The Apple apologists are coming out of the orchard like cockroaches.
Nice ad hominem. I guess if you can't make a successful argument then you can at least try to distract people by attacking the person you are arguing with!
Xerox attempted to pull off what was basically a double-dip. They profited very nicely from their agreement with Apple to invest in the then-privately-held Apple Computer in exchange for giving information about the Alto to Apple for the purposes of Apple developing those ideas into a product.
Xerox shelved the Alto technology for years because they felt it was a dead-end. Many years later, after Apple was successful in using the traded information, Xerox does a 180 and tries to sue over information they traded to Apple in order to get another slice of the pie.
So the pattern was: invent technology, trade technology, shelve the technology, wait for the company you traded with to make it successful, sue that company.
The lawsuit wasn't dismissed because of the statute of limitations, it was dismissed because the judge determined that Xerox was making its complaint in the wrong forum and over the wrong issues. From an actual news article instead of Wikipedia:
Judge Walker dismissed two counts relating to Xerox's efforts to get Apple's copyright declared invalid, apparently agreeing with Apple that the proper place for such an action would be the Copyright Office, not the courts. He also dismissed three counts relating to the unfair competition assertions, saying that the lawsuit should really be a copyright infringement case, not an unfair competition case.
Xerox didn't go on to make a successful case on the proper grounds, thus proving that the lawsuit most likely was without merit. They were attempting to go for a quick cash grab and were thwarted when their case was dismissed. End of story.
If you are going to start slinging mud around you should at least try to get your facts right first or someone might call you out on it...
Since its inception, Xerox had given other companies tours of PARC, showing off the highly advanced Alto workstation, which had a bitmapped display, an object oriented programming environment, was networkable, and was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. (The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders and stopped giving tours.)
Convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the 1980s, Jobs offered Xerox a killer deal: Apple, which was privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 - in exchange for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted and gave Jobs and a team of Lisa project engineers a tour.
And you do more research, and read the entire page that you linked, you will see they even say either approach works in all modern browsers, including the method Microsoft used
A number of people in that thread call the sorting algorithm into question, none say anything bad about the shuffling algorithm. Overall a smart developer would take this as a cue to do a little more digging into each algorithm and would ultimately choose the Fisher-Yates shuffle over the sorting hack. Both algorithms are about as simple to implement but the shuffle algorithm is faster and more reliable. It's a no-brainer which should be used. In fact, the same guy you quoted also had this to say:
But on the performance side the shuffle function given by Cristoph was a clear winner. Even for small four-element arrays the real shuffle performed about twice as fast as random-sort!
And if you google "javascript random sort" like most programmers who don't use "shuffles" every day (or ever), the top hit is exactly what Microsoft implemented.
A couple of results down yields this link that talks about how it is wrong in several ways to use sort verses a shuffle.
This comes down to a programmer just not doing enough research before implementing a solution. Programmers who use the first Google link without digging deeper can get themselves into some serious trouble. A few minutes spent up-front doing a little research can save you hours of headaches later.
One solutions takes 3 seconds, can be done by an intern, and makes the company no money. The other solution takes a little bit of time, maybe some reading or prior knowledge and still makes the company no money. The results yielded for each solution are acceptable for the situation. Given the cost to profit it seems like Microsoft chose EXACTLY the right solution.
I dunno, a quick Google for "javascript shuffle array" brings up this simple function as the first result:
//+ Jonas Raoni Soares Silva //@ http://jsfromhell.com/array/shuffle [v1.0]
Yeah, a lot of companies thought that way, and ended up polluting places, and then going out of business, leaving the rest of us to clean it up.
Then you implement a straightforward inspection process at regular intervals for certain industrial processes to ensure the site is being properly maintained. Have businesses put down a deposit on some types of storage/manufacturing which are known to have difficulties, in case they go under and leave a mess.
Yes, this sort of policy will slow the growth of those businesses a little but what it DOESN'T do is hit unrelated businesses and individuals with the unnecessary complexity and costs of something like Cap and Trade. We don't need radical solutions, just reasonable ones that are tried and true.
As someone who works as an environmental/analytical chemist in the industry I can tell you that the EPA actually does a pretty damn good job these days, as opposed to the mess that was happening 50 years ago. Most of the major environmental mishaps are found on historical sites, places that haven't been in active use for a while and which the problems are only found in EPA inspections when they get re-purposed. Most contemporary industrial sites are well-monitored and kept in decent condition and shouldn't be a problem if the companies go under.
The real news is that, according to the article, Steve Jobs is planning on using Apple's $40 billion in cash to throw a toga party!
Besides the environment, many homed in on the theme of just what Apple plans on doing with all that cash it has sitting around--approximately $40 billion in reserve, Apple reported last quarter. One shareholder asked if Apple might consider investing in electric-car maker Tesla. To that, Jobs replied he was planning on throwing "a toga party" with the money instead.
What I've never quite understood is why most operating systems boot every time like it's the first time. If you look at most operating systems, they run a bunch of scripts, initialize a bunch of things, thrash the hard drive with random read and/or write patterns, and end up.. at exactly the same state every time. Why not just capture that state, and restore it?
Mac OS X pretty much does just this. It uses several files such as BootCache, BootCache.playlist, and Extensions.mkext to store a preset startup state that it can load fairly quickly. There still need to be some sanity checks to make sure that hardware and software haven't changed but overall the Mac OS X boot process is pretty quick.
That rule fell for its own error in logic a looong time ago. The error was, that the ideal is efficiency! Simplifying it to "simplicity" is on oversimplification, causing loss of purpose. Because too simple means harder again. Because in that case, you actually lose efficiency.
You might not know this but the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle is that if you are given two ways of doing something equally well you are usually best off choosing the more simple way. It's not "lose all functionality because simple is always better". In other words, unnecessary complexity is bad - necessary complexity is, well, NECESSARY!
The other part of the philosophy is that, in general, you are better off with several simple components instead of one monolithic device. This is related to the idea of object-oriented programming.
Yes, over-simplifiing is a bad thing but there is nothing in KISS that says you should over-simplify, just that you should only do just enough to accomplish your goal. Embellishing and making your product over-complex is to be avoided.
Well personally, since you pretty much have to link your iPhone to a single iTunes on a single computer, it was a pain when a new OS got rolled out and I had to wait until I got home (if I was traveling, etc) to get the update.
Actually there's no trouble at all updating your iPhone via any computer. Just plug it in and update it. When it asks you if you want to sync the iPhone with the stuff on the other computer you just tell it no. Works like a charm.
The "problem" the author is talking about is no different than the "problem" with developing for Windows, desktop Linux, server Linux, Windows Mobile, BREW, J2ME, BlackBerry, etc... Basically its a "problem" with *every* platform - including the iPhone now that iPhone apps are supposed to work on the iPad (different form factor, screen size, features, etc...)
The iPhone OS still avoids most of this due to the fact that the set of hardware you can run your app on is fairly well-defined. Apple makes all of the devices and they can present you with a complete and concise list of hardware you might want to support. It even provides programmers with simulators which cover all of the configurations. For Google to do the same thing with Android it has to rely on the disparate manufacturers volunteering their configurations back to Google and then Google has to sort through all that info, put it into a standard format, and get it back out to developers. This is a much more daunting situation than what Apple has to deal with.
However, unlike all those other platform, Android supports some *very* powerful tools in resource selection and defining what API you are targeting. Target the 1.5 SDK, and it will work on 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 because Android *knows* what SDK you are targeting. You can also specify that the "bg_image" resource be different based upon various criteria like screen DPI, whether it is in portrait or landscape mode, etc... and Android will pick the right resource without the developer needing to do anything in code.
Apple's iPhone SDK also allows multiple versions of resources and very simply allows a developer to make one version of their app that support multiple hardware and software configurations.
The other advantage that Apple has is that it has set up a culture that encourages people to use the latest OS whenever possible. Even if someone doesn't update Apple has mechanisms in place that allow a developer to easily specify minimal OS version requirements for their apps. I'm sure that Android has similar but Apple's is very tightly integrated with the App Store, kudos to Google if they implement theirs as well as Apple's.
That's not what's usually understood when someone says they're splitting atoms. Otherwise, I could split a few million just scuffing my socks on the carpet or by forgetting to put a dryer sheet in when I do laundry.
Lol, yeah, it was just a joke.
Technically though, splitting an atom usually means you take all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus and split them into two or more groups of protons and neutrons without changing the total amount of them. You really can't split a hydrogen atom because it only has 1 proton and no neutrons. I suppose if it was deuterium or tritium you could split it.
Without knowing the engineering specifics, it's impossible to calculate, but it's certainly possible it would be a speed and efficiency win rather than a loss.
Yeah, that's really my point. It's not a definite win so it's not definitely something that the characters in that universe should have done. Add to that the fact that the ramjets were in short supply (they were taken from the wall of the ring and there were only so many of them) and were being used for multiple spacecraft, it might just not have been viable.
I wondered why they didn't run them in series. Cumulative thrust would have put the ship closer to light speed.
Not necessarily. You are actually fusing those hydrogen atoms, turning them into helium. The output of one ramjet has less hydrogen than went into it. Yes, you could fuse that hydrogen/helium exhaust into heavier elements but it won't release as much energy. Basically you'll be adding mass to your spacecraft by putting another engine on but you won't be increasing your thrust as much as you may think.
You might eke out a bit more acceleration with another engine in series but it's probably not worth it. You don't want to put them in parallel on a small ship either, for several reasons. For example, the magnetic fields that funnel material into the engine are supposed to extend in a cone far in front of the engine. Two engines that are close together will have their magnetic fields interact, complicating the management of those fields. Another concern would be properly adjusting those engines to maintain even thrust on both sides. When you're traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light a slight variation in the hydrogen input of one engine could tear apart your spaceship pretty easily.
I fail to see the point where you either criticize Apple or approve Apple in relation to the topic. ... In simple terms, does this whole story affect you in any way from buying Apple products in the future ?
That's why I said this:
I'm all for holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line but 2 isolated examples with no independent corroboration or statements by the company tends to make me skeptical of the whole story.
So, no it doesn't stop me from buying Apple products at this point. If there are a lot more reports of this sort and Apple goes after people who have done far less than these two then I'll re-evaluate. Until then this is just two out of millions of users.
Who's to say what the real story is here anyways? Allegedly these two guys got banned and because they are iPhone hackers they are supposing that's the reason for the ban but several other good theories have been proposed. For example, it would be trivial to discover these guys iTunes accounts (one admitted his was firstname_lastname@yahoo.com) and then just make a bunch of failed login attempts and get the account deactivated. Some malicious person could have easily done this.
There's just too little information and these incidents are too isolated for it to affect me one way or the other. It tells me to pay attention but not to come to any snap judgements.
Even better, according to the numbers given in the article the cost is still higher than gasoline.
If you go to the DOE site that breaks down gasoline prices you see that the costs of the crude oil and refining it into gasoline are approximately 74% of December's retail price average of $2.61, making that part cost $1.93 per gallon. The article has this to say about the price of cellulostic biofuel.
In the United States, Novozymes is working with Poet LLC, the nation's top corn ethanol producer, which plans in 2011 to open a 25-million-gallon cellulosic plant fed with corn husks and corncobs. Over the past year, Poet has nearly halved its total production costs to $2.35 a gallon, and expects to fall below $2 by the ribbon-cutting.
Note that this price is heavily subsidized and it's STILL higher than plain old gasoline. They say in several years they might be able to get the enzyme costs down another 25 cents or so but I don't know if they are taking into account higher prices of feedstock as demand increases. Those increases will surely counteract some of the savings in enzyme costs.
I still don't understand what drives this technology. Years of research for something that is barely in the same price range as what it is intended to replace. Wouldn't we be better off investing in small nuclear reactors? They could be placed every few miles, provide cheap, plentiful, local electricity at very low losses which would charge electric vehicles or break apart water for hydrogen-powered cars.
Overall I dislike the high amount of government subsidies that go into alternative fuels. If a technology is promising then let the companies subsidize themselves, they can go out and get investors just like every other business.
So you're willing to protest when you get cut off but not when the guys whose software freed your phone get cut off?
It's a matter of scale and purpose. Someone hacking their own device and keeping that action to themselves is a single event. Someone making tools and enabling others (most likely people who couldn't do it in the first place) to hack their device is a manifold increase in the number of hacks, possibly also enabling further, deeper hacks of the device and network security.
There's no hard and fast cutoff as to what I would consider a reasonable degree of a company's ability to defend its closed system. When we are talking about cellular networks it wouldn't take much to cause major problems, even legitimate users can bring down the system. Add in people changing the software in unanticipated ways and then DISTRIBUTING those changes and you can easily cause havoc. On the other hand, stuff like DeCSS which enables a person to make backups of their DVDs has a less direct effect upon other users. It can still cause problems with piracy and such but it's not going to suddenly make everyone's DVDs unusable.
In this case I think that perhaps the iPhone hackers broke the terms of service of the iTunes Store and they had their accounts terminated. Apple has a right to do this, it's spelled out in the TOS. As long as they use it selectively for major infractions I'm not too worried about it, it's when they use it to ban every single little violation that I'll be worried. Is that arbitrary? Perhaps but everyone draws the line somewhere.
Finally, I don't jailbreak. If I didn't care for Apple's rules I wouldn't have bought the iPhone in the first place. If I wanted a more open device there are some out there and I would have gotten one. My iPhone works just fine for me without hacking anything.
I'm having a problem understanding what you mean by "holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line" in the context of this article which deals with 2 hackers being cut off because of jailbreaking, when you justify Apple by stating that "even then" they have "every right" to do so.
I may not like it when a company does something and I'll complain to that company about it but that doesn't change the fact that they have the right to do it. These hackers agreed to the terms of service (you HAVE to in order to use the store in the first place) and then they broke those terms. The remedy as spelled out in the agreement is termination of service.
This doesn't mean I agree or disagree with either party, it just means that I acknowledge Apple's right to terminate service under these circumstances. If I think that some part of the terms of service is unfair or is being enforced unfairly then I will protest with letters to Apple, posts in public forums, avoiding the service, etc. Apple may be in the right but that doesn't necessarily affect my opinion of their actions.
You might want to go back and re-read my statement in context and in its entirety. Cutting-and-pasting two small blocks of text out of several different sentences can be very misrepresentative of what was actually said.
If you have a real, cogent argument to make then by all means go for it if you have the ability. Otherwise all you are doing is adding to the noise level here.
It can happen. I'm sure a lot of XBox 360 users were thinking the same thing before Microsoft did their mass bannings from XBL.
Of course it can happen. Google could also start arming its employees with Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapons and send them out in the streets causing mischief and mayhem but I don't think too many people are losing sleep over that possibility!;-)
The point is that only fools panic over what COULD remotely possibly maybe happen. Keep an eye on the issue, yes. Respond if it gets out of hand, yes! But don't make the assumption that two incidents equals a mass ban. That's just jumping the gun and overreacting.
So who's to say it's not someone just messing with these guys? All it takes is a few bad login attempts to temporarily disable ANY Apple ID.
That's an excellent point. I guess we'll all have to wait for Apple to make a statement if they are instituting a policy against jailbreakers. Until then maybe knee-jerk reactions are a bit over the top? What an amazing concept...
I'm all for holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line but 2 isolated examples with no independent corroboration or statements by the company tends to make me skeptical of the whole story. Even then, Apple has every right to cut off access to these hackers. It's right in the iTunes Terms of Service which you have to agree to before you use the service:
You agree not to attempt to, or assist another person to, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security components related to such Usage Rules for any reason whatsoever.
Termination by Apple. If you fail, or Apple suspects that you have failed, to comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, including but not limited to failure to make payment of fees due, failure to provide Apple with a valid credit card or with accurate and complete Registration Data, failure to safeguard your Account information, violation of the Usage Rules or any license to the software, or infringement or other violation of third parties' rights, Apple, at its sole discretion, without notice to you may: (i) terminate this Agreement and/or your Account, and you will remain liable for all amounts due under your Account up to and including the date of termination; and/or (ii) terminate the license to the software; and/or (iii) preclude access to the Service (or any part thereof).
Get a grip people. There haven't been any reports that Apple is banning people who jailbreak their own personal phones, they have banned TWO people who are involved in discovering and propagating exploits for the iPhone. Yes, these hacks are being used to jailbreak but it's a much different thing to ban someone who is actively seeking new ways to break into the iPhone OS than it is to ban someone unlocking their own phone.
If Apple starts banning en-masse people who have jailbroken their iPhones then we can break out the torches and pitchforks. Until then it's a company saying "no more soup for you" to a couple of hackers who are looking to exploit the company's secure system. And yes, I'll be right there with the rest of you if Apple does start pushing around joe average over this issue.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apple apologists are coming out of the orchard like cockroaches.
Nice ad hominem. I guess if you can't make a successful argument then you can at least try to distract people by attacking the person you are arguing with!
Xerox attempted to pull off what was basically a double-dip. They profited very nicely from their agreement with Apple to invest in the then-privately-held Apple Computer in exchange for giving information about the Alto to Apple for the purposes of Apple developing those ideas into a product.
Xerox shelved the Alto technology for years because they felt it was a dead-end. Many years later, after Apple was successful in using the traded information, Xerox does a 180 and tries to sue over information they traded to Apple in order to get another slice of the pie.
So the pattern was: invent technology, trade technology, shelve the technology, wait for the company you traded with to make it successful, sue that company.
The lawsuit wasn't dismissed because of the statute of limitations, it was dismissed because the judge determined that Xerox was making its complaint in the wrong forum and over the wrong issues. From an actual news article instead of Wikipedia:
Judge Walker dismissed two counts relating to Xerox's efforts to get Apple's copyright declared invalid, apparently agreeing with Apple that the proper place for such an action would be the Copyright Office, not the courts. He also dismissed three counts relating to the unfair competition assertions, saying that the lawsuit should really be a copyright infringement case, not an unfair competition case.
Xerox didn't go on to make a successful case on the proper grounds, thus proving that the lawsuit most likely was without merit. They were attempting to go for a quick cash grab and were thwarted when their case was dismissed. End of story.
If you are going to start slinging mud around you should at least try to get your facts right first or someone might call you out on it...
And will Apple pay Xerox for inventing Graphical User Interfaces?
Erm, you DO know that Apple and Xerox had an agreement on the sharing of GUI technology?
Here's some of the history:
Since its inception, Xerox had given other companies tours of PARC, showing off the highly advanced Alto workstation, which had a bitmapped display, an object oriented programming environment, was networkable, and was more powerful than most minicomputers of the day. (The researchers at PARC had since become leery of outsiders and stopped giving tours.)
Convinced that the technology at PARC could help Apple usher in the 1980s, Jobs offered Xerox a killer deal: Apple, which was privately owned at the time, would allow Xerox to invest $1 million in Apple, which was sure to soar in value when the company went public in 1981 - in exchange for two guided tours of PARC's technology. Xerox happily accepted and gave Jobs and a team of Lisa project engineers a tour.
And you do more research, and read the entire page that you linked, you will see they even say either approach works in all modern browsers, including the method Microsoft used
A number of people in that thread call the sorting algorithm into question, none say anything bad about the shuffling algorithm. Overall a smart developer would take this as a cue to do a little more digging into each algorithm and would ultimately choose the Fisher-Yates shuffle over the sorting hack. Both algorithms are about as simple to implement but the shuffle algorithm is faster and more reliable. It's a no-brainer which should be used. In fact, the same guy you quoted also had this to say:
But on the performance side the shuffle function given by Cristoph was a clear winner. Even for small four-element arrays the real shuffle performed about twice as fast as random-sort!
And if you google "javascript random sort" like most programmers who don't use "shuffles" every day (or ever), the top hit is exactly what Microsoft implemented.
A couple of results down yields this link that talks about how it is wrong in several ways to use sort verses a shuffle.
This comes down to a programmer just not doing enough research before implementing a solution. Programmers who use the first Google link without digging deeper can get themselves into some serious trouble. A few minutes spent up-front doing a little research can save you hours of headaches later.
One solutions takes 3 seconds, can be done by an intern, and makes the company no money. The other solution takes a little bit of time, maybe some reading or prior knowledge and still makes the company no money. The results yielded for each solution are acceptable for the situation. Given the cost to profit it seems like Microsoft chose EXACTLY the right solution.
I dunno, a quick Google for "javascript shuffle array" brings up this simple function as the first result:
It didn't take much time at all to do the search, probably just as much time as it took to come up with the wrong function that Microsoft used.
Yeah, a lot of companies thought that way, and ended up polluting places, and then going out of business, leaving the rest of us to clean it up.
Then you implement a straightforward inspection process at regular intervals for certain industrial processes to ensure the site is being properly maintained. Have businesses put down a deposit on some types of storage/manufacturing which are known to have difficulties, in case they go under and leave a mess.
Yes, this sort of policy will slow the growth of those businesses a little but what it DOESN'T do is hit unrelated businesses and individuals with the unnecessary complexity and costs of something like Cap and Trade. We don't need radical solutions, just reasonable ones that are tried and true.
As someone who works as an environmental/analytical chemist in the industry I can tell you that the EPA actually does a pretty damn good job these days, as opposed to the mess that was happening 50 years ago. Most of the major environmental mishaps are found on historical sites, places that haven't been in active use for a while and which the problems are only found in EPA inspections when they get re-purposed. Most contemporary industrial sites are well-monitored and kept in decent condition and shouldn't be a problem if the companies go under.
The real news is that, according to the article, Steve Jobs is planning on using Apple's $40 billion in cash to throw a toga party!
Besides the environment, many homed in on the theme of just what Apple plans on doing with all that cash it has sitting around--approximately $40 billion in reserve, Apple reported last quarter. One shareholder asked if Apple might consider investing in electric-car maker Tesla. To that, Jobs replied he was planning on throwing "a toga party" with the money instead.
What I've never quite understood is why most operating systems boot every time like it's the first time. If you look at most operating systems, they run a bunch of scripts, initialize a bunch of things, thrash the hard drive with random read and/or write patterns, and end up.. at exactly the same state every time. Why not just capture that state, and restore it?
Mac OS X pretty much does just this. It uses several files such as BootCache, BootCache.playlist, and Extensions.mkext to store a preset startup state that it can load fairly quickly. There still need to be some sanity checks to make sure that hardware and software haven't changed but overall the Mac OS X boot process is pretty quick.
Here's a good summary of the boot process for Mac OS X. It's a little old but most of it is still relevant.
That rule fell for its own error in logic a looong time ago.
The error was, that the ideal is efficiency! Simplifying it to "simplicity" is on oversimplification, causing loss of purpose. Because too simple means harder again. Because in that case, you actually lose efficiency.
You might not know this but the Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS) principle is that if you are given two ways of doing something equally well you are usually best off choosing the more simple way. It's not "lose all functionality because simple is always better". In other words, unnecessary complexity is bad - necessary complexity is, well, NECESSARY!
The other part of the philosophy is that, in general, you are better off with several simple components instead of one monolithic device. This is related to the idea of object-oriented programming.
Yes, over-simplifiing is a bad thing but there is nothing in KISS that says you should over-simplify, just that you should only do just enough to accomplish your goal. Embellishing and making your product over-complex is to be avoided.
Well personally, since you pretty much have to link your iPhone to a single iTunes on a single computer, it was a pain when a new OS got rolled out and I had to wait until I got home (if I was traveling, etc) to get the update.
Actually there's no trouble at all updating your iPhone via any computer. Just plug it in and update it. When it asks you if you want to sync the iPhone with the stuff on the other computer you just tell it no. Works like a charm.
The "problem" the author is talking about is no different than the "problem" with developing for Windows, desktop Linux, server Linux, Windows Mobile, BREW, J2ME, BlackBerry, etc... Basically its a "problem" with *every* platform - including the iPhone now that iPhone apps are supposed to work on the iPad (different form factor, screen size, features, etc...)
The iPhone OS still avoids most of this due to the fact that the set of hardware you can run your app on is fairly well-defined. Apple makes all of the devices and they can present you with a complete and concise list of hardware you might want to support. It even provides programmers with simulators which cover all of the configurations. For Google to do the same thing with Android it has to rely on the disparate manufacturers volunteering their configurations back to Google and then Google has to sort through all that info, put it into a standard format, and get it back out to developers. This is a much more daunting situation than what Apple has to deal with.
However, unlike all those other platform, Android supports some *very* powerful tools in resource selection and defining what API you are targeting. Target the 1.5 SDK, and it will work on 1.6, 2.0, and 2.1 because Android *knows* what SDK you are targeting. You can also specify that the "bg_image" resource be different based upon various criteria like screen DPI, whether it is in portrait or landscape mode, etc... and Android will pick the right resource without the developer needing to do anything in code.
Apple's iPhone SDK also allows multiple versions of resources and very simply allows a developer to make one version of their app that support multiple hardware and software configurations.
The other advantage that Apple has is that it has set up a culture that encourages people to use the latest OS whenever possible. Even if someone doesn't update Apple has mechanisms in place that allow a developer to easily specify minimal OS version requirements for their apps. I'm sure that Android has similar but Apple's is very tightly integrated with the App Store, kudos to Google if they implement theirs as well as Apple's.
To be honest, the Apple stores are nicer-looking than a lot of the chapels out there!
That and they are a temple, of sorts.
That's not what's usually understood when someone says they're splitting atoms. Otherwise, I could split a few million just scuffing my socks on the carpet or by forgetting to put a dryer sheet in when I do laundry.
Lol, yeah, it was just a joke.
Technically though, splitting an atom usually means you take all the protons and neutrons in the nucleus and split them into two or more groups of protons and neutrons without changing the total amount of them. You really can't split a hydrogen atom because it only has 1 proton and no neutrons. I suppose if it was deuterium or tritium you could split it.
Without knowing the engineering specifics, it's impossible to calculate, but it's certainly possible it would be a speed and efficiency win rather than a loss.
Yeah, that's really my point. It's not a definite win so it's not definitely something that the characters in that universe should have done. Add to that the fact that the ramjets were in short supply (they were taken from the wall of the ring and there were only so many of them) and were being used for multiple spacecraft, it might just not have been viable.
something tells me that cutting a large number of single protons in half right in front of the ship would more than double their problems....
No no, they aren't splitting protons - they are splitting atoms! As in, all the electrons go to the left and all the protons go to the right!
I wondered why they didn't run them in series. Cumulative thrust would have put the ship closer to light speed.
Not necessarily. You are actually fusing those hydrogen atoms, turning them into helium. The output of one ramjet has less hydrogen than went into it. Yes, you could fuse that hydrogen/helium exhaust into heavier elements but it won't release as much energy. Basically you'll be adding mass to your spacecraft by putting another engine on but you won't be increasing your thrust as much as you may think.
You might eke out a bit more acceleration with another engine in series but it's probably not worth it. You don't want to put them in parallel on a small ship either, for several reasons. For example, the magnetic fields that funnel material into the engine are supposed to extend in a cone far in front of the engine. Two engines that are close together will have their magnetic fields interact, complicating the management of those fields. Another concern would be properly adjusting those engines to maintain even thrust on both sides. When you're traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light a slight variation in the hydrogen input of one engine could tear apart your spaceship pretty easily.
I thought they changed their name to SyFi.
Even worse they went whole-hog and changed their name to SyFy!
I fail to see the point where you either criticize Apple or approve Apple in relation to the topic.
...
In simple terms, does this whole story affect you in any way from buying Apple products in the future ?
That's why I said this:
I'm all for holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line but 2 isolated examples with no independent corroboration or statements by the company tends to make me skeptical of the whole story.
So, no it doesn't stop me from buying Apple products at this point. If there are a lot more reports of this sort and Apple goes after people who have done far less than these two then I'll re-evaluate. Until then this is just two out of millions of users.
Who's to say what the real story is here anyways? Allegedly these two guys got banned and because they are iPhone hackers they are supposing that's the reason for the ban but several other good theories have been proposed. For example, it would be trivial to discover these guys iTunes accounts (one admitted his was firstname_lastname@yahoo.com) and then just make a bunch of failed login attempts and get the account deactivated. Some malicious person could have easily done this.
There's just too little information and these incidents are too isolated for it to affect me one way or the other. It tells me to pay attention but not to come to any snap judgements.
Even better, according to the numbers given in the article the cost is still higher than gasoline.
If you go to the DOE site that breaks down gasoline prices you see that the costs of the crude oil and refining it into gasoline are approximately 74% of December's retail price average of $2.61, making that part cost $1.93 per gallon. The article has this to say about the price of cellulostic biofuel.
In the United States, Novozymes is working with Poet LLC, the nation's top corn ethanol producer, which plans in 2011 to open a 25-million-gallon cellulosic plant fed with corn husks and corncobs. Over the past year, Poet has nearly halved its total production costs to $2.35 a gallon, and expects to fall below $2 by the ribbon-cutting.
Note that this price is heavily subsidized and it's STILL higher than plain old gasoline. They say in several years they might be able to get the enzyme costs down another 25 cents or so but I don't know if they are taking into account higher prices of feedstock as demand increases. Those increases will surely counteract some of the savings in enzyme costs.
I still don't understand what drives this technology. Years of research for something that is barely in the same price range as what it is intended to replace. Wouldn't we be better off investing in small nuclear reactors? They could be placed every few miles, provide cheap, plentiful, local electricity at very low losses which would charge electric vehicles or break apart water for hydrogen-powered cars.
Overall I dislike the high amount of government subsidies that go into alternative fuels. If a technology is promising then let the companies subsidize themselves, they can go out and get investors just like every other business.
So you're willing to protest when you get cut off but not when the guys whose software freed your phone get cut off?
It's a matter of scale and purpose. Someone hacking their own device and keeping that action to themselves is a single event. Someone making tools and enabling others (most likely people who couldn't do it in the first place) to hack their device is a manifold increase in the number of hacks, possibly also enabling further, deeper hacks of the device and network security.
There's no hard and fast cutoff as to what I would consider a reasonable degree of a company's ability to defend its closed system. When we are talking about cellular networks it wouldn't take much to cause major problems, even legitimate users can bring down the system. Add in people changing the software in unanticipated ways and then DISTRIBUTING those changes and you can easily cause havoc. On the other hand, stuff like DeCSS which enables a person to make backups of their DVDs has a less direct effect upon other users. It can still cause problems with piracy and such but it's not going to suddenly make everyone's DVDs unusable.
In this case I think that perhaps the iPhone hackers broke the terms of service of the iTunes Store and they had their accounts terminated. Apple has a right to do this, it's spelled out in the TOS. As long as they use it selectively for major infractions I'm not too worried about it, it's when they use it to ban every single little violation that I'll be worried. Is that arbitrary? Perhaps but everyone draws the line somewhere.
Finally, I don't jailbreak. If I didn't care for Apple's rules I wouldn't have bought the iPhone in the first place. If I wanted a more open device there are some out there and I would have gotten one. My iPhone works just fine for me without hacking anything.
I'm having a problem understanding what you mean by "holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line" in the context of this article which deals with 2 hackers being cut off because of jailbreaking, when you justify Apple by stating that "even then" they have "every right" to do so.
I may not like it when a company does something and I'll complain to that company about it but that doesn't change the fact that they have the right to do it. These hackers agreed to the terms of service (you HAVE to in order to use the store in the first place) and then they broke those terms. The remedy as spelled out in the agreement is termination of service.
This doesn't mean I agree or disagree with either party, it just means that I acknowledge Apple's right to terminate service under these circumstances. If I think that some part of the terms of service is unfair or is being enforced unfairly then I will protest with letters to Apple, posts in public forums, avoiding the service, etc. Apple may be in the right but that doesn't necessarily affect my opinion of their actions.
You might want to go back and re-read my statement in context and in its entirety. Cutting-and-pasting two small blocks of text out of several different sentences can be very misrepresentative of what was actually said.
If you have a real, cogent argument to make then by all means go for it if you have the ability. Otherwise all you are doing is adding to the noise level here.
It can happen. I'm sure a lot of XBox 360 users were thinking the same thing before Microsoft did their mass bannings from XBL.
Of course it can happen. Google could also start arming its employees with Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapons and send them out in the streets causing mischief and mayhem but I don't think too many people are losing sleep over that possibility! ;-)
The point is that only fools panic over what COULD remotely possibly maybe happen. Keep an eye on the issue, yes. Respond if it gets out of hand, yes! But don't make the assumption that two incidents equals a mass ban. That's just jumping the gun and overreacting.
So who's to say it's not someone just messing with these guys? All it takes is a few bad login attempts to temporarily disable ANY Apple ID.
That's an excellent point. I guess we'll all have to wait for Apple to make a statement if they are instituting a policy against jailbreakers. Until then maybe knee-jerk reactions are a bit over the top? What an amazing concept...
I'm all for holding a company's feet to the fire when they step over the line but 2 isolated examples with no independent corroboration or statements by the company tends to make me skeptical of the whole story. Even then, Apple has every right to cut off access to these hackers. It's right in the iTunes Terms of Service which you have to agree to before you use the service:
You agree not to attempt to, or assist another person to, circumvent, reverse-engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise tamper with any of the security components related to such Usage Rules for any reason whatsoever.
Termination by Apple. If you fail, or Apple suspects that you have failed, to comply with any of the provisions of this Agreement, including but not limited to failure to make payment of fees due, failure to provide Apple with a valid credit card or with accurate and complete Registration Data, failure to safeguard your Account information, violation of the Usage Rules or any license to the software, or infringement or other violation of third parties' rights, Apple, at its sole discretion, without notice to you may: (i) terminate this Agreement and/or your Account, and you will remain liable for all amounts due under your Account up to and including the date of termination; and/or (ii) terminate the license to the software; and/or (iii) preclude access to the Service (or any part thereof).
Get a grip people. There haven't been any reports that Apple is banning people who jailbreak their own personal phones, they have banned TWO people who are involved in discovering and propagating exploits for the iPhone. Yes, these hacks are being used to jailbreak but it's a much different thing to ban someone who is actively seeking new ways to break into the iPhone OS than it is to ban someone unlocking their own phone.
If Apple starts banning en-masse people who have jailbroken their iPhones then we can break out the torches and pitchforks. Until then it's a company saying "no more soup for you" to a couple of hackers who are looking to exploit the company's secure system. And yes, I'll be right there with the rest of you if Apple does start pushing around joe average over this issue.