this is like their constant updating of iTunes or iPod firmware to prevent non Apple use. Yet they would never come and say it.
Maybe not outright, but in iTunes 8.2.1, they made it pretty obvious to anybody that knew what was going on, when the release notes said "iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses and issue with verification of Apple devices."
As an Engineer, I'd agree with others who think that there could be a legitimate reason for this - they might have changed something that now makes it explicitly incompatible.
As an Engineer who has worked in a company with a Marketing department, I'd bet this wasn't primarily an Engineering change - if it worked before and it doesn't now, they're not going to choose a point release to break it; if 10.6 broke the Atom, I'd be more likely to believe that it was an optimization. It's still possible, I just don't think it's the most likely situation.
As a Mac user, I have just one thing to say: Who cares? Does this topic really merit hitting the Slashdot front page 3 times?
Personally, I'd bet on an Apple product in the first half of next year that will fall between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook Air. And it won't run on an Atom. (Hey, isn't it about time for PA Semi to come out with something useful?)
I'll concede one point - the clock was indeed an integer, and the rounding error apparently came by multiplying that integer by 0.1, where the 0.1 had only limited precision. (I found the GAO report.) I'm relieved that the programmer wasn't so stupid as to add 0.1 many times (I agree no system designer SHOULD do that, but I've seen some pretty stupid designs...), but I still think the designers are idiots for different reasons than you think the designers are idiots.;-)
I still think that the hardware could have been used just the way it was - and indeed, the software bug was found 14 days before the attack, was fixed 9 days beforehand, and the fix arrived the day after the attack. Different hardware design could've prevented the bug, but in my opinion, the shortfall was that of the programmers not understanding their hardware (or thoroughly testing their software).
Actually, judging by their description of the problem, I'd guess that they were using a floating point format, with no more than 20 bits of mantissa (see my comment elsewhere on this topic). It works out pretty well if you assume that they just continually add 0.1 to a register for 100 hours. And judging from the way the math lines up, it sounds like they might've been taking that 24-bit floating point number, and putting it into a much larger register, otherwise the addition of 0.1 to 360,000 would have given a result of 360,000, and not just accumulated an error of about 1/3 s. Of course, all I have to go on is what the article says. I'd *hope* that nobody (not hardware, not software) would make a clock the way that I can infer from what is described in the article, but that's the best guess I can make.
There were probably perfectly good reasons for choosing a processor (or designing one, if that's what they did) with only a 24-bit word. For example, cost. Just because you CAN make a 64-bit floating point unit doesn't mean you SHOULD. It's typically far better to take an off-the-shelf part, and use it properly. My PC is capable of 32-bit and 64-bit integer and floating point math natively. However, if I run Mathematica on it, I can work with arbitrary-precision numbers that may have hundreds or thousands of bits of precision, or more. And, in the rare cases where a computation results in possibly-reduced precision, the program is smart enough to warn me that the answer is inexact.
So why spend money on an ASIC if you can use commercial off-the-shelf hardware? And even if you do use an ASIC, why make it more expensive by adding extra hardware when software could do just as well. (Added bonus: a software error is much easier and less expensive to fix. If hardware had been the culprit for this problem, a fix would have likely taken 6 months or more and cost millions of dollars.)
As an aside, I've noticed you quite vehemently stating in this comment and others that the error was due to the inaccuracy of the clock (I presume you mean something like, eg, a 25 MHz clock chip that was running at 24.99999 MHz), and not rounding errors as the article stated. Do you have a citation for this?
Actually, it sounds like they were using a 24-bit floating point register for the clock, and just adding 0.1 every clock tick. Doing a bit of math, you can see that the article's error of.3433 seconds matches with a floating point format with 17 to 20 bits. 0.1 (base 10) == 0.00011001100110011001100... etc (base 2) There are 3600000 0.1-second periods in 100 hours (base 10) Floating point formats vary, but 0.1 (base 10) would be stored as approximately 1.10011001100110011 * 2^-4 in binary. That's 18 bits of mantissa, though some formats (like IEEE) make the leading 1 implicit, so it could be 17 bits. The next two bits are zero, so we can't really tell if they're used or not, so the format could have up to 20 bits in the mantissa. The remainder of the 24 bits would be used for the sign and exponent. Now, that binary number is exactly 209715/131072 (base 10). Multiply that by 3,600,000 (the number of clock ticks), and you get exactly 5898234375/16384 (base 10). Subtract out 360,000 (the actual number of seconds), and you get (presto!) -0.343323 (inexact) seconds of error.
On the other hand, if you count the clock ticks as an integer, then multiply by 0.1 any time you need the time, you're off by at most the least significant bit in the mantissa (or about 2^-18 or so). That would be a much better way of implementing the clock mechanism.
The problem was error accumulated in the clock register itself due to the imprecision of the clock, and overflows due to the inappropriately small size of the register. Both are hardware issues and represent bad design decisions. They way to fix them is to design the hardware properly in the first place so that it is appropriate for the job at hand.
...so your suggested solution is an infinitely precise register, and an infinitely large register?
You're obviously not a hardware designer, so I'll spare the clue-by-four. But there are some things that are better handled by software. It would certainly be *possible* to make a register look almost infinitely large; in the event the hardware detects an overflow, it allocates some space in memory, and calls that the upper bits of the register. Then it resets the register itself, and can start counting from zero again. You've extended your register size from, say 64 bits to 64 bits plus whatever amount of memory you have. But it's still not quite infinite. What happens when you run out of memory? (OK, so then the hardware starts saving to the hard drive. And if that fills up? Why, then the hardware signs you up for an online backup service using your credit card number and starts sending the overflow there. And when you get a new credit card?)
As you can see, you've delayed the problem - perhaps even by enough that almost nobody will ever encounter it. But it's still there, lying in wait for somebody to stumble across.
The better hardware solution? Provide the tools for the programmer to do what's appropriate for his application. Almost nobody designs hardware for just one application any more - I'd be willing to make a sizable bet that all of the cases cited in TFA used general-purpose hardware, so the general-purpose solution is software. Metaphorically, the hardware should give the programmer a loaded gun and let him decide how to use it. He can use it to shoot a deer and eat for a month, or shoot a bear to protect himself, or shoot fish in a barrel if he needs entertainment. Of course, he might also shoot himself in the foot because he doesn't know what he's doing.
Now if you want to make an argument over what layer of software takes advantage of the tools that the hardware provides, that's a legitimate discussion. Perhaps the compiler should make the hardware look infinite (this has same problems as the hardware doing it, but you save transistors). Or maybe provide a math library with the capability of making the hardware look infinite, and making sure the programmer tells it what to do if it eventually does overflow (but your programmer still has to recognize that he needs to use the library).
In any case, basically every solution to these problems come down to one thing: how many programmers need to know that the hardware really isn't infinite? If the answer is "every damn one of them," that really simplifies picking the idiots out of the crowd.
There are several ways (both GUI and CLI) to strip out any architecture code that you don't want on the Mac, pretty much negating the occasional instance where disk space is not plentiful. For that matter, most of the application size isn't in the code itself, anyway. The biggest application I have, iWeb, weighs in at 518 MB. Of that, only 8.8 MB is the executable; it's pretty evenly split between x86 and PPC code. Command line tools are a little different, since they don't contain other resources like the Application packages; the lipo tool I'm using to tell me the architecture size in the executable is about 150 KB, again about half x86 and half PPC./usr/bin is 171 MB for me, so I could probably strip out a good 85 MB without the extra x86 code. (Well, OK, I just tried it; it dropped to 94 MB - so I could save 77 MB. But, more importantly, it's ridiculously easy - the command to get rid of everything but PPC code (eg x86, x86_64, and ppc64) is just "ditto -arch ppc/usr/bin ~/ppc-bin".)
My alma mater is occasionally the subject of similar articles to this one for defending their trademark. The only commonality? The use of the letter W. Color, shape, style, font might all be different - but if it has a W in it, then they might send out a letter asking that it be changed, eventually leading to a lawsuit.
But they have to defend their trademark vigorously - they make millions of dollars in licensing fees for clothing and the like where it appears, and occasionally, other schools (or other entities) DO make a logo that obviously infringes.
As a side note, they reportedly pay a company to defend their trademark for them; I'm sure that does little to discourage excessive lawsuits to help boost the company's numbers when they have to justify their existence for next year's budget.
Yes, but they're doing this for legal safety; either Woolworth's trademark claim gets denied (Apple wins), Woolworth settles (Apple wins), or the government determines that the logos are sufficiently distinct and grants Woolworth's application (Apple still wins). Otherwise, say somebody makes a logo that the government decides does infringe on Apple's trademark; if the offenders can make the case that Woolworth's did it first and Apple didn't protect their trademark, then Apple loses it. But having a definite decision that Woolworth's did not infringe on Apple's logo gives Apple ammunition in future lawsuits.
I'm not convinced that rampant piracy of books is simply waiting for the iPod Text. After all, Napster was both created and shut down before even the first iPod was released. True, there were many other MP3 players, but they were uncommon; most of my friends simply downloaded music to their computers. What else was happening at the same time? Well, the MP3 format was becoming commonplace, so that might have helped. Or it might have been a result of Napster's popularity. Books already have at least one common digital format; PDF.
I think two bigger obstacles to literary piracy are demand and libraries. Demand because many people simply don't read that many books. And libraries because virtually every community has a vast repository of books from which to choose; they're legal, free, and have that great dead-tree feel that most people prefer.
Agreed. Speaking as an Engineer who has worked on hardware between first manufacture and first sale, this is no big deal. Prototypes are expensive, and usually not pretty. And you just don't let the folks in marketing (or the executives) touch your prototypes - you usually don't have enough to use yourself, much less to loan out for a few days, and risk getting broken at the hands of photographers and the like who don't take proper precautions in handling the boards. Not to mention, they look pretty ugly - faceplates and covers may not be ready yet (or even designed), they might have a few mod wires (though that happens occasionally on shipping products too), and the ones that the engineers work with probably have lots of extra wires hanging off in every direction. If I work on a new board, I may have to pick a random heatsink out of the box of spare parts, or to have it built without all the mechanical pieces (like standoffs and covers) because they get in the way of me doing my job. So when the marketing types want something to photograph or show off to the world? I pick out something that's dead as a doornail. That's one of the few good uses for all the boards I kill! (Or I might give it to the mechanical engineer for shock and vibration testing, or packaging drop tests, or things like that.)
So what's the big deal? If they start talking about their latest greatest product too long before it's ready, that'll just keep their customers from buying NVIDIA's current products. Many a company has been bitten (or even put out of business) by doing that; see the Osborne Effect. Obviously, they think it's far enough along that they can start talking about it without risking their revenue stream.
Actually, I have an iPhone 3GS, and have no complaints. It gets warm with heavy use (aka gaming), but not unreasonably hot. Maybe it would be a problem in a particularly warm climate (I've played games on it in up to 100 degree weather), but I tend to overheat long before the phone would.
Go work doing warranty computer repair for a while... You'll become a cynic too. I've seen more than my fair share of laptops that just "suddenly stopped working" due to apparent spontaneous creation of red wine or cola within the case. The customers will go out of their way to clean the outside of the case, hoping that we won't notice the sticky residue that's coating the guts of the computer. There are many cases of cracked screens (both laptops and phones) that the customer legitimately did not see happen - but those are far more likely to be cases where the screen got cracked due to poor handling than due to manufacturing defects.
And Apple does occasionally own up to their (and their suppliers') mistakes, when there's a significant statistical outlier in terms of failures. Batteries, graphics chips, power supplies, power adapters... I even remember my parents' 15" Apple CRT being covered by an extended warranty in about 1995 because it had a tendency to start flickering yellow. But they don't do that every time somebody on the Internet makes a fuss - whether legitimate or not. Apple customers are ridiculously picky. Like those who complained about the mold lines on the G4 Cube's plastic. Or about misalignment of a laptop case by less than a millimeter. Or a hard drive that clicks slightly differently from what customers are used to hearing (which, admittedly can sometimes be a sign of failure, but can also just be the way it was designed).
I hate to burst your bubble, but the price increase you note is from the switch to low-sulfur diesel, not increased demand. I learned this from a chemist who works at an oil company in Texas, so I'm inclined to believe him.
Ew, I hate the keyboard clitoris. I'm all for keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible - I just learn all the keyboard shortcuts. Especially ones for moving the insertion point. And any time I'm on an OS that's not my usual one, it really frustrates me to have to adjust to the differences (like whether skipping forward or backward one word will stop before or after the space, for example).
I can empathize with someone getting sued for that much; yeah, they broke the law, and they should probably have to pay a penalty for that. Should they have to lose their house? I think that's a bit excessive.
What is the cost of a law-abiding cyclist to you? Are you an extra 5 seconds late to work in the morning because you had to slow down briefly to pass safely? Gee, I sure can empathize with that. Yessirree, I couldn't care less. Oh, wait - that's not empathy. That's apathy. Sorry, I get those confused.
Perhaps you should encourage your local municipality to add more bike lanes to roads, and add more bike paths separate from roads. We'd all be happier for it.
It's the law. Legally, a bicyclist has all the rights AND all the responsibilities of any other vehicle. That means that you must give me 3 feet of clearance when passing. It also means that I must give you 3 feet of clearance when passing (so none of that darting down the middle of two lanes of stopped traffic that some bikers and motorcycles like to do).
I have no idea where you're from, or what this "rego" you speak of is - but quite frankly, bikes cost less for society. In my locale, roads are not paid for entirely by gas taxes, registration fees, etc.; money for them also comes out of income or property taxes. So maybe you pay slightly more than I do - but you also require a more sturdy road, use the roads more, and cause more wear on them. Semi truck drivers undoubtedly pay more than you do too - and they cause more wear and require a heftier road, and probably put on a good number more miles than you. Is that some great injustice too?
Think of it this way; every biker you see is one less driver that's getting in your way, and one less car parked between you and that perfect parking spot right next to the door of your destination. Most of us are smart enough to use residential streets, bike lanes, or bike paths, rather than highways and main thoroughfares. If you take all the bikers off the road and replace them with the cars, you can bet they'll be in between you and the next stoplight (which you would otherwise indubitably race towards at top speed, only to slam on the brakes, repeating at each successive block).
I love riding bikes and skateboarding but I stay the fuck off the goddamn road. I've rode on the sidewalk my entire life and I've never been cited, even as cops drove right by.
It's illegal for a reason, you know. Speaking as an experienced cyclist (I've biked more in a summer than many people drive), I can tell you that sidewalks are often more dangerous than the roads. Drivers entering and leaving the road are not watching for bikes (when's the last time you looked more than 5 feet down a sidewalk when crossing it at a driveway?). Pedestrians move unpredictably. Even worse, many of them are walking dogs, which have a tendency to chase bikes (which is usually a losing proposition for the dog). Riding on the sidewalk is unsafe for bikers, and it's unsafe for walkers.
I agree that many bicyclists need to improve their skills. I have a headlight and taillight, wear light-colored clothing, signal turns, and share the road with cars; many others do not. By all means, stay pissed as hell at the bikers that do stupid things - they annoy me too. But bicycles have just as much right to the road as cars do.
In my own experience, I've found there are 3 different battery life numbers you run into with any laptops. These numbers are always significantly different.
That's because the chips in the laptops actually vary quite a bit. Given two "identical" chips (CPU and GPU are the biggest power consuming chips, so the most likely to influence the battery life), one might draw a few more watts than the other at both peak and idle consumption. The chips will be sold with a spec of what their maximum consumption is, and they're guaranteed to be below that. I doubt most manufacturers test with a worst-case CPU and worst-case GPU and a worst-case battery (whose capacity is slightly lower for whatever reason). More likely, they test on a number of different machines, and report a typical number. The reviewer and every other individual will only have one sample to work with, and are likely to see something completely different from each other.
Not to mention, usage patterns vary hugely. I tend to use my laptop with the screen on the absolute dimmest setting. Most people don't. I keep a CPU monitor on the screen so I know when a particular web page or application is chowing down on power. Most people don't. For these and other reasons, I tend to get pretty decent battery life on my laptop, even though it's 6 years old (with a battery replacement after 3 years. Obviously however, battery life is not as good as it once was; but it's enough for my occasional usage.).
Apple, like many companies, is often rather fearful of power adapter and battery issues. If you have a power adapter that's sparking, or a battery that's bulging, or something that might pose a safety risk, they'll often choose to replace it for you (in warranty or not) rather than let you continue using it, risk getting hurt, and starting a lawsuit (or a recall).
Obviously, this varies a lot. A fraying power adapter cord is also likely to be caused abuse, and they'll figure that you're smart enough that if it's sparking, you probably shouldn't use it while sitting in a pool of gasoline (or at all, for that matter). And even a bulging battery might be called a consumable, and they'll just tell you to buy a new one. It depends on a lot of things - if you have/had AppleCare, the mood of whoever you're talking to, how much money you regularly throw at Apple for new products, how widespread the problem is, how many times you ask, etc.
if someone comes out with a spare-battery-attached-to-a-magsafe-connector for those die-hards who absolutely *need* it, angels may sing in the treetops.
No endorsements from me here, mind you - just wanted to point out that there are indeed such products for sale. I, however, neither own a MacBook nor have ever had any desire for a second battery on my PowerBook.
But the action you must take is clear: under no circumstances are you to follow the link, or read the article. This is Slashdot! And that is Fox News! TWO reasons!!!
I have one better - I got a warranty card for my brother's car, shortly after I moved out-of-state. It was addressed to my new address, not forwarded.
I, on the other hand, only own a 1995 Bianchi hybrid with about 10,000 miles or so. Since it's a bicycle, I don't really feel the need to buy a car warranty for it.
But on a more serious note, Intel will always be able to leverage their advanced fabrication processes to reduce power consumption. Most ARM chips I've seen use older (in terms of desktop CPU) process technology but the good architecture still gives you excellent power consumption.
I think that may actually be on purpose. Moving to a smaller process offers many benefits, such as increased speed and circuit density. However, it also tends to increase the leakage power of a chip. Leakage used to be almost nonexistent; these days, somewhere on the order of 50% of the power dissipation in a chip is just leakage.
For those not familiar with (semiconductor) leakage, here's a quick explanation: Transistors, as they are used in digital logic, have two states; 'on' and 'off'. When you make those transistors as small as they are currently (45 nanometers from the source to the drain, and maybe 4 to 7 atomic layers insulating the gate from the silicon substrate), transistors also have two states; 'on' and 'mostly on'. It turns out that when you only have a few atoms of silicon dioxide insulating the gate of the transistor, electrons can sometimes just hop straight through your insulation.
Now there are lots of things that help this - using something other than silicon dioxide to insulate the gate, or using a thicker gate oxide (which means slower transistors), or power gating to disable transistors that aren't in use. However, this is more of a problem in smaller process technology nodes. As a process matures, fabs develop ways to combat this, and low-power chips come out. But the leading-edge chips that pay for this new technology don't need to have the same ultra-low leakage that you need in an always-on device like a phone, so it takes a few years before the same technology moves into that market. It doesn't make a difference if you're Intel, or if you're fabless and buy wafers from TSMC.
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this is like their constant updating of iTunes or iPod firmware to prevent non Apple use. Yet they would never come and say it.
Maybe not outright, but in iTunes 8.2.1, they made it pretty obvious to anybody that knew what was going on, when the release notes said "iTunes 8.2.1 provides a number of important bug fixes and addresses and issue with verification of Apple devices."
As an Engineer, I'd agree with others who think that there could be a legitimate reason for this - they might have changed something that now makes it explicitly incompatible.
As an Engineer who has worked in a company with a Marketing department, I'd bet this wasn't primarily an Engineering change - if it worked before and it doesn't now, they're not going to choose a point release to break it; if 10.6 broke the Atom, I'd be more likely to believe that it was an optimization. It's still possible, I just don't think it's the most likely situation.
As a Mac user, I have just one thing to say: Who cares? Does this topic really merit hitting the Slashdot front page 3 times?
Personally, I'd bet on an Apple product in the first half of next year that will fall between the iPhone/iPod Touch and the MacBook Air. And it won't run on an Atom. (Hey, isn't it about time for PA Semi to come out with something useful?)
I'll concede one point - the clock was indeed an integer, and the rounding error apparently came by multiplying that integer by 0.1, where the 0.1 had only limited precision. (I found the GAO report.) I'm relieved that the programmer wasn't so stupid as to add 0.1 many times (I agree no system designer SHOULD do that, but I've seen some pretty stupid designs...), but I still think the designers are idiots for different reasons than you think the designers are idiots. ;-)
I still think that the hardware could have been used just the way it was - and indeed, the software bug was found 14 days before the attack, was fixed 9 days beforehand, and the fix arrived the day after the attack. Different hardware design could've prevented the bug, but in my opinion, the shortfall was that of the programmers not understanding their hardware (or thoroughly testing their software).
Obviously, you feel differently.
Actually, judging by their description of the problem, I'd guess that they were using a floating point format, with no more than 20 bits of mantissa (see my comment elsewhere on this topic). It works out pretty well if you assume that they just continually add 0.1 to a register for 100 hours. And judging from the way the math lines up, it sounds like they might've been taking that 24-bit floating point number, and putting it into a much larger register, otherwise the addition of 0.1 to 360,000 would have given a result of 360,000, and not just accumulated an error of about 1/3 s. Of course, all I have to go on is what the article says. I'd *hope* that nobody (not hardware, not software) would make a clock the way that I can infer from what is described in the article, but that's the best guess I can make.
There were probably perfectly good reasons for choosing a processor (or designing one, if that's what they did) with only a 24-bit word. For example, cost. Just because you CAN make a 64-bit floating point unit doesn't mean you SHOULD. It's typically far better to take an off-the-shelf part, and use it properly. My PC is capable of 32-bit and 64-bit integer and floating point math natively. However, if I run Mathematica on it, I can work with arbitrary-precision numbers that may have hundreds or thousands of bits of precision, or more. And, in the rare cases where a computation results in possibly-reduced precision, the program is smart enough to warn me that the answer is inexact.
So why spend money on an ASIC if you can use commercial off-the-shelf hardware? And even if you do use an ASIC, why make it more expensive by adding extra hardware when software could do just as well. (Added bonus: a software error is much easier and less expensive to fix. If hardware had been the culprit for this problem, a fix would have likely taken 6 months or more and cost millions of dollars.)
As an aside, I've noticed you quite vehemently stating in this comment and others that the error was due to the inaccuracy of the clock (I presume you mean something like, eg, a 25 MHz clock chip that was running at 24.99999 MHz), and not rounding errors as the article stated. Do you have a citation for this?
Actually, it sounds like they were using a 24-bit floating point register for the clock, and just adding 0.1 every clock tick. Doing a bit of math, you can see that the article's error of .3433 seconds matches with a floating point format with 17 to 20 bits.
0.1 (base 10) == 0.00011001100110011001100... etc (base 2)
There are 3600000 0.1-second periods in 100 hours (base 10)
Floating point formats vary, but 0.1 (base 10) would be stored as approximately 1.10011001100110011 * 2^-4 in binary. That's 18 bits of mantissa, though some formats (like IEEE) make the leading 1 implicit, so it could be 17 bits. The next two bits are zero, so we can't really tell if they're used or not, so the format could have up to 20 bits in the mantissa. The remainder of the 24 bits would be used for the sign and exponent.
Now, that binary number is exactly 209715/131072 (base 10). Multiply that by 3,600,000 (the number of clock ticks), and you get exactly 5898234375/16384 (base 10). Subtract out 360,000 (the actual number of seconds), and you get (presto!) -0.343323 (inexact) seconds of error.
On the other hand, if you count the clock ticks as an integer, then multiply by 0.1 any time you need the time, you're off by at most the least significant bit in the mantissa (or about 2^-18 or so). That would be a much better way of implementing the clock mechanism.
The problem was error accumulated in the clock register itself due to the imprecision of the clock, and overflows due to the inappropriately small size of the register. Both are hardware issues and represent bad design decisions. They way to fix them is to design the hardware properly in the first place so that it is appropriate for the job at hand.
...so your suggested solution is an infinitely precise register, and an infinitely large register?
You're obviously not a hardware designer, so I'll spare the clue-by-four. But there are some things that are better handled by software. It would certainly be *possible* to make a register look almost infinitely large; in the event the hardware detects an overflow, it allocates some space in memory, and calls that the upper bits of the register. Then it resets the register itself, and can start counting from zero again. You've extended your register size from, say 64 bits to 64 bits plus whatever amount of memory you have. But it's still not quite infinite. What happens when you run out of memory? (OK, so then the hardware starts saving to the hard drive. And if that fills up? Why, then the hardware signs you up for an online backup service using your credit card number and starts sending the overflow there. And when you get a new credit card?)
As you can see, you've delayed the problem - perhaps even by enough that almost nobody will ever encounter it. But it's still there, lying in wait for somebody to stumble across.
The better hardware solution? Provide the tools for the programmer to do what's appropriate for his application. Almost nobody designs hardware for just one application any more - I'd be willing to make a sizable bet that all of the cases cited in TFA used general-purpose hardware, so the general-purpose solution is software. Metaphorically, the hardware should give the programmer a loaded gun and let him decide how to use it. He can use it to shoot a deer and eat for a month, or shoot a bear to protect himself, or shoot fish in a barrel if he needs entertainment. Of course, he might also shoot himself in the foot because he doesn't know what he's doing.
Now if you want to make an argument over what layer of software takes advantage of the tools that the hardware provides, that's a legitimate discussion. Perhaps the compiler should make the hardware look infinite (this has same problems as the hardware doing it, but you save transistors). Or maybe provide a math library with the capability of making the hardware look infinite, and making sure the programmer tells it what to do if it eventually does overflow (but your programmer still has to recognize that he needs to use the library).
In any case, basically every solution to these problems come down to one thing: how many programmers need to know that the hardware really isn't infinite? If the answer is "every damn one of them," that really simplifies picking the idiots out of the crowd.
There are several ways (both GUI and CLI) to strip out any architecture code that you don't want on the Mac, pretty much negating the occasional instance where disk space is not plentiful. For that matter, most of the application size isn't in the code itself, anyway. The biggest application I have, iWeb, weighs in at 518 MB. Of that, only 8.8 MB is the executable; it's pretty evenly split between x86 and PPC code. /usr/bin is 171 MB for me, so I could probably strip out a good 85 MB without the extra x86 code. (Well, OK, I just tried it; it dropped to 94 MB - so I could save 77 MB. But, more importantly, it's ridiculously easy - the command to get rid of everything but PPC code (eg x86, x86_64, and ppc64) is just "ditto -arch ppc /usr/bin ~/ppc-bin".)
Command line tools are a little different, since they don't contain other resources like the Application packages; the lipo tool I'm using to tell me the architecture size in the executable is about 150 KB, again about half x86 and half PPC.
My alma mater is occasionally the subject of similar articles to this one for defending their trademark. The only commonality? The use of the letter W. Color, shape, style, font might all be different - but if it has a W in it, then they might send out a letter asking that it be changed, eventually leading to a lawsuit.
But they have to defend their trademark vigorously - they make millions of dollars in licensing fees for clothing and the like where it appears, and occasionally, other schools (or other entities) DO make a logo that obviously infringes.
As a side note, they reportedly pay a company to defend their trademark for them; I'm sure that does little to discourage excessive lawsuits to help boost the company's numbers when they have to justify their existence for next year's budget.
Yes, but they're doing this for legal safety; either Woolworth's trademark claim gets denied (Apple wins), Woolworth settles (Apple wins), or the government determines that the logos are sufficiently distinct and grants Woolworth's application (Apple still wins). Otherwise, say somebody makes a logo that the government decides does infringe on Apple's trademark; if the offenders can make the case that Woolworth's did it first and Apple didn't protect their trademark, then Apple loses it. But having a definite decision that Woolworth's did not infringe on Apple's logo gives Apple ammunition in future lawsuits.
I'm not convinced that rampant piracy of books is simply waiting for the iPod Text. After all, Napster was both created and shut down before even the first iPod was released. True, there were many other MP3 players, but they were uncommon; most of my friends simply downloaded music to their computers. What else was happening at the same time? Well, the MP3 format was becoming commonplace, so that might have helped. Or it might have been a result of Napster's popularity. Books already have at least one common digital format; PDF.
I think two bigger obstacles to literary piracy are demand and libraries. Demand because many people simply don't read that many books. And libraries because virtually every community has a vast repository of books from which to choose; they're legal, free, and have that great dead-tree feel that most people prefer.
Agreed. Speaking as an Engineer who has worked on hardware between first manufacture and first sale, this is no big deal. Prototypes are expensive, and usually not pretty. And you just don't let the folks in marketing (or the executives) touch your prototypes - you usually don't have enough to use yourself, much less to loan out for a few days, and risk getting broken at the hands of photographers and the like who don't take proper precautions in handling the boards. Not to mention, they look pretty ugly - faceplates and covers may not be ready yet (or even designed), they might have a few mod wires (though that happens occasionally on shipping products too), and the ones that the engineers work with probably have lots of extra wires hanging off in every direction. If I work on a new board, I may have to pick a random heatsink out of the box of spare parts, or to have it built without all the mechanical pieces (like standoffs and covers) because they get in the way of me doing my job.
So when the marketing types want something to photograph or show off to the world? I pick out something that's dead as a doornail. That's one of the few good uses for all the boards I kill! (Or I might give it to the mechanical engineer for shock and vibration testing, or packaging drop tests, or things like that.)
So what's the big deal? If they start talking about their latest greatest product too long before it's ready, that'll just keep their customers from buying NVIDIA's current products. Many a company has been bitten (or even put out of business) by doing that; see the Osborne Effect. Obviously, they think it's far enough along that they can start talking about it without risking their revenue stream.
Actually, I have an iPhone 3GS, and have no complaints. It gets warm with heavy use (aka gaming), but not unreasonably hot. Maybe it would be a problem in a particularly warm climate (I've played games on it in up to 100 degree weather), but I tend to overheat long before the phone would.
Go work doing warranty computer repair for a while... You'll become a cynic too. I've seen more than my fair share of laptops that just "suddenly stopped working" due to apparent spontaneous creation of red wine or cola within the case. The customers will go out of their way to clean the outside of the case, hoping that we won't notice the sticky residue that's coating the guts of the computer. There are many cases of cracked screens (both laptops and phones) that the customer legitimately did not see happen - but those are far more likely to be cases where the screen got cracked due to poor handling than due to manufacturing defects.
And Apple does occasionally own up to their (and their suppliers') mistakes, when there's a significant statistical outlier in terms of failures. Batteries, graphics chips, power supplies, power adapters... I even remember my parents' 15" Apple CRT being covered by an extended warranty in about 1995 because it had a tendency to start flickering yellow. But they don't do that every time somebody on the Internet makes a fuss - whether legitimate or not. Apple customers are ridiculously picky. Like those who complained about the mold lines on the G4 Cube's plastic. Or about misalignment of a laptop case by less than a millimeter. Or a hard drive that clicks slightly differently from what customers are used to hearing (which, admittedly can sometimes be a sign of failure, but can also just be the way it was designed).
I hate to burst your bubble, but the price increase you note is from the switch to low-sulfur diesel, not increased demand. I learned this from a chemist who works at an oil company in Texas, so I'm inclined to believe him.
Ew, I hate the keyboard clitoris. I'm all for keeping my hands on the keyboard as much as possible - I just learn all the keyboard shortcuts. Especially ones for moving the insertion point. And any time I'm on an OS that's not my usual one, it really frustrates me to have to adjust to the differences (like whether skipping forward or backward one word will stop before or after the space, for example).
There, fixed that for you.
There, fixed that for you.
There, fixed that for you.
There, fixed that for everybody else.
I can empathize with someone getting sued for that much; yeah, they broke the law, and they should probably have to pay a penalty for that. Should they have to lose their house? I think that's a bit excessive.
What is the cost of a law-abiding cyclist to you? Are you an extra 5 seconds late to work in the morning because you had to slow down briefly to pass safely? Gee, I sure can empathize with that. Yessirree, I couldn't care less. Oh, wait - that's not empathy. That's apathy. Sorry, I get those confused.
Perhaps you should encourage your local municipality to add more bike lanes to roads, and add more bike paths separate from roads. We'd all be happier for it.
So where do *push bikes* get this "right" from?
It's the law. Legally, a bicyclist has all the rights AND all the responsibilities of any other vehicle. That means that you must give me 3 feet of clearance when passing. It also means that I must give you 3 feet of clearance when passing (so none of that darting down the middle of two lanes of stopped traffic that some bikers and motorcycles like to do).
I have no idea where you're from, or what this "rego" you speak of is - but quite frankly, bikes cost less for society. In my locale, roads are not paid for entirely by gas taxes, registration fees, etc.; money for them also comes out of income or property taxes. So maybe you pay slightly more than I do - but you also require a more sturdy road, use the roads more, and cause more wear on them. Semi truck drivers undoubtedly pay more than you do too - and they cause more wear and require a heftier road, and probably put on a good number more miles than you. Is that some great injustice too?
Think of it this way; every biker you see is one less driver that's getting in your way, and one less car parked between you and that perfect parking spot right next to the door of your destination. Most of us are smart enough to use residential streets, bike lanes, or bike paths, rather than highways and main thoroughfares. If you take all the bikers off the road and replace them with the cars, you can bet they'll be in between you and the next stoplight (which you would otherwise indubitably race towards at top speed, only to slam on the brakes, repeating at each successive block).
I love riding bikes and skateboarding but I stay the fuck off the goddamn road. I've rode on the sidewalk my entire life and I've never been cited, even as cops drove right by.
It's illegal for a reason, you know. Speaking as an experienced cyclist (I've biked more in a summer than many people drive), I can tell you that sidewalks are often more dangerous than the roads. Drivers entering and leaving the road are not watching for bikes (when's the last time you looked more than 5 feet down a sidewalk when crossing it at a driveway?). Pedestrians move unpredictably. Even worse, many of them are walking dogs, which have a tendency to chase bikes (which is usually a losing proposition for the dog). Riding on the sidewalk is unsafe for bikers, and it's unsafe for walkers.
I agree that many bicyclists need to improve their skills. I have a headlight and taillight, wear light-colored clothing, signal turns, and share the road with cars; many others do not. By all means, stay pissed as hell at the bikers that do stupid things - they annoy me too. But bicycles have just as much right to the road as cars do.
In my own experience, I've found there are 3 different battery life numbers you run into with any laptops. These numbers are always significantly different.
That's because the chips in the laptops actually vary quite a bit. Given two "identical" chips (CPU and GPU are the biggest power consuming chips, so the most likely to influence the battery life), one might draw a few more watts than the other at both peak and idle consumption. The chips will be sold with a spec of what their maximum consumption is, and they're guaranteed to be below that. I doubt most manufacturers test with a worst-case CPU and worst-case GPU and a worst-case battery (whose capacity is slightly lower for whatever reason). More likely, they test on a number of different machines, and report a typical number. The reviewer and every other individual will only have one sample to work with, and are likely to see something completely different from each other.
Not to mention, usage patterns vary hugely. I tend to use my laptop with the screen on the absolute dimmest setting. Most people don't. I keep a CPU monitor on the screen so I know when a particular web page or application is chowing down on power. Most people don't. For these and other reasons, I tend to get pretty decent battery life on my laptop, even though it's 6 years old (with a battery replacement after 3 years. Obviously however, battery life is not as good as it once was; but it's enough for my occasional usage.).
Apple, like many companies, is often rather fearful of power adapter and battery issues. If you have a power adapter that's sparking, or a battery that's bulging, or something that might pose a safety risk, they'll often choose to replace it for you (in warranty or not) rather than let you continue using it, risk getting hurt, and starting a lawsuit (or a recall).
Obviously, this varies a lot. A fraying power adapter cord is also likely to be caused abuse, and they'll figure that you're smart enough that if it's sparking, you probably shouldn't use it while sitting in a pool of gasoline (or at all, for that matter). And even a bulging battery might be called a consumable, and they'll just tell you to buy a new one. It depends on a lot of things - if you have/had AppleCare, the mood of whoever you're talking to, how much money you regularly throw at Apple for new products, how widespread the problem is, how many times you ask, etc.
if someone comes out with a spare-battery-attached-to-a-magsafe-connector for those die-hards who absolutely *need* it, angels may sing in the treetops.
You mean like this, this, or this?
No endorsements from me here, mind you - just wanted to point out that there are indeed such products for sale. I, however, neither own a MacBook nor have ever had any desire for a second battery on my PowerBook.
But the action you must take is clear: under no circumstances are you to follow the link, or read the article. This is Slashdot! And that is Fox News! TWO reasons!!!
I have one better - I got a warranty card for my brother's car, shortly after I moved out-of-state. It was addressed to my new address, not forwarded.
I, on the other hand, only own a 1995 Bianchi hybrid with about 10,000 miles or so. Since it's a bicycle, I don't really feel the need to buy a car warranty for it.
But on a more serious note, Intel will always be able to leverage their advanced fabrication processes to reduce power consumption. Most ARM chips I've seen use older (in terms of desktop CPU) process technology but the good architecture still gives you excellent power consumption.
I think that may actually be on purpose. Moving to a smaller process offers many benefits, such as increased speed and circuit density. However, it also tends to increase the leakage power of a chip. Leakage used to be almost nonexistent; these days, somewhere on the order of 50% of the power dissipation in a chip is just leakage.
For those not familiar with (semiconductor) leakage, here's a quick explanation: Transistors, as they are used in digital logic, have two states; 'on' and 'off'. When you make those transistors as small as they are currently (45 nanometers from the source to the drain, and maybe 4 to 7 atomic layers insulating the gate from the silicon substrate), transistors also have two states; 'on' and 'mostly on'. It turns out that when you only have a few atoms of silicon dioxide insulating the gate of the transistor, electrons can sometimes just hop straight through your insulation.
Now there are lots of things that help this - using something other than silicon dioxide to insulate the gate, or using a thicker gate oxide (which means slower transistors), or power gating to disable transistors that aren't in use. However, this is more of a problem in smaller process technology nodes. As a process matures, fabs develop ways to combat this, and low-power chips come out. But the leading-edge chips that pay for this new technology don't need to have the same ultra-low leakage that you need in an always-on device like a phone, so it takes a few years before the same technology moves into that market. It doesn't make a difference if you're Intel, or if you're fabless and buy wafers from TSMC.
...it's the lack of encryption that really bothers me. After all, that could let some unknown party watch what I'm doing online!