Shopping around may be a good idea for a new set-up, but this has to do with existing hotels.
Replacing the lock means purchasing a complete new set of locks, purchasing a complete new set of key cards and programming equipment, labour cost of replacing all these locks plus probably adaptations to the existing doors and door frames, possibly even the need to replace all the doors because there is no way to fit the new lock in the existing space in a good looking way.
Going with the upgrade option on offer sounds cheaper and more practical/less intrusive to me.
Then there is the legal question of whether the existing locks are "fit for purpose" or not. Being able to hack a lock does not necessarily mean they're not good enough, as given enough time/effort any lock can be broken. That it can be broken this easily, doesn't necessarily mean the company selling them has the legal obligation to fix this. It's definitely not as easy or as black/white as you and many others here would like to believe. Affected hotels will have to sue the company to get back their costs for replacement.
Most people don't pay. They want something for nothing. A study recently published to slashdot shows even if you sold ebooks or games for $1 each, people would still take the stuff for free rather than pay.
Yet the iTunes store, the Amazon Kindle Store, Google Play Store, to name a few, are pretty popular. And based on articles and discussions here on slashdot, in case of Android apps, piracy rates are actually very low.
Over the years I now and then upgraded my system, getting a cleanly installed OS, with an extension-less Firefox.
Pop-ups/unders are nicely taken care of by FF and are not an issue. The somewhat sensible pop-ups (link that legitimately opens a new window) are pushed into tabs, and that's fine.
Yet it's the ads that always make me install FlashBlock very soon. Flashing, jumping, hovering over content (those are maybe even the worst): they irritate me, they distract me from reading the actual content, sometimes make it near impossible due to being so distracting flashing or moving around and blocking text that I want to read. Get rid of those Flash ads and my life improves a lot. And no I'm not going to uninstall Flash as too many sites depend on it, and I don't want to mess around with workarounds to watch a YouTube video or so.
FlashBlock is mostly enough, it blocks the vast majority of irritations.
Though when I'm busy installing extensions, I'll get ABP too. Unfortunately it has no general option of "allow non-intrusive ads" that I know of. Static images or text ads, those are OK. OTOH I don't exactly miss them either, so I can't be bothered too much.
If I pay for TV, then I want it to show as many shows that I enjoy watching as possible. Otherwise no reason to pay for it. So that means the channel has to cater to my tastes, or I won't pay.
For a national service like the BBC where everyone in the UK has to pay for, this means that they should program shows that as many people in their audience as possible like, and with it get the highest overall ratings (in both viewership and quality rating). This way the people that pay for the service get the most value for their money.
This is basically what commercial broadcasters do already: they program primarily popular content, as they want as many people as possible to watch their channel, so they have more viewers for their advertisements.
The above of course unless the publicly funded broadcaster has a very specific charter where they have to program more of a certain type of content, which if decided democratically will again end up being programming that most people want to watch.
The article claims they flew it at 15 ft, and that they think they can way higher like 10,000 ft: if true that's definitely not just ground effect, but unfortunately video doesn't even show the 15 ft trials, only hovering really close to the ground. I would expect them to show off their top tests too.
The think I'm mostly wondering about is stability. How do they do that? Hovercrafts are notorious for their instability, especially smaller craft. Flying them is a tough balancing act.
At least the videos look genuine to me, so it seems to be a real product. Oh well, time will tell how true it all is.
For instant access keep a local copy of your back-up (second HD in same computer). This is for when everything else fails, and ideally there is no need to read that Glacier archive ever.
Actually, currently I'm using a second hard disk in the same computer for back-ups. Instantly available, but not off-site which is the key for me. Almost as good as optical and storing the disk next to the computer.
Local optical disk is nice, but the main draw-back is that I have to remember to swap out the disks on a regular basis (of course no need to do full backup daily, currently I do monthly full and incremental after that).
Web storage for off-site storage has the great advantage that it can be automated; and in a weekend I don't mind if my upstream is saturated or nearly so for 5-10 hours.
When you're big enough, it usually pays off to do stuff in-house, as you have economy of scale.
Everyone smaller than that, is struggling to do proper back-ups. I for one, have something like 50 GB of data to backup. Way too small for tape. It's HD size. But HDs are not exaclty suitable to drop in a tote bag and take home on the train. Also they're a bit expensive to have a new HD every week/month so you have to rotate, making the transport even worse. I've looked into using memory cards or USB sticks, but I need 64GB ones which are still very expensive. A service like this I should seriously look into (especially now I have a 20 Mbit up/down Internet connection).
I would expect their competitors, including local independent shops, to take over really quickly. And if you want to suggest that the US doesn't have any such local stores any more, then with the disappearance of Walmart they will appear very soon again.
OK I agree on you that Apple is overvalued, but many other people obviously believe it's the right value for the company.
Apple is more than iPods/iPads/etc. It's a company, it's an organisation that knows how to produce those things, how to market them, how to sell them, and, maybe most importantly, how to create new products in a way that no-one else has done before (even if based on old ideas, the actual product is something that didn't exist before). This know-how, this organisation, that is also what makes a company and what gives it value.
Most likely, Apple has internally prototypes for the iPad4, the iPhone6, various powerbooks, an extra thin Macbook Air, and who knows what they have. Having these upcoming products adds to the value of a company. Having the facilities and the people to develop new products adds to it. There is likely a whole lot of know-how on the shelf, things that work and things that don't. There will be ideas that can not be done yet, because the technology doesn't exist.
And then there is the pure brand value. The Apple Computer brand is very valuable: for example if you would have two absolutely identical tablets, one with the Apple brand the other without, they would sell at different price. There is immense value in that.
Valuing companies like Apple is very difficult. How much is the brand worth? How much is the employee's collective know-how worth? How much are their shops worth - other than their pure real estate value? How many successful products will they be able to put on the market in the upcoming year, five years, decade?
And that doesn't account for just Apple, that accounts for all companies. It's the sum of parts that's making a company, and by having those parts together it's final value is more than the sum of the parts.
A company like Exxon is relatively easier to value. They work with a physical product, they own huge amounts of real estate and physical infrastructure, etc. They also have a lot of know-how of course, but that's not their core product.
2. Only business IT structure that is build on Microsoft would even need to be concerned.
And you of course try to imply that this is the business' fault.
Of course most of the world's business depends on Microsoft, and that in itself is an issue. Though it is not that there are easy alternatives, or quick fixes for these companies to switch to another system overnight, and not much reason for them to take so much risk when what they have actually works.
Oh and by the way, if the world would depend on Debian, it would be the same problem. That system is also not bug-free.
To the rest of your post, you've got it exactly right - it's not motivated by a nefarious lock-in plot to take away consumer choice. It simply reflects a prioritization of user-customizability below other factors, like product aesthetics and cost reduction.
And considering that these pretty looking, non-user-upgradable laptops sell really well (otherwise manufacturers would go back to the old ways of course), it's what most of their customers actually prefer.
If a trained health care worker can't distinguish between sane and insane, how could a jury of randomly picked people do this?
The jury will listen - like in all trials - to the evidence put forward to them by witnesses, and in this case this will be expert witnesses: those exact health care workers who personally evaluated an individual. And these experts will give their expert opinion on the case, just like they would do without jury. And it's not that a jury will go against expert advice I may assume.
There are nowadays many countries with special laws on how to deal with "terrorists".
A "normal criminal" can be held without charge for a few days, a "terrorist" can be held without charge (well, they're called terrorist which should be a charge in itself) for weeks or more.
A "normal criminal" has all kinds of rights, a "terrorist" loses many of those rights, just for being suspected of terrorism.
This man did something the government didn't like, which they possibly don't have a specific law for or just don't know well how to deal with, and there you go, he's branded a terrorist, loses all his rights, can be tossed in jail and possibly even shipped to Gitmo. All without the need of any substantiated charge against the suspect.
As soon as we all can start treating "terrorists" as "normal criminals", I'm sure we'll make enormous headway in winning this so-called "war on terror".
Now this ex-marine should definitely not be treated as terrorist. I have no idea how serious his ideas are, whether he really intends to start a revolution and whatnot, but apparently certain people believe he is serious about it. Giving him a serious mental assessment sounds in place, but he should be called "mentally unstable" or something like that, not "terrorist". Putting him in an institution immediately sounds also a bit much to me, though I don't know the individual's background.
Not all copies are inferior. Japan got huge in the 80s/90s by "copying and improving". And they were not the first that did this; it's how UK lost out to mainland Europe in the later stages of the industrial revolution: they were the first to industrialise, but the continent copied there methods and products, and improved on them.
China is currently very much in the copy phase, sooner or later they will also start to innovate themselves (some Chinese companies already do that), followed by a time in which the establised companies will be out-innovated. It may take a while, the Chinese don't seem to be very fast in picking up the innovation part, but if the world's history is anything to go by, sooner or later they will.
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
Not much changed. These days newspapers across the world (especially English-language papers) have identical articles too. They just take it from "the wire" and reprint it without any editing usually. I literally see the same articles in a local Hong Kong paper that I see later linked from/. so some US online paper.
The only difference is that nowadays this exchange goes a lot faster, and that papers usually pay for the privilege.
One of the reasons of the development of the micro USB standard, and phones having a standard 3.5 mm jack for headphones, is that you don't have to buy a new charger or new charging cable with every phone you get. Most people buying a phone, are replacing one. It would be great if at least one can re-use the charger of one to charge the other. And it allows more competition in market for replacement chargers.
Point in case: my wife bought herself a Kindle some time ago, and is now charging them via my LG phone's charger. The kindle came with a micro USB cable (nice to have a spare), but no charger. Being able to re-use an existing charger is just fantastic, it saves clutter, it saves money, it reduces waste (one less charger produced and, sooner or later, scrapped).
You already say "the box comes with USB charging cable", that means that by buying an iPhone you ARE required to buy such a cable as well. It comes as a package, after all, the cost of that cable is in the price of your iPhone.
According to TFA, encryption and decryption is now available and built in in the hardware even. So it's become computationally cheap. The AES key is also burned in silicon, making it impossible to get to.
But as usual the weakest link is the user's password, in this case a PIN. A typical 4-digit PIN can be cracked (using special software to prevent phone from wiping itself after ten failed attempts) in a matter of minutes; one needs an 8-digit PIN to be reasonably secure (average 15 years for a brute-force attack).
These Kindles may not continue forever, they do last very very long on a charge - Amazon claims up to two months, based on half an hour reading a day, so about 30 hours of constant use.
The iPad 3 is reported to last only around six hours.
Totally agreed. They probably did so already. If I were to consider to buy a Windows based tablet, I'd be waiting for the Surface (in a parallel universe or so, you never know, in this universe I'm not even considering to buy a tablet to begin with).
And even in this universe, I'm interested in it. Not to buy, just normal curiousity. The specs are very interesting, the form factor is different from anything else currently on the markt. That's interesting.
MS doesn't have anything like an app market, like Amazon has a book store.
The product of Amazon is book sales; the Kindle is their vehicle to stimulate those sales. I don't see anything Microsoft has that they could sell though the Surface tablet.
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Well, insofar, it's not one that I have in my toolbox. That's how obscure and uncommonly used they are.
It's also not one that I couldn't buy at the local hardware shop, if I'd need one.
Shopping around may be a good idea for a new set-up, but this has to do with existing hotels.
Replacing the lock means purchasing a complete new set of locks, purchasing a complete new set of key cards and programming equipment, labour cost of replacing all these locks plus probably adaptations to the existing doors and door frames, possibly even the need to replace all the doors because there is no way to fit the new lock in the existing space in a good looking way.
Going with the upgrade option on offer sounds cheaper and more practical/less intrusive to me.
Then there is the legal question of whether the existing locks are "fit for purpose" or not. Being able to hack a lock does not necessarily mean they're not good enough, as given enough time/effort any lock can be broken. That it can be broken this easily, doesn't necessarily mean the company selling them has the legal obligation to fix this. It's definitely not as easy or as black/white as you and many others here would like to believe. Affected hotels will have to sue the company to get back their costs for replacement.
Bad analogy: bees collect pollen, too.
Most people don't pay. They want something for nothing. A study recently published to slashdot shows even if you sold ebooks or games for $1 each, people would still take the stuff for free rather than pay.
Yet the iTunes store, the Amazon Kindle Store, Google Play Store, to name a few, are pretty popular. And based on articles and discussions here on slashdot, in case of Android apps, piracy rates are actually very low.
Totally agreed.
Over the years I now and then upgraded my system, getting a cleanly installed OS, with an extension-less Firefox.
Pop-ups/unders are nicely taken care of by FF and are not an issue. The somewhat sensible pop-ups (link that legitimately opens a new window) are pushed into tabs, and that's fine.
Yet it's the ads that always make me install FlashBlock very soon. Flashing, jumping, hovering over content (those are maybe even the worst): they irritate me, they distract me from reading the actual content, sometimes make it near impossible due to being so distracting flashing or moving around and blocking text that I want to read. Get rid of those Flash ads and my life improves a lot. And no I'm not going to uninstall Flash as too many sites depend on it, and I don't want to mess around with workarounds to watch a YouTube video or so.
FlashBlock is mostly enough, it blocks the vast majority of irritations.
Though when I'm busy installing extensions, I'll get ABP too. Unfortunately it has no general option of "allow non-intrusive ads" that I know of. Static images or text ads, those are OK. OTOH I don't exactly miss them either, so I can't be bothered too much.
While true, there is one fallacy.
If I pay for TV, then I want it to show as many shows that I enjoy watching as possible. Otherwise no reason to pay for it. So that means the channel has to cater to my tastes, or I won't pay.
For a national service like the BBC where everyone in the UK has to pay for, this means that they should program shows that as many people in their audience as possible like, and with it get the highest overall ratings (in both viewership and quality rating). This way the people that pay for the service get the most value for their money.
This is basically what commercial broadcasters do already: they program primarily popular content, as they want as many people as possible to watch their channel, so they have more viewers for their advertisements.
The above of course unless the publicly funded broadcaster has a very specific charter where they have to program more of a certain type of content, which if decided democratically will again end up being programming that most people want to watch.
The article claims they flew it at 15 ft, and that they think they can way higher like 10,000 ft: if true that's definitely not just ground effect, but unfortunately video doesn't even show the 15 ft trials, only hovering really close to the ground. I would expect them to show off their top tests too.
The think I'm mostly wondering about is stability. How do they do that? Hovercrafts are notorious for their instability, especially smaller craft. Flying them is a tough balancing act.
At least the videos look genuine to me, so it seems to be a real product. Oh well, time will tell how true it all is.
For instant access keep a local copy of your back-up (second HD in same computer). This is for when everything else fails, and ideally there is no need to read that Glacier archive ever.
Actually, currently I'm using a second hard disk in the same computer for back-ups. Instantly available, but not off-site which is the key for me. Almost as good as optical and storing the disk next to the computer.
Local optical disk is nice, but the main draw-back is that I have to remember to swap out the disks on a regular basis (of course no need to do full backup daily, currently I do monthly full and incremental after that).
Web storage for off-site storage has the great advantage that it can be automated; and in a weekend I don't mind if my upstream is saturated or nearly so for 5-10 hours.
I think your organisation is too big for Glacier.
When you're big enough, it usually pays off to do stuff in-house, as you have economy of scale.
Everyone smaller than that, is struggling to do proper back-ups. I for one, have something like 50 GB of data to backup. Way too small for tape. It's HD size. But HDs are not exaclty suitable to drop in a tote bag and take home on the train. Also they're a bit expensive to have a new HD every week/month so you have to rotate, making the transport even worse. I've looked into using memory cards or USB sticks, but I need 64GB ones which are still very expensive. A service like this I should seriously look into (especially now I have a 20 Mbit up/down Internet connection).
Privacy remains an issue of course.
I would expect their competitors, including local independent shops, to take over really quickly. And if you want to suggest that the US doesn't have any such local stores any more, then with the disappearance of Walmart they will appear very soon again.
OK I agree on you that Apple is overvalued, but many other people obviously believe it's the right value for the company.
Apple is more than iPods/iPads/etc. It's a company, it's an organisation that knows how to produce those things, how to market them, how to sell them, and, maybe most importantly, how to create new products in a way that no-one else has done before (even if based on old ideas, the actual product is something that didn't exist before). This know-how, this organisation, that is also what makes a company and what gives it value.
Most likely, Apple has internally prototypes for the iPad4, the iPhone6, various powerbooks, an extra thin Macbook Air, and who knows what they have. Having these upcoming products adds to the value of a company. Having the facilities and the people to develop new products adds to it. There is likely a whole lot of know-how on the shelf, things that work and things that don't. There will be ideas that can not be done yet, because the technology doesn't exist.
And then there is the pure brand value. The Apple Computer brand is very valuable: for example if you would have two absolutely identical tablets, one with the Apple brand the other without, they would sell at different price. There is immense value in that.
Valuing companies like Apple is very difficult. How much is the brand worth? How much is the employee's collective know-how worth? How much are their shops worth - other than their pure real estate value? How many successful products will they be able to put on the market in the upcoming year, five years, decade?
And that doesn't account for just Apple, that accounts for all companies. It's the sum of parts that's making a company, and by having those parts together it's final value is more than the sum of the parts.
A company like Exxon is relatively easier to value. They work with a physical product, they own huge amounts of real estate and physical infrastructure, etc. They also have a lot of know-how of course, but that's not their core product.
2. Only business IT structure that is build on Microsoft would even need to be concerned.
And you of course try to imply that this is the business' fault.
Of course most of the world's business depends on Microsoft, and that in itself is an issue. Though it is not that there are easy alternatives, or quick fixes for these companies to switch to another system overnight, and not much reason for them to take so much risk when what they have actually works.
Oh and by the way, if the world would depend on Debian, it would be the same problem. That system is also not bug-free.
To the rest of your post, you've got it exactly right - it's not motivated by a nefarious lock-in plot to take away consumer choice. It simply reflects a prioritization of user-customizability below other factors, like product aesthetics and cost reduction.
And considering that these pretty looking, non-user-upgradable laptops sell really well (otherwise manufacturers would go back to the old ways of course), it's what most of their customers actually prefer.
If a trained health care worker can't distinguish between sane and insane, how could a jury of randomly picked people do this?
The jury will listen - like in all trials - to the evidence put forward to them by witnesses, and in this case this will be expert witnesses: those exact health care workers who personally evaluated an individual. And these experts will give their expert opinion on the case, just like they would do without jury. And it's not that a jury will go against expert advice I may assume.
There are nowadays many countries with special laws on how to deal with "terrorists".
A "normal criminal" can be held without charge for a few days, a "terrorist" can be held without charge (well, they're called terrorist which should be a charge in itself) for weeks or more.
A "normal criminal" has all kinds of rights, a "terrorist" loses many of those rights, just for being suspected of terrorism.
This man did something the government didn't like, which they possibly don't have a specific law for or just don't know well how to deal with, and there you go, he's branded a terrorist, loses all his rights, can be tossed in jail and possibly even shipped to Gitmo. All without the need of any substantiated charge against the suspect.
As soon as we all can start treating "terrorists" as "normal criminals", I'm sure we'll make enormous headway in winning this so-called "war on terror".
Now this ex-marine should definitely not be treated as terrorist. I have no idea how serious his ideas are, whether he really intends to start a revolution and whatnot, but apparently certain people believe he is serious about it. Giving him a serious mental assessment sounds in place, but he should be called "mentally unstable" or something like that, not "terrorist". Putting him in an institution immediately sounds also a bit much to me, though I don't know the individual's background.
What?
You suggest I read TFA?
The blasphemy! I didn't read that! What were you thinking?!
Not all copies are inferior. Japan got huge in the 80s/90s by "copying and improving". And they were not the first that did this; it's how UK lost out to mainland Europe in the later stages of the industrial revolution: they were the first to industrialise, but the continent copied there methods and products, and improved on them.
China is currently very much in the copy phase, sooner or later they will also start to innovate themselves (some Chinese companies already do that), followed by a time in which the establised companies will be out-innovated. It may take a while, the Chinese don't seem to be very fast in picking up the innovation part, but if the world's history is anything to go by, sooner or later they will.
Having other people copy your designs doesn't mean you can't innovate anymore. On the contrary: by innovating you will stay ahead of the pack.
Also, copies always mean the copier is playing catch-up. They always have to wait and see what you've done, before they can try to do the same. By innovating you will keep the advantage, having everybody copy your work just means you have to innovate even harder and faster. That's tough of course, much easier to stop the rest from picking up your innovative ideas.
Not much changed. These days newspapers across the world (especially English-language papers) have identical articles too. They just take it from "the wire" and reprint it without any editing usually. I literally see the same articles in a local Hong Kong paper that I see later linked from /. so some US online paper.
The only difference is that nowadays this exchange goes a lot faster, and that papers usually pay for the privilege.
One of the reasons of the development of the micro USB standard, and phones having a standard 3.5 mm jack for headphones, is that you don't have to buy a new charger or new charging cable with every phone you get. Most people buying a phone, are replacing one. It would be great if at least one can re-use the charger of one to charge the other. And it allows more competition in market for replacement chargers.
Point in case: my wife bought herself a Kindle some time ago, and is now charging them via my LG phone's charger. The kindle came with a micro USB cable (nice to have a spare), but no charger. Being able to re-use an existing charger is just fantastic, it saves clutter, it saves money, it reduces waste (one less charger produced and, sooner or later, scrapped).
You already say "the box comes with USB charging cable", that means that by buying an iPhone you ARE required to buy such a cable as well. It comes as a package, after all, the cost of that cable is in the price of your iPhone.
According to TFA, encryption and decryption is now available and built in in the hardware even. So it's become computationally cheap. The AES key is also burned in silicon, making it impossible to get to.
But as usual the weakest link is the user's password, in this case a PIN. A typical 4-digit PIN can be cracked (using special software to prevent phone from wiping itself after ten failed attempts) in a matter of minutes; one needs an 8-digit PIN to be reasonably secure (average 15 years for a brute-force attack).
And battery life.
These Kindles may not continue forever, they do last very very long on a charge - Amazon claims up to two months, based on half an hour reading a day, so about 30 hours of constant use.
The iPad 3 is reported to last only around six hours.
Totally agreed. They probably did so already. If I were to consider to buy a Windows based tablet, I'd be waiting for the Surface (in a parallel universe or so, you never know, in this universe I'm not even considering to buy a tablet to begin with).
And even in this universe, I'm interested in it. Not to buy, just normal curiousity. The specs are very interesting, the form factor is different from anything else currently on the markt. That's interesting.
MS doesn't have anything like an app market, like Amazon has a book store.
The product of Amazon is book sales; the Kindle is their vehicle to stimulate those sales. I don't see anything Microsoft has that they could sell though the Surface tablet.