Exactly. The time to get upset about privacy loss passed about a decade ago.

If anything, Google Glass democratizes intrusion. It levels the playing field a little bit with Big Brother. I think a lot of very interesting footage from "closed door" meetings and smokey back rooms will become available.

Well, first of all, Google Glass incorporates facial and clothing recognition, so everyone captured can be tagged by Google and their movements tracked. Right now, the cameras don't have this, so people still are in relative anonymity.

But once everyone is identifiable, society will become extremely... shy.

Think about what you do during the day and think of what you might not do if your actions were tracked constantly. Imagine it as a super-facebook. Perhaps your visit to the grocery store gets you tagged buying chips and pop and other unhealthful foods. Or your visit to the doctor gets noted. I'm sure insurance companies would love to buy that information on you (especially with photographic evidence). Or perhaps you had a good time at a bar and get taped heading off in your car.

And I'm sure your boss would love to know what you did on the "sick day" that you took. Remember, all this information is potentially public, or easily purchasable from Google.

Nevermind someone accidentally seeing you surfing your porn collection, or anti-gun lobby recording and identifying people who visit gun stores (and cross-referencing those people with other activities).

Yes, it democratizes society. I'm just not sure I like the end result. It's sort of like MAD - where politeness happens because there are no secrets so everyone knows everyone else's deepest and darkest secrets. I'm sure I prefer a polite society, but one that's polite because it's good, not because everyone is afraid of offending someone.

It is rare for me to agree with the present administration but they got this one exactly right. In the UK merchants were punished for still using old weights and measures. I would really hate to see that here. Not our way.

Well, technically, when the old system of weights and measures ewnt out, you HAD to convert. Because otherwise it meant you were possibly ripping off people using an uncalibrated scale.

If you look at your gas pump or grocery pricing scale, you'll find a calibration sticker on them that tells you when the unit was last measured and approved for trade use.

It's why your bathroom scale says "not for trade use" on it - it's not calibrated and what it shows is not guaranteed.

And using an uncalibrated scale for trade is considered fraud - I'm sure you'll be pissed if the pump said you pumped in 10 gallons of gas, and in reality, it only pumped in 9, thus cheating you that gallon (and $3-4, depending on where you are). Or if you bought a pound of meat that really was 15oz instead.

In the UK, all they had to do was simply declare the imperial scales and uncalibrated (and only use metric calibration tools), at which point yes, the shop really was committing fraud.

Hell, we see it today - where a 4 litre bottle of milk gets shrunk to 3.79 litres (which conveniently, is a gallon).

Not at all. MS have already said games are going to be locked to a single account and using a disc elsewhere will require paying an installation fee. Resellers are going to have to pay to have access to MS's disc/key system to be able to reset the disc within the system. We know all the details and how it will work, what we don't know is the price for each part.

Negative.

The installation fee applies if you don't do the license transfer - the disc is basically a medium to convey the gigs of game, because the games are so big it's not practical for most people to download them.

What happens is this - you own the game, and once you install it, the disc is useless. The game is in your account and like Steam, you can redownload it all the time. Or reinstall from disc.

Now, you can pass the disc onto a friend - and this is where the magic happens. If you don't give your friend the license, then your friend has to pay for a copy of the game (at whatever the digital download price is), and both you and your friend own the game.

Or, you can pass on the license, in which case you can't play the game anymore, but your friend can. Now, supposedly these license transfers incur a fee. Possibly, who knows?

The thing is, Microsoft by doing this has eliminated the need for disc based DRM, and in theory, one could download a game from Bittorrent and burn their own disc. Or one could bring in a thumb drive and have a new release downloaded to it for playing, so stores never run out of inventory, either.

And in theory, rare or low-print games will be available indefinitely as well since new license can be bought (the "installation fee").

Make sure you get good quality, high CRI fluorescent lights. A lot of what people don't like about fluorescent lights is the poor quality light, which is sad, because better quality ones are available. You should try for a CRI above 90, and settle for one between 80 and 90. Most linear fluorescents have a CRI rating on the packaging, but CFLs usually don't. You can find high CRI CFLs, but mostly in daylight rather than soft white.

Applies to LEDs as well.

The thing is both fluorescent and LEDs don't have a continuous spectrum. A regular incandescent bulb generates a rather Gaussian-like distribution of intensity vs. wavelength between blue and red (centered on red-yellow, which gives significant amount of IR). This continuous spectrum is what people like. Daylight's better, being a more normal distribution of intensity vs. wavelength (i.e., the blues and the reds are of equal intensity).

Fluorescent and LEDs use discrete phosphors, so there are distinct peaks in the spectrum of red, green and blue and the phosphors do not emit the same intensity. So while the light looks white, it isn't because there are missing/diminished wavelengths in the spectrum of light they emit. "Daylight" bulbs emit a LOT of blue, to the detriment of red and green, so they look like daylight, but the spectrum is nowhere near even. "warm" bulbs raise the intensity of green and red and thus do provide better color rendition (which is why high-CRI bulbs tend to only be warm ones).

The only real reason to use daylight bulbs is if you want a higher quantity of light - the blue intensity is extremely high and you get a lot of light for that. If you want something more "bulb like" you want a warm white one which brings up the intensity of red and green to make it more "neutral"

This'd only be newsworthy if it's installed via Google Play or another mainstream source. Otherwise, it's just stupid people paying the price for their ignorance.

Unlike iOS, Android is sold in far more countries than the store supports (Apple obviously only sells iOS devices in places where they have an iTunes store - which is why some countries only have the App Store and no music, movies nor books).

One of these countries is... China. Which is a huge population and stuff is shared rather promiscuously, plus the official Chinese app stores are full of infected apps.

In addition, many of these places also sell Android devices with no Google stuff, so the only way to get apps are unofficial app stores. And unfortunately, everyone calls AOSP devices "Android".

Not entirely true: When someone makes a screenshot within the alotted time the picture is visible (the sender can set the amount of time it's visible), you can still make a normal screengrab (only have experience with an iPhone here), but it will notify the sender that a screenshot has been taken. The iPhone does not need to be unlocked for it.

Or given how iOS is sandboxed, the photos will be nearby the app in its documents folder. You need something that can browse the iPhone filesystem over its protocol - like iPhone Explorer or Ubuntu and usbmux. No jailbreak required - it's standard because stuff like iTunes needs to be able to access the documents for backup purposes.

Unless they encrypt the photos, they'd probably be right there and downloadable.

Also, why is a microkernel OS so apparently difficult to construct?

They aren't. There are many microkernel OSes out there that are successful, like QNX (which has made plenty of noise about how it runs nuclear reactors and such). Hell, even Windows was completely microkernel at one point.

The main problem is performance. This comes from two problems - repeated kernel requests, and IPC.

Kernel requests happen because device drivers are run at application level (which provides great isolation). However, device drivers tend to require a lot of stuff at the kernel level (which is why they're typically in the kernel...) - things like interrupts, physical memory access, DMA, memory allocations (both physical and virtual), and such. Each one of those things it can't do alone (because well, it's an application - if applications can do those things, your microkernel is no better than DOS - the goal is to isolate things from each other). So it becomes an kernel API call to request an interrupt, to register an event object (the interrupt handler runs in the driver server as an interrupt thread), to get memory mappings installed, etc. Each API call is a system call in the end, which are generally expensive things because they require context saving and switching (some microkernel OSes use "thread migration" to mitigate this) and so forth.

The second problem is IPC. All the servers are isolated from each other and can only communicate through IPC mechanisms. So a microkernel has to end up being a message routing and forwarding service as well. Let's say an application wants to read a file it has open. It calls read(), which traps into the kernel (system call, after all), which the kernel then sends a message to the server which can handle the call (filesystem), so it passes the message to the filesystem server and then switches back to user mode so the filesystem server can handle it. The filesystem server then translates it to a block and issues a read to the partition driver (which if it's a separate server is yet another user-kernel-user transition), which then goes to the disk driver (u-k-u). From here, it goes to the bus handler (because said disk can be on SATA, IDE, USB, Firewire) where the transfer actually happens, and then the message winds it way back to the disk driver, the partition driver, the filesystem driver, then the application.

Switching from user to kernel is expensive - generally requires generating a software interrupt (system call) which triggers into the kernel's exception handler which then has to decode the request. Switching back is generally cheaper (usually just a return instruction which sets the proper mode bits), but you're still taking several mode switches per API call.

No big surprise, these things add up into a ton of cycles.

Microkernel OSes have developed means to alleviate the issue - thread migration being a big one (typically a server is implemented as a thread waiting on a mailbox, it gets the message then handles it). Thread migration means the application's thread context isn't saved, but migrated to the kernel, then passed onto the servers as necessary so instead of having to wake up threads and run the server loop, it becomes more expensive function calls, almost like RPC except the thread that called it is where it's executing on.

In a monolithic OS like Linux, all those messages and IPC are reduced down to function calls (usually through function pointers) - so the application making the system call becomes the only transition - the virtual filesystem handles the call, calls the filesystem driver, which calls the partition driver, which calls the disk driver, which calls the bus driver, ... and then they return up the stack like a typical subroutine call.

Oh, and Windows NT 3.51 did this as well. Guess what? Graphics performance sucked, which is why in NT 4, Microsoft moved the graphics driver into ring0 (kernel mode), thus creating the ability for poorly written graphics drivers to crash the entire OS. But, graphics are faster because you're not shuffling so much messages around. I think Windows has steadily put more and more of the graphics stack in the kernel since then, as well.

So if you have to install games to your Xbox ZERO or "deactivate" them to sell them, why bother with a console at all, just get a PC...

Uh, last I checked, deactivating a game happens today - when you sell your disc you can't play the game anymore. Seems reasonable to me. Unless you really want to pirate the game, in which case it means you sell the disc and don't give up the license. Not that Steam lets you do that, anyhow (given that almost no one now does used PC game sales).

As for the disc - it's a bridge between a full download (it's Blu-ray, so games can be up to 50GB) and using discs (which are slow, break, get scratched up, noisy, wear out, etc) which provide a very quick and efficient way of moving a large amount of data easily. The potential I see is where USB drives get really cheap and you can simply transfer a game to one via a kiosk.

This method has some interesting implications.

1) A game can't really go 'out of print' anymore - if the game is no longer available for sale (electronic or retail), but someone has the disc, you can always buy a copy by using the disc (assuming you can't download it, but if it's not for sale anymore...). This has very interesting implications because it means every game will be available. For those who want to find some hard-to-find game they made few copies of,, well, as long as you can get a hold of the disc, you can play it and pass the disc to someone else. Low print runs are no longer any excuse. (I have several games where you can't buy them anymore and they command $$$ now)

2) DRM on the disc is actually unnecessary. So one could, theoretically, download the game and burn it onto a BD and use that. Again, implications on rare and hard to find games.

3) Rare and hard to find games no longer command outrageous prices if rare discs aren't required to play the game - except for collectors.

4) You still have used game sales, but you also cut out the middleman (e.g., EBGames) - if you can transfer the license to someone else, it means Microsoft suddenly is a broker of the deal. You sell the game, Microsoft handles the monetary transfer (the hardest part), transfers the license, and the cut Microsoft takes pays for it all AND a little goes to the publisher. An alternative way would be to generate a code for the game license, then pass it onto a third party who can verify it, claim the license and sell it - i.e., online used game sales, no shipping required, even.

Hate to say it, but Microsoft really may be onto something here - allowing used game sales for disc/"digital" downloaded games,

And yet Apple still paid $6billion in Corporate Income Tax in 2012. That's a lot of tax to pay for an entity which tax supposedly isn't for...

It's a bit hard to not pay income tax on income earned within the US.

The US remains Apple's biggest market by far.

Basically, Apple makes stuff. The stuff the sell inside the US is subject to US taxes. You can't evade them - it's pretty clear cut.

The fuzziness starts on worldwide profits - like how Apple US probably sells Apple Ireland stuff at cost, making 0 profits. Or shipping them straight to Apple Ireland from China. Apple Ireland the proceeds to sell the stuff to everyone in Europe, keeping the profits for itself. Technically, the money is Apple's, a worldwide corporation, but isn't, in that Apple US can't touch it because it's outside the US, and bringing it in would incur income taxes.

The only thing Apple can evade is California taxes by having the profits funneled through a different state, like Microsoft does with Nevada.

But if you buy an iPhone in the US, Apple has to pay full freight for it. Likewise, iTunes US sales.

That's also why there's a big brouhaha over "repatriating cash" - because Apple has $100B offshore (and about $44B domestically). To bring that $100B back would incur another $35B in taxes. However, interest rates are ridiculously low (thanks to the 2008 wall street fiascos), so borrowing $17B (of which about $6B in taxes would've been owed if they brought it back) is really, really, really cheap - well under $1B in interest.

For companies whose majority of sales are NOT in the US, the situation is even more tricky.

Apple is going to find out the hard way that 'fast development/aquisition' means something entirely different to Apple than it does to the military. Apple probably thinks that half a year is a long time, while the military thinks that five/ten years is quite average.

Apple releases a new phone and tablet once a year. That's not fast, and in a market like smartphones, it's pretty damn slow when the likes of Samsung are releasing tons of phones daily. Sure they're not all SGS4s, but damn, Samsung makes hundreds of phone models running Android all around.

Even the 3Gs is 4 years old and it runs ios6. Even when ios7 comes out this year, ios6 will still be around for a few holdouts.

by petermgreen (876956) Alter Relationship on Sunday May 19, 2013 @07:11AM (#43767707) Homepage

The difference is of course that with apple nowadays the desktops/laptops are a sideline and the phones/locked down arm based tablets are the main thrust of the buisness. With MS the OS for phones/locked down arm based tablets is a sideline and the desktop/laptop OS is the main thrust of the buisness.

http://www.osnews.com/story/25547/Apple_Restricts_Certain_APIs_to_Mac_App_Store_Applications
http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/29/windows-store-metro-mode-no-sideloading-psa/

Apple is focusing less on OS X for a simple reason - it's not bringing home the cash. It's still raking in more money than iTunes (which rakes in a lot, but since it's run merely as a complementary business...), but iOS devices are making a pile of money for Apple. And business dictates that you should invest in things that are making money now, and less in those that made money in the past (the future IS a post-PC world - most PCs are "good enough" for the vast majority of people), and tons in stuff that will bring in future profits (whatever that might be).

As for restricting APIs - yes, because it makes sense to. iCloud allows for persistent storage of data. Mac App Store apps are sandboxed. Let's say you have a malware infection - if it infects a MAS app, it's sandboxed so damage is contained. EXCEPT, well, there's iCloud, and it may hop onto there. You delete the app, install it on another Mac. Boom, that app is again reinfected when it scans iCloud.

Should iCloud be allowed on non-MAS apps, then it will need to be enforced on sandboxed apps to prevent whole-system infections that persist across reinstalls. Think about it - app gets infected and spreads the infecting document via iCloud. You reinstall the OS. Reinstall the app, and it scans iCloud and boom, infected again.

Sure, Apple could virus-scan it all, but what to make of virus documents? They may be legit documents that users want, and it may be impossible to remove without damaging it.

So for security, it's best to contain the infection to whatever little damage it can do.

Hell, it's a surprise no Windows malware has thought to use Dropbox or other service to persist itself across reinstalls.

Unfortunately, to fix someone's car these days, you need to get into technology as well :(

Just comfortable enough to use a computer. You're not installing an OS, compiling kernels, or other crap. Just as long as you poke the right keys on the keyboard for it to do what you want.

If the diagnostic machine breaks - you don't fix it - it could be a seriously expensive piece of kit - you call the service technician to fix it (who may be you, the IT worker). And they generally know if your kit is broken they need to fix it pronto because if it breaks too often, you may not buy it again, or doesn't make money, or other issue. Especially since it's not "on the clock" and no money can be made while it's broken.

My mom was a legal secretary for 17 years, with the result that she loathes most lawyers. From her description of the bozos that she worked with over the years most of them think that changing their default password to their pet's name or their brat's birthday is all the security that their laptop will ever need. After all, they only browse the vanilla porn sites on their work laptop, there shouldn't be any malware on those, right?

I find this true of a lot of professionals. They can earn a ton of money, but they also can be extremely cheap. And even worse, their "superior" knowledge in one field makes them believe that they're superior in all other fields - thinking everyone else not in the same field

It applies to all fields - be it IT, medical, legal, educational, etc. It seems just because someone spent a few years learning something specialized, they're suddenly above everyone else.

Hell, you'll see spending on non-field related things to be extremely cheap as well - a lawyer may spend a lot on nice furniture and stuff to show they're good, but their IT and office assistant spending would be very low. Ditto doctors - I've finally seen the people who use the crappiest of the crappy laptops that get sold at Best Buy. Hell, they'll complain about it but not do a single thing about it - or spending a few more bucks and getting something that would frustrate them less.

And yes, it applies to you, the IT worker as well - see how much money you spend on nice clothes rather than the jeans and T-shirt. Or even if you have a suit and tie (or are you the type that says "clothes don't matter"? Well, to a lawyer, IT doesn't matter, either. That includes security.).

It won't be long until this comes and bites someone in the ass. Imagine a lawyer or doctor gets hacked and ends up violating lawyer-client or doctor-patient privilege. Will said information be allowed in a case? What if it was due to poor security? Who's responsible?

IT workers are lucky though - there's no privilege that depends on them keeping secrets that a court respects. Other than maybe getting discredited because of poor dress.

The kids will never learn, but I wager the dog won't piss on it more than once.

Yeah, but how is the dog supposed to pass that knowledge onto its successor?

Ironically while Apple executives laugh at the president at the suggestion of iphone manufacture in the states, Samsung make their chips in the US. Really its a mystery why Apple is being considered at all they are as anti American as they come. If I was cynical I would suggest its part of the deal to bring back the some imac mini manufacturing to the states...although we have seen very little actual manufacture as yet.

I know Americans have poor geography skills, but last I checked, Austin, TX, was in the US. And then Samsung spent $4b upgrading it.

But continue your hater-ade. And Samsung still supplies the A6 processors to Apple. And for final irony, The SGS4. Uses the US-made Exynos processor OUTSIDE NORTH AMERICA. And uses the TSMC-fabbed Qualcomm Snapdragon INSIDE North America.