Blizzard has gone back on so many things they were once publicly opposed to, from PvE-to-PvP transfers to the purchasing of gold using real-world money. And it all began after Activision got involved.
Yep. I stayed out of WoW, so my first experience under Activision was StarCraft 2, and man did the experience suck. The game was fine, but the policies and other crap associated with battle.net 2.0... damn.
I suppose Activision's already running out of blood from Blizzard, so they need fresh blood to squeeze money out of. Say, like Bungie. Perhaps that's the business model - take fine game companies with good records of producing good games and squeeze every penny out of them.
This is the same thing that happened to the i740 successors and larrabee (both of which sucked engineering-wise, but whose basic premise should've been kept: Intel could've been in the videocard market where nVidia/ATI are now. But some shortsighted manager decided it made more sense to cut their losses than to persevere and get the product right so the next generation and the one after that would succeed.
True, but then again, considering Intel is one of the top video card makers out there, does it really matter? Considering the work involved in making a great graphics chip - is the R&D expense worth it to gain a % or two marketshare gain?
And with that, remember Intel's been synonymous with "crap graphics" for years now. Even if they released a card with awesome blows-everyone-out-of-the-water capability it'll be dead in 6 months unless they can come up with something new.
And those products DEPEND upon the seed being secret?
Um, that's the point of the RSA token. The RSA token is merely a watch that instead of displaying the current time, displays a 6-digit number. That number is basically the output of a PRNG - one cryptographically secure (so hijacking a number or two won't reveal the entire sequence). That PRNG is seeded by a seed value so it generates a predictable set of numbers.
When you register a key, you enter in its ID number, which does a seed lookup so when you log in, the appropriate number can be calculated and compared with what your key should be showing you.
The seed has to be available somehow - the key gets programmed with a seed out of necessity (so it can calculate the proper number), but the log in authenticator also needs the seed. And the authenticator can be made by anyone licensing the technology. Somehow the seed value needs to be transported to the authenticator so all valid users' numbers can be calculated and compared.
The only thing I don't know is when the authenticator needs the seed - does it check against RSA's system or does it just log the seed value internally. Or why RSA keeps the seed once it's been registered (perhaps to allow multiple authenticators to use the same keyfob?).
That's if you qualify for a merchant account. eBay/Paypal are the perfect combination of companies because many sellers don't qualify. ANd if they do, Paypal fees can be lower because they don't meet the minimum transaction amounts (quantity of transactoins, quantity of money) that a good merchant account has.
So Paypal can be evil just because they're the only game in town - it's either bend over to the banks, or bend over to Paypal.
Basically, if you're Joe Blow, you can't accept a credit card (which kills online auction sites like eBay). If you run a small business, you can get sideswiped by merchant accounts (some of the cards can have quite high fees - like those "infinite" cards).
Actually, I'd say that blocking porn websites is the last thing any authoritarian government should do.
People want porn, so let it through the censorship filters. Let the censorship filters block all the "bringing down the state" stuff, but let porn through.
People get their fix, and they'd be too busy with porn to care about rights and freedoms. At least, that's how I'd run my state.
Fact is - open source advocates are basically elitists - yes the source is there, what more do you need? Documentation? A UI? Go fix it yourself! It's all about "scratching your own itch" which is the problem.
Someone like Jobs is more of a user's advocate. He's a bit more effective because he makes the user's itch YOUR itch (the whole Reality Distortion Field).
So yes, your piece of software may be brilliant and flexible to solve 99.999% of anyone who uses it problems, and since it's open source, it's the greatest thing ever. But what Jobs does is look at seeing what 95% of the people need, and simplifying things down to that. Because sometimes, there are things users don't care about - you may have a text field that's required by 3% of the users, and when it's needed, they need it often, so it's right there on the main page. But someone like Jobs will simply force it's removal - that field confuses the 95% of people who don't need to touch it.
The sad reality for open-source is that the boring stuff is not often done, even though the boring stuff is what's important for the user. The dichotomy between computer users of the techno-elite and those who merely want to get their work done with the aid of the computer is huge. And unfortunately, the techno-elite are but a very small part of the population. It's akin to making a car easy for the mechanic, or making it look good for the driver - while mechanics appreciate being able to tinker with such a car, drivers prefer cars that look nice and have other qualities that can make it a pain to work on by a mechanic.
Perhaps that's why there's a dichotomy - Jobs knows what users put value in, while open-source doesn't. It keeps screaming out "openness" and "freedom" when users simply want other stuff. My mom doesn't care that Firefox is "open source" and full of "freedom" and "openness". She cares about surfing the web in a somewhat secure manner, and I get called over whenever there's a bloody Firefox update and she loses her status bar again or other crap. Hell, given I put Windows 7 on her PC, it might be better I just wean her back to Internet Explorer or Chrome, both of which are more secure than Firefox (thanks to OS sandboxing).
Ditto the old mantra "release early, release often" - great for open source, lousy for users because each release usually isn't properly tested and gets regressions, and they spend time "maintaining their computer" over "using the computer".
And that is probably why Jobs excelled. He made "everyone else" his priority. Open source is great (I prefer open source apps to closed ones, where possible), but it's also fundamentally incompatible with users who just want to get some task done using a computer, and not enabling their computer to get some task done.
It's why we have consoles for games - people wanted to play games, not mess with their computers in order to play games. In fact, computer gaming is coming back because it's getting easier to play games - all the old issues of videocards and drivers and patches and updates seems to have gone out the window and most games don't need the latest and greatest.
Tim Cook believes that inventory is evil, and for good reason. You have to pay money to keep those warehouses going, and meanwhile the stuff inside is losing value anyway. Ever since he started managing Apple's supply chains, and no doubt this will continue through his tenure as CEO, Apple runs a lean ship. Still, I think when the numbers come out, it'll be clear Apple sold a lot of phones, above and beyond any other phone's rollout stockpile, and this was not just some marketing gimmick of reduced supplies to hype the demand. Apple did stockpile more phones than the last time around, yet they still sold out like crazy. I'm sure if there was any possible way for Apple to make more of them faster, they would be doing just that.
Apple's numbers are absolutely enormous compared to most other products out there. Most phones will be lucky to hit the 100,000 units sold mark, and fewer hit marks of 250,000 and a handful at 500,000. And the iPhone can hit over 1M units on opening weekend. (Note that this would be individual models - considering how fast phones turn over...).
And that 1M preorders was the first 24 hours. It probably sold 2+M by the time Apple quit taking preorders. And Apple's probably got another 1M+ lined up for retail sales.
You'd think when you build 2-4M of the things a month, there'd be some channel stuffing going on, but it seems the sell through rate is fairly high.
And the numbers are even bigger when you look at production costs. If we say Apple put up 3M units for sales (2M preorders and 1M retail), and say it costs $200 to build, that's $600M just to build the thing - over half a billion dollars.
And Apple's loathe to use the "it's sold out" moniker - they probably stopped taking preorders when order delivery dates start extending into 3 weeks. They don't want to every sell out - if you wanted to buy a iPhone, they want to have one waiting for you. They don't want people profiting off eBay.
There's plenty of others. That's one problem. And we're not talking about the scammy "pay-per-bid" sites that advertise you can get $HOT_GADGET for $10.
The problem is the other sites are so small (there's one for video games only, for example) that sellers expect eBay pricing, and get annoyed at lowball bids from buyers. And buyers only flock if they see good pricing - if they have to pay eBay prices, they might as well shop on eBay and save the extra effort.
And yes, I've seen it happen. Some guys on a mailing list post their stuff then promptly complain of being lowballed and saying they get more on eBay.
eBay has critical mass - buyers flock there because it has everything (the jokes help, but the jokes were inspired because eBay has everything). Sellers flock there because buyers flock there, so having lots of possible buyers mean higher bids.
Seriously, this exact mistake seems to occur at least a couple times a year. You would think that anyone with enough security clearance to make redactions would, I don't know, take a 4 hour training course on how to use MS Word? Do they hand this job off to interns, or what?
An easier solution.
Take document. Print it out on paper. With thick fat black marker, redact away. Then take redacted documents, and scan them in. This is just a modification on the way they used to do it in the old days.
The problem is people want to electronically redact, and that just doesn't work - too many mistakes can be made. We never had this problem before on old documents - they made a copy, redacted, and photocopied the result, and made that photocopy available.
It's also odd the government wouldn't want to do that - after all, scanned documents without OCR just make it that much harder for those pesky people who make FOIA requests - might as well make their lives as hard as possible. &sarcmark;
Besides, these cat-and-mouse games aren't going to stop the widespread, automated compromises of Windows systems that make botnets possible in the first place. It also won't eliminate the average users' notion that security must always be someone else's problem, that they don't need to learn a few basic things that would make them much harder targets (particularly for trojans and other user-assisted exploits).
Newsflash - Windows boxes are a lot harder to infect these days. In fact, the vast majority of compromises don't happen because you connected a Windows box to the Internet. They happen because the user browses to some website, and either a drive-by download happens and installs malware (either through a compromised website, or through a compromised ad network), or they run an attachment because the email says to.
In fact, the biggest security risk now is the user, and users will do anything (the Dancing Pigs problem) in order to accomplish their goal.
What we really need is for the average target to be hardened enough that you can't write a single exploit that works on millions of machines. As long as Microsoft sells their products on the basis of ease-of-use with no warnings made that some knowledge is required to use them safely, they should have some liability. As long as users insist on never slowly learning more and more about the systems they use, they are not victims when someone exploits this. It's not a matter of blame, it's a matter of personal responsibility and whether one chooses to be part of the problem.
I thought we all agreed that the whole "walled garden" approach was a Bad Idea(tm)? The primary problem is the user, and the only way to fix that is closed, locked-down devices that can only run vetted apps.
If you consider the lengths to which people can be tricked into spamming others on Facebook (including copypasta of raw Javascript code), limiting the user is pretty much the only way. Heck, even having an "advanced user" option will end up being selected on everyone (instructions to do so will be posted once a user wants to do something like that - dancing pigs, remember?).
I wouldn't worry too much about it. The WiMax network will probably hang around for a LONG time, long after your phone's obsolete and you're on the 3rd contract since.
Given the old analog AMPS network took until what, 2008? to be killed, and the installed base of mobile and fixed WiMax stations, there's probably at least a decade of WiMax coverage.
Heck, the old CDMA phones will probably work as well for a long time coming purely due to installed base.
And at the very least, you'd probably have 3G service.
These transistions take years to accomplish, and Sprint's got an investment in WiMax gear they're not going to suddenly abandon (it's fairly expensive), so WiMax will still be around. And face it, LTE's not hitting its stride yet (most of the "4G" phones out there are still HSPA+ if you look closely, NOT LTE).
Heck, Sprint may keep the WiMax stuff for a long time coming for fixed WiMax coverage use, or limited mobile to fixed use (i.e., company fleet trucks that don't leave a metro region).
I highly recommend thus book. The problem stems from the definition of property. It's main characteristic is that it is scarce. Real goods are property. Ideas are not. The problem with patents and copyrights are they are trying to make a non scarce good artificially scarce.
Actually, copyright and patents, when given properly are for scarce things. Ideas are a dime a dozen. However, taking that idea and fleshing out a whole work (book/song/movie/wthatever) takes time and energy. Copyright seeks to protect that investment in order to improve society.
Patents are similar - there are tons of ideas out there. However, turning an idea into a practical machine isn't as easy, so patents seek to protect implementations of ideas.
The problem is that copyright keeps getting extended and penalties made harsher which basically destroy the original goal - to protect the real work of taking some idea and turning it into something.
Ditto patents, but mostly because software is quite an intangible that the "old laws" really cannot cope with . After all, IP laws date back many centuries, and back then, there was really nothing equivalent to software - it's something that takes an idea and is written that causes machinery to work in specific ways. Before that, a machine was a well-isolated system that had inputs, did something with it, and produced an output to accomplish some task in a specific fashion. But software can accomplish the same task in many ways, as long as it obeys the system limitations as the physical system it's in.
Then there's software that doesn't interact with any physical machine other than the computer it's running on. Or maybe not even that. And that's a problem.
Perhaps said trader got annoyed at all the alerts and simply told them "I'm a hot shit super trader. if there's any odd trades coming from me, it's because I know stuff you idiots don't so screw you and let me do my trades!" This is espeiclaly true if the trader has a reputation of oddball trades but makes tons of money back.
The other possibility is said trader simply causes alarms constantly but they're small ones and they up the threshold for his alarm. Eventually the threshold is pushed extremely high and while being detected, won't be acted upon as that sort of trade usually happens.
Either way, hiding a bunch of trades becomes easy. The system has to adapt to different trading patterns constantly so there's no real way to not hae false positive alerts, and prima donna traders who think they're above it al and think the alerts are just a nuisance as the trades they do will constantly trigger it.
Even then, you could run a VPN over a steganographic connection. In practice I find port 80 is the best - it's never failed me so far. 443 is a good option too, in fact a better option in theory, but keep in mind that a few mobile internet providers in 3rd world countries block 443.
A number of VPNs these days use HTTPS (443). It's called SSL VPN and you can get access points from the usual vendors (Cisco, Sonicwall, etc). They're all the rage these days as they start up as normal HTTPS connections (and you can use it with a web browser at the very minimum - no client required).
Reason for this is many corporate networks have started blocking everything but 80/443. When you're visiting a customer with their network set up that way, being able to VPN over HTTPS is extremely valuable. Especially since it goes through NAT easily as well.
You first have to install a the app from an untrusted site and ignore the page full of warnings the OS throws at you before this can do anything. Seriously, look at the screen shot in the FA. You have to agree that the app can make outgoing phone calls. If you click through that many warnings I would hardly call this malware. Its doing exactly what it says it will do.
I can say that "Unauthorized Sources" can be enabled quite easily - perhaps you go use Amazon's App Store. That's not a protection anymore. In fact, it was Amazon that probably got AT&T to re-enable the option.
Either way though, the Dancing Pigs problem still exists. Remember the old iPhone virus? It spread by using default passwords on jailbroken devices running OpenSSH. OpenSSH was not installed by default, and jailbreaking was somewhat more complex than it is today. And we're talking about people having to use SFTP and SSH and enter in tricky UNIX commands to install stuff on their iPhones.
Long warning screens? People who will be infected don't read them. Especially when it says stuff like "Download this file, copy it to your SD card and run the installer. Click Install. Congratulations, you've installed Foo, now download all the apps you want for FREE!".
In fact, that permission list is probably longer than necessary to invoke the TL;DR response by people on purpose.
Of course it would save lives, but the problem is that the predictions aren't very good. Knowing that an earthquake was going to be hitting in 20 minutes would allow for people to head outside and turn off the gas to their house, then go inside and go to whatever room has the fewest windows and hanging objects and secure them before hunkering down under the strongest table available.
That being said, for the most part if you live in a region that gets earthquakes you'll know about it and the building codes ought to already account for that.
Well, you *HOPE* that is the case that the building is strong enough and the code was capable of taking the earthquake into account. There's also a bunch of heritage buildings that aren't up to modern code, too.
Usually it's places along the eastern rim of the Ring of Fire (i.e., west coast of North America) that are the most iffy.
Having even just 20 minutes of warning is enough to turn off gas mains (and have gas company do same), have electricity turned off, fill bathtubs with emergency water, and seek out clearings. A lot of deaths from earthquakes don't happen from the building crushing survivors, but in the aftermath of fire and general chaos.
Hell, most parents would kill for a minute of warning so they can gather up their children in a safe meeting spot rather than race through a house with questionable structural integrity.
Adobe were losing their grip on the online web-based gaming world along comes this news. I'm looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
Easy. Ads, probably the largest use of Flash other than playing videos. Except instead of boring video ads, they can do it now all in stunning 3D to drain your battery even faster, to cause Windows to pop in and out of Aero when loading web pages and other fun stuff.
And you know somebody out there will make you have to twirl and spin objects around to find that "click to close ad" link and such.
Hell, if it's a site like IGN, you may be forced to "play" through the ad to get to the content as well.
Epically so. I've never seen Engadget go down under pressure, not on E3, not during any Apple event I can remember, not during any other keynote... Are people *really* that excited about the iPhone 5?
Other sites went down as well. MacWorld died shortly before the show opened. Ars Technica (which contracted with a third party to do the hosting) had periods where nothing made it through (the only option was switch to twitter). The Loop died hard shortly after starting.
The only one I was watching that didn't have problemts was gdgt. The worst it suffered was the auto-refresh failed and you had to manually refresh.
It's already been stated that Kindle Fire will have access to apps from Pandora, Twitter, Facebook, and Netflix. If they go back on this then I'm sure many people will be disappointed.
Easy - it'll have all access to apps that the Amazon App Store has. The fire's a nice device, but it's so tied to Amazon that outside of the US, it's useless - you can't buy music or apps unless you have a US credit card.
As for hacking it - has anyone hacked the Playbook yet? They're the same internally after all..
The "Kinect" technology was actually offered to Apple first; but the third party company (can't remember the name) turned it down, saying that Apple had too many "conditions" in their offer.
Actually, Kinect started at Microsoft Research. There were two possible ways - they tried to homegrow a solution, then saw PrimeSense and decided it was better to buy than research. But having the technology is useless without having it do something, so that's what the research went into.
So Kinect didn't start out as a pure research project (other than maybe "let's research into ways people can be engaged without needing specialized controllers"), which then involved purchasing technology (PrimeSense hardware) and developing a use for it. All that evolved into Kinect.
Microsoft didn't simply go and buy it from PrimeSense to relabel it - they still had to take the technology and refine it.
Technically, a contract has two elements. First is offer and acceptance, and the other is consideration.
The offer Borders made was to sell you a book at a certain price AND to agree to whatever other terms ("I agree to -terms-"). By purchasing the product, you've agreed to the terms of the sale (offer and acceptance).
The consideration part is interesting, because contracts for no money exchange (or exchange of goods of value) aren't valid (it's why you have contracts saying you agree to pay $1). That happens when money actually changes hands (for online orders, when the item shipped and your credit card charged).
You're free to not agree to the contract (cancel the purchase), or amend it (if you want to go through the trouble) and present a counteroffer.
So your act of purchasing a book pretty much shows you agreed to the terms of sale. Also, the fact that consideration happens afterwards means if they make a pricing mistake, they can cancel your order as the contract hasn't been formed yet (no consideration has been exchanged). However, once they ship and charge you, they can't come after you for more money.
There are still people using OtherOS, since if you wanted to keep it, all you have to do is not update your PS3's firmware. Sure you'll lose access to PSN, but PSN is their playground with their ball, so it's your choice.
You lose all access to games made after April 2010, too, because PS3 games insist on updating the firmware. If you're running old firmware, no games for you. Ditto Blu-Ray playback if an update is needed.
So it's OtherOS *OR* games and movies. Before it was "It does everything". Now I have to choose, and it seems Sony owes me a PS3.
PSN can be ignored now with the new ToS, but not running new firmware isn't an option anymore if you want to play anything recent.
Betting on carrier-jumping with the original iPhone was a safe bet.
Now - not so safe, especially considering that iPhone market share is stalled and Android is growing.
The marketshare has "stalled" because people are buying iPhones at the rate the market is growing. The smartphone market is growing fast, and Androids are filling the gap because they're available in every price range, formfactor and customization. Heck, if you look, there probably are 1.5 or 1.6 phones being sold (without Google, using AOSP).
All that's happening is that Apple is pulling in customers, and Android as a collective whole is pulling them in faster, but individually each manufacturer may not be pulling in a whole bunch. (Apple takes over 2/3rds of mobile profits. Androids, dumb/featurephones have to split the shrinking leftovers, and those phones make a vast majority of phones sold - Apple probably only has 5% marketshare overall pulling in more than 2/3rds profits, while the other 95% are splitting the remaining third.)
Maybe I should have phrased it better. I know people want iphones, that's pretty obvious. I'm just doubting that 30 million of them want them badly enough to move to sprint.
A VERY good question.
30M iPhones is 10% of the US population (or just under the population of Canada).
This is for a phone using a radio used ONLY by Sprint (WiMax - AT&T, Verizon use LTE, as does practically everyone else in the world). So it's a phone with 4G capabilities limited to the US market only.
I don't know what Sprint's marketshare of the US cellular market is, but 10% of the US population would be a pretty significant chunk of their subscriber base I'd think.
The one thing about the iPhone that's interesting though is the lack of branding. The only other phone sold by carriers that's the same is the Nexus S. No branding, no carrier apps,...
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Yep. I stayed out of WoW, so my first experience under Activision was StarCraft 2, and man did the experience suck. The game was fine, but the policies and other crap associated with battle.net 2.0... damn.
I suppose Activision's already running out of blood from Blizzard, so they need fresh blood to squeeze money out of. Say, like Bungie. Perhaps that's the business model - take fine game companies with good records of producing good games and squeeze every penny out of them.
True, but then again, considering Intel is one of the top video card makers out there, does it really matter? Considering the work involved in making a great graphics chip - is the R&D expense worth it to gain a % or two marketshare gain?
And with that, remember Intel's been synonymous with "crap graphics" for years now. Even if they released a card with awesome blows-everyone-out-of-the-water capability it'll be dead in 6 months unless they can come up with something new.
Um, that's the point of the RSA token. The RSA token is merely a watch that instead of displaying the current time, displays a 6-digit number. That number is basically the output of a PRNG - one cryptographically secure (so hijacking a number or two won't reveal the entire sequence). That PRNG is seeded by a seed value so it generates a predictable set of numbers.
When you register a key, you enter in its ID number, which does a seed lookup so when you log in, the appropriate number can be calculated and compared with what your key should be showing you.
The seed has to be available somehow - the key gets programmed with a seed out of necessity (so it can calculate the proper number), but the log in authenticator also needs the seed. And the authenticator can be made by anyone licensing the technology. Somehow the seed value needs to be transported to the authenticator so all valid users' numbers can be calculated and compared.
The only thing I don't know is when the authenticator needs the seed - does it check against RSA's system or does it just log the seed value internally. Or why RSA keeps the seed once it's been registered (perhaps to allow multiple authenticators to use the same keyfob?).
That's if you qualify for a merchant account. eBay/Paypal are the perfect combination of companies because many sellers don't qualify. ANd if they do, Paypal fees can be lower because they don't meet the minimum transaction amounts (quantity of transactoins, quantity of money) that a good merchant account has.
So Paypal can be evil just because they're the only game in town - it's either bend over to the banks, or bend over to Paypal.
Basically, if you're Joe Blow, you can't accept a credit card (which kills online auction sites like eBay). If you run a small business, you can get sideswiped by merchant accounts (some of the cards can have quite high fees - like those "infinite" cards).
Actually, I'd say that blocking porn websites is the last thing any authoritarian government should do.
People want porn, so let it through the censorship filters. Let the censorship filters block all the "bringing down the state" stuff, but let porn through.
People get their fix, and they'd be too busy with porn to care about rights and freedoms. At least, that's how I'd run my state.
I call it a failing of Open Source in general.
Fact is - open source advocates are basically elitists - yes the source is there, what more do you need? Documentation? A UI? Go fix it yourself! It's all about "scratching your own itch" which is the problem.
Someone like Jobs is more of a user's advocate. He's a bit more effective because he makes the user's itch YOUR itch (the whole Reality Distortion Field).
So yes, your piece of software may be brilliant and flexible to solve 99.999% of anyone who uses it problems, and since it's open source, it's the greatest thing ever. But what Jobs does is look at seeing what 95% of the people need, and simplifying things down to that. Because sometimes, there are things users don't care about - you may have a text field that's required by 3% of the users, and when it's needed, they need it often, so it's right there on the main page. But someone like Jobs will simply force it's removal - that field confuses the 95% of people who don't need to touch it.
The sad reality for open-source is that the boring stuff is not often done, even though the boring stuff is what's important for the user. The dichotomy between computer users of the techno-elite and those who merely want to get their work done with the aid of the computer is huge. And unfortunately, the techno-elite are but a very small part of the population. It's akin to making a car easy for the mechanic, or making it look good for the driver - while mechanics appreciate being able to tinker with such a car, drivers prefer cars that look nice and have other qualities that can make it a pain to work on by a mechanic.
Perhaps that's why there's a dichotomy - Jobs knows what users put value in, while open-source doesn't. It keeps screaming out "openness" and "freedom" when users simply want other stuff. My mom doesn't care that Firefox is "open source" and full of "freedom" and "openness". She cares about surfing the web in a somewhat secure manner, and I get called over whenever there's a bloody Firefox update and she loses her status bar again or other crap. Hell, given I put Windows 7 on her PC, it might be better I just wean her back to Internet Explorer or Chrome, both of which are more secure than Firefox (thanks to OS sandboxing).
Ditto the old mantra "release early, release often" - great for open source, lousy for users because each release usually isn't properly tested and gets regressions, and they spend time "maintaining their computer" over "using the computer".
And that is probably why Jobs excelled. He made "everyone else" his priority. Open source is great (I prefer open source apps to closed ones, where possible), but it's also fundamentally incompatible with users who just want to get some task done using a computer, and not enabling their computer to get some task done.
It's why we have consoles for games - people wanted to play games, not mess with their computers in order to play games. In fact, computer gaming is coming back because it's getting easier to play games - all the old issues of videocards and drivers and patches and updates seems to have gone out the window and most games don't need the latest and greatest.
Apple's numbers are absolutely enormous compared to most other products out there. Most phones will be lucky to hit the 100,000 units sold mark, and fewer hit marks of 250,000 and a handful at 500,000. And the iPhone can hit over 1M units on opening weekend. (Note that this would be individual models - considering how fast phones turn over...).
And that 1M preorders was the first 24 hours. It probably sold 2+M by the time Apple quit taking preorders. And Apple's probably got another 1M+ lined up for retail sales.
You'd think when you build 2-4M of the things a month, there'd be some channel stuffing going on, but it seems the sell through rate is fairly high.
And the numbers are even bigger when you look at production costs. If we say Apple put up 3M units for sales (2M preorders and 1M retail), and say it costs $200 to build, that's $600M just to build the thing - over half a billion dollars.
And Apple's loathe to use the "it's sold out" moniker - they probably stopped taking preorders when order delivery dates start extending into 3 weeks. They don't want to every sell out - if you wanted to buy a iPhone, they want to have one waiting for you. They don't want people profiting off eBay.
Because Intel does not have SuperSpeed USB on any of hits chipsets. It does have Thunderbolt on its chipsets though.
Intel's planning on adding USB 3.0 to their chipsets in 2012.
Motherboards and other equipment with USB 3.0 ports have them because they use an external controller.
There's plenty of others. That's one problem. And we're not talking about the scammy "pay-per-bid" sites that advertise you can get $HOT_GADGET for $10.
The problem is the other sites are so small (there's one for video games only, for example) that sellers expect eBay pricing, and get annoyed at lowball bids from buyers. And buyers only flock if they see good pricing - if they have to pay eBay prices, they might as well shop on eBay and save the extra effort.
And yes, I've seen it happen. Some guys on a mailing list post their stuff then promptly complain of being lowballed and saying they get more on eBay.
eBay has critical mass - buyers flock there because it has everything (the jokes help, but the jokes were inspired because eBay has everything). Sellers flock there because buyers flock there, so having lots of possible buyers mean higher bids.
An easier solution.
Take document. Print it out on paper. With thick fat black marker, redact away. Then take redacted documents, and scan them in. This is just a modification on the way they used to do it in the old days.
The problem is people want to electronically redact, and that just doesn't work - too many mistakes can be made. We never had this problem before on old documents - they made a copy, redacted, and photocopied the result, and made that photocopy available.
It's also odd the government wouldn't want to do that - after all, scanned documents without OCR just make it that much harder for those pesky people who make FOIA requests - might as well make their lives as hard as possible. &sarcmark;
Newsflash - Windows boxes are a lot harder to infect these days. In fact, the vast majority of compromises don't happen because you connected a Windows box to the Internet. They happen because the user browses to some website, and either a drive-by download happens and installs malware (either through a compromised website, or through a compromised ad network), or they run an attachment because the email says to.
In fact, the biggest security risk now is the user, and users will do anything (the Dancing Pigs problem) in order to accomplish their goal.
I thought we all agreed that the whole "walled garden" approach was a Bad Idea(tm)? The primary problem is the user, and the only way to fix that is closed, locked-down devices that can only run vetted apps.
If you consider the lengths to which people can be tricked into spamming others on Facebook (including copypasta of raw Javascript code), limiting the user is pretty much the only way. Heck, even having an "advanced user" option will end up being selected on everyone (instructions to do so will be posted once a user wants to do something like that - dancing pigs, remember?).
I wouldn't worry too much about it. The WiMax network will probably hang around for a LONG time, long after your phone's obsolete and you're on the 3rd contract since.
Given the old analog AMPS network took until what, 2008? to be killed, and the installed base of mobile and fixed WiMax stations, there's probably at least a decade of WiMax coverage.
Heck, the old CDMA phones will probably work as well for a long time coming purely due to installed base.
And at the very least, you'd probably have 3G service.
These transistions take years to accomplish, and Sprint's got an investment in WiMax gear they're not going to suddenly abandon (it's fairly expensive), so WiMax will still be around. And face it, LTE's not hitting its stride yet (most of the "4G" phones out there are still HSPA+ if you look closely, NOT LTE).
Heck, Sprint may keep the WiMax stuff for a long time coming for fixed WiMax coverage use, or limited mobile to fixed use (i.e., company fleet trucks that don't leave a metro region).
Actually, copyright and patents, when given properly are for scarce things. Ideas are a dime a dozen. However, taking that idea and fleshing out a whole work (book/song/movie/wthatever) takes time and energy. Copyright seeks to protect that investment in order to improve society.
Patents are similar - there are tons of ideas out there. However, turning an idea into a practical machine isn't as easy, so patents seek to protect implementations of ideas.
The problem is that copyright keeps getting extended and penalties made harsher which basically destroy the original goal - to protect the real work of taking some idea and turning it into something.
Ditto patents, but mostly because software is quite an intangible that the "old laws" really cannot cope with . After all, IP laws date back many centuries, and back then, there was really nothing equivalent to software - it's something that takes an idea and is written that causes machinery to work in specific ways. Before that, a machine was a well-isolated system that had inputs, did something with it, and produced an output to accomplish some task in a specific fashion. But software can accomplish the same task in many ways, as long as it obeys the system limitations as the physical system it's in.
Then there's software that doesn't interact with any physical machine other than the computer it's running on. Or maybe not even that. And that's a problem.
You missed other reasons.
Perhaps said trader got annoyed at all the alerts and simply told them "I'm a hot shit super trader. if there's any odd trades coming from me, it's because I know stuff you idiots don't so screw you and let me do my trades!" This is espeiclaly true if the trader has a reputation of oddball trades but makes tons of money back.
The other possibility is said trader simply causes alarms constantly but they're small ones and they up the threshold for his alarm. Eventually the threshold is pushed extremely high and while being detected, won't be acted upon as that sort of trade usually happens.
Either way, hiding a bunch of trades becomes easy. The system has to adapt to different trading patterns constantly so there's no real way to not hae false positive alerts, and prima donna traders who think they're above it al and think the alerts are just a nuisance as the trades they do will constantly trigger it.
A number of VPNs these days use HTTPS (443). It's called SSL VPN and you can get access points from the usual vendors (Cisco, Sonicwall, etc). They're all the rage these days as they start up as normal HTTPS connections (and you can use it with a web browser at the very minimum - no client required).
Reason for this is many corporate networks have started blocking everything but 80/443. When you're visiting a customer with their network set up that way, being able to VPN over HTTPS is extremely valuable. Especially since it goes through NAT easily as well.
Dancing Pigs.
I can say that "Unauthorized Sources" can be enabled quite easily - perhaps you go use Amazon's App Store. That's not a protection anymore. In fact, it was Amazon that probably got AT&T to re-enable the option.
Either way though, the Dancing Pigs problem still exists. Remember the old iPhone virus? It spread by using default passwords on jailbroken devices running OpenSSH. OpenSSH was not installed by default, and jailbreaking was somewhat more complex than it is today. And we're talking about people having to use SFTP and SSH and enter in tricky UNIX commands to install stuff on their iPhones.
Long warning screens? People who will be infected don't read them. Especially when it says stuff like "Download this file, copy it to your SD card and run the installer. Click Install. Congratulations, you've installed Foo, now download all the apps you want for FREE!".
In fact, that permission list is probably longer than necessary to invoke the TL;DR response by people on purpose.
Well, you *HOPE* that is the case that the building is strong enough and the code was capable of taking the earthquake into account. There's also a bunch of heritage buildings that aren't up to modern code, too.
Usually it's places along the eastern rim of the Ring of Fire (i.e., west coast of North America) that are the most iffy.
Having even just 20 minutes of warning is enough to turn off gas mains (and have gas company do same), have electricity turned off, fill bathtubs with emergency water, and seek out clearings. A lot of deaths from earthquakes don't happen from the building crushing survivors, but in the aftermath of fire and general chaos.
Hell, most parents would kill for a minute of warning so they can gather up their children in a safe meeting spot rather than race through a house with questionable structural integrity.
Easy. Ads, probably the largest use of Flash other than playing videos. Except instead of boring video ads, they can do it now all in stunning 3D to drain your battery even faster, to cause Windows to pop in and out of Aero when loading web pages and other fun stuff.
And you know somebody out there will make you have to twirl and spin objects around to find that "click to close ad" link and such.
Hell, if it's a site like IGN, you may be forced to "play" through the ad to get to the content as well.
Easy - it'll have all access to apps that the Amazon App Store has. The fire's a nice device, but it's so tied to Amazon that outside of the US, it's useless - you can't buy music or apps unless you have a US credit card.
As for hacking it - has anyone hacked the Playbook yet? They're the same internally after all..
Actually, Kinect started at Microsoft Research. There were two possible ways - they tried to homegrow a solution, then saw PrimeSense and decided it was better to buy than research. But having the technology is useless without having it do something, so that's what the research went into.
So Kinect didn't start out as a pure research project (other than maybe "let's research into ways people can be engaged without needing specialized controllers"), which then involved purchasing technology (PrimeSense hardware) and developing a use for it. All that evolved into Kinect.
Microsoft didn't simply go and buy it from PrimeSense to relabel it - they still had to take the technology and refine it.
Technically, a contract has two elements. First is offer and acceptance, and the other is consideration.
The offer Borders made was to sell you a book at a certain price AND to agree to whatever other terms ("I agree to -terms-"). By purchasing the product, you've agreed to the terms of the sale (offer and acceptance).
The consideration part is interesting, because contracts for no money exchange (or exchange of goods of value) aren't valid (it's why you have contracts saying you agree to pay $1). That happens when money actually changes hands (for online orders, when the item shipped and your credit card charged).
You're free to not agree to the contract (cancel the purchase), or amend it (if you want to go through the trouble) and present a counteroffer.
So your act of purchasing a book pretty much shows you agreed to the terms of sale. Also, the fact that consideration happens afterwards means if they make a pricing mistake, they can cancel your order as the contract hasn't been formed yet (no consideration has been exchanged). However, once they ship and charge you, they can't come after you for more money.
You lose all access to games made after April 2010, too, because PS3 games insist on updating the firmware. If you're running old firmware, no games for you. Ditto Blu-Ray playback if an update is needed.
So it's OtherOS *OR* games and movies. Before it was "It does everything". Now I have to choose, and it seems Sony owes me a PS3.
PSN can be ignored now with the new ToS, but not running new firmware isn't an option anymore if you want to play anything recent.
The marketshare has "stalled" because people are buying iPhones at the rate the market is growing. The smartphone market is growing fast, and Androids are filling the gap because they're available in every price range, formfactor and customization. Heck, if you look, there probably are 1.5 or 1.6 phones being sold (without Google, using AOSP).
All that's happening is that Apple is pulling in customers, and Android as a collective whole is pulling them in faster, but individually each manufacturer may not be pulling in a whole bunch. (Apple takes over 2/3rds of mobile profits. Androids, dumb/featurephones have to split the shrinking leftovers, and those phones make a vast majority of phones sold - Apple probably only has 5% marketshare overall pulling in more than 2/3rds profits, while the other 95% are splitting the remaining third.)
A VERY good question.
30M iPhones is 10% of the US population (or just under the population of Canada).
This is for a phone using a radio used ONLY by Sprint (WiMax - AT&T, Verizon use LTE, as does practically everyone else in the world). So it's a phone with 4G capabilities limited to the US market only.
I don't know what Sprint's marketshare of the US cellular market is, but 10% of the US population would be a pretty significant chunk of their subscriber base I'd think.
The one thing about the iPhone that's interesting though is the lack of branding. The only other phone sold by carriers that's the same is the Nexus S. No branding, no carrier apps, ...