If I was using Bitcoin for "very fast, nearly free transfer of currency anywhere in the world" I'd care because every time I used it to transfer money, I'd have to risk losing a large chunk of it to speculators as a result of the vale being so unstable. That's why I don't tend to use it.
Even on iPhone, it's unusual for anyone to bother exploiting those for malicious purposes despite the fact that working exploits are publicly available.
As for Apple's "slide to unlock" patent, it seems novel to me. I don't recall anybody else using a similar method of unlocking a phone prior to Apple's implementation of it.
Prior to the invention and manufacture of cheap capacitive touch screens it wasn't practical to do so; resistive touch screens aren't that good at detecting finger swipes and it's fairly pointless with a stylus. Apple didn't invent those, they were just the second to release a phone with one. (The first was the LG Prada. Apparently it had software limitations that made swipe gestures impractical due to the hurried development.)
Exactly. There is actually an IC equivalent to bad software patents, and I accidentally ran across an example of one whilst searching the internet for something else. Audio codecs in modern computers used to use a standard called AC97 which had a particular layout of registers that was standardised across all devices, plus a small number of extra hardware-specific registers. Now, if you're in this situation and you needed to fit more registers in than you have space for, there's an old and obvious solution - add a bank of extended registers and have one register to specify which extended register to access and another which can be read and written to access the currently-selected extended register.
Somehow, someone managed to patent the application of this old and well-known solution to AC97 audio codecs, probably because even though it was obvious to everyone no-one had actually used it in an AC97 audio codec before due to the fact they had just been invented. Now no-one else can.
Of course, unless you were well connected and got in early, it'll probably cost you more to mine than you'll actually make. Bitcoin was designed to seriously benefit the early adopters. It looks like part of the reason the price dropped so much was them selling their huge holdings and making a vast real-money profit whilst the majority of users got screwed. (Some had millions of dollars worth of bitcoins from relatively casual, low-risk and low-cost mining.)
And every cent you made was a cent someone else lost, quite possibly someone else who was actually foolish enough to provide actual goods and services in exchange for bitcoins. There's no actual benefit provided by Bitcoins, it's just a zero-sum gamble masquerading as useful work. Kind of like a minature version of the behaviour in Wall Street that lead us into a massive recession, in fact.
Except that hardly anyone bothers to exploit those. In fact, for quite a while security vulnerabilities in web browsers, Flash, etc were a lot easier to exploit on Mac OS X than on Windows - and even then no-one bothered to exploit them.
It appears that AC is married to someone with a harsh voice. The AC didn't claim that all women, or even all wives, have harsh voices. AC just claimed one person who AC likely spends a lot of time with has a harsh voice.
For some reason, it almost always happens to be wives rather than husbands that are referred to as having harsh, screetching voices. Odd that. Heaven forbid anyone suggest this might be due to sexism, though!
That'd be relatively unusual in the embedded ARM world; most of the graphics drivers are closed source, particularly if you want video decode acceleration or OpenGL ES.
If seasteading takes off, I doubt the revolting masses will even be able to touch the rich, and that's just one of many potential problems with your idea.
From what I recall, the cost of iPhone plans is rather more than normal plans here in the UK. Not sure about the US though; your mobile phone market is kind of messed up.
None of them support the feature in question - the final specification details for it were only ironed out recently, and if any motherboard implemented it before then they'll have got it wrong.
One fun side note: notice how that link says "it will fail to recognize future Intel processors with a family number different from 6". Intel have conspicuously kept the family number reported by CPUID at 6 on their new processors in order not to trigger a fallback to the non-Intel pathway that AMD processors get to use, presumably because they know how much that'll harm them in benchmarks and how bad the reviews will look.
Pentium-4 managed to be hot, slow and expensive all at once... though by comparison to modern chips I don't think it's actually that power-hungry, scarily enough. Intel and AMD are heading well above the 100W level again.
Except that's not quite right either, because classic hyperthreading only gets about 10-20% improvements at most from using two threads rather than one, whereas Bulldozer appears to be closer to 80-90% even for stuff that makes heavy use of the shared resources.
This gave AMD a giant gaping opportunity to dominate with their not-so-shitty AMD64. Then they released the dual-core, another great hit. They enjoyed nearly 4 years without any serious competition from Intel
Despite how much better AMD's desktop chips were than Intel's, sometimes they literally couldn't give them away. Intel were threatening to cut off OEM's supplies of laptop chips if they sold AMD processors on the desktop (AMD weren't so competitive for laptops), set up deals where buying less Intel chips would mean paying more money for them (AMD didn't have the capacity to provide all the big OEM's entire supply of processors - they were and are a lot smaller than Intel, and new fabs just took too long to come online). AMD should've been selling every chip they could produce, but Intel used every dirty trick they could think of to make sure this didn't happen.
In theory it actually has the equivalent of an 128-bit wide FPU for every integer unit. Though I hear rumours that they may have not put as much effort into making the classic x87 FPU instructions run fast and that harmed them in some of the non-SSE-supporting benchmarks that a lot of the reviews used.
His opinions are objectively justified. For example, this thread is about it being "useful for Airplay", but Apple use public-key authentication to prevent any Apple devices streaming over Airplay to anything except approved Apple hardware. (Someone's managed to extract the private key but there's no official solution and Apple could break this at any time.)
Oh, and there's already a reverse-engineered ALAC decoder to go along with it.
Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo
Making it incompatible with the code they'd started off with in the process, which eventually killed the original project. KHTML is now basically unusable on the modern web, all the developers having been siphoned off to Webkit, and it was very hard to find a decent Webkit-based browser for Linux until Google ported Chrome to it.
I'm not actually sure if any iPods have ever actually had hardware audio decoding - not even the first one. In fact, a lot of MP3 players seem to just choose a suitable main CPU and do the decoding on that. (I suspect that most or all of the "hardware" decoders are probably just DSPs with hardcoded firmware anyway, so you may as well save some silicon area and power and combine the two.)
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If I was using Bitcoin for "very fast, nearly free transfer of currency anywhere in the world" I'd care because every time I used it to transfer money, I'd have to risk losing a large chunk of it to speculators as a result of the vale being so unstable. That's why I don't tend to use it.
Even on iPhone, it's unusual for anyone to bother exploiting those for malicious purposes despite the fact that working exploits are publicly available.
As for Apple's "slide to unlock" patent, it seems novel to me. I don't recall anybody else using a similar method of unlocking a phone prior to Apple's implementation of it.
Prior to the invention and manufacture of cheap capacitive touch screens it wasn't practical to do so; resistive touch screens aren't that good at detecting finger swipes and it's fairly pointless with a stylus. Apple didn't invent those, they were just the second to release a phone with one. (The first was the LG Prada. Apparently it had software limitations that made swipe gestures impractical due to the hurried development.)
Exactly. There is actually an IC equivalent to bad software patents, and I accidentally ran across an example of one whilst searching the internet for something else. Audio codecs in modern computers used to use a standard called AC97 which had a particular layout of registers that was standardised across all devices, plus a small number of extra hardware-specific registers. Now, if you're in this situation and you needed to fit more registers in than you have space for, there's an old and obvious solution - add a bank of extended registers and have one register to specify which extended register to access and another which can be read and written to access the currently-selected extended register.
Somehow, someone managed to patent the application of this old and well-known solution to AC97 audio codecs, probably because even though it was obvious to everyone no-one had actually used it in an AC97 audio codec before due to the fact they had just been invented. Now no-one else can.
Of course, unless you were well connected and got in early, it'll probably cost you more to mine than you'll actually make. Bitcoin was designed to seriously benefit the early adopters. It looks like part of the reason the price dropped so much was them selling their huge holdings and making a vast real-money profit whilst the majority of users got screwed. (Some had millions of dollars worth of bitcoins from relatively casual, low-risk and low-cost mining.)
And every cent you made was a cent someone else lost, quite possibly someone else who was actually foolish enough to provide actual goods and services in exchange for bitcoins. There's no actual benefit provided by Bitcoins, it's just a zero-sum gamble masquerading as useful work. Kind of like a minature version of the behaviour in Wall Street that lead us into a massive recession, in fact.
Except that hardly anyone bothers to exploit those. In fact, for quite a while security vulnerabilities in web browsers, Flash, etc were a lot easier to exploit on Mac OS X than on Windows - and even then no-one bothered to exploit them.
It appears that AC is married to someone with a harsh voice. The AC didn't claim that all women, or even all wives, have harsh voices. AC just claimed one person who AC likely spends a lot of time with has a harsh voice.
For some reason, it almost always happens to be wives rather than husbands that are referred to as having harsh, screetching voices. Odd that. Heaven forbid anyone suggest this might be due to sexism, though!
That'd be relatively unusual in the embedded ARM world; most of the graphics drivers are closed source, particularly if you want video decode acceleration or OpenGL ES.
Not just that; apparently he's got a street magic trick involving a diamond ring that you literally cannot win due to the way the rules are set up.
If seasteading takes off, I doubt the revolting masses will even be able to touch the rich, and that's just one of many potential problems with your idea.
From what I recall, the cost of iPhone plans is rather more than normal plans here in the UK. Not sure about the US though; your mobile phone market is kind of messed up.
Where do you think that extra money is going to? I'll give you a hint.
The iPod Nano 6g isn't the iPod Touch or the iPhone.
None of them support the feature in question - the final specification details for it were only ironed out recently, and if any motherboard implemented it before then they'll have got it wrong.
One fun side note: notice how that link says "it will fail to recognize future Intel processors with a family number different from 6". Intel have conspicuously kept the family number reported by CPUID at 6 on their new processors in order not to trigger a fallback to the non-Intel pathway that AMD processors get to use, presumably because they know how much that'll harm them in benchmarks and how bad the reviews will look.
Pentium-4 managed to be hot, slow and expensive all at once... though by comparison to modern chips I don't think it's actually that power-hungry, scarily enough. Intel and AMD are heading well above the 100W level again.
Except that's not quite right either, because classic hyperthreading only gets about 10-20% improvements at most from using two threads rather than one, whereas Bulldozer appears to be closer to 80-90% even for stuff that makes heavy use of the shared resources.
This gave AMD a giant gaping opportunity to dominate with their not-so-shitty AMD64. Then they released the dual-core, another great hit. They enjoyed nearly 4 years without any serious competition from Intel
Despite how much better AMD's desktop chips were than Intel's, sometimes they literally couldn't give them away. Intel were threatening to cut off OEM's supplies of laptop chips if they sold AMD processors on the desktop (AMD weren't so competitive for laptops), set up deals where buying less Intel chips would mean paying more money for them (AMD didn't have the capacity to provide all the big OEM's entire supply of processors - they were and are a lot smaller than Intel, and new fabs just took too long to come online). AMD should've been selling every chip they could produce, but Intel used every dirty trick they could think of to make sure this didn't happen.
In theory it actually has the equivalent of an 128-bit wide FPU for every integer unit. Though I hear rumours that they may have not put as much effort into making the classic x87 FPU instructions run fast and that harmed them in some of the non-SSE-supporting benchmarks that a lot of the reviews used.
His opinions are objectively justified. For example, this thread is about it being "useful for Airplay", but Apple use public-key authentication to prevent any Apple devices streaming over Airplay to anything except approved Apple hardware. (Someone's managed to extract the private key but there's no official solution and Apple could break this at any time.)
Oh, and there's already a reverse-engineered ALAC decoder to go along with it.
Perhaps the non-GUI calls it made were only POSIX calls, but it also made a ton of calls to Qt and KDE, which Apple had to redo
Making it incompatible with the code they'd started off with in the process, which eventually killed the original project. KHTML is now basically unusable on the modern web, all the developers having been siphoned off to Webkit, and it was very hard to find a decent Webkit-based browser for Linux until Google ported Chrome to it.
The Apache license is GPL-incompatible. Which is convenient for Apple, since they hate the GPL.
I'm not actually sure if any iPods have ever actually had hardware audio decoding - not even the first one. In fact, a lot of MP3 players seem to just choose a suitable main CPU and do the decoding on that. (I suspect that most or all of the "hardware" decoders are probably just DSPs with hardcoded firmware anyway, so you may as well save some silicon area and power and combine the two.)
SanDisk don't seem to bother with firmware encryption on any of their MP3 players, even when it'd be trivial for them to do so. Apple do.