It's worrisome because although NAT is not designed to take the place of a firewall, in fact it often does. For home or SOHO users, it's actually reasonably good as a firewall. They "should" have better, you might argue, but in fact they don't, most often. IPv6 removes the need for NAT, possibly leaving many SOHO users with no firewall-like protection.
You can have NAT with IPv6 - I believe there's even an RFC for it, and an implementation on FreeBSD. Linux did get patches that were rejected. Hell, there's even NAT-PT, which lets IPv4-only hosts access IPv6 only hosts (and vice-versa). Imagine that - we could switch and continue life as we know it, and don't care if we're talking to an IPv4 or IPv6 host.
NAT has an awesome advantage - it isolates your internal network numbering from the external network numbering. Many early RFCs on the early Internet were fixated around people having to renumber their networks because of conflicts in their network addressing, and enough people had trouble that they created the private address space so future networks will not have to undergo such renumberings and disruption.
It certainly would be nice to be isolated from my ISP's whims and wishes for most of my stuff on the network. Sure I'll have to deal with it for a few servers I have, but I'd rather do it for a few than for every.
Of course, the problem is the IPv6 fanboys who believe IPv6 means complete end-to-end connectivity again and that NAT has absolutely no use in an IPv6 world and even suggesting NAT impacts IPv6 "purity" that keeps IPv6 adoption from happening widely. Of course, end-to-end connectivity is broken anyways with proper firewalls (at least a program can detect private network access and assume firewall usage, but with IPv6, it's impossible).
And I'm sure people would prefer to have IPv6 to operate like IPv4 did with NAT as it's a lot less to learn and things work on IPv6 as they did with IPv4.
Really, what's with the obsession with the location that a widget is put together, when the design, programming, and engineering (The good, high-value jobs that I'd actually like to have.) are all done here?
Exactly. Manufacturing is a piss-poor job. It pays really low, is really boring, repetitive and has very strict quotas. Basically you're putting tab A into slot B for 8 hours straight, and you have under a second to do it. Take 1.1 seconds and you'll be called out for being less productive.
Though, with automation it does mean you have high paying robot technician jobs as well, and manufacturing in the US is highly automated because it's such an awful job. The parts that can't be automated will just be filled with illegal immigrants who want the jobs - everyone else would last only a few days before boredom kills them, literally.
Personally, I wish all mobile apps for websites would die horribly. Mobile web works, and works pretty much everywhere.
Not gonna happen. In fact, mobile apps are going to become full fledged apps and the web will be reduced to basically launching those apps and offering the apps for download.
Given how contentious the arguments for web DRM is, and that the anti-DRM group is saying "just make an app if you want DRM!", well, it shouldn't be surprising when people actually DO.
Kinda ironic, that those who want a free web is making the web less free by advocating proprietary apps.
Hence why UEFI should be dismissed. If it's useless, just don't implement it, it's cheaper...
UEFI is quite useful and is pretty much in every PC made since 2005 or so. Intel has stopped making BIOSes for their CPUs and only makes UEFI boot software available. This has been true since the Core series of CPUs were released - Core Solo/Duo, etc. It existed a few years prior to Apple using Intel CPUs.
In fact, what you know as the "bios" today is really UEFI running a BIOS emulator.
But UEFI offers many advantages over BIOS. For starters, it gets rid of TON of legacy crap - like 512 byte boot sectors, partition loaders, etc. GRUB has plenty of stage loaders just to load Linux because of BIOS. A modern UEFI loader is a single file executed by UEFI. Likewise, the ROMs that handle networking, display and such have a better interface through a well defined UEFI extension interface.
Of course, you probably meant UEFI Secure Boot, Which is separate from UEFI and only in very new PCs. But most PCs running today run UEFI. Linux has been supporting UEFI boot for a while too.
Unless they are gonna kickstarter the chips in the thing it'll be DAMN hard to make it FOSS, simply because the ones making the GPUs, wireless, etc, are about the most proprietary lot on the planet. Hell I don't even think you CAN make a FOSS GPU as everything from texture compression on up is patented up the ass, I know there was a project to make one using an FPGA but I never heard any more about it, probably ran into the legal minefield and ran aground.
So? Why do we need a GPU? The goal is fully open hardware drivers. But that doesn't mean we need to have drivers for ALL hardware the SoC has. If the GPU cannot be open-sourced, so be it. It just means you don't use the GPU and stick with 2D acceleration. This saves the problem too in that a lot of GPUs require firmware that's loaded at runtime.
Wireless I describe below - remember the FSF doesn't consider firmware that's embedded in hardware to be closed, so if you ensure the radio firmware exists in flash memory for the radio, you're golden. If you have to load it, you're not.
It won't happen. Minimally, the SDR (Software Defined Radio) will be required by the FCC, and other similar regulatory agencies around the world, to have a locked down image, or it won't be licensed for use, period. An SDR is defined to be a combination of the software and hardware, and you can't change one or the other without getting the thing relicensed, or requialified for use on the carrier network in the country in question.
No, you don't need to do that. The FCC merely requires that if you have an SDR, that it cannot be programmed to run outside the band it's licensed on. Whether you do this via a locked image, or through hardware lockouts is up to you. Basically, the SDR cannot exceed its license.
So if you have a radio that can transmit DC to daylight, you must somehow limit it to transmitting on licensed bands through some measure. One measure is locking down the image. Another measure is to simply have filters in the transmitter output chain that will prevent it from exceeding its bands.
So it's perfectly acceptable to have open source transmit hardware, just the hardware has to ensure it's only allowed to transmit on the bands it's licensed for.
Then again, the FSF oddly considers firmware that's part of hardware to be hardware. So if the radio is preprogrammed at the factory and never touched, it's considered "open hardware". However, if the hardware requires you to load the firmware from a file into its memory, that hardware is no longer open. So another option is to ensure the modem firmware lives in flash that belongs to the modem..
But using an apple TV I was looking at the prices and saw that access to some TV season would cost me $34. That is bonkers. The whole idea of cutting the cord was not only to stop paying my cable company but to break the ridiculous model that Hollywood has been forcing on us for years. If you watch a TV show on some form of broadcast or cable the producer makes around $0.10 to $0.25 per household for the first showing from the advertisers. So a TV series for download (which effectively is a rerun) is somehow expecting to make double or triple that? Even renting an entire series physically was cheaper than that.
No, cutting the cord means no cable, satellite or other subscription TV service. It doesn't mean "free TV", it just means you're watching OTA and purchasing your TV content some other method (DVDs, streaming, whatever).
In this case, $35 for a TV season, which unless you're watching a LOT of TV shows that aren't OTA, you'd probably save in the long run - $60 x 12 months for cable is $720/year. Or 20 TV series you can't get via an antenna.
If you watch just 10, you're still saving over cable. And that's the point of cutting the cord - because cable providers have gotten so greedy that it costs hundreds of dollars a month when all you want can be had purchased for much less. Many TV shows can be had the day after on iTunes (get a season pass and iTunes makes it ready for you when it's available - I think it even syncs it over if you desire). Some, like Game of Thrones, require patience but if it saves you $15/month ($180/year) just for that when you can buy it for $35, you're still ahead.
If you want to break the Hollywood model - quit watching TV. Read a book, surf the web, play some games, whatever.
Effectively, cutting the cord is realizing most TV is crap, cable/satellite/whatever is too expensive, and getting the TV you really want for a lot less money through iTunes, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Anyway, I think ol Qualcomm is lacking a certain basic understanding of what multicore architecture brings to the table. Er, phone. Desktop. Tablet. Whatever.
But that's ok. Manufacturers that remain mired in the past fall to their competitors and so self-select themselves out of the game.
Except Qualcomm has a point.
An 8 core SoC has 4 powerful A15-ish cores, and 4 power efficient A7-ish cores. Now, ARM's big.LITTLE allows for OS awareness of all 8 cores and their asymmetry, or you can treat it as a 4-core system and perform a direct switch.
The reason for this is the A15 is a power hog. It's fast, but it turns energy into heat very quickly. The A7 is slower, but turns less energy into heat. When you're gaming, you want the big beefy cores to give you maximum FPS goodness or whatever, then when you're back to listening ot MP3s, switch it for the power sippers.
Now, Qualcomm has skin in the game in that their 4 core Kraits are able to do DVFS on each individual core (so each core runs as fast as it needs to be, and no faster), which means it doesn't need a secondary batch of slower processors because it can run the main ones slower and more power efficiently..
Of course, what 8-core purveyors DON'T mention is you cannot run all 4 A15 cores for more than a few minutes at a time - you'll destroy the SoC because it overheats. That's how bad the A15s are. If you can use 2 A15s and keep the other 2 idle, for the most pare, you can do this forever. But put some load in and you'll need to throttle the A15s - 100-100-50-50% at first, and if temperatures still aren't cooling, start throttling the slower ones even more, turning them off if need be.
And in phones there's no space for the heatsink and fan, and often there's a PoP memory on top, so you can't even stick a heatsink on if you wanted.
Thermal management is extremely important on these octacores. especially as the system can't be cooled traditionally.
Until Qualcomm makes a server chip, they do have a point - what's the point of quad or octacore if you're not able to keep them running at full load because the hardware is limiting the speed?
Of course, anyone will know that benchmarks only run for a few minutes at a time. Aggressive core management also helps (switching to A7s as much as possible to keep the chip cooler).
There is little difference between the two because the Xbox has effectively killed PC gaming as a seperate category for the publisher's intents and purposes. This leads to a more console oriented market whereas before it was a dual console and PC market, both being pretty different and thus allowing different games to thrive within each.
PC are more powerful though but that difference doesn't really matter anymore because the increase visually it buys isn't all that grand for anything under a $1200 machine.
I think the 90% piracy rate on PCs had something to do with it (piracy on Xbox360 was around 10% for comparison). Then publishers put on DRM and you had the whole SecuROM fiasco that burned out optical drives.
All the Xbox did was show that between the Xbox and PS2, consoles were getting "good enough". The PS3 and Xbox360 basically said that things were pretty much there and consoles were no longer the huge compromises they once were when compared to PCs.
Publishers switched over because you could develop for PCs and load it up with DRM crap, or develop for consoles (which were "good enough") suffer less piracy and get more people paying for it. And people were buying consoles as well because it was more "social" and fun to play on the big screen TV than the little monitor.
What's happened since then is the universal DRM for PC now - Steam. And the proliferation of Intel graphics cards (around the time of the Xbox, people still used external video chips) which basically meant 90% of PCs sold were doing fairly poorly in the graphics department (and NVidia and AMD/ATi saw their marketshare dwindle as people rushed for cheaper Intel graphics).
But, the PC adapted - no longer were AAA titles going to PCs, which meant indie games rose in prominence - a good indie game (most are crap, still) now has a huge hungry base to which people would buy them and play with. And since these were low-budget productions, DRM wasn't really an issue, since piracy tended to help. And these games worked even on piss-poor Intel graphics, which meant huge market. Plus the rise of mobile gaming helped.
Consoles this round took notice and if you're paying attention, you'll see both Sony and Microsoft are trying hard to attract indies to their consoles.
Now, it might be nice if Apple allowed people to have the capabilities provided by a jailbreak if they want them. That's not the same as having a jailbreak.
How would you do that without giving people the chance to completely hose their machines like PCs?
Jailbreaking is to get out of the "jail" that iOS puts on applications, so it's basically giving root to iOS users.
Why? Because people jailbroke as "something neat" and then followed some instructions that said to install OpenSSH in order to do something that required jailbreaking (pirated apps? unique apps? who knows or cares).
Point being, give people the ability to, and they'll do it without regards for security.
It's just like the "Allow non-market apps" checkbox on Android - I'm fairly certain most people have it checked without regard for WHY it's there in the first place. Perhaps they saw some free app on Amazon? Or bought something from Humble Bundle? If you follow how to install those apps, they say to check it.
Not... necessarily. There is such a thing as bad publicity, as amply demonstrated by MS recently with regards to the XboxOne DRM and other issues. That bought them a lot of ill-will from their ex-fans. Sure, they did a 180, retracted their position and maybe clawed back some of their hard core fans. But everything they've been doing since is to make up for lost traction for their new console. Worse still, they publicly boosted their strongest competitor at a very crucial time, when the new consoles were being unveiled and the publicity machine was gearing up to create hype.
Yeah, but what happened since then? It's petered out, and now everyone knows about Xbox One. Sure Microsoft is tweaking their policies but they're entitled to do that because of competition.
In fact, the hype's died down and that's it. Who cared about the DRM? In the end, it was the hardcore gamer - because face it - the public (who buys Xbox Ones and PS4s in larger quantities) don't follow E3 or PAX or SDCC. In fact, in his lull period between the gamer conventions (which are honestly for hard core fans of gaming) and release, the hype's died down quite a bit. It'll ramp up In a few months again and by that time, everyone's forgotten everything. Except the name "Xbox".
Except... thats not the point. The point from a marketing perspective is to close sales for your client. There is no point spamming a million eyeballs if none of them are potential customers. Thats the reason why Google Adwords commands premium rates- because they can deliver ads to people who are most likely to buy the product (i.e. those searching for "ipad sale" etc).
While marketing is used to sell stuff, selling stuff is not always the goal of a marketing campaign. Raising brand awareness is often just as important because if you're in a store, people remember brands better than what was advertised.
It's why Apple has very distinctly named products - iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro. They don't call an iPad a tablet, but an iPad. Because people are more likely to remember "iPad" as distinct from "tablet". Ask the public and what they say is likely what they have. If they ask for an iPad, they likely want an iPad, not an Android tablet. If they ask for a tablet, they're likely to go for a tablet over an iPad.
More importantly, if this thing blows up, it has the potential to damage Samsung's brand. Samsung is a billion dollar company and Samsung Smart App is in comparison a piddly portion of the whole. If however, Samsung gains a reputation for astroturfing, it could seriously damage the brand. Just look at what is happening to MS now, I have seen numerous posts supportive of MS products on many tech forums being derided as being from paid shills, and rightly so since they were outed. Once the brand is poisoned, it is extremely difficult to repair.
Nonsense. People forget. Otherwise Microsoft should be bankrupt by now for what they did. Likewise Intel. And Apple. Likewise Amazon (one-click patent anyone? They sued their competitors over it, remember that? Or have you forgotten?). And many other companies outside the tech sector that had huge PR blunders. (You'd think a tire store selling Firestone tires would go out of business, right? I'm sure people are buying BP products at the same price Shell/etc are selling the same products).
And Samsung's committed way worse sins including basically bribing government and getting away with a lot of crap. You don't hear about it because it's just a news story, and that's it, flooded out by other Samsung marketing campaigns and time.
And in a week's time, I bet few will remember it.
Like I said, if it's really bad, you come out with a marketing apology - one that expresses how sincerely sorry you are for offering incentives for developing for the "Samsung Smart App Challenge". Thereby expressing regret AND marketing at the same time.
We already do. It's called a driver's test. Sadly in the US it's a complete joke. But the process is in place.
Not really, because all you have to do is your best driving once in your life and you're good for the next 50 years.
Now, change the law so everyone has to recertify every time they get their driver's license and then you might have a point. Or more often. And part of recertification includes recurrent training that should include a multitasking test where people have to use a cellphone/eat a sandwich/put on lipstick/shave/etc and drive into simulated traffic.
The only joke is how many people have drowned in the "OMG WIDESCREEN FLATPANEL HD" kool-aid that's set us back so far we're only now getting flatpanels with a vertical resolution equal to what a 10+ year old trinitron could do effortlessly. That and ever shorter and wider monitors, I see some modern laptops and it's like reading off a postage envelope.
No, you can buy huge 1920x1200 screens. Just quit being a cheapskate and looking at sub-$200 monitors. Good high end CRTs that didn't blur out at 1600x1200 cost plenty back in the days as well, and if anything, the sub $200 CRTs were never good at anything more than 1024x768 unless you like seeing blur.
The only reason we have "full HD" monitors for sub $200 is economies of scale - 1080p video processors and scalers are damned cheap because they take in every input imaginable (HDMI, DVI, VGA, component, composite, S-video) and output 1080p, so they're popular for monitors and TVs.
Video processors that can handle other resolutions aren't in such high demand, so they cost more. Likewise, good LCDs to pair them up with are harder to get as well (I expect driving a 1080p display is pretty much standard now, but any other resolution isn't).
Dell sells 1920x1200 monitors that are fairly decent and on sale for under $400. You wouldn't get the size, quality, weight or picture quality for $400 back in the day of CRTs.
My BenQ XL2420TX says you have no idea what you're talking about. 144hz refresh rate with a 1ms response time looks crisp no matter how much stuff is moving on the screen. Even my old POS Samsung SyncMaster LCD doesn't have any ghosting or blur that you speak of (60hz, 1ms refresh time). This seems like a problem with you just buying shitty monitors. If this was a few years back, then yes, you would have a point... but even the most fickle of users (CS 1.6 professionals) have recently moved off of CRT monitors to BenQ monitors for tournaments.
Actually, the problem isn't how fast you update the screen, it's how the motion blurring reduces resolution. There's something called Motion Resolution that details the apparent resolution of a screen when objects are in motion on it. Now, higher rates and shorter refresh times help (though there isn't a standard - some "240" monitors really are just 120hz or even 60hz. And the 1ms is "grey to grey", black to white is often quite a bit longer which his why they never quote it anymore).
Of course, whether or not he can see it or it's psychological, that's a different matter altogether.
Nobody cares enough about Africa to listen in on them. The only thing Africa has is resources, and China already is buying them. Is the infrastructure subject to surveillance? Sure, but every infrastructure is, even heterogeneous ones like the US.
Resource deals are better facilitated if you can spy on the other side and listen to what they're holding out on and such. Makes sense for China to learn what the real price the seller wants versus what they negotiate for. If you know the other side is bluffing, it makes exploitation much easier.
Second, if they become heavily invested in infrastructure, China's planning for the future. They know China won't be the cheap manufacturing base forever, and it will be Africa next. Well, those manufacturing bases need infrastructure, and what better way to spy on competitors than having the entire nation wired with your spy gear?
Well, apple I'm sure has a special deal. But with a droid, that's your problem if you do that. But if the carrier is pushing it out they want control over it.
This is definitely somewhere MS or one of the big Android players could have gone for the jugular in the market and said 'the carrier is a dumb pipe and you control updates to YOUR device".
Except Apple has pretty much DONE that. Hell, they've gotten carriers to bend over and take it too - see Russian carriers dropping iPhone support because of onerous terms.
Samsung is officially larger than Apple now - they beat Apple at their own game - turning $600M more profit than Apple in mobile devices. Profit, not revenue - $5.2B vs. $4.6B. Yes, over 10%.
And Microsoft was smart enough to be able to do this too - while their Windows Phone rollouts are more phased rather than Apple's just-click-upgrade-yourself method, but they control those updates as well.
Hell, Apple still does two things that few Android vendors do - they provide the OS update file so you can update it on your PC (Nexus devices have images you can flash, but it's not as easy or convenient as just clicking "Upgrade" in iTunes). Second, with iOS apps, you can download them on your PC and sync it over to your phone. If it's a large app, it's a lot more convenient to use your PC to download it over its wired connection rather than your phone to do it over wifi. And you have a backup too - doesn't matter if Apple removes it or anything, you always can reinstall it via iTunes sync.
Yes, iTunes is hated, but it certainly has some useful features.
Since when? iOS has had repeated and nearly constant flaws that have allowed for compromises both locally and remotely (via webpages). At this point it's such a given that this is mostly a non story.
Wow, that remote exploit was for iOS 4, an OS that shipped in 2010-2011. There's only one phone stuck on iOS 4 - the iPhone 3G - everyone else is able to run a higher version.
Yes, I suppose if one is used to Android, they would think a ton of people still use iOS 4, but no. After all, iOS 4 came out around the time of Gingerbread, which is still used by a third of Android phones.
Of course, iOS 6 has proven to be EXTREMELY difficult to compromise. It took 6 months before the first jailbreak came out (for 6.1.0) and a bunch of critical flaws were discovered including unlock screen flaws, resulting in 6.1.1, 6.1.2 and the current version of 6.1.3.
Unfortunately, 6.1.3 closed the flaw the jailbreaking flaw and no new one has been found since. Old devices have tethered jailbreaks for 6.1.3 but that's it. New ones like the iPhone 5 and iPad 4... no jailbreak exists.
Keep in mind it wasn't Samsung, but their stupid, and probably former, marketer.
Why former?
Think about what happened now - a bunch more people know that Samsung has a "Samsung Smart App Contest". Sure there's some outrage about astroturfing, but you know half the ragers are going to check it out anyways to see what they're raging about.
Which means the marketing worked because it got a bunch more people who'll enter in. Even better, those people will look at the terms of the Samsung App Store and may decide to put their apps up (Samsung is effectively making it "free" to developers) on it and enter as part of the SSAC, thus populating both Samsung's App Store (soon to be default - you'll have the Play Store of course, but Samsung's will have more prominence).
Either way, the old saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" comes true, and some marketer who was called out is probably walking all the way to the bank.
Hell, it was basically win-win. If he wasn't found out, great, more entries. If he was called out, even more publicity. Either way, more people know about it and that was the entire point. Hell, add an "apology" a week later and continue the marketing momentum.
The best way would've been to held your mouth shut UNTIL it was too late to enter the SSAC. Then make a big stink about it. Effectively, Samsung got free marketing in everyone's urge to break the news.
Office for android is a start, however I would really like to see a native Office port to desktop Linux. It would convince a lot of people, including myself, to jump ship from Windows and move over entirely to Linux.
It's not office for android. It's Office365 for Android.
There's a HUGE difference. Namely, Office365 is cloud-based. Once you absorb that, the strategy behind Office for Android and the earlier Office for iOS is clear - because those documents are in the cloud, they may need final tweaking while on the road or whatever, and you can use your phone or tablet to edit the documents live (it's in the cloud).
Thus Office for iOS and Office for Android are meant to sell more Office365 subscriptions because otherwise you'd only be able to use it on a PC.
Take a look at Best Buy sometime - you'll find a strong deemphasis on the regular boxed version of Office (Office 2013), but Office365 is everywhere. Likewise, Office for Mac 2011 is hard to find, yet the Mac section will have piles of Office365 cards.
And yes, if it means something, Microsoft will release Office for Linux as well, if it means they can sell more Office365 subscriptions.
Remember, Office365 is cloud-based and you pay yearly (around $80?) for the ability to use Office in the cloud. It is NOT a native version, and none of the Office for Android, Office for iOS will work WITHOUT a subscription to Office365.
And Microsoft is heavily pushing Office365 for obvious reasons. The only non-Cloud versions of Office are regular Microsoft Office 2013 (Windows), or Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 (OS X), which you pay once and that's it, and they work offline. And beyond those two versions, you won't see those ported to iOS or Android or Linux anytime soon.
Basically, Microsoft knows that if you're going to offer something in the cloud, it helps to make it available for as many platforms as possible. Of course, they probably won't kill their bread and butter by porting the real Office to Linux, but they might make a native Office365 version of it.
I'm sure they can further obfuscate the actual code, but at the end of the day the processor is going to have to run machine code, and one way or the other you can tap the processor's activity to read the "decrypted" code. Beyond that, I imagine the performance penalties involved will be monstrous. Even normal obfuscation techniques have pretty heavy penalties.
Not really. I've seen memory encryption units that ensure that all data hitting memory is encrypted, and it's possible to have the startup code also encrypted in flash and decrypted internally.
Basically every modern processor (or SoC) has an onboard hardware cryptographic accellerator, and most SoCs have the ability to hard-program in a key to one-time-programmable memory. Once programmed, the lock bit is blown and the key cannot be read by the processor anymore. On bootup, the crypto accellerator transfers the key from OTP to its internal locked down key cache and the processor running internal boot code then fetches the first bootloader from flash storage, decrypts it to internal SRAM and runs it. That first bootloader then initializes SDRAM, starts the memory encryption, then loads the encrypted second bootloader from flash, decrypts it, then writes it to encrypted SDRAM and then runs it.
The SDRAM controller maybe has a few extra cycles of latency at the high clock speed (so it doesn't affect the actual RAM timing) with encryption on, so the encryption overhead is hidden by the memory access latency.
The reading of encrypted bootloaders maybe makes it a tiny bit slower since the data has to be shoveled through the crypto accellerator, but not by much.
Tapping the bus on a modern SoC is practically impossible, as well given the way those chips are fabbed. In fact, it's not often a bus anymore, but a packetized switch.
Yeah,it is important, because in Asia you can relatively easily point your antenna across the border and get overseas channels if your TV can tune/decode them. In Vietnam you can pick up Cambodian, Thai and Chinese TV channels, and the TV sets sold there have a massive array of options to let you choose colour standard, field rate, audio subcarrier frequency, etc. to ensure that you can decode and view anything you can receive. DPKR doesn't look so kindly on such features.
Except the tablet's TV tuner is restricted to tuning just the state-approved channels. There's probably restrictions on trying to tune it to something else as well. It's not a huge benefit other than having a portable TV.
Great, let's just make the roads even less safe than they are now.
Driving is a very odd activity in that the person who does the stupid thing is very rarely affected by the consequences. Like say drinking and driving. A drunk driver getting into an accident rarely gets major injuries, however, the victim(s) usually get the brunt of the injuries and damages.
Consequence-free results of driving? Now an drunken idiot can go an cause havoc on the roads and basically get away scot-free - not even a scratch on his body. Even when we elevate a DUI to murder it's still not quite the same as what happened to the victim.
It will burn a hole in your table though. Ever noticed how hot smartphones get when left running at full capacity for a while?
This is especially true on the A15-based smartphones and the "octacore". Truth is, they hit their max temperature (around 125C) after a few minutes if you peg all 4 high-powered (A15) cores in around 5 minutes.
From an analysis I saw, the software had to modulate at that point two of the cores to be around 50% utilization (so 2 going 100%, the other 2 at 50%) in order to maintain 125C junction temperature. If the chip still continued to heat, one core must be turned off and the other to 25%.
Basically, don't give it more than one core unless you put a heatsink on it... two cores will basically render the phone almost useless.
Nvidia has always been pushing their propriety tech, so its not surprising they don't support ATI video cards for streaming, but they are cutting out a large number of users by supporting on their cards. The number of people who are going to buy an Nvidia card so they can stream to Shield is probably going to be very low compared to the number of current ATI customers who may have given it a try, myself included.
Who in total are still miniscule compared to the number running Intel graphics (Intel is the #1 graphics card manufacturer by volume).
Which then begs the question - if you have an NVidia card, you're already self-selecting people who probably also have a nice PC (it probably requires a recent video card too), and these people are probably loving their rig to play in front of multiple monitors and specialized keyboards and mice and who probably wouldn't want to play on the dinky thing that is SHIELD.
It makes what Sony is doing with PS4 at least easier to stomach - there are plenty of reasons why you might not be able to play on the PS4 (usually, someone wants to watch TV...), so picking the game up on Vita makes perfect sense.
They can't. IIRC the requirements for bundling Windows RT include having the device locked down so it will only run Windows RT.
While I can understand the desire to run your own OS on an ARM tablet, I generally question why. Other than "because I can".
Because most SoCs used in these tablets are under heavy NDA, and even worse, the parts used may not even have datasheets available without NDA.
Think about it - you can run any OS you want on these tablets - but where are you going to get it? Half the stuff in a modern SoC is only provided as a binary blob (graphics drivers especially, but you have audio, camera, network and other things as well) which means if you want to, it's going to be a very hard slog .
And that's even if you have all the code to the kernel already.
Hell, some of those NDAs aren't even available to individual developers - you need to be from a company and that company has to ship enough product to "matter".
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Last I checked, you needed a network connection for this stuff. So all you need to do is... not plug in the network cable. Or configure the wifi.
So just use it as a TV and you're golden. No one says you have to plug in every cable the TV supports.
Of course, I suppose a smart Smart TV might try to use the ethernet-over-HDMI function ...
You can have NAT with IPv6 - I believe there's even an RFC for it, and an implementation on FreeBSD. Linux did get patches that were rejected. Hell, there's even NAT-PT, which lets IPv4-only hosts access IPv6 only hosts (and vice-versa). Imagine that - we could switch and continue life as we know it, and don't care if we're talking to an IPv4 or IPv6 host.
NAT has an awesome advantage - it isolates your internal network numbering from the external network numbering. Many early RFCs on the early Internet were fixated around people having to renumber their networks because of conflicts in their network addressing, and enough people had trouble that they created the private address space so future networks will not have to undergo such renumberings and disruption.
It certainly would be nice to be isolated from my ISP's whims and wishes for most of my stuff on the network. Sure I'll have to deal with it for a few servers I have, but I'd rather do it for a few than for every.
Of course, the problem is the IPv6 fanboys who believe IPv6 means complete end-to-end connectivity again and that NAT has absolutely no use in an IPv6 world and even suggesting NAT impacts IPv6 "purity" that keeps IPv6 adoption from happening widely. Of course, end-to-end connectivity is broken anyways with proper firewalls (at least a program can detect private network access and assume firewall usage, but with IPv6, it's impossible).
And I'm sure people would prefer to have IPv6 to operate like IPv4 did with NAT as it's a lot less to learn and things work on IPv6 as they did with IPv4.
Exactly. Manufacturing is a piss-poor job. It pays really low, is really boring, repetitive and has very strict quotas. Basically you're putting tab A into slot B for 8 hours straight, and you have under a second to do it. Take 1.1 seconds and you'll be called out for being less productive.
Though, with automation it does mean you have high paying robot technician jobs as well, and manufacturing in the US is highly automated because it's such an awful job. The parts that can't be automated will just be filled with illegal immigrants who want the jobs - everyone else would last only a few days before boredom kills them, literally.
Not gonna happen. In fact, mobile apps are going to become full fledged apps and the web will be reduced to basically launching those apps and offering the apps for download.
Given how contentious the arguments for web DRM is, and that the anti-DRM group is saying "just make an app if you want DRM!", well, it shouldn't be surprising when people actually DO.
Kinda ironic, that those who want a free web is making the web less free by advocating proprietary apps.
Ah, but that requires marketing, and everyone knows marketing is the devil! Advertising too.
Can't advertise and can't market, because the geeks block all ads and hate marketers.
UEFI is quite useful and is pretty much in every PC made since 2005 or so. Intel has stopped making BIOSes for their CPUs and only makes UEFI boot software available. This has been true since the Core series of CPUs were released - Core Solo/Duo, etc. It existed a few years prior to Apple using Intel CPUs.
In fact, what you know as the "bios" today is really UEFI running a BIOS emulator.
But UEFI offers many advantages over BIOS. For starters, it gets rid of TON of legacy crap - like 512 byte boot sectors, partition loaders, etc. GRUB has plenty of stage loaders just to load Linux because of BIOS. A modern UEFI loader is a single file executed by UEFI. Likewise, the ROMs that handle networking, display and such have a better interface through a well defined UEFI extension interface.
Of course, you probably meant UEFI Secure Boot, Which is separate from UEFI and only in very new PCs. But most PCs running today run UEFI. Linux has been supporting UEFI boot for a while too.
So? Why do we need a GPU? The goal is fully open hardware drivers. But that doesn't mean we need to have drivers for ALL hardware the SoC has. If the GPU cannot be open-sourced, so be it. It just means you don't use the GPU and stick with 2D acceleration. This saves the problem too in that a lot of GPUs require firmware that's loaded at runtime.
Wireless I describe below - remember the FSF doesn't consider firmware that's embedded in hardware to be closed, so if you ensure the radio firmware exists in flash memory for the radio, you're golden. If you have to load it, you're not.
No, you don't need to do that. The FCC merely requires that if you have an SDR, that it cannot be programmed to run outside the band it's licensed on. Whether you do this via a locked image, or through hardware lockouts is up to you. Basically, the SDR cannot exceed its license.
So if you have a radio that can transmit DC to daylight, you must somehow limit it to transmitting on licensed bands through some measure. One measure is locking down the image. Another measure is to simply have filters in the transmitter output chain that will prevent it from exceeding its bands.
So it's perfectly acceptable to have open source transmit hardware, just the hardware has to ensure it's only allowed to transmit on the bands it's licensed for.
Then again, the FSF oddly considers firmware that's part of hardware to be hardware. So if the radio is preprogrammed at the factory and never touched, it's considered "open hardware". However, if the hardware requires you to load the firmware from a file into its memory, that hardware is no longer open. So another option is to ensure the modem firmware lives in flash that belongs to the modem..
No, cutting the cord means no cable, satellite or other subscription TV service. It doesn't mean "free TV", it just means you're watching OTA and purchasing your TV content some other method (DVDs, streaming, whatever).
In this case, $35 for a TV season, which unless you're watching a LOT of TV shows that aren't OTA, you'd probably save in the long run - $60 x 12 months for cable is $720/year. Or 20 TV series you can't get via an antenna.
If you watch just 10, you're still saving over cable. And that's the point of cutting the cord - because cable providers have gotten so greedy that it costs hundreds of dollars a month when all you want can be had purchased for much less. Many TV shows can be had the day after on iTunes (get a season pass and iTunes makes it ready for you when it's available - I think it even syncs it over if you desire). Some, like Game of Thrones, require patience but if it saves you $15/month ($180/year) just for that when you can buy it for $35, you're still ahead.
If you want to break the Hollywood model - quit watching TV. Read a book, surf the web, play some games, whatever.
Effectively, cutting the cord is realizing most TV is crap, cable/satellite/whatever is too expensive, and getting the TV you really want for a lot less money through iTunes, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Hulu, etc.
Except Qualcomm has a point.
An 8 core SoC has 4 powerful A15-ish cores, and 4 power efficient A7-ish cores. Now, ARM's big.LITTLE allows for OS awareness of all 8 cores and their asymmetry, or you can treat it as a 4-core system and perform a direct switch.
The reason for this is the A15 is a power hog. It's fast, but it turns energy into heat very quickly. The A7 is slower, but turns less energy into heat. When you're gaming, you want the big beefy cores to give you maximum FPS goodness or whatever, then when you're back to listening ot MP3s, switch it for the power sippers.
Now, Qualcomm has skin in the game in that their 4 core Kraits are able to do DVFS on each individual core (so each core runs as fast as it needs to be, and no faster), which means it doesn't need a secondary batch of slower processors because it can run the main ones slower and more power efficiently..
Of course, what 8-core purveyors DON'T mention is you cannot run all 4 A15 cores for more than a few minutes at a time - you'll destroy the SoC because it overheats. That's how bad the A15s are. If you can use 2 A15s and keep the other 2 idle, for the most pare, you can do this forever. But put some load in and you'll need to throttle the A15s - 100-100-50-50% at first, and if temperatures still aren't cooling, start throttling the slower ones even more, turning them off if need be.
And in phones there's no space for the heatsink and fan, and often there's a PoP memory on top, so you can't even stick a heatsink on if you wanted.
Thermal management is extremely important on these octacores. especially as the system can't be cooled traditionally.
Until Qualcomm makes a server chip, they do have a point - what's the point of quad or octacore if you're not able to keep them running at full load because the hardware is limiting the speed?
Of course, anyone will know that benchmarks only run for a few minutes at a time. Aggressive core management also helps (switching to A7s as much as possible to keep the chip cooler).
I think the 90% piracy rate on PCs had something to do with it (piracy on Xbox360 was around 10% for comparison). Then publishers put on DRM and you had the whole SecuROM fiasco that burned out optical drives.
All the Xbox did was show that between the Xbox and PS2, consoles were getting "good enough". The PS3 and Xbox360 basically said that things were pretty much there and consoles were no longer the huge compromises they once were when compared to PCs.
Publishers switched over because you could develop for PCs and load it up with DRM crap, or develop for consoles (which were "good enough") suffer less piracy and get more people paying for it. And people were buying consoles as well because it was more "social" and fun to play on the big screen TV than the little monitor.
What's happened since then is the universal DRM for PC now - Steam. And the proliferation of Intel graphics cards (around the time of the Xbox, people still used external video chips) which basically meant 90% of PCs sold were doing fairly poorly in the graphics department (and NVidia and AMD/ATi saw their marketshare dwindle as people rushed for cheaper Intel graphics).
But, the PC adapted - no longer were AAA titles going to PCs, which meant indie games rose in prominence - a good indie game (most are crap, still) now has a huge hungry base to which people would buy them and play with. And since these were low-budget productions, DRM wasn't really an issue, since piracy tended to help. And these games worked even on piss-poor Intel graphics, which meant huge market. Plus the rise of mobile gaming helped.
Consoles this round took notice and if you're paying attention, you'll see both Sony and Microsoft are trying hard to attract indies to their consoles.
How would you do that without giving people the chance to completely hose their machines like PCs?
Jailbreaking is to get out of the "jail" that iOS puts on applications, so it's basically giving root to iOS users.
If you give people the ability to, they will do it because someone will tell them to do it. There is no way around dancing pigs. Hell when jailbreaking was a popular activity, there was a Rickrolling worm that spread amongst jailbroken iPhones. And another one that stole banking information.
Why? Because people jailbroke as "something neat" and then followed some instructions that said to install OpenSSH in order to do something that required jailbreaking (pirated apps? unique apps? who knows or cares).
Point being, give people the ability to, and they'll do it without regards for security.
It's just like the "Allow non-market apps" checkbox on Android - I'm fairly certain most people have it checked without regard for WHY it's there in the first place. Perhaps they saw some free app on Amazon? Or bought something from Humble Bundle? If you follow how to install those apps, they say to check it.
Yeah, but what happened since then? It's petered out, and now everyone knows about Xbox One. Sure Microsoft is tweaking their policies but they're entitled to do that because of competition.
In fact, the hype's died down and that's it. Who cared about the DRM? In the end, it was the hardcore gamer - because face it - the public (who buys Xbox Ones and PS4s in larger quantities) don't follow E3 or PAX or SDCC. In fact, in his lull period between the gamer conventions (which are honestly for hard core fans of gaming) and release, the hype's died down quite a bit. It'll ramp up In a few months again and by that time, everyone's forgotten everything. Except the name "Xbox".
Not really, because all you have to do is your best driving once in your life and you're good for the next 50 years.
Now, change the law so everyone has to recertify every time they get their driver's license and then you might have a point. Or more often. And part of recertification includes recurrent training that should include a multitasking test where people have to use a cellphone/eat a sandwich/put on lipstick/shave/etc and drive into simulated traffic.
Resource deals are better facilitated if you can spy on the other side and listen to what they're holding out on and such. Makes sense for China to learn what the real price the seller wants versus what they negotiate for. If you know the other side is bluffing, it makes exploitation much easier.
Second, if they become heavily invested in infrastructure, China's planning for the future. They know China won't be the cheap manufacturing base forever, and it will be Africa next. Well, those manufacturing bases need infrastructure, and what better way to spy on competitors than having the entire nation wired with your spy gear?
Except Apple has pretty much DONE that. Hell, they've gotten carriers to bend over and take it too - see Russian carriers dropping iPhone support because of onerous terms.
Samsung is officially larger than Apple now - they beat Apple at their own game - turning $600M more profit than Apple in mobile devices. Profit, not revenue - $5.2B vs. $4.6B. Yes, over 10%.
And Microsoft was smart enough to be able to do this too - while their Windows Phone rollouts are more phased rather than Apple's just-click-upgrade-yourself method, but they control those updates as well.
Hell, Apple still does two things that few Android vendors do - they provide the OS update file so you can update it on your PC (Nexus devices have images you can flash, but it's not as easy or convenient as just clicking "Upgrade" in iTunes). Second, with iOS apps, you can download them on your PC and sync it over to your phone. If it's a large app, it's a lot more convenient to use your PC to download it over its wired connection rather than your phone to do it over wifi. And you have a backup too - doesn't matter if Apple removes it or anything, you always can reinstall it via iTunes sync.
Yes, iTunes is hated, but it certainly has some useful features.
Wow, that remote exploit was for iOS 4, an OS that shipped in 2010-2011. There's only one phone stuck on iOS 4 - the iPhone 3G - everyone else is able to run a higher version.
Yes, I suppose if one is used to Android, they would think a ton of people still use iOS 4, but no. After all, iOS 4 came out around the time of Gingerbread, which is still used by a third of Android phones.
Of course, iOS 6 has proven to be EXTREMELY difficult to compromise. It took 6 months before the first jailbreak came out (for 6.1.0) and a bunch of critical flaws were discovered including unlock screen flaws, resulting in 6.1.1, 6.1.2 and the current version of 6.1.3.
Unfortunately, 6.1.3 closed the flaw the jailbreaking flaw and no new one has been found since. Old devices have tethered jailbreaks for 6.1.3 but that's it. New ones like the iPhone 5 and iPad 4 ... no jailbreak exists.
Why former?
Think about what happened now - a bunch more people know that Samsung has a "Samsung Smart App Contest". Sure there's some outrage about astroturfing, but you know half the ragers are going to check it out anyways to see what they're raging about.
Which means the marketing worked because it got a bunch more people who'll enter in. Even better, those people will look at the terms of the Samsung App Store and may decide to put their apps up (Samsung is effectively making it "free" to developers) on it and enter as part of the SSAC, thus populating both Samsung's App Store (soon to be default - you'll have the Play Store of course, but Samsung's will have more prominence).
Either way, the old saying "there's no such thing as bad publicity" comes true, and some marketer who was called out is probably walking all the way to the bank.
Hell, it was basically win-win. If he wasn't found out, great, more entries. If he was called out, even more publicity. Either way, more people know about it and that was the entire point. Hell, add an "apology" a week later and continue the marketing momentum.
The best way would've been to held your mouth shut UNTIL it was too late to enter the SSAC. Then make a big stink about it. Effectively, Samsung got free marketing in everyone's urge to break the news.
It's not office for android. It's Office365 for Android.
There's a HUGE difference. Namely, Office365 is cloud-based. Once you absorb that, the strategy behind Office for Android and the earlier Office for iOS is clear - because those documents are in the cloud, they may need final tweaking while on the road or whatever, and you can use your phone or tablet to edit the documents live (it's in the cloud).
Thus Office for iOS and Office for Android are meant to sell more Office365 subscriptions because otherwise you'd only be able to use it on a PC.
Take a look at Best Buy sometime - you'll find a strong deemphasis on the regular boxed version of Office (Office 2013), but Office365 is everywhere. Likewise, Office for Mac 2011 is hard to find, yet the Mac section will have piles of Office365 cards.
And yes, if it means something, Microsoft will release Office for Linux as well, if it means they can sell more Office365 subscriptions.
Remember, Office365 is cloud-based and you pay yearly (around $80?) for the ability to use Office in the cloud. It is NOT a native version, and none of the Office for Android, Office for iOS will work WITHOUT a subscription to Office365.
And Microsoft is heavily pushing Office365 for obvious reasons. The only non-Cloud versions of Office are regular Microsoft Office 2013 (Windows), or Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 (OS X), which you pay once and that's it, and they work offline. And beyond those two versions, you won't see those ported to iOS or Android or Linux anytime soon.
Basically, Microsoft knows that if you're going to offer something in the cloud, it helps to make it available for as many platforms as possible. Of course, they probably won't kill their bread and butter by porting the real Office to Linux, but they might make a native Office365 version of it.
Not really. I've seen memory encryption units that ensure that all data hitting memory is encrypted, and it's possible to have the startup code also encrypted in flash and decrypted internally.
Basically every modern processor (or SoC) has an onboard hardware cryptographic accellerator, and most SoCs have the ability to hard-program in a key to one-time-programmable memory. Once programmed, the lock bit is blown and the key cannot be read by the processor anymore. On bootup, the crypto accellerator transfers the key from OTP to its internal locked down key cache and the processor running internal boot code then fetches the first bootloader from flash storage, decrypts it to internal SRAM and runs it. That first bootloader then initializes SDRAM, starts the memory encryption, then loads the encrypted second bootloader from flash, decrypts it, then writes it to encrypted SDRAM and then runs it.
The SDRAM controller maybe has a few extra cycles of latency at the high clock speed (so it doesn't affect the actual RAM timing) with encryption on, so the encryption overhead is hidden by the memory access latency.
The reading of encrypted bootloaders maybe makes it a tiny bit slower since the data has to be shoveled through the crypto accellerator, but not by much.
Tapping the bus on a modern SoC is practically impossible, as well given the way those chips are fabbed. In fact, it's not often a bus anymore, but a packetized switch.
Except the tablet's TV tuner is restricted to tuning just the state-approved channels. There's probably restrictions on trying to tune it to something else as well. It's not a huge benefit other than having a portable TV.
Great, let's just make the roads even less safe than they are now.
Driving is a very odd activity in that the person who does the stupid thing is very rarely affected by the consequences. Like say drinking and driving. A drunk driver getting into an accident rarely gets major injuries, however, the victim(s) usually get the brunt of the injuries and damages.
Consequence-free results of driving? Now an drunken idiot can go an cause havoc on the roads and basically get away scot-free - not even a scratch on his body. Even when we elevate a DUI to murder it's still not quite the same as what happened to the victim.
This is especially true on the A15-based smartphones and the "octacore". Truth is, they hit their max temperature (around 125C) after a few minutes if you peg all 4 high-powered (A15) cores in around 5 minutes.
From an analysis I saw, the software had to modulate at that point two of the cores to be around 50% utilization (so 2 going 100%, the other 2 at 50%) in order to maintain 125C junction temperature. If the chip still continued to heat, one core must be turned off and the other to 25%.
Basically, don't give it more than one core unless you put a heatsink on it... two cores will basically render the phone almost useless.
Who in total are still miniscule compared to the number running Intel graphics (Intel is the #1 graphics card manufacturer by volume).
Which then begs the question - if you have an NVidia card, you're already self-selecting people who probably also have a nice PC (it probably requires a recent video card too), and these people are probably loving their rig to play in front of multiple monitors and specialized keyboards and mice and who probably wouldn't want to play on the dinky thing that is SHIELD.
It makes what Sony is doing with PS4 at least easier to stomach - there are plenty of reasons why you might not be able to play on the PS4 (usually, someone wants to watch TV...), so picking the game up on Vita makes perfect sense.
While I can understand the desire to run your own OS on an ARM tablet, I generally question why. Other than "because I can".
Because most SoCs used in these tablets are under heavy NDA, and even worse, the parts used may not even have datasheets available without NDA.
Think about it - you can run any OS you want on these tablets - but where are you going to get it? Half the stuff in a modern SoC is only provided as a binary blob (graphics drivers especially, but you have audio, camera, network and other things as well) which means if you want to, it's going to be a very hard slog .
And that's even if you have all the code to the kernel already.
Hell, some of those NDAs aren't even available to individual developers - you need to be from a company and that company has to ship enough product to "matter".