Well, I don't know about that, but at least it was better than Oculus Rift, if images in TFA are anything to go by. Something like semi-spherical 320 by 240 degrees with 3D zone of maybe 120 by 240 degrees in the middle, or thereabouts.

20/20 vision is defined as the ability to distinguish a line pair separated by 1 arc-minute. So at 2 pixels per minute, your 320x240 degree angle of view translates into 38,400 x 28,800 pixels.

The human eye gets away with it because only a tiny amount of the center of your vision has that resolution. The rest is a blurry, indistinct mess. Alas, Oculus Rift does not know where in that 320x240 degree field you are looking at so it can't take advantage of this fact. In the future, maybe we'll have head-mounted projector displays which track where your eyes are looking, and project a high-resolution image only at that spot, while the rest of the field is projected at low-resolution. It would certainly reduce the burden on 3D graphics hardware.

What matters is not if an app can tell where you are in the store, but if and when the app shares that information with a server. I don't care what information an application collects, if the data stays in-app.

Of course the great likelihood is that an app that collects that information will probably send that to a server, at the very least to query for specifics around you... but a smart app developer could provide a privacy option for users while still gaining benefit from iBeacons and the like.

But they can only do that if I've had my phone on since 2003. :-D

What? It will happen automatically when I turn it back on? *sigh*

Lemme guess - you're a guy who carries his smartphone in his pocket, and is incapable of imagining any other use scenario.

The phone is designed with the Asian market in mind. Phablets are insanely popular there among women, who put a cover on them and carry them in their purses. The problem is that if you get a text, you have to pull the phone out of your purse and flip open the cover to read it. A cover with a cutout for the screen is one solution, but still requires taking out the phone to read the text. Putting a display on the edge allows you to read the text while the phone is still in the purse.

Because as everybody knows, all Apple employees are special little snowflakes whose precious little lives

They are human beings who deserve a break from a rough work schedule, and again what is even the point of serving Sony's 11th hour demands when a release next week has essentially the same effect? Are you truly so daft as to imagine the physical act of release means anything next to the symbolic act of simply saying the release will go ahead?

I somehow get the sense you are that daft, and perhaps far dafter than can be discerned at first glance... I'll let you have the last response as you are quite simply batshit insane and not worthy of further correspondence.

Yeah, what the hell is this, HackerNews? :-)

All drivers on OS X are already required to tell the operating system ahead of time that a device is about to DMA to memory. That's how that VT-d is able to configure the IOMMU hardware to allow those devices to access RAM without worrying about 64-bit address spaces. So the OS already knows precisely which pages of physical RAM should be accessible by PCIe devices using DMA. If other pages of RAM are accessible, that's a bug.

Similarly, making the Thunderbolt controller's IOMMU mappings be driven by that part of the kernel should not break any drivers at all, by definition, because PCIe devices shouldn't be issuing DMA requests except at driver-preapproved locations. So AFAIK, the only way such a fix could break any device would be if that device was trying to do something really dangerous, like reprogramming one of the PCI bus bridges, or reflashing the computer's EFI firmware....

I mean, I suppose that some drivers might be inadvertently configuring a mapping for a page of memory that also contains executable code or class instances (with function pointers), in which case fully fixing this would also require Apple to modify the IOMemoryDescriptor class to ensure that the DMA-enabled pages are whole pages owned by the descriptor, but that should still be pretty minor, and should result in only a modest amount of wired kernel memory bloat.

In the worst case, such a change might require a CPU-driven copy-on-prepare and/or copy-on-complete to work around drivers that provide their own virtual addresses for a memory descriptor that aren't page-aligned, which would cause a big performance hit for those few drivers, but I'd expect most driver developers to quickly fix those design mistakes to eliminate the performance hit. (And that's assuming this isn't done already—for some reason, I thought those buffers had to be page aligned or you'd get a panic, but I'm not seeing anything about it in the docs, so I might be remembering wrong.)

So what's the motive then?

I'm skeptical it was North Korea too. But they do in fact have a huge motive. You know how Thailand's government gets their panties in a bunch every time a foreigner somehow mocks their king? Multiply that by a hundred. That's how much North Korea reveres their leader. Not just their government, but a good fraction of their people. They've had it drilled into their heads since birth that their leader is a god. They got upset at this commercial. Sony was gonna release a whole movie.