aiscott

I've done much the same with my 2009 MBP. I love that laptop.

However, something to keep in mind here is that the upgrades we have performed are built in to the retina MBP (SSD/Ram anyway).

The drive will be upgradable by third parties before too long, just like the Air. Ram is an issue... no real answer there except to max it out to start.

The meme should specify the headline is a statement with a question mark, rather than a proper question.

I.e. THIS POST TO BE DOWNVOTED?

Vs SHOULD THIS POST BE DOWNVOTED?

Well, you did come across as a dick. Go read the whole article this time, and look at the picture of their kid at the end.

I think your post was longer than the article. That makes you a dick and an imbecile.

Read up on the heroku architecture. These are the terms used.

The manual garbage collection wasn't the problem. An unexpected data structure created by garbage collection wasn't handled in a fault tolerant manner.

Yeah, flash is still super pricey. I run a pair as well in my mbp. The ability to configure lesser options to make it cheaper counts for something as well.

With Apple you are stuck with very few yet pricey base configurations to start from.

  They come in a lot cheaper than those new MBPs, too

Configured approximately the same as the cheaper Retina MBP, the verix cost $200 more than the retina macbook pros.

I say approximately because the mbp has 1600MHz ram vs 1333 in the verix, but I had to choose a 300GB SSD in the verix vs 256 in the mbp. As well, the verix option was for a 2.2GHz vs 2.3GHz of the MBP.

That was the cheaper MBP. Configuring the verix to match the costlier Retina MBP puts the Verix at $500 more.

I realize this is anecdotal, but my 2009 macbook pro 13 is in great shape. Screen, battery, and keyboard are all great. I've watched the new macbook pros come out for 3 years now, and I have felt no serious desire to upgrade.

The only thing the newer macbooks would beat mine on would be games, and I just don't play very many. When I do its usually casual like Plants vs Zombies or whatever.

It's lasted longer and fared better than any other laptop I've owned (14" vostro, 13" inch vaio, 17" HP). It has simply been the best laptop I've every owned.

I have done upgrades, the best of which being an SSD. Without that, I'm sure I'd be feeling the pain of old hardware. I pulled the optical drive out and moved my mechanical drive to that bay for extra storage.

The casing has a few very minor nicks, and I did take it in to the apple store to get new rubber "feet" a few months back (under warranty).

I love my macbook pro. Someday I'll upgrade again, if the logic board gives out or something. Probably to a new macbook pro. Perhaps not though, the other manufacturers are catching up with their ultrabooks.

This laptop has been the first computer I've owned where I haven't felt like I was "fighting" with it to get work done.

The "retina" display is the first thing they've done that has me actually wanting to buy new hardware.

I've never used a Thinkpad, though, so I can't say whether it would have fared better or not.

It's flash based, up to 768GB.

  massage beef Concords recliners

That is an awesome idea.

I imagine the drug atenolol would become popular among politicians.

Are you kidding? Have you seen a macbook logic board?

I switched a couple years ago. I started my switch with hackintoshing my vostro laptop. I did buy a copy of snow-leopard, but even so, it was probably not strictly legal.

Being relatively early in the hackintosh scene, a few things didn't work. Mainly the graphics weren't accelerated so all the nice animations in OSX looked crappy. But it afforded me the opportunity to use it as my main OS for a while before commiting to anything expensive.

I rather liked the OS and had started iPhone developing. As my vostro laptop got long in the tooth, I chose to upgrade to a MacBook Pro.

Still using that laptop today, in spite of two or three newer generations of apple laptops coming out. It's been very nice, for 32 months, no hardware issues. Last week, I've had a weird glitch where it switches to optical output when I remove headphones, and this has been annoying. I'll take it into the genius bar this weekend maybe.

Probably the nicest thing about it is that it hasn't felt it's age. In my daily usage, I doubt the experience would be any better on newer hardware than mine is now. Gaming would probably be another matter, but I generally just do casual gaming.

However, the infamous Walled Garden has been encroaching on the OSX space. That is something to give serious consideration to. It gives me pause. I've been thinking about giving linux a go again. Ubuntu has been giving me grief in vmware, but I'm going to see about dual booting.

Hard-copies endure. Digital, not so much. Checkout Jordan Mechner's recent archaeological expedition to retrieve some source code of his from 25 years ago (Prince of Persia). It was nearly lost, and that is only 25 years!

The digital world is ephemeral.

Pretty much any time I've become aware in a dream that I am dreaming, I wake up immediately. The one dream that I remember where I suddenly realized I was dreaming but didn't wake up went pretty awry. I became very confused in the dream trying to figure out if I was awake or not. It was disturbing.

Personally I don't like the idea of "image" based computing very much. I mean, it's fine in a lot of circumstances, but the file system provides a nice broadly compatible database that is consistent across programs.

I think the need for such a well defined and accepted user organizable data store isn't going away regardless of the underlying storage medium.

I like that my file system can be reasoned about in very concrete ways. I'm okay with using a tag based system like gmail, but I find it very flat and more difficult to organize vs traditional hierarchy of folders.

And btw, GET OFF MY LAWN!

His OP did specify surface area.

Was there a specific book you had in mind? There are 8 at the link.

Flame is not remotely in the same category as stuxnet.

The news agencies are confusing capability with complexity. Stuxnet was very targeted with insider information on esoteric industrial systems. It was designed to fly under the radar, cause damage to physical systems in such a way that it would appear to be from "wear and tear."

As I recall, stuxnet used some compiler shenanigans to obfuscate stackframes and make it difficult to decompile (after having first decrypted the executable code).

Flame is written in Lua! A scripting language! So to say that somehow Flame is going to be hard to analyze is absurd.

It's a 20MB package of the Lua VM, the scripts, and modules like sqlite. It's about as vanilla of an application as you can get!

They claim this 20MB package size is going to make it super duper hard to analyze, and yet they have the source code to look at, and while it's a decent size at 3k lines, it's SOURCE CODE. Not obfuscated machine language.

The coverage on this is just stupid.

Some good information on Flame is at http://www.securelist.com/en/blog/208193522/The_Flame_Questi... . It still has the absurd commentary, but at least it gives details on what is actually there.

I believe the intended meaning of compromise with regards to marriage is about not always getting "your way."

The ProAsic3 is a commercial FPGA. So no, it's not military. The military may use it, but that doesn't change that it is a commercial part built to commercial specifications.

To call it a military chip is inaccurate.

I do think it is unreasonable. With a SEM you only get to look at the surface of things, which is going to be either glass or metal or polysilicon. The only way to see a transistor in a sem is if you chemically remove all the top layers (which are the connections between transistors), or perform a cross section.

In the cross section case you are going to see a few dozen transistors out of the millions in a design of any complexity.

It would be remotely feasible to discover some sort of shenanigans if you knew the exact layout of the design, which would basically mean you are a foundry yourself. In that case you might get lucky and spot some difference between the mask you made, and the mask that was used to produce the part under inspection.

But the scales involved make this not believable to me. It would be roughly like scanning the whole of, say, America, and checking every street and intersection of every town, and comparing it against some known quantity to see if something changed in Springfield Missouri.

Maybe somebody could automate this, but the chemical processes for removing layers is less than perfect. Those strands of metal stretching across the ASIC have some built in tension, and if you remove the layer of glass above them, then tend to spring up and jumble. Good luck trying to do something with that.

I simply do not believe one could find a "back door" looking at a chip in a SEM. It sounds to me like you are describing destructive physical analysis whose purpose is to make sure requisite manufacturing practices are being followed.

I just downloaded. It seems nice I guess. The search is neat, but not a killer feature for me.

I still prefer Atomic Browser, mainly for the full screen capability. That is not so important on the iPad, but it makes for a nicer experience on the iPhone.

While the fragmentation such as it is really sucks for developers, I do see an upside.

It's a grand experiment with many competing designs, all striving to become the best and biggest (sounds like Osmos ;).

iPhone iterates down a closeted path. Innovation for iphone depends solely on the creativity at Apple. And while that is nothing to sneeze at, if some really left-field neato must-have innovative feature occurs, I think it's going to be found on Android first.

I believe this was the first deployment of solar arrays for spacex. The previous orbit was internal power only.

Yes, I agree, physical dexterity is a large task to surmount when learning. Possibly the largest, although this will vary from person to person.

I can see some neat applications for GTar, like illuminating different modes for a key.

As it is, gTar seems to me to be the hackertyper.net of guitars.

I tried to listen to one once. Just to see what it was about... It started out with Gruber cursing because Dan wasn't on yet or some reason. I gave it a few more minutes; it was like listening in on somebody's private conversation. I didn't get the allure of it at all and killed it.

I don't have the time to internet people chit-chat. I can't do it and work at the same time because I find it distracting. If it was somehow really great and I wanted to listen to it, the best I could offer would be downloading and playing it in the car on a long trip. Just ain't gonna happen.

Do things happen in the podcast that don't make it into a blog post somewhere?

Elon Musk tweeted that joke too. I find it pretty annoying, he's a senior staff engineer, and that is pretty rude to denigrate him in public like that. Hopefully they know each other well and it's a running joke or something.

I found the first demo inspiring, and I'm very much looking forward to where things will go.

Linus rubs people the wrong way all the time. It's just the way he is wired. He enjoys arguments and hyperbole. Once you understand that, you can choose to accept that and interact with him without undue suffering, or not.