10 years ago, we were talking about PalmOS and Symbian, and maybe laughing at what was WindowsCE/PocketPC. These days, only Windows CE is left (industrial embedded), and we've seen the rise of iOS and Android.
Hell, we even have WebOS, MeeGo/Maemo and many others (QPE anyone remember that?). And don't forget J2ME was supposed to be the mobile language of choice to run phone apps.
Honestly, too many things change in 10 years - heck, by 2020 iOS and Android may have become extinct as well. (PalmOS had 60,000+ apps and was ocnsidered far superior to PocketPC in speed and elegance, but it died because Palm couldn't keep up with flashy and the OS was creaky). All it takes is a few missteps that leads to the downfall of the platform.
Technologies come, technologies go. If the devs were any good, it doesn't matter if the app was written in.NET or whatever proprotary API set - it can be migrated. Heck, on the desktop side we've seen the death of MacOS ("Classic"), and the rise of OS X.
The default link for Safari for Windows does not include QuickTime, although you can optionally click a button and choose to receive it. iTunes comes with QuickTime... mostly because it requires QuickTime. PS: iTunes also comes with Bonjour for Windows... mostly because it uses Bonjour.
I think Safari's an optional download, even though you have the main bulk of Safari when you install iTunes as well (WebKit).
iTunes depends on QuickTime as the playback engine (movies and music), and WebKit as the iTunes store is now moved to HTML. Previously it was using QuickTime hyperlink objects (a bastardization of HTML), but Apple switched a few years ago. And Bonjour is around because iTunes network streaming uses it.
Though, it's helpful in finding headless Linux boxes as well - it seems Ubuntu starts avahi so it has mDNS. With the Bonjour resolver, I can just do "hostname.local" to find my Linux boxes on the network (and resolve their IPs). Handy if they can't register against DNS.
Well, while ther eare FCC vans that do scan the airwaves, the licensed user (always a licensed user) has the right to complain. If the out-of-spectrum use of WiFi leads to their system being interfered with, they call up the FCC and say they have an interference problem, after determining it isn't their equipment.
At that point, the FCC can run around triangulating the source, and once they've located it, demand it be resolved. It is up to the owner of the device to comply, and until done, said device would be put in a non-interfering state (including pulling power).
It is very unlikely to lead to an arrest, but it can lead to a fine.
The licensed user always trumps unlicensed users, and it is always up to the unlicensed user to fix it. (Amateurs and cable TV have always been at odds - but most hams will help fix it as a neighbourly gesture, but they don't HAVE to).
If the D+ and D- lines are shorted in the cable itself, then it will draw as much current as the host can source, all the time. Your phone has no control over whether that number is 100 mA or 1.7 A.
The danger is though that the power supply is well-protected. Most cheap USB power adapters may only be able to provide 500mA. Sure, if you try to draw 1A, they can try to supply it (provided the voltage rails don't dip too low), until something burns up. Usually the regulator as at 500mA it can survive with whatever cooling system it's been given, but at 1+A, it overheats and dies.
Not a good thing - a dead regulator can easily put the source DC on the output lines, frying your device. And assuming that $10 USB adapter you bought at the store has crowbar circuits, a fuse (!), or other protective device is asking a bit much.
So? It still remains a relatively hostile environment for other operating systems (boot loader, partition format).
The bootloader is EFI. Used in every modern PC. The partition is GPT, required in modern PCs these days.
Yes, most BIOSes these days comprise of an EFI loader, with BIOS backwards compatibility. Oh wait, Windows requires that to start up on the Macs as well. Hell, Ubuntu installs trivially on a Mac.
And GPT is required these days. MBR won't cut it unless you want to stick with drives 2TB and smaller (MBR has a 2TB partition limit). With 3TB and larger hard drives coming out, the OS needs to understand GPT in order to use it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 natively understand it. Windows XP requires a special partition driver to be installed. Linux... should understand it natively.
It's not hostile, it's different. And Apple, as always, seems to like to push the way forward. First by getting rid of floppy drives, legacy ports (for USB). Then they got EFI and GPT, and now, optical drives.
Heaven forbid AOpen or some other shit shop wait a few weeks for google to iron out the bugs, have them verify their hardware can run Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich and make them sign a contract that they will updates the OS to the newest versions for a period of 18 months. The de facto world of release garbage and buggy phones, never supplying updates and hurting Android's reputation is no longer welcome, and I'm glad.
They can and will always be able to do that - AOSP allows them. Unless Google kills AOSP, there will always be a ton of crap Android phones.
All Google can do is give conditoins if you're also licensing the "with Google" stuff. Hell, Samsung's Galaxy Tab came with 2.2 and Google was very much against it (and it had "with Google"), so the amount of control Google has, is unknown.
You and I in the developed world may never see the crap phones without the Google stuff, but China and many other places they're plentiful. It's also why alternative marketplaces are so popular (because they can't get the official market, at least without doing some hacking work).
There will be crap phones and crap tablets running Android. This won't change at all - unless Google stops supporting AOSP for some reason.
The bit that complicates it for me in this case is that this is knowing that I'm paying $20 to piggy-back on packets that are already being sent constantly anyhow. There's no incremental bandwidth usage and no real infrastructure cost associated - charging for texting is close to pure profit.
Actually, there is. It's one of the reasons why the iPhone on AT&T nearly took out AT&T's network. Yes, the AT&T network was nearly disabled because the control channel was too busy (there were plenty of voice/data channels to go around).
The bandwidth of the control channel is shared by everyone, and because it's a control channel, everything is coordinated through it. Making a call? The phone asks for two voice channels through the control channel. Ditto for incoming calls - the cells set up a pair of channels and announce the call over the control channel. Ditto to set up and tear down data connections (which can re-use voice channels).
Problem was, the iPhone was VERY aggressive. Maybe too aggressive - it would request a data channel, then tear it down the instant it went idle. This caused excess control channel traffic (but was good for battery life - holding idle data connections open costs battery).
Toss in many iPhone users, many text users, and heavy calling and the control channel can get congested way before capacity. And this leads to slow network data (it can take forever to set up a channel), dropped calls (if the control channel is full, it's hard for the radio to perform handoff), and other issues.
Europe and Asia didn't suffer because texting was so common that carriers migrated to variable-bandwidth control channels - the control channel bandwidth could expand with need.
T-mobile suffered a similar issue with an IM app - I guess the interaction between the IM app and Android's network handling starting causing the same problems.
That's the technical side, anyhow. But the practical side - texts, like gas, are products sold at market rates - what the market will pay, which have little to do with the real cost of providing the service. And people have said they'd pay heavily for texting.
Yes, and Apple would never abuse the courts in such a vile way
Actually, Apple is using the courts the wrong way. You see, by suing Samsung BEFORE the sale of products, they've lost out on possible damages from patents. After all, by blocking based on that, Samsung just has to make some changes (like dumping TouchWiz - android users everywhere would love that), and boom, no more infringement.
It's far less profitable to sue for an unreleased product than to wait for the product to get successful and wait a few years, so you can claim massive treble damages.
None of this pre-empting suing crap - you sue AFTER a product has made profits.
Revenge for Apple going after Samsung. Apple is probably not too popular right now with many Koreans, I bet this lawsuit will have legs right now just due to sentiment.
This.
It's not so simple. Sure it's simple "revenge", but it's also cutting off one's nose to spite the face. Don't forget who Samsung's top customer is (Apple). Then realize that of the profits in the mobile sector, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, ZTE, HTC and everyone else are splitting up the 1/3rd leftover after Apple. It's very possible that the loss of Apple's business would hurt Samsung way more than Apple blocking sales of Samsung's Android phones and tablets.
Heck, it could very well cause quite some pain if Samsung is left with a surplus of parts and idle production lines. Heck, since Apple pretty much commands the large flash chip market (much to everyone's annoyance - it makes holiday launches awful as prices spike as Apple locks in orders), dumping Samsung could cause price ripples in components (to which Apple will lock in the low prices).
Or it could be because Apple has already been burnt by copying Nokia's IP without the license, so recognised that it kinda needed a pool in the cell phone arena to prevent other firms burning it in a similar way.
Apple wasn't "burnt" by Nokia. They refused to pay MORE for the same patent licenses that everyone else (including Motorola) paid for them. Not monetarily, but in those licensess for patents that Apple holds. (violating the "non-discriminatory" part of RAND)
Anyhow, these patent wars aren't going to happen. Apple holds a bunch of LTE patents, to which they must license under RAND terms to everyone else using it. Google's acquisition of MMI also inherits a bunch of patents that are licensed under RAND. In the end, it'll be a stalemate of money going around in circles.
(RAND because otherwise the standards bodies won't really want to touch it otherwise - there are so many patents available that they would much rather pick a competing one instead. Though there are a lot of other stadnards that get thrown in as well as everyone wants a little piece of being in the standard pie).
For the other apps, you're right, they're absolutely closed. But if Google went away, what could you do with a client for their now-offline services?:-)
Well, the primary place to get apps is the Marketplace, which is controlled by Google. Sure, you can use alternative ones, but their selection is relatively poor compared to the Market.
It's why Android devices without the "with Google" stuff tend to be fairly awful - most authors don't bother putting their stuff up for sideloading or alternate marketplaces. If Google goes away, you'll have a bunch of abandoned apps (never to be re-posted), and everyone else will scramble around and suddenly you need to be a member of 5 or 6 marketplaces to get apps.
Apple has a whole branch of their marketing department dedicated to encouraging and supplying free Apple gear to production companies. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I've noticed that MacBooks always have the distinctive Apple logo, but everything else has some generic symbol or simply a blank spot on the lid where the logo used to be. I don't think I've ever seen a MacBook with its logo removed or covered.
Mythbusters does it from time to time. It's quite funny since they cover up the Apple logo on the back with a square of cardboard and sometimes (not always), they vover up the "Macbook" on the bezel with tape.
Other more innovative ways include putting on some stickers over the logo. Or camera tricks using props.
Though, considering how distinct Apple products are, it's really hard to *not* know it's an Apple laptop or desktop PC. Even if they cover up the logo and the product name.
And this must be a new thing - Apple traditionally does not go seeking product-placement anywhere. They let the production company come to them, and even then they refuse any requests for money. They may provide some hardware, but no money.
True, I'm just saying that if geolocation is truly important to you then maybe you should at least attempt to verify it server-side (by looking up the IP address of the user, if it shows the user in Germany while the client is reporting that it's in Egypt then maybe there's a problem somewhere).
That breaks a very common case where you have geolocation data - mobile data. Specifically, data roaming. Data roaming works because the roaming carrier forwards packets your phone sense out to your carrier, who then uses their gateway to connect you to the Internet. As far as anyone is concerned, your IP is wherever your carrier is.
And since phones are basically the main reason to get geolocation data...
Nah, they should switch to Macs. There's nothing like running a TCP/IP stack that reuses a modified copy of old FreeBSD code without changing the comments. =)
Considering OS X is simply a Mach kernel plus a BSD layer bolted on top, is it a surprise? Heck, Apple's hired a few of the FreeBSD folks as well (to work on both the xnu kernel and BSD). And considering Mach doesn't provide networking, it shouldn't be a surprise that the standard TCP/IP stack makes it into OS X unmolested. Heck, the BSD TCP/IP stack is considered the reference stack.
Plus, changing the comments is silly. It ends up showing up on the diffs and makes it just a bit harder to merge.
I guess comparing a home screen to a secondary application chooser is also negligible?
Well, Apple might be making the best design decision for Samsung ever, actually - to scrap TouchWiz and ship just plain old Android. That secondary launcher does look way too much like iOS' launcher, after all.
Hell, maybe Apple can do Android a favor and have all the manufacturers scrap their crappy "value added" features. TouchWiz, MOTOBLUR and the others, out the door, and everyone gets the standard Android UI.
Huh? Installation error also applies to the "boxed" coolers. It's not like they sold them already mounted on the mainboard. However, damaging a CPU when installing the HSF has been fairly rare for a while now, since the advent of improved mounting mechanisms, integrated heat spreaders and CPUs with thermal throttles.
Interestingly, it was AMD processors that were vulnerable to HSF misinstallation - chipping an AMD processor would almost always break it. The Intel parts would sustain some pretty nasty chips along the edge and still work. It's a reason why shims were made for AMD processors to prevent chipping them by accident.
Likewise, the old Intel CPUs would crash before they overheated and burned up, wherease the AMDs simply cooked themselves.
Maybe, but look at it from the flipside: China generally takes a very lax approach to Western copyright infringement. Them snapping to action to shut these stores down implies that China is afraid of Apple. Seriously. They fucked around with Google just like anyone else, but they're running scared under the fear that Apple will crack down on them.
Or perhaps China realizes that copyrights don't mean much when so much is being created anyways.
But patents and trademarks, if China wants to be the next superpower, they do need those. Patents - well, it's obvious if they want to control upcoming technology. Trademarks are important as well - if China isn't known for obeying trademarks, then the world might very well not pay attention to Chinese trademarks. So when Foxconn makes some next-gen products under the Foxconn name (HTC used to only be an ODM and not an end product manufacturer), should China allowed a bunch of trademark violations, nothing's to stop someone in the US or other countries from doing the same to China's marks.
China can't coast on "cheap factory labor" forever - eventually it'll start producing capital-intensive goods and they'll need to ensure that people respect the Chinese marks. By enforcing other trademarks they can ensure this. Last thing they want is to have other countries undermining China's marks.
And Curiosity is a needed exercise on landing heavier and heavier things on mars.
It's a step in the evolution of exploration on Mars.
First was Sojourner, which was just shoebox sized - all it had to do was land and explore a bit to ensure things actually worked.
Then came Spirit and Opportunity - which are much bigger rovers - think washing-macine or so sized. Again its purpose was to explore Mars and prove that things could work.
Curiouslity is the largest of the lot (think SUV), and the old landing system wouldn't work anymore, but with all the science and knowledge gained from Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's reasonably confident that it'll be more successful than if we just sent Curiousity to begin with.
Again, just a small stepping stone, but enough has been learned from Mars that something like Curiousity and its complexities could be built and have a reasonable chance of success. It still needs to be tested thoroughly (its mission will be far longer than 90 days), but we know what to expect now.
>"You've only worked with x86 based servers I take it?"
Yes, only X86. 45 min??!!! I would go insane! Even 10 min would make me go running away.
Depends on the system. On a PC where rebooting is the norm, yes, a 10 min/45 min boot is terrible.
But on mainframes and other big iron, a 45 minute boot is unusually short (reboots usually are scheduled and take hours) - checking all the hardware and so forth. Of course these systems tend to have uptimes measurable in decades and don't go down even if a CPU or memory module fails (you hot-swap them).
Just a different method of operation, really. Heck, I think the biggest problem is the worry that one would be unable to restart everything properly on the next reboot - the last reboot may have happened two or more sysadmins ago and the guy who rebooted it is retired or dead.
Or do you mean you're sticking with Firefox 3.6? Because that seems like a good idea these days, at least until they figure out that their "rapidly release schedule" isn't actually helping anything and is just ensuring that no one gives a shit about new Firefox releases any more.
Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser. With FF6, that means Google's only going to support FF4, FF5 and FF6. FF3.6 won't work with Google Apps and other stuff anymore (seriously, I tried using G+ with FF3.5, and it demanded I upgrade - supported browsers are 3.6, 4 and 5 then).
And when will Mozilla stop screwing around with the UI? FF5 screwed up the tab bar if you have a bunch of tabs and close them right->left since the now-rightmost tab doesn't scroll right - your mouse just has an empty space.
Lawyers have to keep track of their time in six-minute intervals. The billable hour is not fun for them either.
As a private pilot, I took have to keep track of times in 6 minute intervals.
You see, the reason is we track times in hours, with a precision of 1/10th of an hour (i.e., 6 minutes).
All that means is that lawyers too have to keep track of their billable hours to a tenth of an hour. And given the number of apps out there for every platform for keeping track of time, I don't think keeping track of billable hours is a huge deal.
"However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything."
30 years ago... as useless then as it is now.
Not really. Depending on your usage, scroll lock is very useful at controlling a KVM. It can also be very useful if you deal with very large spreadsheets - even today you can hit scroll lock and then use the cursor keys to scroll through the document rather than use the scroll bars or mouse. Think of it as the "mousewheel" for the keyboard.
It's a shame more apps don't use it - if you want to scroll using the keyboard, it's the best way.
Though, you can have some fun if you hit scroll lock on someone's keyboard. Nothing really appears to happen, but if they use Excel or something...
It works a lot better if you realize there's no such thing as privacy on social networks.
First - a social network's goal is to get information. Lots of information. They do this by making it appealing for you to give that information.
Second - a large percentage of people are reluctant to give up certain amounts of information - perhaps their upbringing or other norms make it difficult.
To achieve both the first (get as much data as possible) and second (people may not willingly give up that data), they introduce "privacy settings" to offer the illusion that there's some concept of protection of that information, when in reality its to allow the site to sell that information. Sure Joe Average may not be able to see that data, but you can bet if you pay $$$ you can.
tl;dr - "don't post online what you don't want the world to know". There's no "privacy settings" in there - because they're irrelevant.
Does this really need a standard? Seems like something that a manufacture could just do.
They already have. SATA-over-mPCIe has been around since the original eeePC - the SATA SSD it uses was mounted in a mini-PCIe looking slot. But it wasn't, since it ran SATA signals over it.
A more recent example started since the 2010 Macbook Airs which had a bog-stadanrd SATA based SSD in something that looked like a mini-PCIe slot - again, it was SATA signals wired to the slot.
This spec just makes it official so everyone can build adapters, SSDs and laptops based on it and be standardized across the entire line. otherwise you'd have formfactor issues, possible pinout issues, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Safari's an optional download, even though you have the main bulk of Safari when you install iTunes as well (WebKit).
iTunes depends on QuickTime as the playback engine (movies and music), and WebKit as the iTunes store is now moved to HTML. Previously it was using QuickTime hyperlink objects (a bastardization of HTML), but Apple switched a few years ago. And Bonjour is around because iTunes network streaming uses it.
Though, it's helpful in finding headless Linux boxes as well - it seems Ubuntu starts avahi so it has mDNS. With the Bonjour resolver, I can just do "hostname.local" to find my Linux boxes on the network (and resolve their IPs). Handy if they can't register against DNS.
The danger is though that the power supply is well-protected. Most cheap USB power adapters may only be able to provide 500mA. Sure, if you try to draw 1A, they can try to supply it (provided the voltage rails don't dip too low), until something burns up. Usually the regulator as at 500mA it can survive with whatever cooling system it's been given, but at 1+A, it overheats and dies.
Not a good thing - a dead regulator can easily put the source DC on the output lines, frying your device. And assuming that $10 USB adapter you bought at the store has crowbar circuits, a fuse (!), or other protective device is asking a bit much.
The bootloader is EFI. Used in every modern PC. The partition is GPT, required in modern PCs these days.
Yes, most BIOSes these days comprise of an EFI loader, with BIOS backwards compatibility. Oh wait, Windows requires that to start up on the Macs as well. Hell, Ubuntu installs trivially on a Mac.
And GPT is required these days. MBR won't cut it unless you want to stick with drives 2TB and smaller (MBR has a 2TB partition limit). With 3TB and larger hard drives coming out, the OS needs to understand GPT in order to use it. Windows Vista and Windows 7 natively understand it. Windows XP requires a special partition driver to be installed. Linux... should understand it natively.
It's not hostile, it's different. And Apple, as always, seems to like to push the way forward. First by getting rid of floppy drives, legacy ports (for USB). Then they got EFI and GPT, and now, optical drives.
They can and will always be able to do that - AOSP allows them. Unless Google kills AOSP, there will always be a ton of crap Android phones.
All Google can do is give conditoins if you're also licensing the "with Google" stuff. Hell, Samsung's Galaxy Tab came with 2.2 and Google was very much against it (and it had "with Google"), so the amount of control Google has, is unknown.
You and I in the developed world may never see the crap phones without the Google stuff, but China and many other places they're plentiful. It's also why alternative marketplaces are so popular (because they can't get the official market, at least without doing some hacking work).
There will be crap phones and crap tablets running Android. This won't change at all - unless Google stops supporting AOSP for some reason.
Actually, there is. It's one of the reasons why the iPhone on AT&T nearly took out AT&T's network. Yes, the AT&T network was nearly disabled because the control channel was too busy (there were plenty of voice/data channels to go around).
The bandwidth of the control channel is shared by everyone, and because it's a control channel, everything is coordinated through it. Making a call? The phone asks for two voice channels through the control channel. Ditto for incoming calls - the cells set up a pair of channels and announce the call over the control channel. Ditto to set up and tear down data connections (which can re-use voice channels).
Problem was, the iPhone was VERY aggressive. Maybe too aggressive - it would request a data channel, then tear it down the instant it went idle. This caused excess control channel traffic (but was good for battery life - holding idle data connections open costs battery).
Toss in many iPhone users, many text users, and heavy calling and the control channel can get congested way before capacity. And this leads to slow network data (it can take forever to set up a channel), dropped calls (if the control channel is full, it's hard for the radio to perform handoff), and other issues.
Europe and Asia didn't suffer because texting was so common that carriers migrated to variable-bandwidth control channels - the control channel bandwidth could expand with need.
T-mobile suffered a similar issue with an IM app - I guess the interaction between the IM app and Android's network handling starting causing the same problems.
That's the technical side, anyhow. But the practical side - texts, like gas, are products sold at market rates - what the market will pay, which have little to do with the real cost of providing the service. And people have said they'd pay heavily for texting.
A lot of Americans actually bought iPhones in Canada because they were unlocked.
A lot less now since Apple sells unlocked iPhones in the US.
Actually, Apple is using the courts the wrong way. You see, by suing Samsung BEFORE the sale of products, they've lost out on possible damages from patents. After all, by blocking based on that, Samsung just has to make some changes (like dumping TouchWiz - android users everywhere would love that), and boom, no more infringement.
It's far less profitable to sue for an unreleased product than to wait for the product to get successful and wait a few years, so you can claim massive treble damages.
None of this pre-empting suing crap - you sue AFTER a product has made profits.
It's not so simple. Sure it's simple "revenge", but it's also cutting off one's nose to spite the face. Don't forget who Samsung's top customer is (Apple). Then realize that of the profits in the mobile sector, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Motorola, ZTE, HTC and everyone else are splitting up the 1/3rd leftover after Apple. It's very possible that the loss of Apple's business would hurt Samsung way more than Apple blocking sales of Samsung's Android phones and tablets.
Heck, it could very well cause quite some pain if Samsung is left with a surplus of parts and idle production lines. Heck, since Apple pretty much commands the large flash chip market (much to everyone's annoyance - it makes holiday launches awful as prices spike as Apple locks in orders), dumping Samsung could cause price ripples in components (to which Apple will lock in the low prices).
Apple wasn't "burnt" by Nokia. They refused to pay MORE for the same patent licenses that everyone else (including Motorola) paid for them. Not monetarily, but in those licensess for patents that Apple holds. (violating the "non-discriminatory" part of RAND)
Anyhow, these patent wars aren't going to happen. Apple holds a bunch of LTE patents, to which they must license under RAND terms to everyone else using it. Google's acquisition of MMI also inherits a bunch of patents that are licensed under RAND. In the end, it'll be a stalemate of money going around in circles.
(RAND because otherwise the standards bodies won't really want to touch it otherwise - there are so many patents available that they would much rather pick a competing one instead. Though there are a lot of other stadnards that get thrown in as well as everyone wants a little piece of being in the standard pie).
Well, the primary place to get apps is the Marketplace, which is controlled by Google. Sure, you can use alternative ones, but their selection is relatively poor compared to the Market.
It's why Android devices without the "with Google" stuff tend to be fairly awful - most authors don't bother putting their stuff up for sideloading or alternate marketplaces. If Google goes away, you'll have a bunch of abandoned apps (never to be re-posted), and everyone else will scramble around and suddenly you need to be a member of 5 or 6 marketplaces to get apps.
Mythbusters does it from time to time. It's quite funny since they cover up the Apple logo on the back with a square of cardboard and sometimes (not always), they vover up the "Macbook" on the bezel with tape.
Other more innovative ways include putting on some stickers over the logo. Or camera tricks using props.
Though, considering how distinct Apple products are, it's really hard to *not* know it's an Apple laptop or desktop PC. Even if they cover up the logo and the product name.
And this must be a new thing - Apple traditionally does not go seeking product-placement anywhere. They let the production company come to them, and even then they refuse any requests for money. They may provide some hardware, but no money.
That breaks a very common case where you have geolocation data - mobile data. Specifically, data roaming. Data roaming works because the roaming carrier forwards packets your phone sense out to your carrier, who then uses their gateway to connect you to the Internet. As far as anyone is concerned, your IP is wherever your carrier is.
And since phones are basically the main reason to get geolocation data...
Considering OS X is simply a Mach kernel plus a BSD layer bolted on top, is it a surprise? Heck, Apple's hired a few of the FreeBSD folks as well (to work on both the xnu kernel and BSD). And considering Mach doesn't provide networking, it shouldn't be a surprise that the standard TCP/IP stack makes it into OS X unmolested. Heck, the BSD TCP/IP stack is considered the reference stack.
Plus, changing the comments is silly. It ends up showing up on the diffs and makes it just a bit harder to merge.
Well, Apple might be making the best design decision for Samsung ever, actually - to scrap TouchWiz and ship just plain old Android. That secondary launcher does look way too much like iOS' launcher, after all.
Hell, maybe Apple can do Android a favor and have all the manufacturers scrap their crappy "value added" features. TouchWiz, MOTOBLUR and the others, out the door, and everyone gets the standard Android UI.
Interestingly, it was AMD processors that were vulnerable to HSF misinstallation - chipping an AMD processor would almost always break it. The Intel parts would sustain some pretty nasty chips along the edge and still work. It's a reason why shims were made for AMD processors to prevent chipping them by accident.
Likewise, the old Intel CPUs would crash before they overheated and burned up, wherease the AMDs simply cooked themselves.
Or perhaps China realizes that copyrights don't mean much when so much is being created anyways.
But patents and trademarks, if China wants to be the next superpower, they do need those. Patents - well, it's obvious if they want to control upcoming technology. Trademarks are important as well - if China isn't known for obeying trademarks, then the world might very well not pay attention to Chinese trademarks. So when Foxconn makes some next-gen products under the Foxconn name (HTC used to only be an ODM and not an end product manufacturer), should China allowed a bunch of trademark violations, nothing's to stop someone in the US or other countries from doing the same to China's marks.
China can't coast on "cheap factory labor" forever - eventually it'll start producing capital-intensive goods and they'll need to ensure that people respect the Chinese marks. By enforcing other trademarks they can ensure this. Last thing they want is to have other countries undermining China's marks.
It's a step in the evolution of exploration on Mars.
First was Sojourner, which was just shoebox sized - all it had to do was land and explore a bit to ensure things actually worked.
Then came Spirit and Opportunity - which are much bigger rovers - think washing-macine or so sized. Again its purpose was to explore Mars and prove that things could work.
Curiouslity is the largest of the lot (think SUV), and the old landing system wouldn't work anymore, but with all the science and knowledge gained from Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, NASA's reasonably confident that it'll be more successful than if we just sent Curiousity to begin with.
Again, just a small stepping stone, but enough has been learned from Mars that something like Curiousity and its complexities could be built and have a reasonable chance of success. It still needs to be tested thoroughly (its mission will be far longer than 90 days), but we know what to expect now.
Depends on the system. On a PC where rebooting is the norm, yes, a 10 min/45 min boot is terrible.
But on mainframes and other big iron, a 45 minute boot is unusually short (reboots usually are scheduled and take hours) - checking all the hardware and so forth. Of course these systems tend to have uptimes measurable in decades and don't go down even if a CPU or memory module fails (you hot-swap them).
Just a different method of operation, really. Heck, I think the biggest problem is the worry that one would be unable to restart everything properly on the next reboot - the last reboot may have happened two or more sysadmins ago and the guy who rebooted it is retired or dead.
Google only supports the last 3 versions of a browser. With FF6, that means Google's only going to support FF4, FF5 and FF6. FF3.6 won't work with Google Apps and other stuff anymore (seriously, I tried using G+ with FF3.5, and it demanded I upgrade - supported browsers are 3.6, 4 and 5 then).
And when will Mozilla stop screwing around with the UI? FF5 screwed up the tab bar if you have a bunch of tabs and close them right->left since the now-rightmost tab doesn't scroll right - your mouse just has an empty space.
As a private pilot, I took have to keep track of times in 6 minute intervals.
You see, the reason is we track times in hours, with a precision of 1/10th of an hour (i.e., 6 minutes).
All that means is that lawyers too have to keep track of their billable hours to a tenth of an hour. And given the number of apps out there for every platform for keeping track of time, I don't think keeping track of billable hours is a huge deal.
Not really. Depending on your usage, scroll lock is very useful at controlling a KVM. It can also be very useful if you deal with very large spreadsheets - even today you can hit scroll lock and then use the cursor keys to scroll through the document rather than use the scroll bars or mouse. Think of it as the "mousewheel" for the keyboard.
It's a shame more apps don't use it - if you want to scroll using the keyboard, it's the best way.
Though, you can have some fun if you hit scroll lock on someone's keyboard. Nothing really appears to happen, but if they use Excel or something...
It works a lot better if you realize there's no such thing as privacy on social networks.
First - a social network's goal is to get information. Lots of information. They do this by making it appealing for you to give that information.
Second - a large percentage of people are reluctant to give up certain amounts of information - perhaps their upbringing or other norms make it difficult.
To achieve both the first (get as much data as possible) and second (people may not willingly give up that data), they introduce "privacy settings" to offer the illusion that there's some concept of protection of that information, when in reality its to allow the site to sell that information. Sure Joe Average may not be able to see that data, but you can bet if you pay $$$ you can.
tl;dr - "don't post online what you don't want the world to know". There's no "privacy settings" in there - because they're irrelevant.
They already have. SATA-over-mPCIe has been around since the original eeePC - the SATA SSD it uses was mounted in a mini-PCIe looking slot. But it wasn't, since it ran SATA signals over it.
A more recent example started since the 2010 Macbook Airs which had a bog-stadanrd SATA based SSD in something that looked like a mini-PCIe slot - again, it was SATA signals wired to the slot.
This spec just makes it official so everyone can build adapters, SSDs and laptops based on it and be standardized across the entire line. otherwise you'd have formfactor issues, possible pinout issues, etc.