Well, I suppose they're "saving" it for Pwn2Own. But given CanSecWest happened recently, they're also doing a CYA - if it gets revealed how it works, they've already scooped the story.
So it's a win-win. Either an easy victory to win that Windows laptop (sure it ain't a shiny Macbook that everyone else is going for... but it's also less competition), plus lots of money from those interested, and credit should someone else happen to discover the same bug.
Or it could be, you know, a mistake... People mess up with licenses all the time, if they correct it and don't repeat the same mistake twice I generally don't tend to paint it as malice. Clearly you seem to have different standards.
What ever happened to those wireless drivers again? I think OpenBSD wrote it, and it's BSD, and the Linux Wireless folks took it (at OpenBSD's urging) then promptly removed the BSD license and slapped on GPL licenses.
So now, the authors can't take back patches.
Not that it really matters. I've seen an alarming number of companies start having to set up "Open Source Licensing" processes to ensure they can comply with licenses like the GPLv3 - and start requiring this process for every piece of open-source software - whether it's for internal use only, or to be used with the product.
And previously these processes were only for commercially-licensed software.
People just don't line up in China, period! This Apple store incident does not come as a surprise to me.
It's not unusual, either. It's actually a one-dimensional mob that quickly degenerates. It's all about the push and shove, really.
And people in Japan also actually do tne orderly lineup thing. It's really just a Chinese trait.
I'm surprised there's an iPad fight at the Apple Store - Apple's been requiring people to sign up and reserve iPad2's (and iPhone4's) in its Chinese stores for a while now, to avoid all the mobs and crap that has happened.
Like scalpers buying 20 or 30 iPhone4's at a time at the Apple Store (which is unusual, since Apple restricts them to 2 per person), which led to Apple to requiring purchases to sign up online and reserve it ahead of time.
Apple hates scalpers and they've done all sorts of things thwart them, especially with things in tight supply like iPhone4s and iPad2s.
Darn. I thought there were 35 ways to jailbreak the iPhones these days. Perhaps one of them would work on the iPad2 (which is still lacking a jailbreak).
(Jailbreaking relies on vulnerabilities typically)
Why don't you have the packages delivered to your office? Both UPS and FedEx will make sure that they deliver to a business during its hours of operation, so there's no worry about missing a delivery. They'll never get left on your porch in plain view, either.
Because you run into idiotic companies that only ship to billing addresses.
And UPS is the worst when it comes to cross-border shipments. You never know how much they're going to rip you off just for carrying the package across the border. USPS and DHL were the best ($5-8 plus taxes). FedEx was decent ($25+taxes). UPS, I've never had a standard price for "brokerage". I've had it be anywhere from 30-300% the value of the package ($20 for a "free" item, $150 for a $300 item, and $30 for a $100 item are the ones that come to mind).
UPS is such a ripoff, and if someone ships UPS only, I go elsewhere. FedEx maybe, if I'm ordering something expensive enough. USPS, sure I'll order. I might even go for the faster shipping options as well.
Hell, Amazon.ca (Canada) started using UPS last year. Every package they sent via Canada Post, no problem (for the past 10+ years). Last year, out of 3 UPS packages they sent me, 2 had issues. One reported that they couldn't find the office (that address has been on file for 10 years now...), the other one got shipped to SOMEONE ELSE! UPS tracking marked it as received with a signature confirmation... except it wasn't anyone at the office and it definitely wasn't with the guy handling shipping. At least Amazon has great customer service.
How can Oracle monetize Java, enough to make the mammoth purchase price of Sun worth it?
J2SE and J2EE are pretty much free, but J2ME's still got lots of money in it. Only J2SE/J2EE's pretty much free (though you can bet J2EE's going to have tons of Oracle support), but J2ME's widely deployed and heavily licensed.
You see, all those dumbphones and featurephones with JVMs in them have J2ME licenses in them that contribute a not-insignicant amount of patent licensing fees back to Sun/Oracle, hence Oracle's lawsuit against Android.
If you have to write any embedded assembly, thinking in RPN is more conventional than not.
Actually, that's incorrect.
There are three ways to express a sequence of operations mathematically - prefix, postfix, and infix.
Infix is the traditional way, e.g. "1+1". The operator is in-between the operands.
Postfix is what RPN is, "1 1 +", the operator follows after the operands are loaded.
Prefix is what traditional assembly is, "+ 1 1" where the operator is first, followed by the operands. Depending on your architecture, one of the operands may be implied, e.g. "lda 0; add 1; add 1" which is prefix.
Postfix tends to make more sense to humans, and trivial for a calculator to parse - if you wanted to add two numbers, you get the two numbers first, then you perform the addition. Ditto for a calculator - you can do a large number of calculations with a 4-level stack.
About the only thing infix notation is good for is it's really easy to indicate intent (you can write some pretty obfuscated RPN where ALL the operands come first on a huge stack, followed by all the operators. Yowch.), and for those who don't know their rules of precedence, you can punch it in directly into a good calculator.
This is just the latest attempt to promote the Mac app store, but it's also another step toward what's ultimately coming. Mac computers will one day be every bit as closed off as iPhones and iPads, with all software having to come through the Mac app store the same way it has to now with the iPhone/iPad app stores. Everything Apple will then be a walled garden, with Apple as gatekeepers.
People keep saying this, but it's not possible - the unerlying platform is too open.
First, there's limited number of things you can do with apps in the Mac App Store. No demo apps, no shareware apps, and nothing that requires installing drivers - apps must be basically self-contained entities. Devs are still required to distribute demo/shareware via their websites, and peripheral makers can't distribute drivers and the like via the Mac App Store. So we've excluded virtualization software, funky peripheral addons (Kinect, various USB game controllers (Xbox360, PS3), etc), plug-ins to other software, etc.
Second, it's easier to close off iOS than OS X, because how are you going to develop OS X and iOS apps? iOS can be closed off and require every binary to be signed, as OS X is used for development. How will a developer for "closed" Mac OS X develop their app in the first place? Their compiled output has to run somehow. And if you say the same way as iOS, then you've just made OS X a great way to enforce open-source - if everyone has to compile the code themselves to run on their Mac, then "open" apps are open-source. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Third, how many ways can you jailbreak a Mac? It's a standard PC after all. You can boot the Mac into Target Disk Mode, edit the disk that way. You can install Boot Camp, and edit the disk through Windows and Linux. You can remove the disk and edit it on another computer. And I say "edit" because that's all jailbreaking really does. iOS devices have a harder time because the interface is very limited. On Macs, it's trivially easy since the mass storage device is so easily available and accessible. And Apple stopping Boot Camp? Highly unlikely - they realize that a chunk of their sales come from people who use Boot Camp exclusively to run other OSes on their Macs.
Hell, the closest Apple has come is strange and weird interfaces like the MacBook Air SSD disk - USB-SATA adapters for that are a little hard to find still, as are replcements...
The only way they can make OS X be like iOS is if they start doing things that really close off the Mac, which make it pointless to own a Mac. That's not to say some idiotic post-Jobs CEO won't try, though.
No, in my case I can trace the worst of it directly the the Time Warner Cable channel guide. Slowly rolled out in Austin over a few days, I immediately noticed a huge delay when changing channels, and was able to confirm with friends and neighbors across the city (some who had HD boxes, some not, some with the new guide, some without), that those who had the new channel guide were noticeably slowed (~1s), and those with the old guide didn't see anything unusual... until they too received the "upgrade".
The trouble in this case is that once you've invested a ton of money into an upgrade that clearly doesn't work as planned, it also doesn't make sense to spend more money to fix it or to go back to the old method. Unless the system is completely non-functional or people are bailing in droves, you just have them grin and bear it until the next scheduled upgrade. Say, five years or so.
Like I said before, it's crap software coupled with viewers who don't give a damn other than "it's cheaper than TiVo". Basically slap dash any old crap together.
I'm disgusted with our cableboxes, but TiVo can't be used because in Canada, there's no mandate for stuff like CableCARD, so all cable providers sell their boxes which can't work with any other providers, and you can't use any box other than one the provider originally sold. It's a load of garbage software and terrible UI. (When the CableCARD mandate came out, PACE bought up all the old cablebox designs from Motorola just so they could manufacture the boxes strictly for the Canadian market).
Hell, that crap cablebox may be one reason people are cutting the cable too. When even cheap chinese-made network media players have better UIs...
This does not explain the > 500ms delay when trying to use the guide.
Easy, crap software.
Cablebox DVRs suck. Horribly. Besides the UI stinking, and random latencies and random ability to record TV.
It's a wonder, since TiVo's been out over a decade (and it's UI is a bit dated, but works well and is far less complicated to use), and cablebox software is still crap. Especially since cableboxes have more powerful CPUs than TiVos.
I've never understood it. I guess that's why TiVos cost so much more - when you pay $3 a month for a DVR, they can throw whatever crap on it and the user doesn't know better, because they'd rather pay that than $13/month.
And I can bet Moxi, Myth and Windows MCE all have better UIs.
Sending HD quality family videos to family that they can just pop into the bdr under the tv. But macintosh never was a content production platform was it?;)
There are Blu-Ray-on-DVD-R standards for that, actually. It's a Blu-Ray formatted movie on a DVD, because BD-R discs are still expensive compared to the cheap DVD recordables you can buy.
Plus, Blu-Ray's a horrendous format. Your best shot at getting a BD-R working in a generic BD player is use the BDAV profile. Using BDMV (what Blu-Ray movies use) with BD-R's is an iffy proposition, especially unencrypted (Blu-Ray/BDMV requires AACS - it's not optional).
It's difficult enough that's it just easier to get a media player box (AppleTV/Boxee/Roku/WD TV/etc) and send those videos as mp4 files on a DVD or thumbdrive.
besides controllers via blu-tooth would be piss easy to support with a firmware upgrade.
i reckon an appleTV style box for say 300 dollars with ipad 2 hardware would be well within the ballpark given that it won't need gps, 3g, gyroscope, touch screen, etc.
There's a HUGE developer base currently writing for IOS who will be able to do some pretty interesting things with more powerful hardware. to develop for a console has previously required learning a new API/toolkit, etc. IOS is already familiar.
This may be the real reason behind the AppleTV 2. Look at it so far - it plays media, yet is capable of running apps (it's iOS under there, after all) and can be jailbroken all the same.
It's quite well on its way to being a cheap console box - $99 plus $50 for a controller, and the App Store. Apple's approval process is far less draconian than Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony, and their development requirements are far lower than those three as well.
Apple may have inadvertently re-entered the console market. Perhaps that's something for iOS 5. Maybe even unified gaming (play on your iPhone/iPad or AppleTV). Or control your AppleTV game with your iPhone/iPad (lots of situations where you want to do things without letting everyone else playing on the couch know what you're doing - e.g., sports games and plays).
The thing is, videogames and movies serve two different purposes. A videogame serves to entertain, either solo or alone.
A movie's purpose is NOT to entertain. Instead, it's purpose is to put asses in seats.
Those two differences in purpose, while not typically mutually exclusive, do come to be at odds very often. If it's a game, typically the one that leads to more entertainment wins. If it's a movie, though, the result that will put more asses in seats will generally win out.
After all, we have summer blockbusters that make tons of money but plots consisting of not more than a couple of words, main characters thinner than tissue in depth, and plot holes that serve as a structural element.
It's why all media adaptations are hard. Each medium has a different sort of expectation to it. A videogame has different pacing than that of a book (e.g., a book can go in-depth into character development and past history for chapters - videogames can't or you bore the audience). A book has different requirements compared to a movie (ditto). Etc. It's very difficult to do any sort of adaptation - at best all you can do is try to make each medium complementary to each other.
The other thing is, well, the audience makeup varies and media overlaps don't tend to be very big. Sure a videogame can be made into a movie, but the audience seeing the movie alone is bigger than the audience seeing the movie after playing the game.
It's not easy, and requires a lot of skill. It's why Marvel Studios started doing independent productions (Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Hulk, and now Thor). Or something like how Microsoft has to set up a group to manage its Halo property (besides several successful games, they've got bestselling books and some popular comics and other licensed materials, and probably why the movie kept getting cancelled).
white hat conventions put that to bed years ago as OS X is typically one of the first to be hacked
If you mean CanSecWest and Pwn2Own, it's not a valid test of OS security. For one simple reason - the machines.
You have 3 PCs you can hack, and winner gets that machine. A MacBook Pro running OS X, some Sony laptop running Windows, and I don't know what they did for Linux.
So you can probably break into the Sony easily enough (there's enough crapware in the default install that there's a vulnerability somewhere), but then you just get a crappy laptop.
Or you can go for the Mac, and get some decent shiny for your efforts.
Perhaps if they really wanted to test OS security, they'd use all MacBook Pros or something, because all Pwn2Own shows is that despite all the/. crowd pleading of "Dell/etc PCs have better specs - no one cares for shiny", it ain't true.
The smart ones go for the Linux/Windows boxes because they know the vast majority are going for the shiny laptop, so they have a better chance of walking away with something they can sell for a few hundred bucks.
I got lucky. My Dell laptop with a nice dual 8800M-GTX (SLI) card in it failed in a very interesting way. It would boot up in 2D just fine (I could boot in safe mode, and I could get to the login screen), but the instant it started up 3D, it would either lock up or bluescreen (an interesting one - it wasn't the usual BSOD, just one that said something like "Hardware parity error")
Thankfully I bought the 4 year extended on-site warranty, so I simply called Dell, faked through their OS restore procedure (same effect - though it gets as far as the testing 3D performance step before it locks up - I already tried it).
I had them also send the tech a replacement graphics card as well, and told them to replace that first. Half an hour later, it was working great.
Thank god for extended warranties. I usualy get them for laptops because heat failures are common... and probably one of the few times an extended warranty makes sense.
Great. This comes out on election day... when the once bright star of Canadian high-tech companies is sold in pieces to various non-Canadian interests.
Investors obviously aren't impressed. After the huge crash last week in RIMM, with this announcement you would expect some recovery, but there just isn't anything there.
The big problem is the PlayBook. First, it doesn't ship with any messaging/calendaring components - if you want those, you need to link it with a BlackBerry.
The second problem is, Blackberry Link only works with OS6 devices. If you're stuck with an OS5/OS4 device with no OS upgrade options (not available/corporate won't do it), a Playbook is nothing more than a web browser that can do Flash, but is otherwise just a toy.
And nevermind if you don't have a Blackberry to begin with - you'd be better served with a Xoom or an iPad if you wanted a tablet.
That's why investors are spooked - the Playbook was hailed as having great hardware inside (1GHz dual core! 1GB RAM!) but then contemporary platforms start coming out with similar specs (Xoom has similar specs, iPad has half the RAM).
I'm sure a number of people have been pressing for OS6 upgrades just so they could make the Playbook useful.
(My dad really wants one so he doesn't have to look at the tiny screen. Alas, his BB only runs OS4.2, and his IT department has informed him new BBs will also run 4.2. He's got a better chance with an iPad and webmail (or ActiveSync) than a Playbook.)
Not a damned one of them can remain stable and online for more than an hour,
Do remember these devices are built extremely cheaply. Get them hot, or their power goes out of spec, and they go flaky. It could be overheating, or it could be the wallwart's dying, both of which are equally likely.
After all, Linksys/Cisco isn't willing to spend the few pennies for a reverse polarity diode, who knows what else they skimped on.
The bigger issue though is the WRT54GL doesn't have enough oomph to push data terribly fast. If you're on a 5/1Mbps connection it's fine, but if you're starting to push 20Mbps+ through it, you're reaching its limits and it can be holding you back from the speed you can get.
That wouldn't have been a problem, since that is what BSD'ed code is for. The other way around (bsd ppl 'stealing' linux gpl'ed code) is a problem, so my guess is that was what happened and that is also the way I remember it.
No, what happened was the Linux guys took the BSD'd code (not a problem - the BSD was designed for this), then locked it up with the GPL (they even had the gall to replace the BSD license with the GPL in the header files).
The end result is because of this, all changes to the Linux drivers cannot be incorporated back into BSD because those changes are GPL'd which are incompatible with BSD. Had they kept the drivers as BSD rather than relicensing it, then it wouldn't be much of an issue.
It's especially annoying because the product is still open-source and the people who took the code (perfectly legally) ensured that changes couldn't go upstream. So now we have two opensource projects, one of which cannot accept changes back into its tree.
Oh, don't forget too, that different countries have different regulations about what FDR capabilities (in terms of data collected, length of storage before over-writing, and crash survivability) the airlines under their flags, which don't inherently affect the airplane's safety. So look forward to tieing things up in the courts for decades trying to apply this extraterritoriarily.
That's what ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) is for. It's something they can mandate the minimums for. The countries participating in ICAO have to pass laws that implement it, and can easily demand that aircraft flying through their airspace must follow all ICAO rules.
Flags of convenience aren't a huge thing for aircraft as they are for boats. Most American airlines, for example, will have standard N-numbers assigned to them, as would most airlines of the world would tend to have their aircraft callsigns from their base location. (ICAO hands out the country groupings, e.g, C-Fxxx and C-Gxxx are Canadian aircraft).
I wonder why they ask the $5 for it. The XCode is worth thousands of dollars but apple chose to give it away for free. Comparing to the actual price the $5 is as good as free but creates a small entry barrier in sense I have to go searching for my credit card or iTunes store credentials. Maybe they want us to be all set for publishing once we get this XCode running on our machines making the iTunes account creation a part of installation process.
SOX compliance.
Xcode4 contains so many new significant features and changes that if Apple gave it for free, they'd have to restate their revenue numbers (because they've already recognized the "revenue" for Xcode 3.x in the cost of a Snow Leopard).
XCode 3.x is still free because there's no new features.
Apple's recognizes revenue for most of their products at the time of purchase. For the iPhone, they split it over 2 years. Microsoft recognizes revenue for all their sales over 3 years or so.
Only thing Blackberry had going for it was security, which they gave away with their capitulation to United Arab Emirates and other governments instance on access. There is no reason to get a RIM device over Droid or IOS and many reasons to not get one.
Actually, this only affects BIS users. BES uesrs have a Blackberry-BES shared key and remain private. So even though BES sends all data to RIM's network, RIM can't get access to your emails, and never could. (No company would use it if RIM ended up getting access to all their private emails, and would put RIM in a position to blackmail them AND their competitors).
Do you really think half the users even know what all the technobabble you're asking for even means? The reality based on what I've seen and heard from others is that if you're upfront about what you do with data and permissions people get spooked and don't want the app even if it's harmless, but if you don't say a word about it then people don't even give it a second thought and happily download the app.
It's partly why the Android model isn't that great, either. It's good to enumerate and require the services presented, but after using it a little while, its deficiencies start showing.
1) If the app demands extra data not in the APK, it means it needs external storage permissions and internet access. (I kinda miss the iOS method where you download it all self-contained, sans DLC of course, but getting a 200MB file and it has everything).
2) Users don't read dialogs. As tech people we should know this. Even if it's a highly inofrmative dialog like "Could not write file - the disk is full. Please delete something and try again" the user will still ask for support even though they're able to solve the problem themselves.
3) Dialogs get in the way. As part of 2, they'll make a beeline for whatever gets them to their goal the fastest. If your app really wants to do something bad, I suggest not enumerating just the permissions you need, but every permission you can request. Somewhere between the third and forth permission item they'll just get bored and scroll and tap "install". It's human nature.
4) If the user likes apps, they'll probably just blindly click Install anyways without bothering with permissions. After all, that dialog is just another step during app install People just get very mechanical and do things from muscle memory.
5) Users want to get things done. Installing/deleting/maintenance tasks are chores and get in the way of getting things done. If they want the app, anything you throw in the way just annoys and they'll dismiss it without reading.
It's the reason why few people read EULAs (see 3 and 4), people get called over to handle some stupid task request (2) and the like.
It's an annoying reality of the world and it really makes things like alerts/popups/etc. utterly worthless and makes it difficult to impossible to design things to get the user informed. iOS's notification system is broken in that way (it pops up and screws up your current task). Doing a deny-by-default just ends up with users getting frustrated when the app constantly complains it needs access to something, etc (see Vista) - devs just make it so anything useful is blocked until some permission is granted (even if that permission is orthogonal to pupose - e.g., request access to SMS while connecting to a server).
Hell, I thought the Android system was cool, and miles better than the iOS method. Then I realized that half the time I'm tapping Install without looking over the permissions either.
"The Cloud" has always been nothing more than marketing buzz. All "The Cloud" is are physical servers running a hypervisor and running your machine instances as VMs. There's still people, switches, routers, firewalls, servers, and storage that are used to build "The Cloud."
This belief that doing things in "The Cloud" makes them impervious to hardware failure, power outage, network connection drops, etc. has always been misinformed.
Actually, that's the whole point of doing things "in the cloud" versus just using a webhost or a colo facility. At the latter you provisoin your machine as how you think it'll be used and manage it as you would any other piece of IT equipment locally. If it dies, you go down and replace it. If you get hit by a link from/., your server gets slow. If its the holidays your server crashes, etc. You could overprovision your services by buying extra servers to handle the overflow, but then you're paying lots of extra money to handle the few instances when you get heavy traffic. Since you're leasing hardware and/or physical space, you're paying for that all the time. Depending on their size, provisioning extra services can take hours or days.
Whereas, had it been "in the cloud" at Amazon or something, if your website gets slow because someone discovered your product and posted it on/. or did the social networking thing, you can spin up a new instance immediately (for just a few more dollars) and rake in the cash. At the end of the week when traffic drops off, you destroy the new instance and pay just for the computation you used. Should the datacenter suffer a power or network outage, unless you have a spare in another datacenter, you're hosed.
And yes, the cloud should make things impervious to hardware failure, power outages, network outages, etc. After all, you've decoupled the datacenter from the servers itself. If a physical EC2 box dies, everything should be movied automagically - since you're only dealing with a VM not attached to any particular hardware, it shouldn't matter that your server now isn't hte same one as yesterday. Network and power outages the same - your server should be floating amongst the datacenters that your provider has since you're paying for the CPU cycle, not for the server or physical space.
Alas, what happened here was Amazon wasn't decoupled enough.
The tale of the guy that developed the Graphing Calculator at Apple more than a decade ago makes for a good read. It's not quite the same thing, but does reflect people of the same mindset.
Apparently Apple tends to operate like that. Features like Expose came out because someone did it for fun and showed it off to his manager and it somehow trickled up to Jobs who had it implemented officially in the next revision of OS X (10.3 I think at the time).
And don't forget HP was probably one of the first to do so (with the caveat that they get right to first refusal). It's how the Apple 1 started - Woz created it with HP parts, and HP didn't see a future in personal computing, so they let Woz keep it and continue development.
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Well, I suppose they're "saving" it for Pwn2Own. But given CanSecWest happened recently, they're also doing a CYA - if it gets revealed how it works, they've already scooped the story.
So it's a win-win. Either an easy victory to win that Windows laptop (sure it ain't a shiny Macbook that everyone else is going for... but it's also less competition), plus lots of money from those interested, and credit should someone else happen to discover the same bug.
What ever happened to those wireless drivers again? I think OpenBSD wrote it, and it's BSD, and the Linux Wireless folks took it (at OpenBSD's urging) then promptly removed the BSD license and slapped on GPL licenses.
So now, the authors can't take back patches.
Not that it really matters. I've seen an alarming number of companies start having to set up "Open Source Licensing" processes to ensure they can comply with licenses like the GPLv3 - and start requiring this process for every piece of open-source software - whether it's for internal use only, or to be used with the product.
And previously these processes were only for commercially-licensed software.
It's not unusual, either. It's actually a one-dimensional mob that quickly degenerates. It's all about the push and shove, really.
And people in Japan also actually do tne orderly lineup thing. It's really just a Chinese trait.
I'm surprised there's an iPad fight at the Apple Store - Apple's been requiring people to sign up and reserve iPad2's (and iPhone4's) in its Chinese stores for a while now, to avoid all the mobs and crap that has happened.
Like scalpers buying 20 or 30 iPhone4's at a time at the Apple Store (which is unusual, since Apple restricts them to 2 per person), which led to Apple to requiring purchases to sign up online and reserve it ahead of time.
Apple hates scalpers and they've done all sorts of things thwart them, especially with things in tight supply like iPhone4s and iPad2s.
Darn. I thought there were 35 ways to jailbreak the iPhones these days. Perhaps one of them would work on the iPad2 (which is still lacking a jailbreak).
(Jailbreaking relies on vulnerabilities typically)
Because you run into idiotic companies that only ship to billing addresses.
And UPS is the worst when it comes to cross-border shipments. You never know how much they're going to rip you off just for carrying the package across the border. USPS and DHL were the best ($5-8 plus taxes). FedEx was decent ($25+taxes). UPS, I've never had a standard price for "brokerage". I've had it be anywhere from 30-300% the value of the package ($20 for a "free" item, $150 for a $300 item, and $30 for a $100 item are the ones that come to mind).
UPS is such a ripoff, and if someone ships UPS only, I go elsewhere. FedEx maybe, if I'm ordering something expensive enough. USPS, sure I'll order. I might even go for the faster shipping options as well.
Hell, Amazon.ca (Canada) started using UPS last year. Every package they sent via Canada Post, no problem (for the past 10+ years). Last year, out of 3 UPS packages they sent me, 2 had issues. One reported that they couldn't find the office (that address has been on file for 10 years now...), the other one got shipped to SOMEONE ELSE! UPS tracking marked it as received with a signature confirmation... except it wasn't anyone at the office and it definitely wasn't with the guy handling shipping. At least Amazon has great customer service.
J2SE and J2EE are pretty much free, but J2ME's still got lots of money in it. Only J2SE/J2EE's pretty much free (though you can bet J2EE's going to have tons of Oracle support), but J2ME's widely deployed and heavily licensed.
You see, all those dumbphones and featurephones with JVMs in them have J2ME licenses in them that contribute a not-insignicant amount of patent licensing fees back to Sun/Oracle, hence Oracle's lawsuit against Android.
Actually, that's incorrect.
There are three ways to express a sequence of operations mathematically - prefix, postfix, and infix.
Infix is the traditional way, e.g. "1+1". The operator is in-between the operands.
Postfix is what RPN is, "1 1 +", the operator follows after the operands are loaded.
Prefix is what traditional assembly is, "+ 1 1" where the operator is first, followed by the operands. Depending on your architecture, one of the operands may be implied, e.g. "lda 0; add 1; add 1" which is prefix.
Postfix tends to make more sense to humans, and trivial for a calculator to parse - if you wanted to add two numbers, you get the two numbers first, then you perform the addition. Ditto for a calculator - you can do a large number of calculations with a 4-level stack.
About the only thing infix notation is good for is it's really easy to indicate intent (you can write some pretty obfuscated RPN where ALL the operands come first on a huge stack, followed by all the operators. Yowch.), and for those who don't know their rules of precedence, you can punch it in directly into a good calculator.
People keep saying this, but it's not possible - the unerlying platform is too open.
First, there's limited number of things you can do with apps in the Mac App Store. No demo apps, no shareware apps, and nothing that requires installing drivers - apps must be basically self-contained entities. Devs are still required to distribute demo/shareware via their websites, and peripheral makers can't distribute drivers and the like via the Mac App Store. So we've excluded virtualization software, funky peripheral addons (Kinect, various USB game controllers (Xbox360, PS3), etc), plug-ins to other software, etc.
Second, it's easier to close off iOS than OS X, because how are you going to develop OS X and iOS apps? iOS can be closed off and require every binary to be signed, as OS X is used for development. How will a developer for "closed" Mac OS X develop their app in the first place? Their compiled output has to run somehow. And if you say the same way as iOS, then you've just made OS X a great way to enforce open-source - if everyone has to compile the code themselves to run on their Mac, then "open" apps are open-source. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Third, how many ways can you jailbreak a Mac? It's a standard PC after all. You can boot the Mac into Target Disk Mode, edit the disk that way. You can install Boot Camp, and edit the disk through Windows and Linux. You can remove the disk and edit it on another computer. And I say "edit" because that's all jailbreaking really does. iOS devices have a harder time because the interface is very limited. On Macs, it's trivially easy since the mass storage device is so easily available and accessible. And Apple stopping Boot Camp? Highly unlikely - they realize that a chunk of their sales come from people who use Boot Camp exclusively to run other OSes on their Macs.
Hell, the closest Apple has come is strange and weird interfaces like the MacBook Air SSD disk - USB-SATA adapters for that are a little hard to find still, as are replcements...
The only way they can make OS X be like iOS is if they start doing things that really close off the Mac, which make it pointless to own a Mac. That's not to say some idiotic post-Jobs CEO won't try, though.
Like I said before, it's crap software coupled with viewers who don't give a damn other than "it's cheaper than TiVo". Basically slap dash any old crap together.
I'm disgusted with our cableboxes, but TiVo can't be used because in Canada, there's no mandate for stuff like CableCARD, so all cable providers sell their boxes which can't work with any other providers, and you can't use any box other than one the provider originally sold. It's a load of garbage software and terrible UI. (When the CableCARD mandate came out, PACE bought up all the old cablebox designs from Motorola just so they could manufacture the boxes strictly for the Canadian market).
Hell, that crap cablebox may be one reason people are cutting the cable too. When even cheap chinese-made network media players have better UIs...
Easy, crap software.
Cablebox DVRs suck. Horribly. Besides the UI stinking, and random latencies and random ability to record TV.
It's a wonder, since TiVo's been out over a decade (and it's UI is a bit dated, but works well and is far less complicated to use), and cablebox software is still crap. Especially since cableboxes have more powerful CPUs than TiVos.
I've never understood it. I guess that's why TiVos cost so much more - when you pay $3 a month for a DVR, they can throw whatever crap on it and the user doesn't know better, because they'd rather pay that than $13/month.
And I can bet Moxi, Myth and Windows MCE all have better UIs.
There are Blu-Ray-on-DVD-R standards for that, actually. It's a Blu-Ray formatted movie on a DVD, because BD-R discs are still expensive compared to the cheap DVD recordables you can buy.
Plus, Blu-Ray's a horrendous format. Your best shot at getting a BD-R working in a generic BD player is use the BDAV profile. Using BDMV (what Blu-Ray movies use) with BD-R's is an iffy proposition, especially unencrypted (Blu-Ray/BDMV requires AACS - it's not optional).
It's difficult enough that's it just easier to get a media player box (AppleTV/Boxee/Roku/WD TV/etc) and send those videos as mp4 files on a DVD or thumbdrive.
This may be the real reason behind the AppleTV 2. Look at it so far - it plays media, yet is capable of running apps (it's iOS under there, after all) and can be jailbroken all the same.
It's WiFi module does Bluetooth as well.
It's quite well on its way to being a cheap console box - $99 plus $50 for a controller, and the App Store. Apple's approval process is far less draconian than Microsoft/Nintendo/Sony, and their development requirements are far lower than those three as well.
Apple may have inadvertently re-entered the console market. Perhaps that's something for iOS 5. Maybe even unified gaming (play on your iPhone/iPad or AppleTV). Or control your AppleTV game with your iPhone/iPad (lots of situations where you want to do things without letting everyone else playing on the couch know what you're doing - e.g., sports games and plays).
The thing is, videogames and movies serve two different purposes. A videogame serves to entertain, either solo or alone.
A movie's purpose is NOT to entertain. Instead, it's purpose is to put asses in seats.
Those two differences in purpose, while not typically mutually exclusive, do come to be at odds very often. If it's a game, typically the one that leads to more entertainment wins. If it's a movie, though, the result that will put more asses in seats will generally win out.
After all, we have summer blockbusters that make tons of money but plots consisting of not more than a couple of words, main characters thinner than tissue in depth, and plot holes that serve as a structural element.
It's why all media adaptations are hard. Each medium has a different sort of expectation to it. A videogame has different pacing than that of a book (e.g., a book can go in-depth into character development and past history for chapters - videogames can't or you bore the audience). A book has different requirements compared to a movie (ditto). Etc. It's very difficult to do any sort of adaptation - at best all you can do is try to make each medium complementary to each other.
The other thing is, well, the audience makeup varies and media overlaps don't tend to be very big. Sure a videogame can be made into a movie, but the audience seeing the movie alone is bigger than the audience seeing the movie after playing the game.
It's not easy, and requires a lot of skill. It's why Marvel Studios started doing independent productions (Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Hulk, and now Thor). Or something like how Microsoft has to set up a group to manage its Halo property (besides several successful games, they've got bestselling books and some popular comics and other licensed materials, and probably why the movie kept getting cancelled).
If you mean CanSecWest and Pwn2Own, it's not a valid test of OS security. For one simple reason - the machines.
You have 3 PCs you can hack, and winner gets that machine. A MacBook Pro running OS X, some Sony laptop running Windows, and I don't know what they did for Linux.
So you can probably break into the Sony easily enough (there's enough crapware in the default install that there's a vulnerability somewhere), but then you just get a crappy laptop.
Or you can go for the Mac, and get some decent shiny for your efforts.
Perhaps if they really wanted to test OS security, they'd use all MacBook Pros or something, because all Pwn2Own shows is that despite all the /. crowd pleading of "Dell/etc PCs have better specs - no one cares for shiny", it ain't true.
The smart ones go for the Linux/Windows boxes because they know the vast majority are going for the shiny laptop, so they have a better chance of walking away with something they can sell for a few hundred bucks.
I got lucky. My Dell laptop with a nice dual 8800M-GTX (SLI) card in it failed in a very interesting way. It would boot up in 2D just fine (I could boot in safe mode, and I could get to the login screen), but the instant it started up 3D, it would either lock up or bluescreen (an interesting one - it wasn't the usual BSOD, just one that said something like "Hardware parity error")
Thankfully I bought the 4 year extended on-site warranty, so I simply called Dell, faked through their OS restore procedure (same effect - though it gets as far as the testing 3D performance step before it locks up - I already tried it).
I had them also send the tech a replacement graphics card as well, and told them to replace that first. Half an hour later, it was working great.
Thank god for extended warranties. I usualy get them for laptops because heat failures are common... and probably one of the few times an extended warranty makes sense.
Great. This comes out on election day... when the once bright star of Canadian high-tech companies is sold in pieces to various non-Canadian interests.
(trying to be as non-political about it...)
The big problem is the PlayBook. First, it doesn't ship with any messaging/calendaring components - if you want those, you need to link it with a BlackBerry.
The second problem is, Blackberry Link only works with OS6 devices. If you're stuck with an OS5/OS4 device with no OS upgrade options (not available/corporate won't do it), a Playbook is nothing more than a web browser that can do Flash, but is otherwise just a toy.
And nevermind if you don't have a Blackberry to begin with - you'd be better served with a Xoom or an iPad if you wanted a tablet.
That's why investors are spooked - the Playbook was hailed as having great hardware inside (1GHz dual core! 1GB RAM!) but then contemporary platforms start coming out with similar specs (Xoom has similar specs, iPad has half the RAM).
I'm sure a number of people have been pressing for OS6 upgrades just so they could make the Playbook useful.
(My dad really wants one so he doesn't have to look at the tiny screen. Alas, his BB only runs OS4.2, and his IT department has informed him new BBs will also run 4.2. He's got a better chance with an iPad and webmail (or ActiveSync) than a Playbook.)
Do remember these devices are built extremely cheaply. Get them hot, or their power goes out of spec, and they go flaky. It could be overheating, or it could be the wallwart's dying, both of which are equally likely.
After all, Linksys/Cisco isn't willing to spend the few pennies for a reverse polarity diode, who knows what else they skimped on.
The bigger issue though is the WRT54GL doesn't have enough oomph to push data terribly fast. If you're on a 5/1Mbps connection it's fine, but if you're starting to push 20Mbps+ through it, you're reaching its limits and it can be holding you back from the speed you can get.
No, what happened was the Linux guys took the BSD'd code (not a problem - the BSD was designed for this), then locked it up with the GPL (they even had the gall to replace the BSD license with the GPL in the header files).
The end result is because of this, all changes to the Linux drivers cannot be incorporated back into BSD because those changes are GPL'd which are incompatible with BSD. Had they kept the drivers as BSD rather than relicensing it, then it wouldn't be much of an issue.
It's especially annoying because the product is still open-source and the people who took the code (perfectly legally) ensured that changes couldn't go upstream. So now we have two opensource projects, one of which cannot accept changes back into its tree.
That's what ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organization) is for. It's something they can mandate the minimums for. The countries participating in ICAO have to pass laws that implement it, and can easily demand that aircraft flying through their airspace must follow all ICAO rules.
Flags of convenience aren't a huge thing for aircraft as they are for boats. Most American airlines, for example, will have standard N-numbers assigned to them, as would most airlines of the world would tend to have their aircraft callsigns from their base location. (ICAO hands out the country groupings, e.g, C-Fxxx and C-Gxxx are Canadian aircraft).
SOX compliance.
Xcode4 contains so many new significant features and changes that if Apple gave it for free, they'd have to restate their revenue numbers (because they've already recognized the "revenue" for Xcode 3.x in the cost of a Snow Leopard).
XCode 3.x is still free because there's no new features.
Apple's recognizes revenue for most of their products at the time of purchase. For the iPhone, they split it over 2 years. Microsoft recognizes revenue for all their sales over 3 years or so.
Actually, this only affects BIS users. BES uesrs have a Blackberry-BES shared key and remain private. So even though BES sends all data to RIM's network, RIM can't get access to your emails, and never could. (No company would use it if RIM ended up getting access to all their private emails, and would put RIM in a position to blackmail them AND their competitors).
But BIS users though, were pretty screwed.
It's partly why the Android model isn't that great, either. It's good to enumerate and require the services presented, but after using it a little while, its deficiencies start showing.
1) If the app demands extra data not in the APK, it means it needs external storage permissions and internet access. (I kinda miss the iOS method where you download it all self-contained, sans DLC of course, but getting a 200MB file and it has everything).
2) Users don't read dialogs. As tech people we should know this. Even if it's a highly inofrmative dialog like "Could not write file - the disk is full. Please delete something and try again" the user will still ask for support even though they're able to solve the problem themselves.
3) Dialogs get in the way. As part of 2, they'll make a beeline for whatever gets them to their goal the fastest. If your app really wants to do something bad, I suggest not enumerating just the permissions you need, but every permission you can request. Somewhere between the third and forth permission item they'll just get bored and scroll and tap "install". It's human nature.
4) If the user likes apps, they'll probably just blindly click Install anyways without bothering with permissions. After all, that dialog is just another step during app install People just get very mechanical and do things from muscle memory.
5) Users want to get things done. Installing/deleting/maintenance tasks are chores and get in the way of getting things done. If they want the app, anything you throw in the way just annoys and they'll dismiss it without reading.
It's the reason why few people read EULAs (see 3 and 4), people get called over to handle some stupid task request (2) and the like.
It's an annoying reality of the world and it really makes things like alerts/popups/etc. utterly worthless and makes it difficult to impossible to design things to get the user informed. iOS's notification system is broken in that way (it pops up and screws up your current task). Doing a deny-by-default just ends up with users getting frustrated when the app constantly complains it needs access to something, etc (see Vista) - devs just make it so anything useful is blocked until some permission is granted (even if that permission is orthogonal to pupose - e.g., request access to SMS while connecting to a server).
Hell, I thought the Android system was cool, and miles better than the iOS method. Then I realized that half the time I'm tapping Install without looking over the permissions either.
Actually, that's the whole point of doing things "in the cloud" versus just using a webhost or a colo facility. At the latter you provisoin your machine as how you think it'll be used and manage it as you would any other piece of IT equipment locally. If it dies, you go down and replace it. If you get hit by a link from /., your server gets slow. If its the holidays your server crashes, etc. You could overprovision your services by buying extra servers to handle the overflow, but then you're paying lots of extra money to handle the few instances when you get heavy traffic. Since you're leasing hardware and/or physical space, you're paying for that all the time. Depending on their size, provisioning extra services can take hours or days.
Whereas, had it been "in the cloud" at Amazon or something, if your website gets slow because someone discovered your product and posted it on /. or did the social networking thing, you can spin up a new instance immediately (for just a few more dollars) and rake in the cash. At the end of the week when traffic drops off, you destroy the new instance and pay just for the computation you used. Should the datacenter suffer a power or network outage, unless you have a spare in another datacenter, you're hosed.
And yes, the cloud should make things impervious to hardware failure, power outages, network outages, etc. After all, you've decoupled the datacenter from the servers itself. If a physical EC2 box dies, everything should be movied automagically - since you're only dealing with a VM not attached to any particular hardware, it shouldn't matter that your server now isn't hte same one as yesterday. Network and power outages the same - your server should be floating amongst the datacenters that your provider has since you're paying for the CPU cycle, not for the server or physical space.
Alas, what happened here was Amazon wasn't decoupled enough.
Apparently Apple tends to operate like that. Features like Expose came out because someone did it for fun and showed it off to his manager and it somehow trickled up to Jobs who had it implemented officially in the next revision of OS X (10.3 I think at the time).
And don't forget HP was probably one of the first to do so (with the caveat that they get right to first refusal). It's how the Apple 1 started - Woz created it with HP parts, and HP didn't see a future in personal computing, so they let Woz keep it and continue development.