I thought Apple was only renting space to developers [slashdot.org], and got a fixed percentage from them. Isn't setting/raising prices something developer's should decide to do? Or are things somehow different in the UK?
Basically, when you sell something in any of Apple's stores, you choose a price tier in your default currency, and prices in other currencies are based on that price combined with the current exchange rates. For example, if I create a book right now, and specify tier 10 everywhere, that's $9.99 in USD, or $13.99 in CAD. If the Canadian dollar increases relative to the dollar, in a year, tier 10 could be $9.99 in the U.S. and $12.99 in CAD. In theory, the amount paid will always be approximately equal to $9.99 in USD.
To add further complexity, Apple provides some alternate price tiers that let you charge lower prices in developing countries, and for books, even lets you set per-country price tiers, IIRC, which could distort pricing even further... but that's a side discussion.:-)
A better measure is the Big Mac Index [wikipedia.org]. A McDonalds Big Mac contains more commodities, and a significant portion of the price is in the service sector. In the UK, the average price of a Big Mac is 2.99UKP. In America, it is $4.79. So the fair market conversion should be about 0.62. So the pound is currently undervalued against the dollar, and Apple is screwing the Brits.
That's silly. The Big Mac in the UK is likely made with British beef, British bread, British lettuce, British tomatoes, etc. Expecting the same exchange rate is completely unrealistic when you're talking about buying goods that are made outside the EU.
Mind you, I'm not saying the 1:1 conversion rate that Apple is using isn't Apple's way of giving the middle finger to the UK for Brexit, nor am I saying that I agree with it, but the rate ought to be set based on roughly the average conversion rate over the past few months or so, and that rate isn't anywhere near 0.62:1. Realistically, looking at recent trends, a 0.82:1 rate is probably pretty reasonable. Add to that Apple's usual safety margin, and I'd expect more like 0.85:1.
By contrast, I replaced my iPhone 5 battery after only about three years because it had swelled up like someone with a peanut allergy on a Planters factory tour.
As a cable TV provider, you're correct. However, Comcast also has a large network of fiber and copper that provide high-speed data service to a captive audience. Not all Comcast infrastructure is legacy copper, and even the copper that is there is often just the local loop, backed by fiber a few blocks away..
Actually, no, my original iPhone still works just fine on its original battery. I used it until I got my iPhone 5, and up until a few months ago, I still kept it powered, up until the original charger started malfunctioning and shutting off power randomly, causing it to buzz over and over. I decided it wasn't worth buying a new charger to keep it charged up.
At last check, it still worked correctly on the T-Mobile network with my OneSim.
30 million out of 1.3 billion? That's 48.8% women, 51.2% men. The U.S. has 49.2% men, 50.8% men. So the U.S. is imbalanced almost as much percentage-wise, albeit in the opposite direction. I don't think that's a big enough gap to be a serious concern.
All my camera user micro SD. Adapters are reliable, the cards are equally priced (though they top out at a lower capacity), and my laptop's have micro SD slots instead of regular SD.
Let me rephrase that. Most cameras natively use full-size SD.
Yes, seriously. The couple of minutes saved wouldn't significantly exceed the time it takes to walk across the room, unzip the camera bag, dig the flash card reader out from wherever I managed to squeeze it, and walk back. And I can be doing other things with the laptop while it imports for that extra two minutes, whereas I can't be doing other things while I dig a flash reader out of my bag.
It rarely makes sense to use an external flash reader unless you don't have an internal one.
Under what situation would such a maneuver be necessary, or even advantageous
Landing on a freeway with other vehicles around you moving at 70 MPH. If this is designed to replace cars, it can't require you to land in an empty field or in a parking lot. It has to be able to land on a road in the presence of other traffic and be a normal car when not flying. If you have to land in an empty field or in an empty parking lot and then push it on tiny wheels into a parking spot, it isn't a flying car; it's a helicopter.
I did say, "assuming it is bottom-heavy". If it tends to land upside-down, IMO, the entire design is a non-starter. if it lands upright, the tires would take some of the impact when they explode, and the axles would take a little more as they bend/shear. So it wouldn't be as serious an impact as in a helicopter falling from the same height. Plus, if you design it right, you could potentially handle a single-rotor failure without crashing anyway.
Just to clarify, I doubt very much any phone or tablet was responsible. But if one was, my money would be on the iPhone 6s rather than the iPad. My first guess would be that perhaps EgyptAir didn't replace the window heaters, which IIRC were recalled for an overheating problem in that model. If that isn't the problem, then the next most likely cause would be something in avionics, not in the cockpit. Personal devices in the cockpit are way down the list.
My money would be on the iPhone 6s. The early devices had a battery problem where they would suddenly shut down long before they were supposed to fully discharge. This leads me to wonder if the batteries have a dendrite problem, which (in addition to causing early shutdowns) could potentially cause them to overheat and catch fire.
Falsehood #2. Wifi is still a pretty uncommon feature, and even when present is fairly problematic, finicky, and requires an unreasonable number of steps to initiate.
Actually, I've never found it finicky. The problem is that the actual maximum speed of wireless is GARBAGE for transferring photos, much less video. Wi-Fi is more than an order of magnitude too slow to be practical. Anybody who thinks otherwise has almost certainly never shot photos with anything more capable than a toy iPhone camera.
To give some context, my brand-new, high-end 5D Mark IV shoots photos that can be from 30–70 megabytes each depending on RAW settings. Even though it supports 802.11n, if memory serves, all devices in IBSS mode (without infrastructure Wi-Fi) are limited to 802.11g speeds. So in practice, unless you bring a Wi-Fi router along with you (no camera supports the captive portal Wi-Fi that you'll find in every hotel on the planet), you'll be limited to only 54 megbits per second.
At 54 megabits per second, transferring a typical daily run of 500 photos at 70 megabytes each takes almost an hour and a half, and that's actually slightly optimistic. I do use the wireless functionality to transfer a few pics at a time from my camera to my iPhone while traveling so that I can quickly post pics from my real camera on Facebook. It works well for that, because I'm only grabbing five or six pics at a time, and I'm getting a much smaller JPEG copy instead of a RAW file.
At night, though, the flash card comes out of the camera and goes into the side of my laptop, where I spend only about four or five minutes to import that entire batch of photos. If Apple had bothered to keep their SD card reader hardware up-to-date, it would take under two minutes, but the two minutes saved isn't worth the hassle of trying to dig a flash card reader out of my bag.
With a laptop that lacks a flash reader, however, the entire equation changes. Suddenly, my choices are to either try to dig out an SD card reader (which will always be hard to dig out of a camera bag) or carry a retractable USB 3.0 cable (which turns out to be easier to put in a place where it is accessible, because it is so thin) and use the camera itself as a reader, albeit with the same poor performance as Apple's old SD card reader, and draining the camera battery the whole time. Both choices are approximately equally bad, and the decision to hobble their hardware by removing such a convenient way of importing content makes me seriously question Apple's commitment to the photography market.
Then again, I never used Aperture. If I had, I'd probably have much stronger negative comments....
And finally, Falsehood #5. What universe are you from? Have you even shopped for cameras ever? I cannot even fathom where you're pulling all this nonsense from.
Pretty much. Apart from cellular phones (where nobody uses the micro-SD slot anyway), pretty much the only cameras that use micro-SD are the little cameras built by GoPro. All pro cameras use either CF or full-size SD, because when the camera isn't a tiny little toy, the size savings of micro-SD aren't enough of a benefit to make up for the smaller contact size and the resulting decrease in reliability and robustness.
Nothing you say is true to the point where you're either delusional or trolling.
Trolling, I'd imagine. Either that or it's an Apple employee astroturfing. Hard to say which.
A flying vehicle adds 4 additional degrees of freedom (up-down, pitch, roll, yaw)... so much more that can go wrong.
Current flying vehicles have those extra degrees of freedom because of their design, but in principle, you could design a flying vehicle that has only one additional degree of freedom (altitude), keeping the vehicle approximately horizontal at all times and using horizontally oriented secondary fans to steer. And arguably, you should, because at that point, it would be much more practical for a driver to take control if needed.
A car that is light enough to get off the ground is too fragile to survive a collision of any consequence.
I think the key phrase is "Self-driving". If there's any significant collision risk, the car could simply go straight up to avoid it. Surviving on-ground collisions should be basically a non-goal at that point.
- Pets (and children) that will be blown into lift jets
Only if they change the laws of physics. Lift jets push something up by blowing air downwards. They suck from the top. I mean, I suppose if you have pets and children in jetpacks, it might be a concern, but if your kids and pets are doing that sort of thing, you have bigger things to worry about then them getting sucked into my (hypothetical) flying car's engines. Just saying.:-D
Just about anyplace you could safely land a "flying car" you could also land a helicopter.
Not true. A helicopter can't be moving horizontally when it lands. A flying car with wheels could potentially be moving at 70+ MPH horizontally when it lands. Assuming they can avoid any blades that stick out beyond the sides of the vehicle, that design difference completely changes the equation.
You don't need strict maintenance, just strict altitude limits. A vehicle falling from twenty feet off the ground, assuming it is bottom-heavy and lands on the tires, almost certainly won't kill you. At fifty feet, it probably won't. At a hundred feet, you'll probably have a low survival rate unless you have a whole-car airbag or something.
As long as self-driving cars fly over existing motorways, and as long as cars underneath are smart enough to avoid being landed upon, you should be fine. And even if they do, there's probably some safe height where everyone would survive. Assuming the flying far is designed to be extremely light (for obvious reasons), I'd imagine twenty or thirty feet would probably be fairly safe.
And considerably more powerful than a rpi B or zero, which are plenty sufficient for a great number of computing tasks, including state of the art engineering design work, scientific analysis, publication, etc.....
I use a first-gen Raspberry Pi Model B as my secondary DNS server. It has plenty of horsepower for that, and it probably draws less power than the charge circuit on the UPS it's attached to (which will power it for many hours beyond when my routing hardware goes black. Maybe I should rewire things.:-/ But I digress.
Because almost every other person I've met who has an interest in keeping platforms open wants to give up other rights that aren't important to them. Gun control and hate speech laws for instance.
In each case, the right must be balanced against the rights of others. Gun control infringes a right with the goal of preventing people from being killed. Hate speech laws are about limiting someone's right to incite others to violent acts. Open platforms must be balanced against the needs for the powerless (i.e. non-IT professionals) to be protected from malicious code.
All rights come with responsibilities, and all rights have limits beyond which the free exercise of those rights cannot be tolerated. Freedom is about drawing those lines sensibly to maximize rights without making it too easy for those with power to use those rights to infringe upon the rights of others. One would hope that everyone who has an interest in keeping platforms open also understands the other side, and is willing to find solutions that meet the needs of the other side without destroying the openness that they seek. If they are not, they will eventually lose those rights. That isn't fair, and it isn't just, but it is reality.
Computing as a service is taking over. Why do your processing on a slow machine when you can have access to a remote rendering farm. This is the future.
Call me when I can push those 70 megabyte image files to the cloud for processing quickly enough and pull the resulting full-screen rendering quickly enough (without any compression artifacts) for that extra CPU speed in the cloud to beat the performance of local processing. Basically, the round-trip speed would need to be double-digit milliseconds, so on the order of 100 gigabit speeds... wirelessly... and full duplex.
At the current rate of progress, my great grandkids will be on Social Security before the cloud can replace local CPU horsepower, and I don't even have kids yet. The cloud might be the future, but from my perspective, it is the very, very distant future except in the context of software with very limited resource needs.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, when you sell something in any of Apple's stores, you choose a price tier in your default currency, and prices in other currencies are based on that price combined with the current exchange rates. For example, if I create a book right now, and specify tier 10 everywhere, that's $9.99 in USD, or $13.99 in CAD. If the Canadian dollar increases relative to the dollar, in a year, tier 10 could be $9.99 in the U.S. and $12.99 in CAD. In theory, the amount paid will always be approximately equal to $9.99 in USD.
To add further complexity, Apple provides some alternate price tiers that let you charge lower prices in developing countries, and for books, even lets you set per-country price tiers, IIRC, which could distort pricing even further... but that's a side discussion. :-)
That's silly. The Big Mac in the UK is likely made with British beef, British bread, British lettuce, British tomatoes, etc. Expecting the same exchange rate is completely unrealistic when you're talking about buying goods that are made outside the EU.
Mind you, I'm not saying the 1:1 conversion rate that Apple is using isn't Apple's way of giving the middle finger to the UK for Brexit, nor am I saying that I agree with it, but the rate ought to be set based on roughly the average conversion rate over the past few months or so, and that rate isn't anywhere near 0.62:1. Realistically, looking at recent trends, a 0.82:1 rate is probably pretty reasonable. Add to that Apple's usual safety margin, and I'd expect more like 0.85:1.
I wasn't trying to refute that claim—just the claim that they were all incapable of being used.
By contrast, I replaced my iPhone 5 battery after only about three years because it had swelled up like someone with a peanut allergy on a Planters factory tour.
As a cable TV provider, you're correct. However, Comcast also has a large network of fiber and copper that provide high-speed data service to a captive audience. Not all Comcast infrastructure is legacy copper, and even the copper that is there is often just the local loop, backed by fiber a few blocks away..
Actually, no, my original iPhone still works just fine on its original battery. I used it until I got my iPhone 5, and up until a few months ago, I still kept it powered, up until the original charger started malfunctioning and shutting off power randomly, causing it to buzz over and over. I decided it wasn't worth buying a new charger to keep it charged up.
At last check, it still worked correctly on the T-Mobile network with my OneSim.
30 million out of 1.3 billion? That's 48.8% women, 51.2% men. The U.S. has 49.2% men, 50.8% men. So the U.S. is imbalanced almost as much percentage-wise, albeit in the opposite direction. I don't think that's a big enough gap to be a serious concern.
Let me rephrase that. Most cameras natively use full-size SD.
Yes, seriously. The couple of minutes saved wouldn't significantly exceed the time it takes to walk across the room, unzip the camera bag, dig the flash card reader out from wherever I managed to squeeze it, and walk back. And I can be doing other things with the laptop while it imports for that extra two minutes, whereas I can't be doing other things while I dig a flash reader out of my bag.
It rarely makes sense to use an external flash reader unless you don't have an internal one.
Landing on a freeway with other vehicles around you moving at 70 MPH. If this is designed to replace cars, it can't require you to land in an empty field or in a parking lot. It has to be able to land on a road in the presence of other traffic and be a normal car when not flying. If you have to land in an empty field or in an empty parking lot and then push it on tiny wheels into a parking spot, it isn't a flying car; it's a helicopter.
I did say, "assuming it is bottom-heavy". If it tends to land upside-down, IMO, the entire design is a non-starter. if it lands upright, the tires would take some of the impact when they explode, and the axles would take a little more as they bend/shear. So it wouldn't be as serious an impact as in a helicopter falling from the same height. Plus, if you design it right, you could potentially handle a single-rotor failure without crashing anyway.
Just to clarify, I doubt very much any phone or tablet was responsible. But if one was, my money would be on the iPhone 6s rather than the iPad. My first guess would be that perhaps EgyptAir didn't replace the window heaters, which IIRC were recalled for an overheating problem in that model. If that isn't the problem, then the next most likely cause would be something in avionics, not in the cockpit. Personal devices in the cockpit are way down the list.
My money would be on the iPhone 6s. The early devices had a battery problem where they would suddenly shut down long before they were supposed to fully discharge. This leads me to wonder if the batteries have a dendrite problem, which (in addition to causing early shutdowns) could potentially cause them to overheat and catch fire.
Actually, I've never found it finicky. The problem is that the actual maximum speed of wireless is GARBAGE for transferring photos, much less video. Wi-Fi is more than an order of magnitude too slow to be practical. Anybody who thinks otherwise has almost certainly never shot photos with anything more capable than a toy iPhone camera.
To give some context, my brand-new, high-end 5D Mark IV shoots photos that can be from 30–70 megabytes each depending on RAW settings. Even though it supports 802.11n, if memory serves, all devices in IBSS mode (without infrastructure Wi-Fi) are limited to 802.11g speeds. So in practice, unless you bring a Wi-Fi router along with you (no camera supports the captive portal Wi-Fi that you'll find in every hotel on the planet), you'll be limited to only 54 megbits per second.
At 54 megabits per second, transferring a typical daily run of 500 photos at 70 megabytes each takes almost an hour and a half, and that's actually slightly optimistic. I do use the wireless functionality to transfer a few pics at a time from my camera to my iPhone while traveling so that I can quickly post pics from my real camera on Facebook. It works well for that, because I'm only grabbing five or six pics at a time, and I'm getting a much smaller JPEG copy instead of a RAW file.
At night, though, the flash card comes out of the camera and goes into the side of my laptop, where I spend only about four or five minutes to import that entire batch of photos. If Apple had bothered to keep their SD card reader hardware up-to-date, it would take under two minutes, but the two minutes saved isn't worth the hassle of trying to dig a flash card reader out of my bag.
With a laptop that lacks a flash reader, however, the entire equation changes. Suddenly, my choices are to either try to dig out an SD card reader (which will always be hard to dig out of a camera bag) or carry a retractable USB 3.0 cable (which turns out to be easier to put in a place where it is accessible, because it is so thin) and use the camera itself as a reader, albeit with the same poor performance as Apple's old SD card reader, and draining the camera battery the whole time. Both choices are approximately equally bad, and the decision to hobble their hardware by removing such a convenient way of importing content makes me seriously question Apple's commitment to the photography market.
Then again, I never used Aperture. If I had, I'd probably have much stronger negative comments....
Pretty much. Apart from cellular phones (where nobody uses the micro-SD slot anyway), pretty much the only cameras that use micro-SD are the little cameras built by GoPro. All pro cameras use either CF or full-size SD, because when the camera isn't a tiny little toy, the size savings of micro-SD aren't enough of a benefit to make up for the smaller contact size and the resulting decrease in reliability and robustness.
Trolling, I'd imagine. Either that or it's an Apple employee astroturfing. Hard to say which.
Nonsense. That's much too technical a term for modern Republicans. They'd just call him a "Libruhl" and then run him out of town on a rail.
There would be a lot more American Indians alive today. Beyond that, though the outcome would be anybody's guess. :-)
Current flying vehicles have those extra degrees of freedom because of their design, but in principle, you could design a flying vehicle that has only one additional degree of freedom (altitude), keeping the vehicle approximately horizontal at all times and using horizontally oriented secondary fans to steer. And arguably, you should, because at that point, it would be much more practical for a driver to take control if needed.
I think the key phrase is "Self-driving". If there's any significant collision risk, the car could simply go straight up to avoid it. Surviving on-ground collisions should be basically a non-goal at that point.
Only if they change the laws of physics. Lift jets push something up by blowing air downwards. They suck from the top. I mean, I suppose if you have pets and children in jetpacks, it might be a concern, but if your kids and pets are doing that sort of thing, you have bigger things to worry about then them getting sucked into my (hypothetical) flying car's engines. Just saying. :-D
Not true. A helicopter can't be moving horizontally when it lands. A flying car with wheels could potentially be moving at 70+ MPH horizontally when it lands. Assuming they can avoid any blades that stick out beyond the sides of the vehicle, that design difference completely changes the equation.
You don't need strict maintenance, just strict altitude limits. A vehicle falling from twenty feet off the ground, assuming it is bottom-heavy and lands on the tires, almost certainly won't kill you. At fifty feet, it probably won't. At a hundred feet, you'll probably have a low survival rate unless you have a whole-car airbag or something.
As long as self-driving cars fly over existing motorways, and as long as cars underneath are smart enough to avoid being landed upon, you should be fine. And even if they do, there's probably some safe height where everyone would survive. Assuming the flying far is designed to be extremely light (for obvious reasons), I'd imagine twenty or thirty feet would probably be fairly safe.
Intel laptop CPUs currently have a hard limit of 16 GB for LP-DDR3. Given that most laptops ship with either 8 or 16 GB, there's no real wiggle room.
I use a first-gen Raspberry Pi Model B as my secondary DNS server. It has plenty of horsepower for that, and it probably draws less power than the charge circuit on the UPS it's attached to (which will power it for many hours beyond when my routing hardware goes black. Maybe I should rewire things. :-/ But I digress.
In each case, the right must be balanced against the rights of others. Gun control infringes a right with the goal of preventing people from being killed. Hate speech laws are about limiting someone's right to incite others to violent acts. Open platforms must be balanced against the needs for the powerless (i.e. non-IT professionals) to be protected from malicious code.
All rights come with responsibilities, and all rights have limits beyond which the free exercise of those rights cannot be tolerated. Freedom is about drawing those lines sensibly to maximize rights without making it too easy for those with power to use those rights to infringe upon the rights of others. One would hope that everyone who has an interest in keeping platforms open also understands the other side, and is willing to find solutions that meet the needs of the other side without destroying the openness that they seek. If they are not, they will eventually lose those rights. That isn't fair, and it isn't just, but it is reality.
Call me when I can push those 70 megabyte image files to the cloud for processing quickly enough and pull the resulting full-screen rendering quickly enough (without any compression artifacts) for that extra CPU speed in the cloud to beat the performance of local processing. Basically, the round-trip speed would need to be double-digit milliseconds, so on the order of 100 gigabit speeds... wirelessly... and full duplex.
At the current rate of progress, my great grandkids will be on Social Security before the cloud can replace local CPU horsepower, and I don't even have kids yet. The cloud might be the future, but from my perspective, it is the very, very distant future except in the context of software with very limited resource needs.