1) It's on ARM hardware, so any comments about Windows are irrelevant. (I don't count Windows 8, since that's not out yet, and will likely only support a limited subset of ARM machines due to the fragmented nature of ARM board architectures. Most likely Win8 will only run on "certified" ARM hardware - look at how tightly MS controls WP7 hardware architectures.) 2) There are probably severe limitations that Always Innovating isn't mentioning. I've checked them out periodically for a few years. Always Innovating would be better named Always Heavy on the Rhetoric. They're "all show and no go".
You clearly don't know much about the Space Shuttle.
In terms of reusability, it was an utter and complete failure.
Yes it was "reusable", but it turned out more expensive to launch than one-shot non-reusable systems because its reusability approach was completely hosed. For example, half the tiles needed to be replaced after each launch.
That's why the Space Shuttle has been decommissioned in favor of nonreusable systems.
SpaceX's reuasbility research will use nothing from the shuttle except possibly lessons learned on what NOT to do.
The 520 is one of the lowest-end within its generation.
Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.
Due to the nature of PCI Express, it's actually easier for manufacturers to make PCI cards than AGP cards nowadays.
12 was the primary reason I bought a PS2 and I have no regrets. I used the PS2 for not much else to be honest.
However, 13 was a major reason for upgrading to a PS3 - while I don't regret the PS3, I would if it weren't for its media playback capabilities. FF13 was a MASSIVE disappointment.
Because according to some articles, something is changing the nature of the event - it used to be that only a handful of birds were affected each season, the numbers are now increasing significantly with each season.
Since the Nook Color isn't designed as a video playback device, this limitation wasn't a big deal for whomever chose the hardware architecture for the Nook.
For example, the GPU in many Samsung devices happens to be capable of decoding hardware accelerated video at well ABOVE the device resolution - the assumption being that it'll be used for HDMI output.
The GPU in Nvidia Tegra 2 systems is kinda "meh" as far as video playback performance. Nvidia focused on gaming - it can handle 720p H.264, but you need to either limit yourself to baseline profile OR limit your bitrate significantly. In terms of video playback, the GPU in my Samsung Infuse blows away the GPU in my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Tegra 2).
"This goes beyond simple theories and pipe dreams. This was actively performed in a lab and the process is well documented." The majority of cures/treatments that work in a lab are still pipe dreams. There's a shitload of stuff you can do to a virus in a test tube that you can't do in a human body.
Yes. Where I work, we have a production load and test process for some of our hardware that depends on cygwin. We have had cygwin cause problems for us only once, and that happened to be on a non-production station. (Production stations had all their files on the local hard drive - this machine was performing some operations on LAN shares and the Cygwin issue was related to LAN shares.)
Now the Xilinx ISE toolchain that was being called from our scripts hosted in Cygwin... ugh that's a whole other story. Xilinx ISE is a consistent nightmare to get properly installed and configured.
I'm not surprised that MS is deprecating SUA - almost no one used it because it utterly sucked and was massively crippled compared to cygwin.
As others have said - if this URL was sent out en masse in a manner that many people would consider "spammish", then those emails would have been flagged by many as spam, and then future emails with that URL would be MUCH more likely to hit a spam filter.
Same reason, for example, emails from the Republican National Convention might be more likely to have issues going through gmail than the DNC - Not because of any political affiliations, but because the RNC are a bunch of damn spammers. I usually vote Democrat but will consider voting Republican if it's a particular case of a moderate Republican and the Democrat is a scumbag (both parties have plenty of scumbags...) - However, if in the runup to the election I get a bunch of rhetoric-laden spam emails, I'm going to make a point of NOT voting for the party who sent the spam.
So far, for whatever reason, I get rhetoric-laden spam every few days from the RNC, never from anyone with affiliations with the Democratic party, and I always immediately flag it as spam, to the point where that crap now automatically goes to my spam folder about 50% of the time.
Did I say Apple was making ALL of the profit? I just said they have the lion's share of it.
If you're not familiar with that phrase - it means Apple is getting the majority of the profit out of the deal. Samsung makes a bit of profit, but not nearly as much as their handset business has been making.
Apple has been slapping Samsung with weak "look and feel" patents.
Samsung is firing back with a bunch of core hardware patents... The patents they're using are closer in idea to what the patent system was originally designed for, as opposed to Apple patents which are an abuse of the patent system.
There is also the fact that Samsung is using these in a defensive role... Apple are a bunch of douchebags who rather than seek reasonable licensing fees (this happens a LOT and you never hear about it because sane companies ask for reasonable and non-excessive fees), immediately seek injunctions to have devices removed from the market.
The technologies you're thinking of are: 1) Van Eck phreaking (affects CRTs) - not sure of any actual implementations of this that were of much use 2) Local oscillator leakage detection - many TV tuners use a standardized IF frequency, and you can analyze IF and LO leakage to determine where it's tuned. This is also how "radar detector detectors" work. 3) Generic radio direction finding - hunting down Russian spies that are transmitting is a lot easier than detecting a receive-only device.
This is a different technique - it analyzes the power usage patterns of a household and matches those to the expected power usage patterns that a set of candidate content would cause in order to determine which content choice was viewed. The larger this content set becomes and the smaller the time intervals compared become (e.g. arbitrary pauses/rewinds/fast-forwards for DVR recordings, Internet streaming, and DVD/BluRay viewing), the harder the task becomes.
In the cryptography world, this is known as a sidechannel attack - specifically DPA.
"It's time for some clever EEs to come up with a countermeasure." There are plenty of countermeasures for DPA in the crypto world - However: 1) The negative impact of this is a hell of a lot lower than key extraction 2) The positive effects of having power consumption tied to scene brightness are significant. Localized backlight dimming means that a scene with low average brightness uses less power. OLED displays take this to another level - black pixels use no power.
Also - In this case it appears they were only able to identify which channel a TV was tuned into. DVR makes this MUCH more difficult because fast-forward/rewind vastly increases the number of datasets you need to compare against. Also, while in theory you could identify a DVD, the selection of possible DVDs is so great and the amount of noise in the measurements is such that you're never in practice going to be able to identify someone's watched content reliably.
Google clearly realizes this, and I believe that was part of their reasons for withholding 3.x source - to give them more leverage while they figured out how to resolve the fragmentation fiasco.
Update latencies for Honeycomb devices are the lowest I've seen on average for any Android revision. No one seems to take more than 1-2 months to release an update.
The question is - can they continue exercising their anti-fragmentation leverage once they've released source? Probably - they've shown the device manufacturers that they're willing to play hardball, and will probably use Google Apps/Android Market licensing as their leverage going forward.
The interesting thing is that with Android 3.x so far: 1) Average update latency is FAR lower. Every single device that was released initially with 3.0 has had 3.1 available for a few months. 3.2 is available for quite a few devices already despite it being released less than a month ago. 2) Not a single Honeycomb device has a fully locked bootloader. Of those that do have locked bootloaders (Xoom and Galaxy Tab 10.1): a) The Motorola Xoom has an unlockable bootloader, the first Motorola Android device since the original Droid to have one b) The Samsung Tab 10.1 has a dual-stage bootloader - the nvflash stage is locked on some devices which prevents nvflash from being used to flash, but does NOT prevent any later-stage components from being loaded if they can be flashed (unlike Motorola locked bootloaders, which prevent flashing AND booting of all unsigned code). The Samsung bootloader stage, aka the "Odin" stage based on the name of Samsung's software that can flash kernels and system images with the assistance of said bootloader stage) is fully unlocked - anything that can be flashed with Odin can be flashed regardless of signing, and will boot regardless of signing.
Not even remotely... Significantly larger portions of the Android 3.x source have been released.
Basically - Every single one of the iOS4 components that had source released in the link given was because it was pre-existing LGPL-licensed code. Most of those components are also present in Android 3.x and similarly are open-sourced. (Not all of 3.x is closed-source.)
In addition, unlike iOS, the base Linux kernel for Android 3.x devices is fully open-source.
More importantly - Apple practices full and complete Tivoization in regards to the components that they do release source code to. Yeah the source exists but it's utterly and completely useless on every single Apple device thanks to Tivoization.
Android 3.x, on the other hand, is notable in that while many source code components are missing, NONE of those that have been released are Tivoized on any device - even the Xoom has an unlocked bootloader (or at least unlockable) in direct contrast to nearly every other Motorola Android device.
If it's news to you, you must be hiding under a rock, or at least not paying attention at all to Android.
To summarize the situation: Google has been temporarily withholding the 3.x source for two reasons: 1) They needed time to work on their anti-fragmentation strategy after the rampant Tivoization and poison-pilling that many of the manufacturers (especially) practiced with 1.x and 2.x - This may have been a side aspect to their purchase of Motorola, since Moto was the worst of the major Android handset manufacturers in terms of Tivoization and poison-pill handsets. Once the Motorola purchase completes they can put a kibosh on Moto's insane bootloader-locking practices. (However it remains to be seen whether or not they actually do this - but it would be stupid of them not to.) 2) 3.x had a lot of tablet-specific cruft in it that Google did not want anyone shoehorning back into a phone handset
They've clearly stated that when the tablet (3.x) and phone (1.x/2.x) branches are merged in ICS (most likely 4.0), the source for ICS will be released. I believe they have also stated that 3.x source will be retroactively released once ICS is out.
One thing you need to look at beyond market share is market share growth.
Android's market share GROWTH is significantly higher than Apple's. So if you've got anywhere close to Apple's market share while you're growing faster - well, the writing's on the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
1) It's on ARM hardware, so any comments about Windows are irrelevant. (I don't count Windows 8, since that's not out yet, and will likely only support a limited subset of ARM machines due to the fragmented nature of ARM board architectures. Most likely Win8 will only run on "certified" ARM hardware - look at how tightly MS controls WP7 hardware architectures.)
2) There are probably severe limitations that Always Innovating isn't mentioning. I've checked them out periodically for a few years. Always Innovating would be better named Always Heavy on the Rhetoric. They're "all show and no go".
You clearly don't know much about the Space Shuttle.
In terms of reusability, it was an utter and complete failure.
Yes it was "reusable", but it turned out more expensive to launch than one-shot non-reusable systems because its reusability approach was completely hosed. For example, half the tiles needed to be replaced after each launch.
That's why the Space Shuttle has been decommissioned in favor of nonreusable systems.
SpaceX's reuasbility research will use nothing from the shuttle except possibly lessons learned on what NOT to do.
Especially since I haven't seen a DD-WRT release in a LONG time.
I'm fairly certain I was running build 13064 (the "latest development release" listed on dd-wrt.com) over a year ago.
"Recent News" on dd-wrt.com has the latest entry as 10/13/2010
No-IP updating has been broken for over a year. The router says it's updating, but I still get inactivity nastygrams every 30 days from No-IP
The 520 is one of the lowest-end within its generation.
Also, cards like these often have a lot of media playback capabilities that aren't bandwidth-hungry. This could likely, for example, allow an old clunker system to be upgraded to Blu-Ray capabilities fairly cheaply.
Due to the nature of PCI Express, it's actually easier for manufacturers to make PCI cards than AGP cards nowadays.
FAT Long File Name support
I agree. I liked 10 and 12 - especially 12.
12 was the primary reason I bought a PS2 and I have no regrets. I used the PS2 for not much else to be honest.
However, 13 was a major reason for upgrading to a PS3 - while I don't regret the PS3, I would if it weren't for its media playback capabilities. FF13 was a MASSIVE disappointment.
Because according to some articles, something is changing the nature of the event - it used to be that only a handful of birds were affected each season, the numbers are now increasing significantly with each season.
And hardware varies a lot in this regard.
Since the Nook Color isn't designed as a video playback device, this limitation wasn't a big deal for whomever chose the hardware architecture for the Nook.
For example, the GPU in many Samsung devices happens to be capable of decoding hardware accelerated video at well ABOVE the device resolution - the assumption being that it'll be used for HDMI output.
The GPU in Nvidia Tegra 2 systems is kinda "meh" as far as video playback performance. Nvidia focused on gaming - it can handle 720p H.264, but you need to either limit yourself to baseline profile OR limit your bitrate significantly. In terms of video playback, the GPU in my Samsung Infuse blows away the GPU in my Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Tegra 2).
"This goes beyond simple theories and pipe dreams. This was actively performed in a lab and the process is well documented."
The majority of cures/treatments that work in a lab are still pipe dreams. There's a shitload of stuff you can do to a virus in a test tube that you can't do in a human body.
Yup. My guess is that the person who had issues with OWA and Firefox was using excessively aggressive privacy settings.
Yes. Where I work, we have a production load and test process for some of our hardware that depends on cygwin. We have had cygwin cause problems for us only once, and that happened to be on a non-production station. (Production stations had all their files on the local hard drive - this machine was performing some operations on LAN shares and the Cygwin issue was related to LAN shares.)
Now the Xilinx ISE toolchain that was being called from our scripts hosted in Cygwin... ugh that's a whole other story. Xilinx ISE is a consistent nightmare to get properly installed and configured.
I'm not surprised that MS is deprecating SUA - almost no one used it because it utterly sucked and was massively crippled compared to cygwin.
As others have said - if this URL was sent out en masse in a manner that many people would consider "spammish", then those emails would have been flagged by many as spam, and then future emails with that URL would be MUCH more likely to hit a spam filter.
Same reason, for example, emails from the Republican National Convention might be more likely to have issues going through gmail than the DNC - Not because of any political affiliations, but because the RNC are a bunch of damn spammers. I usually vote Democrat but will consider voting Republican if it's a particular case of a moderate Republican and the Democrat is a scumbag (both parties have plenty of scumbags...) - However, if in the runup to the election I get a bunch of rhetoric-laden spam emails, I'm going to make a point of NOT voting for the party who sent the spam.
So far, for whatever reason, I get rhetoric-laden spam every few days from the RNC, never from anyone with affiliations with the Democratic party, and I always immediately flag it as spam, to the point where that crap now automatically goes to my spam folder about 50% of the time.
Did I say Apple was making ALL of the profit? I just said they have the lion's share of it.
If you're not familiar with that phrase - it means Apple is getting the majority of the profit out of the deal. Samsung makes a bit of profit, but not nearly as much as their handset business has been making.
Not quite as simple as you make it sound.
Apple has been slapping Samsung with weak "look and feel" patents.
Samsung is firing back with a bunch of core hardware patents... The patents they're using are closer in idea to what the patent system was originally designed for, as opposed to Apple patents which are an abuse of the patent system.
There is also the fact that Samsung is using these in a defensive role... Apple are a bunch of douchebags who rather than seek reasonable licensing fees (this happens a LOT and you never hear about it because sane companies ask for reasonable and non-excessive fees), immediately seek injunctions to have devices removed from the market.
No - Samsung is making some money off of components, but Apple is the one getting the lion's share of the profit.
No, it wasn't.
The technologies you're thinking of are:
1) Van Eck phreaking (affects CRTs) - not sure of any actual implementations of this that were of much use
2) Local oscillator leakage detection - many TV tuners use a standardized IF frequency, and you can analyze IF and LO leakage to determine where it's tuned. This is also how "radar detector detectors" work.
3) Generic radio direction finding - hunting down Russian spies that are transmitting is a lot easier than detecting a receive-only device.
This is a different technique - it analyzes the power usage patterns of a household and matches those to the expected power usage patterns that a set of candidate content would cause in order to determine which content choice was viewed. The larger this content set becomes and the smaller the time intervals compared become (e.g. arbitrary pauses/rewinds/fast-forwards for DVR recordings, Internet streaming, and DVD/BluRay viewing), the harder the task becomes.
Wrong. That's what the GPL is about.
The Apache license has no such requirements.
I've never heard this. It has always been "once it's cleaned up in ICS it will be released".
3.1 is not ICS.
In the cryptography world, this is known as a sidechannel attack - specifically DPA.
"It's time for some clever EEs to come up with a countermeasure."
There are plenty of countermeasures for DPA in the crypto world - However:
1) The negative impact of this is a hell of a lot lower than key extraction
2) The positive effects of having power consumption tied to scene brightness are significant. Localized backlight dimming means that a scene with low average brightness uses less power. OLED displays take this to another level - black pixels use no power.
Also - In this case it appears they were only able to identify which channel a TV was tuned into. DVR makes this MUCH more difficult because fast-forward/rewind vastly increases the number of datasets you need to compare against. Also, while in theory you could identify a DVD, the selection of possible DVDs is so great and the amount of noise in the measurements is such that you're never in practice going to be able to identify someone's watched content reliably.
Google clearly realizes this, and I believe that was part of their reasons for withholding 3.x source - to give them more leverage while they figured out how to resolve the fragmentation fiasco.
Update latencies for Honeycomb devices are the lowest I've seen on average for any Android revision. No one seems to take more than 1-2 months to release an update.
The question is - can they continue exercising their anti-fragmentation leverage once they've released source? Probably - they've shown the device manufacturers that they're willing to play hardball, and will probably use Google Apps/Android Market licensing as their leverage going forward.
The interesting thing is that with Android 3.x so far:
1) Average update latency is FAR lower. Every single device that was released initially with 3.0 has had 3.1 available for a few months. 3.2 is available for quite a few devices already despite it being released less than a month ago.
2) Not a single Honeycomb device has a fully locked bootloader. Of those that do have locked bootloaders (Xoom and Galaxy Tab 10.1):
a) The Motorola Xoom has an unlockable bootloader, the first Motorola Android device since the original Droid to have one
b) The Samsung Tab 10.1 has a dual-stage bootloader - the nvflash stage is locked on some devices which prevents nvflash from being used to flash, but does NOT prevent any later-stage components from being loaded if they can be flashed (unlike Motorola locked bootloaders, which prevent flashing AND booting of all unsigned code). The Samsung bootloader stage, aka the "Odin" stage based on the name of Samsung's software that can flash kernels and system images with the assistance of said bootloader stage) is fully unlocked - anything that can be flashed with Odin can be flashed regardless of signing, and will boot regardless of signing.
Not even remotely... Significantly larger portions of the Android 3.x source have been released.
Basically - Every single one of the iOS4 components that had source released in the link given was because it was pre-existing LGPL-licensed code. Most of those components are also present in Android 3.x and similarly are open-sourced. (Not all of 3.x is closed-source.)
In addition, unlike iOS, the base Linux kernel for Android 3.x devices is fully open-source.
More importantly - Apple practices full and complete Tivoization in regards to the components that they do release source code to. Yeah the source exists but it's utterly and completely useless on every single Apple device thanks to Tivoization.
Android 3.x, on the other hand, is notable in that while many source code components are missing, NONE of those that have been released are Tivoized on any device - even the Xoom has an unlocked bootloader (or at least unlockable) in direct contrast to nearly every other Motorola Android device.
If it's news to you, you must be hiding under a rock, or at least not paying attention at all to Android.
To summarize the situation:
Google has been temporarily withholding the 3.x source for two reasons:
1) They needed time to work on their anti-fragmentation strategy after the rampant Tivoization and poison-pilling that many of the manufacturers (especially) practiced with 1.x and 2.x - This may have been a side aspect to their purchase of Motorola, since Moto was the worst of the major Android handset manufacturers in terms of Tivoization and poison-pill handsets. Once the Motorola purchase completes they can put a kibosh on Moto's insane bootloader-locking practices. (However it remains to be seen whether or not they actually do this - but it would be stupid of them not to.)
2) 3.x had a lot of tablet-specific cruft in it that Google did not want anyone shoehorning back into a phone handset
They've clearly stated that when the tablet (3.x) and phone (1.x/2.x) branches are merged in ICS (most likely 4.0), the source for ICS will be released. I believe they have also stated that 3.x source will be retroactively released once ICS is out.
It has some GNU stuff in it, but VERY little compared to your typical Linux distro.
One thing you need to look at beyond market share is market share growth.
Android's market share GROWTH is significantly higher than Apple's. So if you've got anywhere close to Apple's market share while you're growing faster - well, the writing's on the wall.