The problem isn't technology. From throughout human history - all technology through the ages is inherently neutral. A gun that can be used to kill an innocent person, can also be used to kill a criminal. Likewise, high-technology is socially neutral.
The problem though is that humans are not neutral. Those in power (social power, political power, or monetary power) often exploit new technology in ways to enforce their power. Is it a fault of the inventors? Not really - I'm sure most inventions were created as a way to be the next great equalizer (like how the Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer and that anyone can publish). Except those in power realize its potential and quickly create methods to turn that equalizer into the great stratifier - those in power will either keep their power or gather even more of it. Those without, get oppressed.
The problem happens because technology is used by morally bankrupt individuals. It's a social problem, and technological innovations created to try to solve social problems ultimately fail. You can't fix social problems with technology.
According to TFA, each of these new 8GB 20nm dice are 118 mm. There are 32 of them in the 335 series. 37.8 square centimeters of processed silicon is serious business. Honestly, I'm amazed that it's so cheap.
The thing is, it's made up of individual dies. If you tried to make a single slab of silicon that's 38 square cm, you'll find it impossible because of flaws. The smaller the die, the less chance it will be made on imperfect silicon, so smaller processes lead to more dies per wafer (less cost per die) and higher yields. Both make for cheaper memory in the end.
As for finding good SSDs - the trick is to see what Apple, Dell Lenovo, etc. use. Especially Apple. Because Apple ships so many SSDs, if there was any sort of failure of them, it would seem the whole world would be up in arms because when you're shipping millions, even a small percentages amplify - say 1% failure rate when you're shipping millions mean tens to hundreds of thousands of failures and it will become SSDgate like Atennagate (probably a similar number of affected people).
Apple and the other OEMs pick reliability over performance - because when you're doing 40k IOPS and 500MB/sec writes, for most users, it's "fast enough". If you can make the firmware less buggy and end up with a SSD that only does 20K iOPS and 200-300MB/sec writes, it's still "fast" and the OEMs are much happier (less warranty issues).
For that, it means either Intels or more commonly, Samsung - Apple etc. tend to use Samsung or Toshiba controllers.
Windows 8 isn't had for gaming, it's just bad for Valve. Vale has wanted Steam to be a general App Store for a long while, and if regular plebes start using the Windows Marketplace, they'll lose that battle before they even begin. Valve's just concerned with their potential market being at risk.
Exactly.
Sure it's great that Linux gets all these games, but really, the move for Valve to Linux is basically to be one of the first to offer their app store (Steam - probably the first of the concept we recognize today) on a platform that's lacking one.
Support isn't an issue - after all, Valve can deal with it the same way you deal with it on Windows or OS X - you ship every damn library you need (including C library) All they need to support in the end is the lowlevel X protocol - from Xlib up, Steam can supply their own versions.
Windows 8 threatened their bread and butter, so they're preparing alternatives, like any good company would. And yes, Steam is just as curated as any other app store. Greenlight was created to appear more "open", as they don't accept any old project.
(Yes, I know of one developer who has games on almost all consoles - Wii, PS3, Xbox360, PSP, Vita (no DS as there wasn't enough horesepower), and on other platforms - Android, iOS, and OS X. But they have no Windows port and Valve refused to get back to them for putting it on Steam. So they're in an odd situation where everyone WANTS a PC port and they have ports to practically everything else... but Greenlight only got them to around 65%)
The accident that made the open PC industry possible was that IBM copyrighted their BIOS code of the original IBM-PC but forgot to patent the BIOS concept itself which allowed Compaq to build computers with its own implementation of a IBM-PC-compatible BIOS.
Incorrect.
IBM actually was the king of vendor lock-in. The only problem was they needed a PC, stat, after pretty much ignoring the market and being content to sell mainframes. But they saw the winds of change and they weren't going to be the top guy anymore.
So the IBM PC was created purely out of commonly available parts - something unheard of at IBM - just because they needed it out the door quickly. Why do you think they outsourced the OS to Microsoft? They needed one, quick. They wanted CP/M but Digital wasn't returning phone calls.
If IBM had maybe a few more years, the results would've been much different (see PCjr and other IBM innovations including Micro Channel), and Microsoft would be but a minor player in development languages (as the IBM PC would run IBM's own developed OS).
It also led to the mistake of letting Microsoft control the rights to DOS - instead of being IBM exclusive. Also a very unusual step for IBM at the time - probably either due to haste, or it was the only way Microsoft would let them have an OS (Gates was a very cunning businessman).
Of course these days, given the cut-throat nature of the PC business and the very small margins, things have settled down a lot hardware wise and the race to the bottom has nearly completed (everything's sold on very tiny margins). Intel had to shake up the market by telling people that people are willing to spend more than $1k on a PC provided it offered some innovation over every other box at best buy. (Why do you think all the ultrabooks have screens that aren't 1366x768?)
Isn't the concept of privacy lost when you put that information online? To me it's the same as announcing something in a news paper and then hoping no one you knows sees it. If there is something about you that can be easily googled then it's not private and in this day and age you shouldn't consider it to be.
Yes, you are completely correct.
However, a stunningly large number of people fall for the marketing trick known as "privacy controls" (which were put in purely to give people the feeling of privacy so they'd tell the site even more information).
It's like people who set everything to "only me" and pretend Facebook is an online diary that no one else will ever read. Once that information is out there, it ain't a secret.
The maker is a relatively small company from France, so I suppose their presence is stronger in Europe. Also, it's not out yet.
They're also the makers of some pretty damn locked down Androids as well, and using pretty crappy low end hardware. If you really wanted a company that concentrated on specs over everything else, it was Archos.
Their pre-Andorid players locked the bootloader to the hard drive - once the drive died, you couldn't change the drive. This continued on with Android - locking to the hard drive, and verifying the signatures on the kernel and all that. You could root them, but they always went away the next reboot. (And Android was considered far more open because you could at least install apps yourself - previously you could only buy what Archos let you).
And the hardware, oh the hardware. Could you imagine buying a device with an LCD screen and having 3-4 dead pixels stare back at you in the face? Hell, the only time you get 'em now is if you went with the really cheap monitors using rejected LCD panels. But at least you're paying much less than half the price. Archos products aren't positioned to be cheap... it's just their choise of poor quality components.
The article's central argument is that data centers can be run at higher temperatures. I'm pointing out that if you run your data center at higher temperatures to save on your energy costs, much or all of those savings could end up getting neutralized by premature equipment failure, and the cost of mitigating it.
Yet when Google analyzed data from 100,000 servers, they found failures were negatively correlated with temperature. As long as they kept the temp in spec, they had fewer hard errors at the high end of the operating temperature range. That is why they run "hot" data centers today.
Well, other than hard drives, I think most servers probably have a life of around 3 odd years or so before they're replaced with gear under a new support contract, at which point even if it was able to last 10 and you shortened it to 5, the server would be replaced before it dies.
Sure that oddball PC you have in the corner that's got a decade's worth of dust on it probably wouldn't have lasted as long, but it's probably good practice to figure out what it did and replace it.
Use of the viral and restrictive GPL is falling dramatically and truly free licensing like BSD is on the rise. Fading away are the days of the open source world being dominated by 15 years screaming about 'possibly GPL violation!!!' on Slashdot.
One of the major ironies is how closed the GPL can be.
Take some BSD code and stick it into a GPL project. Perfectly legal (assuming it's modified BSD - there's still a lot of original BSD licensed code out there).
Now improve on that GPL'd code - fix a bug say.
Now the GPL guys will scream about the superiority of the GPL and how "open" it is, except they've just closed the patch! There's no way for the BSD guys to get that code back in because the code has been GPL-tainted, and is thus unavailable to be pulled back in to fix the bug. (And it's legally questionable if they could look at the GPL patch to figure out how to fix it).
Of course, the original authors are fine with what happened in the beginning - it's BSD and they agreed to it. However, the whole unable-to-get-at-shared-code probably irks them to no end - they know there's a fix, but they can't incorporate it because of the GPL.
At the same time, people are screaming in their ears about how BSD lets some company "steal" their code and close it up compared to the superior GPL, when the supposedly open GPL has done exactly that. Perhaps even worse, at least if the code was closed by some company, it's a case of ignorance - if the company doesn't say, no one knows. The GPL project openly flaunts that code back at the BSD folk - like a flag showing how superior the GPL is.
Note that the top half is a screen, while the bottom half is a convenient bezel to hold it and input data with. No tablet today has this sort of layout. The closest we've come to having a PADD would be the early revisions of Amazon Kindle readers (with the keyboard at hte bottom) or a Blackberry-style phone.
By the way, I hate Apple but I hate vertical touch screens for everyday PC use because it's a stupid gimmick that makes people feel all futuristic when in reality it's 1/3 the speed of a mouse. What a paradox!
Perhaps that's why despite Apple having dabbled in it for probably a decade now, they haven't released a full-touch-screen based computer. There were tons of rumors of touchscreen monitors on iMacs and laptops, but they never materialized. Probably after doing enough research, it turns out people just hate having to lift their arms up to touch the screen.
I think of the touchscreen stuff ended up going into the touchpads (which Apple seems to have mastered - I know there's tons of people who hate touchpads, but Apple ones are surprisingly not only usable, but decent enough to use as a primary pointing device).
The only time a vertical touchscreen PC works is when you're standing and need brief interactions with it (see restaurant POS systems).
...for average use in the home 1920x1080 (1080p) *resolution* is not the problem for a ~60-70" TV (still considered high end!) from 10' away. The limiting factor for quality is still the encoding rate for anything less than BD bitrates. So, for anything other than physical media 4K is not even remotely practical, and even for physical media it's such a diminishing return few consumers will care. Combine that with the fact physical media is in decline and I don't see 4K adoption any time soon...
Actually, for the most part, most consumers with HDTVs sit far away enough that 1080p is "retina" resolution - the eye just cannot resolve the added resolution.
I think the guides I've seen has the viewing distance to be almost 1:1 with the diagnoal display size (distance to TV in inches should be between 1-2x the diagonal screen size in inches) if you want to resolve 1080p sharply. beyond that and resolution diminishes.
Most people don't sit so close to their TVs - they probably sit a good 6-10 feet away which means even at 1080p, they're not seeing the full picture as the eye just can't resolve it.
Yes, a "retina" display isn't just for personal electronics. It applies to many things - it's not just dpi, but dpi+distance. Increase the distance, the DPI requilred drops.
It's probably more then Apple's iTunes live apps. 80% of Apple apps has never been downloaded, less then %1 earned more the $1000... Apple is so technically incompetent that they utterly failed to provide any kind of discovery system for apps, therefore it is futile to develop for them anymore. Microsoft has a huge chance to win the developers here.
An app store does not eliminate the need for marketing. Seriously, you can't get far in the world wihtout some form of advertising. "Release it and they will come" only applies to a very small niche of folks who know what they want. Most people don't, and if you invent something better (like say, a car), it won't succeed unless you start marketing it.
Users don't discover apps. They may browse them out of curiousity, but the vast majority get their apps after learning about it from other places.
Hell, that applies to most things in life as well. Just releasing sometihng as open-source won't make it popular, even if it fulfills the needs of a bunch of people - someone has to find it first.
And most apps earning under $1000 isn't a big surprise - the big ones tend to have people actually doing some work and marketing their apps. Plus given around 50-70% of apps are free/freemium (which only has a 1% conversion rate), plus apps which are promotional tools moreso than apps for sales (e.g., Steam app, all those store/manufacturer/catalog apps, and I'm' sure Kindle/Kobo/Nook apps aren't designed to make money directly).
And there's a lot of crap out there, as with any system. It happens all over the place - for every gem of an indie game, there's thousands of crap ones. For every good indie band, there's thousands of garage bands where the din of city traffic is more musical. Or YouTube.
It's why a lot of Kickstarters fail, and why Ouya is going to have problems as well if everyone's crap game is going to be posted on it.
And I'm pretty certain the 1% thing is probably consistent across Google Play and many other places as well (including well, running a business). It's only on highly-curated environments like Steam or consoles where the likelihood to make money is much higher (though also much harder).
Windows App Store's advantage right now is that for the lazy, they can get in "on the ground floor". But when it gets popular, that 1% rule will apply as well.
You lose efficiency, thus wasting energy, when you convert the 208v AC into the low DC voltages necessary to run the computer. Instead of each computer having a power supply that converts from high AC to low DC some companies are using large AC to DC power supplies to power whole racks of servers. These servers run on DC.
Low voltage DC is piss-poor for distribution because power losses in wires increases at the SQUARE of the current. 120V@1A will have far lower losses than 12V@10A - 100 times less.
The big AC to DC places use high-voltage DC for that reason - lower current cables are far easier to handle than high current cables (the thickness of a conductor depends on its current - ampacity. The insulator does have to get thicker for higher voltages, but it's a lot more flexible than a thick 00-gauge wire.
DC-DC converters are fairly efficient and converting down to where you need has less losses than trying to shove 100A of 12VDC to a rack (assuming said rack only consumes 1200W. I think a modern rack can easily draw 3600/4800W fully loaded with servers which would mean up to 400A at 12V to the rack - calling for seriously thick cabling).
Oh, and what happens when you have high currents flowing at low voltages? You get welding. Because IIR heating is far more effective when you're passing huge currents through.
What determines a patent on a standard requiring RAND licensing? It would seem that 'pinch to zoom' and 'slide to unlock' have become de-facto standards for touch-screen devices. How is it that trivial patents like those can be used to block sales of a device when a patent that controls the basic functioning of a device must be licensed to precisely those competitors that are abusing the trivial ones? And you can't even block sales of the devices when the infringer refuses to strike a RAND deal...
Easy.
A standards body, like IEEE, 3GPP, etc., decide they want a new standard. Ethernet (yes, there are patents on all parts). WiFi (plenty to go around). 5G, Codec. whatever. They get together industry to help them produce the new standard. Industry presents their technology, and they hash out what will make it and what doesn't. As a condition for having the technology included in the new standard, all related patents to use that technology must be FRAND licensed. Otherwise you get a really broken spec where competitors cannot implement the standard because the companies refuse to license.
It's also a big game of political football - technologies that are great may be shunned and inferior ones used because the company with the inferior technology greased more palms. It's pretty lucrative.
Basically a patent is FRAND licensed if it's used in a standard for that standard only, because you can't implement the standard without that patent.
Apple needs ot license Samsung patents in order to produce a phone because Samsung put their technology into the celluar spec, probably LTE or 3G, and you cannot build a phone without those patents (implementing the standard automatically violates the patent).
However, the other things like pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-unlock (if valid), are not part of a standard (there's no standard for "smartphone" that everyone has to follow). You could tap a sequence of numbers to unlock (say, entering a PIN code). You could require the user press the power button three times to unlock, etc.
An de-facto standards aren't standards - Microsoft doesn't have to license you the Office patents to implement something that reads Office documents (which they provide), even though Office is a defacto standard in business. Well, they do for their XML standard (because they submitted it as a standard), but not for say, the.doc format.
TiVo's got the same thing - they have a bunch of core DVR patents that if you implement one, you pretty much have to license it, but they don't have to.
As an aside, a lot of standards also have licensing bodies where you can acquire a license to every patent for one fee without having to talk to any of the participants - MPEG has MPEG-LA to license you all the patents used for a video codec, I think the IEEE has one as well for Ethernet and WiFi. 3GPP doesn't (which means if you want to build a phone, you have to talk to everyone).
Music has always been a very sticky item in the motion pictures (TV and movies).
A lot of the time, you can get permissions to do X, but you can't do Y (e.g., you can tape a production for broadcast, but you can't put it on a DVD). Especially with older things - many TV shows have to be re-cut with licensed music (this can include the opening sequence and credits too) as the original contracts for licensing never included home video or anything else. And some material can't be licensed anymore as their creators are dead and all that (and their estates refuse to grant licenses or permission).
It's just another aspect of the convoluted nature of copyright and licensing.
Top Gun was probably one of the first movies to use a LOT of licensed music during the movie (music composed specifically for a movie (soundtrack scores and such) usually are licensed fully to the movie for further uses as part of the movie, but external music often has commercial value that makes it impractical to grant it).
It's a horrendous mess and something lawyers spend a lot of client money on in trying to obtain releases.
Heck, I know one concert was recorded for Blu-Ray/DVD and PBS. PBS was allowed to include some extra tracks (as a non-profit) that were not allowed to be put on the Blu-Ray or DVD (because those were commercial ventures). Of course, the entire concert couldn't be put in since some didn't include recording and rebroadcast rights...
It could also be more benign. The fact that most of us have high speed internet connections and can update the system when the updates are made and tested. The Service Pack Concept is a throwback to them good old days where we would get a CD or Disk in the mail and run the upgrade. Because trying to get it online every week would be a major job.
Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.
The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.
And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.
The bad news for us is that since the masses will probably move to the alternate devices, volume will go down on traditional computers
This means prices will rise
Is it a terrible thing?
I mean, the problem is the "general public" cared about cost and we ended up in a race to the bottom, where margins are thin and we're seeing the results in low-res screens, integrated graphics, and basically a lot of sameness as everyone builds to a price.
Let prices rise a bit - clear out the low end crap. If you wanted a decent laptop with a screen higher than 1366x768, you always had to pay more than $1000. Or discrete graphics. Or computers not built from flimsy plastic.
See ultrabooks - we're getting very high-res screens and other innovations, even though they cost $1000+, a market most PC manufacturers shunned in the face to build sub-$500 PCs.
All that's happened with the race to the bottom are companies like Apple realizing they have the whole $1000+ PC market to themselves - all they have to do is entice people away from the $500 crowd - see what you get when you spend more.
The question then becomes "how were these compromised" and it sounds like the hardware itself was modified, but the actual details are very vague.
Standard pin=pad fraud actually. What the criminals do is they steal pin-pads, then back at their lair, modify them to include recording hardware (you know, crack open the case, add a magstripe recorder (just an MP3 player with record function) and wires to the keypad to record the PIN.
Then they go to the cashiers, and when no one's looking, swap out the pin-pads.
It usually happens with smaller outfits (fast food outlets and the like) where they don't bolt-down the pin-pad to prevent theft. That's why the big guys have pin-pads that are encased in metal or otherwise bolted down to the counter.
The pin-pads are usually connected to the main unit (where the cashier enters in the amount and gets the printouts) by a simple coiled cable with RJ style jacks on them, making it trivially quick to swap surreptitiously.
We shouldn't have to hire lawyers just so we can install software without getting fucked.,
What would help is also WHY those clauses are in there. A lot of the iTunes clauses really deal with things like being able to purchase and download music, repeated again for apps, repeated again for movies, etc. Then a bunch of terms on if you use feature X that it can be sent to Apple and what you agree to there, blah blah blah. Then Apple lets you redownload music through iCloud, and the ToS has to change to say that yes, you are allowed to do that (before you were solely responsible and Apple won't provide another download).
Of course, it's also a testabment to how the scope of iTunes has bloated.
Around the edges of the machine are various buttons and connectors. From top to bottom on the right, we have a speaker, mini-HDMI, full-size USB 2.0, and the magnetic power connector. I've taken an instant dislike to the power connector. The magnets are so strong that the Surface aggressively grabs the connector, snatching it away from my grasp. It doesn't, however, seat the connector properly within its receptacle, so the system can't actually charge. I have to jiggle the thing and reseat it every time.
Is this true on all the surfaces that the "magsafe" port doesn't engage properly, or perhaps just Ars' one isn't that great? After all, it seems that a power port where it can appear fully attached but still not connected would be a somewhat annoying problem.
It can't be Apple patented a method to use magnets and end up with a reliable power connection every time without jiggling the cable. (You'd think there would be huge reports for people having to wiggle their MagSafe/Magsafe2 power cables to get their Macs to charge already).
Imagine what the criminals of the world will do with a database of android unlock codes and gestures!
Or law enforcement - imagine what they can do with the data - they sieze your phone, plug it in to see if it'll spew data out the USB port while locked. If you have USB debugging on, they could look at the logcat and see the unlock code and use it to legitimately snoop around (it "wasn't locked - it just had a very fancy "slide to unlock" function).
Given how cellphone's legal status as a container is in doubt, this could be potentially troubling. (And face it - those who use CM nightlies probably HAVE USB debugging on.
And on my non-CM JB phone, you can access adb and the logcat while it's still locked.
Not everybody who sells applications wants to make buckloads of money, there used to be hobbyists like me who invest their spare time to bring affordable, high-quality applications to people. To many of us, the shareware fee was not a means to get rich, but needed as a small incentive (and justification, e.g. to the wife...) to keep maintaining and developing the app. My main shareware app for OS X is better than most of the competition and available for $15 since the past decade -- however, you won't find it in the App store. Many thousands of great applications and a whole culture is dying with the App stores and people don't even realize how much they are loosing in terms of cash, as they are being ripped off by developers who only want fast cash and certainly aren't interested in long-term maintenance or a sustainable business model.
Died out because people either didn't pay (if they got the full version), or trashed it if they got useless demoware in the end. And most shareware ended up being crippleware or just plain old demos and people just pirated the full version like everything else.
In fact, the ONLY platform in the end where shareware worked to a limited extent was MacOS, and a bit into OS X - Mac users apparently were willing to pay up for good software, even if they didn't have to.
Even the big shareware houses ended up going to the traditional software model once they became big enough (like Ambrosia Software - big indie game developer/publisher for MacOS and OS X).
Part of the reason is (I think it was mentioned in a/. article before) it's actually easier to develop for Linux (not to mention the other perks). Maybe it's obvious, maybe not, but very few AAA scale companies took the plunge (their main consumers are on Win/Mac after all, and big companies don't take risks). Now that Valve's discovered it and is making a bum rush to port things over before Windows 8 strikes, I expect we'll see other companies following.
Or Valve sees an opporunity - the major platform vendors are starting to provide their own walled gardens (as an adjunct to the normally open nature). Linux has no vendor, so Valve can be the pioneer in putting their own walled garden into Linux. It starts by offering compelling content - Valve's own games, then spreads out.
It should be no surprise that Steam is adding non-game software to the mix. Even Steambox is really just another console in the end.
The only question is how is Steam's level of curation compared to the loosest of walled gardens, Apple's. (Apple's curation, whilst problematic (you don't get to have 700,000 things without problems), is considered very light-handed compared to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo).
I thought the worst part was the 30% they take off the top.
For its price, 30% is fairly cheap in the end. Amazon takes 50+% off the top for books (standard wholesale rates - why do you think Amazon can always offer books 30% off?), and probably very similar things happen for eBooks. We know it's about 30% for eBooks under $10, and it's more over $10 (to encourage people to price books at under $10), easily 50% or higher.
Microsoft and Sony charge more for their stores and DLC. I can't tell you about Steam, but it's probably less, mostly because they don't have to recoup 30 cents + 1-5% off 99 cents (when you sell for $10+, 30 cents per transaction plus 1-5% of transaction value isn't much). Though I suppose it'll probably change if Steam gets a bunch of 99 cent apps and Valve starts having to subsidize transaction fees (usually there's a table of fees - like if it's below $5, it's 30%, if it's below $10, it's say, 20%, etc).
Of course, the difficulties in hosting a bunch of apps (most of which are free so cost you money per download) plus the maintenance of all the equipment and the necessary security (PCI-DSS, even moreso because you're storing a LOT of personal data so people can buy in the future without re-entry of credit cards).
And gift cards... free money on interest, except well, considering iTunes cards are routinely 20% off ($50 iTunes card for $40) means the retailer's profit and Apple's expenses are paid from the leftover 10% (probalby 50-50).
If it was easy, then why are only the big guys hosting stores - if you can run an Android app store taking only 10% off the top, you should be a big hit.
As for the store where 1% make money - Apple paid out $6.5B to developers. If only 7000 apps made money (1% of roughly 700,000 apps), that's over $900,000 that each of those 7,000 apps made. So you have a 1% of getting a million bucks for say, a $2000 investiment. If you try 100 times, that's $200,000 in new equipment, to get $900,000. That seems like a risk. Or it could just be faulty numbers. Sure people may claim 1% of apps make money, but if it was true, it's well worth the risk. Even as a VC I can see if I can invest in 100 app companies for $2000 hardware to get 1 of them earning 900K, that's an extremely good value proposition. So the numbers are faulty, because we know a handful made over $1M, and most apps probably make a few thousand dollars (the ones that require payment - upfront or in-app).
And app store or no - there is always a need to do marketing and advertising. You can't put it up and they will come - you must advertise. Sorry, but if people don't know if your app exists, they can't find it. Word of mouth, send some review copies around, etc. We are not yet in an age where advertising and marketing are superfluous, no matter what anybody says. (And yes, being on the front page of iTunes or featured apps are marketing as well.)
Fundamentally, client-side security doesn't work. You can obscure the hell out of it and bury it deep within the system, but sooner or later, someone's gonna crack it. If they'd just let the damn homebrew people make backups of their games and install their own software, I doubt the mod community would have sprung up like this. They wanted access to the hardware, not pirated games. If they'd just locked up the portion of the system responsible for validating a game disk with some kind of TPM mechanism but left the possibility of running "unsigned" content, I doubt this breakthrough would have happened within the life of the product.
Sony, like every other big corporation, doesn't understand how hackers think. They don't give a fuck about your games: They want to see the nifty hardware! They want to push it to its limits, make new stuff with it. These are creative people who are endlessly fascinated with how things work. They're bored engineers.
Guess what? It's why the PS3 took so long to be "cracked". (Technically, the Xbox360 isn't cracked - hacked firmware can be run on the DVD drive to play pirated games, but that's it. And the signed Xbox dashboard actually detects this and reports it back to Microsoft. Running homebrew is extremely difficult - a vulnerable run of Xbox360s allowed Linux, but that's it).
The thing that kept the PS3 from being hacked and pirated to heck and back was the fact there was PS3 Linux. Once Sony retroactively removed it from ALL PS3s because of a theoretical hack (that was never even exploited as more than a curiosity), the real hackers started getting their hands on it.
And it all culminated in the January 2011 presentation by failoverfl0w that basically cracked the PS3 encryption keys wide open by revealing the keys.
Which ended up with a bunch of retail PS3s being converted to run debug firmware. Which Sony noticed when a bunch of PS3s started downloading paid DLC for free and at which point they discovered that people have infiltrated PSN and downloaded the databases.
The only difference now is we have the core root keys to the very lowest hardware (I think we only have level1 before courtesy geohot).
Had Sony not done PS3 Linux, it would've been cracked far sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's not.
The problem isn't technology. From throughout human history - all technology through the ages is inherently neutral. A gun that can be used to kill an innocent person, can also be used to kill a criminal. Likewise, high-technology is socially neutral.
The problem though is that humans are not neutral. Those in power (social power, political power, or monetary power) often exploit new technology in ways to enforce their power. Is it a fault of the inventors? Not really - I'm sure most inventions were created as a way to be the next great equalizer (like how the Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer and that anyone can publish). Except those in power realize its potential and quickly create methods to turn that equalizer into the great stratifier - those in power will either keep their power or gather even more of it. Those without, get oppressed.
The problem happens because technology is used by morally bankrupt individuals. It's a social problem, and technological innovations created to try to solve social problems ultimately fail. You can't fix social problems with technology.
The thing is, it's made up of individual dies. If you tried to make a single slab of silicon that's 38 square cm, you'll find it impossible because of flaws. The smaller the die, the less chance it will be made on imperfect silicon, so smaller processes lead to more dies per wafer (less cost per die) and higher yields. Both make for cheaper memory in the end.
As for finding good SSDs - the trick is to see what Apple, Dell Lenovo, etc. use. Especially Apple. Because Apple ships so many SSDs, if there was any sort of failure of them, it would seem the whole world would be up in arms because when you're shipping millions, even a small percentages amplify - say 1% failure rate when you're shipping millions mean tens to hundreds of thousands of failures and it will become SSDgate like Atennagate (probably a similar number of affected people).
Apple and the other OEMs pick reliability over performance - because when you're doing 40k IOPS and 500MB/sec writes, for most users, it's "fast enough". If you can make the firmware less buggy and end up with a SSD that only does 20K iOPS and 200-300MB/sec writes, it's still "fast" and the OEMs are much happier (less warranty issues).
For that, it means either Intels or more commonly, Samsung - Apple etc. tend to use Samsung or Toshiba controllers.
Exactly.
Sure it's great that Linux gets all these games, but really, the move for Valve to Linux is basically to be one of the first to offer their app store (Steam - probably the first of the concept we recognize today) on a platform that's lacking one.
Support isn't an issue - after all, Valve can deal with it the same way you deal with it on Windows or OS X - you ship every damn library you need (including C library) All they need to support in the end is the lowlevel X protocol - from Xlib up, Steam can supply their own versions.
Windows 8 threatened their bread and butter, so they're preparing alternatives, like any good company would. And yes, Steam is just as curated as any other app store. Greenlight was created to appear more "open", as they don't accept any old project.
(Yes, I know of one developer who has games on almost all consoles - Wii, PS3, Xbox360, PSP, Vita (no DS as there wasn't enough horesepower), and on other platforms - Android, iOS, and OS X. But they have no Windows port and Valve refused to get back to them for putting it on Steam. So they're in an odd situation where everyone WANTS a PC port and they have ports to practically everything else... but Greenlight only got them to around 65%)
Incorrect.
IBM actually was the king of vendor lock-in. The only problem was they needed a PC, stat, after pretty much ignoring the market and being content to sell mainframes. But they saw the winds of change and they weren't going to be the top guy anymore.
So the IBM PC was created purely out of commonly available parts - something unheard of at IBM - just because they needed it out the door quickly. Why do you think they outsourced the OS to Microsoft? They needed one, quick. They wanted CP/M but Digital wasn't returning phone calls.
If IBM had maybe a few more years, the results would've been much different (see PCjr and other IBM innovations including Micro Channel), and Microsoft would be but a minor player in development languages (as the IBM PC would run IBM's own developed OS).
It also led to the mistake of letting Microsoft control the rights to DOS - instead of being IBM exclusive. Also a very unusual step for IBM at the time - probably either due to haste, or it was the only way Microsoft would let them have an OS (Gates was a very cunning businessman).
Of course these days, given the cut-throat nature of the PC business and the very small margins, things have settled down a lot hardware wise and the race to the bottom has nearly completed (everything's sold on very tiny margins). Intel had to shake up the market by telling people that people are willing to spend more than $1k on a PC provided it offered some innovation over every other box at best buy. (Why do you think all the ultrabooks have screens that aren't 1366x768?)
Yes, you are completely correct.
However, a stunningly large number of people fall for the marketing trick known as "privacy controls" (which were put in purely to give people the feeling of privacy so they'd tell the site even more information).
It's like people who set everything to "only me" and pretend Facebook is an online diary that no one else will ever read. Once that information is out there, it ain't a secret.
They're also the makers of some pretty damn locked down Androids as well, and using pretty crappy low end hardware. If you really wanted a company that concentrated on specs over everything else, it was Archos.
Their pre-Andorid players locked the bootloader to the hard drive - once the drive died, you couldn't change the drive. This continued on with Android - locking to the hard drive, and verifying the signatures on the kernel and all that. You could root them, but they always went away the next reboot. (And Android was considered far more open because you could at least install apps yourself - previously you could only buy what Archos let you).
And the hardware, oh the hardware. Could you imagine buying a device with an LCD screen and having 3-4 dead pixels stare back at you in the face? Hell, the only time you get 'em now is if you went with the really cheap monitors using rejected LCD panels. But at least you're paying much less than half the price. Archos products aren't positioned to be cheap... it's just their choise of poor quality components.
Well, other than hard drives, I think most servers probably have a life of around 3 odd years or so before they're replaced with gear under a new support contract, at which point even if it was able to last 10 and you shortened it to 5, the server would be replaced before it dies.
Sure that oddball PC you have in the corner that's got a decade's worth of dust on it probably wouldn't have lasted as long, but it's probably good practice to figure out what it did and replace it.
One of the major ironies is how closed the GPL can be.
Take some BSD code and stick it into a GPL project. Perfectly legal (assuming it's modified BSD - there's still a lot of original BSD licensed code out there).
Now improve on that GPL'd code - fix a bug say.
Now the GPL guys will scream about the superiority of the GPL and how "open" it is, except they've just closed the patch! There's no way for the BSD guys to get that code back in because the code has been GPL-tainted, and is thus unavailable to be pulled back in to fix the bug. (And it's legally questionable if they could look at the GPL patch to figure out how to fix it).
Of course, the original authors are fine with what happened in the beginning - it's BSD and they agreed to it. However, the whole unable-to-get-at-shared-code probably irks them to no end - they know there's a fix, but they can't incorporate it because of the GPL.
At the same time, people are screaming in their ears about how BSD lets some company "steal" their code and close it up compared to the superior GPL, when the supposedly open GPL has done exactly that. Perhaps even worse, at least if the code was closed by some company, it's a case of ignorance - if the company doesn't say, no one knows. The GPL project openly flaunts that code back at the BSD folk - like a flag showing how superior the GPL is.
A PADD is not a tablet. Especially a TNG one.
Note that the top half is a screen, while the bottom half is a convenient bezel to hold it and input data with. No tablet today has this sort of layout. The closest we've come to having a PADD would be the early revisions of Amazon Kindle readers (with the keyboard at hte bottom) or a Blackberry-style phone.
Perhaps that's why despite Apple having dabbled in it for probably a decade now, they haven't released a full-touch-screen based computer. There were tons of rumors of touchscreen monitors on iMacs and laptops, but they never materialized. Probably after doing enough research, it turns out people just hate having to lift their arms up to touch the screen.
I think of the touchscreen stuff ended up going into the touchpads (which Apple seems to have mastered - I know there's tons of people who hate touchpads, but Apple ones are surprisingly not only usable, but decent enough to use as a primary pointing device).
The only time a vertical touchscreen PC works is when you're standing and need brief interactions with it (see restaurant POS systems).
Actually, for the most part, most consumers with HDTVs sit far away enough that 1080p is "retina" resolution - the eye just cannot resolve the added resolution.
I think the guides I've seen has the viewing distance to be almost 1:1 with the diagnoal display size (distance to TV in inches should be between 1-2x the diagonal screen size in inches) if you want to resolve 1080p sharply. beyond that and resolution diminishes.
Most people don't sit so close to their TVs - they probably sit a good 6-10 feet away which means even at 1080p, they're not seeing the full picture as the eye just can't resolve it.
Yes, a "retina" display isn't just for personal electronics. It applies to many things - it's not just dpi, but dpi+distance. Increase the distance, the DPI requilred drops.
An app store does not eliminate the need for marketing. Seriously, you can't get far in the world wihtout some form of advertising. "Release it and they will come" only applies to a very small niche of folks who know what they want. Most people don't, and if you invent something better (like say, a car), it won't succeed unless you start marketing it.
Users don't discover apps. They may browse them out of curiousity, but the vast majority get their apps after learning about it from other places.
Hell, that applies to most things in life as well. Just releasing sometihng as open-source won't make it popular, even if it fulfills the needs of a bunch of people - someone has to find it first.
And most apps earning under $1000 isn't a big surprise - the big ones tend to have people actually doing some work and marketing their apps. Plus given around 50-70% of apps are free/freemium (which only has a 1% conversion rate), plus apps which are promotional tools moreso than apps for sales (e.g., Steam app, all those store/manufacturer/catalog apps, and I'm' sure Kindle/Kobo/Nook apps aren't designed to make money directly).
And there's a lot of crap out there, as with any system. It happens all over the place - for every gem of an indie game, there's thousands of crap ones. For every good indie band, there's thousands of garage bands where the din of city traffic is more musical. Or YouTube.
It's why a lot of Kickstarters fail, and why Ouya is going to have problems as well if everyone's crap game is going to be posted on it.
And I'm pretty certain the 1% thing is probably consistent across Google Play and many other places as well (including well, running a business). It's only on highly-curated environments like Steam or consoles where the likelihood to make money is much higher (though also much harder).
Windows App Store's advantage right now is that for the lazy, they can get in "on the ground floor". But when it gets popular, that 1% rule will apply as well.
Low voltage DC is piss-poor for distribution because power losses in wires increases at the SQUARE of the current. 120V@1A will have far lower losses than 12V@10A - 100 times less.
The big AC to DC places use high-voltage DC for that reason - lower current cables are far easier to handle than high current cables (the thickness of a conductor depends on its current - ampacity. The insulator does have to get thicker for higher voltages, but it's a lot more flexible than a thick 00-gauge wire.
DC-DC converters are fairly efficient and converting down to where you need has less losses than trying to shove 100A of 12VDC to a rack (assuming said rack only consumes 1200W. I think a modern rack can easily draw 3600/4800W fully loaded with servers which would mean up to 400A at 12V to the rack - calling for seriously thick cabling).
Oh, and what happens when you have high currents flowing at low voltages? You get welding. Because IIR heating is far more effective when you're passing huge currents through.
Easy.
A standards body, like IEEE, 3GPP, etc., decide they want a new standard. Ethernet (yes, there are patents on all parts). WiFi (plenty to go around). 5G, Codec. whatever. They get together industry to help them produce the new standard. Industry presents their technology, and they hash out what will make it and what doesn't. As a condition for having the technology included in the new standard, all related patents to use that technology must be FRAND licensed. Otherwise you get a really broken spec where competitors cannot implement the standard because the companies refuse to license.
It's also a big game of political football - technologies that are great may be shunned and inferior ones used because the company with the inferior technology greased more palms. It's pretty lucrative.
Basically a patent is FRAND licensed if it's used in a standard for that standard only, because you can't implement the standard without that patent.
Apple needs ot license Samsung patents in order to produce a phone because Samsung put their technology into the celluar spec, probably LTE or 3G, and you cannot build a phone without those patents (implementing the standard automatically violates the patent).
However, the other things like pinch-to-zoom and slide-to-unlock (if valid), are not part of a standard (there's no standard for "smartphone" that everyone has to follow). You could tap a sequence of numbers to unlock (say, entering a PIN code). You could require the user press the power button three times to unlock, etc.
An de-facto standards aren't standards - Microsoft doesn't have to license you the Office patents to implement something that reads Office documents (which they provide), even though Office is a defacto standard in business. Well, they do for their XML standard (because they submitted it as a standard), but not for say, the .doc format.
TiVo's got the same thing - they have a bunch of core DVR patents that if you implement one, you pretty much have to license it, but they don't have to.
As an aside, a lot of standards also have licensing bodies where you can acquire a license to every patent for one fee without having to talk to any of the participants - MPEG has MPEG-LA to license you all the patents used for a video codec, I think the IEEE has one as well for Ethernet and WiFi. 3GPP doesn't (which means if you want to build a phone, you have to talk to everyone).
Music has always been a very sticky item in the motion pictures (TV and movies).
A lot of the time, you can get permissions to do X, but you can't do Y (e.g., you can tape a production for broadcast, but you can't put it on a DVD). Especially with older things - many TV shows have to be re-cut with licensed music (this can include the opening sequence and credits too) as the original contracts for licensing never included home video or anything else. And some material can't be licensed anymore as their creators are dead and all that (and their estates refuse to grant licenses or permission).
It's just another aspect of the convoluted nature of copyright and licensing.
Top Gun was probably one of the first movies to use a LOT of licensed music during the movie (music composed specifically for a movie (soundtrack scores and such) usually are licensed fully to the movie for further uses as part of the movie, but external music often has commercial value that makes it impractical to grant it).
It's a horrendous mess and something lawyers spend a lot of client money on in trying to obtain releases.
Heck, I know one concert was recorded for Blu-Ray/DVD and PBS. PBS was allowed to include some extra tracks (as a non-profit) that were not allowed to be put on the Blu-Ray or DVD (because those were commercial ventures). Of course, the entire concert couldn't be put in since some didn't include recording and rebroadcast rights...
Until you have to install a new version on blank hardware. One of the really big annoyances with Windows is the initial install. Install Windows 7 (no SP). Now run Windows Update for the next 10 hours downloading and installing updates.
The SP is basically a roll up of fixes so you can install all 500 or so in one go, or when slipstreamed onto the disc, during install. Which turns the Windows Update hassles from huge mess down to something much more managable.
And no, you don't need to get them every week. Once every few months or once a year is quite enough to ensure you aren't spending hours installing updates.
Is it a terrible thing?
I mean, the problem is the "general public" cared about cost and we ended up in a race to the bottom, where margins are thin and we're seeing the results in low-res screens, integrated graphics, and basically a lot of sameness as everyone builds to a price.
Let prices rise a bit - clear out the low end crap. If you wanted a decent laptop with a screen higher than 1366x768, you always had to pay more than $1000. Or discrete graphics. Or computers not built from flimsy plastic.
See ultrabooks - we're getting very high-res screens and other innovations, even though they cost $1000+, a market most PC manufacturers shunned in the face to build sub-$500 PCs.
All that's happened with the race to the bottom are companies like Apple realizing they have the whole $1000+ PC market to themselves - all they have to do is entice people away from the $500 crowd - see what you get when you spend more.
Standard pin=pad fraud actually. What the criminals do is they steal pin-pads, then back at their lair, modify them to include recording hardware (you know, crack open the case, add a magstripe recorder (just an MP3 player with record function) and wires to the keypad to record the PIN.
Then they go to the cashiers, and when no one's looking, swap out the pin-pads.
It usually happens with smaller outfits (fast food outlets and the like) where they don't bolt-down the pin-pad to prevent theft. That's why the big guys have pin-pads that are encased in metal or otherwise bolted down to the counter.
The pin-pads are usually connected to the main unit (where the cashier enters in the amount and gets the printouts) by a simple coiled cable with RJ style jacks on them, making it trivially quick to swap surreptitiously.
It's a pretty standard fraud, actually.
What would help is also WHY those clauses are in there. A lot of the iTunes clauses really deal with things like being able to purchase and download music, repeated again for apps, repeated again for movies, etc. Then a bunch of terms on if you use feature X that it can be sent to Apple and what you agree to there, blah blah blah. Then Apple lets you redownload music through iCloud, and the ToS has to change to say that yes, you are allowed to do that (before you were solely responsible and Apple won't provide another download).
Of course, it's also a testabment to how the scope of iTunes has bloated.
From the Ars Technica review,
Is this true on all the surfaces that the "magsafe" port doesn't engage properly, or perhaps just Ars' one isn't that great? After all, it seems that a power port where it can appear fully attached but still not connected would be a somewhat annoying problem.
It can't be Apple patented a method to use magnets and end up with a reliable power connection every time without jiggling the cable. (You'd think there would be huge reports for people having to wiggle their MagSafe/Magsafe2 power cables to get their Macs to charge already).
Or law enforcement - imagine what they can do with the data - they sieze your phone, plug it in to see if it'll spew data out the USB port while locked. If you have USB debugging on, they could look at the logcat and see the unlock code and use it to legitimately snoop around (it "wasn't locked - it just had a very fancy "slide to unlock" function).
Given how cellphone's legal status as a container is in doubt, this could be potentially troubling. (And face it - those who use CM nightlies probably HAVE USB debugging on.
And on my non-CM JB phone, you can access adb and the logcat while it's still locked.
Died out because people either didn't pay (if they got the full version), or trashed it if they got useless demoware in the end. And most shareware ended up being crippleware or just plain old demos and people just pirated the full version like everything else.
In fact, the ONLY platform in the end where shareware worked to a limited extent was MacOS, and a bit into OS X - Mac users apparently were willing to pay up for good software, even if they didn't have to.
Even the big shareware houses ended up going to the traditional software model once they became big enough (like Ambrosia Software - big indie game developer/publisher for MacOS and OS X).
Or Valve sees an opporunity - the major platform vendors are starting to provide their own walled gardens (as an adjunct to the normally open nature). Linux has no vendor, so Valve can be the pioneer in putting their own walled garden into Linux. It starts by offering compelling content - Valve's own games, then spreads out.
It should be no surprise that Steam is adding non-game software to the mix. Even Steambox is really just another console in the end.
The only question is how is Steam's level of curation compared to the loosest of walled gardens, Apple's. (Apple's curation, whilst problematic (you don't get to have 700,000 things without problems), is considered very light-handed compared to Microsoft, Sony or Nintendo).
For its price, 30% is fairly cheap in the end. Amazon takes 50+% off the top for books (standard wholesale rates - why do you think Amazon can always offer books 30% off?), and probably very similar things happen for eBooks. We know it's about 30% for eBooks under $10, and it's more over $10 (to encourage people to price books at under $10), easily 50% or higher.
Microsoft and Sony charge more for their stores and DLC. I can't tell you about Steam, but it's probably less, mostly because they don't have to recoup 30 cents + 1-5% off 99 cents (when you sell for $10+, 30 cents per transaction plus 1-5% of transaction value isn't much). Though I suppose it'll probably change if Steam gets a bunch of 99 cent apps and Valve starts having to subsidize transaction fees (usually there's a table of fees - like if it's below $5, it's 30%, if it's below $10, it's say, 20%, etc).
Of course, the difficulties in hosting a bunch of apps (most of which are free so cost you money per download) plus the maintenance of all the equipment and the necessary security (PCI-DSS, even moreso because you're storing a LOT of personal data so people can buy in the future without re-entry of credit cards).
And gift cards... free money on interest, except well, considering iTunes cards are routinely 20% off ($50 iTunes card for $40) means the retailer's profit and Apple's expenses are paid from the leftover 10% (probalby 50-50).
If it was easy, then why are only the big guys hosting stores - if you can run an Android app store taking only 10% off the top, you should be a big hit.
As for the store where 1% make money - Apple paid out $6.5B to developers. If only 7000 apps made money (1% of roughly 700,000 apps), that's over $900,000 that each of those 7,000 apps made. So you have a 1% of getting a million bucks for say, a $2000 investiment. If you try 100 times, that's $200,000 in new equipment, to get $900,000. That seems like a risk. Or it could just be faulty numbers. Sure people may claim 1% of apps make money, but if it was true, it's well worth the risk. Even as a VC I can see if I can invest in 100 app companies for $2000 hardware to get 1 of them earning 900K, that's an extremely good value proposition. So the numbers are faulty, because we know a handful made over $1M, and most apps probably make a few thousand dollars (the ones that require payment - upfront or in-app).
And app store or no - there is always a need to do marketing and advertising. You can't put it up and they will come - you must advertise. Sorry, but if people don't know if your app exists, they can't find it. Word of mouth, send some review copies around, etc. We are not yet in an age where advertising and marketing are superfluous, no matter what anybody says. (And yes, being on the front page of iTunes or featured apps are marketing as well.)
Guess what? It's why the PS3 took so long to be "cracked". (Technically, the Xbox360 isn't cracked - hacked firmware can be run on the DVD drive to play pirated games, but that's it. And the signed Xbox dashboard actually detects this and reports it back to Microsoft. Running homebrew is extremely difficult - a vulnerable run of Xbox360s allowed Linux, but that's it).
The thing that kept the PS3 from being hacked and pirated to heck and back was the fact there was PS3 Linux. Once Sony retroactively removed it from ALL PS3s because of a theoretical hack (that was never even exploited as more than a curiosity), the real hackers started getting their hands on it.
And it all culminated in the January 2011 presentation by failoverfl0w that basically cracked the PS3 encryption keys wide open by revealing the keys.
Which ended up with a bunch of retail PS3s being converted to run debug firmware. Which Sony noticed when a bunch of PS3s started downloading paid DLC for free and at which point they discovered that people have infiltrated PSN and downloaded the databases.
The only difference now is we have the core root keys to the very lowest hardware (I think we only have level1 before courtesy geohot).
Had Sony not done PS3 Linux, it would've been cracked far sooner.