Ask Wikileaks, Assange, and anyone who supported them financially about how much better it is. "Better" depends entirely on whether or not you are fucking with American power. The Chinese do the same with whomever fucks with their power. This is about an empire taking over the internet at its core. DNS and so many other things should be decentralized and encrypted. No power base in the world will let that happen - they need to monitor us to maintain power.
I hate to break it to you but you can't take over something you invented and were the primary driver of. Many other countries have made huge contributions but the Internet was invented in the USA and it was US universities, companies, etc that made it what it is today.
The open nature of the Internet is due to the open nature of US and other western universities, along with some of the strongest free-speech protections to be found in any country of similar size or position.
Given all the options, and much like democracy as a form of government, US control seems like the "least worst".
This doesn't have to be an adversarial process or a bad thing.
If I were in charge, I'd tell Lightsquared "sure, no problem... as long as you supply suitable communication equipment and free bandwidth to anyone affected", where suitable is a low-power modem capable of running for X hours on Y mHA of battery power, and operating between V-Z temperature range.
If they want to give NOAA, Universities, and anyone else involved in using weather balloons free low-power LTE modems and some reasonable bandwidth, why not? You could go even further and make them provide a geosync satellite uplink to make sure they have nationwide coverage for weather balloons just in case they are out of range of ground-based towers.
It would certainly be a more efficient use of the spectrum compared to 400bps transmitters that have to be isolated by frequency from each other. You could launch 1,000 weather balloons in the same area without any interference issues... something not possible with the current system.
Apple hasn't sued all Android device makers, nor has it sued Google. They are absolutely *not* trying to stop all Android devices. Apple sued one handset maker over specific products they felt were copying too closely (rather than just borrowing or being inspired-by.) People have speculated that it was mostly about warning off competitors from that sort of copying - not about damages or banning products, though those things indirectly serve the real purpose.
Don't kid yourself about Google... they are as guilty as can be of abusing the patent system. They lost all credible claims of "innocent party" in the patent wars the moment they bought Motorola and failed to put a stop to the patent abuse. You get sued? Sure, go ahead and countersue with everything you've got. If Google wants to grant broad patent protection to its Android partners go ahead and do that. But there is nothing open or good about what they are doing.
P.S. Apple is paying a per-handset fee to Nokia over patents. Apple and Microsoft have cross-license agreements. Apple isn't neither unique nor extraordinary in the patent lawsuit game. I'm not sure why they have to be held to a higher standard on everything... people don't claim they will stop buying Samsung phones because they sued LG, or how much they hate Nokia because they sued Apple (one of the first shots-across-the-bow actually).
First, Apple is keeping to the requirement by offering a micro-USB cable.
Second, the reason they didn't use micro-USB is because it doesn't have the requisite number of pins. As we saw with Thunderbolt, the USB folks will *not* allow you to add non-standard pins to their connector.
This connector must support at least 2 amps of charging for the iPad (in the future presumably). That puts micro-USB right out of the picture.
It must also support digitally sending all the data necessary to support the 30-pin compatibility, including the upcoming HDMI and VGA adapters. Building any sort of intelligence into the cable or other end would require an actual USB interface chip and would require extending the USB specification in non-standard ways... not that you could push enough data on the 2 data pins to run a 720p HD display anyway, unless you piggy-backed some custom protocol on top of USB, then had some sort of hand-shake mode to figure that out... assuming the USB people didn't sue you for abusing their standard to begin with.
The connector itself is far better designed than any USB connector ever; it is reversible and it has self-cleaning contacts, yet it is stronger than micro-usb.
It's OK though; I expect a barrage of anti-Apple FUD every time they release a new device. I'm used to it by now. If you want a legit complaint, the price of the 30-pin adapters is ridiculous.
Steve Jobs, when introducing the iPad, said it was a device inbetween a phone and a PC.
Granted - some people are able to get by with just a tablet and it works well for them. And there are certainly some types of content-creation that work really well on tablets. But in general the tablet is an addition to your workflow, not a replacement for it.
Personally I find my iPad great for audio measurement using a dock-connector reference mic, taking notes, and drawing. I also use it to browse the web, answer email, etc. But writing code? I do that on my laptop.
Digging is ok in most parts of the country. But lets pick a 'big city' New York. Do you have any idea how much infrastructure is under those roads already? Oh which is used and which isnt? Not so simple a task anymore is it?
This is much less of a problem then most people realize. My north-Dallas suburb has all underground utilities (including electricity) running under the sidewalks (due to legacy layout there is no right-of-way zone) and Verizon managed to run fiber with zero issues and without digging up the sidewalks. Unfortunately Dallas proper is ATT so no fiber for those inside the city limits, which is funny because the much higher density would make it a better payoff. NYC is more complicated but ultimately it can (and is) being done.
The utilities tend to be segmented vertically, with more sensitive ones buried deeper, then with same-class services being spread out horizontally. The fiber was run by using machines that navigate conduit through the ground without actually digging the entire length up. This also allows you to run new conduit under existing services without disturbing them. I'm not sure how much sensing those machines have but it would be fairly easy to have metal-sensors, radar, ultrasound, etc in the dig head, along with actuation to allow you to steer it. This would let you avoid almost any issues by sensing when you are near a gas line or legacy copper and steering the cutting head around it (the conduit itself is flexible plastic). Funny enough, the densest downtown cores all have underground utility tunnels and the like which makes running lines there even easier.
What we do know is that Verizon was able to reduce their capex spend on legacy copper infrastructure in FIOS areas and that the actual rollout was less expensive and faster than anticipated. It will certainly pay for itself in less than 20 years. They also claim to have spent 20 billion on it, but when you look at their capex budgets over the past few years you can see that a lot of that is offset by less spending on the copper plant.
Think about that for a minute... For maybe 100 billion (less than 1/5 of the defense budget) we could roll out gigabit fiber to 90% of all homes and businesses in the United States. There is a ton of dark fiber criss-crossing the country for backbone purposes.
The problem isn't money and it isn't technical. The problem is that our institutions are dysfunctional (by design). Our Telco companies would rather pump the short-term stock price than invest in infrastructure - the new Verizon CEO killed future FIOS rollouts and did the handshake deal with cable to avoid competing with each other so they can focus on wireless revenue - a place where data caps and high prices ensure huge profits.
Our government has been hijacked by the "no new taxes ever" crowd, who deliberately cut taxes to introduce deficits, to justify cutting government services and reducing the pay/benefits (and thus quality) of government employees**. Then they point to the government they deliberately broke as justification for further cuts.
**Why is it that you only need to spend money to buy a good CEO? Why can't the government spend money to buy good civil servants? Or get more employees to reduce lines at places like the DMV or INS?
No new infrastructure has ever succeeded without massive government intervention. Part of that is you can only get financing when you can show a good chance of return on investment... but with new infrastructure you are stuck with the chicken and egg problem. Without the infrastructure there is no demand and without demand private enterprise won't build the infrastructure.
Government financed, cleared the way for, and rolled out the army to protect the trans-continental railroad. Without the largesse of the federal government the railroads would have only built the profitable lines to certain areas, on incompatible track gauges (check the history books). Without government-mandated air brakes and knuckle couplers we'd sti
Here's what I think happened: MS decided (along with half the industry) that tablets will gradually replace desktop computer and decided they had to invent a new GUI paradigm that made Windows tablet-friendly. Whereupon they made the same mistake they've made many times before â" they forgot that many of their users still need the old paradigm. We're still using laptops and desktops; we're even plugging keyboards and mice into our tablets and using them as desktops.
No, Microsoft continues to suffer from their "Windows-itis" disease, where to protect their existing Windows cash cow they insist on forcing it to be everywhere. See Windows Mobile/Windows CE, Kin, et al. That's one of the hallmarks of a company so blinded by their previous success they stop changing or innovating and work to extend and protect the cash cow (often until it is too late).
This is just a symptom of that... they desperately want to get in on the tablet game but since Windows has to be everywhere (and the same as much as possible) that means pushing the tablet interface onto the desktop. They also saw how easily people can switch to the Mac because of all the "iOS-isms" Apple has brought to the Mac, so they figured it would be a huge boost to their tablet efforts to have a consistent "Windows" brand.
What they forget is most people hate or are at best ambivalent about Windows as a brand and as much as Apple can just make a change and get everyone to fall in line, not even they replaced the Desktop for some iOS-like fullscreen-only interface.
If you look at it objectively, it is obvious that Apple isn't getting into the enterprise server market anytime soon and your server products division is doing quite well. But people are buying iPads and the lack of MS Office is teaching a whole new generation that they don't need Office anymore. That's a dangerous precedent to set. If Windows is a cash cow, Office is a whole herd. The choice is obvious - instead of risking millions on competing with the iPad (and pissing off your OEMs in the process), just start releasing everything for iOS. If you assume even just the corporate business iPad users bought it, that's already over a billion dollar a year business *after* Apple's cut. For zero risk and a few developer salaries.
We know Google makes a ton of their mobile revenue from iOS - that makes Android a puzzle as well. Why are you working so hard to piss off one of your largest markets? Of course Google needs to decide whether they are going to crap or get off the toilet... they own Motorola. If Motorola starts selling #1 devices in numbers, how long will Samsung, HTC, etc keep pushing Android? At some point they'll have to go their own way. If Google hamstrings Motorola so as not to compete with their OEMs, then what are they going to do about Amazon, Baidu, et al taking Google's R&D and ripping out all the Google services then replacing them with their own? How long will they continue to be Amazon's free R&D department? And how can they justify a 12 billion purchase of Motorola just to let them spin their wheels? What will Google do when Samsung gets jealous of Google's revenue and forks Android and replaces all the Google services with Samsung-branded services? How long until the other OEMs follow Samsung's lead?
In a sense, Microsoft has now decided to adopt this same problem as their own. If Surface sells like crazy, all the OEMs will jump ship. Why compete against Microsoft when you have to pay an additional $20-50 license tax on top? If it doesn't, then why did you waste your energy and money when you could be making billions off iPad apps *and* getting license revenue from the OEMs?
A bad store manager can leave a lasting trail of damage. Sounds like this store had a bad one and it rubbed off on the employees.
I don't see how this is a noteworthy story though... In any large retail operation you will have some bad "apples". It also sounds like Apple found out and fired most of them.
Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.
The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.
This might be slightly OT but you make a good point and this is something that we, as a society, will have to deal with eventually.
At some point in the future there won't be a need for as much manual labor as we have now. Robots/machines will eventually take over most tasks - look at Foxconn buying a million (!) robots to start converting some assembly of electronics to robotic assembly. Look at what Musk is doing at Tesla and how the cars are made almost entirely by robots.
Either: Work weeks will get shorter and some form of guaranteed income (or massive increases in minimum wage) will take place, thus having the average person work many fewer hours per week for the same or much higher pay than people get now for 40 hours of work. I don't see this as a bad thing - I suspect many (if not most) first-world people would be glad to continue their current lifestyle while working fewer hours - they'd get to spend more time with their family, pursuing hobbies (including spending money on them), etc.
Or: Most people are going to end up poor and unemployed (leading to a vicious downward spiral where less consumer $$$ means less economic activity, further depressing the need for output, leading to people willing to work for scraps, further putting downward pressure on economies around the world, repeat until riot/revolution). We already have a massive glut of capital, running around shoving money at anything that smells like yield (the primary driver of the financial crisis - too much cheap money desperately looking for a place to invest, though certainly not the only driver). If all the resources continue to accumulate at the top then we may end up with a brutal police state that crushes most people while a few lords live in mansions, consuming luxury goods produced by robots solely for the rich. Prices for everything would skyrocket (despite the minimal cost of production) because the money is just changing hands between the various rich factory/resource owners.
Some of this is just a learning curve on the part of developers. As has been pointed out, a lot of the issues surround access to the file system but as long as the user selects a folder (via the OS' built-in privileged process proxy that presents the selection UI for your app) or drags it to your app, you can store a link to it that is part of your sandbox, including across reboots.
In this App's case, it would mean reworking his UI slightly to have users select folders with content in them, not individual movies. Then he can show a list of movies in that folder and let the user pick, all the while reading separate subtitle files or moving to the next movie with no issues.
There does need to be a category of Developer Utilities / System Utilities that allow things like asking for Admin rights. This is one place Apple is totally wrong. Sure, make the review process extra detailed and don't allow apps to go into that category unless they are truly utilities, but it is definitely needed.
The days of [app permissions] == [user permissions] are long over... We're just stuck with a broken security model that never anticipated people would be running so much code from so many sources, code that can't necessarily be trusted (or that itself loads data/code from untrusted sources). It's like the difference between traditional Unix permission bits and ACLs: once you use ACLs you realize how primitive user/group/owner is. Sandboxing is an attempt at limiting the permission of apps but it remains to be seen if that's the best way.
It is quite unfortunate and demonstrates that US leaders still don't "get" it. They think that prosecuting Assange will have some kind of effect on Wikileaks when nothing could be further from the truth.... or they're just trying to get back at him out of spite (same reason they tortured Manning when he was obviously guilty and a simple court martial would have seen him put in prison for the rest of his life. Why degrade ourselves?)
The reason the US isn't explicitly asking for extradition is probably because we intend to perform an "extraordinary rendition" and snag him from Sweden illegally (but with Swedish cooperation), then imprison him in Gitmo forever without trial.
I wish I were joking. My grandfather volunteered for WWII; It makes me sad that we have thrown all the things he fought for in the trash can, first in a blind attempt to fight communism (when the prudent course was just to let it die under its own weight just like the USSR did), then in a blind attempt to fight a "war on drugs", and now in a blind attempt to fight a "war on terror".
Oh well... so many Americans are petty and FYGM these days. I guess it's no surprise that our politicians are too. When we had the Soviets to fight against it forced us to push all objections out of the way and cooperate for the common good. We managed to do such great and big things back then... We voted to tax ourselves to build the Interstate Highway system. Imagine proposing a tax to build a national "Internet Highway" today! The threat of communism put the Fear Of God(TM) into the rich and forced them to share the wealth, which in turn improved everyone's lives. Now it's all slipping away.
It's not like BitTorrent is a widely-known standardized protocol with a handful of existing open-source clients...
So how exactly is BitTorrent supposed to survive (as a company) and continue improving the software?
There has to be some path to monetization. If you aren't paying for a product then you are the product, (being sold to marketers).
I've gotten to the point where I won't rely on anything offered for free because then you're just one corporate re-org, acquisition, etc away from being booted out in the cold. And who could blame people for wanting to eat or earn a living? They don't owe you anything.
I think their big mistake is not offering an ad-free experience for a small fee... then people can support further development whichever way they want.
Google's WebRTC proposal is very narrowly tailored, relies on stateful SIP, and is tied to their WebM video standard.
Microsoft's proposal is more flexible, stateless, simpler to implement, and is more "web-ish", eg: Relying on an exchange where my browser says "I can accept h264, webm, mpeg2" and the baby monitor says "I speak h264" so we use negotiated h264.
Basically Microsoft is saying that we should adopt a standard that makes it easy to interact with non-browser devices, phone/cell networks, etc. We should also make the API easier to use and stateless. The original WebRTC proposal is only concerned with letting Google+ users video-chat with other Google+ users and it shows.
I would also point out that Microsoft is following the correct W3C procedure by making a proposal and asking for comments. In the past they would have just shipped it in IE and/or rolled it out automatically to all Windows users, thus making their standard the de-facto standard. We should reward this kind of participation and interaction, not condemn it.
I would also point out that Microsoft invented AJAX by just rolling out their own standard... the same way JSON was invented. Design by committee sucks in most cases and we'd be far better served by selecting from competing proposals or merging two competing proposals rather than requiring 15 people to sit down and agree on the definition of the draft standard of the proposal to consider altering the document title.
And how long is Google going to continue funding the R&D for Amazon, Baidu, etc? How much of a cut does Google get on each Kindle sold, given the huge amount of money they spent developing Android? (Hint: zero).
How long do you think Samsung will let Google reap the profits from Music, App, Movie, etc sales and the various services? What will Google's response be when Samsung starts releasing devices that only have the Samsung app store?
How long will Google let Motorola sit idle after spending 12 billion on it? How will the other handset makers take to Motorola having some top-selling models, eroding their profits? Or will Google hobble Motorola to prevent that?
Nothing about the current Android ecosystem makes any sense and the sooner Google makes a decision the better. Either spin off Motorola and admit it was a mistake (and force all Android vendors to use Google's services), or close the source and make them compete on their own (and really put Motorola to use).
They can't keep doing this half-way thing or they'll have the satisfaction of having everyone using Android and making zero dollars on it. Not exactly a great way to run a company.
Well good for us then; they'll be hobbled with baby versions of a state-controlled Internet and the rest of us will be benefitting from the real thing, assuming there is an actual advantage (I believe there is).
That is if libertarians* and conservatives don't succeed in reverting us to a corporatist theocracy, dominated by telco/cableco dualopolies.
At least when the liberals screw you they whisper sweet nothings and buy you a new dress. The conservatives smack you around and call you a whore.
* real free markets don't exist without government coercion, otherwise those willing to use brown-nosing, bribes, violence, collusion, etc monopolize enough critical services (eg railways, telecom) to effectively extract tolls on *all* commerce. Back during the libertarian wet-dream of small government in the late 1800s-1930s, Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry by owning all the major railroads, thus if you refused to cooperate you were denied shipping services by the railroad. Without the troublesome FDA, people sold radium-infused tonics that gave people jaw cancer and sold X-Ray shoe fitting machines that gave kids cancer. Without the EPA, companies just dumped industrial chemicals into rivers where it killed all the fish and caught one on fire. If sued, they just filed bankruptcy, moved down the road, and started up again. Funny enough how they never address how government got where it is today... Through massive monopolies, huge safety problems that tool thousands of lives, and massive pollution: all results of the "free market".
Right now the Mac app store makes no distinction between system/developer utilities and regular consumer applications. As a result, the list of available entitlements are too narrow. Regular users are baffled by the file system and getting it out of their faces is a great idea. Locking down apps is also good from a security perspective for most apps and users.
Apple just needs to make a special more rigorous review process for these sorts of apps and only allow those apps to request admin access or touch the file system outside the sandbox. In fact only the Developer and Utility categories need allow this sort of thing.
On a related note, Apple needs something like Windows' contracts so apps can specify the types of data they can provide or accept and let the system manage the interaction. This gives a safe clean way for apps to share data... The primary drawback of Apple's current "share nothing" model.
Seemingly like everything Google does these days, this is another half-hearted effort which sucks because I would really love to see someone stick it to the telco/cable dualopoly, especially now that Verizon has a back-room handshake deal not to compete with the cable companies for wireline and the cable companies won't start their own wireless network (look it up - VZW is buying spectrum from the cable co's and has terminated all further FIOS expansio, right about the time their old telco/infrastructure CEO retired and their new MBA CEO took over). We also have a bunch of republican state governments (sorry - so far it's 100% republican) that have made it illegal for city governments to deploy fiber, even if they sell access to third-party ISPs and don't run one themselves)
Anyway, Google is only going to roll out fiber to neighborhoods where at least 10% of the potential customers sign up in advance, not to the entire city. I could totally understand running your fiber backbone rings then waiting to extend it into individual neighborhoods until people sign up - limit your capex for deployment - but this seems a bit insane.
I also wish Apple/MS/et al would go after the market... it is obvious that the owners of legacy pipes intend to install toll roads on all internet access and have all made back-room handshake deals not to compete with each other. With billions in cash in the bank there is no reason the tech giants couldn't start an open-access internet utility to string fiber (just to the dense cities) to homes and businesses... Imagine Microsoft, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, et al throwing their weight behind OpenInternetCo and designating the top 50 metro markets in the US (which would cover a huge percentage of the population) to receive cheap gigabit internet. Once the network starts building up you can run your CDNs on it and avoid interconnect/peering fees. Over time more and more of the traffic can stay inside OpenInternetCo's network.
If they don't jump on some sort of bandwagon soon (deploying fiber, $$millions$$ on lobbying, etc) they will find their internet-based services useless as the gatekeepers ratchet down bandwidth caps and try their hardest to soak up all the profits. We are also destined to see more and more "our video service doesn't count against your cap, but Netflix/iTunes/Google Play sure does! Oh and your cap is being 'enhanced' to a lower and $5 cheaper tier this month but the upper tier will cost $40 more"
The hilarious thing is that people often use the density/rural argument to explain why that's impossible in the US** but Verizon's own FIOS numbers prove that is BS. Once you stop investing in copper upkeep, deploying fiber is a relatively cheap operation. Verizon says they spent 20 billion to deploy fiber across half their footprint, but if you look at capex+upkeep on copper you realize a huge chunk of that fiber cost was offset! Even if we assume 20 billion, then extrapolate from there OpenInternetCo could cover the top 50 metro areas for less than 100 billion, the amount of money that just Apple has as cash in the bank. Presumably they'd kick in cash and bring on investors so I would guestimate 25-50 billion from all the tech giants combined would be enough. If I were them, I'd buy Sprint to get access to a cellular provider to ensure fair competition in that space but also to get access to their Tier-1 backbone and cross-country fiber network. Also add in someone like Frontier or Embarq/Century and you have an existing (and profitable) base to build from. You could eventually roll fiber to less dense markets and cover 80-90% of the US, and turn a profit.
**This argument also doesn't account for places like Dallas, TX that is plenty dense enough (and certainly in the city core) to support fiber deployments - the suburbs have it at far less density but that's because the suburbs were part of the initial FIOS deployment but the city proper is ATT territory and ATT isn't going to divert *any* CxO bonuses to infrastructure under any circumstances.
The magnets are still available for sale, but some retailers agreed to pull them because the CPSC asked them to.
You can still buy them from the company's website.
The recall was a long time ago to clarify the packaging and all the current products clearly say not for children and specifically mention the danger of swallowing them.
The owner of the business must be republican because he uses it as an opportunity to bash Obama, but he is also playing this up for the same reason all small business owners tend to hyperventilate about everything - publicity to drum up sales.
The CPSC -is- suing the maker in an attempt to get them banned but I highly doubt the lawsuit will succeed. Frankly I'd rather they go after all the snake oil peddlers and herbal supplement/homeopathic makers. That shit does far more damage to many thousands of people every year. Or maybe we could break up the telco/cable dualopoly but fat chance.
Oh so if I install this random Root Certificate Authority on my machine, thus granting some random hackers the ability to perform MITM attacks against all my SSL sessions, they can perform a MITM attack on in-app purchase transactions?
Shocking, simply shocking.
FYI: this exists so enterprise customers can install their root CA certs so their internal certificates will be considered valid.
At its core, this is the same problem we have with SSL in general. CAs are a single point of failure and one rogue certificate or one hacked CA breaks the entire chain of trust.
You are over thinking it and/or biased. Apple uses glue because it is faster to manufacture and it frees you from certain structural constraints. I don't like that from a repair standpoint but I understand why they do it.
The MacBook Retina has soldered memory because that allows the case to be smaller and the structure doesn't need accomadation for an access panel. It also simplifies the trace routing since you don't need to deal with a memory slot. I would also bet that 90% of their users never upgrade the memory in their laptops, so why compromise just for the 10%? I don't like this choice but it isn't some arbitrary scheme to scam people.
This seems like a much easier way to send spam... Most users will be using the stock mail app so just install, ask for the world in privileges (most users just click yes to anything), then send spam in the background using the user's account.
If you are smart, you avoid sending any spam to that user's contacts and intercept any replies that contain the spam text as a quoted string. That would make it far less likely for the victim to notice anytime soon.
Even if the spam isn't coming from Android phones right now, I'm sure someone will do it eventually.
Well if you RTFA, you will see that it is actually the decryption that fails. The package itself validates as being properly downloaded (the bits sent by the server are the bits received), but the binary is corrupt and not properly encrypted so the OS refuses to run it.
The problem appears to be in the distribution system that signs the binary then distributes the package across the CDNs, after App Review approves it. The current theories are that the signing system is somehow incorrectly signing a mismatch of old and new code but once the caches expire it seems to fix itself. This may have something to do with the delta update system since it can do partial updates now... Presumably each distribution zone is signing the app when received and the zone may have received new metadata before it receives the updated bits, thus signing the old app executable with the new binary's signature. That's all speculation for now.
I'd have more sympathy for Google if they weren't continuing the practice of suing over FRAND standards-essential patents.
Motorola (and now Google) have asserted that even though Qualcomm pays a license fee for Motorola's FRAND patents that they have the right to retroactively revoke that license for chips Apple buys and force Apple to pay a higher royalty directly. It's a terrible and underhanded way to do business and if the courts let them get away with it no one is safe, not even if you buy technology from another vendor who has licensed the patents in question because the patent holder will be able to dictate terms to that vendor that YOU are no longer a valid customer, then come after you... All after you already shipped devices, putting you on the hook for back royalties!
Motorola is also articulating a theory that FRAND now means a percentage of the sales price of devices which is insane. Numbers like 2% of the iPhone retail price or Xbox retail price. It has never been used this way in the past, and seems to be an attempt to stifle competition.
The Samsung case is a more straightforward one of Samsung retaliating against Apple by using FRAND patents, in violation of the standards and their previous agreements. Now whether Apple should have sued them in the first place I don't know... They have been copying Apple's designs and I guess Apple feels like they stabbed them in the back by using their manufacturing knowledge to help their mobile division get a head start... But all of that may have been perfectly legal which would make Apple's lawsuits sour grapes. What I don't understand is that Apple seems to represent more revenue as a customer than Samsung gets as a competitor and these lawsuits seem to be pushing them to use other vendors so why continue them? If I were Samsung management I'd push hard for a quick settlement.
The other side to this coin, and one I think Google is testing with the Nexus Q, is that an adverse ITC ruling can stop you dead because it prohibits imports. The second is that if China experiences any political upheavals or major natural disasters, you are well and truly SOL because you have no backup facilities or alternate vendors. Personally, I'd be uncomfortable with that and I would require at least some percentage (say 10%) of my product must be manufactured entirely in a first-world country or possibly even my home turf so I would have a favorable political climate.
For Apple, get visas, bring some of those engineers/managers to the states, and partner with Foxconn to setup a manufacturing company here. Yes, those units will be slightly more expensive, but it would give me a base of talent I could scale up if the SHTF and not leave me entirely unable to ship product for years if there is a military coup or something in China.
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Ask Wikileaks, Assange, and anyone who supported them financially about how much better it is. "Better" depends entirely on whether or not you are fucking with American power. The Chinese do the same with whomever fucks with their power. This is about an empire taking over the internet at its core. DNS and so many other things should be decentralized and encrypted. No power base in the world will let that happen - they need to monitor us to maintain power.
I hate to break it to you but you can't take over something you invented and were the primary driver of. Many other countries have made huge contributions but the Internet was invented in the USA and it was US universities, companies, etc that made it what it is today.
The open nature of the Internet is due to the open nature of US and other western universities, along with some of the strongest free-speech protections to be found in any country of similar size or position.
Given all the options, and much like democracy as a form of government, US control seems like the "least worst".
This doesn't have to be an adversarial process or a bad thing.
If I were in charge, I'd tell Lightsquared "sure, no problem... as long as you supply suitable communication equipment and free bandwidth to anyone affected", where suitable is a low-power modem capable of running for X hours on Y mHA of battery power, and operating between V-Z temperature range.
If they want to give NOAA, Universities, and anyone else involved in using weather balloons free low-power LTE modems and some reasonable bandwidth, why not? You could go even further and make them provide a geosync satellite uplink to make sure they have nationwide coverage for weather balloons just in case they are out of range of ground-based towers.
It would certainly be a more efficient use of the spectrum compared to 400bps transmitters that have to be isolated by frequency from each other. You could launch 1,000 weather balloons in the same area without any interference issues... something not possible with the current system.
Apple hasn't sued all Android device makers, nor has it sued Google. They are absolutely *not* trying to stop all Android devices. Apple sued one handset maker over specific products they felt were copying too closely (rather than just borrowing or being inspired-by.) People have speculated that it was mostly about warning off competitors from that sort of copying - not about damages or banning products, though those things indirectly serve the real purpose.
Don't kid yourself about Google... they are as guilty as can be of abusing the patent system. They lost all credible claims of "innocent party" in the patent wars the moment they bought Motorola and failed to put a stop to the patent abuse. You get sued? Sure, go ahead and countersue with everything you've got. If Google wants to grant broad patent protection to its Android partners go ahead and do that. But there is nothing open or good about what they are doing.
P.S. Apple is paying a per-handset fee to Nokia over patents. Apple and Microsoft have cross-license agreements. Apple isn't neither unique nor extraordinary in the patent lawsuit game. I'm not sure why they have to be held to a higher standard on everything... people don't claim they will stop buying Samsung phones because they sued LG, or how much they hate Nokia because they sued Apple (one of the first shots-across-the-bow actually).
Geez, nice hyperbolic story.
First, Apple is keeping to the requirement by offering a micro-USB cable.
Second, the reason they didn't use micro-USB is because it doesn't have the requisite number of pins. As we saw with Thunderbolt, the USB folks will *not* allow you to add non-standard pins to their connector.
This connector must support at least 2 amps of charging for the iPad (in the future presumably). That puts micro-USB right out of the picture.
It must also support digitally sending all the data necessary to support the 30-pin compatibility, including the upcoming HDMI and VGA adapters. Building any sort of intelligence into the cable or other end would require an actual USB interface chip and would require extending the USB specification in non-standard ways... not that you could push enough data on the 2 data pins to run a 720p HD display anyway, unless you piggy-backed some custom protocol on top of USB, then had some sort of hand-shake mode to figure that out... assuming the USB people didn't sue you for abusing their standard to begin with.
The connector itself is far better designed than any USB connector ever; it is reversible and it has self-cleaning contacts, yet it is stronger than micro-usb.
It's OK though; I expect a barrage of anti-Apple FUD every time they release a new device. I'm used to it by now. If you want a legit complaint, the price of the 30-pin adapters is ridiculous.
Steve Jobs, when introducing the iPad, said it was a device inbetween a phone and a PC.
Granted - some people are able to get by with just a tablet and it works well for them. And there are certainly some types of content-creation that work really well on tablets. But in general the tablet is an addition to your workflow, not a replacement for it.
Personally I find my iPad great for audio measurement using a dock-connector reference mic, taking notes, and drawing. I also use it to browse the web, answer email, etc. But writing code? I do that on my laptop.
Digging is ok in most parts of the country. But lets pick a 'big city' New York. Do you have any idea how much infrastructure is under those roads already? Oh which is used and which isnt? Not so simple a task anymore is it?
This is much less of a problem then most people realize. My north-Dallas suburb has all underground utilities (including electricity) running under the sidewalks (due to legacy layout there is no right-of-way zone) and Verizon managed to run fiber with zero issues and without digging up the sidewalks. Unfortunately Dallas proper is ATT so no fiber for those inside the city limits, which is funny because the much higher density would make it a better payoff. NYC is more complicated but ultimately it can (and is) being done.
The utilities tend to be segmented vertically, with more sensitive ones buried deeper, then with same-class services being spread out horizontally. The fiber was run by using machines that navigate conduit through the ground without actually digging the entire length up. This also allows you to run new conduit under existing services without disturbing them. I'm not sure how much sensing those machines have but it would be fairly easy to have metal-sensors, radar, ultrasound, etc in the dig head, along with actuation to allow you to steer it. This would let you avoid almost any issues by sensing when you are near a gas line or legacy copper and steering the cutting head around it (the conduit itself is flexible plastic). Funny enough, the densest downtown cores all have underground utility tunnels and the like which makes running lines there even easier.
What we do know is that Verizon was able to reduce their capex spend on legacy copper infrastructure in FIOS areas and that the actual rollout was less expensive and faster than anticipated. It will certainly pay for itself in less than 20 years. They also claim to have spent 20 billion on it, but when you look at their capex budgets over the past few years you can see that a lot of that is offset by less spending on the copper plant.
Think about that for a minute... For maybe 100 billion (less than 1/5 of the defense budget) we could roll out gigabit fiber to 90% of all homes and businesses in the United States. There is a ton of dark fiber criss-crossing the country for backbone purposes.
The problem isn't money and it isn't technical. The problem is that our institutions are dysfunctional (by design). Our Telco companies would rather pump the short-term stock price than invest in infrastructure - the new Verizon CEO killed future FIOS rollouts and did the handshake deal with cable to avoid competing with each other so they can focus on wireless revenue - a place where data caps and high prices ensure huge profits.
Our government has been hijacked by the "no new taxes ever" crowd, who deliberately cut taxes to introduce deficits, to justify cutting government services and reducing the pay/benefits (and thus quality) of government employees**. Then they point to the government they deliberately broke as justification for further cuts.
**Why is it that you only need to spend money to buy a good CEO? Why can't the government spend money to buy good civil servants? Or get more employees to reduce lines at places like the DMV or INS?
No new infrastructure has ever succeeded without massive government intervention. Part of that is you can only get financing when you can show a good chance of return on investment... but with new infrastructure you are stuck with the chicken and egg problem. Without the infrastructure there is no demand and without demand private enterprise won't build the infrastructure.
Government financed, cleared the way for, and rolled out the army to protect the trans-continental railroad. Without the largesse of the federal government the railroads would have only built the profitable lines to certain areas, on incompatible track gauges (check the history books). Without government-mandated air brakes and knuckle couplers we'd sti
Here's what I think happened: MS decided (along with half the industry) that tablets will gradually replace desktop computer and decided they had to invent a new GUI paradigm that made Windows tablet-friendly. Whereupon they made the same mistake they've made many times before â" they forgot that many of their users still need the old paradigm. We're still using laptops and desktops; we're even plugging keyboards and mice into our tablets and using them as desktops.
No, Microsoft continues to suffer from their "Windows-itis" disease, where to protect their existing Windows cash cow they insist on forcing it to be everywhere. See Windows Mobile/Windows CE, Kin, et al. That's one of the hallmarks of a company so blinded by their previous success they stop changing or innovating and work to extend and protect the cash cow (often until it is too late).
This is just a symptom of that... they desperately want to get in on the tablet game but since Windows has to be everywhere (and the same as much as possible) that means pushing the tablet interface onto the desktop. They also saw how easily people can switch to the Mac because of all the "iOS-isms" Apple has brought to the Mac, so they figured it would be a huge boost to their tablet efforts to have a consistent "Windows" brand.
What they forget is most people hate or are at best ambivalent about Windows as a brand and as much as Apple can just make a change and get everyone to fall in line, not even they replaced the Desktop for some iOS-like fullscreen-only interface.
If you look at it objectively, it is obvious that Apple isn't getting into the enterprise server market anytime soon and your server products division is doing quite well. But people are buying iPads and the lack of MS Office is teaching a whole new generation that they don't need Office anymore. That's a dangerous precedent to set. If Windows is a cash cow, Office is a whole herd. The choice is obvious - instead of risking millions on competing with the iPad (and pissing off your OEMs in the process), just start releasing everything for iOS. If you assume even just the corporate business iPad users bought it, that's already over a billion dollar a year business *after* Apple's cut. For zero risk and a few developer salaries.
We know Google makes a ton of their mobile revenue from iOS - that makes Android a puzzle as well. Why are you working so hard to piss off one of your largest markets? Of course Google needs to decide whether they are going to crap or get off the toilet... they own Motorola. If Motorola starts selling #1 devices in numbers, how long will Samsung, HTC, etc keep pushing Android? At some point they'll have to go their own way. If Google hamstrings Motorola so as not to compete with their OEMs, then what are they going to do about Amazon, Baidu, et al taking Google's R&D and ripping out all the Google services then replacing them with their own? How long will they continue to be Amazon's free R&D department? And how can they justify a 12 billion purchase of Motorola just to let them spin their wheels? What will Google do when Samsung gets jealous of Google's revenue and forks Android and replaces all the Google services with Samsung-branded services? How long until the other OEMs follow Samsung's lead?
In a sense, Microsoft has now decided to adopt this same problem as their own. If Surface sells like crazy, all the OEMs will jump ship. Why compete against Microsoft when you have to pay an additional $20-50 license tax on top? If it doesn't, then why did you waste your energy and money when you could be making billions off iPad apps *and* getting license revenue from the OEMs?
A bad store manager can leave a lasting trail of damage. Sounds like this store had a bad one and it rubbed off on the employees.
I don't see how this is a noteworthy story though... In any large retail operation you will have some bad "apples". It also sounds like Apple found out and fired most of them.
Strawman argument. The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and it is growing. Just in case that isn't clear, measured by value the US has manufactures more than any other country in the world by a wide margin. By itself the US manufacturing sector would be in top 5 economies in the world. The notion that "we don't manufacture anything anymore" is complete nonsense. The only change is that products with a high proportion of labor cost (labor intensive) are now manufactured where labor is cheaper. However a huge number of products have a low proportion of labor cost (capital intensive) and those are made here. We manufacture automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, agriculture products, chemicals, integrated circuits, and much much more. The death of US manufacturing has been greatly exaggerated.
The change in manufacturing in the US is that it is evolving somewhat like farming did 100 years ago - fewer workers as a percent of population but producing more. As a proportion of the population manufacturing jobs are going to continue to decrease for some time. That does not mean that the US will cease being a manufacturing powerhouse however.
This might be slightly OT but you make a good point and this is something that we, as a society, will have to deal with eventually.
At some point in the future there won't be a need for as much manual labor as we have now. Robots/machines will eventually take over most tasks - look at Foxconn buying a million (!) robots to start converting some assembly of electronics to robotic assembly. Look at what Musk is doing at Tesla and how the cars are made almost entirely by robots.
Either:
Work weeks will get shorter and some form of guaranteed income (or massive increases in minimum wage) will take place, thus having the average person work many fewer hours per week for the same or much higher pay than people get now for 40 hours of work. I don't see this as a bad thing - I suspect many (if not most) first-world people would be glad to continue their current lifestyle while working fewer hours - they'd get to spend more time with their family, pursuing hobbies (including spending money on them), etc.
Or:
Most people are going to end up poor and unemployed (leading to a vicious downward spiral where less consumer $$$ means less economic activity, further depressing the need for output, leading to people willing to work for scraps, further putting downward pressure on economies around the world, repeat until riot/revolution). We already have a massive glut of capital, running around shoving money at anything that smells like yield (the primary driver of the financial crisis - too much cheap money desperately looking for a place to invest, though certainly not the only driver). If all the resources continue to accumulate at the top then we may end up with a brutal police state that crushes most people while a few lords live in mansions, consuming luxury goods produced by robots solely for the rich. Prices for everything would skyrocket (despite the minimal cost of production) because the money is just changing hands between the various rich factory/resource owners.
Some of this is just a learning curve on the part of developers. As has been pointed out, a lot of the issues surround access to the file system but as long as the user selects a folder (via the OS' built-in privileged process proxy that presents the selection UI for your app) or drags it to your app, you can store a link to it that is part of your sandbox, including across reboots.
In this App's case, it would mean reworking his UI slightly to have users select folders with content in them, not individual movies. Then he can show a list of movies in that folder and let the user pick, all the while reading separate subtitle files or moving to the next movie with no issues.
There does need to be a category of Developer Utilities / System Utilities that allow things like asking for Admin rights. This is one place Apple is totally wrong. Sure, make the review process extra detailed and don't allow apps to go into that category unless they are truly utilities, but it is definitely needed.
The days of [app permissions] == [user permissions] are long over... We're just stuck with a broken security model that never anticipated people would be running so much code from so many sources, code that can't necessarily be trusted (or that itself loads data/code from untrusted sources). It's like the difference between traditional Unix permission bits and ACLs: once you use ACLs you realize how primitive user/group/owner is. Sandboxing is an attempt at limiting the permission of apps but it remains to be seen if that's the best way.
iOS shows you who will actually receive the message if you reply, which given the choices is probably the best option.
This hole is not unique to iOS, nor new. In fact it is only a hole insofar as you open a hyperlink from the message.
The real bug is that the carrier gateways don't validate the messages.
It is quite unfortunate and demonstrates that US leaders still don't "get" it. They think that prosecuting Assange will have some kind of effect on Wikileaks when nothing could be further from the truth.... or they're just trying to get back at him out of spite (same reason they tortured Manning when he was obviously guilty and a simple court martial would have seen him put in prison for the rest of his life. Why degrade ourselves?)
The reason the US isn't explicitly asking for extradition is probably because we intend to perform an "extraordinary rendition" and snag him from Sweden illegally (but with Swedish cooperation), then imprison him in Gitmo forever without trial.
I wish I were joking. My grandfather volunteered for WWII; It makes me sad that we have thrown all the things he fought for in the trash can, first in a blind attempt to fight communism (when the prudent course was just to let it die under its own weight just like the USSR did), then in a blind attempt to fight a "war on drugs", and now in a blind attempt to fight a "war on terror".
Oh well... so many Americans are petty and FYGM these days. I guess it's no surprise that our politicians are too. When we had the Soviets to fight against it forced us to push all objections out of the way and cooperate for the common good. We managed to do such great and big things back then... We voted to tax ourselves to build the Interstate Highway system. Imagine proposing a tax to build a national "Internet Highway" today!
The threat of communism put the Fear Of God(TM) into the rich and forced them to share the wealth, which in turn improved everyone's lives. Now it's all slipping away.
What a sad state of affairs.
It's not like BitTorrent is a widely-known standardized protocol with a handful of existing open-source clients...
So how exactly is BitTorrent supposed to survive (as a company) and continue improving the software?
There has to be some path to monetization. If you aren't paying for a product then you are the product, (being sold to marketers).
I've gotten to the point where I won't rely on anything offered for free because then you're just one corporate re-org, acquisition, etc away from being booted out in the cold. And who could blame people for wanting to eat or earn a living? They don't owe you anything.
I think their big mistake is not offering an ad-free experience for a small fee... then people can support further development whichever way they want.
Google's WebRTC proposal is very narrowly tailored, relies on stateful SIP, and is tied to their WebM video standard.
Microsoft's proposal is more flexible, stateless, simpler to implement, and is more "web-ish", eg: Relying on an exchange where my browser says "I can accept h264, webm, mpeg2" and the baby monitor says "I speak h264" so we use negotiated h264.
Basically Microsoft is saying that we should adopt a standard that makes it easy to interact with non-browser devices, phone/cell networks, etc. We should also make the API easier to use and stateless. The original WebRTC proposal is only concerned with letting Google+ users video-chat with other Google+ users and it shows.
I would urge you to go read the actual proposals before commenting on this:
Microsoft: http://html5labs.com/cu-rtc-web/cu-rtc-web.htm
Google's http://dev.w3.org/2011/webrtc/editor/webrtc.html
I would also point out that Microsoft is following the correct W3C procedure by making a proposal and asking for comments. In the past they would have just shipped it in IE and/or rolled it out automatically to all Windows users, thus making their standard the de-facto standard. We should reward this kind of participation and interaction, not condemn it.
I would also point out that Microsoft invented AJAX by just rolling out their own standard... the same way JSON was invented. Design by committee sucks in most cases and we'd be far better served by selecting from competing proposals or merging two competing proposals rather than requiring 15 people to sit down and agree on the definition of the draft standard of the proposal to consider altering the document title.
And how long is Google going to continue funding the R&D for Amazon, Baidu, etc? How much of a cut does Google get on each Kindle sold, given the huge amount of money they spent developing Android? (Hint: zero).
How long do you think Samsung will let Google reap the profits from Music, App, Movie, etc sales and the various services? What will Google's response be when Samsung starts releasing devices that only have the Samsung app store?
How long will Google let Motorola sit idle after spending 12 billion on it? How will the other handset makers take to Motorola having some top-selling models, eroding their profits? Or will Google hobble Motorola to prevent that?
Nothing about the current Android ecosystem makes any sense and the sooner Google makes a decision the better. Either spin off Motorola and admit it was a mistake (and force all Android vendors to use Google's services), or close the source and make them compete on their own (and really put Motorola to use).
They can't keep doing this half-way thing or they'll have the satisfaction of having everyone using Android and making zero dollars on it. Not exactly a great way to run a company.
Well good for us then; they'll be hobbled with baby versions of a state-controlled Internet and the rest of us will be benefitting from the real thing, assuming there is an actual advantage (I believe there is).
That is if libertarians* and conservatives don't succeed in reverting us to a corporatist theocracy, dominated by telco/cableco dualopolies.
At least when the liberals screw you they whisper sweet nothings and buy you a new dress. The conservatives smack you around and call you a whore.
* real free markets don't exist without government coercion, otherwise those willing to use brown-nosing, bribes, violence, collusion, etc monopolize enough critical services (eg railways, telecom) to effectively extract tolls on *all* commerce. Back during the libertarian wet-dream of small government in the late 1800s-1930s, Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry by owning all the major railroads, thus if you refused to cooperate you were denied shipping services by the railroad. Without the troublesome FDA, people sold radium-infused tonics that gave people jaw cancer and sold X-Ray shoe fitting machines that gave kids cancer. Without the EPA, companies just dumped industrial chemicals into rivers where it killed all the fish and caught one on fire. If sued, they just filed bankruptcy, moved down the road, and started up again. Funny enough how they never address how government got where it is today... Through massive monopolies, huge safety problems that tool thousands of lives, and massive pollution: all results of the "free market".
Right now the Mac app store makes no distinction between system/developer utilities and regular consumer applications. As a result, the list of available entitlements are too narrow. Regular users are baffled by the file system and getting it out of their faces is a great idea. Locking down apps is also good from a security perspective for most apps and users.
Apple just needs to make a special more rigorous review process for these sorts of apps and only allow those apps to request admin access or touch the file system outside the sandbox. In fact only the Developer and Utility categories need allow this sort of thing.
On a related note, Apple needs something like Windows' contracts so apps can specify the types of data they can provide or accept and let the system manage the interaction. This gives a safe clean way for apps to share data... The primary drawback of Apple's current "share nothing" model.
Seemingly like everything Google does these days, this is another half-hearted effort which sucks because I would really love to see someone stick it to the telco/cable dualopoly, especially now that Verizon has a back-room handshake deal not to compete with the cable companies for wireline and the cable companies won't start their own wireless network (look it up - VZW is buying spectrum from the cable co's and has terminated all further FIOS expansio, right about the time their old telco/infrastructure CEO retired and their new MBA CEO took over). We also have a bunch of republican state governments (sorry - so far it's 100% republican) that have made it illegal for city governments to deploy fiber, even if they sell access to third-party ISPs and don't run one themselves)
Anyway, Google is only going to roll out fiber to neighborhoods where at least 10% of the potential customers sign up in advance, not to the entire city. I could totally understand running your fiber backbone rings then waiting to extend it into individual neighborhoods until people sign up - limit your capex for deployment - but this seems a bit insane.
I also wish Apple/MS/et al would go after the market... it is obvious that the owners of legacy pipes intend to install toll roads on all internet access and have all made back-room handshake deals not to compete with each other. With billions in cash in the bank there is no reason the tech giants couldn't start an open-access internet utility to string fiber (just to the dense cities) to homes and businesses... Imagine Microsoft, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, et al throwing their weight behind OpenInternetCo and designating the top 50 metro markets in the US (which would cover a huge percentage of the population) to receive cheap gigabit internet. Once the network starts building up you can run your CDNs on it and avoid interconnect/peering fees. Over time more and more of the traffic can stay inside OpenInternetCo's network.
If they don't jump on some sort of bandwagon soon (deploying fiber, $$millions$$ on lobbying, etc) they will find their internet-based services useless as the gatekeepers ratchet down bandwidth caps and try their hardest to soak up all the profits. We are also destined to see more and more "our video service doesn't count against your cap, but Netflix/iTunes/Google Play sure does! Oh and your cap is being 'enhanced' to a lower and $5 cheaper tier this month but the upper tier will cost $40 more"
The hilarious thing is that people often use the density/rural argument to explain why that's impossible in the US** but Verizon's own FIOS numbers prove that is BS. Once you stop investing in copper upkeep, deploying fiber is a relatively cheap operation. Verizon says they spent 20 billion to deploy fiber across half their footprint, but if you look at capex+upkeep on copper you realize a huge chunk of that fiber cost was offset! Even if we assume 20 billion, then extrapolate from there OpenInternetCo could cover the top 50 metro areas for less than 100 billion, the amount of money that just Apple has as cash in the bank. Presumably they'd kick in cash and bring on investors so I would guestimate 25-50 billion from all the tech giants combined would be enough. If I were them, I'd buy Sprint to get access to a cellular provider to ensure fair competition in that space but also to get access to their Tier-1 backbone and cross-country fiber network. Also add in someone like Frontier or Embarq/Century and you have an existing (and profitable) base to build from. You could eventually roll fiber to less dense markets and cover 80-90% of the US, and turn a profit.
**This argument also doesn't account for places like Dallas, TX that is plenty dense enough (and certainly in the city core) to support fiber deployments - the suburbs have it at far less density but that's because the suburbs were part of the initial FIOS deployment but the city proper is ATT territory and ATT isn't going to divert *any* CxO bonuses to infrastructure under any circumstances.
The magnets are still available for sale, but some retailers agreed to pull them because the CPSC asked them to.
You can still buy them from the company's website.
The recall was a long time ago to clarify the packaging and all the current products clearly say not for children and specifically mention the danger of swallowing them.
The owner of the business must be republican because he uses it as an opportunity to bash Obama, but he is also playing this up for the same reason all small business owners tend to hyperventilate about everything - publicity to drum up sales.
The CPSC -is- suing the maker in an attempt to get them banned but I highly doubt the lawsuit will succeed. Frankly I'd rather they go after all the snake oil peddlers and herbal supplement/homeopathic makers. That shit does far more damage to many thousands of people every year. Or maybe we could break up the telco/cable dualopoly but fat chance.
We can only hope this stops most people from posting YouTube comments. People are idiots. Worse, they're often self-righteous delusional idiots.
In real life you can be shunned or punched in the face. Online? Not so much.
Oh so if I install this random Root Certificate Authority on my machine, thus granting some random hackers the ability to perform MITM attacks against all my SSL sessions, they can perform a MITM attack on in-app purchase transactions?
Shocking, simply shocking.
FYI: this exists so enterprise customers can install their root CA certs so their internal certificates will be considered valid.
At its core, this is the same problem we have with SSL in general. CAs are a single point of failure and one rogue certificate or one hacked CA breaks the entire chain of trust.
You are over thinking it and/or biased. Apple uses glue because it is faster to manufacture and it frees you from certain structural constraints. I don't like that from a repair standpoint but I understand why they do it.
The MacBook Retina has soldered memory because that allows the case to be smaller and the structure doesn't need accomadation for an access panel. It also simplifies the trace routing since you don't need to deal with a memory slot. I would also bet that 90% of their users never upgrade the memory in their laptops, so why compromise just for the 10%? I don't like this choice but it isn't some arbitrary scheme to scam people.
This seems like a much easier way to send spam... Most users will be using the stock mail app so just install, ask for the world in privileges (most users just click yes to anything), then send spam in the background using the user's account.
If you are smart, you avoid sending any spam to that user's contacts and intercept any replies that contain the spam text as a quoted string. That would make it far less likely for the victim to notice anytime soon.
Even if the spam isn't coming from Android phones right now, I'm sure someone will do it eventually.
Well if you RTFA, you will see that it is actually the decryption that fails. The package itself validates as being properly downloaded (the bits sent by the server are the bits received), but the binary is corrupt and not properly encrypted so the OS refuses to run it.
The problem appears to be in the distribution system that signs the binary then distributes the package across the CDNs, after App Review approves it. The current theories are that the signing system is somehow incorrectly signing a mismatch of old and new code but once the caches expire it seems to fix itself. This may have something to do with the delta update system since it can do partial updates now... Presumably each distribution zone is signing the app when received and the zone may have received new metadata before it receives the updated bits, thus signing the old app executable with the new binary's signature. That's all speculation for now.
I'd have more sympathy for Google if they weren't continuing the practice of suing over FRAND standards-essential patents.
Motorola (and now Google) have asserted that even though Qualcomm pays a license fee for Motorola's FRAND patents that they have the right to retroactively revoke that license for chips Apple buys and force Apple to pay a higher royalty directly. It's a terrible and underhanded way to do business and if the courts let them get away with it no one is safe, not even if you buy technology from another vendor who has licensed the patents in question because the patent holder will be able to dictate terms to that vendor that YOU are no longer a valid customer, then come after you... All after you already shipped devices, putting you on the hook for back royalties!
Motorola is also articulating a theory that FRAND now means a percentage of the sales price of devices which is insane. Numbers like 2% of the iPhone retail price or Xbox retail price. It has never been used this way in the past, and seems to be an attempt to stifle competition.
The Samsung case is a more straightforward one of Samsung retaliating against Apple by using FRAND patents, in violation of the standards and their previous agreements. Now whether Apple should have sued them in the first place I don't know... They have been copying Apple's designs and I guess Apple feels like they stabbed them in the back by using their manufacturing knowledge to help their mobile division get a head start... But all of that may have been perfectly legal which would make Apple's lawsuits sour grapes. What I don't understand is that Apple seems to represent more revenue as a customer than Samsung gets as a competitor and these lawsuits seem to be pushing them to use other vendors so why continue them? If I were Samsung management I'd push hard for a quick settlement.
The other side to this coin, and one I think Google is testing with the Nexus Q, is that an adverse ITC ruling can stop you dead because it prohibits imports. The second is that if China experiences any political upheavals or major natural disasters, you are well and truly SOL because you have no backup facilities or alternate vendors. Personally, I'd be uncomfortable with that and I would require at least some percentage (say 10%) of my product must be manufactured entirely in a first-world country or possibly even my home turf so I would have a favorable political climate.
For Apple, get visas, bring some of those engineers/managers to the states, and partner with Foxconn to setup a manufacturing company here. Yes, those units will be slightly more expensive, but it would give me a base of talent I could scale up if the SHTF and not leave me entirely unable to ship product for years if there is a military coup or something in China.