From - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1386337&cid=29585841 - every phone OS has ways to get the phone number, much easier than various little hacks to do so. Android, Symbian, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile. Though to Symbian's credit, you need to do a few tricks (like waiting for a phone call), and Android requires permission.
The interesting question is, how many apps on those platforms already call home? Why is Apple "innovating" in revealing what could be standard practice elsewhere?
AMD actually used to have some of the best fabs in the business. They managed to have good yields and mixed production in the same plant. AMD started using copper before Intel for e.g. That part of the business was spun-off as Global Foundries. But yeah, Intel has the best production research and facilities in the industry. It is just that they don't share their fabs with anyone else.
True, but AMD also had a problem with capacity - they literally had to have good yields because their fabs were often running at full capacity because they were always backordered. I can't remember a time when AMD had excess production capacity. Heck, it was often why AMD's chips were poor overclockers - they got binned at their highest speed they were stable at and sold because demand was such that there was no spare chips.
Also why Apple didn't go AMD - Apple has way too much experience being burned by Motorola and IBM both being unable to supply chips in heavy demand. And AMD would've killed for the Apple contract given the way Apple orders parts. But it would pretty much mean that there would be no AMD chips for anyone else.
Heck, it might've been why Microsoft switched from AMD to Intel for the original Xbox. Production problems caused a very expensive redesign for Microsoft and nVidia (to create an Intel compatible chipset).
Intel's got huge fab capacity, and can oversupply quite easily. In fact, there's so much oversupply that Intel often holds back production of faster chips and waits for AMD to catch up to keep prices up. Also why Intel can do special fab runs for customers (like how all Apple's chips support VT, or the special chip in the MacBook Air, etc).
The only real production problems I remember are the special Pentium 3 1.13GHz processors. Which were basically just overclocked Pentium 3s and Intel was called out on it when systems were crashing.
Thus, if you poll every 30 seconds and get no new messages, you use a quarter of a gigabyte a day of bandwidth just polling. So don't do that in an iPhone app to save on SMS charges.
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day. Seriously. In any mobile application (be it iPhone, Android, WebOS or other), you should not poll, and definitely not every 30 seconds, because you'll eat up battery in no time - the CPU and radios just suck power when you do. It's why Apple has the whole push notification deal - getting notified is far better on the battery than polling.
If GV requires this for SMS, then you as app developer should setup a notification server and do the polling there.
And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out. You can't just send it to the phone, you have to send a wakeup to the phone first then send the packet out. In regular GSM, the control channel is what notifies the radio, and the radio handles all the SMS transfer. In IP based network, it may be pushed off onto the main processor to use its IP stack.
Since psychoacoustic is explicitly mentioned in regard to audio compression tech (like MP3) I think he just invented a term for "I ripped it to MP3"
Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it, turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.
Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.
THIS is the sort of piracy that the RIAA (and member companies) should fight against. THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes. THIS is the sort of copyright violation that the laws were written to combat.
Ironically, those Bluebeat guys are the ones arguing for mandatory DRM and suing all the music stores for using "inadequate DRM". A judge finds a company trying to promote their "unbreakable" DRM for copyright infringement.
Apple deliberately disabled Atom support. Due to bad PR, they reversed their position.
According to this MacRumors article, the developer who complained about lack of Atom support was in Build 10C531 which was a week before Oct 27, when build 10C535 came out which works fine with Atom. The developer who complained about lack of Atom support posted his complaint a day before. We're at 10C540 now - which was released yesterday or today.
So to release the complaint a day before Apple releases a new build? In the few hours it takes to pick it up, Apple would then have to see all the "bad PR" and have time to fix it before the next build? (I suspect most of the "bad PR" happened after 10C535 came out.
At best, it would be they broke Atom support accidentally, at worst, some guy just couldn't update his Hackintosh properly.
Not to mention, there'll be a whole host of XSS crap going on so that sites can grab your login information to Paypal from their website. After all, their site has to include the paypal stuff in it, who's to say that "submit" button isn't "send us and paypal your login"?
If using Paypal, I expect to visit Paypal's site to log in. (There were some XSS used to get the site's inventory into Paypal, but that's a different issue, and it happens before login).
My Paypal information is valuable - I don't want to trust some oddball website with it. I hope there's a "Redirect to Paypal" link I can use instead of this stuff...
You know, maybe it's time to publicize the issue as much as possible. The easiest way is to do it by calling it stuff like "the anti-iPod law". (Let's not get pedantic with law/treaty/etc crap - it serves to divert attention).
There's a lot of things that ACTA makes illegal that common people do daily, so a big publicity campaign can cause people to get agitated. Stuff like singing in the shower (not too farfetched) or humming a tune. Recording a TV show to watch later. Ripping a CD for your iPod.
First we should call it something catchy. "The Anti-iPod Law" is pretty good since practically everyone knows what an iPod is and what it does. Then alert them to everyday activities that would be banned, or they can be sued for doing. Public doesn't care about RIAA suing filesharers. They do care if the RIAA starts suing people for ripping CDs to their iPods, though. Or if the MPAA sues people for recording that movie off of TV onto their VCR/DVR. Or singing in the workplace (sure it happend in the UK, but it isn't a big stretch in the UK). How about having your iPod searched at the border? They keep saying they won't force iPods to be searched, but there's no guarantee.
Start campaigning on how it will impact the common people. Pro-ACTA will have to campaign how it will benefit people, but that can be turned around quite easily ("poor starving hollywood actors need more money to pay for their gold faucets" and the like).
Heck, I've seen newspapers publish about the "Is your iPod illegal?" law.
I seem to remember a year or two ago there was a call for maintainers of the Xbox port - seeing that they want to get away from it (old/obsolete hardware that few people have left, requires use of Xbox SDK that no one has access to now (legally)).
Of course, the ability to run elsewhere (Windows/Mac/Linux/etc) has given it a lot more legitimacy in the world, so I think the Xbox side has been downplayed to be almost non-existent now.
My landlord has keys to my apartment. Does that mean I have no expectation of privacy in my own apartment, just because a third party theoretically has access to it? Even if I haven't given permission for my landlord to enter my apartment?
Yes, outside of what the law and your agreement provide. You'll probably find that your landlord can enter your apartment (and depending on the legals, may have to provide some notice - 24 hours is common, but maybe not) to inspect. Near the end your agreement, your landlor might be able to let anyone into your apartment to show it around, again, possibly with or without notification. And of course, all liability for stolen items falls on you.
And if the police come by, the landlord may let them in without a warrant (though you may demand to see one if you're present at the door). Again, that's up to the agreement and the law.
The target market for this DS is big and growing. Older people (parents, etc) find the current DS line with screens that are too small - now Nintendo sees a huge market for large screens and less agile hands.
Nintendo's no longer just a "kiddy" company - their products are aimed at everyone, particularly non-gamers. Nintendo might not win the console wars, but they'll infiltrate the homes of everyone else.
Also electricity. I don't need a full blown computer running 24/7 just to provide wifi for my laptop.
Noise too. While modern PCs can be quiet, it's still something that hums away with its fans and hard drives spinning. Some people are disturbed greatly by the hum, others need it. But a router makes very little noise (usually a high-pitched squeal from the DC-DC converters).
Also, if your PC breaks/gets infected/whatever, it'll take down your whole network. Now you gotta go and rig up your other computer so you can get on the 'net and download the necessary tools to fix it. A router? No changes, just go over and get the files while you fix.
Whilst mentioning encryption causes people to post that f'ing cartoon with the $5 wrench adnauseum, the fact is, even fairly weak encryption whilst data transits though your ISP goes a long long way.
That's why the spy agencies are against it. The best way to avoid an arms race is to simply avoid raising the stakes so the other side remains blissfully ignorant. If things are good now, not rocking the boat is the best solution.
For example, a certain bone-headed ISP which one of my relatives uses, enforces using their outgoing mail server for "anti-spam reasons". Do they log all outgoing emails? You can bet they do. SMTP over SSL raises the bar just high enough that they don't bother any more.
MOst ISPs block outgoing SMTP, for spam reasons. Despite this, an annoyingly large amount of spam still comes from outgoing SMTP connections, enough so that sending email from a dynamic connection is mostly useless anyhow because of the dynamic IP blocklists.
The solution is to either use the ISP's mailserver, or your own mailserver at your hosting provider using stuff like Authenticated SMTP, which, surprise, uses a different port. It's an intentional workaround, because either your mail is going through your ISP (who can detect if you're sending 1000 emails a day 24/7), or your hosting provider (ditto, if the spambot is smart enough to steal your SMTP authetication details). Since all modern email clients support this standard, it's just a setup issue. And Authenticated SMTP can use SSL (to protect login credentials) if you're inclined.
Because long prison terms create nicely-behaved perfect citizens after time served? Got any research material to that effect lying around?
Less that, and more "just put away repeat offenders" so they can't commit anymore crimes. Here (Vancouver, Canada), it's reported that 10% of criminals commit 90% of the offenses (we're talking property crime and such). So it's less rehabilitation, and more lock them up so they can't commit crimes aspect. (Especially since bleeding-heart judges often just let them off with a slap on the wrist, so they'll commit their next robbery or mugging fresh from court - revolving door justice).
If I did not have a 2nd gen GBA SP (the one with the _true_ backlight), I'd have cared.
But forget backwards compatibility for a second. What about the DS games that used the GBA port?
There's only a few games that used the GBA port - oens that used the rumble pak (a handful of games), and Guitar Hero. Most of the others have clever addons to the slot 1 (e.g., the one with the pedometer) cartridge.
Anyhow, it's not like Nintendo's stopped selling the regular DS lite. You can still buy them brand new, enjoy the GBA games you always did, and the few games with rumble pak/guitar hero. It's just a modification of the DS lineup.
That's a ridiculous comparison. FusionIO cards are not anywhere near the same class at the Intel drives. They have a certain purpose and are geared toward a certain market. The Intel SSDs are a completely different beast. You can't very well use a PCI card in a notebook, which is a typical host for SSDs. The Intel SSDs are coming pretty close to maxing out the SATA 2 port, and that's all that matters for consumer-level systems. It's pretty frelling impressive. I, for one, welcome our performance-improving firmware overlords!
Yes you can.
Many netbooks with SSDs don't have a SATA-connected hard drive. Instead, they have an SSD connected to the miniPCIe slot inside. The card pretends to be a standard IDE hard drive (after all, an Intel SSD on a SATA controller is the same thing - the SATA controller sits on the PCIe bus), and BIOS boots from it when it enumerates all the storage controllers and storage devices attached. Linux etc. see it as a standard disk and nothing special, too.
I'm referring to SSDs that connect via miniPCIe via the PCIe interface - there are a bunch that are just thumbdrives and use the USB side of the miniPCIe slot. (Like ExpressCard, miniPCIe has both PCIe x1 and USB 2.0, WWAN cards use the USB side, as do card readers and the like).
The reason for stuff like SATA SSDs is because it's familiar to more people - you have a black box with a SATA interface, it must be a hard drive and acts like a hard drive (or it could be optical, but I'm assuming a modicum of intelligence). Plus, it works in cases where you have SATA but not PCIe.
It's all encrypted. You could detect it, but not really "monitor" the activity.
No, but knowing both parties (one end is this thing, which you detect, and the other end is someone using it), it's often "good enough".
Think of it as a pen recorder for the destination - you'll know who's using the service and where it's coming from inside the network. Trace that IP back to an address.
This is assuming that all uses for such a service are "illegal" in China (with the thinking of if it was legal, why use it?). Now you can bounce it through proxies inside China, but then those admins would probably get pressure to identify those using their services...
The obvious solution is to block the IPs to keep it from working. But then another one will pop up and you'll have to block that, lather, rinse, repeat.
No, I'm sure places like China already know about it. Instead of preventing the access, it's probably easier to monitor who's using them when they connect to those addresses. People work around blocks easily enough. But if you let a circumvention tool work, especially one that results in easily tracable activity, why block it? Monitor, find the user, and do some "re-education".
Blocking is an arms race. People will make better blocks and others make better workarounds and it escalates rapidly. But if you keep the current workaround keep working, more people will be using it, making it easy to monitor and track. And evolution won't happen as fast. It'll evolve so the monitoring programs will have to be adjusted, but when it works, the movement to evolve is far lower than if it was blocked and now you have a bunch of people trying to find a way to evade it.
Our game, Roadkill Cafe, went on sale in July. Great reviews and terrible sales. At $2 the reviews said that the game was a bargain. People still didn't buy it. We lowered the price to a dollar, and still the sales sucked. In the meantime at least 1500 pirates downloaded it the weekend the crack came out.
Problem is, I never heard of your game until now. You see, there are what, 80,000 apps in the App Store? ANd tons more coming out daily? You'll probably stay in the "newest 100 apps" list for maybe a day or so, and you'll be off AppShopper's lists within hours. So you may have the game that beats all games, but you have to rise above the noise to be noticed.
However, with your pirated version of the game, guess what? Your app probably stays on the front page of the cracker's webpage for days, or easily on the aggregator's list.
So basically everyone can find your pirated app way quicker than on the iTunes store because while iTunes may have dozens of new apps (and hundreds of updates) daily, the number of pirated apps introduced daily is far lower. Maybe that's why pirated apps seem so big - an app's spotlight in the iTunes store is minutes. For a pirated version, it can be hours and days. Marketing is important, and word of mouth only gets you so far.
And I don't buy the "pirated apps are easier than iTunes" argument. By default, when you buy an app on iTunes, you click a few times, and boom, it's downloaded and set to sync. With a pirated app, you ahve to find it on the site, download (usually from a filehost, or bittorrent), double-click to get it recognized in iTunes, then sync. It's easy, but a lot more steps, especially if you have to involve bittorrent, or one of the free filesharing sites and have to do the CAPTCHA thing.
Oh yeah, and half the cracked apps aren't cracked at all - the uploader just uploaded the un-cracked IPA, to which anyone can view the would-be cracker's apple ID. Or they miss the "self-aware" checks.
According to TechCrunch, it's a music search with the option to do limited streaming. So you can search for music, preview them, then either use those services to buy or use iTunes/Amazon to buy it.
A device driver is a loadable module that gets inserted into the kernel and provides an interface to a specific piece of hardware... It's been a while since I've owned an iPod -- the most recent one I had was a 4th Generation 20 gigger, but I'm fairly sure at least back then iPods didn't require unique drivers. They went through the standard USB Mass Storage driver.
Unfortunately, the iPod Touch and iPhone require a USB driver because Mass Storage means you can't do a lot of things while it's still attached to a PC (like say, use them). Thus they don't emulate mass storage at all.
Of course, Apple could've used CDC Ethernet, making iTunes syncing over WiFi a reality (since CDC Ethernet emulates a network connection). But I suspect the reason is, XP onwards only supports RNDIS (which you can simulate via CDC Ethernet) by default, while Linux/MacOS X support CDC Ethernet. The problem is, OS X misidentifies RNDIS devices as dialup CDC devices, and you get into the whole "Mac/Windows" format thing again.
This device appears to be superior to the Kindle in every way. I told my friend just now, "hey, I know you're interested in the Kindle, but you should wait for the Nook!" I explained how it was better. His only question was "Cool, but can it get the Wall Street Journal like the Kindle?" I checked. It's not on BN's ebook site. Fail. Content is still king.
And this is a situation that can never be resolved for as long as B&N is selling eBooks?
I'm sure right now B&N really doesn't have a compelling reason to offer the WSJ. Doesn't mean they won't offer it when the product is released. After all, of all the devices right now that support the B&N ebooks (iPhone, Blackberry, WinMo(?), Symbian), I'm sure they can't uh, access the WSJ via some other method (say, the built-in web browsers). But once this is released, then the WSJ may very well be a subscription option since you can't use nook to read the online version. (Or so it appears).
Apple had one computer with one operating system (the mac) vs one operating system (MS-DOS and later Windows) running on hundreds of different clones.
Eventually, the clones competed fiercely on price and features and ate away most of the market share. This happens even as apple had an arguably better product.
Is it a war that Apple wants to win? The iPhone doesn't hold a candle to the Blackberries or the Nokias in sales, and I suppose we oculd wipe out its millions sold as a rounding error compared to the total unit sales of cellphones. This applies to everything else as well that Apple does (excluding the iPods, which was more a case of good timing).
Take Mac hardware sales and the iPhone - they're big numbers, but tiny overall compared to the entire market. However, Apple's in a place they want to be - they make loads of money where they are - while everyone's competing in the sub-$1000 area (have you seen the crap they push for it? Pentium CPUs, screens sub-1024x768 on a 15"...), leaving Apple to mop up the >$1000 area, where all the decent machines live. Ditto with the iPhone - be like Nokia and sell a billion phones a month, or, sell millions, but reap up 40% of the profits of the sector.
(I exclude the iPod simply because it's a case of timing - Apple came out with a decent product at the time just before exponential growth - lots of space (though less than a Nomad), small compact form factor (pocketable, unlike a Nomad), and best of all - fast transfers (USB1.1 vs Firewire - no competition). But that's a rarity in the world - Apple was lucky. They had Toshiba wondering what to do with the new little hard drive they invented, and saw a potential there.)
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From - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1386337&cid=29585841 - every phone OS has ways to get the phone number, much easier than various little hacks to do so. Android, Symbian, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile. Though to Symbian's credit, you need to do a few tricks (like waiting for a phone call), and Android requires permission.
The interesting question is, how many apps on those platforms already call home? Why is Apple "innovating" in revealing what could be standard practice elsewhere?
It's not that swank. Just a hardware encoder and decoder, and an FPGA that offloads a lot of it.
But 60MHz isn't terribly slow when you realize the Series 1 is 10+ year old hardware. PCs weren't a lot faster, but they were a lot more expensive.
True, but AMD also had a problem with capacity - they literally had to have good yields because their fabs were often running at full capacity because they were always backordered. I can't remember a time when AMD had excess production capacity. Heck, it was often why AMD's chips were poor overclockers - they got binned at their highest speed they were stable at and sold because demand was such that there was no spare chips.
Also why Apple didn't go AMD - Apple has way too much experience being burned by Motorola and IBM both being unable to supply chips in heavy demand. And AMD would've killed for the Apple contract given the way Apple orders parts. But it would pretty much mean that there would be no AMD chips for anyone else.
Heck, it might've been why Microsoft switched from AMD to Intel for the original Xbox. Production problems caused a very expensive redesign for Microsoft and nVidia (to create an Intel compatible chipset).
Intel's got huge fab capacity, and can oversupply quite easily. In fact, there's so much oversupply that Intel often holds back production of faster chips and waits for AMD to catch up to keep prices up. Also why Intel can do special fab runs for customers (like how all Apple's chips support VT, or the special chip in the MacBook Air, etc).
The only real production problems I remember are the special Pentium 3 1.13GHz processors. Which were basically just overclocked Pentium 3s and Intel was called out on it when systems were crashing.
And if you poll, you'll consume so much battery that the iPhone won't make it through a working day. Seriously. In any mobile application (be it iPhone, Android, WebOS or other), you should not poll, and definitely not every 30 seconds, because you'll eat up battery in no time - the CPU and radios just suck power when you do. It's why Apple has the whole push notification deal - getting notified is far better on the battery than polling.
If GV requires this for SMS, then you as app developer should setup a notification server and do the polling there.
And SMS does require special handling since the target may not be awake when you need to push it out. You can't just send it to the phone, you have to send a wakeup to the phone first then send the packet out. In regular GSM, the control channel is what notifies the radio, and the radio handles all the SMS transfer. In IP based network, it may be pushed off onto the main processor to use its IP stack.
Actually, the Bluebeat guys did something a bit more tricky. They compressed the music as MP3 (whch I guess is psychoacoustic simulation - after all, the MP3 was compressed by using psychoacoustic principles to reduce the data contained, producing a simulation of the original). But the trick they're using to get around copyright law was to embed images into it, turning it into an "audio-visual" work. There is a separation, because AV works (think movies) are one entity - you cannot copyright the sound part of a movie separately from the moving images part.
Of course, that defense must fail, otherwise Hollywood would be using music with aplomb instead of having to get licenses to it when they incorporate it into a movie or TV show. Many older programs are tied up from home viewing because licenses don't allow home video distribution, and are often edited to replace licensed works.
Ironically, those Bluebeat guys are the ones arguing for mandatory DRM and suing all the music stores for using "inadequate DRM". A judge finds a company trying to promote their "unbreakable" DRM for copyright infringement.
According to this MacRumors article, the developer who complained about lack of Atom support was in Build 10C531 which was a week before Oct 27, when build 10C535 came out which works fine with Atom. The developer who complained about lack of Atom support posted his complaint a day before. We're at 10C540 now - which was released yesterday or today.
So to release the complaint a day before Apple releases a new build? In the few hours it takes to pick it up, Apple would then have to see all the "bad PR" and have time to fix it before the next build? (I suspect most of the "bad PR" happened after 10C535 came out.
At best, it would be they broke Atom support accidentally, at worst, some guy just couldn't update his Hackintosh properly.
Not to mention, there'll be a whole host of XSS crap going on so that sites can grab your login information to Paypal from their website. After all, their site has to include the paypal stuff in it, who's to say that "submit" button isn't "send us and paypal your login"?
If using Paypal, I expect to visit Paypal's site to log in. (There were some XSS used to get the site's inventory into Paypal, but that's a different issue, and it happens before login).
My Paypal information is valuable - I don't want to trust some oddball website with it. I hope there's a "Redirect to Paypal" link I can use instead of this stuff...
You know, maybe it's time to publicize the issue as much as possible. The easiest way is to do it by calling it stuff like "the anti-iPod law". (Let's not get pedantic with law/treaty/etc crap - it serves to divert attention).
There's a lot of things that ACTA makes illegal that common people do daily, so a big publicity campaign can cause people to get agitated. Stuff like singing in the shower (not too farfetched) or humming a tune. Recording a TV show to watch later. Ripping a CD for your iPod.
First we should call it something catchy. "The Anti-iPod Law" is pretty good since practically everyone knows what an iPod is and what it does. Then alert them to everyday activities that would be banned, or they can be sued for doing. Public doesn't care about RIAA suing filesharers. They do care if the RIAA starts suing people for ripping CDs to their iPods, though. Or if the MPAA sues people for recording that movie off of TV onto their VCR/DVR. Or singing in the workplace (sure it happend in the UK, but it isn't a big stretch in the UK). How about having your iPod searched at the border? They keep saying they won't force iPods to be searched, but there's no guarantee.
Start campaigning on how it will impact the common people. Pro-ACTA will have to campaign how it will benefit people, but that can be turned around quite easily ("poor starving hollywood actors need more money to pay for their gold faucets" and the like).
Heck, I've seen newspapers publish about the "Is your iPod illegal?" law.
I seem to remember a year or two ago there was a call for maintainers of the Xbox port - seeing that they want to get away from it (old/obsolete hardware that few people have left, requires use of Xbox SDK that no one has access to now (legally)).
Of course, the ability to run elsewhere (Windows/Mac/Linux/etc) has given it a lot more legitimacy in the world, so I think the Xbox side has been downplayed to be almost non-existent now.
Yes, outside of what the law and your agreement provide. You'll probably find that your landlord can enter your apartment (and depending on the legals, may have to provide some notice - 24 hours is common, but maybe not) to inspect. Near the end your agreement, your landlor might be able to let anyone into your apartment to show it around, again, possibly with or without notification. And of course, all liability for stolen items falls on you.
And if the police come by, the landlord may let them in without a warrant (though you may demand to see one if you're present at the door). Again, that's up to the agreement and the law.
You jest, but that's exactly right.
The target market for this DS is big and growing. Older people (parents, etc) find the current DS line with screens that are too small - now Nintendo sees a huge market for large screens and less agile hands.
Nintendo's no longer just a "kiddy" company - their products are aimed at everyone, particularly non-gamers. Nintendo might not win the console wars, but they'll infiltrate the homes of everyone else.
Yep, and it also updates the adware on your laptop.
(This hit me too - I updated the software on my T60 and up pops some Lenovo ads)
Noise too. While modern PCs can be quiet, it's still something that hums away with its fans and hard drives spinning. Some people are disturbed greatly by the hum, others need it. But a router makes very little noise (usually a high-pitched squeal from the DC-DC converters).
Also, if your PC breaks/gets infected/whatever, it'll take down your whole network. Now you gotta go and rig up your other computer so you can get on the 'net and download the necessary tools to fix it. A router? No changes, just go over and get the files while you fix.
That's why the spy agencies are against it. The best way to avoid an arms race is to simply avoid raising the stakes so the other side remains blissfully ignorant. If things are good now, not rocking the boat is the best solution.
MOst ISPs block outgoing SMTP, for spam reasons. Despite this, an annoyingly large amount of spam still comes from outgoing SMTP connections, enough so that sending email from a dynamic connection is mostly useless anyhow because of the dynamic IP blocklists.
The solution is to either use the ISP's mailserver, or your own mailserver at your hosting provider using stuff like Authenticated SMTP, which, surprise, uses a different port. It's an intentional workaround, because either your mail is going through your ISP (who can detect if you're sending 1000 emails a day 24/7), or your hosting provider (ditto, if the spambot is smart enough to steal your SMTP authetication details). Since all modern email clients support this standard, it's just a setup issue. And Authenticated SMTP can use SSL (to protect login credentials) if you're inclined.
Less that, and more "just put away repeat offenders" so they can't commit anymore crimes. Here (Vancouver, Canada), it's reported that 10% of criminals commit 90% of the offenses (we're talking property crime and such). So it's less rehabilitation, and more lock them up so they can't commit crimes aspect. (Especially since bleeding-heart judges often just let them off with a slap on the wrist, so they'll commit their next robbery or mugging fresh from court - revolving door justice).
Of course, this should be more than 3 offenses...
There's only a few games that used the GBA port - oens that used the rumble pak (a handful of games), and Guitar Hero. Most of the others have clever addons to the slot 1 (e.g., the one with the pedometer) cartridge.
Anyhow, it's not like Nintendo's stopped selling the regular DS lite. You can still buy them brand new, enjoy the GBA games you always did, and the few games with rumble pak/guitar hero. It's just a modification of the DS lineup.
Yes you can.
Many netbooks with SSDs don't have a SATA-connected hard drive. Instead, they have an SSD connected to the miniPCIe slot inside. The card pretends to be a standard IDE hard drive (after all, an Intel SSD on a SATA controller is the same thing - the SATA controller sits on the PCIe bus), and BIOS boots from it when it enumerates all the storage controllers and storage devices attached. Linux etc. see it as a standard disk and nothing special, too.
I'm referring to SSDs that connect via miniPCIe via the PCIe interface - there are a bunch that are just thumbdrives and use the USB side of the miniPCIe slot. (Like ExpressCard, miniPCIe has both PCIe x1 and USB 2.0, WWAN cards use the USB side, as do card readers and the like).
The reason for stuff like SATA SSDs is because it's familiar to more people - you have a black box with a SATA interface, it must be a hard drive and acts like a hard drive (or it could be optical, but I'm assuming a modicum of intelligence). Plus, it works in cases where you have SATA but not PCIe.
No, but knowing both parties (one end is this thing, which you detect, and the other end is someone using it), it's often "good enough".
Think of it as a pen recorder for the destination - you'll know who's using the service and where it's coming from inside the network. Trace that IP back to an address.
This is assuming that all uses for such a service are "illegal" in China (with the thinking of if it was legal, why use it?). Now you can bounce it through proxies inside China, but then those admins would probably get pressure to identify those using their services...
The obvious solution is to block the IPs to keep it from working. But then another one will pop up and you'll have to block that, lather, rinse, repeat.
No, I'm sure places like China already know about it. Instead of preventing the access, it's probably easier to monitor who's using them when they connect to those addresses. People work around blocks easily enough. But if you let a circumvention tool work, especially one that results in easily tracable activity, why block it? Monitor, find the user, and do some "re-education".
Blocking is an arms race. People will make better blocks and others make better workarounds and it escalates rapidly. But if you keep the current workaround keep working, more people will be using it, making it easy to monitor and track. And evolution won't happen as fast. It'll evolve so the monitoring programs will have to be adjusted, but when it works, the movement to evolve is far lower than if it was blocked and now you have a bunch of people trying to find a way to evade it.
Problem is, I never heard of your game until now. You see, there are what, 80,000 apps in the App Store? ANd tons more coming out daily? You'll probably stay in the "newest 100 apps" list for maybe a day or so, and you'll be off AppShopper's lists within hours. So you may have the game that beats all games, but you have to rise above the noise to be noticed.
However, with your pirated version of the game, guess what? Your app probably stays on the front page of the cracker's webpage for days, or easily on the aggregator's list.
So basically everyone can find your pirated app way quicker than on the iTunes store because while iTunes may have dozens of new apps (and hundreds of updates) daily, the number of pirated apps introduced daily is far lower. Maybe that's why pirated apps seem so big - an app's spotlight in the iTunes store is minutes. For a pirated version, it can be hours and days. Marketing is important, and word of mouth only gets you so far.
And I don't buy the "pirated apps are easier than iTunes" argument. By default, when you buy an app on iTunes, you click a few times, and boom, it's downloaded and set to sync. With a pirated app, you ahve to find it on the site, download (usually from a filehost, or bittorrent), double-click to get it recognized in iTunes, then sync. It's easy, but a lot more steps, especially if you have to involve bittorrent, or one of the free filesharing sites and have to do the CAPTCHA thing.
Oh yeah, and half the cracked apps aren't cracked at all - the uploader just uploaded the un-cracked IPA, to which anyone can view the would-be cracker's apple ID. Or they miss the "self-aware" checks.
According to TechCrunch, it's a music search with the option to do limited streaming. So you can search for music, preview them, then either use those services to buy or use iTunes/Amazon to buy it.
Unfortunately, the iPod Touch and iPhone require a USB driver because Mass Storage means you can't do a lot of things while it's still attached to a PC (like say, use them). Thus they don't emulate mass storage at all.
Of course, Apple could've used CDC Ethernet, making iTunes syncing over WiFi a reality (since CDC Ethernet emulates a network connection). But I suspect the reason is, XP onwards only supports RNDIS (which you can simulate via CDC Ethernet) by default, while Linux/MacOS X support CDC Ethernet. The problem is, OS X misidentifies RNDIS devices as dialup CDC devices, and you get into the whole "Mac/Windows" format thing again.
And this is a situation that can never be resolved for as long as B&N is selling eBooks?
I'm sure right now B&N really doesn't have a compelling reason to offer the WSJ. Doesn't mean they won't offer it when the product is released. After all, of all the devices right now that support the B&N ebooks (iPhone, Blackberry, WinMo(?), Symbian), I'm sure they can't uh, access the WSJ via some other method (say, the built-in web browsers). But once this is released, then the WSJ may very well be a subscription option since you can't use nook to read the online version. (Or so it appears).
Is it a war that Apple wants to win? The iPhone doesn't hold a candle to the Blackberries or the Nokias in sales, and I suppose we oculd wipe out its millions sold as a rounding error compared to the total unit sales of cellphones. This applies to everything else as well that Apple does (excluding the iPods, which was more a case of good timing).
Take Mac hardware sales and the iPhone - they're big numbers, but tiny overall compared to the entire market. However, Apple's in a place they want to be - they make loads of money where they are - while everyone's competing in the sub-$1000 area (have you seen the crap they push for it? Pentium CPUs, screens sub-1024x768 on a 15"...), leaving Apple to mop up the >$1000 area, where all the decent machines live. Ditto with the iPhone - be like Nokia and sell a billion phones a month, or, sell millions, but reap up 40% of the profits of the sector.
(I exclude the iPod simply because it's a case of timing - Apple came out with a decent product at the time just before exponential growth - lots of space (though less than a Nomad), small compact form factor (pocketable, unlike a Nomad), and best of all - fast transfers (USB1.1 vs Firewire - no competition). But that's a rarity in the world - Apple was lucky. They had Toshiba wondering what to do with the new little hard drive they invented, and saw a potential there.)