The best security feature Apple had on the ipad was delays between incorrect login attempts leading to eventual wiping of the data
That's not just an iPad thing - it's been around on the iPhone before that - enter your PIN wrong 10 times or so and it wipes. But not before making you wait - the first three attempts have zero wait times, but after that it's a huge ramp up of 1 minute+ per attempt. Presumably it's why it takes months for Apple to unlock one physically.
Though, you can always (iOS has supported this for even longer) use a complex password/phrase mechanism. It's less convenient because it pops up the regular keyboard over the dialpad, but it's also a lot more secure - supposedly if you enable complex passwords, it forms the basis for a number of security keys in the OS.
Also, Apple requires you to create a PIN code when you enable the fingerprint sensor. If it's been 48 hours since you used the fingerprint sensor to authenticate, you have to use the PIN instead. Likewise, if you've just restarted the iPhone, you have to use the PIN for your first authentication, you can't use the fingerprint sensor.
And that's really the point of the fingerprint sensor. Because if you look at statistics, most users do not use a PIN or other locking mechanism on their phone. They use the default keylock. That's it. No PIN, no swipe, no face recognition, no password (both iOS and Android support "complex" authentication that goes beyond a PIN). And it's understandable because a user interacts with their phone hundreds of times a day and it gets old quick.
So basically to amp up security, the 5S lets you replace the PIN with a fingerprint, because it's better if most users enable a PIN than half of them (or less!) do. Hell, I might want to use a complex password if it means I don't have to enter it every 5 minutes because I look something up, then re-lock the phone only to need it a few minutes later to look up something else (or answer a phone call, or text, or whatever).
And yes, until it broke, I loved the fingerprint sensor on my laptop.
What I wouldn't give to be able to travel back in time and prevent 1366x768 or '720p' from being defined as 'HD' resolution. Ideally with some sort of plan that involves more explosions than a braindead summer action movie. What a pox upon the eyes of the world, especially with so many applications making poor use of extra horizontal space (so it's barely better than 1024x768, circa 15 years ago) and 768 pixels being pretty narrow for the 'well, just flip it 90 degrees' strategy that saves other widescreens for non-movie purposes.
Because 720p and 1080i are not equivalent. 1080p is not officially "HD".
720p and 1080i take roughly the same bandwidth, but there are cases where 1080i is inappropriate and 720p is better. Primarily, you'll find it in the fact it's progressive versus interlaced.
Fast action things like sports need the enhanced framerate (720p is 60fps), while dramas and other programming prefer the enhanced resolution offered by 1080i. It's basically framerate vs. resolution - you can have 60 progressive scanned frames at 720p, or 30 frames at 1080i (60 fields).
And don't get me started with "1080p", which seems to mean 1080p30 for the most part (which is roughly equivalent to 1080i...).
And no, you cannot convert 720p to 1080i without losing information - because the reduced framerate of 1080i means you're going to have to discard lines.
FedEx is a company that I will avoid at all costs. I lost about half a day chasing them because they'd reported me to a debt collecting agency over an unpaid delivery. There were only two problems with this: paying for the delivery was not my liability (I hadn't signed anything) and they actually were paid by the people who were supposed to pay (who had a corporate account and a FedEx account number that deliveries could just be charged against).
UPS sucks for that reason as well - especially if it's international.
If I go to a store online and see they only ship UPS, I instantly go to a competitor. (FedEx is a higher threshold).
The only time I use UPS is within the country, and not by choice - they're almost always more expensive and slower than the freaking mail! And half the time they can't even get their deliveries straight. (Let's say I only needed to use Amazon customer support because UPS decided that they couldn't find the floor, despite it being written right there on the address label AND being well, in my Amazon address book for the past 10 years and having hundreds of other orders in the past arrive successfully). Once maybe, but this kept happening repeatedly. The lamest one was when the driver failed to deliver because they couldn't find the name in the directory - despite all they needed to do was... read the address label, see it says "10th floor", get into the elevator and press 10. No, they just went into the lobby, looked at the directory, decided I didn't exist, and turn around. WTF?
Anyhow, UPS is good at extra billing - sure the shipper only paid $10, but if it's international, cha-ching, Fee fee fee fee fee fee fee... by the time you're through, you've paid an extra 30-200%. (Yes, 200%. They once wanted $20 for something that cost me $10 including shipping. I chose to eat the $10 by refusing the package than spend $30 total).
I don't know what it is, but I've had less trouble with the post office than UPS. FedEx is marginally better - but they still charge a lot.
It sounds like you're suffering from OCD. I sympathize with you, I have many compulsive tendencies myself. Checking to see what just came in isn't one of them. My phone makes nice soft little noises when stuff happens, and I just ignore it most of the time. If I'm feeling like engaging, then I pick it up. I may not even bother to pick it up if it actually rings, I've got service.
Take a look at people sometime and you'll find their devices control them. It's so bad that you can find people who believe the meaning of "get together" is sitting at a table together with everyone tapping away at their own phone.
Or why you have articles like "When is it OK to answer your phone" and such. Nevermind all the drivers you see on the road where they're barely looking at the road (and thus weaving about or going much slower than the flow and creating a hazard). Or pedestrians who seem to have overcome their childhood training of "look both ways before crossing" and blindly step out into the street to get run over (and not usually when the light's in their favor - they just forget the edge of the road is there and cross it without looking)
Gadget-itis is everywhere. You don't need to train your child on technology - they'll really pick it up themselves (the shiny glowing tablet is a way more "interesting" toy than a pile of lego or wooden blocks.
And yes, stepping back and realizing when you do something for enjoyment versus doing it because some device compels you to do it is quite liberating. Taking a step back, realizing that you don't NEED to answer that tweet right this moment or answer that email leaves so much time for other stuff.
Are there repair persons anymore? Seems stuff is so shoddy nowadays it is not expected to last more than one or two years. Even if I want to have my machines repaired, they are either impossible to repair or it is cheaper to purchase a new one.
Stuff isn't shoddy these days. You may think they are, but they aren't. It's just you've got survivor bias going on - "old stuff" looks more reliable because for the most part, what old stuff you see today is merely the survivor - you don't see the crap that's broken and discarded decades earlier.
Want an example? Take cars - how many "classic" cars are there versus how many were built? A lot of "classics" they had 50,000+ made, and not a lot are running on the roads today. What you saw are the survivors - the few that people cared enough to keep going - everything else was scrapped when they got in an accident or just could not be sold and was taken to the wrecker.
And stuff's a lot cheaper nowadays because modern technology has made modern stuff less overengineered - is there any possible reason to manufacture a computer that'll keep working for 10 years, when most PCs will be discarded or recycled within 5?
And you mentioned the problem for repairs yourself - it's uneconomical. Because the truth is these days, human labor is expensive. Given it'll take at least a couple of hours to diagnose and fix a problem, if not more, and the people who can do so require specialized training and thus charge out at skilled labor rates, spending $500 to repair something you can buy new for $500 makes little sense.
The only places where repairing is still economical are countries where human labor is cheap, which also tend to be places where buying new is very expensive to them.
Outside of that, the only cheap replacements are where parts can be diagnosed and swapped in and out quickly. If your computer's RAM is faulty, or hard drive is dead, it's a really easy fix that costs a few minutes. Likewise, if your monitor's screen is cracked.
The expensive fixes are ones that aren't so easy - instead of your screen being cracked, let's say it doesn't work. Well now it can be a dozen different things and fixing goes from "replace obviously broken part" with "find broken part".
Of course, people do that - as a hobby. As a techie, you probably get tons of broken cast offs that you may fix a few to get a free-to-you piece of hardware. Because your hobby time is "free" and you're not invested in the broken equipment (if it's broken, it doesn't matter). Though, if your main PC breaks, you probably have a spare ready to go because it's important to you, but if you got a broken monitor donated from a friend, well, fix it or not...
The final version even included examples. It says that on one hand taking an old invention and implementing it in software doesn't make it new, on the other hand a new invention that happens to be built in C++ is a new invention. In other words, whether it's software, hardware, firmware, or dinnerware doesn't effect patentability. Newness controls.
And that's the way it should be. Because let's say you invent a new radio modulation scheme that lets you approach Shannon's limit far closer than ever before even in the worst conditions.
If you implement it as hardware, you can patent it, fine, we understand. If you implement it as software (using an SDR), then it being software should have no impact on its patentability. Perhaps you do fancy signal processing - so now you have an embedded DSP doing part of the work, and hardware doing the rest.
What New Zealand really said was "on a computer" was no longer a sufficient transformation to make it new and novel (one thing companies do with expiring patents is find new uses and patent those - cue drug companies facing with expiring patents that go and combine the expiring drug with some other drug to make new one - so you end up taking one pill instead of two).
Sometimes you can see it happening in real life - I believe a few years ago the patents on Bounce dryer sheets expired and a year or so before that they came up with contests and other things to find new uses for it. Of course, one of the reasons would be to... file a new patent on a new use for it.
except that EVERY month, you run the risk of your system breaking badly...
Linux isn't immune either to bad updates hosing it, and for most users, once it's hooped, you pretty much need to call an admin over to try to reverse the faulty update.
And I'm fairly certain Linux updates (which honestly come daily) end up hosing you at random times. Granted, at least on most distributions the updates aren't installed automatically, so you're safe from automatic hosing, but it's generally annoying enough that most developers don't update until their project is done or there's a real need to. (Yes, it also means if you get past the firewall, you can easily hack into every dev machine because of vulnerabilities).
They broke it of from the community. They made changes but they did not commit the diffs. This after huge pressure from KDE devs. I prefere to have my code eaten up by other GPL projects and remain free forever than get assimilated in Apple's pretty iShit.
They couldn't do that, because KHTML is LGPL.
In fact, Apple released their changes as required by the LGPL.
What KDE devs wanted was better documentation on the changes because Apple's changes were being sent to the KHTML guys as large diffs without much commentary. As WebKit and KHTML diverged, the pages became more and more difficult to integrate, and there's little information as to what changes were to improve things and others were bug fixes.
That was the main beef with the KDE guys - Apple was releasing source code as required, but they couldn't be integrated.
There was never any "code lockup" and in fact, Apple was providing the KHTML guys with patches out of kindness (remember, the (L)GPL never states you need to give the changes back upstream - you're free to fork it as you wish).
The code was always free. It's the upstream guys were getting patches that they couldn't use was the problem, and Apple has every right to ignore them if they wanted.
What Apple did in the end was put up a public CVS server with all the changes, so the KDE folks could see the diffs as smaller patches as well as individual change logs. Neither of which is a requirement of the GPL.
Otherwise RedHat would be in trouble because they're doing the same thing with Oracle - they're combining their patches into one huge patch so guys like Oracle can't pick and choose easily.
WebKit is still LGPL, by the way. It's never been anything other.
In the long run this is really going to suck for the Sony engineers, maintaining a fork with a different system compiler.
I don't see why - Sony is not going to track FreeBSD - they already forked it and created their OS around it.
There's no need to track FreeBSD - not that you'd want to because having your dev environment change under you just costs developers money.
Sony's been using BSD for a long while now and unless some major security flaw happens in it that could potentially compromise things, the kernel will probably stay static. Likewise, the compiler too - unless the code it generates has security holes, then it probably will never get updated or even looked at. (And there's still going to be old vulnerable versions out there - Sony can't force everyone to recompile their code).
Even the base OS is unlikely to need recompiling with updated compilers - if it's even bothered with.
The only "suck" happens if newer features of GCC are required in the code. But given the base OS probably won't change unless a major security vulnerability is found, they can switch to LLVM for the application code if newer features are required.
This is what armored cockpit doors are for. You can detonate a bomb. You cannot take the plane over and fly it into populated areas or buildings. That is 99% of the airplane security we need, because no matter what, if someone wants to get explosives on a plane, they will.
Armored cockpit doors are useless if the explosive has ripped the plane in half. There isn't much metal separating the inside of the plane from the outside, and uncontrollability is only a few severed cables away.
The armored door keeps unwanted people out. But a hand grenade going off can easily make the entire plane go down - either by tearing a big hole in the fuselage (or causing the pressurized cabin to overpressure and explode because to the huge pressure differential), or by severing critical control cables (or hydraulics), or causing fires from fuselage fuel tanks.
And yes, airplanes have redundant equipment, but they're designed to protect against individual systems failure (e.g., one hydraulic system fails). They aren't designed to handle a case where an explosion sends shrapnel that disables all the systems.
Heck, in the 80s, they came up with bombproof luggage cans, and the FAA was considering making them mandatory. But the airlines lobbied against it.
Not really. The "Users" in RMS's time WERE developers of some ability. Even when ERS took up the Open Source banner over Free Software, he was looking at it as a Developer.
People who are strictly users don't really care. This is how the UNIX vendors, Microsoft and Apple were able to dominate their respective fields for so long. It was only people who wanted to develop extensions of closed software that Open || Free vs closed became an issue.
Back in the days, computer users were technically proficient out of necessity - either you had to know electronics and solder to build your own computers, or to write software to make it do what you want.
The thing was, Steve Jobs realized that computers shouldn't be for just the technically minded - it was a transformative technology that could revolutionize how things were done. But to do that required getting the computer out of the hands of techies and into the general public - world-changing technologies just aren't world changing if they are locked up and not shared. (Sound familiar?)
So fast forward to today where computers are everywhere - they are some of the most powerful tools mankind has created. Thing is, though, as a tool, it should assist the user in helping them do what they want, not be an end to itself. After all, if a tool doesn't help you, it's pointless.
A car helps transport people - but drivers don't have to be mechanics to use them. If they had to be, we'd probably still be back in the late 19th century where cars were a rarity because the reward wouldn't be there. Likewise a computer is useful for many things - entertainment, communications, assistance, information delivery, etc.
But you have to realize that users don't care how it works - they don't want to know because that's not reason why the computer is so useful. The computer is useful because it allows them to go about their day efficiently - perhaps to look up a tidbit of information through Wikipedia, or connect them to with like-minded individuals scattered throughout the globe. Or advanced research - things like software defined radios (these people don't care how computers work - they write their DSP algorithms and have them "magically" work - they don't care about OS updates or kernels or whatever).
And I'm sure you'll agree that not everyone needs to know how a computer works. Your mechanic doesn't - yet they use a computer based diagnostic machine to fix your car (would you like to have your car on the stand then have the mechanic say it's going to take days because he accidentally hosed the diagnostics machine playing around with the new Linux kernel?).
I found spinning rust to at least give some clues prior to a crash and burn. I would say, single ssd is not ready for anything critical, in my opinion. Worst case scenario, you can always get the platters transfered in a good drive and recover from there (pricey, bur cheap if data is valuable enough).
Sudden SSD failure is actually not really a failure that's detectable. Good SSDs have tons of metrics available through SMART including media wear indicators that tell you impending failure long before it happens.
But when an SSD suddenly dies, it's generally because the controller's FTL tables got corrupted. For high performance drives, it's remarkably easy to do as performance is #1, not data safety. There's nothing wrong with the disk or the electronics.
The FTL (flash translation layer) is what maps a sector the OS uses to the actual flash sector itself. If it gets corrupted, the controller has no way of accessing the right sectors anymore and things go tits up. It's even worse because a lot of metrics are tied to the FTL, including media wear, so losing that data means you can't simply erase and start over - you're completely hooped as the controller cannot access anything.
If you want to think of it another way, treat it like the super block on a filesystem, and the filesystem tables. Now imagine they get corrupt - the data is useless and recovery is difficult, even though the underlying media is perfectly fine. It's possible to hose it so badly that recovery is impossible.
For speed, FTL tables are cached - and modern SSDs can easily have 512MB-1GB of DDR memory just to hold the tables. Of course, you can't write-through changes since the tables themselves need to be wear-levelled on the flash media.
One of the iffiest times for this comes when an SSD is power cycled - pulling the power on an SSD can cause corruption because the tables may be in the middle of an update. But things like firmware bugs and other things can easily corrupt the table as well (think a stray pointer scribbling over the table RAM). A good SSD often has extra capacitance onboard to ensure that on sudden power failure, there is enough backup power to do an emergency commit to flash. This protects against power cycling, but firmware bugs can still destroy the data.
Of course, SSDs without such features mean the firmware has to be extra careful. And sometimes, such precautions can miss a point in time where you cannot pull the power at all.
It's sort of reminiscent of that Seagate failure that resulted in a log file reaching a certain size disabling the drive - the data and media were perfectly fine, it's just that the firmware crapped out.
So, it's exactly like the XBOne feature that the Internet howled SO derisively at, that Microsoft dropped it, despite it being a fantastic idea?
No, it's a lamer version of it.
Of course, Microsoft's problem is twofold.
1) They're Microsoft. Everything they do incites hate. See: Apple. They can cure cancer or world poverty or hunger and people will still hate them.
2) Microsoft also has a communication problem (this is a bigger issue). They just cannot communicate with the public well. And a lot of what they needed to explain, can't be explained in 140 characters. So instead of being able to explain the entire thing calmly and completely, they leak out little bits that the internet amplifies. Of course, twitter is also far more trusted than the "official source" where the tweet came from, so whoever posts the initial tweet can easily misread something and the whole Internet gets worked up over nothing. (Which then becomes a meme as people believe it to be true).
Hell, we had it happen to McAfee yesterday, and probably dozens of other examples exist as well, like how Microsoft charges $40K to submit new revisions and stuff like that.
Perhaps what SHOULD be worrying is that Sony is unusually silent on the matter - perhaps they also charge $40K for updates (but their NDAs are better so no dev is allowed to even talk about it). Or perhaps the PS4 will have the exact same DRM requirements. Sony has not said anything about going towards how the Xbox was originally envisioned with always on DRM. (Of course, everyone assumes that the PS4 won't have it, but since Sony doesn't actually confirm it for good, they forget that it really means Sony is reserving the ability to do it later).
Can you enumerate the differences? The XBOne version allowed you to designate friends/family who could play your games, with the option for them to go ahead and buy. I don't see any difference with the Steam version.
The Steam version is an all-or-nothing - once a friend decides to play a game, if you want to play ANY game in your library, it kicks them out. So if your friend is playing Portal and you want to play Portal 2, you can start playing Portal 2 and your friend will have a few minutes to quit or buy Portal.
On the Xbox, it would let you play Halo while they played Ryse. You just couldn't have both playing Ryse or both Halo at the same time.
And I presume if you have two friends sharing your Steam account, one locks out the other (you as owner have priority and will kick whoever else is using it out). The Xbox allows full sharing as if you passed the disc on.
Steam still doesn't allow selling games, though. Even if the publisher gets a cut like how the Xbox was also supposed to allow.
PowerVR has some of the most pathetic support for x86 and Windows I've ever seen, and it hasn't got any better. With my fanless Shuttle PC using an Atom N2800, I have a choice of either 32-bit Windows and glitchy graphics, 64-bit Windows and VGA output, or Linux with VGA output. It's pretty obvious why, of course... PowerVR's x86 market is so infinitesimally small compared to their ARM market, they probably hired some old printer driver developer to be the sole guy working on it stashed in a closet somewhere. It is really surprising that Intel ever decided to use them, without some sort of support contract built in.
Two things...
1) Why are you running 64-bit Windows when all the Atom chipsets only support 2GB of RAM?
2) PowerVR doesn't care about x86. In fact, I don't think they're officially in x86 at all. Yes, PowerVR does NOT do x86.
They're making a nice living doing GPU cores for ARMs, not x86 - the only reason you find them for Intel is that Intel needed a GPU, and GMA950s are a joke. So they licensed PowerVR just to have a power efficient GPU. They probably got some reference implementation driver code and ported that to Windows. Of course, for this they did a low-budget port - Atoms are bottom of the barrel in cost and there's only so much R&D money you can throw.
No one competes in the x86 world - it's just Intel, NVidia and AMD.
Except FreeBSD is not using GCC 4.8. They're using GCC 4.2.1, the last version that was GPLv2.
While the current version of GCC may be faster than Clang/LLVM, that doesn't mean Clang/LLVM isn't faster than what is in use now, so the switch may even boost performance compared to the ancient version of GCC in use.
Also, GPL code will always be ahead of weak copyleft code. Take Libre Office vs Open Office. Libre Office can take code from Open Office but OO can't take code form LO. Code that LO takes from OO will always be free.
And that is one of the worst justifications ever. In fact, it's so bad, it lends credence to the "GPL is viral" belief - because the GPL can take and take and take, and not give back (which one could argue is against the SPIRIT of FOSS - that one shares so everyone benefits). Yes, it's legal, just TiVoization and GPLv2 is legal, but spiritually, it really reeks, especially when GPL advocates claim moral superiority.
Heck, perhaps the biggest problem with BSD is NOT the ability for "software robbers" to take and close the source, but for "software robbers" to take and claim moral superiority that their license "frees" the code (funny how "freeing" or "liberating" the source involves ensuring that it can never get back to the original authors, eh?).
Personally, I use unmodified BSD or GPLv2, because I have objections to the GPLv3 (and no, you can't mix v2-only and v3 code because the GPLv3 can be seen as causing restrictions disallowed by GPLv2. Funny how the champions of Freedom even admit that there are limits to how Free you can be).
Not at all. ChromeCast is a very different beast than miracast/ariwhatever....: the content is *not* streamed from the master to the slave, but *pointed at and handed off*. The slave then directly connects to the server, the master then can even be switched off with no consequences.
Only to the point of cloud-accessible content. For "tab mirroring", Chrome's actually rendering the image and sending it through WiFi. It's why you can watch unsupported videos on Chromecast - because your local PC is actually tab-mirroring it to the device. It's also why audio and video are horrendously desynced and not smooth at all.
call me selfish, but I'm way more concerned about attempt by its competitor, to enforce digital only games.
You're assuming Sony doesn't do the same. Or that the existing PS3 and Xbox360 do it. Or that the PC is doing it as well.
You have to admit that what Microsoft did at the time was fairly forward thinking. What is one of the most common complaints about Steam? That you have to download 4-12+GB of data? In an otherwise very convenient software distribution method? (Steam was amongst the first "app stores" around). Or that it was bad for people with lousy broadband?
Microsoft did the same - you could download a 25+GB game, or you can get the disc, and save the download. They also went one further by allowing people to resell games (something no digital download store even offers the possibility right now of doing - sure a publisher could deny you the ability, but how is that different from the status quo?).
And hell, people missed the biggest (dis?)advantage - no game is effectively "out of print". Did Europe get a game you want but it's not coming to North America? (or Japan, or Asia, or...). Well, with the digital scheme, the discs were effectively DRM-free (Microsoft has admitted that the plan was to not have DRM on the disc because it wasn't required anymore). Just torrent yourself a copy of the game and purchase it. The disadvantage is of course the loss of control and weakened regional exclusivity that many countries have, and that sellers off Amazon.com and eBay can't really scalp copies, and of course, not having to pay (potentially exorbitant) worldwide shipping (if the store lets you buy it - like how Amazon.com restricts what can be bought internationally).
What's in it for them? The point of releasing open source code is not to gain users, it's to gain contributors. If you're someone for whom having to download a tarball and build it is too high a barrier to entry, then you're probably not someone who is likely to contribute patches either (and if you don't already have a dev environment set up, then you're almost certainly not going to contribute code). Given that they have limited time to spend on the project, does it make more sense to spend that time catering to you, or to people who will build from source?
Users ARE contributors. First off, just using the program means they find it useful for their needs and thus find things that seem odd (aka bugs). Or insufficient (like documentation). They're also your best asset at marketing (yes, marketing - unless you want your project to die on the vine, you need to advertise and ensure it's known). Getting more people means you grow a community and the chance to attract further developers.
The problem with OSS in general it seems is that it overvalues developers at the expense of everyone else. Think "you have the source - there's the documentation!" or "don't file a bug, fix it!" type mentalities.
Unfortunately, the reality of the world is - like an author of a book, the source code isn't the only thing in the world. There's a whole world of other people with soft or non-technical skills that are required. For tiny little command line utilities, sure a lot of this isn't required (and perhaps where the mentality comes from), but larger non-trivial projects really do need contributions from technical writers, designers (especially UX), and sometimes, unrelated experts who find your program actually solves one of their problems (science is full of examples where one field inadvertently creates progress in another because the principles apply).
And sometimes, there are projects that are useful for users but the software is so mature that very little further development is needed.
Well I would say you actually try to get a few binaries. Windows 32bit Windows 64bit a DEB package and RPM for Linux and OS X.
Why would you do a 64-bit Windows build? There's very little reason to do so except:
* Your program is library that plugs into an existing 64-bit Windows program * Your program routinely deals with huge datasets that a 3GB user area is guaranteed to be insufficient. * Your program is a Windows device driver (which eliminates the need for Linux/OS X binaries)
64-bit Windows can run 32-bit Windows code just fine. In fact, after getting a computer where 64-bit Windows was necessary, most binaries run on it are still 32-bit - even large ones like Firefox (due to compatibility).
This is all well and good, but couldn't just one manufacturer afford to set aside one measly manufacturing line for making 5 1/4 inch Hard Drives again?
Here me out. Now that they are up to 1TB per platter with current tech on 3.5 inch drives just imagine what they could fit into a 5 1/4 inch drive now!!
The problem is not volume - modern hard drives are shedding platters when they can add more platters fairly easily (most 1TB drives are now single platter, and there's space for 3-4 platters like time from yore).
The problem is how fast do you want your data? Going back to 5 1/4" drives mean you need to slow down the rotational velocity because of heat concerns (most of the heat a hard drive generates is friction, and internal stresses (remember how "52x" CD-ROM drives would sometimes shatter the disc? Same thing happens for hard drives - you'd need thicker, stronger platters and that means more rotational weight). It's why 10K hard drives use 2" or smaller platters (basically platters you would put in a 2.5" hard drive) and have extensive heatsinking.
Going from the large 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" formfactors also enabled us to go from 3600 RPM to 4200, 5400, and 7200 RPM easily.
That's why we say fuck magnetic media and cram SSD tech into that 5.25 form factor.
You can, but the primary driver is the cost of the flash media - most SSDs have plenty of space for additional flash chips (especially at 128GB/256GB) - it's just the cost of populating it up is prohibitive. Even in the 2.5" form factor, most of the volume is air.
The added volume of a 5 1/4" enclosure would just mean you enable $50,000 SSDs that can store 100+TB. If space was a problem, you wouldn't find "thin" 5/7mm SSDs common - you'd see them using a full 9.5mm height (most SSDs are empty air).
Adding lower cost lower density chips doesn't give you much either - there are sweet spots in pricing and smaller chips can be more expensive due to lower volume production compared to higher density ones. Plus you'd need a controller able to handle those extra chips - modern day SSDs use 16+ channel controllers to be able to hit 16 chips simultaneously - you could add extra control lines and gang up the chips (the flash is designed to share one controller amongst several chips - it's how most flash is arranged these days in that each package has several dies). Problem is that you then create the potential where it's possible to severely cut SSD performance if you end up doing a series of accesses that end up not using the controllers in parallel (which is how SSDs get their speed).
Petty bickering is more of Ubuntu going, "Wayland isn't coming fast enough... let's create our own instead of helping!" Waste of resources, Ubuntu.
How is this any different from the rest of Linux? Oh, KDE is blah, let's create GNOME! or "I hate distribution YYY, lets make ZZZ!"
How is Wayland vs. Mir any different? "Oh Wayland isn't coming along, let's create Mir!". I thought variety within Linux was a good thing which is why we have a million Linux distributions and forks and other stuff.
Whether or not they were correct in this thinking is possibly open for debate. There's certainly been some things they've said publicly that were debunked, but that doesn't mean the core of their premise is wrong. They are moving to a mobile strategy that AFAIK just isn't a prime directive of Wayland, but I'm not well versed in all that is Wayland so maybe someone that is can clear that up.
The petty bickering is Wayland devs and fans getting butt hurt about some things Canonical has said publicly some of which has been proven wrong as I said above. Since then, it's been a cacophony of rants from the Wayland devs/fans with general Canonical/Ubuntu haters thrown in bashing on Canonical/Ubuntu/Mir/Unity at every opportunity.
How is this any different from the other flamewars that happen? KDE vs. GNOME, vi vs. Emacs, Linux distro vs. Linux distro.
The fingerprint scanner won't be very useful. It will be slower to recognize your print than you could swipe in a lock pattern or PIN, and obviously the phone itself contains numerous copies of your print on its body so security wise it's basic at best.
You know what? The fingerprint sensor is more convenient. A good chunk of people do not have PINs nor swipe codes, just the standard "swipe to unlock" (iOS and Android).
If a fingerprint sensor is easy, then more people will secure their phones from unauthorized access.
It is fairly brilliant - instead of punching in a 4 digit PIN (insecure), swipe code (insecure), you might as well just rely on pressing the button to unlock at the same time. It's just as insecure, but it's still way more secure than no PIN, swipe code or finger print at all.
It probably ranks somewhere between the 4-digit PIN and the "complex" passcode in security (yes, you CAN have passwords or pass phrases on IOS like Android, but entering it will get old within a day).
And that's the point - a lot of people don't use any security on their phone at all.
To me this sounds like a question asking, "what are you going to do with your Walkman?" TVs, and TV-viewing, are quite obsolete. The device you watch anything on now is irrelevant. When you can watch anything you want, any time you want, anywhere you want, why would anyone spend money on a single-use device like a TV to conform to a very outdated form of media consumption?
And yet, people aren't just doing Netflix on their tablets and smartphones, they're doing Netflix on their HDTVs as well. Or Hulu Plus.
So no, the HDTVs aren't obsolete because people want to do stuff together. Gathering a family around a 15" 1080p laptop screen? No way. I'd much rather do it on the nice 60" big screen so we can spread out on the nice comfy sofa or chairs.
Likewise, I'd rather play video games on the big screen (though I do a lot of mobile gaming because well, it's "with me").
"TV" as in TV content is no longer cable based, network based or time based, but gathering around a big screen to do something together like watch a movie? That's fairly timeless (even in the days before TV - people would gather around the family radio).
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That's not just an iPad thing - it's been around on the iPhone before that - enter your PIN wrong 10 times or so and it wipes. But not before making you wait - the first three attempts have zero wait times, but after that it's a huge ramp up of 1 minute+ per attempt. Presumably it's why it takes months for Apple to unlock one physically.
Though, you can always (iOS has supported this for even longer) use a complex password/phrase mechanism. It's less convenient because it pops up the regular keyboard over the dialpad, but it's also a lot more secure - supposedly if you enable complex passwords, it forms the basis for a number of security keys in the OS.
And that's really the point of the fingerprint sensor. Because if you look at statistics, most users do not use a PIN or other locking mechanism on their phone. They use the default keylock. That's it. No PIN, no swipe, no face recognition, no password (both iOS and Android support "complex" authentication that goes beyond a PIN). And it's understandable because a user interacts with their phone hundreds of times a day and it gets old quick.
So basically to amp up security, the 5S lets you replace the PIN with a fingerprint, because it's better if most users enable a PIN than half of them (or less!) do. Hell, I might want to use a complex password if it means I don't have to enter it every 5 minutes because I look something up, then re-lock the phone only to need it a few minutes later to look up something else (or answer a phone call, or text, or whatever).
And yes, until it broke, I loved the fingerprint sensor on my laptop.
Because 720p and 1080i are not equivalent. 1080p is not officially "HD".
720p and 1080i take roughly the same bandwidth, but there are cases where 1080i is inappropriate and 720p is better. Primarily, you'll find it in the fact it's progressive versus interlaced.
Fast action things like sports need the enhanced framerate (720p is 60fps), while dramas and other programming prefer the enhanced resolution offered by 1080i. It's basically framerate vs. resolution - you can have 60 progressive scanned frames at 720p, or 30 frames at 1080i (60 fields).
And don't get me started with "1080p", which seems to mean 1080p30 for the most part (which is roughly equivalent to 1080i...).
And no, you cannot convert 720p to 1080i without losing information - because the reduced framerate of 1080i means you're going to have to discard lines.
UPS sucks for that reason as well - especially if it's international.
If I go to a store online and see they only ship UPS, I instantly go to a competitor. (FedEx is a higher threshold).
The only time I use UPS is within the country, and not by choice - they're almost always more expensive and slower than the freaking mail! And half the time they can't even get their deliveries straight. (Let's say I only needed to use Amazon customer support because UPS decided that they couldn't find the floor, despite it being written right there on the address label AND being well, in my Amazon address book for the past 10 years and having hundreds of other orders in the past arrive successfully). Once maybe, but this kept happening repeatedly. The lamest one was when the driver failed to deliver because they couldn't find the name in the directory - despite all they needed to do was... read the address label, see it says "10th floor", get into the elevator and press 10. No, they just went into the lobby, looked at the directory, decided I didn't exist, and turn around. WTF?
Anyhow, UPS is good at extra billing - sure the shipper only paid $10, but if it's international, cha-ching, Fee fee fee fee fee fee fee... by the time you're through, you've paid an extra 30-200%. (Yes, 200%. They once wanted $20 for something that cost me $10 including shipping. I chose to eat the $10 by refusing the package than spend $30 total).
I don't know what it is, but I've had less trouble with the post office than UPS. FedEx is marginally better - but they still charge a lot.
Great, now what are they going to call it? It's only a few letters away now.
Unless for kicks Ubuntu is going to bundle 3.12 with their S version...
Take a look at people sometime and you'll find their devices control them. It's so bad that you can find people who believe the meaning of "get together" is sitting at a table together with everyone tapping away at their own phone.
Or why you have articles like "When is it OK to answer your phone" and such. Nevermind all the drivers you see on the road where they're barely looking at the road (and thus weaving about or going much slower than the flow and creating a hazard). Or pedestrians who seem to have overcome their childhood training of "look both ways before crossing" and blindly step out into the street to get run over (and not usually when the light's in their favor - they just forget the edge of the road is there and cross it without looking)
Gadget-itis is everywhere. You don't need to train your child on technology - they'll really pick it up themselves (the shiny glowing tablet is a way more "interesting" toy than a pile of lego or wooden blocks.
And yes, stepping back and realizing when you do something for enjoyment versus doing it because some device compels you to do it is quite liberating. Taking a step back, realizing that you don't NEED to answer that tweet right this moment or answer that email leaves so much time for other stuff.
Stuff isn't shoddy these days. You may think they are, but they aren't. It's just you've got survivor bias going on - "old stuff" looks more reliable because for the most part, what old stuff you see today is merely the survivor - you don't see the crap that's broken and discarded decades earlier.
Want an example? Take cars - how many "classic" cars are there versus how many were built? A lot of "classics" they had 50,000+ made, and not a lot are running on the roads today. What you saw are the survivors - the few that people cared enough to keep going - everything else was scrapped when they got in an accident or just could not be sold and was taken to the wrecker.
And stuff's a lot cheaper nowadays because modern technology has made modern stuff less overengineered - is there any possible reason to manufacture a computer that'll keep working for 10 years, when most PCs will be discarded or recycled within 5?
And you mentioned the problem for repairs yourself - it's uneconomical. Because the truth is these days, human labor is expensive. Given it'll take at least a couple of hours to diagnose and fix a problem, if not more, and the people who can do so require specialized training and thus charge out at skilled labor rates, spending $500 to repair something you can buy new for $500 makes little sense.
The only places where repairing is still economical are countries where human labor is cheap, which also tend to be places where buying new is very expensive to them.
Outside of that, the only cheap replacements are where parts can be diagnosed and swapped in and out quickly. If your computer's RAM is faulty, or hard drive is dead, it's a really easy fix that costs a few minutes. Likewise, if your monitor's screen is cracked.
The expensive fixes are ones that aren't so easy - instead of your screen being cracked, let's say it doesn't work. Well now it can be a dozen different things and fixing goes from "replace obviously broken part" with "find broken part".
Of course, people do that - as a hobby. As a techie, you probably get tons of broken cast offs that you may fix a few to get a free-to-you piece of hardware. Because your hobby time is "free" and you're not invested in the broken equipment (if it's broken, it doesn't matter). Though, if your main PC breaks, you probably have a spare ready to go because it's important to you, but if you got a broken monitor donated from a friend, well, fix it or not...
And that's the way it should be. Because let's say you invent a new radio modulation scheme that lets you approach Shannon's limit far closer than ever before even in the worst conditions.
If you implement it as hardware, you can patent it, fine, we understand. If you implement it as software (using an SDR), then it being software should have no impact on its patentability. Perhaps you do fancy signal processing - so now you have an embedded DSP doing part of the work, and hardware doing the rest.
What New Zealand really said was "on a computer" was no longer a sufficient transformation to make it new and novel (one thing companies do with expiring patents is find new uses and patent those - cue drug companies facing with expiring patents that go and combine the expiring drug with some other drug to make new one - so you end up taking one pill instead of two).
Sometimes you can see it happening in real life - I believe a few years ago the patents on Bounce dryer sheets expired and a year or so before that they came up with contests and other things to find new uses for it. Of course, one of the reasons would be to... file a new patent on a new use for it.
Linux isn't immune either to bad updates hosing it, and for most users, once it's hooped, you pretty much need to call an admin over to try to reverse the faulty update.
And I'm fairly certain Linux updates (which honestly come daily) end up hosing you at random times. Granted, at least on most distributions the updates aren't installed automatically, so you're safe from automatic hosing, but it's generally annoying enough that most developers don't update until their project is done or there's a real need to. (Yes, it also means if you get past the firewall, you can easily hack into every dev machine because of vulnerabilities).
They couldn't do that, because KHTML is LGPL.
In fact, Apple released their changes as required by the LGPL.
What KDE devs wanted was better documentation on the changes because Apple's changes were being sent to the KHTML guys as large diffs without much commentary. As WebKit and KHTML diverged, the pages became more and more difficult to integrate, and there's little information as to what changes were to improve things and others were bug fixes.
That was the main beef with the KDE guys - Apple was releasing source code as required, but they couldn't be integrated.
There was never any "code lockup" and in fact, Apple was providing the KHTML guys with patches out of kindness (remember, the (L)GPL never states you need to give the changes back upstream - you're free to fork it as you wish).
The code was always free. It's the upstream guys were getting patches that they couldn't use was the problem, and Apple has every right to ignore them if they wanted.
What Apple did in the end was put up a public CVS server with all the changes, so the KDE folks could see the diffs as smaller patches as well as individual change logs. Neither of which is a requirement of the GPL.
Otherwise RedHat would be in trouble because they're doing the same thing with Oracle - they're combining their patches into one huge patch so guys like Oracle can't pick and choose easily.
WebKit is still LGPL, by the way. It's never been anything other.
I don't see why - Sony is not going to track FreeBSD - they already forked it and created their OS around it.
There's no need to track FreeBSD - not that you'd want to because having your dev environment change under you just costs developers money.
Sony's been using BSD for a long while now and unless some major security flaw happens in it that could potentially compromise things, the kernel will probably stay static. Likewise, the compiler too - unless the code it generates has security holes, then it probably will never get updated or even looked at. (And there's still going to be old vulnerable versions out there - Sony can't force everyone to recompile their code).
Even the base OS is unlikely to need recompiling with updated compilers - if it's even bothered with.
The only "suck" happens if newer features of GCC are required in the code. But given the base OS probably won't change unless a major security vulnerability is found, they can switch to LLVM for the application code if newer features are required.
Armored cockpit doors are useless if the explosive has ripped the plane in half. There isn't much metal separating the inside of the plane from the outside, and uncontrollability is only a few severed cables away.
The armored door keeps unwanted people out. But a hand grenade going off can easily make the entire plane go down - either by tearing a big hole in the fuselage (or causing the pressurized cabin to overpressure and explode because to the huge pressure differential), or by severing critical control cables (or hydraulics), or causing fires from fuselage fuel tanks.
And yes, airplanes have redundant equipment, but they're designed to protect against individual systems failure (e.g., one hydraulic system fails). They aren't designed to handle a case where an explosion sends shrapnel that disables all the systems.
Heck, in the 80s, they came up with bombproof luggage cans, and the FAA was considering making them mandatory. But the airlines lobbied against it.
Back in the days, computer users were technically proficient out of necessity - either you had to know electronics and solder to build your own computers, or to write software to make it do what you want.
The thing was, Steve Jobs realized that computers shouldn't be for just the technically minded - it was a transformative technology that could revolutionize how things were done. But to do that required getting the computer out of the hands of techies and into the general public - world-changing technologies just aren't world changing if they are locked up and not shared. (Sound familiar?)
So fast forward to today where computers are everywhere - they are some of the most powerful tools mankind has created. Thing is, though, as a tool, it should assist the user in helping them do what they want, not be an end to itself. After all, if a tool doesn't help you, it's pointless.
A car helps transport people - but drivers don't have to be mechanics to use them. If they had to be, we'd probably still be back in the late 19th century where cars were a rarity because the reward wouldn't be there. Likewise a computer is useful for many things - entertainment, communications, assistance, information delivery, etc.
But you have to realize that users don't care how it works - they don't want to know because that's not reason why the computer is so useful. The computer is useful because it allows them to go about their day efficiently - perhaps to look up a tidbit of information through Wikipedia, or connect them to with like-minded individuals scattered throughout the globe. Or advanced research - things like software defined radios (these people don't care how computers work - they write their DSP algorithms and have them "magically" work - they don't care about OS updates or kernels or whatever).
And I'm sure you'll agree that not everyone needs to know how a computer works. Your mechanic doesn't - yet they use a computer based diagnostic machine to fix your car (would you like to have your car on the stand then have the mechanic say it's going to take days because he accidentally hosed the diagnostics machine playing around with the new Linux kernel?).
Sudden SSD failure is actually not really a failure that's detectable. Good SSDs have tons of metrics available through SMART including media wear indicators that tell you impending failure long before it happens.
But when an SSD suddenly dies, it's generally because the controller's FTL tables got corrupted. For high performance drives, it's remarkably easy to do as performance is #1, not data safety. There's nothing wrong with the disk or the electronics.
The FTL (flash translation layer) is what maps a sector the OS uses to the actual flash sector itself. If it gets corrupted, the controller has no way of accessing the right sectors anymore and things go tits up. It's even worse because a lot of metrics are tied to the FTL, including media wear, so losing that data means you can't simply erase and start over - you're completely hooped as the controller cannot access anything.
If you want to think of it another way, treat it like the super block on a filesystem, and the filesystem tables. Now imagine they get corrupt - the data is useless and recovery is difficult, even though the underlying media is perfectly fine. It's possible to hose it so badly that recovery is impossible.
For speed, FTL tables are cached - and modern SSDs can easily have 512MB-1GB of DDR memory just to hold the tables. Of course, you can't write-through changes since the tables themselves need to be wear-levelled on the flash media.
One of the iffiest times for this comes when an SSD is power cycled - pulling the power on an SSD can cause corruption because the tables may be in the middle of an update. But things like firmware bugs and other things can easily corrupt the table as well (think a stray pointer scribbling over the table RAM). A good SSD often has extra capacitance onboard to ensure that on sudden power failure, there is enough backup power to do an emergency commit to flash. This protects against power cycling, but firmware bugs can still destroy the data.
Of course, SSDs without such features mean the firmware has to be extra careful. And sometimes, such precautions can miss a point in time where you cannot pull the power at all.
It's sort of reminiscent of that Seagate failure that resulted in a log file reaching a certain size disabling the drive - the data and media were perfectly fine, it's just that the firmware crapped out.
No, it's a lamer version of it.
Of course, Microsoft's problem is twofold.
1) They're Microsoft. Everything they do incites hate. See: Apple. They can cure cancer or world poverty or hunger and people will still hate them.
2) Microsoft also has a communication problem (this is a bigger issue). They just cannot communicate with the public well. And a lot of what they needed to explain, can't be explained in 140 characters. So instead of being able to explain the entire thing calmly and completely, they leak out little bits that the internet amplifies. Of course, twitter is also far more trusted than the "official source" where the tweet came from, so whoever posts the initial tweet can easily misread something and the whole Internet gets worked up over nothing. (Which then becomes a meme as people believe it to be true).
Hell, we had it happen to McAfee yesterday, and probably dozens of other examples exist as well, like how Microsoft charges $40K to submit new revisions and stuff like that.
Perhaps what SHOULD be worrying is that Sony is unusually silent on the matter - perhaps they also charge $40K for updates (but their NDAs are better so no dev is allowed to even talk about it). Or perhaps the PS4 will have the exact same DRM requirements. Sony has not said anything about going towards how the Xbox was originally envisioned with always on DRM. (Of course, everyone assumes that the PS4 won't have it, but since Sony doesn't actually confirm it for good, they forget that it really means Sony is reserving the ability to do it later).
The Steam version is an all-or-nothing - once a friend decides to play a game, if you want to play ANY game in your library, it kicks them out. So if your friend is playing Portal and you want to play Portal 2, you can start playing Portal 2 and your friend will have a few minutes to quit or buy Portal.
On the Xbox, it would let you play Halo while they played Ryse. You just couldn't have both playing Ryse or both Halo at the same time.
And I presume if you have two friends sharing your Steam account, one locks out the other (you as owner have priority and will kick whoever else is using it out). The Xbox allows full sharing as if you passed the disc on.
Steam still doesn't allow selling games, though. Even if the publisher gets a cut like how the Xbox was also supposed to allow.
Two things...
1) Why are you running 64-bit Windows when all the Atom chipsets only support 2GB of RAM?
2) PowerVR doesn't care about x86. In fact, I don't think they're officially in x86 at all. Yes, PowerVR does NOT do x86.
They're making a nice living doing GPU cores for ARMs, not x86 - the only reason you find them for Intel is that Intel needed a GPU, and GMA950s are a joke. So they licensed PowerVR just to have a power efficient GPU. They probably got some reference implementation driver code and ported that to Windows. Of course, for this they did a low-budget port - Atoms are bottom of the barrel in cost and there's only so much R&D money you can throw.
No one competes in the x86 world - it's just Intel, NVidia and AMD.
Except FreeBSD is not using GCC 4.8. They're using GCC 4.2.1, the last version that was GPLv2.
While the current version of GCC may be faster than Clang/LLVM, that doesn't mean Clang/LLVM isn't faster than what is in use now, so the switch may even boost performance compared to the ancient version of GCC in use.
And that is one of the worst justifications ever. In fact, it's so bad, it lends credence to the "GPL is viral" belief - because the GPL can take and take and take, and not give back (which one could argue is against the SPIRIT of FOSS - that one shares so everyone benefits). Yes, it's legal, just TiVoization and GPLv2 is legal, but spiritually, it really reeks, especially when GPL advocates claim moral superiority.
Heck, perhaps the biggest problem with BSD is NOT the ability for "software robbers" to take and close the source, but for "software robbers" to take and claim moral superiority that their license "frees" the code (funny how "freeing" or "liberating" the source involves ensuring that it can never get back to the original authors, eh?).
Personally, I use unmodified BSD or GPLv2, because I have objections to the GPLv3 (and no, you can't mix v2-only and v3 code because the GPLv3 can be seen as causing restrictions disallowed by GPLv2. Funny how the champions of Freedom even admit that there are limits to how Free you can be).
Only to the point of cloud-accessible content. For "tab mirroring", Chrome's actually rendering the image and sending it through WiFi. It's why you can watch unsupported videos on Chromecast - because your local PC is actually tab-mirroring it to the device. It's also why audio and video are horrendously desynced and not smooth at all.
You're assuming Sony doesn't do the same. Or that the existing PS3 and Xbox360 do it. Or that the PC is doing it as well.
You have to admit that what Microsoft did at the time was fairly forward thinking. What is one of the most common complaints about Steam? That you have to download 4-12+GB of data? In an otherwise very convenient software distribution method? (Steam was amongst the first "app stores" around). Or that it was bad for people with lousy broadband?
Microsoft did the same - you could download a 25+GB game, or you can get the disc, and save the download. They also went one further by allowing people to resell games (something no digital download store even offers the possibility right now of doing - sure a publisher could deny you the ability, but how is that different from the status quo?).
And hell, people missed the biggest (dis?)advantage - no game is effectively "out of print". Did Europe get a game you want but it's not coming to North America? (or Japan, or Asia, or...). Well, with the digital scheme, the discs were effectively DRM-free (Microsoft has admitted that the plan was to not have DRM on the disc because it wasn't required anymore). Just torrent yourself a copy of the game and purchase it. The disadvantage is of course the loss of control and weakened regional exclusivity that many countries have, and that sellers off Amazon.com and eBay can't really scalp copies, and of course, not having to pay (potentially exorbitant) worldwide shipping (if the store lets you buy it - like how Amazon.com restricts what can be bought internationally).
Users ARE contributors. First off, just using the program means they find it useful for their needs and thus find things that seem odd (aka bugs). Or insufficient (like documentation). They're also your best asset at marketing (yes, marketing - unless you want your project to die on the vine, you need to advertise and ensure it's known). Getting more people means you grow a community and the chance to attract further developers.
The problem with OSS in general it seems is that it overvalues developers at the expense of everyone else. Think "you have the source - there's the documentation!" or "don't file a bug, fix it!" type mentalities.
Unfortunately, the reality of the world is - like an author of a book, the source code isn't the only thing in the world. There's a whole world of other people with soft or non-technical skills that are required. For tiny little command line utilities, sure a lot of this isn't required (and perhaps where the mentality comes from), but larger non-trivial projects really do need contributions from technical writers, designers (especially UX), and sometimes, unrelated experts who find your program actually solves one of their problems (science is full of examples where one field inadvertently creates progress in another because the principles apply).
And sometimes, there are projects that are useful for users but the software is so mature that very little further development is needed.
Why would you do a 64-bit Windows build? There's very little reason to do so except:
* Your program is library that plugs into an existing 64-bit Windows program
* Your program routinely deals with huge datasets that a 3GB user area is guaranteed to be insufficient.
* Your program is a Windows device driver (which eliminates the need for Linux/OS X binaries)
64-bit Windows can run 32-bit Windows code just fine. In fact, after getting a computer where 64-bit Windows was necessary, most binaries run on it are still 32-bit - even large ones like Firefox (due to compatibility).
The problem is not volume - modern hard drives are shedding platters when they can add more platters fairly easily (most 1TB drives are now single platter, and there's space for 3-4 platters like time from yore).
The problem is how fast do you want your data? Going back to 5 1/4" drives mean you need to slow down the rotational velocity because of heat concerns (most of the heat a hard drive generates is friction, and internal stresses (remember how "52x" CD-ROM drives would sometimes shatter the disc? Same thing happens for hard drives - you'd need thicker, stronger platters and that means more rotational weight). It's why 10K hard drives use 2" or smaller platters (basically platters you would put in a 2.5" hard drive) and have extensive heatsinking.
Going from the large 5 1/4" to 3 1/2" formfactors also enabled us to go from 3600 RPM to 4200, 5400, and 7200 RPM easily.
You can, but the primary driver is the cost of the flash media - most SSDs have plenty of space for additional flash chips (especially at 128GB/256GB) - it's just the cost of populating it up is prohibitive. Even in the 2.5" form factor, most of the volume is air.
The added volume of a 5 1/4" enclosure would just mean you enable $50,000 SSDs that can store 100+TB. If space was a problem, you wouldn't find "thin" 5/7mm SSDs common - you'd see them using a full 9.5mm height (most SSDs are empty air).
Adding lower cost lower density chips doesn't give you much either - there are sweet spots in pricing and smaller chips can be more expensive due to lower volume production compared to higher density ones. Plus you'd need a controller able to handle those extra chips - modern day SSDs use 16+ channel controllers to be able to hit 16 chips simultaneously - you could add extra control lines and gang up the chips (the flash is designed to share one controller amongst several chips - it's how most flash is arranged these days in that each package has several dies). Problem is that you then create the potential where it's possible to severely cut SSD performance if you end up doing a series of accesses that end up not using the controllers in parallel (which is how SSDs get their speed).
How is this any different from the rest of Linux? Oh, KDE is blah, let's create GNOME! or "I hate distribution YYY, lets make ZZZ!"
How is Wayland vs. Mir any different? "Oh Wayland isn't coming along, let's create Mir!". I thought variety within Linux was a good thing which is why we have a million Linux distributions and forks and other stuff.
How is this any different from the other flamewars that happen? KDE vs. GNOME, vi vs. Emacs, Linux distro vs. Linux distro.
You know what? The fingerprint sensor is more convenient. A good chunk of people do not have PINs nor swipe codes, just the standard "swipe to unlock" (iOS and Android).
If a fingerprint sensor is easy, then more people will secure their phones from unauthorized access.
It is fairly brilliant - instead of punching in a 4 digit PIN (insecure), swipe code (insecure), you might as well just rely on pressing the button to unlock at the same time. It's just as insecure, but it's still way more secure than no PIN, swipe code or finger print at all.
It probably ranks somewhere between the 4-digit PIN and the "complex" passcode in security (yes, you CAN have passwords or pass phrases on IOS like Android, but entering it will get old within a day).
And that's the point - a lot of people don't use any security on their phone at all.
And yet, people aren't just doing Netflix on their tablets and smartphones, they're doing Netflix on their HDTVs as well. Or Hulu Plus.
So no, the HDTVs aren't obsolete because people want to do stuff together. Gathering a family around a 15" 1080p laptop screen? No way. I'd much rather do it on the nice 60" big screen so we can spread out on the nice comfy sofa or chairs.
Likewise, I'd rather play video games on the big screen (though I do a lot of mobile gaming because well, it's "with me").
"TV" as in TV content is no longer cable based, network based or time based, but gathering around a big screen to do something together like watch a movie? That's fairly timeless (even in the days before TV - people would gather around the family radio).