Comment Re:Hosted in the US? (Score 1) 98
What if I need to 3D print the result?
Why the iPhone 6 Has the Same Base Memory As the iPhone 5 264
Lucas123 writes When the iPhone 5 was launched two years ago, the base $199 (with wireless plan) model came with 16GB of flash memory. Fast forward to this week when the iPhone 6 was launched with the same capacity. Now consider that the cost of 16GB of NAND flash has dropped by more than 13% over the past two years. So why would Apple increase capacity on its $299 model iPhone 6 to 64GB (eliminating the 32GB model), but but keep the 16GB in the $199 model? The answer may lie in the fact that the 16GB iPhone is, and has been, by far the best selling model. IHS analyst Fang Zhang believes Apple is using that to push users to its iCloud storage service. Others believe restricting storage capacity allows Apple to afford the new features, like NFC and biometrics.
CERN Tests First Artificial Retina Capable of Looking For High Energy Particles 60
KentuckyFC writes: Pattern recognition is one of the few areas where humans regularly outperform even the most powerful computers. Our extraordinary ability is a result of the way our bodies process visual information. But surprisingly, our brains only do part of the work. The most basic pattern recognition—edge detection, line detection and the detection of certain shapes—is performed by the complex circuitry of neurons in the retina. Now particle physicists are copying this trick to hunt for new particles. A team at CERN has built and tested an artificial retina capable of identifying particle tracks in the debris from particle collisions. The retina can do this at the same rate the LHC smashes particles together: about 800 million collisions per second. In other words, it can sift through the data in real time. The team says the retina outperforms any other particle-detecting device by a factor of 400v.
iPhone 6 Sales Crush Means Late-Night Waits For Some Early Adopters 222
Even after the months of hype and speculation, the behind-the-scenes development and manufacture, and then the announcement Tuesday, it seems Apple's servers weren't quite ready for the workout they got from would-be early adopters of its newest iPhone. Preorders through Verizon Wireless and AT&T largely started without a hitch at midnight, though some customers on Twitter have since complained about issues. Those problems were nothing compared to the issues experienced by Sprint and T-Mobile customers. The Sprint and T-Mobile sites were still down for many users nearly two hours after presales were slated to start. Access to Sprint's site faded in and out, while the T-Mobile site continued to display a form to register for a reminder for when the preorders began. Some people joked on Twitter that they "might as well wait for the iPhone 6S now." Apple's store itself was down for a few hours, too.
Comment Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right? (Score 1) 162
Sorry, I may have spoken too soon there. Certain features of hangouts look like they still require plus, if you are not on an Apps (business) account. But they seem to have almost completely phased this out. In general they seem to have halted the major push for plus. I'd like to think they fired* the head of plus partly because of the failure of the push and the backlash of the real name, and youtube stuff...but I don't know why he "left" ( http://recode.net/2014/04/24/e... ). Anyways, here's what i could find on how to use hangouts:
https://productforums.google.c...
https://support.google.com/plu...
https://support.google.com/a/a...
Here's how to use it without plus:
https://support.google.com/han...
Comment Re:Hangouts is, in turn, part of plus, right? (Score 1) 162
No, it can be used with or without plus.
Comment Re:Unseal the documentation too (Score 1) 200
Obviously this isnt suffrage or civil rights, but it's an important piece of information when building a socioeconomic model of how American capitalism functions. These are the real "rational" actors in the market and we need all this information. Letting lawsuits like this settle behind closed doors for relatively small amounts of money and heavily redacted documents only serves to further obscure the truth. It doesn't take millions marching on Washington to for the truth to have value. Rather, without the truth, who will ever protest?
I understand where you are coming from but I think your line of thought here does the discussion a disservice. It's never futile to work for informing the public even just a little bit more. But it's time to stop "expecting" these lawsuits to produce crappy results -- it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
As I mentioned in my OP: one of the class advocates for the plaintiff did not accept the settlement that the lawyers on both sides had worked out. And instead of giving in to fatalism that "this is just the way these lawsuits go", he instead wrote a letter to Lucy Koh, the judge, asking her to throw out the settlement. And now she has done just that!
This quote is cheesy but good:
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.
(Incidentally I can't imagine you actually think Snowden had no lasting effect on the world).
Comment Re:Unseal the documentation too (Score 1) 200
I don't think apathy needs an advocate. There really is no sense in loudly proclaiming defeatism. Sure, some people don't care, but the defendants would not have worked so hard to keep documents sealed if *nobody* cared. This case is being widely covered by the media:
Reuters: http://uk.reuters.com/article/...
Time: http://time.com/42322/steve-jo...
Financial Times: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/ee7535...
And over 186 more articles just from the past few days
So I don't know about what you said right there. I don't believe that "no one cares".
Comment Re:Punitive Damages? (Score 5, Informative) 200
You dont need to wonder, you need to read:
http://pando.com/2014/03/22/re...
http://pando.com/2014/01/23/th...
Some estimates put it as high as $9 billion.
This wasn't just about cold calling. The chilling effects were far more reaching. It's just that the documented evidence only referred specifically to cold calling, so that is what can be proved. In reality this was much more of a "gentleman's agreement" and it had the effect of driving down wages at dozens of large companies possibly affecting ~1 million workers. If you think it stopped with just poaching and had no other effect, you are being naive. Google actually had to raise some salaries due to Facebook not participating.
Here are just some of the companies involved:
Google
Apple, Inc
Comcast Corporation
DoubleClick
Genentech
IBM Corporation (Junior hires okay—also applies to subsidiaries)
Illumita
Intel Corporation
Intuit
Microsoft
Oglivy
WPP
AOL, Inc.
Ask.com
Clear Channel Communications, Inc.
Dell, Inc.
Earthlink, Inc
Virgin Media, Inc. (Formerly NTL, Inc.)
Comment Dogma... (Score 1) 40
Yeah, Tea Party is too specific to an existing dogma. But, there are quite a few liberals who skew closer to Noam Chomsky's brand. I think a number of liberals take anti-establishment seriously and believe that libertarianism has some insightful observations on how things work ( e.g. regulatory capture). But a number of liberals have different solutions. Very different from Chomsky's "Anarchist Social Libertarianism" (or whatever he calls it). And especially different from the pro big business of "libertarian" politicians.
There is room to agree on populism.
There is room to agree on that things are broken.
There is room to agree things need to change.
But what we need is to stop fighting on abstract idealistic polarized solutions.
It's time to start thinking beyond these extreme dogmatic and impractical abstract ideas of how to run things. We dont want oppressive big brother government, and we dont want out-of-control, laissez-faire, libertarian capitalism.
Comment Unseal the documentation too (Score 5, Interesting) 200
The thing we really need here is public justice. If the world does not know how these ultra rich are conspiring against them, then there is no justice. They need to unseal all of the evidence, no exceptions.
Also I think it's important to note one of the plaintiffs (Michael Devine) who pushed the judge into ruling against this, the lawyers wanted to walk away with their check.
Plaintiff fights Apple, Google settlement in wage-fixing suit
A programmer who is part of the class action lawsuit against several tech giants says $324 million isn't enough.
-----
"As an analogy," Devine wrote to Koh, according to the Times, "if a shoplifter is caught on video stealing a $400 iPad from the Apple Store, would a fair and just resolution be for the shoplifter to pay Apple $40, keep the iPad, and walk away with no record or admission of wrongdoing? Of course not."
Had the case gone to trial as planned at the end of May, court filings indicate, the tech employees would have sought $3 billion. Lucasfilm, Pixar, and Intuit agreed to settle last year for a combined $20 million, covering 8 percent of the employees named in the suit.
Silicon Valley Fights Order To Pay Bigger Settlement In Tech Talent Hiring Case 200
The Washington Post carries a story from the Associated Press that says the big companies hit hardest by Judge Lucy Koh's ruling in the "No Poaching" case have not suprisingly appealed that ruling, which found that a proposed settlement of $324.5 million to a class-action lawsuit was too low. The suit, filed on behalf of 60,000 high-tech workers allegedlly harmed by anti-competitive hiring practices, will probably enter its next phase next January or March. (Judge Koh is probably
not very popular at Apple in particular.) If you're one of those workers (or in an analogous situation), what kind of compensation or punitive action do you think is fair?
Some Core I7 5960X + X99 Motherboards Mysteriously Burning Up 102
An anonymous reader writes "Intel's Haswell-E Eight-Core CPU and X99 motherboards just debuted but it looks like there may be some early adoption troubles leading to the new, ultra-expensive X99 motherboards and processors burning up. Phoronix first ran a story about their X99 motherboard having a small flame and smoke when powering up for the first time and then Legit Reviews also ran an article about their motherboard going up in smoke for reasons unknown. The RAM, X99 motherboards, and power supplies were different in these two cases. Manufacturers are now investigating and in at least the case of LR their Core i7-5960X also fried in the process."
Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor 177
adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."
Comment Re:Medium is appropriate... (Score 1) 325
Apparently Google agrees with you as well as it seems they changed the priority to Critical in the past few hours.
