In addition to generating tons of traffic that nobody pays attention to, it has the effect of panicking those users who don't understand what the virus is about.
A relative of mine uses AOL on a Macintosh. There is no way his system can be infected with Sobig, but I had to spend nearly a half hour explaining it to him. He kept on pointing to the "your system has a virus" messages in his mailbox as proof that he is infected and that he needs a better virus scanner (because the one he has doesn't say he has it.)
The majority of computer users are like this relative, not like you and me.
Roulette is very interesting in this regard. All of the payout amounts are calculated to have an expected value of 1 (break-even) on a 36-number board. Then you play on a 38-number board (thanks to the existance of 0 and 00), which stacks the game in the house's favor.
For example, the odds of hitting a single color on a 36-number board is 18:36 (or 1:2) and a win on such a bet yields 2:1 (1:1 payout, plus your bet). But you play on a 38-number board, where the odds of hitting red or black is 18:38 (or 1:2.11).
Similarly, the odds of hitting a single number on a 36-number board is 1:36 and a single number bet has a yield of 36:1 (35:1 payout, plus your bet). But the odds of hitting a single number on a 38-number board are 38:1 (or 1:38).
Similarly, the odds of hitting a corner bet (4 numbers) on a 36-number board is 4:36 (1:9) and the yield of hitting such a bet is 9:1 (8:1 payout, plus your bet). But the odds of hitting it on a 38-number board is 4:38 (1:9.5).
And so on for all of the other possible bets you can make.
I happen to find the simple logic of these rules quite appealing (even though I consider the game itself to be rather boring.)
But then the G5 isn't exactly available yet either.
You may want to read this press release. The 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz models are shipping now. The dual 2GHz model will ship by the end of the month (at most a week and a half from now).
The biggest problem I see (and I became a Mac user in 2001, so beige Apple boxes make me think of the Apple IIe) is how much OS X needs RAM. 512MB minimum. Really.
Not really. While I will be the first to agree that performance absolutely sucks if you only have 128M (the minimum it will install with), I've found that performance just just fine on systems with 256M.
You're right that 512M works even better, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's the minimum, unless you routinely run the kind of apps that require that much memory regardless of the OS. (Photoshop comes to mind.)
NO COMPUTER will effectively last more than 5 years max.
I strongly disagree with this assertion.
My PC at home is over 5 years old (dual-PPro/200). After bumping the memory to its maximum capacity (256M), the only thing it doesn't run well are modern games. Office suites, internet stuff, non-realtime games, CD burning, etc. all run just fine, thank you.
Just because you can't live without the fastest stuff there is, don't go around claiming that everything older is worthless trash.
That's easy: Require a license to connect to the Internet.
Actually, you're not that far off from a workable solution.
Have ISP's proxy everything. Most users don't do more than web and mail. Add in SSH, FTP, news, a few streaming media protocols, and a few chat protocols and you've got just about everything that most people use. With the possible exception of SSH, all of these can be proxied. Block everything you're not proxying.
When you block any and all direct connections between users and their servers, you block the spread of anything that uses an unsupported protocol (e.g. NetBIOS or RPC). Anything that tries to use the proxy to spread itself can be blocked by that very same proxy.
Of course, a lot of the more technically savvy users would balk at this, but that's where something resembling a license can come in. Those who prove that they have a clue can have the blocks removed to allow direct connections. If they prove that they really don't have a clue (say, by being slammed by a worm that could've been fixed by installing a month-old OS patch) then the blocks can quickly be put back again.
I work in the games industry, and am fairly active in the warez scene (I like to see when games I work on make it to IRC/ftp servers).
???
You like to see your games pirated? Or do you like to know that your games are popular enough that people want to pirate them? Or do you mean something else?
Let's say the artist has 20 songs, and only 12 "fit" on the CD, it would be kinda of cool for them to release the other 8 to iTMS.
It would be a great idea.
Your comment reminds me of the various Jethro Tull box sets. Between their 20-years box set, the 25-years box set, and the Nightcap album, there was over 4 hours of previously unreleased material. Most of it was not published because it was too much to fit on the album they were working on at the time. Some got released as singles and B-sides, but a lot just languished until the box sets came out.
Similar story for Asia's two Archiva albums - two full CDs of previously unreleased material.
As much as I love listening to this stuff, it would be even cooler if the artists would be able to release them in some form (maybe download, maybe an exclusive CD offer, maybe something else) at the time of production so we don't have to wait for years and years (assuming the band remains popular enough to convince the labels to release a box set in the first place.)
By the way, has anyone noticed that music on the radio often sounds like it has been run through a lossy compressor now days...
Yes, and that's exactly what they do.
Laws in most countries prohibit them from exceeding certain power output levels, which puts a cap on their peak volume. In order to make the music seem louder, they compress the dynamic range and than boost the volume of the compressed signal so that almost all of the sound is as close to the legal limit as possible.
It makes them seem louder at the expense of quality. And psychoacoustics have nothing to do with this. They don't care one bit about what the music sounds like. They just want it to be louder than their competitors. They think this will make more people listen to them.
And who knows, they may be right. After all, their target audience is teenagers that replace their car mufflers with resonaters, thinking that a loud engine will convince womens to have sex with them.
Then FireWire (a.k.a IEEE 1984) should be even better because you can totally isolate it from the PC via simple transformers for the two data cable-pairs. This will trivially eliminate all ground loops.
I suppose, but it seems rather pointless to me.
FireWire is a twisted-pair differential signal. You don't get common-mode noise with differential signals. Any current carried through the ground wire would not affect the signal path.
Yeah and you click and drag a disk into the trash can to eject it from the system. There really isn't an eject button on the case!
I don't know why I'm responding to such obvious flamebaiting nonsense, but....
There are quite a lot of ways to eject media.
To open/close the CD tray, there's an eject button on the keyboard
If your keyboard doesn't have an eject button (an old model or third-party), you can use F12 to open/close the CD tray
You can install a menu-bar icon for opening/closing the CD tray. The program for this comes with MacOS X
Some apps (like iTunes) provide thieir own button for opening/closing the CD tray
You can also select a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the menubar
You can ctrl-click a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the popup menu
If you have a multi-button mouse, you can right-click a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the popup menu
Enough possibilities for you?
Oh yes, and FWIW, in OS X, the trash icon changes to an eject icon when you're dragging a disk, just to avoid the confusion that some people have with the concept of using a trash-can for eject.
At a previous job, I can recall many times where sales and marketing (S&M being an incredibly accurate acronym here) promised features that were not even on our development roadmap, simply because a big customer wanted them. The feature gets promised, a deadline for shipment is decided on and then the developers are expected to hold to that schedule.
The result is invariably that other more important features get dropped from the release and the release has inadequate testing. And very often, the customer we were doing all this for ends up deciding that that feature wasn't very important after all. So everybody from top to bottom gets screwed.
At that company, we managed (after several years of this nonsense) to get our VP of engineering to get the president involved, who tightened the thumbscrews on S&M to prevent this. We managed to do it because it was a small company with only 3 layers of management between the president and the lowest-level developers. When this problem happens in bigger companies, however, engineering is simply SOL.
What after after you add in RAM? You will have to find something that will hold memory parallel with motherboard.
The only memory modules I've ever seen that fit this description are SO-DIMMs. As far as I know, these are only used in laptops and embedded systems. Definitely not in a generic motherboard that you'll be able to use for building a cheap homebrew system.
I'll have to agree here that a laptop motherboard is your only viable alternative for getting something down to a 3/4" profile.
Assuming you can find the boards, and you can do the work to assemble the systems, it wouldn't surprise me if the cost ends up as high (if not higher) than that of a commercial tablet PC.
The only under-$100 computer I know of is a PalmOS device. And they aren't cheap if you get the models with WiFi in them.
Winter is colder because the earth's axis is tilted. Winter occurs for the hemisphere which is tilted away from the sun (the northern hemisphere in January, the southern in July.
Given this fact, are southern-hemisphere winters colder than northern? And are the southern hemisphere summers hotter?
I would assume so, since the temperature contribution from the Earth-Sun distance would add to the axial-tilt contribution, instead of subtract from it.
Apple has no reason to open source specific pieces of their code.
I will argue that open-sourcing Darwin is for purely selfish reasons. There's no need for anything like altruism or ideology.
Apple chose to base OS X on BSD (FreeBSD, I believe) because it's a very good and stable platform. But they knew that they would have to make some changes to the kernel in order to port it to the PowerMac, since it's a hardware platform that that changes with each new release.
In order to reap the benefits of open source (getting updates from people all over the internet) they have to release their source as well. If they don't, then they end up needing a team of engineers to track and integrate updates that are made to the public source tree. And if the public tree undergoes an architecture change, Apple would have to integrate all of that - which can be expensive.
The only way to avoid this is for Apple to release their changes back to the community. In doing so, the community will have them in the baseline code that it uses for making changes. So when Apple then integrates those changes back into its own line, it's a relatively painless process.
In other words, by doing this, Apple greatly reduces their cost of using the BSD platform. And as a happy side-bonus, the rest of the world (that is, us) get access to the sources to the core of their flagship OS.
I'd love something the size of my existing Palm III series, with a built-in digital camera, MP3/Ogg playing capabilities, cellphone with integrated modem for Internet connectivity and HotSyncing. Basically, all the little gadgets built into one tiny package. But until I can have all that without having to worry about keeping spare batteries with me everywhere I go, I'll stick with my little Palm IIIxe.
Have you looked at the newest model Palms?
When I used a Palm III, I always worried about keeping spare batteries with me wherever I went. Since it had no charger, I had to make sure to always be near a replacement set of AAA batteries, so I could quickly change them as soon as the "low battery" warning popped up.
My current PDA (a Palm m515) is actually much better in this area. Yes, the faster processor and color display consumes more power. But the unit uses rechargeable batteries. I place the unit in its cradle every evening to hot-sync it, and I usually leave it there while do my evening's web surfing. This fully recharges it every evening.
If I forget to charge it, it's still not a big deal. The batteries seem to last about 3-4 days if I use the backlight, and about 10 days if I don't (and the display uses a reflective tech, so I don't need the backlight when outdoors or in a brightly lit room). This is less than the 30-60 days I got out of my III, but it lasts long enough that it isn't a problem - I've never forgotten to sync/charge the unit more than two nights in a row.
Working scale models were good fot the old days when mostly mechanical devices were patented. But now the majority of NON-TRIVIAL patentable ideas require large (if not huge) capital investment to make even a proof-of-concept breadboard thing.
I think that's the point. Patents are designed to protect those people who expend the time, effort and money to develop a proof of concept. They were never intended to grant proprietary rights to someone who simply comes up with an idea and then sits back waiting for others to independantly develop it so he can sue them.
So now they have to inform you. So you'll get a dialog saying "We are installing spyware. Click here to install it or here to abort this installation". Do you seriously think they'll give you the option of installing the program without the spyware?
It's just like those draconian EULA terms on Microsoft's security updates. If you don't agree to the terms, then the installer doesn't run and you have a computer with known security holes in it.
It all depends if the iPod is seen as a consumer elecronic device - a TV, home stereo, alarm clock - or a computer.
This is the big question, isn't it? Let's see if we can extrapolate from a few non-computer devices that I have had personal experience upgrading:
My modem was purchased with the K56Flex protocol in it. Later on, I got a firmware upgrade to v.90 - which was promised when I originally bought the thing. But they're not offering me an upgrade to v.92 protocol. (Of course, ever since I got broadband, the modem isn't used anyway, so it's a moot point for me.)
Another example: my gateway router. It comes with PPPoE protocol support. Some early models had bugs in the PPPoE stack. Firmware updates were released to fix it. But the first-generation models that didn't offer PPPoE at all didn't get updates to add the protocol.
And yet another. I have a KurzweilK2500 synthesizer. Kurzweil periodically releases system software updates. Mostly to fix bugs and stuff. A few years ago, one of their updates introduced a completely new feature - Hammond B3 emulation. To their credit, this feature was made available free of charge, which I did not expect. They did not, however make this feature available to users of the older K2000 models even though the K2000 chipset could probably have supported it with most of of the same functionality.
Note that in all three cases a corporation released a firmware update that was applicable to some customers and not others. They made a product-level decision about how far they would extend support. Some customers are denied upgrades because their hardware can't handle it (e.g. a 33.6K modem user who wants an upgrade to 56K), some because the development effort would be substantial (e.g. Kurzweil not porting their B3 mode to the K2000), and some for purely business reasons (wanting to sell new units, testing effort, etc.)
These kinds of decisions are made all the time. I apprecitate it when companies take the extra effort to give me features that they had no promised me, but I don't expect this, and I certainly don't expect it to be free.
An iPod can not produce 104dB of SPL. It has no speakers. It only produces voltage levels.
It may be that the Apple-supplied headphones can produce 104dB of SPL. Big deal. A different pair of headphones with different sensitivity will produce a different SPL (maybe higher, maybe lower) for the same voltage.
By placing an artificial limit on the voltages the unit can produce, it may be unable to produce the power necessary to produce a comfortable SPL level when used with better headphones (which will likely have higher impedance than the 32 ohm earbuds that Apple provides.)
If you listen to your iPod at 100+ dB for a prolonged period of time, you might find yourself with hearing loss. Broken iPods can be fixed or replaced, but unfortunately your eardrums are permanent, and non replaceable.
This assumes, of course, that they're talking about 100+ dB of sound pressure (SPL).
But that's completely ludicrous. The SPL levels are a function of the speaker/headphone design and proximity to your ears in addition to the power output of the amplifier.
A dB is a unit of ratio between a given level (power, pressure, whatever) and a reference level.
In this particular case, they're probably talking about dBu or dBV or dBm or some other ratio involving output voltage/power levels.
104dBu is not the same as 104dBV which is not the same as 104dBm. Either one can translate into high SPL levels, low SPL levels, or anything in between, depending on what kind of speakers, headphones or other amplifiers are attached.
According to Apple the iPod can put out up to 30mw of RMS power per channel. This is about 29 dBm (20 log(30) ),so it's obviously not what the original article is talking about.
I'm actually rather curious now to know what that unqualified "104 dB" figure is referring to, since every different brand/model of headphones you use will have a different SPL for any given power level.
I was hoping they'd tell us what the slot did. I haven't seen anything that could use it.
That slot was intended for use with a floppy disk drive. The drive shipped in Japan, but was never released in the US.
The only vestige of it in the US release are certain software titles (like Excitebike) that have "Save/Load" options on the menu that do nothing. (It's my understanding that the Japanese Famicom releases of these titles are identical and those menu options access the floppy drive.)
LCs are very slow compared to what is nowadays the speed bits traveling along a glass fibre. I cannot see a useful way of using it directly to redirect or modulate laser light.
LCs are definitely too slow to be used for something like modulation or per-packet switching, given current data rates (an OC-192 fiber carries approximately 10Gbps, or one bit per 0.1ns).
But there are other uses. It is still useful for pure optical circuit-switching applications, where you want software to set up an optical circuit that will not change for a long time (hours, days, maybe even years) until it is explicitly reprovisioned or rerouted.
This is currently done with very small electro-mechanical parts that can optically redirect light from each input fiber to the appropriate output fibers. A system that can do it using a diffracting LC (such as that described in the article) would be able to do it with no moving parts - greatly increasing reliability. It would probably also be faster, although that's less important for this application, given the large amounts of time that the optical circuits are likely to remain established.
Depending on how precise they can control the diffraction, it might even be possible for one LC to diffract multiple wavelengths in different ways, and be able to control them individually. If this can be accomplished, it makes Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM - where multiple optical circuits are carried on one fiber using multiple wavelengths) easier to implement, since you would no longer have to separate the wavelengths into separate fibers before switching them.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to generating tons of traffic that nobody pays attention to, it has the effect of panicking those users who don't understand what the virus is about.
A relative of mine uses AOL on a Macintosh. There is no way his system can be infected with Sobig, but I had to spend nearly a half hour explaining it to him. He kept on pointing to the "your system has a virus" messages in his mailbox as proof that he is infected and that he needs a better virus scanner (because the one he has doesn't say he has it.)
The majority of computer users are like this relative, not like you and me.
For example, the odds of hitting a single color on a 36-number board is 18:36 (or 1:2) and a win on such a bet yields 2:1 (1:1 payout, plus your bet). But you play on a 38-number board, where the odds of hitting red or black is 18:38 (or 1:2.11).
Similarly, the odds of hitting a single number on a 36-number board is 1:36 and a single number bet has a yield of 36:1 (35:1 payout, plus your bet). But the odds of hitting a single number on a 38-number board are 38:1 (or 1:38).
Similarly, the odds of hitting a corner bet (4 numbers) on a 36-number board is 4:36 (1:9) and the yield of hitting such a bet is 9:1 (8:1 payout, plus your bet). But the odds of hitting it on a 38-number board is 4:38 (1:9.5).
And so on for all of the other possible bets you can make.
I happen to find the simple logic of these rules quite appealing (even though I consider the game itself to be rather boring.)
You may want to read this press release. The 1.6GHz and 1.8GHz models are shipping now. The dual 2GHz model will ship by the end of the month (at most a week and a half from now).
Not really. While I will be the first to agree that performance absolutely sucks if you only have 128M (the minimum it will install with), I've found that performance just just fine on systems with 256M.
You're right that 512M works even better, but I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's the minimum, unless you routinely run the kind of apps that require that much memory regardless of the OS. (Photoshop comes to mind.)
I strongly disagree with this assertion.
My PC at home is over 5 years old (dual-PPro/200). After bumping the memory to its maximum capacity (256M), the only thing it doesn't run well are modern games. Office suites, internet stuff, non-realtime games, CD burning, etc. all run just fine, thank you.
Just because you can't live without the fastest stuff there is, don't go around claiming that everything older is worthless trash.
Actually, you're not that far off from a workable solution.
Have ISP's proxy everything. Most users don't do more than web and mail. Add in SSH, FTP, news, a few streaming media protocols, and a few chat protocols and you've got just about everything that most people use. With the possible exception of SSH, all of these can be proxied. Block everything you're not proxying.
When you block any and all direct connections between users and their servers, you block the spread of anything that uses an unsupported protocol (e.g. NetBIOS or RPC). Anything that tries to use the proxy to spread itself can be blocked by that very same proxy.
Of course, a lot of the more technically savvy users would balk at this, but that's where something resembling a license can come in. Those who prove that they have a clue can have the blocks removed to allow direct connections. If they prove that they really don't have a clue (say, by being slammed by a worm that could've been fixed by installing a month-old OS patch) then the blocks can quickly be put back again.
???
You like to see your games pirated? Or do you like to know that your games are popular enough that people want to pirate them? Or do you mean something else?
It would be a great idea.
Your comment reminds me of the various Jethro Tull box sets. Between their 20-years box set, the 25-years box set, and the Nightcap album, there was over 4 hours of previously unreleased material. Most of it was not published because it was too much to fit on the album they were working on at the time. Some got released as singles and B-sides, but a lot just languished until the box sets came out.
Similar story for Asia's two Archiva albums - two full CDs of previously unreleased material.
As much as I love listening to this stuff, it would be even cooler if the artists would be able to release them in some form (maybe download, maybe an exclusive CD offer, maybe something else) at the time of production so we don't have to wait for years and years (assuming the band remains popular enough to convince the labels to release a box set in the first place.)
Yes, and that's exactly what they do.
Laws in most countries prohibit them from exceeding certain power output levels, which puts a cap on their peak volume. In order to make the music seem louder, they compress the dynamic range and than boost the volume of the compressed signal so that almost all of the sound is as close to the legal limit as possible.
It makes them seem louder at the expense of quality. And psychoacoustics have nothing to do with this. They don't care one bit about what the music sounds like. They just want it to be louder than their competitors. They think this will make more people listen to them.
And who knows, they may be right. After all, their target audience is teenagers that replace their car mufflers with resonaters, thinking that a loud engine will convince womens to have sex with them.
I suppose, but it seems rather pointless to me.
FireWire is a twisted-pair differential signal. You don't get common-mode noise with differential signals. Any current carried through the ground wire would not affect the signal path.
I don't know why I'm responding to such obvious flamebaiting nonsense, but....
There are quite a lot of ways to eject media.
- To open/close the CD tray, there's an eject button on the keyboard
- If your keyboard doesn't have an eject button (an old model or third-party), you can use F12 to open/close the CD tray
- You can install a menu-bar icon for opening/closing the CD tray. The program for this comes with MacOS X
- Some apps (like iTunes) provide thieir own button for opening/closing the CD tray
- You can also select a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the menubar
- You can ctrl-click a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the popup menu
- If you have a multi-button mouse, you can right-click a disk icon and pick "Eject" from the popup menu
Enough possibilities for you?Oh yes, and FWIW, in OS X, the trash icon changes to an eject icon when you're dragging a disk, just to avoid the confusion that some people have with the concept of using a trash-can for eject.
At a previous job, I can recall many times where sales and marketing (S&M being an incredibly accurate acronym here) promised features that were not even on our development roadmap, simply because a big customer wanted them. The feature gets promised, a deadline for shipment is decided on and then the developers are expected to hold to that schedule.
The result is invariably that other more important features get dropped from the release and the release has inadequate testing. And very often, the customer we were doing all this for ends up deciding that that feature wasn't very important after all. So everybody from top to bottom gets screwed.
At that company, we managed (after several years of this nonsense) to get our VP of engineering to get the president involved, who tightened the thumbscrews on S&M to prevent this. We managed to do it because it was a small company with only 3 layers of management between the president and the lowest-level developers. When this problem happens in bigger companies, however, engineering is simply SOL.
The only memory modules I've ever seen that fit this description are SO-DIMMs. As far as I know, these are only used in laptops and embedded systems. Definitely not in a generic motherboard that you'll be able to use for building a cheap homebrew system.
I'll have to agree here that a laptop motherboard is your only viable alternative for getting something down to a 3/4" profile.
Assuming you can find the boards, and you can do the work to assemble the systems, it wouldn't surprise me if the cost ends up as high (if not higher) than that of a commercial tablet PC.
The only under-$100 computer I know of is a PalmOS device. And they aren't cheap if you get the models with WiFi in them.
Mozilla also works for most games, but it is painfully slow for Word Whomp, which is one of my favorites.
What problems are you seeing?
Given this fact, are southern-hemisphere winters colder than northern? And are the southern hemisphere summers hotter?
I would assume so, since the temperature contribution from the Earth-Sun distance would add to the axial-tilt contribution, instead of subtract from it.
I will argue that open-sourcing Darwin is for purely selfish reasons. There's no need for anything like altruism or ideology.
Apple chose to base OS X on BSD (FreeBSD, I believe) because it's a very good and stable platform. But they knew that they would have to make some changes to the kernel in order to port it to the PowerMac, since it's a hardware platform that that changes with each new release.
In order to reap the benefits of open source (getting updates from people all over the internet) they have to release their source as well. If they don't, then they end up needing a team of engineers to track and integrate updates that are made to the public source tree. And if the public tree undergoes an architecture change, Apple would have to integrate all of that - which can be expensive.
The only way to avoid this is for Apple to release their changes back to the community. In doing so, the community will have them in the baseline code that it uses for making changes. So when Apple then integrates those changes back into its own line, it's a relatively painless process.
In other words, by doing this, Apple greatly reduces their cost of using the BSD platform. And as a happy side-bonus, the rest of the world (that is, us) get access to the sources to the core of their flagship OS.
Have you looked at the newest model Palms?
When I used a Palm III, I always worried about keeping spare batteries with me wherever I went. Since it had no charger, I had to make sure to always be near a replacement set of AAA batteries, so I could quickly change them as soon as the "low battery" warning popped up.
My current PDA (a Palm m515) is actually much better in this area. Yes, the faster processor and color display consumes more power. But the unit uses rechargeable batteries. I place the unit in its cradle every evening to hot-sync it, and I usually leave it there while do my evening's web surfing. This fully recharges it every evening.
If I forget to charge it, it's still not a big deal. The batteries seem to last about 3-4 days if I use the backlight, and about 10 days if I don't (and the display uses a reflective tech, so I don't need the backlight when outdoors or in a brightly lit room). This is less than the 30-60 days I got out of my III, but it lasts long enough that it isn't a problem - I've never forgotten to sync/charge the unit more than two nights in a row.
I think that's the point. Patents are designed to protect those people who expend the time, effort and money to develop a proof of concept. They were never intended to grant proprietary rights to someone who simply comes up with an idea and then sits back waiting for others to independantly develop it so he can sue them.
So now they have to inform you. So you'll get a dialog saying "We are installing spyware. Click here to install it or here to abort this installation". Do you seriously think they'll give you the option of installing the program without the spyware?
It's just like those draconian EULA terms on Microsoft's security updates. If you don't agree to the terms, then the installer doesn't run and you have a computer with known security holes in it.
This is the big question, isn't it? Let's see if we can extrapolate from a few non-computer devices that I have had personal experience upgrading:
My modem was purchased with the K56Flex protocol in it. Later on, I got a firmware upgrade to v.90 - which was promised when I originally bought the thing. But they're not offering me an upgrade to v.92 protocol. (Of course, ever since I got broadband, the modem isn't used anyway, so it's a moot point for me.)
Another example: my gateway router. It comes with PPPoE protocol support. Some early models had bugs in the PPPoE stack. Firmware updates were released to fix it. But the first-generation models that didn't offer PPPoE at all didn't get updates to add the protocol.
And yet another. I have a Kurzweil K2500 synthesizer. Kurzweil periodically releases system software updates. Mostly to fix bugs and stuff. A few years ago, one of their updates introduced a completely new feature - Hammond B3 emulation. To their credit, this feature was made available free of charge, which I did not expect. They did not, however make this feature available to users of the older K2000 models even though the K2000 chipset could probably have supported it with most of of the same functionality.
Note that in all three cases a corporation released a firmware update that was applicable to some customers and not others. They made a product-level decision about how far they would extend support. Some customers are denied upgrades because their hardware can't handle it (e.g. a 33.6K modem user who wants an upgrade to 56K), some because the development effort would be substantial (e.g. Kurzweil not porting their B3 mode to the K2000), and some for purely business reasons (wanting to sell new units, testing effort, etc.)
These kinds of decisions are made all the time. I apprecitate it when companies take the extra effort to give me features that they had no promised me, but I don't expect this, and I certainly don't expect it to be free.
It may be that the Apple-supplied headphones can produce 104dB of SPL. Big deal. A different pair of headphones with different sensitivity will produce a different SPL (maybe higher, maybe lower) for the same voltage.
By placing an artificial limit on the voltages the unit can produce, it may be unable to produce the power necessary to produce a comfortable SPL level when used with better headphones (which will likely have higher impedance than the 32 ohm earbuds that Apple provides.)
This assumes, of course, that they're talking about 100+ dB of sound pressure (SPL).
But that's completely ludicrous. The SPL levels are a function of the speaker/headphone design and proximity to your ears in addition to the power output of the amplifier.
A dB is a unit of ratio between a given level (power, pressure, whatever) and a reference level.
In this particular case, they're probably talking about dBu or dBV or dBm or some other ratio involving output voltage/power levels.
104dBu is not the same as 104dBV which is not the same as 104dBm. Either one can translate into high SPL levels, low SPL levels, or anything in between, depending on what kind of speakers, headphones or other amplifiers are attached.
According to Apple the iPod can put out up to 30mw of RMS power per channel. This is about 29 dBm (20 log(30) ),so it's obviously not what the original article is talking about.
I'm actually rather curious now to know what that unqualified "104 dB" figure is referring to, since every different brand/model of headphones you use will have a different SPL for any given power level.
That slot was intended for use with a floppy disk drive. The drive shipped in Japan, but was never released in the US.
The only vestige of it in the US release are certain software titles (like Excitebike) that have "Save/Load" options on the menu that do nothing. (It's my understanding that the Japanese Famicom releases of these titles are identical and those menu options access the floppy drive.)
LCs are definitely too slow to be used for something like modulation or per-packet switching, given current data rates (an OC-192 fiber carries approximately 10Gbps, or one bit per 0.1ns).
But there are other uses. It is still useful for pure optical circuit-switching applications, where you want software to set up an optical circuit that will not change for a long time (hours, days, maybe even years) until it is explicitly reprovisioned or rerouted.
This is currently done with very small electro-mechanical parts that can optically redirect light from each input fiber to the appropriate output fibers. A system that can do it using a diffracting LC (such as that described in the article) would be able to do it with no moving parts - greatly increasing reliability. It would probably also be faster, although that's less important for this application, given the large amounts of time that the optical circuits are likely to remain established.
Depending on how precise they can control the diffraction, it might even be possible for one LC to diffract multiple wavelengths in different ways, and be able to control them individually. If this can be accomplished, it makes Wave Division Multiplexing (WDM - where multiple optical circuits are carried on one fiber using multiple wavelengths) easier to implement, since you would no longer have to separate the wavelengths into separate fibers before switching them.