An OTA HDTV signal is about 20mbit/s. Now the rub is, most PVRs have the option to record at least two channels simultaniously. And it later needs to be read back out, then re-encoded, and written later -- real-time encoding is very, very processor intensive if you want any kind of quality. 5400 is fine for storing. It's not good for encoding/decoding simultaniously. The other thing is, budget 5400 RPM drives have smaller buffers. Which means they're going to be a lot slower for something like video.
No DVR re-encodes it. They all encode it in real time. If it's digital already (say, digital cable, satellite, ATSC), guess what? Most don't even do a thing - they record the bitstream to disk directly and play it back as-is. If it's analog, a pair of SD class encoders is nothing (analog TV is rarely HD - the only analog signals for HD I've seen are HD boxes outputting component video. In which case it's encoded by the capture box).
A 5400 RPM drive is more than sufficient for that purpose. Hell, most DVRs also have specialized filesystems that optimize for video - knowing that your video is huge long chunks, they use 1MB+ chunk sizes so fragmentation is a non-issue and can hold a decent amount of video so you're not seeking often at all.
As a tech user, I know that nearly nothing technical was invented by Apple. (Off the top of my head, I can't think of anything but I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt,)
They have improved some things a lot but their top activity is marketing. They have no doubts 'invented' some business models but their most active practice is to sell above average devices at premium prices and some car manufacturers have been doing that for decades,
True - Apple doesn't do technical innovation. They do user experience innovation though. By figuring out how a user wants to do something, they practically took it over.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they made it less technical and more usable (and produced one of the finest mobile browsers at the time when the only competitor was... Opera. IE was a neutered mess).
Apple didn't invent videochat, they just made it as simple as making a phone call - just call, and if the other end's available, a button pops up. Sure you could do it with Skype, if you had the endpoints already set up (and at the time, you were limited to chatting via the PC - skype enabled TVs not being terribly available).
Likewise with Siri - they didn't invent voice recognition/searching/etc., just a brain dead simple way to access it. Or OS X - taking the "scary" out of UNIX based OSes and overtaking traditional UNIX vendors in sales.
As for marketing - it only gets you so far. The first sale, actually. Once people find out that you sell crap products, you're pretty much not going to be able to polish a turd much more. If Macs were all flash and no substance, they wouldn't be selling tens of millions annually. (And they didn't all start selling after Windows 8, either).
Apple innovates by making technology, well, human. Though they do put a lot of dollars into some technical evolution - had the iPhone 4 not come out, we'd probably still be stuck with low-res screens everywhere (of course, there's also taking it a bit too far, like 1080p screens in 5", or 440+ DPI, well beyond "retina" for even the eagle eyed, but that's competition). But no, we're seeing scores of laptops without 1366x768 screens these days (no longer reserving the 1080p screens for the very rich).
Apple doesn't care about the tech crowd. Hell, the tech crowd has had app stores longer than Apple - Valve being a notable entrant with Steam. All Apple did was figure out how to take Steam and put it on mobile - to end up with an extremely convenient way to get apps onto the device. Hell, Amazon did the same with the Kindle - there were ebook stores and ebook readers prior to the Kindle (see Sony), but damn did Amazon make the connection that if your reader could make it possible for the user to just browse and buy the book directly... just like Apple and apps, or Steam and games.
I think Valve (the owner of Steam) are going for Linux because they are afraid Microsoft will eventually turn Windows into a "walled garden" like Apple's iOS, introduce their own application store and force out competitors like Steam.
Well, Steam's two platforms have their own stores. The Apple Mac App Store is pretty innoculous as it's filled with indie games - the AAA titles tend to be on Steam (or a reason why Apple won't be closing OS X anytime soon).
So it's prudent to have it on Linux, and because they're also one of the most well known names in online app stores (probably the second after the original Xbox Live Arcade), and one of the oldest for PCs. Put it on Linux, which has no native app store, and there's a potential market there. Remember how one of Linux's complaints is lack of commercial software? Well, Steam makes it possible. If they do a SteamBox on Linux, even better - commercial app vendors now have a configuration to target. And with its name, it'll probably be one of the app stores on Linux.
It's not an obsolete processor. It's a SoC designed for a VERY specific use case - a media player.
It's got a top-notch GPU with video decode and 3D graphics (VideoCore 4), making it ideal for media playback. Broadcom threw a lowly ARM core there to handle thee UI and other tasks (like the care and feeding of the VC4 - from network, USB, or other sources of media). For that, you don't need a high end processor, but by integrating the two, a media player only needs a single chip solution that's cheap. No need to add an external processor that would probably be overpowered for the purpose, then need to handle multiple power rails and memory and other things.
It's a very purpose build ASIC. That's why it's cheap - it was designed for a media player that costs $99 retail like a Roku or AppleTV or other media box. It's got a powerful GPU to handle the video, and a lightweight ARM to handle UI, and feeding the media to the GPU.
It's also why it can be a dog-slow processor that can still do impressive graphics at 1080p or play video at 1080p.
So, you pay $30 a month for a set of channels and watch 5 of them, with a couple you might occasionally have a look at.
Instead there's an a la carte option. Now, the cable company knows that you're willing to pay $30 a month for those 5 channels. Why would they not simply charge you $6 each?
Not only that, but all the lesser channels are starting to get some of the "prime" programming now. If you carefully observe what the stations are doing, they're evolving for the a la carte option - putting top ranked shows across the entire network, so you can't buy just one, but you have to buy them all. Maybe after a year the last season will make its way to the other channels with ads to buy the original channel, but the stations are evolving their programming.
What was once all consolidated on one main channel and 2-3 weaker channels often showing reruns and older material has devolved into all channels showing top-tier stuff and lowly reruns. Now you're not just buying History Channel, but History and H2, with little overlap in programming.
Just take a look at niche software products like Adobe's stuff or any point of sale system. The prices are high, and especially for the point of sale stuff, not that complicated in features.
POS is extremely complex. The actual adding up of costs isn't, but when calculating taxes, it's HORRENDOUSLY COMPLEX. Most stores will sell a mix of stuff that is taxed, and isn't taxed. And some places have stuff that have several taxes, fees, levies, to be applied as well.
For a small business, the register is usually programmed with several buttons to cover the tax cases (no tax, full tax, partial tax). But if you have a POS system, it's usually tied in with inventory so scanning it can retrieve the inventory record to determine what taxes it needs to apply, what fees/levies are required to be added separately, etc.
Then it's all tied in with a reporting system so you can do your business taxes and report how much tax you've collected in sales and such.
And if your store has internet sales, things get more complex still.
There is no POS software. It's a POS service product you're really buying because it's continually updated. The basic part is easy. The business logic is constantly in flux.
Once Bitcoin reaches some level of critical mass, it will attract the attention of the entrenched banking system and their lap dog regulators. If it takes outlawing the possession of graphics cards to stop mining, they'll get that law passed.
If your hard drive will serve as a bank or credit card, you are a serious threat to the banking industry.
No, the established banking system will see it as another forex system to make money on by speculating and all that.
Hell, Wall Street is probably looking at ways to set up fractional bitcoin systems so they can do HFT in bitcoins,
The only way for bitcoin to reach critical mass and attract the attention of regulators would be for those Wall Street bankers to have caused a lot of harm - either by sending so many transactions through the system that everyone hashing through gets overloaded to the point of being unable to rollback (if you're doing a trade every millisecond, and it takes 10 minutes on average to confirm a transaction, you could ptentially send 600,000 transactions through...).
Bitcoin hasn't yet attracted the attention at a high level - because it's the perfect currency to do stuff in. Banks love unregulated things, so they're going to find ways to make money through bitcoins before they're going to cry foul through a government regulator.
When the banks start offering the usual array of futures, options, trading, etc., in bitcoins, that's when regulators may start picking up on it.
Right now the problem is the increasing value of a bitcoin - at $30 each, 1 bitcoin is seriously going to overpay for a lot - I mean, if 1 bitcoin buys you a 2 year domain registration, that's about 50% more than what it would cost regularly. Or say I ran a store offering 10 music tracks per bitcoin or 2 albums. Now with it going higher, it would mean having to let customers overpay, or give them stuff they don't want (e.g., 25 tracks, or 2 albums + 5 tracks), which if you only want ONE song, is kind of annoying.
The banking system loves bitcoin. They're just trying to figure out how to exploit it to make money. And they're not going to run to any government regulator to reign in on potential windfalls.
Which is all well and good until you face another power with modern manned airplanes which have instant response time. I'm not supporting these projects, but comparing a manned fighter to a drone is pretty apples to oranges. Drones tend to occupy fairly different roles like observation and hitting motionless or slow ground targets and children.
The limit of modern fighters is the little piece of meat upfront. It requires heavy life-support equipment to be carried, can't withstand more than 9Gs for more than a few tens of seconds with assistance (the modern G-suit/helmet/mask/pressure vest ensemble gives you about a +3G tolerance increase over no assistance at all, and you can be trained to handle 5-6Gs unassisted).
So a next-gen fighter will practically be all remotely operated to enable faster and more maneuverability (the manned jet may have a pilot, but if you can turn tighter and faster than he can, you can flip the tables from pursued to pursuer)
It's basically estimated that the F-35 (and the F-22 before cancellation) would be the last generation of manned fighters around because the limits of the pilots are limiting performance and many countries will just opt to use last-gen technology while they wait for the price to come down.
The F-35 would be the computing equivalent of upgrading to an octo-core processor from a quadcore. Yes there are improvements, but the gains are getting to be fairly marginal as the bottleneck is elsewhere.
Storing passwords in readable text is a bad idea for a lot of reasons
It needs to be more than a bad idea: it needs to be illegal, and people or organizations that betray their users' trust, need to pay a price for their negligence.
One of the problems I see is if they can't be bothered to hash passwords, they probably can't be bothered to do it right despite what the law says. After all, a hashed password table is just as bad if used incompetently, maybe worse because of a false sense of security.
Thing stuff like failing to salt, using low grade hashes, etc.
At least with plain-text, it's obvious security is bad. With poorly implemented "encryption", things are worse.
these glasses are going nowhere. They look stupid so they are dead on arrival. Furthermore, they only appeal to the part of the population that already wears glasses.
The hype over these nerd glasses couldn't more clearly illustrate how out of touch dorks are with regular people.
There are several problems. If you want to talk about Glass as enabling face to face human interaction, you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face. Secondly, most people will probably notice your eyes darting about so they know you're not paying attention to them, and once that happens, they'll never believe you're paying attention unless you take the damn things off.
But I'm sure you'll find a lot of people "encouraged" to wear the glasses because they ARE a portable camera that basically records 24/7. While useful to catching crooks because basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time, and anyone who stands out will probably have multiple cameras trained on them, they also have the downside of well, everything you do would be recorded. So if you visit any sort of morally questionable establishment, it'll be recorded.
And of course, with Google Goggles, it'll all be tagged for easy searching.
I sort of agree with you, but to play devil's advocate... what if they were wrong?
Well, you'd think there would be multiple calls now, wouldn't you? I mean, MIT's not some secure facility - a gunman with a large gun would be spotted by many, and someone else would've seen it and called it in.
Plus well, there's probably some security guy there wondering where the guy is
Yes, just like all the other products on the market including the ones I mentioned. No drivers needed. So what does this do that the others do not? I'm truly interested as I use these products and am always open to alternatives or better options.
No, most of the other drives do not do that. Most are simply an HID device coupled with a hard drive. On some, you enter the code and the USB port gets activated (rip out the drive to bypass). Actually, an alarming number of these are this kind.
On others, the drive is encrypted, and the keypad or fingerprint reader is used in conjunction with software running on the host PC to decrypt it.
This one looks to do all the encryption and decryption on the device - enter the code to unlock, and it decrypts the drive. Rip the drive out and you can't bypass it as it's still encrypted. OS agnostic and everything.
Maybe to the end user, but I thought SMS was essentially free to the carrier since they piggyback in control packets that would be sent anyway.
Hint: Why is AT&T the worst carrier around? It's related to one phone's aggressive power management on the radio that was released in 2007.
The control channel is crowded, and AT&T has plenty of signal and plenty of open channel bandwidth (if you can get one of them, downloads are fast), but the control channel is full. And things don't work when the control channel is full - like calls dropping (because the phone can't contact the tower for a handoff), slow data (likewise, can't contact tower for a data channel assignment), inability to make or receive calls, and delayed texts.
The explosion of text messaging, aggressive power management on the iPhones leads to overburdened control channels that really end up wasting a lot of tower capacity. Heck, an old IM app did the same to T-Mobile - it managed to flood their towers with data connection and takedown messages that their service suffered as well.
It's why carriers set up smaller cellsites (in densely populated areas, they're often only one city block diameter), why there are Cells on Wheels near stadiums, etc - basically they offload a lot of control channel traffic onto other frequencies so the service remains up and one tower doesn't get overburdened trying to service thousands of cellphones in a small area.
SMS is "free" in the sense it's built into the protocol, but it isn't free because it does load down already busy control chanels.
And yes, it means you can DDoS a cell network if you overload all the control channels. Or jam them - one frequency takes down all phones on a tower.
It still makes no sense because with the exception of the screen it's packed with old or unreasonably spec'd hardware at a ridiculously high price compared to an Apple product (that are supposed to be high priced crap by a lot of/. opinion) that runs a full OS, plus a browser, plus a cloud, plus a lot of other things a real computer can do
Well, you can run Linux on every ChromeBook/Box out there - just flip the developer switch and install Linux.
Of course, if you're looking for a practical reason for a user who would probably want Windows or OS X.... well....
you could buy an Apple if you wanted high res, or you could buy an Ultrabook for less and get better value, for most people.
For/. though, running Linux on it would make sense, though they'd probably just get a MacBook Pro/Retina or an Ultrabook and get a better PC for not a whole lot more.
user education should be printed in all caps, bold, underlined, comic sans, etc...
At some point, unless we develop new algorithms that utterly break how current encryption algorithms behave (which I know I know, is a possibility... and of course the NSA has it already)... your weakest point is not going to be the computer. It's going to be the lackey at the front-desk happily letting a "tech" in (physically or electronically)
First off, any security system designed should account for Dancing Pigs in which security decisions should not be left up to the user because the user will always choose dancing pigs/rabbits/kittens over security basically 100% of the time. (Replace it with whatever - pr0n, pirated programs/apps, "free money", etc).
And anyone who says users should learn everything about computing before allowed in front of one - do you know everything about your car? Do you want your mechanic to be able to fix your car, or to compile and install a new Linux kernel? (Especially on your dime).
I don't see these methods as being as effective as profiling programs based on their behavior and then negating them by dangerous behaviors, not by prior encounter.
Lists are too easily subverted, not only by hacks like this, but by misidentification and other errors. As someone who recently had to re-send a large number of emails because an "anti-spam" agency mistakenly categorized my mailhost as a spam attacker, I find the many false categorizations to be as damaging as the original fear.
Well, this company sells whilelisting app services. In that customers pay them to subscribe to a whitelist of applications that can run on their PC. I'm fairly certain there are ways to install some app for LOB use as necessary.
It's not a generic solution for eveyrone, just those for a few companies paranoid about security and only wanting "their programs" running. Basically the list is small to begin with and most likely customized to the client.
Using heuristics for behavior tracking doesn't work - malware can act "pretty normal" and applications "pretty abnormal" which triggers them. For common examples - see all the times virus scanners delete some critical Windows files.
Effectively, the whitelist is a default deny for those who want it - malware can't run because they're blocked, but same as a user bringing in portable Firefox (even if Firefox is already on their PC - the PC one being signed, the portable one not signed by the proper key).
I've always wondered why jailbreaking exists. If people wanted to do whatever they wanted to their phones, why would they get an iPhone? The reason I've never even considered an iPhone is because of Apple's attitude towards it.
Because the walled garden is just one aspect of the entire thing. If you want a decent phone with a screen that's not humongous and actually usable single-handedly, your options are REALLY limited. A phone with a 4" or smaller screen on Android doesn't exist if you want a decent CPU, lots of RAM, and a high-res screen.
Basically, if you want something like a flagship Samsung Galaxy S III has but in a screen that's smaller, it doesn't exist in the Android realm.
Or perhaps the user likes the way iOS does things compared to Android. It's a phone, after all, and if the user is frustrated with Android, no amount of software freedom will convince them it's better.
Lots of reasons - the whole "software freedom" is really just a minor aspect in analyzing what device suits a user best.
Or put another why - why do people choose Windows over Linux? Why do they install Windows 7 over WIndows 8, when they can install Linux? Hell, I develop Linux code using Windows - my Linux box sits headless beside me and I use Samba and gVim/Win32 and SSH windows because I find X clunky, slow, ugly and really poor font rendering.
Jailbreaking is often a bonus, as well. 7M jailbroken iOS 6 devices is a drop compared to all the iOS devices out there.
That only happens with companies that are failing anyway. Its in nobody's interest to destroy a thriving business, or at least one that is worth more alive than dead.
It happens to everyone. Wall Street hedge fund managers feel that they're immune to things like the economy - they want their 8/10/15+% ROI damn the recession. Hell, at a time when most people would be just happy to have their investments be stable (as opposed to disappear), they still want their share of the blood.
Hell, Einhorn is trying to "unlock" the Apple's cash with a really convoluted scheme involving stock swaps and guaranteed dividends. So convoluted that the PR session he held to promote his idea that he had to explain his concept several times to various Wall Street bankers.
If it was simple, he wouldn't need to explain a thing. Yes, Wall Street plays by different rules, economic depressions included.
I'm sure this technology would get banned and made illegal before it every really took off. I mean, I could review when I was peeing when I was 13. That right there, is kiddie porn, and I need to be protected from watching my 13 year old self's private bits.
Nah. Only ones that upload to private servers will be banned - ones that use Google (e.g., Google Glass, say), will not only be allowed, they'd probably be encouraged.
After all, you may be recording your whole life, but you're also recording everyone else's lives as well. A crime happen? Well just access everyone's recorded from the area and use them to track the perp. Users who want to be walking CCTVs - now that's big brother. And everyone wants to wear one willingly.
Hell, try to convince everyone to turn away and you'll find someone curious enough to look. Trips to those shady stores or verifying if your teen really was where they said they were, or verifying alibis have suddenly turned a lot easier.
Myth 1: Intel can't make x86 power/performance competitive with ARM: Being busted as we speak.
I read the summary and the article twice. I have not found anything that said what the power consumption of this SoC is. In fact, the article gushes all about specs EXCEPT power consumption.
Are they at the 1mW/MHz level of ARMs yet or aren't they? The closest thing I cound is "Hurry Up and Get Idle" thing which doesn't tell me a thing about power.
As for A15 power guzzler, yes, it's a huge drain, but that doesn't mean you have to use where power is a concern (big.LITTLE is a way to mitigate it, but there are problems, though you can run all cores at once if you wanted). It's also a microarchitecture issue - enough such that 64-bit actually scraps a lot of things that the 32-bit ARM had purely because it doesn't work cleanly to a modern superscalar processor (e.g., conditional execution).
DRM is always user-hostile; but Nintendo's is just hilarious(even as their consoles are markedly easier to crack than Sony's or Microsoft's). Downloaded material is permanently locked to the hardware it was downloaded on. Even now that the Wii U has 'Nintendo network accounts' those are locked to the device they were created on. There is a transfer process for certain sorts of material; but it's the most ass-backwards and error-prone exercise one can imagine. Even better, the 'virtual' Wii within the Wii U, for backwards compatibility, counts as a separate device and is almost entirely non-integrated. It's just terrible at every step.
How do you propose the DRM then? Remember, it has to work even if the purchaser is a kid.
Oh, and asking a kid for any personal information, which can include a name, email address, or anything else, is illegal. Yes, you cannot ask a kid for their email address because most child privacy protection laws prohibit it. Nintendo will get in a lot of trouble otherwise. Basically the only thing you can ask them in any jurisdiction is... nothing.
And yes, a lot of their consoles are sold to children under 13, where these laws often take place. And lawyers are instantly happy to sue otherwise.
The only unique identifier available is... well, the hardware serial number, which is very ephermeral since hardware can be bought and sold, but it's the only one you've got so far...
It's licensed from Dr. Dre's line of headphones (which I believe is manufactured by Monster cable). Existing technology that they had to slap some hip guy's name on. I have it on my HP laptop and it honestly sounds pretty good as far as laptop speakers go.
Expensive headphones that sound like crap, actually - it's great if all you want to listen to are well, bass beats. That's it. You can do better for far less money. Hell, even Bose is cheaper and better audio.
But effectively, the beats is just an equalizer preset that someone characterized the device for and adjusted to get rid of tinnyness another stuff that makes mobile speakers sound like crap. And yes, it does work, sound does come out much better.
But has anyone ever actually had a warranty claim denied just because the phone is/was rooted and/or running different software?
Indeed, even HTC's own warranty statement doesn't seem to automatically exclude coverage for devices that are simply running different software.
Well, the thing is, most people do NOT file warranty claims - they go back to their carrier and ask what to do. Because what happens if you have to send the phone to HTC and then wait for them to replace it - if you're lucky, it'll take a week. Most of the time it'll take 2 or more weeks. And you'll be spending a chunk on shipping and other things to get your RMA in.
Most people will just go back to their carrier and then figure out what to do. If they broke the screen, they'd probably buy a new phone, or do an early upgrade. If it's a real fault like a bad power burron, they'd probably replace it or steer you towards the extended warranty.
About the only people who do actually claim warranties are for Apple phones - mostly because you just go into the store and they can replace it on the spot. But you can't do that at a Samsung store, a Microsoft store, or other manufacturer store.
But claiming warranty service is always a PITA - you call them up, get an RMA, ship it off, wait for it to be returned, etc. etc. etc.
Carriers often provide their own warranty and extended warranty, and have the bulk power to basically make the manufacturer responsible for it - they'd just return them back en masse and claim it against future shipments. When that happens, who broke it, etc. gets lost and a company like HTC is in no way going to be able to individually deny warranty claims because it takes too much work when you're getting 1000 phones sent back.
Most will simply be reflashed and tested - if they work, great, if not, fix it or use it for parts. Now, if it was you or I doing the whole warranty thing, maybe they'll test it and deny the claim. But when the carrier is returning thousands at a time (which could be a month or so), it's not so practical. Plus, unlike Apple, these companies NEED carrier business. If HTC started denying claims, the carrier can simply not bother to purchase HTC phones (or buy a lot less of them).
Translation: Boo-fucking-hoo. Online marketing scum have been abusing users for years, making this a retaliatory measure. Let them cry all they want, because nobody gives a shit.
Why bother using cookies? Most browsers are pretty unique and easy to fingerprint. The EFF has a site that can test that and for a good chunk of configurations, you can uniquely identify the browser.
Hell, the "Do Not Track" part of a browser should make everything generic so you can't really tell. \ Advertisers will also be strong advocates of IPv6 - IPv4 addresses are far too reused for reliable tracking, but with prefixes and even using the entire address can reliably track people.
Looking under "Drivers, FS" it would seem that the Minix developers are still focusing on keeping it compatible with qemu and virtualbox, ie, they don't expect anybody to run it on real hardware and use it for real jobs.
Well, it's a teaching OS, and if you want to teach how to write an OS, it would help to be able to not need another PC to do it on - after all, you'll build it on the host OS (Minix is self-hosting, so it could be that), but you'd rather not replace your obviously-working kernel with your test version and having to maintain a separate PC just to test with gets old, quick. Perhaps if you had automated deployment tools and all that, but it's still a huge pain. Imagine teaching it - you build and have to switch the projector to the test PC.
So it's kinda useful to have it be very compatible with VM software, especially since a student may not have access to another PC at the moment or what not.
And hell, since Minix self-hosts, it'll be doubly annoying to have to reboot your PC to do your OS course homework, then copy it out somehow to your PC to submit your work, then reboot to do your other homework. So another plus for VM support.
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No DVR re-encodes it. They all encode it in real time. If it's digital already (say, digital cable, satellite, ATSC), guess what? Most don't even do a thing - they record the bitstream to disk directly and play it back as-is. If it's analog, a pair of SD class encoders is nothing (analog TV is rarely HD - the only analog signals for HD I've seen are HD boxes outputting component video. In which case it's encoded by the capture box).
A 5400 RPM drive is more than sufficient for that purpose. Hell, most DVRs also have specialized filesystems that optimize for video - knowing that your video is huge long chunks, they use 1MB+ chunk sizes so fragmentation is a non-issue and can hold a decent amount of video so you're not seeking often at all.
True - Apple doesn't do technical innovation. They do user experience innovation though. By figuring out how a user wants to do something, they practically took it over.
Apple didn't invent the smartphone, they made it less technical and more usable (and produced one of the finest mobile browsers at the time when the only competitor was... Opera. IE was a neutered mess).
Apple didn't invent videochat, they just made it as simple as making a phone call - just call, and if the other end's available, a button pops up. Sure you could do it with Skype, if you had the endpoints already set up (and at the time, you were limited to chatting via the PC - skype enabled TVs not being terribly available).
Likewise with Siri - they didn't invent voice recognition/searching/etc., just a brain dead simple way to access it. Or OS X - taking the "scary" out of UNIX based OSes and overtaking traditional UNIX vendors in sales.
As for marketing - it only gets you so far. The first sale, actually. Once people find out that you sell crap products, you're pretty much not going to be able to polish a turd much more. If Macs were all flash and no substance, they wouldn't be selling tens of millions annually. (And they didn't all start selling after Windows 8, either).
Apple innovates by making technology, well, human. Though they do put a lot of dollars into some technical evolution - had the iPhone 4 not come out, we'd probably still be stuck with low-res screens everywhere (of course, there's also taking it a bit too far, like 1080p screens in 5", or 440+ DPI, well beyond "retina" for even the eagle eyed, but that's competition). But no, we're seeing scores of laptops without 1366x768 screens these days (no longer reserving the 1080p screens for the very rich).
Apple doesn't care about the tech crowd. Hell, the tech crowd has had app stores longer than Apple - Valve being a notable entrant with Steam. All Apple did was figure out how to take Steam and put it on mobile - to end up with an extremely convenient way to get apps onto the device. Hell, Amazon did the same with the Kindle - there were ebook stores and ebook readers prior to the Kindle (see Sony), but damn did Amazon make the connection that if your reader could make it possible for the user to just browse and buy the book directly... just like Apple and apps, or Steam and games.
Well, Steam's two platforms have their own stores. The Apple Mac App Store is pretty innoculous as it's filled with indie games - the AAA titles tend to be on Steam (or a reason why Apple won't be closing OS X anytime soon).
So it's prudent to have it on Linux, and because they're also one of the most well known names in online app stores (probably the second after the original Xbox Live Arcade), and one of the oldest for PCs. Put it on Linux, which has no native app store, and there's a potential market there. Remember how one of Linux's complaints is lack of commercial software? Well, Steam makes it possible. If they do a SteamBox on Linux, even better - commercial app vendors now have a configuration to target. And with its name, it'll probably be one of the app stores on Linux.
It's not an obsolete processor. It's a SoC designed for a VERY specific use case - a media player.
It's got a top-notch GPU with video decode and 3D graphics (VideoCore 4), making it ideal for media playback. Broadcom threw a lowly ARM core there to handle thee UI and other tasks (like the care and feeding of the VC4 - from network, USB, or other sources of media). For that, you don't need a high end processor, but by integrating the two, a media player only needs a single chip solution that's cheap. No need to add an external processor that would probably be overpowered for the purpose, then need to handle multiple power rails and memory and other things.
It's a very purpose build ASIC. That's why it's cheap - it was designed for a media player that costs $99 retail like a Roku or AppleTV or other media box. It's got a powerful GPU to handle the video, and a lightweight ARM to handle UI, and feeding the media to the GPU.
It's also why it can be a dog-slow processor that can still do impressive graphics at 1080p or play video at 1080p.
Not only that, but all the lesser channels are starting to get some of the "prime" programming now. If you carefully observe what the stations are doing, they're evolving for the a la carte option - putting top ranked shows across the entire network, so you can't buy just one, but you have to buy them all. Maybe after a year the last season will make its way to the other channels with ads to buy the original channel, but the stations are evolving their programming.
What was once all consolidated on one main channel and 2-3 weaker channels often showing reruns and older material has devolved into all channels showing top-tier stuff and lowly reruns. Now you're not just buying History Channel, but History and H2, with little overlap in programming.
POS is extremely complex. The actual adding up of costs isn't, but when calculating taxes, it's HORRENDOUSLY COMPLEX. Most stores will sell a mix of stuff that is taxed, and isn't taxed. And some places have stuff that have several taxes, fees, levies, to be applied as well.
For a small business, the register is usually programmed with several buttons to cover the tax cases (no tax, full tax, partial tax). But if you have a POS system, it's usually tied in with inventory so scanning it can retrieve the inventory record to determine what taxes it needs to apply, what fees/levies are required to be added separately, etc.
Then it's all tied in with a reporting system so you can do your business taxes and report how much tax you've collected in sales and such.
And if your store has internet sales, things get more complex still.
There is no POS software. It's a POS service product you're really buying because it's continually updated. The basic part is easy. The business logic is constantly in flux.
No, the established banking system will see it as another forex system to make money on by speculating and all that.
Hell, Wall Street is probably looking at ways to set up fractional bitcoin systems so they can do HFT in bitcoins,
The only way for bitcoin to reach critical mass and attract the attention of regulators would be for those Wall Street bankers to have caused a lot of harm - either by sending so many transactions through the system that everyone hashing through gets overloaded to the point of being unable to rollback (if you're doing a trade every millisecond, and it takes 10 minutes on average to confirm a transaction, you could ptentially send 600,000 transactions through...).
Bitcoin hasn't yet attracted the attention at a high level - because it's the perfect currency to do stuff in. Banks love unregulated things, so they're going to find ways to make money through bitcoins before they're going to cry foul through a government regulator.
When the banks start offering the usual array of futures, options, trading, etc., in bitcoins, that's when regulators may start picking up on it.
Right now the problem is the increasing value of a bitcoin - at $30 each, 1 bitcoin is seriously going to overpay for a lot - I mean, if 1 bitcoin buys you a 2 year domain registration, that's about 50% more than what it would cost regularly. Or say I ran a store offering 10 music tracks per bitcoin or 2 albums. Now with it going higher, it would mean having to let customers overpay, or give them stuff they don't want (e.g., 25 tracks, or 2 albums + 5 tracks), which if you only want ONE song, is kind of annoying.
The banking system loves bitcoin. They're just trying to figure out how to exploit it to make money. And they're not going to run to any government regulator to reign in on potential windfalls.
The limit of modern fighters is the little piece of meat upfront. It requires heavy life-support equipment to be carried, can't withstand more than 9Gs for more than a few tens of seconds with assistance (the modern G-suit/helmet/mask/pressure vest ensemble gives you about a +3G tolerance increase over no assistance at all, and you can be trained to handle 5-6Gs unassisted).
So a next-gen fighter will practically be all remotely operated to enable faster and more maneuverability (the manned jet may have a pilot, but if you can turn tighter and faster than he can, you can flip the tables from pursued to pursuer)
It's basically estimated that the F-35 (and the F-22 before cancellation) would be the last generation of manned fighters around because the limits of the pilots are limiting performance and many countries will just opt to use last-gen technology while they wait for the price to come down.
The F-35 would be the computing equivalent of upgrading to an octo-core processor from a quadcore. Yes there are improvements, but the gains are getting to be fairly marginal as the bottleneck is elsewhere.
One of the problems I see is if they can't be bothered to hash passwords, they probably can't be bothered to do it right despite what the law says. After all, a hashed password table is just as bad if used incompetently, maybe worse because of a false sense of security.
Thing stuff like failing to salt, using low grade hashes, etc.
At least with plain-text, it's obvious security is bad. With poorly implemented "encryption", things are worse.
There are several problems. If you want to talk about Glass as enabling face to face human interaction, you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face. Secondly, most people will probably notice your eyes darting about so they know you're not paying attention to them, and once that happens, they'll never believe you're paying attention unless you take the damn things off.
But I'm sure you'll find a lot of people "encouraged" to wear the glasses because they ARE a portable camera that basically records 24/7. While useful to catching crooks because basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time, and anyone who stands out will probably have multiple cameras trained on them, they also have the downside of well, everything you do would be recorded. So if you visit any sort of morally questionable establishment, it'll be recorded.
And of course, with Google Goggles, it'll all be tagged for easy searching.
Well, you'd think there would be multiple calls now, wouldn't you? I mean, MIT's not some secure facility - a gunman with a large gun would be spotted by many, and someone else would've seen it and called it in.
Plus well, there's probably some security guy there wondering where the guy is
No, most of the other drives do not do that. Most are simply an HID device coupled with a hard drive. On some, you enter the code and the USB port gets activated (rip out the drive to bypass). Actually, an alarming number of these are this kind.
On others, the drive is encrypted, and the keypad or fingerprint reader is used in conjunction with software running on the host PC to decrypt it.
This one looks to do all the encryption and decryption on the device - enter the code to unlock, and it decrypts the drive. Rip the drive out and you can't bypass it as it's still encrypted. OS agnostic and everything.
Hint: Why is AT&T the worst carrier around? It's related to one phone's aggressive power management on the radio that was released in 2007.
The control channel is crowded, and AT&T has plenty of signal and plenty of open channel bandwidth (if you can get one of them, downloads are fast), but the control channel is full. And things don't work when the control channel is full - like calls dropping (because the phone can't contact the tower for a handoff), slow data (likewise, can't contact tower for a data channel assignment), inability to make or receive calls, and delayed texts.
The explosion of text messaging, aggressive power management on the iPhones leads to overburdened control channels that really end up wasting a lot of tower capacity. Heck, an old IM app did the same to T-Mobile - it managed to flood their towers with data connection and takedown messages that their service suffered as well.
It's why carriers set up smaller cellsites (in densely populated areas, they're often only one city block diameter), why there are Cells on Wheels near stadiums, etc - basically they offload a lot of control channel traffic onto other frequencies so the service remains up and one tower doesn't get overburdened trying to service thousands of cellphones in a small area.
SMS is "free" in the sense it's built into the protocol, but it isn't free because it does load down already busy control chanels.
And yes, it means you can DDoS a cell network if you overload all the control channels. Or jam them - one frequency takes down all phones on a tower.
Well, you can run Linux on every ChromeBook/Box out there - just flip the developer switch and install Linux.
Of course, if you're looking for a practical reason for a user who would probably want Windows or OS X.... well....
you could buy an Apple if you wanted high res, or you could buy an Ultrabook for less and get better value, for most people.
For /. though, running Linux on it would make sense, though they'd probably just get a MacBook Pro/Retina or an Ultrabook and get a better PC for not a whole lot more.
First off, any security system designed should account for Dancing Pigs in which security decisions should not be left up to the user because the user will always choose dancing pigs/rabbits/kittens over security basically 100% of the time. (Replace it with whatever - pr0n, pirated programs/apps, "free money", etc).
And anyone who says users should learn everything about computing before allowed in front of one - do you know everything about your car? Do you want your mechanic to be able to fix your car, or to compile and install a new Linux kernel? (Especially on your dime).
Well, this company sells whilelisting app services. In that customers pay them to subscribe to a whitelist of applications that can run on their PC. I'm fairly certain there are ways to install some app for LOB use as necessary.
It's not a generic solution for eveyrone, just those for a few companies paranoid about security and only wanting "their programs" running. Basically the list is small to begin with and most likely customized to the client.
Using heuristics for behavior tracking doesn't work - malware can act "pretty normal" and applications "pretty abnormal" which triggers them. For common examples - see all the times virus scanners delete some critical Windows files.
Effectively, the whitelist is a default deny for those who want it - malware can't run because they're blocked, but same as a user bringing in portable Firefox (even if Firefox is already on their PC - the PC one being signed, the portable one not signed by the proper key).
Because the walled garden is just one aspect of the entire thing. If you want a decent phone with a screen that's not humongous and actually usable single-handedly, your options are REALLY limited. A phone with a 4" or smaller screen on Android doesn't exist if you want a decent CPU, lots of RAM, and a high-res screen.
Basically, if you want something like a flagship Samsung Galaxy S III has but in a screen that's smaller, it doesn't exist in the Android realm.
Or perhaps the user likes the way iOS does things compared to Android. It's a phone, after all, and if the user is frustrated with Android, no amount of software freedom will convince them it's better.
Lots of reasons - the whole "software freedom" is really just a minor aspect in analyzing what device suits a user best.
Or put another why - why do people choose Windows over Linux? Why do they install Windows 7 over WIndows 8, when they can install Linux? Hell, I develop Linux code using Windows - my Linux box sits headless beside me and I use Samba and gVim/Win32 and SSH windows because I find X clunky, slow, ugly and really poor font rendering.
Jailbreaking is often a bonus, as well. 7M jailbroken iOS 6 devices is a drop compared to all the iOS devices out there.
It happens to everyone. Wall Street hedge fund managers feel that they're immune to things like the economy - they want their 8/10/15+% ROI damn the recession. Hell, at a time when most people would be just happy to have their investments be stable (as opposed to disappear), they still want their share of the blood.
Hell, Einhorn is trying to "unlock" the Apple's cash with a really convoluted scheme involving stock swaps and guaranteed dividends. So convoluted that the PR session he held to promote his idea that he had to explain his concept several times to various Wall Street bankers.
If it was simple, he wouldn't need to explain a thing. Yes, Wall Street plays by different rules, economic depressions included.
Nah. Only ones that upload to private servers will be banned - ones that use Google (e.g., Google Glass, say), will not only be allowed, they'd probably be encouraged.
After all, you may be recording your whole life, but you're also recording everyone else's lives as well. A crime happen? Well just access everyone's recorded from the area and use them to track the perp. Users who want to be walking CCTVs - now that's big brother. And everyone wants to wear one willingly.
Hell, try to convince everyone to turn away and you'll find someone curious enough to look. Trips to those shady stores or verifying if your teen really was where they said they were, or verifying alibis have suddenly turned a lot easier.
I read the summary and the article twice. I have not found anything that said what the power consumption of this SoC is. In fact, the article gushes all about specs EXCEPT power consumption.
Are they at the 1mW/MHz level of ARMs yet or aren't they? The closest thing I cound is "Hurry Up and Get Idle" thing which doesn't tell me a thing about power.
As for A15 power guzzler, yes, it's a huge drain, but that doesn't mean you have to use where power is a concern (big.LITTLE is a way to mitigate it, but there are problems, though you can run all cores at once if you wanted). It's also a microarchitecture issue - enough such that 64-bit actually scraps a lot of things that the 32-bit ARM had purely because it doesn't work cleanly to a modern superscalar processor (e.g., conditional execution).
How do you propose the DRM then? Remember, it has to work even if the purchaser is a kid.
Oh, and asking a kid for any personal information, which can include a name, email address, or anything else, is illegal. Yes, you cannot ask a kid for their email address because most child privacy protection laws prohibit it. Nintendo will get in a lot of trouble otherwise. Basically the only thing you can ask them in any jurisdiction is... nothing.
And yes, a lot of their consoles are sold to children under 13, where these laws often take place. And lawyers are instantly happy to sue otherwise.
The only unique identifier available is... well, the hardware serial number, which is very ephermeral since hardware can be bought and sold, but it's the only one you've got so far...
Expensive headphones that sound like crap, actually - it's great if all you want to listen to are well, bass beats. That's it. You can do better for far less money. Hell, even Bose is cheaper and better audio.
But effectively, the beats is just an equalizer preset that someone characterized the device for and adjusted to get rid of tinnyness another stuff that makes mobile speakers sound like crap. And yes, it does work, sound does come out much better.
Well, the thing is, most people do NOT file warranty claims - they go back to their carrier and ask what to do. Because what happens if you have to send the phone to HTC and then wait for them to replace it - if you're lucky, it'll take a week. Most of the time it'll take 2 or more weeks. And you'll be spending a chunk on shipping and other things to get your RMA in.
Most people will just go back to their carrier and then figure out what to do. If they broke the screen, they'd probably buy a new phone, or do an early upgrade. If it's a real fault like a bad power burron, they'd probably replace it or steer you towards the extended warranty.
About the only people who do actually claim warranties are for Apple phones - mostly because you just go into the store and they can replace it on the spot. But you can't do that at a Samsung store, a Microsoft store, or other manufacturer store.
But claiming warranty service is always a PITA - you call them up, get an RMA, ship it off, wait for it to be returned, etc. etc. etc.
Carriers often provide their own warranty and extended warranty, and have the bulk power to basically make the manufacturer responsible for it - they'd just return them back en masse and claim it against future shipments. When that happens, who broke it, etc. gets lost and a company like HTC is in no way going to be able to individually deny warranty claims because it takes too much work when you're getting 1000 phones sent back.
Most will simply be reflashed and tested - if they work, great, if not, fix it or use it for parts. Now, if it was you or I doing the whole warranty thing, maybe they'll test it and deny the claim. But when the carrier is returning thousands at a time (which could be a month or so), it's not so practical. Plus, unlike Apple, these companies NEED carrier business. If HTC started denying claims, the carrier can simply not bother to purchase HTC phones (or buy a lot less of them).
Why bother using cookies? Most browsers are pretty unique and easy to fingerprint. The EFF has a site that can test that and for a good chunk of configurations, you can uniquely identify the browser.
Hell, the "Do Not Track" part of a browser should make everything generic so you can't really tell.
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Advertisers will also be strong advocates of IPv6 - IPv4 addresses are far too reused for reliable tracking, but with prefixes and even using the entire address can reliably track people.
Well, it's a teaching OS, and if you want to teach how to write an OS, it would help to be able to not need another PC to do it on - after all, you'll build it on the host OS (Minix is self-hosting, so it could be that), but you'd rather not replace your obviously-working kernel with your test version and having to maintain a separate PC just to test with gets old, quick. Perhaps if you had automated deployment tools and all that, but it's still a huge pain. Imagine teaching it - you build and have to switch the projector to the test PC.
So it's kinda useful to have it be very compatible with VM software, especially since a student may not have access to another PC at the moment or what not.
And hell, since Minix self-hosts, it'll be doubly annoying to have to reboot your PC to do your OS course homework, then copy it out somehow to your PC to submit your work, then reboot to do your other homework. So another plus for VM support.