It would never catch on because it doesn't support what existing Micro USB connectors do, and what other manufacturers already use. For example, there is no way to do uncompressed 1080p video over it, and phones were doing that three or four years ago so are not likely to drop back now. The cost of the Apple video solution is prohibitive as well, when an MHL adapter is Ã5.

Lightning doesn't seem to support USB peripherals either. Not sure if it is an inherent limitation of the design or just that Apple don't use them, but many Android devices can make use of USB flash drives, card readers, game controllers, keyboards, mice and the like.

micro USB connectors DO NOT DO VIDEO.

MHL and SlimPort and every other standard does. No, those connectors are not compatible with each other, but they do allow you to fit a microUSB plug into them. They are not, however, micro USB. That'll be like saying Apple invents a new connector, but you can use micro USB with it. It just means the connector was made compatible, but if Apple puts in Firewire/thunderbolt/whatever, it doesn't mean micro USB inherits those properties.

USB peripherals are supported by lightning just fine. You can connect cameras, memory cards, even USB DACs to an iOS device just fine - you do need the "Camera Connection Kit" which converts your 30 pin or Lightning port to a USB host port, to which you can plug in a camera, memory card reader or flash drive, or USB audio device to. Or keyboard, if you wanted.

And it's taken long enough for USB to get to the point where you can plug it in without caring for orientation. USB micro aren't immune to this - USB micro AB ports generally are reversible because of their godawful design. And most devices should be using microAB ports instead of just microB and special adapters to make it an A port. It's just the user experience is so terrible, and it makes it incompatible with MHL and SlimPort (which only are compatible with micro B cables).

When you sign the back of your card, you're providing a template for forgery to anyone that happens to steal or find your card. I can understand why the credit card company would want you to do this, as a convincing forgery job on a signed sales receipt shifts liability from them to the consumer. However, as a consumer, I don't understand why you'd willingly buy in to such a system.

Because signing a credit card isn't for verification. It's for agreement of the terms and conditions.

Signing the back of your card is how you indicate that you agree with the terms of your cardholder agreement, which your provider has spelled out how you pay them back, how they charge interest, what interest rate, billing, etc. If you don't sign the card and the merchant accepts it, then they have to eat the loss because you didn't agree to the terms.

Likewise, signing the chit just means you agree to pay the amount shown in line with your agreement.

It's just contracts, in the end. The card signature shows you agree to the contract between you and the credit card provider. The chit signature shows you agree to the contract to pay the amount shown. If someone else forges your signature, that's fraud and you're not responsible. Likewise, if someone uses your credit card with their signature, that too is valid since it was signed under agreement.

There's nothing special about the signature. Banks routinely loan out lots of money without even a "reference signature" to compare to, yet they're still valid.

You're just signing to show you agreed to the presented terms.

If you look closely, the chits all say "Cardholder agrees to pay the amount shown per the terms of the cardholder agreement" which is what you're REALLY agreeing to.

Someone who has enough skill to use the Other OS function probably has enough skill to install CFW

Actually, CFW is freakishly easy to install. It's just an offline update.

No one uses OtherOS anymore. The reason you use CFW is pirating games and all that. It always has been since the OtherOS folks, pissed at losing it, hacked the PS3 to restore it. Which ended up leaving a huge hole for everyone else to exploit, so there are more than a few ISO loaders and dumpers and all that.

Not sure about their status to play online, since I hear that Sony sends down a binary to run on them to report on the status (client-side trust), which I assume is pretty easy to fake after a few days.

Anyhow, it appears Xbox Live is back up, the best they could do was make it "intermittent". And only login was affected.

A CEO that gets it.

Tim Cook realizes he's not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is perhaps one of three people in the world who can be an asshole and yet get results done (the other two - Linus Torvalds and Theo De Raadt). Say what you want, but they're all assholes, except mysteriously, they get results.

Everyone else who've tried, failed miserably.

And I'm sure Cook realizes it too - he's no Jobs and being an asshole would destroy the company (most who try fail, hence why there's only three people in the world who could do it). He's got to be different, and if that means revamping the company from being under the thumb to how companies should be run, so be it.

Still, you do miss the odd Jobs-style flare up. I mean, Ballmer had his chairs. Cook is just a bit.. understated.

It's almost like the editors wanted to publish a biased article or something. Scandalous.

Exactly. It's exactly the same thing Apple, Google and everyone else has.

Hell, in Apple's case, it's cheaper to borrow the money in the US than repatriate it. When Apple needed $17B, they took on debt against future US earnings, because it would cost them less to pay back that principle plus interest than it would if they were to bring in the money from offshore into the US (which I think would've been close to $30B to get $17B they could spend). And Apple has very rarely taken on debt intentionally.

An unintentional side effect is well, Apple, Microsoft and Google have to spend that money outside the US, so they hire developers and other people to work outside the US as well.

If my PS3 breaks while they're still making them? I'm not sure I'd buy another. I'd just get a cheap 3D-capable Blu-Ray player and play SotN by other means.

You'd get better quality using a cheap 3D blu-ray these days - the PS3's HDMI output means it only supports half-resolution 3D, and in doing so, lossy audio, making it one of the most undesirable 3D players out there.

3D over HDMI comes in 4 formats - side-by-side (SBS), Top-and-bottom, line-interleaved, and frame-packed. The latter format involves fitting two full resolution frames (1920x1080 x2) per frame, while the others are fitting two frames in a 1080p frame. Side by side means the two frames are 960x1080 in size (losing horizontal resolution), while top and bottom means they're 1920x540 (losing vertical resolution), while interleaved means every other line belongs to a frame, again losing half the vertical resolution.

Couple that with lossy audio (the PS3 can't do lossless audio in 3D mode, go figure), and it was a nice "how do you do" feature. The people who could use it however, generally were people who spent a lot of money with a nice system. Even today, they still are since 3D has disappeared practically from store shelves. Relegated to a few high-end models so if you wanted it, you paid for it.

The removal of OtherOS didn't affect the average gamer, it only affected a very small group of people who installed Yellowdog Linux out of curiosity. I was one of those who did so -- a year later, I didn't particularly care that the feature was removed, because as everyone else who tried it discovered, OtherOS sucked. The hypervisor, which can't be worked around, locked out much of the hardware. Want to use it as a cool games emulator? Good idea! But since the hypervisor has always restricted the RSX, the PS3 runs much slower than your standard HTPC, and has almost no graphics acceleration.

It's only been recently that some exploits with specific hypervisor versions have allowed the Linux kernel to boot in "game mode," unlocking full graphics acceleration, but that's not a Sony feature and wasn't available through OtherOS.

OtherOS always sucked because Sony was scared it would lead to pirated games or homebrew games that competed with their own offerings, so they crippled it from the very start.

And you know what? It helped keep piracy at bay.

Here's one thing Microsoft learned on the original Xbox - when the interests of homebrewers and pirates align, you lose. It's why the Xbox360 is locked down and to this day, unbroken save for limited piracy hacks.

Sony had the same with OtherOS. Within 6 months of them removing OtherOS, the PS3's horrendously broken security system was breached - by people looking to run OtherOS! And what happened after that? The pirates came in and basically took over. It's so bad in the early days, you could still use PSN with a fully opened console (which led to the PSN shutdown a few months later). And these days, you still can since the complete console security system was breached - anything Sony tries is a element of "trust the client". Which means it works for a few days, then fails as everyone learns how to spoof the response.

And perhaps another factor was Microsoft's "opening" of the Xbox360 using XNA and the Xbox Live Indie Arcade where homebrewers can write code and then play them and even offer them for sale.

It's lead to the Xbox360 being unbreached - no "hacked" console can be connected to Xbox Live without being detected, and the security of the software is such that it still only runs Microsoft's code.

So if you hacked your xbox, you could play pirated games, but never online.

The only way to flee is to have an alternative. And despite all of the wanna-bes, there are no real quality alternatives.

Or network effects make alternatives less attractive.

Take eBay for example. The network effect makes it such that despite its fees and policies, it remains the #1 site for buy and selling goods.

Sure other sites have started up and are better in many ways, but you see complaints from buyers along the lines of "If I wanted to pay eBay prices, I'd use eBay!" and complaints from sellers of "Buyers are always lowballing me - they refues to pay what I'd get on eBay!". Well, yeah, the network effect is such that buyers KNOW they're using a lesser site so they hope to get bargains (or else they'd just save the effort and use eBay) and sellers are using it hoping to use the lower rates to make more money (but expecting the same prices as eBay). This ends up with auction sites basically dying because sellers want eBay prices despite lower demand, and buyers want cheaper prices because of relative obscurity (again, if they wanted to pay eBay pricing, they'd just use eBay).

Facebook and the others are the same thing - you want me to use your network, but all my friends are on Facebook, so I'd just be making extra work for myself to use your network. You'd better have a compelling reason for me to do twice as much work. (See G+).

It only works if you have the network effect going for you. Something like Amazon doesn't, because I can buy a DVD from them, or a DVD from Walmart.com, so the two are fungible.

eBay is not fungible with any other auction site. Facebook and G+ are not fungible (for most people) - you cannot take a user of one site, transplant them to the other and expect things to go just fine. Amazon and Walmart are, since it doesn't matter where you get your product from - you just use free shipping and pick the one that has the lowest price.

Am I alone in thinking that the NSA doesn't really care about exploiting flaws in TOR but rather is more interested in encouraging its use because they've exploited something else?

I think the NSA encourages TOR use, to be honest - they used to, or still run, one of the largest set of exit nodes, for the sole purpose of monitoring traffic. (Most Tor users don't really care about the private tor stuff, they just want their "anonymous facebook" and "anonymous G+" without gubmint spying)

I mean, unless one keeps their traffic solely within the Tor network, monitoring exit nodes quickly becomes a way to identify people and their traffic.

You would be surprised how conditioned you can become to traffic patterns always being a certain way. I nearly caused an accident last week when I turned left in front of a car that was going straight. I am a good driver... why did I do that? The intersection was where two small neighborhood roads intersect the main road. After I screwed up, I realized that In the last 25 years, I had _never_ seen a car go straight through that particular intersection. I unconsciously assumed that he was waiting for the light so that he could turn left, like cars always do.

The intersection on our street has two lanes on the cross street - one dedicated right-turn lane, and a combined left-turn/straight-through lane.

We usually go straight through, but it's some where we never go through without being cautious because a straight-through/left-turn lane is a rarity. It's usually more common as a left-turn, and a right-turn/straight lane. People just don't seem to understand that after the car turns left, the car behind might want to go straight.

We've nearly had accidents where people would assume we'd be turning left.

Had a right-turn from the main road assume the same thing - the light was red, we headed straight, and the guy never looked to his left and continued making the right turn. He never figured out that people might not be turning and didn't look.

These days more traffic goes through there so people are more used to not assuming that most people turn. But geez.

It's apparently common enough that it's why they have "Traffic Pattern Changed" signs to warn drivers that they've mucked with the lights, lanes, etc.

But the fact that 7200 games failed to hit their goal doesn't mean anything by itself. Maybe they were horrible at "selling" their idea, or had unrealistic financial goals, or kickstarted too soon, etc.

Or too ambitious.

I participated in two projects that had four kickstarters - two failed, two succeeded. Each project had one failed (the first one) and one success, on the same project.

The difference was easy - the failed ones were too ambitious - too much pie in the sky and too broad a scope. So when they failed, the went away, thought things through, then a few months later, they re-launched with a narrower scope, more focused product, etc.

They simply took the reasons for failure to heart, redesigned things around, tried to cut back on what they were offering and narrowed things down to the point where they could ask for less money (you're far more likely to succeed if you only need a couple hundred thousand than a million), make timelines more realistic, focus the presentation on more specifics and give a general "yes, we can do it" sense of realism.

And to be honest, 1-in-4 success is fairly high, I've seen fairly terrible Kickstarters that amount to "look at what I programmed in a day! Give me money!"

A good study would provide a description of what the internet would look like without ads. My intuition is that I'd be just fine with the only content available being content that did not seek a revenue stream. I thought the internet was better back then anyway.

It's also a pointless study because it's never going to happen. I'd guess the only reason it was done is to support the idea that ad blockers and no script are "bad". Oh wait it was conducted by an ad platform.

It's basically a study that shows how much revenue per user a web site can get.

It's also completely impractical because when you add in the costs of actually transacting, it'll far outweigh the $230 a year. I mean, even if everyone basically replaced their ads with paid content gateways, just managing all the payments and such will easily add quite a bit to it. I visit a webpage once, the page gets 1 cent for the visit, but to process that payment would add another 50 cents to that mix.

I visit /. daily and perhaps it generates $20/year, which is easy to manage subscription wise since transactions would just add a few more cents on top of that.

Then there's the whole payment system thing. You think each website can manage their own payment scheme? Think of the ripe opportunities for hacking and downloading the payment databases. Companies with interests in keeping private data private can't do it. Imagine Joe Schmoe with a blog - is he going to care that someone downloads his database?

I'm not so sure about a "good internet" back then - having used it since 1995, I can say until the .com boom, researching wasn't all that much different - you still headed to the library to use books and encyclopaedias (no Wikipedia), if you needed to download a driver you had to write (longhand) to the company and they'd send you a disk for $5 and return postage (and wait a couple of weeks), etc.

Which is the whole point. The company gives explicit instructions that personal cell phones are not to be used or authorized. You have to find something alternative (pay phone, calling card, tin cans...). Now if you happen to still use your personal cell phone for a call, you're breaking policy. They won't know [wink wink] that you're using your personal cell phone for convenience unless you happen to try to get reimbursed for it. And if you try, well, that results in some type of reprimand/discipline since you violated company policy.

And the flip side is, it means if you're off the clock, you're not obligated to answer or make phone calls even if they schedule the meeting.

Because if you have to drive to a payphone (not unusual these days) then that incurs business mileage and time. And hey, those things are reimbursable now.

So if the business is too cheap to pay for that part of your expenses, then the flip side is if they need to make an off-hours call, participation is now completely optional

My dad was talking to their IT guys about BYOD and all that. His conclusion is he'd rather bring two phones than use a non-reimbursed personal phone. Or to use his work phone for personal (local) calls so the only thing it ends up costing is airtime. (It doesn't really matter that he went over - his business:home usage of that phone was like 99:1 or so and he consistently did hundreds of minutes every month).