You're got to look at it from a business perspective. Microsoft is a 'traditional' software company: They make a product and sell it. They have no model for continuing to make money from their product post-sale, so they are highly dependent upon keeping customers continually upgrading. An increasingly difficult task - Windows XP remained popular for many years after MS intended it to die. Compare to Apple or Google: They don't just make products, but make an ecosystem around it - iTunes, , the app stores, tie-ins to other services, advertising. Every iPhone and Android device is a revenue stream to Apple or Google well after the initial sale.
Microsoft wants to copy that. It's a great business idea. Not always good for end-users though - the factor that enables the ecosystem business model is device usage restrictions. Apple couldn't make money off the iPhones if people were able to install just anything from anywhere, without the App Store taking a cut.
False. The iTunes store, while bringing in $1B in revenue or so, makes less money than Mac revenue by an order of magnitude. iOS revenue is even higher.
Apple sells ecosystems, but they don't concentrate on the content - the content is, however, used to sell hardware and that's where Apple makes their money. If the user decided they only wanted FREE apps, and used their own music, movies and books, Apple doesn't care because the iTunes money is really puny. (In fact, technically, free apps cost Apple money). And Apple does a lot of work for developers for that 30% - handling the payment, invoicing, hosting, taxes, etc. All a developer has to do is write the app, the description, the screenshots, and sit back and rake in the money. Apple even handles source-deductions for you. As a dev, all you do is report it on your income tax. If some state wants sales tax, Apple handles it automatically so you don't have to.
Amazon though, couldn't make money off Kindles if they allowed anyone to install anything from anywhere, which is why a Kindle is heavily locked down. Sure you can sideload books and stuff, but that stuff's free anyways. Buy content from Amazon and they're ahead. It's also why Amazon doesn't sell their tablets outside of places where you can buy their music, movies and TV content. Hell, it's why Barnes and Noble decided it would be easier to just have Google Play - because they have a more balanced model of make some money off hardware, make some money off content.
And yes, Apple sells ecosystems - but it isn't centered around iTunes. It's centered around Apple. iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac, AppleTV. It's just the current thing tying them together is iTunes. But content sales are far from a big revenue (or even profit) center - they're used to just drive sales of other stuff. What money does Apple make for a free app? $99 annually from a developer only goes so far.
I'm just surprised because a brushed motor, which I was assuming this was, acts as a feeble arc gap under normal operation; but presumably had to pass regulatory muster when first manufactured, as well as remaining efficient enough to keep the fridge running, within the power budget provided by a domestic breaker while also putting out enough RF noise to escape(usually sealed to keep the refrigerant in) coolant loop and disrupt the cell towers.
I would have expected one perturbed enough to be a regulatory issue to have popped a breaker, caught fire, or just stopped cooling beer before getting to that point.
Just a hint at how much RF you need - your cellphone (GSM) typically has a 1W transmitter. Usually, it operates at less than 250mW, and most will probably never ever exceed 500mW. That's all it takes to contact the tower.
Hell, hams have been able to hit their local repeaters with handhelds that rarely go above 5W, and most cell towers are lot closer. It doesn't take a lot of power to flood the receiver of the tower.
Anyhow, a 240V 13A socket provides over 3kW of power. The fridge motor really only needs under 1kW. A bad motor can easily drag in another 1kW and still not pop the breaker.
All one really needs to do is to enclose the motor in some fine mesh which shields the spark gap
And modern day ITU regulations prohibit operation of a spark gap transmitter because they are very wideband and interfere with lots of communications. This actually proved to be a problem when they wanted to resurrect the transmitters similar to the kind used on the Titanic - the required huge faraday cages to minimize interference.
But having said that, you only get the air temp on the floor. This does you no good w.r.t. 3D air flows where you could have bad heat traps above ground (hot air rises, yo).
How do you do it right now? I mean, if you only have one probe, it can only probe the location.
Oh right, you use multiple probes. Guess what? Roomba can have multiple probes as well - like putting them up on a pole and having and getting the temperature vs. height.
The only real difference is that Roomba can only get current temperature where it's at - everywhere else is historical temperature.
In the US, it seems to be happening automatically.
After all, you don't have 3-year contracts In the US for a long time - it's always been two years.
And lately even ETF fees have been going down across the board - I think it was Verizon who wanted to charge it all the way and they got smacked back rather badly, so now everyone uses a pro-rated system.
Cellphone unlocking - OK that's relatively new, but the ones where it matters seem to be coming around to doing it willingly as well.
It mostly came about because us Canadians got sick and jealous of you guys in the US with your freer plans.
It's a pity that the 'lighting' connector's dependence on an in-cable processor likely makes it more complex to use the old power-only mod...
You still can do it - you're working with the regular USB cable (the A plug) side still.
The coding exists on the other end and does nothing.
This hack is NOT about a charger. The hack is basically saying someone could hide a regular computer inside a charger. So when you plug into the USB plug, you're actually establishing a sync connection, not just a power connection. (Lighting to USB is actually a very basic connection that many people have reversed engineered).
Instead of being a dumb charger with a few pins pulled certain ways, you're actually plugging into a PC that says "go ahead, charge at 1A/2A" while doing stuff over USB to the attached device.
So the real issues is that these guys found a way to inject software onto it - less a charger security hole and more a regular iOS USB security hole.
Standard Oil didn't get in trouble because they had low prices, they got in trouble because they created a trust. They not only sold oil, but they either owned or controlled most of the oil transportation system. Because of that control, nobody could compete with them in the oil market because it would have been too expensive for a competitor to build their own transportation system. Therefore, competitors could not arise, and SO could in fact raise prices to very high levels.
Ebooks are not remotely like that. Sure, Amazon could drive competitors out of the ebook market by having very low prices, but as soon as they try to raise prices competitors will pop up, as it is stupidy cheap to retail ebooks.
Except by then, everyone would have been using Kindles for ebooks and have significant investments in Kindle ebooks.
Remember, books have DRM, and unless an upstart platform were to offer them DRM-free (try getting publishers onside for that), then people won't bother. The barrier to entry is extremely high and people with Kindles won't want to buy your book reader because it won't read their Kindle books.
Remember what happened a few years ago with iTunes? Prior to it going DRM-free, it was all DRM'd and even worse, no one could sell DRM music that worked on the iPod (the most popular music player at the time). Sure there were competitors, but they were related to crap "PlaysForSure" style stores who more often than not closed shop because of low traffic.
With DRM, once a platform has achieved critical mass, there's no way to break it, short of going DRM-free. It happened for music, but publishers seem reluctant to adopt that model.
And ebooks were sold prior to Amazon releasing the Kindle - Sony did it. But once the Kindle came out, it was pretty much over - the Kindle was superior - easier to get books on it (no PC required), you could get books from anywhere with 3G, etc. So it legitimately took over the market. Except the publishers (like the music industry) were getting unhappy with Amazon's tactics. Apple offered them an alternative that they readily adopted, which pressured Amazon into switching models as well. Of course, the Apple model didn't really do much - other than allow other bookstores to open (besides Amazon's store, there's also the Barnes and Noble Nook, Kobo and iBooks. Even though iBooks is probably the smallest, the fact that other stores have popped up is generally a good thing).
Of course, Amazon isn't in the clear - I come across many "kindle only" books where the author typically takes the "amazon exclusive' offer and with no print option... the only alternatives would be to do without (better) or pirate (I don't have any Kindle books).
Thunderbolt has bridge chips in it. But the real issues may be the os being able to see that new hardware and software if may be looking for stuff like com1, com2.
And does that pcie card have dos divers? windows 9x drivers? Does the serial chip work with the all Seldom used features?
Of course Thunderbolt has bridge chips - it's a different physical layer than regular PCIe. But going through a bridge is very easy for PCI/PCIe/Thunderbolt - you just do a standard memory or I/O operation. The bridge chip (which has been preprogrammed) captures the operation and forwards it on through its fabric.
As far as the system CPU knows (or anything on the main bus), it's completely transparent.
And the only PCIe drivers you need for DOS? They're in the BIOS. Part of the "Plug and Pray" deal is that the BIOS configures the PCI(e) bridges as necessary to map stuff into memory and I/O space.
Be aware that PCI has existed since the early 90s, before Win9x was even a glimmer in Gates' eye. And even during the Win9x era, most people still used DOS, and ISA was done through PCI-ISA bridges. It's also where PnP failed because one had to manually map out ISA resources so the PnP stuff in the BIOS and OS will NOT attempt to use those resources. But once all-PCI PCs debuted, it was pretty transparent.
And once configured by something (which really just involves setting up maps and IRQ mappings) - which could even be DOS application - using the hardware is actually pretty trivial - PCI is a memory and I/O mapped bus. And PCIe, to encourage adoption, is logically PCI backwards compatible, so anything that's PCI-aware can configure a PCIe device in legacy mode.
Thunderbolt may require more configuration of the bridge chips, but it really doesn't actually implement anything that isn't in the PCIe spec (hot plugging is actually in PCIe). Of course, it's an advanced PCIe feature, but it still doesn't mean you can't configure it somehow.
Of course, the REAL problem will come from the fact that PCI only has 4 interrupts that are shared. Those 4 are system dependent on how they map to the IRQ controller, so it's possible REALLY old software that assumed I/O and IRQ addresses may not work. Then again, those rarely worked beyond COM2 anyhow.
they want apps to originate from the app market, not from sites using js.
Actually, that's an old IOS bug. New iOS has web bookmarks on the home screen lauching using the Safari Nitro engine, so they're actually faster than native apps using a webview.
Reason for this is because Safari is sandboxed more heavily so it's allowed to actually bypass W^X restrictions and compile javascript to native code. Of course, the extra sandboxing is necessary for obvious reasons.
For a little while (early iOS 5 I believe) weblinks you put on the home screen didn't get the benefit of Nitro for whatever reason. This was fixed in a later version so weblinks use Nitro.
Of course, Apple has been encouraging app makers to NOT simply create a 100% webview that just loads a website. And because there's less sandboxing on apps, they don't benefit from Nitro, so they actually run slower than if they just gave the URL to their site away and have users create weblinks themselves (you can bookmark to the home screen).
Though I have said all along, if there was an airline I could walk on with my bag, go through no security checkpoint at all, sit down in a seat, and pay cash right then and there for the ride, with no id. I would fly it every time, and not worry the least bit about it.
Well, you'll probably need ID, but you can do that right now today. The flight might take longer and be a bit less comfortable (very rarely will you get even bathroom facilities), and it will cost more, but you can do that.
How? You can learn to fly a small aircraft. Takes a few weeks if you concentrate, maybe a couple of years if you're a weekend flyer. And without modifications, you can pretty much fly through the entire continental US, Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and continental South America.
Or, if you want, you can have someone else do all the hassles for you and charter a small aircraft to take you to your destination.
It costs a lot more, is a lot slower, and is subject to weather delays, and is a lot less comfortable, but it makes the journey fun. And for the most part, you just show up at the FBO, say hello, pay your fare and hop on. You can do it at your own convenience, too - very rarely are these flights scheduled. As long as it's reasonable, you can book anytime that's available.
. They probably have to shut down the scanner, remove the disk then attach it to a regular PC.
They probably upload the images to the cloud.
So if a technician needs to review the image; they have to login to a certain Dropbox account.....
Except taking out the hard drive shuts down the scanner. So now you have a huge lineup of people waiting to pass through security and the technician shut down the scanner (because without said hard drive, no new scans can be saved).
Of course, then comes the issue of credibility - and traceability. After all, if it was some no-name person, there isn't much to go on (the guys seeing the scans are separate and have no clue who is walking through). So a technician really has to be on the ball to note when some celebrity walked through. Else they have scans of people who could be fat, thin, ugly, or beautiful, or trans or whatever. Remember, all they have to go by is an illustration - the actual scan is not viewable until the drive is removed.
It's what separates the old scanners from the new - no one sees the scans - just a generic human body illustration.
My point in about value. Why do physical books cost so much? Because it cost for the materials to make them. How much does it cost for ebooks? Very fucking little. But instead of getting cheaper books, we get DRM on the ebooks and high prices.
The actual printing, distribution and warehousing of printed books is very little, actually - 10% tops in most cases.
The real cost goes towards retailer markups (Amazon etc. get them at 50% off cover price or so - it's why you can easily get them 30% off), and to the author, editor, typesetter, proofreader, cover artist, indexer, ToC-maker, registration, and other materials makers.
The writer gets you the manuscript. Just the body of the book, that's it. The editor is responsible for marking it up as appropriate (something they do very little of these days, mind you, but it could be due to shrinking margins). The typesetter is responsible for taking the manuscript and reformatting it as necessary for both print and electronic - apply publisher styles and ensuring things don't go wrong generating the "camera ready" copy. Indicies and table of contents are generated as well (you can't get page numbers until it's been typeset). Then the frontmatter and endmatter have to be generated - including sending out proofs for comments you see on the book, the author bio, the summary, a photographer to take the author photo (if one doesn't already exist in-house - even on a latest release, that photo can predate the author by many years), then it has to be registered - ISBN, Library of Congress, etc. Finally, an artist has to be commissioned to do the front cover - which is a huge marketing piece and one of the things that will get a book to leap off the shelf (books aren't judged by the cover, but the cover often gets you in the door to have a patron look inside).
And of course, moral rights means that while this is going on, the author has to approve it all.
Publishers do add a lot of value. It's not to be compared with all the work YOU do if you self-publish. Of course, when you self-publish, you also get to keep it all - rather than the puny percentage of the final sale price you get. (Remember, retailer's chunk is 50%).
Emulators are already advanced enough for anything done with windows 3.1 or dos back on pentium ones. As we move forward you will get better virtualization and emulation of that hardware. It's worth it to keep the original game data.
Not really. For the old games, you need a cycle-accurate emulator because a lot of games relied on precise timing of instructions and the busses in order to function correctly.
It's only the recent games made for super-powerful consoles (like say, a dreamcast, PS2 or Xbox era forward) that this is no longer the case as most games don't use such cycle timings. Previous generation games like the PSX would still need such techniques.
But dos and older windows 9X apps / os may not like USB to RS232 and or pci / pci-e based RS232 ports. Also VM pass though may not work 100%.
You can try running free dos / MS-DOS 7.x or 8 on newer hardware but usb may not work as well.
All serial ports from the Win9x era use PCI. Well, they use a PCI-to-ISA bridge (external), or a PCI-to-LPC (intenral) bridge.
PCIe is no different - ti's a different physical layer, but once everything is mapped correctly by the BIOS, you can use it by doing simple IN and OUT instructions like you always could. Once it is all set up (which just involves reassigning the right memory and I/O mappings into the system memory map) it's no different than if someone hung a UART off the port directly.
Hell, that's one of the fancy things with Thunderbolt - you can actually hang real PCIe devices (and thus, real serial ports) off it. No crappy USB-to-serial adapters - just a real serial port.
What makes anyone believe the TSA when they say they aren't saving the images?!
They probably are, but then again, the screens are no longer seeing actual scans - instead the computer is analyzing the image and identifying suspicious locations on a generic human illustration.
Sure they can probably save the image (probably both the illustrated version and the actual scan) but said images cannot be retrieved directly.
That's the difference in the scanners - instead of looking at actual scans, the new scanners only draw rectangles when they detect something suspicious on an illustrated human form. The screeners know where to examine the person and don't get nudie pics. At least immediately. They probably have to shut down the scanner, remove the disk then attach it to a regular PC.
The mainstream operating systems don't have ubiquitous vector scaled graphics yet, so those ultra-high PPI monitors are of little interest to me
They make text very nice - if you're using one of the high-PPI displays. Of course, only OS X seems to have the best most universal support for it - even the MBPr's 2880x1800 seems to scale nicely from 2 (virtual 1440x900) to 1.5 (virtual 1900x1200). Every other OS seems to do terrible things if you try running high PPI, but even at 1.5x scaling, the MBPr looks very "native".
Of course, the fact that it's actually downscaling the image helps - most OSes simply scale up - while OS X uses the 2x resources on a 3840x2400 framebuffer that's scaled down to 2880x1800.
I mean I'm a big proponent of embedded Linux, but I just can't understand why every big company or government that deals with embedded devices wants Java on there. I understand the need for high level APIs and using common systems, but still. Android is a monster designed for tablets and phones. If you stripped out the UI you wouldn't really have android any more. You'd just have an embedded Linux platform with a few Java APIs on top.
That isn't to say Android is useless. It's designed for tables, phones, and mobile devices. So, use it for those things. There's just no need for a headless sensor to be running so much unused crap.
Because the price difference in the end isn't that great. However, an Android developer is cheap because they're plentiful compared to strictly embedded programmers who have to write the BSP and the application layer.
Use Android and the BSP comes mostly for free,and there are thousands of Android developers willing to write your application software on the cheap. And years down the road, there will still be plenty of Android developers.
Hell, if they could convert AppleTVs to these purposes, they'd probably get iOS devs as well, purely due to numbers.
First, 100 fast chargers does not a nationwide blanket make.
It doesn't have to fully blanket the nation, just enough to get you from one station to the other.
Once you do that, there's a chance you'll have towns and cities begging Tesla to install them as well - similar to how the old rail system used to work when rail transportation was king. The towns used to fete the railway executives into building a stop in their town because it attracts people there, and with people comes money.
And since a Tesla is a luxury car, even if a station cost $1M to build, just having it could easily bring in tons of itinerant Tesla owners willing to spend some dough in town.
It's like how advertisers pay more for iOS eyeballs than Android eyeballs - because IOS users tend to buy stuff they sell. Your own little Leaf or Volt customer won't bring much money in, but richer Tesla owners?
Because Apples products are marketing and bullshit... and I don't think Apples upper managements quite realize that just yet while Steve Jobs knew it all along.
Except that isn't true - if a product was crap, but the marketing was good, it still won't sell. Because right after people realize it's crap, they post all about its crappiness. Especially these days of instant connectivity. Even minor problems that a minority of people see (see Antennagate) gets blown up.
So obviously, slick marketing only gets people In the door. And it only works once - see Windows Vista amongst other things that people say suck because of early experiences failing to meet marketing. (Or see Project Mojave, which was Microsoft's attempt to fix it). It took Microsoft to release a whole new product (Windows 7) which had minor tweaks to be a success.
And I'm sure no amount of slick marketing is getting WIndows 8 to stick.
So the fact that if iPods and iPhones and Macs were crap, they wouldn't sell well beyond the first day. Because within 5 minutes of opening the box, the first tweets about its crappiness would be splattered far and wide.
And this applies to Apple especially because any Apple story gets repeated for days on end.
Obviously, there's more to Apple than slick marketing - there's also execution. Now, Apple's hardware rarely stacks up competitively to other competitors, but slick packaging and UX tend to make it a winner amongst those who care about use cases more than numbers. Pure numbers leads to pure idiocy (remember the CPU MHz wars? Megapixel wars?) - and right now we're engaged In screen size wars with larger and larger phones being released (some with not so great screens - the SGS4 Mini with a 4.3" 540x960 display, the SGS Grand 5" 480x800 display... seriously?!). Or the fact that HTC has an accessory for your phone that's basically a dumbphone that's easier to pocket...
Crap content, crap summary, crap analysis. Jesus, is someone holding a gun to your head and FORCING you to post Apple stories? There's NO APPLE NEWS. Apple has gone quiet, as it does quite regularly, and the tech press is losing it's fucking mind.
Blame the economy. Any Apple news brings in lots of ad revenue. No Apple news brings in little.
Face it - there's no other company on earth that can bring in the crowds Apple can.
Google? Beyond Android fanboys and a tiny amount of Android haters, most people go "meh".
Microsoft? The Microsoft haters have subsided, and most people don't really care either way.
Apple? Well let's see, every Apple article attracts Apple fanboys, Apple haters (who seem to always be a steady population ever since the company was founded), Android fanboys, Android/Google haters (small).
An Apple story brings in loads of Apple fanboys, and the crowd of Apple haters (who either hate them for legitimate reasons, or irrationally hate them) who always seem to be a constant population. The population of Google haters or Microsoft haters is far lower and they don't seem to populate those articles at much.
It's the eyeballs people. Apple stories tend to attract the most because everyone descends down on them. Or, if you wanted to troll the internet, just write an Apple (non-)story.
If they only charge Tesla vehicles, that would be like building gas stations that only sell proprietary fuel for Ford vehicles. Maybe sell the juice cheaper to Tesla owners but they need to provide high current plugs for all of the major electric vehicles.
Cross-country travel is still gong to be a hard sell, tho. They're talking about 30 minutes to 50% charge. So call it an hour to 90% and 1.5 hours to 100%. And I assume they're talking about the small Tesla pack to get the best numbers. And non-Tesla vehicles will have to be charged at a more conservative rate so they're going to have people hanging around for an hour or two charging their vehicles. That's a lot of time to kill.
They're currently Tesla only as they built out the supercharger technology. In fact, supercharger Teslas used to be an option before Elon announced every Tesla would come with it.
I have no doubt Tesla will try to sell it to other car automakers - license the technology and benefit from fast-fill stations.
It's also around 40 minutes for 80% charge - as these are lithium ion batteries, 80% is around where the constant-current charge turns into constant-voltage charge, thus the last 20% takes at least another 40 minutes to an hour.
But 40 minutes isn't that long - on car trips I've seen our time spent at rest stops to easily be 30 minutes. If they put superchargers near attractions, it's possible to stop, charge and have lunch at the same time.
Yes, I know there are many folks who see a 8 hour trip and their instinct is to just hit the interstate for 8 hours and arrive there - no breaks, no rest stops, nothing. But most people prefer a far more relaxed trip - and if you have kids, stops are necessary anyways. Take a 4 person family and spending time at supercharger stations is just convenient - between lunch, toilet breaks, fresh air breaks, stretch breaks etc, it's completely adequate.
Heck, I believe there was a request for a station at the NJ turnpike, purely because it's convenient. Stop there, charge up and have lunch and return an hour later.
Usually when a country expects other countries to obey their laws, things don't work out quite so well.
Except well, Singapore has a great firewall as well, and all media is censored prior to sale. If you note, it's any site with a large number of Singaporean readers. Which means if you don't comply, they will simply cut you off at the gateway. If you have any media assets locally, they can be seized. Or if you publish anything, expect Customs ot sieze them as well.
If you're a big publisher, this is quite problematic, especially if you have related media assets like DVDs and such.
And nevermind that Singapore is a huge port into Asia and often a stopover or destination.
What most of us wanted back was the Start menu, not just the Start button. Microsoft still doesn't get it: We don't want to see or interact with Metro, at all. Ever. It has no place on the desktop.
There's a super-basic (no programs) start menu still in Windows 8 - if you right click in the lower left corner you'll get a context menu that gives you a good chunk of the stuff that's harder to find in the start screen - like easy access to the control panel and other places. It's the only way to retain your sanity on Windows 8 (I still don't know of a reliable way to get to the control panel via the Metro interface...).
Of course, my old Windows key + R, "shutdown -r -t 0" habit is well entrenched and used a lot too, from rebooting machines over RDP.
Ctrl-Alt-End takes you to the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu through RDP. You can shut down PCs and everything else through it nowadays. It's required if you want to change your password and such.
Moore's Law applies to the number of transistors in a chip. Just because you have found an increase in performance that did follow Moore's Law for a while does not mean that Moore's Law is somehow about flash memory. Therefore, when the increase no longer follows Moore's Law, it does NOT mean that Moore's Law has failed. The only thing that has failed is your own prediction that things other than the number of transistors would follow that curve.
And transistors (even floating gate ones - they're just transistors with an extra gate not attached to anything) has a strong correlation with capacity.
There are two kinds of ICs out there - pin-limited and area-limited. Pin limited ICs are your SoCs and CPUs and such - where the functionality of the entire chip is limited entirely by the number of I/O pads you can stuff on the die and the package while still maintaining adequate yields (the more I/O pads, the more chance of failure during bonding to the package - so while the silicon die may work fine, the attachment to the package didn't).
Area limited ICs are the opposite - these are where their functionality is limited purely by silicon area. The problem with making a die too big is the increased likelihood of failure caused by wafer imperfections, which decreases yields. As each wafer has a fixed area, a bigger die also reduces the number of ICs you can make from it. So bigger dies lead to lower yields due to imperfections and lower yields due to being able to make less per wafer (the fixed cost is actually pretty large compared to the processing costs).
Area-limited ICs include camera sensors (you want bigger sensors, but bigger sensors translate directly into lower yields as the sensor matrix has more imperfections ("dead pixels"), lower yields (bad sensors with too many bad pixels, and lower numbers of sensors per wafer), an higher costs (which is why a full-frame dSLR costs way more than one with an APS-sized sensor). Likewise, memory products are also area limited - because if you can use more die area, you can have a larger device. But too large means your high-cap dies are low yields and thus high prices. So to solve this, smaller transistors mean you can pack double the transistors in the same area (per Moore's law) and have practically twice the storage.
An area-limited IC tends to be very transistor-dense. A pin-limited IC tends to have hotspots of transistor density (embedded memories like caches) which comprise the vast majorities of transistors in a chip, but for the most part, what takes up space on pin-limited ICs is wiring. So much so that wiring tends to be the one spreading transistors out and making them less dense.
That said, I completely agree. We are now reporting about non-news as news?
Because Apple stories bring in ad revenue. A lot of it, in fact. If you can attract Android fanboys and Apple-haters to the mix, you can count on a good chunk of ad revenue.
So Apple non-news is the media's attempt to bring some Apple story ad revenue back.
Journalists are hurting for money too, you know,
And Apple's positioned themselves to be the "premium, but accessible" brand. Unlike Google (who simply are ho-hum because they're splashed across the vast majority of web searchines), and Samsung (who you see everywhere for everything - from lowly crap to high end smartphones and appliances).
And Google I/O was a huge bust in terms of reporting. The PS4 and Xbox One announcements tended to be yawners.
Only Apple stories can bring in crowds from Apple fanboys, Android fanboys, Apple haters, and the general public - it won't be long until even the Apple-haters have haters ("I remember when hating Apple was COOL..."). Android stories bring out some Android fanboys, and a few Apple fanboys, but otherwise not much of a stir. Microsoft stories (including Xbox) similarly - the anti-Microsoft rhetoric has died down. Even Google can't seem to pull in crowds.
Except it seems that Apple has throughout its entire life a steady supply of fans, haters, and people interested in their product.
Hell, it won't be long until you see "Tim Cook - help a starving journalist and announce *something*".
We have to spend it for it to work. We're not. That's why despite unprecedented monetary expansion we are not seeing inflation at the moment. The money is sitting in vaults (well, technically it's mostly numbers on computers, but...), it's not moving, and so virtually everything is at a standstill and will remain so unless someone figures out a way to get that money into people's hands and then out of those hands into other hands.
That is a huge problem with deflationary economies - when something that costs $1 today may cost $0.90 tomorrow - people end up hoarding the money. After all, what idiot would spend the dollar today when tomorrow they can spend 90 cents and get the same thing. Repeat "tomorrow" as forward as you want. It. Sure there will always be SOME economic activity (people need to eat, after all), and some things like rent and such are fixed (so landlords get richer because their money gets more valuable. Ironically, it also leads to rent stability because landlords won't want to evict tenants paying higher rent). And you have unemployment (because labour is a good money gets spent on).
This was a huge problem with non-fiat currency - basically the mining of gold was holding back the economy.
Of course, the reduced economic activity caused by deflation induces a recession which gets people to be even more tight-fisted.
Instead, by and large, most people are using what money they have to pay off mortgages and settle other debts.
Never a bad plan, and generally a good thing. But of course, if people aren't spending because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs and houses, it's a real danger.
Low interest rates are a blunt solution, as you're fuelling it with credit spending - while credit itself isn't a bad thing, if people are buying on credit now it just means it's artificially fueled growth.
The best solution would be to figure out why society feels unstable - if people are afraid of losing their jobs, then it leads to people hoarding and saving and reduced economic output (and ironically, more job losses as people aren't spending).
We may actually be stuck - you can't have good work without people spending money, and if people aren't spending money and generating economic activity, good work can't be produced. The only way to get a functioning economy again is to get people to earn money and spend it. Right now all that's happening is a lot of early economic expansion is being paid back, but while the money is flowing to creditors, creditors aren't spending it resulting In a stall.
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False. The iTunes store, while bringing in $1B in revenue or so, makes less money than Mac revenue by an order of magnitude. iOS revenue is even higher.
Apple sells ecosystems, but they don't concentrate on the content - the content is, however, used to sell hardware and that's where Apple makes their money. If the user decided they only wanted FREE apps, and used their own music, movies and books, Apple doesn't care because the iTunes money is really puny. (In fact, technically, free apps cost Apple money). And Apple does a lot of work for developers for that 30% - handling the payment, invoicing, hosting, taxes, etc. All a developer has to do is write the app, the description, the screenshots, and sit back and rake in the money. Apple even handles source-deductions for you. As a dev, all you do is report it on your income tax. If some state wants sales tax, Apple handles it automatically so you don't have to.
Amazon though, couldn't make money off Kindles if they allowed anyone to install anything from anywhere, which is why a Kindle is heavily locked down. Sure you can sideload books and stuff, but that stuff's free anyways. Buy content from Amazon and they're ahead. It's also why Amazon doesn't sell their tablets outside of places where you can buy their music, movies and TV content. Hell, it's why Barnes and Noble decided it would be easier to just have Google Play - because they have a more balanced model of make some money off hardware, make some money off content.
And yes, Apple sells ecosystems - but it isn't centered around iTunes. It's centered around Apple. iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac, AppleTV. It's just the current thing tying them together is iTunes. But content sales are far from a big revenue (or even profit) center - they're used to just drive sales of other stuff. What money does Apple make for a free app? $99 annually from a developer only goes so far.
Just a hint at how much RF you need - your cellphone (GSM) typically has a 1W transmitter. Usually, it operates at less than 250mW, and most will probably never ever exceed 500mW. That's all it takes to contact the tower.
Hell, hams have been able to hit their local repeaters with handhelds that rarely go above 5W, and most cell towers are lot closer. It doesn't take a lot of power to flood the receiver of the tower.
Anyhow, a 240V 13A socket provides over 3kW of power. The fridge motor really only needs under 1kW. A bad motor can easily drag in another 1kW and still not pop the breaker.
All one really needs to do is to enclose the motor in some fine mesh which shields the spark gap
And modern day ITU regulations prohibit operation of a spark gap transmitter because they are very wideband and interfere with lots of communications. This actually proved to be a problem when they wanted to resurrect the transmitters similar to the kind used on the Titanic - the required huge faraday cages to minimize interference.
How do you do it right now? I mean, if you only have one probe, it can only probe the location.
Oh right, you use multiple probes. Guess what? Roomba can have multiple probes as well - like putting them up on a pole and having and getting the temperature vs. height.
The only real difference is that Roomba can only get current temperature where it's at - everywhere else is historical temperature.
In the US, it seems to be happening automatically.
After all, you don't have 3-year contracts In the US for a long time - it's always been two years.
And lately even ETF fees have been going down across the board - I think it was Verizon who wanted to charge it all the way and they got smacked back rather badly, so now everyone uses a pro-rated system.
Cellphone unlocking - OK that's relatively new, but the ones where it matters seem to be coming around to doing it willingly as well.
It mostly came about because us Canadians got sick and jealous of you guys in the US with your freer plans.
You still can do it - you're working with the regular USB cable (the A plug) side still.
The coding exists on the other end and does nothing.
This hack is NOT about a charger. The hack is basically saying someone could hide a regular computer inside a charger. So when you plug into the USB plug, you're actually establishing a sync connection, not just a power connection. (Lighting to USB is actually a very basic connection that many people have reversed engineered).
Instead of being a dumb charger with a few pins pulled certain ways, you're actually plugging into a PC that says "go ahead, charge at 1A/2A" while doing stuff over USB to the attached device.
So the real issues is that these guys found a way to inject software onto it - less a charger security hole and more a regular iOS USB security hole.
Except by then, everyone would have been using Kindles for ebooks and have significant investments in Kindle ebooks.
Remember, books have DRM, and unless an upstart platform were to offer them DRM-free (try getting publishers onside for that), then people won't bother. The barrier to entry is extremely high and people with Kindles won't want to buy your book reader because it won't read their Kindle books.
Remember what happened a few years ago with iTunes? Prior to it going DRM-free, it was all DRM'd and even worse, no one could sell DRM music that worked on the iPod (the most popular music player at the time). Sure there were competitors, but they were related to crap "PlaysForSure" style stores who more often than not closed shop because of low traffic.
With DRM, once a platform has achieved critical mass, there's no way to break it, short of going DRM-free. It happened for music, but publishers seem reluctant to adopt that model.
And ebooks were sold prior to Amazon releasing the Kindle - Sony did it. But once the Kindle came out, it was pretty much over - the Kindle was superior - easier to get books on it (no PC required), you could get books from anywhere with 3G, etc. So it legitimately took over the market. Except the publishers (like the music industry) were getting unhappy with Amazon's tactics. Apple offered them an alternative that they readily adopted, which pressured Amazon into switching models as well. Of course, the Apple model didn't really do much - other than allow other bookstores to open (besides Amazon's store, there's also the Barnes and Noble Nook, Kobo and iBooks. Even though iBooks is probably the smallest, the fact that other stores have popped up is generally a good thing).
Of course, Amazon isn't in the clear - I come across many "kindle only" books where the author typically takes the "amazon exclusive' offer and with no print option... the only alternatives would be to do without (better) or pirate (I don't have any Kindle books).
Only for old houses. We actually have FttP and our phone has an optical terminal on it.
I'd wish we could say we got internet through it, but the Telco is only giving like 25M/512k or something over DSL over it. Nothing like FIOS or such.
Of course Thunderbolt has bridge chips - it's a different physical layer than regular PCIe. But going through a bridge is very easy for PCI/PCIe/Thunderbolt - you just do a standard memory or I/O operation. The bridge chip (which has been preprogrammed) captures the operation and forwards it on through its fabric.
As far as the system CPU knows (or anything on the main bus), it's completely transparent.
And the only PCIe drivers you need for DOS? They're in the BIOS. Part of the "Plug and Pray" deal is that the BIOS configures the PCI(e) bridges as necessary to map stuff into memory and I/O space.
Be aware that PCI has existed since the early 90s, before Win9x was even a glimmer in Gates' eye. And even during the Win9x era, most people still used DOS, and ISA was done through PCI-ISA bridges. It's also where PnP failed because one had to manually map out ISA resources so the PnP stuff in the BIOS and OS will NOT attempt to use those resources. But once all-PCI PCs debuted, it was pretty transparent.
And once configured by something (which really just involves setting up maps and IRQ mappings) - which could even be DOS application - using the hardware is actually pretty trivial - PCI is a memory and I/O mapped bus. And PCIe, to encourage adoption, is logically PCI backwards compatible, so anything that's PCI-aware can configure a PCIe device in legacy mode.
Thunderbolt may require more configuration of the bridge chips, but it really doesn't actually implement anything that isn't in the PCIe spec (hot plugging is actually in PCIe). Of course, it's an advanced PCIe feature, but it still doesn't mean you can't configure it somehow.
Of course, the REAL problem will come from the fact that PCI only has 4 interrupts that are shared. Those 4 are system dependent on how they map to the IRQ controller, so it's possible REALLY old software that assumed I/O and IRQ addresses may not work. Then again, those rarely worked beyond COM2 anyhow.
Actually, that's an old IOS bug. New iOS has web bookmarks on the home screen lauching using the Safari Nitro engine, so they're actually faster than native apps using a webview.
Reason for this is because Safari is sandboxed more heavily so it's allowed to actually bypass W^X restrictions and compile javascript to native code. Of course, the extra sandboxing is necessary for obvious reasons.
For a little while (early iOS 5 I believe) weblinks you put on the home screen didn't get the benefit of Nitro for whatever reason. This was fixed in a later version so weblinks use Nitro.
Of course, Apple has been encouraging app makers to NOT simply create a 100% webview that just loads a website. And because there's less sandboxing on apps, they don't benefit from Nitro, so they actually run slower than if they just gave the URL to their site away and have users create weblinks themselves (you can bookmark to the home screen).
The actual printing, distribution and warehousing of printed books is very little, actually - 10% tops in most cases.
The real cost goes towards retailer markups (Amazon etc. get them at 50% off cover price or so - it's why you can easily get them 30% off), and to the author, editor, typesetter, proofreader, cover artist, indexer, ToC-maker, registration, and other materials makers.
The writer gets you the manuscript. Just the body of the book, that's it. The editor is responsible for marking it up as appropriate (something they do very little of these days, mind you, but it could be due to shrinking margins). The typesetter is responsible for taking the manuscript and reformatting it as necessary for both print and electronic - apply publisher styles and ensuring things don't go wrong generating the "camera ready" copy. Indicies and table of contents are generated as well (you can't get page numbers until it's been typeset). Then the frontmatter and endmatter have to be generated - including sending out proofs for comments you see on the book, the author bio, the summary, a photographer to take the author photo (if one doesn't already exist in-house - even on a latest release, that photo can predate the author by many years), then it has to be registered - ISBN, Library of Congress, etc. Finally, an artist has to be commissioned to do the front cover - which is a huge marketing piece and one of the things that will get a book to leap off the shelf (books aren't judged by the cover, but the cover often gets you in the door to have a patron look inside).
And of course, moral rights means that while this is going on, the author has to approve it all.
Publishers do add a lot of value. It's not to be compared with all the work YOU do if you self-publish. Of course, when you self-publish, you also get to keep it all - rather than the puny percentage of the final sale price you get. (Remember, retailer's chunk is 50%).
Not really. For the old games, you need a cycle-accurate emulator because a lot of games relied on precise timing of instructions and the busses in order to function correctly.
It's only the recent games made for super-powerful consoles (like say, a dreamcast, PS2 or Xbox era forward) that this is no longer the case as most games don't use such cycle timings. Previous generation games like the PSX would still need such techniques.
All serial ports from the Win9x era use PCI. Well, they use a PCI-to-ISA bridge (external), or a PCI-to-LPC (intenral) bridge.
PCIe is no different - ti's a different physical layer, but once everything is mapped correctly by the BIOS, you can use it by doing simple IN and OUT instructions like you always could. Once it is all set up (which just involves reassigning the right memory and I/O mappings into the system memory map) it's no different than if someone hung a UART off the port directly.
Hell, that's one of the fancy things with Thunderbolt - you can actually hang real PCIe devices (and thus, real serial ports) off it. No crappy USB-to-serial adapters - just a real serial port.
They probably are, but then again, the screens are no longer seeing actual scans - instead the computer is analyzing the image and identifying suspicious locations on a generic human illustration.
Sure they can probably save the image (probably both the illustrated version and the actual scan) but said images cannot be retrieved directly.
That's the difference in the scanners - instead of looking at actual scans, the new scanners only draw rectangles when they detect something suspicious on an illustrated human form. The screeners know where to examine the person and don't get nudie pics. At least immediately. They probably have to shut down the scanner, remove the disk then attach it to a regular PC.
They make text very nice - if you're using one of the high-PPI displays. Of course, only OS X seems to have the best most universal support for it - even the MBPr's 2880x1800 seems to scale nicely from 2 (virtual 1440x900) to 1.5 (virtual 1900x1200). Every other OS seems to do terrible things if you try running high PPI, but even at 1.5x scaling, the MBPr looks very "native".
Of course, the fact that it's actually downscaling the image helps - most OSes simply scale up - while OS X uses the 2x resources on a 3840x2400 framebuffer that's scaled down to 2880x1800.
Because the price difference in the end isn't that great. However, an Android developer is cheap because they're plentiful compared to strictly embedded programmers who have to write the BSP and the application layer.
Use Android and the BSP comes mostly for free ,and there are thousands of Android developers willing to write your application software on the cheap. And years down the road, there will still be plenty of Android developers.
Hell, if they could convert AppleTVs to these purposes, they'd probably get iOS devs as well, purely due to numbers.
It doesn't have to fully blanket the nation, just enough to get you from one station to the other.
Once you do that, there's a chance you'll have towns and cities begging Tesla to install them as well - similar to how the old rail system used to work when rail transportation was king. The towns used to fete the railway executives into building a stop in their town because it attracts people there, and with people comes money.
And since a Tesla is a luxury car, even if a station cost $1M to build, just having it could easily bring in tons of itinerant Tesla owners willing to spend some dough in town.
It's like how advertisers pay more for iOS eyeballs than Android eyeballs - because IOS users tend to buy stuff they sell. Your own little Leaf or Volt customer won't bring much money in, but richer Tesla owners?
Except that isn't true - if a product was crap, but the marketing was good, it still won't sell. Because right after people realize it's crap, they post all about its crappiness. Especially these days of instant connectivity. Even minor problems that a minority of people see (see Antennagate) gets blown up.
So obviously, slick marketing only gets people In the door. And it only works once - see Windows Vista amongst other things that people say suck because of early experiences failing to meet marketing. (Or see Project Mojave, which was Microsoft's attempt to fix it). It took Microsoft to release a whole new product (Windows 7) which had minor tweaks to be a success.
And I'm sure no amount of slick marketing is getting WIndows 8 to stick.
So the fact that if iPods and iPhones and Macs were crap, they wouldn't sell well beyond the first day. Because within 5 minutes of opening the box, the first tweets about its crappiness would be splattered far and wide.
And this applies to Apple especially because any Apple story gets repeated for days on end.
Obviously, there's more to Apple than slick marketing - there's also execution. Now, Apple's hardware rarely stacks up competitively to other competitors, but slick packaging and UX tend to make it a winner amongst those who care about use cases more than numbers. Pure numbers leads to pure idiocy (remember the CPU MHz wars? Megapixel wars?) - and right now we're engaged In screen size wars with larger and larger phones being released (some with not so great screens - the SGS4 Mini with a 4.3" 540x960 display, the SGS Grand 5" 480x800 display... seriously?!). Or the fact that HTC has an accessory for your phone that's basically a dumbphone that's easier to pocket...
Blame the economy. Any Apple news brings in lots of ad revenue. No Apple news brings in little.
Face it - there's no other company on earth that can bring in the crowds Apple can.
Google? Beyond Android fanboys and a tiny amount of Android haters, most people go "meh".
Microsoft? The Microsoft haters have subsided, and most people don't really care either way.
Apple? Well let's see, every Apple article attracts Apple fanboys, Apple haters (who seem to always be a steady population ever since the company was founded), Android fanboys, Android/Google haters (small).
An Apple story brings in loads of Apple fanboys, and the crowd of Apple haters (who either hate them for legitimate reasons, or irrationally hate them) who always seem to be a constant population. The population of Google haters or Microsoft haters is far lower and they don't seem to populate those articles at much.
It's the eyeballs people. Apple stories tend to attract the most because everyone descends down on them. Or, if you wanted to troll the internet, just write an Apple (non-)story.
They're currently Tesla only as they built out the supercharger technology. In fact, supercharger Teslas used to be an option before Elon announced every Tesla would come with it.
I have no doubt Tesla will try to sell it to other car automakers - license the technology and benefit from fast-fill stations.
It's also around 40 minutes for 80% charge - as these are lithium ion batteries, 80% is around where the constant-current charge turns into constant-voltage charge, thus the last 20% takes at least another 40 minutes to an hour.
But 40 minutes isn't that long - on car trips I've seen our time spent at rest stops to easily be 30 minutes. If they put superchargers near attractions, it's possible to stop, charge and have lunch at the same time.
Yes, I know there are many folks who see a 8 hour trip and their instinct is to just hit the interstate for 8 hours and arrive there - no breaks, no rest stops, nothing. But most people prefer a far more relaxed trip - and if you have kids, stops are necessary anyways. Take a 4 person family and spending time at supercharger stations is just convenient - between lunch, toilet breaks, fresh air breaks, stretch breaks etc, it's completely adequate.
Heck, I believe there was a request for a station at the NJ turnpike, purely because it's convenient. Stop there, charge up and have lunch and return an hour later.
Except well, Singapore has a great firewall as well, and all media is censored prior to sale. If you note, it's any site with a large number of Singaporean readers. Which means if you don't comply, they will simply cut you off at the gateway. If you have any media assets locally, they can be seized. Or if you publish anything, expect Customs ot sieze them as well.
If you're a big publisher, this is quite problematic, especially if you have related media assets like DVDs and such.
And nevermind that Singapore is a huge port into Asia and often a stopover or destination.
There's a super-basic (no programs) start menu still in Windows 8 - if you right click in the lower left corner you'll get a context menu that gives you a good chunk of the stuff that's harder to find in the start screen - like easy access to the control panel and other places. It's the only way to retain your sanity on Windows 8 (I still don't know of a reliable way to get to the control panel via the Metro interface...).
Ctrl-Alt-End takes you to the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu through RDP. You can shut down PCs and everything else through it nowadays. It's required if you want to change your password and such.
And transistors (even floating gate ones - they're just transistors with an extra gate not attached to anything) has a strong correlation with capacity.
There are two kinds of ICs out there - pin-limited and area-limited. Pin limited ICs are your SoCs and CPUs and such - where the functionality of the entire chip is limited entirely by the number of I/O pads you can stuff on the die and the package while still maintaining adequate yields (the more I/O pads, the more chance of failure during bonding to the package - so while the silicon die may work fine, the attachment to the package didn't).
Area limited ICs are the opposite - these are where their functionality is limited purely by silicon area. The problem with making a die too big is the increased likelihood of failure caused by wafer imperfections, which decreases yields. As each wafer has a fixed area, a bigger die also reduces the number of ICs you can make from it. So bigger dies lead to lower yields due to imperfections and lower yields due to being able to make less per wafer (the fixed cost is actually pretty large compared to the processing costs).
Area-limited ICs include camera sensors (you want bigger sensors, but bigger sensors translate directly into lower yields as the sensor matrix has more imperfections ("dead pixels"), lower yields (bad sensors with too many bad pixels, and lower numbers of sensors per wafer), an higher costs (which is why a full-frame dSLR costs way more than one with an APS-sized sensor). Likewise, memory products are also area limited - because if you can use more die area, you can have a larger device. But too large means your high-cap dies are low yields and thus high prices. So to solve this, smaller transistors mean you can pack double the transistors in the same area (per Moore's law) and have practically twice the storage.
An area-limited IC tends to be very transistor-dense. A pin-limited IC tends to have hotspots of transistor density (embedded memories like caches) which comprise the vast majorities of transistors in a chip, but for the most part, what takes up space on pin-limited ICs is wiring. So much so that wiring tends to be the one spreading transistors out and making them less dense.
Because Apple stories bring in ad revenue. A lot of it, in fact. If you can attract Android fanboys and Apple-haters to the mix, you can count on a good chunk of ad revenue.
So Apple non-news is the media's attempt to bring some Apple story ad revenue back.
Journalists are hurting for money too, you know,
And Apple's positioned themselves to be the "premium, but accessible" brand. Unlike Google (who simply are ho-hum because they're splashed across the vast majority of web searchines), and Samsung (who you see everywhere for everything - from lowly crap to high end smartphones and appliances).
And Google I/O was a huge bust in terms of reporting. The PS4 and Xbox One announcements tended to be yawners.
Only Apple stories can bring in crowds from Apple fanboys, Android fanboys, Apple haters, and the general public - it won't be long until even the Apple-haters have haters ("I remember when hating Apple was COOL..."). Android stories bring out some Android fanboys, and a few Apple fanboys, but otherwise not much of a stir. Microsoft stories (including Xbox) similarly - the anti-Microsoft rhetoric has died down. Even Google can't seem to pull in crowds.
Except it seems that Apple has throughout its entire life a steady supply of fans, haters, and people interested in their product.
Hell, it won't be long until you see "Tim Cook - help a starving journalist and announce *something*".
That is a huge problem with deflationary economies - when something that costs $1 today may cost $0.90 tomorrow - people end up hoarding the money. After all, what idiot would spend the dollar today when tomorrow they can spend 90 cents and get the same thing. Repeat "tomorrow" as forward as you want. It. Sure there will always be SOME economic activity (people need to eat, after all), and some things like rent and such are fixed (so landlords get richer because their money gets more valuable. Ironically, it also leads to rent stability because landlords won't want to evict tenants paying higher rent). And you have unemployment (because labour is a good money gets spent on).
This was a huge problem with non-fiat currency - basically the mining of gold was holding back the economy.
Of course, the reduced economic activity caused by deflation induces a recession which gets people to be even more tight-fisted.
Never a bad plan, and generally a good thing. But of course, if people aren't spending because they're afraid they'll lose their jobs and houses, it's a real danger.
Low interest rates are a blunt solution, as you're fuelling it with credit spending - while credit itself isn't a bad thing, if people are buying on credit now it just means it's artificially fueled growth.
The best solution would be to figure out why society feels unstable - if people are afraid of losing their jobs, then it leads to people hoarding and saving and reduced economic output (and ironically, more job losses as people aren't spending).
We may actually be stuck - you can't have good work without people spending money, and if people aren't spending money and generating economic activity, good work can't be produced. The only way to get a functioning economy again is to get people to earn money and spend it. Right now all that's happening is a lot of early economic expansion is being paid back, but while the money is flowing to creditors, creditors aren't spending it resulting In a stall.