I don't know why they don't have 2 of their PCIe storage ports tho, there's space for it and compared to the cost of the system I doubt they needed to cut such a minor corner (It might even be cheaper because they wouldn't need 2 separate production lines for gfx daughterboards with and without the PCIe connector)
Probably ran out of PCIe lanes, to be honest.
They're limited - two workstation graphics cards at x16 consume 32 lanes, the TB2 ports are probably close to 2 lanes each (so 12 more lanes consumed), so you have wifi/bluetooth consuming another lane (bluetooth is USB) plus another lane for the storage. That's 46 PCIe lanes consumed. Or if TB2 only takes one lane PCIe 3.0, that's 40 lanes.
It's a dirty little secret - the number of PCIe lanes are limited - sure you can split them with a bridge, but you're still sharing lanes in the end.
A lot of motherboards with "3x PCIe x16 slots" rarely, if ever, run x16 on all 3 slots - it just means they have 3 x16 slots on them - probably configured as x16, x8 and x4. In PCIe, it makes no difference what slot you pick since they're compatible - which is a wonder why they don't just use x16 slots everywhere since they'll fit any PCIe device (a x1/x2/x4/x8/x16 device can fit in a x16 slot, while a x16 cannot fit in a x8 or smaller slot - and this is in the spec).
Lazy way: Buy a single USB Key to backup essential data - attach it to your key chain so that as long as you are safe it should be too (not recommended for those who lose their keys a lot)
Slightly less lazy way: Encrypt said data and have 2 USB keys with the same data, store them in different places/ways.
Serious way: Buy a security deposit box and 2 hardware encrypted USB keys. Store 1 in the box and use the 2nd as your "active backup" - switch them out every 30 days or so so the most you stand to lose is 30 days worth of data.
Hardcore way: Hardcopy everything and store offsite.
USB key can be substituted for a proper external harddrive if data storage levels require it but I don't recommend trying to put the harddrive on your key chain.
Why are techies so out of touch with The Real World(tm)?
Unless you're visiting your parents/friends/cousins/etc houses on a weekly basis (not a bad idea), then guess what? USB keys will back up once. Honest truth - users will not lift a finger to back up. If it doesn't happen automatically, or requires manual intervention, it will not happen. It's a chore, and unless you do it regularly for them, it will not happen.
I'm sure everyone's run across the "can you restore a file for me? I have backups!" only to find the backups ended a year ago because they "would do it next week".
To be honest, the cloud backups are probably spyware, but they're also convenient. They don't do a single thing, and it's there. Their PC die? Well, their documents are patiently waiting on Dropbox, Skydrive, GDrive, whatever. Hell, set up OwnCloud on your own server farm and set up the client on your parents PC so it backs up there.
You think these tips suck? To be honest, they're basic, and really, they're also geared for the real world. Computers are meant to automate boring tasks. Why are we forced to do stuff the computer can do automatically?
Or do you really think that companies like Apple are all marketing? They understand the real world - that's why they do stuff like Time Machine - a simple, quiet, out of the way backup mechanism! Or auto-save, working on Time Machine that lets you go back to an earlier revision of a document, view it, copy and paste, etc,?
You know, Microsoft made an excellent backup product - called Windows Home Server. Backs up the network nightly, does de-dupe, images every machine, etc. Silent, runs in the background, even wakes the machine to backup. Alas, it's discontinued, but it is one of the best things around - it just works.
And anyone worried about NSA or "not owning the data" as an excuse to not have an automated backup plan? Guess what - which is worse - telling your parents/kids/etc that they should've taken the effort while you sit there trying to recover the data manually spending hours, or just retrieving the file for them? You can lecture all about the NSA as you want, and it'll fall on deaf ears.
Users won't backup unless it happens automatically. Users will also let others use their PCs. That's the real world and anyone who says otherwise hasn't worked in a real IT department. Users are way too clever. If you ban use of thumb drives, they will either use cloud storage to share files, the file server will fill up with useless crap (intermixed with vital project information and somehow required for production), or users will send emails of the files around.
Hell, you probably think Android's permission system is "pretty cool" when in fact, it's a perfect example of dancing pigs security. I.e., it's insecurity at its finest. Unless you're a techie. Which I can bet the vast majority of the 80% of Android users are not. Hell, I'm sure most of them think Android is an iPhone with pirated apps.
"Why is the government mandating that you support a [particular] for-profit company?"
This would be a lot less of an issue if the company in question didn't have a monopoly on providing the required certification.
Actually, government has done it a lot of times. Education is huge - you may have heard of stuff like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the SATs, GMATs, and other degrees? Do you know that the Educational Testing Services (ETS) which provides those tests also own some rather fancy hotels and other things?
You know why? They're non-profit, and every student is subject to those tests - either paid for by the state (ITBS, among other tests that elementary students take), or the student (SATs, etc). And each test is expensive, despite being well, evaluated by a bunch of fancy Scantron machines. So much so ETS makes a pile of money every year they have to spend (as they can't make a profit - "non-profit") thus ending up owning a pile of hotels and other stuff.
Standardized testing - now there's a profitable market that's really owned by one company.
At least with software development, you can opt out of CMMI and just not do government contracts. Or you can be "the only one in your field" and be exempt from regulations because your product serves a niche - if the government needs your software, they aren't going to demand CMMI from you - they'll just request it.
Most homes will probably need a computer for the near future. Note I said "a" computer. Most first world places (basically most of the/. readers) will probably have at least one computer per person - and maybe a couple more "community" computers (e.g., HTPC, servers, etc).
And most families probably have close to three computers - the "family" PC, the work/parents PC (which may or may not be borrowed from work), and the kids PC. Or more.
Well, it probably turns out a number of them are completely redundant and were there only because they needed something and the only choice was a PC (desktop or laptop).
Now we have tablets, and a bunch of those PCs are probably redundant - the kid's PC may just be the family PC, and the work/parents PC may also be the family PC. Because everything else - games, websurfing, YouTube, banking, are done on tablets. Leaving the family PC for the odd tasks like school work, reports and working from home (if work hasn't issued a laptop).
So we're unlikely to see the demise of the PC - but we're also likely to see the number of PCs shrink - back when the PC was the only computing option - you needed a PC for games, online banking, websurfing, etc. - you bought as many to prevent contention. Nowadays, tablets do most of the stuff you bought the extra PCs for making them redundant.
The other reason would be that if NVidia engineers could read the documentation needed to write ATI drivers and vice versa, they would figure out some clever ideas that their competitor had and reproduce them. If you make more and more powerful cards, you always need new clever ideas how you turn more transistors into more speed. You run into bottlenecks that weren't bottlenecks when you had a quarter of the transistors. Since Intel integrated graphics is quite a bit behind in that respect, Intel is probably doing clever things that ATI and NVidia would have been glad to know four years ago.
The other thing is, well, the documentation simply doesn't exist. Having worked with quite a few ASIC vendors, inside and out, I can tell you the modern SoC if heavily undocumented. For a good chunk of the blocks, unless they're external IP (from say, Synopsys, Cadence or ARM), there IS no documentation other than a register list.
Yes, the documentation may just be a register list. Nothing to tell you how you should drive the hardware, if the registers have to be programmed in a certain way, or if there's tricks and other things that are important to know. Or even how some data structures need to be laid out in memory for hardware (you may get a brief layout, but that's it). Any my favorite - how the hardware reacts to an error. Sometimes it just plain locks up requiring a full reset. Other times it sets some strange error bit that must be cleared in order to resume functionality. If you're lucky to know how to clear the error.
Oh, and how does a software developer find out such information? Easy, they ask the ASIC designer how they envisioned the thing to work. Sometimes they're helpful and tell you exactly what you need to know, but they can be terse and expect you to figure out their thinking. And sometimes what you want to do LOOKS possible from the registers, only to find out that no, you just cannot program the bits that way and no, you shouldn't try.
That's probably why Intel took so long to get the documentation out - Haswell has been out since what, April? And only now they release the documentation? Well, it's probably because Intel was getting the whole whack together from random designer notes, software design, etc. Then bringing all that together (Intel creates some of the best documentation around) and editing it and all that.
For the most part, nVidia and AMD probably DON'T have much in the way of documentation on the latest GPUs. Intel does, and only because they spend time and effort doing it - but Intel's also huge and has a lot of cash to have a bunch of engineers sitting around writing documentation exclusively.
If you think OSS people hate writing documentation - it's no better when it's commercial development - again, the project usually doesn't allow for much documentation to be created. And things like GPUs which change frequently, well, by the time the documents are written, it's obseleted 3 times over.
Just so everyone gets the scale of the issue - Boxing Day sales are a Commonwealth tradition - started in the UK, but most countries do observe them (including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others).
It's really the Commonwealth equivalent of Black Friday - including the traditions of sales starting the day before the event (Thanksgiving for Black Friday, Christmas for Boxing Day). It's a huge spike of traffic for most sites - I know even as little as 5 years ago - sites going down around 9PM PST were common (given most sales started at midnight) - 8:59 and the site was fine, once the clock ticked over, the sites fell over.
These days the sites do often slow down, but they stay up as many sites now employ mitigation techniques including queuing transactions to avoid overloading the SSL payment backends (they call it the checkout queue).
Of course, that was years ago, there's almost no reason why in 2013 the site should go down, nevermind going down permanently. Of course, perhaps the biggest reason is they were hacked - the best time to hack is during heavy times where systems fall over in unpredictable ways that may expose information to get at the juicy data as well as hiding in plain sight. There's really no other reason why a site would be taken down - heavy traffic is easily anticipated (It's not like you don't know when Christmas is) and accommodated.
I bet that's what really happened - they got hacked. Better to say "too much traffic!" and show incompetence that way than to show incompetence in handling customer information...
I'm still trying to process the fact that there are new SSDs that DON'T have ultracaps. You'd think that what happened to OCZ might have taught the industry a lesson or something. Well, besides, "There's a sucker born every minute!"
You don't always need ultracaps.
Remember, the primary reason why SSDs fail is corruption of the FTL tables (the thing that helps the firmware map sectors to actual flash cells). Once the table gets corrupted, the only way to recover is a full reformat to reexamine every flash cell and start anew. If you're lucky, there's enough metadata around to rebuild it. Most likely not as modern advanced ECC algorithms use the entire spare area of the array for data protection.
If you're willing to give up some performance, you can often run the firmware in a "slower but more reliable" mode where you save the cost of the caps (tantalums or ultracaps - very expensive) at the cost of performance.
Of course, companies like OCZ used modded firmware where they disabled the performance-killing safety and aimed for maximum performance. And failed to put in the required backup power.
Given how SSDs are more or less "fast enough" these days (really - is the average user going to notice 800MB/sec reads and writes over say, 1GB/sec reads/writes?), the firmware can often "scale back" and do more protection on the FTL corruption issue at the cost of performance.
The alternative explanation is most Netflix employee work is so routine that anyone could do it - you could hire a mediocre, good or brilliant employee and you'd end up with the same result.
So assume you're an "A-player" and hired by Netflix. And they put you on a routine job of updating some pile of CSS and Javascript. Do you think you'll bring your "A-game" there?
The problem is the "A-players" often need varying, changing tasks to keep "entertained". Give them dull boring maintenance tasks and you're "wasting their talent". Yet as any big continuing software project goes, maintenance is the largest and most common task - fixing bugs, refactoring, etc. Very little goes towards flashy new interfaces and features. Heck, a large part can be simple technical support - handling cases from other developers on how to use APIs to accomplish various tasks.
Presumably the "B-players" who aren't working on the flashy new stuff know the heart of the system inside and out. Yet getting rid of them gets rid of institutionalized knowledge - you give them a problem or a customer question, and they know exactly where to zero in on the code. They may not be able to fix ti as quickly, or can easily get tangled up, but they know where to start looking and how the systems interact. Of course, the A player can probably get a fix done quickly once pointed out the location, but they won't know the repercussions. Some of which won't happen until the fix is long forgotten about.
When everything is new, yes, you want A players because it's getting stuff done. But once you have something, maintenance is no longer in the A-player's interests - they want flashy and new, not bugfixing and documentation (what's the open-source mantra? You have the code, fix it yourself? Bingo.).
Personally I think it is a bad idea because of the 4GB program virtual address space limit; which applications will be frequently exceeding, especially the server applications that would otherwise benefit the most from optimization.
You're making an assumption that the 4GB limit is prohibitive. For some applications, it could be - databases and scientific processing, and definitely games. But there are plenty of other applications that won't really benefit from the enlarged address space - would a word processor benefit? A 1GB word processor document is a fair amount of text - probably close to the point where it's best to split the document up for easier managability.
Or various streaming processing algorithms - like DSP which can benefit from the added registers, and really, don't consume much RAM at all (since the data streams in and out).
Sure, one reason to go 64-bit is to bust the 4GB limit. Another reason is to get speed advantages because x64 offers more registers and other stuff.
Heck, iOS probably uses something like that to get the insane speedups because the ARM AArch64 is a MUCH faster architecture, yet every iOS device shipping now only has 1GB of RAM. Here 64-bit is for speed, not memory.
And you know what? Canada has it worse. In fact, the big 3 carriers were so scared of Verizon coming in that they ran attack ads on the basis of "we pay the lowest!" (of the two major carriers) and "think of the children!" and "jobs jobs jobs!".
Nevermind that if Verizon actually charged more in Canada, people wont' flock to them.
Canada's big three are so scared they tried to buy out the small AWS carriers before they even got started - going so far as to offer Wind a 10x profit for their wireless license.
Then they're pulling every dirty trick in the book to ensure that Wind won't get established (foreign ownership rules, etc). Finally, they even forced Industry Canada to take down their "wireless calculator" because no matter how you sliced it, the small competitors WERE cheaper in every way possible. This tool was in beta testing for a couple of years, and they lobbied to kill it just when it rolled out.
And when Verizon announced they weren't going to Canada? Their stock rose 30%.
Yes, it's that bad in Canada. You guys in the US actually have it fairly good.
the new mac pro and their peripherals is not going to fit very well into a flight case is it - which is what crews on location will be using. Oops the Grip just knocked over the table with the macs and all the peripherals.
Given that most onsite shots are done with laptops and even iPads, that's no longer a very likely scenario.
I mean, taking a look at how a director is shooting, he's sitting at a table of laptops. Hell, the director probably is holding an iPad in his hand directing the shot - the iPad loaded with the script, the animatic (or storyboards, but those are fading out in favor of animatics) and the dailies.
The whole pile of equipment? That's back at the VFX shop where they have racks of servers - probably connected to desktops via stuff like GigE or Thunderbolt.
Laptops are now what people are using for shoots - no one lugs desktops around. OTOH, the new Mac Pro DOES fit nicely into a carry on flight case.
Maybe. Then again, Silk Road was very public, and served to demonstrate that most drug users are perfectly functional individuals (since you can hardly get your hands on Bitcoins if you aren't) as well as threatened to turn drug cartel wars into nerds throwing insults at each other over the Internet. Both of these would be bad for the public perception required for the War on Drugs to keep popular support, which in turn would harm efforts to further militarize the police and curtail the rights of people - and even more cynically, to keep them from exploring altered states of consciousness and whatever opportunities for personal growth they might offer.
It's a very fine line though. Most drug users ARE high functioning and in VERY high places. I mean, your stockbroker is a good chance to be using, as would may other people on Wall Street.
Imagine though, that it was revealed that the whole 2008 meltdown was caused by a few crackheads one day? Then what? War on Drugs is bad? The damn drugs caused me to lose my job!
And yes, I meant people in high places - where their 6-figure salaries can keep a good habit going away from family and friends (who really do not know). I'm sure the public War on Drugs would be damaged once it's revealed that CEOs and executives are the biggest users.
Yeah, I'm sure the public will be real sympathetic to the poor CEOs making millions a year in bonuses (which probably goes to pay for their drug habit, natch) when they get laid off.
I never really understood this. You go and get a really expensive phone, then begrudge someone their 99 cents. Or seriously spend more than a few seconds thought on whether or not to buy that "really expensive" $1.99 app. And subsequently get suckered into dropping tens of dollars on in-app purchases in in some freemium game. People are weird...
Or why bother doing it on iOS - Android is where the piracy scene is at - with piracy levels around the PC level (90%+). I mean, why go through the hassles of jailbreaking when you're really just going to expose your phone to the same crap that lets Android malware spread far and wide? Why not just do it on Android where it's not just permitted, but often encouraged by "sideloading"?
All that Taig and this jailbreak has shown is that people jailbreak for piracy purposes. And hell, Taig may not have the exploits, but given that China is where Android malware runs rampant, do you really trust that it's all nicely sandboxed?
Hell, even the traditional reasons for jailbreaking aren't ready yet - Cydia isn't quite iOS7 ready. And MobileSubstrate isn't, either. (MS is a library that lets jailbroken apps cleanly and safely hook into the OS without causing too much disaster). Which means this jailbreak is only useful for... pirated apps.
And Apple is bound to use this as a perfect reason on why jailbreaking should not be allowed - piracy and security. Oh wait, they already did. This jailbreak just proved their point!
If you see a brand name or logo in a movie or TV you can be damn well certain they are paying for it. Product placement is not given away for free and the editors will take special care to edit out names and brands of items that haven't paid for product placement.
Actually, another reason is liability - a product placement often carries a pile of terms and conditions on how and when the product must be displayed, and how it must be shown. Some of these are understandable (e.g., a car sponsor may request that none of the cars used in live shots may be shown as causing intentional damage, or showing faults, etc). Usually, the items must be shown in a positive light and all that.
So not only do editors not want to give free ads away, they don't want to run afoul of any possible libel or slander by misrepresenting a product. By editing away any distinctive marks, they also can use it as a "generic" computer and not likely to damage brands or get sued.
This is why characters use iPhones far more than any other cell phone, despite the fact that the iPhone has a much smaller market percentage than non-Apple phones. The reality is that around 80% of people use non-Apple phones, which means that for any 5 random phones seen on TV, only one should be an iPhone, yet we all know that it isn't the case. It's also the reason that everybody on TV is now using Microsoft Surface on their tablets.
Actually, if you consider iPhone vs. Android, that's true. But iPhone vs. other specific phone models, it's not so easy - the SGS4 and SGS3, possibly the two best selling Android phones, make up around 10% (combined) of the Android market, but both individually (including all the sub models) sold less than iPhones.
The iPhone is iconic, an Android phone is not - it's generally so bad that if there's a specific Android phone product placement, the phone itself will announce its make and model - e.g., Sony pictures phones will use Sony phones, but they often will have SONY plastered on them, and maybe even show "Xperia Z" or something when the actor uses it.
That's one of the big Android problems - sure they use s smartphone, but that's it. If it's an iPhone, it's obvious it's an iPhone. If it's a Windows Phone, ditto. But if it's an Android phone, that's practically any POS shape and size that's so generic it's fades away.
Hell, Microsoft Surface paid placements all have the actors snapping the keyboard to the tablet, and flipping out the stand. Otherwise it was likely to drown in the background of "windows tablets".
If you think form doesn't matter - it means the device is ignorable and is a poor candidate for product placement. Unless your item has a distinct design element (a la Apple, or Surface, or Sony) then the on-screen use will be very generic because there's nothing that sets it apart.
It could also be that Apple's computers tend to be very distinctive and thus, easily recognizable. It's something that's a part of Apple's designs - they don't tend to fade and become just another generic widget in the background.
This is especially because Apple's made computers out of aluminum, which gives it a distinctive look all to itself. Having oddly-shaped PCs (think the iLamp and such) add to the distinctiveness.
Heck, Thinkpads were fairly common as well - given the red nipple pointer. Of course, PCs these days generally Dells which don't usually have many distinctive elements and thus end up blending into the background.
Where is global warming when you need it? Once again I'm freezing my ass off in Canada. That ain't local weather by any stretch when it is a whole continent. Largest cold mass over the arctic in recent history once again, (notice I said "once again"!). We got lucky last year, if you can call it that. Most of the cold slipped over Russia instead of here, but not this year. The cold mass is even larger this year, so it hasn't missed us. I seriously fear a mini ice age, like in 1066, or worse. Evidence is building to support that possibility! I hope not,
You're seeing it.
Global warming isn't characterized just by warmer temperatures, but more temperature extremes.
In other words, summers get hotter, and winters get colder. And warm snaps in winter get hot, while cold snaps in summer get colder. (You see spring or early summer temps in heat waves in winter, and snow in summer).
So be prepared to freeze your ass off some more - climate change and global warming will ensure that your summers will be extremely hot, and your winters extremely cold. And no, you're not going to have a nice "nice" summer that's not too hot, nor a "nice warm" winter where it doesn't get cold.
Yes, the earth is getting hotter, but 0.7C or 4C over a century isn't that much - but it's an average. That means the hot spots can be +15C hotter, while the cold spots -11C colder and you'd still get your 4C difference. And by hot spots and cold spots, could be summer or winter as well. Like how a 25C summer day can turn into a 40C heatwave, and a 5C winter day can easily turn into a -6C winter day (oh look...).
And it's been shown that this is what's happening. The hot days get hotter, the cold days get colder. What was once a nice temperate zone gets bigger spikes in hot and cold. Global warming will never make a cold place appealing to live in - except for maybe the odd day of the year.
Oh yeah, more hurricanes as well 0 a hurricane cools the oceans by dumping the heat into the atmosphere.
It's even more laughable than that. You can simply take a screenshot and it'll be saved permanently. In iOS, press the home button and the lock button at the same time. I'm sure it's easy with Android, too.
Except they detect that. If you take a screenshot in Android, a message is sent back to the sender that you took a screenshot. Basically, do this enough times and the sender may exclude you from future snapchats and send you the photo directly - after everyone else has found out.
It's a form of social DRM - you don't do it because you feel left out (and you'd be outed by everyone so your social network rank falls). Or your friend can nudge you and ask why are you doing it.
Of course, I didn't mention iOS becuase until iOS 7, Snapchat also detected it (indirectly, since Apple's walled garden blocks the detection so they use proxy measures). Of course, in iOS7, such proxy measures don't need to be done anymore so the notification fails.
I really can't understand why PC manufacturers are shunning people asking for 16:10 displays. It's not like Apple builds its panels itself. It's buying them from Samsung AFAIK. I'm sure they'll cost more because of smaller demand but I'm happily paying for the difference (panel, case, different circuitry to antennas mounted on the top of the panel, etc). Just build a 16:10 variant of a business laptop and see how many of us buy it. Matte please.
Oh but you could, you'd just pay significantly more.
A 1080p panel uses the same electronics as a 1080p TV, so it's really, really, really cheap to implement. A 1920s1200 panel doesn't - you require electronics to be able to handle it, which because they aren't made by a trillion manufacturers in trillion level quantities, costs a whole lot more.
Apple can do it because they make millions of the same hardware - when you buy in that quantity, stuff is cheaper.
But you could buy Dells with 1920x1200 screens - you'd just be looking at a $2500+ laptop, for the screen mostly, rather than a $1500 laptop (everything else the same). I know I bought a Dell with a 1920x1200 screen - cost me over $4k (but this was because it had several niceties like Blu-Ray, a high end video card, high spec CPU, etc).
Apple is seen as a "premium" manufacturer - because they charge $2500+ for laptops (well, $1200 now...), way above what PC manufacturers will going for (the sub-$1000 market). Apple has to use good quality parts, and they have ot offer a "premium" experience. Hell, every time a new Macbook came out, everyone disregarded the screen - showing they could get a Dell for $1000 less, except it was rarely even a 1080p screen. That's just how the cookie crumbles - if you want those extra 120 rows of pixels, you paid a pretty penny for it.
The race to the bottom isn't a good thing. Beyond a certain point, people are just making to a price point and cutting corners as a result. See sub-$500 laptops - they all cut some corners. Hell, the most innovation happened in the higher-margin ultrabook category, where you get higher res (though 1080p) screens but they also cost a lot more money.
The space station should have the most advanced remote manipulator system available. Deep-sea work is not done by guys in complex suits, it is done by remotely controlled manipulator robots. The continued dependence on space suits for basic construction/repair/maintenence operation just seems like a bad idea given current remote maniplulation technology.
Deep sea work is different - when you have external pressures higher than internal ones, the demands are different.
And no, a lot of deep sea work isn't done by remote manipulators, but by divers - often saturation divers (where divers work and live "at depth" because decompression can take up to a week. And accidents have happened because the saturation chamber is above atmospheric pressure, and catastrophic decompression has happened.
One reason is that when external pressures are higher, you only deal with "suit squeeze" where the suit presses on the body (This assumes the use of regular diving equipment, and not NewtSuits which allow a shirtsleeve environment, and are highly complex beasts). In this case, all one needs to do is inflate the suit to equalize pressure.
In space, though, inflating a suit is the last thing you want to do, because it leads to ballooning - in effect, a space suit is a human-shaped balloon, and if you've ever blown up a latex glove, you know the main air chamber gets the biggest (i.e. chest area) while the extremities don't really inflate at all Lots of special fabrics are involved in this under control, but it's unavoidable. If you ever seen the strap that connects the helmet ring and runs to the crotch, that's to keep the helmet from ballooning away from the head.
Then there's the whole mobility problem - air-tight bearings just aren't easy to move, and in fact, there is always leakage (how much is acceptable varies.
Finally - ventilation - getting heat away from the body, getting extremities cool or warmed (as necessary) isn't an easy task, and having pools of sweat gathering around just isn't fun (try wearing a sauna suit all day - after a workout it's fine, but it'll get clammy, cold and just plain yucky after a while).
It's a great read on all the intricacies of pressure and space suits. And how even now we still are in the learning phase.
As for robots - they're getting there - the problem being that there's a lot of feedback issues - one wrong move can put a nasty dent in the structure, which weakens it. While the pressure vessel is isolated, there's only a small difference between "minor dent" and "major problem".
The primary fear is that it would be a high risk vector for malware. A secondary fear is that it opens the jailbreakers to lawsuits, if there are too many pirated apps on that website.
Well, given how much must be done to have a jailbreak, the fact it was paid for by the Chinese is probably the most interesting part. Very sketchy. Do we need to remind people of all the Android malware that seems to infect Chinese phones?
There's plenty of things that get executed and a lot of it runs are root. If you think Android malware is bad, the fact this is designed for pirated iOS apps has the likelihood of the same thing. And heck, I'm sure pirated Android apps are the same vector on Android.
Plus, apparently without involvement of Saurik (Cydia), the build they have doesn't work very well, and neither does MobileSubstrate (it's a library Saurik wrote that lets developers do interesting things safely).
And really, anyone really remember Apple's response to jailbreaking - you know, about potentially compromising your phoen, piracy, etc? Geez, do you really want to prove Apple right?
Finally, a pirated app store? Really? Jailbreakers are seen by Apple as pirates and most developers see people who jailbreak as nothing but pirates - even though there are plenty of valid reasons to jailbreak that isn't piracy. This just reinforces the impression that jailbreakers do it just to pirate.
You can't generally set a value for something of worth in bitcoin, because its value changes too much... sometimes even from one day to the next. The only way to manage it at all is to always deal in x dollars worth of bitcoin, in which case the dollar is still the currency being used.
You can. You simply fix the rate of Bitcoins to whatever the local currency you want is for that billing period.
E.g., let's say the past 30 days, bitcoin had a high of $1200 USD to a low of $200 USD and is currently $500 USD, and your phone bill is $50. Well, you could simply bill it at 0.25 BTC (1/4th of $200 is $50). That way you cover your risk of being underpaid.
Or if you're a repeated billing customer, you let them pay what they think is the right amount (e.g. 0.10BTC here) and if it's short, you just do the standard short payment routine - e.g., say it drops to $250USD when you cash out, in which case the customer owes another $25 in BTC for the next bill.
Or you do both - you win if it's too much, and you don't lose if it's too little. Chances are it's also not so simple since you'd want to build in the conversion fees as well.
And yes, "short changing" is a problem if you pay them on a Friday night and the value drops when they cash it in Monday morning.
For the more advanced ones, they may do instant transfers, where you log in to pay your bill, click Pay in BTC and they say "You must send us 0.30BTC in the next 5 minutes" to pay the bill. That too is an option if you've got a particularly advanced exchanging system. Even BTC doesn't swing too wildly in 5 minutes.
Anyone know if Jolla phones are banned from being made by the Android OEMs because they're using a third party jvm for compatibility?
Yes, the terms of the OHA prohibit OEMs that ship Android phones from making "Android compatible" phones.
But Oppo is shipping an Android phone, so it's not an issue. If Oppo were to ship an Aliyun phone or a Jolla phone, they too will get a phone call reminding them of their legal commitment to not make a phone that does not run Android but can run Android apps. (So you can make a phone running your own OS, as long as it does NOT run Android apps).
Yes, it's CyanogenMod, but it's still Android in the end. That's perfectly allowed. In fact, Cyanogen is the only one allowed to distribute Gapps outside of Google.
Though, this makes the Blackberry announcement interesting - since Foxconn makes a lot of Android phones for others - are they going to be harassed for making Blackberry phones since those can run Android apps that are not Android?
Slashdot IS the 1%: You need just $34,000 annual income to be in the global elite.
I find that number to be wrong on many levels.
First, 1% of the population is about 70M people.
You're telling me that out of the population of the US, Canada and Western Europe, that only 70M of those people make more then $34,000?
If they were all Americans, that means 3 out of every 4 Americans make less than $34,000, a number I feel is high, especially when you add in the populations of Western Europe.
Additionally, I would think a there would be a significant number of those people in say, China (where income inequality is HUGE)..
I would believe the number is much closer to the top 5-8% of the population makes $34,000+.
I learn things in my free time in order to beef up my skills for the next employer since the only way you can get a raise is to change jobs.
That should not be your only reason.
You should be learning for several reasons.
First, its' professional competence - if you ever join any professional organization, they all have mandates for continuing education. I.e., you must always be learning new things, if nothing else than to keep current. You cannot let your skills go stale - learn new things, technologies, and be educated enough to know what are fads, what are useful and what can be used the next time around.
Second, learning is fun. If you're interested in the topic, learn learn learn! Nothing's worse than the old fogey in the cube who refuses to learn anything and insists on using outdated technology and references because they refused to believe there may be something better.
Sure the old ways may be good, but how do you know they're still relevant good, or necessary? You learn new things, then you compare them. Some of them you quickly find out are flash in the pan stuff that dies out, others contain worthwhile concepts worth exploring. And maybe sometimes you learn something new that blows your mind away.
Finally, learn in order to simplify. Humans are lazy. Learning something that lets you be lazy is natural and beneficial - go beyond writing mere scripts, and learn how perhaps to automate things better.
And especially us technology workers where things move so fast, you need to continually learn new things in order to just keep current.
It isn't about the price of the printed gun, it is about exclusivity. This gun is a limited edition, and will be from the set of the first 100 metal guns ever made by using a printer. That is bound to give the gun some value that exceeds the sum of its parts.
And yet, what's to stop someone from making a copy of the file and hitting print on their own set of printers?
Yes, you get to be one of the first 100 to own a 3D printed gun. Too bad someone may extract the model file and be able to print up 100 more copies.
You can almost bet once the first 100 go, they'll announce "3D Printed Gun! Unlimited Edition - $5000" or something. After all, anything popular goes from "limited edition" to "unlimited edition" soon enough.
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Probably ran out of PCIe lanes, to be honest.
They're limited - two workstation graphics cards at x16 consume 32 lanes, the TB2 ports are probably close to 2 lanes each (so 12 more lanes consumed), so you have wifi/bluetooth consuming another lane (bluetooth is USB) plus another lane for the storage. That's 46 PCIe lanes consumed. Or if TB2 only takes one lane PCIe 3.0, that's 40 lanes.
It's a dirty little secret - the number of PCIe lanes are limited - sure you can split them with a bridge, but you're still sharing lanes in the end.
A lot of motherboards with "3x PCIe x16 slots" rarely, if ever, run x16 on all 3 slots - it just means they have 3 x16 slots on them - probably configured as x16, x8 and x4. In PCIe, it makes no difference what slot you pick since they're compatible - which is a wonder why they don't just use x16 slots everywhere since they'll fit any PCIe device (a x1/x2/x4/x8/x16 device can fit in a x16 slot, while a x16 cannot fit in a x8 or smaller slot - and this is in the spec).
Why are techies so out of touch with The Real World(tm)?
Unless you're visiting your parents/friends/cousins/etc houses on a weekly basis (not a bad idea), then guess what? USB keys will back up once. Honest truth - users will not lift a finger to back up. If it doesn't happen automatically, or requires manual intervention, it will not happen. It's a chore, and unless you do it regularly for them, it will not happen.
I'm sure everyone's run across the "can you restore a file for me? I have backups!" only to find the backups ended a year ago because they "would do it next week".
To be honest, the cloud backups are probably spyware, but they're also convenient. They don't do a single thing, and it's there. Their PC die? Well, their documents are patiently waiting on Dropbox, Skydrive, GDrive, whatever. Hell, set up OwnCloud on your own server farm and set up the client on your parents PC so it backs up there.
You think these tips suck? To be honest, they're basic, and really, they're also geared for the real world. Computers are meant to automate boring tasks. Why are we forced to do stuff the computer can do automatically?
Or do you really think that companies like Apple are all marketing? They understand the real world - that's why they do stuff like Time Machine - a simple, quiet, out of the way backup mechanism! Or auto-save, working on Time Machine that lets you go back to an earlier revision of a document, view it, copy and paste, etc,?
You know, Microsoft made an excellent backup product - called Windows Home Server. Backs up the network nightly, does de-dupe, images every machine, etc. Silent, runs in the background, even wakes the machine to backup. Alas, it's discontinued, but it is one of the best things around - it just works.
And anyone worried about NSA or "not owning the data" as an excuse to not have an automated backup plan? Guess what - which is worse - telling your parents/kids/etc that they should've taken the effort while you sit there trying to recover the data manually spending hours, or just retrieving the file for them? You can lecture all about the NSA as you want, and it'll fall on deaf ears.
Users won't backup unless it happens automatically. Users will also let others use their PCs. That's the real world and anyone who says otherwise hasn't worked in a real IT department. Users are way too clever. If you ban use of thumb drives, they will either use cloud storage to share files, the file server will fill up with useless crap (intermixed with vital project information and somehow required for production), or users will send emails of the files around.
Hell, you probably think Android's permission system is "pretty cool" when in fact, it's a perfect example of dancing pigs security. I.e., it's insecurity at its finest. Unless you're a techie. Which I can bet the vast majority of the 80% of Android users are not. Hell, I'm sure most of them think Android is an iPhone with pirated apps.
Actually, government has done it a lot of times. Education is huge - you may have heard of stuff like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, the SATs, GMATs, and other degrees? Do you know that the Educational Testing Services (ETS) which provides those tests also own some rather fancy hotels and other things?
You know why? They're non-profit, and every student is subject to those tests - either paid for by the state (ITBS, among other tests that elementary students take), or the student (SATs, etc). And each test is expensive, despite being well, evaluated by a bunch of fancy Scantron machines. So much so ETS makes a pile of money every year they have to spend (as they can't make a profit - "non-profit") thus ending up owning a pile of hotels and other stuff.
Standardized testing - now there's a profitable market that's really owned by one company.
At least with software development, you can opt out of CMMI and just not do government contracts. Or you can be "the only one in your field" and be exempt from regulations because your product serves a niche - if the government needs your software, they aren't going to demand CMMI from you - they'll just request it.
That is the answer.
Most homes will probably need a computer for the near future. Note I said "a" computer. Most first world places (basically most of the /. readers) will probably have at least one computer per person - and maybe a couple more "community" computers (e.g., HTPC, servers, etc).
And most families probably have close to three computers - the "family" PC, the work/parents PC (which may or may not be borrowed from work), and the kids PC. Or more.
Well, it probably turns out a number of them are completely redundant and were there only because they needed something and the only choice was a PC (desktop or laptop).
Now we have tablets, and a bunch of those PCs are probably redundant - the kid's PC may just be the family PC, and the work/parents PC may also be the family PC. Because everything else - games, websurfing, YouTube, banking, are done on tablets. Leaving the family PC for the odd tasks like school work, reports and working from home (if work hasn't issued a laptop).
So we're unlikely to see the demise of the PC - but we're also likely to see the number of PCs shrink - back when the PC was the only computing option - you needed a PC for games, online banking, websurfing, etc. - you bought as many to prevent contention. Nowadays, tablets do most of the stuff you bought the extra PCs for making them redundant.
The other thing is, well, the documentation simply doesn't exist. Having worked with quite a few ASIC vendors, inside and out, I can tell you the modern SoC if heavily undocumented. For a good chunk of the blocks, unless they're external IP (from say, Synopsys, Cadence or ARM), there IS no documentation other than a register list.
Yes, the documentation may just be a register list. Nothing to tell you how you should drive the hardware, if the registers have to be programmed in a certain way, or if there's tricks and other things that are important to know. Or even how some data structures need to be laid out in memory for hardware (you may get a brief layout, but that's it). Any my favorite - how the hardware reacts to an error. Sometimes it just plain locks up requiring a full reset. Other times it sets some strange error bit that must be cleared in order to resume functionality. If you're lucky to know how to clear the error.
Oh, and how does a software developer find out such information? Easy, they ask the ASIC designer how they envisioned the thing to work. Sometimes they're helpful and tell you exactly what you need to know, but they can be terse and expect you to figure out their thinking. And sometimes what you want to do LOOKS possible from the registers, only to find out that no, you just cannot program the bits that way and no, you shouldn't try.
That's probably why Intel took so long to get the documentation out - Haswell has been out since what, April? And only now they release the documentation? Well, it's probably because Intel was getting the whole whack together from random designer notes, software design, etc. Then bringing all that together (Intel creates some of the best documentation around) and editing it and all that.
For the most part, nVidia and AMD probably DON'T have much in the way of documentation on the latest GPUs. Intel does, and only because they spend time and effort doing it - but Intel's also huge and has a lot of cash to have a bunch of engineers sitting around writing documentation exclusively.
If you think OSS people hate writing documentation - it's no better when it's commercial development - again, the project usually doesn't allow for much documentation to be created. And things like GPUs which change frequently, well, by the time the documents are written, it's obseleted 3 times over.
Just so everyone gets the scale of the issue - Boxing Day sales are a Commonwealth tradition - started in the UK, but most countries do observe them (including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others).
It's really the Commonwealth equivalent of Black Friday - including the traditions of sales starting the day before the event (Thanksgiving for Black Friday, Christmas for Boxing Day). It's a huge spike of traffic for most sites - I know even as little as 5 years ago - sites going down around 9PM PST were common (given most sales started at midnight) - 8:59 and the site was fine, once the clock ticked over, the sites fell over.
These days the sites do often slow down, but they stay up as many sites now employ mitigation techniques including queuing transactions to avoid overloading the SSL payment backends (they call it the checkout queue).
Of course, that was years ago, there's almost no reason why in 2013 the site should go down, nevermind going down permanently. Of course, perhaps the biggest reason is they were hacked - the best time to hack is during heavy times where systems fall over in unpredictable ways that may expose information to get at the juicy data as well as hiding in plain sight. There's really no other reason why a site would be taken down - heavy traffic is easily anticipated (It's not like you don't know when Christmas is) and accommodated.
I bet that's what really happened - they got hacked. Better to say "too much traffic!" and show incompetence that way than to show incompetence in handling customer information...
You don't always need ultracaps.
Remember, the primary reason why SSDs fail is corruption of the FTL tables (the thing that helps the firmware map sectors to actual flash cells). Once the table gets corrupted, the only way to recover is a full reformat to reexamine every flash cell and start anew. If you're lucky, there's enough metadata around to rebuild it. Most likely not as modern advanced ECC algorithms use the entire spare area of the array for data protection.
If you're willing to give up some performance, you can often run the firmware in a "slower but more reliable" mode where you save the cost of the caps (tantalums or ultracaps - very expensive) at the cost of performance.
Of course, companies like OCZ used modded firmware where they disabled the performance-killing safety and aimed for maximum performance. And failed to put in the required backup power.
Given how SSDs are more or less "fast enough" these days (really - is the average user going to notice 800MB/sec reads and writes over say, 1GB/sec reads/writes?), the firmware can often "scale back" and do more protection on the FTL corruption issue at the cost of performance.
So assume you're an "A-player" and hired by Netflix. And they put you on a routine job of updating some pile of CSS and Javascript. Do you think you'll bring your "A-game" there?
The problem is the "A-players" often need varying, changing tasks to keep "entertained". Give them dull boring maintenance tasks and you're "wasting their talent". Yet as any big continuing software project goes, maintenance is the largest and most common task - fixing bugs, refactoring, etc. Very little goes towards flashy new interfaces and features. Heck, a large part can be simple technical support - handling cases from other developers on how to use APIs to accomplish various tasks.
Presumably the "B-players" who aren't working on the flashy new stuff know the heart of the system inside and out. Yet getting rid of them gets rid of institutionalized knowledge - you give them a problem or a customer question, and they know exactly where to zero in on the code. They may not be able to fix ti as quickly, or can easily get tangled up, but they know where to start looking and how the systems interact. Of course, the A player can probably get a fix done quickly once pointed out the location, but they won't know the repercussions. Some of which won't happen until the fix is long forgotten about.
When everything is new, yes, you want A players because it's getting stuff done. But once you have something, maintenance is no longer in the A-player's interests - they want flashy and new, not bugfixing and documentation (what's the open-source mantra? You have the code, fix it yourself? Bingo.).
You're making an assumption that the 4GB limit is prohibitive. For some applications, it could be - databases and scientific processing, and definitely games. But there are plenty of other applications that won't really benefit from the enlarged address space - would a word processor benefit? A 1GB word processor document is a fair amount of text - probably close to the point where it's best to split the document up for easier managability.
Or various streaming processing algorithms - like DSP which can benefit from the added registers, and really, don't consume much RAM at all (since the data streams in and out).
Sure, one reason to go 64-bit is to bust the 4GB limit. Another reason is to get speed advantages because x64 offers more registers and other stuff.
Heck, iOS probably uses something like that to get the insane speedups because the ARM AArch64 is a MUCH faster architecture, yet every iOS device shipping now only has 1GB of RAM. Here 64-bit is for speed, not memory.
And you know what? Canada has it worse. In fact, the big 3 carriers were so scared of Verizon coming in that they ran attack ads on the basis of "we pay the lowest!" (of the two major carriers) and "think of the children!" and "jobs jobs jobs!".
Nevermind that if Verizon actually charged more in Canada, people wont' flock to them.
Canada's big three are so scared they tried to buy out the small AWS carriers before they even got started - going so far as to offer Wind a 10x profit for their wireless license.
Then they're pulling every dirty trick in the book to ensure that Wind won't get established (foreign ownership rules, etc). Finally, they even forced Industry Canada to take down their "wireless calculator" because no matter how you sliced it, the small competitors WERE cheaper in every way possible. This tool was in beta testing for a couple of years, and they lobbied to kill it just when it rolled out.
And when Verizon announced they weren't going to Canada? Their stock rose 30%.
Yes, it's that bad in Canada. You guys in the US actually have it fairly good.
Given that most onsite shots are done with laptops and even iPads, that's no longer a very likely scenario.
I mean, taking a look at how a director is shooting, he's sitting at a table of laptops. Hell, the director probably is holding an iPad in his hand directing the shot - the iPad loaded with the script, the animatic (or storyboards, but those are fading out in favor of animatics) and the dailies.
The whole pile of equipment? That's back at the VFX shop where they have racks of servers - probably connected to desktops via stuff like GigE or Thunderbolt.
Laptops are now what people are using for shoots - no one lugs desktops around. OTOH, the new Mac Pro DOES fit nicely into a carry on flight case.
It's a very fine line though. Most drug users ARE high functioning and in VERY high places. I mean, your stockbroker is a good chance to be using, as would may other people on Wall Street.
Imagine though, that it was revealed that the whole 2008 meltdown was caused by a few crackheads one day? Then what? War on Drugs is bad? The damn drugs caused me to lose my job!
And yes, I meant people in high places - where their 6-figure salaries can keep a good habit going away from family and friends (who really do not know). I'm sure the public War on Drugs would be damaged once it's revealed that CEOs and executives are the biggest users.
Yeah, I'm sure the public will be real sympathetic to the poor CEOs making millions a year in bonuses (which probably goes to pay for their drug habit, natch) when they get laid off.
Or why bother doing it on iOS - Android is where the piracy scene is at - with piracy levels around the PC level (90%+). I mean, why go through the hassles of jailbreaking when you're really just going to expose your phone to the same crap that lets Android malware spread far and wide? Why not just do it on Android where it's not just permitted, but often encouraged by "sideloading"?
All that Taig and this jailbreak has shown is that people jailbreak for piracy purposes. And hell, Taig may not have the exploits, but given that China is where Android malware runs rampant, do you really trust that it's all nicely sandboxed?
Hell, even the traditional reasons for jailbreaking aren't ready yet - Cydia isn't quite iOS7 ready. And MobileSubstrate isn't, either. (MS is a library that lets jailbroken apps cleanly and safely hook into the OS without causing too much disaster). Which means this jailbreak is only useful for... pirated apps.
And Apple is bound to use this as a perfect reason on why jailbreaking should not be allowed - piracy and security. Oh wait, they already did. This jailbreak just proved their point!
Actually, another reason is liability - a product placement often carries a pile of terms and conditions on how and when the product must be displayed, and how it must be shown. Some of these are understandable (e.g., a car sponsor may request that none of the cars used in live shots may be shown as causing intentional damage, or showing faults, etc). Usually, the items must be shown in a positive light and all that.
So not only do editors not want to give free ads away, they don't want to run afoul of any possible libel or slander by misrepresenting a product. By editing away any distinctive marks, they also can use it as a "generic" computer and not likely to damage brands or get sued.
Actually, if you consider iPhone vs. Android, that's true. But iPhone vs. other specific phone models, it's not so easy - the SGS4 and SGS3, possibly the two best selling Android phones, make up around 10% (combined) of the Android market, but both individually (including all the sub models) sold less than iPhones.
The iPhone is iconic, an Android phone is not - it's generally so bad that if there's a specific Android phone product placement, the phone itself will announce its make and model - e.g., Sony pictures phones will use Sony phones, but they often will have SONY plastered on them, and maybe even show "Xperia Z" or something when the actor uses it.
That's one of the big Android problems - sure they use s smartphone, but that's it. If it's an iPhone, it's obvious it's an iPhone. If it's a Windows Phone, ditto. But if it's an Android phone, that's practically any POS shape and size that's so generic it's fades away.
Hell, Microsoft Surface paid placements all have the actors snapping the keyboard to the tablet, and flipping out the stand. Otherwise it was likely to drown in the background of "windows tablets".
If you think form doesn't matter - it means the device is ignorable and is a poor candidate for product placement. Unless your item has a distinct design element (a la Apple, or Surface, or Sony) then the on-screen use will be very generic because there's nothing that sets it apart.
It could also be that Apple's computers tend to be very distinctive and thus, easily recognizable. It's something that's a part of Apple's designs - they don't tend to fade and become just another generic widget in the background.
This is especially because Apple's made computers out of aluminum, which gives it a distinctive look all to itself. Having oddly-shaped PCs (think the iLamp and such) add to the distinctiveness.
Heck, Thinkpads were fairly common as well - given the red nipple pointer. Of course, PCs these days generally Dells which don't usually have many distinctive elements and thus end up blending into the background.
You're seeing it.
Global warming isn't characterized just by warmer temperatures, but more temperature extremes.
In other words, summers get hotter, and winters get colder. And warm snaps in winter get hot, while cold snaps in summer get colder. (You see spring or early summer temps in heat waves in winter, and snow in summer).
So be prepared to freeze your ass off some more - climate change and global warming will ensure that your summers will be extremely hot, and your winters extremely cold. And no, you're not going to have a nice "nice" summer that's not too hot, nor a "nice warm" winter where it doesn't get cold.
Yes, the earth is getting hotter, but 0.7C or 4C over a century isn't that much - but it's an average. That means the hot spots can be +15C hotter, while the cold spots -11C colder and you'd still get your 4C difference. And by hot spots and cold spots, could be summer or winter as well. Like how a 25C summer day can turn into a 40C heatwave, and a 5C winter day can easily turn into a -6C winter day (oh look...).
And it's been shown that this is what's happening. The hot days get hotter, the cold days get colder. What was once a nice temperate zone gets bigger spikes in hot and cold. Global warming will never make a cold place appealing to live in - except for maybe the odd day of the year.
Oh yeah, more hurricanes as well 0 a hurricane cools the oceans by dumping the heat into the atmosphere.
Except they detect that. If you take a screenshot in Android, a message is sent back to the sender that you took a screenshot. Basically, do this enough times and the sender may exclude you from future snapchats and send you the photo directly - after everyone else has found out.
It's a form of social DRM - you don't do it because you feel left out (and you'd be outed by everyone so your social network rank falls). Or your friend can nudge you and ask why are you doing it.
Of course, I didn't mention iOS becuase until iOS 7, Snapchat also detected it (indirectly, since Apple's walled garden blocks the detection so they use proxy measures). Of course, in iOS7, such proxy measures don't need to be done anymore so the notification fails.
Oh but you could, you'd just pay significantly more.
A 1080p panel uses the same electronics as a 1080p TV, so it's really, really, really cheap to implement. A 1920s1200 panel doesn't - you require electronics to be able to handle it, which because they aren't made by a trillion manufacturers in trillion level quantities, costs a whole lot more.
Apple can do it because they make millions of the same hardware - when you buy in that quantity, stuff is cheaper.
But you could buy Dells with 1920x1200 screens - you'd just be looking at a $2500+ laptop, for the screen mostly, rather than a $1500 laptop (everything else the same). I know I bought a Dell with a 1920x1200 screen - cost me over $4k (but this was because it had several niceties like Blu-Ray, a high end video card, high spec CPU, etc).
Apple is seen as a "premium" manufacturer - because they charge $2500+ for laptops (well, $1200 now...), way above what PC manufacturers will going for (the sub-$1000 market). Apple has to use good quality parts, and they have ot offer a "premium" experience. Hell, every time a new Macbook came out, everyone disregarded the screen - showing they could get a Dell for $1000 less, except it was rarely even a 1080p screen. That's just how the cookie crumbles - if you want those extra 120 rows of pixels, you paid a pretty penny for it.
The race to the bottom isn't a good thing. Beyond a certain point, people are just making to a price point and cutting corners as a result. See sub-$500 laptops - they all cut some corners. Hell, the most innovation happened in the higher-margin ultrabook category, where you get higher res (though 1080p) screens but they also cost a lot more money.
Deep sea work is different - when you have external pressures higher than internal ones, the demands are different.
And no, a lot of deep sea work isn't done by remote manipulators, but by divers - often saturation divers (where divers work and live "at depth" because decompression can take up to a week. And accidents have happened because the saturation chamber is above atmospheric pressure, and catastrophic decompression has happened.
One reason is that when external pressures are higher, you only deal with "suit squeeze" where the suit presses on the body (This assumes the use of regular diving equipment, and not NewtSuits which allow a shirtsleeve environment, and are highly complex beasts). In this case, all one needs to do is inflate the suit to equalize pressure.
In space, though, inflating a suit is the last thing you want to do, because it leads to ballooning - in effect, a space suit is a human-shaped balloon, and if you've ever blown up a latex glove, you know the main air chamber gets the biggest (i.e. chest area) while the extremities don't really inflate at all Lots of special fabrics are involved in this under control, but it's unavoidable. If you ever seen the strap that connects the helmet ring and runs to the crotch, that's to keep the helmet from ballooning away from the head.
Then there's the whole mobility problem - air-tight bearings just aren't easy to move, and in fact, there is always leakage (how much is acceptable varies.
Finally - ventilation - getting heat away from the body, getting extremities cool or warmed (as necessary) isn't an easy task, and having pools of sweat gathering around just isn't fun (try wearing a sauna suit all day - after a workout it's fine, but it'll get clammy, cold and just plain yucky after a while).
NASA actually documented the history of pressure suits and their problems - "Dressing for Altitude" - http://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/dress_for_altitude_detail.html
It's a great read on all the intricacies of pressure and space suits. And how even now we still are in the learning phase.
As for robots - they're getting there - the problem being that there's a lot of feedback issues - one wrong move can put a nasty dent in the structure, which weakens it. While the pressure vessel is isolated, there's only a small difference between "minor dent" and "major problem".
Well, given how much must be done to have a jailbreak, the fact it was paid for by the Chinese is probably the most interesting part. Very sketchy. Do we need to remind people of all the Android malware that seems to infect Chinese phones?
There's plenty of things that get executed and a lot of it runs are root. If you think Android malware is bad, the fact this is designed for pirated iOS apps has the likelihood of the same thing. And heck, I'm sure pirated Android apps are the same vector on Android.
Plus, apparently without involvement of Saurik (Cydia), the build they have doesn't work very well, and neither does MobileSubstrate (it's a library Saurik wrote that lets developers do interesting things safely).
And really, anyone really remember Apple's response to jailbreaking - you know, about potentially compromising your phoen, piracy, etc? Geez, do you really want to prove Apple right?
Finally, a pirated app store? Really? Jailbreakers are seen by Apple as pirates and most developers see people who jailbreak as nothing but pirates - even though there are plenty of valid reasons to jailbreak that isn't piracy. This just reinforces the impression that jailbreakers do it just to pirate.
You can. You simply fix the rate of Bitcoins to whatever the local currency you want is for that billing period.
E.g., let's say the past 30 days, bitcoin had a high of $1200 USD to a low of $200 USD and is currently $500 USD, and your phone bill is $50. Well, you could simply bill it at 0.25 BTC (1/4th of $200 is $50). That way you cover your risk of being underpaid.
Or if you're a repeated billing customer, you let them pay what they think is the right amount (e.g. 0.10BTC here) and if it's short, you just do the standard short payment routine - e.g., say it drops to $250USD when you cash out, in which case the customer owes another $25 in BTC for the next bill.
Or you do both - you win if it's too much, and you don't lose if it's too little. Chances are it's also not so simple since you'd want to build in the conversion fees as well.
And yes, "short changing" is a problem if you pay them on a Friday night and the value drops when they cash it in Monday morning.
For the more advanced ones, they may do instant transfers, where you log in to pay your bill, click Pay in BTC and they say "You must send us 0.30BTC in the next 5 minutes" to pay the bill. That too is an option if you've got a particularly advanced exchanging system. Even BTC doesn't swing too wildly in 5 minutes.
Yes, the terms of the OHA prohibit OEMs that ship Android phones from making "Android compatible" phones.
But Oppo is shipping an Android phone, so it's not an issue. If Oppo were to ship an Aliyun phone or a Jolla phone, they too will get a phone call reminding them of their legal commitment to not make a phone that does not run Android but can run Android apps. (So you can make a phone running your own OS, as long as it does NOT run Android apps).
Yes, it's CyanogenMod, but it's still Android in the end. That's perfectly allowed. In fact, Cyanogen is the only one allowed to distribute Gapps outside of Google.
Though, this makes the Blackberry announcement interesting - since Foxconn makes a lot of Android phones for others - are they going to be harassed for making Blackberry phones since those can run Android apps that are not Android?
I find that number to be wrong on many levels.
First, 1% of the population is about 70M people.
You're telling me that out of the population of the US, Canada and Western Europe, that only 70M of those people make more then $34,000?
If they were all Americans, that means 3 out of every 4 Americans make less than $34,000, a number I feel is high, especially when you add in the populations of Western Europe.
Additionally, I would think a there would be a significant number of those people in say, China (where income inequality is HUGE)..
I would believe the number is much closer to the top 5-8% of the population makes $34,000+.
That should not be your only reason.
You should be learning for several reasons.
First, its' professional competence - if you ever join any professional organization, they all have mandates for continuing education. I.e., you must always be learning new things, if nothing else than to keep current. You cannot let your skills go stale - learn new things, technologies, and be educated enough to know what are fads, what are useful and what can be used the next time around.
Second, learning is fun. If you're interested in the topic, learn learn learn! Nothing's worse than the old fogey in the cube who refuses to learn anything and insists on using outdated technology and references because they refused to believe there may be something better.
Sure the old ways may be good, but how do you know they're still relevant good, or necessary? You learn new things, then you compare them. Some of them you quickly find out are flash in the pan stuff that dies out, others contain worthwhile concepts worth exploring. And maybe sometimes you learn something new that blows your mind away.
Finally, learn in order to simplify. Humans are lazy. Learning something that lets you be lazy is natural and beneficial - go beyond writing mere scripts, and learn how perhaps to automate things better.
And especially us technology workers where things move so fast, you need to continually learn new things in order to just keep current.
And yet, what's to stop someone from making a copy of the file and hitting print on their own set of printers?
Yes, you get to be one of the first 100 to own a 3D printed gun. Too bad someone may extract the model file and be able to print up 100 more copies.
You can almost bet once the first 100 go, they'll announce "3D Printed Gun! Unlimited Edition - $5000" or something. After all, anything popular goes from "limited edition" to "unlimited edition" soon enough.