I would call naive the idea that a company enters a market without the idea to do better than their competitors, and hoping to take over the complete market. More market share = more profit. Monopoly = much more profit.
I can see problems for human speculators, but not for investors.
An investor buys a stock now, to hold for a significant period of time (months or years), collecting dividend and hopefully sees the value of that stock increase. And the stock value is ultimately determined by the profit of the company that issued the stock.
Does this micro-second trading lower the value of the stocks? It doesn't seem so because overall, over the long run, the bourses tend to go up. And so do stocks of all healthy companies. Companies make profit, their stock prices soar, and when an investor sees his stock has doubled in value and they need the money they can sell it at the then-current price. Made easier actually by the microsecond traders as the liquidity of a stock increases due to it being traded more.
Microsecond traders only can make profit from short-term value changes in the stock. They can not lower the value of a stock. They do prevent slower (human) speculators, that try to do the same, from profiting as much as they used to. The real investor won't be affected.
The reaction of the attacker should also be very fast, considering the actual orders are already done on a micro-second scale.So an attacker should react in a fraction of that time. Going to be tough.
Remember Christmas 2006? Heavy earthquake in Taiwan. Hong Kong got cut off from most of their Internet connections (other than local) for days, and it took weeks to be back to normal.
There are several undersea cables between Taiwan and Hong Kong, over different routes. Now I don't know the size of Sidney Harbour but I have the feeling that the Taiwan Strait is a bit bigger. So those routes are further apart. Not a "single point of failure"? Think again: they were all cut in a single event.
That said, there are two parts of risk assessment: cost of failure, and cost of mitigating it. Building a nuclear plant to withstand a 1:10,000 year tsunami vs a 1:100,000 year tsunami may cost many billions, and ten times the cost of the lower security option. An extra cable to increase reliability so much may cost a million or so, and barely double the total cost (numbers made up for the sake of the argument).
And finally it's up to the person having to pay for it, to say whether they think it's worth it, or not.
400m is 1.3 ns (nano-seconds), 2.6 ns for round trip. If that kind of time interval is make or break, then I wonder why they're still talking about microsecond trading!
Just get a smartphone without data plan. My voice plan is even just 2G. Dirt cheap, and free WiFi is sufficiently available for when I really want to look something up.
I've had 3G for voice a few years ago, but the only difference I noticed is hotter phone & worse battery drain, and worse coverage (shop talked about better call quality - well I didn't hear the difference). I must add that coverage improved over time, and is good now.
Actually I had a look at the blog now, and the food on the photos on the first page of that blog looks pretty good. Varied, little deep-fried stuff, quite some fresh vegetables and fruits. Of course the looks don't say everything about overall quality and taste, they do usually go hand in hand, as in most low quality food also doesn't look good.
OK too lazy to look up that blog, but if the meal providers are afraid of their jobs, then I'd say that implies they know their food is of poor quality.
All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.
I don't understand Microsoft promoting such an immature OS.
But then I also don't understand why a company with such huge resources can't release a major update to it's flagship product (Windows, the OS) for the better part of a decade. Both are possibly related.
When the first iPhone came out, it had it's issues (no copy/paste), but for what I heard the parts that worked, just worked. No strange behaviours.
Same for the Android OS, I don't recall having heard that being called "immature".
Of course neither of them is bug free, but from the outset they were pretty decent systems.
The problem MS now has, is that they tried to market an immature, buggy system. This system is tried by the early adopters, and rejected as "it sucks". These early adopters will tell their friends, and those friends won't bother trying it because "it sucks".
The Windows Phone system is on the market for almost two years now, and even a fan calls it "immature". So why would I want to even try it? It's immature, and many early adopters say "it sucks". Now we go forward another year or two. Maybe by then WP is a great system: stable, nice features, fast. It doesn't matter anymore because everyone knows already that "it sucks" and it's "immature" and they will stay with their Androids or iPhones. Which have evolved a lot by then, too.
MS will have to 1) make it mature, 2) make it feature-competitive with iOS and Android, and 3) give it a very new name and look. Otherwise they won't stand a chance to break out of this negative image that they have.
And they can't blame anyone but themselves, as they obviously forgot that it's no problem to release immature shit in a market they own (the PC desktops), while that's not the way to get any foothold in a market with established players (smartphones).
If you don't like the presentation in an ad, there's little hope for the real thing. For the simpe reason that an ad will always show the highlights only, brushed up, in a best case scenario. Like how the orignal iPhone ads show it to load web pages in a fraction of a second. Which was technically impossible as mobile data wasn't that fast. Ads are exaggerated, beautified versions of reality. If you don't like that version, not likely you're ever going to like the actual reality version.
And one could even argue that if they can't explain it in an ad (like how Apple showed the complete working of an iPhone in a single 30-second ad), it's far too complex.
If I were to teach my child programming, Python would be my first choice. It provides a command-line like interface to try single commands and see instant results, and quite easily can build more and more complex programs.
It's been a while, but Glade2/GTK+2 was a pleasure to build UIs with. So easy, now that made me feel like working with Legos after I got the concept of signals and so. Very powerful stuff.
Python doesn't care much about the underlying OS. The OS is more and more irrelevant.
I'm using Linux mainly because I know it and can handle the dark underbelly of that OS, as exposed by the CLI/terminal. And for the rest, it just works, it doesn't get in the way, and that's all an OS should do: stay out of the way, out of sight, and make sure everything just works.
It is no difference when it comes to learning to write.
Yet it makes a big difference when learning to type, which nowadays is (or at least should be) the logical follow-up on learning to write, when the learning to write part is done.
You CAN NOT touch type on a tablet. That's the difference. Tables are useful only as textbook replacement, and in that case you should probably consider an e-book reader with colour screen instead of a general purpose tablet.
I didn't mean to imply that rugged/cheap are totally incompatible.
That's what I read somewhat in your remark before: "just get something that's cheap to replace", implying "why bother about ruggedness".
Thinkpads tended to be quite rugged, at least the IBMs were. I suppose Lenovo's are too. Not the cheapest laptops, but they're supposed to last longer.
Sooner or later I'll go get a new netbook again. Asus' EEEPCs are prime choices for me, especially with my experience from the 701, even with all its shortcomings. Hope they're still as rugged as that one. Unfortunately last time I checked (about a year ago) I didn't see any with SSD, only HDD...
Sure they can break anything but they don't have to. Toys that can withstand some abuse last a lifetime; toys that can not withstand abuse last a day.
The laptop don't have to be indestructible to survive being handled by a child. My old EEEPC is an example of a reasonably rugged device that has seen quite some abuse including drops, and still works.
I'm using Skype occasionally for video calls. My parents would like to see their grandson, that's why. And my grandson is happy to see his grandparents now and then too - it's a 12 hour flight away so you can imagine we don't go often.
I'd be glad to see an alternative, as we often enough have problems with Skype. Having to deal with ads is going to be beyond annoying very soon. But I have yet to hear about a serious alternative:
Free of charge for PC to PC calls. I don't care about calls to landlines v.v.
Decent quality video. Skype's quality is not really good for the bandwidth it has available (400-500 kbit - our upstream speeds).
Decent sound quality. Skype's is generally not so good.
Cross-platform: up-to-date clients for Windows, Mac, Linux.
That are the basic requirements of what such software should do. Add some account management (you have to be able to find each other), I don't want to have to fool around with IP addresses like Gnome's offering (Ekiga?) used to do. It has to just work. Is it really that hard?
No need for GPS. IP address is good enough for this purpose. They need to know in which country you live, like to know which city, but that's about as detailed as need be.
Most kids wouldn't care much about what OS is installed, either. The person who has to provide technical support to the devices, does.
Besides one shouldn't teach a child "windows" or "word", one should teach concepts such as: files and folders, types of storage media, text input (including touch typing - I've never had proper courses myself unfortunately, computers were considered so simply that you don't need to learn to type), basic text layout, serif vs sans-serif font, input methods (an issue for Chinese input), basics of a spreadsheet: what it is, what it can be used for. Maybe even basics of databases. Don't go deep: most people don't need that in daily life, and if they do need it they have the foundation to build upon.
By the time your current primary school kid reaches the workforce, our current computers and software will be obsolete, yet the concept of files and folders goes back many decades already and is likely to stay with us for a very long time. Fonts also stay with us, as do layout principles.
And to learn those concepts, it really doesn't matter which OS is installed. They all use the same concepts, even when it looks a bit different. Seeing the same concepts in a different environment can even be a boon for learning as it shows more of the idea of the concept being universal, and independent of the exact presentation.
My kid is reaching primary age now, and I dread the idea of having to buy a tablet for him. Some schools here actually give iPads to their students... a waste of money.
Tablets are OK to read books, watch a video, browse the Internet or read an e-mail, but all of those (except watching video) he can't do yet. He can read/write maybe a hundred Chinese characters plus a handful of English words by now, but he first should learn to write them properly. Not just because it teaches him to write, but it also teaches fine motor movements, and that's something that people tend to forget about.
He will later need a computer to type homework, but for proper typing nothing beats a good old keyboard.
A tablet you can't type on AND read the screen at the same time unless you bend yourself in a cramped position. Eyes point forward, fingers point downward. There is a reason most laptop screens don't hinge 180 to flat down above the keyboard.
When he's older, and can read well, a tablet may be a textbook replacement. It definitely has it's advantages: compact, light weight, easily updated, can add more videos and images. Yet that's P3 at the earliest. A tablet may or may not be useful for inputting Chinese characters as it may allow handwriting input, though finger drawing on a touch screen is a big difference from pen writing on paper.
To come back on the subject: in my case, I'd look out for a netbook for him. Smaller keyboard is no problem for small fingers, they're cheap so not too much lost when broken, and often built quite rugged compared to normal laptops - at least that's my feeling from holding them in my hands. Furthermore for normal web browsing, book reading and word processing they're plenty powerful enough.
I for one was doing simple woodworking in my primary school. Especially the later years. I also joined a carpentry club at the time.
That did not include the use of power tools, by the way. If any power tools were needed the teacher/supervisor would do this. The rest a 10-12 yo can handle. (Jig)sawing, hammering a nail, glueing: it may not be so perfectly straight yet, but they're old enough to do it.
Child porn is illegal. He actively tried to depict child porn, albeit by using mature actresses. Yet I think what he did, from what I read in that wp entry, shouldn't be illegal - on the assumption that his co-stars knew beforehand what they were going to do, and agreed to that.
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I would call naive the idea that a company enters a market without the idea to do better than their competitors, and hoping to take over the complete market. More market share = more profit. Monopoly = much more profit.
With only ARM type chips on mobile, I wouldn't say that there is much competition. At least not for the ARM company itself (the designers).
Adding Intel to the mix would add to competition in that market though. And ARM has enough of a head start in that market to survive.
I can see problems for human speculators, but not for investors.
An investor buys a stock now, to hold for a significant period of time (months or years), collecting dividend and hopefully sees the value of that stock increase. And the stock value is ultimately determined by the profit of the company that issued the stock.
Does this micro-second trading lower the value of the stocks? It doesn't seem so because overall, over the long run, the bourses tend to go up. And so do stocks of all healthy companies. Companies make profit, their stock prices soar, and when an investor sees his stock has doubled in value and they need the money they can sell it at the then-current price. Made easier actually by the microsecond traders as the liquidity of a stock increases due to it being traded more.
Microsecond traders only can make profit from short-term value changes in the stock. They can not lower the value of a stock. They do prevent slower (human) speculators, that try to do the same, from profiting as much as they used to. The real investor won't be affected.
The reaction of the attacker should also be very fast, considering the actual orders are already done on a micro-second scale.So an attacker should react in a fraction of that time. Going to be tough.
I don't think it's as reliable as they think.
Remember Christmas 2006? Heavy earthquake in Taiwan. Hong Kong got cut off from most of their Internet connections (other than local) for days, and it took weeks to be back to normal.
There are several undersea cables between Taiwan and Hong Kong, over different routes. Now I don't know the size of Sidney Harbour but I have the feeling that the Taiwan Strait is a bit bigger. So those routes are further apart. Not a "single point of failure"? Think again: they were all cut in a single event.
That said, there are two parts of risk assessment: cost of failure, and cost of mitigating it. Building a nuclear plant to withstand a 1:10,000 year tsunami vs a 1:100,000 year tsunami may cost many billions, and ten times the cost of the lower security option. An extra cable to increase reliability so much may cost a million or so, and barely double the total cost (numbers made up for the sake of the argument).
And finally it's up to the person having to pay for it, to say whether they think it's worth it, or not.
400m is 1.3 ns (nano-seconds), 2.6 ns for round trip. If that kind of time interval is make or break, then I wonder why they're still talking about microsecond trading!
Just get a smartphone without data plan. My voice plan is even just 2G. Dirt cheap, and free WiFi is sufficiently available for when I really want to look something up.
I've had 3G for voice a few years ago, but the only difference I noticed is hotter phone & worse battery drain, and worse coverage (shop talked about better call quality - well I didn't hear the difference). I must add that coverage improved over time, and is good now.
That doesn't sound promising.
Actually I had a look at the blog now, and the food on the photos on the first page of that blog looks pretty good. Varied, little deep-fried stuff, quite some fresh vegetables and fruits. Of course the looks don't say everything about overall quality and taste, they do usually go hand in hand, as in most low quality food also doesn't look good.
OK too lazy to look up that blog, but if the meal providers are afraid of their jobs, then I'd say that implies they know their food is of poor quality.
All they have to do is make their food decent. That is: reasonably healthy and balanced, reasonably fresh, and reasonably tasty. No need for five-star dinner quality, it's school dinners, but that also means you shouldn't serve them crap.
Released in 2010, and in 2012 an obvious fan (the article submitter) calls it immature. I think that summarises it nicely.
I don't understand Microsoft promoting such an immature OS.
But then I also don't understand why a company with such huge resources can't release a major update to it's flagship product (Windows, the OS) for the better part of a decade. Both are possibly related.
When the first iPhone came out, it had it's issues (no copy/paste), but for what I heard the parts that worked, just worked. No strange behaviours.
Same for the Android OS, I don't recall having heard that being called "immature".
Of course neither of them is bug free, but from the outset they were pretty decent systems.
The problem MS now has, is that they tried to market an immature, buggy system. This system is tried by the early adopters, and rejected as "it sucks". These early adopters will tell their friends, and those friends won't bother trying it because "it sucks".
The Windows Phone system is on the market for almost two years now, and even a fan calls it "immature". So why would I want to even try it? It's immature, and many early adopters say "it sucks". Now we go forward another year or two. Maybe by then WP is a great system: stable, nice features, fast. It doesn't matter anymore because everyone knows already that "it sucks" and it's "immature" and they will stay with their Androids or iPhones. Which have evolved a lot by then, too.
MS will have to 1) make it mature, 2) make it feature-competitive with iOS and Android, and 3) give it a very new name and look. Otherwise they won't stand a chance to break out of this negative image that they have.
And they can't blame anyone but themselves, as they obviously forgot that it's no problem to release immature shit in a market they own (the PC desktops), while that's not the way to get any foothold in a market with established players (smartphones).
It is totally rational.
If you don't like the presentation in an ad, there's little hope for the real thing. For the simpe reason that an ad will always show the highlights only, brushed up, in a best case scenario. Like how the orignal iPhone ads show it to load web pages in a fraction of a second. Which was technically impossible as mobile data wasn't that fast. Ads are exaggerated, beautified versions of reality. If you don't like that version, not likely you're ever going to like the actual reality version.
And one could even argue that if they can't explain it in an ad (like how Apple showed the complete working of an iPhone in a single 30-second ad), it's far too complex.
It makes the naming of the various flavous of Ubuntu look great!
As long as it runs Angry Birds, the kids will be fine.
If I were to teach my child programming, Python would be my first choice. It provides a command-line like interface to try single commands and see instant results, and quite easily can build more and more complex programs.
It's been a while, but Glade2/GTK+2 was a pleasure to build UIs with. So easy, now that made me feel like working with Legos after I got the concept of signals and so. Very powerful stuff.
Python doesn't care much about the underlying OS. The OS is more and more irrelevant.
I'm using Linux mainly because I know it and can handle the dark underbelly of that OS, as exposed by the CLI/terminal. And for the rest, it just works, it doesn't get in the way, and that's all an OS should do: stay out of the way, out of sight, and make sure everything just works.
It is no difference when it comes to learning to write.
Yet it makes a big difference when learning to type, which nowadays is (or at least should be) the logical follow-up on learning to write, when the learning to write part is done.
You CAN NOT touch type on a tablet. That's the difference. Tables are useful only as textbook replacement, and in that case you should probably consider an e-book reader with colour screen instead of a general purpose tablet.
I didn't mean to imply that rugged/cheap are totally incompatible.
That's what I read somewhat in your remark before: "just get something that's cheap to replace", implying "why bother about ruggedness".
Thinkpads tended to be quite rugged, at least the IBMs were. I suppose Lenovo's are too. Not the cheapest laptops, but they're supposed to last longer.
Sooner or later I'll go get a new netbook again. Asus' EEEPCs are prime choices for me, especially with my experience from the 701, even with all its shortcomings. Hope they're still as rugged as that one. Unfortunately last time I checked (about a year ago) I didn't see any with SSD, only HDD...
Sure they can break anything but they don't have to. Toys that can withstand some abuse last a lifetime; toys that can not withstand abuse last a day.
The laptop don't have to be indestructible to survive being handled by a child. My old EEEPC is an example of a reasonably rugged device that has seen quite some abuse including drops, and still works.
Honest question: which other service?
I'm using Skype occasionally for video calls. My parents would like to see their grandson, that's why. And my grandson is happy to see his grandparents now and then too - it's a 12 hour flight away so you can imagine we don't go often.
I'd be glad to see an alternative, as we often enough have problems with Skype. Having to deal with ads is going to be beyond annoying very soon. But I have yet to hear about a serious alternative:
Free of charge for PC to PC calls. I don't care about calls to landlines v.v.
Decent quality video. Skype's quality is not really good for the bandwidth it has available (400-500 kbit - our upstream speeds).
Decent sound quality. Skype's is generally not so good.
Cross-platform: up-to-date clients for Windows, Mac, Linux.
That are the basic requirements of what such software should do. Add some account management (you have to be able to find each other), I don't want to have to fool around with IP addresses like Gnome's offering (Ekiga?) used to do. It has to just work. Is it really that hard?
No need for GPS. IP address is good enough for this purpose. They need to know in which country you live, like to know which city, but that's about as detailed as need be.
Most kids wouldn't care much about what OS is installed, either. The person who has to provide technical support to the devices, does.
Besides one shouldn't teach a child "windows" or "word", one should teach concepts such as: files and folders, types of storage media, text input (including touch typing - I've never had proper courses myself unfortunately, computers were considered so simply that you don't need to learn to type), basic text layout, serif vs sans-serif font, input methods (an issue for Chinese input), basics of a spreadsheet: what it is, what it can be used for. Maybe even basics of databases. Don't go deep: most people don't need that in daily life, and if they do need it they have the foundation to build upon.
By the time your current primary school kid reaches the workforce, our current computers and software will be obsolete, yet the concept of files and folders goes back many decades already and is likely to stay with us for a very long time. Fonts also stay with us, as do layout principles.
And to learn those concepts, it really doesn't matter which OS is installed. They all use the same concepts, even when it looks a bit different. Seeing the same concepts in a different environment can even be a boon for learning as it shows more of the idea of the concept being universal, and independent of the exact presentation.
My kid is reaching primary age now, and I dread the idea of having to buy a tablet for him. Some schools here actually give iPads to their students... a waste of money.
Tablets are OK to read books, watch a video, browse the Internet or read an e-mail, but all of those (except watching video) he can't do yet. He can read/write maybe a hundred Chinese characters plus a handful of English words by now, but he first should learn to write them properly. Not just because it teaches him to write, but it also teaches fine motor movements, and that's something that people tend to forget about.
He will later need a computer to type homework, but for proper typing nothing beats a good old keyboard.
A tablet you can't type on AND read the screen at the same time unless you bend yourself in a cramped position. Eyes point forward, fingers point downward. There is a reason most laptop screens don't hinge 180 to flat down above the keyboard.
When he's older, and can read well, a tablet may be a textbook replacement. It definitely has it's advantages: compact, light weight, easily updated, can add more videos and images. Yet that's P3 at the earliest. A tablet may or may not be useful for inputting Chinese characters as it may allow handwriting input, though finger drawing on a touch screen is a big difference from pen writing on paper.
To come back on the subject: in my case, I'd look out for a netbook for him. Smaller keyboard is no problem for small fingers, they're cheap so not too much lost when broken, and often built quite rugged compared to normal laptops - at least that's my feeling from holding them in my hands. Furthermore for normal web browsing, book reading and word processing they're plenty powerful enough.
I for one was doing simple woodworking in my primary school. Especially the later years. I also joined a carpentry club at the time.
That did not include the use of power tools, by the way. If any power tools were needed the teacher/supervisor would do this. The rest a 10-12 yo can handle. (Jig)sawing, hammering a nail, glueing: it may not be so perfectly straight yet, but they're old enough to do it.
Why pay a premium?
Warranty and overall build quality (including strength and durability of the casing) come to mind. Children are not the most careful bunch.
Child porn is illegal. He actively tried to depict child porn, albeit by using mature actresses. Yet I think what he did, from what I read in that wp entry, shouldn't be illegal - on the assumption that his co-stars knew beforehand what they were going to do, and agreed to that.