The iPhone 5C is $99 with a 2 year contract. Only $100 less than the iPhone 5s. I'm pretty sure the iPhone 5 was $699 without a plan. If they price the iPhone 5s similarly, then the iPhone 5c will probably cost around $599. Which isn't cheap at all by my standards. Sure it's a little cheaper, but hardly cheap enough to even warrant a different model. Make it free on the 2 year plan, or less than $300 for the unlocked phone, and then you are getting closer. I really don't know how people justify paying $700 for a phone. Seems just ludicrous to me.
Here's a trick - the prices don't scale. A $99 phone on contract can be anywhere from $200-500+. The $200 phones generally are $500+
So the heavier subsidized 5S will require a more expensive phone plan, while the 5C can be used with cheaper phone plans or be bought outright (I'm guessing it's $300-400 off contract).
At least, that's how it generally works - a $99 phone will have less subsidy and can be used with cheaper plans than the more expensive phone can.
So in places like Canada, where carriers demand a 5S be bought with an $80/month plan, they can demand the 5C be bought with a $50/month plan because the subsidy is less (being cheaper and all).
Of course, the best way is to buy it outright, because on special, you can find plans that are better and cheaper and usually make up the subsidy within a year. Like buying an iPhone outright is $700, but the cheaper $40 plan (saving $40/month over the subsidized required $80/month plan) offers more because it's on special (I've easily seen double data, double minutes, unlimited text compared to the regular price "smartphone $80/month" plan). $40/month * 12 months is $480. Or basically the subsidy on the $200 on contract phone.
And that's the goal - the 5C is for lower subsidy and cost - places that don't subsidize now have a lower cost iPhone.
Owned for 20 years, or 12 million alive and 10 million sighted children if you prefer. Then anybody can do what they like with the patent. It also doesn't stop some rival from producing a crop with equivalent properties expressed through some other means.
Considering the rice is "owned", how are you going to get poor people to pay for it?
Basically, you've just committed 12M people + 10M children to death and blindness because the people who this can help, cannot pay.
It's so bad that many essential medicines get state approval to violate the patents so they can be produced cheaply for the population that needs it. It's a very sore sticking point for the owning companies and trade negotiations (especially with the US).
Wrong. Read the Vienna Convention if you are seriously interested in it. Espionage from the embassy building is explicitly forbidden. And the belief that the embassy is US territory is very much wrong. All that the Vienna Convention says is that the embassy and all the property belonging to it are immune to search or seizure, and that agents of the host country may not enter without consent of the embassy staff, that's it.
You assume the US doesn't have any special rights because they are, "The United States of America".
If there's any country guilty of violating more treaties (especially when it benefits them), it's generally been the US. It doesn't matter what - if the US can get an advantage by ignoring the treaty, it will, repeatedly. The other country can (and often does) cry foul, but rarely does anything get done about it.
Something about "might makes right".
Vienna treaty or no, if the US feels they want to put up an antenna, they'll just put up an antenna. Germany can protest all it wants, but by the time it rolls around to some body to do something about it, it'll be years down the road.
When Google, Yahoo, and Facebook join together to assert that the state of surveillance on the internet is out of hand, you know you are totally fucked.
Not really.
You have to realize the business model - all of them sell your information for money. Google especially since that's their core revenue stream - not just Google Ads, but every other ad network they own, including DoubleClick. Between ads, Google Analytics, YouTube and other Google properties, they pretty much know your entire surfing history. (Google DNS may deny it, but that's just because they haven't found a way to monetize the information).
Key word: SELL
Governments want that information for FREE.
Between the three of them, there's more information on everyone than any government could hope to collect for itself. So they're tempting targets.
Perhaps one should worry about the agencies that aren't mentioned - perhaps because they're paying for the information like any other company is wanting to buy ads and gather analytics.
Due to there history of trying to protect their users data?
It's in their best interests not to allow outside parties get at the data?
Only to the point where $$$ is concerned. You forget 99% of Google's income comes from selling ads. Ads that come with piles of analytics (courtesy of "Free" Google Analytics). And Google owns the vast majority of ad networks out there, including the ever-popular DoubleClick (purveyor of famous Pop Ups and Pop Under ads).
I'm fairly certain the NSA could get access at data far more easily by simply paying for it rather than trying to get it "for free". It's not in Google's interest to offer it for free. It's in Google's interest to SELL you to customers.
Heck, the commercial sector is basically doing the government's work for them - Google has its fingers in so many ways that the data collection will far exceed what the NSA could possibly hope to collect. (Except, perhaps, for Tor users since the NSA can run and monitor a bunch of exit nodes which they do - but it's no big stretch that a Tor user might go and log into their Google account...)..
This is what curbs piracy. You're not going to stop broke fourteen year-olds from downloading movies with hollow rhetoric and invented damages. However, you can quite easily get a family of four on a modest income to pay $10 a month for Netflix. Why this makes Hollywood brains explode I'll never know.
You only need one example - iTunes. Apple did "the impossible" by competing for free. Back in the days of Napster and filesharing, Apple managed to open a store and be damn successful at selling music for 99 cents each. Sure you can pirate the same music for free, but for most people, it was just easier to go to iTunes and click Buy.
For the rest of us, there's the local cable TV monopoly (who abuse that monopoly [delimiter.com.au] to stop legal download services competing with them)... or Bittorrent.
Yeah, that's definitely a bummer, considering Apple is one of the few companies actually trying hard to sell movies and TV shows legally. Of course, scoring Game of Thrones on iTunes saves you having to buy Foxtel and it's available quickly.
It's interesting to note that Apple is probably the only content distributor that operates in a number of countries. Given the need to negotiate individual rights for everything (music, movies, TV shows) in every country individually, it makes Apple probably the largest global vendor, or at least one that operates in the most countries. The only bigger ones are ones who move physical media around - i.e., Amazon.
1) In Japan there are these popular PS3 accessories called Nasne and Torne which help integrate the PS3 and the TV more allowing TV show recording alongside a few other minor features. The vita TV seems to be the PS4 version of these devices.
So THAT'S where Microsoft got their Xbox One ideas. Only a matter of time before it records, or maybe that's why the Japanese release is delayed... built in video recording...
No, it's cue the hundreds of Kickstarter projects that will build you the thing.
Putting designs on the 'net is nice, but people want the stuff itself, and short of putting a kit together, some entrepreneurial type would use kickstarter to do it. Offer it as parts, a kit, a fully assembled unit, add a few bucks for your time effort and profit, and done.
Though, it doesn't always work out - like that half-price made-in-China Makerbot Replicator project (perfectly legal - all the designs were open, though you can tell Makerbot was pissed because the Replicator 2 is no longer as "open").
There are already 512 gig drives on the msata scale and they're tiny (51 x 30 x 0.8mm) so, why re-introduce mechanical harddrives which are larger?
Cost. Your 512GB SSD is unlikely to cost $50 or so that something like this spinning rust would.
In fact, most 512GB SSDs cost around $500 or so, so unless you want to double your tablet price and then some (I'm sure Microsoft would love to tell you how well their Surfaces sold back when they were $900), using a huge SSD isn't really practical.
Spinning rust has been cheaper and unless you go very small (1.8" drives are dead because SSDs have gotten smaller and cheaper than spinning rust versions).
My car was such a dud it wasn't made for many years and resulted in one of the greatest financial setbacks for the manufacturer. The engineers did a fine job designing it, the assembly line did a terrific job of putting it together, but the bean-counters who sourced the parts and figured ways to shave costs doomed it. If they had gone with the original engineers plans it would have been a hit and my car would have been worth a small fortune for being very early off the production line.
That's also the argument used to buy the first ones off the assembly line - of anything - a TV, a monitor, a game console, etc. Because what happens is if the product is popular, the hardware is changed to shave on costs here and there. So the next revision will look exactly the same as the old one, but be made with cheaper parts so more profit can be made, or the price can be lowered.
Now, Apple *generally* doesn't do it, though they did for the iPhone 5 (to add AWS support for T-Mobile), but manufacturers often silently change hardware internally. TVs and monitors, notable, often go for cheaper caps in their power supplies to save cost and to fail sooner.
Game consoles generally get more public revisions as features are added and dropped (both Microsoft and Sony are guilty).
Regarding antenna issues, battery heating up issues, other shortcomings of Apples rather trendsetting iPhones should by now curb some enthusiasm for the wary. Fool me once, shame on you - fool me twice, shame on me sorta fing.
Not just Apple, but everyone else has issues as well. It's just that when you sell 20 million units the first day, shortcomings and stuff you've overlooked tend to get found and amplified. Like antennagate - I'm fairly sure it affected SOME people, but for most, it didn't. It's just the name "Apple" and anything causes mountains to be made from molehills. Hell, the iPhone 4 continued to set sales records until the iPhone 4s came out, so either everyone seemed to have forgotten about antennagate, or in the end, it really wasn't a huge deal (no, Apple didn't change anything later on. The only redesign was for the Verizon model).
And yes, even battery flaws, because one bad battery out of a million devices is obviously a quality issue (1ppm... or 0.0001%).
Or the law of big numbers - a 0.1% failure rate (generally exceptional for electronics) still means 1,000 units fail out of every million.
Some of this might sound trivial by todays standards but they were doing this in 1998. Before Microsoft got its shit together with 2000 (NT 5) and before MacOS X. In fact, Be was founded by ex Apple employees and BeOS was supposed to be an alternative to MacOS on the old PowerPC Macs. It was very efficient and made old Pentium 133MHz systems with 32MB RAM feel fast. But its closed source nature coupled with user space networking made it slow to adopt new technology. It was a nice OS with a pretty cool community. Too bad its pretty much dead.
It wasn't the closed-source nature of it.
It was stupidly bad business decisions, because they were counting on Apple to buy them out.
Back when Apple was shopping around for something to replace Classic MacOS, they strongly considered buying out Be. But Jean-Louis Gassee (the CEO, and former Apple lead) decided he's get greedy and demanded that Be was worth $300M. After all, who needed what Be had? Apple.
Unfortunately, Apple called their bluff and decided that Be wasn't quite worth that much, and since Gassee and Amelio couldn't agree on the price, they left the bargaining table. In the end, a Steve Jobs made a very compelling argument to purchase NeXT and its technologies outright, for a whopping $450M (and Jobs would help see the transition through and all that stuff).
Of course, this spurning by Apple hurt Be quite badly - they were hurting for systems and all that, and the dot-com crash pretty much did them in.
Things would be different today had Apple and Be actually managed to come to an agreement....
That was my reaction. The iPad is not an ereader, you might as well just read on a laptop as the iPad screen has most of the same drawbacks. Sure, it's slightly more convenient, but not by much.
Actually, reading on the iPad is a lot easier than reading on the laptop. Ignoring better battery life, heat and other technology related issues, the formfactor of a tablet in general makes it easier to hold. Especially since there's no keyboard in the way. Of course, that's why there's convertible laptops to begin with, which get you into the tablet form factor.
A book is more traditionally in the "tablet" style formfactor which makes it easy to use singlehandedly.
Like film grain, ferrite oxide molecules are rather larger than the Planck length. Also like film grain, we don't have individual molecules acting as magnetic targets, but entire crystals which are vastly larger than the individual molecules. The noise that a good studio tape recorder adds will be orders of magnitude larger typically much more than a digital conversion on good converters, but does impart subtle distortion and compression. That's fine, but we can't pretend it's neutral. It's not like an effect at all unless you can opt not to use it.
Actually, it's "that noise" that makes Vinyl, Tubes and now Tape "sound better" than digital.
You cannot "clip" a vinyl record, tube or tape. Doing so on vinyl results in an unusable master as it'll never play back properly (or long enough - the bigger the wobble, the less playtime there is). Likewise, tubes and tape apply a compression to the waveform as they approach the dynamic range limit, which introduces harmonics.
Clipping is a solid-state process - introduced by A to D converters, transistor amplifiers, etc. They're really an artifact of digital superiority - that excellent linearity can be had by transistors and digital equipment that they'll easily go rail-to-rail if you push them too far. This is excellent because that's what you want - that the transistor can saturate while amplifying the signal rather than having to build in enough gain by underdriving the active elements to stay in the linear region.
Of course, the BIG problem is the harmonics introduced by clipping sound absolutely horrible to human ears. Like the tri-tone, it's completely harsh and sounds terrible.
The harmonics introduced by vinyl, tubes and tape, however, due to the waveform distortion caused by dynamic range compression, sound more "pleasant" to the ear, perhaps "warmer" (though that can be caused purely by the pink noise). But definitely less harsh and the effect is sometimes desirable, as overdriving tubes and generating those harmonics is often a very desirable outcome for effects - be it vocal or instrumental.
A LOT of work goes into trying to prevent clipping because it sounds so bad, but it's hard because you're forcing a huge overdesign of equipment to handle the out-of-range signals and often more equipment is needed (more amps because each amp block is set to provide less gain to stay away from the rails).
The trouble everyone is grappling with here is that they want a smart watch to be some kind of smartphone-like thing. We've seen it work in comics, right? Dick Tracey and all. The only trouble is that the size of things people want to put on their wrists isn't big enough for much of a display, isn't big enough for much of a data entry device and isn't big enough for much of a battery. You just can't pack a lot of function on there, much less do it attractively, much less do it in a form factor where it becomes a fashion accessory, particularly for ladies since ladies are used to tiny watches.
And that's the interesting thing. Apple doesn't innovate technically - they innovate practically.
All your shortcomings are challenges. Most of Apple's competitors like Samsung and such throw technology at it - build it and they will come. Apple doesn't do that - preferring to put the right technology at the problem. This may mean doing with a crappy CPU if it means battery life goes from "a nominal day" to "a week".
Likewise, Apple tends to be good at UI - they know there's limited space to do things, so perhaps it's time to re-think it. Like how iOS and OS X are different enough purely because of UI interactions. You can count on the iPod Nano revisions to pretty much be the entire "beta test" of the watch - it's an inexpensive platform to test with, and you can observe how people react to it.
And perhaps that's where Apple sees its strengths - it's not throwing hardware or technology at a problem, it's doing the hardware and software intelligently so users want to use it. Apple's innovations aren't technology - and to claim all innovations must be an advancement is both shortsighted and incorrect. Apple innovates by seeing what the user really needs.
It also means the iWatch will have fewer features, and not do many things that the Galaxy Gear or Pebble will do out of the gate. Be everything to everyone is not Apple's MO. But do the 80% of what people want and 100% of what people need at first wins them over. And right now, they need a relatively small size, long battery life, and be stylish. The latter may mean breaking out Apple's forte in metal cases and building it out of stainless steel and other materials considered "high end" in watches. And battery life must be decent - a week minimum to allow for forgetfulness.
Far too many people focus on tech specs and neglect to answer "what does the user really want". And Apple's niche is that. Their stuff is rarely cutting edge, but it's stuff users go "why didn't anyone else do this before?" or "now that's practical".
As long as you can't read an Amazon Kindle on a Nook, DRM is doing its job. If Nooks and Barnes and Noble are getting driven out of business, DRM is doing its job well.
Or you go legislative - aka get the DoJ to remove a competitor for you. The DoJ has effectively tore up Apple's contracts with publishers, and Apple is only allowed to negotiate with one publisher every 6 months, starting 6 months from now.
So now, Amazon has one less competitor for the next 6 months. And that competition is forced to only have one publisher then, so it's reduced competition for the next 2-3 years. Not a bad deal - Nook and B&N are on thin ice, and the other potentially big competitor is gone. If you can get rid of Nook in the next 12 months, you can jack up prices because there will be no one else selling ebooks other than Amazon.
And already I've seen Kindle prices higher than Nook prices. And many Kindle-only books and many self-publishers get very special deals if they go exclusive.
I'll take the pirate stuff any day of the week, because the groups that do it are small enough that reputation matters; It's their only currency.
And the problem is... lots of people release crap credited to "good" groups.
Unless you've got access to the release servers, you're getting it through a third party. You can name any pirate group and I can show you malware laden versions of their stuff as third parties decided to wrap the crap in other stuff. Or better yet, fake releases claimed to be by pirate groups.
Reputation matters. Malware authors know it and create fake files with the name of such pirate groups knowing people will distribute it for them thinking it's a real release.
In the end, unless you're in the scene and have direct scene server access, the stuff you get via torrents is just as questionable as the big guys stuff because you can't tell the relation of the uploader to the original scene release.
Presumably you are talking about your experience in the US, because that kind of shit would never be allowed in the EU. You have a right to food, accommodation and compensation. I don't know why US consumers put up with being treated that way.
Because US customers want price over everything, and such civilities bring the ticket price up. Do that and your airline will suffer as people will jump ship to save $1 off the ticket of an airline that treats the like crap.
Same thing with other things as well - a good part of the reason why stuff in the EU cost more is the embedded duties and VAT added to the product price. But a portion also goes towards the "extended warranty" that the EU mandates as mandatory. So in the US, when the salesdroid says "Do you want an extended warranty with that?" well, you can have your 2 year warranty a la the EU by answering yes.
The reason they do this rather than use a larger die is exactly to get a higher yield (defect density is constant, defect probability increases with surface). Therefore I highly doubt they're only getting one good chip per wafer. Cost is based on supply and demand, and these chips are very, very specialized. They're used in applications where costs are huge anyway, such as high-performance IC prototyping - things like CPUs, ASICs for multi-hundred Gb/s switches/routers et cetera.
It's not just supply and demand, it's processing costs.
And yes, I've used the ZCV7000T chips before - the platform I used I think had the $30K versions (in 1000 lot quantities, heheh - that's $30M if you want the quantity discount), and had 4 of them, or 8 of them. And even the 8-FPGA ones still weren't big enough.
The thing is - a silicon wafer has a number of defects. The bigger the die, the greater the likelihood of a defect (and at 22nm, we're not talking about huge defects, either - just a simple misplaced atom is good enough as now we're talking of hundreds of atoms).
Also, the bigger the die, the less you can make per wafer, so it's a double whammy - the larger dies mean greater chance of defects, AND less dies per wafer. So smaller dies generally get much better yields (it's not a linear relationship). Splitting your chip into multiple dies complicates packaging, but can increase yields more than enough to compensate.
A wafer typically costs around $1200 each after processing, so even 1 die per wafer the cost is $1200.
And some stuff defects are fine - big devices like CCDs and CMOS camera sensors have dead pixels (defects) that are mapped out by processing software - because these sensors are so big and of fixed size size so Moore's law can't make them cheaper). Also, NAND flash has bad blocks, and the newer ones are often multi-dice as well to get larger densities.
It changes because your ISP will give your router a IPv6 prefix. All the devices on your network can then use that prefix in combination with their own address to form a publicly addressable IPv6 address. It's the equivalent of your ISP giving you your own/8 address for IPv4.
Potentially publicly accessible.
Because nothing changes with IPv6, except things get WAY more confusing. You'll still need relay servers because there are little boxes known as "firewalls" that break direct connectivity. Right now stuff like STUN are used to get around them, and we'll still need them in the future.
Sure NAT breaks DIRECT connectivity, but it's easy to detect NAT (most trivial way is detecting a public vs. private IP). And NAT with a firewall blocking all but 80, 443 and 21 brings about even more strangeness.
Now imagine with IPv6 you have an "internet accessible" address, but cannot connect to it.
In fact, it's easy with IPv4 right now because we always assume NAT. But IPv6 is likely going to be the same because we'll still have firewalls instead of NAT.
It's rather sad how people always blame the parents for not controlling their kids, and then those same people bitch and moan whenever someone tries to introduce a technology to help parents control their kids.
Those people always insist that technology is no substitute for good parenting, as if that's some sort of sage revelation. But it's not. It's a distraction. It's changing the subject. No one is saying technology like this replaces good parenting. It's not designed to replace good parenting. It's designed to enable it.
Technology has nothing to do with good parenting. Because smartphones didn't exist in huge quantities 10 years ago. Internet was new and novel 15 years ago. VIdeo games at least in popularity is barely 35 years old, and home computing is barely over 40.
And we've had kids and have been parenting them for thousands of years. The industrial age (or really what we'd call modern life) is close to 150 years old. And the electronic distractions are barely a third of that.
Sure we've all had screaming kids and tantrums, and kids have been bored since forever. But sticking a shiny screen in front of them is relatively new, and barely a blip on the timeline when doing it out and about. (Hell, a perambulator is way smaller than the urban SUV strollers people have that basically needs an entire lane - be the poor fool who is going the other way and have to get around them).
Hell, you'd think it was the dark ages when cellphones weren't as ubiquitous as they are now - somehow a lot of us older folk grew up in houses where our parents went out for the night and were for the most part, unreachable - the babysitter didn't have a way of contacting the parents directly. Hell, doctors didn't carry cellphones as much either - and yet, we seem to have managed medical emergencies just fine as well.
No, the problem is not technology, is the societal response to technology - everyone's becoming ruder, and they can't imagine not having immediate access to anyone else, for any reason. (Back in the "dark ages", if the boss needed to reach you after hours, there was a chance they couldn't get you. And you know what? It was just fine.
That's why there's a push back to "good parenting", sans technology. Kids SHOULD get bored. They should also find ways to occupy themselves without getting into trouble (something a good parent teaches them about). A bored kid doesn't immediately turn to drugs and guns and gangs and violence (some did, but they still do today). No, they turned fingers into literal hand guns, cops and robbers, indians vs. cowboys, built stuff using lego (and smash them - it's half the fun) and many other things. Some of which could include chores to encourage the aforementioned behavior.
That's why people bitch and moan because all these changes are recent. In fact, less than a generation old. The same parents who want these techno babysitters themselves grew up without them. Even the newly married folks or college age kids didn't have them when they were young. The earliest kids would really be in their early teens and barely able to drive.
Oh yeah, there was television, but not the thousand channel universe, and rarely more than one or two TVs in the house. And radio played the same crap then as they do today. No streaming radio, you listened to what they played, and no Amazon to order your specific tastes if the local store didn't have it. If you were lucky, you could mail-order, which was a 4-6 week ordeal.
They're attacking American websites. Surely that constitutes electronic terrorism and would fall under the NSA's mandate.
Except said websites were still working fine. What the SEA did was phish the registrar (Melbourne IT) for a password which they then used to change the DNS records of said websites.
Sites like the NYT et al, all worked if you entered in via their IP address.
No elaborate website hack, just a DNS social engineering attack.
No, that's not addiction. Addiction is when you ingest a substance into your body which causes you to develop a physical dependance. What you're referring to is called a "habit". In common usage, thanks to War on Drugs propaganda, the two terms are used interchangeably most of the time, but there's an important difference. With habits, you're not bound to a particular substance or activity- you can replace one activity with another. With addiction, you cannot- only that particular substance will fulfill the craving.
What you have is a person who is not capable of dealing with real life, so they seek various activities as a means of escape. After a while, those activities become all-consuming, and cause problems. You can see this with many things- religion, reading, sports, watching TV, gambling, video games, board games/card games, art, music, science, etc.
Addiction includes behavior - and recognized addictions include sex, and gambling.
People don't get "addicted" to the internet by seeking an escape - even though escapism IS one of the reasons why people get addicted (this includes chemical addictions like drugs, tobacco and alcohol) as well as behavioral.
In fact, addiction is usually classified by what happens when one removes oneself from the activity - typically signs of withdrawal appear, and this applies to both chemical and behavioral addictions.
Some people are so addicted to smartphones that they cannot be without them for more than a couple of minutes - they get anxious, get the shakes, all the classic withdrawal symptoms. And it's one reason we've had Crackberry as a term. Likewise, for some, videogaming - we don't call it World of Warcrack for nothing, either.
Now, perhaps smartphone addiction and videogaming addiction can be classified more generally as internet addiction. But it's hard to tell.
Truth be told, ANYTHING can be done to excess, and typically when it is, the person is addicted to doing that. That's why we call the disease addiction. And besides commonality in withdrawal symptoms between various addictions, we also see commonality in brain patterns while the addict is consuming or performing the activity that they're addicted to.
Any thoughts on how the following rule would help the patent system?: Make patents non transferable.
The problem is, they currently ARE NON-TRANSFERABLE.
They are issued to the inventor(s) and are completely owned by the inventor(s). The people named on the patents (who cannot be companies) own the patent permanently.
Instead, what happens is the inventor, as part of their employment contract, agrees to license the the company full exclusive use of the patent. Which means the company (that sponsored the patent) is the only one that can use the patent.
And the problem is, that's the way the patent system is supposed to work - patents belong to individuals who are free to either implement their patents, or to license the patent to those who can implement the inventions.
Except that now companies have, because it costs over $10,000 to file a patent, effectively contracted inventors to exclusively license their patents - they file patents in return for exclusivity.
When you see companies buying and selling patents, that's what they're trading - the rights to use the patent. If you want to troll the patent system, you can do the same, except get an exclusive license to software licensed AGPLv3 or something.
An error that can be fixed by changing the OS language could conceivably be a DRM issue. the others are less likely.
Not working at a high resultion is extremely unlikely to be DRM related. This may be an issue that affects the PC version as well, though; Just that such high resolution displays are rare on the PC.
OS localization has always been a VERY tough nut to crack, and no one does any adequate job.
Windows tries by using API calls to tell you where Program Files and Windows directories are (and it returns " (x86)" as necessary for 32-bit apps). But most devs don't use those APIs nor the environment variables and assume it's ALWAYS "C:\Program Files" (nevermind you may want to install on D: or use a localized version where that folder is translated).
OS X is likely similar - the EA programmers assumed something to be a fixed string that got localized in the end.
And heck, I'm sure Linux isn't invulnerable to it - since localized versions of many command line utilities exist to break your shell scripts... (though to be fair, you can set enough variables to force it to English for just the shell script, though how many people remember to do that?).
Though, not testing high-resolution displays is a sin for OS X - Apple does NOT ship a computer with a 1080p display, the "Retina" MacBook Pros sell extremely well, and the iMacs all have high res screens as well. The lowest res thing is the 11" MacBook Air with its 1366x768 screen.
The screen-less Macs (Mac Pro, Mac Mini) are some of the worst sellers in Apple's lineup, and are there purely to fill a niche.
None of it is really DRM related. Just practically "It compiles - ship it!" mentality.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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I remember Jobs way back in the cat era poking fun at Vista's pre production name "Longhorn" and now they name their own OS "Mavericks" which as every QI watcher knows was originally a term describing unbranded cattle.
Well, it's a Mac, so the appropriate animal is the Dogcow.
OTOH, given they're moving to location names, Mavericks is apparently a place for surfers. Unofficially, at that, so it's either a play on the stereotype of Californians, or Apple's OS names are going to be of obscure place names only known to locals.
Then again, maybe Apple's transitioning to sports equipment?
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Here's a trick - the prices don't scale. A $99 phone on contract can be anywhere from $200-500+. The $200 phones generally are $500+
So the heavier subsidized 5S will require a more expensive phone plan, while the 5C can be used with cheaper phone plans or be bought outright (I'm guessing it's $300-400 off contract).
At least, that's how it generally works - a $99 phone will have less subsidy and can be used with cheaper plans than the more expensive phone can.
So in places like Canada, where carriers demand a 5S be bought with an $80/month plan, they can demand the 5C be bought with a $50/month plan because the subsidy is less (being cheaper and all).
Of course, the best way is to buy it outright, because on special, you can find plans that are better and cheaper and usually make up the subsidy within a year. Like buying an iPhone outright is $700, but the cheaper $40 plan (saving $40/month over the subsidized required $80/month plan) offers more because it's on special (I've easily seen double data, double minutes, unlimited text compared to the regular price "smartphone $80/month" plan). $40/month * 12 months is $480. Or basically the subsidy on the $200 on contract phone.
And that's the goal - the 5C is for lower subsidy and cost - places that don't subsidize now have a lower cost iPhone.
Considering the rice is "owned", how are you going to get poor people to pay for it?
Basically, you've just committed 12M people + 10M children to death and blindness because the people who this can help, cannot pay.
It's so bad that many essential medicines get state approval to violate the patents so they can be produced cheaply for the population that needs it. It's a very sore sticking point for the owning companies and trade negotiations (especially with the US).
You assume the US doesn't have any special rights because they are, "The United States of America".
If there's any country guilty of violating more treaties (especially when it benefits them), it's generally been the US. It doesn't matter what - if the US can get an advantage by ignoring the treaty, it will, repeatedly. The other country can (and often does) cry foul, but rarely does anything get done about it.
Something about "might makes right".
Vienna treaty or no, if the US feels they want to put up an antenna, they'll just put up an antenna. Germany can protest all it wants, but by the time it rolls around to some body to do something about it, it'll be years down the road.
Not really.
You have to realize the business model - all of them sell your information for money. Google especially since that's their core revenue stream - not just Google Ads, but every other ad network they own, including DoubleClick. Between ads, Google Analytics, YouTube and other Google properties, they pretty much know your entire surfing history. (Google DNS may deny it, but that's just because they haven't found a way to monetize the information).
Key word: SELL
Governments want that information for FREE.
Between the three of them, there's more information on everyone than any government could hope to collect for itself. So they're tempting targets.
Perhaps one should worry about the agencies that aren't mentioned - perhaps because they're paying for the information like any other company is wanting to buy ads and gather analytics.
Only to the point where $$$ is concerned. You forget 99% of Google's income comes from selling ads. Ads that come with piles of analytics (courtesy of "Free" Google Analytics). And Google owns the vast majority of ad networks out there, including the ever-popular DoubleClick (purveyor of famous Pop Ups and Pop Under ads).
I'm fairly certain the NSA could get access at data far more easily by simply paying for it rather than trying to get it "for free". It's not in Google's interest to offer it for free. It's in Google's interest to SELL you to customers.
Heck, the commercial sector is basically doing the government's work for them - Google has its fingers in so many ways that the data collection will far exceed what the NSA could possibly hope to collect. (Except, perhaps, for Tor users since the NSA can run and monitor a bunch of exit nodes which they do - but it's no big stretch that a Tor user might go and log into their Google account...)..
You only need one example - iTunes. Apple did "the impossible" by competing for free. Back in the days of Napster and filesharing, Apple managed to open a store and be damn successful at selling music for 99 cents each. Sure you can pirate the same music for free, but for most people, it was just easier to go to iTunes and click Buy.
Yeah, that's definitely a bummer, considering Apple is one of the few companies actually trying hard to sell movies and TV shows legally. Of course, scoring Game of Thrones on iTunes saves you having to buy Foxtel and it's available quickly.
It's interesting to note that Apple is probably the only content distributor that operates in a number of countries. Given the need to negotiate individual rights for everything (music, movies, TV shows) in every country individually, it makes Apple probably the largest global vendor, or at least one that operates in the most countries. The only bigger ones are ones who move physical media around - i.e., Amazon.
So THAT'S where Microsoft got their Xbox One ideas. Only a matter of time before it records, or maybe that's why the Japanese release is delayed... built in video recording...
No, it's cue the hundreds of Kickstarter projects that will build you the thing.
Putting designs on the 'net is nice, but people want the stuff itself, and short of putting a kit together, some entrepreneurial type would use kickstarter to do it. Offer it as parts, a kit, a fully assembled unit, add a few bucks for your time effort and profit, and done.
Though, it doesn't always work out - like that half-price made-in-China Makerbot Replicator project (perfectly legal - all the designs were open, though you can tell Makerbot was pissed because the Replicator 2 is no longer as "open").
Cost. Your 512GB SSD is unlikely to cost $50 or so that something like this spinning rust would.
In fact, most 512GB SSDs cost around $500 or so, so unless you want to double your tablet price and then some (I'm sure Microsoft would love to tell you how well their Surfaces sold back when they were $900), using a huge SSD isn't really practical.
Spinning rust has been cheaper and unless you go very small (1.8" drives are dead because SSDs have gotten smaller and cheaper than spinning rust versions).
That's also the argument used to buy the first ones off the assembly line - of anything - a TV, a monitor, a game console, etc. Because what happens is if the product is popular, the hardware is changed to shave on costs here and there. So the next revision will look exactly the same as the old one, but be made with cheaper parts so more profit can be made, or the price can be lowered.
Now, Apple *generally* doesn't do it, though they did for the iPhone 5 (to add AWS support for T-Mobile), but manufacturers often silently change hardware internally. TVs and monitors, notable, often go for cheaper caps in their power supplies to save cost and to fail sooner.
Game consoles generally get more public revisions as features are added and dropped (both Microsoft and Sony are guilty).
Not just Apple, but everyone else has issues as well. It's just that when you sell 20 million units the first day, shortcomings and stuff you've overlooked tend to get found and amplified. Like antennagate - I'm fairly sure it affected SOME people, but for most, it didn't. It's just the name "Apple" and anything causes mountains to be made from molehills. Hell, the iPhone 4 continued to set sales records until the iPhone 4s came out, so either everyone seemed to have forgotten about antennagate, or in the end, it really wasn't a huge deal (no, Apple didn't change anything later on. The only redesign was for the Verizon model).
And yes, even battery flaws, because one bad battery out of a million devices is obviously a quality issue (1ppm... or 0.0001%).
Or the law of big numbers - a 0.1% failure rate (generally exceptional for electronics) still means 1,000 units fail out of every million.
It wasn't the closed-source nature of it.
It was stupidly bad business decisions, because they were counting on Apple to buy them out.
Back when Apple was shopping around for something to replace Classic MacOS, they strongly considered buying out Be. But Jean-Louis Gassee (the CEO, and former Apple lead) decided he's get greedy and demanded that Be was worth $300M. After all, who needed what Be had? Apple.
Unfortunately, Apple called their bluff and decided that Be wasn't quite worth that much, and since Gassee and Amelio couldn't agree on the price, they left the bargaining table. In the end, a Steve Jobs made a very compelling argument to purchase NeXT and its technologies outright, for a whopping $450M (and Jobs would help see the transition through and all that stuff).
Of course, this spurning by Apple hurt Be quite badly - they were hurting for systems and all that, and the dot-com crash pretty much did them in.
Things would be different today had Apple and Be actually managed to come to an agreement....
Actually, reading on the iPad is a lot easier than reading on the laptop. Ignoring better battery life, heat and other technology related issues, the formfactor of a tablet in general makes it easier to hold. Especially since there's no keyboard in the way. Of course, that's why there's convertible laptops to begin with, which get you into the tablet form factor.
A book is more traditionally in the "tablet" style formfactor which makes it easy to use singlehandedly.
Actually, it's "that noise" that makes Vinyl, Tubes and now Tape "sound better" than digital.
You cannot "clip" a vinyl record, tube or tape. Doing so on vinyl results in an unusable master as it'll never play back properly (or long enough - the bigger the wobble, the less playtime there is). Likewise, tubes and tape apply a compression to the waveform as they approach the dynamic range limit, which introduces harmonics.
Clipping is a solid-state process - introduced by A to D converters, transistor amplifiers, etc. They're really an artifact of digital superiority - that excellent linearity can be had by transistors and digital equipment that they'll easily go rail-to-rail if you push them too far. This is excellent because that's what you want - that the transistor can saturate while amplifying the signal rather than having to build in enough gain by underdriving the active elements to stay in the linear region.
Of course, the BIG problem is the harmonics introduced by clipping sound absolutely horrible to human ears. Like the tri-tone, it's completely harsh and sounds terrible.
The harmonics introduced by vinyl, tubes and tape, however, due to the waveform distortion caused by dynamic range compression, sound more "pleasant" to the ear, perhaps "warmer" (though that can be caused purely by the pink noise). But definitely less harsh and the effect is sometimes desirable, as overdriving tubes and generating those harmonics is often a very desirable outcome for effects - be it vocal or instrumental.
A LOT of work goes into trying to prevent clipping because it sounds so bad, but it's hard because you're forcing a huge overdesign of equipment to handle the out-of-range signals and often more equipment is needed (more amps because each amp block is set to provide less gain to stay away from the rails).
And that's the interesting thing. Apple doesn't innovate technically - they innovate practically.
All your shortcomings are challenges. Most of Apple's competitors like Samsung and such throw technology at it - build it and they will come. Apple doesn't do that - preferring to put the right technology at the problem. This may mean doing with a crappy CPU if it means battery life goes from "a nominal day" to "a week".
Likewise, Apple tends to be good at UI - they know there's limited space to do things, so perhaps it's time to re-think it. Like how iOS and OS X are different enough purely because of UI interactions. You can count on the iPod Nano revisions to pretty much be the entire "beta test" of the watch - it's an inexpensive platform to test with, and you can observe how people react to it.
And perhaps that's where Apple sees its strengths - it's not throwing hardware or technology at a problem, it's doing the hardware and software intelligently so users want to use it. Apple's innovations aren't technology - and to claim all innovations must be an advancement is both shortsighted and incorrect. Apple innovates by seeing what the user really needs.
It also means the iWatch will have fewer features, and not do many things that the Galaxy Gear or Pebble will do out of the gate. Be everything to everyone is not Apple's MO. But do the 80% of what people want and 100% of what people need at first wins them over. And right now, they need a relatively small size, long battery life, and be stylish. The latter may mean breaking out Apple's forte in metal cases and building it out of stainless steel and other materials considered "high end" in watches. And battery life must be decent - a week minimum to allow for forgetfulness.
Far too many people focus on tech specs and neglect to answer "what does the user really want". And Apple's niche is that. Their stuff is rarely cutting edge, but it's stuff users go "why didn't anyone else do this before?" or "now that's practical".
Or you go legislative - aka get the DoJ to remove a competitor for you. The DoJ has effectively tore up Apple's contracts with publishers, and Apple is only allowed to negotiate with one publisher every 6 months, starting 6 months from now.
So now, Amazon has one less competitor for the next 6 months. And that competition is forced to only have one publisher then, so it's reduced competition for the next 2-3 years. Not a bad deal - Nook and B&N are on thin ice, and the other potentially big competitor is gone. If you can get rid of Nook in the next 12 months, you can jack up prices because there will be no one else selling ebooks other than Amazon.
And already I've seen Kindle prices higher than Nook prices. And many Kindle-only books and many self-publishers get very special deals if they go exclusive.
And the problem is... lots of people release crap credited to "good" groups.
Unless you've got access to the release servers, you're getting it through a third party. You can name any pirate group and I can show you malware laden versions of their stuff as third parties decided to wrap the crap in other stuff. Or better yet, fake releases claimed to be by pirate groups.
Reputation matters. Malware authors know it and create fake files with the name of such pirate groups knowing people will distribute it for them thinking it's a real release.
In the end, unless you're in the scene and have direct scene server access, the stuff you get via torrents is just as questionable as the big guys stuff because you can't tell the relation of the uploader to the original scene release.
Because US customers want price over everything, and such civilities bring the ticket price up. Do that and your airline will suffer as people will jump ship to save $1 off the ticket of an airline that treats the like crap.
Same thing with other things as well - a good part of the reason why stuff in the EU cost more is the embedded duties and VAT added to the product price. But a portion also goes towards the "extended warranty" that the EU mandates as mandatory. So in the US, when the salesdroid says "Do you want an extended warranty with that?" well, you can have your 2 year warranty a la the EU by answering yes.
It's not just supply and demand, it's processing costs.
And yes, I've used the ZCV7000T chips before - the platform I used I think had the $30K versions (in 1000 lot quantities, heheh - that's $30M if you want the quantity discount), and had 4 of them, or 8 of them. And even the 8-FPGA ones still weren't big enough.
The thing is - a silicon wafer has a number of defects. The bigger the die, the greater the likelihood of a defect (and at 22nm, we're not talking about huge defects, either - just a simple misplaced atom is good enough as now we're talking of hundreds of atoms).
Also, the bigger the die, the less you can make per wafer, so it's a double whammy - the larger dies mean greater chance of defects, AND less dies per wafer. So smaller dies generally get much better yields (it's not a linear relationship). Splitting your chip into multiple dies complicates packaging, but can increase yields more than enough to compensate.
A wafer typically costs around $1200 each after processing, so even 1 die per wafer the cost is $1200.
And some stuff defects are fine - big devices like CCDs and CMOS camera sensors have dead pixels (defects) that are mapped out by processing software - because these sensors are so big and of fixed size size so Moore's law can't make them cheaper). Also, NAND flash has bad blocks, and the newer ones are often multi-dice as well to get larger densities.
Potentially publicly accessible.
Because nothing changes with IPv6, except things get WAY more confusing. You'll still need relay servers because there are little boxes known as "firewalls" that break direct connectivity. Right now stuff like STUN are used to get around them, and we'll still need them in the future.
Sure NAT breaks DIRECT connectivity, but it's easy to detect NAT (most trivial way is detecting a public vs. private IP). And NAT with a firewall blocking all but 80, 443 and 21 brings about even more strangeness.
Now imagine with IPv6 you have an "internet accessible" address, but cannot connect to it.
In fact, it's easy with IPv4 right now because we always assume NAT. But IPv6 is likely going to be the same because we'll still have firewalls instead of NAT.
Technology has nothing to do with good parenting. Because smartphones didn't exist in huge quantities 10 years ago. Internet was new and novel 15 years ago. VIdeo games at least in popularity is barely 35 years old, and home computing is barely over 40.
And we've had kids and have been parenting them for thousands of years. The industrial age (or really what we'd call modern life) is close to 150 years old. And the electronic distractions are barely a third of that.
Sure we've all had screaming kids and tantrums, and kids have been bored since forever. But sticking a shiny screen in front of them is relatively new, and barely a blip on the timeline when doing it out and about. (Hell, a perambulator is way smaller than the urban SUV strollers people have that basically needs an entire lane - be the poor fool who is going the other way and have to get around them).
Hell, you'd think it was the dark ages when cellphones weren't as ubiquitous as they are now - somehow a lot of us older folk grew up in houses where our parents went out for the night and were for the most part, unreachable - the babysitter didn't have a way of contacting the parents directly. Hell, doctors didn't carry cellphones as much either - and yet, we seem to have managed medical emergencies just fine as well.
No, the problem is not technology, is the societal response to technology - everyone's becoming ruder, and they can't imagine not having immediate access to anyone else, for any reason. (Back in the "dark ages", if the boss needed to reach you after hours, there was a chance they couldn't get you. And you know what? It was just fine.
That's why there's a push back to "good parenting", sans technology. Kids SHOULD get bored. They should also find ways to occupy themselves without getting into trouble (something a good parent teaches them about). A bored kid doesn't immediately turn to drugs and guns and gangs and violence (some did, but they still do today). No, they turned fingers into literal hand guns, cops and robbers, indians vs. cowboys, built stuff using lego (and smash them - it's half the fun) and many other things. Some of which could include chores to encourage the aforementioned behavior.
That's why people bitch and moan because all these changes are recent. In fact, less than a generation old. The same parents who want these techno babysitters themselves grew up without them. Even the newly married folks or college age kids didn't have them when they were young. The earliest kids would really be in their early teens and barely able to drive.
Oh yeah, there was television, but not the thousand channel universe, and rarely more than one or two TVs in the house. And radio played the same crap then as they do today. No streaming radio, you listened to what they played, and no Amazon to order your specific tastes if the local store didn't have it. If you were lucky, you could mail-order, which was a 4-6 week ordeal.
Except said websites were still working fine. What the SEA did was phish the registrar (Melbourne IT) for a password which they then used to change the DNS records of said websites.
Sites like the NYT et al, all worked if you entered in via their IP address.
No elaborate website hack, just a DNS social engineering attack.
Addiction includes behavior - and recognized addictions include sex, and gambling.
People don't get "addicted" to the internet by seeking an escape - even though escapism IS one of the reasons why people get addicted (this includes chemical addictions like drugs, tobacco and alcohol) as well as behavioral.
In fact, addiction is usually classified by what happens when one removes oneself from the activity - typically signs of withdrawal appear, and this applies to both chemical and behavioral addictions.
Some people are so addicted to smartphones that they cannot be without them for more than a couple of minutes - they get anxious, get the shakes, all the classic withdrawal symptoms. And it's one reason we've had Crackberry as a term. Likewise, for some, videogaming - we don't call it World of Warcrack for nothing, either.
Now, perhaps smartphone addiction and videogaming addiction can be classified more generally as internet addiction. But it's hard to tell.
Truth be told, ANYTHING can be done to excess, and typically when it is, the person is addicted to doing that. That's why we call the disease addiction. And besides commonality in withdrawal symptoms between various addictions, we also see commonality in brain patterns while the addict is consuming or performing the activity that they're addicted to.
And yes, anything includes the internet.
The problem is, they currently ARE NON-TRANSFERABLE.
They are issued to the inventor(s) and are completely owned by the inventor(s). The people named on the patents (who cannot be companies) own the patent permanently.
Instead, what happens is the inventor, as part of their employment contract, agrees to license the the company full exclusive use of the patent. Which means the company (that sponsored the patent) is the only one that can use the patent.
And the problem is, that's the way the patent system is supposed to work - patents belong to individuals who are free to either implement their patents, or to license the patent to those who can implement the inventions.
Except that now companies have, because it costs over $10,000 to file a patent, effectively contracted inventors to exclusively license their patents - they file patents in return for exclusivity.
When you see companies buying and selling patents, that's what they're trading - the rights to use the patent. If you want to troll the patent system, you can do the same, except get an exclusive license to software licensed AGPLv3 or something.
OS localization has always been a VERY tough nut to crack, and no one does any adequate job.
Windows tries by using API calls to tell you where Program Files and Windows directories are (and it returns " (x86)" as necessary for 32-bit apps). But most devs don't use those APIs nor the environment variables and assume it's ALWAYS "C:\Program Files" (nevermind you may want to install on D: or use a localized version where that folder is translated).
OS X is likely similar - the EA programmers assumed something to be a fixed string that got localized in the end.
And heck, I'm sure Linux isn't invulnerable to it - since localized versions of many command line utilities exist to break your shell scripts... (though to be fair, you can set enough variables to force it to English for just the shell script, though how many people remember to do that?).
Though, not testing high-resolution displays is a sin for OS X - Apple does NOT ship a computer with a 1080p display, the "Retina" MacBook Pros sell extremely well, and the iMacs all have high res screens as well. The lowest res thing is the 11" MacBook Air with its 1366x768 screen.
The screen-less Macs (Mac Pro, Mac Mini) are some of the worst sellers in Apple's lineup, and are there purely to fill a niche.
None of it is really DRM related. Just practically "It compiles - ship it!" mentality.
Well, it's a Mac, so the appropriate animal is the Dogcow.
OTOH, given they're moving to location names, Mavericks is apparently a place for surfers. Unofficially, at that, so it's either a play on the stereotype of Californians, or Apple's OS names are going to be of obscure place names only known to locals.
Then again, maybe Apple's transitioning to sports equipment?