The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.

-Matt

AppleTV had over $1B in revenue last year. It might not be a big segment of the market yet, but it isn't a small niche either and its growing like crazy. Plus the ongoing revenue from the product has insanely high margins.

-Matt

I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.

It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.

I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.

-Matt

There's no "app" for screenshots because it's built into Android itself, and has been since 4.0 (which was released many years ago). It's volume down + power button. Just Google for "Android screenshot".

And until late last year, you could get brand new Android phones with Gingerbread on them. Even older than ICS.

Assuming users all have ICS+ phones is not a safe assumption. At least Gingerbread users are unlikely to be accessing the Google Play store, so developers don't need to concentrate on it anymore. (The Google Play survey only covers phones that accessed the Play Store the past 2 weeks or so, so those ancient phones are not something developers need to worry about).

This is a classic solved problem in computer science: chose an algorithm that you can support in the generation of machines you plan to deploy, even if it's slow in the lab.

Yeah, and now computers are so fast, that the encryption is suspect.

Think about it - GSM has been around for 20 years and its encryption has been hacked.for the past half-decade, if not more. And why? Because back then, the encryption was pretty much unbreakable with equipment of the day and implementable on hardware available at the time. These days the computers are much faster and encryption hardware available that easily breaks it in real time.

TCP/IP is what, 30 years old now? Any encryption it specifies as mandatory would be equivalent to plain text now.

Fun Fact: OSI is actually a networking stack. It's not just the 7 layers you see on a networking chart. It was actually a real to life stack. And in the 80s, government computers were specifying OSI networking capability as a requirement.

So why didn't it succeed, and why is the only artifact we have that 7 layer model? Well, TCP/IP was written by a few scrappy people at DARPA. OSI was a consortium of dozens of companies all trying to get their own piece of the pie. Naturally, OSI's design by committee really lead nowhere as companies fought to have their own thing in the stack.

In other words, TCP was "good enough" and out there and working. OSI was complex and growing and being fought over. It got so bad that the OSI group imploded on itself. And TCP kept on trucking.

No matter who it is, how long it has been around, or what the service is... if it is a cloud service it will one day go away.

Actually, it's not just the cloud, it's Real Life(tm) too.

That coffeeshop you buy your java brew from may decide one day to stop serving it at all. Or it may close up shop. Or it may change owners and molest the brew to something vile and undrinkable.

The Cloud is not much different than anything else. Your favorite store might change hands, close down, stop offering the goods you want, etc.

Anything you buy from others is subject to shutdown. While unlikely, your ISP might decide to close up shop and stop providing internet service to you. Or your colo provider may not be able to renew its lease and have to shut down.

Yes, some of these companies have been around a long time, but remember they're survivors - thousands of other companies have came and went.

The oldest company in North America is the Hudson Bay Company (now a Canadian department store, formerly a fur trading business). Doesn't mean it'll be around tomorrow, and for every company that's been in business for 340+ years, millions of others have been started, closed and so forth.

Cloud companies are just the same - another service that can be here today, gone tomorrow.

Professionals do the job and get paid.

They did neither.

End of argument.

"Hey, kid. If you get down in that mine, dig out the coal, and bring it back to me, I'll pay you. ...What? You want a light? Why did you take the job if you don't have the tools to do it? Batteries cost money, kid. ...What? What's all this whining about dust and poisonous gases and how you can't carry more than two lumps because you're only six years old? I'm paying you; do your job. You don't want to be thought of as unprofessional, do you?"

What self-serving sophistry.

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

Given GLONASS is really only complete above the Russian Federation and spotty everywhere outside it, a dumb navigation chip would use GPS outside of Russia and GPS/GLONASS inside because it can't acquire a complete GLONASS lock outside.

A smarter chip may use whatever GLONASS satellites it does see to aid in reception, and the error would probably result in the software rejecting it as a whacked out satellite. (It happens on GPS as well - sometimes they screw up so the receivers know to discard the data received from a malfunctioning satellite). In this case, it would've seen the GLONASS was returning a nonsensical result and mark it as a bad satellite.

I've noticed much increased performance since I upgraded to a phone that uses both systems, especially in cities with a lot of tall buildings like NYC and Chicago.

Most likely your phone can properly extract the GPS data from the phone network via assisted GPS. In this case, you only need to see one satellite and the cell tower supplies the other satellite information.

Also, your new phone may have more sensitive electronics and more often than not, its wifi supports location assistance using wifi triangulation.

All that would combine to give you much faster acquisition than just pure GPS alone.

Both Google and Apple support WiFi location - Google is probably more question-response, while Apple sends you information and then a bit more to cache to lighten server loads. (That cache was the cause of the whole "iOS is tracking me" deal way back in IOS 4 because everyone believed Apple was getting the location data and stuffing it in the file, instead of what really happened in that Apple send more data for the cache in your phone to save data.

It will work well enough until NoScript becomes prevalent enough that sites will realize that all they need to do is host the advertising/tracking scripts on their own domain.

Which is better than the alternative, which is all your information is sent straight to Google. Because now if the ad is hosted locally, there's less correlation between a particular user and the websites they visit.

Right now, visit /. and say, reddit, and Google gets pings from your browser on both sites. Via cookies and other mechanisms, Google can conclude you are the same user (especially if you're logged into Google when you visit both sites). But if /;. hosted the ads, and reddit hosted the ads, then it would take both sites to share their logs with each other and even then it's hard to conclusively determine if it's the same user, since cookies shared with /. are not available to reddit except through an external third party site (like say, Google).

So if the information gets siloed, it's a lot harder to positively track you. After all, with NAT, it could be you're hitting /. while someone else hits reddit. While if it's right now, Google can easily say it was you that visited both because you logged into Google, or Google Ads/DoubleClick/etc tracked the cookie you have.

Commercial hardware assembly is hard - not to mention that since you're selling something you take on a bunch of liability as far as product quality goes regardless.

it's actually quite easy. So easy actually.

If you want to talk about contract manufacturers, they're more than happy to assemble your hardware for you - including going from parts to finished product in the box (most CMs offer pick and place at a minimum, testing as an option, and final packaging and assembly as an option after there).

CMs are well used to small runs (you almost always go local for that as the big CMs like Foxconn and Flextronics are meant for dealing in the 10,000 quantity to millions), and they're very helpful in guiding you through the build process and ensuring everything is there.

What CMs will not do is redesign your product to make it easier to manufacture - if your product requires a million steps to assemble, they'll do the million steps (and charge accordingly). Which is why most designs go through another design pass called "Design for Manufacture" which seeks to redo the design taking into account what mass manufacture needs - sort of like replacing fiddly cable assemblies with flex or ribbon cables, switching out dozens of boards to a single PCB, simplifying the case design so it auto-aligns the board and components within, etc.

Computer hardware assembly is a little more scattered, but given the number of whitebox PCs made in little mom and pop computer shops these days, also not a big deal.

"Contracts" or not, the developers' reaction was the correct one.

That "pepsi consultant" can go eat shit and die - if he or she thinks he/she can push geeks to do whatever he/she likes.

Well, if the event was sponsored by Pepsi, yes. That's generally one of the conditions for sponsorship.

Otherwise the event will probably either not happen because there are no funds to organize it, some other sponsor is found (to which one has to follow THEIR rules), or some other form of fundraising is determined.

It's why sites like Wikipedia don't do advertising - because they refuse to abide by any sort of rules a sponsor might want to impose, and while it's possible there are few who are willing to sponsor anyways, the numbers are far fewer, and the money small enough that it's not worth the bother.

The fallout from this will likely be minimal unless Pepsi sponsors a large number of them - generally the event there is dead, but others will remain unaffected.

Plenty of blame to go around - Pepsi for being so demanding, the organizers for not reading the contract close enough to see what restrictions on sponsorship were, and developers for not asking questions about the sponsorship (and probably letting the "cool, I'm on TV!" factor play an excessively large rule)

What it really sounds like is the State of Vermont & the NRC made some poor assumptions about decommissioning costs and didn't require the operator to set aside enough money over the last 42 years.
Irrational public opinion has nothing to do with this, even if Entergy wasn't shutting the plant down because of profitability concerns.

No, it's not the NRC or Vermont's fault. The plant was life-extended another 20 years. Entergy however sees it as uneconomic, so they applied to Vermont and the NRC to approve an early shutdown.

The decommissioning fund was expected to grow another 20 years to be sufficient, but since the plant was closed early, it doesn't have enough money.

Entergy is 100% at fault here because they want to close it early.

It's really along the lines of you saving for retirement until you're 65, then at 45 declaring you want to retire early. Well, your retirement fund (decommissioning fund) was planned out for you retiring at 65, not 45, so now there's going to be a shortfall, obviously.

Should the taxpayer be forced to fund your retirement because you decided to retire early and your savings are short?

No, because it's purely a choice to do it early - you could very well continue to work until 65 and realize your retirement plans, just like you could operate the power plant until it's time to close it down, contributing to the decommissioning fund the extra few years.

Especially since circumstances like cheap natural gas aren't sudden overnight events - natural gas prices have been falling for over a decade or so after peaking.

How many diseases are there where the chances of getting it can be increased or the symptoms worsened by psychosomatic influence, yet which CANNOT be prevented or mitigated with advance knowledge? Not a hypothetical question, I honestly don't know.

Probably every psychosomatic disease out there. It doesn't matter what disease, just knowing the symptoms will often produce symptoms of the disease, even if the person doesn't have it.

Like WiFi radiation "poisoning" (substitute smart meter, cellphone, etc). Advanced knowledge tends to bring out the symptoms, and for all the testing available post symptoms, it's impossible to distinguish (as far as tests go, the people reporting "radiation sickness" really ARE sick!). Only a true double blind test can reveal it's really psychosomatic.