Apple and Android platforms also suffer from hacking - their piracy rates are at 60% by some: http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/7/3225154/dead-trigger-dev-interview-piracy-android-ios This does not make Windows 8 any worse than the competition. In fact, it looks somewhat better from this article because the hacks are lengthier, at least for the present.
Interesting statistic for iOS. Because the only way to pirate is to either jailbreak (~10% of iOS users jailbreak, but not all of them are pirates), or pay Apple $99/year to get a dev certificate so you can run unsigned code, that would imply his game is only interesting to those kind of users.
So either it's completely a ripoff that people aren't willing to pay for it, or being advertised on the piracy sites was some of the best marketing he got.
(And yes, for iOS 6 and iPhone 5/iPad mini/iPad 4, the only way to pirate is $99/year, so you better find 100 99 cent apps to make it worthwhile...).
They can contain a phone number, for example. Like when that Samsung bug was exposed where you dial a specific number and it factory-resets your phone. Scan the QR core, tap "go" and boom, phone's reset and you've lost all your data, games, contacts, etc.
Just do it with something like "call this number to get free minutes" or something...
According to statcounter, Android had topped iOS for half a year already, with 32% and 24% market share respectively last month.
Man, that's... awful.
For every iOS device sold, there are 3 Androids. Yet the traffic for Android devices is only 50% higher than iOS?
What are people doing with their android phones? Android should be 3 times as much usage as iOS, not 1.5 times as much... or is Android the new "featurephone"?
If you read the announcements, you will weasel words like "14nm class". The bottom line is: these are not 14nm processes. It would be more accurate to call them 20nm with FinFets. Global Foundries process does reduce some parameters from their 20nm planer but there is nothing 14nm about it.
The irony also is that it's a SoC, so most of the transistors there are NOT going to be "14nm" or "22nm" or whatever. They're going to be larger.
Why? Several things decide the size of a transistor - first, the use of the transistor - if it's an output driving several inputs, it means the transistor has to scale up to switch reasonably quickly. Ditto if the transistor has to drive a "long line" across the chip as it has to overcome capacitances and have enough current drive to overcome inductances. Power consumption reduction is achieved by making transistors smaller (because the fundamental gate capacitances and switching currents will be subsequently smaller, but it also means it will run slower - a small transistor driving a big one will take time for the drive required to overcome the bigger one's capacitances and such). But if power isn't a concern, it can run faster as well because there's less parasitics so a stronger drive will switch more quickly (a big transistor driving a small one will cause the small one to switch much quicker). Then there's the "overdrive" capability - a lot of circuits rely on geometry and current handling. Like a 6T SRAM - it's basically a couple of switching transistors (read/write, word output) followed by two back-to-back inverters (a couple of transistors each). The forward inverter has bigger transistors than the feedback inverter - when you write into the cell, the bit line overdrives it so the feedback inverter is overpowered and the forward inverter switches. After two gate times (forward and back), the value is latched. But it also means the bit line transistors are huge - they have to drive a long line and overpower a feedback inverter.
The small transistors are pretty much reserved for memory - where density of transistors is important. Density of transistors in non-memory (i.e., "random logic") parts is very low - because the problem is wiring density, not transistor density - the wires are dictating how close the transistors can be. So even on the SoC, the only small transistors would be stuff like caches and such. Everything else will be bigger because of what they're driving.
It's also quite plausible that you can die - it has happened before. People get lost, they run out of fuel, they don't have water, the temperature easily gets up into the 40-50C range and - dead.
This happened only last month when two guys working on a station got their 4WD bogged 10 miles from the homestead and tried to walk back under the hot sun. One of them died from heat and dehydration.
And then we have all the cases of people driving into lakes and other such things following their GPSes.
Nothing really new with Apple's Maps - follow a GPS blindly and it will lead you wrong eventually. Then again, it's Apple Maps, where compeittors love to make up fake nonexistent problems because they can't seem to find the billions of real ones (like this one).
Only if text gets printed 5 dots high at 1200 dpi.
Which is the problem with these "retina" displays on non-OS X - either they run 1:1 (which makes text look really damn small, and using the higher-res modes of the OS tends to screw up apps because they assumed the screen DPI was 72/96/132 fixed and don't leave enough space for the label).
The 1200dpi is because the printer can only print binary - on or off. Halftoning makes the greys and being able to control it means the variations can be more precisely controlled. In the end, the graphic itself is only printed to 300-odd DPI. Basically the printing press scales everything up so it can "retina" everything to make text super-sharp and graphics not have the "comic book" color dots.
Unfortunately, today's OSes don't really handle high-res all that well, so it's like printing a 300dpi document at 1200dpi - what you'll get is a page of 4x4 pages - each page is printed using 300dpi, and it can fit 4 inches into 1 now, resulting in being able to squeeze 16 pages onto one. Great if you're doing cheat sheets I suppose, but annoying if you have to continually use a mangifying glass to read it.
Hell - try that new HTC phone - the one that squeezes a 1080p display into 4" (400+dpi). Resolution-aware apps look great (though not so much better - the dpi is too high to be seen), but resolution unaware apps are unusable - they see a 1080p screen and still draw test 5 pixels high.
The same thing is going to happen with all online services. One day XBOX Live for the 360 will be turned off and every single game with multiplayer will break, every single thing you paid for and haven't downloaded to your HDD will be lost and all your achievements and community of friends discarded.
It's important to note why Xbox support for Xbox Live was dropped - compatibility issues were hindering the Xbos360. When there are millions of Xbox360 users on and under 1000 Xbox users on at the same time, holding back features to serve the 0.1% makes little sense. (In fact, most of that was Halo 2 which commanded a huge majority of those 1000 players - the rest of the top 10 were under 100 - usually under 50 players). And most of the Halo 2 was played on Xbox360s anyways. Plus., at that point, Halo 3 was long considered "old" so "upgrading" wasn't really a big deal.
So yes, eventually Xbox360 support for Xbox Live will be discontinued, but not before the Xbox Next is released, where it carries over everything you did before. (Yes, there will be situations where you'll have achievements that are no longer obtainable...). The question of when is easy - when the number of Xbox 360 players diminishes again to be a very small minority.
sounds to me like this GLU company will have a hard time selling their tech to new game developers.
glu will probably just use it for there own games. steam has took over for everything else.
GLU's not a huge PC developer. They are, however, huge in the mobile space - I believe they along with gameloft are some of the biggest mobile developers pre-iPhone (they made games for featurephones running Java). Post iPhone era they basically make much richer games for smartphones (iPhone and Android).
I'm guessing GameSpy is going to go into that stuff moreso than PC - there isn't much in the way of multiplayer systems on mobile - you have Gree (OpenFeint) and that's about it.
I know the summary says OS X, but this is just loading Darwin binaries. You know, Darwin, the BSD-based OS that Apple voluntarily open-sourced? I know Apple have a reputation as the next evil empire, but I think suing people for doing things that they specifically enabled with an open-source release is a bit unlikely.
It also really depends on what Apple would sue for? I mean, if you're running an OS X binary that ships with OS X, like say, iTunes or something, OK, Apple might have a reason to sue. But if you're running say, Steam for Mac OS X, what Apple could sue over would be specious, at best as there'll be very little Apple code in that binary.
Apple doesn't write the entire application suite for OS X - there's tons of little independent developers and big companies writing apps for OS X.
I have personally observed a digital camera (Nikon D200 I think), interfering with the navigation receiver on a small plane. Every time we took a picture the VOR needles would jump slightly. We were at cruise altitude and VFR so it wasn't a problem, but it would have been disturbing if it happened low on an ILS approach.
My flight instructor's cellphone rang once we landed and I was taxiing, and I ended up hearing both sides of the conversation in my headset (not a problem - ATC was quiet). Just a regular dumbphone, which rang. Plus, I can hear the GSM pings through the intercom during flight.
(Cellphone regulations on flights are actually from the FCC to prevent massive multistate DDoS - cellphones aren't supposed to see every cell tower across 4+ states, nevermind try to figure out what control channel to use).
Anyhow, the FCC envelope (emitted EM radiation vs. frequency) for avionics is much stricter than for consumer equipment (class B) and class A devices (office use only) are even looser. The FAA can really tell the FCC to sharpen up their transmission envelopes to permit this, but then it would result in howls because meeting those new envelopes is HARD. (and there's a huge swath of frequencies from 108MHz-138MHz where the allowed EM interference is so low lots of tricks are applied...). So if the FAA told the FCC that it would allow "class C" devices aboard for continuous use, practically no one would make it, and you'd have to deal with "not for use on aircraft" labelling.
The official regulations state that absent of regulations, the pilot in command has final judgement over the use of electronics. If he/she decides that no one will be allowed to use electronics at all, he's entitled to enforce that position. And his decision overrides the FAA while the plane is in flight.
Ten years ago the IEEE did a test and found some surprising things - like a certain cellphone, when left on, would cause the GPS to lose lock (not too big a deal then as GPS wasn't as essential as it today), or others would cause the compass to drift a few degress.
Yes, absolutely! Parental controls already exist on other consoles like Xbox 360 to handle exactly this sort of thing. And any minor who can bypass those controls can easily STAY UP UNTIL 11PM, making this just a bunch of completely useless pandering towards the "family values" crowd...
As Apple and everyone who has dealt with the V-Chip knows, nobody uses parental controls, even when it says so right on the box or users are forced to enable them. Parent simply hands device off to their kids and lets them play with it directly. Or they let the kid set it up. They're basically useless things that are used to show government groups that they're on top of regulations.
As for pandering to the family values group - they're pretty powerful, and really, it's "good enough". Instead of a complex setup of parental controls, it's something that works well enough, and if a family group parent complains, you can ask right back "well, why are you letting your kid stay up past 11PM?".
my MacBook Pro does an outstanding job of running Linux. You can dual boot it or run Linux in VMware or Virtual Box. No graphics card issues at all. Everything worked right out of the gate - sound, graphics, wireless, everything. If you can, try and find one a few years old. The new ones have those soldered on chips that make it impossible to upgrade. Get an SSD, take out the DVD, put in a second HD and you're off to the races.
Actually, all you need are the ones that lack the "Retina" display. Apple still makes regular plain old Macbook Pros (13" and 15") with fully upgradable everything. Just avoid the MacBook Pro with Retina display and you're fine. You don't want it anyhow - running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes. And running non-native looks ugly on any OS other than OS X (Try running 1920x1200 on it - it'll look practically native on OS X, and ugly as heck on any other OS).
So stick with the traditional line and you'll be fine. Easiest way to tell is because they still come with optical drives.
No reason to not get the latest tech, especially as Apple is still manufacturing them.
That's misunderstanding how Facebook works. Any one can wilfully choose to subscribe to his updates, so it's the same as them being public.
OK, where's the URL to the post? And remember, "public" doesn't mean signing up for an account on Facebook. I want to go to that URL and see all updates. WITHOUT creating an account, and last I checked, you can't "friend" without an account.
If I have to register, well, it's not public anymore. Because what any company can do is then create a company blog, post to it and require registration to proceed. It's the same thing - create a "public" website where all the information is hidden behind a registration wall. And hell, why can't the company ask for demographic information during registration? Even very personal details that would make most investors shy away from registering.
There are reasons why there are companies who specialize in doing nothing but spreading press releases - because they get it out there everywhere - in print, on investor sites, and in general news. These guys get the word out. Heck, a public blog site works just as well.
Of course, in this case, it's probably a misunderstanding - the poster didn't think such information could possibly be interesting to investors, just a meaningless statistic. But the SEC doesn't proactively go after companies - they work on complaints, and what happened here was some investors probably found out after the fact and it offended them because such statistics are important to see if Netflix is grown, dying, or stagnant. Hell, people were leaving Netflix in droves a few months ago due to all the changes.
Do you really need statistical methods? I mean, the vast majority of internet users use Google in some shape or form, and probably have a Google account.
Android phones account for 3/4ths of all smartphones out there, and most will also be associated with a Google account, most likely the same account as their desktop PC.
That would match a good chunk of people right there - Google's already got all that information to tie people together. Hell, Google probably knows which computers are public use by seeing how many different people login from it (made easier with IPv6 - a bit tricky with IPv4...).
Hell, Facebook's in an even better position - login from their PCs, tablets and smartphones, thus linking them all together. And I'd be surprised if Twitter didn't have such similar information as well.
The three of them together can probably positively identify who owns what devices. (I'd add Apple, but they're a minority player - an Apple ID can only identify a PC and tablet, and a minority of smartphones...).
Your choices all have the same outcome. It is not the number of american jobs that is important to the economy, it is the number of american jobs that provide a livable wage.
In a robotic plant, most of the workers are the ones who box things up at the end of the process. Usually the minimum qualifications are a high school diploma, if that. How is that a well paying job?
Unless Apple intends to pay a livable wage to its employees at these plant(s), which would mean either a significant price hike in products or a reduction in profits, all they are doing is pandering to the populus notion of buy American.
Well, manufacturing is an unskilled job for the most part. In fact, factory jobs tend to be some of the worst around because they're utterly dull, boring and uninspiring work putting tab A into slot B and doing so in 750 milliseconds or less.
Other unskilled jobs include janitorial, housekeeping, etc. These are unskilled because anyone who graduates high school has all the requisite knowledge and skill to actually perform them, and they pay low because well, anyone who walks off the street can do it.
Robotic factories require far more skilled labor - you have to have technicians who can repair the robots, highly paid engineers who have to figure out how to make the product manufacturable by robots, supervisors to handle robot emegencies (and to manage human-robot interactions), engineers or techs to program the robots, etc. These require specialized training and as such, are much higher paying jobs. But of course there are far less of them - a robot tech can service multiple robots each work shift, likewise a manufacturing engineer designs the whole thing out before production begins, etc.
It's why the average American is far more productive than their Chinese counterpart - you cannot simply move manufacturing from China to the US without redesigning your product around that fact. Because all that happens is you're replacing low-skill jobs in China with low-skill jobs in the US (most of which would actually be fulfilled by illegal immigrants and such - just like in other low skill jobs).
Apple probably will pay just over minimum wage, because really, that's all the job demands. Unless you think putting stuff in boxes demands more pay than flipping burgers, cleaning toilets or other stuff.
And knowing Apple, if you're making tons of the stuff, they probably won't have a human hand touching it - just robots all the way into sealing the box. The only humans in the actual line are probably there to keep it going - receiving parts into inventory and stocking the part carriers for the robots, and shipping out the finished pallets of product.
It's not just that browsers must wrap Safari. It's that they must use a crippled version of UIWebView, one that is much slower than Safari's Nitro engine. The result is that web pages take almost exactly double the time to load in other browsers.
That's because Nitro compiles to native code and runs it. I don't know about you, but you should have alarm bells ringing at that - remote code downloaded, compiled and executed. Forget any other security hole, this is actually a security nightmare.
On iOS, this is resolved because Safari itself runs with even less priviledges than the normal "mobile" (used for apps) user, so it's sandboxed. That way if some remote code tries to exploit a hole, the attack surface is much smaller.
Unfortunately, such things also make it useless for apps - unless your app wraps a website, there's nothing much you can do in an even more restrictive sandbox than what apps get.
Android's mechanisms could be more secure to prevent something like that from happening on that platform so regular apps can execute arbitrary code willy-nilly without problems. Though permissions to stuff like contacts and other things...
Why is it that just because a bunch of younger people have gotten used to a different way of doing things, that somehow makes the way older people do things evil, wrong, out of date, etc.? The office phone is not there so you can twit your friendface and blog the interwebs: It's there for business. It's there for all possible meanings of the phrase "your call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes." It's there because it won't shit itself when 500 people decide to visit a Youtube video about a cat. It has no dead zones, doesn't need you to take the battery out if you try to load too many apps, or the SD card wiggles loose, etc. It. Just. Works.
Businesses like things that just work. Your cell phone may be cutting edge state of the art, the thing all the cool kids are using and blah blah blah, but businesses care about those kinds of things... said no one. Ever. Businesses care about fixed costs and reliability and your cell phone won't ever have either. Configure one little thing wrong and you could be eating hundreds of dollars in overage fees... and god help you if your battery charge is running low and you're in the middle of an important call.
One reason I have an office phone is so I can use it for business purposes. I hardly ever make long distance calls (so I never use VoIP at all, including Skype), so my long distance plan is basically "none". I can make long distance calls, but they're pricey, or run down to the store to buy a long-distance prepaid card (cheaper to buy for the few times I use it versus paying for a long distance plan).
At work? I may have to call long distance for many reasons - including talking to other people, teleconferencing, etc. Company pays for the call as it's on company time (or can bill customer for it if it was customer business). I don't have to worry about getting a $200 cellphone bill nor wait the weeks for my expense report for business phone calls (which have to be scrutinized line by line) to be reimbursed.
And even at home we have a landline - again for the same reason. No worries about calls dropping (would you really want to do that job interview on a cellphone? Risking a dropped call seems pretty unnecessary...). And if the battery on the cordless gets low, I can always switch handsets (something most cellphones cannot do, still).
Yep, I don't know why browser creators don't consider this information leakage a significant bug.
Law of unintended consequences without an easy fix.
For example, browsers have long used vlink highlighting to show previously visited links, which are really handy if users have a tendency to wander. E.g., if you're just browsing Wikipedia, it's awfully nice to know if you've already seen the article it links to ahead of time. Or if it's a list of files, if you've already downloaded it before (perhaps if you're showing someone how to get said file or what file you actually used).
The question becomes though is should scripts be able to get at the DOM properties? Setting it is useful (to highlight new options for example), but getting it? Might be useful for some effects I suppose. And then once gotten, it's really just a simple XmlHttpRequest away from passing that information back to the server.
It's really nothing special other than the clever combination of several innocent features in a nefarious way. (And no one had the gal to patent it... )
How does the victim here leave for work the next day if a thief has taken their keys? Even the biggest sheep should realize that when their keys have been stolen, they might need to change their locks at home.
The right scary story here is that a thief finds your car unlocked, gets your home address (which is possible just from your tag), and immediately drives it to your house to loot it. Once that's done, they return the car to your office parking lot. Now there's not even a getaway vehicle required in the crime! Your own car will be used against you. It solves all sorts of issues. If the neighbors notice someone looting the house, the thief can tell them "I'm helping my buddy move some things, that's why he loaned me his car".
Or said theif doesn't steal keys, but merely borrows them unknowingly. So copy of key, plus address from registration (or portable GPS - I bet 99% of them have an addressbook entry named "Home", and 99% of those contain the real address!).
The latter scenario is possible too if the thief spends the time to monitor your activities to see how much time he has to drive, loot your place, and drive back (assuming they can find parking, too...).
House tip: Put about $100 in the kitchen drawer, and keep the rest of the cash in a more secure location. A thief going through your stuff will most likely find that $100 and move on. A thief who doesn't may get pissed and trash your place "just because" you made it more difficult for him and waste his time. In the latter case, he's not walking out with much, but he's making sure you're not going to have an easy time cleaning up, either. Better they get $100 in drug money than get angry and do $10,000 in willful damaes.
Wait, what? A web site can secretly access my browser history? Why does this need the FTC need to get involved, shouldn't "we" stop them by fixing the browsers?
The question becomes "how". There's a lot of tricks that's used - for example, they can use CSS and DOM inspection to see if you've visited a link before (like setting the vlink color to be different from the link color, then inspecting the DOM to see what the color of the link is). Of course, the browser can hide visited links from you the user by making sure the attributes are the same, but seeing links that are in your history can be extremely useful.
The browser doesn't allow direct access to the history, but there are various tricks used to achieve the same effect
It is impossible to do what we have been doing with PCs.
To be more correct, the PC is really just ONE platform, while ARM SoCs form many.
E.g., in a PC, the memory will ALWAYS be in the same location, the BIOS will ALWAYS be in the same location as well. Once you have those two basics out of the way, it's trivial to figure out where stuff like video adapters are (which happen to be in the same spot for a basic console, as well). PCI enumeration and assignment (which relies on the PCI bridge being in the same spot, as well as stuff like keyboard controllers and all that having the same I/O map).
When stuff's in the same location, it's easy.
With ARM, that's like everyone agreeing to use say, Samsung SoC's for the next 30 years and making sure Samsung's SoCs remain backwards compatible w.r.t. memory maps.
After all, you can still boot DOS on a modern PC these days, If the memory map changed, or even if the memory is not in the same spot as it was before, that won't work as the link addresses are all wrong.
Linux uses device trees for ARM, which is a hack to try to get the same thing on ARM SoCs, but the problem there is things like DMA controllers aren't the same, memory controllers vary, etc. And of course, where one chip can have memory starting at 0x80000000, others can have it at 0x40000000, or 0xC0000000...
Whenever companies like Facebook or Google do things with our data that raise serious privacy concerns, the majority of slashdotters' reaction is "meh, if you don't like it, then don't use it." Oh the irony that you complain about this then.
Probably because Facebook and Google don't log SMSes (well, Google does if you use Google Voice). So the police already know they can get at all that data in your Facebook/Google account, but they don't have anything if you text.
If Google managed to log all SMSes as well, the police probably wouldn't bother asking for text logs anyhow - getting it form Google is easier.
Yes and no. Moore's law states that the number of transistors will double every 2 years. The problem is that we are nearing the peak of what is possible with current technology in a single core, hence all the focus on 4,6,8, and even 16 core systems for consumers (always been popular in supercomputers and the like). That means doubling transistor count every 2 years can be done through increasing cores... but there is no point in doing that if programs can only use a few of them (very few consumers now need 4 cores, much less 8 or 16).
Except... the number of transistors in a CPU is irrelevant!
A CPU doesn't have the transistor density that really benefits much from Moore's Law - because the vast majority of the space on a chip is not taken up by transistors, but by wiring. In fact, the wiring density is what's limiting transistor density (a good thing - larger transistors can give you better performance because they can drive the longer wires quicker).
Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).
The thing with the highest transistor density (and thus the most benefit of Moore's Law) is actually memory structures - caches, DRAM, SRAM, flash memory, etc. This is where each transistor is vital to memory storage and packing them in close means more storage is available, in which case Moore's law states that RAM etc. will double in capacity or halve in cost every 18 months or so.
Smaller transistors do help CPUs consume a little less power, but double the number of transistors doesn't do a whole lot because there's a lot of empty space that the wiring forces to be transistor-free. (Non-memory parts of the CPU are effectively "random logic" where there's no rhyme or reason to the wiring). It's why the caches have the most transistors yet take the smallest areas.
That is because of the standards being reliant on patent technology. FRAND be damned. That whole concept needs to go away in standards. It isn't a standard if the barrier to entry is that minefield.
Well, the 3GPP went the other way compared to the MPEG association. With MPEG, you can license EVERY h.264 patent you need by paying the fixed fee schedule offered by the MPEG Licensing Authority (aka MPEG-LA).
Of course, people dislike the patent pool idea as well because it offers no flexibility. Like how consumer camcorders are licensed for h.264 personal use licenses - you can't make a movie you intend to sell (though there are plenty of people who violate this rule - a lot of original content on YouTube uses consumer level gear with the personal use license but the content is paid for by ads to the creator). It also results in stuff like "The output of this program may not be used for professional or commercial projects without payment of additional licensing fees".
OTOH, it makes acquiring every patent MUCH easier - just pay the fee, you're home free.
The reason the 3GPP went with the "you must license with everyone" model is because the spec includes a ton of stuff that's optional and stuff not needed for a standard handset. One licensing fee would include paying a ton of patents that no one really practically uses.
And an interesting thing about this case - Ericsson is doing to Samsung what Samsung is doing to Apple, and indeed, Ericsson's arguments are practically identical. It's a very interesting situation, to say the least. (Likewise, it's probably similar to the rates Google/Motorola are asking from Apple and Microsoft and such, too.
Definitely geared more towards business / infrastructure, than the S3's market, oh well.
Actually, the problem is the licensing of FRAND patents that Samsung had from Ericsson expired (Ericsson owns a few essential 3G onwards patents that are FRAND licensed). Samsung refused to relicense the patents.
It's not whether or not they're i the same market, it's that the S3 (and many others) use 3G and possibly LTE patents that belong to Ericsson, and that Samsung and Ericsson have failed to negotiate a new licensing agreement for said patents.
Just so you know, to make a cellphone you have to license a lot of patents from Ericsson, RIM, ex-Nortel (now Apple), Google/Motorola, Samsung, and the list goes on and on and on and on...
So instead, when you CTO, the manufacturer bulk-ships enclosures, motherboards, LCD panels, and such to a US fulfillment center, then snaps the right pieces together to complete your order. It is quite literally assembly of the system. (About as much work as building your own PC from components from Newegg, I would say.)
I would guess that most PC vendors do much the same thing, but since typical PC towers are much more easily configurable than an Apple iMac, they probably have to do even less work stateside.
The FTC has stated such "screwdriver" assembly of a computer from foreign parts does NOT qualify for "Assembled in USA" labelling. So no PC merely put together from foreign parts qualifies. There has to be some "substantial transformation" that takes place. So merely dumping the parts into a box doesn't qualify.
What would qualify and likely happened is Apple made some of the cases in the US. In this case, assembly transformed a block of aluminum into a case (machining) and firction-stir-welded it together, then the parts were put inside. In this case, there was a transformation of a part from solid metal into a case (irrelevant where the metal came from as it was transformed).
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Interesting statistic for iOS. Because the only way to pirate is to either jailbreak (~10% of iOS users jailbreak, but not all of them are pirates), or pay Apple $99/year to get a dev certificate so you can run unsigned code, that would imply his game is only interesting to those kind of users.
So either it's completely a ripoff that people aren't willing to pay for it, or being advertised on the piracy sites was some of the best marketing he got.
(And yes, for iOS 6 and iPhone 5/iPad mini/iPad 4, the only way to pirate is $99/year, so you better find 100 99 cent apps to make it worthwhile...).
QR codes can contain more than just a URL.
They can contain a phone number, for example. Like when that Samsung bug was exposed where you dial a specific number and it factory-resets your phone. Scan the QR core, tap "go" and boom, phone's reset and you've lost all your data, games, contacts, etc.
Just do it with something like "call this number to get free minutes" or something...
Man, that's ... awful.
For every iOS device sold, there are 3 Androids. Yet the traffic for Android devices is only 50% higher than iOS?
What are people doing with their android phones? Android should be 3 times as much usage as iOS, not 1.5 times as much... or is Android the new "featurephone"?
The irony also is that it's a SoC, so most of the transistors there are NOT going to be "14nm" or "22nm" or whatever. They're going to be larger.
Why? Several things decide the size of a transistor - first, the use of the transistor - if it's an output driving several inputs, it means the transistor has to scale up to switch reasonably quickly. Ditto if the transistor has to drive a "long line" across the chip as it has to overcome capacitances and have enough current drive to overcome inductances. Power consumption reduction is achieved by making transistors smaller (because the fundamental gate capacitances and switching currents will be subsequently smaller, but it also means it will run slower - a small transistor driving a big one will take time for the drive required to overcome the bigger one's capacitances and such). But if power isn't a concern, it can run faster as well because there's less parasitics so a stronger drive will switch more quickly (a big transistor driving a small one will cause the small one to switch much quicker). Then there's the "overdrive" capability - a lot of circuits rely on geometry and current handling. Like a 6T SRAM - it's basically a couple of switching transistors (read/write, word output) followed by two back-to-back inverters (a couple of transistors each). The forward inverter has bigger transistors than the feedback inverter - when you write into the cell, the bit line overdrives it so the feedback inverter is overpowered and the forward inverter switches. After two gate times (forward and back), the value is latched. But it also means the bit line transistors are huge - they have to drive a long line and overpower a feedback inverter.
The small transistors are pretty much reserved for memory - where density of transistors is important. Density of transistors in non-memory (i.e., "random logic") parts is very low - because the problem is wiring density, not transistor density - the wires are dictating how close the transistors can be. So even on the SoC, the only small transistors would be stuff like caches and such. Everything else will be bigger because of what they're driving.
tt also happened in the US, too. A couple from BC got lost in Nevada after following their GPS down a narrow trail road and got stuck. The wife, who stayed in the vehicle managed to barely survive, but her husband was presumed dead and his body was only found months later.
And then we have all the cases of people driving into lakes and other such things following their GPSes.
Nothing really new with Apple's Maps - follow a GPS blindly and it will lead you wrong eventually. Then again, it's Apple Maps, where compeittors love to make up fake nonexistent problems because they can't seem to find the billions of real ones (like this one).
It's important to note why Xbox support for Xbox Live was dropped - compatibility issues were hindering the Xbos360. When there are millions of Xbox360 users on and under 1000 Xbox users on at the same time, holding back features to serve the 0.1% makes little sense. (In fact, most of that was Halo 2 which commanded a huge majority of those 1000 players - the rest of the top 10 were under 100 - usually under 50 players). And most of the Halo 2 was played on Xbox360s anyways. Plus., at that point, Halo 3 was long considered "old" so "upgrading" wasn't really a big deal.
So yes, eventually Xbox360 support for Xbox Live will be discontinued, but not before the Xbox Next is released, where it carries over everything you did before. (Yes, there will be situations where you'll have achievements that are no longer obtainable...). The question of when is easy - when the number of Xbox 360 players diminishes again to be a very small minority.
GLU's not a huge PC developer. They are, however, huge in the mobile space - I believe they along with gameloft are some of the biggest mobile developers pre-iPhone (they made games for featurephones running Java). Post iPhone era they basically make much richer games for smartphones (iPhone and Android).
I'm guessing GameSpy is going to go into that stuff moreso than PC - there isn't much in the way of multiplayer systems on mobile - you have Gree (OpenFeint) and that's about it.
It also really depends on what Apple would sue for? I mean, if you're running an OS X binary that ships with OS X, like say, iTunes or something, OK, Apple might have a reason to sue. But if you're running say, Steam for Mac OS X, what Apple could sue over would be specious, at best as there'll be very little Apple code in that binary.
Apple doesn't write the entire application suite for OS X - there's tons of little independent developers and big companies writing apps for OS X.
My flight instructor's cellphone rang once we landed and I was taxiing, and I ended up hearing both sides of the conversation in my headset (not a problem - ATC was quiet). Just a regular dumbphone, which rang. Plus, I can hear the GSM pings through the intercom during flight.
(Cellphone regulations on flights are actually from the FCC to prevent massive multistate DDoS - cellphones aren't supposed to see every cell tower across 4+ states, nevermind try to figure out what control channel to use).
Anyhow, the FCC envelope (emitted EM radiation vs. frequency) for avionics is much stricter than for consumer equipment (class B) and class A devices (office use only) are even looser. The FAA can really tell the FCC to sharpen up their transmission envelopes to permit this, but then it would result in howls because meeting those new envelopes is HARD. (and there's a huge swath of frequencies from 108MHz-138MHz where the allowed EM interference is so low lots of tricks are applied...). So if the FAA told the FCC that it would allow "class C" devices aboard for continuous use, practically no one would make it, and you'd have to deal with "not for use on aircraft" labelling.
The official regulations state that absent of regulations, the pilot in command has final judgement over the use of electronics. If he/she decides that no one will be allowed to use electronics at all, he's entitled to enforce that position. And his decision overrides the FAA while the plane is in flight.
Ten years ago the IEEE did a test and found some surprising things - like a certain cellphone, when left on, would cause the GPS to lose lock (not too big a deal then as GPS wasn't as essential as it today), or others would cause the compass to drift a few degress.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed
As Apple and everyone who has dealt with the V-Chip knows, nobody uses parental controls, even when it says so right on the box or users are forced to enable them. Parent simply hands device off to their kids and lets them play with it directly. Or they let the kid set it up. They're basically useless things that are used to show government groups that they're on top of regulations.
As for pandering to the family values group - they're pretty powerful, and really, it's "good enough". Instead of a complex setup of parental controls, it's something that works well enough, and if a family group parent complains, you can ask right back "well, why are you letting your kid stay up past 11PM?".
Actually, all you need are the ones that lack the "Retina" display. Apple still makes regular plain old Macbook Pros (13" and 15") with fully upgradable everything. Just avoid the MacBook Pro with Retina display and you're fine. You don't want it anyhow - running at native resolution is a good way to strain your eyes. And running non-native looks ugly on any OS other than OS X (Try running 1920x1200 on it - it'll look practically native on OS X, and ugly as heck on any other OS).
So stick with the traditional line and you'll be fine. Easiest way to tell is because they still come with optical drives.
No reason to not get the latest tech, especially as Apple is still manufacturing them.
OK, where's the URL to the post? And remember, "public" doesn't mean signing up for an account on Facebook. I want to go to that URL and see all updates. WITHOUT creating an account, and last I checked, you can't "friend" without an account.
If I have to register, well, it's not public anymore. Because what any company can do is then create a company blog, post to it and require registration to proceed. It's the same thing - create a "public" website where all the information is hidden behind a registration wall. And hell, why can't the company ask for demographic information during registration? Even very personal details that would make most investors shy away from registering.
There are reasons why there are companies who specialize in doing nothing but spreading press releases - because they get it out there everywhere - in print, on investor sites, and in general news. These guys get the word out. Heck, a public blog site works just as well.
Of course, in this case, it's probably a misunderstanding - the poster didn't think such information could possibly be interesting to investors, just a meaningless statistic. But the SEC doesn't proactively go after companies - they work on complaints, and what happened here was some investors probably found out after the fact and it offended them because such statistics are important to see if Netflix is grown, dying, or stagnant. Hell, people were leaving Netflix in droves a few months ago due to all the changes.
Do you really need statistical methods? I mean, the vast majority of internet users use Google in some shape or form, and probably have a Google account.
Android phones account for 3/4ths of all smartphones out there, and most will also be associated with a Google account, most likely the same account as their desktop PC.
That would match a good chunk of people right there - Google's already got all that information to tie people together. Hell, Google probably knows which computers are public use by seeing how many different people login from it (made easier with IPv6 - a bit tricky with IPv4...).
Hell, Facebook's in an even better position - login from their PCs, tablets and smartphones, thus linking them all together. And I'd be surprised if Twitter didn't have such similar information as well.
The three of them together can probably positively identify who owns what devices. (I'd add Apple, but they're a minority player - an Apple ID can only identify a PC and tablet, and a minority of smartphones...).
Well, manufacturing is an unskilled job for the most part. In fact, factory jobs tend to be some of the worst around because they're utterly dull, boring and uninspiring work putting tab A into slot B and doing so in 750 milliseconds or less.
Other unskilled jobs include janitorial, housekeeping, etc. These are unskilled because anyone who graduates high school has all the requisite knowledge and skill to actually perform them, and they pay low because well, anyone who walks off the street can do it.
Robotic factories require far more skilled labor - you have to have technicians who can repair the robots, highly paid engineers who have to figure out how to make the product manufacturable by robots, supervisors to handle robot emegencies (and to manage human-robot interactions), engineers or techs to program the robots, etc. These require specialized training and as such, are much higher paying jobs. But of course there are far less of them - a robot tech can service multiple robots each work shift, likewise a manufacturing engineer designs the whole thing out before production begins, etc.
It's why the average American is far more productive than their Chinese counterpart - you cannot simply move manufacturing from China to the US without redesigning your product around that fact. Because all that happens is you're replacing low-skill jobs in China with low-skill jobs in the US (most of which would actually be fulfilled by illegal immigrants and such - just like in other low skill jobs).
Apple probably will pay just over minimum wage, because really, that's all the job demands. Unless you think putting stuff in boxes demands more pay than flipping burgers, cleaning toilets or other stuff.
And knowing Apple, if you're making tons of the stuff, they probably won't have a human hand touching it - just robots all the way into sealing the box. The only humans in the actual line are probably there to keep it going - receiving parts into inventory and stocking the part carriers for the robots, and shipping out the finished pallets of product.
That's because Nitro compiles to native code and runs it. I don't know about you, but you should have alarm bells ringing at that - remote code downloaded, compiled and executed. Forget any other security hole, this is actually a security nightmare.
On iOS, this is resolved because Safari itself runs with even less priviledges than the normal "mobile" (used for apps) user, so it's sandboxed. That way if some remote code tries to exploit a hole, the attack surface is much smaller.
Unfortunately, such things also make it useless for apps - unless your app wraps a website, there's nothing much you can do in an even more restrictive sandbox than what apps get.
Android's mechanisms could be more secure to prevent something like that from happening on that platform so regular apps can execute arbitrary code willy-nilly without problems. Though permissions to stuff like contacts and other things...
One reason I have an office phone is so I can use it for business purposes. I hardly ever make long distance calls (so I never use VoIP at all, including Skype), so my long distance plan is basically "none". I can make long distance calls, but they're pricey, or run down to the store to buy a long-distance prepaid card (cheaper to buy for the few times I use it versus paying for a long distance plan).
At work? I may have to call long distance for many reasons - including talking to other people, teleconferencing, etc. Company pays for the call as it's on company time (or can bill customer for it if it was customer business). I don't have to worry about getting a $200 cellphone bill nor wait the weeks for my expense report for business phone calls (which have to be scrutinized line by line) to be reimbursed.
And even at home we have a landline - again for the same reason. No worries about calls dropping (would you really want to do that job interview on a cellphone? Risking a dropped call seems pretty unnecessary...). And if the battery on the cordless gets low, I can always switch handsets (something most cellphones cannot do, still).
Law of unintended consequences without an easy fix.
For example, browsers have long used vlink highlighting to show previously visited links, which are really handy if users have a tendency to wander. E.g., if you're just browsing Wikipedia, it's awfully nice to know if you've already seen the article it links to ahead of time. Or if it's a list of files, if you've already downloaded it before (perhaps if you're showing someone how to get said file or what file you actually used).
The question becomes though is should scripts be able to get at the DOM properties? Setting it is useful (to highlight new options for example), but getting it? Might be useful for some effects I suppose. And then once gotten, it's really just a simple XmlHttpRequest away from passing that information back to the server.
It's really nothing special other than the clever combination of several innocent features in a nefarious way. (And no one had the gal to patent it... )
Or said theif doesn't steal keys, but merely borrows them unknowingly. So copy of key, plus address from registration (or portable GPS - I bet 99% of them have an addressbook entry named "Home", and 99% of those contain the real address!).
The latter scenario is possible too if the thief spends the time to monitor your activities to see how much time he has to drive, loot your place, and drive back (assuming they can find parking, too...).
House tip: Put about $100 in the kitchen drawer, and keep the rest of the cash in a more secure location. A thief going through your stuff will most likely find that $100 and move on. A thief who doesn't may get pissed and trash your place "just because" you made it more difficult for him and waste his time. In the latter case, he's not walking out with much, but he's making sure you're not going to have an easy time cleaning up, either. Better they get $100 in drug money than get angry and do $10,000 in willful damaes.
To be more correct, the PC is really just ONE platform, while ARM SoCs form many.
E.g., in a PC, the memory will ALWAYS be in the same location, the BIOS will ALWAYS be in the same location as well. Once you have those two basics out of the way, it's trivial to figure out where stuff like video adapters are (which happen to be in the same spot for a basic console, as well). PCI enumeration and assignment (which relies on the PCI bridge being in the same spot, as well as stuff like keyboard controllers and all that having the same I/O map).
When stuff's in the same location, it's easy.
With ARM, that's like everyone agreeing to use say, Samsung SoC's for the next 30 years and making sure Samsung's SoCs remain backwards compatible w.r.t. memory maps.
After all, you can still boot DOS on a modern PC these days, If the memory map changed, or even if the memory is not in the same spot as it was before, that won't work as the link addresses are all wrong.
Linux uses device trees for ARM, which is a hack to try to get the same thing on ARM SoCs, but the problem there is things like DMA controllers aren't the same, memory controllers vary, etc. And of course, where one chip can have memory starting at 0x80000000, others can have it at 0x40000000, or 0xC0000000...
Probably because Facebook and Google don't log SMSes (well, Google does if you use Google Voice). So the police already know they can get at all that data in your Facebook/Google account, but they don't have anything if you text.
If Google managed to log all SMSes as well, the police probably wouldn't bother asking for text logs anyhow - getting it form Google is easier.
Except... the number of transistors in a CPU is irrelevant!
A CPU doesn't have the transistor density that really benefits much from Moore's Law - because the vast majority of the space on a chip is not taken up by transistors, but by wiring. In fact, the wiring density is what's limiting transistor density (a good thing - larger transistors can give you better performance because they can drive the longer wires quicker).
Most of the transistors used in a CPU actually goes towards the cache - when you're talking about 16+ MB of pure L1/L2/L3 cache, implemented as 6T SRAM cells, that's 100M transistors right there (and that doesn't include the cache line tag logic and CAM).
The thing with the highest transistor density (and thus the most benefit of Moore's Law) is actually memory structures - caches, DRAM, SRAM, flash memory, etc. This is where each transistor is vital to memory storage and packing them in close means more storage is available, in which case Moore's law states that RAM etc. will double in capacity or halve in cost every 18 months or so.
Smaller transistors do help CPUs consume a little less power, but double the number of transistors doesn't do a whole lot because there's a lot of empty space that the wiring forces to be transistor-free. (Non-memory parts of the CPU are effectively "random logic" where there's no rhyme or reason to the wiring). It's why the caches have the most transistors yet take the smallest areas.
Well, the 3GPP went the other way compared to the MPEG association. With MPEG, you can license EVERY h.264 patent you need by paying the fixed fee schedule offered by the MPEG Licensing Authority (aka MPEG-LA).
Of course, people dislike the patent pool idea as well because it offers no flexibility. Like how consumer camcorders are licensed for h.264 personal use licenses - you can't make a movie you intend to sell (though there are plenty of people who violate this rule - a lot of original content on YouTube uses consumer level gear with the personal use license but the content is paid for by ads to the creator). It also results in stuff like "The output of this program may not be used for professional or commercial projects without payment of additional licensing fees".
OTOH, it makes acquiring every patent MUCH easier - just pay the fee, you're home free.
The reason the 3GPP went with the "you must license with everyone" model is because the spec includes a ton of stuff that's optional and stuff not needed for a standard handset. One licensing fee would include paying a ton of patents that no one really practically uses.
And an interesting thing about this case - Ericsson is doing to Samsung what Samsung is doing to Apple, and indeed, Ericsson's arguments are practically identical. It's a very interesting situation, to say the least. (Likewise, it's probably similar to the rates Google/Motorola are asking from Apple and Microsoft and such, too.
Actually, the problem is the licensing of FRAND patents that Samsung had from Ericsson expired (Ericsson owns a few essential 3G onwards patents that are FRAND licensed). Samsung refused to relicense the patents.
It's not whether or not they're i the same market, it's that the S3 (and many others) use 3G and possibly LTE patents that belong to Ericsson, and that Samsung and Ericsson have failed to negotiate a new licensing agreement for said patents.
Just so you know, to make a cellphone you have to license a lot of patents from Ericsson, RIM, ex-Nortel (now Apple), Google/Motorola, Samsung, and the list goes on and on and on and on...
The FTC has stated such "screwdriver" assembly of a computer from foreign parts does NOT qualify for "Assembled in USA" labelling. So no PC merely put together from foreign parts qualifies. There has to be some "substantial transformation" that takes place. So merely dumping the parts into a box doesn't qualify.
What would qualify and likely happened is Apple made some of the cases in the US. In this case, assembly transformed a block of aluminum into a case (machining) and firction-stir-welded it together, then the parts were put inside. In this case, there was a transformation of a part from solid metal into a case (irrelevant where the metal came from as it was transformed).
http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus03-complying-made-usa-standard