I know I could blame the car manufacturer for choosing a proprietary standard but honestly what else could they do without a competing standard? Why isn't there one after all this time?
It probably wouldn't get very far. There are so many Apple i-devices out there right now that all use that same connector, there's no single other manufacturer that could get anywhere near that active product quantity. To get another viable competing standard would require several of the other big names to get together and agree on something. And you can just imagine how impossible that would be to pull off.
Right now really is the best opportunity they have though, with Apple changing connectors. For awhile at least, they won't have the majority of products in circulation that use it. But the problem is they've caught the world off-guard, and I doubt anyone else has a different docking design in the pipe that does all the things Apple's dock connector does. By the time a big name like Nokia or Sony got their iron in the fire, Apple will already have a huge lead again and the race will basically be won about the time it starts.
One angle they might try is something similar to the thunderbolt connector - a single connector that uses a single base io protocol to manage a variety of different types of data. (video and block transfer being thunderbolt's two main ones) They could just make a single small connector like USB (four wires or thereabouts) that sends power and data, with established uses for the data. (video, audio, control, block transfer, etc) But the disadvantage to that is it makes designing peripherals that can use it expensive due to the need for a control chip. (look at all the people whining about the price of the thunderbolt cables) Look at how easy it is to make a speaker or TV dock right now... just run wires from the dock connector to the AV lines out to the TV. Simple, cheap, and reliable.
So neither option for an alternative really has much of a chance.
I'm sort of confused, what do you think the cable does?
Yes I can see that. On a small device like a phone or ipod there's only room for a couple connectors. Also each connector eats up space on the inside and cuts into battery life. Headphones are a requirement for the ipod and a high value connector on ipad and iphone also. Apple has added one more connector for all the other uses. The current connector does at least:
- power - usb - firewire - stereo audio out - stereo microphone in - volume up and down - track up and down - play/pause - menu - composite video - internal speaker disable
I suspect you're overlooking all the other functions on that cable, and seeing it as merely a power/USB cable, when it's much more than that. (full dock connector specs at http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml)
And the accessories you're bemoaning are using a connector that is ten years old. Lets look at some other 10 year old connectors, like scsi, ps/2, serial, adb. None of those are a standard jack on new hardware anymore. It IS a shame to have just bought an accessory that uses a connector that is about to be vintage'd, but it has to happen sooner or later. Let it go. Replace a few old accessories. Buy a new cable or two. And enjoy the next ten years before it inevitably happens again. Go sit on your porch and shake your cane, "Back in MY DAY we didn't have that new-fangled dock connector! All we had was this BIG OLD one, and we LIKED it!"
Apple just did a similar update with their power connector, the magsafe. It didn't change function much, just got a little slimmer. But Apple is selling an inexpensive adapter so you can continue to use your old spare power brick or charge-from-display. I suspect they will do something like that with the dock connector, and there will likely be 3rd party adapters available also. Such an adapter won't work with most of your "drop-in" accessories, but that can't really be helped. Most of those had problems anyway when a new model of ipod came out, and many of them addressed this problem by having changeable dock inserts. Maybe your accessory manufacturer will release an adapter kit.
On a somewhat off-topic note, I was hoping Apple was going to upgrade the magport so the center pin was optical for a digital link. The second power adapter I keep at home could have had my external display, ethernet, usb hub, backup hard drive, and speakers all plugged into it. When I got home I'd snap in just the one magsafe cable and be instantly attached to everything. Instead, I come home and have to plug in six cables, several of which really don't handle frequent use well. I wish I had a dock connector for my laptop like I do for my iphone.:(
For how many years now has Apple been the last holdout with proprietary connectors?
OK then clearly they should have gone with the other industry standard cable that supports power, usb, video, remote volume and play selection, etc. Oh wait, that's right, there isn't another one!
Your argument is only valid when there are other non-proprietary options. It works well when talking about say, Sony's "i-link" proprietary firewire connector, or any of those proprietary USB connectors on cameras, where they're using a special connector to force you to buy cables and other accessories directly from them at some absurd mark-up. But that's not the case with Apple's dock connector.
This is the only connector that does it all in discrete pins, vastly simplifying construction of accessories. Even cars are coming with Apple's dock connector in them nowadays. Apple's not being an ass and forcing you to use their connector to do what they could have done with another standard connector. They just happen to have pioneered the market and have been using this one connector for the last decade, with a crapton of accessories being made by other vendors. You don't have to buy your dock from Apple. Try getting an iLink cable from someone besides Sony. (for $35 or so) That's how you abuse proprietary connectors
People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines.
I believe you're severely over-estimating the number of such jobs in china. If you put every line worker in china out of a job and tried to get them something else higher-end to do, I don't think you could find enough employment in the world.
But I think that's one of the reasons China is trying to slow down their population explosion. They know there's simply not going to be as many jobs in the future as there are now. All those people either have to have work or have to be state-supported. Communist governments like China are supposed to, in theory, spread the wealth, but there's usually not enough to take good care of everyone.
This only works in the middle east, and only for a limited time, due to the vast amount the countries there are raking in from the world for their oil. A lot of their people don't have to work, or don't have to work hard. China's main export is "cheap stuff for the rest of the world" So although they have very high volume, the actual amount is a lot lower than you might think just due to the low cost demanded by the wholesalers like wallymart. (and they are sooo screwed when that oil runs out, although if they have half a brain and save a lot and invest seriously in their country as we're seeing them do now, they'll at least have a golden parachute)
THIS is the only reasonable explanation for why manufacturers in China are saying that labor is expensive there. It's not. It's dirt cheap. But so is the product they are selling. The bottom line is that China as a country isn't bringing in enough money to provide good quality of living for its huge population. As long as they continue to specialize in supercheap export products and have a large population, this just can't change.
All that's going to happen through automation is that walmart's prices might fall a nickel and a cityfull of people in china will hit the unemployment list. And it's hard to say who's to blame. Do you blame the consumer for not "buying responsibly", when they're just trying to stretch their paycheck and provide the best life possible for their family? Do you blame the retailer for not carrying only higher quality products, when they are better able to fulfill their responsibility to their shareholders by maximizing profit and volume? Do you blame the manufacturer in China for automating so they can shave a little off the cost of manufacture because their wholesaler is threatening to buy from another source? Or do you blame China for having a large enough population to allow manufacturers there to lowball the salary because they will still get all the warm bodies they need?
China realizes all this. They can't control the world's consumers. They can't control the world's retailers. If they try to interfere with their local manufacturing it will cause them to fail. So they do the only thing they can, and encourage the population to have only one child. China's doing the only thing that really anyone in this entire process can to try to improve it. Increased automation is just going to make matters worse for China IMHO. It's going to drive the price of labor even further down just when the country is trying to prop it UP. This isn't a simple little issue, it's a part of a tightly interwoven issues, and is impossible to fix by looking at only one part of it.
The immediate effect of increased automation will be a drop in the cost of labor in China, resulting in higher unemployment, heavier burden on state social services, and a drop in prices from OTHER manufacturers that didn't automate, because now labor is cheaper. The people of China are the first losers. We over here in Europe and America probably won't notice much of a difference for awhile, and I don't see any clear idea of how it will affect us in the long term. Prices in world markets are based on supply-and-demand when supply is low. But
I was just thinking this sounds like a nice way to get some power from your tinting. But I wonder how useful it is in reality? And attaching wires to a roll-down window will increase mechanical complexity and add will eventually wear out the wires leading to the window or whatever track mechanism you're going to use to transfer power.
I assume this has been tested to work with safety glass? And you can't tint your front or rear windows legally. Probably would make getting a window replaced significantly more expensive when the neighbor kid gets careless with his pellet gun.
When the written word become illegal for any reason - tyranny is the ruler.
Free speech needs to have some limits. Bomb threats and yelling FIRE in a theatre are the most popular counter-examples. Slander, exposure of trade secrets, and insider-trading are just a handful of other arguable candidates.
It IS possible for someone to clearly violate someone else's obvious rights under the guise of "freedom of speech". It can't just blindly be labeled "tyranny".
No, actually it means that the CEO has to do something to cause a quick spike in the stock price when he wants to cash in.
(reminds me a bit also of the "pump and dump" phrase)
That almost sounds like "insider trading" except by one person rather than two. Is that legal? (assuming you get caught and they can prove it to the court's satisfaction of course, since it doesn't matter if it's legal or not if you don't get "caught")
I doubt that would have any effect. They are just the wheels in the machine. It's the system that's broken, and they can't really change anything even if they were motivated to try and do so.
And in most cases they're just loosely following the rules, or in a few cases, strictly enforcing them. Think carefully about which way you'd prefer them to work on the average. (hint: the latter are the cases that tend to make the headlines)
yes that probably won't apply well to tablets, not now anyway. I was referring more to laptop computers. I get a new machine on the average every 3 years. I get from $800-1500 for them depending on age. Try selling a 3 yr old (anything but Apple) laptop for anywhere near that price.
Tablets are still in price freefall because there are so many new players running onto the field, it's a madhouse. I can't be on the internet for more than a few minutes before I'm advertised by someone selling a tablet. We won't see price stability until the market calms down and most of the "hey I think I can make a better selling tablet than the other 200 out there already!" have flamed out.
But it shouldn't be long now. Microsoft makes an excellent barometer for this sort of thing, they're usually the last major player to enter a given market. Look at MP3 players. About the time the Zune came out, the portable music market was settled. And the surface isn't far from release, so tablets should be approaching a settling point here real soon.
Yes, people keep Apple product packaging. Part of the reason I keep mine is my gear always has a good resale value several years from now when it's time to upgrade. (one of the often overlooked benefits of buying Apple) And people will pay more for a gadget that comes with all the original accessories and the box in good condition. Buyers picture you as someone that has taken good care of the gadget and will prefer your listing over similarly priced listings that lack accessories and box.
It also means when I ship it to the seller, it will be safe even from the UPS gorillas because it's in packaging specifically designed to protect it from rough handling. Instead of mummifying it in bubble wrap and then boxing it, I put the original box IN a box of peanuts. And it arrives perfect every time. Even that time they punched a softball-size hole in the box.
Apple improves their packaging every few years also. The packages get smaller, have less unrecyclable materials in them, and continue to provide the same level of protection. They've even made the size of their service parts boxes smaller, a little feature few see.
I was kinda wondering this myself, when dealing with a film that is probably down to 1/20 of a mm between the die and the heat sink, is there any significant difference in the performance of the different compounds?
I see places selling "high grade" compound in small dose injectors, usually called "silver" something or other, and it costs 2-4x as much as regular compound. Makes me wonder if it's about as useful as buying Monster Cables.
I bought a CAN of heat sink compound about a decade ago for home. It's a tin the size of a varnish can. I figure for me that'll be a "lifetime supply". (the brand was ThermalCote) I don't know what I paid for it, ($25? been so long) but it'd probably be many hundreds of dollars if bought by the injector applicator fulls. Glad the lid seals nice and tight, it's just like a paint can.
Answering several commenters above and adding some more information as well...
1. Apple tried this out from about 1997 to 2002 in their G3 and G4 laptops and some of the desktops. They tried a variety of "thermal tabs". They worked ok. Sometimes they're quicker to put on, other times they take more time. Some were brittle. They should be available from a variety of sources at this point, not just Sony. They were also used on some of the G5's and mac pro CPUs. They tried quite a few variations over the years, and the most recent on the early mac pros were considered highly hazardous materials and we were advised to wear gloves when handling them and to not let them be exposed to air for any length of time. They may still be using them but the procs come attached to the heat sink so I don't have to handle them directly. All the products I lift heat sinks from have been using regular compound for the last several years. So I assume they figure the tabs are good for manufacturing time but not the best idea for field-repair. They may have been using 3M as a supplier, I don't know.
2. They were more expensive than thermal compound but easier to store a bunch of them in a small box/envelope.
3. I tried to reuse them and mostly failed. They tend to bond to either the heat sink or the die, or both, and get torn up pretty bad when you lift off the heat sink. Usually have to scrape the bits off both surfaces with a plastic spudger before using a new one. Makes taking things apart for test swapout or inspection a bit more of a hassle and a little more expensive.
4. one advantage they had was no spillover. A few systems I've worked with wouldn't tolerate heat sink goop spilling too far over to the ballast resistors or caps mounted near the die on the package. For those you had to be very careful about how much compound you used so it wouldn't squish out and touch something it shouldn't and generate some capacitance that would cause wonky behavior from the cpu. These are idiot-proof that way for the most part. I've also been told about problems with getting an air bubble in with the compound and creating a pocket over the die with no compound on it - I've never had that happen to me personally but I've seen the effect a few times. This isn't possible with the tabs. I've also read cautions for not applying too much compound, as though if you put on too much it wouldn't squish out enough and would create too thick of a layer of compound between die and heat sink but I don't think that's likely to happen considering the viscosity of the compound and the torque of the heat sink.
5. Occasionally we'd get tabs that were the exact size of the die, or a little undersize, and those caused problems getting them on right with full coverage. I also watched a tech forget to replace the new tab, with the expected results, so you may run into a few oops moments when changing your technique.
The effects of a solar flair like that happen across a wide degree of speeds. We get hit by light and I assume other things like xrays etc first, but other things will travel slower. The mass ejection is the slowest part isn't it? So seeing as the earth moves, I don't see how we can possibly get hit by all of the components of the flair.
They make it sound like we got "bullseyed" for this incoming storm, when really the sun had to have "lead the target" by quite a distance right? Or are these events so wide that they will cover earth's position for several days or weeks?
Compare that to some of their competitors that will suddenly toss out a fully functional product, available NOW. Not complete and polished maybe, but at least it works acceptably well just out of the gate, and isn't months away from release.
That crap only works when selling to businesses. If they're going to compete in the private sector they're going to have to get their act straight and get some hustle going.
Semifunctional products scheduled for release months from now won't compete well with products that work that are available today. You'll either enter the market with few available new customers or catch all sorts of bad PR about needing several patches just to get it working as expected/advertised (or both) like the others already in the market already do.
Tricking an app store into giving you free game boosters is one thing, but then soliciting donations to upgrade the system is surprisingly brazen. A bit like the difference between pirating movies to watch, and selling pirated movies on the corner.
"first you do something" "then they laugh at you" "then you fail" "then you insist nothing is wrong" "then they REALLY laugh at you" "then you complete your fail"
"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" should be the MS Corporate motto.
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It probably wouldn't get very far. There are so many Apple i-devices out there right now that all use that same connector, there's no single other manufacturer that could get anywhere near that active product quantity. To get another viable competing standard would require several of the other big names to get together and agree on something. And you can just imagine how impossible that would be to pull off.
Right now really is the best opportunity they have though, with Apple changing connectors. For awhile at least, they won't have the majority of products in circulation that use it. But the problem is they've caught the world off-guard, and I doubt anyone else has a different docking design in the pipe that does all the things Apple's dock connector does. By the time a big name like Nokia or Sony got their iron in the fire, Apple will already have a huge lead again and the race will basically be won about the time it starts.
One angle they might try is something similar to the thunderbolt connector - a single connector that uses a single base io protocol to manage a variety of different types of data. (video and block transfer being thunderbolt's two main ones) They could just make a single small connector like USB (four wires or thereabouts) that sends power and data, with established uses for the data. (video, audio, control, block transfer, etc) But the disadvantage to that is it makes designing peripherals that can use it expensive due to the need for a control chip. (look at all the people whining about the price of the thunderbolt cables) Look at how easy it is to make a speaker or TV dock right now... just run wires from the dock connector to the AV lines out to the TV. Simple, cheap, and reliable.
So neither option for an alternative really has much of a chance.
Thanks for the pointer. Good reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glik_v._Cunniffe
Yes I can see that. On a small device like a phone or ipod there's only room for a couple connectors. Also each connector eats up space on the inside and cuts into battery life. Headphones are a requirement for the ipod and a high value connector on ipad and iphone also. Apple has added one more connector for all the other uses. The current connector does at least:
- power
- usb
- firewire
- stereo audio out
- stereo microphone in
- volume up and down
- track up and down
- play/pause
- menu
- composite video
- internal speaker disable
I suspect you're overlooking all the other functions on that cable, and seeing it as merely a power/USB cable, when it's much more than that.
(full dock connector specs at http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml)
And the accessories you're bemoaning are using a connector that is ten years old. Lets look at some other 10 year old connectors, like scsi, ps/2, serial, adb. None of those are a standard jack on new hardware anymore. It IS a shame to have just bought an accessory that uses a connector that is about to be vintage'd, but it has to happen sooner or later. Let it go. Replace a few old accessories. Buy a new cable or two. And enjoy the next ten years before it inevitably happens again. Go sit on your porch and shake your cane, "Back in MY DAY we didn't have that new-fangled dock connector! All we had was this BIG OLD one, and we LIKED it!"
Apple just did a similar update with their power connector, the magsafe. It didn't change function much, just got a little slimmer. But Apple is selling an inexpensive adapter so you can continue to use your old spare power brick or charge-from-display. I suspect they will do something like that with the dock connector, and there will likely be 3rd party adapters available also. Such an adapter won't work with most of your "drop-in" accessories, but that can't really be helped. Most of those had problems anyway when a new model of ipod came out, and many of them addressed this problem by having changeable dock inserts. Maybe your accessory manufacturer will release an adapter kit.
On a somewhat off-topic note, I was hoping Apple was going to upgrade the magport so the center pin was optical for a digital link. The second power adapter I keep at home could have had my external display, ethernet, usb hub, backup hard drive, and speakers all plugged into it. When I got home I'd snap in just the one magsafe cable and be instantly attached to everything. Instead, I come home and have to plug in six cables, several of which really don't handle frequent use well. I wish I had a dock connector for my laptop like I do for my iphone. :(
OK then clearly they should have gone with the other industry standard cable that supports power, usb, video, remote volume and play selection, etc. Oh wait, that's right, there isn't another one!
Your argument is only valid when there are other non-proprietary options. It works well when talking about say, Sony's "i-link" proprietary firewire connector, or any of those proprietary USB connectors on cameras, where they're using a special connector to force you to buy cables and other accessories directly from them at some absurd mark-up. But that's not the case with Apple's dock connector.
This is the only connector that does it all in discrete pins, vastly simplifying construction of accessories. Even cars are coming with Apple's dock connector in them nowadays. Apple's not being an ass and forcing you to use their connector to do what they could have done with another standard connector. They just happen to have pioneered the market and have been using this one connector for the last decade, with a crapton of accessories being made by other vendors. You don't have to buy your dock from Apple. Try getting an iLink cable from someone besides Sony. (for $35 or so) That's how you abuse proprietary connectors
I believe you're severely over-estimating the number of such jobs in china. If you put every line worker in china out of a job and tried to get them something else higher-end to do, I don't think you could find enough employment in the world.
But I think that's one of the reasons China is trying to slow down their population explosion. They know there's simply not going to be as many jobs in the future as there are now. All those people either have to have work or have to be state-supported. Communist governments like China are supposed to, in theory, spread the wealth, but there's usually not enough to take good care of everyone.
This only works in the middle east, and only for a limited time, due to the vast amount the countries there are raking in from the world for their oil. A lot of their people don't have to work, or don't have to work hard. China's main export is "cheap stuff for the rest of the world" So although they have very high volume, the actual amount is a lot lower than you might think just due to the low cost demanded by the wholesalers like wallymart. (and they are sooo screwed when that oil runs out, although if they have half a brain and save a lot and invest seriously in their country as we're seeing them do now, they'll at least have a golden parachute)
THIS is the only reasonable explanation for why manufacturers in China are saying that labor is expensive there. It's not. It's dirt cheap. But so is the product they are selling. The bottom line is that China as a country isn't bringing in enough money to provide good quality of living for its huge population. As long as they continue to specialize in supercheap export products and have a large population, this just can't change.
All that's going to happen through automation is that walmart's prices might fall a nickel and a cityfull of people in china will hit the unemployment list. And it's hard to say who's to blame. Do you blame the consumer for not "buying responsibly", when they're just trying to stretch their paycheck and provide the best life possible for their family? Do you blame the retailer for not carrying only higher quality products, when they are better able to fulfill their responsibility to their shareholders by maximizing profit and volume? Do you blame the manufacturer in China for automating so they can shave a little off the cost of manufacture because their wholesaler is threatening to buy from another source? Or do you blame China for having a large enough population to allow manufacturers there to lowball the salary because they will still get all the warm bodies they need?
China realizes all this. They can't control the world's consumers. They can't control the world's retailers. If they try to interfere with their local manufacturing it will cause them to fail. So they do the only thing they can, and encourage the population to have only one child. China's doing the only thing that really anyone in this entire process can to try to improve it. Increased automation is just going to make matters worse for China IMHO. It's going to drive the price of labor even further down just when the country is trying to prop it UP. This isn't a simple little issue, it's a part of a tightly interwoven issues, and is impossible to fix by looking at only one part of it.
The immediate effect of increased automation will be a drop in the cost of labor in China, resulting in higher unemployment, heavier burden on state social services, and a drop in prices from OTHER manufacturers that didn't automate, because now labor is cheaper. The people of China are the first losers. We over here in Europe and America probably won't notice much of a difference for awhile, and I don't see any clear idea of how it will affect us in the long term. Prices in world markets are based on supply-and-demand when supply is low. But
I was just thinking this sounds like a nice way to get some power from your tinting. But I wonder how useful it is in reality? And attaching wires to a roll-down window will increase mechanical complexity and add will eventually wear out the wires leading to the window or whatever track mechanism you're going to use to transfer power.
I assume this has been tested to work with safety glass? And you can't tint your front or rear windows legally. Probably would make getting a window replaced significantly more expensive when the neighbor kid gets careless with his pellet gun.
Free speech needs to have some limits. Bomb threats and yelling FIRE in a theatre are the most popular counter-examples. Slander, exposure of trade secrets, and insider-trading are just a handful of other arguable candidates.
It IS possible for someone to clearly violate someone else's obvious rights under the guise of "freedom of speech". It can't just blindly be labeled "tyranny".
(reminds me a bit also of the "pump and dump" phrase)
That almost sounds like "insider trading" except by one person rather than two. Is that legal? (assuming you get caught and they can prove it to the court's satisfaction of course, since it doesn't matter if it's legal or not if you don't get "caught")
Went over 640k huh? Gotta watch out for that.
I doubt that would have any effect. They are just the wheels in the machine. It's the system that's broken, and they can't really change anything even if they were motivated to try and do so.
And in most cases they're just loosely following the rules, or in a few cases, strictly enforcing them. Think carefully about which way you'd prefer them to work on the average. (hint: the latter are the cases that tend to make the headlines)
How better to attract more geeks to the kernel project, than promises of BIG BOOBS?
yes that probably won't apply well to tablets, not now anyway. I was referring more to laptop computers. I get a new machine on the average every 3 years. I get from $800-1500 for them depending on age. Try selling a 3 yr old (anything but Apple) laptop for anywhere near that price.
Tablets are still in price freefall because there are so many new players running onto the field, it's a madhouse. I can't be on the internet for more than a few minutes before I'm advertised by someone selling a tablet. We won't see price stability until the market calms down and most of the "hey I think I can make a better selling tablet than the other 200 out there already!" have flamed out.
But it shouldn't be long now. Microsoft makes an excellent barometer for this sort of thing, they're usually the last major player to enter a given market. Look at MP3 players. About the time the Zune came out, the portable music market was settled. And the surface isn't far from release, so tablets should be approaching a settling point here real soon.
Yes, people keep Apple product packaging. Part of the reason I keep mine is my gear always has a good resale value several years from now when it's time to upgrade. (one of the often overlooked benefits of buying Apple) And people will pay more for a gadget that comes with all the original accessories and the box in good condition. Buyers picture you as someone that has taken good care of the gadget and will prefer your listing over similarly priced listings that lack accessories and box.
It also means when I ship it to the seller, it will be safe even from the UPS gorillas because it's in packaging specifically designed to protect it from rough handling. Instead of mummifying it in bubble wrap and then boxing it, I put the original box IN a box of peanuts. And it arrives perfect every time. Even that time they punched a softball-size hole in the box.
Apple improves their packaging every few years also. The packages get smaller, have less unrecyclable materials in them, and continue to provide the same level of protection. They've even made the size of their service parts boxes smaller, a little feature few see.
I was kinda wondering this myself, when dealing with a film that is probably down to 1/20 of a mm between the die and the heat sink, is there any significant difference in the performance of the different compounds?
I see places selling "high grade" compound in small dose injectors, usually called "silver" something or other, and it costs 2-4x as much as regular compound. Makes me wonder if it's about as useful as buying Monster Cables.
I bought a CAN of heat sink compound about a decade ago for home. It's a tin the size of a varnish can. I figure for me that'll be a "lifetime supply". (the brand was ThermalCote) I don't know what I paid for it, ($25? been so long) but it'd probably be many hundreds of dollars if bought by the injector applicator fulls. Glad the lid seals nice and tight, it's just like a paint can.
Answering several commenters above and adding some more information as well...
1. Apple tried this out from about 1997 to 2002 in their G3 and G4 laptops and some of the desktops. They tried a variety of "thermal tabs". They worked ok. Sometimes they're quicker to put on, other times they take more time. Some were brittle. They should be available from a variety of sources at this point, not just Sony. They were also used on some of the G5's and mac pro CPUs. They tried quite a few variations over the years, and the most recent on the early mac pros were considered highly hazardous materials and we were advised to wear gloves when handling them and to not let them be exposed to air for any length of time. They may still be using them but the procs come attached to the heat sink so I don't have to handle them directly. All the products I lift heat sinks from have been using regular compound for the last several years. So I assume they figure the tabs are good for manufacturing time but not the best idea for field-repair. They may have been using 3M as a supplier, I don't know.
2. They were more expensive than thermal compound but easier to store a bunch of them in a small box/envelope.
3. I tried to reuse them and mostly failed. They tend to bond to either the heat sink or the die, or both, and get torn up pretty bad when you lift off the heat sink. Usually have to scrape the bits off both surfaces with a plastic spudger before using a new one. Makes taking things apart for test swapout or inspection a bit more of a hassle and a little more expensive.
4. one advantage they had was no spillover. A few systems I've worked with wouldn't tolerate heat sink goop spilling too far over to the ballast resistors or caps mounted near the die on the package. For those you had to be very careful about how much compound you used so it wouldn't squish out and touch something it shouldn't and generate some capacitance that would cause wonky behavior from the cpu. These are idiot-proof that way for the most part. I've also been told about problems with getting an air bubble in with the compound and creating a pocket over the die with no compound on it - I've never had that happen to me personally but I've seen the effect a few times. This isn't possible with the tabs. I've also read cautions for not applying too much compound, as though if you put on too much it wouldn't squish out enough and would create too thick of a layer of compound between die and heat sink but I don't think that's likely to happen considering the viscosity of the compound and the torque of the heat sink.
5. Occasionally we'd get tabs that were the exact size of the die, or a little undersize, and those caused problems getting them on right with full coverage. I also watched a tech forget to replace the new tab, with the expected results, so you may run into a few oops moments when changing your technique.
The effects of a solar flair like that happen across a wide degree of speeds. We get hit by light and I assume other things like xrays etc first, but other things will travel slower. The mass ejection is the slowest part isn't it? So seeing as the earth moves, I don't see how we can possibly get hit by all of the components of the flair.
They make it sound like we got "bullseyed" for this incoming storm, when really the sun had to have "lead the target" by quite a distance right? Or are these events so wide that they will cover earth's position for several days or weeks?
THIS is one of MS's biggest problems IMHO.
Compare that to some of their competitors that will suddenly toss out a fully functional product, available NOW. Not complete and polished maybe, but at least it works acceptably well just out of the gate, and isn't months away from release.
That crap only works when selling to businesses. If they're going to compete in the private sector they're going to have to get their act straight and get some hustle going.
Semifunctional products scheduled for release months from now won't compete well with products that work that are available today. You'll either enter the market with few available new customers or catch all sorts of bad PR about needing several patches just to get it working as expected/advertised (or both) like the others already in the market already do.
hmmmm... protect the public, or protect profit... protect the public, or protect profit... oh wait, that's an easy decision!
Yes, a grave situation to be in for sure....
Tricking an app store into giving you free game boosters is one thing, but then soliciting donations to upgrade the system is surprisingly brazen. A bit like the difference between pirating movies to watch, and selling pirated movies on the corner.
I wasn't aware that a fee had ever been required for photocopying for school work? Isn't that a "fair use"?
(though I recall the photocopier at the library requiring a nickel per)
yup, that U3 is the most common offender I've seen
I thought it was more like
"first you do something"
"then they laugh at you"
"then you fail"
"then you insist nothing is wrong"
"then they REALLY laugh at you"
"then you complete your fail"
"Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!" should be the MS Corporate motto.
who bargains with grief? sounds more like the starting scale for alcoholism.
But a Race to the Bottom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom) is so much fun to watch! And this automates the process! it'll be so much fun! wheeeee!!