hindenburg (just like the other Zeppelins at the time) was coated in something that closely resembled thermite, making it highly flammable. The hull on its own burned well, but the combination with hydrogen is what made it go really fast.
Now sure there is a lot to say about their methods, and the rather shallow research, but the conclusion is quite clear: it was not just the hydrogen, it was not just the coating, it was the combination of the two. Somehow the hydrogen acts as catalyst boosting the burning of the outer hull. Only when they burned a coated hull filled with hydrogen they got a burn that resembled the Hindenburg disaster.
Hydrogen will always be a fire risk, but it can be lessened by making the hull non-flammable. Something that we can do, but the Germans at the time not, or at least not as easily. Whether we can make it safe enough for modern standards, that is another matter.
Try landing any of those in a typhoon, for 500 ton lifting capacity the blimp must be huge, and no matter how streamlined it's going to catch a lot of wind. Keeping them grounded in a typhoon will be a tall order even.
They use it because digital (Internet) distribution of content is still in its infancy.
And that's not just because you guys in the US have shitty "broadband" (the rest of the developed world solved that issue long time ago), it's because the content owners do not allow easy purchase/rent of a movie or so over the Internet.
Yet there are plenty of signs the DVD and CD are on their way out. I'm in the recycling business, and I used to handle quite some CD/DVD production wastes - but some five, six years ago this trade almost totally collapsed. There was simply no supply available any more, and supply of waste is a direct measure of actual production (as production simply has a certain percentage of rejects).
The age of the optical media is over, it's a sunset industry. It will not go away completely, ever, but it's getting more and more irrelevant.
OK, fair enough, yet it remains one-way traffic. And stuff like food they still need to produce themselves. That may be the biggest challenge, as I doubt earth-based plants will do well on Mars, with the little sunshine lack of nutrients in the soil. Sure it can all be solved, but it's really hard if you're on a budget both energy and material supplies wise.
There is no money to be made inside the colony. And that because there is no money there, except for the loose change that the colonists brought with them. The money they make is on earth: publicity, interviews, biographies, etc.
Where do you think money could come from? Trade with Earth? Not as long as it's a one-way trip. These colonists are on their own, completely isolated supplies wise, they must be fully self-sufficient. And economical - that is, whatever economy they can set up there, which in the beginning will not be much. In that regard they're going to be quite close to isolated tribes living deep in the Amazon jungle.
I don't think a private company will think about those matters. Well, maybe they do, for a short moment, and then say "that's for the politicians to figure out, not our problem".
Such a colony on Mars, especially small ones, will anyway be a perfect anarchy/communist type of organisation. They're too small to have anything that resembles a government.
Of course it's a lot of attention grabbing, but don't we all?
That said I can see uses for a self-made, completely plastic gun. Even one that lasts for only a few shots. It's just hard to come with legitimate uses.
It'd be a great murder weapon. Self-made, so hard to trace back to an individual. Plastic is hard to detect, so useful for e.g. airline hijackings or getting it through a metal detector. The bullets may be more of an issue to smuggle in, though. That it breaks after a few shots is not so important, that it's not too accurate also doesn't matter much in close quarters.
That would work if these upgrades were not so totally phone-model-specific. So it's basically only the manufacturer that can release software upgrades for their phones with relative ease.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, wait a moment! You mean I can not have my cake and eat it too? Now that's preposterous!
Regards,
Austrian incarnation of the RIAA.
It sounds awfully like DRM. After all, the app is trying to put certain restrictions on you (the R in DRM), and you circumvent them. That's all.
The trial/full issue: that can be done because they are essentially the same version. To go from trial version to full version, only a configuration key needs to be changed, and you're good. The real solution to this issue is for the developer to have two versions - and upon upgrade to the full version, a different piece of software is installed. That's also what I see mostly in the Google Play Store, where the "pro" version is a different app than the "free" version.
The ads: well like above. Don't rely on checking a key, just display those ads in the trial version of your app. Having a simple key that is plain text to boot, that's easy to circumvent. It seems they're not even trying to protect this.
In-app purchases are a tougher nut, and indeed here some serious protection attempt obviously has been done by encrypting stuff.
That is a simple and extremely short-sighted statement.
To check a route, you use a map. Why would any map be more reliable than another? Because one is printed, and the other not? I for one have learned to trust on-line maps as much as printed maps. Google Maps, OSM, and many other maps are simply as reliable as printed maps - often even more so as they tend to get updated. To get an update on your paper map you have to actually go and get a new one, while the online map is always at the latest. There is no obvious reason why Apple's maps would not be as reliable as the rest that's out there already.
So you look at your map, look at your route, see it follows motorways where available and major secondary roads in other places - and off you go.
The problem is now that Apple's maps are mostly OK but sometimes simply totally wrong. They put this town 70 km away from the actual location. They obviously also have roads mapped that lead to and from this town, presumably existing roads, so people follow them, as they see on their map that the road will lead them to the town. The town is mapped there, after all, and not knowing any better - which is totally reasonable - people trust their maps.
So the GPS takes you to that location. Where you expect the town to be, only to find out that you're ending up somewhere totally different. And the only way to find that out, is if you carefully compare two maps. And, as maps are generally considered reliable, no-one will do that.
For at least a decade if not more, millions of drivers every day rely on their GPS navigation systems. I've done this too, and mostly it works great. It's guided me straight to people's front doors - without me having to worry on driving directions, searching for direction signs etc. It is mostly an enhancement of safety, as it allowed me to concentrate on the unfamiliar roads and busy, chaotic traffic, without having to figure out where to go as well. And then after everyone is so used to working, reliable satnav, suddenly one of the major offerings messes up. No wonder that's causing really serious problems.
I'm not ashamed at all. After all it took rocket scientists (the ones that actually studied the subject very thoroughly) many years to figure that one out.
That is 55 ms on some 16 hours, seven orders of magnitude less. And it's not measured by round trip, but by Doppler effect.
Then the calculations to where it is expected to be are so mighty accurate that we can actually know that this is an anomaly, and not within error. To be able to calculate where the craft should be, you must know very accurately the gravitational constant, the masses of the Sun and the respective planets, effects of the solar wind pushing the craft out (actually that's what they were trying to measure as well), the speed of the Earth relative to Voyager, and probably some relativistic effects. Probably I missed some variables that have to be taken into account here. That overall accuracy is simply mind boggling as there are so many variables involved that with the slightest error in some of them, you end up with a much larger error in the final result.
Hey, this is support for religion, particularly the intellectual design theory!
After all it must be some God or whatever that has designed the universe to such perfection that we can shoot stuff in space, and by the time it's out of our solar system can say "hey it's not where we expect it to be, it's a few meters off. Oh wait a moment, we forgot to account for some photons.".
Back in 2011 or so, during the Republican primaries spectacle, foreign media already commented on the sad state of the Republican party. That Romney was the best they could come up with. With the US economy still in tatters and for whatever reason not restarting, it's quite surprising Obama got such a relatively easy victory for a second term.
I always see conference calls as something private, like a closed meeting.
I suppose there are certain guidelines on specific channels that can be used to make information public - and whether Facebook is an appropriate channel is part of the issue here. The other part is whether or not the actual information is "material" for investors.
The most impressive thing is that we can actually measure this minute effect to such an accuracy that we know there is something unexpected going on. And then subsequently accurately explain this inaccuracy.
Interestingly, the Mythbusters have tried to ignite a fuel tank (following the Hollywood myth that when a car gets shot, it will explode in a huge fireball), and only with a lot of effort (using tracer rounds) they managed to get a fire. No big explosions there.
Hydrogen is small, helium is smaller! When testing for leaks, you use He as it's the smallest (so leaks most) and easiest detected (not normally present in the atmosphere). He is actually the hardest gas to contain.
2. I work with a team of people and we have group pickup which is extremely important (where's that function on a smart phone?)
That is probably the killer feature of office phones, and why they're still used big time. Sharing the lines with multiple people. When one is on the phone, someone else can pick up their call and either help the caller directly, or take a message, or whatever. Voice mail is no replacement for that. It's also not easy to pass a mobile call to someone else, as it requires physically handing over the phone (and hoping they remember to give you back instantly as you're out of a phone for the time).
As a software engineer you're likely much more frequently found at your desk than the average sales rep.
So for you, a land line is just the best tool for the job. For an always-on-the-move sales rep, a mobile phone is.
Even high end phones like the iPhone or a Flagship Android phone has Crap call quality
That is because those phones are really pocket-sized tablets that have a phone function added as an afterthought. I really have the feeling that over the past few years general mobile phone call quality has gone down.
I don't think you really want to explode a whole balloon full of hydrogen+oxygen. At least not if you value your ears, and your windows. A 5-8 cm soap bubble of the stuff gives a pretty serious bang already...
The BALLOON explodes, not the hydrogen.
The extra bang comes thanks to the quick burning of the hydrogen - when the balloon bursts, the hydrogen is like a cloud in the air, and for a short while can be ignited. Which is exactly what that blowtorch does. When the balloon bursts the hydrogen will instantly ignite, and burn really rapidly, causing the louder "boom" you hear.
The Mythbusters did an episode on the Hindenburg. Indeed because what you see burn is the outer hull. Hydrogen burns, burns fast, and is gone fast. It doesn't explode unless mixed with air - the Hindenburg didn't explode, it just burned really fast.
Well long story short: the Mythbusters found out that the hull of the Hindenburg (just like the other Zeppelins at the time) was coated in something that closely resembled thermite, making it highly flammable. The hull on its own burned well, but the combination with hydrogen is what made it go really fast.
Now sure there is a lot to say about their methods, and the rather shallow research, but the conclusion is quite clear: it was not just the hydrogen, it was not just the coating, it was the combination of the two. Somehow the hydrogen acts as catalyst boosting the burning of the outer hull. Only when they burned a coated hull filled with hydrogen they got a burn that resembled the Hindenburg disaster.
Hydrogen will always be a fire risk, but it can be lessened by making the hull non-flammable. Something that we can do, but the Germans at the time not, or at least not as easily. Whether we can make it safe enough for modern standards, that is another matter.
Try landing any of those in a typhoon, for 500 ton lifting capacity the blimp must be huge, and no matter how streamlined it's going to catch a lot of wind. Keeping them grounded in a typhoon will be a tall order even.
They use it because digital (Internet) distribution of content is still in its infancy.
And that's not just because you guys in the US have shitty "broadband" (the rest of the developed world solved that issue long time ago), it's because the content owners do not allow easy purchase/rent of a movie or so over the Internet.
Yet there are plenty of signs the DVD and CD are on their way out. I'm in the recycling business, and I used to handle quite some CD/DVD production wastes - but some five, six years ago this trade almost totally collapsed. There was simply no supply available any more, and supply of waste is a direct measure of actual production (as production simply has a certain percentage of rejects).
The age of the optical media is over, it's a sunset industry. It will not go away completely, ever, but it's getting more and more irrelevant.
And very true.
Expensive to buy, expensive to maintain.
OK, fair enough, yet it remains one-way traffic. And stuff like food they still need to produce themselves. That may be the biggest challenge, as I doubt earth-based plants will do well on Mars, with the little sunshine lack of nutrients in the soil. Sure it can all be solved, but it's really hard if you're on a budget both energy and material supplies wise.
There is no money to be made inside the colony. And that because there is no money there, except for the loose change that the colonists brought with them. The money they make is on earth: publicity, interviews, biographies, etc.
Where do you think money could come from? Trade with Earth? Not as long as it's a one-way trip. These colonists are on their own, completely isolated supplies wise, they must be fully self-sufficient. And economical - that is, whatever economy they can set up there, which in the beginning will not be much. In that regard they're going to be quite close to isolated tribes living deep in the Amazon jungle.
As long as they do not send out all the phone sanitisers, or we'd be in a lot of trouble.
I don't think a private company will think about those matters. Well, maybe they do, for a short moment, and then say "that's for the politicians to figure out, not our problem".
Such a colony on Mars, especially small ones, will anyway be a perfect anarchy/communist type of organisation. They're too small to have anything that resembles a government.
Of course it's a lot of attention grabbing, but don't we all?
That said I can see uses for a self-made, completely plastic gun. Even one that lasts for only a few shots. It's just hard to come with legitimate uses.
It'd be a great murder weapon. Self-made, so hard to trace back to an individual. Plastic is hard to detect, so useful for e.g. airline hijackings or getting it through a metal detector. The bullets may be more of an issue to smuggle in, though. That it breaks after a few shots is not so important, that it's not too accurate also doesn't matter much in close quarters.
That would work if these upgrades were not so totally phone-model-specific. So it's basically only the manufacturer that can release software upgrades for their phones with relative ease.