As for where they are, electronics using vacuum tubes are popular with audiophiles and people who like playing with old radio equipment, particularly ham radio operators with a bit of nuclear war paranoia...
Vacuum tubes are still used today - they're the cheapest way to have high-powered devices. If you're transmitting at 1kW, the finals are probably tubes because it's easier to have a high-powered tube than find high-powered solid-state transistors. Ditto if you're doing 10kW or 100kW (not uncommon for broadcast stations). Here the final power amplifier is almost exclusively a tube-based one.
Audiophiles like tubes because it's "warmer". Practically speaking though, Guitarists have it right - the tube distortion characteristic is much friendlier on the ear than a transistor distortion. Transistors clip if you overdrive them - and clipping produces awful harmonics (if you've heard badly-ripped MP3s, that's mostly the reason why they sound so horrible). Overdriving tubes produces harmonics as well, but they're more pleasing.
It's part of the loudness war problem as well - clipping should be something that happens rarely, if ever, but on poorly mastered music with dynamic range compression,..., it clips constantly.
Have you ever seen one of its predecessors ? They aren't indicative of Chinese engineering (at least I don't hope so for their sake.) Hiphones are just cheap generic phone innards mashed into a case resembling genuine Apple devices (or in this case mockups thereof) with a skinned UI. At least they did as good a job as Samsung ripping off the icons;-) but they are otherwise just really crappy.
Still requires work and effort to do.
Heck, you should see some of the crappy iPod clones - they look the same, but man are they just plain awful - the screen, the software, etc.
Either way, the only thing possibly stolen from Apple is the design (and given the way people on/. feel about it given the Apple v. Samsung and Apple v. Motorola lawsuits). Everything else is different. Sure it may be a remashed generic phone design, but someone had to take the time to lay out a circuit board, find appropriate parts (crappy as they are), and do the necesary software mods. 95% of the work may already be done, but converting that reference design to something people will buy is where all the ODM work comes into play (they all do it - HTC, etc. - they take the reference design and repackage it and modify software as appropriate).
Most of the innards of phones you find today will be fairly similar. Whether it be Samsung, HTC, Motorola, or whatever.
These things come with crap called a "java based OS." They stink. It'd be interesting if they came up with a clone that could actually run iOS.
People are saying "Apple deserves this" for making their products in China, but I disagree.
In fact, this device is based on rumors of the iPhone 5. Which means the chinese company doing this has had to design the case, the electronics and the software themselves. I don't think they're using the same components at all - so other than possible design, everything in the hiPhone5 is completely original.
Put in that context, it's more interesting ot see the state of original Chinese designs moreso than copycat.
I'm pretty sure this has already been solved. You coat them with a capsaicin powder. Higher on the scoville scale the better.
Given I tried it with my dog once so she won't chew on some things, it didn't work. We came back to find the item unchewed, yes, but the powder was cleanly licked off.
The damn squirrels would realize it makes their nuts taste better and start attacking all the coated cables!
I agree. The case appears to be a slam dunk for the DA. The idiot troll Gizmodo editors didn't even bother consulting an attorney, didn't even occur to them that there was any moral or legal issue with purchasing a stolen corporate secret prototype... fools.
I wonder though, with all the trouble and loss of revenue Gizmodo caused with the Antennagate BS, if Apple made some deal with Gizmodo to have the charges dismissed if the quasi-journalists' stop being such asshats. Doesn't seem likely... as Apple mercilessly killed ThinkSecret, and they never even approached the bullshit that Gizmodo pulled last summer.
Unlikely. The Gizmodo thing probably cost Gizmodo more in the end - Apple's basically blackballed them, and Apple brings in LOTS of clicks. In fact, at WWDC 2010, they were BEGGING for a press pass. Why they didn't think to purchase a ticket instead (sure, the press pass is free, but the iPhone4 reveal made that super unlikely).
These days, Gizmodo's basically dead. The Gawker CEO enforced some screwed up site design that barely works anymore (people are constantly complaining about the new layout), all the big names at Gizmodo have left (Jason Chen, Brian Lam, etc. have left to pursue other activities).
And if Gawker was smart, everything they did would've been over the phone or in-person. They weren't charged because there's simply no evidence. They said they paid $10,000, but the only evidence was a posting.
So anyone who jumps aboard their video streaming service announced 2 weeks ago can get a glimpse of their future right now, eh?
It's just Vudu.
In fact, VuDu just announced that to get around the App Store payment processor, they launched a web app - so they're streaming movies using HTTP Live Streaming.
Now I just need an HTTP Live Streaming downloader...
Likewise, Amazon has a web-based E-reader. Someone's probably going to write a simple tool to dump DRM-free ebooks that way.
Perhaps Apple's HTML5 over Flash and App Store stances could inadvertently lead to a DRM-free world.
Either I didn't dig deep enough, or I was looking in the wrong place. But is there any evidence that Apple is not shipping the hardware to the Asian continent for "recycling" methods that pollute their land and poison their workers?
It looks like it's in partnership with another company that they do the last two R's. Remember, it's Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The company buys old hardware and tries to refurbish it (i.e., Reuse). Stuff that's too old is recycled - and it appears they use WeRecycle for that. Or I suppose if there's a state-sponsored recycling program, they'd use those.
Do remember though that the money you get is quite little (you'll make far more on eBay or Craigslist), so a bit of that is used to fund the whole program. As is the scrap value.
+1, in fact there have been rumors of iPhone 6 getting wireless charging months ago.
I give it a day before the "OMG EM FIELDS BAD!!!!!" folk kill it. You know, the kind of people who argue WiFi is bad for you (yet they have a microwave oven), that smart meter's EM radiation will kill you and give you cancer (ignoring the fact that you're completely bathed in the EM field from the power lines in your house), etc.
These phones? Meh, the folk who scream the loudest probably haven't even heard of Android. (And you can bet they have cellphones). But once Apple makes it popular and trendy,... watch the lawsuits fly.
Hell, it probably won't even be 24 hours before we'll see the first class-action lawsuit filed against Apple because of wireless charging "is killing our kids!".
So, to install the rootkit, you also need to exploit a bug in the user. Where do I file the bug report?
The user is the biggest vulnerability. It's called the Dancing Pigs problem and it's extremely difficult to protect. In fact, popping up additional dialogs hurt security because of it (that Android permissions screen? Utterly useless - even if you make it so they have to check off every item then hit install).
Power over USB is negotiated. If the supplier does not have it does not grant the device's request. Simply put this means you won't be able to use all your devices with your laptop without adding an external power supply to the device... There are other physics problems with their idea. (At 50V, 2A still seems like a lot of current to put through your small USB connector. At 100V your USB cable is not a safety hazard...)
It doesn't work.
The power negotiation bit just tells the OS that you may have plugged something that draws too much power in, but if it doesn't trip the overcurrent detector, all is good.
And most PCs are built with only one overcurrent detector servicing all USB ports. So if your PC has 10 USB ports, it'll have a 5A detector in it. (Which is bad if a USB fault kicks 2.5A over the port since it won't shut down. The upside though is that USB portable hard drives often draw >500mA starting up - brief 1-2A spikes are common which will trigger individual port detectors, but except for those few PCs, it works).
The other thing is, the negotiations fail in that practically all OSes pick a working interface without considering power. If you have two interfaces, one saying the device can draw 500mA, the other saying 100mA, most OSes (Windows/Linux/OS X) pick the first interface. When designing an OTG device, this is a huge PITA (OTG can only provide 100mA), ditto for low-power ports on most portable devices. Hell, an annoyingly large subset of USB devices will not work at 100mA, either, despite it being the minimum current spec (each port of an unpowered hub can do only 100mA, enumeration power you can count on is 100mA, etc)
The device we had would set a current limit so it wouldn't draw more than the allowed current. If we put the 100mA interface descriptor first, it would get selected always. If we put the 500mA interface, it would get selected. (We modified our firmware to read and check for lower-power interfaces).
Windows 3.x didn't come with a stack, you had to supply your own (Trumpet Winsock, anyone?).
Windows 95, though, featured it's own brand new stack, BSD based.
Then WinSock 2 came out, and that one dumped the BSD based stack for their own. (WinSock 2 featured changable stacks with a new internal API which made it incompatible with the old stack). This stack was under development for a while - Windows 95 shipped with a BSD stack purely because of release date issues.
Then Vista, or more correctly, NDIS6 rolled out. NDIS6's packet architecture is completely different, and to extract the speed improvements (as well as take advantage of TCP Offload Engines better), it was rewritten to use the new NDIS6 API set. (NDIS does, however, allow old NDIS 4/5.1 protocols and miniports work through a built-in translation layer).
Many new words are added to the language by common use. If I want to look something up I often Google it. This verb is a recent example of this. Turning something into a game is another new word in developement.
As someone once said, "Verbing weirds language". 'nuff said.
Then how should somebody new to the industry become qualified to produce for this province?
These days, a variety of ways.
Before, there was the PC. Make a PC game - in Flash if you want, watch it get big. Or do a mod for an existing game - lots of people started this way.
But if Flash/Windows/game_engine_of_choice isn't your thing, you also have a bunch of other options.
1) Xbox360 and XNA Dev Studio - write apps and games for Windows, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox360 (bonus - it plays on the Xbox! With controller!).
2) Android App Store.
3) Apple App Store - probably the most "console like" app store, without the crazy console restrictions. Yes you have approval and crap, but you have it on consoles too. Just that Apple's policies are far more lenient than any console maker. And you're not having to rent a separate office, have secured premises or purchase dev hardware - just a Mac, an iDevice, and the SDK.
The gaming industry is remarkably easy to get into these days - just 5 years ago you were restricted to PC platforms with either a Flash game, a mod or a custom-developed one. These days, 3 new platforms have opened up, all of which can be easily demonstrated during an interview.
So you're saying that I, with my non-jailbroken, non-tethering phone, can get my service disconnected by using a SSH app?
Considering SSH is about the lowest-bandwidth service I can think of, I find this hard to believe. But it's something I'll be testing tonight. I use SSH on my Android phone all the time when I'm away from home.
Alas, the honest answer is, "it depends." SSH may or may not be blocked by your carrier+plan combination, and if you're just doing interactive SSH, probably unlikely to trigger any sort of carrier alert (SSH packets are small and infrequent). But try to push it by doing SFTP transfers and you might trigger something.
It depends on your carrier's data policies and your data plan. Some carriers don't care and stick a plain old NAT (or two) for all plans, others rely on all sorts of price differenciators and specials and other crap and elaborate arrays of firewalls, proxies and such.
And I meant using your phone as an SSH server, having your PC use an SSH client in SOCKS mode (ssh -D port) and proxying through localhost - your phone will create the TCP connections on demand.
What someone really ought to do is a comprehensive analysis of what data plans offer -which carriers firewall, which carriers proxy (including recompression - I believe someone did a simple benchmark and noticed pages loaded faster on Verizon than AT&T, but AT&T loaded YouTube videos faster - iPhone 4), what protocols are let through and which aren't, etc.
The 3GPP based carriers will do these things (because switching phones is trivial), the CDMA carriers less so (they know what your phone can do).
A cellphone data connection goes through a gateway. It's not a traditional TCP/IP link, but it sure looks like one from the mobile side. What happens is the TCP/IP packets are encapsulated by the modem, forwarded to the base station, and the base station determines which gateway to use.
In GSM, the gateway is chosen by the APN you enter (or your phone automatically uses). CDMA is different, but it effectively looks up the gateway for you.
The gateway does things depending on the plan you buy. Consider the entirety of data plans available - unlimited "social networking" for feature phones, unlimited data for blackberries, gigs and gigs for smartphones, 1-2GB for laptop, each of which is increasing in price. The reason for this is service differentiation. The lowest and cheapest plan probably uses well defined proxy servers that only forward to specific hosts. The blackberry plans go to specific blackberry networks. The smartphone plans often have stuff like transparent proxying (caching plus stuff like recompression), firewalling (HTTP/HTTPS/SMTP/POP/IMAP only is typical), NAT (multiple layers).
Laptop data plans (MiFi's and the like) often stick you behind a simple NAT, but are otherwise free from other firewalling. And if you pony up $$$, you can often get VPN plans that give you a real life IP address and no firewalling.
Guess what? These firewalls also note what traffic isn't making it thorugh. Various ping probes, odd port traffic, stuff like that gets logged. Use a Windows machine and it's easy from traffic that no smartphone will ever generate.
Those who use their phone as a modem (PC does TCP/IP) are the first to trigger the alerts, those who use SSH-SOCKS (phone does TCP/IP) are harder to tell (all packets originate from phone, traffic not using proxy isn't seen), in which case they have to see if connections are made to odd ports and the like (e.g., if you try to ssh to a host).
Other techniques are a bit of packet identification and link utilization - you can easily tell a smartphone from a PC just by the way the browsers create network traffic, for example (especially with smartphone plan transparent proxies)
You think carriers are stupid for selling 2GB laptop plans when you can get 5GB smartphone plans for half the price?
Let's be honest here. Slashdot is practically a hangout for Google fans and is on Google's side in nearly every story.
[...]
Because of the negative emotional connotation "Microsoft" has and the positive emotional connotation "Google" has, people here will refuse to see the similarity, but objectively
I think it's just the infatuation cycle. I can recall similar things happening to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Second Life and it's happening to Google now.
People like company X because they do something cool, then 5-6 years later company X gets popular and/. begins its contrarian style hate. It's just like all those people who like an indie band who then gets signed and then claim their music now is crap and they were better before. Especially if there's something to rally around. After a few years,/. becomes indifferent.
For Amazon, that tipping point was One-Click. There were howls of protest and boycotts (and all the book reviews of the period linked to Barnes and Noble). These days, no one cares too much.
For Apple, it was the iPhone and the App Store. Give it a few years (probably by the iPhone 8 or 9) and we'd again be all indifferent. (in the mid-2000's, we were infatuated with Apple - OS X! Unix! Open Source AND Commercial Software!, blah blah blah).
Ditto Facebook (not MySpace! Clean!), Second Life (3D! Avatars! Real Money!), etc.
Google's just riding the wave up that started around GMail and continued through Android, but is starting to wane with G+ and the almightly data repository that is owned by Google and sold to advertisers.
Microsoft, alas, started before/. and got to rode the negative tide. These days, it's mostly indifference.
Some places actually charge you a large early termination fee AND make you return your phone. And charge you if the phone isn't in perfect condition.
Citation needed. That would be illegal. Even though they lock you into a 2-year contract when buying a phone at a subsidized price, you ARE making a legitimate purchase and the phone does become your property and yours alone (interpretation of "your property and yours alone" may differ).
It depends. The ETF is composed of two parts - the first is the phone subsidy, the second is the breaking of contract penalties.
The second part is easy - if you visualize it from the other size. The contract is a source of long-term revenue (18+ months), and the carrier has basically counted on that revenue to continue. By breaking the contract, the penalties are usually such that the future revenues that they would've gotten from you are covered, or at least a portion of them. Basically you're "buying out" the contract - paying upfront what they would've gotten over the period (it's just the same as your employer buying out your notice period so you leave immediately by paying a lump sum). You'll see similar penalties on your mortgage and other contracts, as well.
The first part is somewhat tricky - some contracts state that you get to keep it after a duration (30-90 days is typical), before which it's more of a rental charge to cover loss because it isn't "new" anymore if you choose to break the contract. But after that period, the fee goes toward paying out the subsidy.
It's really composed of two charges - the carriers lump it into one "to make it easier" (e.g., ETF starts at say, $500 and decreashes at $20/month)
If you RTFA (/., I know), it's just that in the span of a few months, Sony could fail multiple times in such a spectacular fashion.
All those big guys? Yeah, they had their fails, but not a string of repeated ones - PS3 completely broken - complete with master keys, PSN customer details leaked, SOE customer details leaked, the various fun things Lulzsec did, plus PSN got so horribly hacked they had to shut it down for 2 months. And finally, they laid off their security guys.
Nevermind the unmentioned fail of bringing back PSN - they had a password reset thing that you filled in. Except... well, anyone with the PSN customer information could go grab anyone's account - the details they asked for - were what was stolen.
It got to the point where people were annoucing days where some Sony thing or other WASN'T hacked.
Android is most absolutely not closed-source like its competitors.
Do not confusion Android with AOSP. They are two separate versions. Android is commercially licensed (+GPL2 Linux), while AOSP is Apache with GPL2 for the Linux kernel. And getting Android does take money - you have to be in the OHA (so there is a licensing fee, but it's relatively small and it's not per-unit, but an annual one).
Periodically, Google pushes code from Android into AOSP.
OHA members get access to the latest versions of the Android code before release, but they also have to agree to conditions to use that code, conditions not present in AOSP, such as support for 18 months (no more release and forget - Google's demanding 18 months of support and updates), less fancy dressings and customizations, and unlockable bootloaders.
OHA members do this so they can also license (separately) "with Google" because Android phones are relatively useless without the Market app because there are few alternate sources that have a comprehensive selection of apps. (Hell, most "free" apps rarely put up an apk for download - just a QR code to grab it through the marketplace).
And Archos is also a member of the OHA now - they have to be in roder to release a 3.x tablet. Only OHA members have access to Honeycomb source, and while there are hacked versions of Honeycomb around, I wouldn't trust them in a production product. Though, whether or not Archos abides by their open-bootloader thing, that's another issue. Historically Archos devices auto-lock to the hard drive (so you can't replace it), and have signed bootloaders and kernel, which also check for signed user spaces. Archos Androids were "open" in they could run apps, any roots and jailbreaks lasted until the next reboot.
AOSP may be open source, but it's more like "let's just dump what we have" moreso than a true open-source project - the stuff goes from Android -> AOSP typically.
It's the market which has one or more laptops only used for websurfing. You know, like most people who have a laptop today. I guess it's weird to serve "most people" when you could serve a niche. No, wait, that's not weird at all. You are.
So instead of buying a netbook for $300, I can have a locked-down netbook (ChromeOS is locked down walled garden, after all) for the same price.
Geez. When Apple does it, it's bad. When Google does it, it's good? (Especially since, well, an Android device shows up as mass storage...).
Incorrect. Android's license is GPL (Linux kernel ONLY) and Apache (everything else).
In addition, it's also available in a COMMERCIAL license.
Yes, there are two Androids. The one you get with your phone you buy is the commercially licensed one, access given only to OHA members (who get early access to the next software). The Apache-licensed one is AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Periodically Google opens the code and relicenses it to Apache, usually when a new version is released (i.e., when the premiering phone is released).
Google currently only licenses the "with Google" stuff (market, youtube, gmail apps) to commercial licensors under commercial terms. It's also how Google's enforcing new handset policies like support for 18 months and things like that (which they can't do if OEMs and ODMs use the open-source version). And for all we know, the manufacturers may be paying a fee for it - at the very minimum, the annual fee to be in the OHA.
I am still scratching my head as to how these machines are exactly web facing so that they could be remotely exploited? I have a hard time picturing a robotic arm with a web interface to control it. It would be more be a custom application on an embedded system. Did I mention embedded systems? They're a bit different from windows based systems on most occasions. Dunno, really can't follow the logic here, the only that should face the web should be non-employee based consumer websites for a business, maybe VPN if the execs understand whats at stake.
If the system needs to communicate with another system over the network, thats why we make subnets and dedicated ports... dedicated switches to take it a step further.
Easy. In dark times, the SCADA systems used proprietary systems and programs to access them (and were on private networks). Accessing data was arcane and limited to whatever the vendor allowed and provided.
Then came along OPC. OLE for Process Control was just what - allowing access to everything via OLE. Now anyone with Windows and an OLE-compliant app can get data from the system in real time. Imagine opening an Excel spreadsheet and having it update with the latest information from the industrial process right then and there in real time. No need to go to a special PC, get the data, save it, transform it, and finally process it.
Now, that special PC can have OPC software installed, and anyone with OLE-compliant software can query the data in real time. OPC is big enough that all vendors gave in and implemented an adapter to their proprietary interface. Said special PC was now connected to the corporate network AND the industrial network.
Next came the internet. And it opened a new can of worms.
First, a company might want access to the data remotely.
Or, more popularly, a machine on the network gets compromised, which infects the special PC (which probably is way behind in patches - industrial contorl PCs often have a narrow band of "supported" patches, and no one wants to fix what isn't broken (product is still being produced).
And then, QED.
If the company was smart, they'd stick a data diode between the special PC and the rest of the corporate network.
Actually, I'd hazard a guess that MOST SCADA systems are vulnerable. These things weren't designed with security in mind - they're supposed to run off closed networks separated from the Internet (easily done - most of these things predate the Internet).
Heck, the biggest "security issue" would've been access via OPC ("OLE for Process Control" - yes, that same stuff Microsoft touted - "Object Linking and Embedding" from Windows 3.x).
And yeah, most industrial entities probably lack the proper IT team and infrastructure - after all, most of their work involved keeping the network up and running for the controllers, keeping OPC working. The someone demands Internet connectivity on their desktop and they set up routers and firewalls (and don't know about stuff like data diodes).
Basically, stuff that was never designed for security ends up on the Internet.
It's not really analogous for the Java/Android story... If you wanted to reach for an analogy, it'd be Oracle suing Microsoft over.Net.
Except Microsoft licensed Java VM patents for.Net. Oracle can't sue Microsoft for infringement because they've already got a licensing agreement in place.
So the situation's the same, just the Microsoft-Sun (now Oracle) deal would've been the path had Google licensed the patents as well. One licensed the stuff, the other didn't.
You're right though: we don't see a relatively small title in the top 10 because of its high rating and the top 10 isn't ordered by rating (better score, more downloads). The highest rated game (Mass Effect 2) didn't make it in the top 10.
Because Mass Effect 2's wide release didn't make the cut.
The survey was the 3 month period between late 2010 and early 2011. Mass Effect 2 was released January 2010. The only reason it's in the study is because Mass Effect 2 was released for PS3 in January 2011, a year later. Everyone who wanted to pirate ME2 would've done it in 2010 already. The only people pirating ME2 during this survey would be those with PS3s (hacked ones, at that).
Slashdot Mirror
Vacuum tubes are still used today - they're the cheapest way to have high-powered devices. If you're transmitting at 1kW, the finals are probably tubes because it's easier to have a high-powered tube than find high-powered solid-state transistors. Ditto if you're doing 10kW or 100kW (not uncommon for broadcast stations). Here the final power amplifier is almost exclusively a tube-based one.
Audiophiles like tubes because it's "warmer". Practically speaking though, Guitarists have it right - the tube distortion characteristic is much friendlier on the ear than a transistor distortion. Transistors clip if you overdrive them - and clipping produces awful harmonics (if you've heard badly-ripped MP3s, that's mostly the reason why they sound so horrible). Overdriving tubes produces harmonics as well, but they're more pleasing.
It's part of the loudness war problem as well - clipping should be something that happens rarely, if ever, but on poorly mastered music with dynamic range compression, ..., it clips constantly.
Still requires work and effort to do.
Heck, you should see some of the crappy iPod clones - they look the same, but man are they just plain awful - the screen, the software, etc.
Either way, the only thing possibly stolen from Apple is the design (and given the way people on /. feel about it given the Apple v. Samsung and Apple v. Motorola lawsuits). Everything else is different. Sure it may be a remashed generic phone design, but someone had to take the time to lay out a circuit board, find appropriate parts (crappy as they are), and do the necesary software mods. 95% of the work may already be done, but converting that reference design to something people will buy is where all the ODM work comes into play (they all do it - HTC, etc. - they take the reference design and repackage it and modify software as appropriate).
Most of the innards of phones you find today will be fairly similar. Whether it be Samsung, HTC, Motorola, or whatever.
People are saying "Apple deserves this" for making their products in China, but I disagree.
In fact, this device is based on rumors of the iPhone 5. Which means the chinese company doing this has had to design the case, the electronics and the software themselves. I don't think they're using the same components at all - so other than possible design, everything in the hiPhone5 is completely original.
Put in that context, it's more interesting ot see the state of original Chinese designs moreso than copycat.
Given I tried it with my dog once so she won't chew on some things, it didn't work. We came back to find the item unchewed, yes, but the powder was cleanly licked off.
The damn squirrels would realize it makes their nuts taste better and start attacking all the coated cables!
Unlikely. The Gizmodo thing probably cost Gizmodo more in the end - Apple's basically blackballed them, and Apple brings in LOTS of clicks. In fact, at WWDC 2010, they were BEGGING for a press pass. Why they didn't think to purchase a ticket instead (sure, the press pass is free, but the iPhone4 reveal made that super unlikely).
These days, Gizmodo's basically dead. The Gawker CEO enforced some screwed up site design that barely works anymore (people are constantly complaining about the new layout), all the big names at Gizmodo have left (Jason Chen, Brian Lam, etc. have left to pursue other activities).
And if Gawker was smart, everything they did would've been over the phone or in-person. They weren't charged because there's simply no evidence. They said they paid $10,000, but the only evidence was a posting.
It's just Vudu.
In fact, VuDu just announced that to get around the App Store payment processor, they launched a web app - so they're streaming movies using HTTP Live Streaming.
Now I just need an HTTP Live Streaming downloader...
Likewise, Amazon has a web-based E-reader. Someone's probably going to write a simple tool to dump DRM-free ebooks that way.
Perhaps Apple's HTML5 over Flash and App Store stances could inadvertently lead to a DRM-free world.
It looks like it's in partnership with another company that they do the last two R's. Remember, it's Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The company buys old hardware and tries to refurbish it (i.e., Reuse). Stuff that's too old is recycled - and it appears they use WeRecycle for that. Or I suppose if there's a state-sponsored recycling program, they'd use those.
Do remember though that the money you get is quite little (you'll make far more on eBay or Craigslist), so a bit of that is used to fund the whole program. As is the scrap value.
I give it a day before the "OMG EM FIELDS BAD!!!!!" folk kill it. You know, the kind of people who argue WiFi is bad for you (yet they have a microwave oven), that smart meter's EM radiation will kill you and give you cancer (ignoring the fact that you're completely bathed in the EM field from the power lines in your house), etc.
These phones? Meh, the folk who scream the loudest probably haven't even heard of Android. (And you can bet they have cellphones). But once Apple makes it popular and trendy, ... watch the lawsuits fly.
Hell, it probably won't even be 24 hours before we'll see the first class-action lawsuit filed against Apple because of wireless charging "is killing our kids!".
The user is the biggest vulnerability. It's called the Dancing Pigs problem and it's extremely difficult to protect. In fact, popping up additional dialogs hurt security because of it (that Android permissions screen? Utterly useless - even if you make it so they have to check off every item then hit install).
Hell, the age of the Honor System Virus is actually around. Facebook viruses and spam and such often rely on such odd techniques as well (click here and here and here, paste this URL, etc...).
A simple popup like "Low battery" might be easily dismissed by anyone and no one is the wiser.
It doesn't work.
The power negotiation bit just tells the OS that you may have plugged something that draws too much power in, but if it doesn't trip the overcurrent detector, all is good.
And most PCs are built with only one overcurrent detector servicing all USB ports. So if your PC has 10 USB ports, it'll have a 5A detector in it. (Which is bad if a USB fault kicks 2.5A over the port since it won't shut down. The upside though is that USB portable hard drives often draw >500mA starting up - brief 1-2A spikes are common which will trigger individual port detectors, but except for those few PCs, it works).
The other thing is, the negotiations fail in that practically all OSes pick a working interface without considering power. If you have two interfaces, one saying the device can draw 500mA, the other saying 100mA, most OSes (Windows/Linux/OS X) pick the first interface. When designing an OTG device, this is a huge PITA (OTG can only provide 100mA), ditto for low-power ports on most portable devices. Hell, an annoyingly large subset of USB devices will not work at 100mA, either, despite it being the minimum current spec (each port of an unpowered hub can do only 100mA, enumeration power you can count on is 100mA, etc)
The device we had would set a current limit so it wouldn't draw more than the allowed current. If we put the 100mA interface descriptor first, it would get selected always. If we put the 500mA interface, it would get selected. (We modified our firmware to read and check for lower-power interfaces).
There were three stacks used in Windows.
Windows 3.x didn't come with a stack, you had to supply your own (Trumpet Winsock, anyone?).
Windows 95, though, featured it's own brand new stack, BSD based.
Then WinSock 2 came out, and that one dumped the BSD based stack for their own. (WinSock 2 featured changable stacks with a new internal API which made it incompatible with the old stack). This stack was under development for a while - Windows 95 shipped with a BSD stack purely because of release date issues.
Then Vista, or more correctly, NDIS6 rolled out. NDIS6's packet architecture is completely different, and to extract the speed improvements (as well as take advantage of TCP Offload Engines better), it was rewritten to use the new NDIS6 API set. (NDIS does, however, allow old NDIS 4/5.1 protocols and miniports work through a built-in translation layer).
As someone once said, "Verbing weirds language". 'nuff said.
These days, a variety of ways.
Before, there was the PC. Make a PC game - in Flash if you want, watch it get big. Or do a mod for an existing game - lots of people started this way.
But if Flash/Windows/game_engine_of_choice isn't your thing, you also have a bunch of other options.
1) Xbox360 and XNA Dev Studio - write apps and games for Windows, Windows Phone 7 and Xbox360 (bonus - it plays on the Xbox! With controller!).
2) Android App Store.
3) Apple App Store - probably the most "console like" app store, without the crazy console restrictions. Yes you have approval and crap, but you have it on consoles too. Just that Apple's policies are far more lenient than any console maker. And you're not having to rent a separate office, have secured premises or purchase dev hardware - just a Mac, an iDevice, and the SDK.
The gaming industry is remarkably easy to get into these days - just 5 years ago you were restricted to PC platforms with either a Flash game, a mod or a custom-developed one. These days, 3 new platforms have opened up, all of which can be easily demonstrated during an interview.
Alas, the honest answer is, "it depends." SSH may or may not be blocked by your carrier+plan combination, and if you're just doing interactive SSH, probably unlikely to trigger any sort of carrier alert (SSH packets are small and infrequent). But try to push it by doing SFTP transfers and you might trigger something.
It depends on your carrier's data policies and your data plan. Some carriers don't care and stick a plain old NAT (or two) for all plans, others rely on all sorts of price differenciators and specials and other crap and elaborate arrays of firewalls, proxies and such.
And I meant using your phone as an SSH server, having your PC use an SSH client in SOCKS mode (ssh -D port) and proxying through localhost - your phone will create the TCP connections on demand.
What someone really ought to do is a comprehensive analysis of what data plans offer -which carriers firewall, which carriers proxy (including recompression - I believe someone did a simple benchmark and noticed pages loaded faster on Verizon than AT&T, but AT&T loaded YouTube videos faster - iPhone 4), what protocols are let through and which aren't, etc.
The 3GPP based carriers will do these things (because switching phones is trivial), the CDMA carriers less so (they know what your phone can do).
I think it's just the infatuation cycle. I can recall similar things happening to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Second Life and it's happening to Google now.
People like company X because they do something cool, then 5-6 years later company X gets popular and /. begins its contrarian style hate. It's just like all those people who like an indie band who then gets signed and then claim their music now is crap and they were better before. Especially if there's something to rally around. After a few years, /. becomes indifferent.
For Amazon, that tipping point was One-Click. There were howls of protest and boycotts (and all the book reviews of the period linked to Barnes and Noble). These days, no one cares too much.
For Apple, it was the iPhone and the App Store. Give it a few years (probably by the iPhone 8 or 9) and we'd again be all indifferent. (in the mid-2000's, we were infatuated with Apple - OS X! Unix! Open Source AND Commercial Software!, blah blah blah).
Ditto Facebook (not MySpace! Clean!), Second Life (3D! Avatars! Real Money!), etc.
Google's just riding the wave up that started around GMail and continued through Android, but is starting to wane with G+ and the almightly data repository that is owned by Google and sold to advertisers.
Microsoft, alas, started before /. and got to rode the negative tide. These days, it's mostly indifference.
It depends. The ETF is composed of two parts - the first is the phone subsidy, the second is the breaking of contract penalties.
The second part is easy - if you visualize it from the other size. The contract is a source of long-term revenue (18+ months), and the carrier has basically counted on that revenue to continue. By breaking the contract, the penalties are usually such that the future revenues that they would've gotten from you are covered, or at least a portion of them. Basically you're "buying out" the contract - paying upfront what they would've gotten over the period (it's just the same as your employer buying out your notice period so you leave immediately by paying a lump sum). You'll see similar penalties on your mortgage and other contracts, as well.
The first part is somewhat tricky - some contracts state that you get to keep it after a duration (30-90 days is typical), before which it's more of a rental charge to cover loss because it isn't "new" anymore if you choose to break the contract. But after that period, the fee goes toward paying out the subsidy.
It's really composed of two charges - the carriers lump it into one "to make it easier" (e.g., ETF starts at say, $500 and decreashes at $20/month)
If you RTFA (/., I know), it's just that in the span of a few months, Sony could fail multiple times in such a spectacular fashion.
All those big guys? Yeah, they had their fails, but not a string of repeated ones - PS3 completely broken - complete with master keys, PSN customer details leaked, SOE customer details leaked, the various fun things Lulzsec did, plus PSN got so horribly hacked they had to shut it down for 2 months. And finally, they laid off their security guys.
Nevermind the unmentioned fail of bringing back PSN - they had a password reset thing that you filled in. Except... well, anyone with the PSN customer information could go grab anyone's account - the details they asked for - were what was stolen.
It got to the point where people were annoucing days where some Sony thing or other WASN'T hacked.
Do not confusion Android with AOSP. They are two separate versions. Android is commercially licensed (+GPL2 Linux), while AOSP is Apache with GPL2 for the Linux kernel. And getting Android does take money - you have to be in the OHA (so there is a licensing fee, but it's relatively small and it's not per-unit, but an annual one).
Periodically, Google pushes code from Android into AOSP.
OHA members get access to the latest versions of the Android code before release, but they also have to agree to conditions to use that code, conditions not present in AOSP, such as support for 18 months (no more release and forget - Google's demanding 18 months of support and updates), less fancy dressings and customizations, and unlockable bootloaders.
OHA members do this so they can also license (separately) "with Google" because Android phones are relatively useless without the Market app because there are few alternate sources that have a comprehensive selection of apps. (Hell, most "free" apps rarely put up an apk for download - just a QR code to grab it through the marketplace).
And Archos is also a member of the OHA now - they have to be in roder to release a 3.x tablet. Only OHA members have access to Honeycomb source, and while there are hacked versions of Honeycomb around, I wouldn't trust them in a production product. Though, whether or not Archos abides by their open-bootloader thing, that's another issue. Historically Archos devices auto-lock to the hard drive (so you can't replace it), and have signed bootloaders and kernel, which also check for signed user spaces. Archos Androids were "open" in they could run apps, any roots and jailbreaks lasted until the next reboot.
AOSP may be open source, but it's more like "let's just dump what we have" moreso than a true open-source project - the stuff goes from Android -> AOSP typically.
So instead of buying a netbook for $300, I can have a locked-down netbook (ChromeOS is locked down walled garden, after all) for the same price.
Geez. When Apple does it, it's bad. When Google does it, it's good? (Especially since, well, an Android device shows up as mass storage...).
Incorrect. Android's license is GPL (Linux kernel ONLY) and Apache (everything else).
In addition, it's also available in a COMMERCIAL license.
Yes, there are two Androids. The one you get with your phone you buy is the commercially licensed one, access given only to OHA members (who get early access to the next software). The Apache-licensed one is AOSP (Android Open Source Project). Periodically Google opens the code and relicenses it to Apache, usually when a new version is released (i.e., when the premiering phone is released).
Google currently only licenses the "with Google" stuff (market, youtube, gmail apps) to commercial licensors under commercial terms. It's also how Google's enforcing new handset policies like support for 18 months and things like that (which they can't do if OEMs and ODMs use the open-source version). And for all we know, the manufacturers may be paying a fee for it - at the very minimum, the annual fee to be in the OHA.
Easy. In dark times, the SCADA systems used proprietary systems and programs to access them (and were on private networks). Accessing data was arcane and limited to whatever the vendor allowed and provided.
Then came along OPC. OLE for Process Control was just what - allowing access to everything via OLE. Now anyone with Windows and an OLE-compliant app can get data from the system in real time. Imagine opening an Excel spreadsheet and having it update with the latest information from the industrial process right then and there in real time. No need to go to a special PC, get the data, save it, transform it, and finally process it.
Now, that special PC can have OPC software installed, and anyone with OLE-compliant software can query the data in real time. OPC is big enough that all vendors gave in and implemented an adapter to their proprietary interface. Said special PC was now connected to the corporate network AND the industrial network.
Next came the internet. And it opened a new can of worms.
First, a company might want access to the data remotely.
Or, more popularly, a machine on the network gets compromised, which infects the special PC (which probably is way behind in patches - industrial contorl PCs often have a narrow band of "supported" patches, and no one wants to fix what isn't broken (product is still being produced).
And then, QED.
If the company was smart, they'd stick a data diode between the special PC and the rest of the corporate network.
Actually, I'd hazard a guess that MOST SCADA systems are vulnerable. These things weren't designed with security in mind - they're supposed to run off closed networks separated from the Internet (easily done - most of these things predate the Internet).
Heck, the biggest "security issue" would've been access via OPC ("OLE for Process Control" - yes, that same stuff Microsoft touted - "Object Linking and Embedding" from Windows 3.x).
And yeah, most industrial entities probably lack the proper IT team and infrastructure - after all, most of their work involved keeping the network up and running for the controllers, keeping OPC working. The someone demands Internet connectivity on their desktop and they set up routers and firewalls (and don't know about stuff like data diodes).
Basically, stuff that was never designed for security ends up on the Internet.
Except Microsoft licensed Java VM patents for .Net. Oracle can't sue Microsoft for infringement because they've already got a licensing agreement in place.
So the situation's the same, just the Microsoft-Sun (now Oracle) deal would've been the path had Google licensed the patents as well. One licensed the stuff, the other didn't.
Because Mass Effect 2's wide release didn't make the cut.
The survey was the 3 month period between late 2010 and early 2011. Mass Effect 2 was released January 2010. The only reason it's in the study is because Mass Effect 2 was released for PS3 in January 2011, a year later. Everyone who wanted to pirate ME2 would've done it in 2010 already. The only people pirating ME2 during this survey would be those with PS3s (hacked ones, at that).