Apparently that's a feature for Intel & Microsoft, etc and not a bug.
Imagine the horror if everyone kept their current PC and OS twice as long.. maybe even as much as 1/5th the lifespan of a good toaster.. Quarterly revenue growth would be devastated and shareholders and the market would revolt. Can't have that now, can we?
Apple wouldn't leave a lot 'money on table' with more expensive NAND so lets say they did 3 different sets of NAND flash: 512, 1TB and 2TB and fused off access to make 128 and 256GB configurations.
That's still 3 x 3 x 2 or 18 different main board variations, which is more than the 2014 Mini, which had 9 motherboard versions (the most for a Mini to that point in time). So not that likely.
I'm guessing Apples bigger plans regarding the T2 Chip and security trumped the streamlining of manufacturing issues and costs enough to make them choose this path.
Now I wonder which of the 28 variations will be the rarest.
Based on the teardown, and fiddling with Apple's online purchase configuration, it looks like they must have 28 different versions of the 201 Mac Mini mainboard.
Options for components soldered onto the mainboard:
3 different CPUs (i3, i5 and i7)
5, 4 and 5 SSD options (128, 256, 512, 1TB and 2TB) depending on the CPU. i5 can't be equipped with 128GB, but i7 can as CPU upgrade from i3
2 different Ethernet NICs ( Gigabit and 10GB )
So ( 5 + 4 + 5 ) * 2 = 28 different sets of components soldered to the mainboard.
Even for Apple, that's a lot of variations. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with docketed storage, which would reduced the Mac Mini to 6 different mainboard configurations.
In the very 90s I worked for a few different tech or engineering / services companies and at more than one I learned that the early days of the company were full of similar stories.
I think it had more to do with the nature of an early tech startup combined people with a white collar office setting and sometimes long hours that allowed for social mixing, goofing off, encounters the left people saying 'check the sofa for stains', etc. Add in some corporate success in lines of business that weren't 'mature' to the point of being cut and dry and it was easy to blur the lines, especially with younger people who were not married / didn't have families (though that didn't stop some).
I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.
When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.
I see many other posts making the same point, and I'll add my specific story from the 1980s.
In 1987, I was doing some work for a local chain of auto-body shops that had some software to do job pricing. In the process of understanding how the business worked, I got to know some of the guys who did sheet metal, welding, body repair, mechanical, etc. These were your typical blue-collar young males for the most part.
In the corner of the main shop area there was a dedicated terminal (VT100ish) and modem for connecting to the state DMV mainframe, where you could do basic queries. There were a couple legit uses for it, which is why the shop had it, but the only time I saw it used was by a couple of the guys who would enter the license plate number of cars they saw driven by pretty women, to pull up the registration info to find out the names and addresses of the car's owner. No checks or balances or access control; the logon info was taped on the side of the terminal. Any access logs would have been somewhere in Austin.
Totally creepy stuff then, still creepy 30 years later.
And Initially, programs storage was achieved via saving and loading to/from cassette tap. The use of floppy disks was only enabled later via the Expansion Interface, which needed the Level 2 ROMs (which included a version of Microsoft Basic, not the Tiny BASIC that the Level 1 models had).
We're a tiny shop and one of our products is a compression product. Lots of data is processed, and it's worth it to our clients to have beefy hardware, as they run jobs that take hours to complete.
Out top test machine is an Ivy Bridge -era 2 socket workstation that we had Puget Systems custom build for us -. 2x Xeon E7-4650v2 CPUs - 20 cores / 40 threads. Spent over $7K on the CPUs alone.
We're needing a couple more high thread count boxes for our newest product. We're waiting a couple months to see what ThreadRipper systems look like, but almost certainly we're getting one. or two...
I remember in the late 1980s the guys at the auto body shop using the DPS terminal to access the state license plate database and get the name and address info on cute girls they saw in their cars.
The base urges to and desire to gain an advantage if they think there are no consequences have always been there.
I don't have the full story - there's aspects she can't share with me, but I gathered that the politics of switching that stuff to Oracle are more complicated than just the SOX issue... but SOX compliance was the nail in the coffin so to speak. And it was a departmental decision, not just her. I do know their projects involves the handling of employee data for tens of thousands of people in many countries, as well as customer data and their compliance department is rather large and scary.
> Not controlling your own security will make things like, oh, HIPAA and PCI compliance problematical.
Add Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance to the list as well.
My wife just dealt with this at her Fortune 500 company. Microsoft will not disclose completely what the telemetry in SQL Server 2016 is phoning home. They have no choice with respect to compliance , and have made the decision to migrate their older reporting from SQL server (older versions) to Oracle.
She wishes she had a recording of their MS sales rep telling her team that it doesn't matter.
> But... but... you forgot to mention they're using previous-generation processors in their brand-new laptops! That takes courage!
Not really. The Kaby Lake equivalents of the Skylake CPUs they are using have not been released yet, so they are the current generation CPUs in those configurations.
Also, it wasn't until the early 60s that the earliest photocopiers appeared, courtesy of Haloid Xerox corporation, and a good decade after that before most people could usually get access to them for personal use.
That brought about a change in thinking. Prior, unless a print shop was going to get involved, you only really thought about making copies at the time of creation - via carbon paper, or mimeographs. People weren't used to the idea of creating copies of something after the fact.
The writing habits of authors and people like Roddenberry were already well developed. Today we think nothing of 'backing things up', but at the time it must have been a strange idea to them.
Ahhh. David H Ahl's 101 BASIC games - those were written on a mainframe I believe, and required a little bit (not much usually) of work just to translate to the BASIC dialects found on the common machines of the time (Commodore PET, Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari). The Atari BASIC was the hardest of the bunch because it's string handling differed the most (not being based on the Dartmouth/Microsoft BASIC interpreters of the time)
For real fun, I remember at about age 14, taking a commercial game- Starbase Hyperion - that was written in Atari BASIC, but had a few 'anti-hack' measures, and undoing them to make it readable when listed (like coming up with meaningful names for all the variables - they were in a table that had been replaced with control characters).
As I recall, it was common for the CPU in machines of that era to interact heavily with the Floppy Controller during the I/O process: listening for the sync hole (a real hole in the floppy), driving the stepper motor, transferring bytes, intra-sector timings, stop/start bits, etc. All of which could be further impacted by the system clocks and even the memory wait states used in that particular machine.
There were many early "homebuilt" CP/M machine from sources like HeathKit, Northstar, etc, so there could have been quite a few variants in terms of the actual magnetic data on the disk.
For some real fun, look up how the CompuColor II (circa 1979) controlled it's floppy disks -- it used a serial IO chip in developer/debug mode to save on having a dedicated floppy controller chip.
As someone who has made games for over 20 years, including mobile, and was responsible for a game in Steam's top 100 played over 10 years after it's initial release... let me translate this press release for you...
"We want a revenue stream sustained for 10 years without us having to constantly develop new games and enter into the lottery that is mobile games today....... We also want it to never rain during the daytime, or when we are out and about."
Having worked on some hugely popular titles let me just say that I've learned that despite all you do, you don't control your audience. You're in the entertainment business, no matter how good an entertainment product you have, and no matter how much marketing you are doing, you are not making something that is truly necessary in your customer's lives.
So if your players get bored, don't have as much time to spare, popular fads change, new fads sweep the popular conscience, technologies or platforms change, they don't have the money to spare, they want something new and more novel, or whatever... then life moves on and so do your players.
The idea suggested by the headline - that a game's life cycle will be longer just because a developer deems it should be, is ludicrous.
Digging into the press release, though, that's not what they are saying. They are saying they will design their games, technically and gameplay, with a long lifespan in mind. That means growing and evolving content - new levels, new content, new stories, etc. Ongoing active development, much like a long running TV show - never completely wrapping things up and always leaving the door open for what comes next.
Doing that means keeping a development team active for the duration.. which in reality is going to be for as long the game sustains a certain revenue level. If not, the game goes into "sunset" mode. Lots of mobile games are already doing this entire strategy.
Heck, I worked on an iOS game doing just that 3 years ago. It requires that your game develop a large enough *paying* player base early on, and that you sustain their interest enough to keep the IAPs coming, and do it on a regular and consistent enough basis. The whole whale vs non-payer thing comes into play, as well as newer, shinier competition. That means they will pull out all the (Skinner boxes, social groups/teams, etc) stops to keep players hooked and interested.
Great if you can do it, but there is no magic formula or guarantee that you will succeed, or for as long as you want to.
It's officially not released yet, and the seller linked to is in Japan and gouging anyone who can't wait another couple weeks. I'm not sure how or what stock they got a hold of.
According to Intel, list price is $377 boxed or $366 Tray. Not $540.
because no one would misuse this tech to act creepy.
True story:
Back around 1989 I was maintaining a minicomputer system for a small chain of Auto Body Shops near Ft. Worth Texas. I got to know a lot about how the business works and made friends with some of the VERY blue collar guys who sanded, welded, painted and whatnot.
At that time the body shop had dedicated terminal that could dial up the Texas DMV database and retrieve the registration info for a given license plate. On at least two separate occasions I observed one of the shop guys using the terminal to get the name and address of a car they observed that was driven by an attractive woman. Nothing creepy or potentially dangerous there? Yeah.
Maybe we should study CCTV operators in England to make sure that attractive women, or any other category of people, aren't being watched more closely than everyone else.
When I was a teen, one of the main functions of driving (and borrowing my parent's car) was to go be with my friends, hanging out or whatever. Otherwise I was stuck at home by myself.
My own kids are constantly texting, emailing, playing online with, or using other means to interact with their friends without physical proximity. They can do it from anywhere they have wireless connectivity, even when traveling out of town.
Again, back when I was a teen, we had a single land line telephone. If it wasn't in use, It was possible to call and just talk to one of my friends at a time, provided they were home, their line wasn't busy, and they were willing to be tethered by a cord to the phone's location in the house.
First: What is the purpose of keeping the information? If it's just to have a record for your own sake of what and when and how much, do you even need to scan the statement or receipt or keep the original? or can having all the info imported into a money manager be enough?
I've been using Quicken for over a decade (still using Quicken 2000 actually as later versions are bloaty) to keep all my financial history in detail. For answering questions like "When did I buy that Belkin KVM switch so I can see if the warranty period has expired" searching the register is good enough as I add enough info the memos. In this example (real one from just a week ago), finding the information easily was enough, and it's to my advantage to have all the individual statements and detail items combined into larger account histories rather than parse an archive tree full of pdf/ocr files (FWIW: even this old version of quicken lets me attach scans of receipts to entries)
Second Question: In what cases is the Original Paper required as opposed to a scan? If you need to show an original statement, receipt or other document to prove some thing or get something approved, do you know when an electronic copy or reproduction is as acceptable as the original? I don't think this is an area with consistent clear cut answers yet because of its newness.
Let's take an admittedly unlikely example. You have a house but have moved to take a job out of state, and you're trying to sell the house. Some scumbag squatter moves in and tries submitting false documents to claim ownership. All the documents relating to purchase and any mortgages have been scanned and shredded. Will the courts, police, banks, city and county offices etc. give you any trouble because they are not signed originals? What if the scumbag claims you fabricated the documents (like he did) and his are the originals? What if some entities accept a scan and others don't?
I've implemented a hybrid system where different documents get scanned / destroyed at different times. I have a single card-file cabinet (Filing cabinet with half-height drawers). Paper copies of everything from the current year and previous year are kept in a drawer. At the end of each year, I take all the documents from year-1, shred most of them (assuming any need for them has past), and put the ones I deem most critical in a small box to archive.
...they'd rather see Home users use a different licensing model... something with more long term revenue for the company. One way to help such a new model would be to make the current purchase model less attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently that's a feature for Intel & Microsoft, etc and not a bug.
Imagine the horror if everyone kept their current PC and OS twice as long .. maybe even as much as 1/5th the lifespan of a good toaster .. Quarterly revenue growth would be devastated and shareholders and the market would revolt. Can't have that now, can we?
Apple wouldn't leave a lot 'money on table' with more expensive NAND so lets say they did 3 different sets of NAND flash: 512, 1TB and 2TB and fused off access to make 128 and 256GB configurations.
That's still 3 x 3 x 2 or 18 different main board variations, which is more than the 2014 Mini, which had 9 motherboard versions (the most for a Mini to that point in time). So not that likely.
I'm guessing Apples bigger plans regarding the T2 Chip and security trumped the streamlining of manufacturing issues and costs enough to make them choose this path.
Now I wonder which of the 28 variations will be the rarest.
Based on the teardown, and fiddling with Apple's online purchase configuration, it looks like they must have 28 different versions of the 201 Mac Mini mainboard.
Options for components soldered onto the mainboard:
3 different CPUs (i3, i5 and i7)
5, 4 and 5 SSD options (128, 256, 512, 1TB and 2TB) depending on the CPU. i5 can't be equipped with 128GB, but i7 can as CPU upgrade from i3
2 different Ethernet NICs ( Gigabit and 10GB )
So ( 5 + 4 + 5 ) * 2 = 28 different sets of components soldered to the mainboard.
Even for Apple, that's a lot of variations. I'm somewhat surprised they didn't go with docketed storage, which would reduced the Mac Mini to 6 different mainboard configurations.
In the very 90s I worked for a few different tech or engineering / services companies and at more than one I learned that the early days of the company were full of similar stories.
I think it had more to do with the nature of an early tech startup combined people with a white collar office setting and sometimes long hours that allowed for social mixing, goofing off, encounters the left people saying 'check the sofa for stains', etc. Add in some corporate success in lines of business that weren't 'mature' to the point of being cut and dry and it was easy to blur the lines, especially with younger people who were not married / didn't have families (though that didn't stop some).
I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.
When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.
I haven't run across this yet. What sites are doing it?
I see many other posts making the same point, and I'll add my specific story from the 1980s.
In 1987, I was doing some work for a local chain of auto-body shops that had some software to do job pricing. In the process of understanding how the business worked, I got to know some of the guys who did sheet metal, welding, body repair, mechanical, etc. These were your typical blue-collar young males for the most part.
In the corner of the main shop area there was a dedicated terminal (VT100ish) and modem for connecting to the state DMV mainframe, where you could do basic queries. There were a couple legit uses for it, which is why the shop had it, but the only time I saw it used was by a couple of the guys who would enter the license plate number of cars they saw driven by pretty women, to pull up the registration info to find out the names and addresses of the car's owner. No checks or balances or access control; the logon info was taped on the side of the terminal. Any access logs would have been somewhere in Austin.
Totally creepy stuff then, still creepy 30 years later.
Nope, he's describing the LDIR instruction, which was useful for block copying or filling memory.
See: http://z80-heaven.wikidot.com/... for more details
And Initially, programs storage was achieved via saving and loading to/from cassette tap. The use of floppy disks was only enabled later via the Expansion Interface, which needed the Level 2 ROMs (which included a version of Microsoft Basic, not the Tiny BASIC that the Level 1 models had).
I think you're the one doing the babbling.
We're a tiny shop and one of our products is a compression product. Lots of data is processed, and it's worth it to our clients to have beefy hardware, as they run jobs that take hours to complete.
Out top test machine is an Ivy Bridge -era 2 socket workstation that we had Puget Systems custom build for us -. 2x Xeon E7-4650v2 CPUs - 20 cores / 40 threads. Spent over $7K on the CPUs alone.
We're needing a couple more high thread count boxes for our newest product. We're waiting a couple months to see what ThreadRipper systems look like, but almost certainly we're getting one. or two...
Felgercarb!
More seriously though, pancreatic cancer is one of the worst ways to go.
I always respected his efforts to revive the BattleStar Galactica IP when there wasn't much interest in doing so. Reminds me of what I did with AoE 2.
...someone attempts to exert their copyright of "their pictures" of these "public domain artworks"?
This is old news, just newer tech.
I remember in the late 1980s the guys at the auto body shop using the DPS terminal to access the state license plate database and get the name and address info on cute girls they saw in their cars.
The base urges to and desire to gain an advantage if they think there are no consequences have always been there.
I don't have the full story - there's aspects she can't share with me, but I gathered that the politics of switching that stuff to Oracle are more complicated than just the SOX issue... but SOX compliance was the nail in the coffin so to speak. And it was a departmental decision, not just her. I do know their projects involves the handling of employee data for tens of thousands of people in many countries, as well as customer data and their compliance department is rather large and scary.
> Not controlling your own security will make things like, oh, HIPAA and PCI compliance problematical.
Add Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance to the list as well.
My wife just dealt with this at her Fortune 500 company. Microsoft will not disclose completely what the telemetry in SQL Server 2016 is phoning home. They have no choice with respect to compliance , and have made the decision to migrate their older reporting from SQL server (older versions) to Oracle.
She wishes she had a recording of their MS sales rep telling her team that it doesn't matter.
> But... but... you forgot to mention they're using previous-generation processors in their brand-new laptops! That takes courage!
Not really. The Kaby Lake equivalents of the Skylake CPUs they are using have not been released yet, so they are the current generation CPUs in those configurations.
Also, it wasn't until the early 60s that the earliest photocopiers appeared, courtesy of Haloid Xerox corporation, and a good decade after that before most people could usually get access to them for personal use.
That brought about a change in thinking. Prior, unless a print shop was going to get involved, you only really thought about making copies at the time of creation - via carbon paper, or mimeographs. People weren't used to the idea of creating copies of something after the fact.
The writing habits of authors and people like Roddenberry were already well developed. Today we think nothing of 'backing things up', but at the time it must have been a strange idea to them.
Ahhh. David H Ahl's 101 BASIC games - those were written on a mainframe I believe, and required a little bit (not much usually) of work just to translate to the BASIC dialects found on the common machines of the time (Commodore PET, Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari). The Atari BASIC was the hardest of the bunch because it's string handling differed the most (not being based on the Dartmouth/Microsoft BASIC interpreters of the time)
For real fun, I remember at about age 14, taking a commercial game- Starbase Hyperion - that was written in Atari BASIC, but had a few 'anti-hack' measures, and undoing them to make it readable when listed (like coming up with meaningful names for all the variables - they were in a table that had been replaced with control characters).
As I recall, it was common for the CPU in machines of that era to interact heavily with the Floppy Controller during the I/O process: listening for the sync hole (a real hole in the floppy), driving the stepper motor, transferring bytes, intra-sector timings, stop/start bits, etc. All of which could be further impacted by the system clocks and even the memory wait states used in that particular machine.
There were many early "homebuilt" CP/M machine from sources like HeathKit, Northstar, etc, so there could have been quite a few variants in terms of the actual magnetic data on the disk.
For some real fun, look up how the CompuColor II (circa 1979) controlled it's floppy disks -- it used a serial IO chip in developer/debug mode to save on having a dedicated floppy controller chip.
As someone who has made games for over 20 years, including mobile, and was responsible for a game in Steam's top 100 played over 10 years after it's initial release... let me translate this press release for you...
"We want a revenue stream sustained for 10 years without us having to constantly develop new games and enter into the lottery that is mobile games today.... ... We also want it to never rain during the daytime, or when we are out and about."
Having worked on some hugely popular titles let me just say that I've learned that despite all you do, you don't control your audience. You're in the entertainment business, no matter how good an entertainment product you have, and no matter how much marketing you are doing, you are not making something that is truly necessary in your customer's lives.
So if your players get bored, don't have as much time to spare, popular fads change, new fads sweep the popular conscience, technologies or platforms change, they don't have the money to spare, they want something new and more novel, or whatever... then life moves on and so do your players.
The idea suggested by the headline - that a game's life cycle will be longer just because a developer deems it should be, is ludicrous.
Digging into the press release, though, that's not what they are saying. They are saying they will design their games, technically and gameplay, with a long lifespan in mind. That means growing and evolving content - new levels, new content, new stories, etc. Ongoing active development, much like a long running TV show - never completely wrapping things up and always leaving the door open for what comes next.
Doing that means keeping a development team active for the duration.. which in reality is going to be for as long the game sustains a certain revenue level. If not, the game goes into "sunset" mode. Lots of mobile games are already doing this entire strategy.
Heck, I worked on an iOS game doing just that 3 years ago. It requires that your game develop a large enough *paying* player base early on, and that you sustain their interest enough to keep the IAPs coming, and do it on a regular and consistent enough basis. The whole whale vs non-payer thing comes into play, as well as newer, shinier competition. That means they will pull out all the (Skinner boxes, social groups/teams, etc) stops to keep players hooked and interested.
Great if you can do it, but there is no magic formula or guarantee that you will succeed, or for as long as you want to.
It's officially not released yet, and the seller linked to is in Japan and gouging anyone who can't wait another couple weeks. I'm not sure how or what stock they got a hold of.
According to Intel, list price is $377 boxed or $366 Tray. Not $540.
because no one would misuse this tech to act creepy.
True story:
Back around 1989 I was maintaining a minicomputer system for a small chain of Auto Body Shops near Ft. Worth Texas. I got to know a lot about how the business works and made friends with some of the VERY blue collar guys who sanded, welded, painted and whatnot.
At that time the body shop had dedicated terminal that could dial up the Texas DMV database and retrieve the registration info for a given license plate. On at least two separate occasions I observed one of the shop guys using the terminal to get the name and address of a car they observed that was driven by an attractive woman. Nothing creepy or potentially dangerous there? Yeah.
Maybe we should study CCTV operators in England to make sure that attractive women, or any other category of people, aren't being watched more closely than everyone else.
When I was a teen, one of the main functions of driving (and borrowing my parent's car) was to go be with my friends, hanging out or whatever. Otherwise I was stuck at home by myself.
My own kids are constantly texting, emailing, playing online with, or using other means to interact with their friends without physical proximity. They can do it from anywhere they have wireless connectivity, even when traveling out of town.
Again, back when I was a teen, we had a single land line telephone. If it wasn't in use, It was possible to call and just talk to one of my friends at a time, provided they were home, their line wasn't busy, and they were willing to be tethered by a cord to the phone's location in the house.
She sums it up pretty well... http://judgybitch.com/2013/07/29/policing-twitter-is-dumb/
Just a couple questions come to mind:
First: What is the purpose of keeping the information? If it's just to have a record for your own sake of what and when and how much, do you even need to scan the statement or receipt or keep the original? or can having all the info imported into a money manager be enough?
I've been using Quicken for over a decade (still using Quicken 2000 actually as later versions are bloaty) to keep all my financial history in detail. For answering questions like "When did I buy that Belkin KVM switch so I can see if the warranty period has expired" searching the register is good enough as I add enough info the memos. In this example (real one from just a week ago), finding the information easily was enough, and it's to my advantage to have all the individual statements and detail items combined into larger account histories rather than parse an archive tree full of pdf/ocr files (FWIW: even this old version of quicken lets me attach scans of receipts to entries)
Second Question: In what cases is the Original Paper required as opposed to a scan? If you need to show an original statement, receipt or other document to prove some thing or get something approved, do you know when an electronic copy or reproduction is as acceptable as the original? I don't think this is an area with consistent clear cut answers yet because of its newness.
Let's take an admittedly unlikely example. You have a house but have moved to take a job out of state, and you're trying to sell the house. Some scumbag squatter moves in and tries submitting false documents to claim ownership. All the documents relating to purchase and any mortgages have been scanned and shredded. Will the courts, police, banks, city and county offices etc. give you any trouble because they are not signed originals? What if the scumbag claims you fabricated the documents (like he did) and his are the originals? What if some entities accept a scan and others don't?
I've implemented a hybrid system where different documents get scanned / destroyed at different times. I have a single card-file cabinet (Filing cabinet with half-height drawers). Paper copies of everything from the current year and previous year are kept in a drawer. At the end of each year, I take all the documents from year-1, shred most of them (assuming any need for them has past), and put the ones I deem most critical in a small box to archive.
...they'd rather see Home users use a different licensing model... something with more long term revenue for the company. One way to help such a new model would be to make the current purchase model less attractive.
nahh. That couldn't be.