Apple RAM upgrade prices are often not too bad at the time of a product launch. The problem is that they then stay the same even when the price of the RAM has halved (or more). When the Mac Mini was introduced, the price of an upgrade to 1GB was cheaper than doing it yourself. A year later, it cost the same.
No, that's exactly what I said: they don't do any useful work. They increase the entropy of the universe, but there is no calculation performed that has a result that anyone cares about outside of the closed system of BitCoin. If it were a promise of future computational work, then that would be different.
Gold is going to keep going up in value for as long as the supply of people with a poor grasp of economics keeps increasing and until cheap elemental transmutation becomes possible. This makes it seem like a pretty good long-term investment...
A government controlled currency is still "made up"
As has been stated before, it's a question of backing. Government-issued currencies are backed up by a promise from the government that they will accept them in payment for taxes and, often, by a legal requirement for merchants to accept them within the relevant country's borders. This guarantees that you will be able to exchange them for goods or services in the future, for as long as the government survives, although it does not guarantee that they will retain the same value. BitCoin is backed by nothing. It depends entirely on the willingness of other users to accept it.
The simplest form of money is an IOU: you do something for me, and I give you a promise to do something of equal value in return. This is then backed by me, my promise, and the fact (or, at least, belief) that I am capable of doing something of value in the future. A typical currency is a form of group IOU, which says that you have done some work for someone in a group and that someone in the same group will do some work for you in the future. As long as there are people in the group willing and able to redeem the IOU, then it holds some value, and if an entire country requires these IOUs for taxes and is legally required to accept them in payment for goods or services then there is a very high chance that you will be able to redeem your IOU. With BitCoin, anyone can create new IOUs without doing any useful work, but no one is required to accept them.
There's a very easy shortcut to recognition for a journal: make sure everyone in the field has heard of everyone on the editorial committee. It's not that hard to round up half a dozen prominent researchers in a field to be in charge of a journal. You give them the authority to reject any papers that are submitted and then everyone reading the journal knows that the papers are things that those guys thought were interesting and novel, which means that they are probably of a high standard. You can get other people to do the first and second round reviews, so their actual workload is very low. You don't need to publish a printed version initially, which means you have no size constraints. If you only have three good submissions, only publish three papers in the first edition, then let everyone know that the acceptance rate was low. If you want more content, then you can invite articles and editorials that are not peer reviewed, as long as there is a clear distinction between those that are and those that aren't. I've only seen this done once, but it worked very well in that instance.
It's also pretty interesting that this comes with two Thunderbolt ports. Lack of GigE would be irritating for me (as would lack of FireWire 800), but I think two Thunderbolt ports more than makes up for it. Even driving a plain DisplayPort monitor with one, you've still got something that's effectively an external PCIe connector for everything else...
The only excuse for Apple's dropping Classic and Rosetta is greed.
Rosetta was licensed by Apple from Transitive Technologies, a company that was subsequently bought by IBM, a company that had no interest in licensing anything to Apple, especially after Steve Jobs' (very public) comments about IBM's failures with PowerPC. This meant that Apple was unable to license Rosetta for a newer version of OS X. 'PowerPC ancient technology and you should have upgraded by now' sounds a lot better than 'We built a large part of our migration strategy around a piece of third-party software that we can no longer license' from a marketing standpoint.
If you're using docking stations, then Thunderbolt is more useful than an Ethernet port. The Ethernet hardware will be in the display, so you just have a single cable to plug in to get keyboard, mouse, ethernet, and video (and, optionally, some extra storage from some external hard disks).
Uh, OS X has had resolution independence for years. One of the tools installed with XCode lets you alter the DPI settings on a per-app basis, so you can make individual apps bigger or smaller, but by default it's set to a fixed size based on the display.
This sort of thing isn't used for 'sites' in the sense of web sites, it's designed for sites in the sense of places where you have offices. Having guaranteed QoS between your data centre and your branch offices, even when they are using different ISPs for last-mile access, is.
That's why he said pick the product that you don't remember. Stand in front of the options, and if you see one that seems like the obvious choice but don't know why, buy a different one: it usually means that you recognise them from some advertising.
That works fine, unless there is a botnet that is attacking you, with each bot trying 3 attempts on the same login. That's the attack pattern I see on SSH on my server...
An Excel spreadsheet is not serious number crunching. A few million calculations, mostly integer, per second was a heavy number crunching load back in the '80s, when people were doing largely the same calculations on a 4.77MHz 8088, but even a 100MHz ARM core can easily keep up with the recalculations of almost any spreadsheet. Redrawing the window with antialiased text is likely to be more computationally demanding than recalculating the spreadsheet itself.
I've seen similar behaviour with the device I own running Ubuntu, but more pronounced because it only has an 800MHz ARM CPU. The issue appears to be that udevd eats an increasing amount of CPU time until it becomes completely unusable. If you kill udevd, it becomes useable again. Well, aside from the 'let's copy random elements from OS X without understanding why they were there and therefore get a similar look without any of the UI benefits' Unity interface...
It's also only 8th in Latin America, after two in Brazil, two in Chile, two in Mexico and one in Colombia. Being on the top 400 list at all means it's doing quite well - a lot of good institutions don't make it - but it's still a long way from 'one of the best in the world'.
That's the second claim of that level of lag I've seen, and I wonder what hardware you're seeing that on. My phone is a cheap two-year-old model, yet seems to be pretty smooth for anything I use it for. I'd definitely notice 100ms input lag, and probably notice 100ms audio lag. Android makes a lot of UI mistakes, but I've not seen the kind of lag you describe. The only time I've seen something even close to that was when I played with a Galaxy Tab in a shop, and then some of the full-screen animations looked like they were done entirely in software, but that wasn't input lag, it was 'just' dropping frames in animations.
With a steal broadsword, you really want to swing bring it to a stop about two inches inside the opponent. Any stronger, and it is in danger of snagging and you dying immediately after your first opponent. With a spring steal weapon, you pull the blade a couple of inches before it hits, but the movement is more or less the same. If they're wearing chain mail, then you don't even need to pull it much...
Sound works fine on FreeBSD, no need for ugly hacks like PulseAudio, just in-kernel low-latency sound mixing and a full OSS4 implementation, complete with per-application volume controls, surround sound, and all of the features you'd expect of a modern operating system.
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9)
The Nokia 770, introduced in 2006 did, however.
There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom
These are all cool, but they were first demoed in a TED talk around 2001. Small, cheap, capacitive touchscreens made them possible.
The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all.
That's probably a valid criticism, and the current Android phone and contact programs certainly don't make me disagree that there's some very poor UI going on there. I'm not sure what iOS does in this regard, but if Android is copying it then it's nothing to be proud of, and if Android isn't copying it then Android isn't copying it.
Setting up mobile internet on it [knowyourmobile.com] looked like instructions for setting a dial-up connection in Windows 3 Trumpet Winsock. And the browser was so bad anyway, I couldn't find any review that ever touched on it except to say it was a disaster.
Not sure about the Prada, but setting up mobile Internet on my old N80 was trivial: the information was all in the SIM, just select the relevant profile. The browser was about as good as it could be on a device with a tiny screen. On the 770 it was better, but it lacked some of the nice UI additions, again largely because it had a stylus-driven resistive touchscreen. Many of the interface elements on modern phones are copied quite literally from iOS: Apple puts them in the public webkit repository and other people just download and use them.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
The availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens is a big UI dividing lines, just as the availability of cheap small TFTs was in replacing the older text-driven interfaces with more pictorial ones in earlier phones. The original iPhone came out at around the same times as this, but most of the UI elements people claim were copied are obvious extensions of older ideas to the newer hardware. Most of the really original UI models in iOS have not been copied: for example, I've not seen anything on Android that uses the sideways swiping navigation model for exploring nested menus.
What do you mean by an 'iPhone-like' interface? One with colourful icons arranged in a grid, like every Palm or Nokia device for the last decade? One with a home screen with a few widgets on it and shortcuts to applications, like every Nokia S60 device for the last decade? One with a touchscreen interface, like any phone produced after capacitive touchscreens got cheap enough to be used on mobile phones?
The judge is only allowed to make the ruling based on the evidence presented by both sides. If the prosecution failed to enter as evidence the amount that Apple made from iPhone sales, then this is their omission, not the judge's. A fine equal to the iPhone-related profits made while the misleading advertising was running would have been a strong deterrent, but if no one tells the judge what that amount is then he is not allowed to look it up from random (possibly biased or inaccurate) sources online.
I can imagine a family wanting the TV to, for example, only allow itself to be turned on (and only to certain channels) at certain times if an adult is not in the room. It might also be nice if when you sat down it showed the shows that you want that it's recorded, rather than the ones your partner might want to watch, or if you're both in the room for it to default to showing the intersection of your two sets of favourites. It would be nice if it could automatically pause itself if I stood up and resume once I sat down again. Depending on the fidelity of the tracking, I can imagine my mother would like a TV that noticed when in a film she fell asleep and let her resume watching from just before that point.
And once you've got the technology into people's living rooms, and you're recording the information locally anyway, I bet a lot of people would opt in to targeted advertising in exchange for a small reduction in their cable bill.
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Apple RAM upgrade prices are often not too bad at the time of a product launch. The problem is that they then stay the same even when the price of the RAM has halved (or more). When the Mac Mini was introduced, the price of an upgrade to 1GB was cheaper than doing it yourself. A year later, it cost the same.
No, that's exactly what I said: they don't do any useful work. They increase the entropy of the universe, but there is no calculation performed that has a result that anyone cares about outside of the closed system of BitCoin. If it were a promise of future computational work, then that would be different.
Gold is going to keep going up in value for as long as the supply of people with a poor grasp of economics keeps increasing and until cheap elemental transmutation becomes possible. This makes it seem like a pretty good long-term investment...
A government controlled currency is still "made up"
As has been stated before, it's a question of backing. Government-issued currencies are backed up by a promise from the government that they will accept them in payment for taxes and, often, by a legal requirement for merchants to accept them within the relevant country's borders. This guarantees that you will be able to exchange them for goods or services in the future, for as long as the government survives, although it does not guarantee that they will retain the same value. BitCoin is backed by nothing. It depends entirely on the willingness of other users to accept it.
The simplest form of money is an IOU: you do something for me, and I give you a promise to do something of equal value in return. This is then backed by me, my promise, and the fact (or, at least, belief) that I am capable of doing something of value in the future. A typical currency is a form of group IOU, which says that you have done some work for someone in a group and that someone in the same group will do some work for you in the future. As long as there are people in the group willing and able to redeem the IOU, then it holds some value, and if an entire country requires these IOUs for taxes and is legally required to accept them in payment for goods or services then there is a very high chance that you will be able to redeem your IOU. With BitCoin, anyone can create new IOUs without doing any useful work, but no one is required to accept them.
There's a very easy shortcut to recognition for a journal: make sure everyone in the field has heard of everyone on the editorial committee. It's not that hard to round up half a dozen prominent researchers in a field to be in charge of a journal. You give them the authority to reject any papers that are submitted and then everyone reading the journal knows that the papers are things that those guys thought were interesting and novel, which means that they are probably of a high standard. You can get other people to do the first and second round reviews, so their actual workload is very low. You don't need to publish a printed version initially, which means you have no size constraints. If you only have three good submissions, only publish three papers in the first edition, then let everyone know that the acceptance rate was low. If you want more content, then you can invite articles and editorials that are not peer reviewed, as long as there is a clear distinction between those that are and those that aren't. I've only seen this done once, but it worked very well in that instance.
It's also pretty interesting that this comes with two Thunderbolt ports. Lack of GigE would be irritating for me (as would lack of FireWire 800), but I think two Thunderbolt ports more than makes up for it. Even driving a plain DisplayPort monitor with one, you've still got something that's effectively an external PCIe connector for everything else...
The only excuse for Apple's dropping Classic and Rosetta is greed.
Rosetta was licensed by Apple from Transitive Technologies, a company that was subsequently bought by IBM, a company that had no interest in licensing anything to Apple, especially after Steve Jobs' (very public) comments about IBM's failures with PowerPC. This meant that Apple was unable to license Rosetta for a newer version of OS X. 'PowerPC ancient technology and you should have upgraded by now' sounds a lot better than 'We built a large part of our migration strategy around a piece of third-party software that we can no longer license' from a marketing standpoint.
If you're using docking stations, then Thunderbolt is more useful than an Ethernet port. The Ethernet hardware will be in the display, so you just have a single cable to plug in to get keyboard, mouse, ethernet, and video (and, optionally, some extra storage from some external hard disks).
Uh, OS X has had resolution independence for years. One of the tools installed with XCode lets you alter the DPI settings on a per-app basis, so you can make individual apps bigger or smaller, but by default it's set to a fixed size based on the display.
This sort of thing isn't used for 'sites' in the sense of web sites, it's designed for sites in the sense of places where you have offices. Having guaranteed QoS between your data centre and your branch offices, even when they are using different ISPs for last-mile access, is.
I think something notices it's not running and restarts it. The second time, it seems not to be in the pathological state it enters on boot.
That's why he said pick the product that you don't remember. Stand in front of the options, and if you see one that seems like the obvious choice but don't know why, buy a different one: it usually means that you recognise them from some advertising.
That works fine, unless there is a botnet that is attacking you, with each bot trying 3 attempts on the same login. That's the attack pattern I see on SSH on my server...
An Excel spreadsheet is not serious number crunching. A few million calculations, mostly integer, per second was a heavy number crunching load back in the '80s, when people were doing largely the same calculations on a 4.77MHz 8088, but even a 100MHz ARM core can easily keep up with the recalculations of almost any spreadsheet. Redrawing the window with antialiased text is likely to be more computationally demanding than recalculating the spreadsheet itself.
My old G4 PowerBook supported WiFi, and so did the five or six revisions of the hardware before it...
I've seen similar behaviour with the device I own running Ubuntu, but more pronounced because it only has an 800MHz ARM CPU. The issue appears to be that udevd eats an increasing amount of CPU time until it becomes completely unusable. If you kill udevd, it becomes useable again. Well, aside from the 'let's copy random elements from OS X without understanding why they were there and therefore get a similar look without any of the UI benefits' Unity interface...
It's also only 8th in Latin America, after two in Brazil, two in Chile, two in Mexico and one in Colombia. Being on the top 400 list at all means it's doing quite well - a lot of good institutions don't make it - but it's still a long way from 'one of the best in the world'.
That's the second claim of that level of lag I've seen, and I wonder what hardware you're seeing that on. My phone is a cheap two-year-old model, yet seems to be pretty smooth for anything I use it for. I'd definitely notice 100ms input lag, and probably notice 100ms audio lag. Android makes a lot of UI mistakes, but I've not seen the kind of lag you describe. The only time I've seen something even close to that was when I played with a Galaxy Tab in a shop, and then some of the full-screen animations looked like they were done entirely in software, but that wasn't input lag, it was 'just' dropping frames in animations.
With a steal broadsword, you really want to swing bring it to a stop about two inches inside the opponent. Any stronger, and it is in danger of snagging and you dying immediately after your first opponent. With a spring steal weapon, you pull the blade a couple of inches before it hits, but the movement is more or less the same. If they're wearing chain mail, then you don't even need to pull it much...
Sound works fine on FreeBSD, no need for ugly hacks like PulseAudio, just in-kernel low-latency sound mixing and a full OSS4 implementation, complete with per-application volume controls, surround sound, and all of the features you'd expect of a modern operating system.
The Prada had no virtual keyboard (text input via T9)
The Nokia 770, introduced in 2006 did, however.
There was no swipe to scroll (they used desktop-style scrollbars that a reviewer had a hell of a time using), or multitouch, or pinch-zoom
These are all cool, but they were first demoed in a TED talk around 2001. Small, cheap, capacitive touchscreens made them possible.
The traditional contacts and other phone programs looked like they'd been transplanted from a traditional candybar phone, and didn't take advantage of the larger screen space at all.
That's probably a valid criticism, and the current Android phone and contact programs certainly don't make me disagree that there's some very poor UI going on there. I'm not sure what iOS does in this regard, but if Android is copying it then it's nothing to be proud of, and if Android isn't copying it then Android isn't copying it.
Setting up mobile internet on it [knowyourmobile.com] looked like instructions for setting a dial-up connection in Windows 3 Trumpet Winsock. And the browser was so bad anyway, I couldn't find any review that ever touched on it except to say it was a disaster.
Not sure about the Prada, but setting up mobile Internet on my old N80 was trivial: the information was all in the SIM, just select the relevant profile. The browser was about as good as it could be on a device with a tiny screen. On the 770 it was better, but it lacked some of the nice UI additions, again largely because it had a stylus-driven resistive touchscreen. Many of the interface elements on modern phones are copied quite literally from iOS: Apple puts them in the public webkit repository and other people just download and use them.
But, there should be no doubt that Apple's iPhone was the dividing line that separated pre- and post-2007 smartphone+touchscreen interfaces, as clear as the Iridium layer marks the end of the age of dinosaurs (an apt analogy there, too).
The availability of cheap capacitive touchscreens is a big UI dividing lines, just as the availability of cheap small TFTs was in replacing the older text-driven interfaces with more pictorial ones in earlier phones. The original iPhone came out at around the same times as this, but most of the UI elements people claim were copied are obvious extensions of older ideas to the newer hardware. Most of the really original UI models in iOS have not been copied: for example, I've not seen anything on Android that uses the sideways swiping navigation model for exploring nested menus.
What do you mean by an 'iPhone-like' interface? One with colourful icons arranged in a grid, like every Palm or Nokia device for the last decade? One with a home screen with a few widgets on it and shortcuts to applications, like every Nokia S60 device for the last decade? One with a touchscreen interface, like any phone produced after capacitive touchscreens got cheap enough to be used on mobile phones?
"The iPad WiFi + 4G" is the name
And if this device didn't support 802.11, would you also consider that it wasn't misleading?
The judge is only allowed to make the ruling based on the evidence presented by both sides. If the prosecution failed to enter as evidence the amount that Apple made from iPhone sales, then this is their omission, not the judge's. A fine equal to the iPhone-related profits made while the misleading advertising was running would have been a strong deterrent, but if no one tells the judge what that amount is then he is not allowed to look it up from random (possibly biased or inaccurate) sources online.
I can imagine a family wanting the TV to, for example, only allow itself to be turned on (and only to certain channels) at certain times if an adult is not in the room. It might also be nice if when you sat down it showed the shows that you want that it's recorded, rather than the ones your partner might want to watch, or if you're both in the room for it to default to showing the intersection of your two sets of favourites. It would be nice if it could automatically pause itself if I stood up and resume once I sat down again. Depending on the fidelity of the tracking, I can imagine my mother would like a TV that noticed when in a film she fell asleep and let her resume watching from just before that point.
And once you've got the technology into people's living rooms, and you're recording the information locally anyway, I bet a lot of people would opt in to targeted advertising in exchange for a small reduction in their cable bill.