Sprint is rolling out 4G WiMax. Verizon and AT&T are going LTE. T-Mobile is going HSPA+.
From what I see, these services have some latency problems, but for anything that isn't realtime such as gaming, these might be a suitable alternative to Comcast.
Right now, 4G is not widespread but competition is heating up because of Sprint/Clear's rollout. I'm sure that other cellphone companies will be offering similar speeds.
If it wasn't for the latency, perhaps these services may be a complete replacement for Comcast.
Microsoft is making a mistake by having all app downloads go through their app store. Instead, they should not just keep the XNA or Silverlight stuff, but allow for legacy apps.
This way, a business with a specific Windows Mobile app that they use, which could be a point of sales program, or a special client will still work, but they get the benefit of the state of the art hardware.
Another closed phone architecture is not going to help Microsoft at all, as Windows Phone 7 needs a critical mass of apps, and it will be hard prying people from Objective-C or Java to write onto MS's platform without some solid reason to be on this platform.
Long term, DRM never works. Games eventually end up cracked, people make server emulators, activation servers get fakes. DRM may have some successes where it never gets broken (PS3, StarForce), but it doesn't help long term.
These days, if I had to design an optimal DRM mechanism for a game, I would do it in three phases:
Phase 1: This covers the critical first month after release. Here, I'd use an activation mechanism, CD-ROM protection, or something similar. This is to maximize the sale numbers where a game either is given praise in sales, or if it doesn't make the numbers, the game company is shut down.
Phase 2: This covers the patched lifetime of the game. I'd have a CD-key for access to multiplayer features such as additional content, patches, and access to multi-player on the WAN level. Any other DRM would get patched out, because it will get broken anyway, and why annoy the users.
Phase 3: This covers the game after it is stopped being patched. All CD key and other stuff and such would be patched out, it would be given a way to specify an alternative game server when the main ones are moved offline, and source code for the server side is put out. This way, people can keep a legacy system going.
I'm sure the music from the 1970s to the mid 1990s will be preserved because most "rock" radio stations only play from that span of time, ignoring anything in the 21'st century.
Probably one of my biggest gripe of almost all today's radio stations, they effectively have 100-150 songs on shuffle except for some random special programs, and nothing really new out of that. The independents are hard to find.
What would happen if there was a disaster is that there would be laws that would be ineffective like Sarbanes Oxley, but would require companies to have a lot of internal stuff for it. Sarbanes Oxley was a boon for storage providers, as relevant E-mails and messages have to be archived for 7 years.
I'd love to see some actual privacy laws, but I'm sure there won't be -- so many businesses make so much cash tracking everything they can on a person in the US. If laws get passed, they likely would be toothless feel good wonders.
Or what happens is the same thing that happened when pseudoephedrine. It was made where one had to put down a card, register and all that crap.
Of course this did absolutely nothing to stop the meth labs. They just sourced their stuff from Mexico, or if in the US; robbed the trucks before they got to the stores.
It will be exactly the same with phones and SIM cards. People will just source the anonymous phones from Mexico, and because a lot of people use Mexican SIM cards in the US, it won't cost them much more.
This is very common in WoW. It usually goes like this:
1: Someone visits a website which is either legit but gets served up a fake ad via an ad-rotater, or the site is using exploits directly. Either way, a keylogger gets downloaded. It can be an add-on that just logs keys in the background and ends when the Web browser is closed and not even installed on the system.
2: The keylogger grabs the WoW password.
3: The account is grabbed, password and other info is changed.
4: The higher level characters have their gear sold for in game currency, and are used as mining bots, mailing the mined loot to another hacked account, and put on the auction house for people to buy. This continues until people notice the hacked accounts (characters running through walls, jumping below the ground level, or just warping) and the account gets banned.
5: The game currency is then sold for real life currency, or the accounts are sold to suckers.
Of course, Blizzard has a solid solution to protect against this: Plunk down $6.50 for a Blizzard Authenticator or download and use an app for the iPhone or Android. With two-factor authentication, a keylogger will not be able to seize a WoW account, although every other account on the system is at risk. Anyone who is serious about security should get secondary authentication.
Ultimately, banks and other MMO companies need to get on this bandwagon and offer a secondary authentication mechanism.
I'd love to see enterprise applications available for XServes. Having Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and other items that are a core part of a company running on an other OS than Windows would be nice. If only for the fact that having a non mainstream OS means that Joe Script Kiddie won't have an exploit for it, and exploits that work happily on Windows just wouldn't work on OS X.
Exchange is the de facto standard for communication in businesses. Having it be able to be run (with its requisite, Active Directory) on a non Windows platform would be great.
Of course, I'd like to see it available for all UNIX variants, but OS X is a start.
Doesn't matter where the oil gets sucked out of. Oil is 100% fungible, and it is bought and sold on the world market regardless where it comes from. So, the only advantage of drilling oil here in the US is that it lowers the price as of now.
Because of this, it is long term stupid to be using oil that the US has access to right now. All it takes is a single edict from a Saud prince, or some Middle Eastern countries tired of the US in the region calling an embargo to the US, and we have the 1970s all over again, but worse, as the US is more dependent on oil... and the oil producing nations in the Middle East have a second nation they can sell too.. China.
Rachael Maddow had a blurb on this yesterday. It showed how similar techniques (including "top kill") were used in attempt to plug the leak, then the leak was finally killed by another well drilled, with a devastating impact on the environment, about six months after the fact.
What lessons can we learn from this? First and foremost, this drives the point home that one of the first priorities is that oil should be relegated to plastic making, and not an energy source.
Nuclear technology may not be perfect, and the biggest problem with it is that it isn't goof-proof. If a group of drunk contractors pass out on the job when putting together a solar cell array, it likely won't affect much other than the head of the guy the cell array fell on. Nuclear plants need to be engineered to be as moron resistant as possible, because both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by "cockpit errors". Hopefully Gen III and Gen IV reactors will go a long way to address this.
This is not to say that other energy sources are not relevant, but until fusion gets able to be used on a production basis (as in multi-gigawatt reactors), the only real solution for dense areas without access to large amount of real estate is nuclear breeder reactors.
Of course, there are other ways to help with energy. I've seen some research on generators which turn water into hydrogen and pass the stuff down a pipeline to an electricity generation station nearby a metropolitan area where it is burned. This minimizes energy loss over long distances as opposed to power lines.
In any case, this BP disaster just further reinforces the point of getting off of oil and onto other energy sources.
Moving to IPv6 will help for one thing, but what we need is better support on the lower layers. Mesh networks come to mind, where it is possible to allocate a percentage of bandwidth on a wireless AP to devices, and devices that can't reliably communicate with an AP would send packets through the nearest device in an ad hoc configuration, perhaps using some type of endpoint encryption.
Unless something is done, between treaties like ACTA and the neutering of the FCC, we may end up with the Internet turning into not a mere walled garden, but a max security prison with users separated from each other and messages only passed by guards.
Imagine instead of the Internet where you can do most of what you want freely, you had to pay for access you paid by the month, pay by the minute online, pay per news article accessed, paid per E-mail, paid per message on a forum read/posted, paid per instant message sent/received, paid per kilobyte transferred, paid because you were using faster than a 1200 bps modem, ad nauseum. I'm guessing this is the model a lot of the bigwigs want back again.
Before the Internet, if someone wanted to download anything, you either had one of two things: A source of cool things to upload so you had a useful upload/download ratio, or you paid money to a BBS/CIS/The Source/AOL/some other service to download.
These bad old days are what a lot of well heeled people are wanting back. They see people sending E-mail, copying files, sending attachments, and are mad that their wallets are not getting fatter because of this. There are two ways to stick this genie back in the bottle: Pass laws/treaties, or try to get people to get used to paying for what was once free. ACTA is an example of the former, and I'm sure there is work on trying to get people for the latter.
People here may know the difference between true journalism versus some tripe on someone's Wordpress site, but I don't think the average user on the Internet really does. Look how popular "articles" are which are just blurbs on a blog that point to links elsewhere.
What will happen is that people will still go to the same sites. However, if first tier news sites hide behind a paywall, the well written articles will be replaced by articles from primary sources from someone else citing Billy Joe Jim Bob who happened to saw something between swigs of moonshine.
That, or journalists who know what they are doing, but can't find work in the old school places will end up forming a startup and succeeding in bringing first tier news where the AP and the paywall sites fail.
If he can get people to subscribe on the iPads/Kindles/Nooks/etc. of the world, more power to him. However, the majority of news readership will still be people on computers looking at websites.
Who knows, it may work. IMHO, I just don't think there are enough people who are not just owners of a tablet device, but who are willing to pony up for a subscription. I don't the money is there to float a company on, just on this market segment.
This will backfire. Say all news sites decide to immediately join and not have a single article on the Net. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will come in and fill the gap, be it more firms discussing how nifty the latest gadget is, or political figures will start sites and call them news.
I can see a political mouthpiece taking advantage of a dearth of news by filling in the vacuum with his/her rhetoric. His or her site would go from what it is now, to expanding to fill the void. It would have local chapters to get news in cities and states, E-mail, chat, and social networking, and end up being a "one stop shop" for almost anything.
End result: True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
People want something to read on the Internet in the morning, and if the news sites refuse to provide this, then someone will, and it likely will be someone who has political gains by doing so.
I wonder if this is a gambit to get laws passed limiting the availability of articles, where the Times and other sites lose money, then end up whining to the governments of US and Europe that "news piracy" or some other tripe like that is affecting them and causing them dire losses. Of course, with a sympathetic ear, I wonder if some provision to ACTA might be added to persecute news aggregation sites, or make them liable similar to how MGM vs. Grokster set the basis of making Grokster liable for inducing infringement.
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
What is happening here is hubris. He scored big on his companies making blockbusters (the movie Avatar helped fill his coffers up, so he isn't lacking for much.) However, he expects people to pay for news articles like they happily pony up money to see a Na'vi kick some corporate enforcer derriere in 3D. This is his mistake.
News aggregation sites will keep on going. They will just not index his news sites' stuff. Going to news.google.com and reading about events is not like going to see a movie. People are not going to pay per article when they can read all day free. And unless the whole Internet is replaced by a walled garden like a Compuserve (which I'm sure a lot of very well heeled people want), it will likely remain this way.
I forgot to list this in my earlier post, but here are the scenarios that will happen with Murdoch delisting his news sites:
1: They get forgotten except by subscribers. Can the news sites make money without ad revenue alone? Can they get by and make profits just on these people? This may cause costs to rise per person to hundreds of dollars a year. If the news site has such a fan base that people would do that, it may work, but people would probably find their news elsewhere. If they are reading from an aggregate like news.google.com, they might not even realize that the Times sites are not present on the list anymore.
2: They become boutique sites like peer reviewed journals. There are a number of academic sites which are pay to play, and cost a hefty fee per PDF article. However, for general news, I don't think people would be interested in this. Maybe for back article research, but not for day to day items.
3: They wise up and start playing ball again. Ad revenue may not be the most money they can get, but compared to no revenue at all, it might be a fruitful decision.
4: They end up in the dust. There are a lot of unemployed journalists, it it wouldn't take much impetus for a startup news site to start up that is lean enough to run on ad revenue, perhaps having additional revenue streams for back article searches. No, this startup news site may not have enough money to pay for an AP wire, but those stories can always be come by other ways.
Most of Europe has something like this, either a keyfob, or a TAN list.
However, it a rare sight for an American bank to offer much if anything more than username/password protection. You might find a bank that asks a question from your challenge/response list, or asks you to select the answer on a random list, where the text is a bitmap (to help foil malware that doesn't have an OCR engine.) Anything more than that, good luck.
What is ironic is that Blizzard offers a keyfob and/or an app for the iPhone and Android. Why can't banks here in the US protect their customers more than a game company protects theirs?
I like the idea of a dedicated, private network. This is what a lot of companies used to have before they were called intranets.
Maybe expand on this some, have it be a B2B backbone (BIPRnet, similar to NIPRnet and SIPRnet) where unless authorization is prearranged beforehand for one business's machines to communicate with another's, the switching fabric wouldn't allow the connection? This could be done even at a port level, so B2B E-mail via an Exchange connector at a custom port would go through, but someone on a non-email host trying to spam would not be able to. This network doesn't even need to run TCP/IP.
This backbone can run connections atop the Internet if needed, using dedicated bridges which use preshared keys (no public keys to crack or PKI because the bridges only connect with 1, maybe 2-3 other failovers). However, the best security is dedicated lines. Add to this endpoint to endpoint encryption similar to IPSec on the packet level for starters, and application to encryption on higher layers.
This way, a large business that processes credit orders never have to send their batch transactions over the Internet, and unless someone hacks the central switch, the packets are not touchable by normal Internet hacking, and if they are, the unencrypted data is protected by multiple layers so one compromised host (unless it is an endpoint) doesn't reveal much.
It could even go as far as to have a hardware card that has functionality of a mini HSM, keeping public keys in that. That way, a compromised or hacked machine could be booted off the backbone by a CRL.
Common sense would be banks offering either a hardware keyfob and/or an app for Android/iPhone/Win Mobile that gives secondary authentication, or confirmation of transactions like IBM's ZTIC.
Or even better, a common standard, similar to RSA SecurID, so each bank doesn't have to have their own different, incompatible type of offline auth device.
Having this would shift theft of accounts from just getting malware onto peoples' computers back to either attacking banks directly, or their patrons.
With virtualization, the 16 bit applications may end up remaining with us indefinitely. I have a relative who is still using an insanely backlevel version of WordPerfect, and most likely when she gets a new computer, I will end up putting that version of WordPerfect in an XP Compatibility Mode, or a VMWare Workstation Unity session for her, so even though the program still can only understand 8.3 filenames, it still will interoperate with a 64 bit OS.
Another business I have consulted for has an old program that they used to use that would dial their bank via a modem, get changes, then put them in some sort of spreadsheet. This is now still living in a Windows 3.1 virtual machine so they have access to the old records at anytime.
Isn't this taught to death in ITIL 101 that every MBA must go through in order to get their certificate in an accredited college? It sort of is sad that the concepts taught in this never hit the real world in a lot of organizations. Not all. I've seen some companies actually be proactive, but it is easy for firms to fall into the "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" trap.
In reality, I would be happy if a handset maker would keep Android updated for at least one year after the device is discontinued, preferably 2-3 years, which is the length of a cellphone contract. This makes people view that the device they are stuck with for 2 years (which is the usual contract length here in the US) is worth the purchase price, and when the contract is up, will likely stick with the same provider for the next phone.
I think that as time goes on and Android becomes a mature platform, that having to have the absolute latest version of the OS won't be as critical. For example, Windows Mobile 5 to 6 did have that many fundamental changes that would force users to move to it, other than SD card encryption and Exchange policies. The bad thing is that this is going to probably take a year or two before all the core features that would make Android enterprise-ready, so a handset bought now may not officially be able to run future Android versions, especially if the maker only lets certain signed kernels run on their devices.
Once Android matures to a point where what changes with versions is the UI mainly (similar to how Windows Mobile's UI has evolved from 5.0 to 6.5), I'm sure most of the arguments about fragmentation will go away, other than hardware/handset issues.
Of course, there will be features that will cause fragmentation (3D graphic support comes to mind which came to one device in Windows Mobile a few years back.) But once the foundation is in place, most apps should be able to work across any modern version of Android with few problems.
Ultimately, what Android needs long-term is for someone (be it Google with a UI and the OS, a handset maker with a cool phone, or an app maker who has a "killer app") to start taking the lead and offering cool features with it to keep critical mass and the app developers. Otherwise, the platform will always be chasing Apple, and we all know how that turned out in the MP3 player market where Apple essentially has an iron grip there except for the low-end flash players.
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Sprint is rolling out 4G WiMax. Verizon and AT&T are going LTE. T-Mobile is going HSPA+.
From what I see, these services have some latency problems, but for anything that isn't realtime such as gaming, these might be a suitable alternative to Comcast.
Right now, 4G is not widespread but competition is heating up because of Sprint/Clear's rollout. I'm sure that other cellphone companies will be offering similar speeds.
If it wasn't for the latency, perhaps these services may be a complete replacement for Comcast.
Microsoft is making a mistake by having all app downloads go through their app store. Instead, they should not just keep the XNA or Silverlight stuff, but allow for legacy apps.
This way, a business with a specific Windows Mobile app that they use, which could be a point of sales program, or a special client will still work, but they get the benefit of the state of the art hardware.
Another closed phone architecture is not going to help Microsoft at all, as Windows Phone 7 needs a critical mass of apps, and it will be hard prying people from Objective-C or Java to write onto MS's platform without some solid reason to be on this platform.
Long term, DRM never works. Games eventually end up cracked, people make server emulators, activation servers get fakes. DRM may have some successes where it never gets broken (PS3, StarForce), but it doesn't help long term.
These days, if I had to design an optimal DRM mechanism for a game, I would do it in three phases:
Phase 1: This covers the critical first month after release. Here, I'd use an activation mechanism, CD-ROM protection, or something similar. This is to maximize the sale numbers where a game either is given praise in sales, or if it doesn't make the numbers, the game company is shut down.
Phase 2: This covers the patched lifetime of the game. I'd have a CD-key for access to multiplayer features such as additional content, patches, and access to multi-player on the WAN level. Any other DRM would get patched out, because it will get broken anyway, and why annoy the users.
Phase 3: This covers the game after it is stopped being patched. All CD key and other stuff and such would be patched out, it would be given a way to specify an alternative game server when the main ones are moved offline, and source code for the server side is put out. This way, people can keep a legacy system going.
I'm sure the music from the 1970s to the mid 1990s will be preserved because most "rock" radio stations only play from that span of time, ignoring anything in the 21'st century.
Probably one of my biggest gripe of almost all today's radio stations, they effectively have 100-150 songs on shuffle except for some random special programs, and nothing really new out of that. The independents are hard to find.
What would happen if there was a disaster is that there would be laws that would be ineffective like Sarbanes Oxley, but would require companies to have a lot of internal stuff for it. Sarbanes Oxley was a boon for storage providers, as relevant E-mails and messages have to be archived for 7 years.
I'd love to see some actual privacy laws, but I'm sure there won't be -- so many businesses make so much cash tracking everything they can on a person in the US. If laws get passed, they likely would be toothless feel good wonders.
Or what happens is the same thing that happened when pseudoephedrine. It was made where one had to put down a card, register and all that crap.
Of course this did absolutely nothing to stop the meth labs. They just sourced their stuff from Mexico, or if in the US; robbed the trucks before they got to the stores.
It will be exactly the same with phones and SIM cards. People will just source the anonymous phones from Mexico, and because a lot of people use Mexican SIM cards in the US, it won't cost them much more.
This is very common in WoW. It usually goes like this:
1: Someone visits a website which is either legit but gets served up a fake ad via an ad-rotater, or the site is using exploits directly. Either way, a keylogger gets downloaded. It can be an add-on that just logs keys in the background and ends when the Web browser is closed and not even installed on the system.
2: The keylogger grabs the WoW password.
3: The account is grabbed, password and other info is changed.
4: The higher level characters have their gear sold for in game currency, and are used as mining bots, mailing the mined loot to another hacked account, and put on the auction house for people to buy. This continues until people notice the hacked accounts (characters running through walls, jumping below the ground level, or just warping) and the account gets banned.
5: The game currency is then sold for real life currency, or the accounts are sold to suckers.
Of course, Blizzard has a solid solution to protect against this: Plunk down $6.50 for a Blizzard Authenticator or download and use an app for the iPhone or Android. With two-factor authentication, a keylogger will not be able to seize a WoW account, although every other account on the system is at risk. Anyone who is serious about security should get secondary authentication.
Ultimately, banks and other MMO companies need to get on this bandwagon and offer a secondary authentication mechanism.
I'd love to see enterprise applications available for XServes. Having Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, Sharepoint, and other items that are a core part of a company running on an other OS than Windows would be nice. If only for the fact that having a non mainstream OS means that Joe Script Kiddie won't have an exploit for it, and exploits that work happily on Windows just wouldn't work on OS X.
Exchange is the de facto standard for communication in businesses. Having it be able to be run (with its requisite, Active Directory) on a non Windows platform would be great.
Of course, I'd like to see it available for all UNIX variants, but OS X is a start.
Doesn't matter where the oil gets sucked out of. Oil is 100% fungible, and it is bought and sold on the world market regardless where it comes from. So, the only advantage of drilling oil here in the US is that it lowers the price as of now.
Because of this, it is long term stupid to be using oil that the US has access to right now. All it takes is a single edict from a Saud prince, or some Middle Eastern countries tired of the US in the region calling an embargo to the US, and we have the 1970s all over again, but worse, as the US is more dependent on oil... and the oil producing nations in the Middle East have a second nation they can sell too.. China.
Rachael Maddow had a blurb on this yesterday. It showed how similar techniques (including "top kill") were used in attempt to plug the leak, then the leak was finally killed by another well drilled, with a devastating impact on the environment, about six months after the fact.
What lessons can we learn from this? First and foremost, this drives the point home that one of the first priorities is that oil should be relegated to plastic making, and not an energy source.
Nuclear technology may not be perfect, and the biggest problem with it is that it isn't goof-proof. If a group of drunk contractors pass out on the job when putting together a solar cell array, it likely won't affect much other than the head of the guy the cell array fell on. Nuclear plants need to be engineered to be as moron resistant as possible, because both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were caused by "cockpit errors". Hopefully Gen III and Gen IV reactors will go a long way to address this.
This is not to say that other energy sources are not relevant, but until fusion gets able to be used on a production basis (as in multi-gigawatt reactors), the only real solution for dense areas without access to large amount of real estate is nuclear breeder reactors.
Of course, there are other ways to help with energy. I've seen some research on generators which turn water into hydrogen and pass the stuff down a pipeline to an electricity generation station nearby a metropolitan area where it is burned. This minimizes energy loss over long distances as opposed to power lines.
In any case, this BP disaster just further reinforces the point of getting off of oil and onto other energy sources.
Moving to IPv6 will help for one thing, but what we need is better support on the lower layers. Mesh networks come to mind, where it is possible to allocate a percentage of bandwidth on a wireless AP to devices, and devices that can't reliably communicate with an AP would send packets through the nearest device in an ad hoc configuration, perhaps using some type of endpoint encryption.
Unless something is done, between treaties like ACTA and the neutering of the FCC, we may end up with the Internet turning into not a mere walled garden, but a max security prison with users separated from each other and messages only passed by guards.
Imagine instead of the Internet where you can do most of what you want freely, you had to pay for access you paid by the month, pay by the minute online, pay per news article accessed, paid per E-mail, paid per message on a forum read/posted, paid per instant message sent/received, paid per kilobyte transferred, paid because you were using faster than a 1200 bps modem, ad nauseum. I'm guessing this is the model a lot of the bigwigs want back again.
Before the Internet, if someone wanted to download anything, you either had one of two things: A source of cool things to upload so you had a useful upload/download ratio, or you paid money to a BBS/CIS/The Source/AOL/some other service to download.
These bad old days are what a lot of well heeled people are wanting back. They see people sending E-mail, copying files, sending attachments, and are mad that their wallets are not getting fatter because of this. There are two ways to stick this genie back in the bottle: Pass laws/treaties, or try to get people to get used to paying for what was once free. ACTA is an example of the former, and I'm sure there is work on trying to get people for the latter.
People here may know the difference between true journalism versus some tripe on someone's Wordpress site, but I don't think the average user on the Internet really does. Look how popular "articles" are which are just blurbs on a blog that point to links elsewhere.
What will happen is that people will still go to the same sites. However, if first tier news sites hide behind a paywall, the well written articles will be replaced by articles from primary sources from someone else citing Billy Joe Jim Bob who happened to saw something between swigs of moonshine.
That, or journalists who know what they are doing, but can't find work in the old school places will end up forming a startup and succeeding in bringing first tier news where the AP and the paywall sites fail.
If he can get people to subscribe on the iPads/Kindles/Nooks/etc. of the world, more power to him. However, the majority of news readership will still be people on computers looking at websites.
Who knows, it may work. IMHO, I just don't think there are enough people who are not just owners of a tablet device, but who are willing to pony up for a subscription. I don't the money is there to float a company on, just on this market segment.
This will backfire. Say all news sites decide to immediately join and not have a single article on the Net. Nature abhors a vacuum. Someone will come in and fill the gap, be it more firms discussing how nifty the latest gadget is, or political figures will start sites and call them news.
I can see a political mouthpiece taking advantage of a dearth of news by filling in the vacuum with his/her rhetoric. His or her site would go from what it is now, to expanding to fill the void. It would have local chapters to get news in cities and states, E-mail, chat, and social networking, and end up being a "one stop shop" for almost anything.
End result: True news sites that try to obey journalistic integrity get pushed to the side, and mainstream news becomes run by the political pundits.
People want something to read on the Internet in the morning, and if the news sites refuse to provide this, then someone will, and it likely will be someone who has political gains by doing so.
I wonder if this is a gambit to get laws passed limiting the availability of articles, where the Times and other sites lose money, then end up whining to the governments of US and Europe that "news piracy" or some other tripe like that is affecting them and causing them dire losses. Of course, with a sympathetic ear, I wonder if some provision to ACTA might be added to persecute news aggregation sites, or make them liable similar to how MGM vs. Grokster set the basis of making Grokster liable for inducing infringement.
The thing is that Murdoch is a genius and a kingmaker. He has shaped the landscape of US and UK politics radically. The guy isn't dumb, and he knows his stuff.
What is happening here is hubris. He scored big on his companies making blockbusters (the movie Avatar helped fill his coffers up, so he isn't lacking for much.) However, he expects people to pay for news articles like they happily pony up money to see a Na'vi kick some corporate enforcer derriere in 3D. This is his mistake.
News aggregation sites will keep on going. They will just not index his news sites' stuff. Going to news.google.com and reading about events is not like going to see a movie. People are not going to pay per article when they can read all day free. And unless the whole Internet is replaced by a walled garden like a Compuserve (which I'm sure a lot of very well heeled people want), it will likely remain this way.
I forgot to list this in my earlier post, but here are the scenarios that will happen with Murdoch delisting his news sites:
1: They get forgotten except by subscribers. Can the news sites make money without ad revenue alone? Can they get by and make profits just on these people? This may cause costs to rise per person to hundreds of dollars a year. If the news site has such a fan base that people would do that, it may work, but people would probably find their news elsewhere. If they are reading from an aggregate like news.google.com, they might not even realize that the Times sites are not present on the list anymore.
2: They become boutique sites like peer reviewed journals. There are a number of academic sites which are pay to play, and cost a hefty fee per PDF article. However, for general news, I don't think people would be interested in this. Maybe for back article research, but not for day to day items.
3: They wise up and start playing ball again. Ad revenue may not be the most money they can get, but compared to no revenue at all, it might be a fruitful decision.
4: They end up in the dust. There are a lot of unemployed journalists, it it wouldn't take much impetus for a startup news site to start up that is lean enough to run on ad revenue, perhaps having additional revenue streams for back article searches. No, this startup news site may not have enough money to pay for an AP wire, but those stories can always be come by other ways.
People getting news will find other sources, and the advertising revenue will go to whomever to the competition.
Most of Europe has something like this, either a keyfob, or a TAN list.
However, it a rare sight for an American bank to offer much if anything more than username/password protection. You might find a bank that asks a question from your challenge/response list, or asks you to select the answer on a random list, where the text is a bitmap (to help foil malware that doesn't have an OCR engine.) Anything more than that, good luck.
What is ironic is that Blizzard offers a keyfob and/or an app for the iPhone and Android. Why can't banks here in the US protect their customers more than a game company protects theirs?
I like the idea of a dedicated, private network. This is what a lot of companies used to have before they were called intranets.
Maybe expand on this some, have it be a B2B backbone (BIPRnet, similar to NIPRnet and SIPRnet) where unless authorization is prearranged beforehand for one business's machines to communicate with another's, the switching fabric wouldn't allow the connection? This could be done even at a port level, so B2B E-mail via an Exchange connector at a custom port would go through, but someone on a non-email host trying to spam would not be able to. This network doesn't even need to run TCP/IP.
This backbone can run connections atop the Internet if needed, using dedicated bridges which use preshared keys (no public keys to crack or PKI because the bridges only connect with 1, maybe 2-3 other failovers). However, the best security is dedicated lines. Add to this endpoint to endpoint encryption similar to IPSec on the packet level for starters, and application to encryption on higher layers.
This way, a large business that processes credit orders never have to send their batch transactions over the Internet, and unless someone hacks the central switch, the packets are not touchable by normal Internet hacking, and if they are, the unencrypted data is protected by multiple layers so one compromised host (unless it is an endpoint) doesn't reveal much.
It could even go as far as to have a hardware card that has functionality of a mini HSM, keeping public keys in that. That way, a compromised or hacked machine could be booted off the backbone by a CRL.
Common sense would be banks offering either a hardware keyfob and/or an app for Android/iPhone/Win Mobile that gives secondary authentication, or confirmation of transactions like IBM's ZTIC.
Or even better, a common standard, similar to RSA SecurID, so each bank doesn't have to have their own different, incompatible type of offline auth device.
Having this would shift theft of accounts from just getting malware onto peoples' computers back to either attacking banks directly, or their patrons.
With virtualization, the 16 bit applications may end up remaining with us indefinitely. I have a relative who is still using an insanely backlevel version of WordPerfect, and most likely when she gets a new computer, I will end up putting that version of WordPerfect in an XP Compatibility Mode, or a VMWare Workstation Unity session for her, so even though the program still can only understand 8.3 filenames, it still will interoperate with a 64 bit OS.
Another business I have consulted for has an old program that they used to use that would dial their bank via a modem, get changes, then put them in some sort of spreadsheet. This is now still living in a Windows 3.1 virtual machine so they have access to the old records at anytime.
Isn't this taught to death in ITIL 101 that every MBA must go through in order to get their certificate in an accredited college? It sort of is sad that the concepts taught in this never hit the real world in a lot of organizations. Not all. I've seen some companies actually be proactive, but it is easy for firms to fall into the "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" trap.
In reality, I would be happy if a handset maker would keep Android updated for at least one year after the device is discontinued, preferably 2-3 years, which is the length of a cellphone contract. This makes people view that the device they are stuck with for 2 years (which is the usual contract length here in the US) is worth the purchase price, and when the contract is up, will likely stick with the same provider for the next phone.
I think that as time goes on and Android becomes a mature platform, that having to have the absolute latest version of the OS won't be as critical. For example, Windows Mobile 5 to 6 did have that many fundamental changes that would force users to move to it, other than SD card encryption and Exchange policies. The bad thing is that this is going to probably take a year or two before all the core features that would make Android enterprise-ready, so a handset bought now may not officially be able to run future Android versions, especially if the maker only lets certain signed kernels run on their devices.
Once Android matures to a point where what changes with versions is the UI mainly (similar to how Windows Mobile's UI has evolved from 5.0 to 6.5), I'm sure most of the arguments about fragmentation will go away, other than hardware/handset issues.
Of course, there will be features that will cause fragmentation (3D graphic support comes to mind which came to one device in Windows Mobile a few years back.) But once the foundation is in place, most apps should be able to work across any modern version of Android with few problems.
Ultimately, what Android needs long-term is for someone (be it Google with a UI and the OS, a handset maker with a cool phone, or an app maker who has a "killer app") to start taking the lead and offering cool features with it to keep critical mass and the app developers. Otherwise, the platform will always be chasing Apple, and we all know how that turned out in the MP3 player market where Apple essentially has an iron grip there except for the low-end flash players.