And the same can be said for plane crashes, or ocean liners, or drilling for oil.
Almost everything we do carries risk, even "safe" things like natural farming - clearing hedges to make bigger fields, leading to a dustbowl effect...
Science, industrialism and modern progress is not about 100% eliminating risk - you can do that as effectively as running backwards around the Earth to reverse its rotation - but in minimising them. The fact that there have been nuclear accidents does not mean that being pro-nuclear is a bad position. Given the prevalence of nuclear power relative to coal and comparing the economic, human and ecological damage, nuclear is a long, long way ahead. Is it totally safe? No, of course not.
Those are the breaks with open source licenses though - you have to take the rough with the smooth if you are going to release code in a manner that gives freedom in distribution (depending on the licence of course - GPL, BSD, apache etc).
You have to live with all the potential consequences that arise from the licence you choose - some of which might not be agreeable.
I'm being modded insightful for my post as a whole, which you do need to read to comprehend the use of satire, and you're claiming that my stance (that you can make money of OSS and that it's perfectly fine to do so) is "FUD". Are you a Microsoft shill, or just too shoot-from-the-hip to actually read and attempt to comprehend my comment.
Just to be 100% crystal clear, I am on the side of "pro-OSS" and "OSS is not a poison chalice".
You will also note, in my comment that you didn't read, I addressed the issue with non-commercial licences, and this specific case.
Read comprehension: not just for school. Get some.
Surprises me too, flying on a plane designed in CATIA, running closed, custom flight software.
Still, if he wants to get there on time it's probably better than compiling your own plane and realising that your engines are missing the libenginepylon dependency.
So what you're saying is that OSS is a poisoned chalice that anyone who wants to make money or a career for themselves in software development shouldn't touch with a 12 foot barge pole?
No, I didn't think so.
You seem to think that commercial interest and OSS are exclusive to one another. Where do the major OSS licences forbid you making money?
In this case, if he was using code released specifically under a non-commercial licence then clearly it would explain why his software has been pulled, but your rant smacks of a much broader chip on your shoulder that you think it's immoral to sell OSS software for money, or otherwise generate income from OSS software.
I'm not sure what was worse: shoehorning Shia LeBoef into it, in a manner that can only be described as "high school play-quality" acting, the "super magnetic bones" or that we've displaced "jumped the shark" with "nuked the fridge" as a comment.
Indiana Jones always had an element of the supernatural about it - look at some of the key plot elements in Temple of Doom, and especially Last Crusade, so aliens are not an enormous stretch away from the norm. I can stay engaged in the story if it's presented in a plausible fashion (for the story), but doing things like the fridge scene just pull me right out of the story and go "well, that was crappy, even for a fantasy film... oh, I'm watching a film" and completely breaks the mood.
I know it's common in films (like characters shrugging off beatings that would hospitalise normal people without even causing bruises, and seemingly being immune to bullet wounds that don;t affect the use of their limbs at all etc), but sometimes it's pushed beyond suspension of disbelief. There were so many things wrong with the fridge scene it was as if they were intentionally trying to piss us all off.
So what you're saying is, no matter what evidence is presented to you, and no matter how simple occam's razor makes it, you'll somehow always twist it to make MS the bad guy.
Gotcha.
How are you going to spin MS giving upgraded Xbox 360 consoles to people affected by the firmware update problems with early generation ones? Some sort of "forcing people to stay in the closed ecosystem tyranny!" angle?
What about their continued development of things like Mac Office (including a total rewrite of the macro and scripting for the Mac version)?
They're not stupid - they picked Skype precisely because so many people use it. It's not in their interests to drive people away from the platform.
The lossy recompression (assuming you ripped back to a lossy format) was just a side effect of the free, built in DRM removal. The paid upgrade for you better files when the store went DRM free. The other option was a direct to mp3 conversion from the DRM'ed tracks (set the encoder to mp3, select all the tracks, click "create mp3 version") with no need for CD-Rs.
I didn;t say it was perfect, but the original DRM'ed files weren't a perfect solution either. The current system (relatively high bitrate, DRM-free, AAC music) is pretty good - certainly good enough for a large number of people. Of course, the fact that the iTunes store exists doesn't prevent you from buying CDs, but you knew that already.
Of course it is, like all DRM schemes, but it was never Apple's choice - it was a requirement of the content owners, and Apple made it as weak as they could get away with (I mean, building in a way to defeat the DRM by default and then promoting its use with every download is a pretty obvious 'we think this is stupid too, but go with it for now' move by them).
As soon as they could get rid of the DRM they did so, and offered a couple of ways out for the old tracks, one of which was the CD burn method which always existed, the other was an upgrade fee per track that got you new downloads at a higher bitrate with no DRM.
Don't try to apply any sense to a DRM system with an obvious analog hole (humans need to hear the music!) - Apple thought so too and were as disdainful as possible while still being on the right side of the music industry (since they own the content Apple wants to sell).
Why rename them? iTunes supports CD-text, it's right there in the options. This option was suggested by Apple at the time you bought the music (very strongly suggested on each purchase), and is a free way to do it, if a little time consuming if you have tons of stuff - it is, however, a free and fully supported way to remove DRM from old iTunes tracks. The assertion was that "if there was no way to get out of the DRM trap with old tracks" then "people won't switch". I am simply stating that not only can you "get out", but that the ability to do so was built in from day one.
The sync API for iTunes is documented and available to anyone who wants to write something that works with it. What you can't do (and what Apple somehow turned into the bad guy for stamping on) is pretend to be an iPod by spoofing Apple's USB vendor ID so you can be super lazy and not write an interface to iTunes' own sync system.
Missing Sync isn't free, but the sync API (certainly in OS X) is open and documented so you can write your own if you want to.
Use iTunes itself to break that DRM, as Apple have encouraged strongly all along: burn it to audio CD. This has always been possible, ever since DRMed music was available in iTunes. You sacrifice a little if you then re-rip into a lossy format, but it is free. Alternatively you can upgrade your old purchased tracks for 20 cents (or local currency equivalent) to the higher-bitrate, non-DRM versions that are now available in the store.
Yes, in the Macbook air - we're talking about the iMac here, but suddenly you want to talk about an ultra-portable with very specific parts (you can't replace the SSD in the new Air either because it's not in a standard form factor, it's a thin stick designed especially for Apple to fit into the Air's case).
Ignoring the designed-for-extreme-thinness-by-compromising-upgrade-ability Macbook Air, all of their other models on sale *do* have user replaceable RAM, but your throwaway comment implied that it was the case that it was common to all (or at the very least, the iMac which is what we were talking about).
The Air's case is *extremely thin*, and designing it with user replaceable RAM was just not in the design brief. It's not just a 1mm connector and a couple of clips - you have to design the board layout to put it in a position so you can install an access door, so that affects your design choices. You then need space around the chip since it can't be a snug fit without damaging the chip or the board (so you need a little space on both sides). All in all, this adds complexity and size to your design. It's the same reason they went to all-internal batteries - they know that for the vast majority of users (the vast, vast, vast majority) the pros of doing that outweigh the downsides of not being able to replace the battery without taking the computer apart.
The Air was not designed with upgrades in mind, not for anti-consumer reasons, but because it made the design better for the vast majority of people who would be using it:
* non replaceable battery: no need for battery bay or connectors or bulky casing for battery, or uniform shape making it possible to remove from a bay - positive effects; bigger space for battery cells, non-uniform shape to fill up even more space, thinner case, much increased battery life compared to a removable one.
* custom SSD stick shaped to fill available space: no need to design around an arbitrary 2.5" HDD shape that is a legacy from the days of spinning hard drives - there's no reason the SSD has to be that shape if your goal is to make the design as small as possible.
* RAM soldered to board: system not designed for upgrades but instead for extreme smallness. Soldering RAM to board allows you to put it wherever it works best on the board (circuit path layout, physical locations etc) and allows you to drop the connectors and "bulky" removable RAM chips that have extra circuit board and connector that are unnecessary since the machine is designed to be tiny.
These weren't decisions made with a Machiaveillan twirl of a moustache and villainous laughter as the hardware engineers exclaimed "ahahaha! now let's see them upgrade this machine!" - they were made in order to make the MacBook Air extremely small, with as long a battery life as possible. Inevitable compromises obviously needed to be made. I respectfully suggest that if you think all you have to think about is a couple of RAM clips (which are large in comparison to the thickness of an Air) then you don;t really understand the concept of thinking about the design as a whole.
If we look at the normal laptops and desktops made by Apple, they all have regular drives (HDD and SSD), normal RAM in removable slots and so on. It's only the two recent generations of iMac that have changed the way the HDD temperature is measured. I don't see why they didn;t keep the external sensor cable that was stuck to the side of the drive as used in the white intel iMac (like the one I own and am typing on now, having changed out the drive myself), but I can assure you it wasn't an "anti-consumer" design decision that led them to iterate the design as they have done - if you are at the skill level to be able to disassemble an iMac then you are a small percentage of the user base - Apple hardly cares they lose these few drive repairs compared to the bulk of the user base who bought an All-in-one who will simply send it to Apple to repair.
In any event, you can simply short the pin (as listed in Apple's o
But you can upgrade the RAM aftermarket - easily in fact, and it's user serviceable. They take temperature data because the iMac is cooled by zones, rather than simply monitoring the CPU temperature. There are sensors all over it. Their old method (custom cable) required a separate part, as did the even older method (a physical temperature probe (the most user friendly method). This new method removes the need for both of those things, and you can bypass it by shorting the cable out, in the same manner to jumper settings, so presumably other in-zone sensors are fine, although an internal reading is obviously more accurate and allows finder control of the fans.
You are quick to mark it as an "anti consumer conspiracy" when the far more obvious choices are "it was designed that way because it worked for them.
Well, it makes up for the other Mac headline recently "Malware explosion on OS X" due to a single piece of malware - an unsophisticated social engieering trojan that is easy to remove- and 200-odd reports on Apple's support forums.
No, the reason that they're doing it this way, according to most educated guesses, is that SMART status while standard is a little unreliable sometimes, and you really don't want to be polling it all the time, and in the prior iMac (2009-2010) they used a specific special cable that was different for each manufacturer's drive (and they use about 4 different makes in the iMac line - including Seagate - they don't claim to know more than them, they simply ask Seagate and others for a drive that has specifications they can use, in this case a custom firmware that makes the drive more useful to them).
What they then did was repurpose the LED access light connector, which they don't use (there's no external LED HD light on the iMac) and used the signals for temperature sensing. What this means is that they can simply use one connector (the same connector) regardless of what drive they install, streamlining inventory and assembly. Since it was never designed for user service, they didn't see it as a downside that it was a non-standard method.
Now, having personally upgraded the HD in my own 20" white Intel iMac, I wish they'd made it possible for me to do without jumping through hoops if I upgrade to one of these machines (my white iMac simply has a temperature sensor that attaches to the outside of the drive, so you just transfer it to the new one), but I'm sure it won't be long before some third party solution comes along to cure it. Apple's own documentation mentions shorting that line out if an SSD is installed in that bay instead of a spinning drive, for example, and I'm sure they are looking at what some third party shops are doing - they released firmware for the 2011 iMacs that enabled full 6GBs speed on 2 of the 3 SATA busses, for example, despite not shipping any BTO parts that could use it, ostensibly after OWC said "hey, it would be cool to put our SATA 3 SSDs in here!"
The iMac is a big laptop, essentially, so I expect it to come with various issues like this. It's no different from a custom logic board and PSU. It will be documented and worked out soon - likely using Apple's own documentation.
If they're so determined to force the upsell, you think they'd have stuck to having the CPU soldered onto the board though, eh? As it is now, this is one of the first times in the iMac they've gone for a socketed stock CPU. I'm not sure anyone has attempted to put in anything different, but no doubt it will be tried soon. The GPU is also on an external card that is clearly a board made by AMD. It's obviously custom and thus not upgradable easily, but the door does remain open for the possibility of changing it out in the future - even if it's only for one of the more powerful cards currently in the lineup (like the one in the top spec 27"),
From your own link you're not invalidating his grammar; it's perfectly ok to place punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on context and whether you are using US or British style.
Great if you could combine them with batteries though, and charge them up using a KERS type system, then use that energy to assist acceleration and use the batteries for cruising. Should help to extend the range of electric vehicles. Or perhaps a few large ultracaps that are very quick to charge at a top-up station, helping to reduce the big downside of electric vs ICE: long recharging time vs filling up the tank.
Hook up to a high power source and charge them up in a couple of minutes then set off again, and have them discharge into the battery system (thus charging it) as you drive, or use the power directly to run the motors.
Just making wild ass guesses here, but there have got to be useful applications for them here.
For the exact reasons we've been talking about, and things like graphene have been hinting at; we don't have the materials to make a space elevator. We have the know how, and the imagination and opportunities with the sorts of things we could do if we had one, but so far have been unable to build one since the strongest material we have is just not strong enough to be useful (at least, not without it being absurdly heavy and impractical).
Seems sort of obvious, really. We launch things into space right now at huge cost that modern society has come to rely on and at the very least expect - satellites (GPS, communications, TV, weather, science), and we're limited in what else we can send up there due to the huge cost of working against the Earth's gravity well by brute forcing it. Even if we don't decide to go out and mine asteroids, or mine helium from the moon, launching satellites that we use right now every single day for hundreds of reasons would be considerably cheaper with an elevator that exploited the angular momentum of the Earth... if you can find a material that is strong enough to built it out of.
You are intentionally (probably, but I haven't ruled out general cluelessness) misreading my intent. You seem to suggest that I think it's ok if the product isn't working right, but that's not what I'm saying at all. You buy a product and you are entitled to have that product in full working order. If it's not, then the company needs to make sure that it is, but beyond repairing it and restoring the product to the way it would be if you purchased it new and didn't have any problems they have no obligations to you at all. You're not entitled to have them bend over and kiss your ass purely because of accidental circumstances - it's not the company's fault that the product broke, since it is impossible to provide a 100% perfect run of products in a mass production environment, or even in a short-run hand-built setting. What the company is obligated to do is put it right, so you're at the same level as someone who got a working one off the bat.
Whether they then decide to do anything else for you is entirely up to them, and many often will compensate their nice customers (and do the bare minimum for those who berate their staff and F-and-blind their way up the CS tree like a douchebag - you catch more flies with honey, etc). However, don't think for one millisecond that you are *entitled* to them giving you anything extra than what is available to you when you purchased the product. The money is in exchange for the product, and everything advertised therein. It does not entitle you to anything else beyond that.
This is the case for *all* companies and products, not just Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
And the same can be said for plane crashes, or ocean liners, or drilling for oil.
Almost everything we do carries risk, even "safe" things like natural farming - clearing hedges to make bigger fields, leading to a dustbowl effect...
Science, industrialism and modern progress is not about 100% eliminating risk - you can do that as effectively as running backwards around the Earth to reverse its rotation - but in minimising them. The fact that there have been nuclear accidents does not mean that being pro-nuclear is a bad position. Given the prevalence of nuclear power relative to coal and comparing the economic, human and ecological damage, nuclear is a long, long way ahead. Is it totally safe? No, of course not.
Those are the breaks with open source licenses though - you have to take the rough with the smooth if you are going to release code in a manner that gives freedom in distribution (depending on the licence of course - GPL, BSD, apache etc).
You have to live with all the potential consequences that arise from the licence you choose - some of which might not be agreeable.
I'm being modded insightful for my post as a whole, which you do need to read to comprehend the use of satire, and you're claiming that my stance (that you can make money of OSS and that it's perfectly fine to do so) is "FUD". Are you a Microsoft shill, or just too shoot-from-the-hip to actually read and attempt to comprehend my comment.
Just to be 100% crystal clear, I am on the side of "pro-OSS" and "OSS is not a poison chalice".
You will also note, in my comment that you didn't read, I addressed the issue with non-commercial licences, and this specific case.
Read comprehension: not just for school. Get some.
Surprises me too, flying on a plane designed in CATIA, running closed, custom flight software.
Still, if he wants to get there on time it's probably better than compiling your own plane and realising that your engines are missing the libenginepylon dependency.
So what you're saying is that OSS is a poisoned chalice that anyone who wants to make money or a career for themselves in software development shouldn't touch with a 12 foot barge pole?
No, I didn't think so.
You seem to think that commercial interest and OSS are exclusive to one another. Where do the major OSS licences forbid you making money?
In this case, if he was using code released specifically under a non-commercial licence then clearly it would explain why his software has been pulled, but your rant smacks of a much broader chip on your shoulder that you think it's immoral to sell OSS software for money, or otherwise generate income from OSS software.
And you don't understand what "biased, misleading and incorrect summary" means, do you?
Cool story bro.
Yeah, it's not like they'll be used exclusively in an environment where there's just no source of 5V DC power... oh wait.
I'm not sure what was worse: shoehorning Shia LeBoef into it, in a manner that can only be described as "high school play-quality" acting, the "super magnetic bones" or that we've displaced "jumped the shark" with "nuked the fridge" as a comment.
Indiana Jones always had an element of the supernatural about it - look at some of the key plot elements in Temple of Doom, and especially Last Crusade, so aliens are not an enormous stretch away from the norm. I can stay engaged in the story if it's presented in a plausible fashion (for the story), but doing things like the fridge scene just pull me right out of the story and go "well, that was crappy, even for a fantasy film... oh, I'm watching a film" and completely breaks the mood.
I know it's common in films (like characters shrugging off beatings that would hospitalise normal people without even causing bruises, and seemingly being immune to bullet wounds that don;t affect the use of their limbs at all etc), but sometimes it's pushed beyond suspension of disbelief. There were so many things wrong with the fridge scene it was as if they were intentionally trying to piss us all off.
So what you're saying is, no matter what evidence is presented to you, and no matter how simple occam's razor makes it, you'll somehow always twist it to make MS the bad guy.
Gotcha.
How are you going to spin MS giving upgraded Xbox 360 consoles to people affected by the firmware update problems with early generation ones? Some sort of "forcing people to stay in the closed ecosystem tyranny!" angle?
What about their continued development of things like Mac Office (including a total rewrite of the macro and scripting for the Mac version)?
They're not stupid - they picked Skype precisely because so many people use it. It's not in their interests to drive people away from the platform.
The lossy recompression (assuming you ripped back to a lossy format) was just a side effect of the free, built in DRM removal. The paid upgrade for you better files when the store went DRM free. The other option was a direct to mp3 conversion from the DRM'ed tracks (set the encoder to mp3, select all the tracks, click "create mp3 version") with no need for CD-Rs.
I didn;t say it was perfect, but the original DRM'ed files weren't a perfect solution either. The current system (relatively high bitrate, DRM-free, AAC music) is pretty good - certainly good enough for a large number of people. Of course, the fact that the iTunes store exists doesn't prevent you from buying CDs, but you knew that already.
Yes, that's why this has happened before MS has any operational control of Skype because the merger hasn't finished yet.
This is exactly like the time when my sister blamed me for turning off her coffee pot while I was still an hour's drive away from her place.
Keep grinding that anti-MS axe though, perhaps one day you'll use it for something useful.
Of course it is, like all DRM schemes, but it was never Apple's choice - it was a requirement of the content owners, and Apple made it as weak as they could get away with (I mean, building in a way to defeat the DRM by default and then promoting its use with every download is a pretty obvious 'we think this is stupid too, but go with it for now' move by them).
As soon as they could get rid of the DRM they did so, and offered a couple of ways out for the old tracks, one of which was the CD burn method which always existed, the other was an upgrade fee per track that got you new downloads at a higher bitrate with no DRM.
Don't try to apply any sense to a DRM system with an obvious analog hole (humans need to hear the music!) - Apple thought so too and were as disdainful as possible while still being on the right side of the music industry (since they own the content Apple wants to sell).
Why rename them? iTunes supports CD-text, it's right there in the options. This option was suggested by Apple at the time you bought the music (very strongly suggested on each purchase), and is a free way to do it, if a little time consuming if you have tons of stuff - it is, however, a free and fully supported way to remove DRM from old iTunes tracks. The assertion was that "if there was no way to get out of the DRM trap with old tracks" then "people won't switch". I am simply stating that not only can you "get out", but that the ability to do so was built in from day one.
Sure it will, if you use something like MarkSpace's Missing Sync:
http://www.markspace.com/products/android/missing-sync-android.html
The sync API for iTunes is documented and available to anyone who wants to write something that works with it. What you can't do (and what Apple somehow turned into the bad guy for stamping on) is pretend to be an iPod by spoofing Apple's USB vendor ID so you can be super lazy and not write an interface to iTunes' own sync system.
Missing Sync isn't free, but the sync API (certainly in OS X) is open and documented so you can write your own if you want to.
Use iTunes itself to break that DRM, as Apple have encouraged strongly all along: burn it to audio CD. This has always been possible, ever since DRMed music was available in iTunes. You sacrifice a little if you then re-rip into a lossy format, but it is free. Alternatively you can upgrade your old purchased tracks for 20 cents (or local currency equivalent) to the higher-bitrate, non-DRM versions that are now available in the store.
Yes, in the Macbook air - we're talking about the iMac here, but suddenly you want to talk about an ultra-portable with very specific parts (you can't replace the SSD in the new Air either because it's not in a standard form factor, it's a thin stick designed especially for Apple to fit into the Air's case).
Ignoring the designed-for-extreme-thinness-by-compromising-upgrade-ability Macbook Air, all of their other models on sale *do* have user replaceable RAM, but your throwaway comment implied that it was the case that it was common to all (or at the very least, the iMac which is what we were talking about).
The Air's case is *extremely thin*, and designing it with user replaceable RAM was just not in the design brief. It's not just a 1mm connector and a couple of clips - you have to design the board layout to put it in a position so you can install an access door, so that affects your design choices. You then need space around the chip since it can't be a snug fit without damaging the chip or the board (so you need a little space on both sides). All in all, this adds complexity and size to your design. It's the same reason they went to all-internal batteries - they know that for the vast majority of users (the vast, vast, vast majority) the pros of doing that outweigh the downsides of not being able to replace the battery without taking the computer apart.
The Air was not designed with upgrades in mind, not for anti-consumer reasons, but because it made the design better for the vast majority of people who would be using it:
* non replaceable battery: no need for battery bay or connectors or bulky casing for battery, or uniform shape making it possible to remove from a bay - positive effects; bigger space for battery cells, non-uniform shape to fill up even more space, thinner case, much increased battery life compared to a removable one.
* custom SSD stick shaped to fill available space: no need to design around an arbitrary 2.5" HDD shape that is a legacy from the days of spinning hard drives - there's no reason the SSD has to be that shape if your goal is to make the design as small as possible.
* RAM soldered to board: system not designed for upgrades but instead for extreme smallness. Soldering RAM to board allows you to put it wherever it works best on the board (circuit path layout, physical locations etc) and allows you to drop the connectors and "bulky" removable RAM chips that have extra circuit board and connector that are unnecessary since the machine is designed to be tiny.
These weren't decisions made with a Machiaveillan twirl of a moustache and villainous laughter as the hardware engineers exclaimed "ahahaha! now let's see them upgrade this machine!" - they were made in order to make the MacBook Air extremely small, with as long a battery life as possible. Inevitable compromises obviously needed to be made. I respectfully suggest that if you think all you have to think about is a couple of RAM clips (which are large in comparison to the thickness of an Air) then you don;t really understand the concept of thinking about the design as a whole.
If we look at the normal laptops and desktops made by Apple, they all have regular drives (HDD and SSD), normal RAM in removable slots and so on. It's only the two recent generations of iMac that have changed the way the HDD temperature is measured. I don't see why they didn;t keep the external sensor cable that was stuck to the side of the drive as used in the white intel iMac (like the one I own and am typing on now, having changed out the drive myself), but I can assure you it wasn't an "anti-consumer" design decision that led them to iterate the design as they have done - if you are at the skill level to be able to disassemble an iMac then you are a small percentage of the user base - Apple hardly cares they lose these few drive repairs compared to the bulk of the user base who bought an All-in-one who will simply send it to Apple to repair.
In any event, you can simply short the pin (as listed in Apple's o
But you can upgrade the RAM aftermarket - easily in fact, and it's user serviceable. They take temperature data because the iMac is cooled by zones, rather than simply monitoring the CPU temperature. There are sensors all over it. Their old method (custom cable) required a separate part, as did the even older method (a physical temperature probe (the most user friendly method). This new method removes the need for both of those things, and you can bypass it by shorting the cable out, in the same manner to jumper settings, so presumably other in-zone sensors are fine, although an internal reading is obviously more accurate and allows finder control of the fans.
You are quick to mark it as an "anti consumer conspiracy" when the far more obvious choices are "it was designed that way because it worked for them.
Well, it makes up for the other Mac headline recently "Malware explosion on OS X" due to a single piece of malware - an unsophisticated social engieering trojan that is easy to remove- and 200-odd reports on Apple's support forums.
Swings and roundabouts, really.
No, the reason that they're doing it this way, according to most educated guesses, is that SMART status while standard is a little unreliable sometimes, and you really don't want to be polling it all the time, and in the prior iMac (2009-2010) they used a specific special cable that was different for each manufacturer's drive (and they use about 4 different makes in the iMac line - including Seagate - they don't claim to know more than them, they simply ask Seagate and others for a drive that has specifications they can use, in this case a custom firmware that makes the drive more useful to them).
What they then did was repurpose the LED access light connector, which they don't use (there's no external LED HD light on the iMac) and used the signals for temperature sensing. What this means is that they can simply use one connector (the same connector) regardless of what drive they install, streamlining inventory and assembly. Since it was never designed for user service, they didn't see it as a downside that it was a non-standard method.
Now, having personally upgraded the HD in my own 20" white Intel iMac, I wish they'd made it possible for me to do without jumping through hoops if I upgrade to one of these machines (my white iMac simply has a temperature sensor that attaches to the outside of the drive, so you just transfer it to the new one), but I'm sure it won't be long before some third party solution comes along to cure it. Apple's own documentation mentions shorting that line out if an SSD is installed in that bay instead of a spinning drive, for example, and I'm sure they are looking at what some third party shops are doing - they released firmware for the 2011 iMacs that enabled full 6GBs speed on 2 of the 3 SATA busses, for example, despite not shipping any BTO parts that could use it, ostensibly after OWC said "hey, it would be cool to put our SATA 3 SSDs in here!"
The iMac is a big laptop, essentially, so I expect it to come with various issues like this. It's no different from a custom logic board and PSU. It will be documented and worked out soon - likely using Apple's own documentation.
If they're so determined to force the upsell, you think they'd have stuck to having the CPU soldered onto the board though, eh? As it is now, this is one of the first times in the iMac they've gone for a socketed stock CPU. I'm not sure anyone has attempted to put in anything different, but no doubt it will be tried soon. The GPU is also on an external card that is clearly a board made by AMD. It's obviously custom and thus not upgradable easily, but the door does remain open for the possibility of changing it out in the future - even if it's only for one of the more powerful cards currently in the lineup (like the one in the top spec 27"),
From your own link you're not invalidating his grammar; it's perfectly ok to place punctuation inside or outside the quotation marks, depending on context and whether you are using US or British style.
Great if you could combine them with batteries though, and charge them up using a KERS type system, then use that energy to assist acceleration and use the batteries for cruising. Should help to extend the range of electric vehicles. Or perhaps a few large ultracaps that are very quick to charge at a top-up station, helping to reduce the big downside of electric vs ICE: long recharging time vs filling up the tank.
Hook up to a high power source and charge them up in a couple of minutes then set off again, and have them discharge into the battery system (thus charging it) as you drive, or use the power directly to run the motors.
Just making wild ass guesses here, but there have got to be useful applications for them here.
For the exact reasons we've been talking about, and things like graphene have been hinting at; we don't have the materials to make a space elevator. We have the know how, and the imagination and opportunities with the sorts of things we could do if we had one, but so far have been unable to build one since the strongest material we have is just not strong enough to be useful (at least, not without it being absurdly heavy and impractical).
Seems sort of obvious, really. We launch things into space right now at huge cost that modern society has come to rely on and at the very least expect - satellites (GPS, communications, TV, weather, science), and we're limited in what else we can send up there due to the huge cost of working against the Earth's gravity well by brute forcing it. Even if we don't decide to go out and mine asteroids, or mine helium from the moon, launching satellites that we use right now every single day for hundreds of reasons would be considerably cheaper with an elevator that exploited the angular momentum of the Earth... if you can find a material that is strong enough to built it out of.
You are intentionally (probably, but I haven't ruled out general cluelessness) misreading my intent. You seem to suggest that I think it's ok if the product isn't working right, but that's not what I'm saying at all. You buy a product and you are entitled to have that product in full working order. If it's not, then the company needs to make sure that it is, but beyond repairing it and restoring the product to the way it would be if you purchased it new and didn't have any problems they have no obligations to you at all. You're not entitled to have them bend over and kiss your ass purely because of accidental circumstances - it's not the company's fault that the product broke, since it is impossible to provide a 100% perfect run of products in a mass production environment, or even in a short-run hand-built setting. What the company is obligated to do is put it right, so you're at the same level as someone who got a working one off the bat.
Whether they then decide to do anything else for you is entirely up to them, and many often will compensate their nice customers (and do the bare minimum for those who berate their staff and F-and-blind their way up the CS tree like a douchebag - you catch more flies with honey, etc). However, don't think for one millisecond that you are *entitled* to them giving you anything extra than what is available to you when you purchased the product. The money is in exchange for the product, and everything advertised therein. It does not entitle you to anything else beyond that.
This is the case for *all* companies and products, not just Apple.
Every single Mac released since before the PPC era, and to this day, ships with an ethernet port with the exception of the Macbook Air.
All modern Macbooks and Macbook Pros have a gigabit ethernet port. GigE became standard around the time of the Powermac G4.