Safe nuclear power is not a technical problem. It is a political problem. In Fukushima, the authorities knew the generators were crap. So the debate gets a third angle: do you trust the engineers? Well maybe. But do you trust the politicians?
Not just politicians, but CEOs who often have local politicians tied up around their fingers.
You can make safe nuclear reactors. The problem is, nuclear power is expensive - it has immense startup costs, and even bigger shutdown costs (imagine if someone told you that after you stop making money off the site, you have to still man it and keep it around for 30 odd years?).
Of course, you have CEOs and other executives who see two opportunities to bilk the population - the first to get subsidies to build the plant, the second to get huge subsidies to shut down the plant (usually in the form of abandonment and forcing the local government and taxpayer to foot the cleanup bill). And yes, if you refuse to pay, well, see ya, we'll be heading to the next town - perhaps they want the jobs and money. Same goes for any possible regulations that the CEO might not like - want renewable energy? Well, go for it, but I hope your tree huggers can provide high paying jobs like we can. Etc. In the end, the town gets so dependent on it that the company is untouchable.
In the middle, when the plant's producing power, it's very cheap and economical - the cheapest we have. Of course, it can be cheaper still, to pad the bonus this year - perhaps by cutting safety and maintenance because really, who cares? If the town doesn't like it, what can they do? The jobs are in the nuclear power plant.
The real problem is greed - small town sees big dollar signs and jobs, and company executives see nothing but a sucker who's willing to do anything to help you build and politicians too powerless to kill their golden goose.
Politicians are the problem when the power company's a public utility and they see a great source of revenue as a way to keep taxes low.
However, the real truth is, it's been going back to the US Constitution and the whole separation of church and state thing.
The main pusher of Creationism in the US is the Discovery Institute, and their agenda is simple - they (strongly) believe that the ills of the modern world are caused by, effectively, the secular nature of the world. Back in the "old days" (of say 19th and early 20th century) things were simpler and you didn't have such violence and misbehaviour on the streets because everyone had the fear of God. But as society moved to a more secular nature, you get things like school shootings, disrespect, etc. etc. etc.
So the entire goal is to get back to the "roots" where people said the Lord's Prayer before class and where kids were obedient and all that jazz.
Of course, there is the whole church and state thing, which means you can't just introduce prayer into the classroom - that won't work. Instead, you work by gradual changes. Creationism is a start - you can sort of try to introduce it as an alternative to evolution in the classroom.
Unfortunately, the problem was Creationism was a purely religious concept and many people saw right through the attempt, which is why it's called Intelligent Design today. (In fact, during the transition, you could find the evolution of the search and replace of Creationism with Intelligent Design in the form of transition fossils (an evolutionary concept, *gasp*!) in documents, which was how people discovered it really was just another name for Creationism).
Once you get Intelligent Design into the science texts, you can make pushes for other changes to get more religion in school.
The end goal, of course, is to get an entire nation full of God-fearing obedient and "lawful" people who will never want to stray from the pack.
*If* such a mechanism was coded in, the nature of open source would mean it would be found by others.
The open source mantra, "many eyes make bugs shallow" is unfortunately false. A carefully crafted backdoor can require a LOT of work to find, and if especially well done, may require people of varying skills to actually find it.
And no, anyone worth their salt will not submit patches that contain the entire backdoor in it. There might be oddball lines that don't seem to make sense here and there, but other patches would be just as free to introduce part of the vulnerability while still being a part of the code that has to be in there.
So now you've got a backdoor that's spread out over many patches, and even better, the time between implementation and actual usage can be quite long (enough so that various parts of the backdoor may be patched out, only to be put back in as an odd edge case). Or perhaps a well calculated patch will have someone else implement a part of the changes.
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that. They are just mad they don't have a piece of the action.
Regardless of their ability to spy on their own people I think this is a good thing and I say that as a red, white and blue American citizen. I don't like that we control the whole ball of wax. Its time other countries stepped things up and built on what the US started. The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
What happens is that the internet gets fractured - you'll have the "US Intenret", the "Brazil Internet" just like we have the "Iran Internet", and to a lesser extent, the "China Internet". All little networks running separate and independent.
Today the internet is bigger than any one country - even the NSA can't tap all of it, and it's likely the stuff they tapped they did things like running TOR exit nodes and monitored the data that way.
But tomorrow, the internet will shrivel up (hey, we don't need IPv6 anymore!) as every country runs its own version of the internet, and wanting to connect to the bigger part around it well, you're a terrorist.
For #12, I'm curious about the app updates, especially the fingerprint scanner. I wonder how authentication info is passed to the app, be it a salted value, or an "ACK/NAK" return.
App updates are handled by Apple completely - you post an app on iTunes connect and whenever your phone notices, it'll update it automatically.
Developers currently do not have access to the fingerprint reader (because there are plenty of questions on how it should work and when it should work and perhaps even stuff like can you authorize it for a time period). The only things the fingerprint reader is good for is to unlock your phone and (optionally) used to store your iTunes password for authorization purposes.
I'm guessing it's to see if it's going to just be a wank feature or genuinely useful, and to see if people use it for iTunes or not. And possibly to solicit information from developers on how they would like it used - remember the secure area is limited in size so how are developers going to store access tokens and such, etc. etc. etc.
Re:One button to the main screen! Is that changed?
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Ars Technica Reviews iOS 7
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Although I'd agree with you, it's important to note that this only applies to Samsung phones (and maybe HTC, I've never had one). Stock android (ie. google) phones have a back button, but no menu. They rely on "in-app" onscreen menus.
That's an Android 4.0 thing, actually. The menu button is deprecated and having used both Android and iOS, I really dislike the menu button.
I tend to find it easily forgettable - and it seems a lot of devs like to hide essential functionality inside a menu leading to all sorts of "this app doesn't have X feature" type things because people forget to hit the menu bar.
Since ICS, it's a LOT better - the triple dot thing isn't intuitive, but at least it seems to imply tapping it does something when it shows up.
As for back, I do prefer the iOS way - the pentagon at the top telling you where you're going back to (especially if you're entering a screen layout from multiple paths). Of course, it's very frustrating in things that don't obey the conventions like games that put the back button on some other corner of the screen. Or on Android where the back button may or may not work in a game.
In the end, it comes down to preferences. I prefer the iOS way where an app is forced to expose all its functionality and not hide it. I think this comes from the whole "single mouse button" mentality where you're not supposed to hide any functions that are only accessible via a right-click menu. I'm sure everyone has dozens of applications on Windows and Linux where unless you right click, you won't realize there's a lot more depth to what can be done.
Spec chasers go for whatever the latest and greatest Android/Apple device is and play playground top-trumps with that. Crackberry users just need "good enough" and have been kicking the habit in increasing numbers around the world for some time now for exactly that reason - why pay all that money for good enough when you can get kick-ass with better support prospects for the same price from someone else? From EE (UK 4G network) for same the monthly fee I can get an iPhone 5 for £10 or a Q10 for £30. They're actually trying to charge more for a worse product with the same subscription. The Blackberry only survives because of that tribal fanboi segregation bollocks so many people have fallen for, but without something to crow about, RIM won't survive purely on that for very much longer.
Actually, no.
Spec chasers are exclusively an Android phenomenon - Android devices have ALWAYS outclassed the iPhone.
Either in more RAM, faster processor, more cores, bigger screens, more megapixels, whatever.
The reason is that basically once you get below the surface, all Android phones are similar and there's very little to actually differentiate them. Espeically since the look and feel of modern Android handsets are controlled by Google now, so OEMs are now limited to superficial skinning.
So the only way OEMs can really innovate is by tossing more at it. Of course, they're running into the same limitations as everyone else - everyone gets the same processors, the same RAM, the screen screens, etc. Or you could try the Samsung way and release a thousand different phones a year, each slightly tweaked (collectively, the lesser Samsung phones greatly outsell the flagships - think back to the SGS3 - very popular (#1 seller) phone, but it still only moved 60M units which is barely 10% of Android phones sold, and Samsung has 90% of the Android market).
Hell, most people on/. are measurebators, if you read the Android and Apple threads. (A measurebator is someone who only goes by the numbers, and nothing else. Like comparing a camera by megapixels instead of picture quality. Or consoles - PS3 is on paper faster than Xbox, but it excludes which one is more "fun" to a person, etc).
Competition produces inefficiency, as efforts are duplicated and people work to destroy each other rather than cooperate to produce the best possible set of options.
Well there are two big sites most people have heard of. Kickstarter seems to have been verbed (verbing weirds language, mind you), but relatively popular and used in contexts where the crowdfunding site is NOT kickstarter.
The other one is Indiegogo.
They have their pluses and minuses. For Indiegogo, a plus can be a project doesn't have to reach its goal to be funded - if the project owner is willing to have Indiegogo take a bigger cut (9% vs 3%) they can say it will always go through. A minus for Indiegogo would be that contributors have to pay upfront - if the funding is unsuccessful (and the owner doesn't want to allow partial funding, like how Canonical chose with the Edge), then contributors are refunded.
Kickstarter doesn't allow partial funding, but they don't charge you until it's due (depending on your credit card is (foreign currency, carrying a balance, etc), Indiegogo can cost you 10% or more if it's refunded).
But while it personally means I will never support an Indiegogo project (and get constantly annoyed when people refer it as a "Kickstarter project" because it seems synonymous with crowd funding), I can appreciate the flexibility of both options.
Plus, Kickstarter has started to tighten the rules a bit to prevent cut-and-run and other type of things.
And there's no network effects - it's not like eBay where they can unilaterally change the rules and everyone has to shut up and take it (because it's damn hard to run another auction site - you end up with buyers lowballing (because it's not eBay), and sellers wanting eBay-like prices despite the lower clientele).
Having both around keeps both honest - Kickstarter can't unilaterally change the rules without upsetting people who'll just go to Indiegogo instead, and vice-versa. Sure resources are wasted - whenever you have duplication of effort, it happens (the most efficient would be a single site), but I'd rather take inefficiency over monopoly.
And we're also finding new areas where crowdfunding is interesting, but neither Kickstarter nor Indiegogo is appropriate. And there's always the attempt to do it by oneself.
Would you please switch to 64-bit already? It's the year 2013, no one who uses the newest Firefox has a 32-bit system anymore, and it's not possible in practice to fix crashes due to running out of memory in C/C++.
Basically it was a buggier version, with fewer users and even fewer plugins that supported it.
You'll find a lot of kinds of applications to be 32-bit only - even Microsoft puts 32-bit IE as default (even though they have a 64-bit version) for the same reasons. Other applications with plugins like Office tend to recommend installing the 32-bit version as well.
OTOH, I use profiles and separate Firefox sessions...
So, since the Gold Shop and the Real Money Auction House were the primary reasons they were giving for requiring the always online, does this mean that they'll be patching that "functionality" out as well?
A single manufacturer (2nd-largest market share though) suffers reduced production of chips (silicon not deep-fried - sort of!) Manufacturing plant will be operational within a month There are other manufacturers that make the same thing Another manufacturer has largest market share 10% world-wide "shortage" is result
Global prices have to increase?....Sorry, I smell bullshit.
DRAM is a commodity like oil, pork bellies, orange juice, gasoline.
it's traded on a global scale, and production generally meets demand. Margins are very low because of intense competition and pricing that's effectively determined by sellers (which regulates production). It's also a very perishable product in that the value of it decreases as time progresses because if you can't get rid of your DRAM within a couple of months, someone will come out with bigger/better/faster and devalue your stock for you.
And unlike necessities like oil, no one stores DRAM (see perishable).
Additionally, this is mass production season - demand for DRAM is at its peak around this time of year as manufacturers are gearing up for the holiday season and many existing contracts need fulfillment. Those who did not lock in their rates by preordering ahead of time has to buy what scraps are left over after the Apples, Samsungs, HPs and especially now Sony and Microsoft have taken their cut.
That 10% cut could easily mean there's just no spare RAM for smaller players to buy because everyone else with fixed-deliverable contracts get first priority in the line of what's left. So if you were thinking of building a PC, you might not be able to buy RAM for it because manufacturers cannot make any as there's no unclaimed ICs left.
So it may not mean anything to the Dells and Apples who are guaranteed their stock by contractual obligation, but for everyone else, it means a whole lot.
And even so, it can also mean the big guys are shorted - production generally follows their orders as they order the vast majority of parts - excess you generally want to have little of because that means having to sell to smaller players. If contracts take up 95% of the world supply, that 5% means no spare ICs unless you ordered well in advance, or can delay manufacture enough to sell your existing stock at elevated prices and purchase them later again.
The latter does happen, but only if you can absorb the delay - if you want stuff out for the holidays, you have to be manufacturing now because you need product boxed up by October for shipping to retailers by November to have It on shelves by late November.
Oh, that must mean those terrorist organizations like Occupy Wall Street, - or any other community based activist group trying to agitate for improved conditions for the people. Must be why we are treated as the enemy.
OWS scared bankers and traders - the people with money. Those people called their senators and reps and action got taken.
OWS terrorized those with money (i.e., power) therefore the OWS guys get branded as terrorists.
Remember, the victor writes the history books.
Proles like you and me? No money and no power, thus we'll never be able to recast OWS as a legitimate organization.
Because an Operating System isn't an Operating System, unless you can get a bundled app store with it...
Well, as part of ensuring less fragmentation in Android between OS versions, Google has created a huge framework (Google Services Framework) to isolate apps from the OS. GSF is a big, binary only library with system level privileges that ensure it doesn't need to ask for more permissions ever.
Of course, AOSP does not have this, and excepting the few app stores outside of Google Play, apps are few and far between as most developers only post their apps on Google Play and nowhere else.
It seems however, that when buying a $40 beverage people tend to expect artistic packaging.
Basically, the vast majority of people then who think they're buying a premium product when it's really just a middle of the line thing.
Because the really good wines (more than $40/bottle) have found alternative sealing devices like plastic screwcaps and (gasp) boxes which keep a lot better (holding the value), require less maintenance (oh yeah, you have to maintain it! Or you leave the chance it turns to vinegar) and so forth.
Cue the Pawn Stars episode where one guy brings in a good vintage Dom (sealed) only to find the cork is deteriorating and is floating in the liquid, which also has most likely turned into vinegar from improper storage.
I believe it was Jobs that said that if you aim to protect your bread and butter, someone else will just eat you up.
So Apple has absolutely no issue with creating devices that will eat into existing product lines - take the iPod line. You had the original, then the mini, shuffle and nano. Each of which eats into each other's sales somewhat. But you still sell more this way than any other way.
Or the iPhone. It certainly ate into the iPod (group) sales, and the iPod Touch certain ate into iPhone sales (an iPhone without the phone!)
Or the iPad - it's certainly eating into Mac sales, especially lower end - people who would've bought an Air probably bought iPads instead - it does everything they needed it for anyhow.
If you innovate by trying not to compete with yourself, you end up like Kodak, inventor of the digital camera. However, the digital camera concept was not Kodak's focus, which was selling chemicals, so Kodak sat on the technology until other companies started selling them and film and chemical sales bottomed out. They could've transformed from a chemical company to an imaging one - the bulk of their sales would be chemicals, but they'd have a growing business doing all sorts of imaging - from digital cameras to printers and even having photo printers that develop to regular print paper, selling more chemicals.
If the 5C sales eat into the 5S sales - so be it. Each should compete on their own merits, and if the 5C should prove more popular, well, it means the 5S didn't deliver good value for money.
And just like it was said, they both make money. And the end goal is to make money - if you convert a Samsung user to an Apple user, a plus - who cares if they buy a 5S or 5C? It could also be if you didn't have one or the other, the user may have stuck with Samsung. And yes, there will also be users who go from Apple to Samsung.
Wow - this seem such a niche market companies (with all due respect) for making top 10 contribution to linux kernel - interesting...
No, it makes complete sense - these guys do drivers and such as a marketing exercise. When companies come to them, they want to answer "Yes, we have a driver for you, it's already in the kernel". OEMs are far more likely to choose a company that has drivers already in the kernel than not (and thus need to develop one). And being mainline In the kernel is a quality bar - it's one thing to have a driver to integrate yourself, it's another to have one that's in every kernel going forward.
So a lot of these contributions are "scratching their own itch" where the itch is "sell more of our chips".
The patriot act made buying anything overseas without a credit card that's registered in your name very difficult. Yes, you can mail cash in an envelope but our crooked postal workers often just steal it.
That has always been the case - pre 9/11 or post.
It's why credit cards, despite being so "nasty" are generally popular because they make it EASY.
Sending cash overseas has always been iffy - hell, sending cash in general has been iffy. If not postal workers (who may need to examine envelope contents if it gets ripped up by the machines to see if there's an address), then the recipient may just pocket the cash.
Another way is a cheque, which was the most common way to send money through the mail, but in the internet age waiting 10=12 days for it to clear is a bore.
There are also money orders and such, but they generally involve lining up at the bank or post office to obtain, but they clear instantly. Or Western Union.
but none beat the speed and convenience of credit - just a few numbers gets payment sent instantaneously. It's also why Paypal grew to where it is today - because sending random joes money is a lot easier with credit cards.
The only company that uses resistors is Apple. The USB spec was released in 2007 so maybe their early devices pre-dated that. In any case, any properly designed USB device from the past 5 years should fast charge from a dumb charger simply by having the D+ and D- lines shorted.
The iPod was released in 2001. The 3rd Gen iPod in 2003, which incorporated USB charging and a "universal connector". That predates the charging spec by a good 4 years. The iPhone was also released in 2007, and by that time, there were three common currents available - 100mA, 500mA and 1000mA - for charging the iPhone and iPods. The iPad came later in 2010, but Apple decided it would be better to keep backwards compatibility and have a 2000mA setting as well, so you can use 500mA and 1000mA chargers with it too and it won't try to blow them up.
Now supposed I had another nominally 1A power supply that overheats and destroys itself when attemting to supply more than 1A. I connect a USB cable to it and short the D+ and D- lines. When I plug my tablet in it would try to draw 2A and destroy the power supply.
Sadly, I've actually seen this happen when designing products to the USB spec - the cheap ass crappy chargers WILL SELF DESTRUCT if you try to do this. And when they do self-destruct, or even when operating correctly, bad things can happen - like exposing mains potential on the device (the device not mains earth referenced, so it can get 5V from USB, but the USB port, when referenced to mains earth, can be at lethal voltages.
See several people getting electrocuted from using crappy chargers.
Of course, the other danger is well, burning your house down because the charger explodes with flame.
up electronics for a year because they can't tell their kids not to do that (especially the 2 year old, wth...) and take the devices away is a failure in parenting
A box with a rectangular shiny screen is always attractive. Doesn't matter if you're 2 years old or 80. Your eyes are always mysteriously drawn to it.
In fact, the urge to look at said screen can be quite strong, and very intelligent people who ought to know better have been found to ignore very practical warnings while staring at the screen, mesmerized.
It's a very real problem with video billboards and driver distraction. It's a very real problem with pilots (especially ones that move from "steam gauges" to modern glass panels - the displays are VERY eye-catching and distracting and can keep a pilot's eyes from looking outside). I'm fairly certain children find it especially enticing and lack the self control to tear themselves away.
Also, we're not talking exactly a long time here - the 80s were barely over 30 years ago, and look at what happened - people can't tear themselves away from cellphones, if you even suggest to a parent that their kid doesn't need a cellphone, they get all panicky ("what if I need to tell Johnny to go to his friend's after school?!!??!?!"). Likewise, the prospect that a doctor or other emergency personnel needs a cellphone to be reachable is also recent. Or a parent who going for a night out.
In the 80s, there were few cellphones - either high powered executives who could afford the $1/minute rates, or drug dealers. People went out for dinners with babysitters looking after their kids (and never panicked that there was absolutely positively no way to get in contact). Doctors were on call without needing cellphones, etc. And school children could always be contacted, even during school hours!
If it had been done with video effect tools rather than a game cap, it would have been just as worthy of arrest.
That is to say, not worthy at all. In the US, there's this thing called the "First Amendment". He harmed nobody with that video, it is protected speech.
The first amendment simply states you're allowed to make the speech. It doesn't say you're immune from the repercussions of said speech.
I suppose that's the problem with the Constitution - it's all about rights, but the technical thing is, it's not just rights, it's rights and responsibilities.
Otherwise yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre is protected speech. And it is, though you're not immune from charges of inciting a panic, causing death (murder or manslaughter, depending on whether you intended to or not), and other things.
Likewise, if some known (American) Al-Qaeda associate post a video on YouTube calling for the killing of fellow Americans, is that protected speech? Yes, it is. However, you'd be remiss if the authorities didn't arrest the guy. Unfortunately, this guy fell under the same kind of laws (the law never appreciates humor).
Beta took two tapes to hold a movie, while VHS took one, this was significant. The quality difference when hooked up to old TV sets via RF was negligible. If I recall, Beta machines were more expensive as well. At the time, VHS was a better choice for most people.
No, it wasn't quality, nor cost, it was convenience. Two tapes vs. one is a huge issue. Otherwise laserdisc would've been way more popular (one disc holds an entire movie, but you had to flip them around midway or get one of those dual sided players). DVDs had the issue too - while the initial ones compressed it so you could fit it on one side (single layer at the time), they also had flippers where you could get widescreen and pan and scan.
When dual layer discs came out, they were a godsend, but the layer transitions meant the unit paused for a second. These days, there's enough buffering that no pause happens.
And Sony learned their lessons on Betamax by pouring tons of money into Blu-Ray (which had all the disadvantages - it was better, but it cost twice as much as an HD-DVD, it had region coding and other DRM like ROM-mark and such that its competitor didn't have, and even worse, it required special manufacturing equipment - an HD-DVD just needed upgraded DVD facilities - so you can make the HD-DVD and DVD on the same line (which was handy since the new equipment can still make DVDs today)).
Likewise, the $100/hour studio's extra quality doesn't help when some moron will crank all the knobs to 11 and compress it to hell to produce the master. Then it will be played through cheap earbuds. Now that DIY recording is becoming practical, the old way isn't looking so good. It can produce better results but typically doesn't even though it always costs more.
For the crap that is popular music, yeah, it makes sense because quality doesn't make a huge difference.
But there are genres of music where quality does matter. I like my orchestral video game and movie scores, and it has to be at high quality or it sounds like crap. Enough so that at times LAME gives up and gets pegged at 320kbps when set to VBR. Or more importantly - dynamic range - because the music has "punch" - one second you're hearing a delicate flute, followed by the huge thump of a bass drum that kicks you in the stomach.
Heck, back in the 80s, they used to use the William Tell 1812 overture because a bad speaker or lousy amp usually self-destructed - turn them to hear the soft parts and they'd run out of headroom and either clip or short out trying to reproduce the cannon (the power supply generally went...) and likewise speakers couldn't handle the throw caused.
Of course, the nice thing is that amateurs often possess everything they need for quality - once the recording is digital (and these days even amateurs have access to high end 24bit 96kHz equipment that's high quality and cheap), and even better, these masters are often made available in FLAC. And I'm happy to go with them because the big labels rarely do that!
Power supplies used to be awful. I've heard of efficiencies as bad as 55%. Power supplies have their own fans because they burn a lot of power. Around 5 years ago, manufacturers started paying attention to this huge waste of power. Started a website, 80plus.org. Today, efficiencies can be as high as 92%, even 95% at the sweet spot.
They had to, because at 50% efficiency, if you wanted a 500W power supply, you're talking about drawing 1000W. And that would be a practical limit because a typical 15A outlet would provide 1650W. Don't forget a switching supply also has horrible PF, so 1000W could mean 1250VA. Sure it's only consuming 1000W, but your circuit breaker has to handle the extra 250VAR (just over 2A), so your computer was drawing up to 12A instantaneously. At 80% PF, this limited consumed power to around 1300W, which at 50% efficiency meant your PC could draw up to 650W. (The thing with imaginary power is it has very real currents, so your electric meter will never register imaginary power, but all the power handling equipment will see its effects - because what really happens is you "give back" that imaginary power so your meter wouldn't record it).
At the same time, PC components were drawing more and more power and 650W wouldn't cut it.
So the situation was to be as-is and force everyone to install multiple circuits in their computer room, or to sharpen up efficiency.
Which they did, because at 95% efficiency and a power factor of 1.0, you can now have a power supply that nearly goes all the way - 1500W (a little less to account for component variations and such), and still be within 15A.
They have the agreement of the print publisher to produce this free online version. I'm actually somewhat surprised they got it; as the summary notes, they had to convince the publisher that having a free version available online wouldn't hurt print sales, which is often hard to convince publishers of.
The thank-you section of the page lists: Thomas Kelleher and Basic Books, for their open-mindedness in allowing this edition to be published free of charge
I guess it also helps that it isn't a book that's been published recently - being an older title, sales are probably thin to begin with. An online copy can easily be a good marketing mechanism in that case.
The other problem is the write cycle limit on the SSDs, that may or may not be an issue depending upon how you use your computer. But, for those of us that regularly recompile the OS and kernel, an SSD isn't going to stand up to that for very long.
You'd be surprised at the endurance of a lot of SSDs. Especially name brand ones like Intel and Samsung (forget the rest).
As for me, I want a Chromebook Pixel, but wiped and running a full distro of Linux...the hardware is gorgeous.
Could always just replace it with a full blown Linux distro. Problem solved.
The pixel is one of the few Chromebooks you can install another OS with because it has a BIOS emulator. The other Chromebooks don't, so you can't install another Linux at all. ChromeOS uses coreboot I believe and as such, it's nice and secure.
The problem with the Pixel is rebooting Linux is a pain as you have to be in developer mode, then hit Ctrl-L every time in order to load the BIOS, otherwise it'll try to boot ChromeOS in developer mode (which you probably wiped).
Once installed, you'll find poor support for high-dpi displays (though it's changing, slowly - high-dpi support is coming to GNOME), and the touch screen works off the bat, but the touchpad probably won't...
For hardware, it's gorgeous. But the damned thing really doesn't want to run anything other than ChromeOS - besides being inconvenient to use (rebooting or turning it on, you must hit Ctrl-L within 30 seconds or it'll stall out and you'll have to power cycle it to restart it).
It's bad enough that there exists side-by-side chroot installs of Linux - which require entering developer mode and waiting 30 seconds until the bootloader times out and boots in developer mode.
Very nice locked down machines, yes. Running an alternate OS though, isn't very fun at all.
Of course, there's also the NSA factor - you're putting your data on Google's servers, after all...
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Not just politicians, but CEOs who often have local politicians tied up around their fingers.
You can make safe nuclear reactors. The problem is, nuclear power is expensive - it has immense startup costs, and even bigger shutdown costs (imagine if someone told you that after you stop making money off the site, you have to still man it and keep it around for 30 odd years?).
Of course, you have CEOs and other executives who see two opportunities to bilk the population - the first to get subsidies to build the plant, the second to get huge subsidies to shut down the plant (usually in the form of abandonment and forcing the local government and taxpayer to foot the cleanup bill). And yes, if you refuse to pay, well, see ya, we'll be heading to the next town - perhaps they want the jobs and money. Same goes for any possible regulations that the CEO might not like - want renewable energy? Well, go for it, but I hope your tree huggers can provide high paying jobs like we can. Etc. In the end, the town gets so dependent on it that the company is untouchable.
In the middle, when the plant's producing power, it's very cheap and economical - the cheapest we have. Of course, it can be cheaper still, to pad the bonus this year - perhaps by cutting safety and maintenance because really, who cares? If the town doesn't like it, what can they do? The jobs are in the nuclear power plant.
The real problem is greed - small town sees big dollar signs and jobs, and company executives see nothing but a sucker who's willing to do anything to help you build and politicians too powerless to kill their golden goose.
Politicians are the problem when the power company's a public utility and they see a great source of revenue as a way to keep taxes low.
That's the logical explaination.
However, the real truth is, it's been going back to the US Constitution and the whole separation of church and state thing.
The main pusher of Creationism in the US is the Discovery Institute, and their agenda is simple - they (strongly) believe that the ills of the modern world are caused by, effectively, the secular nature of the world. Back in the "old days" (of say 19th and early 20th century) things were simpler and you didn't have such violence and misbehaviour on the streets because everyone had the fear of God. But as society moved to a more secular nature, you get things like school shootings, disrespect, etc. etc. etc.
So the entire goal is to get back to the "roots" where people said the Lord's Prayer before class and where kids were obedient and all that jazz.
Of course, there is the whole church and state thing, which means you can't just introduce prayer into the classroom - that won't work. Instead, you work by gradual changes. Creationism is a start - you can sort of try to introduce it as an alternative to evolution in the classroom.
Unfortunately, the problem was Creationism was a purely religious concept and many people saw right through the attempt, which is why it's called Intelligent Design today. (In fact, during the transition, you could find the evolution of the search and replace of Creationism with Intelligent Design in the form of transition fossils (an evolutionary concept, *gasp*!) in documents, which was how people discovered it really was just another name for Creationism).
Once you get Intelligent Design into the science texts, you can make pushes for other changes to get more religion in school.
The end goal, of course, is to get an entire nation full of God-fearing obedient and "lawful" people who will never want to stray from the pack.
That's the real end goal.
The open source mantra, "many eyes make bugs shallow" is unfortunately false. A carefully crafted backdoor can require a LOT of work to find, and if especially well done, may require people of varying skills to actually find it.
And no, anyone worth their salt will not submit patches that contain the entire backdoor in it. There might be oddball lines that don't seem to make sense here and there, but other patches would be just as free to introduce part of the vulnerability while still being a part of the code that has to be in there.
So now you've got a backdoor that's spread out over many patches, and even better, the time between implementation and actual usage can be quite long (enough so that various parts of the backdoor may be patched out, only to be put back in as an odd edge case). Or perhaps a well calculated patch will have someone else implement a part of the changes.
What happens is that the internet gets fractured - you'll have the "US Intenret", the "Brazil Internet" just like we have the "Iran Internet", and to a lesser extent, the "China Internet". All little networks running separate and independent.
Today the internet is bigger than any one country - even the NSA can't tap all of it, and it's likely the stuff they tapped they did things like running TOR exit nodes and monitored the data that way.
But tomorrow, the internet will shrivel up (hey, we don't need IPv6 anymore!) as every country runs its own version of the internet, and wanting to connect to the bigger part around it well, you're a terrorist.
App updates are handled by Apple completely - you post an app on iTunes connect and whenever your phone notices, it'll update it automatically.
Developers currently do not have access to the fingerprint reader (because there are plenty of questions on how it should work and when it should work and perhaps even stuff like can you authorize it for a time period). The only things the fingerprint reader is good for is to unlock your phone and (optionally) used to store your iTunes password for authorization purposes.
I'm guessing it's to see if it's going to just be a wank feature or genuinely useful, and to see if people use it for iTunes or not. And possibly to solicit information from developers on how they would like it used - remember the secure area is limited in size so how are developers going to store access tokens and such, etc. etc. etc.
That's an Android 4.0 thing, actually. The menu button is deprecated and having used both Android and iOS, I really dislike the menu button.
I tend to find it easily forgettable - and it seems a lot of devs like to hide essential functionality inside a menu leading to all sorts of "this app doesn't have X feature" type things because people forget to hit the menu bar.
Since ICS, it's a LOT better - the triple dot thing isn't intuitive, but at least it seems to imply tapping it does something when it shows up.
As for back, I do prefer the iOS way - the pentagon at the top telling you where you're going back to (especially if you're entering a screen layout from multiple paths). Of course, it's very frustrating in things that don't obey the conventions like games that put the back button on some other corner of the screen. Or on Android where the back button may or may not work in a game.
In the end, it comes down to preferences. I prefer the iOS way where an app is forced to expose all its functionality and not hide it. I think this comes from the whole "single mouse button" mentality where you're not supposed to hide any functions that are only accessible via a right-click menu. I'm sure everyone has dozens of applications on Windows and Linux where unless you right click, you won't realize there's a lot more depth to what can be done.
Actually, no.
Spec chasers are exclusively an Android phenomenon - Android devices have ALWAYS outclassed the iPhone.
Either in more RAM, faster processor, more cores, bigger screens, more megapixels, whatever.
The reason is that basically once you get below the surface, all Android phones are similar and there's very little to actually differentiate them. Espeically since the look and feel of modern Android handsets are controlled by Google now, so OEMs are now limited to superficial skinning.
So the only way OEMs can really innovate is by tossing more at it. Of course, they're running into the same limitations as everyone else - everyone gets the same processors, the same RAM, the screen screens, etc. Or you could try the Samsung way and release a thousand different phones a year, each slightly tweaked (collectively, the lesser Samsung phones greatly outsell the flagships - think back to the SGS3 - very popular (#1 seller) phone, but it still only moved 60M units which is barely 10% of Android phones sold, and Samsung has 90% of the Android market).
Hell, most people on /. are measurebators, if you read the Android and Apple threads. (A measurebator is someone who only goes by the numbers, and nothing else. Like comparing a camera by megapixels instead of picture quality. Or consoles - PS3 is on paper faster than Xbox, but it excludes which one is more "fun" to a person, etc).
Well there are two big sites most people have heard of. Kickstarter seems to have been verbed (verbing weirds language, mind you), but relatively popular and used in contexts where the crowdfunding site is NOT kickstarter.
The other one is Indiegogo.
They have their pluses and minuses. For Indiegogo, a plus can be a project doesn't have to reach its goal to be funded - if the project owner is willing to have Indiegogo take a bigger cut (9% vs 3%) they can say it will always go through. A minus for Indiegogo would be that contributors have to pay upfront - if the funding is unsuccessful (and the owner doesn't want to allow partial funding, like how Canonical chose with the Edge), then contributors are refunded.
Kickstarter doesn't allow partial funding, but they don't charge you until it's due (depending on your credit card is (foreign currency, carrying a balance, etc), Indiegogo can cost you 10% or more if it's refunded).
But while it personally means I will never support an Indiegogo project (and get constantly annoyed when people refer it as a "Kickstarter project" because it seems synonymous with crowd funding), I can appreciate the flexibility of both options.
Plus, Kickstarter has started to tighten the rules a bit to prevent cut-and-run and other type of things.
And there's no network effects - it's not like eBay where they can unilaterally change the rules and everyone has to shut up and take it (because it's damn hard to run another auction site - you end up with buyers lowballing (because it's not eBay), and sellers wanting eBay-like prices despite the lower clientele).
Having both around keeps both honest - Kickstarter can't unilaterally change the rules without upsetting people who'll just go to Indiegogo instead, and vice-versa. Sure resources are wasted - whenever you have duplication of effort, it happens (the most efficient would be a single site), but I'd rather take inefficiency over monopoly.
And we're also finding new areas where crowdfunding is interesting, but neither Kickstarter nor Indiegogo is appropriate. And there's always the attempt to do it by oneself.
They used to have a 64-bit build, but but dropped it for various reasons, though they did bring back 64-bit nightlies.
Basically it was a buggier version, with fewer users and even fewer plugins that supported it.
You'll find a lot of kinds of applications to be 32-bit only - even Microsoft puts 32-bit IE as default (even though they have a 64-bit version) for the same reasons. Other applications with plugins like Office tend to recommend installing the 32-bit version as well.
OTOH, I use profiles and separate Firefox sessions...
They should.
The console versions do not have an auction house nor are they always online.
So the removal of the auction house should remove the need for always online since the consoles do not require it
Otherwise from that overview, it shows that the console version is in some ways superior to the PC versoin.
DRAM is a commodity like oil, pork bellies, orange juice, gasoline.
it's traded on a global scale, and production generally meets demand. Margins are very low because of intense competition and pricing that's effectively determined by sellers (which regulates production). It's also a very perishable product in that the value of it decreases as time progresses because if you can't get rid of your DRAM within a couple of months, someone will come out with bigger/better/faster and devalue your stock for you.
And unlike necessities like oil, no one stores DRAM (see perishable).
Additionally, this is mass production season - demand for DRAM is at its peak around this time of year as manufacturers are gearing up for the holiday season and many existing contracts need fulfillment. Those who did not lock in their rates by preordering ahead of time has to buy what scraps are left over after the Apples, Samsungs, HPs and especially now Sony and Microsoft have taken their cut.
That 10% cut could easily mean there's just no spare RAM for smaller players to buy because everyone else with fixed-deliverable contracts get first priority in the line of what's left. So if you were thinking of building a PC, you might not be able to buy RAM for it because manufacturers cannot make any as there's no unclaimed ICs left.
So it may not mean anything to the Dells and Apples who are guaranteed their stock by contractual obligation, but for everyone else, it means a whole lot.
And even so, it can also mean the big guys are shorted - production generally follows their orders as they order the vast majority of parts - excess you generally want to have little of because that means having to sell to smaller players. If contracts take up 95% of the world supply, that 5% means no spare ICs unless you ordered well in advance, or can delay manufacture enough to sell your existing stock at elevated prices and purchase them later again.
The latter does happen, but only if you can absorb the delay - if you want stuff out for the holidays, you have to be manufacturing now because you need product boxed up by October for shipping to retailers by November to have It on shelves by late November.
OWS scared bankers and traders - the people with money. Those people called their senators and reps and action got taken.
OWS terrorized those with money (i.e., power) therefore the OWS guys get branded as terrorists.
Remember, the victor writes the history books.
Proles like you and me? No money and no power, thus we'll never be able to recast OWS as a legitimate organization.
Well, as part of ensuring less fragmentation in Android between OS versions, Google has created a huge framework (Google Services Framework) to isolate apps from the OS. GSF is a big, binary only library with system level privileges that ensure it doesn't need to ask for more permissions ever.
Of course, AOSP does not have this, and excepting the few app stores outside of Google Play, apps are few and far between as most developers only post their apps on Google Play and nowhere else.
Basically, the vast majority of people then who think they're buying a premium product when it's really just a middle of the line thing.
Because the really good wines (more than $40/bottle) have found alternative sealing devices like plastic screwcaps and (gasp) boxes which keep a lot better (holding the value), require less maintenance (oh yeah, you have to maintain it! Or you leave the chance it turns to vinegar) and so forth.
Cue the Pawn Stars episode where one guy brings in a good vintage Dom (sealed) only to find the cork is deteriorating and is floating in the liquid, which also has most likely turned into vinegar from improper storage.
Why the worry about self-cannibalism?
I believe it was Jobs that said that if you aim to protect your bread and butter, someone else will just eat you up.
So Apple has absolutely no issue with creating devices that will eat into existing product lines - take the iPod line. You had the original, then the mini, shuffle and nano. Each of which eats into each other's sales somewhat. But you still sell more this way than any other way.
Or the iPhone. It certainly ate into the iPod (group) sales, and the iPod Touch certain ate into iPhone sales (an iPhone without the phone!)
Or the iPad - it's certainly eating into Mac sales, especially lower end - people who would've bought an Air probably bought iPads instead - it does everything they needed it for anyhow.
If you innovate by trying not to compete with yourself, you end up like Kodak, inventor of the digital camera. However, the digital camera concept was not Kodak's focus, which was selling chemicals, so Kodak sat on the technology until other companies started selling them and film and chemical sales bottomed out. They could've transformed from a chemical company to an imaging one - the bulk of their sales would be chemicals, but they'd have a growing business doing all sorts of imaging - from digital cameras to printers and even having photo printers that develop to regular print paper, selling more chemicals.
If the 5C sales eat into the 5S sales - so be it. Each should compete on their own merits, and if the 5C should prove more popular, well, it means the 5S didn't deliver good value for money.
And just like it was said, they both make money. And the end goal is to make money - if you convert a Samsung user to an Apple user, a plus - who cares if they buy a 5S or 5C? It could also be if you didn't have one or the other, the user may have stuck with Samsung. And yes, there will also be users who go from Apple to Samsung.
No, it makes complete sense - these guys do drivers and such as a marketing exercise. When companies come to them, they want to answer "Yes, we have a driver for you, it's already in the kernel". OEMs are far more likely to choose a company that has drivers already in the kernel than not (and thus need to develop one). And being mainline In the kernel is a quality bar - it's one thing to have a driver to integrate yourself, it's another to have one that's in every kernel going forward.
So a lot of these contributions are "scratching their own itch" where the itch is "sell more of our chips".
That has always been the case - pre 9/11 or post.
It's why credit cards, despite being so "nasty" are generally popular because they make it EASY.
Sending cash overseas has always been iffy - hell, sending cash in general has been iffy. If not postal workers (who may need to examine envelope contents if it gets ripped up by the machines to see if there's an address), then the recipient may just pocket the cash.
Another way is a cheque, which was the most common way to send money through the mail, but in the internet age waiting 10=12 days for it to clear is a bore.
There are also money orders and such, but they generally involve lining up at the bank or post office to obtain, but they clear instantly. Or Western Union.
but none beat the speed and convenience of credit - just a few numbers gets payment sent instantaneously. It's also why Paypal grew to where it is today - because sending random joes money is a lot easier with credit cards.
The iPod was released in 2001. The 3rd Gen iPod in 2003, which incorporated USB charging and a "universal connector". That predates the charging spec by a good 4 years. The iPhone was also released in 2007, and by that time, there were three common currents available - 100mA, 500mA and 1000mA - for charging the iPhone and iPods. The iPad came later in 2010, but Apple decided it would be better to keep backwards compatibility and have a 2000mA setting as well, so you can use 500mA and 1000mA chargers with it too and it won't try to blow them up.
Sadly, I've actually seen this happen when designing products to the USB spec - the cheap ass crappy chargers WILL SELF DESTRUCT if you try to do this. And when they do self-destruct, or even when operating correctly, bad things can happen - like exposing mains potential on the device (the device not mains earth referenced, so it can get 5V from USB, but the USB port, when referenced to mains earth, can be at lethal voltages.
See several people getting electrocuted from using crappy chargers.
Of course, the other danger is well, burning your house down because the charger explodes with flame.
A box with a rectangular shiny screen is always attractive. Doesn't matter if you're 2 years old or 80. Your eyes are always mysteriously drawn to it.
In fact, the urge to look at said screen can be quite strong, and very intelligent people who ought to know better have been found to ignore very practical warnings while staring at the screen, mesmerized.
It's a very real problem with video billboards and driver distraction. It's a very real problem with pilots (especially ones that move from "steam gauges" to modern glass panels - the displays are VERY eye-catching and distracting and can keep a pilot's eyes from looking outside). I'm fairly certain children find it especially enticing and lack the self control to tear themselves away.
Also, we're not talking exactly a long time here - the 80s were barely over 30 years ago, and look at what happened - people can't tear themselves away from cellphones, if you even suggest to a parent that their kid doesn't need a cellphone, they get all panicky ("what if I need to tell Johnny to go to his friend's after school?!!??!?!"). Likewise, the prospect that a doctor or other emergency personnel needs a cellphone to be reachable is also recent. Or a parent who going for a night out.
In the 80s, there were few cellphones - either high powered executives who could afford the $1/minute rates, or drug dealers. People went out for dinners with babysitters looking after their kids (and never panicked that there was absolutely positively no way to get in contact). Doctors were on call without needing cellphones, etc. And school children could always be contacted, even during school hours!
The first amendment simply states you're allowed to make the speech. It doesn't say you're immune from the repercussions of said speech.
I suppose that's the problem with the Constitution - it's all about rights, but the technical thing is, it's not just rights, it's rights and responsibilities.
Otherwise yelling "FIRE" in a crowded theatre is protected speech. And it is, though you're not immune from charges of inciting a panic, causing death (murder or manslaughter, depending on whether you intended to or not), and other things.
Likewise, if some known (American) Al-Qaeda associate post a video on YouTube calling for the killing of fellow Americans, is that protected speech? Yes, it is. However, you'd be remiss if the authorities didn't arrest the guy. Unfortunately, this guy fell under the same kind of laws (the law never appreciates humor).
No, it wasn't quality, nor cost, it was convenience. Two tapes vs. one is a huge issue. Otherwise laserdisc would've been way more popular (one disc holds an entire movie, but you had to flip them around midway or get one of those dual sided players). DVDs had the issue too - while the initial ones compressed it so you could fit it on one side (single layer at the time), they also had flippers where you could get widescreen and pan and scan.
When dual layer discs came out, they were a godsend, but the layer transitions meant the unit paused for a second. These days, there's enough buffering that no pause happens.
And Sony learned their lessons on Betamax by pouring tons of money into Blu-Ray (which had all the disadvantages - it was better, but it cost twice as much as an HD-DVD, it had region coding and other DRM like ROM-mark and such that its competitor didn't have, and even worse, it required special manufacturing equipment - an HD-DVD just needed upgraded DVD facilities - so you can make the HD-DVD and DVD on the same line (which was handy since the new equipment can still make DVDs today)).
For the crap that is popular music, yeah, it makes sense because quality doesn't make a huge difference.
But there are genres of music where quality does matter. I like my orchestral video game and movie scores, and it has to be at high quality or it sounds like crap. Enough so that at times LAME gives up and gets pegged at 320kbps when set to VBR. Or more importantly - dynamic range - because the music has "punch" - one second you're hearing a delicate flute, followed by the huge thump of a bass drum that kicks you in the stomach.
Heck, back in the 80s, they used to use the William Tell 1812 overture because a bad speaker or lousy amp usually self-destructed - turn them to hear the soft parts and they'd run out of headroom and either clip or short out trying to reproduce the cannon (the power supply generally went...) and likewise speakers couldn't handle the throw caused.
Of course, the nice thing is that amateurs often possess everything they need for quality - once the recording is digital (and these days even amateurs have access to high end 24bit 96kHz equipment that's high quality and cheap), and even better, these masters are often made available in FLAC. And I'm happy to go with them because the big labels rarely do that!
They had to, because at 50% efficiency, if you wanted a 500W power supply, you're talking about drawing 1000W. And that would be a practical limit because a typical 15A outlet would provide 1650W. Don't forget a switching supply also has horrible PF, so 1000W could mean 1250VA. Sure it's only consuming 1000W, but your circuit breaker has to handle the extra 250VAR (just over 2A), so your computer was drawing up to 12A instantaneously. At 80% PF, this limited consumed power to around 1300W, which at 50% efficiency meant your PC could draw up to 650W. (The thing with imaginary power is it has very real currents, so your electric meter will never register imaginary power, but all the power handling equipment will see its effects - because what really happens is you "give back" that imaginary power so your meter wouldn't record it).
At the same time, PC components were drawing more and more power and 650W wouldn't cut it.
So the situation was to be as-is and force everyone to install multiple circuits in their computer room, or to sharpen up efficiency.
Which they did, because at 95% efficiency and a power factor of 1.0, you can now have a power supply that nearly goes all the way - 1500W (a little less to account for component variations and such), and still be within 15A.
I guess it also helps that it isn't a book that's been published recently - being an older title, sales are probably thin to begin with. An online copy can easily be a good marketing mechanism in that case.
You'd be surprised at the endurance of a lot of SSDs. Especially name brand ones like Intel and Samsung (forget the rest).
Some tests by users who do nothing but write to the drives 24/7:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm
Like the old Intel 320s ,a 40GB one reported no more life at 190TB written, died at 685TB.
The Intel X25 80GB - worn out at 147TB, died at 883TB.
It's a challenge because they are damn hard to wear out so the newest and latest SSDs really take forever.
The SSD is likely going to be way too small for usefulness before one actually runs out of usable writes.
The pixel is one of the few Chromebooks you can install another OS with because it has a BIOS emulator. The other Chromebooks don't, so you can't install another Linux at all. ChromeOS uses coreboot I believe and as such, it's nice and secure.
The problem with the Pixel is rebooting Linux is a pain as you have to be in developer mode, then hit Ctrl-L every time in order to load the BIOS, otherwise it'll try to boot ChromeOS in developer mode (which you probably wiped).
Once installed, you'll find poor support for high-dpi displays (though it's changing, slowly - high-dpi support is coming to GNOME), and the touch screen works off the bat, but the touchpad probably won't...
For hardware, it's gorgeous. But the damned thing really doesn't want to run anything other than ChromeOS - besides being inconvenient to use (rebooting or turning it on, you must hit Ctrl-L within 30 seconds or it'll stall out and you'll have to power cycle it to restart it).
It's bad enough that there exists side-by-side chroot installs of Linux - which require entering developer mode and waiting 30 seconds until the bootloader times out and boots in developer mode.
Very nice locked down machines, yes. Running an alternate OS though, isn't very fun at all.
Of course, there's also the NSA factor - you're putting your data on Google's servers, after all...
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/why-the-nsa-loves-googles-chromebook/