The suggestion by earlier posters that phones should contain customer replaceable batteries might mitigate what I have suggested happened. The design of the batteries I've seen for phones with replaceable batteries (like my wife's Samsung Galaxy S4) were contained in substantial metal cases to be placed in a cavity in the phone protected from internal phone components. Maybe the phones would the somewhat thicker. So what? Flag as Inappropriate
Hah. It just appears so.
A battery is in a plastic frame, and wrapped with a sticker to enclose everything. This gives maximum battery volume for a given dimension. The only reason there's a frame is to give some rigidity to the battery connector so a simple bump won't cause your phone to reboot. But outside of that, when you squeeze on the two big flat surfaces, you're really squeezing the battery itself through a sticker.
Same in the compartment - the chassis has the hole, but what you're really lying against is a flat sticker applied to the circuit board so the battery won't short out the phone. Occasionally it isn't even that - it's just solder mask, though usually you have to put the compliance sticker somewhere so you put it in the compartment.
External batteries only have rigidity through the external frame that keeps the contacts mated with the compartment. The only amount of extra protetion is a couple of stickers.
And oddly social etiquette had suddenly changed just in the past few years so people aren't insulted when others do this frequently. If you were having a conversation with someone and they suddenly pulled out a book and started reading while you were trying to talk to them, you would likely be annoyed. But when someone pulls out a phone these days, we are increasingly accepting that they must be doing something important (e.g., responding to a critical message) and also can " multitask" (hint -- that doesn't really work well). But they might just be checking Facebook or whatever.
You got it reversed. Pulling out your smartphone in the middle of a social time with others is considered to be very unacceptable these days, compared with a few years ago where burying your noses in your phone besides your friends was considered OK.
It's why there are recent phenomenon like putting your phones on the table and the first person to reach for it pays the entire table, to putting your phone under your glass of beverage, to just putting it away completely.
What IS acceptable is to see a notification then to quickly glance at it and put your phone away. So if your phone rings, and it's unimportant, you see that and silence it. If it's an emergency, then you excuse yourself from the group and take the call away from your friends. If it's a text, you can read it, but not reply, and you can't look at it when the screen turns off. Just glances. And no, checking frequency is not allowed - if you need to, put it on the table and let everyone see.
But what's curious, is that iOS has absolutely allowed full-on "Sideloading" for a couple of YEARS now, (in fact, there is a Mac/Windows Application called "Cydia Impactor" that doesn't require Jailbreaking, nor a Mac with XCode) and yet, other than that old Bootleg iLife installation (IIRC, that happened long BEFORE the legit Sideloading), you don't hear about the Exploit du Jour with iOS like you do with Android. Why? Surely there are enough people taking advantage of that "Freedom" that there would have been at least SOME exploits by now. But the only one that comes to mind is that short-lived tainted version of XCode that circulated in China a couple of years ago. And that was actually OS X being Trojaned, not iOS, per se. The difference being that OS X (macOS) has always allowed Applications from anywhere (plus it's not iOS); so that doesn't "count".
So, what is fundamentally different between the two platforms that would cause this huge difference? Not marketshare: There are PLENTY of iOS devices (and their typically higher-income owners) to make it worthwhile, especially in the identity-theft arena. Not user-IQ: No matter the platform, there's a Seeker born every minute. So what? Did Apple (who most Slashdotters think are all about "restricting access") actually figure out how to allow full-on Sideloading in a SAFE manner, or is iOS somehow immune-by-design to Trojans (really, how could that be?), or what?
I am not trolling. It's a serious question. Does anyone with deep insight into BOTH platforms know why the ability to Sideload Apps hasn't caused rampant malware on iOS like it undeniably has on Android?
iOS jails applications. That's why breaking out is called "jailbreaking".
Every app runs in a sandbox that's really limited in what it can do - if Apple hasn't blessed it and you can't find a private API to do it, you can't do it.
That's why certain apps are just not possible on iOS by default - Apple doesn't provide an API to do it. iOS also limits what can be done - apps can share very little except through very narrow pathways (they can hand off complete files, so Safari can hand off a PDF to a PDF viewer, but once it does, it loses all access to it), and a few other pathways including ad blocking, It's also why multitasking is limited to certain conditions and scenarios.
In Android, an app pretty much has full access to the system, within the permissions it requests. The only protections is via the permissions system. For Apple, the APIs themselves enforce protections - if you try to access the contacts list, the API will pop up the model dialog. Ditto with location services, photos (which can be a way to get location), make a phone call (the dialer will pop up) and text messages.
When you sideload on iOS, all you're doing is installing an app. That app has the same restrictions regular apps do.
Jailbreaking is a technique on iOS meant to break out of the app jail, and thus allow any application to be installed. Like firewall applications, apps that re-skin the interface etc. Jailbroken apps have full access to the system and in this case you really don't have any app protections. It's the reason why jailbroken iPhones are a security risk because even regular apps can access stuff they shouldn't.
1. To be able to replace the battery if it turns out that the battery is defective and prone to catching fire. If Note 7 had a replaceable battery, Samsung could have told the buyers to just bring the battery to the recycling center etc instead of shipping the entire phone in a flame proof box. 2. To protect the battery from the other phone components.
Wow, so you know more about the fires than Samsung?
Newsflash - the first part of the recalls were PROBABLY caused by faulty Samsung made batteries. So Samsung simply replaced them with phones made with the other source of batteries. Guess what? Those phones caught on fire too. Chances are, the phone circuity has a fault in it.as well, requiring a recall of the phone anyways.
Your second point is only as good as a layer of plastic. The phone battery compartment consists of a plastic sticker that serves to insulate the bottom of the bare circuit board from the battery. The battery itself consists of a frame made of plastic, a battery and a sticker around the entire thing to enclose it. So your phone components really get only another sticker's worth of isolation. When people talk about the volume savings, the plastic frame around the battery is where most if it goes and its there basically to provide a support structure so the contacts can well, make contact. As the battery size inside varies a little bit, the frame ensures the battery remains the same size to fit in the compartment.
It's strange that the news is almost entirely about the release of the remarks and, at least in linked article, no mention of what those remarks are. Could it be that the remarks aren't actually interesting or even newsworthy?
More the likely. Also look at the day it's released - I mean, it wasn't released on a day known for big news. Similar to the Friday Afternoon Dump, you release on these days when it's really bad for you, the releaser.
These leaks themselves aren't terribly interesting. So the only thing Wikileaks is cashing in on is goodwill based on earlier leaks that news of leaks is news itself.
And if you're curious, it's likely a political play by Assange - apparently Ecuador is going to have a presidential election and the current president, Rafael Correa, is not running for another term. This scares Assange because it could easily mean the end to his asylum, and if he's handed over to the US, he'd rather be under a president Trump than Clinton. Perhaps hoping he'd at least get a pardon or something out of it. That's the political play, at least
Or simply consider pirating it has its own issues. Because piracy is so popular, a common tactic for many is to bundle malware with it. Toss in some latest variant of cryptolocker, etc, or other thing and there you go.
Its bad enough that pirating the software is really just an invitation to let all sorts of viruses and trojans and other things in as well. A popular tactic is to use keygens and cracks to actually transport the payload - the original executable can be signed and if you patch that, or wrap it, you lose that signature. But no one questions the keygen so you can wrap that and while it generates the keys, it also installs the malware.
And no, you can't trust release group copies because anyone can take a clean version, wrap that in a malware downloader and then upload that.
This shouldn't be surprising, actually. The market for stolen iPhones has taken a serious hit, because of Apple's iTunes account locking policies. You steal my iPhone, I immediately lock you out of it. If I'm feeling particularly adventurous, I might even go to the trouble of tracking you down, maybe even with a police officer in tow. "Your" stolen device is not only now a brick... it's also a liability. Would-be thieves know this; they'll get at most a few hours of use out of any iPhone that they steal, and likely only a few minutes, if they set off alarms as they're stealing it from a store -- and worst case scenario, (for the thief, that is) they're also much more likely to get jail time for their crime.
It's even worse. The version of iOS those floor phones run is NOT stock. It's a custom version that has all the demo apps built into it. As a result, the app store does not work with it (you can browse, you can download, but the apps don't work), it's likely the phone dialer itself doesn't work and many other things. Heck, perhaps the WiFi is also locked to Apple's WiFi
And there's the Activation Lock, which will lock you out if you attempt to reflash it with the official iOS (via DFU mode, since I believe iTunes won't update it normally). So you really have a paperweight at best. Plus, I believe they auto-wipe themselves every night to clean themselves up of the day's usage.
Right, and Foxconn can't add their own signing keys to the devices when they're the ones burning the ROMs that hold them.
Oh...
Wait...
Considering the ROM in question is fixed in the fabs at TSMC or Samsung, it would be really hard to add another key. In addition, that would require the hardware have support for multiple signing keys.
Even if the keys were programmed after the fact, the ROM code would generally just assume the next stage loader code must be signed with a key in a specific location in OTP. And in general, only one key is valid - the boot ROM has only so much space and having to check additional keys takes up additional logic that may or may not be available.
So Foxconn would need to compromise two facilities, one in Texas (Samsung), one in Taiwan, change the masks ($100K each) that contain the boot ROM code and keys, then load on their compromised firmware.
Oh yeah, and they need to hack Apple so Apple's firmware distributes the modified binaries as well. Apple's ROM code is so sophisticated it can reload the firmware from scratch which would wipe out any of the Foxconn changes. (DFU recovery mode reloads the entire OS).
Class action lawsuits are for punishing the company. The lawyers take most.
Class actions are for doing things as a group where individually, a lawsuit doesn't make sense. Let's say total compensation paid out would've been $200 per person. Are you willing to go to court, spend a day of your time there to get back that $200? Yes, it's small claims, but there are still filing fees (around $40) and your time and effort (and you have to take a day off too). Meanwhile, Sony won't defend themselves and basically waits for the court ordered default judgement. You get your $200 after spending a vacation day, filing fees, parking, etc., while Sony did jack squat and printed the cheque when the verdict came down.
Now imagine how many people would actually do that and you'll find the company effectively gets away with it as $200 is not worth it to spend the whole day in court.
Class actions are thus to punish and to group a bunch of similar court cases together so it becomes far more worthwhile to pursue than individually.
Apple already does; their response is that third-party USB chargers are to blame. Which of course is false, since USB chargers' job is to provide 5VDC (aside from QC which can provide higher voltages at request of the device), that's all; the USB charger will keep supplying 5VDC as long as it is connected. It is the device's job to monitor the battery's voltage and cut off current to the battery pack when the target voltage is reached... and if there is an incoming overvoltage, it's also the device's job to stop accepting power.
This has been an ongoing problem since the iPhone 4, but since Apple is Apple, they get a free pass on it.
You do realize that not all chargers are manufactured alike, right? And they don't always give you 5VDC. In fact, the cheapest of the lot often give a very bad representation of DC, nevermind 5V. In fact, some are so bad, you can get 110VAC/240VAC on the USB because of poor clearances. Indeed, someone was electrocuted because of this.
And no, if it happened to Apple, it would be massive - "batterygate" would join antennagate, and the latter was something only discovered if you really tried at it (and I think even so, it affected more people than the number of exploding iPhones in grand total). Apple's incidences are more random and spread out - while Samsung's really just happened. You'd think if Apple messed up just as bad, that some Android fanboi would be pointing out that the iPhone 7 also has 70-80 causes of it spontaneously combusting by now.
Ironically, Samsung has some of the bset USB chargers around. Problem is, most people are buying the crap $20 chargers that really are safety hazards.
Well, it demonstrates the bandwidth is there for *some* customers. We don't know about the customers who heed warning texts and self-throttle.
I'd be curious to know what percentage of customers who pay overages do so repeatedly (more often than not having them imposed) without doing anything about it, either moving to a higher tier plan or self-limiting their usage.
I can see an argument where it's cheaper to pay an overage 1-2 times per year vs paying for a higher tier you wouldn't consistently need, but it doesn't seem to make much sense people would routinely pay overage costs without doing something to avoid them.
In fact, I would generally expect most consumers to be risk averse and buy into higher tiers they don't need routinely to avoid overages. That was kind of what they did with text messages when it was a case of paying a lot for unlimited texts or buying a small amount and then paying per text when you exceeded your small allocation, even though the math said that unless you went over your allocation by a lot routinely, you were better off paying for small overages than for paying for a high tier you didn't use.
Well, for users, it's extremely easy to upgrade plans. In fact, once you go over, they will usually upsell you on the next higher plan.
I suspect most of the overages are paid by business phones where the usage is not so controllable. I mean, we have users who make so much long distance calls it's in the mid 4 digits, sometimes 5 digits. No plan covers such high usage, and it varies - one month it may be barely $1000, other months it's huge. You also really can't buy a voice plan for such usage - you're bound to go over.
Depending on the job, such usage may be unavoidable.
Thanks for the link. But that doesn't look like a checklist so much as like a PowerPoint slide. Not that it's evil or stupid, but how does one check off items like "Human Machine Interface: Approaches for communicating information to the driver, occupant and other road users"?
It's not a checklist. It's a collection of items that the NHTSA will want to review. Basically it's a list of requirements, but without prescription on how to fulfill them. Instead, they're general guidelines and you enter in how you handled the isssue.
For your example, you'd list of how the HMI of your car is. For the Google car, it wouldn't include a steering wheel because those don't have one. For a more normal car like a Tesla, then you'd include that. You'd also include what sort of indications you're going to tell the driver, and how you want the present the information to the driver.
It may be as simple as a regular car dashboard, or maybe you'll have a monitor showing the current path,current objects detected and other information.
The list is intentionally vague because they don't want to limit your designs, but they want you to think about issues that you may not realize are issues
Software currently sucks, displays have a long way to go yet in terms of at least experiences and games VR isn't just another gimmick with no or marginal value. It isn't an incremental improvement like Color TV, HDTV or 3D TV... In my opinion it is a "game changer" tons of fun and frankly amazing. Until you try VR (smartphones don't count) you won't understand.
Nobody watches 3DTV and says "holy shit" the effect is marginally neat and then you forget about it... everyone who has tried our VR gear is like OMFG and wants one for themselves.
I tried out the Vive. IT was fun for the demo, but at the end of it, I didn't see anything I was so amazed by that I wanted to go out and buy it (and this was when the hardware was readily available - I can go out right now and buy one if I wanted to).
So far, I saw the cost of a new PC and all the gear to go with it, and looked at the demo, and decided the demos weren't so spectacular enough to justify the high cost of it all. And I don't think the Rift is any better in that regard.
And all this despite the heavy push by Valve and others (my Steam is full of VR games, of which at least a couple of them I'm interested in).
But no, the VR may be amazing, but the high cost of entry is basically holding it back. Everyone instead is going for what's affordable - i.e., smartphone VR. Sales figures show the Vive and Rift sales have basically collapsed after a couple of months , and not because people aren't heavily promoting it with demos and all that.
And IMHO, one of the biggest unaddressed problems is glasses. They kinda-sorta work with glasses (the Vive was surprisingly good for me, but sucked for someone else), but at the end of the demo my glasses were starting to fog up which basically limits the max goggle time to a few minutes. Not ideal. Perhaps the second gen models will include a ventilation fan or something.
These are LiPo batteries we're talking about. AFAIK, they're always a single cell, and I don't think they typically contain any circuitry. If they did, they'd have a four-wire connector like lithium ion packs, rather than two. (Or at least all the flat packs I've seen only have the two wires.)
No, you can get LiPo batteries with protection circuits that are just two-wire only. The other two wires are typically a thermistor connection and a one-wire connection to a gas gauge chip or memory chip to hold stuff like serial number, storage capacity, etc. But if you don't need that, two wires is more than sufficient - you can have a thermistor on the board itself, and a gas gauge on the main board works just fine as well.
If even machines come up with measurable differences between work performance of males and females, then I think giving them in average the same amount of money or the same promotions is discrimination. I'm all for giving a woman who performs just as well as a man the same money, but if there are additional risk factors like a pregnancy or when the parent has to raise child, the person usually prioritizes these things over work, so why should work not be allowed to prioritize that person over others who do not raise children or do not drop out for weeks and months out of some work-external reason.
That's been the traditional reason women are paid 80-90% of a man - so it's already priced into existing salary models. If you take into account maternity leave and loss of work experience, it drops down to 60-70% (women lose work experience and re-enter with a lower salary than if they continued working).
The problem was, this also meant a career-first woman who doesn't want to start having children is penalized because it's assumed she'll want to marry, have kids, etc.
Heads are going to roll all around after an event like this one.
Somebody will probably end up writing a book on what went on inside, because I imagine that the internal meetings had some serious drama involved.
I hope there's going to be a post-mortem at some point, because it would be very interesting to find out what went wrong in the end. Rogue manufacturer? Bad quality control? Maybe the phone doing something wrong with charging, as somebody suggested on reddit?
Problem is, it's probably the wrong heads. One of the reasons is it's highly believed the Note 7 release was rushed to beat Apple - release it a month earlier than the iPhone 7 and take a lot of wind out of Apple's event.
So the engineers were probably pushed hard to get it out the door and worked long hours and probably continuously just getting it done. And as you can guess, mistakes were probably made in critical areas just to get it out the door.
Quality control, firmware responsible for charging - these can be easily changed. I think it has to be a serious design error which cannot be repaired without physically altering the case/PCB. Like a chip which gets hot under certain conditions is located too close to the battery, or something similar.
Generally speaking, charging is quite autonomous - there's often no firmware you can change to fix things. Even if it had firmware, it's probably unproogrammable It's possible they used the wrong chip or programmed the mask ROM incorrectly to control charging parameters
I have a theory that after about 1995 when every PC came with a CD drive and most software including the OS came on CD, the quality control went down the toilet. I had a drive that punched tiny holes in disks and itself, but after that it was common to get a drive that only worked a few times and same for the disks. Lowest bidder don't give a shit checkbox manufacturing
Of course, because the floppy became a useless appendage - good only to boot computers and a few other things (like store files on for transport, because CD-Rs were still a bit rare and expensive). But that also meant the price of the drive and disks were limited - people wouldn't pay that much for something of limited usability but still required.
Just think - in 1997 Apple got rid of the floppy disk, and how many howls of protest there were over it. The drive was basically useless and the real reasons people kept it around was legacy. (Around this time there was also talk of legacy-free PCs, but they still needed floppy drives).
And nowadays, a drive is $20. Tell me how much precision mechanical construction you can do for that
This whole thing has been a fiasco. Bad engineering. Bad public relations. Hiding their knowing that there was a problem. Being forced into a recall, and even then, botching the "fix". I am sure there are a number of people now considering if they want a Samsung phone, whether Note 7 or other, now, or ever, to reside in their pocket. This is definitely going to leave a mark.
On the flip side, Apple really appreciates that they decided to torch their sales (literally) right as the iPhone 7 was coming out. Glad Samsung decided to join team Apple.:)
Well, Samsung really wanted to jump the gun on Apple. They knew Apple would be releasing a new phone in September, so they basically wanted to launch their Note 7 flagship a month earlier in Auguet. If nothing more than to capture "impatient" phone buyers with a new shiny well ahead of Apple's annoucnement.
Unfortunately, it appears that Samsung miscalculated the engineering effort and released a product that was half-baked, and half-baked in the worst possible way. Perhaps some South Korean hardware engineer had to work out the power management hardware and software after working long hours finishing something else and overlooked something because he was tired from overworking 180 hours a week just to have the phone ready in August.
It's a worthwhile gamble - if they can jump the gun on Apple, perhaps they could capture a bunch of sales that way, especially since Apple has a nasty habit of actually releasing product within a few weeks of the announcement. Maybe if Apple could just do like what they did the first time around - announce in January and ship in July, which gives Samsung and everyone else time to copy and implement and release? But no, Apple must announce and ship TWO WEEKS LATER.
will Apple also be taking advantage of this moment to hastily shut down the iPhone 6+ "screen death touch" outrage that's brewing?
Considering the iPhone 6+ isn't sold anymore, and its replacement the iPhone 6s+ doesn't have the issue, it's debatable. It's also debatable about how it happens - because if it happened to every phone, then it's serious, but if it happens to a subset, then it's a lot harder to diagnose. (It's suspected to be related to bendgate, where too big phones are stuffed into skinny jean pockets). Of course, given the iPhone6+ is two years old now, well, it's likely people are going to be replacing them as well, stemming the disease.
Let me know if you figure out how to do that with an encrypted SSD drive. You'd essentially need a boot device that was able to reach out to the Internet to get a key to unlock the 2nd stage device. It gets complicated, because then you have to secure THAT.
Or OPAL devices which require an ILO type mechanism because the boot firmware works with the SSD boot code to get a password. The unlock program is stored on the SSD and is run prior to bootup. Inevitably, they require a keyboard and monitor to enter the password at the console before booting. The SSD unlock program is fixed in the SSD firmware and cannot be changed....
We've randomly seen various models of laptops catch fire or explode too, and many of those weren't all that thin, nor would you describe their batteries as "thin" -- especially compared to any smartphone ever manufactured.
Hell, look at the so-called hoverboards. Those things aren't thin, or small. And yet they regularly burst into flame
Samsung had a problem with Samsung-made batteries, so they replaced it with their other supplier. But then they revealed there's a further problem with their battery management circuits. A replaceable battery won't fix this as it's fundamentally part of the phone itself.
As Linus says, the main issue with ARM is not the CPU core but all the other stuff you need to make a computer. On x86 most of it has become standardized, even if the standards are terrible. On ARM manufacturers do their own thing and produce a "board support package" (BSP) that provides semi-standard interfaces to it, but of course it's a pain for an open OS like Linux to deal with and many of them are not interested in providing enough documentation for native drivers to be written.
ARM is kind of a pain in the arse to do low level development for due to the BSP stuff, but on the other hand in the low power/low cost segments x86 isn't even a player. You can get low end ARM parts for less than a Euro. If they were not such a bugger to work with they would be displacing 8 bit parts at a much greater rate, but 8 bit's simplicity keeps it popular.
The thing is, a PC is really just one hardware design. Memory is in one fixed spot in the memory map. I/O is in the same spot (in the IO bus, since it's x86... but even so..).
It's at the point where you could take any x86 based PC and program it because you know where all the components are. If you need to talk to the VGA adapter, well, the framebuffer is always in the same location.
And we have to admit, what we call "x86" really is "IBM PC Compatible" because there were many x86 designs in the early days that were not compatible. We just happened to base our modern PC design off of what is now a 30+ year old PC design. Heck, I think Intel emulates the A20 Gate functionality on the CPU (a design leftover from the move from 8086 to the 80286) - there is a pin that basically states the value of the gate.
Add in the other peripherals that are basically identical like keyboard controllers, DMA controllers (not used anymore), etc, and you have what is effectively just a single hardware platform. It doesn't matter if you have Intel or AMD or nVidia graphics - at a basic level, VGA mode works identically on all of them.
ARM, on the other hand, isn't a monolithic design - it's a CPU core and people attach peripherals to it to meet the design requirements. There is no universal keyboard controller for ARM, because one doesn't exist - some devices have no keyboards and don't need it, others have a full PC keyboard, and yet others still have a basic one able to scan 16 keys in a 4x4 matrix.
The biggest difference is that most x86 designs are not SoC based - so your options aren't as fixed. If you want a different graphics chip, it's usually external, etc. But for ARM, they are SoCs and thus everything is combined to form an almost complete system in a single chip - no CPU, northbridge, IO controller(south bridge), etc type PC design.
And lest we forget, x86 can be incompatible - Intel made a few SoCs that run fine on Linux, but cannot run Windows at all because Windows requires things a certain way, which was not provided. Even today, Intel SoCs often have a "Windows compatibility" block that contains peripherals and other things required for Windows support.
In the end, a PC is like a car - it has 4 wheels, a steering wheel, a transmission, etc, and they all basically drive the same - you need a key, you need to start the engine or activate the card via the ignition (for EVs or hybrids), apply brakes, release the parking brake, shift transmission into reverse, then back out of your spot. Then put the transmission into drive, press down on the accelerator and off you go.
ARM would be more like Caterpillar or Briggs and Stratton - they sell the engine, which forms the core of whatever, but the final vehicle may not be a car. It may have treads instead of tires, use a differential control mechanism, etc. Or the vehicle's movement may not be related to the engine at all
Well, I think the problem is... obviously nothing spectacular is in the dump.
I mean, there's a reason why governments and Wikileaks are releasing stuff on Friday afternoons - it's because it's bad news. This could be report about how government just wasted a few billion dollars on cleaning supplies*, or in Wikileak's case, that there's nothing of real substance there.
It's called a "Friday afternoon dump" and it's done because it's typically too late to hit the evening news, it will show up in Saturday's newspapers (which fewer people read) and gets buried with all the people just wanting to enjoy the weekend.
Think about it for a second - Wikileaks put on a big show last week that everyone was hoping would bring out the smoking gun. When that fizzled, well, the assumption is it doesn't exist. And it makes sense - if there was some really incriminating thing that would be devastating to Clinton, then there will be a big pomp and circumstance party to highlight it. Not just some dump on a late Friday afternoon.
* - Trump's aircraft has to be meticulously cleaned prior to Trump boarding it. Trump will inspect the interior with a white glove and he has been known to fire staff if he finds dust or other dirt in his aircraft. Everything must also be polished to a high luster.
Well they should... or who doesn't remember the "N" SKU for Windows that prevented the instant bundling of Internet Explorer? Microsoft had to develop a separate version of Windows XP, etc. and beyond to meet this standard that stripped out the "preferred" browser that came with Windows in Europe and other regions. This allowed those users to choose and install the browser(/rendering engine) of their preference instead of being defaulted into the browser packaged with their operating system. Why should Apple be given a golden ticket and allowed to skip over such similar legislation? This is not that much different.
Easy. Microsoft was a monopoly that abused their OS monopoly to enter the browser market. The courts forced Microsoft to unbundle the browser because of this.
iOS? At 20%, hardly a monopoly. Apple can't leverage either WebKit on iOS nor iOS itself to distort any market.
Anyhow, browsing engines are hard - especially keeping them sandboxed. iOS and Safari run in a very low privilege state (lower than normal apps) so Safari can use a JIT javascript engine, while normal apps have teo use a slower interpreted engine to prevent sandbox exploits. Then there's battery life itself - given all the crap that can idle in the background chewing up CPU cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if WebKit on IOS has many tweaks to conserve battery life.
I got a bunch of them for about a week straight a few months ago. One time they called me and left a message saying they were from the IRS and I owed money and there was a warrant out for my arrest. They then called me back 10 minutes later stating they were from the Canadian IRS.....really can't believe people fall for this stuff.
Nevermind the publicity. It's been plastered all over the TV about the tax agency scams (in Canada, it's the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA that collects taxes), including interviews with victims and showing the dozens of iTunes cards they buy.
The police continually reiterate it's a scam, the tax agnecy says to give them a call if you're ever unsure (and they do not have the power to just arrest you, especially on small amounts). And that the only form of payment acceptable is money - they do not accept gift cards, stamps, or anything else.
Yet people still fall for it, I wonder what they think about buying dozens of iTunes cards for payment - do they think they have an arrangement with Apple to convert them back to cash?
Not a moron; but from what I have read here and other places, Android users really don't like paying for Apps. So if you're one of the "lucky" ones (not disparaging your talent!), then I honestly say "Good for You! Rock It!!!"
Just because Android users don't like paying for apps doesn't mean you can't make money on Android apps. The #1 way to do so on Android is to rape and pillage the user's information and sell ads. And on Android, this is a perfectly valid and workable business model - probably the recommended business model for Android. You can make more money this way than by selling your app, even.
Then there's the freemium thing as well.
If you're narrowly going to sell apps the traditional way, yes, iOS works great for that. But not on Android where users prefer you sell their information and give away the app.
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Hah. It just appears so.
A battery is in a plastic frame, and wrapped with a sticker to enclose everything. This gives maximum battery volume for a given dimension. The only reason there's a frame is to give some rigidity to the battery connector so a simple bump won't cause your phone to reboot. But outside of that, when you squeeze on the two big flat surfaces, you're really squeezing the battery itself through a sticker.
Same in the compartment - the chassis has the hole, but what you're really lying against is a flat sticker applied to the circuit board so the battery won't short out the phone. Occasionally it isn't even that - it's just solder mask, though usually you have to put the compliance sticker somewhere so you put it in the compartment.
External batteries only have rigidity through the external frame that keeps the contacts mated with the compartment. The only amount of extra protetion is a couple of stickers.
You got it reversed. Pulling out your smartphone in the middle of a social time with others is considered to be very unacceptable these days, compared with a few years ago where burying your noses in your phone besides your friends was considered OK.
It's why there are recent phenomenon like putting your phones on the table and the first person to reach for it pays the entire table, to putting your phone under your glass of beverage, to just putting it away completely.
What IS acceptable is to see a notification then to quickly glance at it and put your phone away. So if your phone rings, and it's unimportant, you see that and silence it. If it's an emergency, then you excuse yourself from the group and take the call away from your friends. If it's a text, you can read it, but not reply, and you can't look at it when the screen turns off. Just glances. And no, checking frequency is not allowed - if you need to, put it on the table and let everyone see.
iOS jails applications. That's why breaking out is called "jailbreaking".
Every app runs in a sandbox that's really limited in what it can do - if Apple hasn't blessed it and you can't find a private API to do it, you can't do it.
That's why certain apps are just not possible on iOS by default - Apple doesn't provide an API to do it. iOS also limits what can be done - apps can share very little except through very narrow pathways (they can hand off complete files, so Safari can hand off a PDF to a PDF viewer, but once it does, it loses all access to it), and a few other pathways including ad blocking, It's also why multitasking is limited to certain conditions and scenarios.
In Android, an app pretty much has full access to the system, within the permissions it requests. The only protections is via the permissions system. For Apple, the APIs themselves enforce protections - if you try to access the contacts list, the API will pop up the model dialog. Ditto with location services, photos (which can be a way to get location), make a phone call (the dialer will pop up) and text messages.
When you sideload on iOS, all you're doing is installing an app. That app has the same restrictions regular apps do.
Jailbreaking is a technique on iOS meant to break out of the app jail, and thus allow any application to be installed. Like firewall applications, apps that re-skin the interface etc. Jailbroken apps have full access to the system and in this case you really don't have any app protections. It's the reason why jailbroken iPhones are a security risk because even regular apps can access stuff they shouldn't.
Wow, so you know more about the fires than Samsung?
Newsflash - the first part of the recalls were PROBABLY caused by faulty Samsung made batteries. So Samsung simply replaced them with phones made with the other source of batteries. Guess what? Those phones caught on fire too. Chances are, the phone circuity has a fault in it.as well, requiring a recall of the phone anyways.
Your second point is only as good as a layer of plastic. The phone battery compartment consists of a plastic sticker that serves to insulate the bottom of the bare circuit board from the battery. The battery itself consists of a frame made of plastic, a battery and a sticker around the entire thing to enclose it. So your phone components really get only another sticker's worth of isolation. When people talk about the volume savings, the plastic frame around the battery is where most if it goes and its there basically to provide a support structure so the contacts can well, make contact. As the battery size inside varies a little bit, the frame ensures the battery remains the same size to fit in the compartment.
More the likely. Also look at the day it's released - I mean, it wasn't released on a day known for big news. Similar to the Friday Afternoon Dump, you release on these days when it's really bad for you, the releaser.
These leaks themselves aren't terribly interesting. So the only thing Wikileaks is cashing in on is goodwill based on earlier leaks that news of leaks is news itself.
And if you're curious, it's likely a political play by Assange - apparently Ecuador is going to have a presidential election and the current president, Rafael Correa, is not running for another term. This scares Assange because it could easily mean the end to his asylum, and if he's handed over to the US, he'd rather be under a president Trump than Clinton. Perhaps hoping he'd at least get a pardon or something out of it. That's the political play, at least
Or simply consider pirating it has its own issues. Because piracy is so popular, a common tactic for many is to bundle malware with it. Toss in some latest variant of cryptolocker, etc, or other thing and there you go.
Its bad enough that pirating the software is really just an invitation to let all sorts of viruses and trojans and other things in as well. A popular tactic is to use keygens and cracks to actually transport the payload - the original executable can be signed and if you patch that, or wrap it, you lose that signature. But no one questions the keygen so you can wrap that and while it generates the keys, it also installs the malware.
And no, you can't trust release group copies because anyone can take a clean version, wrap that in a malware downloader and then upload that.
It's even worse. The version of iOS those floor phones run is NOT stock. It's a custom version that has all the demo apps built into it. As a result, the app store does not work with it (you can browse, you can download, but the apps don't work), it's likely the phone dialer itself doesn't work and many other things. Heck, perhaps the WiFi is also locked to Apple's WiFi
And there's the Activation Lock, which will lock you out if you attempt to reflash it with the official iOS (via DFU mode, since I believe iTunes won't update it normally). So you really have a paperweight at best. Plus, I believe they auto-wipe themselves every night to clean themselves up of the day's usage.
Honestly, it would only be good for parts.
Considering the ROM in question is fixed in the fabs at TSMC or Samsung, it would be really hard to add another key. In addition, that would require the hardware have support for multiple signing keys.
Even if the keys were programmed after the fact, the ROM code would generally just assume the next stage loader code must be signed with a key in a specific location in OTP. And in general, only one key is valid - the boot ROM has only so much space and having to check additional keys takes up additional logic that may or may not be available.
So Foxconn would need to compromise two facilities, one in Texas (Samsung), one in Taiwan, change the masks ($100K each) that contain the boot ROM code and keys, then load on their compromised firmware.
Oh yeah, and they need to hack Apple so Apple's firmware distributes the modified binaries as well. Apple's ROM code is so sophisticated it can reload the firmware from scratch which would wipe out any of the Foxconn changes. (DFU recovery mode reloads the entire OS).
Class actions are for doing things as a group where individually, a lawsuit doesn't make sense. Let's say total compensation paid out would've been $200 per person. Are you willing to go to court, spend a day of your time there to get back that $200? Yes, it's small claims, but there are still filing fees (around $40) and your time and effort (and you have to take a day off too). Meanwhile, Sony won't defend themselves and basically waits for the court ordered default judgement. You get your $200 after spending a vacation day, filing fees, parking, etc., while Sony did jack squat and printed the cheque when the verdict came down.
Now imagine how many people would actually do that and you'll find the company effectively gets away with it as $200 is not worth it to spend the whole day in court.
Class actions are thus to punish and to group a bunch of similar court cases together so it becomes far more worthwhile to pursue than individually.
You do realize that not all chargers are manufactured alike, right? And they don't always give you 5VDC. In fact, the cheapest of the lot often give a very bad representation of DC, nevermind 5V. In fact, some are so bad, you can get 110VAC/240VAC on the USB because of poor clearances. Indeed, someone was electrocuted because of this.
And no, if it happened to Apple, it would be massive - "batterygate" would join antennagate, and the latter was something only discovered if you really tried at it (and I think even so, it affected more people than the number of exploding iPhones in grand total). Apple's incidences are more random and spread out - while Samsung's really just happened. You'd think if Apple messed up just as bad, that some Android fanboi would be pointing out that the iPhone 7 also has 70-80 causes of it spontaneously combusting by now.
Ironically, Samsung has some of the bset USB chargers around. Problem is, most people are buying the crap $20 chargers that really are safety hazards.
http://www.righto.com/2012/10/...
Well, for users, it's extremely easy to upgrade plans. In fact, once you go over, they will usually upsell you on the next higher plan.
I suspect most of the overages are paid by business phones where the usage is not so controllable. I mean, we have users who make so much long distance calls it's in the mid 4 digits, sometimes 5 digits. No plan covers such high usage, and it varies - one month it may be barely $1000, other months it's huge. You also really can't buy a voice plan for such usage - you're bound to go over.
Depending on the job, such usage may be unavoidable.
It's not a checklist. It's a collection of items that the NHTSA will want to review. Basically it's a list of requirements, but without prescription on how to fulfill them. Instead, they're general guidelines and you enter in how you handled the isssue.
For your example, you'd list of how the HMI of your car is. For the Google car, it wouldn't include a steering wheel because those don't have one. For a more normal car like a Tesla, then you'd include that. You'd also include what sort of indications you're going to tell the driver, and how you want the present the information to the driver.
It may be as simple as a regular car dashboard, or maybe you'll have a monitor showing the current path,current objects detected and other information.
The list is intentionally vague because they don't want to limit your designs, but they want you to think about issues that you may not realize are issues
I tried out the Vive. IT was fun for the demo, but at the end of it, I didn't see anything I was so amazed by that I wanted to go out and buy it (and this was when the hardware was readily available - I can go out right now and buy one if I wanted to).
So far, I saw the cost of a new PC and all the gear to go with it, and looked at the demo, and decided the demos weren't so spectacular enough to justify the high cost of it all. And I don't think the Rift is any better in that regard.
And all this despite the heavy push by Valve and others (my Steam is full of VR games, of which at least a couple of them I'm interested in).
But no, the VR may be amazing, but the high cost of entry is basically holding it back. Everyone instead is going for what's affordable - i.e., smartphone VR. Sales figures show the Vive and Rift sales have basically collapsed after a couple of months , and not because people aren't heavily promoting it with demos and all that.
And IMHO, one of the biggest unaddressed problems is glasses. They kinda-sorta work with glasses (the Vive was surprisingly good for me, but sucked for someone else), but at the end of the demo my glasses were starting to fog up which basically limits the max goggle time to a few minutes. Not ideal. Perhaps the second gen models will include a ventilation fan or something.
No, you can get LiPo batteries with protection circuits that are just two-wire only. The other two wires are typically a thermistor connection and a one-wire connection to a gas gauge chip or memory chip to hold stuff like serial number, storage capacity, etc. But if you don't need that, two wires is more than sufficient - you can have a thermistor on the board itself, and a gas gauge on the main board works just fine as well.
That's been the traditional reason women are paid 80-90% of a man - so it's already priced into existing salary models. If you take into account maternity leave and loss of work experience, it drops down to 60-70% (women lose work experience and re-enter with a lower salary than if they continued working).
The problem was, this also meant a career-first woman who doesn't want to start having children is penalized because it's assumed she'll want to marry, have kids, etc.
Problem is, it's probably the wrong heads. One of the reasons is it's highly believed the Note 7 release was rushed to beat Apple - release it a month earlier than the iPhone 7 and take a lot of wind out of Apple's event.
So the engineers were probably pushed hard to get it out the door and worked long hours and probably continuously just getting it done. And as you can guess, mistakes were probably made in critical areas just to get it out the door.
Generally speaking, charging is quite autonomous - there's often no firmware you can change to fix things. Even if it had firmware, it's probably unproogrammable It's possible they used the wrong chip or programmed the mask ROM incorrectly to control charging parameters
Of course, because the floppy became a useless appendage - good only to boot computers and a few other things (like store files on for transport, because CD-Rs were still a bit rare and expensive). But that also meant the price of the drive and disks were limited - people wouldn't pay that much for something of limited usability but still required.
Just think - in 1997 Apple got rid of the floppy disk, and how many howls of protest there were over it. The drive was basically useless and the real reasons people kept it around was legacy. (Around this time there was also talk of legacy-free PCs, but they still needed floppy drives).
And nowadays, a drive is $20. Tell me how much precision mechanical construction you can do for that
Well, Samsung really wanted to jump the gun on Apple. They knew Apple would be releasing a new phone in September, so they basically wanted to launch their Note 7 flagship a month earlier in Auguet. If nothing more than to capture "impatient" phone buyers with a new shiny well ahead of Apple's annoucnement.
Unfortunately, it appears that Samsung miscalculated the engineering effort and released a product that was half-baked, and half-baked in the worst possible way. Perhaps some South Korean hardware engineer had to work out the power management hardware and software after working long hours finishing something else and overlooked something because he was tired from overworking 180 hours a week just to have the phone ready in August.
It's a worthwhile gamble - if they can jump the gun on Apple, perhaps they could capture a bunch of sales that way, especially since Apple has a nasty habit of actually releasing product within a few weeks of the announcement. Maybe if Apple could just do like what they did the first time around - announce in January and ship in July, which gives Samsung and everyone else time to copy and implement and release? But no, Apple must announce and ship TWO WEEKS LATER.
Considering the iPhone 6+ isn't sold anymore, and its replacement the iPhone 6s+ doesn't have the issue, it's debatable. It's also debatable about how it happens - because if it happened to every phone, then it's serious, but if it happens to a subset, then it's a lot harder to diagnose. (It's suspected to be related to bendgate, where too big phones are stuffed into skinny jean pockets). Of course, given the iPhone6+ is two years old now, well, it's likely people are going to be replacing them as well, stemming the disease.
Or OPAL devices which require an ILO type mechanism because the boot firmware works with the SSD boot code to get a password. The unlock program is stored on the SSD and is run prior to bootup. Inevitably, they require a keyboard and monitor to enter the password at the console before booting. The SSD unlock program is fixed in the SSD firmware and cannot be changed....
Hell, look at the so-called hoverboards. Those things aren't thin, or small. And yet they regularly burst into flame
Samsung had a problem with Samsung-made batteries, so they replaced it with their other supplier. But then they revealed there's a further problem with their battery management circuits. A replaceable battery won't fix this as it's fundamentally part of the phone itself.
The thing is, a PC is really just one hardware design. Memory is in one fixed spot in the memory map. I/O is in the same spot (in the IO bus, since it's x86... but even so..).
It's at the point where you could take any x86 based PC and program it because you know where all the components are. If you need to talk to the VGA adapter, well, the framebuffer is always in the same location.
And we have to admit, what we call "x86" really is "IBM PC Compatible" because there were many x86 designs in the early days that were not compatible. We just happened to base our modern PC design off of what is now a 30+ year old PC design. Heck, I think Intel emulates the A20 Gate functionality on the CPU (a design leftover from the move from 8086 to the 80286) - there is a pin that basically states the value of the gate.
Add in the other peripherals that are basically identical like keyboard controllers, DMA controllers (not used anymore), etc, and you have what is effectively just a single hardware platform. It doesn't matter if you have Intel or AMD or nVidia graphics - at a basic level, VGA mode works identically on all of them.
ARM, on the other hand, isn't a monolithic design - it's a CPU core and people attach peripherals to it to meet the design requirements. There is no universal keyboard controller for ARM, because one doesn't exist - some devices have no keyboards and don't need it, others have a full PC keyboard, and yet others still have a basic one able to scan 16 keys in a 4x4 matrix.
The biggest difference is that most x86 designs are not SoC based - so your options aren't as fixed. If you want a different graphics chip, it's usually external, etc. But for ARM, they are SoCs and thus everything is combined to form an almost complete system in a single chip - no CPU, northbridge, IO controller(south bridge), etc type PC design.
And lest we forget, x86 can be incompatible - Intel made a few SoCs that run fine on Linux, but cannot run Windows at all because Windows requires things a certain way, which was not provided. Even today, Intel SoCs often have a "Windows compatibility" block that contains peripherals and other things required for Windows support.
In the end, a PC is like a car - it has 4 wheels, a steering wheel, a transmission, etc, and they all basically drive the same - you need a key, you need to start the engine or activate the card via the ignition (for EVs or hybrids), apply brakes, release the parking brake, shift transmission into reverse, then back out of your spot. Then put the transmission into drive, press down on the accelerator and off you go.
ARM would be more like Caterpillar or Briggs and Stratton - they sell the engine, which forms the core of whatever, but the final vehicle may not be a car. It may have treads instead of tires, use a differential control mechanism, etc. Or the vehicle's movement may not be related to the engine at all
Well, I think the problem is... obviously nothing spectacular is in the dump.
I mean, there's a reason why governments and Wikileaks are releasing stuff on Friday afternoons - it's because it's bad news. This could be report about how government just wasted a few billion dollars on cleaning supplies*, or in Wikileak's case, that there's nothing of real substance there.
It's called a "Friday afternoon dump" and it's done because it's typically too late to hit the evening news, it will show up in Saturday's newspapers (which fewer people read) and gets buried with all the people just wanting to enjoy the weekend.
Think about it for a second - Wikileaks put on a big show last week that everyone was hoping would bring out the smoking gun. When that fizzled, well, the assumption is it doesn't exist. And it makes sense - if there was some really incriminating thing that would be devastating to Clinton, then there will be a big pomp and circumstance party to highlight it. Not just some dump on a late Friday afternoon.
* - Trump's aircraft has to be meticulously cleaned prior to Trump boarding it. Trump will inspect the interior with a white glove and he has been known to fire staff if he finds dust or other dirt in his aircraft. Everything must also be polished to a high luster.
Easy. Microsoft was a monopoly that abused their OS monopoly to enter the browser market. The courts forced Microsoft to unbundle the browser because of this.
iOS? At 20%, hardly a monopoly. Apple can't leverage either WebKit on iOS nor iOS itself to distort any market.
Anyhow, browsing engines are hard - especially keeping them sandboxed. iOS and Safari run in a very low privilege state (lower than normal apps) so Safari can use a JIT javascript engine, while normal apps have teo use a slower interpreted engine to prevent sandbox exploits. Then there's battery life itself - given all the crap that can idle in the background chewing up CPU cycles, I wouldn't be surprised if WebKit on IOS has many tweaks to conserve battery life.
Nevermind the publicity. It's been plastered all over the TV about the tax agency scams (in Canada, it's the Canada Revenue Agency, or CRA that collects taxes), including interviews with victims and showing the dozens of iTunes cards they buy.
The police continually reiterate it's a scam, the tax agnecy says to give them a call if you're ever unsure (and they do not have the power to just arrest you, especially on small amounts). And that the only form of payment acceptable is money - they do not accept gift cards, stamps, or anything else.
Yet people still fall for it, I wonder what they think about buying dozens of iTunes cards for payment - do they think they have an arrangement with Apple to convert them back to cash?
Just because Android users don't like paying for apps doesn't mean you can't make money on Android apps. The #1 way to do so on Android is to rape and pillage the user's information and sell ads. And on Android, this is a perfectly valid and workable business model - probably the recommended business model for Android. You can make more money this way than by selling your app, even.
Then there's the freemium thing as well.
If you're narrowly going to sell apps the traditional way, yes, iOS works great for that. But not on Android where users prefer you sell their information and give away the app.