Trust me, the old SCART cables that were used for the same purpose in Europe in the standard-definition era were worse - they were just as orientation specific and flimsy, except they were also much larger and the cables attached to them much heavier.
Lighting's also just a connector for USB 2/3 - the data wires in the Lightning-to-USB cable go straight through. The reason the cables are so expensive is because they have to have a special Apple-supplied lockout chip or iPhones and iPads will refuse to work with them.
Probably still better than Intel's Galileo board, which doesn't even have proper native GPIOs (they all go through a slow I2C I/O expander), is more expensive, and has worse power usage.
Did you actually bother to click on the second link, written yesterday, which is all about how the problem is still there even after the supposed fixes? Be sure to read the second page too.
Tesla advertised their car to owners as actually having the much lower levels of power usage it would have if the standby functionality was working corrrectly. They completely neglected to mention that it wasn't functioning and that the car used far more power when not in use than they were claiming. It's no different from advertising a TV as having ultra-low standby power usage when in fact the manufacturer knew it would draw far more power.
It almost certainly just acts as a transparent proxy that intercepts connections and DNS requests and sends them through Tor - there's already support in the Tor client for doing this.
Of course, your example shows one reason why any statement about the Model S's safety from Elon Musk should be taken with a pinch of salt - it's just too new! Capacitors with that issue generally took well over a year to go pop (that's partly why the capacitor manufacturers didn't cotton onto the problem), so if the Model S had exactly the same fire issue you were complaining about Elon Musk could still portray it as less likely to have a fire because it hasn't existed long enough for that kind of problem to show up.
To be fair, if that had happened to Model S's then Elon Musk and his supporters would be spinning it as a good thing and the media coverage as some kind of anti-electric-car crusade just as he is with the Model S fires - after all, not only did no-one get hurt by the fires, there was essentially no chance of anyone getting hurt because no-one was in the cars at the time, and it only happened as a result of them being underwater.
You're also teaching them not to recognize when calculations make no sense. How can you subtract 5 pennies from a cup of 6 units of coffee? You can't, and that kind of check will be important in a few years once they move onto using that maths for real-world calculations where dimensional consistency is important.
If you read the sentence before that: As single bits in memory control each task, corruption due to HW or SW faults will suspend needed tasks or start unwanted ones. It only took a single bit in non-error-detecting RAM getting flipped to cause that particular fault, something that could easily happen due to cosmic rays or minor radioactive contamination in the ECU packaging - and that's before you even take into account all the other potentially memory-trashing code. It's more like a manufacturer deciding not to ground the case at all and just hoping nothing will come loose and short to it.
They found, amongst other things, that single-bit flips in non-error-detecting RAM could cause unintended acceleration. Those aren't exactly uncommon and can be made even more common by things they didn't investigate like the materials used to encapsulate the chips.
Some of the chip vendors' USB implementations have license restrictions that make them unsuitable for open hardware projects. There are generally decent open-source replacements but it's not clear they can sublicense VIDs even if they can afford one.
This should be insightful, not funny. Back when I was buying a webcam there were some supposedly USB-compliant UVC webcams from reputable companies that just plain didn't work on Linux because they malfunctioned if you send requests in anything other than the exact way Windows happened to, and I'm pretty sure this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Oh, this is definitely setting a dangerous precedent alright. Remember that Samsung and the other companies have FRAND patents because they helped develop fundamental technologies that made mobile phones possible, like the radio interfaces that allow them to talk to base stations, whereas Apple don't because didn't. By declaring that Apple's refusal to license those patents shouldn't result in an import ban because they're FRAND, Obama's basically telling companies that they shouldn't waste money developing that stuff.
He's sending a clear message that the companies should instead invest their resources on building a thicket of patents on stuff like UI, wait for someone else to do the unsexy fundamental technology work, then use their work for free whilst using your UI patents to ban those that did the boring but necessary R&D work from selling anything. If this isn't your business model from now on, you're the sucker that's going to be taken for a free R&D ride by the companies that did work that way.
You're right that the older 30-pin cables had no method of checking for authenticity, but starting with the iPhone and newer iPod Apple began to require authentication chips in certain kinds of 30-pin cables. For example, they blocked video out and in some cases even audio out on all cables and docks without an authentication chip, including older Apple-made cables that predated the chip.
Actually, Apple aren't doing the pin-reassigning chip for video out; instead they're compressing the video output until it fits down a USB connection and including an entire ARM SoC in the Lightning AV Adapter to decompress it again. So Lightning is really less capable in the multiplexing department than many Android phones' micro-USB connectors.
Except users don't need to bypass warnings or hack the OS to use unsafe counterfeit chargers - so long as they use an Apple-approved cable to connect their deadly charger to their iPhone they won't get any warnings. Literally the only thing Apple are preventing counterfeits of is the cable that plugs into the charger. You've been had by Apple's Reality Distortion Field, as apparently have the mods.
If anything it means that more people are going to cut corners on the charger so they can buy the Apple-approved cable that's now required. At least here in the UK, the price difference between Apple's official Lightning cable and a knock-off is enough to pay for a decent, branded 2100 mA charger from a reputable seller.
Locking out third-party cables doesn't actually help prevent electrocutions. Those have all been from knock-off chargers, whereas the lock-out is just on the cable which is seperate and cannot affect whether people get electrocuted. I mean, I guess maybe they could incorporate some kind of safety feature into the cable but they don't - the charging wires connect straight through from the charget to the phone.
Don't worry - even though the only benefits of Apple's Lightning connector over Micro USB are being able to insert it upside down and a hardware-enforced requirement to pay Apple a cut on any Lightning cables, there were plenty of fanbois in the media ready to portray it as some super-futureproof, all digital miracle. (In fact it's shown exactly the same futureproof, all-digital ability to support new interfaces without hardware changes as bog standard USB. Even the Lightning video out is a hack that compresses the video to the point it could be send over USB, and in fact probably is.)
In practice, there's no such thing as risk-free arbitrage anyway though - there's always a small risk that one of the markets will shift before both sides of the transaction go through.
It affected Seagate 7200.11 drives, I know because one of my hard drives was affected by the bug. Seagate eventually started fixing people's drives for free after outsiders figured out it was a software bug that locked out access and it hit the tech news sites - prior to that their data recovery service was charging thousands of dollars to get people's data back. I can only imagine they realised people were going to ask pointed questions about how exactly their drives wound up with a "bug" that reliably held people's data to ransom for $$$, and that some of those people might be uniformed and have warrants.
Neither do tacks or dozens of other things that aren't for children. Isn't it pretty common knowledge that if it will fit in their mouth count on a kid eating it?
The danger posed by tacks is obvious just from looking at them. Buckyballs look almost exactly like candies - the danger they pose, which in some ways makes them worse than tacks, is so non-obvious that there's people both here on Slashdot and in the WSJ comments section who've failed to grasp it even after reading the warning (in fact even after reading graphic details of the internal injuries to kids from swallowing them):
What's stopping your dumbass kid from eating a ball bearing of the exact diameter of a buckyball? The strength of a typical electromotor case, I'm guessing. So why aren't the Fed banning vacum cleaners, etc?
you could choke on almost anything sold in a dollar store. does it mean that they're selling death machines?
But other toys (Lego for example) come in a box that says not for children under X years old, and nobody expects the Lego to stay in the box or have each individual block marked as unsafe for children
It's definitely harmed people all right - a number of kids have had to have major intestinal surgery and suffered all sorts of nasty long term side effects. If you read the WSJ opinion piece, they only say that it hasn't killed anyone; they're basically lying by omission.
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, the old SCART cables that were used for the same purpose in Europe in the standard-definition era were worse - they were just as orientation specific and flimsy, except they were also much larger and the cables attached to them much heavier.
Lighting's also just a connector for USB 2/3 - the data wires in the Lightning-to-USB cable go straight through. The reason the cables are so expensive is because they have to have a special Apple-supplied lockout chip or iPhones and iPads will refuse to work with them.
Probably still better than Intel's Galileo board, which doesn't even have proper native GPIOs (they all go through a slow I2C I/O expander), is more expensive, and has worse power usage.
Did you actually bother to click on the second link, written yesterday, which is all about how the problem is still there even after the supposed fixes? Be sure to read the second page too.
Tesla advertised their car to owners as actually having the much lower levels of power usage it would have if the standby functionality was working corrrectly. They completely neglected to mention that it wasn't functioning and that the car used far more power when not in use than they were claiming. It's no different from advertising a TV as having ultra-low standby power usage when in fact the manufacturer knew it would draw far more power.
It almost certainly just acts as a transparent proxy that intercepts connections and DNS requests and sends them through Tor - there's already support in the Tor client for doing this.
Of course, your example shows one reason why any statement about the Model S's safety from Elon Musk should be taken with a pinch of salt - it's just too new! Capacitors with that issue generally took well over a year to go pop (that's partly why the capacitor manufacturers didn't cotton onto the problem), so if the Model S had exactly the same fire issue you were complaining about Elon Musk could still portray it as less likely to have a fire because it hasn't existed long enough for that kind of problem to show up.
To be fair, if that had happened to Model S's then Elon Musk and his supporters would be spinning it as a good thing and the media coverage as some kind of anti-electric-car crusade just as he is with the Model S fires - after all, not only did no-one get hurt by the fires, there was essentially no chance of anyone getting hurt because no-one was in the cars at the time, and it only happened as a result of them being underwater.
You're also teaching them not to recognize when calculations make no sense. How can you subtract 5 pennies from a cup of 6 units of coffee? You can't, and that kind of check will be important in a few years once they move onto using that maths for real-world calculations where dimensional consistency is important.
If you read the sentence before that: As single bits in memory control each task, corruption due to HW or SW faults will suspend needed tasks or start unwanted ones. It only took a single bit in non-error-detecting RAM getting flipped to cause that particular fault, something that could easily happen due to cosmic rays or minor radioactive contamination in the ECU packaging - and that's before you even take into account all the other potentially memory-trashing code. It's more like a manufacturer deciding not to ground the case at all and just hoping nothing will come loose and short to it.
They found, amongst other things, that single-bit flips in non-error-detecting RAM could cause unintended acceleration. Those aren't exactly uncommon and can be made even more common by things they didn't investigate like the materials used to encapsulate the chips.
Some of the chip vendors' USB implementations have license restrictions that make them unsuitable for open hardware projects. There are generally decent open-source replacements but it's not clear they can sublicense VIDs even if they can afford one.
This should be insightful, not funny. Back when I was buying a webcam there were some supposedly USB-compliant UVC webcams from reputable companies that just plain didn't work on Linux because they malfunctioned if you send requests in anything other than the exact way Windows happened to, and I'm pretty sure this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Which is in turn a direct result of USB VID/PID pairs being expensive and a pain to obtain.
Oh, this is definitely setting a dangerous precedent alright. Remember that Samsung and the other companies have FRAND patents because they helped develop fundamental technologies that made mobile phones possible, like the radio interfaces that allow them to talk to base stations, whereas Apple don't because didn't. By declaring that Apple's refusal to license those patents shouldn't result in an import ban because they're FRAND, Obama's basically telling companies that they shouldn't waste money developing that stuff.
He's sending a clear message that the companies should instead invest their resources on building a thicket of patents on stuff like UI, wait for someone else to do the unsexy fundamental technology work, then use their work for free whilst using your UI patents to ban those that did the boring but necessary R&D work from selling anything. If this isn't your business model from now on, you're the sucker that's going to be taken for a free R&D ride by the companies that did work that way.
Where I live there's at least one market stall that does that kind of repair locally, complete with a hot air reflow station.
You're right that the older 30-pin cables had no method of checking for authenticity, but starting with the iPhone and newer iPod Apple began to require authentication chips in certain kinds of 30-pin cables. For example, they blocked video out and in some cases even audio out on all cables and docks without an authentication chip, including older Apple-made cables that predated the chip.
Actually, Apple aren't doing the pin-reassigning chip for video out; instead they're compressing the video output until it fits down a USB connection and including an entire ARM SoC in the Lightning AV Adapter to decompress it again. So Lightning is really less capable in the multiplexing department than many Android phones' micro-USB connectors.
Except users don't need to bypass warnings or hack the OS to use unsafe counterfeit chargers - so long as they use an Apple-approved cable to connect their deadly charger to their iPhone they won't get any warnings. Literally the only thing Apple are preventing counterfeits of is the cable that plugs into the charger. You've been had by Apple's Reality Distortion Field, as apparently have the mods.
If anything it means that more people are going to cut corners on the charger so they can buy the Apple-approved cable that's now required. At least here in the UK, the price difference between Apple's official Lightning cable and a knock-off is enough to pay for a decent, branded 2100 mA charger from a reputable seller.
Locking out third-party cables doesn't actually help prevent electrocutions. Those have all been from knock-off chargers, whereas the lock-out is just on the cable which is seperate and cannot affect whether people get electrocuted. I mean, I guess maybe they could incorporate some kind of safety feature into the cable but they don't - the charging wires connect straight through from the charget to the phone.
Don't worry - even though the only benefits of Apple's Lightning connector over Micro USB are being able to insert it upside down and a hardware-enforced requirement to pay Apple a cut on any Lightning cables, there were plenty of fanbois in the media ready to portray it as some super-futureproof, all digital miracle. (In fact it's shown exactly the same futureproof, all-digital ability to support new interfaces without hardware changes as bog standard USB. Even the Lightning video out is a hack that compresses the video to the point it could be send over USB, and in fact probably is.)
In practice, there's no such thing as risk-free arbitrage anyway though - there's always a small risk that one of the markets will shift before both sides of the transaction go through.
It affected Seagate 7200.11 drives, I know because one of my hard drives was affected by the bug. Seagate eventually started fixing people's drives for free after outsiders figured out it was a software bug that locked out access and it hit the tech news sites - prior to that their data recovery service was charging thousands of dollars to get people's data back. I can only imagine they realised people were going to ask pointed questions about how exactly their drives wound up with a "bug" that reliably held people's data to ransom for $$$, and that some of those people might be uniformed and have warrants.
Neither do tacks or dozens of other things that aren't for children. Isn't it pretty common knowledge that if it will fit in their mouth count on a kid eating it?
The danger posed by tacks is obvious just from looking at them. Buckyballs look almost exactly like candies - the danger they pose, which in some ways makes them worse than tacks, is so non-obvious that there's people both here on Slashdot and in the WSJ comments section who've failed to grasp it even after reading the warning (in fact even after reading graphic details of the internal injuries to kids from swallowing them):
What's stopping your dumbass kid from eating a ball bearing of the exact diameter of a buckyball? The strength of a typical electromotor case, I'm guessing. So why aren't the Fed banning vacum cleaners, etc?
you could choke on almost anything sold in a dollar store. does it mean that they're selling death machines?
But other toys (Lego for example) come in a box that says not for children under X years old, and nobody expects the Lego to stay in the box or have each individual block marked as unsafe for children
It's definitely harmed people all right - a number of kids have had to have major intestinal surgery and suffered all sorts of nasty long term side effects. If you read the WSJ opinion piece, they only say that it hasn't killed anyone; they're basically lying by omission.