Sure, the Verizon network is happy to take your money and switch your phone for you. But that is not convenient in a multiuser corporate environment where there may be many business issued phones that need to be available constantly for traveling employees.
And if you are an individual user on the Verizon network, and you just broke your phone and need a cheap replacement, what can you do? Nothing. You get to go dish out full price for a new phone to Verizon because there is virtually no market for used CDMA phones. Many pawn shops won't even touch used CDMA or TDMA phones.
... they need to release it on a more relevant network. Just because Verizon claims to have the most subscribers in the US doesn't mean its a relevant market for blackberry phones. In particular the fact that Verizon is still clinging to old network technology makes it a bit of a burden for phone deployment in corporate environments. GSM networks are head and shoulders above the Verizon network in speed of phone deployment.
If an employee drops their phone and needs to replace it ASAP, someone in the company can pull the SIM card, put it into a new phone, and the employee is back to work with minimal downtime - unless you're on a non-GSM carrier in which case you need to have the magic store deactivate the old phone, sell you a new phone, activate it, etc...
If RIM doesn't realize that their terrible choice of carrier (on an exclusive deal no less) was a big part of the lack of success in the first generation storm, then they need to have their heads examined. Release the new phone on a modern GSM network and we'll see how it really fares.
I don't know what people pirate these days, but back when I used Warez I primarily downloaded applications that I could not afford to purchase. Now there are open source equivalents of those same applications available that meet my needs. I never bothered to pirate movies, since I can get movies on demand through my cable box for just a few dollars, or buy the DVD used at the local rental store for not much more.
Remember a decade or two ago when ergonomic keyboards were going to save our lives and bring about world peace? That really panned out, didn't it?
Or remember before that when the Dvorak layout was being pushed as a better way to type? Clearly since we don't need to worry about typewriter hammers anymore we are ready to move away from QWERTY, right?
Some of us may recall a laptop manufacturer who claimed to have invented a keyboard that could use the kinetic energy of typing to help charge the battery - anyone have one?
I almost got into a car accident when someone cut me off on the way to work this morning. By the logic suggested by TFS, I should stop using the public roadways.
I wish people where I live would apply that logic, my drive to work would be a lot safer.
Although I think we could probably make a positive change in the situation by actually making the driver license test difficult. However the state makes more revenue from the people who drive than those who do not...
Music has not always been expected to be portable. Well, unless you were very very rich, and could afford having a symphonic orchestra following you around wherever you went.
That is true, however for almost as long as we have had cars that people of average income could afford, we have had car radios to listen to in said cars. So if one were to think of that as the beginning of portable music, then we've had portable music for longer than most people on slashdot have been alive.
There also has not always been a market for digital media - that only came about gradually, as the technology permitted
That is true. However, there were plenty of portable music devices on the market for decades prior to the release of the Diamond Rio. So it wasn't a dramatic lifestyle shift to go from listening to tapes to listening to a tapeless system; similar to the transition from taking pictures on film to taking pictures on a digital camera.
With books, though, it will be a different story. I would be more concerned about books on "tape" (archaic term now, but you know what I am saying) being pirated than digital books themselves. Moving to a digital media won't make the books more portable; it doesn't make it safe to read while driving, and still requires the same time commitment to read the full text.
Have you seen the indices of most technical (Ph.D. level) textbooks? They're usually shorter than the table of contents. I don't know about you, but I need to be able to search my textbooks.
I can't tell you how much I had wished my undergraduate science texts had digital copies included for search functions. However I can also tell you that in some classes (organic chemistry in particular) it seemed that the purpose of the class was to memorize the book, so a search function would have been detrimental to that cause. And for that matter how do you enter a benzene ring into a search query?
Conversely, in my PhD course work we have had almost no textbooks. Generally we use primary literature in those courses instead with only a couple exceptions (ethics, for some reason, had a textbook).
That is a valid point. However are they pirated on the same order as music? Your own experience may differ but I know a lot more people who have pirated music at some point in time than I do who have pirated movies. I rather suspect that in terms of degree of piracy, it goes something like music >> movies > software
That said I currently do not have any pirated music (I don't listen to mp3s, I buy CDs when I want something new (which is almost never)), pirated movies (buy 'em from the used bin at the movie rental place instead), or pirated software (the last software I pirated - many years ago - for some time has had an open source alternative that meets my needs).
Music is expected to be portable. You can listen to music while you drive, walk, work, etc. You generally can't read a book while doing any of those things; and for at least the first you are an idiot for even attempting such a feat.
Sure, electronic books could be pirated, but it seems unlikely that it would be as widespread, as there isn't really the same market for electronic books as there is for electronic music formats.
ICANN is about to start selling gTLDs. With the gTLDs go all the TOS and AUP authority that ICANN at one point pretended to enforce on.com,.net, and.org (last I heard those three are not yet for sale). Just wait and see how much more spam you'll get when they sell.drug,.pill,.viagra, etc...
So what they think they are accomplishing by studying obfuscated domain registration data now, I would like to know. Because soon the vast majority of all WHOIS data in the world won't be worth crap or even have consistent or meaningful requirements.
Part of me wonders if this "study" is just a preliminary step towards them eventually selling all the rights to.com,.net, and.org so they can pull a huge one-year profit, and subsequently tell those of us who ask them to do their jobs (in registrar accreditation) to STFU.
They were searching for contraband. That is part of the role of US Customs.
If they were searching for contraband then why didn't the agent have a dog with him? He didn't even open my suitcase (I would have heard the zipper), he just poked around in the trunk a little bit and closed it back up.
Which was pretty much the same thing that happened to me before, I had to unload the trunk, then the agent decided they had seen enough (without opening any containers) and let me through.
What is more irritating about it though is how thoroughly inconsistent it is. For the past 4 years I have cross the border three times per year (at various crossing points). The crossing point I just came through this time I came through about two months ago as well and had a very different (faster) experience with no search. Obviously they don't have enough agents to thoroughly search every vehicle, and nobody would be willing to pay for that anyways.
Part of me wonders if they may have actually had some advance information to suspect my car was clean and so they selected me "randomly" for search just so that they could quickly increment their search total for the day. One of my grandfathers experienced a similar thing when his company implemented "random" drug tests; they knew he was cleaner than a whistle so every time the tests came around they asked him to pee in a cup so that they would have more clean tests in their records.
They are concerned about what US Customs would do to foreigners, they should look at what they do to citizens. I was born and raised in the states, and still live in a state near a border. I recently crossed back into the states (by car) after 5 days in a neighboring country. I pulled up to customs and had to turn off my car and hand my keys to a leather-gloved customs officer so he could search my trunk, while I stayed in my car. I was not allowed to see what he was doing; he could have easily taken items from my trunk or placed items in my trunk without my knowing it. Eventually they cleared me but offered no explanation for what they were doing.
I have had similar experiences in the past as well, I once had to pull from the customs booth to the "additional screening" building (single car garage with doors on both ends) where I had to empty my trunk for a customs agent.
So I can't say I'm surprised if the security theater here was a deciding factor against having another Olympics here. Certainly our procedures have changed a fair bit since 1996.
Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?
There are ways to accommodate that. If he is using a "professional" hosting company, many of them allow for bandwidth scaling to meet expected changes in demand. If he is running his own webserver, he would be wise to set it up more intelligently to handle the traffic loads.
Of course, if the answer is the latter rather than the former, his poor little webserver should be a useless pile of rubble now; perhaps he will replace it with a more robust system.
Though unlike many other people whose sites are slashdotted, Ben has a very good idea of when it will happen. So being unprepared for it is just sad.
He does great work, for sure. But he has been slashdotted more than a couple times; just about every new console he builds and describes leads to a slashdot article, which leads to his webserver being reduced to a smoldering pile of nothingness. He really should stop using his old XT for a webserver. I suspect his portable PS3 would probably handle the load better...
ICANN is an organization composed of human beings, sooner or later it will do something that is evil.
Too late. They have already agreed to sell gTLDs. As if the spam enforcement wasn't horrendous enough (it terms of registrar obligations), it is about to get a lot worse since with the gTLDs will go the registrar TOS.
In other words, for some time ICANN hasn't cared about not doing "evil", as long as it makes money.
how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?
There was an article in Scientific American a few years back (maybe more I've been subscribing for some time now) that discussed that question specifically. Indeed that article (I'll try to dig up the citation later) really suggested that humans and dogs had a very symbiotic relationship; they somewhat domesticated each other. At some point the pre-domesticated dogs learned they could get food from the humans. Subsequently the humans recognized the dogs as both useful hunting partners as well as companions. The humans fed the dogs, the dogs helped get the food. This helped the humans get more steady supplies of meat and the dogs a more steady supply of marrow. You could say that each species improved life for the other.
One could make an argument that having the dogs as hunting partners then gave the humans an opportunity to spend more time on tool making, which subsequently improved their hunting and cooking skills. However the dogs still had numerous advantages over several hunting tools so it remained advantageous to keep the relationship going. At some point after, the humans learned how to breed the dogs for the traits they were most interested in which started us on the path to the domestic dogs we have today.
Furthermore, many of the earliest recognized grave sites with human remains often contain canine remains as well, indicating just how far back the dog-human relationship goes and how much it meant to earlier humans.
I don't know of many evolutionary biologists who would consider that a taboo topic to discuss.
One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food. The dog was a better hunter but we could much more easily access the marrow that the dogs wanted; especially after we cook the meat.
You are entitled to your opinion, however I believe you are wrong. Karl Marx defined communism rather specifically in the Manifesto and the Soviets resembled that definition poorly at best - an argument could be made that they barely resembled it at all.
Calling Soviets Communists because you don't like Communism is roughly equal to calling Scientologists Christians because Scientologists call their building churches. Had Marx been alive when the Soviet union was at its largest he would have likely been troubled at that horrendous mis-application of his economic theory.
Communism doesn't fail in large countries because it is communism. Communism fails in large countries because of human nature and the fact that you inevitably end up with power hungry bastards in charge who end up leading the country to its own demise by virtue of their own selfishness.
But if you had ever read the Manifesto you would know that Marx never intended for communism to be applied to large countries. He had smaller nations such as England and Germany in mind when he wrote it.
Things that exist in real life are the best way to *define* theoretical terms or semantics.
How could any words ever have true meaning if that concept was true? By that notion we could redefine any word we want just by re-applying it. Sure it happens with some words that are poorly defined or ones that enter the language without specific definitions. But that doesn't justify trashing specific definitions of words just to fit one's own philosophical model.
It is rather backwards to ignore what actually happened, and instead insist that the theoretical writings of someone long dead is somehow more "authentic" than the actual experience of over 100 million Soviet people.
Are you entering a claim of the Soviets not being intelligent enough to realize the great chasm between the writings of Marx and what Stalin was doing to his people?
I am by no means trying to minimize or trivialize what happened in the USSR. However any claim of it being due to "communism" is itself ignorant.
At least both Honda Insights have been hybrid cars.
True, it is not as monumetally idiotic as the reuse of the other names that I mentioned. However, the new "Insight" is so much larger than the former that I suspect you could almost park the original inside the new one.
Who was the idiot who thought that it would be a good idea to call this the "Octane III"? This has almost no resemblance to the SGI Octane systems of that past, which were graphics workstations running Irix with MIPS processors. I think the only thing that makes them similar is the price range.
This goes right up there with Honda constantly recycling their product names; passport, odyssey, pilot, and more recently insight.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work.
Well, by your own account Soviet Union didn't felt appart *until and because of* Gorbachov "went about liberalizing the economy and political system (perestroika and glasnost)" so there it goes your argument.
Don't worry, that is just a typical act of a conservative moving the goal posts in the discussion. Notice how badly they have to redefine communism in order to make their first statement have any value anyways.
Strange also how moving away from "communism" is called "liberalizing the economy" while at the same time here in present day America the conservatives are labeling liberal reforms of the US systems as "communist acts".
Slashdot Mirror
it takes a 90 second phone call to support
they will switch it over
several tools thanks to Verizon
Sure, the Verizon network is happy to take your money and switch your phone for you. But that is not convenient in a multiuser corporate environment where there may be many business issued phones that need to be available constantly for traveling employees.
And if you are an individual user on the Verizon network, and you just broke your phone and need a cheap replacement, what can you do? Nothing. You get to go dish out full price for a new phone to Verizon because there is virtually no market for used CDMA phones. Many pawn shops won't even touch used CDMA or TDMA phones.
... they need to release it on a more relevant network. Just because Verizon claims to have the most subscribers in the US doesn't mean its a relevant market for blackberry phones. In particular the fact that Verizon is still clinging to old network technology makes it a bit of a burden for phone deployment in corporate environments. GSM networks are head and shoulders above the Verizon network in speed of phone deployment.
If an employee drops their phone and needs to replace it ASAP, someone in the company can pull the SIM card, put it into a new phone, and the employee is back to work with minimal downtime - unless you're on a non-GSM carrier in which case you need to have the magic store deactivate the old phone, sell you a new phone, activate it, etc...
If RIM doesn't realize that their terrible choice of carrier (on an exclusive deal no less) was a big part of the lack of success in the first generation storm, then they need to have their heads examined. Release the new phone on a modern GSM network and we'll see how it really fares.
I don't know what people pirate these days, but back when I used Warez I primarily downloaded applications that I could not afford to purchase. Now there are open source equivalents of those same applications available that meet my needs. I never bothered to pirate movies, since I can get movies on demand through my cable box for just a few dollars, or buy the DVD used at the local rental store for not much more.
... criticisms of KDawson for posting this article start in 3...2...1...
Remember a decade or two ago when ergonomic keyboards were going to save our lives and bring about world peace? That really panned out, didn't it?
Or remember before that when the Dvorak layout was being pushed as a better way to type? Clearly since we don't need to worry about typewriter hammers anymore we are ready to move away from QWERTY, right?
Some of us may recall a laptop manufacturer who claimed to have invented a keyboard that could use the kinetic energy of typing to help charge the battery - anyone have one?
I almost got into a car accident when someone cut me off on the way to work this morning. By the logic suggested by TFS, I should stop using the public roadways.
I wish people where I live would apply that logic, my drive to work would be a lot safer.
Although I think we could probably make a positive change in the situation by actually making the driver license test difficult. However the state makes more revenue from the people who drive than those who do not...
Why nobody has asked this question before is a great cosmic mystery.
Music has not always been expected to be portable. Well, unless you were very very rich, and could afford having a symphonic orchestra following you around wherever you went.
That is true, however for almost as long as we have had cars that people of average income could afford, we have had car radios to listen to in said cars. So if one were to think of that as the beginning of portable music, then we've had portable music for longer than most people on slashdot have been alive.
There also has not always been a market for digital media - that only came about gradually, as the technology permitted
That is true. However, there were plenty of portable music devices on the market for decades prior to the release of the Diamond Rio. So it wasn't a dramatic lifestyle shift to go from listening to tapes to listening to a tapeless system; similar to the transition from taking pictures on film to taking pictures on a digital camera.
With books, though, it will be a different story. I would be more concerned about books on "tape" (archaic term now, but you know what I am saying) being pirated than digital books themselves. Moving to a digital media won't make the books more portable; it doesn't make it safe to read while driving, and still requires the same time commitment to read the full text.
Have you seen the indices of most technical (Ph.D. level) textbooks? They're usually shorter than the table of contents. I don't know about you, but I need to be able to search my textbooks.
I can't tell you how much I had wished my undergraduate science texts had digital copies included for search functions. However I can also tell you that in some classes (organic chemistry in particular) it seemed that the purpose of the class was to memorize the book, so a search function would have been detrimental to that cause. And for that matter how do you enter a benzene ring into a search query?
Conversely, in my PhD course work we have had almost no textbooks. Generally we use primary literature in those courses instead with only a couple exceptions (ethics, for some reason, had a textbook).
Movies are also a commonly pirated item,
That is a valid point. However are they pirated on the same order as music? Your own experience may differ but I know a lot more people who have pirated music at some point in time than I do who have pirated movies. I rather suspect that in terms of degree of piracy, it goes something like music >> movies > software
That said I currently do not have any pirated music (I don't listen to mp3s, I buy CDs when I want something new (which is almost never)), pirated movies (buy 'em from the used bin at the movie rental place instead), or pirated software (the last software I pirated - many years ago - for some time has had an open source alternative that meets my needs).
Music is expected to be portable. You can listen to music while you drive, walk, work, etc. You generally can't read a book while doing any of those things; and for at least the first you are an idiot for even attempting such a feat.
Sure, electronic books could be pirated, but it seems unlikely that it would be as widespread, as there isn't really the same market for electronic books as there is for electronic music formats.
ICANN is about to start selling gTLDs. With the gTLDs go all the TOS and AUP authority that ICANN at one point pretended to enforce on .com, .net, and .org (last I heard those three are not yet for sale). Just wait and see how much more spam you'll get when they sell .drug, .pill, .viagra, etc...
.com, .net, and .org so they can pull a huge one-year profit, and subsequently tell those of us who ask them to do their jobs (in registrar accreditation) to STFU.
So what they think they are accomplishing by studying obfuscated domain registration data now, I would like to know. Because soon the vast majority of all WHOIS data in the world won't be worth crap or even have consistent or meaningful requirements.
Part of me wonders if this "study" is just a preliminary step towards them eventually selling all the rights to
They were searching for contraband. That is part of the role of US Customs.
If they were searching for contraband then why didn't the agent have a dog with him? He didn't even open my suitcase (I would have heard the zipper), he just poked around in the trunk a little bit and closed it back up.
Which was pretty much the same thing that happened to me before, I had to unload the trunk, then the agent decided they had seen enough (without opening any containers) and let me through.
What is more irritating about it though is how thoroughly inconsistent it is. For the past 4 years I have cross the border three times per year (at various crossing points). The crossing point I just came through this time I came through about two months ago as well and had a very different (faster) experience with no search. Obviously they don't have enough agents to thoroughly search every vehicle, and nobody would be willing to pay for that anyways.
Part of me wonders if they may have actually had some advance information to suspect my car was clean and so they selected me "randomly" for search just so that they could quickly increment their search total for the day. One of my grandfathers experienced a similar thing when his company implemented "random" drug tests; they knew he was cleaner than a whistle so every time the tests came around they asked him to pee in a cup so that they would have more clean tests in their records.
They are concerned about what US Customs would do to foreigners, they should look at what they do to citizens. I was born and raised in the states, and still live in a state near a border. I recently crossed back into the states (by car) after 5 days in a neighboring country. I pulled up to customs and had to turn off my car and hand my keys to a leather-gloved customs officer so he could search my trunk, while I stayed in my car. I was not allowed to see what he was doing; he could have easily taken items from my trunk or placed items in my trunk without my knowing it. Eventually they cleared me but offered no explanation for what they were doing.
I have had similar experiences in the past as well, I once had to pull from the customs booth to the "additional screening" building (single car garage with doors on both ends) where I had to empty my trunk for a customs agent.
So I can't say I'm surprised if the security theater here was a deciding factor against having another Olympics here. Certainly our procedures have changed a fair bit since 1996.
Because it doesn't make sense to buy the server/bandwidth just for the few occasions when he's slashdotted and has a traffic spike?
There are ways to accommodate that. If he is using a "professional" hosting company, many of them allow for bandwidth scaling to meet expected changes in demand. If he is running his own webserver, he would be wise to set it up more intelligently to handle the traffic loads.
Of course, if the answer is the latter rather than the former, his poor little webserver should be a useless pile of rubble now; perhaps he will replace it with a more robust system.
Though unlike many other people whose sites are slashdotted, Ben has a very good idea of when it will happen. So being unprepared for it is just sad.
He does great work, for sure. But he has been slashdotted more than a couple times; just about every new console he builds and describes leads to a slashdot article, which leads to his webserver being reduced to a smoldering pile of nothingness. He really should stop using his old XT for a webserver. I suspect his portable PS3 would probably handle the load better...
You must be thinking of a different ICANN. The one I know sold their control some time ago.
ICANN is an organization composed of human beings, sooner or later it will do something that is evil.
Too late. They have already agreed to sell gTLDs. As if the spam enforcement wasn't horrendous enough (it terms of registrar obligations), it is about to get a lot worse since with the gTLDs will go the registrar TOS.
In other words, for some time ICANN hasn't cared about not doing "evil", as long as it makes money.
how much did our ancestors change due to the new partnership with dogs?
There was an article in Scientific American a few years back (maybe more I've been subscribing for some time now) that discussed that question specifically. Indeed that article (I'll try to dig up the citation later) really suggested that humans and dogs had a very symbiotic relationship; they somewhat domesticated each other. At some point the pre-domesticated dogs learned they could get food from the humans. Subsequently the humans recognized the dogs as both useful hunting partners as well as companions. The humans fed the dogs, the dogs helped get the food. This helped the humans get more steady supplies of meat and the dogs a more steady supply of marrow. You could say that each species improved life for the other.
One could make an argument that having the dogs as hunting partners then gave the humans an opportunity to spend more time on tool making, which subsequently improved their hunting and cooking skills. However the dogs still had numerous advantages over several hunting tools so it remained advantageous to keep the relationship going. At some point after, the humans learned how to breed the dogs for the traits they were most interested in which started us on the path to the domestic dogs we have today.
Furthermore, many of the earliest recognized grave sites with human remains often contain canine remains as well, indicating just how far back the dog-human relationship goes and how much it meant to earlier humans.
I don't know of many evolutionary biologists who would consider that a taboo topic to discuss.
One hypothesis is that domestication of the modern dog came about partially as a result of our ability to cook food. The dog was a better hunter but we could much more easily access the marrow that the dogs wanted; especially after we cook the meat.
You have this backwards
You are entitled to your opinion, however I believe you are wrong. Karl Marx defined communism rather specifically in the Manifesto and the Soviets resembled that definition poorly at best - an argument could be made that they barely resembled it at all.
Calling Soviets Communists because you don't like Communism is roughly equal to calling Scientologists Christians because Scientologists call their building churches. Had Marx been alive when the Soviet union was at its largest he would have likely been troubled at that horrendous mis-application of his economic theory.
Communism doesn't fail in large countries because it is communism. Communism fails in large countries because of human nature and the fact that you inevitably end up with power hungry bastards in charge who end up leading the country to its own demise by virtue of their own selfishness.
But if you had ever read the Manifesto you would know that Marx never intended for communism to be applied to large countries. He had smaller nations such as England and Germany in mind when he wrote it.
Things that exist in real life are the best way to *define* theoretical terms or semantics.
How could any words ever have true meaning if that concept was true? By that notion we could redefine any word we want just by re-applying it. Sure it happens with some words that are poorly defined or ones that enter the language without specific definitions. But that doesn't justify trashing specific definitions of words just to fit one's own philosophical model.
It is rather backwards to ignore what actually happened, and instead insist that the theoretical writings of someone long dead is somehow more "authentic" than the actual experience of over 100 million Soviet people.
Are you entering a claim of the Soviets not being intelligent enough to realize the great chasm between the writings of Marx and what Stalin was doing to his people?
I am by no means trying to minimize or trivialize what happened in the USSR. However any claim of it being due to "communism" is itself ignorant.
At least both Honda Insights have been hybrid cars.
True, it is not as monumetally idiotic as the reuse of the other names that I mentioned. However, the new "Insight" is so much larger than the former that I suspect you could almost park the original inside the new one.
Hence Reagan's irresponsible spending and gloating lead to even more irresponsible spending and gloating in the USSR
In other words, it was a big game of "Let's see who runs out of money first! Loser is the one who runs out first".
That is a pretty good analogy, until
With on one side: A bunch of communists who believe that money is the root of all evil
Because it is an insult to communism to call the last Soviets communists.
Who was the idiot who thought that it would be a good idea to call this the "Octane III"? This has almost no resemblance to the SGI Octane systems of that past, which were graphics workstations running Irix with MIPS processors. I think the only thing that makes them similar is the price range.
This goes right up there with Honda constantly recycling their product names; passport, odyssey, pilot, and more recently insight.
The Soviet Union fell because planned economies do not work.
Well, by your own account Soviet Union didn't felt appart *until and because of* Gorbachov "went about liberalizing the economy and political system (perestroika and glasnost)" so there it goes your argument.
Don't worry, that is just a typical act of a conservative moving the goal posts in the discussion. Notice how badly they have to redefine communism in order to make their first statement have any value anyways.
Strange also how moving away from "communism" is called "liberalizing the economy" while at the same time here in present day America the conservatives are labeling liberal reforms of the US systems as "communist acts".