It's less about email and more about tracking and privacy.
You and I with Google accounts have signed up to give our first borns to the mighty mountain view company.
But there are people without, and for them, Google can easily be tracking them and using information gathered from Gmail users to help build up profiles of these non-Google users, who have never agreed to the Google ToS, or more improtantly, the Google Privacy Policy (which applies to Google users only).
Gmail is the target because it's probably the one service that someone who doesn't use Google can inadvertently interact with Google and not get protections of whatever privacy policy Google has because they never agreed to it.
It's a very interestingly crafted lawsuit, to be sure. And quite possibly, depending on a country's privacy laws, leads to some interesting precedents.
That's why Amazon's strategy of selling devices at or near cost is brilliant, although I'm not sure they're actually doing that given what comparable devices (e-Ink models aside) cost from AliExpress or DealExtreme.
Trust me, the cheap tablets are crap. If you're lucky they'll have decent specs, but most of the time, they won't. The screen will be crap (and finding ones with 480x800 is NOT difficult... the Kindle and Nexus 7 are a more respectable 600x1024). The touch, if you're lucky it will be capacitve, but most likely resistive (with standard awful glare common to cheap touchscreens, etc).
Hell, even some of the old 7" Android tablets were complete pieces of crap - the Kindle Fire, Nook Color/Tablet/whatever, and Nexus 7 actually being pretty decent pieces of kit that really do up the level of quality in what to expect.
Hell, just compare the build quality of a Kobo Vox to a Kindle or Nexus or Nook. For $50 more, it's pretty obvious that the $200 tablets outclass the $150-and-below in practically every way.
Facebook is PHP, with other people's back-ends behind it.
Facebook's source code is PHP. Which is then compiled into C++ (complete with all assets) and then compiled into a native binary. Linking is a huge problem as it produces a huge (multi-gigabyte) executable that is run directly.
Deployment is another issue - I believe they use a form of Bittorrent to do it, and naturally, the scripts that update from one executable to another don't work completely across the entire server farm - so those failed deployments run the old binaries until someone gets around to redeploying it.
I believe the PHP-to-C++ compiler is actually open-sourced by Facebook.
The original Kindle Fire OS is an abomination. Out of the box it has possibly the worst UI in the mobile space and it is quickly apparent that a concerted effort was made to restrict what you can (consume Amazon content) and can't (everything else) do with the the hardware.
Which was the entire intent of the device.
Amazon's business case for the Kindle hardware is the exact opposite to that of Apple. Apple sells content to promote the sales of hardware. (iTunes makes very little revenue compared to hardware sales. How much profit gets made is unknown).
Amazon, though, sells hardware at cost to promote the sale of content (of which they make 30% or more).
Remember, Amazon sells books, movies and music, and the whole purpose of the hardware is to promote sales of all that stuff - after all, you buy the hardware once, but if they have you constantly buying books (especially now that the agency model is bunk - go away iBookstore, go away B&N nook store - you're interfering with our sales), music and movies, Amazon makes a good chunk off that.
It's partly why Google decided to get in the game with the Play Store - Play Books, Play Music, Play Movies.
But to be honest, for 7" tablets, you might as well go with a Nexus 7. You can do everything the kindle does, but it's more open.
Why the hell couldn't they go with Micro-USB like everyone else?
Great for data, poor for everything else.
First, if you want A/V out, your only option is MHL. If you're trying to make cheap video dock, having to deal with HDMI is probably not going to cut it (especially all the licensing fees).
Next, if you want plain stereo audio out, well, at that point it's a proprietary solution. Motorola has audio output if you put a specific series of resistors in which then software takes to mean you want audio out in place of D+/D-. HTC uses a different set. If you want a wired headset, yet another set of resistors, and if you want audio in, or linelevel out, serial out... or have both audio IN and OUT at the same time.
That's where the 30 pin connector was great - for practically no circuits, you got video out, audio out, serial out, It's one of the reasons why there are millions of docks, adapters, cables, and other stuff for iDevices that can range from $20 (or less) to $2000+.
Lightning most likely involves standard conversion chips you can buy as part of the Apple licensing fees - just stick it in and you're done. No mess, no fuss.
Of course, the other solution is to have a million ports all up and down the device.
If you're a hardware developer, if someone offers you a cheap way to get at the signals you want without pesky licensing fees (all taken care of), it saves you a lot of work. Hell, Apple probably offers accessory manufacturers a prebuilt board with a lightning plug that breaks out the 30 pin signals so you don't even have to redo any circuits - either just replace the 30pin with the new connector (circuit built into it), or use the break out board version and wire it to your audio amps and such.
Of course, Apple isn't innocent here for $30 for the adapter is gouging. They should've tossed one in the box free and sell it for $10 if you want more. They can stop packing it in next year once the accessories establish themselves. Right now it's just pure gouging.
Its simply greed on the part of handset owners to try to scam a $2.00 app for nothing.
Well, what you mean is "piracy". It's just people pirating apps, just like they pirate movies, music, software, etc.
And piracy always exists, though the extent of which is debatable. Figures tossed around can easily be 90% on PCs and Androids, while "walled garden" devices like consoles, iOS, and Steam are far lower - 10% or so by other estimates. (Though, given that the Wii and PS3 are completely "open" at this point, how much piracy happens on those consoles is unknown).
It's human nature to do stuff like that, and in many places (e.g., Asia) it's such a casual process that it's practically normal to pirate, rather than pay for apps. Hell, anyone remember the original iPad review from China? "Cannot install pirated apps" was the big negative.
Heck, half the problem is/was the Play store itself. Amazon pretty much only exists in the UK and US (you cannot buy apps from there elsewhere). Play for a long time (back when it was the Marketplace) didn't accept payments from a lot of places. So if you wanted that awesom paid app but didn't live in a place where Play supported you, your only option was to pirate. (Some places like Taiwan are also unable to buy apps, purely because Google, unlike Apple, did not agree to the terms of selling digital goods (I think they wanted a 7 day refund policy)).
Of course, it didn't help that earlier Android APKs aren't really protected from piracy either - you could download the app, copy it off, refund it and copy it back with no issues. Even the initial Google licensing system was somewhat easy to bypass (with apps to do it automatically). Though I think the system in ICS and later is much more robust against easy piracy.
Your in technology, like it or not this is a field that requires more continuing education as a matter of course (if not law) than a lawyer or a doctor. You should never ever be retraining or training. Instead you should constantly be working on your next thing skill and never ever become complacent.
Actually, if you're a professional, you should be constantly learning (which is the goal of higher education - less to impart necessary industry knowledge, and more to continue to learn). Lawyers and doctors are constantly undergoing professional development training. Lawyers use it to catch up on the new nuances of the law and cases that they may not be aware of, as well as new areas of law that are opening up. Doctors have to be trained on the latest diagnoses and medical conditions. In fact, most professional licensing boards require members to participate in professional development activities (which includes training, but also giving keynotes, white papers, journal articles, etc.).
Ditto goes with technology. In fact, technology is probably the easiest field to get training in because everyone practically gives it away. And doing it yourself is a very real possibility - you can easily learn new things. Want to learn Android? Well, Google gives all the stuff you need to know away, and there are tons of books and other materials on the matter. Or learn iOS. Or Windows Phone.
Or try your hand at embedded development - pick up a Raspberry Pi, a BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, ODROID, or play with Arduinos.
And you can do this all in the comfort of your own home, too. Or attend some trade shows and see what people are hyping up.
If you're feeling so out of it and have no urge or motivation to do any of these things (or find something that excites you in technology), then it's not age that's making you too old to retrain. If that's the case, you should go and see what excites you and perhaps consider a change in careers
If you want something to catch on, think "IBM Compatible" or WWW. Neither of those 2 ideas were patented and they seem to have been pretty widely adopten and further developed.
I dunno. Ethernet is patented. As is Wi-Fi. And they seem to have caught on. Cellphones are horrendously heavily patented since their inception, and they seem pretty popular. Heck, MP3s are patented to the hilt and back, too.
Many of the early PCs like the Apple II were completely open - they did have schematics and source code listings that came with the machine. So much so that when Franklin decided to clone it, new precedents had to be set so software can be copyrighted. It's why Compaq had to go to a lot of effort to clone the PC.
This is all good policy. I wish the FCC were being more aggressive about reallocated spectrum but at the very least this is a step in the right direction.
Or is it? It's "government primary, commercial secondary" spectrum, which means the commercial use has to give way to government use. (A lot of the lower spectrum is like this - very little is actually dedicated to one entity or sector).
So the government has a right to the band (it's the government's to begin with) and they're letting commercial interests use it. Except well, officially now the government can spy on users of that band as part of their "spectrum management". Primary users have priority and the right to monitor secondary users of their spectrum to ensure compliance and everything (and if the government want sot block the commercial use temporarily, they can - primary user always has rights over the secondary).
If I understand correctly, the problem has been that there is no common and open standard for ARM platforms, so each chip has its own hardcoded pins and addresses that the kernel must include.
Well, ARM is just the processor core. An ARM SoC consists of the core plus more useful peripherals, like a memory controller (so you can have well, memory), serial ports, USB controllers, display controllers, etc.
Thing is, these things exist all over the memory map - put wherever the IC designers felt they should go.
It's nice to consolidate, but I can't see how far they can go - because stuff like main memory can exist at many different locations in the memory map.
Unlike say, the x86, whose basic platform design remains unchanged since the 80s. Sure chips have consolidated and such, but they all boot the same way - you can expect the BIOS in the same spot, memory to be somewhere else (with a gap), the PCI controller is at the same location, basic VGA video, etc.
Surely we can all agree that "Facebook Privacy" is an oxymoron.
Exactly. "Privacy" esttings are really just a scam to get people to reveal more information than they normally would.
The age-old saying of "Don't post online what you don't want the world to know" holds truer than ever before. As long as what you're sending is handled by a third party, there are no guarantees. Just like there are no guarantees what the recipient of your message may do with your message as well (perhaps they have no privacy compunctions and decide to make it public?).
Heck, the "Only Me" privacy setting on FB is already full of fail - if the information was truly private, perhaps the better way to do it is to... not post it?
Online privacy is basically like telling a secret. It ain't a secret.
is not so much the decline of the dollar, as the automation of manufacturing. As factories become more automated, the "labor" component of the cost goes down, and at some point is exceed by the transportation and inventory costs of off-shoring. At that point it becomes cost effective to "re-shore" the factory.
I have been inside factories in both China and the USA. Chinese factories bustle with people. American factories tend to be almost devoid of all lifeforms. Manufacturing is coming back to America, but manufacturing jobs are not.
That's because American labor is pricier, so the more you automate, the less humans you need to produce the product. It's why American labor, as compared to Chinese, is roughly an order of magnitude more productive (i.e., one American can produce 10 times as much as one Chinese worker). All purely due to automatication.
It's good and bad - a manufacturing job is quite a crappy one - it's completely unskilled, dull, menial and boring. As such, it's a low-paying job to begin with, and very few actually want ot "put tab A into slot B" for 8 hours a day. (The more usual American-made goods tend to be cars and other heavy industrial goods, where the volumes are far lower and the work more varied, though you still have pacing issues).
Though, the good side is it does produce some good jobs - the robot technicians who work on and repair the assembly line, as well as those who work out how to design for manufacturing.
And if we take Apple, we can probably see that Apple's stretching the limits of the Chinese method - automation will have to be employed in order to keep production up just out of sheer necessity. Every prodruct is pretty much "designed for manufacture" and is heavily automated (hence use of adhesives and other repair-unfriendly techniques) or at least done so each worker doesn't have to struggle to meet production (it's easier to apply a rim of glue than to screw in a bunch of screws, for example).
Even the Nexus Q had issues. It probably was fine for Chinese manufacture (its complexity is fine for a low-volume product). But move it so it's made in the US was folly as it was definitely not optimized for manufacture - it cost way more than it needed to build and assemble. Get rid of the two circuit boards and build it into one, get rid of screws, use some glue, get rid of the complex mechanical assembly and simplify things a bit and it'll probably work for high-volume manufacture in the US without costing much more than competitors. Of course, it would be far less hackable...
If I were them, I would be kissing Tim Cook's ass so hard that he couldn't turn around without slapping me with his junk. AMD needs some high profile names to adopt AMD processors.
Problem is I think AMD would be in even more dire straits if Apple adopted them.
One thing that Intel has that AMD doesn't is fab headroom. When Apple chooses the processor for their next computer, Apple will buy it in the millions. If Apple wants it customized to do X (e.g., in the early days, Apple insisted on having CPUs with VT-x in them, even though Intel didn't make any in that class), Intel can happily oblige.
For AMD, it could easily be a struggle, especially if demand for a top end low-yield processor surprises Apple.
You also have to remember that AMD has always had supply issues. Apple had problems with its G5 supplier, IBM, not being able to provide enough top-end G5s that its customers kept ordering (likewise, Motorola kept ignoring Apple to focus more on the military and commercial networking sectors for its PowerPC chips). So Apple was looking for a supplier who wouldn't be under such constraints, and would be able to ramp up production quickly.
AMD at the time was struggling to supply CPUs for the enthusiast sector - they probably had tons of the low end CPUs but likely Apple wasn't too keen on that - they wanted a range, and if they wanted high-end, it would mean the top end chips would end up with Apple, and everyone else gets the dregs.
AMD may be in trouble, but Intel will be in more trouble if AMD folds (think anti-trust and monopoly accusations, and possibly scrutiny and breakup). Intel's probably doing what it can to shore up AMD without directly investing in it. By keeping the price of Intel's chips high, they're letting AMD take the niche on the low end stuff to at least move product (Intel could easily lower prices and still make a profit).
Hell, Intel's probably got a AMD rescue plan in case AMD should really get into a bad spot (but not directly - through piles of third party investment companies).
So how can Samsung bring a suit against Apple that would not be valid to bring against every other user of that same chip?
If Samsung can sue over LTE standard essential patents mean nothing, and standards are then dead.
Depends on how the LTE patents are licensed. Hell, Apple's got a bunch of LTE patents, both original (e.g., nano-SIM) and bought (Nortel). Whether or not they apply to Samsung products is quetionable (they too are probably FRAND patents, and Samsung is probably compensating Apple in some way for them...).
FRAND patent lawsuits are tricky - and even the EU is investigating FRAND patent abuse by Motorola, and the like, because if this continues, it means no one can make an LTE phone, which makes the whole exercise moot. (FYI - the patents Apple sued Samsung for are NOT FRAND, while Samsung counter-sued using FRAND).
It's why there was great opposition to letting Apple's patents into the standard - remember getting your patents into standards (and thus FRAND) is a huge political ploy - with a lot of "I'll vote for you if you vote for me" kinda backroom deals. With Apple being the 800lb giant (money wise anyhow), wanting to shut Apple out is good business sense (cha-ching windfall from Apple). With Apple's patent in, and even though Apple's making the FRAND terms "free", that still counts at the who-owes-whom table when it comes to deciding how the patents are licensed.
That's a new one. The pitiful multitasking support in iOS is an awesome malware-prevention feature!
Well, you have to realize that the reason multitasking is like it on iOS (despite being a full UNIX core) is because of battery life. Everything iOS does is keeping battery life in mind. Push notifications are there because polling is horrendously inefficient (it consumes CPU - which is very expensive when you're on a power budget, and that's not even if you're dragging the baseband up to perform something over the network).
But it's also to do with security - iOS has very limited ways of accessing user data (you must use specific APIs to get at location, contacts, SMS, camera, etc). Things like phone calls and sending texts, which often cost money, have APIs that pull up the inbuilt OS dialler and messaging apps (that require you to confirm).
And yes, power budgets are slim on cellphones. If you want the 250 hours standby or 500 hours, you're looking at 3 mA draws. Yes, 3. The main system processor, draws way more - with ARM, it's around 1mW/MHz (so roughly 1W for a 1GHz processor). Powering that honking beast up blows your budget big time. (Oh, and did I mention that your transmitter and receiver take practically all 3mA keeping you attached to the cell tower? If handoffs are necessary, it blows the poewr budget dealing with all the hand offs. Or in a weak signal area that forces the radio to poewr on looking for stronger signals...).
And full multitasking forces the main CPU to wake up attending to every little thing even with the screen off. (As someone who had to trace down processes that decided to poll every second for something, it gets annoying quick. Trying to correllate power consumption traces with kernel traces is not a fun task...).
And on iOS, I would expect the OS would block access to the camera APIs once the app leaves main focus, so it can only take photos while active, not always (which is a great move for security, but also means you can't have apps that photograph your day).
Well, you still need to do marketing. You need to:
a) get people aware of your kickstarter project b) give them a reason to invest in your project
Your KS page seems to have done a decent job of (b), but I would guess you didn't put enough effort into (a).
Exactly.
Why is it as new technology comes around, people think it's the next big thing that completely obliterates the need for stuff like marketing? You may think advertising and such is the evilest thing on the planet, but if people don't know about it, how are they supposed to know?
Kickstarter is all about marketing. You've got to tell people about your project, why they should care about it, and why it's better than 99% of the other similar things out there.
Ditto with apps - sure you can write a app and make millions, but you need the marketing behind it. And yes, being "on the front page" IS marketing.
Oh, and "word of mouth" is also a form of advertising - if all you do is put it on your twitter feed, well, that's an ad. If you tell a friend, it's advertising (to them), and if they tell others, they're advertising your product to them. (Note that any successful scheme involves many levels - even the big brands do word-of-mouth).
You can never rest on your laurels - "build it and they will come" only works when someone else knows you built it.
It's a bit tricky since AppleCare is a bit more than warranty - it includes phone support and diagnostic software, while the EU just wants a 2 years default warranty (for apple, that's one-year manufacturer, 90 days phone, so it would rise to 2 year manufacturer).
Which just means the cost of 1/2 of an AppleCare plan gets rolled into the price (to bring it to 2 years), except you don't get support. And to bring it to three years, you can pay 60-75% of the cost (2-3 year extension, with full phone support and other stuff).
And then EU residents cry about how they're getting ripped off - because the price of the product has to include sales tax (unlike North America, sales taxes in the EU are built in, and not charged separately), import taxes (25-50%) and now "extended warranty".
Of if you want to compare, ask how much Best Buy charges for a 2 year extended warranty and then tack it on...
Actually, getting rid of patents would basically handicap innovation, because we'd be stuck in a sea of sameness.
If you want to see, take a look at China - they don't respect patents, so what do we have? Tons of iPod lookalikes, iPhone lookalikes (including some that run Android), fake network gear, fake chips, etc.
That's because the Chinese have figured out it's cheaper to copy innovation and sell for less than to try to do any real R&D. Let the sucker company spend the money doing all the hard work, then just copy them and sell it for less.
Closer to home, lots of Android innovations (or why "Android is better than iOS") come from Google avoiding Apple's patents. Ignore TouchWiz - what do you see when you unlock an Android phone? The Android home screen, with its widgets and icons, and the "dock" that holds icons common across the entire scrolling home screen. It doesn't unlock to the launcher (which lacks a dock). Thus neatly avoiding Apple's patent because there's no grid of icons with a dock. And Android users will scream about how superior that is (I personally don't like it, but that's an opinion, I know lots who do).
And while I don't like the home screen, I'm thankful Android didn't become a copy of iOS. Because that's what we'd have in the end.
Heck, the ultrabooks sponsored by Intel - they're close to, but not quite like, a MacBook Air. Leading to lots of design innovations and differentiation in products. Otherwise we'd have a sea of MacBook Air clones, instead everyone's now competing on features, design, and literally feel (ranges from plastic, thin sheet steel to full metal).
Broken isn't a comparative concept. Stupid and sloppy, on the other hand.... I mean httpio:wwwannarborcomentertainmentwhirlydoodle-projectUGI3U41lTnh, that doesn't pass even the most basic sanity test.
Hell, that's something that can be tested by computers! A basic sanity test could just run curl or wget on every link to verify that it's correct and that there's something there (it oculd be completely wrong, but at least you know it's reachable.).
You'd think they could test it using slashcode or something.
True. Google STILL does not map out my old place. Every time I try, it puts the pin in the completely wrong spot. This, despite numerous attempts at "offer corrections".
Hell, I think there's even Street View for it (there are certainly roads there on the map), but they're all unnamed and thus, unsearchable.
NavTeq among others have properly routed to that address since the 2010 update. The satellite images and street view are dated, which is fine, but not having the street named (it was a new street... back in 2008) or mappable for that long is inexcuasble.
Of course, where I am now, both Google and Apple probably won't find it since it's a brand new street dating to last year.
And heck, when Google switched map sources from Tele-Atlas to Google back around 2010, there was a lot of amusement going on as street names and entire towns were misspelled. It got so bad the only solution often was to use Bing or Mapquest.
Of course, I do wonder how bad it was last week when iOS6 was released. Perhaps many of the issues got fixed in-between (such is common since the maps are "in the cloud").
And there is no mass shift to Mac - it's stable at around 5-6% market share of browser users
Actually, it's risen steadily from 5% to 7% over the past few years. It may sound like a slow rise, but when you consider that only 20% of the PC market is home machines, and the rest is enterprise. Then you consider that paired with apple having near 0 penetration into the enterprise market, and you get to the conclusion that apple's share of the home market has gone from 25% to 35%... That's walking about money.
Apple also likes it that way because they're skimming the cream off the PC market. There's no doubt you can run out and buy a PC that's cheaper* than a Mac. Apple refuses to play the "race to the bottom" game as everyone else has done, which is why most Macs cost $1000 and over.
Or why there's a scramble to build ultrabooks and tablets - because these PCs command higher prices and thus more profit than the $500 machines. Basically the PC manufacturers are also getting wise to the fact that the race to the bottom doesn't benefit them - and they'd probably soon exit the field completely to give the white-box guys a niche.
Of course, it also means Apple has to justify the extra costs - which is why they build their cases out of "exotic" materials like metals and glass to also separate themselves from a sea of plastic.
(*) - You can buy a $500 PC. You can't buy a $500 Mac. I'm not talking about equivalent parts, who has better value for money, quality, etc. I'm just saying any consumer can walk into a store with $500 and walk out with a PC. Pure price.
There's a downside to smart meters though. It's known that old power meters tend to get increased drag as they age. So say you use 1200kw this month, the meter may read as if you had only used 1125kw or so (that might be a bit of a large gap for a lower power use, but you get the idea).
True, because it's mechanical and subject ot all sorts of enviornmental conditions of cold and heat, so they do read slower as they lose calibratoin. Though the power company does swap out meters on a regular basis - usually once a decade or so to bring them back to calibration. Of course, 10 years worth of weather does take its toll on the meter base (it's a socket the meter plugs into), so sometimes it can also burn your house down.
I suppose the most wasteful was our electric meter at the new place was the new digital (non-smart) kind - no mechanical pieces, just an electrical usage integrator that sends a pulse to a counter board. A couple of months later it was replaced with a smart meter. Apparently the design of the digital meters is like that - a power board sends pulses to the digital board which totals up the power consumed.
Does anybody know what 'Security Engine' is, and what exactly it is using about 1/3 as much silicon as one of the processor cores to do exactly?
None of the thermal die shots appear to show it actually doing much of anything demanding; but I have to assume that Intel didn't put it there just because they really wanted the processor to be a bit bigger and more power hungry.
I'm guessing it handles a lot of the security stuff, but also has a lot of extra oomph to basically do stuff while the x86 CPUs are off. Like handle music playback, video playback, etc. Stuff that can be done on a more efficient architecture (I think Intel's using MIPS) so the x86 can be powered off to have comparable battery life. Kick them on doing CPU-intensive tasks and watch the battery percentage tick downward steadily.
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It's less about email and more about tracking and privacy.
You and I with Google accounts have signed up to give our first borns to the mighty mountain view company.
But there are people without, and for them, Google can easily be tracking them and using information gathered from Gmail users to help build up profiles of these non-Google users, who have never agreed to the Google ToS, or more improtantly, the Google Privacy Policy (which applies to Google users only).
Gmail is the target because it's probably the one service that someone who doesn't use Google can inadvertently interact with Google and not get protections of whatever privacy policy Google has because they never agreed to it.
It's a very interestingly crafted lawsuit, to be sure. And quite possibly, depending on a country's privacy laws, leads to some interesting precedents.
Trust me, the cheap tablets are crap. If you're lucky they'll have decent specs, but most of the time, they won't. The screen will be crap (and finding ones with 480x800 is NOT difficult... the Kindle and Nexus 7 are a more respectable 600x1024). The touch, if you're lucky it will be capacitve, but most likely resistive (with standard awful glare common to cheap touchscreens, etc).
Hell, even some of the old 7" Android tablets were complete pieces of crap - the Kindle Fire, Nook Color/Tablet/whatever, and Nexus 7 actually being pretty decent pieces of kit that really do up the level of quality in what to expect.
Hell, just compare the build quality of a Kobo Vox to a Kindle or Nexus or Nook. For $50 more, it's pretty obvious that the $200 tablets outclass the $150-and-below in practically every way.
Facebook's source code is PHP. Which is then compiled into C++ (complete with all assets) and then compiled into a native binary. Linking is a huge problem as it produces a huge (multi-gigabyte) executable that is run directly.
Deployment is another issue - I believe they use a form of Bittorrent to do it, and naturally, the scripts that update from one executable to another don't work completely across the entire server farm - so those failed deployments run the old binaries until someone gets around to redeploying it.
I believe the PHP-to-C++ compiler is actually open-sourced by Facebook.
Which was the entire intent of the device.
Amazon's business case for the Kindle hardware is the exact opposite to that of Apple. Apple sells content to promote the sales of hardware. (iTunes makes very little revenue compared to hardware sales. How much profit gets made is unknown).
Amazon, though, sells hardware at cost to promote the sale of content (of which they make 30% or more).
Remember, Amazon sells books, movies and music, and the whole purpose of the hardware is to promote sales of all that stuff - after all, you buy the hardware once, but if they have you constantly buying books (especially now that the agency model is bunk - go away iBookstore, go away B&N nook store - you're interfering with our sales), music and movies, Amazon makes a good chunk off that.
It's partly why Google decided to get in the game with the Play Store - Play Books, Play Music, Play Movies.
But to be honest, for 7" tablets, you might as well go with a Nexus 7. You can do everything the kindle does, but it's more open.
Great for data, poor for everything else.
First, if you want A/V out, your only option is MHL. If you're trying to make cheap video dock, having to deal with HDMI is probably not going to cut it (especially all the licensing fees).
Next, if you want plain stereo audio out, well, at that point it's a proprietary solution. Motorola has audio output if you put a specific series of resistors in which then software takes to mean you want audio out in place of D+/D-. HTC uses a different set. If you want a wired headset, yet another set of resistors, and if you want audio in, or linelevel out, serial out... or have both audio IN and OUT at the same time.
That's where the 30 pin connector was great - for practically no circuits, you got video out, audio out, serial out, It's one of the reasons why there are millions of docks, adapters, cables, and other stuff for iDevices that can range from $20 (or less) to $2000+.
Lightning most likely involves standard conversion chips you can buy as part of the Apple licensing fees - just stick it in and you're done. No mess, no fuss.
Of course, the other solution is to have a million ports all up and down the device.
If you're a hardware developer, if someone offers you a cheap way to get at the signals you want without pesky licensing fees (all taken care of), it saves you a lot of work. Hell, Apple probably offers accessory manufacturers a prebuilt board with a lightning plug that breaks out the 30 pin signals so you don't even have to redo any circuits - either just replace the 30pin with the new connector (circuit built into it), or use the break out board version and wire it to your audio amps and such.
Of course, Apple isn't innocent here for $30 for the adapter is gouging. They should've tossed one in the box free and sell it for $10 if you want more. They can stop packing it in next year once the accessories establish themselves. Right now it's just pure gouging.
Oh, phew. I don't use <blink> anymore.
Me, I do my blinking in more harmless tags. Like <font>, <div> and the like.
(style="text-decoration:blink" - for those who don't want to put it in their css files.)
Can't remember when <blink> was actually deprecated in favor of its CSS counterpart...
Well, what you mean is "piracy". It's just people pirating apps, just like they pirate movies, music, software, etc.
And piracy always exists, though the extent of which is debatable. Figures tossed around can easily be 90% on PCs and Androids, while "walled garden" devices like consoles, iOS, and Steam are far lower - 10% or so by other estimates. (Though, given that the Wii and PS3 are completely "open" at this point, how much piracy happens on those consoles is unknown).
It's human nature to do stuff like that, and in many places (e.g., Asia) it's such a casual process that it's practically normal to pirate, rather than pay for apps. Hell, anyone remember the original iPad review from China? "Cannot install pirated apps" was the big negative.
Heck, half the problem is/was the Play store itself. Amazon pretty much only exists in the UK and US (you cannot buy apps from there elsewhere). Play for a long time (back when it was the Marketplace) didn't accept payments from a lot of places. So if you wanted that awesom paid app but didn't live in a place where Play supported you, your only option was to pirate. (Some places like Taiwan are also unable to buy apps, purely because Google, unlike Apple, did not agree to the terms of selling digital goods (I think they wanted a 7 day refund policy)).
Of course, it didn't help that earlier Android APKs aren't really protected from piracy either - you could download the app, copy it off, refund it and copy it back with no issues. Even the initial Google licensing system was somewhat easy to bypass (with apps to do it automatically). Though I think the system in ICS and later is much more robust against easy piracy.
Actually, if you're a professional, you should be constantly learning (which is the goal of higher education - less to impart necessary industry knowledge, and more to continue to learn). Lawyers and doctors are constantly undergoing professional development training. Lawyers use it to catch up on the new nuances of the law and cases that they may not be aware of, as well as new areas of law that are opening up. Doctors have to be trained on the latest diagnoses and medical conditions. In fact, most professional licensing boards require members to participate in professional development activities (which includes training, but also giving keynotes, white papers, journal articles, etc.).
Ditto goes with technology. In fact, technology is probably the easiest field to get training in because everyone practically gives it away. And doing it yourself is a very real possibility - you can easily learn new things. Want to learn Android? Well, Google gives all the stuff you need to know away, and there are tons of books and other materials on the matter. Or learn iOS. Or Windows Phone.
Or try your hand at embedded development - pick up a Raspberry Pi, a BeagleBoard, PandaBoard, ODROID, or play with Arduinos.
And you can do this all in the comfort of your own home, too. Or attend some trade shows and see what people are hyping up.
If you're feeling so out of it and have no urge or motivation to do any of these things (or find something that excites you in technology), then it's not age that's making you too old to retrain. If that's the case, you should go and see what excites you and perhaps consider a change in careers
I dunno. Ethernet is patented. As is Wi-Fi. And they seem to have caught on. Cellphones are horrendously heavily patented since their inception, and they seem pretty popular. Heck, MP3s are patented to the hilt and back, too.
Many of the early PCs like the Apple II were completely open - they did have schematics and source code listings that came with the machine. So much so that when Franklin decided to clone it, new precedents had to be set so software can be copyrighted. It's why Compaq had to go to a lot of effort to clone the PC.
Or is it? It's "government primary, commercial secondary" spectrum, which means the commercial use has to give way to government use. (A lot of the lower spectrum is like this - very little is actually dedicated to one entity or sector).
So the government has a right to the band (it's the government's to begin with) and they're letting commercial interests use it. Except well, officially now the government can spy on users of that band as part of their "spectrum management". Primary users have priority and the right to monitor secondary users of their spectrum to ensure compliance and everything (and if the government want sot block the commercial use temporarily, they can - primary user always has rights over the secondary).
Just something to keep in mind.
Well, ARM is just the processor core. An ARM SoC consists of the core plus more useful peripherals, like a memory controller (so you can have well, memory), serial ports, USB controllers, display controllers, etc.
Thing is, these things exist all over the memory map - put wherever the IC designers felt they should go.
It's nice to consolidate, but I can't see how far they can go - because stuff like main memory can exist at many different locations in the memory map.
Unlike say, the x86, whose basic platform design remains unchanged since the 80s. Sure chips have consolidated and such, but they all boot the same way - you can expect the BIOS in the same spot, memory to be somewhere else (with a gap), the PCI controller is at the same location, basic VGA video, etc.
Exactly. "Privacy" esttings are really just a scam to get people to reveal more information than they normally would.
The age-old saying of "Don't post online what you don't want the world to know" holds truer than ever before. As long as what you're sending is handled by a third party, there are no guarantees. Just like there are no guarantees what the recipient of your message may do with your message as well (perhaps they have no privacy compunctions and decide to make it public?).
Heck, the "Only Me" privacy setting on FB is already full of fail - if the information was truly private, perhaps the better way to do it is to... not post it?
Online privacy is basically like telling a secret. It ain't a secret.
That's because American labor is pricier, so the more you automate, the less humans you need to produce the product. It's why American labor, as compared to Chinese, is roughly an order of magnitude more productive (i.e., one American can produce 10 times as much as one Chinese worker). All purely due to automatication.
It's good and bad - a manufacturing job is quite a crappy one - it's completely unskilled, dull, menial and boring. As such, it's a low-paying job to begin with, and very few actually want ot "put tab A into slot B" for 8 hours a day. (The more usual American-made goods tend to be cars and other heavy industrial goods, where the volumes are far lower and the work more varied, though you still have pacing issues).
Though, the good side is it does produce some good jobs - the robot technicians who work on and repair the assembly line, as well as those who work out how to design for manufacturing.
And if we take Apple, we can probably see that Apple's stretching the limits of the Chinese method - automation will have to be employed in order to keep production up just out of sheer necessity. Every prodruct is pretty much "designed for manufacture" and is heavily automated (hence use of adhesives and other repair-unfriendly techniques) or at least done so each worker doesn't have to struggle to meet production (it's easier to apply a rim of glue than to screw in a bunch of screws, for example).
Even the Nexus Q had issues. It probably was fine for Chinese manufacture (its complexity is fine for a low-volume product). But move it so it's made in the US was folly as it was definitely not optimized for manufacture - it cost way more than it needed to build and assemble. Get rid of the two circuit boards and build it into one, get rid of screws, use some glue, get rid of the complex mechanical assembly and simplify things a bit and it'll probably work for high-volume manufacture in the US without costing much more than competitors. Of course, it would be far less hackable...
Problem is I think AMD would be in even more dire straits if Apple adopted them.
One thing that Intel has that AMD doesn't is fab headroom. When Apple chooses the processor for their next computer, Apple will buy it in the millions. If Apple wants it customized to do X (e.g., in the early days, Apple insisted on having CPUs with VT-x in them, even though Intel didn't make any in that class), Intel can happily oblige.
For AMD, it could easily be a struggle, especially if demand for a top end low-yield processor surprises Apple.
You also have to remember that AMD has always had supply issues. Apple had problems with its G5 supplier, IBM, not being able to provide enough top-end G5s that its customers kept ordering (likewise, Motorola kept ignoring Apple to focus more on the military and commercial networking sectors for its PowerPC chips). So Apple was looking for a supplier who wouldn't be under such constraints, and would be able to ramp up production quickly.
AMD at the time was struggling to supply CPUs for the enthusiast sector - they probably had tons of the low end CPUs but likely Apple wasn't too keen on that - they wanted a range, and if they wanted high-end, it would mean the top end chips would end up with Apple, and everyone else gets the dregs.
AMD may be in trouble, but Intel will be in more trouble if AMD folds (think anti-trust and monopoly accusations, and possibly scrutiny and breakup). Intel's probably doing what it can to shore up AMD without directly investing in it. By keeping the price of Intel's chips high, they're letting AMD take the niche on the low end stuff to at least move product (Intel could easily lower prices and still make a profit).
Hell, Intel's probably got a AMD rescue plan in case AMD should really get into a bad spot (but not directly - through piles of third party investment companies).
Depends on how the LTE patents are licensed. Hell, Apple's got a bunch of LTE patents, both original (e.g., nano-SIM) and bought (Nortel). Whether or not they apply to Samsung products is quetionable (they too are probably FRAND patents, and Samsung is probably compensating Apple in some way for them...).
FRAND patent lawsuits are tricky - and even the EU is investigating FRAND patent abuse by Motorola, and the like, because if this continues, it means no one can make an LTE phone, which makes the whole exercise moot. (FYI - the patents Apple sued Samsung for are NOT FRAND, while Samsung counter-sued using FRAND).
It's why there was great opposition to letting Apple's patents into the standard - remember getting your patents into standards (and thus FRAND) is a huge political ploy - with a lot of "I'll vote for you if you vote for me" kinda backroom deals. With Apple being the 800lb giant (money wise anyhow), wanting to shut Apple out is good business sense (cha-ching windfall from Apple). With Apple's patent in, and even though Apple's making the FRAND terms "free", that still counts at the who-owes-whom table when it comes to deciding how the patents are licensed.
Well, you have to realize that the reason multitasking is like it on iOS (despite being a full UNIX core) is because of battery life. Everything iOS does is keeping battery life in mind. Push notifications are there because polling is horrendously inefficient (it consumes CPU - which is very expensive when you're on a power budget, and that's not even if you're dragging the baseband up to perform something over the network).
But it's also to do with security - iOS has very limited ways of accessing user data (you must use specific APIs to get at location, contacts, SMS, camera, etc). Things like phone calls and sending texts, which often cost money, have APIs that pull up the inbuilt OS dialler and messaging apps (that require you to confirm).
And yes, power budgets are slim on cellphones. If you want the 250 hours standby or 500 hours, you're looking at 3 mA draws. Yes, 3. The main system processor, draws way more - with ARM, it's around 1mW/MHz (so roughly 1W for a 1GHz processor). Powering that honking beast up blows your budget big time. (Oh, and did I mention that your transmitter and receiver take practically all 3mA keeping you attached to the cell tower? If handoffs are necessary, it blows the poewr budget dealing with all the hand offs. Or in a weak signal area that forces the radio to poewr on looking for stronger signals...).
And full multitasking forces the main CPU to wake up attending to every little thing even with the screen off. (As someone who had to trace down processes that decided to poll every second for something, it gets annoying quick. Trying to correllate power consumption traces with kernel traces is not a fun task...).
And on iOS, I would expect the OS would block access to the camera APIs once the app leaves main focus, so it can only take photos while active, not always (which is a great move for security, but also means you can't have apps that photograph your day).
Exactly.
Why is it as new technology comes around, people think it's the next big thing that completely obliterates the need for stuff like marketing? You may think advertising and such is the evilest thing on the planet, but if people don't know about it, how are they supposed to know?
Kickstarter is all about marketing. You've got to tell people about your project, why they should care about it, and why it's better than 99% of the other similar things out there.
Ditto with apps - sure you can write a app and make millions, but you need the marketing behind it. And yes, being "on the front page" IS marketing.
Oh, and "word of mouth" is also a form of advertising - if all you do is put it on your twitter feed, well, that's an ad. If you tell a friend, it's advertising (to them), and if they tell others, they're advertising your product to them. (Note that any successful scheme involves many levels - even the big brands do word-of-mouth).
You can never rest on your laurels - "build it and they will come" only works when someone else knows you built it.
Not really, it's just honoring the law.
It's a bit tricky since AppleCare is a bit more than warranty - it includes phone support and diagnostic software, while the EU just wants a 2 years default warranty (for apple, that's one-year manufacturer, 90 days phone, so it would rise to 2 year manufacturer).
Which just means the cost of 1/2 of an AppleCare plan gets rolled into the price (to bring it to 2 years), except you don't get support. And to bring it to three years, you can pay 60-75% of the cost (2-3 year extension, with full phone support and other stuff).
And then EU residents cry about how they're getting ripped off - because the price of the product has to include sales tax (unlike North America, sales taxes in the EU are built in, and not charged separately), import taxes (25-50%) and now "extended warranty".
Of if you want to compare, ask how much Best Buy charges for a 2 year extended warranty and then tack it on...
Actually, getting rid of patents would basically handicap innovation, because we'd be stuck in a sea of sameness.
If you want to see, take a look at China - they don't respect patents, so what do we have? Tons of iPod lookalikes, iPhone lookalikes (including some that run Android), fake network gear, fake chips, etc.
That's because the Chinese have figured out it's cheaper to copy innovation and sell for less than to try to do any real R&D. Let the sucker company spend the money doing all the hard work, then just copy them and sell it for less.
Closer to home, lots of Android innovations (or why "Android is better than iOS") come from Google avoiding Apple's patents. Ignore TouchWiz - what do you see when you unlock an Android phone? The Android home screen, with its widgets and icons, and the "dock" that holds icons common across the entire scrolling home screen. It doesn't unlock to the launcher (which lacks a dock). Thus neatly avoiding Apple's patent because there's no grid of icons with a dock. And Android users will scream about how superior that is (I personally don't like it, but that's an opinion, I know lots who do).
And while I don't like the home screen, I'm thankful Android didn't become a copy of iOS. Because that's what we'd have in the end.
Heck, the ultrabooks sponsored by Intel - they're close to, but not quite like, a MacBook Air. Leading to lots of design innovations and differentiation in products. Otherwise we'd have a sea of MacBook Air clones, instead everyone's now competing on features, design, and literally feel (ranges from plastic, thin sheet steel to full metal).
Hell, that's something that can be tested by computers! A basic sanity test could just run curl or wget on every link to verify that it's correct and that there's something there (it oculd be completely wrong, but at least you know it's reachable.).
You'd think they could test it using slashcode or something.
True. Google STILL does not map out my old place. Every time I try, it puts the pin in the completely wrong spot. This, despite numerous attempts at "offer corrections".
Hell, I think there's even Street View for it (there are certainly roads there on the map), but they're all unnamed and thus, unsearchable.
NavTeq among others have properly routed to that address since the 2010 update. The satellite images and street view are dated, which is fine, but not having the street named (it was a new street ... back in 2008) or mappable for that long is inexcuasble.
Of course, where I am now, both Google and Apple probably won't find it since it's a brand new street dating to last year.
And heck, when Google switched map sources from Tele-Atlas to Google back around 2010, there was a lot of amusement going on as street names and entire towns were misspelled. It got so bad the only solution often was to use Bing or Mapquest.
Of course, I do wonder how bad it was last week when iOS6 was released. Perhaps many of the issues got fixed in-between (such is common since the maps are "in the cloud").
Apple also likes it that way because they're skimming the cream off the PC market. There's no doubt you can run out and buy a PC that's cheaper* than a Mac. Apple refuses to play the "race to the bottom" game as everyone else has done, which is why most Macs cost $1000 and over.
Or why there's a scramble to build ultrabooks and tablets - because these PCs command higher prices and thus more profit than the $500 machines. Basically the PC manufacturers are also getting wise to the fact that the race to the bottom doesn't benefit them - and they'd probably soon exit the field completely to give the white-box guys a niche.
Of course, it also means Apple has to justify the extra costs - which is why they build their cases out of "exotic" materials like metals and glass to also separate themselves from a sea of plastic.
(*) - You can buy a $500 PC. You can't buy a $500 Mac. I'm not talking about equivalent parts, who has better value for money, quality, etc. I'm just saying any consumer can walk into a store with $500 and walk out with a PC. Pure price.
True, because it's mechanical and subject ot all sorts of enviornmental conditions of cold and heat, so they do read slower as they lose calibratoin. Though the power company does swap out meters on a regular basis - usually once a decade or so to bring them back to calibration. Of course, 10 years worth of weather does take its toll on the meter base (it's a socket the meter plugs into), so sometimes it can also burn your house down.
I suppose the most wasteful was our electric meter at the new place was the new digital (non-smart) kind - no mechanical pieces, just an electrical usage integrator that sends a pulse to a counter board. A couple of months later it was replaced with a smart meter. Apparently the design of the digital meters is like that - a power board sends pulses to the digital board which totals up the power consumed.
I'm guessing it handles a lot of the security stuff, but also has a lot of extra oomph to basically do stuff while the x86 CPUs are off. Like handle music playback, video playback, etc. Stuff that can be done on a more efficient architecture (I think Intel's using MIPS) so the x86 can be powered off to have comparable battery life. Kick them on doing CPU-intensive tasks and watch the battery percentage tick downward steadily.
MacOS had it before Linux I believe...
Supposedly it dates back to the Macintosh II which supported multiple monitors.
Then again, DOS might be the very first use...