...two months is all you need to cross from one year to the next, which, under the %m-%d-%Y scheme, would still fail to sort in the expected chronological order.
I once repaired a computer with no fewer than 250,000 copies of a particular virus (don't recall which) installed. With each virus.exe weighing in at 12KB, that was 3GB of virus code on the laptop (given that this was about 6 years ago, that was a substantial amount of space).
The machine was a new laptop with XP SP1 installed (so no firewall). On its first day, it was connected to a university LAN for 8 hours non-stop, while a virus was running around the network. The virus did not have code to detect an existing infection, so it simply reinfected the machine many times.
It ran fine until the owner shut it down. Upon restarting, every virus.exe tried to start, resulting in a hung system on boot. It took a commercial antivirus program over 10 hours to finish clearing the machine.
I didn't realize using a standard audio format, with tons of support from tons of software and hardware, and with better licensing terms than MP3 counted as "lock in".
You are also drawing an unfair comparison between Microsoft's desktop operating environment and Apple's mobile environment. Apple runs iOS like basically any game console; if you think that iOS is evil, then you probably also think Nintendo is evil too for making their platforms locked down.
On the other hand, Apple's Mac OS X operating system is far more open than Microsoft's ever was. On OS X, the kernel (Darwin) is open-source, the browser (WebKit) is open-source, the compiler (LLVM/Clang) is open-source, and the company employs developers who maintain and contribute back to these projects.
Apple also sits on several standards committees, and actively participates in standards development and promulgation.
In many, many ways, Apple is not nearly as "evil" as you seem to think.
Python never had shell backquotes. The code snippet is highlighting one way that shell backquotes from other languages can be handled. (The "backquote" operator in Python 2.x is equivalent to "repr", e.g. `3+4` yields '7'; it is now gone in Py3K for obvious reasons).
In Python 2.7 and 3.1, there's now a convenience function for capturing program output:
subprocess.check_output('ls -l')
I doubt your claim that Py3K has made things more complicated. If anything, it has made things simpler: less language "burrs" (e.g. / now does float division, eliminating the need to stick float() on one argument or use weird constructs like 1./3), a cleaner standard library ("io" is a great idea), and proper Unicode/8-bit distinction.
That works out to an effective resolution of ~16000x9000, which is pretty damn high (it's a 144 megapixel display). I'm sure we'll eventually get to that point, but seriously, a 144 MP display is still a few years off.
Also, at normal viewing distances, I doubt a 360 dpi display has any significant advantage over a 120 dpi display (1080p on a 52" screen is about 42 dpi, so 120 dpi seems like a more reasonable goal).
No, to turn off an iPhone/iPod touch the proper way, you hold down the sleep button for five seconds, and slide to power off. It's really not that hard.
Except DES has a keyspace size of 2^56 (~7x10^16 keys), whereas AES (128) has a keyspace size of 2^128 (~3x10^38). That's a factor of 10^22 times more difficult: AES isn't just a little harder than DES, it's absolutely out of reach for current (or even custom) hardware systems.
Heck, even 2^80 is considered infeasible for present hardware, and that's "only" 16 million times harder than DES (i.e. an organization would need millions of dedicated DES crackers, at a cost of trillions of dollars, to be able to break a theoretical 80-bit version of DES, or find collisions in a perfect 160-bit hash function).
DES was weakened by the NSA specifically because they thought 56-bits would be bruteforceable (the EFF built their machine partly to demonstrate that the NSA wouldn't be the only ones able to do so).
AES was not subjected to such an artificial weakening procedure. Unless it has a heretofore undiscovered weakness that permits a break in substantially less than 2^128 operations, AES is secure against current hardware.
Besides, the totally paranoid people are probably using AES-256, anyway; to brute-force AES 256 would require about 10^77 operations, or about 19 billion AES operations per second, *per atom of matter in the Earth* (estimated at 10^49), for 19 billion years.
Yeah...get back to me when you manage to bruteforce a 128-bit AES key on your GPU farm. Only then can you claim that "Encryption is far behind the current power of hardware these days."
Yesterday I used my iPod touch (3rd gen) for about 10 hours of playing music, during which about 3-4 hours was spent actively using the screen to browse the internet and do other things (e.g. rendering fractals for my amusement, using an SSH+X client, a remote desktop client, viewing course notes, etc.)
It arrived home with about 30% of its battery left. Given the amount of use I got out of it for a day, I am quite impressed.
Initial reviewers have gotten *more* than 10 hours out of the iPad; one reviewer managed to play videos straight for 12 and a half hours on a single charge. I think the battery life on the iPad will be quite good (at least for the majority of devices, barring the occasional defect).
This might be true of WM 6.5, but have you seen the direction Microsoft is moving with Windows Phone 7 Series? They appear dead-set on emulating the iPhone's closed environment: no third-party multitasking, approved apps only (though they claim their definition of "approved" will be more broad...we'll see), and the potential for a device manufacturer to restrict modification to the firmware.
I don't really see much "openness" in that model of things...
I can't speak for the iPad, but I know the iPhone actually allows Safari to run in the background. Practical application: audio streams off the Internet can be played in the background; several Internet radio apps use this trick to "run in the background".
My iPod touch (3rd gen, OS 3.1.3) lacks the option for a custom alarm.
However (in my particular case) because I play music at night, playing more music from my iPod as an alarm would likely be ineffective. Instead, I've got mine set to "emergency alarm"...since it loops for about 5 minutes (or more?) at max volume in the morning, it's basically impossible to ignore:)
Which business would that happen to be? Because in Apple's business, if you look at the strictly business side of things (revenue, profit, sales volume, etc.) I don't think you could ever call it "really stupid".
As listed in the table, most netbooks have substantially less than 10 hours of battery life, (indeed, only three entries out of 35 with published battery life estimates have an operational life of more than 10 hours), have a screen resolution of 1024x600 (which is *less* than the iPad's 1024x768), and, excluding the less-than-5" netbooks, weigh substantially more than the iPad's 1.5lb. Most are running 1.0 to 1.6GHz Intel Atoms, which aren't directly comparable with a 1 GHz ARM chip, so I can't comment on the "50% faster".
The iPad also doesn't use handwriting recognition for English (it's a standard QWERTY touchscreen keyboard), and you have the option of using a wireless Bluetooth (full) keyboard as well (this option doesn't even require any additional hardware beyond the keyboard).
So, I'd have to say that on several fronts, your argument about netbooks fails. Care to demonstrate what your "average" netbook looks like? Perhaps you'd also like to tell me how much it weighs, and what its actual battery life is like?
Particle physicists have their own terminology for things. The inverse femtobarn is a particular unit of measurement related to data collection on collisions.
1) no USB transfer of music files: this one's a bummer, but you can definitely work around it by using a 3rd-party sync 2) must use iTunes: see 1) (for example, foo_dop with foobar2000 on Windows is quite competent) 3) you can use the On-The-Go playlist for somewhat limited functionality. Furthermore, smart playlists continue to update on the phone (for example, a ratings-based playlist will be altered if you change the rating on a song). For example, I usually play music out of a highly-rated list, and if I suddenly decide I no longer like a song, I can simply reduce its rating and it will drop out of the playlist. 4) I've only seen it lose its place in the playlist after it is synced to iTunes, because the music (iPod) app is restarted. 5) I don't use Bluetooth audio playback, so I can't comment (though I like how the buttons on the new earbuds work)
Well, unless Ubisoft decides to use a real standard, like SSL, and hardcodes the certificate in the binary.
If you manage to spoof a hardcoded certificate, that would imply that you've found the private key (or some way around it), and severely compromised SSL...it's probably just easier to patch the certificate than to break SSL.
The app uses the iPhone's phone functionality to place calls.
Basically, when you make a call through their interface, they find a free number owned by Google Voice, then send that number to the browser. Using the iPhone's voice connection, that number is dialed, which on Google's end connects you to your destination.
This *does* require a cellular connection, which you simply can't get on an iPod touch.
Slashdot Mirror
...two months is all you need to cross from one year to the next, which, under the %m-%d-%Y scheme, would still fail to sort in the expected chronological order.
Need I point out that %Y-%m-%d sorts properly, whereas %m-%d-%Y does not? When's the last time you needed releases sorted by month but not year?
I once repaired a computer with no fewer than 250,000 copies of a particular virus (don't recall which) installed. With each virus .exe weighing in at 12KB, that was 3GB of virus code on the laptop (given that this was about 6 years ago, that was a substantial amount of space).
The machine was a new laptop with XP SP1 installed (so no firewall). On its first day, it was connected to a university LAN for 8 hours non-stop, while a virus was running around the network. The virus did not have code to detect an existing infection, so it simply reinfected the machine many times.
It ran fine until the owner shut it down. Upon restarting, every virus .exe tried to start, resulting in a hung system on boot. It took a commercial antivirus program over 10 hours to finish clearing the machine.
The soap box is censored, the ballot box is a sham, and the jury box is rigged. Maybe then you see why some would resort to force?
I didn't realize using a standard audio format, with tons of support from tons of software and hardware, and with better licensing terms than MP3 counted as "lock in".
You are also drawing an unfair comparison between Microsoft's desktop operating environment and Apple's mobile environment. Apple runs iOS like basically any game console; if you think that iOS is evil, then you probably also think Nintendo is evil too for making their platforms locked down.
On the other hand, Apple's Mac OS X operating system is far more open than Microsoft's ever was. On OS X, the kernel (Darwin) is open-source, the browser (WebKit) is open-source, the compiler (LLVM/Clang) is open-source, and the company employs developers who maintain and contribute back to these projects.
Apple also sits on several standards committees, and actively participates in standards development and promulgation.
In many, many ways, Apple is not nearly as "evil" as you seem to think.
Python never had shell backquotes. The code snippet is highlighting one way that shell backquotes from other languages can be handled. (The "backquote" operator in Python 2.x is equivalent to "repr", e.g. `3+4` yields '7'; it is now gone in Py3K for obvious reasons).
In Python 2.7 and 3.1, there's now a convenience function for capturing program output:
subprocess.check_output('ls -l')
I doubt your claim that Py3K has made things more complicated. If anything, it has made things simpler: less language "burrs" (e.g. / now does float division, eliminating the need to stick float() on one argument or use weird constructs like 1./3), a cleaner standard library ("io" is a great idea), and proper Unicode/8-bit distinction.
That works out to an effective resolution of ~16000x9000, which is pretty damn high (it's a 144 megapixel display). I'm sure we'll eventually get to that point, but seriously, a 144 MP display is still a few years off.
Also, at normal viewing distances, I doubt a 360 dpi display has any significant advantage over a 120 dpi display (1080p on a 52" screen is about 42 dpi, so 120 dpi seems like a more reasonable goal).
Most Android phones also have a battery cover, so in these cases you just pull the battery: problem solved.
No, to turn off an iPhone/iPod touch the proper way, you hold down the sleep button for five seconds, and slide to power off. It's really not that hard.
Except DES has a keyspace size of 2^56 (~7x10^16 keys), whereas AES (128) has a keyspace size of 2^128 (~3x10^38). That's a factor of 10^22 times more difficult: AES isn't just a little harder than DES, it's absolutely out of reach for current (or even custom) hardware systems.
Heck, even 2^80 is considered infeasible for present hardware, and that's "only" 16 million times harder than DES (i.e. an organization would need millions of dedicated DES crackers, at a cost of trillions of dollars, to be able to break a theoretical 80-bit version of DES, or find collisions in a perfect 160-bit hash function).
DES was weakened by the NSA specifically because they thought 56-bits would be bruteforceable (the EFF built their machine partly to demonstrate that the NSA wouldn't be the only ones able to do so).
AES was not subjected to such an artificial weakening procedure. Unless it has a heretofore undiscovered weakness that permits a break in substantially less than 2^128 operations, AES is secure against current hardware.
Besides, the totally paranoid people are probably using AES-256, anyway; to brute-force AES 256 would require about 10^77 operations, or about 19 billion AES operations per second, *per atom of matter in the Earth* (estimated at 10^49), for 19 billion years.
Yeah...get back to me when you manage to bruteforce a 128-bit AES key on your GPU farm. Only then can you claim that "Encryption is far behind the current power of hardware these days."
Yesterday I used my iPod touch (3rd gen) for about 10 hours of playing music, during which about 3-4 hours was spent actively using the screen to browse the internet and do other things (e.g. rendering fractals for my amusement, using an SSH+X client, a remote desktop client, viewing course notes, etc.)
It arrived home with about 30% of its battery left. Given the amount of use I got out of it for a day, I am quite impressed.
Initial reviewers have gotten *more* than 10 hours out of the iPad; one reviewer managed to play videos straight for 12 and a half hours on a single charge. I think the battery life on the iPad will be quite good (at least for the majority of devices, barring the occasional defect).
This might be true of WM 6.5, but have you seen the direction Microsoft is moving with Windows Phone 7 Series? They appear dead-set on emulating the iPhone's closed environment: no third-party multitasking, approved apps only (though they claim their definition of "approved" will be more broad...we'll see), and the potential for a device manufacturer to restrict modification to the firmware.
I don't really see much "openness" in that model of things...
I can't speak for the iPad, but I know the iPhone actually allows Safari to run in the background. Practical application: audio streams off the Internet can be played in the background; several Internet radio apps use this trick to "run in the background".
You can't really do much with it
From Pogue's review, echoed in several of the reviews I read:
On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on.
...did you read the reviews, or just skim for all the negative stuff you could possibly find?
Well, it also makes using all the Shanzhai iPads easier ;)
My iPod touch (3rd gen, OS 3.1.3) lacks the option for a custom alarm.
However (in my particular case) because I play music at night, playing more music from my iPod as an alarm would likely be ineffective. Instead, I've got mine set to "emergency alarm"...since it loops for about 5 minutes (or more?) at max volume in the morning, it's basically impossible to ignore :)
Which business would that happen to be? Because in Apple's business, if you look at the strictly business side of things (revenue, profit, sales volume, etc.) I don't think you could ever call it "really stupid".
Hmm, I think this comparison of netbooks wants to disagree with your claims.
As listed in the table, most netbooks have substantially less than 10 hours of battery life, (indeed, only three entries out of 35 with published battery life estimates have an operational life of more than 10 hours), have a screen resolution of 1024x600 (which is *less* than the iPad's 1024x768), and, excluding the less-than-5" netbooks, weigh substantially more than the iPad's 1.5lb. Most are running 1.0 to 1.6GHz Intel Atoms, which aren't directly comparable with a 1 GHz ARM chip, so I can't comment on the "50% faster".
The iPad also doesn't use handwriting recognition for English (it's a standard QWERTY touchscreen keyboard), and you have the option of using a wireless Bluetooth (full) keyboard as well (this option doesn't even require any additional hardware beyond the keyboard).
So, I'd have to say that on several fronts, your argument about netbooks fails. Care to demonstrate what your "average" netbook looks like? Perhaps you'd also like to tell me how much it weighs, and what its actual battery life is like?
It (presumably) does for Chinese, since the iPhone does ;)
Particle physicists have their own terminology for things. The inverse femtobarn is a particular unit of measurement related to data collection on collisions.
1) no USB transfer of music files: this one's a bummer, but you can definitely work around it by using a 3rd-party sync
2) must use iTunes: see 1) (for example, foo_dop with foobar2000 on Windows is quite competent)
3) you can use the On-The-Go playlist for somewhat limited functionality. Furthermore, smart playlists continue to update on the phone (for example, a ratings-based playlist will be altered if you change the rating on a song). For example, I usually play music out of a highly-rated list, and if I suddenly decide I no longer like a song, I can simply reduce its rating and it will drop out of the playlist.
4) I've only seen it lose its place in the playlist after it is synced to iTunes, because the music (iPod) app is restarted.
5) I don't use Bluetooth audio playback, so I can't comment (though I like how the buttons on the new earbuds work)
Well, unless Ubisoft decides to use a real standard, like SSL, and hardcodes the certificate in the binary.
If you manage to spoof a hardcoded certificate, that would imply that you've found the private key (or some way around it), and severely compromised SSL...it's probably just easier to patch the certificate than to break SSL.
There's a lot of real problems in mathematics, but the complex problems are just more interesting ;)
The app uses the iPhone's phone functionality to place calls.
Basically, when you make a call through their interface, they find a free number owned by Google Voice, then send that number to the browser. Using the iPhone's voice connection, that number is dialed, which on Google's end connects you to your destination.
This *does* require a cellular connection, which you simply can't get on an iPod touch.