Dumb phones are still going, but how long they will last is anyone's guess.
Well, basically, I think they will last for a very long time.
At least until a smart phone becomes cheaper than a dumb phone - which imho is possible considering a smart phone doesn't have all those mechanical buttons a dumb phone has. And a dozen or so buttons may very well be more expensive to produce than a single touch screen display.
And even then there will likely always remain a market for simple phones that do one thing, and one thing very well: making phone calls.
The third linked article mentions a consumer price of 220 EUR for the phone. That sounds still rather cheap to me (that is about the price of a low-end Android phone - current generation - without any costs for the software other than customisation).
If that 220 euro price is true, it explains to me part of the unattractiveness of the phone: it's hardware must be low end, making it uncompetitive with other phones.
Good one. I have no experience with those: how about checks on your regular metal keys? Almost everybody carries a bundle of keys around (home, office, bicycle, car, whatnot), often invisibly packed in a small purse. Will they check whether you carry any metal handcuff keys in between your normal keys? Or, like at the airport, put it through a separate scanner where they only look for weapons and so?
Interesting the article mentions how those plastic keys are easy to take through airport security. As if it's easier than metal keys. I've routinely taken a keyring with about a dozen keys on planes, could contain any key, never did they really inspect which keys (it just had to go through the scanner). I'm sure just adding a metal handcuff key to that bunch would let me through just as easily. Maybe even easier than with a plastic key, as metal keys are more common.
My info is what is available readily in the media; I haven't made a study of the case. I also don't know whether this accusation is true or not. It's an accusation, not a conviction.
Key in the case is the accusation that Megaupload promoted the sharing of copyright infringing materials, by giving discounts or even paying account holders that would upload such material.
Whether this accusation is true or not I don't know, but if true it sounds to me like valid grounds for prosecution.
I see. I know many countries have laws that stipulate that such unclaimed heritage goes to the government, which then can use it for the general good. Sounds very reasonable to me; better than having it go to the profit of some private business.
I wonder whether the specific attack discussed here was successful.
As in: did the IT department find any other infected sticks (just one could be just as well an accidentally lost stick that happened to carry a virus), and did they find the malware on any of their company computers?
I wonder who really initiated the suit. Not likely the kids: what do they know about money, at that age, let alone law suits? Why would those children suspect the existence of hidden assets? They probably don't even know what the word means.
So other than these two children, who's going to benefit? Is this initiated by some lawyers that do the suing on behalf of the children? Is it initiated by their legal guardian who hopes to get access to (part of) that money?
They're after hidden assets - which are going to be hard to claim after his death when no-one knows it exists (in a related note, I do sometimes wonder indeed what happens to such hidden Swiss bank accounts, where only the account holder knows of, when this person dies). They don't know whether he has any money, they think he does, and are trying to find that out.
The correct shoes will definitely influence an athlete's performance.
I really doubt though that this shoe will be able to do much to improve on Bolt's performance, as I do expect people like him to wear highly personalised shoes already, as every fraction of a second counts at that level.
Not sure what you want to say, but at least you totally confirm my point. News.google.com is not doing any selection; they're just an automated aggregator. Without the underlying news agencies and newspapers they're nothing.
There is one problem I have with searching for news using Google: knowing what to search for. I have no idea what's happening in the world, other than what I get from news media such as the newspapers, the TV news, the radio news, and the like. This site gives me quite some news about IT related issues. Only when you already know what's going on, you can start searching for more information on those specific topics.
SEO for news articles is nice, but it is secondary only. For example, as long as no-one knows that there were elections in Greece, no-one will search for the results. And we still need journalists to compile those results, and explain to the rest of the world what those parties stand for and how those results may influence our daily life.
Also those aggregator sites live and fall with the underlying journalism. Without journalists reporting on issues, there is no news to aggregate for them. And all that "citizen journalism", the idea being that everyone reports on their own blogs what is happening in their neigbourhood, is not going to work either: the problem is that someone would have to dig through those thousands of blogs to find the one important news item. Automated aggregators can't do that.
All serious news companies, including the WSJ, do just that. They have people walking on the streets, searching for interesting bits and pieces of news, searching for links between them, and trying to get the big picture which they then write down in a generally comprehensible manner for the rest of the world.
I've never read the Huffington Post. I'm not that interested in US local/national news, so can't comment on that site specifically. But 7000 comments - that's terrible to wade through.
For all it's shortcomings, I enjoy reading discussions on/. for two basic reasons: 1) threading, 2) moderation.
I have read discussions on many other sites, but this is the only one that I know that is using moderation and where it really works. I'm regularly reading news online on volkskrant.nl (a major Dutch newspaper), I almost never read the comments because there are lots of trolls, flames, etc. that don't add anything intellectual to the discussion and on/. those comments would be modded down soon enough. There are good comments too, but too much crap to wade through. Also they're a flat list, no easy to read threads. Even 4chan reads easier than that for the simple reason that they have threads.
Slashcode is free, and I really think many of those sites should look into taking the discussion part from it. It's by far the best that I've seen so far (no not talking about the code, but the results).
Yes - and unless it changed a lot recently I've always heard it is a lesser offering compared to the Windows version, and often argued as only offered to please the anti-competition regulators. Just checked out some reviews, and it seems it's quite up to par to the Windows offering nowadays.
and Office365 (browser based)?
I know about that one too.
And that one is bit ironic, as by offering a browser-based solution MS is weaning their own customers from the Windows lock-in, as they don't even have to use IE for that. I don't have an Office365 account anywhere so can't test it, but from the face of it, it should work in Firefox on Linux too.
Maybe if they drop the price low enough, somebody might actually buy Microsoft Word instead of downloading LibreOffice for free.
The other day I saw MS Office (boxed set) for sale in a retail shop. The price they asked for it was about as much as what I payed for my latest PC. Way more than the cost of my PC if you wanted to add Exchange to it. I was positively shocked at those prices.
And maybe the most shocking: the fact that people buy it (it's in the shop, so there are customers for it. At least the shop owner thinks it's worth dedicating shelf space to and they wouldn't if it doesn't sell).
IE is Windows-only. Users that want IE, must use Windows. Users that prefer Firefox or Chrome can switch OS without switching browsers.
This is just part of the Windows lock-in. Office is another major one. As long as people stick to MS Office, they must stick to Windows. If they start using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, they can switch OS without switching word processor.
The list goes on. For now the lock-in to Windows, partly thanks to the large number of software titles that are Windows-only, is strong. But every application they lose, and IE is a high-profile one, lessens the lock-in.
And then there's this trend towards more and more in-browser applications, like Google Docs and the like. IE not being the one dominant browser (like it was in the IE6 era) means these apps are going to be written to standards, and run in all browsers. As soon as all software runs in-browser, not only the browser becomes irrelevant (any will do), the OS becomes irrelevant (any that can run a standards-compliant browser will do - or just stick to the basic Mozilla OS or however they call it now), even the underlying hardware becomes irrelevant.
For the world, that's a good thing. For MS, it's not.
The problem is again that those stats are from specific sites.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, given a few comments up, there are big differences in browser use per geographical area. For example US/Canada use mainly IE, while Europeans use mainly Firefox. This can also affect your statistics seriously.
Getting proper global stats is difficult. WP reporting around 30% IE overall sounds rather realistic to me. That site should be relatively bias-free: accessible world-wide, used by techies and non-techies alike, and no meaningful competition.
And with competition, I mean compare it with say Google, which is doing well in the Western world but at least in China they're a distant second, and that will skew their statistics (according to Statcounter, China uses primarily IE, so Google will have IE underestimated).
It teaches people that those unknown, never-heard-of-before, nondescript.org domains are fully safe and a-OK. Just pretend to be from the FBI, send them to such a site, and you can infect them all you want.
Transfer rights in full to a separate company: a shell company set up just to hold those rights. Say all the rights IBM has in it they transfer to this "OS/2 source holding ltd" company.
Have the OS/2 source holding ltd. release the whole thing - put it on ftp and let the world back it up.
And even "buying the rights to the source" may be easier said than done: it only works if the complete source is copyrighted by that company.
It is very well possible that they use bits and pieces of software written by others, for which they do not have the right to redistribute the source, but only the binary linked to their own software. This I have seen before as argument why a source could not be released, or if released, only incomplete and would not compile.
Slashdot Mirror
Dumb phones are still going, but how long they will last is anyone's guess.
Well, basically, I think they will last for a very long time.
At least until a smart phone becomes cheaper than a dumb phone - which imho is possible considering a smart phone doesn't have all those mechanical buttons a dumb phone has. And a dozen or so buttons may very well be more expensive to produce than a single touch screen display.
And even then there will likely always remain a market for simple phones that do one thing, and one thing very well: making phone calls.
The third linked article mentions a consumer price of 220 EUR for the phone. That sounds still rather cheap to me (that is about the price of a low-end Android phone - current generation - without any costs for the software other than customisation).
If that 220 euro price is true, it explains to me part of the unattractiveness of the phone: it's hardware must be low end, making it uncompetitive with other phones.
Good one. I have no experience with those: how about checks on your regular metal keys? Almost everybody carries a bundle of keys around (home, office, bicycle, car, whatnot), often invisibly packed in a small purse. Will they check whether you carry any metal handcuff keys in between your normal keys? Or, like at the airport, put it through a separate scanner where they only look for weapons and so?
Exactly. Why are we even discussing this?
Interesting the article mentions how those plastic keys are easy to take through airport security. As if it's easier than metal keys. I've routinely taken a keyring with about a dozen keys on planes, could contain any key, never did they really inspect which keys (it just had to go through the scanner). I'm sure just adding a metal handcuff key to that bunch would let me through just as easily. Maybe even easier than with a plastic key, as metal keys are more common.
As I said: that's what they're accused of.
My info is what is available readily in the media; I haven't made a study of the case. I also don't know whether this accusation is true or not. It's an accusation, not a conviction.
Key in the case is the accusation that Megaupload promoted the sharing of copyright infringing materials, by giving discounts or even paying account holders that would upload such material.
Whether this accusation is true or not I don't know, but if true it sounds to me like valid grounds for prosecution.
Maybe they had to due to international cooperation treaties?
I see. I know many countries have laws that stipulate that such unclaimed heritage goes to the government, which then can use it for the general good. Sounds very reasonable to me; better than having it go to the profit of some private business.
I wonder whether the specific attack discussed here was successful.
As in: did the IT department find any other infected sticks (just one could be just as well an accidentally lost stick that happened to carry a virus), and did they find the malware on any of their company computers?
I wonder who really initiated the suit. Not likely the kids: what do they know about money, at that age, let alone law suits? Why would those children suspect the existence of hidden assets? They probably don't even know what the word means.
So other than these two children, who's going to benefit? Is this initiated by some lawyers that do the suing on behalf of the children? Is it initiated by their legal guardian who hopes to get access to (part of) that money?
They're after hidden assets - which are going to be hard to claim after his death when no-one knows it exists (in a related note, I do sometimes wonder indeed what happens to such hidden Swiss bank accounts, where only the account holder knows of, when this person dies). They don't know whether he has any money, they think he does, and are trying to find that out.
The correct shoes will definitely influence an athlete's performance.
I really doubt though that this shoe will be able to do much to improve on Bolt's performance, as I do expect people like him to wear highly personalised shoes already, as every fraction of a second counts at that level.
I thought disabling USB ports (and related such as firewire), cameras, microphones was primarily to prevent data from leaking OUT of the company.
Not sure what you want to say, but at least you totally confirm my point. News.google.com is not doing any selection; they're just an automated aggregator. Without the underlying news agencies and newspapers they're nothing.
There is one problem I have with searching for news using Google: knowing what to search for. I have no idea what's happening in the world, other than what I get from news media such as the newspapers, the TV news, the radio news, and the like. This site gives me quite some news about IT related issues. Only when you already know what's going on, you can start searching for more information on those specific topics.
SEO for news articles is nice, but it is secondary only. For example, as long as no-one knows that there were elections in Greece, no-one will search for the results. And we still need journalists to compile those results, and explain to the rest of the world what those parties stand for and how those results may influence our daily life.
Also those aggregator sites live and fall with the underlying journalism. Without journalists reporting on issues, there is no news to aggregate for them. And all that "citizen journalism", the idea being that everyone reports on their own blogs what is happening in their neigbourhood, is not going to work either: the problem is that someone would have to dig through those thousands of blogs to find the one important news item. Automated aggregators can't do that.
All serious news companies, including the WSJ, do just that. They have people walking on the streets, searching for interesting bits and pieces of news, searching for links between them, and trying to get the big picture which they then write down in a generally comprehensible manner for the rest of the world.
I've never read the Huffington Post. I'm not that interested in US local/national news, so can't comment on that site specifically. But 7000 comments - that's terrible to wade through.
For all it's shortcomings, I enjoy reading discussions on /. for two basic reasons: 1) threading, 2) moderation.
I have read discussions on many other sites, but this is the only one that I know that is using moderation and where it really works. I'm regularly reading news online on volkskrant.nl (a major Dutch newspaper), I almost never read the comments because there are lots of trolls, flames, etc. that don't add anything intellectual to the discussion and on /. those comments would be modded down soon enough. There are good comments too, but too much crap to wade through. Also they're a flat list, no easy to read threads. Even 4chan reads easier than that for the simple reason that they have threads.
Slashcode is free, and I really think many of those sites should look into taking the discussion part from it. It's by far the best that I've seen so far (no not talking about the code, but the results).
Have you heard of Office for Mac
Yes - and unless it changed a lot recently I've always heard it is a lesser offering compared to the Windows version, and often argued as only offered to please the anti-competition regulators. Just checked out some reviews, and it seems it's quite up to par to the Windows offering nowadays.
and Office365 (browser based)?
I know about that one too.
And that one is bit ironic, as by offering a browser-based solution MS is weaning their own customers from the Windows lock-in, as they don't even have to use IE for that. I don't have an Office365 account anywhere so can't test it, but from the face of it, it should work in Firefox on Linux too.
Maybe if they drop the price low enough, somebody might actually buy Microsoft Word instead of downloading LibreOffice for free.
The other day I saw MS Office (boxed set) for sale in a retail shop. The price they asked for it was about as much as what I payed for my latest PC. Way more than the cost of my PC if you wanted to add Exchange to it. I was positively shocked at those prices.
And maybe the most shocking: the fact that people buy it (it's in the shop, so there are customers for it. At least the shop owner thinks it's worth dedicating shelf space to and they wouldn't if it doesn't sell).
IE is Windows-only. Users that want IE, must use Windows. Users that prefer Firefox or Chrome can switch OS without switching browsers.
This is just part of the Windows lock-in. Office is another major one. As long as people stick to MS Office, they must stick to Windows. If they start using OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice, they can switch OS without switching word processor.
The list goes on. For now the lock-in to Windows, partly thanks to the large number of software titles that are Windows-only, is strong. But every application they lose, and IE is a high-profile one, lessens the lock-in.
And then there's this trend towards more and more in-browser applications, like Google Docs and the like. IE not being the one dominant browser (like it was in the IE6 era) means these apps are going to be written to standards, and run in all browsers. As soon as all software runs in-browser, not only the browser becomes irrelevant (any will do), the OS becomes irrelevant (any that can run a standards-compliant browser will do - or just stick to the basic Mozilla OS or however they call it now), even the underlying hardware becomes irrelevant.
For the world, that's a good thing. For MS, it's not.
The problem is again that those stats are from specific sites.
Looking at the Wikipedia page, given a few comments up, there are big differences in browser use per geographical area. For example US/Canada use mainly IE, while Europeans use mainly Firefox. This can also affect your statistics seriously.
Getting proper global stats is difficult. WP reporting around 30% IE overall sounds rather realistic to me. That site should be relatively bias-free: accessible world-wide, used by techies and non-techies alike, and no meaningful competition.
And with competition, I mean compare it with say Google, which is doing well in the Western world but at least in China they're a distant second, and that will skew their statistics (according to Statcounter, China uses primarily IE, so Google will have IE underestimated).
It teaches people that those unknown, never-heard-of-before, nondescript .org domains are fully safe and a-OK. Just pretend to be from the FBI, send them to such a site, and you can infect them all you want.
Transfer rights in full to a separate company: a shell company set up just to hold those rights. Say all the rights IBM has in it they transfer to this "OS/2 source holding ltd" company.
Have the OS/2 source holding ltd. release the whole thing - put it on ftp and let the world back it up.
Close that company.
Now who you gonna sue?
And even "buying the rights to the source" may be easier said than done: it only works if the complete source is copyrighted by that company.
It is very well possible that they use bits and pieces of software written by others, for which they do not have the right to redistribute the source, but only the binary linked to their own software. This I have seen before as argument why a source could not be released, or if released, only incomplete and would not compile.
Thanks. Now everyone please change your password from "welkom01" to "correcthorsebatterystaple" and we all have become a lot more secure!