Not quite, It is more Apple ruined them by promising to buy their product and then not following through after they had already heavily invested in meeting the supply for that promise. regardless they need to accept responsibility for entering into such a lopsided agreement. You make stupid decisions and stupid things happen. Why would you trust any company in this way, especially apple.

Well, the other problem was the sapphire wasn't of sufficient quality. Apple's contract said they'd buy it if it was of a certain quality and it failed to meet the bar.

And while lopsided, Apple did lend over $1B as part of the contract to build the factory and merely demanded repayment on a schedule.

Now, Apple is claiming innocence to the fact that they didn't know of the troubles - saying if they knew they would've worked with GTAT to fix issues. Whether it's true or not, we don't know.

Apple bears part of the blame for coming up with the lopsided agreement in the first place. That's not to detract from the blame GT deserves for signing.

Well, Apple has lawyers draw up the contract. GTAT has lawyers to review the contract. It's not Apple presenting a contract to a 1-man shop - it's an organization that's been around and has the resources to scrutinize and negotiate. If GTAT only saw dollar signs when they were handed the contract and didn't review it closely, that's their fault. This isn't a big supplier going after a lone inventor (who may be given leeway for not completely understanding the deal).

Interestingly, Apple is keeping the plant and planning on re-hiring laid off workers. GTAT will be selling off the furnaces but Apple paid ofr the factory and is keeping it to manufacture... something.

Please buy our crap. Pretty please?

We just want to make our money off your app store purchases.

Look, we'll give you the thing for cost if you'll just buy our crap.

*LOL*

Except Apple doesn't make much off of app sales, or media sales for that matter. Even the dwindling iPod sales outclasses the iTunes sales.

Amazon however will sell hardware at or below cost because they plan on selling content, which is why the thing is so tied to Amazon's ecosystem.

Apple, doesn't really care. You could buy your videos off iTunes, or Amazon or even Google Play or whatever. All the content does is help drive hardware sales, which is where Apple makes money. And just use the Kindle app or Nook app or Kobo app for books.

VLCs UI constantly pisses me off - I just can't use it. Fortunately Media Player Classic is there, with the UI I like and no EULAs or DRM.

Every player should hold all my music, otherwise what's the point? But It's only a matter of time before a micro-SD card that can hold everything in FLAC is cheap, at which point it's a non-issue.

So you're say that methods matter and the ends don't automatically justify the means? What's your opinion on Obama's amnesty declaration vs the Constitution?

/thread

I'm sure you're right. Government can print infinite money with no negative consequences down the line. The only reason everyone isn't a millionaire already is the greed of evil bankers. Why didn't anyone realize this before in all of history?

I mean, it's clear as day: you just spend more money that you make, and life is therefore better. I can see no flaw in this plan.

"He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future." - Orwell, 1984

2c per CD? How does that price work out for those of us who keep our definitive backups on AWS or iCloud or OneDrive? And who also would need to pay for a fatter internet connection to get at all the files?

I have no doubt that FLACworks great for the niche who have lots of CDs, lots of hard drives, and who have time and money to spend curating them. But really, if you have kids or emmigrate or whatever, the FLACs are as good as gone when you realize you don't have the time or money you need to keep them useful.

4-5 generations? ...

Our computers still support ASCII from 1960. I'm sure that mp3 support won't go away in my lifetime. And copyright terms will expire before even your 2nd generation of lossy recoding happens.

Instant Godwin, but should Holocaust deniers have the right to demand that Adolf Hitler be disassociated from those "lies"? There's no objective standard of what is true, much less what is current, balanced and relevant information so in truth you ask Google to play oracle. They've found lots of pages mentioning Adolf Hitler and Holocaust together, so they return what they found. They've never done any primary research in the matter, all they have is an objection that it's not true. Should Google then become legally liable if they ignore the protest and keep returning Holocaust-related results? I mean you're holding Google to a higher standard than the sites they're indexing, they can spew out crap on the Internet without fact-checking but if Google collects statistics then they have to determine the truthiness of it. It only works because Google is a megacorporation and the only reason they don't protest harder is probably because it blocks out the competition. Setting up a server to spider the Internet? Easy. Dealing with a zillion more-or-less valid claims to remove information? Massive money sink, great to kill any start-up.

It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.

Drives like this exist, I don't know if any are being sold at the moment but they've certainly been made. I believe the strategy has been used both for dual-attach and for increasing throughput. Some drives also used to read/write multiple tracks (that is, on multiple platters) at a time, but (as has been covered elsewhere in this thread) it got to be too complicated to keep everything aligned as the temperatures and rotational velocities increased.

Alignment isn't an issue - there's no alignment on a modern drive. Instead, at the factory, they write a set of servo tracks all over the platters which do the aligning for you - basically the head seeks to approximately the right position and starts reading, and the servo track tells it where it actually is, so feedback gets the head to the right track.

Old hard drives were open-loop - you said seek to track N, it went to track N by using a stepper motor. Modern hard drives are closed loop in that they are constantly looking for servo tracks to tell them where the head is to pinpoint the right track. It also allows for individual platters to have their own servo tracks before being assembled, as well as handling thermal expansion dynamically (old hard drives would do a scan every 30 seconds or so to find out where the tracks were - called "thermal recalibration". Modern ones don't need this since feedback automatically gets them there, which has the advantage that drive accesses are not paused during the recalibration). This was important if you were streaming data to or from the drive, which was why the early ones were called "A/V" drives - they were designed to do the recalibration on the fly so you can constantly write or read data.

No, the bigger reason why two actuators didn't work is far simpler - think multiprocess programming. Both actuators could read or write data to the platters (of which there was one set) and if you screwed up the order of the accesses, you could easily write the wrong thing (think you do a read then a write of a sector - and the sector happens to be under the actuator doing the write). And yet, if you serialized the accesses, you're back to square 1. So maintaining data consistency was incredibly difficult and at higher datarates, unmanageable.

OP asked for "biometric" ID, okay? RFID, cards, NFC, etc. are not biometric. The reasonable assumption -- unlike yours -- is that he had an actual REASON for asking for biometrics. People don't usually say things for no reason.

Probably because biometrics are easy. You're pretty much guaranteed to have a face or a finger that can be scanned inside the cleanroom. Except of course, you're wearing gloves, and no mention if they have to put on the burka-like hoods as well (which eliminate all but iris scans, which may not be possible if it's an enclosed hood).

Basically the problem is they need fast logins that preferably they don't have to type usernames and passwords (which can be hard on clean-room capable keyboards), so an RFID badge can easily solve the problem since they're usually already clipped to the badge holder on the suit.

And given it's a cleanroom, that usually means it's in a more secured area so primary screening can validate badge against other measures, so unless one also planned on swapping or swiping a badge post-entrance, you can be reasonably sure the credentials are valid.

Plus, usually for stuff involving computers, you either use a login and password, or biometrics. RFID cards or ID badges don't typically come to mind when wanting an authentication solution.

Every single economic recession in history looked like that. But we're already well on the upswing. Certainly everywhere around me (in the Seattle area) is hiring, from the minimum wages jobs to the construction sites to the tech companies.

The usual cycle starts up when people start buying durable consumer goods again: you put off buying that replacement car or washing machine or whatever when the future looks bleak, preferring to limp along with a somewhat-broken one. That demand broke out of the doldrums in early 2012, went back down for a year, and now has taken off like crazy. That's usually the spark that ignites recovery (or, questions of causation aside, it's reliably the sector that comes back first in a recovery).

There's just no evidence that actually works. Many nations have been trying that for decades without success. Once demand is booming, interest rates have proven a good tool to limit growth and pop bubbles, but the reverse doesn't seem to be true. Supply of money can curtail demand, but it can't create demand. When people are scared stability is all-important. Even when things are bad, people will adjust eventually and start spending again, and companies will adjust and start hiring again, if only the government doesn't keep changing the landscape.