I know they offer throw it at the ground shipping. We shipped about a dozen computers and at least half literally had the metal case warped. One had a fork lift tine driven through the box. One of our branch employees saw the UPS delivery driver throwing packages out of the truck onto the concrete. In all cases (include the fork-lift smashed one) UPS denied insurance claims because we didn't pack it well enough.
Yeah, the only real suggestion I've seen for packaging is that it must survive repeated 8 foot falls. Certainly I've not seen "must survive forklift stabbings" on the packaging guide. Though given how many times I've heard it (and probably seen it on various unboxings), makes you wonder if it's done on purpose or UPS is also a forklift driver training ground, except instead of practice pallets, they use real packages in real shipments.
Last I checked, you could go and build a Dell laptop and choose Windows 7. You may have to use the business line of laptops, but they all give that option.
And there's always Apple. Who I think still only provides Win7 drivers - I'm not sure they've got a huge demand for Win8 (though people have done Win8).
There's also a bunch of smaller builders who do Linux PCs...
2013, we now know the sales projections were conservative, and with a need to show revenue growth to investors, I'm sure Tim Cook would not announce that Apple would begin quarterly reports of software revenue (e.g. iTunes) without being certain he can produce big numbers.
iTunes sales numbers are right there in their financials. It's marked as "online services" or somesuch, and it earns a few billion dollars in revenue annually (note timespan).
Of course, those numbers pale compared to even Mac revenue numbers (order of magnitude higher).
And revenues aren't profits - no one outside Apple knows how much the iTunes store makes in profit - though I suspect it's saddled with the cost of the datacenter Apple set up and iCloud and processing fees and such.
[1]: It would be nice to have ExFAT available as sizes of disks and other items get larger, but the IFS code to handle the complexities of a modern filesystem can be larger than the rest of the DOS kernel combined.
Given the purpose of DOS is really to be a file management layer, the FS part of the DOS 'kernel' really ought to be the biggest part. After all, that's what the "disk" part of DOS is supposed to mean, contrasted with a regular OS. There's no thread handling, no memory management (beyond setting things up to access traditional DOS memory map), no exception management, no multitasking, etc. Everything other than file management has to be done by the applicatoin. Now DOS provides some basic library calls, and the BIOS provides a few more, but that's it. APIs to various hardware drives differe per device (though there are a few standard interfaces that some drivers provide).
But right now the market for hard disks is between two giants (Western Digital and Seagate) and one tiny little division of Toshiba that doesn't make much if any 3.5" models. I think we are much more likely to see oligopoly-style non-competition and thus price stability if not outright increases.
Hard drive manufacturing is difficult and expensive. You need clean rooms and specialized equipment to make platters. For a product that contains some pretty damn precise mechanical equipment, you can acquire them for under $100, retail. It's also highly commoditized, so it's no wonder competitors get gobbled up - high volumes, low profit, high barriers to entry.
Contrast this to build an SSD - all you need is a supply of flash chips (Digikey), controllers (Digikey), a circuit board (lots of vendors) and some other parts (all of which can be had from Digikey). Just ship 'em off to your favorite contract manufacturer and out comes back SSDs. It's not quite that simple, but you don't need any clean rooms or other special equipment - your friendly contract manufacturer would have all the required machines because it' used everywhere by everyone.
So that really limits how high HDD prices can go - because building an SSD is really easy compared to an HDD, and we see it in the market today where it seems everyone and their dog is making SSDs. Of course, most are crap and the entire industry is due for a shakeup where the crap guys die and the good ones gain success. Especially since modern SSDs are so fast that speed is meaningless (will you notice if an SSD gives you 500MB/sec or 450MB/sec?), so reliability is where it's at.
I'm interested to see Apple's statistics on how many will suddenly upgrade to iOS6 this week or two..
This can be interpreted in many ways.. For one, how many just really don't like their way of restricting - excluding those who accidentally upgraded btw..
Typically,just over a million devices jailbreak, going by the jailbreaker figures. This is more accurate as a bunch of devices already came with iOS6.
If we scale it per sales of devices, you would expect around 1.5M or so devices to have downloaded it over the week. Not insignificant, but not a huge number either when you consider that Apple sold probably a good 100M or so iOS devices since iOS6 was available.
Typically the jailbreak community comprises around 10% of the entire iOS population, as a rough estimate.
Of course, I'm sure a big chunk of those jailbreakers were really looking for a patched version of mobile-installer so they can run unsigned apps (aka, cracked/pirated ones). With Hackulo.us shut down, the question is whether or not it will be revived now that it's "relevant" again (lack of jailbreak on iOS6 was a part of the reason why it shut down), or if competitors like AppCake will take over (the latter has the advantage it also supports Android).
Otherwise the only way to run patched iOS6 apps was get a dev cert (a couple of companies were selling provisioning files that did this).
They said "terms of use". Use of what? If HE downloaded CCleaner files and included them with his app, then I do see problems galore. But if he did not download CCleaner files himself I do not see how he is obligated contractually to their terms. Contract Law 101.
Depends how he wrote his winapp2.ini importer. Did he use Pinform's documentation/SDK? If so, something may apply if that documentation was provided for the purpose of having users write winapp2.ini files and not for the purposes of developing a competing app.
If he wrote it by examining how users wrote their winapp2.ini files and made guesses, then he's in the clear (reverse-engineering).
If he asked for help from the community, things get trickier because now the licenses and all that are horribly tangled.
I would get a lawyer and compose a polite reply asking why they think it's a TOS violation - perhaps they thought you accessed their documentation and used it against the license?
Right now things are at the "polite" level. Asking for more information on what they think is wrong doesn't hurt, maybe even politely explaining and showing documentation you didn't violate the ToS. It could be a huge misunderstanding and they thought you took their file and used it directly, without realizing there are other sources? (And that's not secure - since that community source could involve someone uploading CCleaner's version).
The Seagate Momentus XT, when it was new, outperformed some competing -- more expensive -- SSDs in write performance. Since then, new SSDs have overtaken it again. But don't write off hybrid drives as underperforming. As the XT showed, if designed well they can be pretty remarkable.
Well, the Momentus XT is still pretty cheap - for under $150, you can get 750GB of storage with 8GB of flash storage.
I use one in a HTPC that has one SATA channel available - the flash part helps the OS get moving around, while the bulk storage holds all the recordings.
Of course, I only buy SSDs from manufacturers who make flash - Samsung, Intel. Brands like OCZ and the like just slap parts together (which is why there are dozens of SSD manufacturers. To make an SSD, you just need a company who can assemble a circuit board. To make an HDD, you need cleanrooms and fine mechanical designs).
You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs.
Unlike alcohol, there isn't a group of MADD mothers trying to guilt-trip everyone into outlawing it completely (just a group of Mormons, but they're not as loud).
Well, MADD is against drunk driving, which is an activity that one can participate in, but the consequences of which are normally borne by someone completely innocent. That's a fairly big injustice. Same goes for cellphones and driving - the user most likely will survive whatever happens, but the third party often will not. It's really a form of privatizing profit (I can drink and drive myself home, or I'm bored, let's see what's on twitter right now), and socializing risk (I won't die, most likely. Who cares about the other car or pedestrian or cyclist? They knew the risks). Of course, I'm not advocating prohibition, just prohibiition should you wish to drive.
And yes, sleepiness while driving is also a bad habit, which is also borne from our work ethic and culture, something we also need to change so the roads aren't filled with half-awake zombies. (Caffeine can help to a limited extent).
OD'ing on caffeine results in the OD'er making a (possibly one-way) trip to the ER, so the risk is borne completely by the person participating in the activity. In this case, it's perfectly acceptable - I don't care what you do to your body, as long as it doesn't affect me. Drunk driving, texting, sleepiness, they affect me as I could be the victim of your bad judgement. But OD'ing on caffeine? Not so much (except in a contrived case where you OD'd and fell dead behind the wheel and I happened to not notice you careening around the road).
Tell that to my Galaxy Nexus that's still running 4.1.1. So much for the idea that Nexus devices are on the cutting edge. They're abandoned as fast as any other phone.
Only the Verizon Nexues are "abandoned". If you got the HSPA ones, you should be at 4.2.x already.
If you're not, perhaps it's because you bought it from a carrier and have the default carrier firmware stuck to them with carrier firmware updates. In which case you need to go to Google, download the latest factory images and install them on your GNex. This will get updates as fast as Google pushes them out (the carrier ones actually have an update URL pointing somewhere else, while the Google ones point to Google).
An interesting note - when I did this, battery life shot up dramatically. The carrier GNex firmware isn't all that great.
I don't know how you guys did it but in the UK we bought the banks. We own them now. When we sell them off we will get back what we paid for them, perhaps even a bit of profit. The bailout wasn't free money, we expect a return. Of course we still had to borrow that cash so it is costing us in interest payments, but the idea that we just gave away hundreds of billions is nonsense. As an added bonus we could lean on those banks to reduce bonus payments and act responsibly. The previous administration made a start but unfortunately the current government won't carry on the policy.
Actually, the US did that too - they actually curbed a whole bunch of spending and executive pay and all that. A lot of the more solvent "banks" actually repaid their loans earlier than due because when you're owned by the government, it's not a good thing to a bank executive.
Thing is, being onthe taxpayer's dole isn't flowers and ponies - all of a sudden the remuneration packages can get reviewed, bonus packages get axed, and even worse, regulators and auditors can come sniffing around the books.
That's why the banks repaid their loans quickly - last thing they want is government auditors opening books and seeing "what went wrong" and then enacting new rules against the shenanigans they played.
Corporations that are poorly managed need to go bankrupt and the burden should not be placed on the tax payers. Yes, some people will lose their jobs. That's called life, sometimes it happens
You missed another important market - some people lose their life savings. Now, the US does not have a particularly strong social security net, so a lot of people rely on investment funded savings and investment funded retirement plans.
The problem is that these people now have to choose between food, utilities (heat/electricity/water), or a roof over their heads.
Plus, a lot of people would suddenly be in a lot more difficult positions. So you've saved the requisite amount of money to live on for 6 months in case you get laid off. So let's say you get laid off. No problem, you have a cushion of money to live on. But no, you got laid off AND your bank failed (WaMu, anyone?). Now you have no income and no money. If you were dilligent, you may have socked away money elsewhere but now you only have half the money and the real risk that they could fold too.
Yes, companies should fail. However, when you're "too big to fail" it means vital corners of the economy are interdependent. When a small business fails - OK, some people left without jobs. When a large presumably infallible company fails, it ripples throughout the economy.
If Apple failed - you'd have maybe half a million people out of work, and many more who have lost a significant chunk of their savings and pensions.
Ditto Microsoft.
But say Google failed - now you'll have ripples through the entire online economy - practically overnight there would be no more advertising (Google and all Google-owned companies like DoubleClick), and sites that relied on it would be in trouble. We saw a ripple of it a few years ago when online ad rates tanked and paywalls cropped up.
In an ideal world, businesses failing would be a neat, clean, simple affair. These days, most companies are horrendously intertwined with many other companies (two competitors may have a very incestuous relationship, for example - think beyond love/hate Apple/Google), so it becomes a very messy affair.
This is a response to both the "Buy New" and "Smaller and smaller" comments. You are both correct with regards to consumer-level point and shoots. HOWEVER, you are incorrect when it comes to DSLR cameras. Digital SLR's are expensive, and hold their value relatively well. A simple shutter malfunction, which can be repaired by Nikon (including shipping and tech-time) for $200, could save a camera that would cost $500+ to replace. Ditto with a bad button or cracked LCD. Cheap parts, which if available, could save lot of useful cameras. I own a Nikon DSLR. I know that if I ever want it fixed, I'll have to send it to Nikon, or buy a differently-broken one from eBay and hope that the local shop will be capable of fixing it. Its a shame that the parts aren't available, but I know it. I'm on the fence about this man's plight. In one hand, his industry is dying. In the other, the MFR's are purposefully putting him out of business by not providing parts.
So you do what EVERY OTHER guy is doing - you have a bunch of old broken ones as parts.
Where do you think guys like iFixit get their Mac parts? Certainly not Apple (who charges huge prices if you do not return the old part back to them). Ditto with all the other parts dealers out there - they all break down and tear apart old equipment and stock the pieces as parts for people to buy. People often scrap their old obsolete or nonfunctional equipment with them (who can offer a small reward for recycling the parts in this manner).
It also ensures that people who have really ancient equipment can get parts as well - want a part for a laptop that's 10 years old? You can buy 'em.
I mean, widespread use and access of the internet (more specifically for most people the web portion of it) is a fairly recent thing. People still can get by just fine without it.
You've ever seen what people are doing for education these days?
Homework assignments posted online, online research (one assignment from the McDonalds article on WiFi? A mock Facebook page about presidents). And let's not forget everyone's favorite teaching tool - Khan Academy and the "flip learning" where you do the KA lectures at home, and go do the homework in class.
Or the new thing - massively online open courseware, like MIT and Stanford courses.
A LOT of educational materials are posted online and a lot of stuff assumes you have it at home. All the way from elementary school through high school.
And the library? See that McDonald's article. It closes at 6PM. For a single parent, they'd get home maybe an hour before, rush their kids out to the library and try to get as much done.
Everyone keeps complaining our education methods are stuck in the 19th century - we try to evolve them (see flip learning/Khan Academy) and we have the digital divide to contend with.
You might be onto something here. I guess you could call it novel serialization. Imagine if this had occured back during the Victorian era. It might have killed literature dead in its tracks. Glad that never happened.
But at least novel serialization took place at the chapter or several chapter levels, which at least leaves a fair bit of media to go into details and other stuff.
Writing, as a medium, is a different way of expressing an idea. You could also do it with music, a movie/film, a play, video game or other medium. The thing is, they all have their unique quirks that can make one medium better than another. Too often people assume a book can be translated to a movie (it can't directly because you can do things in a book that will entertain a reader, but bore a viewer), likewise a video game and movie/book transformations. Not to say some aren't successful (See the Halo franchise - with video games and NYT bestselling books), but they are successful because they concentrate on what makes each medium special and the strengths each brings - they're not direct translations.
At the page level, all you're going to get is a Michael Bay like novel where no cut lasts longer than 3 paragraphs (seriously - watch a Michael Bay movie and you'll see no scene lasts longer than 10 seconds before you cut to a different angle), and every page would have some explosion or other.
Hell, add in some creative pagination so it always breaks off in the middle...
What I still find amazing was how fast the music industry was able to legislate DAT tape into oblivion, but they weren't able to do the same thing to MP3 players.
Well, DAT was created by a company that owned a record company, so that' was easy.
But they DID go after MP3. Remember the big ass case against Diamond (who made the Rio, which was one of the first widely available in North America)? It was a follow on to the Napster lawsuits.
Or the Apple one over "Rip Mix Burn"?
Hell, it's why the original iPod lacked the easy ability to copy music off of (ignoring the fact that the database was easier).
Plus most MP3 players at the time required a PC to operate - most DAT players were both recorders and players.
I'm currently working on a research-grade gizmo that will digitize that entire 4 GHz wide band as one entity. It's to be used for an astronomical spectrometer. It's darn near doable today, the only problem being how to get the oscilloscope companies to shake loose a few 10 Gigasample/sec A/D chips.
Dirty little secret - they don't work that way. They all interleave ADCs. They're not hoarding either because those 8GHz scopes aren't exactly big movers (they're most likely hand assembled becuase few are actually purchased), so the big companies like Analog and TI aren't likely to make just a chip for something that'll take years to sell a wafer's worth.
Given you can get 3GSPS ADCs from TI (12 bit - $2800 each in 1000 quantities. Yes, $2800), most oscilloscope vendors actually interleave them - they pipeline the clocks to the ADCs so each ADC samples at a slightly different time. Use 3 of them, and a clock with 120 degress phase outputs, and you can get 9GSPS. 4 with 90 degree offsets and it's 12GSPS.
You'll need to do a lot of front end work to calibrate the ADCs together, and ensure a stable oscillator so they all sample at the right time, but when you're talking about nearly $10K in 3 chips alone, that's not hard.
Most oscilloscopes, even the cheap 100MHz ones work this way (often a set of 4 100MSPS ADCs clocked incrementally).
The trick revolves around the ADCs sampling at a point in time and then converting the sample - they don't actually try to "catch" the analog signal.
Basically they pipeline the ADCs together because super high speed ADCs are still a rarity. And the likes of the silicon vendors is that they're not likely to hold much stock for the oscilloscope guys - a 1000 piece order will probably last a number of years so most probably just pay the single piece prices. The silicon vendors wouldn't hoard them because that costs money - they'd rather sell them, recoup the cost and do another wafer when necessary.
Well we haven't heard either company say a peep about compatibility and since we are talking about a change of arch that's pretty radical (PPC and Cell for a quad AMD with HT) I'd say the odds are poor for backwards compatibility. of course both current systems have been out so long that they are plentiful and cheap so I have a feeling both companies will tell you simply hang onto the one you have, although I kinda doubt that they will keep making the PS3 the way they made the PS2 for so long as they were never able to get the price down on the cell chip.
That said it looks like the only system that isn't gonna come with AMD this time is the Steambox, Nintendo went with an AMD GPU, the PS4 an AMD APU and the Xboxxx or whatever its called having an AMD CPU plus GPU. This will be pretty interesting and should be a boon to us PC gamers as porting between the systems should be pretty damned trivial this time, I don't know if calling these systems "octo-core" is correct though, you look at the tests of the Bulldozer arch and it really behaves more like a quad with HT than they do true cores like the Stars arch. In either case with that much horsepower we should have plenty of room for great looking and playing games, bring it on I say.
Well, the Xbox360 had limited emulation of the x86 via a highlevel emulator.
And Apple has just recently abandoned their PowerPC-on-x86 emulator as well (Rosetta). I'd say it's fairly doable as Apple had used it for a few years. Of course, it helps that the emulator only has to emulate until it hits a system call or even a library call and then switch to native execution.
The only real thing I see with the use of AMD this time around is "Xbox 2". The original Xbox was supposed to use an AMD processor (and switched to Intel at the last minute). Given all the fun exploits there were for the original Xbox, it'll be interesting to see how many of them are rapidly exploitable. Best bet is to preorder both consoles because the exploits will be fast and furious initially on rev 1.
A part of me also wonders if this is Intel's way of "saving" AMD to avoid future anti-trust lawsuits as well - give AMD a steady source of income so they can survive and keep the government of Intel's back. This pretty much gives AMD 5-7 solid years of base income to live on and survive. (After all, anti-trust regulators could require separating Intel into the "design" and "foundry" businesses, split out the patents into a third party holding company (or give them to AMD), etc... far scarier than foregoing a bit of income).
1) You don't seem to have the same Mac Pro that I do - mine has no LEDs on the DIMM cards. So maybe they revised it in a later model, made it easier to maintain. But on the 2006 one, just removing the exhaust fan (so you can dust the other side) requires about 90 minutes of work, including removing the CPU heatsinks and the *front* fan assembly.
MacPro1,1, the very first model Apple made. It was the cheapeast PC at the time - the instant you wanted dual proc, prices jumped to workstation prices and Dell, etc., charged accordingly. Even build-it-yourself wasn't that much cheaper, oddly. And no, I didn't know that there were lights on the DIMM card (not the DIMMs, but the DIMM cards) until they lit up one day and bathed the area in red light.
Then again, I didn't attempt to get it completely dust free. I was happy to clean off the dust in the front grille, blow through the fans and unleash a dust storm out the grilles and wipe down the video card and the shelf below it. The rest I've learned that it'll be back in a few days, so by the time it builds up to an impenetrable crust of dust, it's probably time to upgrade anyways.
Like now, actually, because 2GB of RAM is pathetically small and Boot Camp won't work with more due to the 32-bit EFI bugs (I use Windows with it mostly).
Don't worry, Sony will just create another "god damn fucking piece of shit oh god i hate you sony please die in a ditch" proprietary format.
This describes Apple and Microsoft, Sony by comparison follows standards...Compare and ebook readers; phones; consoles to the competition and you will find standard connectors; standard components; standard formats.
Hrm... obviously Sony fanboy there. I mean, let's see the Vita - proprietary game cards, proprietary memory cards (the are NOT memory stick, SD, or any others, you MUST buy Sony's overpriced memory - $20 for 4GB, $100 for 32GB). Never forget the thing that was UMD. Or the PSP Go, proprietary USB cable, uses Sony's M2 format cards (if you can find any...).
The Vita's is Sony's latest console. No doubt Sony will take inspiration from it for their PS4.
Hell, Nintendo consoles are probably the most "standard" - USB hard drives, SD cards...
So, assuming these things get popular, anyone sort of concerned that now everyone has a camera recording their every move 24/7? Or worse yet, it's going to be indexed an searched and tracked by Google?
Sure, crime will go down - after all, would anyone want to rob anyone where a yell would bring dozens of cameras recording someone get mugged/raped/etc on the street? Or have dozens of cameras recording every face, so you can tell when that sex offender may be breaking their conditions (in other words, a boon for law enforcement when they have dozens of cameras and angles that can pinpoint anyone at any location).
Then there's the somewhat more... private side, given there'll be dozens of cameras watching you coming out of that... adult entertainment establishment.
I'm not quite sure society is ready yet for a technology that really puts everyone in the spotlight - where there's a camera on you every moment you step outside your house. Compile the results of dozens of cameras and people would have a pretty good track of your movements even if you only appear for a few frames in every glasses. Between law enforcement, Google ad tracking, insurance companies, they'd be really interested in your whereabouts, your activities, and even what you eat and do...
The Mac Pros, or at least the 1,1 model, is not designed in a way that makes it easy to open up and dust it out. Seriously, it was a bloody nightmare trying to strip it down and put it back together, so I doubt many people would do this. Hell, I had been considering upgrading the processors, but now I think I won't, just because installing it will be such a PITA.
I just dusted mine out the other day when I had two LEDs on the motherboard light up, and all 4 DIMM lights on each DIMM card light up (yet it still worked, - go figure).
The Mac Pro is one of the easier ones to dust out - obviously you've never worked on a PC where there are billions of cables running every which way getting in your way.
Maybe if you wanted to rid yourself of every single speck of dust it's a bit more involved, but a general dusting is fairly easy and most of the surfaces are smooth and won't catch the dusting cloth.
Hell, it's actually nice to put out the air duster and not have the dust fly out in your face (given the front and back are effectively one big grille, the dust flies out that way. makes a mess on the table, but means no dust in the eye)
Dusting out a Dell... involves unplugging every SATA cable, unplugging all the power cables, and often removing other things int he way (which means unplugging more cables because well, they won't lift up because the @(#*&%@) cable isn't long enough. You'd think an OEM with full control of the case, motherboard and component layout could spec out cables to be the right length for cable management - so the SATA cable runs from the motherboard down through channels and pops out at the hard drive without excess or stretching. Power cables as well, exit te power supply, follow a nice path to the convenient connector nearby...
Re: Safari and Firefox
on
Twitter #Hacked
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· Score: 4, Informative
Workers' computers at Twitter were compromised by a java exploit. If they were running Safari it's either oooold or they were using Macs.
They'd have to be both - as in a Mac running 10.6 or earlier since Apple removed Java from the OS and blocked old versions. Heck, a couple of days ago Apple blocked ALL versions of Java (they set the minimum version to 0.0.01 above the current one - Oracle just released it that was 0.0.02 above their previous version).
Apple basically kicked Java to the curb with Flashback - they removed their version of Java from the OS (by blocking it, requiring install of the Oracle one). And the Java plugin for Safari is disabled by default - you can enable it, but I believe it disables itself automatically 30 days later, so you have to re-enable it again.
Facebook is putting their own cameras in public with built in facial recognition software. They will track everywhere you go, what you do while you're there, what you buy, what you eat, what you look at and don't buy. Every single thing you do will be logged in their databases, and then sold to... well... pretty much everyone. How much do you want to bet their biggest customer will be the federal government?
Actually, don't you mean Google Glass? After all, everyone's all revved up about these little goggles that let you stay connected and all sorts of other things. But to do these things requires the input of a camera, which Google Glass has.
It's going to be interesting when everyone's packing a camera that's recording everything 24/7. At least if excitement over Google Glass proves true that everyone would be packing them
Hell, all Facebook needs to do is add an app to it, so between Google and Facebook, they got recordings on everyone at every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, the only real suggestion I've seen for packaging is that it must survive repeated 8 foot falls. Certainly I've not seen "must survive forklift stabbings" on the packaging guide. Though given how many times I've heard it (and probably seen it on various unboxings), makes you wonder if it's done on purpose or UPS is also a forklift driver training ground, except instead of practice pallets, they use real packages in real shipments.
Buy direct with customizations.
Last I checked, you could go and build a Dell laptop and choose Windows 7. You may have to use the business line of laptops, but they all give that option.
And there's always Apple. Who I think still only provides Win7 drivers - I'm not sure they've got a huge demand for Win8 (though people have done Win8).
There's also a bunch of smaller builders who do Linux PCs...
iTunes sales numbers are right there in their financials. It's marked as "online services" or somesuch, and it earns a few billion dollars in revenue annually (note timespan).
Of course, those numbers pale compared to even Mac revenue numbers (order of magnitude higher).
And revenues aren't profits - no one outside Apple knows how much the iTunes store makes in profit - though I suspect it's saddled with the cost of the datacenter Apple set up and iCloud and processing fees and such.
Given the purpose of DOS is really to be a file management layer, the FS part of the DOS 'kernel' really ought to be the biggest part. After all, that's what the "disk" part of DOS is supposed to mean, contrasted with a regular OS. There's no thread handling, no memory management (beyond setting things up to access traditional DOS memory map), no exception management, no multitasking, etc. Everything other than file management has to be done by the applicatoin. Now DOS provides some basic library calls, and the BIOS provides a few more, but that's it. APIs to various hardware drives differe per device (though there are a few standard interfaces that some drivers provide).
Hard drive manufacturing is difficult and expensive. You need clean rooms and specialized equipment to make platters. For a product that contains some pretty damn precise mechanical equipment, you can acquire them for under $100, retail. It's also highly commoditized, so it's no wonder competitors get gobbled up - high volumes, low profit, high barriers to entry.
Contrast this to build an SSD - all you need is a supply of flash chips (Digikey), controllers (Digikey), a circuit board (lots of vendors) and some other parts (all of which can be had from Digikey). Just ship 'em off to your favorite contract manufacturer and out comes back SSDs. It's not quite that simple, but you don't need any clean rooms or other special equipment - your friendly contract manufacturer would have all the required machines because it' used everywhere by everyone.
So that really limits how high HDD prices can go - because building an SSD is really easy compared to an HDD, and we see it in the market today where it seems everyone and their dog is making SSDs. Of course, most are crap and the entire industry is due for a shakeup where the crap guys die and the good ones gain success. Especially since modern SSDs are so fast that speed is meaningless (will you notice if an SSD gives you 500MB/sec or 450MB/sec?), so reliability is where it's at.
Typically,just over a million devices jailbreak, going by the jailbreaker figures. This is more accurate as a bunch of devices already came with iOS6.
If we scale it per sales of devices, you would expect around 1.5M or so devices to have downloaded it over the week. Not insignificant, but not a huge number either when you consider that Apple sold probably a good 100M or so iOS devices since iOS6 was available.
Typically the jailbreak community comprises around 10% of the entire iOS population, as a rough estimate.
Of course, I'm sure a big chunk of those jailbreakers were really looking for a patched version of mobile-installer so they can run unsigned apps (aka, cracked/pirated ones). With Hackulo.us shut down, the question is whether or not it will be revived now that it's "relevant" again (lack of jailbreak on iOS6 was a part of the reason why it shut down), or if competitors like AppCake will take over (the latter has the advantage it also supports Android).
Otherwise the only way to run patched iOS6 apps was get a dev cert (a couple of companies were selling provisioning files that did this).
Depends how he wrote his winapp2.ini importer. Did he use Pinform's documentation/SDK? If so, something may apply if that documentation was provided for the purpose of having users write winapp2.ini files and not for the purposes of developing a competing app.
If he wrote it by examining how users wrote their winapp2.ini files and made guesses, then he's in the clear (reverse-engineering).
If he asked for help from the community, things get trickier because now the licenses and all that are horribly tangled.
I would get a lawyer and compose a polite reply asking why they think it's a TOS violation - perhaps they thought you accessed their documentation and used it against the license?
Right now things are at the "polite" level. Asking for more information on what they think is wrong doesn't hurt, maybe even politely explaining and showing documentation you didn't violate the ToS. It could be a huge misunderstanding and they thought you took their file and used it directly, without realizing there are other sources? (And that's not secure - since that community source could involve someone uploading CCleaner's version).
Well, the Momentus XT is still pretty cheap - for under $150, you can get 750GB of storage with 8GB of flash storage.
I use one in a HTPC that has one SATA channel available - the flash part helps the OS get moving around, while the bulk storage holds all the recordings.
Of course, I only buy SSDs from manufacturers who make flash - Samsung, Intel. Brands like OCZ and the like just slap parts together (which is why there are dozens of SSD manufacturers. To make an SSD, you just need a company who can assemble a circuit board. To make an HDD, you need cleanrooms and fine mechanical designs).
You can get very reliable SSDs - just see what Dell/Apple/Lenovo/etc use for their SSDs.
Well, MADD is against drunk driving, which is an activity that one can participate in, but the consequences of which are normally borne by someone completely innocent. That's a fairly big injustice. Same goes for cellphones and driving - the user most likely will survive whatever happens, but the third party often will not. It's really a form of privatizing profit (I can drink and drive myself home, or I'm bored, let's see what's on twitter right now), and socializing risk (I won't die, most likely. Who cares about the other car or pedestrian or cyclist? They knew the risks). Of course, I'm not advocating prohibition, just prohibiition should you wish to drive.
And yes, sleepiness while driving is also a bad habit, which is also borne from our work ethic and culture, something we also need to change so the roads aren't filled with half-awake zombies. (Caffeine can help to a limited extent).
OD'ing on caffeine results in the OD'er making a (possibly one-way) trip to the ER, so the risk is borne completely by the person participating in the activity. In this case, it's perfectly acceptable - I don't care what you do to your body, as long as it doesn't affect me. Drunk driving, texting, sleepiness, they affect me as I could be the victim of your bad judgement. But OD'ing on caffeine? Not so much (except in a contrived case where you OD'd and fell dead behind the wheel and I happened to not notice you careening around the road).
Only the Verizon Nexues are "abandoned". If you got the HSPA ones, you should be at 4.2.x already.
If you're not, perhaps it's because you bought it from a carrier and have the default carrier firmware stuck to them with carrier firmware updates. In which case you need to go to Google, download the latest factory images and install them on your GNex. This will get updates as fast as Google pushes them out (the carrier ones actually have an update URL pointing somewhere else, while the Google ones point to Google).
An interesting note - when I did this, battery life shot up dramatically. The carrier GNex firmware isn't all that great.
Actually, the US did that too - they actually curbed a whole bunch of spending and executive pay and all that. A lot of the more solvent "banks" actually repaid their loans earlier than due because when you're owned by the government, it's not a good thing to a bank executive.
Thing is, being onthe taxpayer's dole isn't flowers and ponies - all of a sudden the remuneration packages can get reviewed, bonus packages get axed, and even worse, regulators and auditors can come sniffing around the books.
That's why the banks repaid their loans quickly - last thing they want is government auditors opening books and seeing "what went wrong" and then enacting new rules against the shenanigans they played.
You missed another important market - some people lose their life savings. Now, the US does not have a particularly strong social security net, so a lot of people rely on investment funded savings and investment funded retirement plans.
The problem is that these people now have to choose between food, utilities (heat/electricity/water), or a roof over their heads.
Plus, a lot of people would suddenly be in a lot more difficult positions. So you've saved the requisite amount of money to live on for 6 months in case you get laid off. So let's say you get laid off. No problem, you have a cushion of money to live on. But no, you got laid off AND your bank failed (WaMu, anyone?). Now you have no income and no money. If you were dilligent, you may have socked away money elsewhere but now you only have half the money and the real risk that they could fold too.
Yes, companies should fail. However, when you're "too big to fail" it means vital corners of the economy are interdependent. When a small business fails - OK, some people left without jobs. When a large presumably infallible company fails, it ripples throughout the economy.
If Apple failed - you'd have maybe half a million people out of work, and many more who have lost a significant chunk of their savings and pensions.
Ditto Microsoft.
But say Google failed - now you'll have ripples through the entire online economy - practically overnight there would be no more advertising (Google and all Google-owned companies like DoubleClick), and sites that relied on it would be in trouble. We saw a ripple of it a few years ago when online ad rates tanked and paywalls cropped up.
In an ideal world, businesses failing would be a neat, clean, simple affair. These days, most companies are horrendously intertwined with many other companies (two competitors may have a very incestuous relationship, for example - think beyond love/hate Apple/Google), so it becomes a very messy affair.
So you do what EVERY OTHER guy is doing - you have a bunch of old broken ones as parts.
Where do you think guys like iFixit get their Mac parts? Certainly not Apple (who charges huge prices if you do not return the old part back to them). Ditto with all the other parts dealers out there - they all break down and tear apart old equipment and stock the pieces as parts for people to buy. People often scrap their old obsolete or nonfunctional equipment with them (who can offer a small reward for recycling the parts in this manner).
It also ensures that people who have really ancient equipment can get parts as well - want a part for a laptop that's 10 years old? You can buy 'em.
You've ever seen what people are doing for education these days?
Homework assignments posted online, online research (one assignment from the McDonalds article on WiFi? A mock Facebook page about presidents). And let's not forget everyone's favorite teaching tool - Khan Academy and the "flip learning" where you do the KA lectures at home, and go do the homework in class.
Or the new thing - massively online open courseware, like MIT and Stanford courses.
A LOT of educational materials are posted online and a lot of stuff assumes you have it at home. All the way from elementary school through high school.
And the library? See that McDonald's article. It closes at 6PM. For a single parent, they'd get home maybe an hour before, rush their kids out to the library and try to get as much done.
Everyone keeps complaining our education methods are stuck in the 19th century - we try to evolve them (see flip learning/Khan Academy) and we have the digital divide to contend with.
But at least novel serialization took place at the chapter or several chapter levels, which at least leaves a fair bit of media to go into details and other stuff.
Writing, as a medium, is a different way of expressing an idea. You could also do it with music, a movie/film, a play, video game or other medium. The thing is, they all have their unique quirks that can make one medium better than another. Too often people assume a book can be translated to a movie (it can't directly because you can do things in a book that will entertain a reader, but bore a viewer), likewise a video game and movie/book transformations. Not to say some aren't successful (See the Halo franchise - with video games and NYT bestselling books), but they are successful because they concentrate on what makes each medium special and the strengths each brings - they're not direct translations.
At the page level, all you're going to get is a Michael Bay like novel where no cut lasts longer than 3 paragraphs (seriously - watch a Michael Bay movie and you'll see no scene lasts longer than 10 seconds before you cut to a different angle), and every page would have some explosion or other.
Hell, add in some creative pagination so it always breaks off in the middle...
Well, DAT was created by a company that owned a record company, so that' was easy.
But they DID go after MP3. Remember the big ass case against Diamond (who made the Rio, which was one of the first widely available in North America)? It was a follow on to the Napster lawsuits.
Or the Apple one over "Rip Mix Burn"?
Hell, it's why the original iPod lacked the easy ability to copy music off of (ignoring the fact that the database was easier).
Plus most MP3 players at the time required a PC to operate - most DAT players were both recorders and players.
Because people love to put money on the line and analyzing the data before hand lets them pretend to be informed gamblers?
Betting on sport is probably as old as sport itself, as is analyzing all the data to see who has the best odds.
Dirty little secret - they don't work that way. They all interleave ADCs. They're not hoarding either because those 8GHz scopes aren't exactly big movers (they're most likely hand assembled becuase few are actually purchased), so the big companies like Analog and TI aren't likely to make just a chip for something that'll take years to sell a wafer's worth.
Given you can get 3GSPS ADCs from TI (12 bit - $2800 each in 1000 quantities. Yes, $2800), most oscilloscope vendors actually interleave them - they pipeline the clocks to the ADCs so each ADC samples at a slightly different time. Use 3 of them, and a clock with 120 degress phase outputs, and you can get 9GSPS. 4 with 90 degree offsets and it's 12GSPS.
You'll need to do a lot of front end work to calibrate the ADCs together, and ensure a stable oscillator so they all sample at the right time, but when you're talking about nearly $10K in 3 chips alone, that's not hard.
Most oscilloscopes, even the cheap 100MHz ones work this way (often a set of 4 100MSPS ADCs clocked incrementally).
The trick revolves around the ADCs sampling at a point in time and then converting the sample - they don't actually try to "catch" the analog signal.
Basically they pipeline the ADCs together because super high speed ADCs are still a rarity. And the likes of the silicon vendors is that they're not likely to hold much stock for the oscilloscope guys - a 1000 piece order will probably last a number of years so most probably just pay the single piece prices. The silicon vendors wouldn't hoard them because that costs money - they'd rather sell them, recoup the cost and do another wafer when necessary.
Well, the Xbox360 had limited emulation of the x86 via a highlevel emulator.
And Apple has just recently abandoned their PowerPC-on-x86 emulator as well (Rosetta). I'd say it's fairly doable as Apple had used it for a few years. Of course, it helps that the emulator only has to emulate until it hits a system call or even a library call and then switch to native execution.
The only real thing I see with the use of AMD this time around is "Xbox 2". The original Xbox was supposed to use an AMD processor (and switched to Intel at the last minute). Given all the fun exploits there were for the original Xbox, it'll be interesting to see how many of them are rapidly exploitable. Best bet is to preorder both consoles because the exploits will be fast and furious initially on rev 1.
A part of me also wonders if this is Intel's way of "saving" AMD to avoid future anti-trust lawsuits as well - give AMD a steady source of income so they can survive and keep the government of Intel's back. This pretty much gives AMD 5-7 solid years of base income to live on and survive. (After all, anti-trust regulators could require separating Intel into the "design" and "foundry" businesses, split out the patents into a third party holding company (or give them to AMD), etc... far scarier than foregoing a bit of income).
MacPro1,1, the very first model Apple made. It was the cheapeast PC at the time - the instant you wanted dual proc, prices jumped to workstation prices and Dell, etc., charged accordingly. Even build-it-yourself wasn't that much cheaper, oddly. And no, I didn't know that there were lights on the DIMM card (not the DIMMs, but the DIMM cards) until they lit up one day and bathed the area in red light.
Then again, I didn't attempt to get it completely dust free. I was happy to clean off the dust in the front grille, blow through the fans and unleash a dust storm out the grilles and wipe down the video card and the shelf below it. The rest I've learned that it'll be back in a few days, so by the time it builds up to an impenetrable crust of dust, it's probably time to upgrade anyways.
Like now, actually, because 2GB of RAM is pathetically small and Boot Camp won't work with more due to the 32-bit EFI bugs (I use Windows with it mostly).
Hrm... obviously Sony fanboy there. I mean, let's see the Vita - proprietary game cards, proprietary memory cards (the are NOT memory stick, SD, or any others, you MUST buy Sony's overpriced memory - $20 for 4GB, $100 for 32GB). Never forget the thing that was UMD. Or the PSP Go, proprietary USB cable, uses Sony's M2 format cards (if you can find any...).
The Vita's is Sony's latest console. No doubt Sony will take inspiration from it for their PS4.
Hell, Nintendo consoles are probably the most "standard" - USB hard drives, SD cards...
So, assuming these things get popular, anyone sort of concerned that now everyone has a camera recording their every move 24/7? Or worse yet, it's going to be indexed an searched and tracked by Google?
Sure, crime will go down - after all, would anyone want to rob anyone where a yell would bring dozens of cameras recording someone get mugged/raped/etc on the street? Or have dozens of cameras recording every face, so you can tell when that sex offender may be breaking their conditions (in other words, a boon for law enforcement when they have dozens of cameras and angles that can pinpoint anyone at any location).
Then there's the somewhat more ... private side, given there'll be dozens of cameras watching you coming out of that ... adult entertainment establishment.
I'm not quite sure society is ready yet for a technology that really puts everyone in the spotlight - where there's a camera on you every moment you step outside your house. Compile the results of dozens of cameras and people would have a pretty good track of your movements even if you only appear for a few frames in every glasses. Between law enforcement, Google ad tracking, insurance companies, they'd be really interested in your whereabouts, your activities, and even what you eat and do...
I just dusted mine out the other day when I had two LEDs on the motherboard light up, and all 4 DIMM lights on each DIMM card light up (yet it still worked, - go figure).
The Mac Pro is one of the easier ones to dust out - obviously you've never worked on a PC where there are billions of cables running every which way getting in your way.
Maybe if you wanted to rid yourself of every single speck of dust it's a bit more involved, but a general dusting is fairly easy and most of the surfaces are smooth and won't catch the dusting cloth.
Hell, it's actually nice to put out the air duster and not have the dust fly out in your face (given the front and back are effectively one big grille, the dust flies out that way. makes a mess on the table, but means no dust in the eye)
Dusting out a Dell ... involves unplugging every SATA cable, unplugging all the power cables, and often removing other things int he way (which means unplugging more cables because well, they won't lift up because the @(#*&%@) cable isn't long enough. You'd think an OEM with full control of the case, motherboard and component layout could spec out cables to be the right length for cable management - so the SATA cable runs from the motherboard down through channels and pops out at the hard drive without excess or stretching. Power cables as well, exit te power supply, follow a nice path to the convenient connector nearby...
They'd have to be both - as in a Mac running 10.6 or earlier since Apple removed Java from the OS and blocked old versions. Heck, a couple of days ago Apple blocked ALL versions of Java (they set the minimum version to 0.0.01 above the current one - Oracle just released it that was 0.0.02 above their previous version).
Apple basically kicked Java to the curb with Flashback - they removed their version of Java from the OS (by blocking it, requiring install of the Oracle one). And the Java plugin for Safari is disabled by default - you can enable it, but I believe it disables itself automatically 30 days later, so you have to re-enable it again.
Actually, don't you mean Google Glass? After all, everyone's all revved up about these little goggles that let you stay connected and all sorts of other things. But to do these things requires the input of a camera, which Google Glass has.
It's going to be interesting when everyone's packing a camera that's recording everything 24/7. At least if excitement over Google Glass proves true that everyone would be packing them
Hell, all Facebook needs to do is add an app to it, so between Google and Facebook, they got recordings on everyone at every time.