Nah

There's no anti-Apple angle. They just chose not to put any new tech in their kit, but sell it like it had some....

For the iFans, here's a quote "We all know Steve Jobs does not want Blu-ray to be on Macs. He famously referred to the licensing rules for Sony's format as a "bag of hurt.""

Any Fule Kno

Ask as "space engineer" and they'll tell you that that there is no such thing as a "rocket scientist." It's a layman's term for mass media use.

Remember

Ah, the old days when computers couldn't multi-CPU very well at all....who on earth would have needed TWO cores in their computer??? Now we have EIGHT core CPUs...how will we ever use all of those?

</sarcasm>

The hardware has to come first before people can write software that will use it. Imagine if Modern Warfare 3 had been written back in the N64 days... I'm sure they would have loved to do it, but no one could have played it.

"normal joe"

"I mean, hard discs aren't forever but the ordinary Joe doesn't usually fret about the actual lifetime."

Normal Joe still doesn't have to worry about SSD lifetimes. Current MLC drives can take quite the hit. A 120GB SSD with perfect wear leveling (5000 writes per cell), heck, let's drop that to 4000 for "imperfect" wear-leveling, can write 480TB worth of data before having troubles (cells no longer able to be written to). That's 263GB/day for 5 years. 182MB/min of continuous writing. Normal Joe won't do that. If we half that (fair guess TLC will have 2500 write endurance), then it's only 131GB/day. If Normal Joe does more than that in a day, they're not Normal Joe. An Enthusist (or higher) should know better anyway and have a few TB HDDs for their torrents or video processing anyway.

RAM

RAM has already taken a nose-dive well before the hard drive floods. However, I'm hoping this will cause a slump in demand when Ivy Bridge comes out. You can still upgrade your mobo/CPU/RAM without having to get a new HDD (or SSD for the new system in this case...)

Thin Computing

In case you missed it, mobile toys such as an iPhone or a tablet have to draw their content from somewhere. And since iTunes isn't hosted on a iPhone5 and websites aren't hosted on the CEO's tablet, there has to be disk storage somewhere. And no, Netflix doesn't host their streaming media on RAIDed Android media players.

At a loss...

"WTF is the point if it doesn't have Micro SD card slot."

In case you missed it....read the last little bit of the article again....(there is an SD card slot)

"So bascially it's similar to the Galaxy tab 10.1 - but looks crapper."

This one, you have the USPTO to thank for that. Well, that and Apple for patenting a square(ish) tablet device with rounded corners.

Android

All the Lintard and iTards want to know why the Android ecosystem is "better" than the Apple Walled Garden? Now you know. Features for the sake of features is Androids motto. Apple's is features us to cut everyone else out, and just enough for the end-users to use to make our product sell.

Fail and fail again.

First, if a website is going to be targeted (like GMail or the comments form for a WordPress page), it is first going to be viewed by the programmer to extract the basic requirements and makeup of the page. Sometimes this can be automated if your program can sniff out <form></form> tags and interpret. However, if the program isn't aware of the particular CAPTCHA method used, it can't effectively defeat it. The CAPTCHA could be cat and dog pictures for all the program knows. It, at best, would find common CAPTCHAs such as reCAPTCHA and the like, based on basic elements, such as external links or structure/naming.

Next, your CAPTCHA is good for your corner of the internet, but if you roll it out en masse, it will fail. Automated attacks using the fore-mentioned chatter-boxes (Wolfram Alpha, et al), or even easier: brute-force collection of your questions and a few hours of simple answering for an automated catalog. Security by obscurity fixes some. It's similar to those who think their self-grown encryption is actually better than AES or the like.

Right...

"Shocking it may be to you but it's not the first time Apple admits to a bug, especially in a .0 release."

You're just holding it wrong.

GPT and UEFI

That is all.

Seagate rep

It's a Seagate drive. That should have been warning enough.

I agree, the malware is the news here. That's a pretty impressive kit, even it was a Windows virus. That is targets Macs makes it all the more delicious for the Windows camp, but if you're mining bitcoin, wouldn't you want to target a demographic that is guaranteed to have a decent GPU (as opposed to Intel GMA) and also guaranteed not to have an AV installed?

Numbers

Unfortunately for everyone in the tech biz, consumers (read: mass sheeple) do not buy a product because it's labeled as "fast" or "gamer edition," they lie to themselves they know what they're looking at and buy the item with the biggest numbers. 2.53GHz is better than 2.1GHz. 6GB of RAM over 4GB of RAM. Webcam vs no webcam. And the kicker: 1TB (1000 GB) over the 120GB SSD. This is why SSDs don't do well on the Best Buy shelf: uneducated masses thinking it's worse because it doesn't have a big number. They have no idea what "sequential write speed" means, let alone "IOPS."

If you want something less grey-area to argue with, SSDs are still far more expensive per GB than HDDs. Even if a 1TB drive costs $120, that's still $0.12/GB as opposed to $1.25+/GB of SSDs. Horses for courses and all that.

Ultra

"Ultra" as in "ultra portable." They run a low-power x86 CPU, such as a severely underclocked mobile i7 chip to eek out as much battery life as possible, but the primary drive is portability and long battery life. The transformer comes close, but it is quite underwhelming in terms of processing power and likely gets lumped in with "netbook" at that point.

He saw the Light

He saw the glow as he ascended to a Windows icon surrounded by light....

Patents

Either they didn't patent ALAC, or their patent is nearing expiration.

@TeeCee

"A load of enthusiast sites grab one, run a load of lightly threaded desktop/gaming benchmarks over it and find that, er, it's not very good at that sort of thing."

Actually, they ran a variety of heavy multi-threaded applications as well, to judge benefits of the "8 cores" vs the "4 core / 8 thread" of the i7 series chips. AnandTech is just one example. The sad part is that Bulldozer pulls close to the i7-2600K, but still falls behind the i7-980X (6 core, 12 thread). The even worse part is the i7-2600K can be OCed substantially with little effort, which then easily beats Bulldozer, which is already clocked so high as to only have another 200MHz of OCing headroom on air.

Therefore, it is not "execution" issues that have failed, it's their technology that isn't keeping up. Here's hoping their new tick-tock policy will keep them closer to Intel at a decent price-point. Sure, they're not grabbing the high-margin top-end, but volume and mid-market is where the revenue is at, which is where their supply issue comes into play. Unfortunately for AMD, where they're a K-series chip within range of an AMD chip, the K-series will win out easily for anyone willing to overclock, even by just 400MHz. A few of the locked-down chips still perform on-par or better than their AMD counterpart for everyday tasks, and meet or beat threaded performance as well.

Bulldozer was supposed to save AMD, but it hasn't. It's still clock-for-clock the same as a Phenom II, hidden by their high GHz settings, but has a better ability to multi-core and power gate. If they can compete price-wise by bringing costs and retail down, Bulldozer is strong enough to make AMD sit well in the bottom half of the market, which may be where they wanted to be all along. Performance crowns are expensive to keep, but if you can do nearly as good, but at a lot less cost, why not?

Even...

Agreed. Samsung has some nice products. Even though the Droid Charge is still running Android 2.2.1, it still looks nicer than an iPhone4, not to mention the feature set. The Galaxy Nexus easily stomps the 4S in RAM and screen resolution, but unfortunately has a 5MP camera instead of 8MP. :( Oh well, the joy of the Android ecosystem is that if a phone has some shortcoming you don't like, wait 3 months and buy the next device or pick a different handset from a different manufacturer. With the iPhone, you're stuck on the 4S specs for another year, waiting for the iPhone 5 to come out with it's woefully bog-standard feature set compared to other smartphones of the time. At least my phone comes with HDMI out and an SD card. :)

Prior Art

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp."

Apple

"...which will be outdated in 6 months (max),"

You, sir, don't follow Apple very well then. They take a full year to outdate their iDevices. In the Android world, phones go out of date within a few months.

Let's not forget that the company blatently dismissed this guy's warnings too.... (read the Aug 25th article)

One would wonder....

I wonder if a touch-screen security keypad (you know, the type that randomizes the grid of digits to press) infringes on this patent, since it shows "images" (of numbers) indicating the "gesture" (sequence of digits) one must enter in order to unlock a device (door). Obviously entirely NOT the original object of this patent, but can easily encompass based on the language.

Snapshots

Your snapshots can't guarentee consistancy on an Application level. A snapshot, when started, acts like the power was cut to the server. If you had an MSSQL server in the middle of a series of transactions when you started the snapshot, you're likely to get data corruption. Fortunately, I believe snapshotting is smart enough to wait for (a) file-write(s) to fully complete first before drawing the line in the sand, but I wouldn't stake my business VMs on it.

Backups are good copies of your data, be it databases in a consistant state, or even files in a consistant state (you saving the word doc along with it's autosave hidden file too?), not to mention the Operating System in a consistant state. Snapshots are nice, when timed to hit during non-peak times, but I still wouldn't trust them on my SQL servers for "backups."

Patch

They'll likely patch it...about as quickly, and accurately as they did with the Daylight Savings Time shifts....

Ah, will be missed.

"What operating system is it running?"

"Um, Vista."

"We're gonna die!"

@GrahamS

Great summary and answers Graham, but one thing overlooked:

"And you can always add some cloud storage on dropbox or box.net - physical SD cards are so 2009. box.net are currently offering 50GB cloud storage for free for life!"

Yes, start shoving /any/ of that 50GB across the 3G (oh, HPDSA+) of the iPhone with your "unlimited" (or not!) data plan. I'll take a high-speed microSD card any day of the week, since it will likely hold videos and music, or loads of snaps from that 8MP camera on the back....

In addition...

"Fine, but you can only access it via shitunes. FAIL!"

Perhaps that's why it "doesn't got a lot of stuff on it"

Obvious responses:

@Ainteenbooty: "In what possible manner did you determine that an iPad SHOULD be used in portrait?"

Just look at the unlock screen for one. Shows in landscape. Also, the camera (which should be on the top, right?) is only on the top if in landscape. Otherwise, your hand could potentially be blocking it (as it would be on the right or left, vertically centered). Then there's the whole connector locations bit that point it toward being meant for landscape. If you want to get software-specific, there are one or two screens that don't rotate out of landscape mode.

@patent argument:

If you notice something from the Netherlands case, the court ordered Apple and Samsung to reach a licensing agreement. What does this mean? It means APPLE WAS NOT PAYING ROYALTIES as it should have been. They've been using the 3G patents without having a license for them. Apple is definitely in the wrong there. Whether Samsung is asking a "fair price" is open for debate, but keep in mind the license amount has a range of "fair prices" set that they must abide by, so even picking the highest "fair price," it is still an agreed upon "fair price."

Don't worry....

Remember? The iPad2 was said to have a 2048x1536 display too. Knowing Apple, if you take the best screen resolution available for Android near the time of release, then knock a bit off or assume same resolution, you're likely going to be right:

iPad2 = 1024x768

Samsung GalaxyTab 10.1 = 1280x800.

Motorola Xoom = 1280x800.

So, the iPad2 falls into the "knock a bit off" category. (yes the Tab "released" a few weeks after the iPad2, but the Xoom existed well before).

For the obvious:

500GB-sized drive (assuming platter density gains of 6X as per the article) would scale and become a 3TB drive, based soley on same platter size with density gains.

Granted, for those who didn't catch this, the explaination will probably be lost on you as well.

Well....

"Samsung have not gone out of their way to place obvious logos on any of their recent devices"

You mean, besides the fairly large, obvious "SAMSUNG" logo they slap on the back of their device? Or if you're talking phones, the "SAMSUNG" logo they put on the front at the bottom... My Samsung Droid Charge looks nothing like an iPhone, esp with the big logo on the face....

Cant

Not only can you NOT play that, but you'll pay us $500 per device for the priviledge of us telling you "no."

That and...

Rather than calculating electricity costs in car polution because of the coal burned to make it, perhaps having nuclear reactors providing most of the power for a country, we can measure cuts in pounds of waste (which is likely to be significantly less than the pounds of CO2 polution just cited in the article).

Yep

VDI was designed to remove the cost of your end-points (including management and hardware) and put them in your datacenter. Considering each end-point in a "rendering" (read Maya or AutoCAD type renderings likely) saturates Gigabit ethernet to the desktop, why would you NOT assume that a measely bonded gigabit or quad gigabit would not get saturated when hosting tens of servers?

Form Factor

Careful though, the device is reasonably rectanglish and has rounded corners and a black frame surrounding the screen. Better not tip Apple off!

Or...

Just use your iPhone as the glorified iPod Touch that it is....you know, those things Android, et al users refer to MP3s? (iTunes converts them, so they can't be referred to as MP3s at that point).

Reading...

You did read that the memory reclaimed was due to a framework or methodology of detecting and squashing memleaks, right? It's not that they unload pages that are in the background or the like, simply fixing buggy code that leaves allocated mem floating unreferenced.

Yes, but...

Another reason the lay computer user can't/won't use Linux. If they download their lovely Chrome installer, how are they going to know they have to go into the properties and mark the file as executable? Perhaps have a helping info page "You're running Linux! Let me show you how you can run this program. Oh, you're running XFCE? Here's the instructions. Oh, Gnome, here's the OTHER instructions. Unity? Bah, open a terminal window (if you know how, or hit ctrl+alt+F2), and do a chmod u+x on the file (if you know where it is, likely somewhere in your ~ folder), then open it."

More secure? Sure. It just saves people from themselves because it doesn't hold their hand while walking them into an oncoming train.... But only 25% of /actual computer users/ would even be able to use it to a decent degree.

I do give Apple credit at making a *nix box that is at least usable by the masses. I just don't like their "culture."

Manned Space Exploration

Manned space exploration is all well and good, but with focusing primarily on robotic exploration, to be eventually followed by manned exploration, we could do so much more. Robots can withstand Mars, likely Venus (but not for too long), Titan, and a dozen other places, and do so at astoundingly cheaper mission costs, even if they sent TWO of each robot, just in case one failed/blows up/etc. We could do tens of missions simultaneously for the same cost as having an astronaut golf on the moon....

Once we get a decent set of building bots on Mars putting together a habitat or digging/finding a hole, THEN we can send some 'nauts up to put boot-prints on top of rover tracks. This will likely be the best method of space exploration. We won't even mention how horridly overpriced the monopoly of space launches has been. Elon has shown us that.

New Security Policy

Put all prototypes on a Kensington lock lanyard. But don't give the employee the code.

Done and Done.

Question of a question

"do typical variations in the sun's output have a greater or lesser effect on global climate than the accumulation of CO2 from all that fossil burning we're doing?"

One hates to answer a question with a question, but just consider what the CO2 in the atmosphere causes to be "trapped?"

Fat Tablets

There's a couple "run a full Win7/Linux" tablets out there. Two of the better ones are the MSI Windpad 110W and the Fujitsu Q550. Check them out before complaining about "glorified phone OSes" for your only options.

Trade dress or no....

"Samsung didn't say how much this spec will cost you, but you can save a bit by settling for a 14in screen or a Core i5 CPU."

Trade dress or no, it will likely "save a bit" compared to buying the Real Thing(tm).

Ribbons and statistics

Since the "most used" commands are likely Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V and the Delete key, I'm sure that will skew the weights for how often New Folder is selected from the context menu or Send To -> USB drive. I know that I WON'T use a fancy button on a ribbon for cut and paste, just because it's the "most used" commands or hotkeys. Newbies might love the visible button, and I know it will be a great feature to add to (listen Microsoft!) the touch GUI (yes, imagine that: a GUI designed for touch, as opposed to the "regular" GUI for keyboard+mouse). But we know MS doesn't listen to anything but TechNet subscribers....