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Comment Time to foil unlockers? (Score 1) 282

I submit the following conspiracy theory to explain the antenna situation:

Apple, in its efforts to thwart unlockers, knowingly ships a defective baseband firmware in iOS4, fully expecting it to be unlocked quickly. Apple then releases iOS4.01 with a new firmware, fixing the horrible issue, as well as the unlocking vector.

Sound possible?

Comment Totally believable this could happen (Score 1) 643

Having worked connecting clients on the sell side of brokerage, I can assure you that we would frequently field requests to disable client trading limits (or balloon them astronomically) when a client's legitimate trade would hit them (maybe they've traded for 5 years and their favourite high-volume stock has gone up in price 10x).

Add in the fact that electronic trading software is often written with no thought to the UI, I'm surprised fat finger issues don't happen more frequently. Well, I guess they do, they just don't make the news very often as they don't cause this kind of a market swing...

In my experience, a lot of capital markets software is crap compared to the commercial stuff you use day-to-day, and a LOT clunkier than even the worst of the worst in open source UIs. When they say they're using the highest tech stuff out there, it doesn't mean it's actually good.

Comment Re:Is This Secure? (Score 1) 208

Having worked in an electronic trading operation (brokerage side) I can already say that security is of very little concern in this kind of operation. Of the three corners of business operations, these systems need to be fast and cheap; quality concerns are secondary as long as you're not completely breaking the clients' trades.

Arguably security isn't very important in high frequency trading. You're trying to get an order to market before it can react to something. Once the order is there, people already know (a lot) about it.

Comment Re:Medical... (Score 2, Interesting) 727

Since you typically make microchips one wafer at a time, and the cost to produce a wafer is roughly independent of what's actually on it given a certain production process (ie A masks, B layers, C coatings, etc), your cost per unit goes DOWN for smaller electronics these days.

As other posters have mentioned, the development costs clearly outweigh the manufacturing costs.

Comment Re:Stupid Users (Score 1) 261

This is why SuperGenPass is your friend. Using one (or more) master password, you quickly generate a unique password for each domain you log in to, all through a handy bookmarklet. Also there's no password storage (except an optional hash for validation), so you don't have to worry about password product XYZ being hacked.

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