Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over its competitors.
Wouldn't that be considered anti-competitive behaviour, punishable with a massive lawsuit and eight-digit fines ? I mean, I don't want to start any rumours, but I get the funny feeling Google's legal team could kick Apple in the teeth.
Yup that's what led me away from CentOS too, after several years of fighting with packages that wouldn't compile due to unmet dependencies. I managed to survive for a while by packaging my own sets of PHP/MySQL and friends, but that only covered a tiny part of the spectrum. Trailing a few versions behind everything got really annoying, maybe not a big deal for big business, but my work is always on the more experimental side of things. I'm fine with building stuff from source, but the glibc issue crippled my ability to do so.
I got so fed up with CentOS that I now run Gentoo on my server, with just a handful of bleeding-edge packages where necessary. It does require a bit of care and attention to patch notes, but dammit if I can't build something on Gentoo, I can safely say the source is broken.
I don't know the politics, but as someone who has to support two-too-many Xen hosts, I really can't fault Red Hat for ditching that bastard system. It had great potential until Citrix plastered their cursed name all over it, along with a nerfed GUI that doesn't even have a Linux port. Fast-forward to 2010 and the only people who don't retch at the sound of Xen, are the people who have already thrown gobs of money at Citrix to throw broken solutions at their non-problems.
What do you mean by "support" ? Maybe I'm weird, but aside from bug fixes, I've never needed any support from a game developer. If it's a 10 year old game, chances are there won't be any new bug fixes coming down the pipe. Install it, play it, delete it. At no point does the developer/publisher need to be involved.
I guess I was blessed with a little too much common sense, but in my mind if you're getting something for zero dollars, you're entitled to zero complaints. If it works for you, great, if it doesn't, find someone who cares. That's what forums are for. You don't see me calling up Theo de Raadt everytime his cursed OpenBSD crashes on one of my mail servers, and I'm actually running this thing for profit. What makes people think a free game is worth even a single moment of the developer's time ?
Ludicrous overkill ? The DirectX 7 requirement is simply a way to screen out those few but fervent imbeciles that run XP on a K6-233 with a 512mb Cirrus Logic VGA, you know, the types who tolerate waiting 10 minutes to boot to a login screen. On the Mac it's a lot simpler, you can specify the lowest Mac and OS you'll support and that's the end of it. Combined with Mac OS' limited selection of device drivers, this ensures a reasonably narrow window of hardware to worry about.
On the PC, you can throw a 15-year old PCI graphics card into a flippin' i7 rig. I know, I've seen it just a few months ago! This guy had a brand new board, quad-core CPU and 12gb Ram, plugged his ancient Voodoo Rage and Sound Blaster AWE64 into it all, along with a funky 6.4gb hard drive. He then had the audacity to complain that I had sold him a crappy system because it was "not much faster than his old AMD X2". I pretty much just yelled and cussed at him until he agreed to spend $40 on a basic PCIe graphics card and make use of the onboard sound - noisy but he was probably pumping it into puny little speakers anyway.
At least with a Mac, you can rely on people throwing out the whole box when they get a new one.
Sweet jesus! I was just going through my piles of old software, ripping ISOs to the NAS and tossing the discs and boxes in the trash, and when I came across MW2 and GBL, the very first thought was "Man, I wanna play these again for the eleventeenth time", shortly followed by "FML, I tossed out that old DOS machine".
And then the ministry of TLA taxation came and took my baby away.
The reality is that Google is not a monolithic entity that does everything poorly. I don't think the search team has much to do with the Android team. They probably don't have many "jacks of all trades", but instead have many small, focused teams that are really good at what they do.
Just because they share the same brand name doesn't mean they all work out of one homogenous brain-pool.
I think most people's issue with Ubuntu is it's overhyped. It is not anywhere near idiot-proof enough nor stable enough to be the everyman's Linux, yet it is preached as the holy gospel of Linux usability. Every one of Ubuntu's failures is amplified tenfold, due to its high visibility, making it all the more embarrassing and demoralizing. It is also difficult to support due to its audience of often less technically inclined users.
(l)User: My firefox is broken! Dev: Um no, it's fine, you just can't install Comet Cursors on Ubuntu. (l)User: Ubuntu sucks! You should drop everything and give me my comet cursors NAO! Also I installed this awesome web site that defrags the kernel to make it go faster YOU SHOULD USE IT ALOT! Dev: No. Eat a bag of dicks until you die.
And so having all these (l)Users posting their every juvenile whim on the support forum, leads to a bit of resentment. It's a necessary pain (for the devs), but it is a lot more pain than they're used to. To us hardcore guys, it also means resources are shifted away from power features in favor of mindless creature comforts and eye-candy.
Yes, as a hardcore user, I am a bit jealous. Thank god for Gentoo!
Blu-Ray didn't "win", at least not in the honourable sense of "besting one's opponent in a challenge of skill". Sony just threw money at key people to make sure HD-DVD never got a fair shot.
Sort of. It's a kinda goofy dialect of C with objects tacked on. They borrow some Smalltalk idioms and pepper the mixture with a generous helping of unnecessary brackets and parentheses.
Personally, I think C++ is just as messy so I call it a draw.
This idiotic religious violence has gone on for far too long. Here's what I propose:
Put a "Muhammad" character on every TV show, on every channel
That's right! Make it so you can't watch more than 2 minutes without someone prancing around calling himself Muhammad. Better yet: have it be a lesbian! Make it so ridiculous that only the truly psychotic will be crazy enough to make (and/or execute) threats. Bring them out into the open so we can round them up and rid ourselves of this world-destroying hysteria. Tolerance is a two-way street, and if they can't tolerate our harmless and victimless comedy, well I see no reason why we should tolerate their murderous xenophobia.
I'm sorry for being a dick, but from which ass did you pull that 10% or 20% number ? If you're rendering the same scene from two angles, the GPU still has to do twice the work. Shaders, occlusion, stenciling, all that stuff has to be re-run because the frame has changed. Rending left/right frames is no different than rendering one frame, moving right three inches then rendering the next frame. The reason they have to drop to 720p isn't so much because of CPU/GPU power but fill rate. There is only so much memory bandwidth available, doubling the number of frames means you need to halve the number of pixels in order to maintain the same fill rate. This is partly why GPU manufacturers have been putting a lot of emphasis on AA/AF and image quality, rather than high resolutions. It is easier to throw more processing at one pixel, than it is to throw more pixels through the pipe. The Cell processor is no exception to this rule. They could build a 64-core Cell, it would still be bottlenecked at the memory controller.
I think the general problem with DSL, and please correct me if I'm wrong as I've only witnessed the service from my own local telco, but it sucks on many levels:
- Fast advertised speeds, actual capacity is usually 75% or less... i.e. if they promised you 8mbps, you'll see 5-6 at the most - Epic latency! It seems DSL technology itself is to blame for high pings, around here cable gets you 30-50ms throughout Canada and the US, while DSL is more in the 70 to 100ms for the same destinations. This is brutal for online gaming. - frequent drop-outs and retransmits under load. That's right, the faster you go, the more line errors you get so your speeds drop right back down, or you get a 5-second pause while the modem retrains. This is MURDER for online gaming - you get kicked the fuck out of the lobby.
Maybe it's localized to my tech-illiterate Ottawa, but DSL has always felt like glorified dial-up. All the problems of the POTS (invariably wired by the landlord and their idiot half-retarded stepson), with more speed shoved down those puny wires. When you call the telco to complain, they always blame the internal wiring, or how you're "at the maximum distance for DSL", which makes it "not their problem". In contrast, the cable company takes responsibility for end-to-end service delivery. If you have a crappy dollar-store coax extension, they will yank it out and chastise you, but they do replace it with a good cable and splitters, at no extra cost.
Those of us who are "raping" the "unlimited" "service" are doing so because, most of the time, we're already on the highest available service tier and it's still not enough. In case you hadn't noticed, this is Slashdot, a community that at least at one point in time was populated by the tech elite. A lot of us work remotely, a lot of us run web businesses, a lot of us make extensive use of online services and entertainment. The traffic between me and my servers totals roughly 600gb per month, which includes differential backups and content updates. And no, it's not porn (it would be 10 times more). It's music. Legit indie music
I have two lines on a load balancer, of the fastest cable plan available, and I pay "overlimit" surcharges every month. Why ? Because the idiotic telcos refuse to sell business-class services to residential addresses. I would love to tap into some dark fiber, which just happens to be 50 feet away from me, but they just won't sell it to me unless I bribe the mayor to re-zone my lot.
There is a lot of room for error without crashing. It is quite common for slightly overtaxed CPUs to boot and run "fine" but produce incorrect math results, hence why people run Prime95 to test them as it will catch those rounding errors and flat-out incorrect calculations.
I'm all for squeezing more value out of a product, but these days the price delta between dual/triple and quad cores is so small it seems rather foolish to even risk it. Sure, there's no permanent damage but for the $30 to $50 you're saving, it's peanuts compared to the value of any work lost in a crash or corrupted file.
If the demand is low, then there is no point in producing a large excess of inventory, particularly with something like SSDs where not only is the manufacturing cost relatively high, but the technology itself is still in heavy flux and thus products are quickly rendered obsolete by later revisions.
If OCZ were to stockpile a gazillion Vertex drives today, who's to say one of their competitors won't release a twice-faster SSD tomorrow that leaves all that Vertex stock to rot on the shelves ? We're talking about niche products marketed to high-end users. Generations are measured in months, not years.
Once SSD adoption really takes off, once everyone and their mother has a flash-based boot drive, then we'll see much more flexibility in manufacturing and pricing, but for now it's like complaining that Ferraris are too expensive. The only people complaining are the jealous types who want one but are too cheap to pony up the cash. Sure, the average SSD costs more than most people's entire PC, but these things aren't marketed to Joe Random and his $249 computer. Really, when you look at the kind of people who use SSDs, it is often the least expensive part of the entire system (excluding the ATX chassis). How about I lay it out for you:
There is no morality involved in patching software. The phone doesn't do what you want, you "fix" it, and the result is you get more enjoyment out of your phone. Were it not moddable, you would have gone with a different phone and Apple would not have made that $500 sale.
And to respond to your assertion that jailbreakers generate more "service requests" and RMAs, I would want to see hard numbers before believing such conjecture. The fact that we are merely replacing software, something Apple's own iTunes does as part of regular maintenance (firmware updates), I can't see how writing different software to the phone can render it inoperable. You can always flash it back to stock firmware, there is no permanent modification.
I did this myself, back when I first got my phone and played around with tethering hacks. One of them completely screwed up the 3G functionality and made my phone very unstable, so I just restored to the unmodified iPhone firmware and everything was back to normal. If an iPhone physically stops working due to a manufacturing defect, which is what the warranty covers, that's not something the software can influence in any way. If it was built wrong at the factory, it was doomed long before anything was ever written to the flash chip.
I agree with getting them the "help" they need, whatever that may be, but the problem there isn't enough attention paid to that "help". All efforts are focused on punishment, not rehabilitation. "Don't do it again, or we'll bore you with more nagging social workers" is not a valid deterrent.
Could it be that taking time out of their day, to see a "professional" and lie down for an hour or so, was the actual effector here, rather than any manipulation the healer or actor did ?
Hardly a conclusive sample, but I have this friend who is a major stress bucket, he is uptight about every littlest thing and I occasionally have to "disconnect" him for a month or so, to preserve my own sanity. He used to see a chiro every week or two for back pain, until one day Howard Stern endorsed a book about back pain that basically told him what I've been saying all along: "it's all in your dumb fat head". Since Stern is this guy's idol, he finally read the damn book, stopped seeing his chiro and his back pain is much less debilitating than it once was. Oh, and this guy is 30, not obese or anything, and is moderately active - more than the average/. reader and myself, at least.
His back pain was (and still is) directly related to his stress and anxiety levels, and while I am in no way a doctor or anything close, I would hazard a guess that many people's chronic pain is a direct result of stress. If you're high-strung all the time, your muscles tense up, blood pressure rises, and a whole bunch of other subconscious things happen as tied to the endocrine system. It is only logical to assume that these can lead to soreness and pain, especially if your stress management skills are poor (or nil). Anything that helps you relax is going to help with the pain. What the person does with their hands is irrelevant, it's the ritual, the psychosomatic effect that is at work here.
They become attractive once you see the difference they make in a desktop PC. I bought my first SSD around 6 months ago, now I swear by them. If you're a heavy multitasker, a fast SSD can make a huge difference by eliminating seek times. I'm actually tempted to replace my boss' boot drive with an SSD, just to see if he notices - and by "notice" I mean "stop bitching about his gaming-grade PC being slow".
It is a sizeable chunk of change right now, considering a 500gb HDD can be bought for under $50, but you can liken it to a graphics card. Some people are fine with the onboard graphics, others need more horsepower and are willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars on faster GPUs. SSDs are no different. There are things I do with my machine that would take hours on an HDD, due to the sheer number of files or DB transactions, that finish in mere minutes on an SSD.
Actually, after reading the summary and skimming through TFA, I'm inclined to say that whole review is bunk. I know for a fact that Kingston's SSDnow series are rebadged Intels, so they should perform identically. The main difference is Kingston's versions tend to be priced more aggressively.
For my money, it's either OCZ Vertex, Intel X25 (or Kingston), or nothing at all. Having tried many of the off-brand ones and been burned, I stick to what I know works. A lot of the cheaper SSDs act like someone duct-taped a SATA bridge to a USB flash drive: high latency, short lifespan, writes 4 times slower than reads... It's all about the controller chip's performance, which all but a handful suck ass.
Slashdot Mirror
s/enough/too much/
Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over its competitors.
Wouldn't that be considered anti-competitive behaviour, punishable with a massive lawsuit and eight-digit fines ? I mean, I don't want to start any rumours, but I get the funny feeling Google's legal team could kick Apple in the teeth.
Yup that's what led me away from CentOS too, after several years of fighting with packages that wouldn't compile due to unmet dependencies. I managed to survive for a while by packaging my own sets of PHP/MySQL and friends, but that only covered a tiny part of the spectrum. Trailing a few versions behind everything got really annoying, maybe not a big deal for big business, but my work is always on the more experimental side of things. I'm fine with building stuff from source, but the glibc issue crippled my ability to do so.
I got so fed up with CentOS that I now run Gentoo on my server, with just a handful of bleeding-edge packages where necessary. It does require a bit of care and attention to patch notes, but dammit if I can't build something on Gentoo, I can safely say the source is broken.
I don't know the politics, but as someone who has to support two-too-many Xen hosts, I really can't fault Red Hat for ditching that bastard system. It had great potential until Citrix plastered their cursed name all over it, along with a nerfed GUI that doesn't even have a Linux port. Fast-forward to 2010 and the only people who don't retch at the sound of Xen, are the people who have already thrown gobs of money at Citrix to throw broken solutions at their non-problems.
What do you mean by "support" ? Maybe I'm weird, but aside from bug fixes, I've never needed any support from a game developer. If it's a 10 year old game, chances are there won't be any new bug fixes coming down the pipe. Install it, play it, delete it. At no point does the developer/publisher need to be involved.
I guess I was blessed with a little too much common sense, but in my mind if you're getting something for zero dollars, you're entitled to zero complaints. If it works for you, great, if it doesn't, find someone who cares. That's what forums are for. You don't see me calling up Theo de Raadt everytime his cursed OpenBSD crashes on one of my mail servers, and I'm actually running this thing for profit. What makes people think a free game is worth even a single moment of the developer's time ?
Ludicrous overkill ? The DirectX 7 requirement is simply a way to screen out those few but fervent imbeciles that run XP on a K6-233 with a 512mb Cirrus Logic VGA, you know, the types who tolerate waiting 10 minutes to boot to a login screen. On the Mac it's a lot simpler, you can specify the lowest Mac and OS you'll support and that's the end of it. Combined with Mac OS' limited selection of device drivers, this ensures a reasonably narrow window of hardware to worry about.
On the PC, you can throw a 15-year old PCI graphics card into a flippin' i7 rig. I know, I've seen it just a few months ago! This guy had a brand new board, quad-core CPU and 12gb Ram, plugged his ancient Voodoo Rage and Sound Blaster AWE64 into it all, along with a funky 6.4gb hard drive. He then had the audacity to complain that I had sold him a crappy system because it was "not much faster than his old AMD X2". I pretty much just yelled and cussed at him until he agreed to spend $40 on a basic PCIe graphics card and make use of the onboard sound - noisy but he was probably pumping it into puny little speakers anyway.
At least with a Mac, you can rely on people throwing out the whole box when they get a new one.
Sweet jesus! I was just going through my piles of old software, ripping ISOs to the NAS and tossing the discs and boxes in the trash, and when I came across MW2 and GBL, the very first thought was "Man, I wanna play these again for the eleventeenth time", shortly followed by "FML, I tossed out that old DOS machine".
And then the ministry of TLA taxation came and took my baby away.
The reality is that Google is not a monolithic entity that does everything poorly. I don't think the search team has much to do with the Android team. They probably don't have many "jacks of all trades", but instead have many small, focused teams that are really good at what they do.
Just because they share the same brand name doesn't mean they all work out of one homogenous brain-pool.
I think most people's issue with Ubuntu is it's overhyped. It is not anywhere near idiot-proof enough nor stable enough to be the everyman's Linux, yet it is preached as the holy gospel of Linux usability. Every one of Ubuntu's failures is amplified tenfold, due to its high visibility, making it all the more embarrassing and demoralizing. It is also difficult to support due to its audience of often less technically inclined users.
(l)User: My firefox is broken!
Dev: Um no, it's fine, you just can't install Comet Cursors on Ubuntu.
(l)User: Ubuntu sucks! You should drop everything and give me my comet cursors NAO! Also I installed this awesome web site that defrags the kernel to make it go faster YOU SHOULD USE IT ALOT!
Dev: No. Eat a bag of dicks until you die.
And so having all these (l)Users posting their every juvenile whim on the support forum, leads to a bit of resentment. It's a necessary pain (for the devs), but it is a lot more pain than they're used to. To us hardcore guys, it also means resources are shifted away from power features in favor of mindless creature comforts and eye-candy.
Yes, as a hardcore user, I am a bit jealous. Thank god for Gentoo!
Blu-Ray didn't "win", at least not in the honourable sense of "besting one's opponent in a challenge of skill". Sony just threw money at key people to make sure HD-DVD never got a fair shot.
Yes well, surprise! The iPhone/iPod has a web browser. They don't need a stinkin' app to put tits on the small screen, they just need WiFi.
Sort of. It's a kinda goofy dialect of C with objects tacked on. They borrow some Smalltalk idioms and pepper the mixture with a generous helping of unnecessary brackets and parentheses.
Personally, I think C++ is just as messy so I call it a draw.
Great, so the cost of a Mac will be cut in half, from not using those horribly cost-prohibitive Xeon chipsets and processors ?
Or would it go up, because you need three AMD chips to match one Intel's performance ?
This idiotic religious violence has gone on for far too long. Here's what I propose:
Put a "Muhammad" character on every TV show, on every channel
That's right! Make it so you can't watch more than 2 minutes without someone prancing around calling himself Muhammad. Better yet: have it be a lesbian! Make it so ridiculous that only the truly psychotic will be crazy enough to make (and/or execute) threats. Bring them out into the open so we can round them up and rid ourselves of this world-destroying hysteria. Tolerance is a two-way street, and if they can't tolerate our harmless and victimless comedy, well I see no reason why we should tolerate their murderous xenophobia.
I'm sorry for being a dick, but from which ass did you pull that 10% or 20% number ? If you're rendering the same scene from two angles, the GPU still has to do twice the work. Shaders, occlusion, stenciling, all that stuff has to be re-run because the frame has changed. Rending left/right frames is no different than rendering one frame, moving right three inches then rendering the next frame. The reason they have to drop to 720p isn't so much because of CPU/GPU power but fill rate. There is only so much memory bandwidth available, doubling the number of frames means you need to halve the number of pixels in order to maintain the same fill rate. This is partly why GPU manufacturers have been putting a lot of emphasis on AA/AF and image quality, rather than high resolutions. It is easier to throw more processing at one pixel, than it is to throw more pixels through the pipe. The Cell processor is no exception to this rule. They could build a 64-core Cell, it would still be bottlenecked at the memory controller.
I think the general problem with DSL, and please correct me if I'm wrong as I've only witnessed the service from my own local telco, but it sucks on many levels:
- Fast advertised speeds, actual capacity is usually 75% or less... i.e. if they promised you 8mbps, you'll see 5-6 at the most
- Epic latency! It seems DSL technology itself is to blame for high pings, around here cable gets you 30-50ms throughout Canada and the US, while DSL is more in the 70 to 100ms for the same destinations. This is brutal for online gaming.
- frequent drop-outs and retransmits under load. That's right, the faster you go, the more line errors you get so your speeds drop right back down, or you get a 5-second pause while the modem retrains. This is MURDER for online gaming - you get kicked the fuck out of the lobby.
Maybe it's localized to my tech-illiterate Ottawa, but DSL has always felt like glorified dial-up. All the problems of the POTS (invariably wired by the landlord and their idiot half-retarded stepson), with more speed shoved down those puny wires. When you call the telco to complain, they always blame the internal wiring, or how you're "at the maximum distance for DSL", which makes it "not their problem". In contrast, the cable company takes responsibility for end-to-end service delivery. If you have a crappy dollar-store coax extension, they will yank it out and chastise you, but they do replace it with a good cable and splitters, at no extra cost.
Those of us who are "raping" the "unlimited" "service" are doing so because, most of the time, we're already on the highest available service tier and it's still not enough. In case you hadn't noticed, this is Slashdot, a community that at least at one point in time was populated by the tech elite. A lot of us work remotely, a lot of us run web businesses, a lot of us make extensive use of online services and entertainment. The traffic between me and my servers totals roughly 600gb per month, which includes differential backups and content updates. And no, it's not porn (it would be 10 times more). It's music. Legit indie music
I have two lines on a load balancer, of the fastest cable plan available, and I pay "overlimit" surcharges every month. Why ? Because the idiotic telcos refuse to sell business-class services to residential addresses. I would love to tap into some dark fiber, which just happens to be 50 feet away from me, but they just won't sell it to me unless I bribe the mayor to re-zone my lot.
Who's the fucking retard now ?
Who the hell is Eric Klinker, and what ever happened to Bram Cohen ? Not that I have much respect for the latter anyway, but I'm just curious.
There is a lot of room for error without crashing. It is quite common for slightly overtaxed CPUs to boot and run "fine" but produce incorrect math results, hence why people run Prime95 to test them as it will catch those rounding errors and flat-out incorrect calculations.
I'm all for squeezing more value out of a product, but these days the price delta between dual/triple and quad cores is so small it seems rather foolish to even risk it. Sure, there's no permanent damage but for the $30 to $50 you're saving, it's peanuts compared to the value of any work lost in a crash or corrupted file.
If the demand is low, then there is no point in producing a large excess of inventory, particularly with something like SSDs where not only is the manufacturing cost relatively high, but the technology itself is still in heavy flux and thus products are quickly rendered obsolete by later revisions.
If OCZ were to stockpile a gazillion Vertex drives today, who's to say one of their competitors won't release a twice-faster SSD tomorrow that leaves all that Vertex stock to rot on the shelves ? We're talking about niche products marketed to high-end users. Generations are measured in months, not years.
Once SSD adoption really takes off, once everyone and their mother has a flash-based boot drive, then we'll see much more flexibility in manufacturing and pricing, but for now it's like complaining that Ferraris are too expensive. The only people complaining are the jealous types who want one but are too cheap to pony up the cash. Sure, the average SSD costs more than most people's entire PC, but these things aren't marketed to Joe Random and his $249 computer. Really, when you look at the kind of people who use SSDs, it is often the least expensive part of the entire system (excluding the ATX chassis). How about I lay it out for you:
High-end motherboard (GA-EX58-UD5) $350
High-end processor (i7 950) $600
12gb DDR3-12800 Ram $350
Two high-end GPUs $1000
1200w power supply $300
60gb SSD $200
So it's really not that big of a pain, price-fixing or not, IMHO.
There is no morality involved in patching software. The phone doesn't do what you want, you "fix" it, and the result is you get more enjoyment out of your phone. Were it not moddable, you would have gone with a different phone and Apple would not have made that $500 sale.
And to respond to your assertion that jailbreakers generate more "service requests" and RMAs, I would want to see hard numbers before believing such conjecture. The fact that we are merely replacing software, something Apple's own iTunes does as part of regular maintenance (firmware updates), I can't see how writing different software to the phone can render it inoperable. You can always flash it back to stock firmware, there is no permanent modification.
I did this myself, back when I first got my phone and played around with tethering hacks. One of them completely screwed up the 3G functionality and made my phone very unstable, so I just restored to the unmodified iPhone firmware and everything was back to normal. If an iPhone physically stops working due to a manufacturing defect, which is what the warranty covers, that's not something the software can influence in any way. If it was built wrong at the factory, it was doomed long before anything was ever written to the flash chip.
I agree with getting them the "help" they need, whatever that may be, but the problem there isn't enough attention paid to that "help". All efforts are focused on punishment, not rehabilitation. "Don't do it again, or we'll bore you with more nagging social workers" is not a valid deterrent.
Could it be that taking time out of their day, to see a "professional" and lie down for an hour or so, was the actual effector here, rather than any manipulation the healer or actor did ?
Hardly a conclusive sample, but I have this friend who is a major stress bucket, he is uptight about every littlest thing and I occasionally have to "disconnect" him for a month or so, to preserve my own sanity. He used to see a chiro every week or two for back pain, until one day Howard Stern endorsed a book about back pain that basically told him what I've been saying all along: "it's all in your dumb fat head". Since Stern is this guy's idol, he finally read the damn book, stopped seeing his chiro and his back pain is much less debilitating than it once was. Oh, and this guy is 30, not obese or anything, and is moderately active - more than the average /. reader and myself, at least.
His back pain was (and still is) directly related to his stress and anxiety levels, and while I am in no way a doctor or anything close, I would hazard a guess that many people's chronic pain is a direct result of stress. If you're high-strung all the time, your muscles tense up, blood pressure rises, and a whole bunch of other subconscious things happen as tied to the endocrine system. It is only logical to assume that these can lead to soreness and pain, especially if your stress management skills are poor (or nil). Anything that helps you relax is going to help with the pain. What the person does with their hands is irrelevant, it's the ritual, the psychosomatic effect that is at work here.
They become attractive once you see the difference they make in a desktop PC. I bought my first SSD around 6 months ago, now I swear by them. If you're a heavy multitasker, a fast SSD can make a huge difference by eliminating seek times. I'm actually tempted to replace my boss' boot drive with an SSD, just to see if he notices - and by "notice" I mean "stop bitching about his gaming-grade PC being slow".
It is a sizeable chunk of change right now, considering a 500gb HDD can be bought for under $50, but you can liken it to a graphics card. Some people are fine with the onboard graphics, others need more horsepower and are willing to pay hundreds if not thousands of dollars on faster GPUs. SSDs are no different. There are things I do with my machine that would take hours on an HDD, due to the sheer number of files or DB transactions, that finish in mere minutes on an SSD.
Actually, after reading the summary and skimming through TFA, I'm inclined to say that whole review is bunk. I know for a fact that Kingston's SSDnow series are rebadged Intels, so they should perform identically. The main difference is Kingston's versions tend to be priced more aggressively.
For my money, it's either OCZ Vertex, Intel X25 (or Kingston), or nothing at all. Having tried many of the off-brand ones and been burned, I stick to what I know works. A lot of the cheaper SSDs act like someone duct-taped a SATA bridge to a USB flash drive: high latency, short lifespan, writes 4 times slower than reads... It's all about the controller chip's performance, which all but a handful suck ass.