I'd say people have less buying power. Look at salaries for various professions in any field in the '90s, and compare to today. They essentially have not moved upwards, except for law based professions. However, law always has been like that where a J.D. is a guaranteed income for life.
Even more basic. Look at cars. Compare what types of cars people bought when graduating college in the 80s and 90s to what they buy today. Today, I see a lot of Honda Fits, Ford Focuses, Mazda 3 series, and other subcompacts, where just 10 years ago, the roads were crammed with SUVs, sports cars, and luxury cars.
Don't forget that college was *MUCH* cheaper 10 or 20 years ago. A public school's tuition would run $1000 a semester in the early 90s. Now it is easily ten times that in some places. Private schools even more so. So, graduates are coming out with $50,000 worth of student loan debt, as most scholarships have dried up, or only cover a small portion of what comes in. To boot, there are not jobs available for people to work their way through college. What once were entry level jobs intended for people who graduated high school are taken by college grads. So, for a lot of people, student loans are the only way they can get their degree.
So, someone coming out of college at 22 has a lot worse time than someone who graduated in the past. They have a large chunk of student loan debt. The starting income is the same as 10 years ago, except inflation has chewed a good chunk of that away. There is no guarantee of work once getting a diploma [1].
[1]: The only way to really stack the odds in your favor is to run internships, paid or unpaid, so a graduating senior has something more than just a diploma in his hand.
If you have been in IT a while, you learn things that you never thought of when starting off.
When you start in IT, you think on a tactical basis. You need a server up, so you reach for the RHEL media, install it, make sure RAID works, install all patches, set users, put the application on it and go to your next project.
As times go on, you start thinking on more than just that level. You learn to start thinking strategically. You know that the default filesystem may bring the box down, so you do a custom filesystem so if/var fills up, it won't cause things to grind to a screeching halt. Or, you figure out a standard imaging process so each box, be it Linux, Windows, Solaris, or what have you has patches, security profiles and other items that differ from company to company built in. As you gain experience, you don't just rush out and build an x86 box when you need another server. You install VMWare on the hardware and install the box in a VM. This way, when your boss decides to move to blade enclosures, it is a matter of just a move of some VMDK files as opposed to major brain surgery with a production application.
None of this stuff is immediately apparent when starting in IT. You learn from mistakes. You think a firmware upgrade of some disks can be done in 5 min + a reboot, only to find that it caused the machine to kernel panic on bootup, and have to back the changes off. Or you might have tested your disaster recovery plan with tons of restores... but forgot to back up the license keys for the backup server, and find that everything is ground to a halt with trying to get data pushed until the maker of the software ships new keys... and all the while the clock is ticking. You take the molly guard off the big red button to get enough clearance to get a server by... forget to put it back on, then some junior admin's derriere EPOs the data center.
If one looks at the average pay a graduating college student gets for a job in the early 1990s, compared to what they get now, the figures have barely budged. In fact, graduating college doesn't mean employment is waiting once a person has their diploma.
If you are an operator, it is fairly easy. Look for lights on servers that glow differently from others, run a script or two, clean packets dropped on the floor by the N5ks and N7ks, pass any complicated stuff to L2, and dig out a good beer from the stash in the CRAC's cooling duct.
If you are a junior admin, it is easy to hard, depending on how much stuff falls on your plate. On more staffed places, it might be just basic system maintaining and pushing out profiles, and handling calls from users.
If you are a senior admin, or an admin at a small company, your job requires as much as any engineer. Capacity planning, security (physical or network, internal or external), risk in general, disaster recovery scenarios, automating tasks, having a real time alert system in place, future expansion, dealing with other departments like development to make sure it is budgeted not just what they need now, but down the road, offsite disaster recovery centers, log management and archiving, handling motions of discovery, infrastructure planning, and so on. So, because of all the knowledge picked up (and this is NOT stuff you can learn in college for the most part), a senior IT admin is on an equal footing with engineers most of the time. Don't forget trying to do all of this while in meetings.
If the carriers win over Apple, it will be a black day. Regardless if you love Apple or hate them, having the carrier dictate the terms of what goes on the device is not a good thing.
First, user interfaces. Do we want every device sporting a new UI just so carrier "A" can look different from "B"? I don't want to have to twiddle a spinning cube to find the app I need, nor use some oddball UI only made just to be different.
Second, crapware. On the iPhone, it does need activation, but it doesn't require anything more than that. Motorola phones have to be tied to an E-mail account (which gets a full mirror of all your contacts and other data) before they can be used for anything other than dialing 911.
Third, markets. I'm sure each carrier will want its own app market. One CDMA carrier on Windows Mobile smartphones (not PDAs) used to force all app makers to purchase a key from them for over $1000 if they wanted their apps to run on their device. In most cases, more markets would be a good thing, but in this scenario, each cellular provider would have their own walled garden separate from everyone else's. Add exclusive licensing restrictions preventing a developer from selling their app in more than one cellular provider's marketplace, and you will find that you might have to buy your phone and choose your carrier depending on which of them carried the app you needed for your business.
Apple won't be dropping the MicroSIM tray anytime soon. Instead, if they are aiming to have a device for China, they will need it to support R/UIM cards, if they are choosing to go that route.
Yes, it is possible for Apple do do a baseband redesign. However will it be profitable for them to switch to a protocol that won't gain them anything in bandwidth [1]? Perhaps in other markets, but not the US.
[1]: Since CDMA2000 1X Advanced isn't here yet, moving to current CDMA is going to cause a loss of features -- namely the ability to talk and use IP functions at the same time.
When the original iPhone came out, 3G was not widespread. It was in some metropolitan areas, just like Clear is now, but it was not available outside of large cities. Because of this and the lag time between getting the phone designed versus hitting the market, Apple apparently decided to make it EDGE only.
Apple is not going to put out an iPhone next year that will be LTE capable for a similar reason. As of now, there is only one LTE network up and running in one town, and only one dumbphone can take advantage of it. It is going to take at least two years for LTE to be widespread. Apple will not release a device until LTE is commonplace.
So, expect the next year's iPhone not to be revolutionary, but evolutionary; like how the 3GS is over the 3G. It will sport an antenna redesign. Most likely it will get a capacity bump to 64GB, and perhaps a slight boost in the MHz department.
IIRC, 4G is technically voice and data on the same stack. The dedicated radio needed for voice is replaced by VoIP.
Of course, this brings in some issues: Phones need to do QoS so if someone is yapping on the device while doing a hefty torrent, the conversation doesn't get interrupted.
The iPhone will not be coming to Verizon anytime soon, no matter how many people post wishful texts onto Macrumors about it:
1: Even with LTE out, it will be years before previous protocols (GSM, CDMA) will be made completely redundant. Even now, if I go to rural areas, phones fall back to EDGE or even GPRS. Until LTE completely replaces GSM and CDMA, you won't find an iPhone on Verizon. Otherwise it would have to fall back to something, and that would be CDMA.
2: Apple is not going to put in CDMA in their devices. It is an obsolete "3G" protocol, and makes about as much sense as putting in AMPS back in phones. If Apple did CDMA, it wouldn't be in the US. The US's CDMA protocol is deliberately crippled and incompatible with the "real" standards. Other countries with CDMA like China use R/UIM cards for their devices (similar functionality as SIM cards.) It will be understandable for Apple to do CDMA for these markets, but not in the US where they are thriving with GSM based equipment.
3: Why would Apple bother with Verizon? T-Mobile would make far more sense because it would take another band for T-Mo's 3G, but it wouldn't take a completely new antenna. Also, Verizon showed Apple the door in the past. I doubt they will get a second chance.
So because it would require Apple to add another antenna into an already packed device, CDMA is not going to happen, unless Apple is gunning for a market where CDMA is a requirement.
I have a Droid X on my desk right by my iPhone. I have yet to use V-cast or Bing, and I have used the Google App Store to purchase a number of apps to make life easier. Android and Verizon have their faults, but access to the App Store isn't one of them.
1: Would be spy working for company "A" calls up someone at company "B" who competes with "A" saying they have some cool secrets. 2: Company "B" notifies company "A" about the would be spy. 3: Would be spy gives the juicy stuff to what he/she thinks is someone who will pay him/her big bucks. 4: ????? 5: No big bucks happen; would be spy ends up with shiny new metal bracelets on wrists and a new domicile.
The problem is this: Even though two companies might be bitter rivals, they may be just as well served outing unsolicited offers for trade secrets as in keeping them, especially for being able to trumpet how honorable they are in PR releases.
Another reason why Country X burned the guy -- he could have either been bringing them disinformation, or it could be someone trying to show that Country X buys info. Either way, Country X's consulate made the best decision by outing the guy.
This is a double edged sword. I see good uses, then I see this used to try to execute search warrants, saying that anything in someone's domicile is in "plain view".
Of course the voyeurs will also love opaque viewing technology too.
What makes FB tolerable is the ban app button. Not just hiding the "Hey, blahblah needs help with getting fertilized" from one app, but making sure those apps don't have a chance to land on your profile.
For people who rattle on about politics, the Hide button works well there. I don't care if someone is on the left or the right... I just don't care about rants from either side.
For people who are too stupid to clean their profile out of spammy apps with fake like buttons and other crap in efforts to infect other people, I just drop them in a group with no access. This way, they still think they are friends, and I can undo the action later on without having to re-friend them.
People who tag pictures that are not me also get the good old fashioned block. Life is too short to deal with flaming rectums.
What can I buy then in the Android segment? The N1 has to be imported in for a price and is last generation's technology. The ADP1 and ADP2 are antiques and won't be able to run Android 3.x in any meaningful capacity? It is easy to say, "don't buy this", but when one finds there are no modern developer-friendly devices, it gets hard. Especially because Android 3.x should be due soon and will be needing a significant hardware boost than what most devices have now.
When I rooted my Droid X, all it took was a replacement of the Busybox executable to give me all the tools I needed. It isn't Maemo, but I have pretty much everything but gpg and mutt available [1].
An iPhone just doesn't require just an exploit to UID 0, it requires one to get out of the BSD jail() with root. It also requires the jailbreak to install a complete userland including an install system (dpkg), shells, an app (Cydia) to manage everything. Even worse, the jailbroken Mobile Terminal app is barely usable, and has to be hunted down from a repo, as the one that comes as default from Cydia does not work on iOS 4.
This doesn't say that the iPhone is bad; it means that a jailbreak on this device is a lot harder to do elegantly than rooting an Android phone.
[1]: Even in the days of Web applications aplenty, there is no faster mail reader than mutt on a decently responsive system, especially if the spool file is local.
The problem is that no Android phone since the Nexus 1 has allowed rooting. Motorola has told modders and developers to go elsewhere explicitly. HTC has always given out source, drivers, and access to dumps so people could easily mod their devices. However because of pressure from the cellular companies, they had to cave in and start making their devices modder hostile.
It would be nice to have a phone that is unlocked and friendly to modders. Problem is that the N1 crashed and burned, and no carrier would want to carry such a device. Likely the only future solution will be having Google carry ADP phones that are unlocked/moddable versions of existing phones, although there has not been an ADP since the ADP2 (the N1 technically does not count.)
This is why I'd like some type of thing akin to a seal and a printed notice, "warranty void if seal opened". The N1 had this when flipping on OEM unlock.
Perhaps this is the best compromise. To keep Joe Sixpack from getting exploited by a Dancing Bunnies exploit, what would be ideal is to require ADB to be installed, a command issued from the PC that would pop up a lengthy, scary as hell to uneducated users that they are about to cross into Mordor, and that they can easily back out right now with no harm done, or proceed and void their warranty. Some warning dialog that even someone who is drunk, baked, high, coked up, and tripping has a good chance of understanding. User clicks "proceed", fastboot is opened, signature checking is relaxed to allow any keys to sign recovery, boot, and OS ROMS, ro.secure is set to 0,/bin/su is enabled and a.apk file for the confirmation part of su installed.
Of course, there would be a method to put this all back and shut the barn door if the user wants to have the phone back for service, similar to a DFU reinstall on iOS devices, but that will be buried in the fine print. This way, if someone does hose up their phone, it isn't hard to get them back to a known good OS level.
There is the fallacy of "this isn't a 100% solution, so why bother?"
If it were up to me, I'd probably implement a solution that went into one place I worked at. They had a private network (only accessible to the dedicated machines, and the corporate network. To bridge the two, they had one machine on the private network which grabbed data from the controllers, then turned it into XML, and pushed it through a serial connection that physically only allowed Tx (Rx was cut) to another machine. The machine on the corporate network had a daemon that read the stream, broke the XML objects up and pushed them to a database where the PHBs could view their report on a Web page, or get an Excel spreadsheet generated on demand.
Of course, the data pushed through the serial cable was not that much. If it were data that was more than kilobits per second, this setup would not work. However, since it was a low bandwidth item, this essentially kept the network with the juicy stuff airgapped from the rest of the world.
Ford had a prototype of a car that used a small reactor, the Nucleon. It was scuttled because at the time they were expecting lighter radioactive shielding materials which never were made.
For cars, I'd wouldn't go with a live reactor. Mainly because all it would take is one drunk driver to cause a mini Chernobyl.
However, the small reactors do have a number of uses that would improve life, once the technology improved to the point where the devices were essentially batteries that could be dropped into place and left with little to no maintaining:
1: Backup electric generators for buildings. Drop one in, and this could provide clean power for a data center. Since the fuel is spent regardless of an outage or no, in normal use, the reactor could put electricity on the grid 24/7 offsetting the electric bill costs. This way, data centers could be located anywhere, not just dependent on the power grid.
2: Reactors for gas stations when autos move to a complete electric infrastructure. Eventually there will be a time where gasoline phases out, so the underground tanks can be replaced by reactors for fast charge "fill-ups". This also can be fed back onto the grid to help if the main municipal power sources go out.
3: Desalination plants. As water needs only becomes more dire, coupling a reactor with gigantic desalination plants and large pipelines to move water inland will become critical for agriculture.
4: Thermal depolymerization. "Boiling" plastic to break it down back into short chain crude takes a lot of energy. However, it means that we can take landfills that burble with methane, run the garbage through various sorting machinery to filter out metals and such, then "cook" the plastic and animal refuse with usable crude as a result, ready for use for plastic making again. On a larger scale, ships could be doing this in the Pacific Gyre to obtain usable oil. Oil is well past peak, so it might not be a green thing to do, but actually profitable when gasoline starts hitting $8.00 a gallon.
5: Large scale weather modification. Doing something like massive jets of water out in the ocean to get more water vapor in the air so it rains can mean the different in having a drought inland versus a productive agricultural season.
6: Ability to inhabit otherwise uninhabitable places. As populations increase, there essentially are only three ways to deal with it. Wars for land, expand into space, or try to make areas like Antarctica or the Outback livable.
This is good sense right here. If a user actually needs port 25, and not 587 or 465 (for SMTP over SSL), they at least should explicitly fill out an online form with the ISP saying they take full responsibility for it, then be granted access.
The best of all worlds would be a firewall application that the user can admin via a Web site. By default, it keeps all incoming traffic from the subscriber's IP address, but can be configured to allow stuff (say incoming ssh connections), or perhaps disabled altogether if the user knows what he or she is doing. It also would block by default all outgoing traffic other than VPNs to known hosts, POP/IMAP, E-mail being injected via 587,HTTP, HTTPS, ssh, and known games (and the servers/ports) they connect to. This way, most ISP users wouldn't know or care that the outgoing port filter is in place, clued users can modify it or turn it off, and botnets wouldn't be able to do much other than spam page requests or SSL setups/teardowns. If the ISP had more time, perhaps it would have a more active IDS in place to detect a DDoS (with very sane limits) and stop it. Everyone benefits.
If it were up to me, I'd just shunt the customer to a remediation server that has downloads of some decent AV utilities.
Physical example: If an apartment complex in a good section of town had a tenant who took the door off his place, let all kinds of transients in to clog up the toilet so the sewage ran off the balcony, left crack pipes all around the facility, and had people trying nearby apartments to see if they could break in, that tenant would be history. Same with ISPs. Why should an ISP have to deal with the fallout due to a customer who cannot follow basic security precautions?
Everyone makes mistakes and even the pros get hacked, so a warning should be given obviously. However, network security comes first before some subscriber's pr0n habit, so if they can't or won't fix a botnet, then they get axed and either download utilities to address the problem from a remediation server, get their PCs reinstalled, or move to a more malware-unfriendly platform.
Making Joe Sixpack responsible for his own security is a good thing in the long run. As of now, there are no consequences for him to allow his machines to become a server for botnets. He doesn't see the damage he is doing with his neglect. However, if it is made known to him that he will be cut from the boobie pics if he continues to display gross negligence, he might actually update his copy of Norton or ask a friend about some strange software called Firefox and AdBlock.
Any sane enterprise has a mechanism in place where their network fabric will contain a segment if the IDS detects a definite threat.
This really shouldn't be a question -- ISPs should mitigate damage done by customers with poor or no security. It is debatable to stick the customer with the bill for cleanup, but it might be a good idea so Joe Sixpack actually learns to either zip up his fly or pay someone to do it for him. Perhaps a warning or two, then start billing for the janitor work.
We are already there. Take laptop batteries or batteries for phones. There are so many different types of batteries. It would be nice to have a standard across all of them, but device makers rather engineer (or have the fellas over in China do the designing) the battery around the object than making something around standard size cells.
Of course we do have battery waste from these because in a year or so, the warranty on laptop batteries expire and shortly after, the batteries themselves do. Perhaps the way to combat the problem of these polluting landfills is a deposit similar to what sane countries have on bottles so they end up being recycled. Or the laptop is chucked and the batteries can't be used in a new one.
Here in Texas, we have single stream recycling, where everything recyclable gets put into one bin, then gets separated out at the plant. Austin, Dallas, and Houston all have this, and for two out of the three cities, it actually turns a profit. The third city signed a really poor contract with three times the processing fees as the other two cities, otherwise it would actually be receiving a check from the recycler as well.
I think most Asian countries are playing the three-monkey card because they are trying to get their economies moving due to this recession, and they just do not want to see military conflict happen. No country in the Pacific Rim wants to see a replay of "The Guns of August" in their neck of the woods.
If Asia destabilized, it would make the Middle East chaos look like a mere bar-fight.
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I'd say people have less buying power. Look at salaries for various professions in any field in the '90s, and compare to today. They essentially have not moved upwards, except for law based professions. However, law always has been like that where a J.D. is a guaranteed income for life.
Even more basic. Look at cars. Compare what types of cars people bought when graduating college in the 80s and 90s to what they buy today. Today, I see a lot of Honda Fits, Ford Focuses, Mazda 3 series, and other subcompacts, where just 10 years ago, the roads were crammed with SUVs, sports cars, and luxury cars.
Don't forget that college was *MUCH* cheaper 10 or 20 years ago. A public school's tuition would run $1000 a semester in the early 90s. Now it is easily ten times that in some places. Private schools even more so. So, graduates are coming out with $50,000 worth of student loan debt, as most scholarships have dried up, or only cover a small portion of what comes in. To boot, there are not jobs available for people to work their way through college. What once were entry level jobs intended for people who graduated high school are taken by college grads. So, for a lot of people, student loans are the only way they can get their degree.
So, someone coming out of college at 22 has a lot worse time than someone who graduated in the past. They have a large chunk of student loan debt. The starting income is the same as 10 years ago, except inflation has chewed a good chunk of that away. There is no guarantee of work once getting a diploma [1].
[1]: The only way to really stack the odds in your favor is to run internships, paid or unpaid, so a graduating senior has something more than just a diploma in his hand.
If you have been in IT a while, you learn things that you never thought of when starting off.
When you start in IT, you think on a tactical basis. You need a server up, so you reach for the RHEL media, install it, make sure RAID works, install all patches, set users, put the application on it and go to your next project.
As times go on, you start thinking on more than just that level. You learn to start thinking strategically. You know that the default filesystem may bring the box down, so you do a custom filesystem so if /var fills up, it won't cause things to grind to a screeching halt. Or, you figure out a standard imaging process so each box, be it Linux, Windows, Solaris, or what have you has patches, security profiles and other items that differ from company to company built in. As you gain experience, you don't just rush out and build an x86 box when you need another server. You install VMWare on the hardware and install the box in a VM. This way, when your boss decides to move to blade enclosures, it is a matter of just a move of some VMDK files as opposed to major brain surgery with a production application.
None of this stuff is immediately apparent when starting in IT. You learn from mistakes. You think a firmware upgrade of some disks can be done in 5 min + a reboot, only to find that it caused the machine to kernel panic on bootup, and have to back the changes off. Or you might have tested your disaster recovery plan with tons of restores... but forgot to back up the license keys for the backup server, and find that everything is ground to a halt with trying to get data pushed until the maker of the software ships new keys... and all the while the clock is ticking. You take the molly guard off the big red button to get enough clearance to get a server by... forget to put it back on, then some junior admin's derriere EPOs the data center.
If one looks at the average pay a graduating college student gets for a job in the early 1990s, compared to what they get now, the figures have barely budged. In fact, graduating college doesn't mean employment is waiting once a person has their diploma.
It really depends on the IT position:
If you are an operator, it is fairly easy. Look for lights on servers that glow differently from others, run a script or two, clean packets dropped on the floor by the N5ks and N7ks, pass any complicated stuff to L2, and dig out a good beer from the stash in the CRAC's cooling duct.
If you are a junior admin, it is easy to hard, depending on how much stuff falls on your plate. On more staffed places, it might be just basic system maintaining and pushing out profiles, and handling calls from users.
If you are a senior admin, or an admin at a small company, your job requires as much as any engineer. Capacity planning, security (physical or network, internal or external), risk in general, disaster recovery scenarios, automating tasks, having a real time alert system in place, future expansion, dealing with other departments like development to make sure it is budgeted not just what they need now, but down the road, offsite disaster recovery centers, log management and archiving, handling motions of discovery, infrastructure planning, and so on. So, because of all the knowledge picked up (and this is NOT stuff you can learn in college for the most part), a senior IT admin is on an equal footing with engineers most of the time. Don't forget trying to do all of this while in meetings.
If the carriers win over Apple, it will be a black day. Regardless if you love Apple or hate them, having the carrier dictate the terms of what goes on the device is not a good thing.
First, user interfaces. Do we want every device sporting a new UI just so carrier "A" can look different from "B"? I don't want to have to twiddle a spinning cube to find the app I need, nor use some oddball UI only made just to be different.
Second, crapware. On the iPhone, it does need activation, but it doesn't require anything more than that. Motorola phones have to be tied to an E-mail account (which gets a full mirror of all your contacts and other data) before they can be used for anything other than dialing 911.
Third, markets. I'm sure each carrier will want its own app market. One CDMA carrier on Windows Mobile smartphones (not PDAs) used to force all app makers to purchase a key from them for over $1000 if they wanted their apps to run on their device. In most cases, more markets would be a good thing, but in this scenario, each cellular provider would have their own walled garden separate from everyone else's. Add exclusive licensing restrictions preventing a developer from selling their app in more than one cellular provider's marketplace, and you will find that you might have to buy your phone and choose your carrier depending on which of them carried the app you needed for your business.
Apple won't be dropping the MicroSIM tray anytime soon. Instead, if they are aiming to have a device for China, they will need it to support R/UIM cards, if they are choosing to go that route.
Yes, it is possible for Apple do do a baseband redesign. However will it be profitable for them to switch to a protocol that won't gain them anything in bandwidth [1]? Perhaps in other markets, but not the US.
[1]: Since CDMA2000 1X Advanced isn't here yet, moving to current CDMA is going to cause a loss of features -- namely the ability to talk and use IP functions at the same time.
When the original iPhone came out, 3G was not widespread. It was in some metropolitan areas, just like Clear is now, but it was not available outside of large cities. Because of this and the lag time between getting the phone designed versus hitting the market, Apple apparently decided to make it EDGE only.
Apple is not going to put out an iPhone next year that will be LTE capable for a similar reason. As of now, there is only one LTE network up and running in one town, and only one dumbphone can take advantage of it. It is going to take at least two years for LTE to be widespread. Apple will not release a device until LTE is commonplace.
So, expect the next year's iPhone not to be revolutionary, but evolutionary; like how the 3GS is over the 3G. It will sport an antenna redesign. Most likely it will get a capacity bump to 64GB, and perhaps a slight boost in the MHz department.
IIRC, 4G is technically voice and data on the same stack. The dedicated radio needed for voice is replaced by VoIP.
Of course, this brings in some issues: Phones need to do QoS so if someone is yapping on the device while doing a hefty torrent, the conversation doesn't get interrupted.
The iPhone will not be coming to Verizon anytime soon, no matter how many people post wishful texts onto Macrumors about it:
1: Even with LTE out, it will be years before previous protocols (GSM, CDMA) will be made completely redundant. Even now, if I go to rural areas, phones fall back to EDGE or even GPRS. Until LTE completely replaces GSM and CDMA, you won't find an iPhone on Verizon. Otherwise it would have to fall back to something, and that would be CDMA.
2: Apple is not going to put in CDMA in their devices. It is an obsolete "3G" protocol, and makes about as much sense as putting in AMPS back in phones. If Apple did CDMA, it wouldn't be in the US. The US's CDMA protocol is deliberately crippled and incompatible with the "real" standards. Other countries with CDMA like China use R/UIM cards for their devices (similar functionality as SIM cards.) It will be understandable for Apple to do CDMA for these markets, but not in the US where they are thriving with GSM based equipment.
3: Why would Apple bother with Verizon? T-Mobile would make far more sense because it would take another band for T-Mo's 3G, but it wouldn't take a completely new antenna. Also, Verizon showed Apple the door in the past. I doubt they will get a second chance.
So because it would require Apple to add another antenna into an already packed device, CDMA is not going to happen, unless Apple is gunning for a market where CDMA is a requirement.
I have a Droid X on my desk right by my iPhone. I have yet to use V-cast or Bing, and I have used the Google App Store to purchase a number of apps to make life easier. Android and Verizon have their faults, but access to the App Store isn't one of them.
I have seen this before first hand:
1: Would be spy working for company "A" calls up someone at company "B" who competes with "A" saying they have some cool secrets.
2: Company "B" notifies company "A" about the would be spy.
3: Would be spy gives the juicy stuff to what he/she thinks is someone who will pay him/her big bucks.
4: ?????
5: No big bucks happen; would be spy ends up with shiny new metal bracelets on wrists and a new domicile.
The problem is this: Even though two companies might be bitter rivals, they may be just as well served outing unsolicited offers for trade secrets as in keeping them, especially for being able to trumpet how honorable they are in PR releases.
Another reason why Country X burned the guy -- he could have either been bringing them disinformation, or it could be someone trying to show that Country X buys info. Either way, Country X's consulate made the best decision by outing the guy.
This is a double edged sword. I see good uses, then I see this used to try to execute search warrants, saying that anything in someone's domicile is in "plain view".
Of course the voyeurs will also love opaque viewing technology too.
What makes FB tolerable is the ban app button. Not just hiding the "Hey, blahblah needs help with getting fertilized" from one app, but making sure those apps don't have a chance to land on your profile.
For people who rattle on about politics, the Hide button works well there. I don't care if someone is on the left or the right... I just don't care about rants from either side.
For people who are too stupid to clean their profile out of spammy apps with fake like buttons and other crap in efforts to infect other people, I just drop them in a group with no access. This way, they still think they are friends, and I can undo the action later on without having to re-friend them.
People who tag pictures that are not me also get the good old fashioned block. Life is too short to deal with flaming rectums.
What can I buy then in the Android segment? The N1 has to be imported in for a price and is last generation's technology. The ADP1 and ADP2 are antiques and won't be able to run Android 3.x in any meaningful capacity? It is easy to say, "don't buy this", but when one finds there are no modern developer-friendly devices, it gets hard. Especially because Android 3.x should be due soon and will be needing a significant hardware boost than what most devices have now.
When I rooted my Droid X, all it took was a replacement of the Busybox executable to give me all the tools I needed. It isn't Maemo, but I have pretty much everything but gpg and mutt available [1].
An iPhone just doesn't require just an exploit to UID 0, it requires one to get out of the BSD jail() with root. It also requires the jailbreak to install a complete userland including an install system (dpkg), shells, an app (Cydia) to manage everything. Even worse, the jailbroken Mobile Terminal app is barely usable, and has to be hunted down from a repo, as the one that comes as default from Cydia does not work on iOS 4.
This doesn't say that the iPhone is bad; it means that a jailbreak on this device is a lot harder to do elegantly than rooting an Android phone.
[1]: Even in the days of Web applications aplenty, there is no faster mail reader than mutt on a decently responsive system, especially if the spool file is local.
The problem is that no Android phone since the Nexus 1 has allowed rooting. Motorola has told modders and developers to go elsewhere explicitly. HTC has always given out source, drivers, and access to dumps so people could easily mod their devices. However because of pressure from the cellular companies, they had to cave in and start making their devices modder hostile.
It would be nice to have a phone that is unlocked and friendly to modders. Problem is that the N1 crashed and burned, and no carrier would want to carry such a device. Likely the only future solution will be having Google carry ADP phones that are unlocked/moddable versions of existing phones, although there has not been an ADP since the ADP2 (the N1 technically does not count.)
This is why I'd like some type of thing akin to a seal and a printed notice, "warranty void if seal opened". The N1 had this when flipping on OEM unlock.
Perhaps this is the best compromise. To keep Joe Sixpack from getting exploited by a Dancing Bunnies exploit, what would be ideal is to require ADB to be installed, a command issued from the PC that would pop up a lengthy, scary as hell to uneducated users that they are about to cross into Mordor, and that they can easily back out right now with no harm done, or proceed and void their warranty. Some warning dialog that even someone who is drunk, baked, high, coked up, and tripping has a good chance of understanding. User clicks "proceed", fastboot is opened, signature checking is relaxed to allow any keys to sign recovery, boot, and OS ROMS, ro.secure is set to 0, /bin/su is enabled and a .apk file for the confirmation part of su installed.
Of course, there would be a method to put this all back and shut the barn door if the user wants to have the phone back for service, similar to a DFU reinstall on iOS devices, but that will be buried in the fine print. This way, if someone does hose up their phone, it isn't hard to get them back to a known good OS level.
There is the fallacy of "this isn't a 100% solution, so why bother?"
If it were up to me, I'd probably implement a solution that went into one place I worked at. They had a private network (only accessible to the dedicated machines, and the corporate network. To bridge the two, they had one machine on the private network which grabbed data from the controllers, then turned it into XML, and pushed it through a serial connection that physically only allowed Tx (Rx was cut) to another machine. The machine on the corporate network had a daemon that read the stream, broke the XML objects up and pushed them to a database where the PHBs could view their report on a Web page, or get an Excel spreadsheet generated on demand.
Of course, the data pushed through the serial cable was not that much. If it were data that was more than kilobits per second, this setup would not work. However, since it was a low bandwidth item, this essentially kept the network with the juicy stuff airgapped from the rest of the world.
Ford had a prototype of a car that used a small reactor, the Nucleon. It was scuttled because at the time they were expecting lighter radioactive shielding materials which never were made.
For cars, I'd wouldn't go with a live reactor. Mainly because all it would take is one drunk driver to cause a mini Chernobyl.
However, the small reactors do have a number of uses that would improve life, once the technology improved to the point where the devices were essentially batteries that could be dropped into place and left with little to no maintaining:
1: Backup electric generators for buildings. Drop one in, and this could provide clean power for a data center. Since the fuel is spent regardless of an outage or no, in normal use, the reactor could put electricity on the grid 24/7 offsetting the electric bill costs. This way, data centers could be located anywhere, not just dependent on the power grid.
2: Reactors for gas stations when autos move to a complete electric infrastructure. Eventually there will be a time where gasoline phases out, so the underground tanks can be replaced by reactors for fast charge "fill-ups". This also can be fed back onto the grid to help if the main municipal power sources go out.
3: Desalination plants. As water needs only becomes more dire, coupling a reactor with gigantic desalination plants and large pipelines to move water inland will become critical for agriculture.
4: Thermal depolymerization. "Boiling" plastic to break it down back into short chain crude takes a lot of energy. However, it means that we can take landfills that burble with methane, run the garbage through various sorting machinery to filter out metals and such, then "cook" the plastic and animal refuse with usable crude as a result, ready for use for plastic making again. On a larger scale, ships could be doing this in the Pacific Gyre to obtain usable oil. Oil is well past peak, so it might not be a green thing to do, but actually profitable when gasoline starts hitting $8.00 a gallon.
5: Large scale weather modification. Doing something like massive jets of water out in the ocean to get more water vapor in the air so it rains can mean the different in having a drought inland versus a productive agricultural season.
6: Ability to inhabit otherwise uninhabitable places. As populations increase, there essentially are only three ways to deal with it. Wars for land, expand into space, or try to make areas like Antarctica or the Outback livable.
This is good sense right here. If a user actually needs port 25, and not 587 or 465 (for SMTP over SSL), they at least should explicitly fill out an online form with the ISP saying they take full responsibility for it, then be granted access.
The best of all worlds would be a firewall application that the user can admin via a Web site. By default, it keeps all incoming traffic from the subscriber's IP address, but can be configured to allow stuff (say incoming ssh connections), or perhaps disabled altogether if the user knows what he or she is doing. It also would block by default all outgoing traffic other than VPNs to known hosts, POP/IMAP, E-mail being injected via 587,HTTP, HTTPS, ssh, and known games (and the servers/ports) they connect to. This way, most ISP users wouldn't know or care that the outgoing port filter is in place, clued users can modify it or turn it off, and botnets wouldn't be able to do much other than spam page requests or SSL setups/teardowns. If the ISP had more time, perhaps it would have a more active IDS in place to detect a DDoS (with very sane limits) and stop it. Everyone benefits.
If it were up to me, I'd just shunt the customer to a remediation server that has downloads of some decent AV utilities.
Physical example: If an apartment complex in a good section of town had a tenant who took the door off his place, let all kinds of transients in to clog up the toilet so the sewage ran off the balcony, left crack pipes all around the facility, and had people trying nearby apartments to see if they could break in, that tenant would be history. Same with ISPs. Why should an ISP have to deal with the fallout due to a customer who cannot follow basic security precautions?
Everyone makes mistakes and even the pros get hacked, so a warning should be given obviously. However, network security comes first before some subscriber's pr0n habit, so if they can't or won't fix a botnet, then they get axed and either download utilities to address the problem from a remediation server, get their PCs reinstalled, or move to a more malware-unfriendly platform.
Making Joe Sixpack responsible for his own security is a good thing in the long run. As of now, there are no consequences for him to allow his machines to become a server for botnets. He doesn't see the damage he is doing with his neglect. However, if it is made known to him that he will be cut from the boobie pics if he continues to display gross negligence, he might actually update his copy of Norton or ask a friend about some strange software called Firefox and AdBlock.
Any sane enterprise has a mechanism in place where their network fabric will contain a segment if the IDS detects a definite threat.
This really shouldn't be a question -- ISPs should mitigate damage done by customers with poor or no security. It is debatable to stick the customer with the bill for cleanup, but it might be a good idea so Joe Sixpack actually learns to either zip up his fly or pay someone to do it for him. Perhaps a warning or two, then start billing for the janitor work.
We are already there. Take laptop batteries or batteries for phones. There are so many different types of batteries. It would be nice to have a standard across all of them, but device makers rather engineer (or have the fellas over in China do the designing) the battery around the object than making something around standard size cells.
Of course we do have battery waste from these because in a year or so, the warranty on laptop batteries expire and shortly after, the batteries themselves do. Perhaps the way to combat the problem of these polluting landfills is a deposit similar to what sane countries have on bottles so they end up being recycled. Or the laptop is chucked and the batteries can't be used in a new one.
Here in Texas, we have single stream recycling, where everything recyclable gets put into one bin, then gets separated out at the plant. Austin, Dallas, and Houston all have this, and for two out of the three cities, it actually turns a profit. The third city signed a really poor contract with three times the processing fees as the other two cities, otherwise it would actually be receiving a check from the recycler as well.
I think most Asian countries are playing the three-monkey card because they are trying to get their economies moving due to this recession, and they just do not want to see military conflict happen. No country in the Pacific Rim wants to see a replay of "The Guns of August" in their neck of the woods.
If Asia destabilized, it would make the Middle East chaos look like a mere bar-fight.