Something that made me smile during the launch was "you don't need Exchange Server anymore"!
Well.. What if I WANT Exchange Server?
Then you USE Exchange Server. Not needing Exchange != doesn't work with Exchange. During the launch working with Exchange (via IMAP) was explicitly mentioned.
I thought the point of mobile data services is that, unlike WiFi, they work when you are more than 100 yards from your home, McDonalds or Starbucks. Judging by the demo, it uses WiFi for data when it's available anyway.
How is it that network integrity is dependent upon the (millions of) client devices. If their network is designed in this way, well, I'll stick with Verizon.
The iPhone on Verizon will only cost 499 cents; a much better deal than the 499 dollars from Cingular. At least, that's what the rep told me...
Of course the screen isn't a feature, neither for its size and resolution or the innovative touch capabilities. Nor is up to 8GiB of flash. Or WiFi. Or Google Maps. Or the extra 770k pixels on the camera. Or IMAP push email.
I know no telco is popular in the sense that people actually like them, but isn't Cingular the most popular (in terms of number of subscribers) network in the US? Or was Steve Jobs bending the truth when he said that?
Hmm. Apple doesn't have to write it all but you can buy softwares. Do the elves write them while Jobs sleeps? The existence of softwares not written by Apple fits the definition of third party apps, doesn't it?
The question then becomes "what does getting a dev kit involve". If the cost is little more than the phone itself, or even a free download like XCode, it may not be so bad. Just putting a couple of hoops between regular consumers and third-party apps, but not making the barrier to entry for 'amateur' hackers prohibitive, they might still maintain enough control without totally closing the platform down. But if dev kits cost $thousands they'll exclude a lot of developers.
When I first saw, it my second thought (after "I want one") was "Hack it!". If I can't write something to control my Mindstorms NXT bots from, port my OS X astronomy widgets and generally fiddle about I'm not sure I'll bother. If they do an exclusive one-network deal in the UK it'll be even less attractive.
My dream? An $800 dev kit which gives you an unlocked (ie not tied to one network), installation-enabled iPhone. Somehow, I think I may be dreaming for a while...
PICs are great if you enjoy paying for a decent C compiler or incredibly unpleasant ASM coding (bank switching, a dearth of registers and relativley few instructions means you spend a lot of time and code doing fairly trivial things - just adding a couple of 16-bit ints is unpleasant enough to code; a library will deal with some of that, but it still takes a bunch of instructions). If you want something vaguely modern and plesant to use try the Atmel AVR which has loads of registers, a gcc port available and instructions to efficiently work with multi-byte variables and other useful stuff. AVRs are also 4x as fast as PICs with the same clock speed. Even nicer is the MSP430 architecture, though the choice of devices is fairly limited compared to PIC and AVR. 16-bit, flat address space (most MCUs are Harvard architecture with two address spaces - MSP430 is also Harvard, but the flat address space means you can largely ignore that fact in pracice), a decent free C compiler and insanely low power consumption. Go with AVR if you want good free toools, good community support, a good range of devices and value your sanity.
Transistor-based computers, while they rely on quantum effects for their operation, perform calculations using large numbers of quanta (electrons) on a large (in quantum terms) scale. When we look at sufficiently large numbers of quanta on a large enough scale, we analyse the bulk properties as electricity. It's at that larger scale that computation happens in a microchip - they are electrical devices, with many electrons representing each bit. The term 'quantum computer' refers specifically to computers which perform the actual computation at the scale of individual quanta.
I'm sure you'll agree that pure physics research has produced led to some pretty useful stuff - electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are behind most of the cool toys geeks love. Just as quantum mecahnics wasn't initially developed with the aim of producing transistors, current theories being developed and tested have no specific technological aim in mind. But it's a certainty that with greater understanding of our universe will come a greater ability to manipulate it. Every advance in physics has brought with it technological advances and I fully expect any future advances will bring further technological advances. Certainly some scientists and engineers need to be working on clean renewable energy tech (and they are), but some need to be working on the tools that those scientists and engineers use - physical theories, mathematical techniques; astronomy is part of that making the science that makes the technology possible.
Implicit in your opinion is the idea that what you do to somebody can't affect the way they behave. The evidence does not support that position. Most notably (though perhaps not most relevant to this case), if you regularly beat a child the chances of them becoming a violent adult are dramatically increased. If you tell people they are worthless frequently enough they will come to believe you; being worthless means you have nothing to lose. The society we live in (I'm not American, but British society isn't that far behind) is creating these people. We have to ask ourselves why. We have to take some respionsibility for creating these killers or more and more will be created. Practically every metric (depression rates, traffic violation rates, divorce rates...) shows that the population as a whole is becoming less happy, less respectful and more angry. If you push the whole curve, those already at the edge of the curve will be pushed over the edge into violence.
Would Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been unpopular, antisocial and unhappy wherever they grew up? Probably. Would they have gone so far as to harm others, had they grown up in a more caring, respectful and just society; one in which they were taught 'how to be good' not with words, but by example? I very much doubt it.
The resistance of the copper wire (or steel or nickel in a banana plug) is X.
Now, add another layer (gold) to the copper wire (or steel or nickel in the banana plug) through which the current also has to flow to get to the terminal.
Of course I have not RTFA because that's not the point of/., but I suspect they're swapping tantalums in to replace electrolytics. With
Tantalum was my first thought, and I did read the article, but it's non-specific. However, a quick Google shows they are actually using Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors. Similar to 'wet' electrolytics, but with a solid electrolyte.
You don't know what you're talking about. The shuttle's flight computers are IBM AP-101 systems and there's basically one which flies the shuttle, catastrophe notwithstanding (there are actually four running the same code for redundancy, with a fifth running independedntly developed backup code). The 8086/8088 systems, which I presume you're aware of because NASA were on the hunt for processors a few years ago, are ground-based test rigs.
Yeah, the date rollover things sucks by modern standards, but with highly restricted memeory (424KiB of core on the original flight computers) niceties such as that were often left out. The AP 101 shares architecture with the IBM/360. You might have heard of Fred Brooks - he of "Mythical Man Month" fame. In another classic essay "The Second System Effect" he complains that OS/360 wastes 26 bytes of core to deal with correct rollovers of leap years. He thinks that should have been left to the operator. The computing world was very different when the shuttle's flight computers were developed.
I can't decide if that's the cutest dog I've ever seen or, you know, Satan himself. The eyes! The eyes! I bet he gets the dog to hypnotise developers into working super-hard.
The simple fact is that too much of the software development is left to the peons, ie. the developers. The skillset of the developers are totally random, as is the style, their expertise, etc. It introduces too much variability to the software development process.
Look at civil engineering projects. They are able to create buildings, bridges, roads, etc, and for the most part are much better understood than software development projects. But the peons, ie. the construction workers, do not dictate anything. There is one way of bolting steel together, one way of mixing concrete, etc. The only person who has any say is the chief architect.
The countruction workers in the software industry have no say whatsoever. The construction workers in software are things like preprocessors, compilers and linkers. The blueprint is the code, the building is the executable. Code is really just a more formal, detailed spec. A chief architect may design the look of the whole building and the main structural components, but they aren't the ones who specify how thick a girder to use to support the walkway on the 7th floor, the size of bolts to use and how much torque to tighten them with; that's some more junior architect or engineer - the equivalent of non-senior programmer.
It's hard because of stupid people. I swear, users get increasingly more challenged as time goes on. An incompetent user would rather push the wrong button and see what happens then read anything.
If your software doesn't take account of the fact that your users prefer to experiment than read the manual it's you who is incompetent, not the user.
It is certainly possible to expend huge amounts on designing a thing to death, but given the howling screw-ups that NASA has produced over the years (was that metric or Imperial?) I wouldn't hold them up as anything like an exemplar of good software engineering practice.
That wasn't a software engineering mistake. When was the last time some NASA code was the cause of a failed mission? Can you give us an example of some better engineered software that that which flies on the Space Shuttle?
[...] just because JoBlowCo can't get it done, doesn't mean the rest of us can't.
Who do you work for, what projects have you done and what methodologies/practices/tools did you use to do what virtually no other large project teams ever manage to do? It's all well and goood saying you can do it, why not enlighten the rest of us as to how, excactly, you do it? Then we can all be great too.
Here's the problem -- after they put their card in & type in their pin to the fake machine, the money won't be paid to the store. Because the system is really just a mock-up designed to/look/ like a chip-and-pin system, it won't actually talk to the bank to get the store its money.
You could quite easily leave the real electronics connected in addition to your sniffer so the transaction goes through properly.
Perhaps you can't see a distinction between 'is similar to other people who have commited a particular crime' and 'have proven themselves willing to commit a particular crime', but I can.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by this:
And, in case you're not familiar, a cop cannot just follow you without cause. At a certain point--which varies by jurisdiction--they must pull you over or move on to their next mark.
Does that mean they can follow you for some period of time without cause, or that they can only follow you with cause and even then only for a limited time? I'm not familiar with that aspect of your law, I expect because it's US law and I'm not USian.
I don't know what you think is being intruded upon either. I don't propose they follow you for hours, stop you, put a video of your driving on YouTube or tell the whole world where you were last Tuesday evening. Their presence may make it impossible for you commit a crime and get away with it, but that's not a right you have anyway. I just don't see how being watched in public is an intrusion. It's not like tapping a phone or bugging a house, where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
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Whatever it stood for in "iMac", which was the first Apple iProduct, iIRC.
Then you USE Exchange Server. Not needing Exchange != doesn't work with Exchange. During the launch working with Exchange (via IMAP) was explicitly mentioned.
I thought the point of mobile data services is that, unlike WiFi, they work when you are more than 100 yards from your home, McDonalds or Starbucks. Judging by the demo, it uses WiFi for data when it's available anyway.
The iPhone on Verizon will only cost 499 cents; a much better deal than the 499 dollars from Cingular. At least, that's what the rep told me...
Of course the screen isn't a feature, neither for its size and resolution or the innovative touch capabilities. Nor is up to 8GiB of flash. Or WiFi. Or Google Maps. Or the extra 770k pixels on the camera. Or IMAP push email.
How do you know it doesn't have decent accessibility features built-in?
I know no telco is popular in the sense that people actually like them, but isn't Cingular the most popular (in terms of number of subscribers) network in the US? Or was Steve Jobs bending the truth when he said that?
The question then becomes "what does getting a dev kit involve". If the cost is little more than the phone itself, or even a free download like XCode, it may not be so bad. Just putting a couple of hoops between regular consumers and third-party apps, but not making the barrier to entry for 'amateur' hackers prohibitive, they might still maintain enough control without totally closing the platform down. But if dev kits cost $thousands they'll exclude a lot of developers.
When I first saw, it my second thought (after "I want one") was "Hack it!". If I can't write something to control my Mindstorms NXT bots from, port my OS X astronomy widgets and generally fiddle about I'm not sure I'll bother. If they do an exclusive one-network deal in the UK it'll be even less attractive.
My dream? An $800 dev kit which gives you an unlocked (ie not tied to one network), installation-enabled iPhone. Somehow, I think I may be dreaming for a while...
I Googled. Daylight Savings Time? Dynamic Stress Test? Data Systems Test? Data Storage and Transfer?
PICs are great if you enjoy paying for a decent C compiler or incredibly unpleasant ASM coding (bank switching, a dearth of registers and relativley few instructions means you spend a lot of time and code doing fairly trivial things - just adding a couple of 16-bit ints is unpleasant enough to code; a library will deal with some of that, but it still takes a bunch of instructions). If you want something vaguely modern and plesant to use try the Atmel AVR which has loads of registers, a gcc port available and instructions to efficiently work with multi-byte variables and other useful stuff. AVRs are also 4x as fast as PICs with the same clock speed. Even nicer is the MSP430 architecture, though the choice of devices is fairly limited compared to PIC and AVR. 16-bit, flat address space (most MCUs are Harvard architecture with two address spaces - MSP430 is also Harvard, but the flat address space means you can largely ignore that fact in pracice), a decent free C compiler and insanely low power consumption. Go with AVR if you want good free toools, good community support, a good range of devices and value your sanity.
Thanks for the new sig!
Transistor-based computers, while they rely on quantum effects for their operation, perform calculations using large numbers of quanta (electrons) on a large (in quantum terms) scale. When we look at sufficiently large numbers of quanta on a large enough scale, we analyse the bulk properties as electricity. It's at that larger scale that computation happens in a microchip - they are electrical devices, with many electrons representing each bit. The term 'quantum computer' refers specifically to computers which perform the actual computation at the scale of individual quanta.
I'm sure you'll agree that pure physics research has produced led to some pretty useful stuff - electromagnetism and quantum mechanics are behind most of the cool toys geeks love. Just as quantum mecahnics wasn't initially developed with the aim of producing transistors, current theories being developed and tested have no specific technological aim in mind. But it's a certainty that with greater understanding of our universe will come a greater ability to manipulate it. Every advance in physics has brought with it technological advances and I fully expect any future advances will bring further technological advances. Certainly some scientists and engineers need to be working on clean renewable energy tech (and they are), but some need to be working on the tools that those scientists and engineers use - physical theories, mathematical techniques; astronomy is part of that making the science that makes the technology possible.
Implicit in your opinion is the idea that what you do to somebody can't affect the way they behave. The evidence does not support that position. Most notably (though perhaps not most relevant to this case), if you regularly beat a child the chances of them becoming a violent adult are dramatically increased. If you tell people they are worthless frequently enough they will come to believe you; being worthless means you have nothing to lose. The society we live in (I'm not American, but British society isn't that far behind) is creating these people. We have to ask ourselves why. We have to take some respionsibility for creating these killers or more and more will be created. Practically every metric (depression rates, traffic violation rates, divorce rates...) shows that the population as a whole is becoming less happy, less respectful and more angry. If you push the whole curve, those already at the edge of the curve will be pushed over the edge into violence.
Would Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold have been unpopular, antisocial and unhappy wherever they grew up? Probably. Would they have gone so far as to harm others, had they grown up in a more caring, respectful and just society; one in which they were taught 'how to be good' not with words, but by example? I very much doubt it.
[my emphasis]
How about a really fat John Deere tractor, with a gun?
The one without a layer of copper oxide?
Tantalum was my first thought, and I did read the article, but it's non-specific. However, a quick Google shows they are actually using Conductive Polymer Aluminum Solid Capacitors. Similar to 'wet' electrolytics, but with a solid electrolyte.
You don't know what you're talking about. The shuttle's flight computers are IBM AP-101 systems and there's basically one which flies the shuttle, catastrophe notwithstanding (there are actually four running the same code for redundancy, with a fifth running independedntly developed backup code). The 8086/8088 systems, which I presume you're aware of because NASA were on the hunt for processors a few years ago, are ground-based test rigs.
Yeah, the date rollover things sucks by modern standards, but with highly restricted memeory (424KiB of core on the original flight computers) niceties such as that were often left out. The AP 101 shares architecture with the IBM/360. You might have heard of Fred Brooks - he of "Mythical Man Month" fame. In another classic essay "The Second System Effect" he complains that OS/360 wastes 26 bytes of core to deal with correct rollovers of leap years. He thinks that should have been left to the operator. The computing world was very different when the shuttle's flight computers were developed.
I can't decide if that's the cutest dog I've ever seen or, you know, Satan himself. The eyes! The eyes! I bet he gets the dog to hypnotise developers into working super-hard.
The countruction workers in the software industry have no say whatsoever. The construction workers in software are things like preprocessors, compilers and linkers. The blueprint is the code, the building is the executable. Code is really just a more formal, detailed spec. A chief architect may design the look of the whole building and the main structural components, but they aren't the ones who specify how thick a girder to use to support the walkway on the 7th floor, the size of bolts to use and how much torque to tighten them with; that's some more junior architect or engineer - the equivalent of non-senior programmer.
If your software doesn't take account of the fact that your users prefer to experiment than read the manual it's you who is incompetent, not the user.
That wasn't a software engineering mistake. When was the last time some NASA code was the cause of a failed mission? Can you give us an example of some better engineered software that that which flies on the Space Shuttle?
Who do you work for, what projects have you done and what methodologies/practices/tools did you use to do what virtually no other large project teams ever manage to do? It's all well and goood saying you can do it, why not enlighten the rest of us as to how, excactly, you do it? Then we can all be great too.
You could quite easily leave the real electronics connected in addition to your sniffer so the transaction goes through properly.
Perhaps you can't see a distinction between 'is similar to other people who have commited a particular crime' and 'have proven themselves willing to commit a particular crime', but I can.
I'm not sure precisely what you mean by this:
Does that mean they can follow you for some period of time without cause, or that they can only follow you with cause and even then only for a limited time? I'm not familiar with that aspect of your law, I expect because it's US law and I'm not USian.
I don't know what you think is being intruded upon either. I don't propose they follow you for hours, stop you, put a video of your driving on YouTube or tell the whole world where you were last Tuesday evening. Their presence may make it impossible for you commit a crime and get away with it, but that's not a right you have anyway. I just don't see how being watched in public is an intrusion. It's not like tapping a phone or bugging a house, where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.