This isn't true with modern JVMs and JIT compilers. Almost all of the modern JVMs perform escape analysis for hot code to determine if an object can become visible outside the local scope, and using stack allocation instead of heap if appropriate.
It allows the bank and Federal Reserve to better classify deposits for the purposes of maintaining reserves. For every dollar on deposit at a bank, they need to have some fraction readily available to repay withdrawals, and another fraction on deposit at the Fed.
By limiting withdrawals on a savings account, the reserve fractions can be lower, since statistically speaking, you're less likely to have single large redemptions from the entire account base at once. If I've got $5M in aggregate savings accounts from all my depositors, it's likely I'm not going to have redemptions that claim a significant fraction of that in any limited time span (days or weeks).
On the other hand, if I've got $5M in aggregate checking account balances, I may end up redeeming a much larger fraction on any given day, like the first of the month when everyone pays their mortgage. I need to keep checking account deposits much more liquid than properly classified savings accounts. In return, a bank generally pays better interest rates on the savings account.
Anything above the entry-level "model rocket" category certainly does need FAA notification and approval if you're doing it inside US airspace: http://www.nar.org/pdf/FARrockets0209.pdf .
Anything going remotely close to orbit is going to get into the High Power or Advanced High Power categories.
Not to mention Boeing and Lockheed Martin's other joint venture, United Space Alliance took over almost all of the logistics of the Shuttle program about 4 years ago. NASA provides the crew and vehicles, USA does most of the rest.
DSTs are around since a century ago [...] So if well DSTs could be wrong or right, implementing them badly is Apple's fault.
Except they haven't been stable for the last century. For about the last 5 years or so, half the governments on the planet seem to randomly move the cut-over dates around randomly a few months before the date hits every year, and without co-ordinating with any other countries to pick a single global weekend.
It sounds like from the summary that the bulk of this 'copying' was the API, which I don't think is even eligible for copyright(not artistic).
Good API design is hard. Saying that it's just API design and not artistic is severely disingenuous to engineers who are actually good at it (and engineers who cringe and suffer when forced to deal with bad API designs.)
As long as a gallon of gas and a gallon of diesel cost close to the same at the pump, of course a head to head comparison is fair to some extent. At the end of the day, MPG is just a proxy for some cost per mile, and if a higher diesel mpg means a lower per mile cost, the fact that diesel is more energy dense then gasoline is somewhat academic.
The WiFi + 3G version has an actual GPS chip in it that works with or without a cell tower in range. "Assisted GPS" means it bootstraps the GPS chip with either WiFi or cell triangulation and time reference to speed up computing the initial GPS solution if they're available, but it is real GPS and works without a cell subscription or if you're not in WiFi or cell coverage.
The GPS chip is built into the 3G chipset though, which is why it's not in the WiFi only version.
I wish they'd add native support for third-party bluetooth GPS pucks to provide Core Location data though.
There's already several apps out there that turn the iPad into a networked wifi printer, or you can just use the OS X Print to PDF feature and sync the PDF over via any one of a number of mechanisms and apps (dropbox, iDisk, iTunes/iBooks, etc.)
That doesn't answer the parent's question. It's being used as an input to consider whether it's unauthorized, not that that action itself makes it unauthorized.
If I have a 6 month old phone that I always guess the passcode correctly, and all of a sudden can't remember it, jailbreak it, swap the sim card, and it ends up in Montana, there's some strong circumstantial evidence someone just stole it.
What's even funnier is if what he implies (but doesn't quite spell out) is he's got this: HDD -> (SATA cable) -> NAS box -> (meters of bog-standard ethernet cables) -> Ethernet Switch -> (ethernet cables) -> Computer -> ???
Even *if* there was a measurable difference in a 1 ft SATA cable, 4 Ethernet interfaces ports, a pile of ethernet cable, and two CPUs after it would swamp any benefit.
Even if you don't keep backups, iTunes keeps a permanent history of your purchases and will let you download any App* you already paid for free if you try to buy it again, on any device tied to the account.
So he's an ass to admit they aren't the only alternative on the market, and if you think this issue is big enough to sway you to competitior, he's not going to lose sleep over it?
Hell, more than 15,000 people who bought an iPhone (0.5% of 3M) have probably called Apple Care complaining that it lets the aliens/cia/nsa/at&t get into their head at night and steal their thoughts. There's always going to be some small percentage of people you can't make happy and are actually better non-customers than customers.
But carrier availability is just another feature of the phone.
What he's saying is the iPhone 4 has a problem, but it's still less of a problem to him than design features of all the other phones on AT&T, and less of a problem than whatever inertia is keeping him on AT&T.
Every product on the planet has trade-offs from every other, nothing's perfect. And at this point, it's starting to look like there's a minor underlying defect in the antenna design of the iPhone 4, but in real world use it performs about statistically even with anything else on the market, and if you mostly stay in normal coverage areas, you'd never notice it.
It's probably not quite a normal distribution for any particular person, but 5% dropped calls on the nationwide network may be reasonable.
I spend 99.9% of my time in high-signal areas and never drop a call. On the other hand, a friend who lives right on the edge of a coverage area (1 bar outside their house, no bars most places inside) is going to drop a few in a hundred from time to time, along with anyone who spends a fair bit of time talking while commuting so they're in and out of coverage and doing multiple tower hand-offs frequently.
Required to be tested against iOS 4 isn't the same as requiring iOS 4. You can still build against the 3.0 SDK if you want to support older devices, you just need to make sure it doesn't break when running on iOS 4 too. You can still build against 2.X if you really want to, but it needs to not crash on 4.0.
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
The expected usable lifetime of most of this stuff is 3 years, and that's what's baked into the capital expense deduction accounting rules. In three years you'll have 2-4x the horsepower available for the same cost, a generational increase in battery technology, and a higher MIPS/watt that likely kept pace or exceeded the horsepower gains. Under three years, the good stuff worth buying is under warranty (or an extended one like Apple care), over three years you're going to get a far better value replacing it than fixing the mainboard anyway.
If you're a business, you've already baked that into your technology refresh cycles. We don't fix depreciated desktops out of warranty, period. We just replace them and start the warranty over.
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
There's an old joke.. A son comes home from college one winter, and while splitting wood for the fireplace one day, notices his father replaced the old Ax that had been handed down from his grandfather, and his father before that. At dinner that night, he asks, "Dad, what happened to Granddad's Ax?". His father looks at him and smiled, "What do you mean? It's still the only ax out in the garage. Of course, a couple months ago I loaned it to the neighbor, and he nicked the blade so bad on a rock I had to replace the head, and a last month that old handle broke so I replaced it, but it's still your granddad's ax."
Most of the people complaining about the ability to upgrade significant chunks of a box bit by bit are probably replacing their entire computer's worth of parts or more over a 3-4 year lifecycle. You're just not doing it all in one chunk, but if you consider it a feature you can go through 4 video cards in 3 years, you might want to reconsider how wasteful someone who just upgrades everything on a relatively stable cycle is being. Eventually you hit major upgrade blocks anyway that the only thing you can keep is the case, and even then it's usually not worth that.
So you need a workstation. Certain occupations probably always will, but that's not the general case now and certainly won't be in the future.
That doesn't mean everyone does. Where I work, we've largely transitioned from developers needing gobs of local horsepower on their desk to everyone using laptops with non-local storage backed by petabytes of storage on NAS and SAN arrays, compiles done on large Linux and FreeBSD clusters (and smaller build servers for where we need binaries for other Unixes), and developer testing done largely in a massive VMware environment and racks of real target hardware in an engineering lab.
Re:TFA is wrong. Flight of the geek is more like i
on
Flight of the Desktops
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or we just grew up.
Seriously, I used to do that crap. Spend 2 months trying to find parts that all played nicely with one another and were reasonably priced. Ordering from 3 different vendors online. Spending half a day putting it together, and hoping you didn't accidentally ESD damage something on the way. Spending another day setting up Windows or Linux the way you wanted it.
Then, 6 months later, spending half a day figuring out which part just went bad, where the reciepts were, and which parts to RMA first. Being out of commission (or using the older box in the corner) for a week or two until the parts came back. Upgrading little bits at at time, till you hit the upgrade cycle where everything had to go at once anyway: new processor needs new MB. New MB needs new RAM and power supply. May as well upgrade to SATA while I'm at it.
Then, we grew up, got real jobs, and had better things to do with our time than babysit hardware on an upgrade treadmill. So I started buying Macs. If something breaks, it's 20 minutes to drop it off at the local Apple store and let them deal with it. No chasing down half a dozen dodgy Taiwanese companies, half of which are out of business now. The hardware and the software works, and I get reasonable lifetimes out of it. The MBP I'm typing this on is pushing four years, and other than a couple replacement batteries (which Apple replaced for free, the second one out of warranty) and adding another stick of RAM last week, still holds up as my daily workstation in the office and at home.
Sure, I'll replace it eventually, but I don't need to tinker with something that just works every six months just to be on the bleeding edge anymore, and I don't need to replace every part in a computer three times because I can. I can pick something off the shelf, use it for 3-4 years, and then trade up to something where every part has been improved substantially in the meantime.
SMS messages are squeezed into unused space in control packets that the phones and towers exchange normally even if there's no call happening. So on GSM networks, SMS isn't data and incurs no cost at all to the operator. SMS should be completely free on GSM providers.
That's true, but as someone else said, there's still a cost on the backend of routing those packets around to get them to the right tower where they can be slotted into the control packet.
On top of that, there's only so many of those control packets per unit time.. Just because it's being stuffed into an unused space, doesn't mean it's an unlimited resource.
That's not to say the current a la carte rates are reasonable, although now they are set to heavily push even light users towards a bundle, where the per text cost is far lower than the usually quoted per-over price. AT&T right now gives me three choices: $0.20/per; $5.00 / 200 and then $0.10/per; or $30 for unlimited. So if you regularly send more than 25 texts a month, you should just go to the $5 plan where you're going to pay between 2.5 - 19 cents each, and if you send more than 450, you should go to the $30 plan and pay 6 cents or less each.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_performance#Escape_analysis_and_lock_coarsening
http://java.dzone.com/articles/escape-analysis-java-6-update
Looks like for the Sun JVM, it's experimental in 6u14 and later. I believe IBM's had it in their JVMs a bit longer than that.
This isn't true with modern JVMs and JIT compilers. Almost all of the modern JVMs perform escape analysis for hot code to determine if an object can become visible outside the local scope, and using stack allocation instead of heap if appropriate.
Is there also a tag for the news source that properly edits it? The one, for example, that knows the difference between "brakes" and "breaks"?
It allows the bank and Federal Reserve to better classify deposits for the purposes of maintaining reserves. For every dollar on deposit at a bank, they need to have some fraction readily available to repay withdrawals, and another fraction on deposit at the Fed.
By limiting withdrawals on a savings account, the reserve fractions can be lower, since statistically speaking, you're less likely to have single large redemptions from the entire account base at once. If I've got $5M in aggregate savings accounts from all my depositors, it's likely I'm not going to have redemptions that claim a significant fraction of that in any limited time span (days or weeks).
On the other hand, if I've got $5M in aggregate checking account balances, I may end up redeeming a much larger fraction on any given day, like the first of the month when everyone pays their mortgage. I need to keep checking account deposits much more liquid than properly classified savings accounts. In return, a bank generally pays better interest rates on the savings account.
Anything above the entry-level "model rocket" category certainly does need FAA notification and approval if you're doing it inside US airspace: http://www.nar.org/pdf/FARrockets0209.pdf .
Anything going remotely close to orbit is going to get into the High Power or Advanced High Power categories.
Not to mention Boeing and Lockheed Martin's other joint venture, United Space Alliance took over almost all of the logistics of the Shuttle program about 4 years ago. NASA provides the crew and vehicles, USA does most of the rest.
DSTs are around since a century ago [...] So if well DSTs could be wrong or right, implementing them badly is Apple's fault.
Except they haven't been stable for the last century. For about the last 5 years or so, half the governments on the planet seem to randomly move the cut-over dates around randomly a few months before the date hits every year, and without co-ordinating with any other countries to pick a single global weekend.
It sounds like from the summary that the bulk of this 'copying' was the API, which I don't think is even eligible for copyright(not artistic).
Good API design is hard. Saying that it's just API design and not artistic is severely disingenuous to engineers who are actually good at it (and engineers who cringe and suffer when forced to deal with bad API designs.)
As long as a gallon of gas and a gallon of diesel cost close to the same at the pump, of course a head to head comparison is fair to some extent. At the end of the day, MPG is just a proxy for some cost per mile, and if a higher diesel mpg means a lower per mile cost, the fact that diesel is more energy dense then gasoline is somewhat academic.
The WiFi + 3G version has an actual GPS chip in it that works with or without a cell tower in range. "Assisted GPS" means it bootstraps the GPS chip with either WiFi or cell triangulation and time reference to speed up computing the initial GPS solution if they're available, but it is real GPS and works without a cell subscription or if you're not in WiFi or cell coverage.
The GPS chip is built into the 3G chipset though, which is why it's not in the WiFi only version.
I wish they'd add native support for third-party bluetooth GPS pucks to provide Core Location data though.
There's already several apps out there that turn the iPad into a networked wifi printer, or you can just use the OS X Print to PDF feature and sync the PDF over via any one of a number of mechanisms and apps (dropbox, iDisk, iTunes/iBooks, etc.)
That doesn't answer the parent's question. It's being used as an input to consider whether it's unauthorized, not that that action itself makes it unauthorized.
If I have a 6 month old phone that I always guess the passcode correctly, and all of a sudden can't remember it, jailbreak it, swap the sim card, and it ends up in Montana, there's some strong circumstantial evidence someone just stole it.
What's even funnier is if what he implies (but doesn't quite spell out) is he's got this:
HDD -> (SATA cable) -> NAS box -> (meters of bog-standard ethernet cables) -> Ethernet Switch -> (ethernet cables) -> Computer -> ???
Even *if* there was a measurable difference in a 1 ft SATA cable, 4 Ethernet interfaces ports, a pile of ethernet cable, and two CPUs after it would swamp any benefit.
Even if you don't keep backups, iTunes keeps a permanent history of your purchases and will let you download any App* you already paid for free if you try to buy it again, on any device tied to the account.
Also, a lot of people disagree with paying for apps as that goes against the purpose and concept of free software (and associated benefits/gains).
If you want to disagree with paying for apps and agree with the concept of free software, you can use free software.
That doesn't give you the right to rip off developers who don't agree to put stuff under a free license and steal their work.
I agree with the concept of driving a Porsche around, but I'm not allowed to just drive one off the lot.
That's already coming in Windows Phone 7, whether they build the hardware or not.
So he's an ass to admit they aren't the only alternative on the market, and if you think this issue is big enough to sway you to competitior, he's not going to lose sleep over it?
Hell, more than 15,000 people who bought an iPhone (0.5% of 3M) have probably called Apple Care complaining that it lets the aliens/cia/nsa/at&t get into their head at night and steal their thoughts. There's always going to be some small percentage of people you can't make happy and are actually better non-customers than customers.
But carrier availability is just another feature of the phone.
What he's saying is the iPhone 4 has a problem, but it's still less of a problem to him than design features of all the other phones on AT&T, and less of a problem than whatever inertia is keeping him on AT&T.
Every product on the planet has trade-offs from every other, nothing's perfect. And at this point, it's starting to look like there's a minor underlying defect in the antenna design of the iPhone 4, but in real world use it performs about statistically even with anything else on the market, and if you mostly stay in normal coverage areas, you'd never notice it.
It's probably not quite a normal distribution for any particular person, but 5% dropped calls on the nationwide network may be reasonable.
I spend 99.9% of my time in high-signal areas and never drop a call. On the other hand, a friend who lives right on the edge of a coverage area (1 bar outside their house, no bars most places inside) is going to drop a few in a hundred from time to time, along with anyone who spends a fair bit of time talking while commuting so they're in and out of coverage and doing multiple tower hand-offs frequently.
So in other words, the iPhone 4 sucks, but every other phone you'd consider sucks more.
Required to be tested against iOS 4 isn't the same as requiring iOS 4. You can still build against the 3.0 SDK if you want to support older devices, you just need to make sure it doesn't break when running on iOS 4 too. You can still build against 2.X if you really want to, but it needs to not crash on 4.0.
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
The expected usable lifetime of most of this stuff is 3 years, and that's what's baked into the capital expense deduction accounting rules. In three years you'll have 2-4x the horsepower available for the same cost, a generational increase in battery technology, and a higher MIPS/watt that likely kept pace or exceeded the horsepower gains. Under three years, the good stuff worth buying is under warranty (or an extended one like Apple care), over three years you're going to get a far better value replacing it than fixing the mainboard anyway.
If you're a business, you've already baked that into your technology refresh cycles. We don't fix depreciated desktops out of warranty, period. We just replace them and start the warranty over.
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
There's an old joke.. A son comes home from college one winter, and while splitting wood for the fireplace one day, notices his father replaced the old Ax that had been handed down from his grandfather, and his father before that. At dinner that night, he asks, "Dad, what happened to Granddad's Ax?". His father looks at him and smiled, "What do you mean? It's still the only ax out in the garage. Of course, a couple months ago I loaned it to the neighbor, and he nicked the blade so bad on a rock I had to replace the head, and a last month that old handle broke so I replaced it, but it's still your granddad's ax."
Most of the people complaining about the ability to upgrade significant chunks of a box bit by bit are probably replacing their entire computer's worth of parts or more over a 3-4 year lifecycle. You're just not doing it all in one chunk, but if you consider it a feature you can go through 4 video cards in 3 years, you might want to reconsider how wasteful someone who just upgrades everything on a relatively stable cycle is being. Eventually you hit major upgrade blocks anyway that the only thing you can keep is the case, and even then it's usually not worth that.
So you need a workstation. Certain occupations probably always will, but that's not the general case now and certainly won't be in the future.
That doesn't mean everyone does. Where I work, we've largely transitioned from developers needing gobs of local horsepower on their desk to everyone using laptops with non-local storage backed by petabytes of storage on NAS and SAN arrays, compiles done on large Linux and FreeBSD clusters (and smaller build servers for where we need binaries for other Unixes), and developer testing done largely in a massive VMware environment and racks of real target hardware in an engineering lab.
Or we just grew up.
Seriously, I used to do that crap. Spend 2 months trying to find parts that all played nicely with one another and were reasonably priced. Ordering from 3 different vendors online. Spending half a day putting it together, and hoping you didn't accidentally ESD damage something on the way. Spending another day setting up Windows or Linux the way you wanted it.
Then, 6 months later, spending half a day figuring out which part just went bad, where the reciepts were, and which parts to RMA first. Being out of commission (or using the older box in the corner) for a week or two until the parts came back. Upgrading little bits at at time, till you hit the upgrade cycle where everything had to go at once anyway: new processor needs new MB. New MB needs new RAM and power supply. May as well upgrade to SATA while I'm at it.
Then, we grew up, got real jobs, and had better things to do with our time than babysit hardware on an upgrade treadmill. So I started buying Macs. If something breaks, it's 20 minutes to drop it off at the local Apple store and let them deal with it. No chasing down half a dozen dodgy Taiwanese companies, half of which are out of business now. The hardware and the software works, and I get reasonable lifetimes out of it. The MBP I'm typing this on is pushing four years, and other than a couple replacement batteries (which Apple replaced for free, the second one out of warranty) and adding another stick of RAM last week, still holds up as my daily workstation in the office and at home.
Sure, I'll replace it eventually, but I don't need to tinker with something that just works every six months just to be on the bleeding edge anymore, and I don't need to replace every part in a computer three times because I can. I can pick something off the shelf, use it for 3-4 years, and then trade up to something where every part has been improved substantially in the meantime.
SMS messages are squeezed into unused space in control packets that the phones and towers exchange normally even if there's no call happening. So on GSM networks, SMS isn't data and incurs no cost at all to the operator. SMS should be completely free on GSM providers.
That's true, but as someone else said, there's still a cost on the backend of routing those packets around to get them to the right tower where they can be slotted into the control packet.
On top of that, there's only so many of those control packets per unit time.. Just because it's being stuffed into an unused space, doesn't mean it's an unlimited resource.
That's not to say the current a la carte rates are reasonable, although now they are set to heavily push even light users towards a bundle, where the per text cost is far lower than the usually quoted per-over price. AT&T right now gives me three choices: $0.20/per; $5.00 / 200 and then $0.10/per; or $30 for unlimited. So if you regularly send more than 25 texts a month, you should just go to the $5 plan where you're going to pay between 2.5 - 19 cents each, and if you send more than 450, you should go to the $30 plan and pay 6 cents or less each.