If you think it's going to be easy to put together a real techy product with software and circuits and PCBs and enclosures and EM certification and patent minefields and manufacturing and packaging and distributors and competition, you might want to examine why you think that.

it's not even that. it's scalability.

It is SUPER easy to put together a one-off or even a 10 or 100-off product.

Scale that up to the thousands and you're looking at a difficulty rating that grows exponentially - what used to work for small batches doesn't anymore when dealing with mass production.

Ordering 1000 parts through Digikey is simple. Ordering 10,000 of same, not so simple because lead times suddenly matter - Digikey may stock the item, but only in small quantities because by the time they sell out, the lead time has expired and they have a new batch.

Not to mention if you really want to order large quantities, you don't go to Digikey, but direct to the manufacturer. You can buy through Digikey and the like, but you're at the mercy of Digikey/Arrow/Newark/etc. Work with the manufacturer and they can quote you better times and availability because they know they can batch in a bigger order. But manufacturers are tricky and most don't want to deal with itty-bitty pseudo-companies. Or they find more lucrative markets (actually happened - the manufacturer of a SAW filter for GPS suddenly got their filter approved for LTE. So the manufacturer basically stopped selling to Digikey in favor of selling direct,

Then there are the companies who just don't want to deal with you, to which you are lucky you can get the part though a reseller.

Add in testing and design for manufacturability which are complicated topics in an of themselves. Testing that used to take half an hour per board needs to be condensed to be more efficient - whether it be custom designed test fixtures, test applications, test harnesses, equipment, etc. And automate, automate, automate so the QA person only has to take their board and stick it in the fixture. If there are dozens of little connectors and other crap, accommodations should be in the fixture to make those connections without human intervention.

And then design for manufacturability - knowing how to build the boards and stick them in cases and minimizing the amount of fiddly things that have to be done so it's more a matter of build the board, stick it in the test fixture, wait for a "PASS" from the automated tester, shove the board in the case that self-aligns and close it up.

No, it's just fucking dumb. By forcing people to have to tediously paint each piece by hand you limit the actual number of people who become interested.

The question is, do you turn off more people with such a requirement than you attract? Today, answer is probably yes, nobody has patience for anything. Back in the day, probably not, it was pre-internet and people sat around doing things that took a long time.

Well, considering to compete in a tournament you MUST paint the figures, that already excludes people like me who have NO artistic skill, Or even just fine painting skills. If it was up to me, the thing would be double the size when I'm done because it would be painted over and over and over again. And it'll still look like someone used a paintbrush they bought from Home Depot for painting walls.

I can understand side tournaments where people compete based on their artistic skill that's unrelated to the main event, but tying the two together means someone like me who can't paint worth a damn won't even bother trying to enter.

Not quite. Although you can compile C++ as part of an OSX or iOS project, there's no point - other than using someone else's library. The parts of projects that aren't Obj-C tend to be C.

Why?

You're dropping out of Obj-C for cross platform compatibility, because you're dealing with a low level Apple API, or because you want maximum speed for some part of the code. All these things are usually best served by C. If you're wanting objects at the expense of speed, then you wouldn't stray from Obj-C in the first place.

Technically, you can just call C code straight from ObjC - ObjC code compiles C code just fine (unlike C++, which cannot compile C code).

Whether that code is in the same file or different doesn't matter - ObjC is a superset of C.

Find me an 8TB SSD that is even within spitting disttance (hell, within ICBM distance) of $300 and you win the prize

I think that will be available in 6 years.
Bear in mind though that this SMR drive is an exception. The other manufacturers are still producing 4-6 TB drives for that price.

Well, $2000 gets you spinning rust 8TB HDDs from the other guys with fancy helium and no SMR right now. You can easily buy 4x 1TB SSDs for that price.

But you can bet even those hard drives will probably drop to $300 range soon enough (probably a couple of years). Moore's law will see the price halve in that time, so you can get an "8TB" SSD (8x 1TB) for $2000 after the spinning rust version dropped to $300-ish.

What I see in Google is the only company that pulls off ads and spying *without* being annoying or terrible. I hate companies that inject ads into things such that it gets in the way or makes it harder to do what you were doing. I hate companies that spy on you without your permission and then do sketchy things with the results. Google ads don't get in the way, they tell you straight-up that they're spying on you, and they don't generally do anything terribly sketchy with the results. Thus, they can spy on me as much as they like, if they keep it up and use it for good.

You do realize Google is the biggest purvey of annoying ads online, right? Popups, popunders, flash ads, etc. Basically all the crap that ABP and others block. Heck, Google through its DoubleClick subsidiary created a nice flash-to-HTML5 converter.

And that Google is probably already spying on you through your apps with the in-app ads (Google owns AdMob, after all).

You have to remember that pretty much every ad on legitimate sites is served through Google. Shady sites like torrents and porn usually are where the other ad networks go. But pull up a site loaded with ads that's legit and pretty much it's all going back to Google.

If you still doubt this technology, go have a look at the technological advances in hard drives, versus the technological advances of flash in the last 5 years. Hard drive vendors have very little to innovate while flash/rram are at the lower end of a hockey stick figure when it comes to innovation and price reduction. Within the next 5 years, flash/rram will replace disk, both in the enterprise as well as the consumer market.

I'd love to see your all-disk array do 2M IOPS, something that all flash arrays are capable of today. Again, at the price that (with dedupe and compression) comes darn close to your disks. Even legacy storage vendors are increasingly investing in solid state technology. Investing in disk is equal to investing in Greek government bonds.

SSDs follow Moore's law - double the transistors, double the size. You can cheat with TLC and more, but the smaller cells aren't helping. Hard drives aren't restricted to Moore's law which is why their prices can tumble.

As for 2M IOPS, if you're doing that, you need SSD, no question. But if you're doing movie editing where raw speed and basically long stripes of writes take place, you may be better off going with hard drives because you value storage over IOPS. When a CGI scene can start to require several TBs of assets to be loaded for rendering (seriously, the modern movie is already pushing 200+TB of assets just for CGI), 2M IOPS isn't so critical.

And if your business needs 2M IOPS and 8TB of storage at 2M IOPS, there are companies willing to accommodate you, and sure you're going to be paying tens of thousands, but if you're pushing that sort of workload, that's probably well worth the investment.

Anyhow, I can see SMR drives serving as yet another tier in the storage hierarchy - you have the SSD for the hot files, the cooler files get put on a huge regular storage array, and the SMR drives serve as cold files long term near-availability storage, and then you have tape for offline storage. The SSD gets used for the files where they're busy so it's fast, the hard drives serve up older files that are referenced only once in a while, and the SMR serves as a archive pool for files accessed rarely or not at all, just before being dumped to tape.

Or, perhaps SMR drives can be used in high capacity applications where it's mostly read only. Think like a digital download store (music, movies), or Netflix. Updating a single file on an SMR is painful, but if you're going to write a big movie to the disk and everyone's going to be reading from it, a large cheap SMR drive fits the bill because it's going to be read from far more than written to.

Honestly, I'm still baffled so many people were upset about getting a few album from a popular, well respected, rock band, simply because it found its way directly onto people's devices. It's not as if it woke you up at 3am and started playing it!

Well, you're looking at several phenomenon combined into one.

First, it's Apple. Apple is newsworthy. If you need ad clicks, mention Apple. Did I mention Apple generates traffic? It's at the point where I'm sure we'll see headlines like "Apple CEO Tim Cook Scratches Butt During Keynote" soon enough.

Second, law of big numbers. Let's say only 0.1% of people hate U2 to complain. Out of half a billion iTunes users, that's half a million people. It doesn't take much to think one of those people has a blog that's worth anything. And combined with the first, well, boom, all over the news.

Third, well, people only really complain when they have a complaint. If 99.9% of the people liked free music, they probably won't all post "cool, free stuff!" online. No, those people who have an issue with it "oh noes, free stuff, don't want!" will post all sorts of messages about it. Combine it with the first and second, and it explodes.

Hell, I'd expect if an error in a factory production line caused a fingerprint to be left on the screen it would be a massive national disaster. Even though one could easily just wipe the offending fingerprint off.

But remembering interviews with Occulus developers there is more to VR than a good resolution and tracking. Things like ridiculous low latency needed to prevent motion sickness and screen artifacts caused by rapid panning. Has Valve solved these things in record time in secret or will this be a better specs on paper but worse in practice product ?

Or you're looking at the fact that VR is being super hyped up, and it's only a matter of time before some company comes up with a consumer product on the market. I mean, Occulus has been around for how many years now releasing devkits but no consumer hardware.

So it's leaving a huge gap in the market - which two scenarios are going to play out. Either VR is going to fizzle out because the public is so tired of seeing Occulus this, Occulus that and nothing is available to actually buy (other than what Samsung releases) that they get tired of the hype and it dies as vaporware. Or someone sees that they can make a quick buck and releases crap, and the public buys into it because Occulus has been hyping it up as the next big thing, but someone else releases a product to get first-mover advantage and satisfy pent up demand. Doesn't matter if it's crap or it makes people sick, people will see it as a Occulus competitor and assume that it'll be representative of the state of VR.

And if it makes people sick, guess what? People will think Occulus isn't all that based on what people experienced with what they could buy.

Remember, the public is going to latch onto what they can get first

It's really interesting how quality feel and real quality mismatch. Bendy plastic absorbs drops way better then solid stainless steel. Steel mostly transfers the energy to the screen, which cracks. Or it deforms permanently. Properly designed plastic pops off and can then be popped back.

And that's the thing. Plastic is cheap - it's why the vast majority of cheap crap is made from plastic. Nice stuff is made from metal, which isn't as easy to work with (you can't really injection-mold metal very well - you could with liquidmetal but that's Apple-exclusive), so building out of metal already costs a lot more to build. When you're spending $600, you sort of want to feel like you're getting your money's worth.

Going from metal to plastic is considered the #1 cost cutting measure in industry - consumers generally view going from metal to plastic as a move that cheapens stuff because plastic is tackier.

Building a good device out of plastic is quite hard - you need to pick the right surface finishes otherwise your plastic can lead to interesting long term issues. You need to assemble it correctly - there's nothing more disconcerting than buying something for $600 and it creaks at the slightest bend (usually a sign of poorly-fitted parts).

With both the BD+ vm and the BD-J stuff, there is a lot of attention paid to 'ooh, the an unauthorized player attempting to do unauthorized things with the content on the disk?!'; but the contents of the disk are largely treated as trusted and the playback device is treated almost entirely as a potential adversary, not as a potential target, either from the disk side or the network side.

This is an unfortunate part of the Blu-Ray standard - the only people who are supposed to be able to author a Blu-Ray disc using BDMV profile are... studios. Initially, back during the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray war (who I found out that they did actually want to unify the two into one rather than go to battle it out - they just couldn't agree on BD-Java vs. JavaScript (HD Interactive) and dug their heels in), HD-DVD was AACS-optional, allowing for home authored HD-DVD discs which played everywhere.

  But Blu-Ray was designed to be an exclusively Hollywood format with content dictated by the Blu-ray association (Sony proudly declared they were never going to make porn Blu-Rays, for example back then). AACS was mandatory, which meant you couldn't make a BDMV profile disc at home - you were given the BDAV profile instead which allowed for non-AACS content. In fact, it was so bad that if you mastered a BDMV disc, it would play in some Blu-Ray players but not others.

These days, either through lax enforcement or explicit standards, AACS is optional on Blu-Rays and you can author basic BDMVs. But early players did not allow BD-R's to be BDMV, not by physical limitations, but software.

Battery cases are like having a broken leg but instead of going to get a cast you get a pair of crutches and call it a day.
Never mind that your battery is too weak or that you have a broken leg, crutches FTW!

Having used both removable batteries and external battery bricks, the external battery brick is FAR more useful.

First of all - how do you charge a removable battery? Very, very, very few phones come with an external battery charger, so if you want to charge your batteries, you have to charge the battery, then turn it off, remove the charged battery, stick in the low battery, then put it on charge again. That's annoying and requires discipline.

An external battery I just plug its adapter into the wall, then plug the output of the external battery into my phone, or my phone into its won charger. Boom, two fully charged batteries and zero intervention other than plugging them in when I get home. None of this having to check it, if it's done then swap, nonsense that gets dull the second day.

The phone I had previous to the very first iPhone I had 3 external batteries for. Keeping all three charged was a royal PITA. (I had to have extras because a bug meant using the camera killed battery life unless you remembered to reboot it). Having used external packs for the iPhone, it was way easier and more convenient.

Plus, I didn't have to worry about my external packs shorting out and creating a fire. Something extra batteries have the danger of since the contacts are exposed and easily bridged.

So when they talk about high temp semiconductors, it is still around -211F

What does this mean in practical terms?
Is this an easy temperature to maintain?
What techniques or materials could we use to keep that temp?
How does power generation and pulling off waste heat factor into it?

A "low temp" superconductor relies on liquid helium to keep it cool (approx 4K). A 'high temp" superconductor relies on liquid nitrogen to keep it cool (77K).

Liquid nitrogen is stupidly cheap - tons of places use liquid nitrogen for a lot of non-superconducting purposes including packaged food preparation, cooling, experimentation (a lot of "cryo" experiments use liquid nitrogen, including the ever popular frozen rose, frozen banana and other science demonstrations).

In fact, to get rid of a small dewar of liquid nitrogen, it's usually just dumped on the table after the demo is done creating a nice effect. A more controlled evaporation is simply leaving the lid off and letting it boil off naturally.

No one keeps stuff cool by liquifying nitrogen onsite. Instead, they just have Air Liquide and similar companies come by every week or so and top off the cryo tank. The cryo tank provides the supply of liquid nitrogen that's needed for the equipment (MRI machines use it in superconducting magnets). Most labs have it available freely as well.

Liquid helium is much more expensive. Liquid nitrogen is so cheap that having it transported and even any wastage is considered "meh". Hell, schools probably buy way more than they need simply because to make it worthwhile you end up with a huge dewar of it.

At the beginning of last week, I saw a number of fake emails "returned" to my ISP email account. A day or two later, I received a phishing email requesting me to change my password for that email account.

Today, someone tried the same thing for my Microsoft account.

It's more creative than usual, but it is still just a phishing attack, and you can easily spot it by the fake URLs in the phishing emails.

Actually, the first is a standard joe-job where they fake the From address. Obviously your ISP isn't using SPF to whitelist the servers that could send the email allowing spammers to use your email as the From address and you're seeing the bounces. Just be lucky most servers don't actually obey the RFC anymore and don't send bounces or other error failed messages because a joe-job like that could easily net you 1000+ bounce replies.

The second I get a lot around the new years and september - basically when school gets back in session so it appears spammers phish the freshmen into giving up their email information. I know they're spam because they're sent to a few email addresses I've never used other than as a honeypot. Oddly, my legit email address gets far less spam than the honeypots

Sorry but what the fuck are you planning to do with 50,000 driver's license numbers?

Well, two people are very interested in that, one can find out, and the fourth can exert some leverage and get at information.

The first two are your DMV (or other agency) and insurance company. The DMV is interested if there's any commercial operations going on by unlicensed drivers. Penalties for such generally are minor, usually just suspension of the commercial activity to suspension of the license and a small fine.

The second would be insurance companies, who now have a list of people who operated in a commercial capacity. Knowing how they like to weasel out of any insurance payout, they can simply use this to note you did commercial activities on a personal insurance policy and use that as justification to cancel your policy. Of course, they won't do this until you get into an accident, at which point you do get a payout ... of all the premiums you paid from when they cancelled to the accident. Yes, it's a very nasty surprise waiting for people who expect insurance to cover them only to find out they're now stuck with a massive personal liability bill.

Third group would be tax agencies who are very interested to know about your income-generating activities and did you report it on your income tax form. This takes a bit of work since they generally don't have access to the driver license database to look up people. Maybe you find out when you try to renew that someone wants to have a nice talk first.

Fourth, well, taxi companies who exert a little pressure on someone to take the driver license number and put them to names and addresses... and I'll leave that one at that.

The link between person and drivers license isn't only held by the DMV or similar agencies - if you've ever used a driver's license as an ID card, well...

I've got an ISO image I downloaded from Microsoft back in April of last year without having to provide any details.

DigitalRiver has stopped providing those ISOs for a little while now. If you visit any of those links, they just redirect you back to Microsoft.com.

Yes, I tried last week when I had to get a Win7 image for a friend. None of those links work anymore.