zaphoyd

I'd second this. In general, Apple hardware is not terribly expensive for what you get (assuming that you don't value things like software, industrial design, power efficiency, noise, compactness at zero because you personally are not interested in them).

A Hackintosh lets you get combinations of hardware that Apple doesn't sell. It also lets you add or remove features that Apple doesn't offer on any model such as replaceable components and large/loud/inefficient machines. In many cases this does end up being cheaper because you are purposely choosing to use fewer or lower quality components.

There are a few different kinds of issues that come up.

Software updates are a pain. Most of the time they work fine (especially now that Apple has more commodity hardware and public OS betas). Sometimes there are issues though and it is just always smart to wait a few months while they are figured out. If you are the sort that always wants to be running the latest OS version you'll find this frustrating or you'll spend a lot of time updating. My MacBook Pro was running Yosemite from day one. My hackintosh is still on 10.9.5. There are a few other minor software issues that come up.. iMessage is always a chore to get working.

On the hardware end you get much greater build to order flexibility. You are limited in hardware to largely things that Apple uses somewhere in their product line but this still gives you quite a few options since there are a few very useful combos that Apple just doesn't sell. My configuration is basically an iMac without a screen and with the Mac Pro graphics card. A Mac Pro would require me to buy ~$2000 of Xeon hardware and a second GPU, neither of which I need. An iMac would saddle me with a mobile GPU and non-replacable glossy screen. As a bonus I have 5 different internal SATA drives (with room for more) and a Blu-Ray burner.

That said, there are a lot of things about Apple hardware that I miss. I don't have any Thunderbolt ports though and the graphics card is full of legacy DVI ports instead of useful DisplayPort ones. The machine is large and uses way more power and throws off way more heat than an Apple machine. I had to do some careful design work to get something quiet and it is still not as quiet as Apple hardware. Sleep has never worked reliably. Boot screen support for my graphics card doesn't exist so I have to physically unplug video cables if I want to see what is happening during boot up (say if I want to reboot in Linux or Windows or from a recovery partition). The audio ports don't have the third contact for a headset like Apple's do so I need a USB headset.

Overall, as a desktop solution for home use, non-commercial software development, and gaming it lets you be more cost efficient with your computing hardware at the price of time spent researching and tinkering. Particularly so if your use case is one that Apple doesn't cater to like gaming or anything that thinness isn't a top priority. Once it was set up I don't tend to have problems. My hardware was ordered with Hackintosh compatibility in mind though. Problems typically tend to be clustered around OS upgrades or hardware changes rather than day to day issues (except for issues due to hardware constraints like sleep/wake and boot screens). It is otherwise pretty stable.

I'd never recommend it for a laptop, a non-technical person, anyone who has more money than time, or anyone who needs something reliable/with manufacturer support/help. I wish I could justify a Mac Pro for my use case but I can't at 3-4x the price. I have a MacBook Pro for serious work which lets me take on more risk of having the desktop out of commission due to any issues.

DisplayPort 1.2 can do a single stream 4k@60Hz display. The first batch of 4k displays to market used the tiling hack to get around some other limitations but these have been resolved in the most recent display iterations. ASUS PB287Q and Samsung U28D590D are both single stream 4K/60Hz using DisplayPort 1.2

While you can use a DisplayPort display with a Thunderbolt iMacs, you cannot use target display mode on a Thunderbolt iMac with a DisplayPort 1.2 PC (or pre-thunderbolt mac).

it might not be a one line change if you are on a version older than 7.31

there is some caching going on because the patch is so new, going into the gui and clicking manually refresh fixed it for me

correct.

How do I not get a voice plan? (tablet aside) Nearly all decent data plans (in the US at least) have a mandatory unlimited voice/SMS bundled.

In particularly large and decentralized organizations some of these more costly transactions do exist. I routinely prepare invoices for services we provide other departments and their accounting staff (yes we each have our own accounting staff x.x) cut an [electronic] check to my account.

Normally after the pedestrian countdown is finished the light turns yellow, then red for traffic moving in the same direction. Traffic in the perpendicular direction then gets a green light making it unsafe for pedestrians to cross.

The issue is that vehicles moving in the same direction as the pedestrians can also see the pedestrian countdown and can use that information to determine approximately how much longer their own vehicle light will remain green.

The article suggests that that different drivers interpret the countdown information differently than the green/yellow/red lights and more specifically, and unlike the colored lights, different drivers interpret the countdown timer differently (some see 3 seconds and speed up, others see 3 seconds and slow down).

Google maps / transit routing smartphone apps do a pretty good job of this. I've not had trouble coming into a new city, asking Google maps to give me mass transit directions and just following them.

Most cities have real time bus/train trackers now that help you plan when to leave so you don't have to wait long.

that is unfortunate considering they are using cloudflare... I wonder what the hacker news software does with IPv4 addresses that couldn't work behind the service described in the article.

IPv6 gives you the ability to make that choice for yourself rather than having it foisted upon you.

IPv6 mobile address portability attempts to keep your IPv6 address constant as you move around different wireless access points or LANs within a company or ISP network. It doesn't provide a globally static address or way to provide a static hostname.

Even with a static or mostly static IPv6 address the ability to have a dual stack dynamic hostname where both the v4 (that changes a lot) and the v6 (which might change less) is still useful. It is also obviously useful as you roam between office and home and such and want to keep a hostname constant.

In theory this setup would be perfect. In practice it is a nightmare because the software makes managing media split across multiple file systems that may or may not be available at any given time very hard. It is particularly bad within the Apple ecosystem. iPhoto really wants your entirely library in one folder on one disk. The iCloud photo stream options do well at syncing but cannot handle the model of store all my photos in the cloud and cache the recently taken/commonly used ones locally.

There are cloud services that solve this but they have their own set of issues. Many are expensive compared to basic direct/network attached storage, others require photos to be public, others come with dubious guarantees that they will still exist next year.

I get a call from my sister with a 128GB MacBook Air every month or two asking to remind her how to move her baby photos/videos to her external drive. Every time we do it I am surprised how complicated and error prone the process is (we've managed to accidentally permanently delete photos). If anyone has a good recommendation for an alternative to iPhoto (and not cloud based) that understands the concept of archiving photos to a network/usb disk that is not always present I would love to hear them.

The Qualys SSL Lab server test is also checking for Heartbleed now:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html

Not sure about the parent here, but I was certainly considering longer term. I would expect early on that there would be high tech tools and items brought on the ship or built form parts of the ship. Actually setting up local production from local resources (beyond what could be constructed on the ship) would probably take some time.

Longer term though.. is it practically/economically feasible to build and run a chip fab capable of building modern ARM CPUs for the needs of 10,000 people? What about the rest of the manufacturing chain for these sorts of devices? Or is the only reason we can buy a smartphone today for a few hundred dollars because of the economies of scale of building tens of millions of them on a 2 year replacement cycle?

A somewhat related question. How many people would it take to sustainably maintain current levels of technology if given time to prepare, the ability to bring all of our knowledge (but not realtime communication with Earth), and a reasonable starting set of tools?

Would a generation ship with 10,000 people still be able to build an iPhone when they arrived? A GPS satellite? Is it a matter of knowledge/ability to specialize or is it the economies of scale that make it possible to build compact high tech items?

Agreed. None of the options for accessing IPv4 only websites via IPv6 only hosts are great. If you are running an IPv4 only website or service this should hopefully worry you.

In this case, your network is probably doing NAT64 or you should be doing it.

For non-HTTPS web there is also: https://www.sixxs.net/tools/gateway/

TWC is definitely not as far along in their deployment. It might just take some more time. =\

Edit: If I recall correctly, when Comcast was doing their initial deployment they started with end nodes only (not delegating prefixes). Then moved to delegated /64s. Now are moving on to delegated /60s and more.

I have Comcast cable service in Chicago. I have an SB6120 modem and an Airport Extreme base station. I didn't do anything special beyond plug it in.

The Airport Base has an IPv6 page that shows what the delegated /64 subnet is. All the devices on my network have autoconfigured themselves with addresses in that range. I appear to be able to manually set hosts to any address in that range as well and it seems to work fine. I do this on some of my server VMs because otherwise they generate a new random address every few days (privacy mode woo). The privacy addressing makes assigning a DNS name to said VM more difficult. I've had the same /64 delegated to me since June 2012.

I've heard that you can request a /60 prefix (16 subnets) if your router supports IPv6 Prefix Delegation (pretty sure the Apple one doesn't). I don't know exactly how you go about doing that though. I'd probably start with the HSI forums on dslreports.com

The change from Jan to Feb 2014 alone is impressive:

Comcast: 20.61% -> 24.42%

AT&T: 13.53% -> 16.77%

Verizon Wireless: 40.03% -> 45.75%

Time Warner Cable: 3.88% -> 5.37%

T-Mobile USA: 9.58% -> 15.76%

Google Fiber: 71.87% -> 76.43%

I've been looking for a good book that teaches idiomatic C++11 programming from scratch. Something like Accelerated C++ or Programming: Principles and Practice Using C++ but using C++11/14 only. Lots of the C++11 books I've found have assumed you know C++98 and say what the differences are. Anyone have any suggestions?

Essentially yes. It is also wonderfully free of ads. =)

Any plans for IPv6 support?

Marginal Cost. IPv4 addresses are expensive, IPv6 practically free.

Direct addressability. Removes the need for slow, expensive intermediaries like NAT boxes and certain types of proxies by allowing security policies to be applied independently of network addressing.

Simplified network planning. Enough address space to make an address layout based on your actual needs rather than being forced to carve up your limited v4 allocation in weird ways. You no longer have to guess what the right long term size of your subnets are (they are always big enough) or worry about putting unrelated machines on the same subnet because you are out of space for new subnets.

Most ipv6 enabled home routers have firewalls with a "block all incoming connections except for listed exceptions" feature. This effectively gives you the same security as NAT but without the port mangling (can run multiple machines on the same port).

Large capacity media servers are something I think makes sense as a home appliance. I also think that if people end up willing to put their money where their mouths are that there will be a market for devices that provide cloud like services with the privacy of local hardware.

Re: security. Cloud services aren't doing a lot better. They are repeatedly broken into and have huge password lists stolen, many have governments have direct programs for extracting datas from them, and someone else can call up their customer support reps and practically ask for your password. Many effective security best practices amount to obscurity (change ssh port number). Large central services are very attractive and lucrative to hack.

yes and no. As long as you are able to get a globally routeable ipv4 address for your home at a reasonable price, no. Once you start being subjected to CGN (either or your end or on the remote end) or the price pressure of IPv4 in your region then you will have a reason. Namely cost and performance.

Because of this I would suggest that if you go router shopping that you should choose a model that supports IPv6 rather than not, even if you don't necessary care which you will end up using. Get a model with a good IPv6 firewall that you can tell to block all incoming connections.

Lastly, I think it is dangerous for "casual users" to say things like "I don't care about direct addressing of devices at home". I firmly believe that universal direct addressing will result in new innovation that might change your mind. :)