Posts by Ammaross Danan 1042 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Sep 2009
Yep. The whole article can be summed up with this paragraph from it:
Management may also be the problem, not the IT worker. "As an experiment," Corman said, "explain to your children what it is you're trying to explain to your chief security officer. If they get it and he doesn't, then the problem isn't with you."
In my position, I work in tandem with an actual knowledgable CIO, and surprise surprise, we accomplish our goals and get the job done.
Last I checked, my 32GB microSD card has a grand total of 100MB of apps, and nearly 14GB of vids and pics I haven't cleaned/culled/copied-off yet. A phone, especially one boasting its camera/vid features should be REQUIRED to have a removable SD card. Oh, and ICS supports removable storage, just look at the ICS tablets with a microSD slot...
HTC already announced their streamlining of phones down to variations of a single model type, similar to how Apple does it with the iPhone. This is their attempt at getting a distinction by design, similar to how an iPhone is readily recognizable (without even needing to see the apple on the back).
"i would be able to get everything i wanted for myself, the wife and the kids straight away."
...Except hook up to the HDMI port of a tv/monitor, unless you buy that i-branded addon and thus, invalidating your "without needing to carry an aux cable around." comment/downside of the Android tab. Unfortunately, this tablet doesn't have a microUSB charging port, so you have to carry around your own form of the i-device proprietary connector. You would think you could achieve docking capability by having a few strategically-placed USB/etc ports at the docking-point, or at least 1 proprietary port and a standard microUSB port.
The iPod nanos are nice though. Shame it requires iTunes to manage....
Renewables have their place. The Gobi, Sahara, most of Southwest USA, etc for solar (and wind in some cases). Solar is more likely than wind turbines to give decent returns. Wave (tidal) turbines are a good start too, but the best move forward would be nuclear plants. With huge amounts of electricity available at fractions of the cost of power today, electric-only cars, trains, equipment, etc would take off in a big way. Imagine proximity chargers (induction or otherwise) under parking stalls at Walmart (or just plugs, either way), down freeway stretches, at the employee parking at work, etc. Your furnace would be electric rather than gas. Hot water would be electric rather than gas. Another big thing would be the readily available electricity for the fusion reactor experiments, since those take the power of an entire city (or more!) to actually get the reactor jump-started (and running, since they're not self-sustaining yet).
@Renato:
The performance metric that counts is the amount of RAM on the device. "Droidtards" have real multitasking, so they can switch between web-browsing (while it's loading) to pull up their playlist, pop over to a remote desktop window, jump back to their picture album, etc etc etc, all without causing disconnects (with the webpage or remote desktop), nor having to page RAM to/from the flash storage. Without this multitasking ability for iOS, they don't need to load up iDevices with more than their 512MB allotment. (iOS has limited multitasking for i-branded apps only, so yes you can play your iTunes music while surfing, I know).
Now, how to power all of these things, plus anything else that might come up in the next year or so you own the device? A quad-core chip should do it. Since the platform is threaded as a standard (unlike the Windows environment of yester-year), all 4 cores could actually get used. Zipping around on a single core with a 800x600 screen (or worse, the phone you cited) won't see much of a performance bottleneck (CPU-wise) with your apparent workload. Mine, however, makes even 1GB RAM dual core chippery fall over (props to the Galaxy Tab 10.1 for handling it best though). We'll see if the iPad2S can top what we can pick up today with the Asus Transformer Prime.
The crux of the matter is that Motorola offered their FRAND licensing to Apple to an amount that falls within the "Fair and Resonable" licensing scheme (albeit likely the top end, but still within the limits), and Apple rejected it and STILL used the patented technology. Similar to Apple suing Samsung for using an OS (which they got from Google) that had rounded corners on icons that are arrayed in a grid on the screen. If the technology supplied by Qualcomm is the only infringment in question, and if the licensing to Qualcomm covers third-parties that use said Qualcomm chips, then Motorola doesn't have a leg to stand on. Of course, this is likely not the case, or else this suit would have been readily tossed already.
There's more than just a die shrink in Ivy Bridge. The tri-gate transistors and the bump in integrated graphics performance just to name two. Need more? Extra PCIe lanes, PCIe 3.0 and native support for USB3. The die shrink and tri-gate transistors alone allows them to drop the core voltage fairly significantly, thus saving power.
My money is sitting until Ivy Bridge comes out. I doubt AMD will come up with a suitable competitor by then (not holding my breath with Piledriver), which is why Intel can sit on their stockpile rather than slash prices a bit to shift it.
"...while Intel is also troubled by its Sandy Bridge processor inventory, the CPU giant plans to delay mass shipments of the new processors to minimize the impact"
So, because their CPUs are still priced high (just shy of launch prices, due to no real competition from AMD), no one buys their chip stocks en masse, so rather than slash the price a bit to shift them, they'll just sit on their current prices until their stockpile goes down.
Come on AMD! This is what competition is supposed to prevent!
Car or no, fake iPads or no, Apple lost the case due to using a registered trademark "iPad" for selling its tablets. The fakes are still out there because they do not use "iPad" in the name, they just look the same. Just like that handbag that has a slight misspelling of a certain brand name....
"OCZ VERTEX 3 SATA III 2.5" SSD 240GB life span is 2 Milion hours."
Mean-Time Between Failure is not "Life Span." Here's an example from a reference:
Example: "MTBF of 100,000 hours. [This figure] indicate[s] that in a population of 1,000,000 batteries, there will be approximately ten battery failures every hour during a single battery's four-hour life span. This is because during that one hour, the 1,000,000 batteries were operational for a sum of 1,000,000 hours; dividing total uptime (1,000,000) with MTBF (100,000) we get the average number of failures."
So, one SSD in a group of 2mil dying every hour, while good odds, doesn't ensure your drive won't pop its clogs in the next 2 hours. Next in line is that mainstream mechanical drives barely crest the 1mil MTBF mark...
As for write-endurance, I've heard of numerous drives having hardware/firmware deaths, but not many (if any) write-endurance problems.
"...would like the threat of injunction removed from all FRAND patents, so no one could use a FRAND patent to have anyone else's products removed from the shelf."
So, in Apple's case, if you reject licensing a FRAND patent, due to being asked the high-end of the stick of a "fair and reasonable" price, simply because you wanted the El Cheapo end, and go ahead and make the product anyway expecting to just fight it out in courts (if it comes to that, as it's expensive for SMBs), you don't get the right to block said company from selling the device and are simply left with spending millions in court to get your previous "fair and reasonable" royalty they owed you legally anyway?
This just in, most Windows PC owners upgrade to....a PC.
Why? Your collection of software only works on Windows. Same reason I tell Apple users (with a truckload of follow-along software) to stay on Apple. For those websurfers and the like, it's quite a free choice. I just know if I had $100+ worth of iPhone apps, I'd be less likely to jump ship to Android or vice versa.
Or just set your Avast to ask you what to do with malware/virii when they're encountered. Simple matter of "allow to run unsandboxed" and you're golden. Unless you're purposely trolling malware/virii infesting things, you'd rarely see a popup asking what to do anyway. Saves a lot of headache for false positives.
When you design a laptop, there's little you can do to get a "solid" feel. Sure, they could carve the laptop case out of steel, but that wouldn't satisfy the weight category now would it? Aluminium it is. You can see this in PC cases, steel for cheapos with aluminium for higher end.
Keyboards have some potential variation, but chiclite style is still fairly common, no big news there. Black keys on an aluminium surround? Oh noes.... At least they're backlit.
Various designs stray into the realm of blending trackpads, minimizing the bezel, or going for a designer plastic casing vs metal. Why Samsung didn't pick one of these other options? The question to you is, "Do you think it's fugly?" Why would they pick those other designs if you answered "yes"?
Fortunately, all this consideration and market research was unnecessary for Samsung to conduct, as it could simply ape the hodge-podge that Apple tossed together.
Yes, NetBackup is more complex. rsync would only be part of the Big Picture. You still wouldn't be able to do client-side dedup (disk/processor intensive), but you'd at least get a synthetic backup with inline compression during transport. rsnapshot would help you manage backup snapshots, similar to NetApp, but at a far worse disadvantage. Then there's the matter of CPIOing it to tape or the like, which NetApp can handle in spades (as long as you like managed tape sets). The advantage your rsync/rsnapshot has is cost, at the expense of "lets hope it keeps working." Granted, NetApp becomes a black box appliance as well, but at least it has commercial support....
"This unit has two drives. Therefore if it can read them in parallel that will easily saturate a 10Gig bus?"
Yes, because you'll use this exact device for an enterprise-level SAN or DAS....
Yes, Fiber Channel can pull 8 or 16Gbps, as Ethernet can pull 40Gbps by bonding 4 10Gbps ports. Why not bond 4 Thunderbolt ports while you're at it? 40Gbps each way. Benefit is, Thunderbolt can daisy chain too.
Nice constructive response Sparticus. My allusion to 6mo-old tech is in comparison to selling tech, not development tech. When the iPad2 came out, it sported a 800x600 resolution, which had been exceeded by other manufacturers. It had a slower core-clock. Definitely half the RAM of other products. Apple does a wonderful job of putting a pretty bow on top of near-top-of-the-line kit, but selling it at premium.
They're likely true, however, in 6-9mo when the phone comes out, it will release using the usual 6mo-old tech and somewhat underwhelming specs, but be vigorously defended with comments of "it's so efficient and good that it doesn't need all that RAM or CPU power..."
All I have to say is microSD slot and HDMI.... Total cost of Ownership comes back to bite iFans.
"The May 2011 explosion in a Foxconn factory in Chengdu was blamed on aluminum dust and took place in a unit where workers polished iPads; it left four dead and 18 severely injured.
HP, Microsoft, Dell, IBM, Nokia use exactly the same manufacturers, as Cook points out."
HOWEVER, what were the chinese polishing which contributed to the dust which exploded? iPADS! Not a plastic-framed HP, IBM computer or Nokia phone. So far, most of the accidents seem to be related to Apple parts. Maybe other corps don't use certain materials due to inherent dangers in their manufacture or refining?
I'm well aware of the "price it high to stab the initial buyers" of economics. The point I was making is that the Prime isn't stabbing at a lofty starting price (such as is done with graphics cards) and sinking down to a "reasonable" price. Much like the iPad (when have you seen the iPad2 base model "sink" in price?), it is sold at a fair price and doesn't necessarily "sink" toward an "equilibrium" price. Hence the comparison. I'm just pointing out the obvious benefits of the product; no "iRage" required.
/coat due to being a quick comment that shouldn't have been bothered to be explained.
"...as they pay more..."
It can be had, with the keyboard dock, for under $500, which is better than the iPad of similar 16GB storage can claim. Only things that beat it would be sub-par 'droid-based tablets of a dual-core (or less!) variety. I, for one, am glad they stuffed it with a quad-core chip, decent RAM and storage, and pitched it at a price-point to make one seriously pass over a Galaxy Tab...
Yep, a load of crap forced upon the workers by management is a common plague. I was in the fortunate position to steer our midsized biz away from tape backups (had 4 servers with tape drives, just to pull the data in time for nightlies, granted the CTO wanted full nightlies...) to a D2D2D method. Unfortunately, there's not many affordable solutions out there for how we wanted/needed to do it. A NetApp VTL gets halfway there, but that's a 5-digit figure for an "almost fits" solution. Needless to say, a Linux server and some development time, we have a proper functional system now. Not quite as clean as a pretty packaged NetApp server, but it does precisely what we wanted.
I don't know of a common encryption system that isn't vulnerable if the password has been entered and the machine is still on, but TrueCrypt is a great option still. For one, they're aware of this RAM issue, and they actively wipe the RAM that contained the valid decryption key when you properly unmount a TrueCrypt volume or shutdown. Therefore, if you want security, just unmount your volume or shutdown the system properly (don't yank the plug). You're safe. As for decrypting a TrueCrypt volume, they may be referring to the same type of RAM vulnerability to do so. I doubt their rainbow tables or dictionary attacks will work against a TrueCrypt volume with a decently long password (15+ chars) and a keyfile or two. Rainbow tables used to crack WEP were several TB in size.
RAM contents have a decay period. When you power up a computer normally, RAM registers are reset to zero automatically, since they may contain latent data. If you take a RAM stick and stuff it in a device that is designed not to do this, you may be able to read the contents if you're quick enough.
Therefore, REGFAIL for not explaining such, and YOUFAIL for not reading up first. :)
Just determine your Total Cost of Ownership. Fortunately, you have an iPad1, so you likely have all the dongles and adapters needed to interface with common stuff (computers, speakers, tvs etc). You can get a Transformer Prime with the keyboard for less than the 16GB iPad2. How much does the bluetooth iPad keyboard cost? The Transformer keyboard even comes with a battery pack the size of what's in the tablet. Plus, you can get it NOW. Not a hard decision really, considering the "rumored" items are just what the Prime already has (minus the supposed screen resolution and the obvious assortment of Android-common connectivity slots).
"Samsung is going to spend another giant wad of cash this year, when it invests ₩25 trillion ($22.3bn) in semiconductors and displays."
Anyone know exactly how must reinvesting Apple has done (new office space not included)? Oh wait, maybe that's why they have such large numbers. That and their price premiums...
And yes, the Samsung 10.1" is a very nice piece of kit. However, the Asus Prime Transformer looks a piece too, at the same price point.
"As I understand it the four processors of T3 consume less than the two of the previous T2."
It's not that they consume less power, which is likely true anyway, it's that they have that ride-along 500Mhz core that does the light lifting while your phone is not running full-on. That's assuming this S3 is running Tegra3 of course....
Joe: "i'd expect people who are buying higher end GPUs to be more likely to opt for an SSD instead of a traditional HDD."
You can't squeeze Battlefield 3, World of Warcraft, Crysis 2, and other such games onto a 120GB SSD comfortably, nor does it make much sense to do so. These gamer enthusists likely would need additional storage for multimedia and the like as well. Just because someone is willing to pay ~$400 for a video card (or two) doesn't mean they'll fork out for an upgrade on a computer on the eve of the Ivy Bridge launch, or the eve of the new Radeons and GeForce cards. And they certainly would avoid paying premiums on new HDDs when their old one(s) can be carried forward.
Article: "And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC OEMs' ability to include a GPU in their systems"
That should likely read: "And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC OEMs' ability to include a GPU in their systems, forcing them to realize there's a GPU built into the CPU nowadays anyway." (since most are flogging Intel, or pushing a cheapo AMD with on-board (integrated) GPU.
You can get a craptastic 60" TV from Walmart for ~$899 or pay upwards to a nice 3D 240Hz bell+whistle 55" name brand for a hair over $2000 (if you don't know how to shop). It then comes down to having a feature-less OLED 55" or a everything-plus-dog 55" LCD that's "good enough" and pocket the $3k difference (new HTPC and desktop rig for the difference I'd say...)
IPS laptop screens exist, but you'll be paying Apple-like prices to get your hands on one.
What I'd like to see is these 4K screens in a laptop. It's hard enough to find a laptop sporting a 1080p screen and the next iPad3 and Prime Transformer will have larger than 1080p crammed into a 10" (touch)screen.
"Is there a manual for my phone anywhere"
Yep. Usually comes in the box your phone came in. Mine's a couple hundred pages thick, so I tossed it back in the box like everyone else apparently. Samsung's Charge has a screenshot in it by hitting home and back at the same time (obviously doesn't work very well). ICS has screenshot built in and is easy to do, so such a feature app will be unnecessary moving forward.
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