Right. What I meant was that with an older MacBook Pro where you could just pop the battery out and pop a new one it, it would be easy to gain access to my laptop on my desk if I'm away for just a few minutes. With the newer MBPs, you'd have to remove the bottom case (8 torx screws?), unplug the battery cable, swap batteries, plug the new cable in, put the bottom back on, and put the screws back in... all before I walked by my desk and noticed.
As an end-user, yeah, it's a little annoying. But in this one ridiculous circumstance it's a "feature".
Isn't this sort of like how the Pandora Batteries worked on the PSP? I think they enabled a diagnostic mode as opposed to a direct hack, but the battery being used to corrupt the system thing isn't totally new.
On the plus side, the hard to replace batteries people complain about make this attack more difficult to perform, instead of just taking a few seconds.
I wonder how much of this is DKIM/DomainKeys and Sender ID? Making it harder to forge things means it's easier to just use compromised accounts instead.
That's what I was thinking when reading about this. It's nice and all, but if driving down a long boring stretch of road is tedious and causes nod-offs and road-hypnosis... how much more common with those things be when the driver doesn't even have to keep their arms on the wheel?
Ars Technica has a much more detailed review. All and all, it sounds like a nice device if you don't want an iPad.
The thing that struck me reading the review (and they commented on this very well) was just how much work seemed unfinished. A couple of times they mentioned "(blah blah blah) but Samsung says that will come in a future update." The amount of "it'll be here later" on the products launching lately seems horrible. How many features on the iPad were listed on the box and in the marketing material but didn't come out until a later software update? How many were there on the BlackBerry tablet? Even the Nintendo 3DS did this.
I just bought LA Noir on Amazon the other day while it was on sale for $45. At that price, I could have rented it for 22 days and still come out ahead. That's actually pretty good.
I see it as useful for basic troubleshooting. Something goes wrong, user profile gets seriously messed up, etc... how do you look something up on the internet? I use another computer, but that may not always be handy. This way, if you can boot this far you can look things up.
Seems like one of those things I'll only use once every few years, but would be really handy when I need it.
"We're talking about the elimination of the wall switch."
So if I forget my phone at work, I can't turn the lights on in my apartment? Brilliant!
The idea of interfaces using the new Android stuff is interesting, but it seems like we'll get into another one of those situations where everyone defines their own standard (which they change when convenient) and nothing works well. The light bulbs in one room are GE bulbs which can't be controlled the by same software as the Sylvania bulbs, but that's OK because the new bulb uses different software than the old ones so I need a patch to the software for that. Look in a book for any home receiver or DVR and look at the HUNDREDS of codes used to control various AV equipment, even from a single manufacturer.
I'll wait for some good standards to be ironed out and become dominant before jumping on this bandwagon. It never really happened in the TV space. Being able to look up a TV show on my iPhone in a guide program and push a button to tune to it would be nice, but that only works right now with some company's cable boxes and their app.
Of course, do I really care if I can individually adjust every light (or anything else) in my house? I doubt I need that kind of control. We're going to go through that phase where people find out what's useful... and I'm not interested in being someone stuck with an something like the Android fridge Samsung has started advertising.
So now, someone can break into Comcast and easily see which houses have good stuff and don't have anyone at home. That must be very handy for thieves.
As a customer, I already don't trust Comcast and think they cost too much. Why would I pay them $40 a month for this? Especially since it would take away from my internet bandwidth?
I agree a few small strips could supply the Kindle's power needs, but I'd imagine it would be hard on the battery. Solar calculators usually run off solar only and don't have a battery in them. Constantly topping off the battery may actually cause memory issues or otherwise just shorten the life of the battery such that the minuses outweigh the pluses.
Wouldn't be hard to try, but given how aggressive everyone (but Sony) has been at pushing prices down, it may be enough of a cost issue.
It's too bad. Sony was out in front but didn't push the market. They didn't respond to the Kindle well, and they still have their readers priced way too high.
It does have something to do with the app store being open. I believe that if you tried to submit an application that sucked down too much CPU (such as using 100% at idle) that it would be rejected from Apple's app store. More subtle waste, probably not, but obvious junk is probably caught by their automated testing.
By doing less QA on apps going into the store, Android can have problems like this more easily.
But your right, this is no different from the problems you see everywhere else. I've seen Flash video players do >720p using 10% CPU on my machine, and I've seen them use >80% to play 240p. I've seen elaborate animations work well, and I've seen simple little banners slow everything to a crawl. It's up to developers.
As an end user, I don't want to/shouldn't have to worry about this. And the true-multitasking in Android means I can play a game and when I quit it can launch some background task that kills my battery. This kind of thing can make it hard for an end user (especially one who isn't used to this kind of stuff) to figure out what's causing the problem. Their watch-and-report idea is actually a very good one and a nice way to add value.
I have an iPhone and I can tell you it doesn't bother me one bit. I know from experience on my laptop just how big a cpu/power drain Flash usually is (this is usually the developer's fault, not flash it's self, but the effect is the same). It's only been once or twice in the last 2+ years I wanted to do something that required flash, and that was usually playing a video. My family has 3 iPhones and an iPad, and they've never asked me about it.
I can generally divide the Flash content I run across into four categories:
Video - shouldn't need flash, now often doesn't thanks to iPhones
Games - Most would have interface problems due to the form factor differences. This is the only one I miss a little, for those games I know would work well with touch.
Menus/sites - Should be in HTML. I hate flash sites as they often break conventions and are hard to navigate. The small screen would only make this worse.
Ads - Enough said.
I know a couple of people with Android phones. Some are diehard Apple haters, and some of them really love their phones. But I don't remember any of them ever mentioning having or using flash. I have been using Flashblock on my computers for a few years and there are only a few times I ever have to load a flash movie.
Would it be nicer to have the option? Maybe. Would the cost to get flash running well on the iPhone have been revenue positive for Apple? I seriously doubt it. At this point, the world has been in "we have to work on the iPhone or we're doomed" mode for at least 2 years. I don't think anyone things the usage of flash is going to go up.
I will note though, as stupid as flash seems on my phone, it does make more sense on a tablet where the larger screen would make interacting with flash sites easier. I still don't think it would be a real problem though.
Bingo. Apple is right on this one, you shouldn't need anything like this. The fact that you do says that something is broken.
That was one of their arguments for why multi-tasking took so long on the iPhone, and why it's not true multi-tasking like on a desktop (or Android). They wanted to avoid this exact problem. Of the people I know with Android phones, this is one of the things they complain about. They ship with crapware that can be very difficult to uninstall or just exit so it doesn't keep sucking up your CPU/battery. Just about a page above this comment is one from someone who rooted the phone on day 3 to remove junk and get it to perform smoothly.
Windows Mobile had programs like top because the OS couldn't manage resources well. My Dell Axim x50v (which was WM 5.5, I think) came with a little program pre-installed by Dell to let you quit applications through a tap on a shortcut on the top menu bar. And do you know why? For convenience? No, because it was necessary. There was no other way to quit apps (except digging through settings to find the task manager and force-quitting them). If you didn't stay on top and manage them, programs would use all your CPU or memory, and things would slow down (or not open). It was terrible.
The fact that Apple can do basic tests to make sure your post-to-twitter app doesn't use 100% CPU all the time is a good thing in my book. I realize you can side load things, but I would like to see Google try to do the same. Certainly I think Amazon should. As a consumer using an appliance (which is the way I use my iPhone), I want to be able to buy apps without having to worry about that kind of thing. Ensuring "manners" from apps, that they generally function correctly... that's the kind of thing I want out of my app store. I hope some of the stores out there (Amazon, carriers, etc) decide to do that. It seems it would be in their interest (as the article attests).
The government, through the CPB, gives public television dollars a year, which makes them government owned. Also, they're public, not private, so they must be government owned/run.
Yeah, it's stupid. But it seems easier for people to categorize in a false government/for-profit dichotomy than to say something legitimate... especially when making partisan attacks.
For the record: republican, loves NPR and PBS, gives them money. They may not have liked the frontline report (haven't seen it, don't doubt it doesn't portray Wikileaks the way many would like), but PBS doesn't deserve this; especially not the password dump. Go after someone that might be doing real damage (like companies doing fracking to get natural gas, general taxpayer fraud in contracts, etc) if some good info comes out. I think PBS pretty clearly does more good than harm.
Molten salt has been used before. Spain opened the Andasol Solar Power Station in 2009. The Wikipedia article says it basically doubles the output of the plant, and the thermal reserve can keep it generating electricity for almost 8 hours in total darkness.
More interesting is that it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant, and that could end up being a problem in Nevada.
This was the killer app for me. The ability to watch server logs while doing things in a web browser. Being able to easily monitor something without having to switch windows with your active task or make things a few lines tall to fit them both on your screen.
In my current job, I only have one monitor, but it's widescreen so it serves that same purpose pretty well. I can have one window off to the side and the browser on top on the right. I can't see everything, but I can see the log well enough to know when I need to change window focus.
At my last job many of the people (down to administrative personnel) ended up getting second monitors. They mostly ended up as outlook monitors, and didn't seem to help their productivity much. I can only think of one person who made real use of it, but she spent lots of time comparing large spreadsheets and compiling data. For most of the non-programers, it was just a "I want two monitors to look cool and busy too" kind of thing.
I don't know how fast the Arduino's ADC is, but it's 10bit. The USB is just a 115k serial port, which I think is a chip restriction.
You could use your own bit-twiddling, or use an Ethernet interface like the Ethershield, which may be fast enough.
It said in the article that the drugs acted together in a manner stronger than each drug individually, which is impressive. I'm with you that my expectations would have been along the lines of "I hope something measurable happens", so this would have been way above that.
Just noticed I didn't answer your question. It looks like it was sent to all member's att.net addresses, which I have setup to forward to my normal address (where they send billing reminders) for just these kind of reasons. If I didn't have the forwarder, I would never check the address. I don't think I'd opened the file on my computer with the account password in it for at least 3 years before I had to go look it up to try to check my usage.
I'd assume there was something in my paper statement too (since I haven't turned off paper billing), but I don't actually read those. I mostly use them as a billing cycle reminder.
I received an email on April 7th called "Updates to your AT&T Internet Terms of Service". The email lists 14 sections that have changed, with little summaries. The two that I expect would cover this are:
Usage: We've added a link at www.att.com/internet-usage where customers can go to get information about AT&T's data usage policy and managing their data usage.
Restrictions on Use & Network Management: We have added language to make clear that the AT&T Acceptable Use Policy is incorporated into the terms of service. Also, to protect our network from harm and to help us ensure a high quality Internet experience for all of our customers, we have added language about reasonable network management practices that AT&T may adopt. We will provide you with advance notice and details if we implement new network management practices that directly impact your service.
I assume those two cover it, especially if I went and actually read the full policy. This is one of those cases where I was on the lookout for something like this. The email wasn't the clear thing it should have been ("Your internet is now capped at 150GB per month, here's why you care"), but it was an email denoting that the terms changed.
Also, extra credit to AT&T for adding this provision. This is the kind of thing that I love companies to do.
Changes to this Agreement: We have changed the acceptance provision so that you are now deemed to have accepted the changes to the agreement after the 30 day notice has passed, rather than immediately after receipt.
I received an email, however they told me to check my usage on their site.
I went to their site and was told they didn't know my usage, so I didn't need to worry about it (it actually said that). I found that a bit disquieting.
I'm not heavy user. The most I do is go on occasional Netflix binges watching a bunch of TV episodes in a row. It's very unlikely I'd actually hit the cap. But if it's going to be enforced against me, I want to be able to see what I've used.
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Right. What I meant was that with an older MacBook Pro where you could just pop the battery out and pop a new one it, it would be easy to gain access to my laptop on my desk if I'm away for just a few minutes. With the newer MBPs, you'd have to remove the bottom case (8 torx screws?), unplug the battery cable, swap batteries, plug the new cable in, put the bottom back on, and put the screws back in... all before I walked by my desk and noticed.
As an end-user, yeah, it's a little annoying. But in this one ridiculous circumstance it's a "feature".
Isn't this sort of like how the Pandora Batteries worked on the PSP? I think they enabled a diagnostic mode as opposed to a direct hack, but the battery being used to corrupt the system thing isn't totally new.
On the plus side, the hard to replace batteries people complain about make this attack more difficult to perform, instead of just taking a few seconds.
Like in Kansas, where I live. Amazon charges me sales tax because of that. They are following the law, CA and NY just don't want to follow it.
I wonder how much of this is DKIM/DomainKeys and Sender ID? Making it harder to forge things means it's easier to just use compromised accounts instead.
It's also a $45-$60k luxury car. It's no the same market.
That's what I was thinking when reading about this. It's nice and all, but if driving down a long boring stretch of road is tedious and causes nod-offs and road-hypnosis... how much more common with those things be when the driver doesn't even have to keep their arms on the wheel?
Can you explain what you were taught incorrectly (or just weren't taught)? I'm curious what the issues were.
Ars Technica has a much more detailed review. All and all, it sounds like a nice device if you don't want an iPad.
The thing that struck me reading the review (and they commented on this very well) was just how much work seemed unfinished. A couple of times they mentioned "(blah blah blah) but Samsung says that will come in a future update." The amount of "it'll be here later" on the products launching lately seems horrible. How many features on the iPad were listed on the box and in the marketing material but didn't come out until a later software update? How many were there on the BlackBerry tablet? Even the Nintendo 3DS did this.
I just bought LA Noir on Amazon the other day while it was on sale for $45. At that price, I could have rented it for 22 days and still come out ahead. That's actually pretty good.
I see it as useful for basic troubleshooting. Something goes wrong, user profile gets seriously messed up, etc... how do you look something up on the internet? I use another computer, but that may not always be handy. This way, if you can boot this far you can look things up.
Seems like one of those things I'll only use once every few years, but would be really handy when I need it.
So if I forget my phone at work, I can't turn the lights on in my apartment? Brilliant!
The idea of interfaces using the new Android stuff is interesting, but it seems like we'll get into another one of those situations where everyone defines their own standard (which they change when convenient) and nothing works well. The light bulbs in one room are GE bulbs which can't be controlled the by same software as the Sylvania bulbs, but that's OK because the new bulb uses different software than the old ones so I need a patch to the software for that. Look in a book for any home receiver or DVR and look at the HUNDREDS of codes used to control various AV equipment, even from a single manufacturer.
I'll wait for some good standards to be ironed out and become dominant before jumping on this bandwagon. It never really happened in the TV space. Being able to look up a TV show on my iPhone in a guide program and push a button to tune to it would be nice, but that only works right now with some company's cable boxes and their app.
Of course, do I really care if I can individually adjust every light (or anything else) in my house? I doubt I need that kind of control. We're going to go through that phase where people find out what's useful... and I'm not interested in being someone stuck with an something like the Android fridge Samsung has started advertising.
So now, someone can break into Comcast and easily see which houses have good stuff and don't have anyone at home. That must be very handy for thieves.
As a customer, I already don't trust Comcast and think they cost too much. Why would I pay them $40 a month for this? Especially since it would take away from my internet bandwidth?
I agree a few small strips could supply the Kindle's power needs, but I'd imagine it would be hard on the battery. Solar calculators usually run off solar only and don't have a battery in them. Constantly topping off the battery may actually cause memory issues or otherwise just shorten the life of the battery such that the minuses outweigh the pluses.
Wouldn't be hard to try, but given how aggressive everyone (but Sony) has been at pushing prices down, it may be enough of a cost issue.
It's too bad. Sony was out in front but didn't push the market. They didn't respond to the Kindle well, and they still have their readers priced way too high.
It does have something to do with the app store being open. I believe that if you tried to submit an application that sucked down too much CPU (such as using 100% at idle) that it would be rejected from Apple's app store. More subtle waste, probably not, but obvious junk is probably caught by their automated testing.
By doing less QA on apps going into the store, Android can have problems like this more easily.
But your right, this is no different from the problems you see everywhere else. I've seen Flash video players do >720p using 10% CPU on my machine, and I've seen them use >80% to play 240p. I've seen elaborate animations work well, and I've seen simple little banners slow everything to a crawl. It's up to developers.
As an end user, I don't want to/shouldn't have to worry about this. And the true-multitasking in Android means I can play a game and when I quit it can launch some background task that kills my battery. This kind of thing can make it hard for an end user (especially one who isn't used to this kind of stuff) to figure out what's causing the problem. Their watch-and-report idea is actually a very good one and a nice way to add value.
I have an iPhone and I can tell you it doesn't bother me one bit. I know from experience on my laptop just how big a cpu/power drain Flash usually is (this is usually the developer's fault, not flash it's self, but the effect is the same). It's only been once or twice in the last 2+ years I wanted to do something that required flash, and that was usually playing a video. My family has 3 iPhones and an iPad, and they've never asked me about it.
I can generally divide the Flash content I run across into four categories:
I know a couple of people with Android phones. Some are diehard Apple haters, and some of them really love their phones. But I don't remember any of them ever mentioning having or using flash. I have been using Flashblock on my computers for a few years and there are only a few times I ever have to load a flash movie.
Would it be nicer to have the option? Maybe. Would the cost to get flash running well on the iPhone have been revenue positive for Apple? I seriously doubt it. At this point, the world has been in "we have to work on the iPhone or we're doomed" mode for at least 2 years. I don't think anyone things the usage of flash is going to go up.
I will note though, as stupid as flash seems on my phone, it does make more sense on a tablet where the larger screen would make interacting with flash sites easier. I still don't think it would be a real problem though.
Bingo. Apple is right on this one, you shouldn't need anything like this. The fact that you do says that something is broken.
That was one of their arguments for why multi-tasking took so long on the iPhone, and why it's not true multi-tasking like on a desktop (or Android). They wanted to avoid this exact problem. Of the people I know with Android phones, this is one of the things they complain about. They ship with crapware that can be very difficult to uninstall or just exit so it doesn't keep sucking up your CPU/battery. Just about a page above this comment is one from someone who rooted the phone on day 3 to remove junk and get it to perform smoothly.
Windows Mobile had programs like top because the OS couldn't manage resources well. My Dell Axim x50v (which was WM 5.5, I think) came with a little program pre-installed by Dell to let you quit applications through a tap on a shortcut on the top menu bar. And do you know why? For convenience? No, because it was necessary. There was no other way to quit apps (except digging through settings to find the task manager and force-quitting them). If you didn't stay on top and manage them, programs would use all your CPU or memory, and things would slow down (or not open). It was terrible.
The fact that Apple can do basic tests to make sure your post-to-twitter app doesn't use 100% CPU all the time is a good thing in my book. I realize you can side load things, but I would like to see Google try to do the same. Certainly I think Amazon should. As a consumer using an appliance (which is the way I use my iPhone), I want to be able to buy apps without having to worry about that kind of thing. Ensuring "manners" from apps, that they generally function correctly... that's the kind of thing I want out of my app store. I hope some of the stores out there (Amazon, carriers, etc) decide to do that. It seems it would be in their interest (as the article attests).
The government, through the CPB, gives public television dollars a year, which makes them government owned. Also, they're public, not private, so they must be government owned/run.
Yeah, it's stupid. But it seems easier for people to categorize in a false government/for-profit dichotomy than to say something legitimate... especially when making partisan attacks.
For the record: republican, loves NPR and PBS, gives them money. They may not have liked the frontline report (haven't seen it, don't doubt it doesn't portray Wikileaks the way many would like), but PBS doesn't deserve this; especially not the password dump. Go after someone that might be doing real damage (like companies doing fracking to get natural gas, general taxpayer fraud in contracts, etc) if some good info comes out. I think PBS pretty clearly does more good than harm.
Molten salt has been used before. Spain opened the Andasol Solar Power Station in 2009. The Wikipedia article says it basically doubles the output of the plant, and the thermal reserve can keep it generating electricity for almost 8 hours in total darkness.
More interesting is that it takes twice as much water (per kwh) to run as a normal power plant, and that could end up being a problem in Nevada.
This was the killer app for me. The ability to watch server logs while doing things in a web browser. Being able to easily monitor something without having to switch windows with your active task or make things a few lines tall to fit them both on your screen.
In my current job, I only have one monitor, but it's widescreen so it serves that same purpose pretty well. I can have one window off to the side and the browser on top on the right. I can't see everything, but I can see the log well enough to know when I need to change window focus.
At my last job many of the people (down to administrative personnel) ended up getting second monitors. They mostly ended up as outlook monitors, and didn't seem to help their productivity much. I can only think of one person who made real use of it, but she spent lots of time comparing large spreadsheets and compiling data. For most of the non-programers, it was just a "I want two monitors to look cool and busy too" kind of thing.
I don't know how fast the Arduino's ADC is, but it's 10bit. The USB is just a 115k serial port, which I think is a chip restriction. You could use your own bit-twiddling, or use an Ethernet interface like the Ethershield, which may be fast enough.
It said in the article that the drugs acted together in a manner stronger than each drug individually, which is impressive. I'm with you that my expectations would have been along the lines of "I hope something measurable happens", so this would have been way above that.
Why in the world are you allowing unprivileged users to set the theme for something that runs as root?
It's not like you're on the internet browsing random sites, it's pulling a few things from disk you have to be a privileged user to set.
If the user has the privileges to change the theme, they had the privileges to corrupt/delete important files.
Just noticed I didn't answer your question. It looks like it was sent to all member's att.net addresses, which I have setup to forward to my normal address (where they send billing reminders) for just these kind of reasons. If I didn't have the forwarder, I would never check the address. I don't think I'd opened the file on my computer with the account password in it for at least 3 years before I had to go look it up to try to check my usage.
I'd assume there was something in my paper statement too (since I haven't turned off paper billing), but I don't actually read those. I mostly use them as a billing cycle reminder.
I received an email on April 7th called "Updates to your AT&T Internet Terms of Service". The email lists 14 sections that have changed, with little summaries. The two that I expect would cover this are:
I assume those two cover it, especially if I went and actually read the full policy. This is one of those cases where I was on the lookout for something like this. The email wasn't the clear thing it should have been ("Your internet is now capped at 150GB per month, here's why you care"), but it was an email denoting that the terms changed.
Also, extra credit to AT&T for adding this provision. This is the kind of thing that I love companies to do.
I received an email, however they told me to check my usage on their site.
I went to their site and was told they didn't know my usage, so I didn't need to worry about it (it actually said that). I found that a bit disquieting.
I'm not heavy user. The most I do is go on occasional Netflix binges watching a bunch of TV episodes in a row. It's very unlikely I'd actually hit the cap. But if it's going to be enforced against me, I want to be able to see what I've used.