There are two states for payments - initiated and posted.
Initiated is when you write a check or use your credit card. Posted is when the money ends up in their final accounts. Initiation takes place in practically real time (they have ot make sure the money's there after all) at which point the funds are "locked", but the actual posting depends on the evidence being presented.
The thing with cheques is that it's often sent through the mail, so you get a day or two of "float" before the actual initiation begins. Sites that send the image off can do an instanteous check of your account balance in real time, but the actual posting takes days.
In scanned image based systems, the images take a few days to process. In traditional chequing, the actual cheque goes from the merchant to their bank, then their bank mails it off to the clearinghouse, who may send it up to another clearinghouse, then onwards to the payer's bank which processes the cheque and sends it back to the payer. It's all mail based and can easily take a couple of weeks or more. Then the bank sends notification that yes, the funds are on the way.
For credit cards, it takes a few days as the merchant's processor batches them up, then forwards it onto the credit card company who distributes the transactions the target bank and actually performs the transaction. You may notice on the online bills that recent transactions are listed but not as posted, meaning they're held but the final transaction amount isn't in yet so your limit is reduced, but no money has changed hands. (The initial authorization may not be for te exact amount charged - e.g., gas station pumps often charge $150 prior to fillup (which is problematic if you're close to your limit), and restauranges may also do up to 25% more to account for tip. When you pay your bill or finish filling up, the actual amount is posted).
Get rid of NASA as it exists, switch to missions where the humans stay on Earth, and let the rest of the world spend their money on manned entertainment (it's not "exploration").
You do realize what the first "A" in NASA stands for, right? Aeronautics - NASA actually performs a lot of R&D on stuff that moves through the air. Space is a big part of their budget because it's so expensive, so their aeronautical research divisions tend to go unnoticed.
NASA started as NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics), and it's still a huge (and quite important) part of NASA's work. It's just the work they do isn't as flashy.
Of course, these cut corners eventually result in huge catastrophes such as a defective main mirror on the space telescope.
You do realize that the defective main mirror deformed by only a tiny amount, right? Something on the order of 2.2 micrometers (0.0000022 m, or 0.0022mm), and it wasn't defective that the telescope was useless. It was a well-characterized flaw and still managed a lot of useful work in the meantime. For a huge mirror, that's pretty impressive given if it was on earth, gravity would probably distort it more.
By buying a haircut with bitcoins, you help shore up the value of bitcoins in everyone's wallet files.
And you'd be an idiot to spend bitcoins.
There are a fixed number of bitcoins that will ever be in circulation. This is by design. By definition, adding more people wanting bitcoin drives up its value, which means a haircut that cost 2 bitcoins will cost less in the future.
Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it, which means all you have are a bunch of people invest by mining and keeping, knowing they will go up in the future. And this is a problem - and why governments are deathly afraid of deflationary economic environments.
The fact that it's so volatile should be an indication - people come in, buy them cheap and sell 'em expensive. It's basically the stock market, except at least with stocks you hold a part of something tangible.
Someone could come up with Bitcoin2.0 and see the value of the original Bitcoin vanish overnight. In fact, once you get near the end of the mining, it'll be held completely by speculators. Hell, you can expect that there will other Bitcoin like things set up once the speculators start coming in en masse and making money (we had this during the dot-com boom - many companies created virtual currencies for microtransactions. All folded). After all, all you need is some code and a website.
Hell, Bitcoin might very well be the IT industry's $cientology. It too was created by an awful sci-fi author and got tons of people believing in it.
Can these distribute apps that duplicate Apple functionality (music player, email client, browser, etc)? Could someone create an application that creates an accessible filesystem? If so, this actually goes a long way towards reducing my dislike of the iDevices.
They can do anything the enterprise allows, within the limits iOS imposes on apps (so full filesystem access isn't allowed - you're sandboxed unless you run your app jailbroken).
But that "priviledge" comes at the cost of an enterprise development fee which is something like $300 and other requirements, and it's something you have to manage - those apps aren't available to the general public.
They're also nice in that they're MIT licensed, and available on all sorts of platforms, including iOS (PuzzleManiak is probably one of the better ports), Android, Symbian and others.
Maybe the way to reform patent law is that if a company patents something in a published standard that they use, promote or approve of; then they lose the right to collect royalties for that patent. If only that could be enshrined in law somehow.
That could end up killing all FOSS patents as well. What usually happens is the patents are licensed under RAND terms (and yes, it could include "licensed for free") for that use only.
What Apple could do here is simply license those patents to everyone using it to implement HTML5. After all, if it's patented, then it'll probably be inside WebKit and the LGPL'd parts of KHTML left inside WebKit. And the LGPL still does require patent licensing of downstream uses. Which means it gives Google and everyone else a free pass (except possibly Opera and Microsoft who don't use WebKit for their mobile browsers).
Plus it would keep the patent trolls at bay - better Apple offering free licenses than a patent troll trying to extract money from *everyone* for the same thing. At least Apple is on the W3C. IPVentures and other "non-practicing entities" are probably thrilled at going through standards that come out looking for violations, after first seeing of said standards take off.
I hugely prefer to work in GNOME, but when forced to use MS Windows, PuTTY is the only thing that makes it bearable!
Funny that I'm the opposite - I detest working at a Linux desktop - just so many things are "off" graphics wise (bad fonts?) that it turns me off. Much prefer working on Linux using SMB sharing my project code and through SSH I do my builds and such. My "native" setup uses Cygwin with OpenSSH, but in a pinch I use PuTTY (usually when it's someone else's machine) purely because it's small, portable and easily removed if need be. I do keep an X server around for the few times I need something graphical done.
I don't know what it is - just that font rendering and spacing on Linux has always seemed "bad" to me compared with OS X or Windows.
Hmm, would this supposed "disc changer hack" allow Mr. Heck to pirate games ? Or hack Sonys PSN network?
PSN network I can understand, piracy, not so much. Simply because every console is subject to piracy. Some, like the PSX and PS2, thrived on it. Others, like the PSP, died because of it (though given its competitor suffers from even MORE piracy, I think its merely a contributing factor).
The Wii has tons of piracy. The Xbox360 ditto. PS3 piracy only really started as of 2011 when the keys were discovered.
Hell, Android suffers a huge amount of piracy (thanks to no DRM at all), and there's no lessening of interest in it. iOS piracy is somewhat lower (if we look at jailbroken numbers, 10% or so assuming everyone who jailbroke did it to pirate).
The fact that the PS3 lived so long without people trying to break it for piracy is an anomaly - mostly because Sony made it more "open". It was only when they shut it that people started examining it more closely.
PSN being hacked boils down to plain stupidity on network design.
Remember that story about the Apple app store netting developers 2.5 billion and Apple itself 1 billion? Where do you think that money came from? That's right, you. Add a billion or so for the credit card companies and that is a lot of money.
Actually, the credit card companies are paid from Apple's $1B income from the App Store. You see, devs get 70%, Apple gets 30%. Out of that 30%, Apple pays for the servers (hosting, storage, bandwidth), as well as the nasty things like credit card billing and so forth. And gift cards don't net Apple much money either - given you can easily find them 20% off, that leaves Apple with a 10% edge (or less) to pay for the costs of the iTunes store.
The iTunes Store makes Apple *some* money, but that's more of a side effect than anything - they make far more money selling you hardware (the margins in the end of iTunes are low enough that Apple proably would close it down if it didn't actually help sell the hardware).
Just before Vista came out, Microsoft said the same thing, and people bought it up because it meant a free Vista upgrade.
The problem was, the machines that ran it were so low-spec that they really shouldn't be running Vista in the first place and the experience sucked. Horribly.
So I'd take this with a grain of salt - sure it *can* run Windows 8, but would you want to? Just like Windows 95 would run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM - yes, it did, but... yes, that's about it.
you would be surprised - alot of the Atom cpu's are 64-bit.. but they just released them with 32bit os's..
Considering that the Atom chipsets typically don't support more than 2GB of RAM, running 64bit isn't a terribly useful proposition - you get the advantage of slightly more speed (because of increased registers) but that's about it. You lose out on caches when pointer lengths double (Windows - they have pointers everywhere).
Sure an Atom can run 64-bit code, but it's probably just as happy running a 32-bit OS since the benefits of the slightly increased performance are washed out because of limited RAM and cache.
I wonder if Military Grade is the same as what we called MilSpec. The US military did a lot of work back in the day to create specifications so what they actually bought wasn't crap.
That's probably what "Military grade" components are all about, actually - just ones meeting MilSpec requirements. They aren't hard to get these days - passive components can be had quite cheaply (the incremental cost is minimal), but for ICs, it can be a huge price jump.
And MilSpec parts aren't necessarily higher grade - they just meet the requirements. E.g., temperature and vibration. Commercial temperature parts are usually 0-40C or 0-70C. Industrial parts around -20-100C. MilSpec demands easily -40-140C or so. Then there's vibration, etc. Many parts are temperature insensitive, so the MilSpec version is simply a rebadging of the same part at a higher price (though to be fair, it would've undergone qualification to ensure that yes, it does meet the requirement). After all, a 10% resistor still is a 10% resistor, MilSpec or no. Just the MilSpec one is guaranteed to work within 10% tolerance through the wider environmental range.
Of course, you can buy military spec parts easily, but unless you build them to MilSpec, it's just a regular device.
They also usually aren't as pretty as consumer grade stuff - a military GPS is far clunkier and bulkier (ignoring the P code stuff) than the svelte units you can find at the local Best Buy. Of course, they also work in situations and environments that the ones you can buy will almost never experience, as well.
Here, its probably the final product (the projected image) is pretty much equivalent to what the military uses for its flight sims in fidelity, not that the equipment is MilSpec.
Obviously the first thing is not to install everything you see, followed by don't use 3rd party markets.
Can't help you with Android security, but there are probably a few million people willing ot sell you Android AntiVirus 2011 XP Premium Edition and the like as well, plus a few legit antivirus/antispyware and other stuff, and roots to install DroidWall and such.
The thing is it's a 3rd party market. They exist in China mostly because Android allows quick and easy pirating, and China being China, well, it's obvious. Install a third party market if you want paid apps for free.
After all, didn't the iPad get dinged because there was no easy way to install pirated apps on it? (Easy as in "allowed by default" even though it's really just a jailbreak away).
That, and Chinese phones often run AOSP, so if you want apps, the only way is often third party markets because they can't get on the Marketplace (which Google licenses only to OHA members and not available via AOSP).
And anyone who claims Android's permission based model is perfect - I can point you to the Dancing Pigs problem. If people want to pirate, no amount of technical hurdles is going to stop them. Throwing up more dialogs and popups and such just means one more thing people will ignore.
Giving people tools that make it easier to keep private things from being seen by prospective employers, parents, the world at large is a good thing. However, the centralized nature still means that Google gets to see everything -- as well as anybody else Google lets in on it.
The problem is, once it can be seen by someone, it can be seen by everyone. Privacy doesn't exist, and the old maxim of "don't put online what you don't want the world to know" is still true today.
Post big news about some (marriage, divorce, baby, etc) and see how long your non-friends will know about it as it gets reposted and implied everywhere.
Hell, put anything your parents can see and they're only a few clicks away from mailing it to their friends and then the forward chain goes on.
In the past, if there was stuff we needed to keep private, we either kept it in our heads, or used a well-secured diary. There is no equivalent for a diary "in the cloud" - though you can go far with an encrypted document.
But posting to Facebook and Google+, that's not keeping it private, and people will know, even if it's by second hand information. Think of your friends posting "Remember how you got so wasted on the weekend?" or "Where'd you get that weed man? It was awesome at the party" - except THEIR feeds aren't as private as yours, and you've been implicated in heavy drinking and smoking pot.
Me personally, I've gotten a Google+ invite. I'm probably going to let it sit unused in my inbox. Google already knows a lot about me so I don't feel the need to make it easier for them.
DVI is sorta kinda a subset of HDMI or maybe visa versa. Also there have been so many DVI-HDMI cables made that you'd have to just grandfather these in by now.
It's a different signally protocol, actually. The only thing that's the same is the physical layer. However, one of the design goals of HDMI was to allow a passive HDMI-to-DVI adapter to be used, so HDMI devices must be able to detect that the device on the other end is doing DVI and adapt accordingly. So HDMI sinks must be able to adapt to and handle DVI sources, and HDMI sources must be able to handle DVI sinks.
That's the only reason why it works - the spec makes it so.
I don't want to recommend my parents upgrade to the next version if I don't know if it's a minor or a major revision.
Hell, it's an annoyance now because I have to update Firefox so often for my parents (they don't have admin password, or a password on their account so I can't even RDP to their PC and update for them).
I'm seriously considering pushing them to Chrome or something that can auto-update itself without my buggering.
Even if we ignore business testing issues, rolling out updates gets annoying quick. Most businesses do quick 1-2 week turnarounds for Patch Tuesday which can take easily the next Patch Tuesday to actually have rolled out to the PCs because the patches always seem to get pushed during some time when users are too busy working to actually reboot their PCs and restart their working environment.
If HDMI LLC can give some good reason, they might sway my opinion. If I dare guess, the only reason I think they can give is that the HDMI spec is supposed to ensure that unauthorized copies cannot be made, and if you are able to produce HDMI-to-anything cables you could connect your HDMI capable output device to something that can record the information./blockquote>
That's the HDCP spec, created by Intel. Yes, Intel. (http://www.intel.com/standards/case/case_dtcp.htm )
The HDMI spec defines 3 devices. HDMI sources, HDMI sinks, and HDMI interconnects (i.e., cables). HDMI interconnects connect HDMI sources to HDMI sinks.
HDMI devices can be sinks and sources (e.g., switches and AV receivers) as well, but the HDMI spec defines the signal that comes out of an HDMI source, and the signal that goes into an HDMI sink. And these are connected via HDMI cables, which have HDMI connectors on each end.
A miniDP to HDMI cable is technically illegal because it isn't defined - an HDMI interconnect only connects HDMI sinks to HDMI sources, and only these can carry the HDMI logo.
That's why miniDP to HDMI *female* adapters are allowed (i.e., dongles). Because it's very well specified and the dongle is an HDMI source, so all it has to do is output a very well specified signal at the HDMI port. The HDMI spec for sources does not specify where the signal data comes from, just how the signal comes out.
And you can find HDMI sinks that capture video data to PCs - the HDMI spec does not specify where the video data must go.
One of the biggest abuses of marketing, these days. Tons of things (especially camcorders) claim "1080p" when they mean 1080p30, but they can also take 1080i60. Depending on how the CCD is clocked, the results can be exactly the same (take 30 frames/second, in one case, you dump it as 30 frames onto storage, in the other, you break it into 2 fields, and dump both. End result is the same).
Or game consoles, where 1080p often also means 1080p30. At least 1080i tends to consistently mean 1080i60 (60 fields/sec, 30 frames/sec).
But I wonder if they are modified in any way. I would have thought that electronics that go into space had to be radiation-hardened and be produced with components that are more reliable / have tighter specs than what are used in consumer devices. Cool idea, though.
Well, they have to be verified and potentially dangerous components removed and replaced with less dangerous ones. I think, for example, the batteries are swapped out with ones that may not spontaneously catch fire. There was an article a few years ago about what it took to bring an iPod to space - they took out the battery and replaced it with alkalines, for example.
LIkewise, the iPhones aboard Atlantis are probalby similarly modified.
As for rad-hard, it's running an experiment. As long as the robots can't go do anything potentially life-threatening (like try to break through the wall), it doesn't matter. If radiation causes them to crash or collect incorrect data, that's something for the data analysis phase to handle.
In other words, expect radiation to mess things up and design your experiment appropriately.
Laws have not kept up with changing technology. There was no such thing as bit torrent or throttling 5-10 years ago. Heck 10 years ago bandwidth caps didn't exist in Canada.
Actually, bandwidth caps have been around since broadband was made available in the late 90s. Pre-DOCSIS, most broadband providers gave you 1GB of transfer. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium they started upping them to 5 and 10GB. Somewhere along the line they upped them again but never enforced them.
This also applied to the US as well. Heck, @Home charged something like $5/GB excess back then. I recall a conversation with an old admin about how someone ran up a $90 bill because they managed to transfer 5+GB in a month.
Of course, back then things were different - Napster was somewhere in the background, web pages didn't have all sorts of Flash crap on them, and videos were tiny and required QuickTime or RealPlayer and the like. Speeds were also much lower, and dialup was still common.
Remember the old LPB complaint? (Low Ping Bastard - i.e., someone on broadband). I also remember complaining about the low caps since I actually managed to pull > 1GB at times over dialup.
I would like to point out the that 20K is 20K more then he would make with the RIAA. The article is about selling a million and STILL OWING money.
Technically, the artist doesn't "owe" the label money. If the artist's contract were to end and they severed all contact, they won't send the artist a bill for the remaining money or send it to debt collectors.
What happens here is the artist was advanced say, $100,000, on terms that the artist make the album. Additional expenses like shows and such increase the advance, which are paid by through royalties.
The advance is paid back quite quickly to the label, but the artist won't see a dime from additional sales of their album until that advance is paid back completely (which means the label would've made the money they spent hundreds of times over).
The article is about how the labels cheat by making all the expenses (travel, studio time, managers, etc) add to the advance, while the payment on the advance is quite low (single digit percentages). Meanwhile, the label has long recouped the money they advanced and are marking money while they aren't paying the artist a dime.
So per album, the artist is making only the advance - while all the record sales money goes to the label.
It's how they can claim 99% of artists they never recoup their investment from - which if you define it as "artists whose advance owing is $0", is quite low. But that's because the amount of money paid towards the advance is quite low and is contractual.
E.g., say $1 out of every album goes towards the advance. So the label advanced $10,000 towards the band. If they sell the album for $10 wholesale (making a 10% payment on advance horrendously high), the band needs to sell 10,000 copies to pay back the advance. The label only needs to sell less - at $9 a pop, they need to sell around 1112 copies to recoup the advance, maybe 1200 to recoup their total investment. Any more is just gravy. Albums 1201 through 10,000 mean $0 to pay the artist, so if the total sales are 4000 copies, the artist is still "in the red", but the label doesn't care because they got $28000 out of the artist "for free" for spending $12000 total ($10k advance and $2k for expenses they didn't go to the band for - perhaps the promoter and recruiter's time).
Yeah, let's pretend "there's an app for that" solves every problem. Let's pretend we're talking about plug-ins that execute arbitrary code... no wait, let's be honest: we're talking about codec support. Fact of the matter is, native support for free codecs is impossible to implement on iOS. I repeat: you're a dishonest bunch.
Funny how non-free codec players exist in the App Store. A quick search brings up a list of Xvid players (with MKV support, too), WMV, MPEG2, amongst other codecs.
Sure it's not "native" in that other apps can make use of it or it plugs into QuickTime directly, but that's more of a security architecture issue than anything else. Apps loading 3rd party plugins has traditionally been a rather huge security hole...
Well, people like me are probably skewing the stats a bit.
A quick examination of my "Mobile Applications" folder in my iTunes library shows it's 310GB in size with nearly 21K files in it.
That's nearly 21 *THOUSAND* apps.
And I've spent less than $100 in total in the app store. Most of those 21K apps are apps marked down to free temporarily (sites like appshopper are terrible for this - you can easily grab a ton of apps that used to cost money and are temporarily free).
Hell, I suppose if I were to price that collection of apps, I'd easily hit $10K if I were to buy every single one at any one point in time. (Probably more, but being conservative here - even though completely free apps probably make up less than 10% of that).
Slashdot Mirror
There are two states for payments - initiated and posted.
Initiated is when you write a check or use your credit card. Posted is when the money ends up in their final accounts. Initiation takes place in practically real time (they have ot make sure the money's there after all) at which point the funds are "locked", but the actual posting depends on the evidence being presented.
The thing with cheques is that it's often sent through the mail, so you get a day or two of "float" before the actual initiation begins. Sites that send the image off can do an instanteous check of your account balance in real time, but the actual posting takes days.
In scanned image based systems, the images take a few days to process. In traditional chequing, the actual cheque goes from the merchant to their bank, then their bank mails it off to the clearinghouse, who may send it up to another clearinghouse, then onwards to the payer's bank which processes the cheque and sends it back to the payer. It's all mail based and can easily take a couple of weeks or more. Then the bank sends notification that yes, the funds are on the way.
For credit cards, it takes a few days as the merchant's processor batches them up, then forwards it onto the credit card company who distributes the transactions the target bank and actually performs the transaction. You may notice on the online bills that recent transactions are listed but not as posted, meaning they're held but the final transaction amount isn't in yet so your limit is reduced, but no money has changed hands. (The initial authorization may not be for te exact amount charged - e.g., gas station pumps often charge $150 prior to fillup (which is problematic if you're close to your limit), and restauranges may also do up to 25% more to account for tip. When you pay your bill or finish filling up, the actual amount is posted).
You do realize what the first "A" in NASA stands for, right? Aeronautics - NASA actually performs a lot of R&D on stuff that moves through the air. Space is a big part of their budget because it's so expensive, so their aeronautical research divisions tend to go unnoticed.
NASA started as NACA (National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics), and it's still a huge (and quite important) part of NASA's work. It's just the work they do isn't as flashy.
You do realize that the defective main mirror deformed by only a tiny amount, right? Something on the order of 2.2 micrometers (0.0000022 m, or 0.0022mm), and it wasn't defective that the telescope was useless. It was a well-characterized flaw and still managed a lot of useful work in the meantime. For a huge mirror, that's pretty impressive given if it was on earth, gravity would probably distort it more.
And you'd be an idiot to spend bitcoins.
There are a fixed number of bitcoins that will ever be in circulation. This is by design. By definition, adding more people wanting bitcoin drives up its value, which means a haircut that cost 2 bitcoins will cost less in the future.
Thus, your best bet with bitcoins is to not spend it, but to hoard it, which means all you have are a bunch of people invest by mining and keeping, knowing they will go up in the future. And this is a problem - and why governments are deathly afraid of deflationary economic environments.
The fact that it's so volatile should be an indication - people come in, buy them cheap and sell 'em expensive. It's basically the stock market, except at least with stocks you hold a part of something tangible.
Someone could come up with Bitcoin2.0 and see the value of the original Bitcoin vanish overnight. In fact, once you get near the end of the mining, it'll be held completely by speculators. Hell, you can expect that there will other Bitcoin like things set up once the speculators start coming in en masse and making money (we had this during the dot-com boom - many companies created virtual currencies for microtransactions. All folded). After all, all you need is some code and a website.
Hell, Bitcoin might very well be the IT industry's $cientology. It too was created by an awful sci-fi author and got tons of people believing in it.
They can do anything the enterprise allows, within the limits iOS imposes on apps (so full filesystem access isn't allowed - you're sandboxed unless you run your app jailbroken).
But that "priviledge" comes at the cost of an enterprise development fee which is something like $300 and other requirements, and it's something you have to manage - those apps aren't available to the general public.
They're also nice in that they're MIT licensed, and available on all sorts of platforms, including iOS (PuzzleManiak is probably one of the better ports), Android, Symbian and others.
So it's really kinda dangerous for all platforms.
That could end up killing all FOSS patents as well. What usually happens is the patents are licensed under RAND terms (and yes, it could include "licensed for free") for that use only.
What Apple could do here is simply license those patents to everyone using it to implement HTML5. After all, if it's patented, then it'll probably be inside WebKit and the LGPL'd parts of KHTML left inside WebKit. And the LGPL still does require patent licensing of downstream uses. Which means it gives Google and everyone else a free pass (except possibly Opera and Microsoft who don't use WebKit for their mobile browsers).
Plus it would keep the patent trolls at bay - better Apple offering free licenses than a patent troll trying to extract money from *everyone* for the same thing. At least Apple is on the W3C. IPVentures and other "non-practicing entities" are probably thrilled at going through standards that come out looking for violations, after first seeing of said standards take off.
Funny that I'm the opposite - I detest working at a Linux desktop - just so many things are "off" graphics wise (bad fonts?) that it turns me off. Much prefer working on Linux using SMB sharing my project code and through SSH I do my builds and such. My "native" setup uses Cygwin with OpenSSH, but in a pinch I use PuTTY (usually when it's someone else's machine) purely because it's small, portable and easily removed if need be. I do keep an X server around for the few times I need something graphical done.
I don't know what it is - just that font rendering and spacing on Linux has always seemed "bad" to me compared with OS X or Windows.
PSN network I can understand, piracy, not so much. Simply because every console is subject to piracy. Some, like the PSX and PS2, thrived on it. Others, like the PSP, died because of it (though given its competitor suffers from even MORE piracy, I think its merely a contributing factor).
The Wii has tons of piracy. The Xbox360 ditto. PS3 piracy only really started as of 2011 when the keys were discovered.
Hell, Android suffers a huge amount of piracy (thanks to no DRM at all), and there's no lessening of interest in it. iOS piracy is somewhat lower (if we look at jailbroken numbers, 10% or so assuming everyone who jailbroke did it to pirate).
The fact that the PS3 lived so long without people trying to break it for piracy is an anomaly - mostly because Sony made it more "open". It was only when they shut it that people started examining it more closely.
PSN being hacked boils down to plain stupidity on network design.
Actually, the credit card companies are paid from Apple's $1B income from the App Store. You see, devs get 70%, Apple gets 30%. Out of that 30%, Apple pays for the servers (hosting, storage, bandwidth), as well as the nasty things like credit card billing and so forth. And gift cards don't net Apple much money either - given you can easily find them 20% off, that leaves Apple with a 10% edge (or less) to pay for the costs of the iTunes store.
The iTunes Store makes Apple *some* money, but that's more of a side effect than anything - they make far more money selling you hardware (the margins in the end of iTunes are low enough that Apple proably would close it down if it didn't actually help sell the hardware).
Just before Vista came out, Microsoft said the same thing, and people bought it up because it meant a free Vista upgrade.
The problem was, the machines that ran it were so low-spec that they really shouldn't be running Vista in the first place and the experience sucked. Horribly.
So I'd take this with a grain of salt - sure it *can* run Windows 8, but would you want to? Just like Windows 95 would run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM - yes, it did, but ... yes, that's about it.
Considering that the Atom chipsets typically don't support more than 2GB of RAM, running 64bit isn't a terribly useful proposition - you get the advantage of slightly more speed (because of increased registers) but that's about it. You lose out on caches when pointer lengths double (Windows - they have pointers everywhere).
Sure an Atom can run 64-bit code, but it's probably just as happy running a 32-bit OS since the benefits of the slightly increased performance are washed out because of limited RAM and cache.
That's probably what "Military grade" components are all about, actually - just ones meeting MilSpec requirements. They aren't hard to get these days - passive components can be had quite cheaply (the incremental cost is minimal), but for ICs, it can be a huge price jump.
And MilSpec parts aren't necessarily higher grade - they just meet the requirements. E.g., temperature and vibration. Commercial temperature parts are usually 0-40C or 0-70C. Industrial parts around -20-100C. MilSpec demands easily -40-140C or so. Then there's vibration, etc. Many parts are temperature insensitive, so the MilSpec version is simply a rebadging of the same part at a higher price (though to be fair, it would've undergone qualification to ensure that yes, it does meet the requirement). After all, a 10% resistor still is a 10% resistor, MilSpec or no. Just the MilSpec one is guaranteed to work within 10% tolerance through the wider environmental range.
Of course, you can buy military spec parts easily, but unless you build them to MilSpec, it's just a regular device.
They also usually aren't as pretty as consumer grade stuff - a military GPS is far clunkier and bulkier (ignoring the P code stuff) than the svelte units you can find at the local Best Buy. Of course, they also work in situations and environments that the ones you can buy will almost never experience, as well.
Here, its probably the final product (the projected image) is pretty much equivalent to what the military uses for its flight sims in fidelity, not that the equipment is MilSpec.
Can't help you with Android security, but there are probably a few million people willing ot sell you Android AntiVirus 2011 XP Premium Edition and the like as well, plus a few legit antivirus/antispyware and other stuff, and roots to install DroidWall and such.
The thing is it's a 3rd party market. They exist in China mostly because Android allows quick and easy pirating, and China being China, well, it's obvious. Install a third party market if you want paid apps for free.
After all, didn't the iPad get dinged because there was no easy way to install pirated apps on it? (Easy as in "allowed by default" even though it's really just a jailbreak away).
That, and Chinese phones often run AOSP, so if you want apps, the only way is often third party markets because they can't get on the Marketplace (which Google licenses only to OHA members and not available via AOSP).
And anyone who claims Android's permission based model is perfect - I can point you to the Dancing Pigs problem. If people want to pirate, no amount of technical hurdles is going to stop them. Throwing up more dialogs and popups and such just means one more thing people will ignore.
That would be an improvement! (Assuming you meant "startup time" by "summoning animation"...)
The problem is, once it can be seen by someone, it can be seen by everyone. Privacy doesn't exist, and the old maxim of "don't put online what you don't want the world to know" is still true today.
Post big news about some (marriage, divorce, baby, etc) and see how long your non-friends will know about it as it gets reposted and implied everywhere.
Hell, put anything your parents can see and they're only a few clicks away from mailing it to their friends and then the forward chain goes on.
In the past, if there was stuff we needed to keep private, we either kept it in our heads, or used a well-secured diary. There is no equivalent for a diary "in the cloud" - though you can go far with an encrypted document.
But posting to Facebook and Google+, that's not keeping it private, and people will know, even if it's by second hand information. Think of your friends posting "Remember how you got so wasted on the weekend?" or "Where'd you get that weed man? It was awesome at the party" - except THEIR feeds aren't as private as yours, and you've been implicated in heavy drinking and smoking pot.
Me personally, I've gotten a Google+ invite. I'm probably going to let it sit unused in my inbox. Google already knows a lot about me so I don't feel the need to make it easier for them.
It's a different signally protocol, actually. The only thing that's the same is the physical layer. However, one of the design goals of HDMI was to allow a passive HDMI-to-DVI adapter to be used, so HDMI devices must be able to detect that the device on the other end is doing DVI and adapt accordingly. So HDMI sinks must be able to adapt to and handle DVI sources, and HDMI sources must be able to handle DVI sinks.
That's the only reason why it works - the spec makes it so.
Hell, it's an annoyance now because I have to update Firefox so often for my parents (they don't have admin password, or a password on their account so I can't even RDP to their PC and update for them).
I'm seriously considering pushing them to Chrome or something that can auto-update itself without my buggering.
Even if we ignore business testing issues, rolling out updates gets annoying quick. Most businesses do quick 1-2 week turnarounds for Patch Tuesday which can take easily the next Patch Tuesday to actually have rolled out to the PCs because the patches always seem to get pushed during some time when users are too busy working to actually reboot their PCs and restart their working environment.
One of the biggest abuses of marketing, these days. Tons of things (especially camcorders) claim "1080p" when they mean 1080p30, but they can also take 1080i60. Depending on how the CCD is clocked, the results can be exactly the same (take 30 frames/second, in one case, you dump it as 30 frames onto storage, in the other, you break it into 2 fields, and dump both. End result is the same).
Or game consoles, where 1080p often also means 1080p30. At least 1080i tends to consistently mean 1080i60 (60 fields/sec, 30 frames/sec).
Annoying.
Well, they have to be verified and potentially dangerous components removed and replaced with less dangerous ones. I think, for example, the batteries are swapped out with ones that may not spontaneously catch fire. There was an article a few years ago about what it took to bring an iPod to space - they took out the battery and replaced it with alkalines, for example.
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/03/15/ipods-rock-the-space-shuttle/
LIkewise, the iPhones aboard Atlantis are probalby similarly modified.
As for rad-hard, it's running an experiment. As long as the robots can't go do anything potentially life-threatening (like try to break through the wall), it doesn't matter. If radiation causes them to crash or collect incorrect data, that's something for the data analysis phase to handle.
In other words, expect radiation to mess things up and design your experiment appropriately.
Critical systems, though, require rad hardening.
Actually, bandwidth caps have been around since broadband was made available in the late 90s. Pre-DOCSIS, most broadband providers gave you 1GB of transfer. Somewhere around the turn of the millenium they started upping them to 5 and 10GB. Somewhere along the line they upped them again but never enforced them.
This also applied to the US as well. Heck, @Home charged something like $5/GB excess back then. I recall a conversation with an old admin about how someone ran up a $90 bill because they managed to transfer 5+GB in a month.
Of course, back then things were different - Napster was somewhere in the background, web pages didn't have all sorts of Flash crap on them, and videos were tiny and required QuickTime or RealPlayer and the like. Speeds were also much lower, and dialup was still common.
Remember the old LPB complaint? (Low Ping Bastard - i.e., someone on broadband). I also remember complaining about the low caps since I actually managed to pull > 1GB at times over dialup.
Technically, the artist doesn't "owe" the label money. If the artist's contract were to end and they severed all contact, they won't send the artist a bill for the remaining money or send it to debt collectors.
What happens here is the artist was advanced say, $100,000, on terms that the artist make the album. Additional expenses like shows and such increase the advance, which are paid by through royalties.
The advance is paid back quite quickly to the label, but the artist won't see a dime from additional sales of their album until that advance is paid back completely (which means the label would've made the money they spent hundreds of times over).
The article is about how the labels cheat by making all the expenses (travel, studio time, managers, etc) add to the advance, while the payment on the advance is quite low (single digit percentages). Meanwhile, the label has long recouped the money they advanced and are marking money while they aren't paying the artist a dime.
So per album, the artist is making only the advance - while all the record sales money goes to the label.
It's how they can claim 99% of artists they never recoup their investment from - which if you define it as "artists whose advance owing is $0", is quite low. But that's because the amount of money paid towards the advance is quite low and is contractual.
E.g., say $1 out of every album goes towards the advance. So the label advanced $10,000 towards the band. If they sell the album for $10 wholesale (making a 10% payment on advance horrendously high), the band needs to sell 10,000 copies to pay back the advance. The label only needs to sell less - at $9 a pop, they need to sell around 1112 copies to recoup the advance, maybe 1200 to recoup their total investment. Any more is just gravy. Albums 1201 through 10,000 mean $0 to pay the artist, so if the total sales are 4000 copies, the artist is still "in the red", but the label doesn't care because they got $28000 out of the artist "for free" for spending $12000 total ($10k advance and $2k for expenses they didn't go to the band for - perhaps the promoter and recruiter's time).
Funny how non-free codec players exist in the App Store. A quick search brings up a list of Xvid players (with MKV support, too), WMV, MPEG2, amongst other codecs.
This app seems to support webm as well...
http://appshopper.com/travel/azul-media-player-your-password-protected-way-to-watch-and-store-movies-on-your-ipad
http://appshopper.com/travel/azul-media-player-your-password-protected-way-to-watch-and-store-movies-on-your-iphone
Heck, there's webm encoders as well
Sure it's not "native" in that other apps can make use of it or it plugs into QuickTime directly, but that's more of a security architecture issue than anything else. Apps loading 3rd party plugins has traditionally been a rather huge security hole...
Well, people like me are probably skewing the stats a bit.
A quick examination of my "Mobile Applications" folder in my iTunes library shows it's 310GB in size with nearly 21K files in it.
That's nearly 21 *THOUSAND* apps.
And I've spent less than $100 in total in the app store. Most of those 21K apps are apps marked down to free temporarily (sites like appshopper are terrible for this - you can easily grab a ton of apps that used to cost money and are temporarily free).
Hell, I suppose if I were to price that collection of apps, I'd easily hit $10K if I were to buy every single one at any one point in time. (Probably more, but being conservative here - even though completely free apps probably make up less than 10% of that).