But Sony in no way wants to encourage the creation of an open SDK. They want to make the jailbreak go away, and that's it. Of course it's not going to happen, but that's all they're working toward with these lawsuits. They want any potential future firmware hackers to see what they did to these guys and think twice about working on PS3 exploits themselves.
I assume the JTAGICE you refer to is a USB debugger device for these dev kits? So you do need some hardware, just not the actual AT90USBKEY or whatever you've chosen.
I don't think it's all that big a leap. There are lots of very smart people actively trying to simulate human intelligence. While a million lines of code is a fairly large undertaking, it's not an unmanageable amount. If anyone actually believed it could be done in a million lines of code, it would have been done, because the profit potential is huge and undeniable. Indeed, why isn't Kurzweil working on it right now?
Even creating just the part that could find interactions between proteins based upon their genetic structure and relative concentrations would make you fabulously wealthy.
The reality is that the problem is vastly more complicated than presented in his estimates.
"Read it. Other than the solid date he predicts, it's pretty plausable."
No it's not. If it was possible to do in a million lines of code, it would have been done by now. Windows XP had something like 40 million lines of code. While we can agree it was probably coded relatively inefficiently, there is no way that any OS even comes close to the complexity of the brain.
Our calibration company seals up all edges of the device that give access to its insides after it has been calibrated. Break those seals, and you're in trouble... they'll refuse to calibrate it in the future because of the risk it's been altered. This is forgiven if you provide paperwork from the OEM that they themselves did the repair on the unit.
I don't know that all calibration houses are this strict, though. You could probably find one that would pass your modified instrument if you really wanted.
Those monopolies were granted for investment in infrastructure. Good luck getting the companies to give them up.
With the majority of those opposing Net Neutrality being Republicans, who will never go against their own corporate interests, we will see no change in this area. The whole reason they're involved with this is to PROTECT their corporate interests. Eliminating these monopolies will will anger these companies greatly, and thus the Republicans will never support that.
The democrats want to keep the monopolies and regulate how they can act. Nobody with any real power is pushing for your solution.
Sure I'd like to do it your way, but let's be realistic here... there's no way in hell that's going to happen.
I'd agree if it weren't for the fact that these ISPs have monopolies in their areas. You address this, but the unfortunate reality is that's the situation we're stuck with. And in that crappy situation, Comcast won't be the last ISP to restrict certain types of traffic and consumers often have no alternatives to choose from. Time Warner, with their media empire, is a prime candidate to eventually restrict access to music and video services. The only thing stopping them right now may be all the attention this issue is receiving.
And with the local restrictions that are in place, even if there were alternatives, there's a good chance they'd all act as a single unit. Look at cellular communications here in the US. One carrier raises a fee, and all the others go "Hey, that's a great idea! We'll do that as well!" ETFs, SMS, and Data fees are all very similar on all the carriers. Their business plan is a variant of "Follow the Leader." It wouldn't surprise me to see similar collusion in the ISP space if each market did have a small number of ISPs to choose from.
The ideal solution is to end the local monopolies, but what are the chances of that?
Sure it does. In the old algorithm, 5 bars was a HUGE range of signal strengths. So large, in fact, that saying you have 5 bars was practically meaningless for measuring this phenomenon. If you were on the high end of 5 bars and gave it a death grip, you might stay at 5 bars. If you were on the low end of 5 bars, you could drop all the way down to zero. The Anandtech graphic was useful for illustrating this, and the numbers all line up. Both situations I mentioned here were possible according to their data. The signal strength when not being held most certainly affects the signal strength when being held.
You can make it worse using the methods you describe, as they increase the conductivity of your hand, but the starting signal strength is still an important factor.
That's key, and I don't see any way that they could have honestly believed that only 0.5% of their users were having trouble. They issued a press release saying they were going to work on a software update, and many were waiting for some kind of magic improvement.
My wife and I have both had problems, but neither contacted Apple Care. Apple Care was simply telling customers there was no problem, as they were instructed to do by Apple. This made it into the press and onto user forums. After that occurred, why would anyone go to Apple Care about this when they already knew what the result would be?!?
It's hard to visualize, and I agree I could have been more clear, so I'll go into more detail.
The mat slides up towards the firewall. If you were to look at it in profile, you'd see the mat physically underneath the pedal.
Now you push the pedal to the floor. The down-and-towards-the-firewall motion of the pedal puts the driver's side edge of the pedal barely overlapping the firewall edge of the mat. If you push the pedal down with force, it can make its way under the soft carpet/plastic mat.
Then when you release the accelerator, the mat is now slightly on top of the pedal, interfering with its ability to return to the idle position.
So the danger, then, is present whenever the mat is located beneath the pedal. The failure case obviously occurs when the mat is on top of the pedal, but any time the mat is physically below the pedal is dangerous.
Manufacturers now aggressively cut the mat in the area around the accelerator to combat this.
The problem is that AT&T installed a tower right behind the Cupertino HQ, which provides them with excellent signal strength while on their campus.
The phones that made it out into the wild were apparently disguised as iPhone 3Gs, and because of this testers were unlikely to see this problem. As we're now aware, putting a case on it hides the defect. Their famous secrecy caused this problem for them.
That's not correct. The typical failure case is where you push down the accelerator, and the pedal's travel causes it to become lodged under the mat. The weight of the mat can then hold it in place. This cannot happen if the accelerator is mounted to the floor.
The case you speak of, where a mat would cover the pedal, would only occur in this case if the mat substantially covered the pedal. This is because the weight required to hold down the pedal now needs to be at the top (firewall side) rather than the bottom (mat side).
You'd have to shift the mat a significant amount to make that happen. 6" or more towards the firewall, I suspect, compared with the 0.5-1" required for the alternative. You could do it getting into the car, I suppose, but you'd notice pretty quickly when you started it up.
They do need to stop using those hooks, though. Some brands are using metal tabs now, which is a bit better I suppose. I've seen velcro used recently in combination with the hooks, which may be a decent solution.
That could be. I've had primarily Japanese cars (including several older Civics), and they all pivoted at the firewall except for my 2006 Civic. Even my 2008 Evo pivots at the firewall. Both are DBW. Of the American/European cars I've driven, I didn't pay enough attention to see how their accelerators connect.
I agree that pivoting at the floor is a better design. Maybe it's taken the Japanese brands this long to realize what the Americans and Europeans have known for awhile.
That sounds optimistic. Honda didn't start switching to electronic throttles in its mainstream models until 2006. The very first one they ever made was the S2000 released in 2000. Mitsubishi didn't start until 2008. Acura in 2004. Nissan in 2006. The first GM I'm aware of was the Malibu in 2008, but I'm less familiar with that brand.
I can't say for sure on the rest of the brands, but given the above list it seems impossible for the majority of cars in the last 10 years to have a drive-by-wire throttle.
This has happened with all automakers. Every automaker that I can think of has had a recall for floor mats interfering with the accelerator pedal. Honda had so many it redesigned the pedals on the new Civic to pivot from the floor instead of the firewall so the mats can't get under them.
Toyota got nailed because it got a lot of publicity. The other brands are all nervously waiting for someone to point the finger at them, knowing they all have these complaints... even with mounting evidence that it's driver error.
AT&T actually gives you a full 30 days from the date of shipment, so there's a good bit of time left before you're stuck with it. The iPhone is actually Apple's only product in the US that has a return period longer than 14 days, I assume because AT&T's 30 day policy supersedes it.
Either way, there's the issue of the restocking fee for returning a "non-defective" phone that's been opened. It's 10% of device cost. I don't know if anyone's determined if this is pre- or post- subsidy, since the people who have returned their iPhone 4s have to send them back to Apple, who checks if they're defective, then charges the fee. You don't find out at time of cancellation if you will be charged the fee, which would be from $20 to $80 depending on model and if they look at subsidized or full price.
So it's not as simple as "just return it." With Apple steadfastly sticking to their "that's how it's supposed to be, you're doing it wrong" stance, anyone who wants to return one is going to get stuck with that fee.
Many manufacturers will set an electronic limiter in the manner you describe. They set the limiter somewhere above the fastest speed it can achieve. Then they can do their testing up to that speed.
If you subsequently modify your car with more power to overcome the frictional effects, then you bump into the electronic limiter. It's their way limiting liability by saying "we only tested the car up to this speed." If you modify the ECU to remove the limit, they can place the blame on you.
Of course, if it's redline limited as you claim, then you'd have to get more power *and* modify the transmission to coax out more speed... however, the principal is the same.
Ah, could be. I know they push carrier updates frequently, which I assumed effected the baseband configuration. Sounds like that's not correct, but there is a set of carrier-specific "something" that gets updated on a regular basis.
There is carrier-specific baseband that runs on each device, so it could have something to do with that. However, over on MacRumors there are people reporting seeing this on carriers other than AT&T as well, such as O2.
It's somewhat baffling. These carriers can't be stupid enough to count on the devices reporting usage accurately, can they?
That's what I was thinking. Looking at recent bills, it seems they no longer (or rarely) log data usage during the day. There's just one update that comes in overnight that seems to be the entire day's usage. Last month, I only had 7 days that logged any data usage during the day, and I can say with certainty that I use the 3G data line at least every 15 minutes.
People are reporting that if they turn their phones off overnight, the 1am-2am update doesn't occur until the phone gets turned back on in the morning (down to the minute). This seems to indicate that the phone itself is keeping track of the usage, and notifying the carrier of the amount either overnight, or at the next available opportunity if it misses the overnight time slot.
If that's the case, it certainly does leave the carrier open to exploits, and is a very poor design.
Slashdot Mirror
But Sony in no way wants to encourage the creation of an open SDK. They want to make the jailbreak go away, and that's it. Of course it's not going to happen, but that's all they're working toward with these lawsuits. They want any potential future firmware hackers to see what they did to these guys and think twice about working on PS3 exploits themselves.
Well, who better to notice what's going on than someone who has already experienced it? They're a dozen or two years ahead of us along that path.
I assume the JTAGICE you refer to is a USB debugger device for these dev kits? So you do need some hardware, just not the actual AT90USBKEY or whatever you've chosen.
That's actually a pretty interesting counter-point. I'd mod you up if I could.
I don't think it's all that big a leap. There are lots of very smart people actively trying to simulate human intelligence. While a million lines of code is a fairly large undertaking, it's not an unmanageable amount. If anyone actually believed it could be done in a million lines of code, it would have been done, because the profit potential is huge and undeniable. Indeed, why isn't Kurzweil working on it right now?
Even creating just the part that could find interactions between proteins based upon their genetic structure and relative concentrations would make you fabulously wealthy.
The reality is that the problem is vastly more complicated than presented in his estimates.
"Read it. Other than the solid date he predicts, it's pretty plausable."
No it's not. If it was possible to do in a million lines of code, it would have been done by now. Windows XP had something like 40 million lines of code. While we can agree it was probably coded relatively inefficiently, there is no way that any OS even comes close to the complexity of the brain.
Our calibration company seals up all edges of the device that give access to its insides after it has been calibrated. Break those seals, and you're in trouble... they'll refuse to calibrate it in the future because of the risk it's been altered. This is forgiven if you provide paperwork from the OEM that they themselves did the repair on the unit.
I don't know that all calibration houses are this strict, though. You could probably find one that would pass your modified instrument if you really wanted.
Those monopolies were granted for investment in infrastructure. Good luck getting the companies to give them up.
With the majority of those opposing Net Neutrality being Republicans, who will never go against their own corporate interests, we will see no change in this area. The whole reason they're involved with this is to PROTECT their corporate interests. Eliminating these monopolies will will anger these companies greatly, and thus the Republicans will never support that.
The democrats want to keep the monopolies and regulate how they can act. Nobody with any real power is pushing for your solution.
Sure I'd like to do it your way, but let's be realistic here... there's no way in hell that's going to happen.
I'd agree if it weren't for the fact that these ISPs have monopolies in their areas. You address this, but the unfortunate reality is that's the situation we're stuck with. And in that crappy situation, Comcast won't be the last ISP to restrict certain types of traffic and consumers often have no alternatives to choose from. Time Warner, with their media empire, is a prime candidate to eventually restrict access to music and video services. The only thing stopping them right now may be all the attention this issue is receiving.
And with the local restrictions that are in place, even if there were alternatives, there's a good chance they'd all act as a single unit. Look at cellular communications here in the US. One carrier raises a fee, and all the others go "Hey, that's a great idea! We'll do that as well!" ETFs, SMS, and Data fees are all very similar on all the carriers. Their business plan is a variant of "Follow the Leader." It wouldn't surprise me to see similar collusion in the ISP space if each market did have a small number of ISPs to choose from.
The ideal solution is to end the local monopolies, but what are the chances of that?
Sure it does. In the old algorithm, 5 bars was a HUGE range of signal strengths. So large, in fact, that saying you have 5 bars was practically meaningless for measuring this phenomenon. If you were on the high end of 5 bars and gave it a death grip, you might stay at 5 bars. If you were on the low end of 5 bars, you could drop all the way down to zero. The Anandtech graphic was useful for illustrating this, and the numbers all line up. Both situations I mentioned here were possible according to their data. The signal strength when not being held most certainly affects the signal strength when being held.
You can make it worse using the methods you describe, as they increase the conductivity of your hand, but the starting signal strength is still an important factor.
That's key, and I don't see any way that they could have honestly believed that only 0.5% of their users were having trouble. They issued a press release saying they were going to work on a software update, and many were waiting for some kind of magic improvement.
My wife and I have both had problems, but neither contacted Apple Care. Apple Care was simply telling customers there was no problem, as they were instructed to do by Apple. This made it into the press and onto user forums. After that occurred, why would anyone go to Apple Care about this when they already knew what the result would be?!?
Reading comprehension is obviously not your strong suit. Did you even make it to the second paragraph before you decided to start trolling?
It's hard to visualize, and I agree I could have been more clear, so I'll go into more detail.
The mat slides up towards the firewall. If you were to look at it in profile, you'd see the mat physically underneath the pedal.
Now you push the pedal to the floor. The down-and-towards-the-firewall motion of the pedal puts the driver's side edge of the pedal barely overlapping the firewall edge of the mat. If you push the pedal down with force, it can make its way under the soft carpet/plastic mat.
Then when you release the accelerator, the mat is now slightly on top of the pedal, interfering with its ability to return to the idle position.
So the danger, then, is present whenever the mat is located beneath the pedal. The failure case obviously occurs when the mat is on top of the pedal, but any time the mat is physically below the pedal is dangerous.
Manufacturers now aggressively cut the mat in the area around the accelerator to combat this.
The problem is that AT&T installed a tower right behind the Cupertino HQ, which provides them with excellent signal strength while on their campus.
The phones that made it out into the wild were apparently disguised as iPhone 3Gs, and because of this testers were unlikely to see this problem. As we're now aware, putting a case on it hides the defect. Their famous secrecy caused this problem for them.
New iPhone team slogan: "Test different[ly]"?
That's not correct. The typical failure case is where you push down the accelerator, and the pedal's travel causes it to become lodged under the mat. The weight of the mat can then hold it in place. This cannot happen if the accelerator is mounted to the floor.
The case you speak of, where a mat would cover the pedal, would only occur in this case if the mat substantially covered the pedal. This is because the weight required to hold down the pedal now needs to be at the top (firewall side) rather than the bottom (mat side).
You'd have to shift the mat a significant amount to make that happen. 6" or more towards the firewall, I suspect, compared with the 0.5-1" required for the alternative. You could do it getting into the car, I suppose, but you'd notice pretty quickly when you started it up.
They do need to stop using those hooks, though. Some brands are using metal tabs now, which is a bit better I suppose. I've seen velcro used recently in combination with the hooks, which may be a decent solution.
That could be. I've had primarily Japanese cars (including several older Civics), and they all pivoted at the firewall except for my 2006 Civic. Even my 2008 Evo pivots at the firewall. Both are DBW. Of the American/European cars I've driven, I didn't pay enough attention to see how their accelerators connect.
I agree that pivoting at the floor is a better design. Maybe it's taken the Japanese brands this long to realize what the Americans and Europeans have known for awhile.
That sounds optimistic. Honda didn't start switching to electronic throttles in its mainstream models until 2006. The very first one they ever made was the S2000 released in 2000. Mitsubishi didn't start until 2008. Acura in 2004. Nissan in 2006. The first GM I'm aware of was the Malibu in 2008, but I'm less familiar with that brand.
I can't say for sure on the rest of the brands, but given the above list it seems impossible for the majority of cars in the last 10 years to have a drive-by-wire throttle.
This has happened with all automakers. Every automaker that I can think of has had a recall for floor mats interfering with the accelerator pedal. Honda had so many it redesigned the pedals on the new Civic to pivot from the floor instead of the firewall so the mats can't get under them.
This is just for model year 2009, I've seen more complete tables as well...
Unintended Acceleration - All Brands
Toyota got nailed because it got a lot of publicity. The other brands are all nervously waiting for someone to point the finger at them, knowing they all have these complaints... even with mounting evidence that it's driver error.
You speak as if TicketMaster doesn't have the entire ticketing industry locked down. There simply are no competitors. You're stuck.
AT&T actually gives you a full 30 days from the date of shipment, so there's a good bit of time left before you're stuck with it. The iPhone is actually Apple's only product in the US that has a return period longer than 14 days, I assume because AT&T's 30 day policy supersedes it.
Either way, there's the issue of the restocking fee for returning a "non-defective" phone that's been opened. It's 10% of device cost. I don't know if anyone's determined if this is pre- or post- subsidy, since the people who have returned their iPhone 4s have to send them back to Apple, who checks if they're defective, then charges the fee. You don't find out at time of cancellation if you will be charged the fee, which would be from $20 to $80 depending on model and if they look at subsidized or full price.
So it's not as simple as "just return it." With Apple steadfastly sticking to their "that's how it's supposed to be, you're doing it wrong" stance, anyone who wants to return one is going to get stuck with that fee.
Many manufacturers will set an electronic limiter in the manner you describe. They set the limiter somewhere above the fastest speed it can achieve. Then they can do their testing up to that speed.
If you subsequently modify your car with more power to overcome the frictional effects, then you bump into the electronic limiter. It's their way limiting liability by saying "we only tested the car up to this speed." If you modify the ECU to remove the limit, they can place the blame on you.
Of course, if it's redline limited as you claim, then you'd have to get more power *and* modify the transmission to coax out more speed... however, the principal is the same.
Those silly Americans, always screwing things up. ;-)
In all seriousness, putting the month before the day is stupid. How did we get into that habit, anyway.
Ah, could be. I know they push carrier updates frequently, which I assumed effected the baseband configuration. Sounds like that's not correct, but there is a set of carrier-specific "something" that gets updated on a regular basis.
There is carrier-specific baseband that runs on each device, so it could have something to do with that. However, over on MacRumors there are people reporting seeing this on carriers other than AT&T as well, such as O2.
It's somewhat baffling. These carriers can't be stupid enough to count on the devices reporting usage accurately, can they?
That's what I was thinking. Looking at recent bills, it seems they no longer (or rarely) log data usage during the day. There's just one update that comes in overnight that seems to be the entire day's usage. Last month, I only had 7 days that logged any data usage during the day, and I can say with certainty that I use the 3G data line at least every 15 minutes.
People are reporting that if they turn their phones off overnight, the 1am-2am update doesn't occur until the phone gets turned back on in the morning (down to the minute). This seems to indicate that the phone itself is keeping track of the usage, and notifying the carrier of the amount either overnight, or at the next available opportunity if it misses the overnight time slot.
If that's the case, it certainly does leave the carrier open to exploits, and is a very poor design.