"Where is customer support and warranty provision going to come from?"

Pretty much the reason for the discount. You're going to the manufacturer for any problems. Often sale/discount items in this case can be limited to "7 day return only"

Beer - random?

Sadly for me, beer seems all too predictable with no element of randomness.

Generally it's drink -> fun -> loud, obnoxiousness -> singing (optional depending on gender) -> unconsciousness -> headache + regret.

@steve007UK

It's easy to understand why the price went up of *existing* stock, because there is no distinction between the HD in the shop, and the HD further up the supply chain. Hell, the value of *your* HD went up too. It's not that there is some magically expensive hard disk further up the supply chain and is waiting to be conveyer-belted along the chain.

By value, I'm talking about "what the market is willing to pay for it", not "what the retailer bought it for". In many instances, the retailer doesn't even "buy" the stock to sell to you, see Sale or Return for an example, and quite probably iPads in authorised resellers (if the Apple NDA allowed us to find out).

In fact if the supply chain as a whole didn't increase its value, it would get even more complicated, as different shops would have vastly different prices depending on when/where in the chain they are.

@Joe 3

Judging by the rest of the posts, this isn't a trolling attempt, but a serious post.

Unless your post is the troll, and I've fallen hook, line and sinker. Or maybe further still, *this* post is troll-bait. The meta has gone off the scale!

Who knows

They had a good 70 seconds to enjoy the smut, as they were apparently 10 seconds ahead of their mother, and the dim-witted parent then apparently took "a minute" to realise what she was looking at.

Best 70 seconds of any youngster's life I reckon..

Eh, no

Classic misunderstanding of independent events' probabilities. Not winning the lottery one week doesn't improve your odds of winning them next week.

I hear the odds of a bomb being carried on a plane are a million to 1. I now carry one with me whenever I fly, as the odds of TWO being on a plane must be huge, so I'll be safe..

It did

It vaguely explained why it was required (needing to measure the peak and trough of the sine wave), however it's pure Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem that dictates the sample rate, aliasing is a symptom of not filtering. 0 -20KHz was the desired range, 2KHz was added as a low-band filter "buffer" (44.1 can't reliably recreate 22KHz of sound). You have to sample at twice the rate of the max rate.

The ".1" was added as 44.1KHz can be represented effectively in both PAL and NTSC systems. Similarly, 48KHz is the magic number that can represent 22KHz with a filter and work on PAL/NTSC systems.

Not least

Exchange "Steve Jobs" for pretty much any CEO of a company. Hard-faced, cutting and decisive generally comes with the territory

@Loyal Commenter

"But I would expect it to contain some sort of entertaining content, rather than an advert for a C-list celebrity thanksgiving show."

Just because you don't find it entertaining?... I thought it was a nice subtle piss-take of the show.

Advice is to not read the Bootnotes section. There is no IT content in any of the stories there - deliberately - take a look, the closest is an article about the ethics of Steve Jobs.

Leak?

It's Black Friday. It's not new, it's not surprising that Apple are joining in.

Right now in the States, there are hundreds of adverts running explaining what sales will be on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Friday_%28shopping%29

"Bootnotes"

Damn I miss the moderatrix sometimes...

"Required"

It asks you to reboot. Clicking "not now, later" ended with a perfectly functioning version of iTunes.

Many installers ask for a reboot. Very few require it!

???

The minute an ISP starts arbitrarily blocking DNS queries is the minute I leave said ISP, and I think the number would be greater than 7. Many of their DNS servers are rather shaky to say the least and basic to boot. My entire family have been put onto OpenDNS specifically to use their blocking services. You're forgetting that the simplest way to tamper with a DNS lookup is via the hosts files, which limiting the DNS server wouldn't prevent.

Quite how much bandwidth you think that DNS queries take, I've no idea, but in the grand scheme of things I'd be amazed if it were even a tenth of a percent.

Flawed

"PC" when they mean "Windows"? Not really, your "Linux" machine is a PC too, and that PC is capable of running those games. Not necessarily with your particular OS, but as a PC it is capable of it.

It's the equivalent of having a roundup of "mobile device games" and showcasing DS, PSP, iOS and Android games. Hell, even a Tamagotchi would count.

Developers write games primarily for Windows (and to an extent, Mac) because there's a greater market and environment for it. They know they have graphics cards with full blown drivers and that pretty much everything is compatible with each other. "Linux" is so wide and vague it's rather difficult to target, especially given that "Linux" refers only to the kernel, which can be ported across pretty much anywhere, including my current router (OpenWRT).

A lot easier to say "PC" and mean "IBM PC Compatible".

Blackberry Balance

"RIM needs to have a program (if not already) of certifying apps, so that corporations would be willing to get those apps installed on their users' devices."

RIM couldn't possibly "certify" apps, there's too many variables as to what sort of app a corporation would find acceptable.

They have addressed it recently though, Blackberry Balance. Effectively it splits the phone in two - personal and corporate use, and data cannot traverse between the two partitions - the user is free to put whatever the like on it, the corporate side is effectively unaware. Not widespread yet, and will probably take some convincing of sysadmins before enabling it.

@Daniel B.

"Can ActiveSync remotely wipe a stolen handset?"

Yes - on WinMo and iPhones certainly, and I'm told Android. SBS/Exchange has supported this for a while now.

"Can ActiveSync apply security policies/restrictions on handsets?"

Yes, as above. Not sure what levels you're talking about, but on the SBS machine I ran, it forced our connected iPhone to have a password and time-out lock (and rather p1ssed some people off as I recall).

Simple

They'll employ someone else who's willing to do just that. There's always going to be someone keener and greener...

One question

I'm guessing you were very careful about your grammar before submitting that post? :-)

9.5 / 10 however. "self important" should be hyphenated.

For every Roger Rabbit though, there was a Space Jam

Pedant..

She didn't kiss the Teselecta as far as I could tell, she kissed the doctor. The doc wasn't necessarily inside the Teselecta while in the broken universe, he just told her to look in his eyes when she returned to the beach.

re: ZX80

I'd be fascinated to see what Sinclair replaced it with if your ZX80 was recalled...

Hanging on to my 3dfx 4MB card in the hopes nVidia do a recall and replace it with a GTX590

:-D

"Sri Lanka! Formerly Ceylon, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass or Ozzy wouldn't go on stage that night"

I'm off to dig out the DVD and bore the arse of my fiancee, I'll pass on her thanks in advance.

Wooo!

Second hand, deprecated stuff, cheaper than original, news at 11.

A product can't get a good review simply by virtue of it maybe being cheaper some day, nor should buying a non-existent-yet third-party adapter be a mitigating factor for the ridiculous new memory card format. I'd be surprised if they came out for a while (it's only for the Vita it seems, so Sony don't need to licence it as they're not trying to permeate the market like the MS Pro etc) plus it's likely the memory cards have proprietary signature/encryption to try and prevent the previous jailbreaking attempts that went on, presumably something similar to MagicGate.

Bespoke

"A bespoke memory stick - meaning my existing Pro Duo is not supported?"

Aye, the PS Vita Card. Expected costs to be around 3x the cost of regular flash. Just as Sony were phasing out the Memory Stick from their camera ranges, they go and fire the shotgun into the other foot.

@Cheeky Chappie

I think you've just been hooked by fishing rod v7.6. If you'll inspect the wall behind you, you will see if large divot where the joke flew over your head and cracked the plaster.

Fair point, my bad. You can understand my suspicion though, as it would only add to the list of security problems with iOS 4.2.1 which will never be fixed (the PDF one being the highest profile)

re: I know code well enough

You know code well enough on an extremely small scale from what you're describing. Deleting or commenting out code just doesn't happen at an enterprise scale without massive consequences. The only thing that is of any concern is this - *you have changed the baseline*. By doing so you've negated all the end user test cases, regardless of how confident you are that you haven't impacted anything outside.

"This is only dangerous if for some strange reason your little app is tied in with the rest of the code in the software."

It's not an "app". And yes, it *has* to be intricately tied into the keyboard code, of which there will be shared code and modules across it. You cannot say for certain which pieces you can remove and which you can't.

For clarity I'm not talking as an Apple hater or lover, they're a company, I really don't get emotionally charged by such things. I'm talking as a former developer, tester and test manager. Change the baseline and I will have no choice but to run the regression packs on everything that the code you've meddled with touched. And consider how many use cases invoke the keyboard on an iPhone - hint, it's most of them. If you merely *disable* the option, I'll have tested that already - it's a valid use case to test against.

Nice

You've just doubled my workload, thanks

Signed, Mr Test Manager

You've just doubled my workload, thanks

Signed, Mr Software Config Manager

etc

Not just baddies

He also manages to work it into his charms with the ladies...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VuIShM5kAQ

@Rob Dobs

To "remove" non-working code from a major development is entirely non-trivial. There are all manners of shared modules that you have to decide whether to remove or not, and regardless of traceability you would end up re-testing the entire stack. Having the feature disabled will have been a test case already, and so require minimal re-work.