Did she bequeath the iPad or the apps/data on the iPad and the iTunes account to go with it? I'm pretty sure that even if the device is locked, that you can still do a factory reset on it and then have access to the iPad. Granted you would lose all the apps and data on the device, but you would still have the device to use as you wish.
If she bequeathed the iTunes account, then the account email and password should have been in the will or related documents, if not, then it's reasonable to assume she just left the hardware which you can reset and then have full use of.
No, it was just the iPad.
The problem is that since iOS7, Apple implemented a kill switch called "Activation Lock" in an attempt to slow down the theft of the devices - with it, the owner can remotely wipe the device, and more importantly, that device cannot be used by anyone else, thus ensuring that any stolen iPads, iPhones, etc. are rendered worthless.
What likely happened is just that - the iPad got locked and is right now, effectively worthless.
Of course, Apple has to be careful too - they can't really offer a way to unlock those devices because it's really a backdoor to Activation Lock and a way for criminals to well, steal your device and then cry to Apple to unlock it saying it belonged to their parents so they could resell it as more than just scrap.
It's really one of those catch-22 situations - Apple can't contact the original owner to verify if that iPad really belongs to them and they're not just some criminal looking to change their $0 iPad into a $400 iPad on the stolen goods market. And they can't just take those documents because well, the family could come back again next week with another stolen iPad and do the same thing.
And no, Activation Lock is practically impossible to defeat - if you reset it, it'll ask for the Apple ID credentials before you can proceed. If you get an unlocked one and try to restore it (with Find my iThing on), iTunes refuses to do it until you turn it off (which requires the password). If you force DFU and reload, it won't work until you re=login again, etc.
It's one of those things - what can Apple do? Remember the goal is to make the illegally acquired resale value zero because a user buying it can't do anything with it. And any way for Apple to help this family can be exploited (hell, do you KNOW that the iPad they got bequeathed wasn't stolen?). Apple requiring a court order basically means the courts will have to ascertain the identity of everyone and be enough of a pain that even a thief probably won't go through that effort. Certainly not one who wants to be identified should the iThing really be stolen.
They may have a chain of evidence though - the store receipt where the iPad was purchased on a credit card, a credit card bill with the charge on it and the billing name and address which can be compared against their Apple ID account, a death certificate with the same name and address on it, a will with the same name and address, and the iPad, whose serial number will match that on the receipt. Woe be to those who bought it at a store who doesn't record serial numbers, though!
How screwed up would the project be had he not been such an "asshole" as you describe?
The truth hurts. Just because people can't handle it and get butthurt doesn't make the person an asshole for pointing out the truth.
I'd also like to know how you feel about other CEO's out there that have proven far more of an asshole than Theo could do in 20 lifetimes. He's a nice guy by comparison. Trust me.
It takes a very special person to be able to be an asshole and not alienate people. Steve Jobs is a famous example, but there's also Linux Torvalds, and Theo.
The asshole-ish nature of those people generally turns people off. However, they also have the rare ability to motivate people to doing the right thing. Jobs is an asshole, but he also managed to bring out people to do better work - he didn't accept crap if he knew it could be done better. Likewise, Linus and others are the same - they aren't afraid to call it crap.
The problem is, a lot of people don't realize that and try to emulate them by being assholes and making life miserable for everyone without any redeeming qualities. It's those qualities that allowed them to be assholes and still get stuff done, not the other way around.
The question is not how many freemium games there are, it's whether their existence is impacting the market for purchased games. In ages past shareware and freeware had the lions share of the PC gaming market (at least among every gamer I knew in middle and high school, and most of my older friends as well), for the simple reason that nobody had $30 to throw away on a game that *might* be good. Consoles were the only place that purchased games dominated, for the simple reason that there were no free games available - but everyone I knew who had a console also had a huge library of free PC games.
Well, on consoles, It started with DLC, which was innocent enough - you played through the content, they provided expansions as DLC rather than brand new games, etc.
Then some craftier ones noted that they could offer DLC on the get-go, so-called Day One DLC where you can purchase upgrades and such right at the start.
It took Android (credit belongs to Android, really) to take freemium to the next level by offering the games for free and having users buy more smurfberries or play credits or whatever, which now extends into the console world with purchased addons and all that.
And now you have Microsoft and Sony in the last gen catching up by being able to offer free games that weren't a marketing gimmick.
Nowadays, it looks like it's used to buy your way into the game - don't want to grind? $1 will get you a bunch of upgrades and gold and whatever.
So at least one company gets it - you don't spend $60 only to be bombarded for $20 season passes for addons the moment the game is released.
And it's such a bad problem the EU is considering motions towards telling when free really means free (with paid addons). Because a lot of mobile games are now making it such that you get a demo, pay for level 1, pay for level 2, etc.
I see stuff online that says normally an SSID is broadcast every 10mS or 100mS (10mS seems low to me). 10 packets per second isn't really a lot, although maybe once every 1 second would be less stupid. I mean when you open a directory in a file browser, it can populate with files for 2-3 seconds if it's large--your photos directory maybe. Why do we need advertisement 10 times per second?
Aside from that, idle access points--even at 100mS between SSID advertisements--don't seem like they'd degrade network too much. In-use access points will, but then we're back to not letting other people use Wifi because you want to use WIfi.
Here's something people don't realize about WiFi - besides the network backbone the access point connects to, WiFi devices on the same frequency communicate with each other too.
If you and your neighbour use the same WiFI channel or close to it, the two APs are actually handshaking between themselves at the management frame level (Layer 2), even though they're not actually on the same network, same SSID, or whatever. They're coordinating between themselves on usage.
And beacons are more than a "WiFi here!" broadcast, they're also used to help mobile stations save power by keeping the radio off longer. Inside the beacon is a bitmap that's indexed by association ID and tells if the AP has buffered packets for it. So a mobile station can on association tell an AP that it wants to check for traffic every 5 beacon times. The AP can either agree, refuse (perhaps there's no more packet memory) or negotiate a different interval. Then the mobile station goes to sleep if there's no traffic, and wakes up the receiver every 5 beacon periods to catch a beacon frame. If there's no traffic for it, it goes back to sleep for another 5 beacon times. If there is traffic, then it wakes up the transmitter and retrieves the packets from the AP buffers.
All that is contingent on the AP having enough buffer to store the packets (it knows it has to store it for at most 5 beacon periods - after that, it's free to drop them)
The other side effect is well, attempts to modernize the lowlevel management protocol have to take legacy devices into account. Even worse, all it needs is a legacy device on the same frequency. It doesn't matter that you have no 802.11b devices on your network, just having one on another network, same frequency will automatically disable any optimizations (because if they can't be decoded by the 802.11b station, there's a chance of a collision or interference).
Also what's to stop people setting up honeypot networks named "xfinitywifi", letting you right in regardless of login credentials and packet-sniffing everything you do?
Why bother going that far?
Just have them provide credentials and always forward to a "invalid password" page. They'll probably try 2-3 times or so and you'll have captured the login information.
Which you can then turn around and connect to your neighbour's AP and get internet for free.
Bonus points for using a higher-powered access point and buying a real SSL certificate.
2: Buy a device that can allow one to click some "accept" buttons and allow themselves to shoot themselves in the foot. Yes, malware can be an issue with this since full control of the device can be obtained by the user.
We had this same war in the early 1990s when TV set top boxes were poised to bring us an Internet analog, but open computers won out. Do we want to lose this victory and go back to only allowing corporate board members having the ability to dictate what we can and cannot do with -our- devices... the ones that we paid for?
I prefer option #2, and some type of speed bump, so the user can leave the walled garden, but they are alerted to the fact so they know damn well know they cannot just walk into Mordor. Right now, the Nexus line does a good job of this, because one has to do several deliberate actions to get root or developer access... something that can't just be done by accident.
Because #2 is easily accomplished by jailbreaking on iOS as well, and even back when it was an involved procedure of over 100 steps, you could easily get Joe Average to do it if you could motivate them. (Pirated apps, "sexy cheerleaders see pic!" apps, etc). In fact, the first iOS worm came about because a ton of people were jailbreaking and part of the process involved installing OpenSSH. And they were leaving the password at default.
These people jailbreaking weren't motivated by "openness" to get them to jailbreak, they wanted to do something - perhaps some cool app or something, so they blindly followed all the steps, including downloading and installing an SSH client on Windows, so they could have the cool app.
It turns out that Android permission lists, steps to allow non-market binaries, etc., are no match. I mean, you can trust Amazon.com to not screw you over, or Humble Bundle. I mean, there's nothing wrong with leaving that unchecked, after all, Amazon and Humble Bundle need it, so it's safe, right?
And there you go - roadblocks are levelled. Joe User, in an attempt to get Amazon's free app of the day, or spending $5 on an Android game bundle, will now disable the very protection that keeps him safe. All his friends need to do is show him some cool app and send it to him and he'll blindly install it. (I'm actually surprised this hasn't really happened yet - remember all those Windows worms that inspected your contact list and sent themselves to everyone on them? It only takes a little brainpower to see how malware could easily do the same over SMS or something).
Essentially all of the Android malware comes from non-Google app stores, or sideloaded APKs. And with respect to the malware that does manage to make it into the Play Store, F-Secure says "the Play Store is most likely to promptly remove nefarious applications, so malware encountered there tends to have a short shelf life.â
Except well, for some markets, like say, China, the only app stores available are third party ones with questionable trust values.
And that checkbox is useless because there are perfectly valid reasons why you want to install apps not from Google Play - Amazon App Store, and Humble Bundle, for instance. Legit app stores, but by using them you have to disable one of the most powerful protections Android has.
Of course, the real reason Android is exploited more is easy - it's so damn easy to install well, pirated apps. Why spend $5 on some high end game when you can download it from free from AppCake and other sites? And given how many people grab trojaned installers and keygens on Windows, people assume that cracked and pirated apps are "clean" and blindly install them.
Sure you can pirate apps on iOS, but you need to jailbreak or find someone to do enterprise signing for you. Though with Apple buying TestFlight (one of the largest ways to "beta" test or test-sign apps) I guess Apple might crack down on users who use it just to sign cracked apps. Either way, it's a step up in difficulty. Though, for some peculiar reason or other, no one has tried to trojan a cracked app for iOS. There are iOS worms that exploit the fact that people blindly install OpenSSH and don't change the pasword, but cracked apps on iOS oddly haven't been trojaned. There's certainly no reason why they can't, but given how long iOS piracy has been around, it seems unusual.
By stealing so much from these exchanges that they end up closing... they are just destabilizing the currency and cause the price of bitcoins to plummet. Any hacker doing this for profit is likely quite retarded.
Why? I mean, so what if it plummets? The guys who got this exchange ran off with over half a million dollars. Without being traced to their real identities.
Even if it plunges to half its value, it's still over a quarter million dollars. Not bad for what's involved, really. There's very few other crimes you can do that'll gather that much return with very little risk - most physical attacks run real risks of getting caught. Once the BTC is in their wallets, they're home free - they just need to cover their tracks (maybe).
Hell, robbing a bank generally only nets you a few thousand dollars and an extreme risk of getting caught.
Stealing credit card numbers works, but it's a LOT of work selling them and the potential of getting caught is high.
Stealing BTC, even if it depresses the price, is far quicker, less risky and there are many ways to launder the BTC.
Ok, I don't understand how bitcoin works, but ultimately they're just encryped hash files on a disk, right? So unless the other person spends them before you do and you have a backup, how can they be stolen?
Thing is, "spending" in bitcoin basically equates to "transfer X BTC from wallet Y to wallet Z". Which can be done by anyone at any time as long as they have access to the key to the wallet.
So all the crooks do is transfer the balance from the wallet to their own and wait for it to appear on the blockchain to confirm it. Most likely, you won't notice in time and it's locked in. Once it's in the blockchain, it's too late.
When I recruit people, having a Facebook profile at all is typically a negative thing. Not enough to disqualify them for a position, but they better make up for it in some other way. If the person has no social media accounts traceable to them, then it's a huge plus.
And yet, having a FB profile is generally required if you're security conscious, because you cannot control what your friends do otherwise. Don't want to be tagged? Well, unless you have a profile, you can't block it! Etc. etc. etc.
So yes, I have a FB profile. I hardly ever log into it (maybe once every couple of months when FB updates their security settings). I don't post anything on it and all I have is minimal. Hell, you can find out more about me from my LinkedIn than my FB. (I also have only 7 friends, and about 10 on the "please add me" list that I haven't decided what I wanted to do with).
I'm not really sure what the iPhone introduced that was new? Maybe virtual game distribution (software-only, no cartridges) and online sales (App Store)?
PalmOS devices had software apps long before the iPhone. The only thing that the iPhone has going for it is that it was kissed by Steve Jobs.
Well, the iPhone was the first usable smartphone for the masses. It didn't have an App Store other than web apps (remember those?). You went to a web site, then you simply tapped an icon to add it to your homescreen which was really a glorified bookmark.
Now, what it REALLY had was a kickass HTML engine - mobile phones in those days had crap for web browsers - the "best" was Opera Mobile, a $30 app if they had it for your phone (and by best, I mean, actually does a half-decent job of rendering it like on a computer). Everything else was like WAP or rendered like Mosaic in today's world. But the iPhone featured Webkit, which was the same as the desktop renderer, giving you a desktop-like browsing experience with support for modern standards.
That was the iPhone's claim to fame - it was a phone, an iPod, and an Internet communicator. (The latter referring to the web browser).
Of course, the App Store came a year later. And it was popular because it was ultra-convenient. You could browse and get apps on the go. PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc., they all required you to go to a computer, browse some third party website, then purchase the app which you downloaded to your hard drive (heaven forbid if the website refused multiple downloads). You then ran the installer app to mark it for installation and then forced a sync with your drive where the app was installed. Repeat for every update, too.
Apple simply made it so the user could do it all without involving a PC and on the road - just browse the app store, tap Purchase, and it's downloaded and installed automagically. And re-downloads are allowed always, and updates were semi-automatic.
Later Palms added the ability to have an "app store" that was merely a bookmark to built in web browser. Depending on the store, you could download the raw PDB file and have it install. Maybe.
The problem only exists with "inventions" that are none and exist only to corner a market without actually adding anything to it, from one-click-patents to patented round corners on devices.
One click is a utility patent. Rounded corners is not patented. The closest thing to it is a design patent Apple owns of a slate like device, with rounded corners, a grid of icons on one of the flat sides, with one row of said icons static while the rest of the grid is changeable.
And yes, it makes a HUGE difference - rounded corners is not patented. Because of one manufacturer's perchant for making a custom Android UI that copied those details down to practically the icons. No one back then was mistaking an Android device as an iPhone, other than the new Samsung Galaxy S where the first comment was "iPhone Clone!" in every review.
(Want to know why Android has a home screen? Or why the launcher doesn't have a static dock? Hello patent avoidance). As a design patent, all the frills are AND - you must have A AND B AND C AND D to violate it. If you simply get rid of B and do something else, you aren't violating it.
(Funny how/. claim people need to know more about IT and computing, and yet know very little about IP law especially given how it affects them).
Serving: 6. Microwave about 75ml of milk for 45s. 7. Put sweetener in the bottom. In my opinion, Nutrasweet and clones are better than even sucrose -- the bitterness improves the coffee. 8. Put a couple of teaspoons of coffee in the sieve and poor boiling water over it. 9. Whisk the milk. 10. Pour in and add chocolate sprinkles.
The sieve doesn't need cleaning. You don't even need to empty the coffee out except after a couple of days or when it's too full. Literally tap against the side of the bin and you're done. No cleaning, no clogging up the sink, no blowing $hundreds on coffee and generating a ton of plastic waste.
My coffee beats the shit out of Starbucks et al. Indeed, unless you drink coffee neat, it beats all the local independent cafes bar who charge 15x more.
Yes, you can make better coffee yourself, there's never been the argument. The thing is, a Keurig, and other systems, make it effectively a three step problem - turn it on, insert pod, push button and coffee comes out.
Sure it's crap, that's not the point. The point is that it's easy, fast, and can be done while you're still trying to open your eyelids.
It's why drip coffeemakers are standard for decades - they're relatively simple to operate (not as easy as a Keurig, but for making bulk quantities, they're easy).
And that's the key issue - there are tons of ways to make great coffee. The problem is if you just want a shot of caffeine in the morning, even a shit cup would do to wake you up. Maybe enough so you can prepare a real cup of coffee.
It's why Starbucks is popular - they handle allt he complex making steps for you in an industrialized fashion.
What you need to do is make it so your method can be reduced to a single button press and it does everything. Of course, the compromises needed to make it suitable for mass-production and cheap enough for home purchase would compromise it as well.
Also, Keurig coffee pods are hilariously expensive compared to other coffee. 8$ for 6 cups of coffee, or grind your own and get a gallon or two for the same price.
That's rather overpriced, I don't want to know where you shop. The most expensive I see is $13 for 18 cups of coffee (or around 70 cents per cup).
Costco and other sell knockoff compatible pods for far less - a box of 40 for $20 or less, or even bulk pod packs.
Of course, you could also use the $20 thing to use your own grinds. Just requires a bit more cleaning up.
Anecdotal, but a friend of mine is a teacher who has implemented a video-game style "points" system
Every student starts with 0 points at the beginning of the year, and counts up from there. At the end of the semester, everything is exactly the same. Total grade is the exact same balance of homework, quizzes, tests, etc... but instead of students bouncing around (A after the first few assignments, down to a C after a bad test, up to a B in a few weeks, back down to a C after skipping some homework, etc) they just count up up up and can see each threshold as they approach it.
Anecdotal, but he's noticed a definite improvement in overall student participation and engagement. Instead of working hard to try and maintain your grade, you're working from the ground up and can better visualize the progress.
That's rather interesting. I suppose it also makes "extra credit" (or bonus points) much more interesting as it could push you up a mark if you're near the threshold (far too often extra credit is imposed at times where it doesn't really help all that much, leading to some students to simply not try).
I wonder if he's noticed any sort of drop off near the end of the term as the grades get closer to the final mark - those students who are satisified simply stop doing stuff having worked hard at the beginning, while others work diligently to get their mark up higher.
Nope. The early mp3 player where drag and drop. Connect to computer, drag music onto device.
The first iPod where only useful on Mac with iTunes.
Of course they moved to windows, but you still need there precious application to use it as designed.
Clearly, you have let Apple dictate your narrative.
Nope, the early MP3 players were custom software utilities.
Rio PMP - you needed to use their software and the parallel port adapter to load MP3s onto the internal storage, or almost-like-SmartMedia-but-not-quite external storage.
Nomad Jukebox - USB 1.1, requires custom driver and custom software application to load. "Explorer" functionality was provided by a third party app you installed.
The later MP3 players started using USB MSC.
Either way, loading a Nomad over USB 1.1 was a several-hour-long wait provided the relatively crappy software itself didn't crap out midway through.
USB 2.0 was just wrapping up when the iPod came out in 2001, it wouldn't be in most new PCs until a couple of years later. In the meantime, Firewire was the fastest way to load up the iPod storage with stuff - taking minutes rather than hours.
Oh, did I ever mention that if your ID3 tags were just slightly out of place (two similar but not exact entries in a field like artist or album) on the Nomad, you got very strange things, including oddball crashes and hangs? I got to learn a very nice ID3 bulk tag editor to fix them so the Nomad would actually work properly. iTunes and such handled them properly and wrote the database properly.
Point: there are quite a few Columbia River dams downstream of Wanapum, not just one. There is only one below Wanapum and above the free-flowing stretch of the Columbia, but that is only about 60 miles or so. Then there are a few hundred more miles of river with several more dams.
There's a number of dams upstream as well - in fact, above the 49th.
It's kind of interesting since the US has a treaty with Canada over the Columbia river - for a long time, the US has been paying Canada (BC, more specifically) to help control the flow. That treaty hasn't expired yet, but the treaty allows for renegotiation of rates and such, which happens within the next year or so. Naturally, the US doesn't want to pay since they believe the electricity generated north of the border more than compensates for calming the river downstream south of the border.
Who gets their way? It'll be interesting, since the primary reason for it is to regulate the flow upstream
Then learn who the hell owns a device once it has been purchased and act accordingly. The OWNER should not be locked out of their device or policed by their device in any fashion.
They are. Their customers (i.e., not you) have basically said that they are incapable of looking after their stuff, so they would want someone else to.
And given what you see on the Internet today with spam, DDoS, botnets and other crap, it appears that the general public does not want to make the computer an end onto itself - after all computers should simplify life, not make it filed with tons of updates and stuff. (Ever notice how despite the intent of computers and such to automate manual procedures, it usually doesn't? Stuff like backups (something only a computer needs) only happen automatically if you pay for a premium version - wtf? It's no wonder people don't do a bunch of computer chores).
And why is it Apple is the bully, when they haven't forcibly removed apps or other content from users? I mean, Amazon's done it, Google's done it, Valve's done it (yes, they've deleted games from user libraries). Apple? Nope. They haven't removed an app from a user - every app they removed from the App Store, as long as you have a copy somewhere, can still be used locally. Funny, that.
Next time you're deleting spam from your inbox and retweaking your filters, or looking through your weblogs at all the probes, remember, you want those users policing themselves? You'd probably be cleaning out dozens of random text spam from your text messages/Google Hangouts/etc by now as marketers realize that they can spam everything through SMS and phone botnets.
Make it illegal to keep secret the details of settlement agreements.
The problem is that there is value in the secrecy and people that are wronged, often just want a pound of flesh, not justice. Basically, it's "blackmail" for victims inside a legal framework. If it were illegal (as normal blackmail is), it wouldn't exist. The legal frame work is the incentive for the corporations to give in (w/o it, there's no incentive).
Given the cost of legal representation to extract a pound of flesh, eliminating this form of legalized reverse blackmail is probably just a recipe for big corporations to out lawyer people. If society instead wanted justice, it wouldn't be an issue.
Not sure that outlawing settlements w/ confidentiality agreements is a good alternative, but it certainly could be an alternative, but with both sides agree? My guess is that not only probably not, the lawyers would lobby against it (since they get paid from settlement money).
Actually, there's a third path. It's to negotiate a non-confidentiality clause into the settlement.
Basically the wronged party brings suit to the wronger. The two get together and hammer out a settlement (this is normal - most lawsuits are settled rather than go through the courts). One party wants confidentiality and they offer something for it. The other party is free to negotiate terms that don't include it, but then they need to give something up.
Heck, perhaps they tried for it - and got a point where it was $20K if you don't want confidentiality, $80k if you do. Yes, it's a give-and-take, and for most people, that pound of flesh that's bigger is what they want.
$60k to keep my mouth shut? Where's that dotted line?!
You're definitely right that short-term thinking can damage a company's long-term prospects, but I don't see how increasing energy costs today to be green does anything to help the long-term ROI. Of course we all need to eventually shift our energy production to less-impactful sources, but that'll happen at roughly the same pace no matter what Apple does, and Apple could just choose the lowest-cost route now and then shift when greener sources become more cost-effective. It does make sense to make some projections of future energy costs and make decisions regarding long-term capital investments (e.g. the design of data centers), based on expected net costs, even if the long-term best option means front-loading some of the costs, but that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about paying more for today's energy.
Except the long term ROI is potential increased sales. Remember that buying Apple is partly buying into an image, and they want to maintain that image. And people want to buy into the image.
Apple being green is part of the marketing plan of Apple, and if you note all their product releases, they clearly state how green they are.
A lot of people are into buying green products, even paying more for it. Enough so that there's an industry term for making false environmental marketing claims - greenwashing.
Apple likes to market green and environmental friendliness, and they definitely do not want to be found greenwashing. So paying more for electricity now allows them to be honest in becoming greener and not some investigative journalist's dream of pointing out greenwashing.
And there's also nothing wrong with being ethical at the expense of profits - at the end of the day, one has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror.
People have shown they're willing to give up profits to be ethical - see the rise of so-called ethical funds at any financial institution - the ones that don't invest in companies that are bad for the environment, produce products that lead to human suffering, etc (i.e., no oil, tobacco, weapons, etc). The ROI on those has traditionally been less (face it - oil companies make a LOT of profit, as do tobacco), but it lets people sleep at night knowing their retirement isn't funded on people getting killed, maimed, addicted, or destroying the future.
The homeopathy section has plenty of Latin words and mathematical terms, but many of its remedies are so diluted that, statistically speaking, they may not contain a single molecule of the substance they purport to deliver.
I don't think they even bother doing the dilutions. They say they do, and probably have someone doing it for show, but that's it. The mass production just uses plain old sugar made into pills and regular water.
After all, how can you tell? The end result is the same whether you actually do the dilutions or just said you did. Heck, you don't even need any of the materials you diluted from.
And no, using equipment doesn't help - it falls below the detectable threshold for chemical analysis equipment.
Hrm, perhaps it's time to open my own homeopathy factory. The markups are awesome.
To be fair, an HDD can use its platters as a flywheel to quickly flush its (relatively tiny) buffer. I never did see proof that that was ever done, though.
None used it to flush the cache because it is too risky - the platters are not maintaining a fixed speed (they're slowing down to generate electricity) so writes to platters become tricky as the timing is off which means you can overwrite more than you expect.
Far better to just dump the buffers.
In fact, the electricity generated by the spinning platters slowing down is used to park the heads - it's called an emergency head park because it basically dumps the electricity into the voice coil that flings the heads to the mechanical stops in the park area. It's fairly violent and most hard drives have much less emergency head park life than standard power down (where the drive moves the heads to the parking area in a controlled fashion) life - a drive may have 50,000+ head load/unload cycles, but under 10,000 emergency park cycles.
You can tell because a soft-park makes only the smallest of clicking sounds on a drive when it spins down. But emergency park it and it's a much louder clunk.
As for deleting the data off the device, I'd probably simply encrypt everything on the device, with the key stored in a specific chip designed to dump said key if anything triggers it. No Key = No Data.
This technique is incredibly common - the iPhone has done it ever since the 3GS 5 years ago.
I would think the Boeing one goes one further and rather than storing the key encrypted with a per-ASIC key in flash, the key is in SRAM that's wiped when battery power is cut or other thing.
And it's often hardware based - the software is only responsible for triggering a RNG to generate bits for the key that's loaded through hardware pathways into the key store (inaccessible to software). The encryption is then enabled by software and the media encryption is handled completely independently of software.
If it's a PCI-e port on a cable, does that mean you can plug non-storage devices in too? I can see applications for things like video walls or GPGPU number-crunchers, where very 'sata' port is potentially a way to cram another video card in.
And yet, that exists today, it's called Thunderbolt. Which is effectively a PCIe x2 over a cable. Thunderbolt drive arrays exist for performance gains that go beyond what SATA has and all that.
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No, it was just the iPad.
The problem is that since iOS7, Apple implemented a kill switch called "Activation Lock" in an attempt to slow down the theft of the devices - with it, the owner can remotely wipe the device, and more importantly, that device cannot be used by anyone else, thus ensuring that any stolen iPads, iPhones, etc. are rendered worthless.
What likely happened is just that - the iPad got locked and is right now, effectively worthless.
Of course, Apple has to be careful too - they can't really offer a way to unlock those devices because it's really a backdoor to Activation Lock and a way for criminals to well, steal your device and then cry to Apple to unlock it saying it belonged to their parents so they could resell it as more than just scrap.
It's really one of those catch-22 situations - Apple can't contact the original owner to verify if that iPad really belongs to them and they're not just some criminal looking to change their $0 iPad into a $400 iPad on the stolen goods market. And they can't just take those documents because well, the family could come back again next week with another stolen iPad and do the same thing.
And no, Activation Lock is practically impossible to defeat - if you reset it, it'll ask for the Apple ID credentials before you can proceed. If you get an unlocked one and try to restore it (with Find my iThing on), iTunes refuses to do it until you turn it off (which requires the password). If you force DFU and reload, it won't work until you re=login again, etc.
It's one of those things - what can Apple do? Remember the goal is to make the illegally acquired resale value zero because a user buying it can't do anything with it. And any way for Apple to help this family can be exploited (hell, do you KNOW that the iPad they got bequeathed wasn't stolen?). Apple requiring a court order basically means the courts will have to ascertain the identity of everyone and be enough of a pain that even a thief probably won't go through that effort. Certainly not one who wants to be identified should the iThing really be stolen.
They may have a chain of evidence though - the store receipt where the iPad was purchased on a credit card, a credit card bill with the charge on it and the billing name and address which can be compared against their Apple ID account, a death certificate with the same name and address on it, a will with the same name and address, and the iPad, whose serial number will match that on the receipt. Woe be to those who bought it at a store who doesn't record serial numbers, though!
It takes a very special person to be able to be an asshole and not alienate people. Steve Jobs is a famous example, but there's also Linux Torvalds, and Theo.
The asshole-ish nature of those people generally turns people off. However, they also have the rare ability to motivate people to doing the right thing. Jobs is an asshole, but he also managed to bring out people to do better work - he didn't accept crap if he knew it could be done better. Likewise, Linus and others are the same - they aren't afraid to call it crap.
The problem is, a lot of people don't realize that and try to emulate them by being assholes and making life miserable for everyone without any redeeming qualities. It's those qualities that allowed them to be assholes and still get stuff done, not the other way around.
Well, on consoles, It started with DLC, which was innocent enough - you played through the content, they provided expansions as DLC rather than brand new games, etc.
Then some craftier ones noted that they could offer DLC on the get-go, so-called Day One DLC where you can purchase upgrades and such right at the start.
It took Android (credit belongs to Android, really) to take freemium to the next level by offering the games for free and having users buy more smurfberries or play credits or whatever, which now extends into the console world with purchased addons and all that.
And now you have Microsoft and Sony in the last gen catching up by being able to offer free games that weren't a marketing gimmick.
Nowadays, it looks like it's used to buy your way into the game - don't want to grind? $1 will get you a bunch of upgrades and gold and whatever.
Thankfully, some people get it - Titanfall, coming out next week will have no day one DLC or paid upgrades, the only DLC planned is maps.
So at least one company gets it - you don't spend $60 only to be bombarded for $20 season passes for addons the moment the game is released.
And it's such a bad problem the EU is considering motions towards telling when free really means free (with paid addons). Because a lot of mobile games are now making it such that you get a demo, pay for level 1, pay for level 2, etc.
Here's something people don't realize about WiFi - besides the network backbone the access point connects to, WiFi devices on the same frequency communicate with each other too.
If you and your neighbour use the same WiFI channel or close to it, the two APs are actually handshaking between themselves at the management frame level (Layer 2), even though they're not actually on the same network, same SSID, or whatever. They're coordinating between themselves on usage.
And beacons are more than a "WiFi here!" broadcast, they're also used to help mobile stations save power by keeping the radio off longer. Inside the beacon is a bitmap that's indexed by association ID and tells if the AP has buffered packets for it. So a mobile station can on association tell an AP that it wants to check for traffic every 5 beacon times. The AP can either agree, refuse (perhaps there's no more packet memory) or negotiate a different interval. Then the mobile station goes to sleep if there's no traffic, and wakes up the receiver every 5 beacon periods to catch a beacon frame. If there's no traffic for it, it goes back to sleep for another 5 beacon times. If there is traffic, then it wakes up the transmitter and retrieves the packets from the AP buffers.
All that is contingent on the AP having enough buffer to store the packets (it knows it has to store it for at most 5 beacon periods - after that, it's free to drop them)
The other side effect is well, attempts to modernize the lowlevel management protocol have to take legacy devices into account. Even worse, all it needs is a legacy device on the same frequency. It doesn't matter that you have no 802.11b devices on your network, just having one on another network, same frequency will automatically disable any optimizations (because if they can't be decoded by the 802.11b station, there's a chance of a collision or interference).
Why bother going that far?
Just have them provide credentials and always forward to a "invalid password" page. They'll probably try 2-3 times or so and you'll have captured the login information.
Which you can then turn around and connect to your neighbour's AP and get internet for free.
Bonus points for using a higher-powered access point and buying a real SSL certificate.
Except you're ignoring the Dancing Pigs (or rabbits, or porn, or whatever) problem.
Because #2 is easily accomplished by jailbreaking on iOS as well, and even back when it was an involved procedure of over 100 steps, you could easily get Joe Average to do it if you could motivate them. (Pirated apps, "sexy cheerleaders see pic!" apps, etc). In fact, the first iOS worm came about because a ton of people were jailbreaking and part of the process involved installing OpenSSH. And they were leaving the password at default.
These people jailbreaking weren't motivated by "openness" to get them to jailbreak, they wanted to do something - perhaps some cool app or something, so they blindly followed all the steps, including downloading and installing an SSH client on Windows, so they could have the cool app.
It turns out that Android permission lists, steps to allow non-market binaries, etc., are no match. I mean, you can trust Amazon.com to not screw you over, or Humble Bundle. I mean, there's nothing wrong with leaving that unchecked, after all, Amazon and Humble Bundle need it, so it's safe, right?
And there you go - roadblocks are levelled. Joe User, in an attempt to get Amazon's free app of the day, or spending $5 on an Android game bundle, will now disable the very protection that keeps him safe. All his friends need to do is show him some cool app and send it to him and he'll blindly install it. (I'm actually surprised this hasn't really happened yet - remember all those Windows worms that inspected your contact list and sent themselves to everyone on them? It only takes a little brainpower to see how malware could easily do the same over SMS or something).
Except well, for some markets, like say, China, the only app stores available are third party ones with questionable trust values.
And that checkbox is useless because there are perfectly valid reasons why you want to install apps not from Google Play - Amazon App Store, and Humble Bundle, for instance. Legit app stores, but by using them you have to disable one of the most powerful protections Android has.
Of course, the real reason Android is exploited more is easy - it's so damn easy to install well, pirated apps. Why spend $5 on some high end game when you can download it from free from AppCake and other sites? And given how many people grab trojaned installers and keygens on Windows, people assume that cracked and pirated apps are "clean" and blindly install them.
Sure you can pirate apps on iOS, but you need to jailbreak or find someone to do enterprise signing for you. Though with Apple buying TestFlight (one of the largest ways to "beta" test or test-sign apps) I guess Apple might crack down on users who use it just to sign cracked apps. Either way, it's a step up in difficulty. Though, for some peculiar reason or other, no one has tried to trojan a cracked app for iOS. There are iOS worms that exploit the fact that people blindly install OpenSSH and don't change the pasword, but cracked apps on iOS oddly haven't been trojaned. There's certainly no reason why they can't, but given how long iOS piracy has been around, it seems unusual.
Why? I mean, so what if it plummets? The guys who got this exchange ran off with over half a million dollars. Without being traced to their real identities.
Even if it plunges to half its value, it's still over a quarter million dollars. Not bad for what's involved, really. There's very few other crimes you can do that'll gather that much return with very little risk - most physical attacks run real risks of getting caught. Once the BTC is in their wallets, they're home free - they just need to cover their tracks (maybe).
Hell, robbing a bank generally only nets you a few thousand dollars and an extreme risk of getting caught.
Stealing credit card numbers works, but it's a LOT of work selling them and the potential of getting caught is high.
Stealing BTC, even if it depresses the price, is far quicker, less risky and there are many ways to launder the BTC.
Thing is, "spending" in bitcoin basically equates to "transfer X BTC from wallet Y to wallet Z". Which can be done by anyone at any time as long as they have access to the key to the wallet.
So all the crooks do is transfer the balance from the wallet to their own and wait for it to appear on the blockchain to confirm it. Most likely, you won't notice in time and it's locked in. Once it's in the blockchain, it's too late.
And yet, having a FB profile is generally required if you're security conscious, because you cannot control what your friends do otherwise. Don't want to be tagged? Well, unless you have a profile, you can't block it! Etc. etc. etc.
So yes, I have a FB profile. I hardly ever log into it (maybe once every couple of months when FB updates their security settings). I don't post anything on it and all I have is minimal. Hell, you can find out more about me from my LinkedIn than my FB. (I also have only 7 friends, and about 10 on the "please add me" list that I haven't decided what I wanted to do with).
Well, the iPhone was the first usable smartphone for the masses. It didn't have an App Store other than web apps (remember those?). You went to a web site, then you simply tapped an icon to add it to your homescreen which was really a glorified bookmark.
Now, what it REALLY had was a kickass HTML engine - mobile phones in those days had crap for web browsers - the "best" was Opera Mobile, a $30 app if they had it for your phone (and by best, I mean, actually does a half-decent job of rendering it like on a computer). Everything else was like WAP or rendered like Mosaic in today's world. But the iPhone featured Webkit, which was the same as the desktop renderer, giving you a desktop-like browsing experience with support for modern standards.
That was the iPhone's claim to fame - it was a phone, an iPod, and an Internet communicator. (The latter referring to the web browser).
Of course, the App Store came a year later. And it was popular because it was ultra-convenient. You could browse and get apps on the go. PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, etc., they all required you to go to a computer, browse some third party website, then purchase the app which you downloaded to your hard drive (heaven forbid if the website refused multiple downloads). You then ran the installer app to mark it for installation and then forced a sync with your drive where the app was installed. Repeat for every update, too.
Apple simply made it so the user could do it all without involving a PC and on the road - just browse the app store, tap Purchase, and it's downloaded and installed automagically. And re-downloads are allowed always, and updates were semi-automatic.
Later Palms added the ability to have an "app store" that was merely a bookmark to built in web browser. Depending on the store, you could download the raw PDB file and have it install. Maybe.
One click is a utility patent. Rounded corners is not patented. The closest thing to it is a design patent Apple owns of a slate like device, with rounded corners, a grid of icons on one of the flat sides, with one row of said icons static while the rest of the grid is changeable.
And yes, it makes a HUGE difference - rounded corners is not patented. Because of one manufacturer's perchant for making a custom Android UI that copied those details down to practically the icons. No one back then was mistaking an Android device as an iPhone, other than the new Samsung Galaxy S where the first comment was "iPhone Clone!" in every review.
(Want to know why Android has a home screen? Or why the launcher doesn't have a static dock? Hello patent avoidance). As a design patent, all the frills are AND - you must have A AND B AND C AND D to violate it. If you simply get rid of B and do something else, you aren't violating it.
(Funny how /. claim people need to know more about IT and computing, and yet know very little about IP law especially given how it affects them).
Yes, you can make better coffee yourself, there's never been the argument. The thing is, a Keurig, and other systems, make it effectively a three step problem - turn it on, insert pod, push button and coffee comes out.
Sure it's crap, that's not the point. The point is that it's easy, fast, and can be done while you're still trying to open your eyelids.
It's why drip coffeemakers are standard for decades - they're relatively simple to operate (not as easy as a Keurig, but for making bulk quantities, they're easy).
And that's the key issue - there are tons of ways to make great coffee. The problem is if you just want a shot of caffeine in the morning, even a shit cup would do to wake you up. Maybe enough so you can prepare a real cup of coffee.
It's why Starbucks is popular - they handle allt he complex making steps for you in an industrialized fashion.
What you need to do is make it so your method can be reduced to a single button press and it does everything. Of course, the compromises needed to make it suitable for mass-production and cheap enough for home purchase would compromise it as well.
That's rather overpriced, I don't want to know where you shop. The most expensive I see is $13 for 18 cups of coffee (or around 70 cents per cup).
Costco and other sell knockoff compatible pods for far less - a box of 40 for $20 or less, or even bulk pod packs.
Of course, you could also use the $20 thing to use your own grinds. Just requires a bit more cleaning up.
That's rather interesting. I suppose it also makes "extra credit" (or bonus points) much more interesting as it could push you up a mark if you're near the threshold (far too often extra credit is imposed at times where it doesn't really help all that much, leading to some students to simply not try).
I wonder if he's noticed any sort of drop off near the end of the term as the grades get closer to the final mark - those students who are satisified simply stop doing stuff having worked hard at the beginning, while others work diligently to get their mark up higher.
Nope, the early MP3 players were custom software utilities.
Rio PMP - you needed to use their software and the parallel port adapter to load MP3s onto the internal storage, or almost-like-SmartMedia-but-not-quite external storage.
Nomad Jukebox - USB 1.1, requires custom driver and custom software application to load. "Explorer" functionality was provided by a third party app you installed.
The later MP3 players started using USB MSC.
Either way, loading a Nomad over USB 1.1 was a several-hour-long wait provided the relatively crappy software itself didn't crap out midway through.
USB 2.0 was just wrapping up when the iPod came out in 2001, it wouldn't be in most new PCs until a couple of years later. In the meantime, Firewire was the fastest way to load up the iPod storage with stuff - taking minutes rather than hours.
Oh, did I ever mention that if your ID3 tags were just slightly out of place (two similar but not exact entries in a field like artist or album) on the Nomad, you got very strange things, including oddball crashes and hangs? I got to learn a very nice ID3 bulk tag editor to fix them so the Nomad would actually work properly. iTunes and such handled them properly and wrote the database properly.
Those were the early MP3 players.
There's a number of dams upstream as well - in fact, above the 49th.
It's kind of interesting since the US has a treaty with Canada over the Columbia river - for a long time, the US has been paying Canada (BC, more specifically) to help control the flow. That treaty hasn't expired yet, but the treaty allows for renegotiation of rates and such, which happens within the next year or so. Naturally, the US doesn't want to pay since they believe the electricity generated north of the border more than compensates for calming the river downstream south of the border.
Who gets their way? It'll be interesting, since the primary reason for it is to regulate the flow upstream
They are. Their customers (i.e., not you) have basically said that they are incapable of looking after their stuff, so they would want someone else to.
And given what you see on the Internet today with spam, DDoS, botnets and other crap, it appears that the general public does not want to make the computer an end onto itself - after all computers should simplify life, not make it filed with tons of updates and stuff. (Ever notice how despite the intent of computers and such to automate manual procedures, it usually doesn't? Stuff like backups (something only a computer needs) only happen automatically if you pay for a premium version - wtf? It's no wonder people don't do a bunch of computer chores).
And why is it Apple is the bully, when they haven't forcibly removed apps or other content from users? I mean, Amazon's done it, Google's done it, Valve's done it (yes, they've deleted games from user libraries). Apple? Nope. They haven't removed an app from a user - every app they removed from the App Store, as long as you have a copy somewhere, can still be used locally. Funny, that.
Next time you're deleting spam from your inbox and retweaking your filters, or looking through your weblogs at all the probes, remember, you want those users policing themselves? You'd probably be cleaning out dozens of random text spam from your text messages/Google Hangouts/etc by now as marketers realize that they can spam everything through SMS and phone botnets.
Actually, there's a third path. It's to negotiate a non-confidentiality clause into the settlement.
Basically the wronged party brings suit to the wronger. The two get together and hammer out a settlement (this is normal - most lawsuits are settled rather than go through the courts). One party wants confidentiality and they offer something for it. The other party is free to negotiate terms that don't include it, but then they need to give something up.
Heck, perhaps they tried for it - and got a point where it was $20K if you don't want confidentiality, $80k if you do. Yes, it's a give-and-take, and for most people, that pound of flesh that's bigger is what they want.
$60k to keep my mouth shut? Where's that dotted line?!
Why do you think the punitive fines for copyright infringement are easily $125,000+ per violation?
Except the long term ROI is potential increased sales. Remember that buying Apple is partly buying into an image, and they want to maintain that image. And people want to buy into the image.
Apple being green is part of the marketing plan of Apple, and if you note all their product releases, they clearly state how green they are.
A lot of people are into buying green products, even paying more for it. Enough so that there's an industry term for making false environmental marketing claims - greenwashing.
Apple likes to market green and environmental friendliness, and they definitely do not want to be found greenwashing. So paying more for electricity now allows them to be honest in becoming greener and not some investigative journalist's dream of pointing out greenwashing.
And there's also nothing wrong with being ethical at the expense of profits - at the end of the day, one has to be able to look at themselves in the mirror.
People have shown they're willing to give up profits to be ethical - see the rise of so-called ethical funds at any financial institution - the ones that don't invest in companies that are bad for the environment, produce products that lead to human suffering, etc (i.e., no oil, tobacco, weapons, etc). The ROI on those has traditionally been less (face it - oil companies make a LOT of profit, as do tobacco), but it lets people sleep at night knowing their retirement isn't funded on people getting killed, maimed, addicted, or destroying the future.
I don't think they even bother doing the dilutions. They say they do, and probably have someone doing it for show, but that's it. The mass production just uses plain old sugar made into pills and regular water.
After all, how can you tell? The end result is the same whether you actually do the dilutions or just said you did. Heck, you don't even need any of the materials you diluted from.
And no, using equipment doesn't help - it falls below the detectable threshold for chemical analysis equipment.
Hrm, perhaps it's time to open my own homeopathy factory. The markups are awesome.
None used it to flush the cache because it is too risky - the platters are not maintaining a fixed speed (they're slowing down to generate electricity) so writes to platters become tricky as the timing is off which means you can overwrite more than you expect.
Far better to just dump the buffers.
In fact, the electricity generated by the spinning platters slowing down is used to park the heads - it's called an emergency head park because it basically dumps the electricity into the voice coil that flings the heads to the mechanical stops in the park area. It's fairly violent and most hard drives have much less emergency head park life than standard power down (where the drive moves the heads to the parking area in a controlled fashion) life - a drive may have 50,000+ head load/unload cycles, but under 10,000 emergency park cycles.
You can tell because a soft-park makes only the smallest of clicking sounds on a drive when it spins down. But emergency park it and it's a much louder clunk.
This technique is incredibly common - the iPhone has done it ever since the 3GS 5 years ago.
I would think the Boeing one goes one further and rather than storing the key encrypted with a per-ASIC key in flash, the key is in SRAM that's wiped when battery power is cut or other thing.
And it's often hardware based - the software is only responsible for triggering a RNG to generate bits for the key that's loaded through hardware pathways into the key store (inaccessible to software). The encryption is then enabled by software and the media encryption is handled completely independently of software.
And yet, that exists today, it's called Thunderbolt. Which is effectively a PCIe x2 over a cable. Thunderbolt drive arrays exist for performance gains that go beyond what SATA has and all that.