No, USB DMAs can only be initiated from the host (it's a client-server protocol, remember).
Note well, though, while we're talking about Macs, that FireWire/IEEE 1394 is non-hosted and does have DMA, so in theory someone could hand you a hacked Sony camcorder or hard drive with malicious firmware, that would then have DMA to your computer. But that's a "hardhack."
You wouldn't have to do a DIP switch, and that would be a bad solution anyways. You could have a pin on the chip that forbids writes unless it's tied to ground, thus one step in the manufacturing would be snipping the pin. Even harder-core would be a pin that blows a circuit protector when it's tied to ground, and permanently forbids writing after the connection.
But as other have pointed out, this would ruin the ability for the vendor to ship field upgrades to keyboards.
On a related note, what David isn't saying is that they have been actively auditoning and recasting actors to replace the original voice talent, so they were ready in any case.
I recorded an actor friend do an audition for Fry and Kif, he was awesome! And he would have been a lot cheaper than Billy West, but alas, it was not to be.
You are probably right, there's some correlation but not much. Apple might not actually move as many units as a Microsoft store... they'll just have to find consolation in the fact they run a much more profitable retail operation. It's hard to see how MS could possibly extract better profits considering the material they're selling.
". Revenue per sq/ft is really only a measure of rental/lease costs on a property, and has very little to do with retail success.
I dunno, since rent is the primary and distinguishing cost factor for a retail operation, it seems like performance per square foot would be a key metric, all other things being equal. "Retail success" is a sorta floppy term, and I'd contend that whatever it is, it doesn't have anything to do with unit sales.
If I sell 10 $1000 laptops for every $3000 MBP you sell, well, I've trumped you in both revenue and volume.
Yes, but you have to do that, and no retail outlet has ever done that, because you pulled those performance figures out of yer butt. We've been through this before with the Gateway and SonySTYLE stores... the thing that sets the Apple stores apart is the on-site customer service operation/"Genius Bar", the good curb appeal and browser-friendly experience, and the relatively well-informed staff. The MS stores could do as well if they incorporate those things, but considering they computer hardware they sell isn't sold for premium prices, they'll never see the revenue or profits.
Who cares if you only sold one computer, if the other guy has to sell five in order to match your profit? The market share war is over, and Microsoft won. They now rule the world of cheap, poorly-supported computers.
It defines a protocol that allows servers to publish documents with threaded conversations, and allow users on different servers to edit those documents and append to the threaded conversations in real-time. It also defines an API that lets developers extend the kind of media that can be placed in the documents, and make documents interactive with the user or other services. It also uses a messaging semantic based on operational transformation, that allows users to browse the complete editing history of any document or thread, and allows agents observing a document to resolve their local state by reading a document as a stream of deltas (it's more complicated than this, but I have yet to wrap my head around OTs completely).
People say it's like email because it lets you do messaging in non-real-time, and has threaded conversations, and documents and media attachments, and it's an open standard. People say it's like IM because conversations are posted to threads in real-time, keystroke-by-keystroke. People say it's like Google Docs (or other such things) because it allows collaborative editing of documents, except this lets you edit the document contemporaneous with other people, since the server protocol merges all updates to the document keystroke-by-keystroke.
I dunno, last time he "did it," he walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars and bought Pixar and NeXT. And then Sculley started licensing clones.
The story is pretty clear that, even with bing's higher click-thru rate, The Google still gets your ad about 13 times as many impressions. Though, not knowing the pricing structures both companies use for ads, I could not tell you the proper return on advertising for both services.
(Note also that, after the initial bump, Bing has once again fallen behind Yahoo.)
I believe the reason for this is it's hard to compete in the low AND high end markets at the same time, at least under the same brand.
To be fair, they do make hordes of money off of lower-income demographics, by selling them iPods and music. They don't actually have a computing product in that range, but computers aren't cars, and it'd be very difficult for them to sell a low-range computer that didn't bring Apple's brand along with it. It'd need a different OS to start...
We've been hearing this line for almost a decade now, and time has told to a tune of nearly 6-fold gain in shareholder value since 2000, giving Apple today a larger market cap than Google, HP, and Dell. I keep waiting for this grand charade to end, but Apple keeps raking in $8 billion dollars a quarter.
They've succeeded by every rational metric of business.
"Premium" is sorta "more expensive" by definition. It does not necessarily mean higher quality. It just means it can summon a higher price on the market, for whatever reason.
They have tried, through various schemes, to compete in this market and have come up bubkis.
I equate it to designer sunglasses. [..] people who want the absolute latest and greatest regardless of how much actual added value they are getting.
This mac is over three years old. You might do better if you at least assumed all of those people with all of that money aren't stupid, but for many slashdotters this seems to be the only possible explanation.
The USB vendor ID was not intended to force users into lock-in at the software level.
It's a strange thing to attribute such an intention on the USB vendor ID, I wonder if there's any documentation of that...
I own an x-keys. Now, when I plug in the X-Keys, my Mac is completely unable to make any use of it, because it doesn't map the keystrokes of the xkeys to any actions. The OS is absolutely receiving the key events through the HID driver, I've seen them in the IO explorer. Is Apple intentionally crippling my x-keys, or rather putting Pi Engineering at a competitive disadvantage because they don't provide software to map the HID events from my X-Keys to software events, while at the same time they DO provide software that allows people to map events from Apple's own gear, like the Mighty Mouse? Is Pi Engineering being "locked-out" of the Mac keyboard market because they have to ship a helper application along with their key arrays?
On the other end of things, it's not so much the interoperability as much as it is the branding involved. When you plug a Pre into iTunes with this voodoo working, it looks like an iPod, and iTunes says "iPod" when it's talking about the Pre. That's a trademark, and it implies (wrongly) that Apple created or sanctioned the functioning of the Pre, when in fact it makes iTunes do a bunch of weird things -- like make two iPod tabs appear in the preferences window, and other oddities. iTunes isn't really built to talk to a Pre this way, and Apple isn't really under any obligation to make it work this way. They've gone and made the library data readable through XML, so vendors can read the library wtihout nettling with iTunes's execution state.
All I can say is, if I wrote a program that wrote data to an open file format, and someone insisted on writing a special bit of code that patched my program and made it do stuff I didn't write it to do, and I was the one who started getting the support calls about it, I'd be sorta pissed.
The gotcha in the wave model, it seems to me, is the permissions system. As it is, if for example a Slashdot thread were a Wave, you would have everyone who was a reader of the wave be an editor of the original posting. Something they've handwaved over in all of the presentations has been that nothing in the text of a wave can apparently be "protected" or "locked." (Though you probably could write an extension that accomplished this.)
There's a real impedence mismatch between waves and a site like slashdot, and in the demos they use "robots" and extensions to bridge the gap to an extent, just as they do with "twitter waves/twaves," but in the demo it seems a lilttle kludgy. The best example of the system working well was their demo of the "bloggy" robot, but even then you could see how the permission/user identification system of people within the wave domain and outside the wave domain could cause problems.
Re:This may seem obvious to some, but...
on
Google Wave Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Waves are persistent like emails, so the people working on it don't have to work on it at the same time, and the infrastructure records all of the actions that bring a wave to it's current state, so someone looking at it a few days later can hit a " playback" button (literally) and see every change every person made. Granted, you can do this now with Word to an extent, but not over the network using an open standard, and not in a way that is deeply integrated into your messaging system, with one server and some editors in a different server in federation with the first one.
That's the really NEW aspect of the thing. Its web interface is a lot like a live-updating Slashdot thread, but the magic is that wave essentially defines a protocol for multiple servers at different organizations collectively mutating and publishing such an object, in such a way that all the users, regardless of where they are, can see the changes a they happen. It's sortof like netnews, if nntp allowed live-editing of threads, and had rich text and media support, and saved every change ever made to any message.
Slashdot Mirror
All these worlds are yours, except Venus. Attempt no landings there. Use them together, use them in peace.
No, USB DMAs can only be initiated from the host (it's a client-server protocol, remember).
Note well, though, while we're talking about Macs, that FireWire/IEEE 1394 is non-hosted and does have DMA, so in theory someone could hand you a hacked Sony camcorder or hard drive with malicious firmware, that would then have DMA to your computer. But that's a "hardhack."
You wouldn't have to do a DIP switch, and that would be a bad solution anyways. You could have a pin on the chip that forbids writes unless it's tied to ground, thus one step in the manufacturing would be snipping the pin. Even harder-core would be a pin that blows a circuit protector when it's tied to ground, and permanently forbids writing after the connection.
But as other have pointed out, this would ruin the ability for the vendor to ship field upgrades to keyboards.
I owe you a link for that... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i8b177543696059c9d4a1cc26fac88778
WTF...
On a related note, what David isn't saying is that they have been actively auditoning and recasting actors to replace the original voice talent, so they were ready in any case.
I recorded an actor friend do an audition for Fry and Kif, he was awesome! And he would have been a lot cheaper than Billy West, but alas, it was not to be.
I think you're missing the post I'm responding to. And, do yourself a favor and take deep breaths while typing.
The quality of a programmer is often proportional to his ego.
Be careful: Humans confuse cockiness with expertise.
You are probably right, there's some correlation but not much. Apple might not actually move as many units as a Microsoft store... they'll just have to find consolation in the fact they run a much more profitable retail operation. It's hard to see how MS could possibly extract better profits considering the material they're selling.
". Revenue per sq/ft is really only a measure of rental/lease costs on a property, and has very little to do with retail success.
I dunno, since rent is the primary and distinguishing cost factor for a retail operation, it seems like performance per square foot would be a key metric, all other things being equal. "Retail success" is a sorta floppy term, and I'd contend that whatever it is, it doesn't have anything to do with unit sales.
I guess this isn't very responsive, on reflection. Oh well, still right.
If I sell 10 $1000 laptops for every $3000 MBP you sell, well, I've trumped you in both revenue and volume.
Yes, but you have to do that, and no retail outlet has ever done that, because you pulled those performance figures out of yer butt. We've been through this before with the Gateway and SonySTYLE stores... the thing that sets the Apple stores apart is the on-site customer service operation/"Genius Bar", the good curb appeal and browser-friendly experience, and the relatively well-informed staff. The MS stores could do as well if they incorporate those things, but considering they computer hardware they sell isn't sold for premium prices, they'll never see the revenue or profits.
Who cares if you only sold one computer, if the other guy has to sell five in order to match your profit? The market share war is over, and Microsoft won. They now rule the world of cheap, poorly-supported computers.
See the flaw?
Yeah, Dell lost a $5000 high-roller customer that probably bought an manufacturer warranty and will buy branded software and peripherals.
They'll have to work pretty hard to sell 10x the number of computers... Common wisdom is that Apple stores have just about the highest revenue-per-square-foot in retail -- the 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York exceeds even Tiffany's.
I mean, the right to be smug isn't even worth $1 an hour to me.
They pay about the same; technically, the Apple smug allowance is conveyed as a health benefit.
the iPhone needs to be opened up to other carriers, plain and simple.
One more year. If ATT wants to keep the exclusive arrangement going they'd better straighten up, otherwise the iPhone is a free agent in 2010.
how is Google going to make money off of it???
Keep an eye on the various "Robots" and "Extensions" they'll be offering as services.
Also, destroying the competitive advantage of Exchange and Lotus Notes will have certain long-term strategic benefits.
It defines a protocol that allows servers to publish documents with threaded conversations, and allow users on different servers to edit those documents and append to the threaded conversations in real-time. It also defines an API that lets developers extend the kind of media that can be placed in the documents, and make documents interactive with the user or other services. It also uses a messaging semantic based on operational transformation, that allows users to browse the complete editing history of any document or thread, and allows agents observing a document to resolve their local state by reading a document as a stream of deltas (it's more complicated than this, but I have yet to wrap my head around OTs completely).
People say it's like email because it lets you do messaging in non-real-time, and has threaded conversations, and documents and media attachments, and it's an open standard. People say it's like IM because conversations are posted to threads in real-time, keystroke-by-keystroke. People say it's like Google Docs (or other such things) because it allows collaborative editing of documents, except this lets you edit the document contemporaneous with other people, since the server protocol merges all updates to the document keystroke-by-keystroke.
I dunno, last time he "did it," he walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars and bought Pixar and NeXT. And then Sculley started licensing clones.
The story is pretty clear that, even with bing's higher click-thru rate, The Google still gets your ad about 13 times as many impressions. Though, not knowing the pricing structures both companies use for ads, I could not tell you the proper return on advertising for both services.
(Note also that, after the initial bump, Bing has once again fallen behind Yahoo.)
I believe the reason for this is it's hard to compete in the low AND high end markets at the same time, at least under the same brand.
To be fair, they do make hordes of money off of lower-income demographics, by selling them iPods and music. They don't actually have a computing product in that range, but computers aren't cars, and it'd be very difficult for them to sell a low-range computer that didn't bring Apple's brand along with it. It'd need a different OS to start...
Either way, time will tell.
We've been hearing this line for almost a decade now, and time has told to a tune of nearly 6-fold gain in shareholder value since 2000, giving Apple today a larger market cap than Google, HP, and Dell. I keep waiting for this grand charade to end, but Apple keeps raking in $8 billion dollars a quarter.
They've succeeded by every rational metric of business.
"Premium" is sorta "more expensive" by definition. It does not necessarily mean higher quality. It just means it can summon a higher price on the market, for whatever reason.
but Mac has no real "economy" option.
They have tried, through various schemes, to compete in this market and have come up bubkis.
I equate it to designer sunglasses. [..] people who want the absolute latest and greatest regardless of how much actual added value they are getting.
This mac is over three years old. You might do better if you at least assumed all of those people with all of that money aren't stupid, but for many slashdotters this seems to be the only possible explanation.
It's a strange thing to attribute such an intention on the USB vendor ID, I wonder if there's any documentation of that...
I own an x-keys. Now, when I plug in the X-Keys, my Mac is completely unable to make any use of it, because it doesn't map the keystrokes of the xkeys to any actions. The OS is absolutely receiving the key events through the HID driver, I've seen them in the IO explorer. Is Apple intentionally crippling my x-keys, or rather putting Pi Engineering at a competitive disadvantage because they don't provide software to map the HID events from my X-Keys to software events, while at the same time they DO provide software that allows people to map events from Apple's own gear, like the Mighty Mouse? Is Pi Engineering being "locked-out" of the Mac keyboard market because they have to ship a helper application along with their key arrays?
On the other end of things, it's not so much the interoperability as much as it is the branding involved. When you plug a Pre into iTunes with this voodoo working, it looks like an iPod, and iTunes says "iPod" when it's talking about the Pre. That's a trademark, and it implies (wrongly) that Apple created or sanctioned the functioning of the Pre, when in fact it makes iTunes do a bunch of weird things -- like make two iPod tabs appear in the preferences window, and other oddities. iTunes isn't really built to talk to a Pre this way, and Apple isn't really under any obligation to make it work this way. They've gone and made the library data readable through XML, so vendors can read the library wtihout nettling with iTunes's execution state.
All I can say is, if I wrote a program that wrote data to an open file format, and someone insisted on writing a special bit of code that patched my program and made it do stuff I didn't write it to do, and I was the one who started getting the support calls about it, I'd be sorta pissed.
The gotcha in the wave model, it seems to me, is the permissions system. As it is, if for example a Slashdot thread were a Wave, you would have everyone who was a reader of the wave be an editor of the original posting. Something they've handwaved over in all of the presentations has been that nothing in the text of a wave can apparently be "protected" or "locked." (Though you probably could write an extension that accomplished this.)
There's a real impedence mismatch between waves and a site like slashdot, and in the demos they use "robots" and extensions to bridge the gap to an extent, just as they do with "twitter waves/twaves," but in the demo it seems a lilttle kludgy. The best example of the system working well was their demo of the "bloggy" robot, but even then you could see how the permission/user identification system of people within the wave domain and outside the wave domain could cause problems.
Waves are persistent like emails, so the people working on it don't have to work on it at the same time, and the infrastructure records all of the actions that bring a wave to it's current state, so someone looking at it a few days later can hit a " playback" button (literally) and see every change every person made. Granted, you can do this now with Word to an extent, but not over the network using an open standard, and not in a way that is deeply integrated into your messaging system, with one server and some editors in a different server in federation with the first one.
That's the really NEW aspect of the thing. Its web interface is a lot like a live-updating Slashdot thread, but the magic is that wave essentially defines a protocol for multiple servers at different organizations collectively mutating and publishing such an object, in such a way that all the users, regardless of where they are, can see the changes a they happen. It's sortof like netnews, if nntp allowed live-editing of threads, and had rich text and media support, and saved every change ever made to any message.