benrobb

Step 1: Purchase iPad2 for $500

Step 2: Drop on tile floor to shatter screen

Step 2a: Sweep up shards of glass off the floor

Step 3: Call AppleCare and find out that it’s not covered under warranty since it was broken through “negligence”.

Step 4: Decide that Apple’s out of warranty repair option ($300) is too expensive to fix a device that costs $500 brand new.

Step 5: Purchase 3rd party touch screen digitizer replacement

Step 6: Spend your Saturday afternoon with a heat gun and a tiny plastic crowbar to prying out thousands of tiny shards of glass.

Step 7: Plug in new replacement screen

Step 8: Test new replacement screen and find out that only 30% of the screen is responsive to touch

Step 9: Recognize that you’re beyond your area of expertise

Step 10: Decide that maybe the $300 repair option might be your best remaining option

Step 11: Call AppleCare again and find out that the $300 repair option actually includes a replacement if they can’t fix it, and that an Apple Store will actually just swap you straight across for a new one, even though you already tried to fix it yourself

Step 12: Decide that the AppleStore is too far away and opt for the UPS shipping option

Step 13: Ship it back to Apple

Step 14: Get an email from Apple that says they’ve determined that they won’t actually fix it or replace it after all (no word about the $300 that you spent for them to fix it)

Step 15: Have a long and frustrating conversation with AppleCare and find out that they won’t actually replace or repair anything unless every shard of the original glass is still in its original place

Step 16: Wait for your $500 lump of junk to come from Apple since they generously ship the unfixed iPad back to you

And that is how you turn your iPad2 into a $500 lump of junk.

I’m slightly ashamed to say that I never really understood the concept of threads or cores before now.

I didn’t know what hyper-threading was, but I’d bought the hype that quad-core processors with 8 logical cores were spectacular.  As it turns out, they are, but now I know why.

Logical cores aren’t as powerful as physical cores, if you could squeeze 8 physical cores on a die, that would be better than 8 logicals, but until somebody figures out how to do that, I’ll stick with the logical ones.

Hyper threading just means that two processes can be operating on a single processor, though still not at the same time, which is why physical cores are better.  Hyperthreading just means that if one thread gets stuck waiting for something, and another thread is ready to go, the first one pauses to let the other one go past.  Kind of like a cargo train pulling onto a side-track so the bullet train can go past.

Motorola asks ITC, two federal courts to throw book at Apple.

Click through to see a chart illustrating all the currently ongoing lawsuits.  This is the second chart I’ve seen like this, but this one is easier to read.  It shows the relationships between all the companies suing each other over patents related to mobile devices.  Direction of the arrow indicates who is suing and who’s being sued.

Nokia seems to be the hub, followed by Apple.  Nokia is suing everyone (and their dog) while Apple is being sued by everyone (and their dog).  Surprisingly Kodak seems to be overly litigious and conspicuously absent from everything is Palm (now HP) who has yet to sue or be sued by anyone at all.

» Poll: Majority Oppose Net Neutrality Adoption – Big Government.

So yes, this pleases me.  I’ve noted before that I love the idea of net neutrality, but I’m not willing to let the government regulate one more aspect of my life in order to make it a reality.  Apparently the nation agrees with me.

I do, however, find it funny that things like this can sway elections and public opinion, when you read the details and find out the the poll was based on 800 people.  That’s 0.00026% of the population if you were wondering.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger Part 12.

There’s an process on Mac computers called ‘mds’ that shows up in Activity Monitor if you’re looking.  That process is Spotlight indexing your computer and it can sometimes use up quite a bit of CPU.

I’m saving this article for myself so that I can fix the issue if it gets too bad on my machine.