Who would even buy a Kindle from WalMart or Target in the first place?
People who shop at Target and Walmart? People who broke theirs and need a replacement immediately? People who wants theirs immediately? (It's the same price, after all)
Thing is, there are a LARGE number of people who don't shop online. They'll purchase stuff from curated stores (Amazon, Apple, etc), but they won't go open a browser and type www.amazon.com, click through and check out. They will however find a book, see "buy it", tap it and boom, book is on their device.
Thing is, a lot of other countries don't often have strong online shopping cultures (mostly due to lack of a decent Amazon, and competitors that charge shipping and taxes), so being able to buy it in a retail store for the same price is often quite appealing.
Here's something extra to hate about them. They took away the god-awful proprietary 30 pin connector, and replaced it with a new god-awful smaller proprietary connector that remains incompatible with the rest of the world. Nobody's old apple-y devices, cables, or chargers will work with their new phones; and non-apple cables or devices will remain incompatible. Yay, Apple, your i5 adopters all get to replace a couple hundred dollars worth of peripherals each.
Well, there comes time to change. The dock connector is nearly a decade old, and being called to do stuff it was never envisioned to do so pins are heavily multiplexed and you still need to have protection circuits (after all, someone could still plug in a +48V firewire cable to it, even if the pins ar eused elsewhere, it still needs ot handle it gracefully). And other stuff get obsolete - do you really need composite, s-video and component video outputs these days? And other stuff gets bodged in (VGA, HDMI, USB host) In the end, the connector's a mess.
The new cable would at least be a bit more future-proof (the dock connector was designed for a time when iPods were king, and smartphones were a race between Blackberry, PalmOS, and WInMo, tablets were running Windows You can only expand it so much before it starts becoming a legacy maintainance nightmare.
So a new connector is needed, and it should take in mind it will have to handle stuff that may be coming soon (e.g., 3D, 4K video formats) as well as stuff that no one's thought of yet (because changing connectors is painful). It should also support what made the old connector good - an easy way to get line-out and headphone audio, an easy way to control the iPod and an easy way to get video.
So the best way to future proof it would be a connector that basically adapts some sort of bidirectional digital signalling system with adapters that produce the final output desired. If some fancy new way to hook up an iDevice to TVs comes out, a new adapter is all it takes (and supporting software), rather than having to figure out how to multiplex pins even more.
It's probably also why the Lightning to dock adapters are so bloody expensive - they've got signalling chips that transform the digital into stndard analog audio, serial control , etc that the old connector has).
Will the lightning->micro usb adapter be free of charge (naive,and against the spirit of the EU directive), or how will this device comply with EN 301489-34 directive?
I believe in the EU boxes, they don't provide a USB-Lightning cable, but a USB-micro cable + micro-Lightning adapter. Just like they did for the iPhone 4s and others - a USB-micro cable and a micro-dock adapter. It's hard to tell, but where the strain relief is on the normal USB-dock cable, it's actually a little nub for the USB micro cable. A quick glance or at a distance and it's impossible ot tell.
So it complies - EU folks get a different cable to begin with and have the option of buying more.
So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it. Advertising has been shoved down people's throats. It's been put in places where it was promised not to appear. It eats away at our culture, it deadens people's nerves, and it saturates everything it comes in contact with. It is a plague -- and it needs reform. It is an industry without regulation, without controls, and with an insatiable appetite.
Advertising IS culture. Hell, old ads are often highly collectible items the reflect on an earlier time. History books don't generally include much pop culture in them, but advertising is a huge reflection of the cultural attitudes and beliefs of the day. And don't forget that a lot of things are ads - from movie posters to TV shows (the show itself, not the ad break). Hell, word of mouth is considered advertising because it's spreading something - be it a new open-source program, movie theatre, new smartphone, computer, whatever.
There were some highly offensive ads back in the day dealing with all sorts of things. A modern history book may make reference, but it can't really capture the extent that people allowed it to get to as compared to some advertising from the era. It's really a reflection of societal values of the era. (Advertising was often the quickest to jump on new trends, the the fastest to ditch what became unacceptable - it's only good business after all).
That said, ads back then didn't try to track or stalk people. You may see a Coca-Cola ad button on a wall, or a Pepsi one, but they didn't track you. What makes online advertising so annoying is that they track you around, following you. With Google doing it, it's even worse because they profile you. And who know what sorts of information you leak. Basically it's creating a profile of you that probably contains stuff you don't know about yourself, and it's all available to the highest bidder. That's scary. "Old media" ads didn't try to track you, profile you or gather information about you. And trying to fake out results is extremely hard (humans are bad at it - like trying to generate random numbers in your head). With enough of a profile, Google can easily discern what stuff you're doing that's trying to poison the data, and what you really normally do.
Why on earth would anyone store the balance on the card you give to customers? Isn't that kind of an open invitation to exploitation not to mention customer service headaches from people losing/damaging their cards?
Perhaps, but you can program them to store a serial number AND a rewritable fare value. And be a "treat it like cash" thing - lose it, you lost its value.
What you have is a central database of ID numbers and their values. When a faregate reads the card, it tries to contact the server. If it succeeds in a few seconds, great, it writes the updated value to the card and you go. If the server doesn't respond (too busy or perhaps it's down), you read the value off the card, deduct, write the new value back, and log the ID number for later reconciliation. When the server comes back, the ID numbers are then taken and values updated.
If the user rewrites the value, the next time the faregate manages to contact the server, the proper value is rewritten back.
User will have lots of free trips while the server is down (which can be blacklisted later) but once it comes up, the balance is made to re-agree. If they scored a few extra trips, well, good for them - but that card will be blocked if they try it and the server is contacted.
Heck, during rush hour, the server can load shed - perhaps ignore N out of every 10 transactions, so it stays speedy and remains up, performing the transactions during the less busy times.
So you get some free rides, but you may not know if you'll get lucky (other than when the entire system goes down and everyone's using stored balance only).
Heck, do it right and you can incorporate transfers in at the same time - each trip bills through (in stored value mode - in server mode it'll just deduct $0), but when timestamps are reconciled, extra charges merely get credited back the next time you swipe.
Where were they 20-30 years ago then? I mean, they're all coming out now (but not commercially available yet, still undergoing testing). Considering we archived orbital flight 30 years ago, they have 30 years of experience to build with.
Or could it be perhaps today there's actually enough money being thrown around by people who want to be astronauts that there's now a good enough ROI? 30 years ago, there was no ROI so no one invested in it (other than NASA).
We had the technology to do so 30 years ago. Yet these private companies advertising orbital flights (for the last decade or so) still haven't launched a commercial service yet (I'm not talking preorders. I mean launching and recovering now as a regular mission).
In other news, I have a Windows XP keygen that is absolutely not malware, which gets flagged as malware by every virus scanner I've tried except ClamAV. That makes me LOL.
Most keygens don't contain malware, but they contain wrappers that are downloaders for malware. Perhaps your virus scanners are picking up the fact that they're wrapped?
I've seen plenty of wrapped keygens that work completely normally - the wrapper starts first and silently downloads the malware in the background while the original keygen works normally. (They detect the downloader). The download is necessary in order to download the latest stuff that won't be detected.
And modern malware these days don't require admin priviledges - they'll take it if they can get it, but if it'll trigger a UAC or admin dialog, they'll disable that part of the functionality. Turns out that for being part of a botnet, you don't need admin (opening ports and incoming/outgoing connections are user available, as are writing files and starting up from the user's profile).
Have the malware be split into a ping and pong runtimes that monitor each other and they'd be very difficult to kill.
For keygens, I run them in an isolated VM instance and roll back the disk files after I'm done using them. You can never be too sure.
That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording.
Incorrect.
Vinyl "sounds better" because it does, mostly because of the dynamic range compression applied to digital media. We know this as the "loudness wars".
One of the side effects is that digital media like CDs clip when the sound peaks. Clipping is very harsh on the ears and most people try to avoid it.
However, "analog" media like vinyl and vacuum tubes don't clip. Vinyl can't clip because a louder sound just deflects the needle more. Do it too much and the needle etches into the groove beside it, ruining the vinyl master. You can, however, still have poor mastering.
Tubes distort the tops of the waveform the harder you drive them - this distortion is far more pleasant to the ear than clipping (and can often be a desired effect).
Have they found an 'electrosensitive' who's prepared to go double-blind on which of a selection of ten telephones/routers is actually switched on yet?
A certain Mr Randi has a million dollars waiting for the first person to do it. Maybe he should apply for that so he can buy a new house in the woods (or even buy the neighbors house and make them go someplace else). Problem solved.
He does, however, live away from civilization (in the woods) and with very little electricity (because that can trigger him - doesn' tmatter the frequency).
His case though, is that it isn't just Wi-Fi. Or cellphones, it's *everything*. It's a lot more compelling than anyone who complains they got headaches after a smart meter got put in or something, especially since he moved away to the countryside and gave up modern conveniences.
You simply cannot claim to be sensitive to "WiFi" or "cellphones" or "smart meters" and live in a modern city - if you were sensitive, you'd already be off on the countryside far away from electrical infrastructure.
I have not been able to glean what open source licence this project used, but for sure it was not the GPL. But THIS TYPE of misappropriation of code is the reason the GPL ought to be used for any kind of community project like this.
If you use an open source licence that allows the code to be taken and closed then don't cry when others figure out how to profit from your work and deny you the fruits of your own frickin' labor.
I believe it's OpenHardware, so its license is CC-BY-SA - in theory they can't lock down the electronics because of it (you have to distribute the schematics, gerbers and everything). But you could lock down the mechanicals, but that's pretty hard to do since anyone else can easily go and figure it out themselves.
The software I believe IS GPL, too.
So either they're designing everything from scratch and becoming like everyone else, at best sharing the name, or they're rewriting the PC side program and closing that, but keeping the hardware "open" (it's Arduino-derived, after all).
And looking at it, I think that's what is happening - they closed the PC side software. Whether or not it would work with the open-source tools is a good question.
I think the Don't Be Evil is long gone, lost in parts from the Google Plus push, the cozying up to carriers where Apple dared to push back.
Don't Be Evil never existed.
Remember Google history. Google needed a CEO, and who did they want? Steve Jobs. Yes, Jobs. Naturally, though, Jobs was involved heavily with Apple and decided it wouldn't be possible.
Instead, what Jobs did was take the Google founders under his wing and teach them about how to be leaders. (Of course, when Google released Android, Jobs felt backstabbed (again - first time was Gates and Windows), and wanted to wage war.).
Of course, given that Google's leadership was governed by Jobs through proxy, you can bet that a lot of Jobs' lessons would've been heeded. You can bet in 5 years, Google would be like Apple today. Sure they have Android, but while it's an open playground, it'll be one constantly spying on you.
the whole patent system is going to come crashing down. The way these companies are going, it will not take much longer before people start realizing the current system is no longer viable. Maybe a decade or so, but not much more.
The problem is, patent wars aren't new We're talking about a tradition that dates back to the 19th century. And patent wars have been fought continually since then.
You probably don't know much about it because not many people care, just like not many people care about the patent trolling going on now.
It's not a new thing, and it's probably debatable to whether it's happening more now proportionally than before.
Any field undergoing massive innovation (right now, it's mobile devices) goes through this. When cars and the ICE was new, there were patent lawsuits flying around then as well. As were lawsuits over hybrid vehicles, windshield wipers, CPUs, etc. Once a field matures and innovations slow down, so do patent lawsuits.
And there's no right solution. Ban software patents, and we'll be stuck in a sea of conformity because everyone will copy each other. Android would turn literally into an iOS clone because all the manufacturers want to copy Apple in everything. Instead, because Google specifically avoids Apple's patents, we have stuff like widgets, home screens, launchers, etc (though some manufacturers sitll try to clone into looking like iOS, sigh).
These super-cheap little dongles are *terrible* performers. They suffer from de-sense when nearby strong stations transmit, tend to have I/Q balance problems, and so on.
You want good performance from an SDR, you're not going to get it for $20. Providing the dynamic range you need to prevent desense and intermod isn't that easy, nor is providing the sample rate you need to deal with a broad swatch of the receive spectrum at one time at the same time you keep that dynamic range.
The cost will be several times that (at least.) And there are units on the market (See RFSPACE) that are hundreds of dollars and even over a thousand, but oh, man, once you use one, you'll know why. I have an SDR-IQ (and write free support software for SDRs, including that one) and I live and breathe these things on a day to day basis.
Yeah, but if you're wanting to experiment with SDRs, do you suggest a hobbyist go out and spend $500+ on a USRP or other high-quality SDR? Or $20, and then make the investment?
You get what you pay for, but damn for $20, I won't complain about lousy performance when getting started.
Most SDRs are basically overglorified soundcards - they consist of a tuner frontend coupled with common audio ADCs (thanks to commercially available 192kHz/24 bit and 96kHz/24bit ADCs meant for studio and mastering work).
Of course, this $20 dongle is 1MHz, but 8 bits (for $20, that's pretty good - high sampling rate ADCs get expensive the faster and more bits you want - top end 100MS/s 24bit can easily run $100+ in 1,000 quantity).
It's just like people complaining the Raspberry Pi is useless because it's a wimpy processor (though coupled with a fairly good GPU), when (Pandaboard/BeagleBoard/ODROID/etc) gets you far better. Yes, it's true, but the Pi's only $35, versus $150 for the rest.
There are SDR-based transceivers on the market for a couple of grand that are considered excellent (see FlexRadio) - for under $2000 you can get one, and their latest gen which doesn't expose I/Q data (we're talking about effectively sampling the antenna port! No downconversion so no messing with I/Q signals) can be had for around $6K-ish.
As one designer I follow thinks, we need to get rid of the idea of "Save" altogether, and just have some sort of "Undo everything I did in this whole entire session" button.
Apple IS trying that. Starting with Lion, they've been experimenting with such things - questioning why do we have "save" buttons, or even "quit". Granted it puts people off kilter, which is why they had to call it "Save As" in Mountain Lion, but the basic concept was the OS manages saving for you in the background. If you hit Save, it creates a checkpoint as it normally would. If you want to revert, you can browse the complete history of your document (and even copy/paste parts from much earlier revisions but deleted later). And it's not lost after you quit or reboot.
Downside is, it only works for some applications because it requires application support.
It's an extension of the Time Machine concept for individual applications - where instead of browsing your machine at certain points in time, you browse the state of your document. (Of course, you can always do a "save as" (or "save current copy" on lion) to generate a completely clean, no history attached copy.
The problem is, computer users are pretty nervous about stuff like that - oddly they expect their phones and such to save their document when they switch to another app, but get worried when their PC tries to do the same for them.
You think you can drive and text at the same time and avoid causing an accident. You are wrong!
Hell, forget driving, try something more basic, like walking. People walk into street furniture all the time (I'm sure YouTube has millions of people walking into lamp posts, benches, fountains and down stairs). Or even worse, walking onto the road in front of a car (happens quite often), usually with very tragic results. And these aren't the people who try to be oblivious to the outside world.
Driving is complicated, walking is not (and really, it doesn't take a lot of higher-order thinking, either to move your feet). If people can't even pay attention enough to walk down the street without bumping/tripping/etc into something (including cars), you expect them to do better when they're dealing with a complex vehicle that requires situational awareness?
Heck, you can tell who's on a cellphone these days - if they're a pedestrian, they walk much slower than the crowd and seem to be drunk at best. If they're driving, they're the ones unable ot keep up with traffic or jerk forward, stop, jerk forward, stop in slow moving traffic. (And they call themselves good drivers, too...).
Alas, while Darwin works fine for pedestrians, it doesn't work so much for drivers...
So does Google now believe that there's a genuine 'risk of disclosing a user's real identity'? Or is this just a case of Google's left hand not knowing what its right hand is patenting?"
Or, by patenting it, they ensure that anyone else trying to allow online anonymity violates the patent in some way, thereby outlawing online anonymity.
At least, that's one use for the patent - to prevent someone from doing stuff counter to your interests.
Google is your friend. Why won't you allow Google to be your friend?
The summary says: " I considered using typewriters but they are in limited supply on the market."
They aren't that limited - they're actually VERY plentiful. In fact, most people simplu melt them down as their scrap value is higher than their actual functioning worth. I'm sure a good chunk of the population has a typewriter hiding in the depths of their basement.
They're really only worth maybe $20 or so.
Most people over 50 have one in their house somewhere. Just because they don't show up on Craigslist or eBay doesn't mean there's a limited supply - most of those people who own one forgot they even have it and don't even bother selling it because it's worthless.
It just means you have to go out and do some legwork in rounding them up.
I wonder if Microsoft has failed to realize that in terms of profit the OS is essentially a front-end for the app store and plans to make money on both the OS and on app sales, analogous to a mall owner charging entrance.
Except they're going to have to charge a lot more money then. Even though Apple gets around $1.2B out of iTunes (for all iTunes sales - apps, music, movies, books), a lot of that is plowed back into servers and into credit card transaction payments (developers are paid out before, but expensives from iTunes haven't been taken out of revenue).
Apple can do it because they offer content to sell hardware. Amazon does it to by offering hardware to sell content. Google does it to increase Android sales overall. Where Microsoft fits in, neither making hardware like Apple (so the App Store can't be used to generate sales), nor offering much in the way of content to drive Windows 8 adoption, is unknown.
Perhaps they can use the App Store to drive Windows license adoption? But at $600 for Windows RT, I'm not sure. The consumer would see the iPad as cheaper and go for that, or see the Androids as cheaper still.
Well, they can limit your data access to what your plan allows.
Yes, plans can limit your data in ways you don't really even WANT to think about.
Unless your carrier is a Tier 1 like Sprint, your smartphone isn't getting a raw network connection. After all, they sell "unlimited data" to featurephones for people to be able to post and browse Facebook and Twitter all day, unlimited data for Blackberries to send emails, but then give you 5GB on a smartphone, or 2GB on a laptop, and the price rising higher for each plan.
They do this by traffic segregation - featurephone traffic is proxied - you're only getting "social networks" that are pre-approved for the plan. Blackberry data is shoved to RIM's datacenter. Smartphone traffic goes through NATs and transparent proxies and firewalls (depending on the carrier, this can limit you to just port 80 and 443 traffic), where images are resized and traffic often optimized for the "mobile experience". Of course, one side effect is that a resized image that looks good on a smartphone can look like garbage on a PC screen. Depending on the carrier, they may do HTTPS shenanigans involving a special certificate pre-installed to allow proxying through HTTPS as well.
Laptop plans give you a less firewalled experience and usually no proxies or anything, with the uber plans offering VPN and a real live IP address.
Of course, for tethering, the carriers would prefer you pay for the more expensive laptop plans (though it's obvious most people don't care for the various shenanigans carriers do to offer smartphone data cheaply and don't mind it happening on the laptop).
Other than that, they'd be happy to allow laptops on smartphone plans - the faster you hit your cap, the faster they can bill those expensive overage charges on you (easily $10/MB+). But they'd rather prefer you pick a more expensive plan first...
With x86 Android, all the CPU-intensive apps, WON'T RUN. They mention Chrome, but Firefox is also out. Non-trivial games won't run, as they're all native ARMv7. I know I make extensive use of emulators like MAME and others on my phone, but not if it's missing an ARMv7 CPU.
Multimedia apps are almost all out of the question, as they're ARMv7 for performance reasons. This includes Flash, so no luck if you wanted to use it. For multimedia, you're pretty much stuck with the piss-poor built-in audio and video players, since they've gone through the trouble of recompiling/porting them to x86.
I believe Intel mentioned something about an ARM emulator, so for those who don't compile their NDK parts with x86, it can still benefit from running them so it isn't the app wasteland it seems.
It won't be high performance, but at least it'll run. I think Intel's mentioned it's not going to be an open-source component or something, though.
I mean, we keep hearing stuff like how Apple keeps over a quarter-million Chinese workers employed and "to move the jobs back here!" Yet according to TFA, in order to be cost competitive, we need robots, which means that instead of that many people being employed here (which admittedly, will probably be Mexicans and such because it's dull, boring repetitive work in conditions not much better than in China), far fewer jobs will be created purely because the majority of those Chinese jobs were replaced by... robots. Granted you'll make a few higher paying jobs (you need robotic technicians to fix, and program the robots, and you'll need a design-for-manufacturing engineer to engineer the product so it can be rapidly assembled by robot (e.g., using adhesives, which can be applied by robot, versus screws, which require more manual dexterity, plastic snap closures or heat welded cases, fewer connectors (and circuilt boards - those flex cable connectors are very finicky), and looking at how to make test jigs to rapidly do pass/fail testing)..
Of course, the bigger quesiton is - given how much domestic manufacturing already usese robots - what's the niche this one is going into? Only angle I can see is "cheap".
Now many sell the IPv4 addresses for about 50EUR a month. This because they say that there are not enough of them. This way with NO investment they can ask 50 EUR more from any (small) business.
Once IPv6 is around, they can not do that anymore and small businesses will just buy cheaper personal accounts.
Hah. Fat chance.
They'll just let through ONE IPv6 address direct to you, calling the rest "firewalled off for your safety". And advertise it as "firewalled for your protection" and if you want, you can get another prefix for another $50/month.
They'll even advertise it as a feature - saying you don't need an IPv6 firewall - the ISP will happily do it for you.
It's mildly amusing that Windows 8 is the first version to gain dynamic ticks, something Linux has had working since around 2007.
Windows CE and PocketPC has had dynamic ticks far longer actually - it was a BSP option you could have. The scheduler supported it (it told you how long to idle, you told it how long you actually idled (so your interrupts had to determine the time idled).
OS X has supported dynamic ticks for god knows since when - I think pratically from the beginning. It was immune to the CPU time-cheating attack as a side effect. (It uses one-shot hardware timers, but it's still ticking based on that more so than a regular periodic tick).
Though, technically, we can say Microsoft is learning all over again techniques it had already used before. It's just that Windows CE and PocketPC ended up being the red-headed stepchild - never being accepted because Microsoft was more concerned about its mainline Windows and Office products
Or maybe, just maybe, technical specs aren't everything. In fact, to the average person on the street, technical specs are basically nothing.
Technical specs are marketing BS. Take a PC - what's the specs people concentrate on? GHz (faster==better), GB (RAM - more==better), GB (HD - more==better). So now we have a bunch of PCs with blazing fast CPUs clock-speed wise, lots of RAM, lots of HD, shit for graphics, shit for resolution (on laptops). The tech specs not talked about get crapped on while the tech specs people are told to care about get maxed. (And CPU GHz is so simplistic a benchmark, I'm sure Intel sold more CPUs based on clock speed than actual performance... say the Pentium 4...).
Or take a digital camera - moar megapixies == bettar! Leading to phone cameras with 10/12/16/40 megapixels and pocket digital cameras. dSLRs though are slow to ramp up, being in that "high end photography" segment that most consumers don't get. Though, entry level dSLRs are seeing stuff like this. Meanwhile, useful specs like noise levels and such get ignored.
Or take monitors and TV sets. Lower refresh speeds! More Hz! More brightness! More Contrast! Leading to sub-1ms refresh panels (using some "magical" measurement system), "240 class" TVs (that really only do 60/120Hz refresh), perma-noon style TV backlights, and million-to-1 contrast ratios for LCDs (using "dynamic" contrast ("local dimming") and other such picture-messing-up crap).
That's the problem with tech specs - people are misled into thinking some measurement X is better, and manufacturers happily make X as big as they can - usually sacrificing other specs (who cares about graphics? who cares about LCD resolution?), or using quasi-scientific or better yet, proprietary measurement techniques.
Most measured specs are bogus - using either techniques that boost it (which they don't say), "proprietary" or "scientific" measuring equipment (no calibration), or specs where the industry simply hasn't agreed on a standard testing regime nor meaning (e.g., "contrast" has no standard measrement protocol that every manufacturer follows...).
PCs are popular because people feel they have a choice. If they want to buy software from staples they can. Amazon? sure. With apple, there is only one place you can get your software, and only a very limited selection of dealers to get your hardware from.
While only Apple makes Apple hardware, like Samsung makes Samsung phones (unless you go for the Sansuny Chinese ripoffs), I'm puzzled. There's only one source for Apple Mac software?
Of course, if you were trying to confuse PC software and iOS software... which is disingenuous at best. Android and iOS, yes, you can get software from torrents, file lockers, Amazon, Google Play, Appslib, and dozens of chinese stores as well, which is a definite advantage for Android.
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People who shop at Target and Walmart? People who broke theirs and need a replacement immediately? People who wants theirs immediately? (It's the same price, after all)
Thing is, there are a LARGE number of people who don't shop online. They'll purchase stuff from curated stores (Amazon, Apple, etc), but they won't go open a browser and type www.amazon.com, click through and check out. They will however find a book, see "buy it", tap it and boom, book is on their device.
Thing is, a lot of other countries don't often have strong online shopping cultures (mostly due to lack of a decent Amazon, and competitors that charge shipping and taxes), so being able to buy it in a retail store for the same price is often quite appealing.
Well, there comes time to change. The dock connector is nearly a decade old, and being called to do stuff it was never envisioned to do so pins are heavily multiplexed and you still need to have protection circuits (after all, someone could still plug in a +48V firewire cable to it, even if the pins ar eused elsewhere, it still needs ot handle it gracefully). And other stuff get obsolete - do you really need composite, s-video and component video outputs these days? And other stuff gets bodged in (VGA, HDMI, USB host) In the end, the connector's a mess.
The new cable would at least be a bit more future-proof (the dock connector was designed for a time when iPods were king, and smartphones were a race between Blackberry, PalmOS, and WInMo, tablets were running Windows You can only expand it so much before it starts becoming a legacy maintainance nightmare.
So a new connector is needed, and it should take in mind it will have to handle stuff that may be coming soon (e.g., 3D, 4K video formats) as well as stuff that no one's thought of yet (because changing connectors is painful). It should also support what made the old connector good - an easy way to get line-out and headphone audio, an easy way to control the iPod and an easy way to get video.
So the best way to future proof it would be a connector that basically adapts some sort of bidirectional digital signalling system with adapters that produce the final output desired. If some fancy new way to hook up an iDevice to TVs comes out, a new adapter is all it takes (and supporting software), rather than having to figure out how to multiplex pins even more.
It's probably also why the Lightning to dock adapters are so bloody expensive - they've got signalling chips that transform the digital into stndard analog audio, serial control , etc that the old connector has).
I believe in the EU boxes, they don't provide a USB-Lightning cable, but a USB-micro cable + micro-Lightning adapter. Just like they did for the iPhone 4s and others - a USB-micro cable and a micro-dock adapter. It's hard to tell, but where the strain relief is on the normal USB-dock cable, it's actually a little nub for the USB micro cable. A quick glance or at a distance and it's impossible ot tell.
So it complies - EU folks get a different cable to begin with and have the option of buying more.
Advertising IS culture. Hell, old ads are often highly collectible items the reflect on an earlier time. History books don't generally include much pop culture in them, but advertising is a huge reflection of the cultural attitudes and beliefs of the day. And don't forget that a lot of things are ads - from movie posters to TV shows (the show itself, not the ad break). Hell, word of mouth is considered advertising because it's spreading something - be it a new open-source program, movie theatre, new smartphone, computer, whatever.
There were some highly offensive ads back in the day dealing with all sorts of things. A modern history book may make reference, but it can't really capture the extent that people allowed it to get to as compared to some advertising from the era. It's really a reflection of societal values of the era. (Advertising was often the quickest to jump on new trends, the the fastest to ditch what became unacceptable - it's only good business after all).
That said, ads back then didn't try to track or stalk people. You may see a Coca-Cola ad button on a wall, or a Pepsi one, but they didn't track you. What makes online advertising so annoying is that they track you around, following you. With Google doing it, it's even worse because they profile you. And who know what sorts of information you leak. Basically it's creating a profile of you that probably contains stuff you don't know about yourself, and it's all available to the highest bidder. That's scary. "Old media" ads didn't try to track you, profile you or gather information about you. And trying to fake out results is extremely hard (humans are bad at it - like trying to generate random numbers in your head). With enough of a profile, Google can easily discern what stuff you're doing that's trying to poison the data, and what you really normally do.
Perhaps, but you can program them to store a serial number AND a rewritable fare value. And be a "treat it like cash" thing - lose it, you lost its value.
What you have is a central database of ID numbers and their values. When a faregate reads the card, it tries to contact the server. If it succeeds in a few seconds, great, it writes the updated value to the card and you go. If the server doesn't respond (too busy or perhaps it's down), you read the value off the card, deduct, write the new value back, and log the ID number for later reconciliation. When the server comes back, the ID numbers are then taken and values updated.
If the user rewrites the value, the next time the faregate manages to contact the server, the proper value is rewritten back.
User will have lots of free trips while the server is down (which can be blacklisted later) but once it comes up, the balance is made to re-agree. If they scored a few extra trips, well, good for them - but that card will be blocked if they try it and the server is contacted.
Heck, during rush hour, the server can load shed - perhaps ignore N out of every 10 transactions, so it stays speedy and remains up, performing the transactions during the less busy times.
So you get some free rides, but you may not know if you'll get lucky (other than when the entire system goes down and everyone's using stored balance only).
Heck, do it right and you can incorporate transfers in at the same time - each trip bills through (in stored value mode - in server mode it'll just deduct $0), but when timestamps are reconciled, extra charges merely get credited back the next time you swipe.
Where were they 20-30 years ago then? I mean, they're all coming out now (but not commercially available yet, still undergoing testing). Considering we archived orbital flight 30 years ago, they have 30 years of experience to build with.
Or could it be perhaps today there's actually enough money being thrown around by people who want to be astronauts that there's now a good enough ROI? 30 years ago, there was no ROI so no one invested in it (other than NASA).
We had the technology to do so 30 years ago. Yet these private companies advertising orbital flights (for the last decade or so) still haven't launched a commercial service yet (I'm not talking preorders. I mean launching and recovering now as a regular mission).
Most keygens don't contain malware, but they contain wrappers that are downloaders for malware. Perhaps your virus scanners are picking up the fact that they're wrapped?
I've seen plenty of wrapped keygens that work completely normally - the wrapper starts first and silently downloads the malware in the background while the original keygen works normally. (They detect the downloader). The download is necessary in order to download the latest stuff that won't be detected.
And modern malware these days don't require admin priviledges - they'll take it if they can get it, but if it'll trigger a UAC or admin dialog, they'll disable that part of the functionality. Turns out that for being part of a botnet, you don't need admin (opening ports and incoming/outgoing connections are user available, as are writing files and starting up from the user's profile).
Have the malware be split into a ping and pong runtimes that monitor each other and they'd be very difficult to kill.
For keygens, I run them in an isolated VM instance and roll back the disk files after I'm done using them. You can never be too sure.
Incorrect.
Vinyl "sounds better" because it does, mostly because of the dynamic range compression applied to digital media. We know this as the "loudness wars".
One of the side effects is that digital media like CDs clip when the sound peaks. Clipping is very harsh on the ears and most people try to avoid it.
However, "analog" media like vinyl and vacuum tubes don't clip. Vinyl can't clip because a louder sound just deflects the needle more. Do it too much and the needle etches into the groove beside it, ruining the vinyl master. You can, however, still have poor mastering.
Tubes distort the tops of the waveform the harder you drive them - this distortion is far more pleasant to the ear than clipping (and can often be a desired effect).
There is one guy in Sweden.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-02/disconnected?single-page-view=true
He does, however, live away from civilization (in the woods) and with very little electricity (because that can trigger him - doesn' tmatter the frequency).
His case though, is that it isn't just Wi-Fi. Or cellphones, it's *everything*. It's a lot more compelling than anyone who complains they got headaches after a smart meter got put in or something, especially since he moved away to the countryside and gave up modern conveniences.
You simply cannot claim to be sensitive to "WiFi" or "cellphones" or "smart meters" and live in a modern city - if you were sensitive, you'd already be off on the countryside far away from electrical infrastructure.
I believe it's OpenHardware, so its license is CC-BY-SA - in theory they can't lock down the electronics because of it (you have to distribute the schematics, gerbers and everything). But you could lock down the mechanicals, but that's pretty hard to do since anyone else can easily go and figure it out themselves.
The software I believe IS GPL, too.
So either they're designing everything from scratch and becoming like everyone else, at best sharing the name, or they're rewriting the PC side program and closing that, but keeping the hardware "open" (it's Arduino-derived, after all).
And looking at it, I think that's what is happening - they closed the PC side software. Whether or not it would work with the open-source tools is a good question.
Don't Be Evil never existed.
Remember Google history. Google needed a CEO, and who did they want? Steve Jobs. Yes, Jobs. Naturally, though, Jobs was involved heavily with Apple and decided it wouldn't be possible.
Instead, what Jobs did was take the Google founders under his wing and teach them about how to be leaders. (Of course, when Google released Android, Jobs felt backstabbed (again - first time was Gates and Windows), and wanted to wage war.).
Of course, given that Google's leadership was governed by Jobs through proxy, you can bet that a lot of Jobs' lessons would've been heeded. You can bet in 5 years, Google would be like Apple today. Sure they have Android, but while it's an open playground, it'll be one constantly spying on you.
The problem is, patent wars aren't new We're talking about a tradition that dates back to the 19th century. And patent wars have been fought continually since then.
You probably don't know much about it because not many people care, just like not many people care about the patent trolling going on now.
It's not a new thing, and it's probably debatable to whether it's happening more now proportionally than before.
Any field undergoing massive innovation (right now, it's mobile devices) goes through this. When cars and the ICE was new, there were patent lawsuits flying around then as well. As were lawsuits over hybrid vehicles, windshield wipers, CPUs, etc. Once a field matures and innovations slow down, so do patent lawsuits.
And there's no right solution. Ban software patents, and we'll be stuck in a sea of conformity because everyone will copy each other. Android would turn literally into an iOS clone because all the manufacturers want to copy Apple in everything. Instead, because Google specifically avoids Apple's patents, we have stuff like widgets, home screens, launchers, etc (though some manufacturers sitll try to clone into looking like iOS, sigh).
Yeah, but if you're wanting to experiment with SDRs, do you suggest a hobbyist go out and spend $500+ on a USRP or other high-quality SDR? Or $20, and then make the investment?
You get what you pay for, but damn for $20, I won't complain about lousy performance when getting started.
Most SDRs are basically overglorified soundcards - they consist of a tuner frontend coupled with common audio ADCs (thanks to commercially available 192kHz/24 bit and 96kHz/24bit ADCs meant for studio and mastering work).
Of course, this $20 dongle is 1MHz, but 8 bits (for $20, that's pretty good - high sampling rate ADCs get expensive the faster and more bits you want - top end 100MS/s 24bit can easily run $100+ in 1,000 quantity).
It's just like people complaining the Raspberry Pi is useless because it's a wimpy processor (though coupled with a fairly good GPU), when (Pandaboard/BeagleBoard/ODROID/etc) gets you far better. Yes, it's true, but the Pi's only $35, versus $150 for the rest.
There are SDR-based transceivers on the market for a couple of grand that are considered excellent (see FlexRadio) - for under $2000 you can get one, and their latest gen which doesn't expose I/Q data (we're talking about effectively sampling the antenna port! No downconversion so no messing with I/Q signals) can be had for around $6K-ish.
Apple IS trying that. Starting with Lion, they've been experimenting with such things - questioning why do we have "save" buttons, or even "quit". Granted it puts people off kilter, which is why they had to call it "Save As" in Mountain Lion, but the basic concept was the OS manages saving for you in the background. If you hit Save, it creates a checkpoint as it normally would. If you want to revert, you can browse the complete history of your document (and even copy/paste parts from much earlier revisions but deleted later). And it's not lost after you quit or reboot.
Downside is, it only works for some applications because it requires application support.
It's an extension of the Time Machine concept for individual applications - where instead of browsing your machine at certain points in time, you browse the state of your document. (Of course, you can always do a "save as" (or "save current copy" on lion) to generate a completely clean, no history attached copy.
The problem is, computer users are pretty nervous about stuff like that - oddly they expect their phones and such to save their document when they switch to another app, but get worried when their PC tries to do the same for them.
Hell, forget driving, try something more basic, like walking. People walk into street furniture all the time (I'm sure YouTube has millions of people walking into lamp posts, benches, fountains and down stairs). Or even worse, walking onto the road in front of a car (happens quite often), usually with very tragic results. And these aren't the people who try to be oblivious to the outside world.
Driving is complicated, walking is not (and really, it doesn't take a lot of higher-order thinking, either to move your feet). If people can't even pay attention enough to walk down the street without bumping/tripping/etc into something (including cars), you expect them to do better when they're dealing with a complex vehicle that requires situational awareness?
Heck, you can tell who's on a cellphone these days - if they're a pedestrian, they walk much slower than the crowd and seem to be drunk at best. If they're driving, they're the ones unable ot keep up with traffic or jerk forward, stop, jerk forward, stop in slow moving traffic. (And they call themselves good drivers, too...).
Alas, while Darwin works fine for pedestrians, it doesn't work so much for drivers...
Or, by patenting it, they ensure that anyone else trying to allow online anonymity violates the patent in some way, thereby outlawing online anonymity.
At least, that's one use for the patent - to prevent someone from doing stuff counter to your interests.
Google is your friend. Why won't you allow Google to be your friend?
They aren't that limited - they're actually VERY plentiful. In fact, most people simplu melt them down as their scrap value is higher than their actual functioning worth. I'm sure a good chunk of the population has a typewriter hiding in the depths of their basement.
They're really only worth maybe $20 or so.
Most people over 50 have one in their house somewhere. Just because they don't show up on Craigslist or eBay doesn't mean there's a limited supply - most of those people who own one forgot they even have it and don't even bother selling it because it's worthless.
It just means you have to go out and do some legwork in rounding them up.
Except they're going to have to charge a lot more money then. Even though Apple gets around $1.2B out of iTunes (for all iTunes sales - apps, music, movies, books), a lot of that is plowed back into servers and into credit card transaction payments (developers are paid out before, but expensives from iTunes haven't been taken out of revenue).
Apple can do it because they offer content to sell hardware. Amazon does it to by offering hardware to sell content. Google does it to increase Android sales overall. Where Microsoft fits in, neither making hardware like Apple (so the App Store can't be used to generate sales), nor offering much in the way of content to drive Windows 8 adoption, is unknown.
Perhaps they can use the App Store to drive Windows license adoption? But at $600 for Windows RT, I'm not sure. The consumer would see the iPad as cheaper and go for that, or see the Androids as cheaper still.
I believe Intel mentioned something about an ARM emulator, so for those who don't compile their NDK parts with x86, it can still benefit from running them so it isn't the app wasteland it seems.
It won't be high performance, but at least it'll run. I think Intel's mentioned it's not going to be an open-source component or something, though.
What I don't get is what's the interest?
I mean, we keep hearing stuff like how Apple keeps over a quarter-million Chinese workers employed and "to move the jobs back here!" Yet according to TFA, in order to be cost competitive, we need robots, which means that instead of that many people being employed here (which admittedly, will probably be Mexicans and such because it's dull, boring repetitive work in conditions not much better than in China), far fewer jobs will be created purely because the majority of those Chinese jobs were replaced by... robots. Granted you'll make a few higher paying jobs (you need robotic technicians to fix, and program the robots, and you'll need a design-for-manufacturing engineer to engineer the product so it can be rapidly assembled by robot (e.g., using adhesives, which can be applied by robot, versus screws, which require more manual dexterity, plastic snap closures or heat welded cases, fewer connectors (and circuilt boards - those flex cable connectors are very finicky), and looking at how to make test jigs to rapidly do pass/fail testing)..
Of course, the bigger quesiton is - given how much domestic manufacturing already usese robots - what's the niche this one is going into? Only angle I can see is "cheap".
Hah. Fat chance.
They'll just let through ONE IPv6 address direct to you, calling the rest "firewalled off for your safety". And advertise it as "firewalled for your protection" and if you want, you can get another prefix for another $50/month.
They'll even advertise it as a feature - saying you don't need an IPv6 firewall - the ISP will happily do it for you.
Windows CE and PocketPC has had dynamic ticks far longer actually - it was a BSP option you could have. The scheduler supported it (it told you how long to idle, you told it how long you actually idled (so your interrupts had to determine the time idled).
OS X has supported dynamic ticks for god knows since when - I think pratically from the beginning. It was immune to the CPU time-cheating attack as a side effect. (It uses one-shot hardware timers, but it's still ticking based on that more so than a regular periodic tick).
Though, technically, we can say Microsoft is learning all over again techniques it had already used before. It's just that Windows CE and PocketPC ended up being the red-headed stepchild - never being accepted because Microsoft was more concerned about its mainline Windows and Office products
Technical specs are marketing BS. Take a PC - what's the specs people concentrate on? GHz (faster==better), GB (RAM - more==better), GB (HD - more==better). So now we have a bunch of PCs with blazing fast CPUs clock-speed wise, lots of RAM, lots of HD, shit for graphics, shit for resolution (on laptops). The tech specs not talked about get crapped on while the tech specs people are told to care about get maxed. (And CPU GHz is so simplistic a benchmark, I'm sure Intel sold more CPUs based on clock speed than actual performance... say the Pentium 4...).
Or take a digital camera - moar megapixies == bettar! Leading to phone cameras with 10/12/16/40 megapixels and pocket digital cameras. dSLRs though are slow to ramp up, being in that "high end photography" segment that most consumers don't get. Though, entry level dSLRs are seeing stuff like this. Meanwhile, useful specs like noise levels and such get ignored.
Or take monitors and TV sets. Lower refresh speeds! More Hz! More brightness! More Contrast! Leading to sub-1ms refresh panels (using some "magical" measurement system), "240 class" TVs (that really only do 60/120Hz refresh), perma-noon style TV backlights, and million-to-1 contrast ratios for LCDs (using "dynamic" contrast ("local dimming") and other such picture-messing-up crap).
That's the problem with tech specs - people are misled into thinking some measurement X is better, and manufacturers happily make X as big as they can - usually sacrificing other specs (who cares about graphics? who cares about LCD resolution?), or using quasi-scientific or better yet, proprietary measurement techniques.
Most measured specs are bogus - using either techniques that boost it (which they don't say), "proprietary" or "scientific" measuring equipment (no calibration), or specs where the industry simply hasn't agreed on a standard testing regime nor meaning (e.g., "contrast" has no standard measrement protocol that every manufacturer follows...).
While only Apple makes Apple hardware, like Samsung makes Samsung phones (unless you go for the Sansuny Chinese ripoffs), I'm puzzled. There's only one source for Apple Mac software?
Is it this one? Or perhaps this place of PC software as you mentioned? Or too bad they can't walk into a store either.
Of course, if you were trying to confuse PC software and iOS software... which is disingenuous at best. Android and iOS, yes, you can get software from torrents, file lockers, Amazon, Google Play, Appslib, and dozens of chinese stores as well, which is a definite advantage for Android.