OS X has FileVault 2, which can encrypt drives with a couple clicks. OS X also has a utility that makes sparse images, using "bands", which allows one to have an encrypted volume grow and shrink as needed. Of course, there is a loss of security with this feature, but it adds versatility.
Actually, bands are created so you can back up the encrypted volume files without bloating your backups.
Think about it - you mount your encrypted disk, then do some file operations - perhaps edit a file. You close the encrypted disk and do a backup. Well, your backup software can't get at the encrypted contents, so now it sees the entire volume has changed and needs backing up. Boom, if it's a 1GB volume, you just bloated your backup image by 1GB. And because yesterday's image is different, you now have two 1GB images. Repeat a few times and it gets unwieldy, fast.
The solution is either to let the backup solution backup the encryption volume while mounted (so it picks up the changed file rather than changed volume). Or as Apple has done it, band the image. Knowing that if you edit a few bytes, only a few things REALLY change in the image, rather than storing the whole 1GB image on the backup store, it backs up the changed bands (which if they're 1MB in size, will amount to a few MB backed up).
Sure it bloats the backup, but if you're routinely editing only a few bytes at a time, bloating the backup by megabytes a day is far superior than the entire volume daily.
It's only an epidemic because the media portrays it that way. People being mean to other people is just a fact of life. It's nothing new, and I'd argue it was a lot worse in the past than it is today. The only difference is that today stories like this go national rather than remain confined to a local news station. Then the various news outlets beat the dead horse until a new salacious scandal can take its place.
The biggest problem with bullying today is this attitude that children need to be insulated from it rather than stand up against it. What ever happened to 'sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me'? If we're going to blame anyone I blame this girl's parents for raising her to be so emotionally weak that she would rather die than stand up for herself.
Bullying is "less" today in that its less physical these days than in the past. However, it's also "more" these days because it's less physical and more emotional. And for kids who are still developing their emotional centers, it's traumatic.
Also, the internet does not forget An anonymous post on ask.fm telling a kid to go kill themselves does not disappear. And it's global - the old tactic of moving to another school or city? Doesn't work anymore.
Back in the old days, you knew your bullies. These days, getting an anonymous text is just as common, especially when spammed across an entire school. And stuff like that unfortunately lasts - a schoolyard bully goes away when the school day ends or they move,etc. Today's bully, doesn't.
One can argue that perhaps the bullied should clean up their facebook page daily, but that gets tiresome quick, and just reinforces the bullying.
Perhaps if we rephrased bullying as harassment, which is what it really is, things get turned into a new light. Before it was local and gone from memory in a few minutes. Now it's global and permanent - "Sally is a poopy-head" disappears the moment it's said on a schoolyard, but stays forever on the internet.
Heck, it's the same problem we're seeing where one's casual after hours recreation suddenly has very real career-limiting effects. Where once no one cared you got drunk off your ass because once you recovered, only a few friends knew, well these days you post that on your social network page and not only does the world (and your future employer) know, well, it's there pretty much permanently. Except in that case, you had a choice to not post it. The harassed or bullied, well, that's not an option.
And grow a backbone? To whom? You don't know who sent the text, who posted the update, who set up the website, who called you the name. The internet is great at letting people be anonymous. You can't even face your bully.
As we've mentioned above, libraries typically delete records as soon as you return whatever you borrowed, so they can't be 'mined'. I believe it's a standard feature in library software these days.
This occurred because the government actually tried to get book lending records and librarians opposed the request. When it went through, they promptly started deleting all lending records because it was data they didn't need to maintain at all and that data was of interest. They only maintain what you have out as a result. (After all, does the library really need to know you borrowed a book after you returned it? What useful purpose could it serve? If you want "recommendations", well, the librarian is probably your best resource - just say you want books similar to the one you're returning.)
Some of the biggest information freedom fighters it seems are librarians.
And the problem with reading is not libraries or books, or video games or TV. It's school. If there's anything that makes reading less cool, is doing endless book reports, analyzing text for subtext and being forced to read some dreary text as a homework assignment. Nothing kills reading faster than turning it into an unpleasurable activity.
Why is everyone talking like there even is a problem? In August Android had almost 80% of the market. Yeah, it must be incredibly boring and horrible to use if so many people want it.
Do they, though? Out of that Android population, guess how many are for high end flagship Android phones. A rough estimate would be under 10% of the entire Android population.
Yes, just 1 in 10 are for the likes of an HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S 4, Moto X, LG G2, etc. The rest are cheap crap phones that carriers pawn off on subscribers as new and flashy and more importantly, free.
The consumer comes into the store, sees an iPhone and wants that. Balks at the $200 price tag, and sees what else is around. Sees they can get some cheap Samsung for free, and walks out of the door with it. Or the contract on their featurephone is coming due, and the carrier basically sends them some Android they have left over for free.
Evidence - well, gee, if everyone's on a 2-3 year plan, why are we still having significant chunks of Gingerbread around? You'd think people wouldn't be using what is now over 3 year old software. All those old crap should've been replaced by now.
Next, you have internet traffic charts for mobile - where oddly, iOS still beats Android (despite Android outselling 4-1) - you'd think with all those Android users, they'd actually use their phones, but I guess the vast majority only use them as glorified featurephones. Not even on WiFi.
Then there are advertising reports that say an iOS impression is worth twice as much as an Android impression (or roughly, an iOS user is worth 8 times as much). Which advertisers blame on the inability to differentiate between valuable Android users (the ones with flagship phones), and everyone else. Turns out if you have cheap Android phones, you're not likely to spend as much money on stuff.
Android is the Windows of the mobile world. It's used because it's cheaply available and why Samsung and others sell tons of crap Android phones. Last year's SGS3 flagship was the most popular Android phone sold, with around 60M units. Yet the Android ecosystem has probably close to 950M units.
Hell, Android user satisfaction generally trails that of Windows Phone! Yes, people are happier using Windows Phone than Android. Especially given how a distant third or fourth it is.
..we've all suspected it was true a long time ago. Honestly I think the bigger surprise was that the surveillance wasn't worse. There have been people who've sworn for years that every time you lick a stamp the Post Office sequences your DNA....
Or perhaps people expect that business done "in public" is in full view of well, the public. Anyone can capture the dealings that go on, either intentionally or accidentally.
The outrage at facebook etc. come from the misleadingly-named "privacy controls" which are more marketing than anything. (Facebook implements it to get people to "open up" and thus increase the value of that profile). It's like telling someone a secret that they reveal later on.
But for email, everyone's always known it's out in the clear and if the NSA isn't doing it, Google, etc. are and building a profile of you that way.
And most people really aren't all that interesting to begin with. If it wasn't for the silly cellphone law that prevented scanners from tuning in, people probably would've gotten bored and moved on (there's only so many "Honey, I'm a few minutes from home" and "Would you pick up some milk?" you can take in between the more interesting calls). Of course, the law kept cropping up so people kept tuning in hoping to catch something juicy.
Hell, that might be a way for terrorists to communicate - "Honey, I'm running late" is code for "go boom now!" versus "I should be home in a few minutes".
OTOH, it seems some people do get genuinely surprised when it's mentioned that all texts are monitored and they're presented with a list of texts they sent during the month...
Get something that makes you happy but shop around for goodness' sake, you can be happy for a lot less than $500.
I never pay more than $200 - or even $150 these days now that I found Grado SR-80i's for around that price. Leaky as hell, but damn do you get good sound for the price.
Of course, the cheapest I've heard were the Koss Porta-Pros - $40 for some impressive sound quality.
Spending a ton of money on headphones is ridiculous - and yes, the next step up in Grado to the SR-125's jumps from $140 to $300+.
In a lot of places where the internet is firewalled, monitored, etc (basically everywhere), a lot of people used fidonet to send messages out because the censors never investigated that traffic - they monitor your email, but not your modem.
So for a lot of people (and journalists and all that), fidonet really is the network of freedom because it's the only valid way out.
Err.... Java 6 is unsupported now, which is probably why it has less bugs patched. They're both buggy piles of crap, but lets compare apples with apples here. One is still being updated.
And apparently Oracle is so fed up with Android that they've put the JDK6 behind a registraiion-wall, something I found out when trying to set up a machine to build Android. Used to be easy to get, now that Oracle's completely deprecated it, they're making ti hard to get the last version available.
It's something to note when trying to set up Android - getting JDK6 is now a PITA...
MIPS provides a much cleaner upgrade path going forward than ARM. MIPS64 is a very clean extension to MIPS32. All of the MIPS32 instructions behave the same except that they are sign extended to 64-bit. 64-bit ARM on the other hand has almost nothing in common with ARM32. The instruction encoding is totally different. The register definitions are also completely different. A lot of the things that made ARM ARM are gone such as conditional execution.
All in the name of speed, actually. Conditional execution is cool, until you realize it complicates a super-scalar multi-issue pipeline with out-of-order execution because the conditional dependency might not get resolved until late in the game.
It's why an ARMv8 chip will not run ARMv7 code much faster - there's very little optimizations left to speed things up.
So ARM re-did a lot of things for 64-bit to make it scalable in the future - rather than try to retain compatibility (there's wasn't any 64-bit code to speak of until ARM defined it), it was time for a clean break.
So 64-bit code runs much faster because many of the architectural changes were designed for scalability.
And in doing so, they also get rid of a lot of cruft in the 32-bit architecture that makes no more sense - notably, coprocessors are gone and replaced with system registers. Stuff like the CPSR are now broken out into PSTATE - more complex to use, but architecturally more scalable in the future.
Plus, they added more architectural registers which is always a nice bonus. And there's a fixed mapping so setting up the 32-bit environment is fairly trivial (it really only takes a few bits to flip and the CPU will switch to AArch32 - I've gone it in pure assembly).
64-bit ARM cleans up a lot of mess, and is pretty damn easy to code in. The encodings may differ, but the coding is a lot simpler and still very familiar.
Unless advertising somehow decreases the cost of bringing products to market, it actually increases prices in the aggregate. You may pay less for a particular product on a particular day, just like you may occasionally win at roulette. Overall though, advertising increases expenditures by the companies, just like the odds favor the house. That cost is passed on to you, even though it's probably not that large. The house edge isn't that large either; but you still lose.
It's a necessary cost though - because if no one knows about your product, then you may have saved money and have a cheaper product, but you'll also get far fewer sales as a result.
You can easily draw parallels to many geek oriented sites and projects that die on/. all the time, and the first top comment is "What is it?".
Hell, I know many people who "cut the cord" using bittorrent, and they're promptly asking if a TV series has started again - or other folks who don't realize that a movie they wanted to catch is now in second run because they didn't know the release date.
Yes, there's a lot of advertising methods - but it's one of those necessary evils. You hope that people would do word-of-mouth, as it's one of the most effective advertising methods available, but it's potentially not timely enough to catch the deal, or the show or whatever.
Is it technically superior? The low quality of video output over it compared with Micro USB suggests that it isn't universally "better".
How is "low quality" inferior to "no output"?
Micro-USB does not support video output at all.
Sure, there are hacks like MHL and SlimPort to hack in video output support over a Micro-USB like connector, but they're incompatible with each other (you can't plug a MHL cable into a SlimPort device, or vice versa, or into something that doesn't support either). And they rely on extra signalling pins in the connector.
You might as well say we should switch our USB ports to eSATAp ones because you can jam USB into there OR a SATA cable.
(heck, MHL doesn't even support 1080p60... just 1080p30. MHL 2.0 fixes that). And still trying to find a economical cable for my Nexus 7 which supports SlimPort. Supposedly it's supposed to be a dumb cable to convert it to DisplayPort, versus MHL which requires electronics.
And yes, I fault Lightning too. One of the big reasons the iPod was successful was accessories, and accessories that made it easy to support docks and other things requiring zero effort on the manufacturer's part because the dock connector had all the signals you could need or want in the format you wanted. Component video? Check. Composite/S-Video? Check. Line-level audio? Check. RS-232 for control? Check. USB? Check. Every signal you could want - it had and it was trivially easy to interface with. No fancy interface electronics or anything.
That's what made super cheap accessories possible.
The only way lightning could top that is if Apple makes an internal board with all that stuff as outputs cheap so manufacturers can trivially add it to their docks. Given how long it's taken, I don't think that's the case.
In the large battery/mains powered arena, Intel is outspending every other GPU company combined, but making very little decent progress. AMD and Nvidia have the world's best GPU cores, and both are scaling their business up into 'super-computing' and down into ARM based mobile
Intel's just doing a lot of graphics research. They're not aiming to compete against AMD and NVidia anytime soon in performance. Remember, Intel vastly beats AMD and NVidia in GPUs shipped They only need to keep up with maybe 2 to 3 years graphics performance so people will find it "good enough".
People still cling to the idea of using the past to predict the future.
Years ago I knew a guy who played the lottery a lot. He kept a list of all the previous winning numbers and spent countless hours studying the numbers looking for patterns that would allow him to predict future winning numbers. It never worked.
All of this data collection is essentially the same thing.
For things that are not entirely random, the past is a great predictor of the future. Things like trends and other factors do regularly show up time and time again - leading to the adage that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Because it's likely it's happened before.
Thing is, you cannot take individual details and extrapolate from that (e.g., you bought coffee the past year, you'll buy one tomorrow).
The goal of dataland is to accumulate data and run behaviorial analysis - stuff like if you bought coffee yesterday AND the week before AND something else AND that other thing, you're 99.99% certain to buy a coffee today.
Of course, we don't know what "something else" and "that other thing" are. Which is why they have large data sets to mine data from.
It also leads to interesting correlations that may not explain why they're related, but that the two things pretty much go together with practical certainty.
And yes, there's no true predictability to it - it's a chaotic system, and humans do add some randomness, but there's more than an even chance.
These routers are generally not very powerful, they might be fast enough to route traffic at line speed but once you force them to do extra processing on all the traffic they start to choke.
Actually, the modern higher end router is plenty powerful - they generally have lots of RAM (128+MB isn't unusual, way more than Linux needs for NAT), lots of CPU and fast networking ports.
Heck, the latest generation are nearly pushing 1Gbps in software. (The generation before was pushing 700-odd Mbps full bore), and we're at 930Mbps or so. This is just pure NAT, mind you.
There's plenty of headroom to do some firewall processing even if it cuts down your speed by half - other than a few select places, you're not getting anywhere close over 100Mbps bi-directional.
and even with recent forays into 64bit ARM (Apple's A7 for example) 32 bit is far from dead.
The main reason Apple with with ARMv8 (the big difference between ARMv7 and ARMv8 is basically 64-bit) is that the 64-bit architecture (AArch64) is way more efficient than 32-bit (AArch32). It's a lot easier to speed up the 64-bit system as it gets rid of a lot of legacy AArch32 features that get in the way of a modern superscalar design CPU.
Surprisingly, things like conditional execution, great back in the 80s, are painful these days with heavy pipelining, register renames, speculative sxecution and superscalar multi-issue back ends. Think about it - the only way to find out if you need to retire the instruction to the architecture registers is at the end when you find out if the instruction should've been executed.
And AArch64 has few other improvements to make it scale better in the future.
Apple went 64-bit not because they planned on putting 4GB of RAM in an iPhone, but because they needed the speed. That's why everything's 64-bit - you're able to take advantage of the speed up and efficiencies AArch64 has.
ARMv8 processors running 32-bit code aren't much faster than their ARMv7 counterparts. But the 64-bit code runs significantly faster.
Find me a kid that wants to get shots. Of course they're going to be against it. But yeah, it's sad this very dangerous idea is still floating around, all because somebody wanted to get money from an alternative vaccine and thus fabricated a lie.
I thought it was basically a lawyer wanted to do a class action against vaccine makers so he had a doctor concoct some fraudulent studies showing that vaccines cause autism and other diseases.
Not just someone hocking alternative vaccines, but someone purposely creating a debate to get rich quick. I think the lawyer in question was disbarred, and the doctor stripped of his license.
I think that the same thing could happen for Linux. But I am no sure it will ever happen. Will there ever be a Linux exclusive game? If you were a game developper, would you commit to realse your fancy need AAA game ONLY on Linux and not on Windows? That seems like a stupid move unless the company receives a ridiculous amount of money cash for the exclusivity.
The other problem with Linux is there's a loudmouth that many LInux-using folks adore and whose principles they subscribe to. Which is perfectly OK - everyone is allowed to have their own beliefs.
The problem is, that those group of people will actively try to discourage purchase of the game because it's not "open" and "free".
It's not a problem for the other platforms as no one really cares about seeing the source code, software freedom, etc., but there's a very vocal community on Linux who does. They've already denounced Steam for Linux, and the porting of closed-source non-Free software to Linux (including games).
Countering that negative marketing is difficult.
About the only thing that isn't a factor is piracy - because like Windows any Linux game will be pirated just as heavily.
No, you don't want round. The big problem with round is that it's perfectly symmetric. With a rectangle, or even a pentagon, there are distinct segments and directions to the building. You know where you're at, you know to get somewhere else you need to head in a certain direction until you see a wall or corner, then head in another direction. e.g. To get from one place to another in a pentagon, you know you need to walk one way, pass 1 or 2 corners, then walk a certain distance to your destination.
In a circle, every part of the building you're in looks the same. You may know you have to travel 37 degrees around the arc, but after walking for a bit you aren't quite sure how many degrees you've traveled because there are no references - it all looks the same. To overcome this you need either really good labeling, or you have to add architectural landmarks to (virtually) break up the circle into physically "different" segments.
There are marvelous inventions called "windows" (the ones NOT by Microsoft) that let you have an external reference so walking one step in any direction doesn't look the same at all.
There's also the other marvelous invention in your smartphone known as a compass that moves as you move about the circle.
Of course, the nice thing with closed buildings like a circle or pentagon is that with sufficient exits, there is only a maximum distance one needs to walk to get from any point. Anyone having to deal with regular linear buildings knows of how it seems everything is always located at the other side.
Who the hell uses Google+? They keep annoying me to use it and I can't find a single use for it.
Every Google account is a G+ account these days. So quite a number of people have a G+ account - most likely either through GMail, Picasa, or YouTube since all the accounts got merged together.
Of course, it looks like it's only on stuff you've +1'd so far, but who knows, they may use the pages you visit (through the +1 tags on every page these days) as virtual +1s...
In a few years, what will really be the functional difference between the Macbook Air and an iPad with a clamshell keyboard?
A lot, actually.
First, their Mac line will still run Intel CPUs, while the iOS line runs ARM based processors. You can't really merge the two for various reasons.
Second, the Macs are "open" devices, while the iPad is a walled garden. This is a fundamental problem that cannot be simply washed away. Either you run x86 binaries on iPad freely, or you run walled garden apps on yoru Mac.
Don't underestimate the implications of the second point - it would mean either the iPad runs applications under emulation but unsigned, or the Mac runs signed iPad apps. The latter doesn't accomplish much, while the former is a pretty huge thing (you can get around the App Store).
There is no way Apple can really lock down the Mac platform, either - when jailbreaking is as simple as taking out the SSD and modifying the contents on a different machine.
And there's enough software out there that losing compatibility with OS X is not an option, either.
Apple is aware that these types of people are amongst their customers, and in many cases, amongst their loudest evangelists - you'll never get better advertising than to say "Other computers were complicated, but I can finally Facebook my kids!". For these kinds of people, the walled garden is a feature, not a bug. For these people, there needs to be a solution. Apple gave one: the Mac App Store.
At first, it was optional. Then, it was a part of the OS. Then, it was enabled by default. Then, you get a warning if you turn off the OS's blocking of sideloading.
And the default option is to allow signed (but not app-store) apps and app store apps. Because there's still a large contingent of software used on Macs NOT sold in the MAS. Little known titles like say, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and others.
Plus, there are enough things that cannot be done in the MAS isolation model that people expect - plugins, for example are impossible under MAS (And never get between a musician and their plugins!). As are device drivers for hardware.
And gatekeeper is more subtle than that - you can run unsigned apps that did not originate from the Internet (it's an extended attribute that gets set) without a warning - the presumption is that it was obtained from "trusted" media - either the output of a compiler (hey Open Source - what better way than to enforce compliance than by only allowing source code distribution?), or through a CD or DVD back in the days.
The thing is - Apple cannot change the default setting without harming a lot of users and 3rd party developers. Especially with sandboxing that forces each app to not even be able to get very far outside the filesystem it's limited to.
Devs need to use MAS for one reason - iCloud, for a good reason. Because MAS apps are sandboxed, even if malware attacks it and infects the iCloud storage, the app remains isolated. Otherwise cloud storage gets very tempting to infect - imagine what fun malware could have if they infect Microsoft Office, look through your Dropbox for Office documents and infect those. Even if you wipe your PC and reinstall - opening those documents reinfects your entire machine. This then becomes a huge issue because now the malware stays persistent (and it'll be ages before people figure out the reason the PC gets reinfected is through Dropbox). Well, Apple won't want to have iCloud be same, so if you want to use iCloud, you need to sandbox yourself to prevent taking over the rest of the Mac.
But getting a signing cert from Apple lets you bypass the MAS and have users still be able to download and install your app - which you can offer for free on your website, sell through any mechanism you want, etc. And do things that no sandbox would allow - install drivers, allow access to the entire filesystem, plug into other apps, etc.
DRM's purpose is to limit web content to those users who have the money (resources) to pay for it.
Their endorsement of DRM is antithetical to W3C's own clearly stated values, and shows that they are no longer a fit group to determine web standards. If anything, the "rhetoric" should be scaled up until they retract their approval of a restrictive internet.
And you know what? People are migrating away from the "open web"!
Ever complain that "everything is an app" and "why don't do they do a web site?".
Especially on iOS, which has supported web apps since it was iPhone OS 1.0. And it still does. Yet everyone wants apps.
You know what the result is? Try using iTunes Preview - it basically gives you a quick summary and wants you to do everything from within an app. Or take a look at Steam - SteamPowered.com is a bit more functional, but a lot of it is tied to an app as well. About the only one that isn't is Google Play - where you can do everything from the website.
Heck, try browsing the web on a mobile device, and half the time they ask you to install their app.
The "open web" is now more about hawking apps than providing content - the content is still there, but you use an app.
Eventually we'll just have stuff like iTunes Preview locking things up off the web, and if you're on any platform other than Windows, OS X, iOS or Android, that's all you get for web content.
This proposal is more about keeping the web relevant to content providers. We've already seen what happened when content provider's interests weren't taken care of - see HD-DVD which only had AACS to protect it. But content providers got angry because lack of region coding meant you could go to amazon.com and buy a HD-DVD of a movie that hasn't even come out yet. Or the Sony PSP where custom firmware was basically the reason why systems outsold games nearly 2-to-1.
The future of the web is already happening - on mobile devices.
Has anyone tried a system where serving in the government is a civic duty just like jury duty? You get selected randomly and serve a short term, maybe a couple years, then go back to being a normal citizen. Perhaps this would be better than having factions competing for power? The power of lobbyists also needs to be checked somehow.. The goal is basically to avoid letting an organized group accumulate power, and instead spread political power as evenly as possible through the general public.
It becomes problematic because one big question is how much do you pay them? Pay too little and it's still easy to do "campaign contributions", pay too much and then you'll have the lottery effect (or worse yet, defaults and all that as they get used to a lifestyle that's unmaintainable).
No, I think the US needs to get back to the 1-per-30,000 tops rule. Sure, it means you somehow have to fit 10,000 people in a building, but perhaps this is a good use of video conferencing - with that many people, most of them can simply stay in their representative area and do work remotely. This way they're closer to the people they represent and not stuck in the capitol. It also cuts down on housing and hotel costs, missed votes, etc.
And with that many people, we can probably pull them from ranks that don't demand as much pay - imagine if their pay was linked to median income in the area they represent. Or directly paid from taxes as a line item.
Lobbying would be much harder - imagine trying to convince 5000+ people to go your way - it would take a LOT of money to do so (even a "modest" contribution of $1000 makes $5M spent, and we know the bigger lobbyists pay easily $10k-100k. Well that just ballooned their lobbying expense to $50M-500M. And if $1000 was all they could afford, a bunch of their local citizens could easily match that.
Tactile feedback sounds like a decent idea. But I wish they'd work on the latency first. You get a much better 'physical' connection with the device when the latency is less than 50 or even 5 milliseconds.
The latest iPhone adds all sorts of scrolling gimmicks, and that'll unfortunately also have the effect of increased latency.
Actually, someone has gone about to measure latency on phones and found that iOS scores consistently better than Android or Windows Phone - an iPhone 5 around 75ms, a 4 at 92ms. They also retested the 4 with iOS7 (it was 6.1.3 before) and found no difference in latency.
They also test tablets and again, iOS generally came in first with around 75ms (iPad Mini) to 81ms (iPad 4th gen) latency. NVidia's SHIELD came in next, but had a huge amount of variance (92ms), showing what one can do if one optimizes their software stack (but the variance is worrying - silky smooth one moment, stuttery jerkiness the next?).
Microsoft's Surface RT comes in at around 95ms, Kindle Fire HD (2013) at 114. The 2013 Nexus 7 at 135 and the Galaxy Tab 8 at a whopping 168ms.
It goes to show that Android can do well in the latency department (see Kindle Fire, NVidia SHIELD), but that optimizations are seriously needed by hardware vendors.
Of course, none of it anywhere near the sub-10ms latency in the video they get, but the latencies are marching downwards.
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Question - is it debit card only? The sender can't use a credit card?
That is one of the reasons why Square is good, and why Paypal is popular - you can just use your credit card and not debit card...
I understand debit for receiving payments, but sending them?
Actually, bands are created so you can back up the encrypted volume files without bloating your backups.
Think about it - you mount your encrypted disk, then do some file operations - perhaps edit a file. You close the encrypted disk and do a backup. Well, your backup software can't get at the encrypted contents, so now it sees the entire volume has changed and needs backing up. Boom, if it's a 1GB volume, you just bloated your backup image by 1GB. And because yesterday's image is different, you now have two 1GB images. Repeat a few times and it gets unwieldy, fast.
The solution is either to let the backup solution backup the encryption volume while mounted (so it picks up the changed file rather than changed volume). Or as Apple has done it, band the image. Knowing that if you edit a few bytes, only a few things REALLY change in the image, rather than storing the whole 1GB image on the backup store, it backs up the changed bands (which if they're 1MB in size, will amount to a few MB backed up).
Sure it bloats the backup, but if you're routinely editing only a few bytes at a time, bloating the backup by megabytes a day is far superior than the entire volume daily.
Bullying is "less" today in that its less physical these days than in the past. However, it's also "more" these days because it's less physical and more emotional. And for kids who are still developing their emotional centers, it's traumatic.
Also, the internet does not forget An anonymous post on ask.fm telling a kid to go kill themselves does not disappear. And it's global - the old tactic of moving to another school or city? Doesn't work anymore.
Back in the old days, you knew your bullies. These days, getting an anonymous text is just as common, especially when spammed across an entire school. And stuff like that unfortunately lasts - a schoolyard bully goes away when the school day ends or they move ,etc. Today's bully, doesn't.
One can argue that perhaps the bullied should clean up their facebook page daily, but that gets tiresome quick, and just reinforces the bullying.
Perhaps if we rephrased bullying as harassment, which is what it really is, things get turned into a new light. Before it was local and gone from memory in a few minutes. Now it's global and permanent - "Sally is a poopy-head" disappears the moment it's said on a schoolyard, but stays forever on the internet.
Heck, it's the same problem we're seeing where one's casual after hours recreation suddenly has very real career-limiting effects. Where once no one cared you got drunk off your ass because once you recovered, only a few friends knew, well these days you post that on your social network page and not only does the world (and your future employer) know, well, it's there pretty much permanently. Except in that case, you had a choice to not post it. The harassed or bullied, well, that's not an option.
And grow a backbone? To whom? You don't know who sent the text, who posted the update, who set up the website, who called you the name. The internet is great at letting people be anonymous. You can't even face your bully.
This occurred because the government actually tried to get book lending records and librarians opposed the request. When it went through, they promptly started deleting all lending records because it was data they didn't need to maintain at all and that data was of interest. They only maintain what you have out as a result. (After all, does the library really need to know you borrowed a book after you returned it? What useful purpose could it serve? If you want "recommendations", well, the librarian is probably your best resource - just say you want books similar to the one you're returning.)
Some of the biggest information freedom fighters it seems are librarians.
And the problem with reading is not libraries or books, or video games or TV. It's school. If there's anything that makes reading less cool, is doing endless book reports, analyzing text for subtext and being forced to read some dreary text as a homework assignment. Nothing kills reading faster than turning it into an unpleasurable activity.
Do they, though? Out of that Android population, guess how many are for high end flagship Android phones. A rough estimate would be under 10% of the entire Android population.
Yes, just 1 in 10 are for the likes of an HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S 4, Moto X, LG G2, etc. The rest are cheap crap phones that carriers pawn off on subscribers as new and flashy and more importantly, free.
The consumer comes into the store, sees an iPhone and wants that. Balks at the $200 price tag, and sees what else is around. Sees they can get some cheap Samsung for free, and walks out of the door with it. Or the contract on their featurephone is coming due, and the carrier basically sends them some Android they have left over for free.
Evidence - well, gee, if everyone's on a 2-3 year plan, why are we still having significant chunks of Gingerbread around? You'd think people wouldn't be using what is now over 3 year old software. All those old crap should've been replaced by now.
Next, you have internet traffic charts for mobile - where oddly, iOS still beats Android (despite Android outselling 4-1) - you'd think with all those Android users, they'd actually use their phones, but I guess the vast majority only use them as glorified featurephones. Not even on WiFi.
Then there are advertising reports that say an iOS impression is worth twice as much as an Android impression (or roughly, an iOS user is worth 8 times as much). Which advertisers blame on the inability to differentiate between valuable Android users (the ones with flagship phones), and everyone else. Turns out if you have cheap Android phones, you're not likely to spend as much money on stuff.
Android is the Windows of the mobile world. It's used because it's cheaply available and why Samsung and others sell tons of crap Android phones. Last year's SGS3 flagship was the most popular Android phone sold, with around 60M units. Yet the Android ecosystem has probably close to 950M units.
Hell, Android user satisfaction generally trails that of Windows Phone! Yes, people are happier using Windows Phone than Android. Especially given how a distant third or fourth it is.
Or perhaps people expect that business done "in public" is in full view of well, the public. Anyone can capture the dealings that go on, either intentionally or accidentally.
The outrage at facebook etc. come from the misleadingly-named "privacy controls" which are more marketing than anything. (Facebook implements it to get people to "open up" and thus increase the value of that profile). It's like telling someone a secret that they reveal later on.
But for email, everyone's always known it's out in the clear and if the NSA isn't doing it, Google, etc. are and building a profile of you that way.
And most people really aren't all that interesting to begin with. If it wasn't for the silly cellphone law that prevented scanners from tuning in, people probably would've gotten bored and moved on (there's only so many "Honey, I'm a few minutes from home" and "Would you pick up some milk?" you can take in between the more interesting calls). Of course, the law kept cropping up so people kept tuning in hoping to catch something juicy.
Hell, that might be a way for terrorists to communicate - "Honey, I'm running late" is code for "go boom now!" versus "I should be home in a few minutes".
OTOH, it seems some people do get genuinely surprised when it's mentioned that all texts are monitored and they're presented with a list of texts they sent during the month...
I never pay more than $200 - or even $150 these days now that I found Grado SR-80i's for around that price. Leaky as hell, but damn do you get good sound for the price.
Of course, the cheapest I've heard were the Koss Porta-Pros - $40 for some impressive sound quality.
Spending a ton of money on headphones is ridiculous - and yes, the next step up in Grado to the SR-125's jumps from $140 to $300+.
That's actually a viable option.
In a lot of places where the internet is firewalled, monitored, etc (basically everywhere), a lot of people used fidonet to send messages out because the censors never investigated that traffic - they monitor your email, but not your modem.
So for a lot of people (and journalists and all that), fidonet really is the network of freedom because it's the only valid way out.
And apparently Oracle is so fed up with Android that they've put the JDK6 behind a registraiion-wall, something I found out when trying to set up a machine to build Android. Used to be easy to get, now that Oracle's completely deprecated it, they're making ti hard to get the last version available.
It's something to note when trying to set up Android - getting JDK6 is now a PITA...
All in the name of speed, actually. Conditional execution is cool, until you realize it complicates a super-scalar multi-issue pipeline with out-of-order execution because the conditional dependency might not get resolved until late in the game.
It's why an ARMv8 chip will not run ARMv7 code much faster - there's very little optimizations left to speed things up.
So ARM re-did a lot of things for 64-bit to make it scalable in the future - rather than try to retain compatibility (there's wasn't any 64-bit code to speak of until ARM defined it), it was time for a clean break.
So 64-bit code runs much faster because many of the architectural changes were designed for scalability.
And in doing so, they also get rid of a lot of cruft in the 32-bit architecture that makes no more sense - notably, coprocessors are gone and replaced with system registers. Stuff like the CPSR are now broken out into PSTATE - more complex to use, but architecturally more scalable in the future.
Plus, they added more architectural registers which is always a nice bonus. And there's a fixed mapping so setting up the 32-bit environment is fairly trivial (it really only takes a few bits to flip and the CPU will switch to AArch32 - I've gone it in pure assembly).
64-bit ARM cleans up a lot of mess, and is pretty damn easy to code in. The encodings may differ, but the coding is a lot simpler and still very familiar.
It's a necessary cost though - because if no one knows about your product, then you may have saved money and have a cheaper product, but you'll also get far fewer sales as a result.
You can easily draw parallels to many geek oriented sites and projects that die on /. all the time, and the first top comment is "What is it?".
Hell, I know many people who "cut the cord" using bittorrent, and they're promptly asking if a TV series has started again - or other folks who don't realize that a movie they wanted to catch is now in second run because they didn't know the release date.
Yes, there's a lot of advertising methods - but it's one of those necessary evils. You hope that people would do word-of-mouth, as it's one of the most effective advertising methods available, but it's potentially not timely enough to catch the deal, or the show or whatever.
Personally, I'm blasé about it. I don't block ads, but I disable javascript which gets rid of most of them. I don't fear ads from TV or the oddball ad that shows up for a cool upcoming movie.
How is "low quality" inferior to "no output"?
Micro-USB does not support video output at all.
Sure, there are hacks like MHL and SlimPort to hack in video output support over a Micro-USB like connector, but they're incompatible with each other (you can't plug a MHL cable into a SlimPort device, or vice versa, or into something that doesn't support either). And they rely on extra signalling pins in the connector.
You might as well say we should switch our USB ports to eSATAp ones because you can jam USB into there OR a SATA cable.
(heck, MHL doesn't even support 1080p60... just 1080p30. MHL 2.0 fixes that). And still trying to find a economical cable for my Nexus 7 which supports SlimPort. Supposedly it's supposed to be a dumb cable to convert it to DisplayPort, versus MHL which requires electronics.
And yes, I fault Lightning too. One of the big reasons the iPod was successful was accessories, and accessories that made it easy to support docks and other things requiring zero effort on the manufacturer's part because the dock connector had all the signals you could need or want in the format you wanted. Component video? Check. Composite/S-Video? Check. Line-level audio? Check. RS-232 for control? Check. USB? Check. Every signal you could want - it had and it was trivially easy to interface with. No fancy interface electronics or anything.
That's what made super cheap accessories possible.
The only way lightning could top that is if Apple makes an internal board with all that stuff as outputs cheap so manufacturers can trivially add it to their docks. Given how long it's taken, I don't think that's the case.
Intel's just doing a lot of graphics research. They're not aiming to compete against AMD and NVidia anytime soon in performance. Remember, Intel vastly beats AMD and NVidia in GPUs shipped They only need to keep up with maybe 2 to 3 years graphics performance so people will find it "good enough".
For things that are not entirely random, the past is a great predictor of the future. Things like trends and other factors do regularly show up time and time again - leading to the adage that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Because it's likely it's happened before.
Thing is, you cannot take individual details and extrapolate from that (e.g., you bought coffee the past year, you'll buy one tomorrow).
The goal of dataland is to accumulate data and run behaviorial analysis - stuff like if you bought coffee yesterday AND the week before AND something else AND that other thing, you're 99.99% certain to buy a coffee today.
Of course, we don't know what "something else" and "that other thing" are. Which is why they have large data sets to mine data from.
It also leads to interesting correlations that may not explain why they're related, but that the two things pretty much go together with practical certainty.
And yes, there's no true predictability to it - it's a chaotic system, and humans do add some randomness, but there's more than an even chance.
Actually, the modern higher end router is plenty powerful - they generally have lots of RAM (128+MB isn't unusual, way more than Linux needs for NAT), lots of CPU and fast networking ports.
Heck, the latest generation are nearly pushing 1Gbps in software. (The generation before was pushing 700-odd Mbps full bore), and we're at 930Mbps or so. This is just pure NAT, mind you.
There's plenty of headroom to do some firewall processing even if it cuts down your speed by half - other than a few select places, you're not getting anywhere close over 100Mbps bi-directional.
The main reason Apple with with ARMv8 (the big difference between ARMv7 and ARMv8 is basically 64-bit) is that the 64-bit architecture (AArch64) is way more efficient than 32-bit (AArch32). It's a lot easier to speed up the 64-bit system as it gets rid of a lot of legacy AArch32 features that get in the way of a modern superscalar design CPU.
Surprisingly, things like conditional execution, great back in the 80s, are painful these days with heavy pipelining, register renames, speculative sxecution and superscalar multi-issue back ends. Think about it - the only way to find out if you need to retire the instruction to the architecture registers is at the end when you find out if the instruction should've been executed.
And AArch64 has few other improvements to make it scale better in the future.
Apple went 64-bit not because they planned on putting 4GB of RAM in an iPhone, but because they needed the speed. That's why everything's 64-bit - you're able to take advantage of the speed up and efficiencies AArch64 has.
ARMv8 processors running 32-bit code aren't much faster than their ARMv7 counterparts. But the 64-bit code runs significantly faster.
I thought it was basically a lawyer wanted to do a class action against vaccine makers so he had a doctor concoct some fraudulent studies showing that vaccines cause autism and other diseases.
Not just someone hocking alternative vaccines, but someone purposely creating a debate to get rich quick. I think the lawyer in question was disbarred, and the doctor stripped of his license.
The other problem with Linux is there's a loudmouth that many LInux-using folks adore and whose principles they subscribe to. Which is perfectly OK - everyone is allowed to have their own beliefs.
The problem is, that those group of people will actively try to discourage purchase of the game because it's not "open" and "free".
It's not a problem for the other platforms as no one really cares about seeing the source code, software freedom, etc., but there's a very vocal community on Linux who does. They've already denounced Steam for Linux, and the porting of closed-source non-Free software to Linux (including games).
Countering that negative marketing is difficult.
About the only thing that isn't a factor is piracy - because like Windows any Linux game will be pirated just as heavily.
There are marvelous inventions called "windows" (the ones NOT by Microsoft) that let you have an external reference so walking one step in any direction doesn't look the same at all.
There's also the other marvelous invention in your smartphone known as a compass that moves as you move about the circle.
Of course, the nice thing with closed buildings like a circle or pentagon is that with sufficient exits, there is only a maximum distance one needs to walk to get from any point. Anyone having to deal with regular linear buildings knows of how it seems everything is always located at the other side.
Every Google account is a G+ account these days. So quite a number of people have a G+ account - most likely either through GMail, Picasa, or YouTube since all the accounts got merged together.
Of course, it looks like it's only on stuff you've +1'd so far, but who knows, they may use the pages you visit (through the +1 tags on every page these days) as virtual +1s...
The problem is, twitter and facebook tend to be one of the first places where news breaks out first, and investments often follow the news.
In the race to figure out what the market is doing earlier and earlier, ignoring places where news breaks out first is folly.
Of course, the flip side is that getting the latest and greatest news means very little has been checked and may not even be accurate.
A lot, actually.
First, their Mac line will still run Intel CPUs, while the iOS line runs ARM based processors. You can't really merge the two for various reasons.
Second, the Macs are "open" devices, while the iPad is a walled garden. This is a fundamental problem that cannot be simply washed away. Either you run x86 binaries on iPad freely, or you run walled garden apps on yoru Mac.
Don't underestimate the implications of the second point - it would mean either the iPad runs applications under emulation but unsigned, or the Mac runs signed iPad apps. The latter doesn't accomplish much, while the former is a pretty huge thing (you can get around the App Store).
There is no way Apple can really lock down the Mac platform, either - when jailbreaking is as simple as taking out the SSD and modifying the contents on a different machine.
And there's enough software out there that losing compatibility with OS X is not an option, either.
And the default option is to allow signed (but not app-store) apps and app store apps. Because there's still a large contingent of software used on Macs NOT sold in the MAS. Little known titles like say, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and others.
Plus, there are enough things that cannot be done in the MAS isolation model that people expect - plugins, for example are impossible under MAS (And never get between a musician and their plugins!). As are device drivers for hardware.
And gatekeeper is more subtle than that - you can run unsigned apps that did not originate from the Internet (it's an extended attribute that gets set) without a warning - the presumption is that it was obtained from "trusted" media - either the output of a compiler (hey Open Source - what better way than to enforce compliance than by only allowing source code distribution?), or through a CD or DVD back in the days.
The thing is - Apple cannot change the default setting without harming a lot of users and 3rd party developers. Especially with sandboxing that forces each app to not even be able to get very far outside the filesystem it's limited to.
Devs need to use MAS for one reason - iCloud, for a good reason. Because MAS apps are sandboxed, even if malware attacks it and infects the iCloud storage, the app remains isolated. Otherwise cloud storage gets very tempting to infect - imagine what fun malware could have if they infect Microsoft Office, look through your Dropbox for Office documents and infect those. Even if you wipe your PC and reinstall - opening those documents reinfects your entire machine. This then becomes a huge issue because now the malware stays persistent (and it'll be ages before people figure out the reason the PC gets reinfected is through Dropbox). Well, Apple won't want to have iCloud be same, so if you want to use iCloud, you need to sandbox yourself to prevent taking over the rest of the Mac.
But getting a signing cert from Apple lets you bypass the MAS and have users still be able to download and install your app - which you can offer for free on your website, sell through any mechanism you want, etc. And do things that no sandbox would allow - install drivers, allow access to the entire filesystem, plug into other apps, etc.
And you know what? People are migrating away from the "open web"!
Ever complain that "everything is an app" and "why don't do they do a web site?".
Especially on iOS, which has supported web apps since it was iPhone OS 1.0. And it still does. Yet everyone wants apps.
You know what the result is? Try using iTunes Preview - it basically gives you a quick summary and wants you to do everything from within an app. Or take a look at Steam - SteamPowered.com is a bit more functional, but a lot of it is tied to an app as well. About the only one that isn't is Google Play - where you can do everything from the website.
Heck, try browsing the web on a mobile device, and half the time they ask you to install their app.
The "open web" is now more about hawking apps than providing content - the content is still there, but you use an app.
Eventually we'll just have stuff like iTunes Preview locking things up off the web, and if you're on any platform other than Windows, OS X, iOS or Android, that's all you get for web content.
This proposal is more about keeping the web relevant to content providers. We've already seen what happened when content provider's interests weren't taken care of - see HD-DVD which only had AACS to protect it. But content providers got angry because lack of region coding meant you could go to amazon.com and buy a HD-DVD of a movie that hasn't even come out yet. Or the Sony PSP where custom firmware was basically the reason why systems outsold games nearly 2-to-1.
The future of the web is already happening - on mobile devices.
It becomes problematic because one big question is how much do you pay them? Pay too little and it's still easy to do "campaign contributions", pay too much and then you'll have the lottery effect (or worse yet, defaults and all that as they get used to a lifestyle that's unmaintainable).
No, I think the US needs to get back to the 1-per-30,000 tops rule. Sure, it means you somehow have to fit 10,000 people in a building, but perhaps this is a good use of video conferencing - with that many people, most of them can simply stay in their representative area and do work remotely. This way they're closer to the people they represent and not stuck in the capitol. It also cuts down on housing and hotel costs, missed votes, etc.
And with that many people, we can probably pull them from ranks that don't demand as much pay - imagine if their pay was linked to median income in the area they represent. Or directly paid from taxes as a line item.
Lobbying would be much harder - imagine trying to convince 5000+ people to go your way - it would take a LOT of money to do so (even a "modest" contribution of $1000 makes $5M spent, and we know the bigger lobbyists pay easily $10k-100k. Well that just ballooned their lobbying expense to $50M-500M. And if $1000 was all they could afford, a bunch of their local citizens could easily match that.
Actually, someone has gone about to measure latency on phones and found that iOS scores consistently better than Android or Windows Phone - an iPhone 5 around 75ms, a 4 at 92ms. They also retested the 4 with iOS7 (it was 6.1.3 before) and found no difference in latency.
They also test tablets and again, iOS generally came in first with around 75ms (iPad Mini) to 81ms (iPad 4th gen) latency. NVidia's SHIELD came in next, but had a huge amount of variance (92ms), showing what one can do if one optimizes their software stack (but the variance is worrying - silky smooth one moment, stuttery jerkiness the next?).
Microsoft's Surface RT comes in at around 95ms, Kindle Fire HD (2013) at 114. The 2013 Nexus 7 at 135 and the Galaxy Tab 8 at a whopping 168ms.
It goes to show that Android can do well in the latency department (see Kindle Fire, NVidia SHIELD), but that optimizations are seriously needed by hardware vendors.
Of course, none of it anywhere near the sub-10ms latency in the video they get, but the latencies are marching downwards.