As some others are pointing out, this is not about moving data to/from the internal hard drive. It's about accessing data quickly, and consolidating connectors.
I just got a new display for my laptop so I have a bigger screen when I'm at home. When I get home, I plug in: - power - left usb - ext speakers - dvi - right usb - ethernet - firewire
That's a LOT of stuff to mess with every time I dock/undock. I'd LOVE it if they'd change the magsafe so the center (data) pin was a full duplex optical connector that could make one thin cable break out ALL of that stuff I have to plug in one at a time now. It may not cover all of those angles, but I'm hoping it does. It's possible.
Also there's a connector wear issue. full size DVI cables aren't the best thing to have to be constantly plugging/unplugging. Ethernet cables break their clips. USB starts to go in upside-down. Ext speakers fit nicely in the mic port. And none of them is really built for a very high number of operations like the magport is.
As for speed, imagine much faster access to external storage - a nice RAID5 hooked to your laptop via lightpeak, for editing video, where the speed limitation is your cpu, your ram amount/speed, and your storage. Laptops as you point out have speed issues with internal storage, between 5400-7200 usually, so external storage is a better choice. Natively best you can do is firewire800, 79mb/sec. (the other faster option is getting an esata expresscard, I have one, they can be 150mb/sec+) But imagine 250mb/sec+ lightpeak access speeds for video editing, no card required. *drool*
I think I'll be doing the $20, seems like a good amount. I like this. It's like the old saying of "vote with your wallet". But in this case, since courts and senators here are not bought with votes but with money, I suppose we're "voting with our wallets" in the truest possible form here.
It just worries me that it's going to take a LOT of $20 bills to do this poor guy any good. Tell your friends.
One man's "big stretch" is another man's "obviously related".
How gross the negligence is also depends on the person and the specifics. My juggling butcher knives is gross negligence. The performer at the circus is not. To do some of these things, like veering off the road into a stalled car, requires a pretty complete lapse of concentration on driving. So it becomes very easy to convince someone that even a LITTLE bit of additional attention to their driving would have almost certainly prevented the accident. And there we have the missing piece.
Ten things may have contributed to the deficit of concentration that led to the accident, but any ONE of them probably would have prevented the collision. And here we have an easy mark, something that's known to be a severe distractive force, probably one of the most distractive forces a driver can engage in. You personally may not agree with it, but to most it's an obvious conclusion.
doing research on alternate fuels, just so they can patent them and then bury the technology?
This has got to be the WORST way possible to abuse the patent system, whose core tenant is to encourage innovation. I've heard of companies buying and then burying things, but to actually R&D them and THEN bury them? wow.
Since without a camera in the car recording you it's impossible to PROVE that something you were doing around the time of the incident contributed to it.
For that reason many places have passed laws barring using distractive devices while driving. Where I live they just passed a law saying no texting while driving. So if I'm texting, and 2 minutes later I get into an accident, it's not much of a stretch to assume I am still messing with my crackberry and maybe even composing a new message when I plow into that stalled car. It's not necessary for them to prove I was SENDING a text at the instant of the accident. Simply showing that I was engaging in illegal distracting activities at about the time of the accident will probably be enough to convict me.
If you engage in illegal, distractive behavior while driving, and during that time you get in an accident, it becomes less of an "accident" and more of a "negligence". Obviously it'll never be 0% of one and 100% of the other, but circumstances like finding a facebook post 40 seconds before the collision will lay a heavy finger on the sales. By breaking a related law you accept a reduction to your "reasonable doubt".
wikileaks won't be able to be prosecuted for the leaks they've done, but they won't be able to make any new leaks. This isn't about retaliation or damage control, but about giving them some legal teeth for later.
and of course that's money being taken out of the mouths of starving artists living in slums unable to feed their family. all that money should go to them. Less the 99.3% we the riaa skim of the top anyway. But it's the PIRATES that are the evil.
to try to find a more concrete reason to go after bittorrent. Everyone's tired of hearing them whine about the zillions of dollars they're losing from the violation of their imaginary property. Usually Plan B involves showing how someone, somewhere is making money. (someone's making money off their IP, they want a cut, ok I get that) But this doesn't work for bittorrent because nobody's making money on it. But they're going to give it a go anyway.
Trying to insult peoples' intelligence tends to LOWER your credibility and sympathy, not raise it. You'd think they'd learn. No, on second thought, they never do learn, do they?
There are figures that as many as 60% of current iPhone apps are pirated (via jailbreaking of course)
That statistic is very misleading. Less than 10% of iphones are jailbroken. OBVIOUSLY that's where all the pirated apps are, since that's where they have to be. So anyone that wants to pirate apps will be jailbreaking their phone, and loading lots of pirated apps onto it.
And of that 10% there will be a percentage of people (like me) that jailbreak it because they want to unlock it or have access to unsigned apps. So in reality the number of people pirating is probably closers to 8-9%.
It comes as no surprise that 9% of people on a platform can pirate enough software to make the overall % pirated software approach 60%. If I wanted to I could install 100 pirated apps. Compare that to the average user installing 15 or so legit apps, and I throw off the whole curve and by that statistic I make it look like everyone is a pirate, and the above statement seems to imply that a LOT of people are jailbreaking.
"60% of current iPhone apps are pirated (via jailbreaking of course)." is too easy to interpret as "60% of iphones are jailbroken", which is totally off-base.
The article does a fairly thorough job of roasting MS over their lack of internal coordination, outlining how one wing starts to work on a new technology and other departments that need to get on board "wanted nothing to do with it'. In any well-managed company, a department that refuses to get on board with a new technology gets hell rained down on them from above until they fall into line.
Take Apple's "spotlight" meta search feature for example. Imagine the team working on the AddressBook app "wanted nothing to do with it"? There'd be hell to pay, and either team managers would change their tune or get replaced. In a large project like an operating system, lack of cooperation simply cannot be tolerated. But it seems that MS is just so large at this point that it doesn't have the power to guarantee their different projects cooperate fully with each other.
I have read from time to time that there was this sort of internal battle going on at MS, where different projects worked in isolation and there was infighting, but I'd never really seen the effects of these issues before. It's interesting to see the result. This appears to be an upper management or communications problem. Whoever is above the Outlook team needs to be asking that team manager "so how's integration with drive extender going?" If they get foot-dragging and complaining and brush-offs, that manager needs to be dragged into the director's office for some "re-education" on cohesive development. If the director isn't asking these questions, THEY need to be replaced. Something of this sort is isn't working properly at MS.
Its like a construction project. You've got all these separate units coming in, doing electrical, plumbing, structural, heating, floors. The general contractor has to make sure these people work together. Refusing to cooperate with one of the other groups simply cannot be tolerated, and it's the GC's responsibility to make sure everything works smoothly. Problems between groups need to be brought to the GC, and the GC needs to settle them immediately. Otherwise the finished building has serious problems. You can't just turn over the house to the owner and say "Oh by the way we removed the heating from the bathroom. The plumbers wouldn't route the pipes around where the heating ducts needed to go. You don't REALLY need heat in such a small room anyway." But that's the sort of thing that MS is pulling from time to time.
I think MS is just taking the cowardly way out. "We can't control our own internal development processes well enough to get this feature integrated properly in with the rest of our technology, so we're just canceling it." The article states simply that companies like Dropbox and DataRobotics (makers of Drobo) that have only one core technology are forced to "get it right", because dropping it simply isn't an option. MS seems to think they have the option to just drop any feature at any time on a whim if it's not going well, instead of going to the additional effort of kicking some butts and making it work. It's not like its an impossible task. This is doable. They just lack the necessary internal management to pull it off consistently.
Bottom line: At MS, with any new project, unless all the key players decide to get on board, the project is doomed.
In other words, the Outlook team manager should not be capable of tanking Drive Extender. But it is, and it did. And THAT is a serious internal management problem that MS has demonstrated over and over. Something's gotta change.
If you want to take a colder view of the issue, you have to see that there's no donation box outside the iphone. I'd imagine anything that stops people from coming to church physically would be discouraged.
Whatever. Being root does not somehow magically allow you to decrypt abitary data.
The data decrypted isn't arbitrary. It's information the phone requires when it starts up. Therefore the phone itself has to have some way (usually protected by root privileged objects) to unlock that information.
Any phone, or computer for that matter, that has automatic login enabled has to make this sacrifice. The iphone auto logs in as user "mobile". OS X (and therefore iOS) has a very convoluted/obfuscated way to unlock the user keychain based on automatic login, but of course no matter how much they obfuscate it, it can be defeated given enough time and dedication, by people that are capable of reverse-engineering your binaries.
This isn't a security blunder by Apple, it's a necessary tradeoff made by any operating system that features auto login. The only way to strengthen this is by encrypting the actual key with the unlock code, but four digits isn't enough entropy to even be worth the effort. You might turn a 6 minute hack into a 7 minute hack if you're very lucky. And as others have pointed out, that's about as much inconvenience as users will tolerate in an unlock code.
I've never understood why this is not considered extortion under the law? Isn't that where you notify someone they're breaking the law and you will go to the police unless they pay you? How do these 'settlement letters' they like to do not get classified as extortion? Or is this a civil law vs criminal law thing? extortion is legal for civil law?
so, more evidence supporting the popular conclusion that people are just looking for someone to blame for their panic-stomp-on-gas-instead-of-brake reaction.
Either trying to avoid the insurance deductible, or the embarrassment of public knowledge of your bad driving I suppose.
instead of copying the other 500 cell phones out there they actually have a good, original idea. Refreshing!
I guess now that I look at it, one thing that IS irritating on my phone is having to switch between apps for brief times. Being able to have two apps open AND visible at the same time would be very useful. But it's just one of those limits we take for granted because until now there really hasn't been any good solution, and every phone has suffered from that same limitation.
Titanic Sunk Due to Weak Rivets and Bolts not bad engineers. No it's some cost cutter who put the cheap ones in
The iceberg was the instigator, the bad fasteners just allowed the iceberg to do a great deal more damage, "unzipping" the hull.
Either by itself probably would not have sunk the ship. Both were required, and so both deserve a share of the responsibility. There was also an idiot that didn't know his "port" from his "starboard", and a bigwig that insisted on "full speed ahead" after the collision. No one single thing sank the titanic, it was more a comedy of errors.
Slashdot Mirror
As some others are pointing out, this is not about moving data to/from the internal hard drive. It's about accessing data quickly, and consolidating connectors.
I just got a new display for my laptop so I have a bigger screen when I'm at home. When I get home, I plug in:
- power
- left usb
- ext speakers
- dvi
- right usb
- ethernet
- firewire
That's a LOT of stuff to mess with every time I dock/undock. I'd LOVE it if they'd change the magsafe so the center (data) pin was a full duplex optical connector that could make one thin cable break out ALL of that stuff I have to plug in one at a time now. It may not cover all of those angles, but I'm hoping it does. It's possible.
Also there's a connector wear issue. full size DVI cables aren't the best thing to have to be constantly plugging/unplugging. Ethernet cables break their clips. USB starts to go in upside-down. Ext speakers fit nicely in the mic port. And none of them is really built for a very high number of operations like the magport is.
As for speed, imagine much faster access to external storage - a nice RAID5 hooked to your laptop via lightpeak, for editing video, where the speed limitation is your cpu, your ram amount/speed, and your storage. Laptops as you point out have speed issues with internal storage, between 5400-7200 usually, so external storage is a better choice. Natively best you can do is firewire800, 79mb/sec. (the other faster option is getting an esata expresscard, I have one, they can be 150mb/sec+) But imagine 250mb/sec+ lightpeak access speeds for video editing, no card required. *drool*
I think I'll be doing the $20, seems like a good amount. I like this. It's like the old saying of "vote with your wallet". But in this case, since courts and senators here are not bought with votes but with money, I suppose we're "voting with our wallets" in the truest possible form here.
It just worries me that it's going to take a LOT of $20 bills to do this poor guy any good. Tell your friends.
what a novel idea!
the whole first attempt at airing this was a textbook trainwreck, and the result was blamed on the show's merit.
One man's "big stretch" is another man's "obviously related".
How gross the negligence is also depends on the person and the specifics. My juggling butcher knives is gross negligence. The performer at the circus is not. To do some of these things, like veering off the road into a stalled car, requires a pretty complete lapse of concentration on driving. So it becomes very easy to convince someone that even a LITTLE bit of additional attention to their driving would have almost certainly prevented the accident. And there we have the missing piece.
Ten things may have contributed to the deficit of concentration that led to the accident, but any ONE of them probably would have prevented the collision. And here we have an easy mark, something that's known to be a severe distractive force, probably one of the most distractive forces a driver can engage in. You personally may not agree with it, but to most it's an obvious conclusion.
doing research on alternate fuels, just so they can patent them and then bury the technology?
This has got to be the WORST way possible to abuse the patent system, whose core tenant is to encourage innovation. I've heard of companies buying and then burying things, but to actually R&D them and THEN bury them? wow.
Since without a camera in the car recording you it's impossible to PROVE that something you were doing around the time of the incident contributed to it.
For that reason many places have passed laws barring using distractive devices while driving. Where I live they just passed a law saying no texting while driving. So if I'm texting, and 2 minutes later I get into an accident, it's not much of a stretch to assume I am still messing with my crackberry and maybe even composing a new message when I plow into that stalled car. It's not necessary for them to prove I was SENDING a text at the instant of the accident. Simply showing that I was engaging in illegal distracting activities at about the time of the accident will probably be enough to convict me.
If you engage in illegal, distractive behavior while driving, and during that time you get in an accident, it becomes less of an "accident" and more of a "negligence". Obviously it'll never be 0% of one and 100% of the other, but circumstances like finding a facebook post 40 seconds before the collision will lay a heavy finger on the sales. By breaking a related law you accept a reduction to your "reasonable doubt".
and if you're an American citizen, they delcare you an "enemy combatant" and snatch you off to gitmo in the night.
What a lovely place we live in.
wikileaks won't be able to be prosecuted for the leaks they've done, but they won't be able to make any new leaks. This isn't about retaliation or damage control, but about giving them some legal teeth for later.
you're confusing the "good guys" with the "bad guys".
and of course that's money being taken out of the mouths of starving artists living in slums unable to feed their family. all that money should go to them. Less the 99.3% we the riaa skim of the top anyway. But it's the PIRATES that are the evil.
to try to find a more concrete reason to go after bittorrent. Everyone's tired of hearing them whine about the zillions of dollars they're losing from the violation of their imaginary property. Usually Plan B involves showing how someone, somewhere is making money. (someone's making money off their IP, they want a cut, ok I get that) But this doesn't work for bittorrent because nobody's making money on it. But they're going to give it a go anyway.
Trying to insult peoples' intelligence tends to LOWER your credibility and sympathy, not raise it. You'd think they'd learn. No, on second thought, they never do learn, do they?
Leaving your trail through the years littered with business collaborators with knives in their backs tends to have that effect.
wow. that strategy letter was quite impressive. Bold, decisive, concrete, committed. Just what good leadership needs. Hope the best for them!
It's just going to rebrand itself as "Microsoft Slashdot"
That statistic is very misleading. Less than 10% of iphones are jailbroken. OBVIOUSLY that's where all the pirated apps are, since that's where they have to be. So anyone that wants to pirate apps will be jailbreaking their phone, and loading lots of pirated apps onto it.
And of that 10% there will be a percentage of people (like me) that jailbreak it because they want to unlock it or have access to unsigned apps. So in reality the number of people pirating is probably closers to 8-9%.
It comes as no surprise that 9% of people on a platform can pirate enough software to make the overall % pirated software approach 60%. If I wanted to I could install 100 pirated apps. Compare that to the average user installing 15 or so legit apps, and I throw off the whole curve and by that statistic I make it look like everyone is a pirate, and the above statement seems to imply that a LOT of people are jailbreaking.
"60% of current iPhone apps are pirated (via jailbreaking of course)." is too easy to interpret as "60% of iphones are jailbroken", which is totally off-base.
The article does a fairly thorough job of roasting MS over their lack of internal coordination, outlining how one wing starts to work on a new technology and other departments that need to get on board "wanted nothing to do with it'. In any well-managed company, a department that refuses to get on board with a new technology gets hell rained down on them from above until they fall into line.
Take Apple's "spotlight" meta search feature for example. Imagine the team working on the AddressBook app "wanted nothing to do with it"? There'd be hell to pay, and either team managers would change their tune or get replaced. In a large project like an operating system, lack of cooperation simply cannot be tolerated. But it seems that MS is just so large at this point that it doesn't have the power to guarantee their different projects cooperate fully with each other.
I have read from time to time that there was this sort of internal battle going on at MS, where different projects worked in isolation and there was infighting, but I'd never really seen the effects of these issues before. It's interesting to see the result. This appears to be an upper management or communications problem. Whoever is above the Outlook team needs to be asking that team manager "so how's integration with drive extender going?" If they get foot-dragging and complaining and brush-offs, that manager needs to be dragged into the director's office for some "re-education" on cohesive development. If the director isn't asking these questions, THEY need to be replaced. Something of this sort is isn't working properly at MS.
Its like a construction project. You've got all these separate units coming in, doing electrical, plumbing, structural, heating, floors. The general contractor has to make sure these people work together. Refusing to cooperate with one of the other groups simply cannot be tolerated, and it's the GC's responsibility to make sure everything works smoothly. Problems between groups need to be brought to the GC, and the GC needs to settle them immediately. Otherwise the finished building has serious problems. You can't just turn over the house to the owner and say "Oh by the way we removed the heating from the bathroom. The plumbers wouldn't route the pipes around where the heating ducts needed to go. You don't REALLY need heat in such a small room anyway." But that's the sort of thing that MS is pulling from time to time.
I think MS is just taking the cowardly way out. "We can't control our own internal development processes well enough to get this feature integrated properly in with the rest of our technology, so we're just canceling it." The article states simply that companies like Dropbox and DataRobotics (makers of Drobo) that have only one core technology are forced to "get it right", because dropping it simply isn't an option. MS seems to think they have the option to just drop any feature at any time on a whim if it's not going well, instead of going to the additional effort of kicking some butts and making it work. It's not like its an impossible task. This is doable. They just lack the necessary internal management to pull it off consistently.
Bottom line: At MS, with any new project, unless all the key players decide to get on board, the project is doomed.
In other words, the Outlook team manager should not be capable of tanking Drive Extender. But it is, and it did. And THAT is a serious internal management problem that MS has demonstrated over and over. Something's gotta change.
Ahh but there's a box by each and every door to the building I bet.
if they prove deliberate destruction of evidence, doesn't that constitute admission of guilt? or some other loss-by-default?
If you want to take a colder view of the issue, you have to see that there's no donation box outside the iphone. I'd imagine anything that stops people from coming to church physically would be discouraged.
The data decrypted isn't arbitrary. It's information the phone requires when it starts up. Therefore the phone itself has to have some way (usually protected by root privileged objects) to unlock that information.
Any phone, or computer for that matter, that has automatic login enabled has to make this sacrifice. The iphone auto logs in as user "mobile". OS X (and therefore iOS) has a very convoluted/obfuscated way to unlock the user keychain based on automatic login, but of course no matter how much they obfuscate it, it can be defeated given enough time and dedication, by people that are capable of reverse-engineering your binaries.
This isn't a security blunder by Apple, it's a necessary tradeoff made by any operating system that features auto login. The only way to strengthen this is by encrypting the actual key with the unlock code, but four digits isn't enough entropy to even be worth the effort. You might turn a 6 minute hack into a 7 minute hack if you're very lucky. And as others have pointed out, that's about as much inconvenience as users will tolerate in an unlock code.
I've never understood why this is not considered extortion under the law? Isn't that where you notify someone they're breaking the law and you will go to the police unless they pay you? How do these 'settlement letters' they like to do not get classified as extortion? Or is this a civil law vs criminal law thing? extortion is legal for civil law?
that's talking about no brakes. no brakes and stuck gas are different things, I thought stuck gas was the issue being discussed here?
so, more evidence supporting the popular conclusion that people are just looking for someone to blame for their panic-stomp-on-gas-instead-of-brake reaction.
Either trying to avoid the insurance deductible, or the embarrassment of public knowledge of your bad driving I suppose.
instead of copying the other 500 cell phones out there they actually have a good, original idea. Refreshing!
I guess now that I look at it, one thing that IS irritating on my phone is having to switch between apps for brief times. Being able to have two apps open AND visible at the same time would be very useful. But it's just one of those limits we take for granted because until now there really hasn't been any good solution, and every phone has suffered from that same limitation.
The iceberg was the instigator, the bad fasteners just allowed the iceberg to do a great deal more damage, "unzipping" the hull.
Either by itself probably would not have sunk the ship. Both were required, and so both deserve a share of the responsibility. There was also an idiot that didn't know his "port" from his "starboard", and a bigwig that insisted on "full speed ahead" after the collision. No one single thing sank the titanic, it was more a comedy of errors.