There are plenty of use cases like this. Apple is publishing iWork for the iPad. How often do you control-tab between a word processor and a browser? I do it often.
Every app can view a web page, they all have access to WebKit. Every application also has access to viewing common document types such as PDF, RTF, Word, Excel, and so on. What if you could view the document and the browser and never switch between apps?
There are plenty of ways to get around the need to multitask. Multitasking is just one solution to the problem of how to easily view multiple sets of data nearly simultaneously. With applications being able to freeze state, view multiple document types, receive background notifications, and do background processing on remote servers there is very little reason to require multitasking in a minimal device like an iPhone or iPad.
Actually, the flying disk goes way back to before the 16th century...it is called a Chakram
There are many examples throughout history of flat, circular objects that were thrown for various reasons. Someone else talked about the discus which has been around since at least 500 BC (and probably much earlier too). There's also a lot of evidence of people throwing around cookie tin lids and other improvised pieces of sports equipment.
The point is that the modern Frisbee started out as the pie tin for the Frisbie Pie Company and it was not invented by Fred Morrison. His innovation was making a flying disc out of plastic, with a more aerodynamic profile, and intended directly for sporting use. He didn't invent the flying disc, he refined it.
I seem to recall watching a documentary that showed the frisbee being invented some time back in 1885 or 1886.
The Frisbie was originally the pie plate used by the Frisbie Pie Company to bake and sell its pies in. Yale students were throwing them around in games since the late 1800's, well before Fred Morrison came up with his "Pluto Platter". Wham-O decided to re-name the Pluto Platter to the Frisbie because that's what it was already widely called, then they had to re-name it again to "Frisbee" in order to avoid trademark infringement.
Having never owned an iPhone, what does Apple do to restrict web downloads of mp3s from Amazon or any number of other online services? The only thing I can think of is that the ipod app is incapable of adding news mp3s to its index without itunes on a computer, but I'm just asking...
Apple doesn't restrict these in any way. Music is loaded onto an iPhone/iPod through iTunes so all you need to do is download your MP3 and then drag it into iTunes. The MP3 is then available to load on to your music player.
If your music has DRM or it is in some format that your device can't play then you would have to transcode it into a format your player can understand first. For example, people who bought music from a music store that used Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM would have to find some way to convert their DRM files into standard AAC or MP3 files before they loaded them on to their iPods.
Look up the EEE-PC T91. It has a touchscreen, and the keyboard can fold under the screen so that the whole thing operates just like an iPad. ... By the way, assuming the rumored price is correct, the T91 costs the same as an iPad. I've been practicing my smugly superior laugh just so that I can use it on everyone who buys one of these "toys."
Of course the T91 is twice as thick, 1.4 times as heavy, has a smaller display with both lower resolution and larger pixels, has half the battery life, and doesn't come with a built-in compass, GPS, or 3G wireless connectivity. Then there's the ease-of-use of an "appliance UI" like an iPad when compared to something running a full-fledged operating system UI.
There's trade-offs on both sides. If the T91 is your thing then go for it but don't assume that your choice is better than someone else's. It may be better for YOU but other people have just as valid reasons for choosing an iPad over a T91. To say that you are "smugly superior" because you got a T91 just makes you a stupid git.
The iPad has to function as a reader, so it allows you to load up a number of different filetypes onto the device, including MSWord, RTF, PDF and so on.
On the iPhone, all those file extensions are blocked. Even if you have a third-party app that can display them, you can't put your own document files onto the device from your computer, unless you circumvent the iTunes synch software by signing up with a fileserver service and going via the internet... just to get around the Apple restrictions. Even//text files// are blocked from being transferred across.
Not quite.
The iPhone has the built-in ability to display all those formats and more. It doesn't restrict that ability at all. There are plenty of apps for the iPhone that let you read and even edit those formats freely. Those apps can also freely transfer those files to and from your computer through various means, not just through a fileserver service.
What the iPhone doesn't do out of the box is act as a USB drive. That's a lot different than saying that it blocks file transfers...
If that is true, then why doesn't Foxconn sell any boards that don't suck except to Apple? No company wants to have their product stand for shit, or have their motto be "we suck!" and anyone who builds PCs for a living will tell you that gamers and other hardcore PC users will happily pay good money for quality, which is why you can have $300 ASUS and Gigabyte boards.
Believe it or not, there is often a lot more money to be made in something cheap rather than something expensive. Most people out there don't know and don't care about the motherboard in their computer, they just want it as inexpensive as possible. A company like Foxconn probably sells a ton of motherboards at a low price and it's not worth it for them to sell a smaller amount of boards at a high price.
You also have to look at where the competition is at. A lot of companies cater to the higher end of the hobbiest industry but there is a low-end market too. Foxconn fills that niche, either to people who don't know better or to people who don't mind possibly returning a bad board or two if it means they will save some cash.
I'm also willing to bet that the bulk of Foxconn's business is as an OEM supplier. The boards they sell to the hobbiest market are probably just their rejects, overruns and reworks from their OEM business. These boards can be sold cheaply because they are designed to be made inexpensively and manufactured in bulk. The high failure rate might be due to the fact that they are the ones that were marginal in QC in the first place - good enough to pass initial inspection but not really run through a thorough burn-in testing process.
As far as selling the better designed boards that are made for a major player like Apple? Don't you think that a smart company like Apple owns the designs for those boards and probably monitors the designs of the motherboards that are sold to the hobbiest industry? If Foxconn sold the boards under their own name and Apple found out then that manufacturing contract would be torn up and a lot more money would be lost than could ever be made up in hobbiest sales.
Definitely don't buy Foxconn boards for building your own computer if you've seen such a high failure rate with them but you really can't extrapolate your experience to the big computer manufacturers. They have much more choice and control over their components than a hobbiest does.
Foxconn boards are seriously cheap? Hell I switched to ECS for budget builds because even THEY were better than Foxconn. I honestly didn't know that Apple ran Foxconns, and if it isn't just BS...wow. Their profit margins must be truly insane if they are cheaping out with low rent boards like that. If I spent that kind of cash and found I was running a Foxconn board I'd be SERIOUSLY pissed.
Not all boards by a company are made the same, even if they are the same model. I've worked at a company that manufactured circuit boards and you'll get different buyers purchasing the same board at different prices with different levels of burn-in testing and inspection. You might have one buyer purchasing boards at cost X with almost no quality control and another purchasing the boards at a huge markup with a guarantee of 6 sigma (usually for the military or such).
You even have companies like Apple who design their own boards and just use a company like Foxconn as the fabricator. This could mean more robust circuit layout, premium, high-reliability parts, additional quality control, and so on.
Note that I said usually - of course there are exceptions and some industries are more adamant about it than others. The movie and TV industry is usually MUCH more strict about DRM than the publishing industry.
And yes, the iPhone/iPad handles PDF (as well as several Microsoft Word formats, RTF, and text files, among others) just fine.
It's DRM'd to high hell - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon.
Erm, no. It's been Steve Job's and Apple's stance for a long time that DRM is a bad thing, even before Amazon sold music. The problem is that publishers want DRM on their products and when they enter into agreements they usually insist on DRM as part of the deal. Do you see any other major player offering DRM-free movies? You can get some DRM-free e-books but it's pretty rare too.
The only reason that Amazon has DRM-free music is because of Apple. Apple got control of the online sales for the music industry so the music industry tried to create competition to Apple by selling music on sites like Amazon. The problem is that the only DRM that would work on the iPod, the most popular music device, was Apple's DRM and only Apple could create music files with Apple DRM. Amazon needed to sell DRM-free MP3 files (which the iPod can also play) and the music industry allowed them to do this. Even with this Apple was still a major player so when it came time to renew the distribution agreements the music industry was forced into making all music DRM-free.
So you can thank Apple for your DRM-free music. Let's hope that they do the same to the book, movie, and television industry!
Given its glossy screen, I can't imagine the iPad will cope too well either if you sit with a 200W light behind you.
That's pretty easy to fix with some inexpensive anti-glare film. Because this stuff exists I'd rather they sold devices with glossy screens so people have the option of simply applying the anti-glare film if they want a matte screen.
Of course it'd be nice to have a choice between glossy and matte screens from the device manufacturer but that would double the type of models that need to be produced. Since most people care about how the display looks they tend to go for glossy screens since the depth and contrast of a glossy screen is superior to that of a matte screen by their very nature. It's a no-brainer for a manufacturer to standardize on glossy instead of matte in order to keep a simplified product line.
No, the purpose of the tab would still be there. The width would be a formatting suggestion to the application. Depending on the application and the user preferences the tab could be treated as either the width encoded in the type of tab or used as the old-style tab.
More information is usually better, at worst you just treat every type of tab as if they were all the same. This is a simple way for applications to pass information about spacing without having to use multiple space characters or some sort of complicated meta-data system.
It seems to me that a lot of the problems of tab could be solved by making more than one kind of tab, encoding the tab width into the tab character itself.
For example, create a tab-2, tab-3. tab-4. tab-5. tab-6. tab-7, tab-8, tab-9, tab-10. Now any text program has more information about formatting. It can display the tab as its default width as given in the tab character, ie: 2 spaces for tab-2, or it can convert the tab into the program's own method of formatting. This kind of system would be virtually invisible to the user and would allow programs to better use tabs and format text.
Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.
There's 2 major problems with this.
The first problem is discretionary income, that is income past what is spent on taxes and living expenses. At the lower incomes most of the income is necessary simply for living. If someone is earning just barely enough for food, shelter, and clothing then a flat percent tax is a killer. Higher incomes have a much larger proportion of discretionary income.
There's a simple answer for this: allow everyone a single deduction based on cost of living for their area. You then tax the remainder which should represent the discretionary income. This is still pretty fair and simple and it is less of a hardship on low wage earners.
The second problem is the Robin Hood syndrome. Since we live in a representative republic it is generally majority rule. The majority of the people vote for politicians who will give them free stuff. These people think, "Those rich people have plenty to give so why not tax them a lot and lower how much the rest are taxed?"
Sadly, the only fix for this is for the rich to hide their money. They will find loopholes in the tax code, move to offshore tax havens, invest their money in ways that can't be taxed, or simply pay off politicians to create ways for the rich to keep their money. The net result is that now the money is effectively removed from the local economy and everyone is worse off.
As usual, people go for the short-term solution. This means we are stuck in the second scenario that I presented. Watch as our economy continues to spiral down the drain...
along the same lines that the uncertainty principle says it is possible but highly improbable that a Ferrari will spontaneously appear in my driveway.
Damn, I'm waiting on that one too! Well, if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true then maybe there's a universe out there where that's happened...
It is impossible for a random electrical surge to cause the above sequence of events to happen. So no, an EMP will not cause money to spit of of an ATM.
I certainly don't know everything about the internals of an ATM machine but I do know 1 thing: impossible is a very strong word. A sequence of glitches like you describe may be extremely unlikely but that doesn't mean that it is impossible. The very nature of an EMP attack is that it creates a lot of glitches at once and I'm sure there is some chance that the right ones can occur to cause an ATM to dump cash.
However, I can see that it is very improbable that it will happen.
Huh, why would an ATM spit out money when it goes dead?
Random electrical input (in the form of induced currents from an EMP) can cause random effects in electronic devices. Yeah, it's not likely for an ATM to start spitting out cash but it might happen if hit by an EMP.
Years ago I knew people who would soak dollar bills in a salt solution then use them in vending machines. The conductive fluid would short out components and once in a while the vending machine would dump change or vend random items. I'm pretty sure that today's machines are hardened against this type of attack so it doesn't work any more.
There were some similar attacks when slot machines went from mechanical to electronic. People would build shock devices - high voltage, low current, battery-powered devices. They would brush electrodes against the metal parts of the slot machine and sometimes it would cause the machine to glitch and dump cash. Now all the slot machines are hardened and tested against these sort of attacks.
Well guess what fanboi, you can get Flash on Windows too. If this isn't an OSX problem where is the Microsoft Security Update? And why is Apple patching this, not Adobe?
Face it, Apple is way less secure than Windows.
There were also vulnerabilities in the Windows version. They were patched by Adobe a couple of months ago. Adobe just released the Mac version of the updates. Again, blame Adobe for being late to patch Flash for Mac, not Apple.
Apple is not patching Flash, they are just pushing out the latest version from Adobe since Flash is part of the default install for Mac OS X.
You might want to actually do some research before you make baseless accusations but I guess that's why you hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" feature...
So much for OSX being "more secure." 7 vulnerabilities in a single solution?!!
Except, of course, Flash is made by Adobe - not Apple. Apple is just installing Adobe's latest version of Flash which was recently released. If you really want to complain about Flash being a security problem then go yell at Adobe.
Only turn flash on when you need it, youtube and the like
You can mostly avoid using Flash with Youtube. Many of the videos can now be viewed with H.264 so you don't need Flash there either.
Honestly I find very few sites that I need to enable Flash to view. Most of the sites that require Flash are annoying anyways and I'm glad to avoid them. A lot of sites want iPhone users to be able to view them and so they provide a non-Flash fallback that is a lot more usable than their main Flash page.
If you look at the Slashdot post there are links to more technical discussions of this so I'll just resort to an analogy which captures some of it simply.
Imagine that you are driving down the road. The road represents "empty" space, a zone with very little matter. You represent a bit of matter zipping through this space. One of your tires happens to cross over a rough patch of dirt and the friction pulls you into that direction. The rough patch of dirt represents a patch of matter that has "information". The friction would be gravity.
Now imagine that instead of a smooth/rough part of the road you have a gradient. The road gets progressively rougher from the left side to the right side. Your car would have a tendency to pull to the right and the more that you went to the right the worse the pull would get, just like gravity.
It all boils down to the fact that a system tends toward its maximum entropy, this is the second law of thermodynamics in a nutshell. In the theory we have been discussing they treat information as representing a certain amount of matter. Since entropy and information are closely related it then follows that a system will tend toward increasing its amount of matter, ie: matter will be attracted toward other matter.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of use cases like this. Apple is publishing iWork for the iPad. How often do you control-tab between a word processor and a browser? I do it often.
Every app can view a web page, they all have access to WebKit. Every application also has access to viewing common document types such as PDF, RTF, Word, Excel, and so on. What if you could view the document and the browser and never switch between apps?
There are plenty of ways to get around the need to multitask. Multitasking is just one solution to the problem of how to easily view multiple sets of data nearly simultaneously. With applications being able to freeze state, view multiple document types, receive background notifications, and do background processing on remote servers there is very little reason to require multitasking in a minimal device like an iPhone or iPad.
Actually, the flying disk goes way back to before the 16th century...it is called a Chakram
There are many examples throughout history of flat, circular objects that were thrown for various reasons. Someone else talked about the discus which has been around since at least 500 BC (and probably much earlier too). There's also a lot of evidence of people throwing around cookie tin lids and other improvised pieces of sports equipment.
The point is that the modern Frisbee started out as the pie tin for the Frisbie Pie Company and it was not invented by Fred Morrison. His innovation was making a flying disc out of plastic, with a more aerodynamic profile, and intended directly for sporting use. He didn't invent the flying disc, he refined it.
I seem to recall watching a documentary that showed the frisbee being invented some time back in 1885 or 1886.
The Frisbie was originally the pie plate used by the Frisbie Pie Company to bake and sell its pies in. Yale students were throwing them around in games since the late 1800's, well before Fred Morrison came up with his "Pluto Platter". Wham-O decided to re-name the Pluto Platter to the Frisbie because that's what it was already widely called, then they had to re-name it again to "Frisbee" in order to avoid trademark infringement.
You are aware that the iPad doesn't have a headphone jack correct?
Wrong:
3.5-mm stereo headphone jack
Having never owned an iPhone, what does Apple do to restrict web downloads of mp3s from Amazon or any number of other online services? The only thing I can think of is that the ipod app is incapable of adding news mp3s to its index without itunes on a computer, but I'm just asking...
Apple doesn't restrict these in any way. Music is loaded onto an iPhone/iPod through iTunes so all you need to do is download your MP3 and then drag it into iTunes. The MP3 is then available to load on to your music player.
If your music has DRM or it is in some format that your device can't play then you would have to transcode it into a format your player can understand first. For example, people who bought music from a music store that used Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM would have to find some way to convert their DRM files into standard AAC or MP3 files before they loaded them on to their iPods.
Look up the EEE-PC T91. It has a touchscreen, and the keyboard can fold under the screen so that the whole thing operates just like an iPad.
...
By the way, assuming the rumored price is correct, the T91 costs the same as an iPad. I've been practicing my smugly superior laugh just so that I can use it on everyone who buys one of these "toys."
Of course the T91 is twice as thick, 1.4 times as heavy, has a smaller display with both lower resolution and larger pixels, has half the battery life, and doesn't come with a built-in compass, GPS, or 3G wireless connectivity. Then there's the ease-of-use of an "appliance UI" like an iPad when compared to something running a full-fledged operating system UI.
There's trade-offs on both sides. If the T91 is your thing then go for it but don't assume that your choice is better than someone else's. It may be better for YOU but other people have just as valid reasons for choosing an iPad over a T91. To say that you are "smugly superior" because you got a T91 just makes you a stupid git.
The iPad has to function as a reader, so it allows you to load up a number of different filetypes onto the device, including MSWord, RTF, PDF and so on.
On the iPhone, all those file extensions are blocked. Even if you have a third-party app that can display them, you can't put your own document files onto the device from your computer, unless you circumvent the iTunes synch software by signing up with a fileserver service and going via the internet ... just to get around the Apple restrictions. //text files// are blocked from being transferred across.
Even
Not quite.
The iPhone has the built-in ability to display all those formats and more. It doesn't restrict that ability at all. There are plenty of apps for the iPhone that let you read and even edit those formats freely. Those apps can also freely transfer those files to and from your computer through various means, not just through a fileserver service.
What the iPhone doesn't do out of the box is act as a USB drive. That's a lot different than saying that it blocks file transfers...
If that is true, then why doesn't Foxconn sell any boards that don't suck except to Apple? No company wants to have their product stand for shit, or have their motto be "we suck!" and anyone who builds PCs for a living will tell you that gamers and other hardcore PC users will happily pay good money for quality, which is why you can have $300 ASUS and Gigabyte boards.
Believe it or not, there is often a lot more money to be made in something cheap rather than something expensive. Most people out there don't know and don't care about the motherboard in their computer, they just want it as inexpensive as possible. A company like Foxconn probably sells a ton of motherboards at a low price and it's not worth it for them to sell a smaller amount of boards at a high price.
You also have to look at where the competition is at. A lot of companies cater to the higher end of the hobbiest industry but there is a low-end market too. Foxconn fills that niche, either to people who don't know better or to people who don't mind possibly returning a bad board or two if it means they will save some cash.
I'm also willing to bet that the bulk of Foxconn's business is as an OEM supplier. The boards they sell to the hobbiest market are probably just their rejects, overruns and reworks from their OEM business. These boards can be sold cheaply because they are designed to be made inexpensively and manufactured in bulk. The high failure rate might be due to the fact that they are the ones that were marginal in QC in the first place - good enough to pass initial inspection but not really run through a thorough burn-in testing process.
As far as selling the better designed boards that are made for a major player like Apple? Don't you think that a smart company like Apple owns the designs for those boards and probably monitors the designs of the motherboards that are sold to the hobbiest industry? If Foxconn sold the boards under their own name and Apple found out then that manufacturing contract would be torn up and a lot more money would be lost than could ever be made up in hobbiest sales.
Definitely don't buy Foxconn boards for building your own computer if you've seen such a high failure rate with them but you really can't extrapolate your experience to the big computer manufacturers. They have much more choice and control over their components than a hobbiest does.
Foxconn boards are seriously cheap? Hell I switched to ECS for budget builds because even THEY were better than Foxconn. I honestly didn't know that Apple ran Foxconns, and if it isn't just BS...wow. Their profit margins must be truly insane if they are cheaping out with low rent boards like that. If I spent that kind of cash and found I was running a Foxconn board I'd be SERIOUSLY pissed.
Not all boards by a company are made the same, even if they are the same model. I've worked at a company that manufactured circuit boards and you'll get different buyers purchasing the same board at different prices with different levels of burn-in testing and inspection. You might have one buyer purchasing boards at cost X with almost no quality control and another purchasing the boards at a huge markup with a guarantee of 6 sigma (usually for the military or such).
You even have companies like Apple who design their own boards and just use a company like Foxconn as the fabricator. This could mean more robust circuit layout, premium, high-reliability parts, additional quality control, and so on.
Note that I said usually - of course there are exceptions and some industries are more adamant about it than others. The movie and TV industry is usually MUCH more strict about DRM than the publishing industry.
And yes, the iPhone/iPad handles PDF (as well as several Microsoft Word formats, RTF, and text files, among others) just fine.
It's DRM'd to high hell - books, movies and apps. The only reason the music isn't is thanks to competition from the likes of Amazon.
Erm, no. It's been Steve Job's and Apple's stance for a long time that DRM is a bad thing, even before Amazon sold music. The problem is that publishers want DRM on their products and when they enter into agreements they usually insist on DRM as part of the deal. Do you see any other major player offering DRM-free movies? You can get some DRM-free e-books but it's pretty rare too.
The only reason that Amazon has DRM-free music is because of Apple. Apple got control of the online sales for the music industry so the music industry tried to create competition to Apple by selling music on sites like Amazon. The problem is that the only DRM that would work on the iPod, the most popular music device, was Apple's DRM and only Apple could create music files with Apple DRM. Amazon needed to sell DRM-free MP3 files (which the iPod can also play) and the music industry allowed them to do this. Even with this Apple was still a major player so when it came time to renew the distribution agreements the music industry was forced into making all music DRM-free.
So you can thank Apple for your DRM-free music. Let's hope that they do the same to the book, movie, and television industry!
Given its glossy screen, I can't imagine the iPad will cope too well either if you sit with a 200W light behind you.
That's pretty easy to fix with some inexpensive anti-glare film. Because this stuff exists I'd rather they sold devices with glossy screens so people have the option of simply applying the anti-glare film if they want a matte screen.
Of course it'd be nice to have a choice between glossy and matte screens from the device manufacturer but that would double the type of models that need to be produced. Since most people care about how the display looks they tend to go for glossy screens since the depth and contrast of a glossy screen is superior to that of a matte screen by their very nature. It's a no-brainer for a manufacturer to standardize on glossy instead of matte in order to keep a simplified product line.
ROFL
Good one Pudge, that's the way to deal with the trolls!
Thus we defeat the purpose of tab.
No, the purpose of the tab would still be there. The width would be a formatting suggestion to the application. Depending on the application and the user preferences the tab could be treated as either the width encoded in the type of tab or used as the old-style tab.
More information is usually better, at worst you just treat every type of tab as if they were all the same. This is a simple way for applications to pass information about spacing without having to use multiple space characters or some sort of complicated meta-data system.
It seems to me that a lot of the problems of tab could be solved by making more than one kind of tab, encoding the tab width into the tab character itself.
For example, create a tab-2, tab-3. tab-4. tab-5. tab-6. tab-7, tab-8, tab-9, tab-10. Now any text program has more information about formatting. It can display the tab as its default width as given in the tab character, ie: 2 spaces for tab-2, or it can convert the tab into the program's own method of formatting. This kind of system would be virtually invisible to the user and would allow programs to better use tabs and format text.
Can someone please tell me why we just don't move to a simple flat tax rate? You make minimum wage? You pay X%. You're lower middle class? You pay the same X%. You're upper class? You pay the sam X%. You're the CEO of a fortune 500 company? You pay the same X%.
There's 2 major problems with this.
The first problem is discretionary income, that is income past what is spent on taxes and living expenses. At the lower incomes most of the income is necessary simply for living. If someone is earning just barely enough for food, shelter, and clothing then a flat percent tax is a killer. Higher incomes have a much larger proportion of discretionary income.
There's a simple answer for this: allow everyone a single deduction based on cost of living for their area. You then tax the remainder which should represent the discretionary income. This is still pretty fair and simple and it is less of a hardship on low wage earners.
The second problem is the Robin Hood syndrome. Since we live in a representative republic it is generally majority rule. The majority of the people vote for politicians who will give them free stuff. These people think, "Those rich people have plenty to give so why not tax them a lot and lower how much the rest are taxed?"
Sadly, the only fix for this is for the rich to hide their money. They will find loopholes in the tax code, move to offshore tax havens, invest their money in ways that can't be taxed, or simply pay off politicians to create ways for the rich to keep their money. The net result is that now the money is effectively removed from the local economy and everyone is worse off.
As usual, people go for the short-term solution. This means we are stuck in the second scenario that I presented. Watch as our economy continues to spiral down the drain...
along the same lines that the uncertainty principle says it is possible but highly improbable that a Ferrari will spontaneously appear in my driveway.
Damn, I'm waiting on that one too! Well, if the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true then maybe there's a universe out there where that's happened...
It is impossible for a random electrical surge to cause the above sequence of events to happen. So no, an EMP will not cause money to spit of of an ATM.
I certainly don't know everything about the internals of an ATM machine but I do know 1 thing: impossible is a very strong word. A sequence of glitches like you describe may be extremely unlikely but that doesn't mean that it is impossible. The very nature of an EMP attack is that it creates a lot of glitches at once and I'm sure there is some chance that the right ones can occur to cause an ATM to dump cash.
However, I can see that it is very improbable that it will happen.
Huh, why would an ATM spit out money when it goes dead?
Random electrical input (in the form of induced currents from an EMP) can cause random effects in electronic devices. Yeah, it's not likely for an ATM to start spitting out cash but it might happen if hit by an EMP.
Years ago I knew people who would soak dollar bills in a salt solution then use them in vending machines. The conductive fluid would short out components and once in a while the vending machine would dump change or vend random items. I'm pretty sure that today's machines are hardened against this type of attack so it doesn't work any more.
There were some similar attacks when slot machines went from mechanical to electronic. People would build shock devices - high voltage, low current, battery-powered devices. They would brush electrodes against the metal parts of the slot machine and sometimes it would cause the machine to glitch and dump cash. Now all the slot machines are hardened and tested against these sort of attacks.
Well guess what fanboi, you can get Flash on Windows too. If this isn't an OSX problem where is the Microsoft Security Update? And why is Apple patching this, not Adobe?
Face it, Apple is way less secure than Windows.
There were also vulnerabilities in the Windows version. They were patched by Adobe a couple of months ago. Adobe just released the Mac version of the updates. Again, blame Adobe for being late to patch Flash for Mac, not Apple.
Apple is not patching Flash, they are just pushing out the latest version from Adobe since Flash is part of the default install for Mac OS X.
You might want to actually do some research before you make baseless accusations but I guess that's why you hide behind the "Anonymous Coward" feature...
So much for OSX being "more secure." 7 vulnerabilities in a single solution?!!
Except, of course, Flash is made by Adobe - not Apple. Apple is just installing Adobe's latest version of Flash which was recently released. If you really want to complain about Flash being a security problem then go yell at Adobe.
Either "cut the amount of vulnerability in half" or "cut the number of vulnerabilities in half". Avoid count noun mismatch.
Good call, I thought it sounded awkward but I didn't have time to rephrase it. Thanks!
Only turn flash on when you need it, youtube and the like
You can mostly avoid using Flash with Youtube. Many of the videos can now be viewed with H.264 so you don't need Flash there either.
Honestly I find very few sites that I need to enable Flash to view. Most of the sites that require Flash are annoying anyways and I'm glad to avoid them. A lot of sites want iPhone users to be able to view them and so they provide a non-Flash fallback that is a lot more usable than their main Flash page.
The Flash update is actually 7 vulnerabilities.
Moral of this story:
Avoid Flash and you can cut the amount of vulnerabilities approximately in half!
If you look at the Slashdot post there are links to more technical discussions of this so I'll just resort to an analogy which captures some of it simply.
Imagine that you are driving down the road. The road represents "empty" space, a zone with very little matter. You represent a bit of matter zipping through this space. One of your tires happens to cross over a rough patch of dirt and the friction pulls you into that direction. The rough patch of dirt represents a patch of matter that has "information". The friction would be gravity.
Now imagine that instead of a smooth/rough part of the road you have a gradient. The road gets progressively rougher from the left side to the right side. Your car would have a tendency to pull to the right and the more that you went to the right the worse the pull would get, just like gravity.
It all boils down to the fact that a system tends toward its maximum entropy, this is the second law of thermodynamics in a nutshell. In the theory we have been discussing they treat information as representing a certain amount of matter. Since entropy and information are closely related it then follows that a system will tend toward increasing its amount of matter, ie: matter will be attracted toward other matter.