OSX was created with an API where you had to program each keyboard shortcut. Macs introduced the mouse to the general population so they made everything rely on the mouse. Windows got created later when keyboard shortcuts was automatically built into the API because they didn't require or expect a user to buy a mouse. I'm not sure of the development of X, other than they weren't as good at designing UI in their spare time.
That would be surprising, as the old MacOS Classic days all you did was define your menus including shortcuts. ResEdit was a great way to redefine crappy key shortcuts back then (or add shortcuts to missing entries), and I'm fairly certain today that short of the special modifier keys, that keyboard shortcuts can be zero-overhead items if desired. In Windows you do have to add a tiny bit of programmatic support for shortcuts, but it's fairly generic code that people boilerplate on.
Windows was designed to be primarily keyboard-navigatable - Macs came with mice, PCs didn't. So expecting the user to buy a mouse was quite unrealistic for Windows (back in the old days of serial mice, PS/2 mice, bus mice, etc.). Nevermind laptops as well - which may or may not even have a port you could plug a mouse into.
About the only input devices you could count on a PC having support for was a keyboard and a joystick.
Yes, I tend to agree with that. Once the 1st gen iPad gets practically obsolete, maybe installing Android through OpeniBoot will be a viable option.
Android runs shitty on Apple hardware. It's not just video accelleration that Android needs, it's the underpowered hardware.
The original iPhone and iPhone 3G, for example, have only 400MHz processors, which is slower than the original G1's 524MHz CPU (over 25% faster). They also have 128MB of RAM, versus 192MB for the G1.
Specwise, almost all Apple iOS hardware is slower than their contemporary Android counterparts. Whether or not it's the greater efficiency of the software that makes iOS snappier or other factors is up for debate (scrolling, for example, is far smoother on iOS than Android. I think iOS4 on the 3G is where things started Android-like).
Well there is a difference. If your iOS device somehow gets borked and yuo want to do a restore firmware you now cant go back to the original one and (if this story is true) it means that you're forced to install the newer (and potentially slower) iOS.
That has always been the case for regular users since the iPhone 3Gs (and all devices that came afterwards, including iPod Touches and iPads).
You can't downgrade unless you have the SHSH blob for your device running that version. You don't need to jailbreak to capture the SHSH blob (Firmware Umbrella can do it without jailbreak), but so can Cydia cache your SHSH blobs for you.
Otherwise there is no way to downgrade. It was a bit easier on the iPhone 3G simply because iOS4 introduced a software SHSH blob verification that can be disabled - the hardware doesn't check it lik elater devices.
I have faith the Dev Team or someone will figure out some sort of work around. Otherwise, it has never been officially enabled anyway which is just a crazy setup. It's nonsensical to not allow people to change versions of iOS. Lots of iphone 3G people I am sure wish they could switch back to iOS v3 after finding v4 too slow. I understand security holes plugged might be part of the reason they do this, but since Apple stops supporting some of the devices (iphone 3G and iphone 1) anyway, it can't be why they don't allow downgrading...
Honestly, they prevent downgrading NOW. It's been done since the 3Gs was released - the SHSH blobs. When you reload the OS, the first "connect to iTunes" part is to get the Apple-signed SHSH blob from the server. The only thing is, for the past couple of years, it suffered from the fact that replay attacks were possible, so if you captured the SHSH blob, you could fake the iTunes server and activate normally.
And this is necessary for all iDevices since then - iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3/4g, iPad (all), etc. Baseband authentication not required - the boot ROM prevents booting the OS image until it has an SHSH blob. iPhone 3G iOS4 implemented a "software authentication" that checked for SHSH, but was trivially bypassed.
It's nothing new, really. Though with the iTunes-optional thing, it may be harder to do if you don't have iTunes...
Linux does thing the way they should be done according to standard. Windows does things they way they actually are done in the real world. The reason is simple: BIOS vendors noticed Windows doesn't follow the standard well, and made the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of users would run windows. Thus they deviated from the standard in order to better support it.
More like Windows used to do it as per the standard. Then Microsoft realized a good chunk of the crap people buy doesn't support it properly, so they have to add a bunch of hacks and tweaks in order to get it to work "properly".
Honestly, hardware sucks. Between buggy BIOSes and hardware with buggy support for everything, it's amazing something like Windows could even work, or that you can use the same Linux kernel without recompiling for different PCs.
You still find the odd USB devices with crappy descriptors in them these days because the manufacturer can't be half-assed to do it right. "Oh, it works in Windows? Great, ship it".
Sometimes the old adage of "be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you emit" causes more problems - people do the bare minimum to get stuff working.
Hell, it's one of the reasons why the old Creative Soundblaster Live cards only worked well on Intel machines - they violated the PCI spec. It's just the Intel chipsets were more forgiving to violations, while other chipests that adhered more to the spec caused random lockups and crashes as the cards locked up the bus. (Only the Audigy line actually fixed the issue...)
Maybe Mark Zuckerberg saw a status update that said, "I should hire GeoHot because my security sucks.
What security would that be? Facebook privacy settings?
No, Facebook's privacy settings are, from the POV of Facebook, excellent. They give the illusion of privacy to encourage people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Which is the entire point - FB is less about providing a place to meet, but more a place to get people to willingly post information online to for data mining purposes.
The old adage of "if you don't want the world to read it, don't post it online" is still true nearly 40 years later (when it used to refer to BBSes). The "privacy" settings Facebook offers is designed to encourage people to forget that fact.
I suppose Facebook might be writing an enhanced Facebook app for jailbroken iOS devices though - one that integrates more things that Apple wouldn't allow so they can violate your privacy just that much more. After all, he knows the ins and outs of iOS to jailbreak...
It most certainly does not work 'out of the box' You have to buy a special USB dongle receiver for $20 to get it to work on PC. And to be fair, Sony has never supported their game pad being on PC, even if it is using bluetooth.
That's if you want to play wireless. I picked up a wired controller for cheap and it works just fine. Eventually I relented and picked up the $20 receiver because well, cords suck.
I like it because it's a nice gamepad to begin with - I even have a Xbox360-to-PS3 adapter so I could use the same wired controller with the PS3. I find the PS3 controller cramps my hand after a few minutes.
Considering it had no buttons and was just a metal stick, I could see how someone might eat it. I wonder if that iPod Shuffle actually carried the warning for real. (I suspect it's small enough to actually be eaten without much difficulty.)
And yes, I know it referred to the first iPod Shuffle.
I'm confused as well. I have TF2 from Orange Box, but I've never played it. I was always under the impression that well, it was free to play... sure it cost $20 to buy it, but that doesn't seem like an overly big hump.
I wasn't aware one had ot pay subscription fees or other stuff to play TF2, especially since plenty of people put up their own dedicated servers for it.
Or is "free to play" now also encompassing the first initial purchase of the game as well?
That is an excellent question. We kept getting calls where the caller-id changed form "California" to "Montana" to "Ohio" etc. Our bank had given our number to telemarketers. This seems like fraud to me since they are clearly avoiding giving out an actual identifiable company id that you could call screen but they are bypassing the "no caller-id provided" call screening. Periodically changing the state name is a further ploy to make it harder to call screen them.
Not really.
They are providing a Caller ID *number*, but they're not providing a name (Caller ID started out only providing numbers - name support came later). For legacy purposes, the phone company supports sending of number-only Caller ID. The phone company then just looks at the area code and does the state name lookup to provide a name you can use (optional - phone company may or may not do it, if they don't, they usually set the name to the number, or set the "no name" flag).
So yes, they are bypassing the blocked number screens by providing a number. Just the name is absent and filled in with the area.
If the calling number is accurate, it's technically not fraud. And if you're screening by name, well, you ought to be screening by number. Most of the time the "caller id blocked" screening also supports blocking by number.
And it's most likely different telemarketers - the work is farmed out after all. One day they'll use a callcenter in California. Another time in Montana, etc.
and of course the weird thing is, a lot of the same people who wave their hands at you and say "oh god there's no way you can send that much data across our network!" are perfectly happy sending... that much data to you in the form of HD cable or uverse/fios tv.
That's because the networks are optimized to send from the head end to the user, and not from the user to the headend.
So one-way videocalling? Fine. Provided it's from the head end to you, and not the other way around.
Even with DOCSIS 3, the bottleneck still remains with the upstream part.
And TV is a broadcast medium, so one-to-many and very efficient. Sending one stream of video to thousands of customers takes no more bandwidth than sending that stream of video to one customer. Which is why IPTV won't scale in the end if every customer wants complete control of the entire system (thus not being able to multicast). Except of course, if you do the whole DVR thing which you might as well have done with regular TV to begin with.
If it's a Win7 OEM version, it'll go for a special BIOS license or other mechanism by default (the Win7 contents might be the same, but there's a slight difference in the discs).
If you use that Win7 OEM key, Win7 won't actually activate properly - you have to call up Microsoft and do a phone activation. If you use the proper OEM key, then Win7 will use the SLIC or other method to get the license and auto-activate. If you buy an OEM copy, you can activate it normally as per retail copies.
And you must use the right key first. If you have a Win7 Enterprise DVD, it won't accept anything other than an Enterprise key.
The OEM keys are fun - because the BIOS module doesn't contain the edition, you can usually go into the upgrade center, and when it asks for the upgrade key, you enter in the OEM key for the Ultimate version and it'll be a genuinely licensed version for the Ultimate.
I've done it with several PCs with OEM Win7. Came with Home Premium, updated to Ultimate in the upgrade center by entering the OEM key. The OEM key ensures Windows uses the OEM method for activation so no Microsoft interaction required. It's pretty neat.
I don't understand why all brands have lots of logos whilst Apple has basically no logos on their devices.
Depends. The iPhone4 has them on the outside for the GSM version because it has to have those logos somewhere on the product the end-user can see (by regulation). Most cellphones hide those logos under the battery. The Verizon version, because it's US only, has no logo other than the Apple one on the back as the FCC one doesn't have to be shown (the FCC ID is good enough).
For the computers, since there are user-openable panels, the logos are hidden in there, like most other laptops.
And it's an aesthetic choice - Apple likes clean lines and such, which is why they don't have those "Intel Inside" and "AMD Graphics" logos and the like to uglify their Macs.
Other devices use the logos as a differentiator so having as many as you can and plastering them all over is seen as a merit badge. If you can't compete on design, you can always compete on features, and all those logos count. It seems for PCs, especially desktops, the gaudier and "technical looking" the PC looks, the better. And nothing looks more "technical" than a bunch of logos.calling attention to you as "complex stuff here!":
Back to the article, I actually don't understand how the process reported could work. To record light the recording medium (e.g. CCD or CMOS sensor) has to have the light fall on it and this implies focus. Possibly it somehow also records the direction of light to allow focus manipulation post-capture. Or possibly it takes multiple shallow DOF images at once. I wish the "article" had more details.
ISTR a little ago there was a demonstration of a camera that basically used a honeycomb lens like that of a fly. Each little lens took a slightly different angle of the scene, and software processing generated the final image, letting you selectively focus on an image after it was taken.
Not sure if it was this company or another... it was a tech demo only though.
My impression was iPhone users are more likely to pay (if only $1 or $2) for apps, whereas android users are less so - is there any truth to that? People making more money developing their apps surely work harder on them.
Revenue wise, the Apple App Store makes hands-over-fist more money than the Google Marketplace rakes in, and it seems per-device app payments is higher on iOS than Android. (Apple has publicly said they paid out $2.5B to developers).
This ignores indirect revenue sources though. Some Android devs have reported making more money off Android apps than their iOS equivalents, mostly because of ads in the app. Rovio is one of them - which makes sense given they only get 70 cents per Angry Birds sale on iOS ($1.40 for the iPad version), but they get many ad impressions on Android - which is bound to make that amount up probably before finishing the first set of levels.
Also, those who buy into iOS know what they're getting into - "free" iPhones have only started cropping up (iPhone 3GS for $0 on contract), so most people were paying the $100-200 for an iPhone or the several hundred for an iPod Touch or iPad. These folk know they are buying it for the App Store and the apps inside.
Android phones though have been offered free practically from the start, so many people would get one over paying for an iPhone, but really only use it for email and web surfing. They may browse the Market out of curiousity and get a few free apps, but it's more of a side note rather than the main event. Either that or they think it's their carrier trying to make up for the "free" phone.
Also, there's also the level of importance of the site to the user.
Some random blogger's website? My NYTimes login? Minor forums I visit? I'll just use the same damn password. Who cares if it's hacked? So someone could post as me. If that site becomes more important, then I can always change the password later.
My online banking/paypal/ebay/amazon/windows live/google password? nice secure and different (all linked to valuable accounts and services). My twitter/blog/NYTimes/slashdot/gawker/etc password? simple ones because if they're hacked, well that's just an inconvenience that I'll have to make a new account.
I like iTunes as well, and yes, it runs like a dog on Windows (but really quite nicely on OS X. Probably because Windows doesn't really like having to host a mini-version of OS X for all the Apple stuff which just bloats everything up).
The irony is the OP likes iTunes, yet objects to SQL. iTunes library files are.itl files which are SQLite databases. iTunes maintains XML files for both backup and compatibility purposes (if the ITL file is missing, iTunes will rebuild from the XML, but otherwise the XML is for programs to parse).
Apple won't admit it, but you can bet they're using CoreData to handle the back end data storage. CoreData can use a variety of means to store data, including a built-in SQLite engine..
The funny thing is, from what I see, most of the world (with the exception of Australia and maybe Canada) has been moving towards unlimited data plans everywhere. The USA are the ones regressing.
There is too much lobbying by people with big pockets and, in the end, the only one losing is the final consumer. Sigh.
Canada moving to unlimited data plans? The only one I've seen right now is by mobilicity, so if you can put up with shitty 3G and shitty coverage, then yes, it's unlimited. (Not being near a Mobilicity "zone", I can't vouch for it, but I'm told their data speeds are horrifically slow).
No, the big carriers here with large coverage have always been limited. Sometimes they'll run specials where you can get a contract for 5GB/$50, otherwise it'll be 2GB/$50 and the like.
And hell, even our regular broadband is limited more. 250GB/month? A luxury with plans only going up to 100GB.
Exactly. Think of all the misspellings you could buy -.comm,.coom,.cm, etc.
Not to mention if your bank buys.bankofamerica it's just as likely some phisher may buy a regular domain as well -.bankofamerica looks the same to most people as.bankofamerica.pl or other thing soon enough.
Or hell... buy.html and.htm. Then you can have www.bankofamerica.com.index.html and people won't notice the '/' was replaced with '.'.
The nice thing with this patent is it requires an IR transmitter. What about using visible light? Or RF? Or a coded audio signal? Or... ?
Imagine everyone having this technology, but implementing them in patent-avoiding incompatible ways. Then any way to disable the camera would require a whole rack of equipment to be carried around.
Nevermind all the legacy equipment that'll be incompatible with it (when this comes out, the iPhone 4 will be out of support - it won't get this stuff), etc.
Of course, it could very well be the plan - make it so inconvenient to carry around a rack of equipment to disable cameras that all recordings should still be allowed. Or maybe Apple's got holdings in film companies (ye olde film camera still works today)...
Not to mention that Apple has been putting a ton of stuff into HTML5 like location awareness (Safari will ask for GPS access permissions), as well as getting APIs so web apps can get access to accellerometer and gyro data, maybe even the camera.
If Apple didn't want people doing webapps, they would've removed the functionality of adding web sites to the home screen, and not bothered with supporting GPS and sensor data access. Heck, one of the main complaints in iOS 4 is that webapps run faster under Safari than they do hosted inside an app (probably because Safari is heavily sandboxed (moreso than regular apps) and thus can do stuff like JIT compilation of javaswcript).
And Safari has support for stored data as well (more structured than cookies) so webapps can save and cache data locally.
Steve Jobs even said there are two environments - a curated one that lets you write native apps, and uncurated web apps. Developers have a choice.
It also helps that Apple's profits more from sales of iOS devices than App Store (I think the entire iTunes online stuff (App Store, Music Store, Movie Store, Book Store) only really generated $1.5B profit - chump change compared to even Mac sales. (Their latest financial report will have the exact figures - and don't mistake iOS device sales with including iTunes sales - they're not bundled together - they're separate line items).
Re:The things IBM made...
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much like Apple is reluctant to talk about their ipod touch-based POS terminals
Supposedly Apple is doing very quiet testing with third parties for that system (Old Navy/Gap is apparently testing them), which Apple calls EasyPay. It's quite sketchy, but it appears Apple has been inundated with requests for more information about them so they could be deployed elsewhere.
A kill switch is just about the dumbest idea ever. As soon as it's made, it will then be every bit as vulnerable as all of these systems that are getting hacked. It would become the quickest, easiest massive DoS attack to pull off, and it would give all of the hacking/cracking community a clear and obvious high value target. Given a dedicated enough team of black hats, it's not a matter of if it gets compromised, its a matter of how long.
A DoS isn't a bad thing compared to getting silently intruded. And DoS tends to be from amateur shops just wanting a few lolz and such. The worst thing is a DoS attracts attention - people notice things are down and work to find out why.
Sony, Citibank - I can bet that the attacks happened for a long while - Sony only shut down PSN after they noticed the odd transactions, and by then it was too late.
Also a DoS isn't profitable. Sure it hurts the company, but oh well. Stealing their data means it hurts the company AND gives them something to sell on the black market.
Think - Epsilon DoS'd - a bunch of marketing emails don't go out. But get at their list of data and you have emails and names. Very useful if you want to go phish. Ditto Sony's customer data. PSN was DoS'd and... nothing happened other than a few gamers got upset. But take 100M+ customer records? Goldmine.
Hell, Anonymous' DoS of PSN probably got Sony investigating when they discovered the breach.
Apple does not have corporate users who hate to upgrade unless things are tested first... whichever year they decide to do it. It is a liability because it is called Windows Update and therefore is part of Windows according to the lawyers. Not to mention Sarbines Oxley requires documentation for unathorized software upgrades or installs and useless annoying crap.
With the Apple Store the user assumes responsibility. No such arrangement on Windows as Offices would refuse to use it otherwise.
Actually, it's because the iOS App Store (and likely the Mac App Store) requires apps to be self-contained. The only dependencies on apps allowed are what comes with a completely clean install of the OS. So as a first-pass test, all you need to do is run your app, because unless you jailbreak, you're reasonably assured that it's just your app running.
If you update your PDF viewer on iOS, iOS will launch the PDF viewer itself and it's running in its own little sandbox when a webbrowser requests it.
Microsoft Office, etc. install stuff all over the place and many hidden dependencies can result - apps using fonts, DLLs, APIs and other things without realizing they're not provided with Windows, just that so many people use those programs that it's assumed it's there and very strange things happen when they aren't.
So in general, updating an iOS app will update the files associated with just that app, and since the app is self-contained, there is no way there can be hidden library dependencies or API dependencies. But Windows and Office have so many components added to them that strange dependencies develop. Heck, I had one program require OpenSSL under Windows, and it worked, despite my never installing the OpenSSL DLLs. Instead, it seemed Windows pulled the OpenSSL DLLs from the WiFi driver's installation directory and used those. Tell me if that isn't a disaster waiting to happen.
A better question would be why would anybody give open access to their photos on something like FB instead of only granting access to their "friends?" It is amazing how much personal stuff people put out in the open on the internet. As an employer I would be more concerned about people's overall lack of discretion than the actual content of most social networking postings. Lack of discretion relates to ones judgment and could be indicative of one's job performance.
Because once it's on the internet, it's effectively out for the world. "Friends" doesn't mean much unless you vet every friend you have before hand. A photo can be easily reposted by a "friend" who has their photo setting to "everyone".
Or a friend can play an app that rapes the photo albums of all their friends.
Facebook's privacy settings don't exist. Remember, Facebook sells personal information. To encourage people to put up that information, they invent "privacy" settings so people think they can reveal all.
Remember, once it's on the internet, it's for the entire world to see. Facebook's just been a lot more obvious of this rule lately by making every new feature available to "everyone" by default, and you have to lock things down. But by then, Google et. al. have scraped it.
My Facebook account has barely any information on it at all - just a neutral profile photo, and that's about the extent of my public information. The other information available is what I'm comfortable with the world knowing (email addresses, etc). I have this so I have an account and can remove myself from photos and such. And I vet my friends very closely - I only have 9 people in it. And there's 5 others in my invitation queue because I'm not sure if I even want them in (people I've met in person, but whom I might not be comfortable letting into my profile).
The first rule of being online - never post online what you don't want everyone to know - has been around since the modem was invented. It's still true today.
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That would be surprising, as the old MacOS Classic days all you did was define your menus including shortcuts. ResEdit was a great way to redefine crappy key shortcuts back then (or add shortcuts to missing entries), and I'm fairly certain today that short of the special modifier keys, that keyboard shortcuts can be zero-overhead items if desired. In Windows you do have to add a tiny bit of programmatic support for shortcuts, but it's fairly generic code that people boilerplate on.
Windows was designed to be primarily keyboard-navigatable - Macs came with mice, PCs didn't. So expecting the user to buy a mouse was quite unrealistic for Windows (back in the old days of serial mice, PS/2 mice, bus mice, etc.). Nevermind laptops as well - which may or may not even have a port you could plug a mouse into.
About the only input devices you could count on a PC having support for was a keyboard and a joystick.
Android runs shitty on Apple hardware. It's not just video accelleration that Android needs, it's the underpowered hardware.
The original iPhone and iPhone 3G, for example, have only 400MHz processors, which is slower than the original G1's 524MHz CPU (over 25% faster). They also have 128MB of RAM, versus 192MB for the G1.
Specwise, almost all Apple iOS hardware is slower than their contemporary Android counterparts. Whether or not it's the greater efficiency of the software that makes iOS snappier or other factors is up for debate (scrolling, for example, is far smoother on iOS than Android. I think iOS4 on the 3G is where things started Android-like).
That has always been the case for regular users since the iPhone 3Gs (and all devices that came afterwards, including iPod Touches and iPads).
You can't downgrade unless you have the SHSH blob for your device running that version. You don't need to jailbreak to capture the SHSH blob (Firmware Umbrella can do it without jailbreak), but so can Cydia cache your SHSH blobs for you.
Otherwise there is no way to downgrade. It was a bit easier on the iPhone 3G simply because iOS4 introduced a software SHSH blob verification that can be disabled - the hardware doesn't check it lik elater devices.
Honestly, they prevent downgrading NOW. It's been done since the 3Gs was released - the SHSH blobs. When you reload the OS, the first "connect to iTunes" part is to get the Apple-signed SHSH blob from the server. The only thing is, for the past couple of years, it suffered from the fact that replay attacks were possible, so if you captured the SHSH blob, you could fake the iTunes server and activate normally.
And this is necessary for all iDevices since then - iPhone 3Gs, iPhone 4, iPod Touch 3/4g, iPad (all), etc. Baseband authentication not required - the boot ROM prevents booting the OS image until it has an SHSH blob. iPhone 3G iOS4 implemented a "software authentication" that checked for SHSH, but was trivially bypassed.
It's nothing new, really. Though with the iTunes-optional thing, it may be harder to do if you don't have iTunes...
More like Windows used to do it as per the standard. Then Microsoft realized a good chunk of the crap people buy doesn't support it properly, so they have to add a bunch of hacks and tweaks in order to get it to work "properly".
Honestly, hardware sucks. Between buggy BIOSes and hardware with buggy support for everything, it's amazing something like Windows could even work, or that you can use the same Linux kernel without recompiling for different PCs.
You still find the odd USB devices with crappy descriptors in them these days because the manufacturer can't be half-assed to do it right. "Oh, it works in Windows? Great, ship it".
Sometimes the old adage of "be liberal in what you accept, conservative in what you emit" causes more problems - people do the bare minimum to get stuff working.
Hell, it's one of the reasons why the old Creative Soundblaster Live cards only worked well on Intel machines - they violated the PCI spec. It's just the Intel chipsets were more forgiving to violations, while other chipests that adhered more to the spec caused random lockups and crashes as the cards locked up the bus. (Only the Audigy line actually fixed the issue...)
What security would that be? Facebook privacy settings?
No, Facebook's privacy settings are, from the POV of Facebook, excellent. They give the illusion of privacy to encourage people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. Which is the entire point - FB is less about providing a place to meet, but more a place to get people to willingly post information online to for data mining purposes.
The old adage of "if you don't want the world to read it, don't post it online" is still true nearly 40 years later (when it used to refer to BBSes). The "privacy" settings Facebook offers is designed to encourage people to forget that fact.
I suppose Facebook might be writing an enhanced Facebook app for jailbroken iOS devices though - one that integrates more things that Apple wouldn't allow so they can violate your privacy just that much more. After all, he knows the ins and outs of iOS to jailbreak...
That's if you want to play wireless. I picked up a wired controller for cheap and it works just fine. Eventually I relented and picked up the $20 receiver because well, cords suck.
I like it because it's a nice gamepad to begin with - I even have a Xbox360-to-PS3 adapter so I could use the same wired controller with the PS3. I find the PS3 controller cramps my hand after a few minutes.
Considering it had no buttons and was just a metal stick, I could see how someone might eat it. I wonder if that iPod Shuffle actually carried the warning for real. (I suspect it's small enough to actually be eaten without much difficulty.)
And yes, I know it referred to the first iPod Shuffle.
I'm confused as well. I have TF2 from Orange Box, but I've never played it. I was always under the impression that well, it was free to play... sure it cost $20 to buy it, but that doesn't seem like an overly big hump.
I wasn't aware one had ot pay subscription fees or other stuff to play TF2, especially since plenty of people put up their own dedicated servers for it.
Or is "free to play" now also encompassing the first initial purchase of the game as well?
Not really.
They are providing a Caller ID *number*, but they're not providing a name (Caller ID started out only providing numbers - name support came later). For legacy purposes, the phone company supports sending of number-only Caller ID. The phone company then just looks at the area code and does the state name lookup to provide a name you can use (optional - phone company may or may not do it, if they don't, they usually set the name to the number, or set the "no name" flag).
So yes, they are bypassing the blocked number screens by providing a number. Just the name is absent and filled in with the area.
If the calling number is accurate, it's technically not fraud. And if you're screening by name, well, you ought to be screening by number. Most of the time the "caller id blocked" screening also supports blocking by number.
And it's most likely different telemarketers - the work is farmed out after all. One day they'll use a callcenter in California. Another time in Montana, etc.
That's because the networks are optimized to send from the head end to the user, and not from the user to the headend.
So one-way videocalling? Fine. Provided it's from the head end to you, and not the other way around.
Even with DOCSIS 3, the bottleneck still remains with the upstream part.
And TV is a broadcast medium, so one-to-many and very efficient. Sending one stream of video to thousands of customers takes no more bandwidth than sending that stream of video to one customer. Which is why IPTV won't scale in the end if every customer wants complete control of the entire system (thus not being able to multicast). Except of course, if you do the whole DVR thing which you might as well have done with regular TV to begin with.
It depends.
If it's a Win7 OEM version, it'll go for a special BIOS license or other mechanism by default (the Win7 contents might be the same, but there's a slight difference in the discs).
If you use that Win7 OEM key, Win7 won't actually activate properly - you have to call up Microsoft and do a phone activation. If you use the proper OEM key, then Win7 will use the SLIC or other method to get the license and auto-activate. If you buy an OEM copy, you can activate it normally as per retail copies.
And you must use the right key first. If you have a Win7 Enterprise DVD, it won't accept anything other than an Enterprise key.
The OEM keys are fun - because the BIOS module doesn't contain the edition, you can usually go into the upgrade center, and when it asks for the upgrade key, you enter in the OEM key for the Ultimate version and it'll be a genuinely licensed version for the Ultimate.
I've done it with several PCs with OEM Win7. Came with Home Premium, updated to Ultimate in the upgrade center by entering the OEM key. The OEM key ensures Windows uses the OEM method for activation so no Microsoft interaction required. It's pretty neat.
Depends. The iPhone4 has them on the outside for the GSM version because it has to have those logos somewhere on the product the end-user can see (by regulation). Most cellphones hide those logos under the battery. The Verizon version, because it's US only, has no logo other than the Apple one on the back as the FCC one doesn't have to be shown (the FCC ID is good enough).
For the computers, since there are user-openable panels, the logos are hidden in there, like most other laptops.
And it's an aesthetic choice - Apple likes clean lines and such, which is why they don't have those "Intel Inside" and "AMD Graphics" logos and the like to uglify their Macs.
Other devices use the logos as a differentiator so having as many as you can and plastering them all over is seen as a merit badge. If you can't compete on design, you can always compete on features, and all those logos count. It seems for PCs, especially desktops, the gaudier and "technical looking" the PC looks, the better. And nothing looks more "technical" than a bunch of logos.calling attention to you as "complex stuff here!":
ISTR a little ago there was a demonstration of a camera that basically used a honeycomb lens like that of a fly. Each little lens took a slightly different angle of the scene, and software processing generated the final image, letting you selectively focus on an image after it was taken.
Not sure if it was this company or another... it was a tech demo only though.
Revenue wise, the Apple App Store makes hands-over-fist more money than the Google Marketplace rakes in, and it seems per-device app payments is higher on iOS than Android. (Apple has publicly said they paid out $2.5B to developers).
This ignores indirect revenue sources though. Some Android devs have reported making more money off Android apps than their iOS equivalents, mostly because of ads in the app. Rovio is one of them - which makes sense given they only get 70 cents per Angry Birds sale on iOS ($1.40 for the iPad version), but they get many ad impressions on Android - which is bound to make that amount up probably before finishing the first set of levels.
Also, those who buy into iOS know what they're getting into - "free" iPhones have only started cropping up (iPhone 3GS for $0 on contract), so most people were paying the $100-200 for an iPhone or the several hundred for an iPod Touch or iPad. These folk know they are buying it for the App Store and the apps inside.
Android phones though have been offered free practically from the start, so many people would get one over paying for an iPhone, but really only use it for email and web surfing. They may browse the Market out of curiousity and get a few free apps, but it's more of a side note rather than the main event. Either that or they think it's their carrier trying to make up for the "free" phone.
Also, there's also the level of importance of the site to the user.
Some random blogger's website? My NYTimes login? Minor forums I visit? I'll just use the same damn password. Who cares if it's hacked? So someone could post as me. If that site becomes more important, then I can always change the password later.
My online banking/paypal/ebay/amazon/windows live/google password? nice secure and different (all linked to valuable accounts and services). My twitter/blog/NYTimes/slashdot/gawker/etc password? simple ones because if they're hacked, well that's just an inconvenience that I'll have to make a new account.
I like iTunes as well, and yes, it runs like a dog on Windows (but really quite nicely on OS X. Probably because Windows doesn't really like having to host a mini-version of OS X for all the Apple stuff which just bloats everything up).
The irony is the OP likes iTunes, yet objects to SQL. iTunes library files are .itl files which are SQLite databases. iTunes maintains XML files for both backup and compatibility purposes (if the ITL file is missing, iTunes will rebuild from the XML, but otherwise the XML is for programs to parse).
Apple won't admit it, but you can bet they're using CoreData to handle the back end data storage. CoreData can use a variety of means to store data, including a built-in SQLite engine..
Canada moving to unlimited data plans? The only one I've seen right now is by mobilicity, so if you can put up with shitty 3G and shitty coverage, then yes, it's unlimited. (Not being near a Mobilicity "zone", I can't vouch for it, but I'm told their data speeds are horrifically slow).
No, the big carriers here with large coverage have always been limited. Sometimes they'll run specials where you can get a contract for 5GB/$50, otherwise it'll be 2GB/$50 and the like.
And hell, even our regular broadband is limited more. 250GB/month? A luxury with plans only going up to 100GB.
Exactly. Think of all the misspellings you could buy - .comm, .coom, .cm, etc.
Not to mention if your bank buys .bankofamerica it's just as likely some phisher may buy a regular domain as well - .bankofamerica looks the same to most people as .bankofamerica.pl or other thing soon enough.
Or hell... buy .html and .htm. Then you can have www.bankofamerica.com.index.html and people won't notice the '/' was replaced with '.'.
There's a lot of potential in this, really.
The nice thing with this patent is it requires an IR transmitter. What about using visible light? Or RF? Or a coded audio signal? Or ... ?
Imagine everyone having this technology, but implementing them in patent-avoiding incompatible ways. Then any way to disable the camera would require a whole rack of equipment to be carried around.
Nevermind all the legacy equipment that'll be incompatible with it (when this comes out, the iPhone 4 will be out of support - it won't get this stuff), etc.
Of course, it could very well be the plan - make it so inconvenient to carry around a rack of equipment to disable cameras that all recordings should still be allowed. Or maybe Apple's got holdings in film companies (ye olde film camera still works today)...
Not to mention that Apple has been putting a ton of stuff into HTML5 like location awareness (Safari will ask for GPS access permissions), as well as getting APIs so web apps can get access to accellerometer and gyro data, maybe even the camera.
If Apple didn't want people doing webapps, they would've removed the functionality of adding web sites to the home screen, and not bothered with supporting GPS and sensor data access. Heck, one of the main complaints in iOS 4 is that webapps run faster under Safari than they do hosted inside an app (probably because Safari is heavily sandboxed (moreso than regular apps) and thus can do stuff like JIT compilation of javaswcript).
And Safari has support for stored data as well (more structured than cookies) so webapps can save and cache data locally.
Steve Jobs even said there are two environments - a curated one that lets you write native apps, and uncurated web apps. Developers have a choice.
It also helps that Apple's profits more from sales of iOS devices than App Store (I think the entire iTunes online stuff (App Store, Music Store, Movie Store, Book Store) only really generated $1.5B profit - chump change compared to even Mac sales. (Their latest financial report will have the exact figures - and don't mistake iOS device sales with including iTunes sales - they're not bundled together - they're separate line items).
Supposedly Apple is doing very quiet testing with third parties for that system (Old Navy/Gap is apparently testing them), which Apple calls EasyPay. It's quite sketchy, but it appears Apple has been inundated with requests for more information about them so they could be deployed elsewhere.
A DoS isn't a bad thing compared to getting silently intruded. And DoS tends to be from amateur shops just wanting a few lolz and such. The worst thing is a DoS attracts attention - people notice things are down and work to find out why.
Sony, Citibank - I can bet that the attacks happened for a long while - Sony only shut down PSN after they noticed the odd transactions, and by then it was too late.
Also a DoS isn't profitable. Sure it hurts the company, but oh well. Stealing their data means it hurts the company AND gives them something to sell on the black market.
Think - Epsilon DoS'd - a bunch of marketing emails don't go out. But get at their list of data and you have emails and names. Very useful if you want to go phish. Ditto Sony's customer data. PSN was DoS'd and... nothing happened other than a few gamers got upset. But take 100M+ customer records? Goldmine.
Hell, Anonymous' DoS of PSN probably got Sony investigating when they discovered the breach.
Actually, it's because the iOS App Store (and likely the Mac App Store) requires apps to be self-contained. The only dependencies on apps allowed are what comes with a completely clean install of the OS. So as a first-pass test, all you need to do is run your app, because unless you jailbreak, you're reasonably assured that it's just your app running.
If you update your PDF viewer on iOS, iOS will launch the PDF viewer itself and it's running in its own little sandbox when a webbrowser requests it.
Microsoft Office, etc. install stuff all over the place and many hidden dependencies can result - apps using fonts, DLLs, APIs and other things without realizing they're not provided with Windows, just that so many people use those programs that it's assumed it's there and very strange things happen when they aren't.
So in general, updating an iOS app will update the files associated with just that app, and since the app is self-contained, there is no way there can be hidden library dependencies or API dependencies. But Windows and Office have so many components added to them that strange dependencies develop. Heck, I had one program require OpenSSL under Windows, and it worked, despite my never installing the OpenSSL DLLs. Instead, it seemed Windows pulled the OpenSSL DLLs from the WiFi driver's installation directory and used those. Tell me if that isn't a disaster waiting to happen.
Because once it's on the internet, it's effectively out for the world. "Friends" doesn't mean much unless you vet every friend you have before hand. A photo can be easily reposted by a "friend" who has their photo setting to "everyone".
Or a friend can play an app that rapes the photo albums of all their friends.
Facebook's privacy settings don't exist. Remember, Facebook sells personal information. To encourage people to put up that information, they invent "privacy" settings so people think they can reveal all.
Remember, once it's on the internet, it's for the entire world to see. Facebook's just been a lot more obvious of this rule lately by making every new feature available to "everyone" by default, and you have to lock things down. But by then, Google et. al. have scraped it.
My Facebook account has barely any information on it at all - just a neutral profile photo, and that's about the extent of my public information. The other information available is what I'm comfortable with the world knowing (email addresses, etc). I have this so I have an account and can remove myself from photos and such. And I vet my friends very closely - I only have 9 people in it. And there's 5 others in my invitation queue because I'm not sure if I even want them in (people I've met in person, but whom I might not be comfortable letting into my profile).
The first rule of being online - never post online what you don't want everyone to know - has been around since the modem was invented. It's still true today.