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Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

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Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#61

Post by blhack »

econgeeker wrote: post #53
blhack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make that three geeks. I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the wireless network that covers my company's campus. The iPad is a wonderful tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS locations. Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API for getting wifi signal st…

Wait, did you want to hack together a solution, or sell something in the App Store? You can run any software you want on your devices without Apple caring at all. Either your company is an enterprise licensee, or you pay your $99. Big deal. $99 keeps the script kiddies out-- you know the ones who download iOS betas to show their friends and then complain that they managed to brick their device?

It's depressing to me that you would say something like this. Please tell me that you don't really believe this?

$99 keeps the script kiddies out? Excuse me? I've been running software written by "script kiddies" for my entire life, to great success. It's very likely that you have too. So has the rest of the world. Most of the internet runs on software written by those meddling "script kiddies".

That computer you've got your hands in front of right now? You need to spend $99 to run a web browser on it. You also need to write the web browser yourself.

Keeps those pesky script kiddies out, you see.

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#62

Post by YooLi »

blhack wrote: post #40
geoka9 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think that at least geeks would be appalled by Apple and avoid their products because of this. But every geek I know (save one or two) is raving about their Apple gadgets.

You can make that three geeks. I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the wireless network that covers my company's campus. The iPad is a wonderful tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS locations. Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API for getting wifi signal st…

What are you talking about? You can write whatever you want for your device. You just can't sell whatever you want in Apple's store, but that is something completely different that using whatever API you want.

Edit: 1. I don't think you know what a script-kiddie is, 2. Your replies make no sense to the context of any msgs you are replying to.

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#63

Post by blhack »

YooLi wrote: post #62
blhack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make that three geeks. I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the wireless network that covers my company's campus. The iPad is a wonderful tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS locations. Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API for getting wifi signal st…

What are you talking about? You can write whatever you want for your device. You just can't sell whatever you want in Apple's store, but that is something completely different that using whatever API you want. Edit: 1. I don't think you know what a script-kiddie is, 2. Your replies make no sense to the context of any msgs you are replying to.

Do you write your own kernel patches? Who wrote your userland?

Software is about communities and if you don't know this, you haven't been paying attention for the last 30 years.

Software is about standing on the shoulders of the people who came before you. If every developer has to write their own stack, and every developer has to pay $99 for the right to do so, we'd still be in the 70s.

How the hell do people honestly think that this is a valid excuse?

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#64

Post by YooLi »

lukeschlather wrote: post #41
ddw wrote: post #29

It would be interesting if Cisco will take advantage of this in any way to allow the control of their networking devices. Not that it's too hard to plug in with an old laptop, but still, the iPad is convenient. It's a little confusing to me why Apple makes it so hard for people to use their devices in customer specific ways like this cable. I read a while back that TV networks like CNN and ESPN were using iPads to co…

People use old laptops, as I understand it, because the USB adapters aren't incredibly reliable at acting like a real serial port. I can't imagine that the emulation this does would be more stable than USB adapters that have had years to iron out the kinks.

The iPhone has serial lines in the 30-pin port. This just gives you access to them. No USB-serial emulation.

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#65

Post by blhack »

econgeeker wrote: post #54
endgame wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Four geeks. Proprietary control (at the software or hardware level) isn't some abstract bogeyman that only Free Software Hippies need to worry about. It's a very real threat.

Except that Apple doesn't exercise any proprietary control, except if you want to sell in the App store. If you just want to hack on your hardware, Apple doesn't care. You might void your warranty, but that's it. Apple keeps the consumers protected, and doesn't stop the hackers. This "very real threat" is literally an imaginary bogeyman that only "Free[1]" Software Hippies care about. [1] So long as you use our licen…

>I've never met a real geek who thought Apple was exercising proprietary control outside of their realm. All of the people who complain about Apple like this-- that I know personally-- are not geeks who got into linux (and the "free" ideology) because it was cool, not because they're really hackers with engineering skills.

Is this a joke?

The real hackers are...apple fans, and the people who got into linux because they thought it was cool are all a bunch of posers?

M. Night Shyamalan, is that you?

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#66

Post by blhack »

YooLi wrote: post #62
blhack wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make that three geeks. I got pretty upset earlier this week. I wanted to do a site-survey of the wireless network that covers my company's campus. The iPad is a wonderful tool for this, you'd think. It has a wifi chip, and a GPS. What I wanted was to drive around and pair signal strengths with GPS locations. Except I can't do this on my iPad because Apple doesn't want me to. The API for getting wifi signal st…

What are you talking about? You can write whatever you want for your device. You just can't sell whatever you want in Apple's store, but that is something completely different that using whatever API you want. Edit: 1. I don't think you know what a script-kiddie is, 2. Your replies make no sense to the context of any msgs you are replying to.

Do you think that econgeeker intends "script kiddie" to mean "teenage who downloads what they believe to be hacking software like back orifice or aol punters to their windows machine"?

What am I missing about the meaning of the word? The classic definition doesn't make any sense in the context of those posts.

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#69

Post by marvin »

noonespecial wrote: post #45

Android: The $49/Night hotel with the free continental breakfast and free wifi. (But there might be roaches in the rooms) Ipad: The $349/Night hotel that charges you $25 if you open the little fridge and $45/hour for the wifi that never quite works. (But the elevators have chrome, move fast and are never out of order. No roaches.) There's no reason in the world that a $350 room shouldn't come with free wifi and snack…

This is completely off topic, but you know that VOSS water? It comes from a place in Norway called Voss, about an hour from where I live. The people who live at Voss have actual VOSS water coming from their tap. True story.

To be sure, VOSS actually DOES taste much better than most other bottled water, and leagues better than tap water does in most cities. If it's worth 15 dollars might be another question. That was today's trivia fact.

Re: Serial cable for iPod approved by Apple

#70

Post by Aqua_Geek »

econgeeker wrote: post #56
st3fan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, your device does not actually get full serial port access. Instead Apple provides a protocol made up of data packets that you can send to and from your device. These packets must be signed by a little crypto chip that you have to license from Apple. Yes, very tight control. A device like this is not simply a cable. It actually contains a little micro-controller that reads and writes Apple's s…

You're making an assumption that he overhead is the cause of the speed. There's no serial port on the iOS device connector. So it isn't really as you represent. The iOS device connector has a USB client port. This requires the other side of the connector to be a USB host. Thus to make this cable ,they have to put in a little micro controller that has a USB host port (which many of them don't since micro controllers a…

There's no serial port on the iOS device connector.

http://pinouts.ru/PortableDevices/ipod_pinout.shtml

More than likely, this device is NOT emulating a serial port via USB.

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