We've been using radio for a little over a century for communication. Now we're quickly reaching the point where the use of low-power devices means what we "leak" into space is going to be radically reduced.
Leakage into space is waste. As the civilization matures it finds ways to minimize waste. That's why we use antennas that have carefully shaped diagrams, frequencies and modulations that carry maximum information, and just enough power to ensure reliable communication. This is partly driven by the fact that our cell phones don't have much power. And majority of our long-haul communications are done in wire (or glass.) What wireless channels we still have, they are mostly microwave links to and from satellites, very wideband, using high gain / narrow beam antennas, and again using just enough power for reliable communication. If we want we can have radios (DSSS) with signals that are completely buried in the noise, and that can be only received by another radio of the same type and using the same code.
You know I think my reply sounds snippier than I intended.
I have no way of knowing what you intended, but I double-checked your comment, and my meter of snippiness is steadily showing zero:-)
As I said, it is not my purpose in life to stop you from buying a tablet:-) I just want to tell more about how well (or not) those devices perform in real world. The iPad - which nobody has, so far - may be better or worse in some aspects, but until it starts selling we won't know. That's why most of my concerns center around the generalities - how you hold it, how you use it. And of course we already know that it is a closed ecosystem.
A tablet, in general I mean not just the iPad, has a better form factor for doing things like looking up information or doing small chunks of data entry.
I believe I mentioned that I have a tablet myself, and it has practically the same weight as the iPad. I can tell you, it is an awful fit for any computing "on the go". Too heavy to begin with, then iPad is hard to hold with one hand (my UMPC has grip space, thankfully). And it's just awkward all around to walk with the thing. I use my tablet for reading in bed, and I hold it with both hands, like a book. If you believe any data input is possible "on the go" - it just isn't so. You want to sit down, put the thing on the table (my UMPC has a flap on the back for that) and then you use the stylus (provided with mine) or the greasy fingers to work it.
I don't know how people are supposed to use the iPad. The keyboard demo shows that it should be standing nearly vertically (maybe at 75-80 degrees), but how do you do that without the keyboard stand? If you sit somewhere, like at a coffee shop, do you need to stack books behind it, or you must hold it in your hand all the time? If the latter, it sounds not very ergonomic. I understand that crew in ST:TNG are carrying tablets all the time, but rarely they are shown actually working on them; a tablet is mostly used to glance at. The computer in Captain's ready room is a desktop.
This is not something iPhone users are encountering because their device is small, and it doesn't need to be held for long (only while you dial a number, and do some other occasional computing.) Most of the time iPhone spends in the pocket, even if it plays music.
Then again, I'd much rather have one of those than a netbook. (I'd rather have a 17" laptop than both of them combined.)
As matter of fact, my main computer (that I type this on) is a 17" Fujitsu LifeBook. This was actually a nice purchase, previously I had only desktops. But now I know that there is a lot of value in a "desktop replacement" type of a notebook. I can carry it if necessary, but usually it sits on the desk and I use it as a desktop. It's plenty fast. The other computer, as I said, is the UMPC, and I have a PDA also. That's why I am so sure that the tablet idea is so limited and limiting - I have the thing for several years.
Funny thing is, the lowest-priced entry-level iPad would be more useful to me than a typical netbook. Heh.
Well, of course it's your decision, I only point out that the iPad will not have the selection of software that Windows/Linux users are familiar with, and it won't have a keyboard, and it won't have USB host or camera - something that netbooks usually have; even my Q1 tablet has all of the above, along with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, VGA output, *stereo* speakers and *stereo* microphones.
Having IPv6 doesn't mean that your v4 devices are going to stop working. They'll still be able to make outgoing v4 connections even when every consumer network is double-NAT'd.
That's what I meant when I said "you'd need some serious 6 to 4 bridging". This stuff is not for consumers, and the first paragraph of your comment just caused a headache:-) Nearly tl;dr. Yes, if you must keep an IPv4 device on your network then you need to have an IPv4 gateway which, hopefully, knows how to translate a bogus server IP address that your IP phone sends out into an IPv6 address that the SIP registrar or SER actually uses on the new Internet. It's way more painful than an IPv4 NAT.
With regard to mixing protocols, this was done by experienced professionals, at ISPs, and even then very sparingly. IPX, for example, was primarily used by Novell and was limited to its NetWare. But if the world migrates to IPv6 this chore will belong to the end user, and no ISP would want to support him (not for any reasonable money, at least.) The end user may need to dump his IPv4 peripherals - it could be cheaper than to figure out how to use them. This is particularly bad with SIP phones because they are supposed to talk to each other, directly (SIP is only setting up the connection.)
It doesn't matter if it is 1" smaller or larger than competing netbooks (of which there are many, of all sizes.) What matters is "does it do what I need it to do?" I think it doesn't. iPad is a pure consumption device; you can only consume services with it, but not create new stuff and not be creative generally. It doesn't even have a keyboard, which clearly shows that Apple doesn't intend you to type much (though you can buy an external kb.)
A netbook, on the other hand, is a complete small computer that can be used for anything that a computer is good for. You can type, you can browse, you can open PDFs (a big deal, actually!) and you can use Web sites that require Flash (there aren't many of those, but they do exist; some use Flash for perfectly good reasons;) I don't recall if iPad has Java - probably not, for the same reason as Flash. You can't have an interpreter on iPad, so Perl or Python or some other scripting language of choice is not possible. If you have a netbook, for example, you can pull photos out of your camera, edit them in Paint.Net (or GIMP) and email them on the go - with the iPad you can't do that. Lack of wire interfaces also makes the iPad useless as a controller for peripherals - no external HDD, no microphone or camera, no printer, etc. It's just for pure consumption - "sit still and consume what we tell you to." Hardly empowering.
So iPad can be used as a "tertiary" computer in an ultra-rich household, where it is fashionable to have a tablet for just browsing around. Those are the same people who bought Segways and pet rocks, I guess. Great market:-) Seriously, the world is large, and you can always sell any junk, the question is only "how many units."
I think Apple got blinded with success of iPhone. However iPhone's main advantage is that it is a phone; the fact that you can *also* run other programs on it is secondary. But iPad makes it a primary function, and I don't see too many people who want to spend around a $1K ($800 + taxes + data plan) just to run primitive software that is developed for iPhone and sold exactly for what it is worth.
I also don't know if it "gets you to the point" faster than the competition. I have an old Sansung Q1 UMPC; it needs about 45 seconds to come out of *hibernation* (and a couple of seconds from sleep) - I doubt that anyone is that much short on time to see any difference if he is setting down to do some work. My UMPC runs Windows (Vista, unfortunately - I haven't tried other options yet, want another HDD for that) but I can (and do) install any software that I need; I have several ebook readers (LIT from MS, for example) and Firefox with every adblocker under the Sun, etc. etc. That's value. I don't care if the Apple's tablet is thinner and lighter (it is lighter by 0.25 lb - big deal!) but I do care that my computer does what I want it to do.
I have yet to understand why new military technology is so widely publicized.
Other comments already mentioned some aspects of why. I can only add that it's pointless to try to hide the existence of such a program - it's large, and it will produce airplanes that will be manufactured, deployed and eventually flown, so that anyone with a camera can take a picture.
What is secret is exact capabilities - how fast and how far it can fly with what load, how much it can carry, how fast it can climb, how many targets it can simultaneously track and fire upon, etc. Numbers are important when you have two comparable airplanes chasing each other.
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
Since the iPad is not the first tablet on the market, you should be able to just look around and see usage examples of other tablets. Here is the set that I know of: [ ]
And that is because manufacturers of tablets are searching for many years for such usage. The only semi-alive example is hospitals, where nurses need access to patients' charts as they move from one patient to another. Well, of course the traditional way of doing it is just to hang the chart onto the patient's bed...
But tablets aren't very popular in real world. Primarily because they limit the user too much. It is nice to have a tablet to read/. in bed at night, but are you willing to spend $800 on it? Note that the tablet won't be of any use beyond reading; its I/O functionality is minimal, on-screen keyboards are OK only for short messages, and the iPad will lack all the software that you find dear to you and that lives happily on your main computer. Other tablets haven't hurt themselves that way, and still they haven't found the customer.
Which means that you don't have any limitations you have with IPv4 while hosting stuff
It also means that ISPs can now charge you per computer, instead of per IP (that you then NAT to cover your whole house.)
If your router supports IPv6 of course
I have three routers, none of them support IPv6, and without specifically searching I don't know any that do (except Airport.) Often it's hard to tell even holding the box in hands at the store.
I don't think that network appliances are the problem.
Unless, of course, you have such appliances. There are millions of devices that are IPv4-only. Support for IPv6 just started, and there is zero chance that earlier products will be upgraded (they are out of warranty by now.)
Things like mobile devices (for which IPv6 would be great)
Mobile devices (cell phones) are self-contained, so they are welcome to have whatever IPv$x they want. These devices are not a problem, and they indeed benefit from IPv6. However everyone else, industrial and residential PC and gadget users, will be in need of some serious 6 to 4 bridging. There are just too many embedded devices which are IPv4 only *and* out of maintenance. We also should remember that majority of network-aware applications are IPv4 only. This is even more true in niche, expensive applications, those that use networked license servers, for example. In their market even if a newer app is available and supports IPv6 you have to buy it again; support on that level is not free.
Have him email it to you. Or FTP it somewhere. There's plenty of ways to get things on your iphone/touch without syncing.
It is mighty stupid to have to email a multi-megabyte file when you hold the phone in one hand and the USB cable in another. On my planet such a product would be reviewed as "poorly done."
I thought it was the Chinese because it was after the accounts of Chinese Human rights activists.
Chinese government has full control inside the country, except at the offices of Google. So what is easier to do:
Mount a cyber-attack on a US company, an attack that is bound to be detected, and an attack that has no lasting advantage (everyone knows that the accounts are compromised.)
Covertly install keyloggers into suspects' computers, or otherwise capture their login/password. Then access their email for years, and nobody knows! Hell, if they use Firefox the passwords aren't even encrypted, all the secret police needs to do is to power the computer up and click a few buttons.
This reasoning shows that the attack is most useful not to the Chinese government but to people who want to put Google and China on a collision course. If the government watches some people it never lets them know that they are watched.
What we have here is a recreation of Litvinenko's poisoning, only done on the Net. In both cases countries were blamed, though any intelligent observer instantly sees that such an extravagant method is not something that secret services ever use. If a secret service wants someone dead, the guy just commits suicide.
I'm guessing that GP's point is that our current space technologies are so awfully expensive that though technically we, as a society, can once in a lifetime do a stunt like trip to the Moon (or now Mars,) it has near-zero practical use.
It is my personal belief that we won't be flying to planets until we design a propulsion technology that is good enough for SSTO. Then it will be also good enough to move between orbits and land on planets and take off again. The current chemical rockets are not even close. Getting to the LEO is pointless if we have nowhere to go from there.
To offer an analogy, it is possible to cross the Atlantic ocean on a raft, or in a rubber boat - it had been done - but if Europeans were limited to those technologies we'd never see Americas.
IMO, the money should be spent primarily on fundamental science, and a smaller part of it - on good, complex robots that can be launched from time to time to other planets. We need to know how this Universe works. An antigravity-based propulsion would solve all our problems, for example. Teleportation or FTL would also come (or definitively not come) from the same pool of knowledge. I'd even settle on a Space Elevator that we will be able to put together out of new materials. We need to stop paddling our reed canoe across the Atlantic for a moment and instead think if there is a better way.
If anything goes wrong, who does the owner expect will make his data automagically rise from any proverbial ashes?
GeekSquad?
I know that you weren't serious about Geek Squad, but there is nothing strange if the owner of the company uses an outside consultant to take care of his notebook, if he can't do it himself. Backups are easy these days, buy a terabyte USB drive and it comes with a backup software. You don't even need to select what you back up - choose to backup the whole laptop, incrementally, on each connect, and the job is done. It's not like laptops are sold only to companies with IT staff.
There can be plenty of confidential data on an owner's laptop - personal data of employees, his business emails, his documents, QuickBooks, taxes, maybe his PGP keyrings... plenty of reasons to not give it to a hired help. The admin should instead focus on running the other 20-30 computers in the company, that contain only production data that is not that secret.
As I understand, the policy is about computers that are reused, and the prior data loss occurred because someone quit, and nobody bothered to preserve the data on his computer until it was too late.
If the owners of the company neglect this rule as they change their own computers, not much you can do or need to do. Just send them a few reminders, and if you hear nothing back, desist. It's their company after all.
The owners may want to do that if the computers were used for storing some confidential information. Such a backup cannot be stored on your shelf among books and other assorted DVDs. If the owners know what they are doing, they perform backup of those computers themselves, and keep the media at home.
If something that like that could be created by these cosmically insignificant energy levels and actually survive long enough to eat planets, the universe would already be pretty darn empty.
And in many cases, the same community that is governed by those laws also write the same laws as well as provide the men that make up the law enforcement force.
That statement is a bit idealistic. Gang members are not welcome in police forces; at the same time police officers spent a lot of time working gang-related cases. Looking at the community at large is not productive, just as if you are looking at both sides in a war. The distinction between a felon and a non-felon is quite obvious, especially in legal and rights areas.
If we were driven by this behavior, law and law enforcement would never exist.
On the other hand, if we were NOT driven by this behavior, law and law enforcement would never exist either. The truth is in between: most of the society wants peace, but a small (and dangerous!) part of the society wants war. In most modern social groups criminals, if left unchecked, overrun the peaceful citizens. In ancient times villagers were known to brutally kill thieves, that kept the balance. Nowadays it's not legal any more, so criminals have an advantage.
They make up part of what humanity is but they do not define it.
There aren't that many criminals in an average society, actually. But their influence is far exceeding the actual harm they do. For example, one sexual predator or a serial killer can terrorize millions of people and change their ways of life forever. If you add actual and potential harm together you will see that criminals define *a lot* of what's going on in the society. As an example, look at 9/11 terrorists. They killed 3,000 people, but look at the changes they unleashed onto the society!
There are also secondary effects of crime. Peaceful citizens arm and train themselves and eventually become more violent. Movies and books are made about crime, making it into a glorious adventure. And so on. Violence is an integral part of a human society, and it defines a lot of what humans are. History of humanity is history of wars, that ought to mean something.
Finally:
The notion that humanity is fundamentally inclined to self destructive anarchy is in direct conflict [...]
It is not in conflict with human history. We can go back as far as records exist, and we see violence, war and crime all over them. Crime is a permanent fixture of a human society. The only known alternative to king's guards is brutality of small prehistoric tribes. Remove the force of law and witness Rwanda, Sudan and Somalia.
Hundreds of hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast before Katrina, and yet nobody shot at the rescuers. Usually, there weren't any rescuers at all
So you answer your own question. Nobody shot at rescuers because the damage was minor and the society survived.
But consider the disaster like in Haiti. The society is in ruins, just like the buildings. Consider this scenario, for example:
A man with a bag full of food encounters a starving family. Children will die without food. The man refuses to share or sell his food. The father of the children is armed. There is nobody else around. What is the ethical solution of this situation, and what is the *likely* solution?
And despite all this dumb, irrational, self-centered nature we have thousands of years of civilized society.
All civilized societies (save a couple of communes like Amish) enforce law and order; in medieval times it was military (guards) patrolling towns; now it is police. A society hopes, of course, that its members will behave, but hope isn't enough.
There were times when police wasn't around - during wars, or in remote lands. Then the law of the jungle takes over.
Make a thought experiment. Take a large city, like New York, and remove all LEO from it. The control of the city will be up for grabs. What will happen, who (if anyone) will reach for that control?
It's software; the number of copies made has nothing whatsoever to do with the effort required to create it.
Poor choice of words on my part. By "volume" I mean amount of time spent on developing F/OSS. Indeed it doesn't matter how many times the bits were downloaded. But your time is finite, and short of leaving your day job you can do only so much.
Because their customers CHOOSE to pay them for their services
I can only confirm that. At my last job an expensive multi-core server got RH installed; in part thanks to Xilinx supporting their toolchain on Linux. Everyone is happy. And the IT people needed that support from RH when they had a problem integrating with the Windows infrastructure (domain) already in place. The Windows Server option was considered and rejected because it supports *less* functionality than Linux, and that is because some UNIX heads at Xilinx (who I met) chose to use some UNIX technologies that are poorly done in Windows.
And how many of those commercial jobs done in months were rush jobs that were released full of holes and bugs?
True, that happens pretty often (we don't need to go beyond Windows Update to prove that.) But overall, commercial outfits are driven by the need for revenue, and as a side effect it also pleases the customers who get the product sooner. It is important to note that most customers don't need perfect software that is too late, they'd rather use imperfect software now, as long as they can manage the crashes. This is not a guess on my part, most of my professional experience is surrounded by such software. I'd gladly take an app that is perfect and does what I need, but there is no such thing (examples: CST, Xilinx etc.)
Even in less exotic areas the GIMP is often rejected by power users in favor of Photoshop because, for example, Photoshop has more smarts to do things, whereas the GIMP gives you mostly the basic tools to move pixels around. The billion dollar company can throw money at the problem to add intelligence into the product, whereas GIMP is limited by a few factors, such as the number of man-hours of coders, expertise of coders (how many of them do AI for image recognition?) and by interests of those coders, because the work is voluntary. If only the GIMP project could afford to pay a top notch AI specialist to code the advanced tools of Photoshop. But they can't, and even the GUI of the GIMP is not as polished as Photoshop's, even though probably everyone on GIMP's team is qualified to code that.
And like many commons, it won't last. Someone, somewhere must pay the developer, because people who choose to live for free are not likely to contribute much to Linux or to anything else.
This can be swept under the rug if the volume of freely given software is small. If I'm employeed by Ty Coon Corp. 40 hours per week, I can afford to spend 1-2 hours per week to develop something and release it under some open source license. But if the work requires 30 hours per week, I need to make it my primary job, and then who is going to keep the lights on? Obviously at that level of involvement some business model is required; RH, for example, has one, and other players also found something that works.
The sad truth is that any good software requires a lot of effort, and that means either money or time. For some time OSS developers chose the time, thus dragging projects for years (while competing commercial jobs were done in months.) I'm not going to complain if some developers now can shorten the development process by spending money on it.
The PRC will certainly be a major player in the years to come, but unless they can work out their human rights abuses and their stance on things like Tibet they're only setting themselves up to pop [...]
The majority of population of any country can't possibly care less about "human rights abuses" unless it involves them personally. In 1938 Stalin had millions of regular people arrested, taken out of their beds at night and sent to Gulag - and even then "the masses" did nothing. So a government can safely abuse human rights of a small group of people, as long as the large group of people is OK with that, or just doesn't care.
And with regard to Tibet, it's something that Chinese and Tibetans will eventually work out. However from purely economic POV Tibet, being situated mostly in mountains, needs China more than China needs Tibet. Per Wikipedia, China invests a lot of money into the economy of Tibet - something that independent Tibet wouldn't be able to do (not without selling most of its mineral rights to foreigners, at least.) And from the military POV, one must be insane to think that China will let Tibet to go free, because the very next moment the new government of Tibet, properly bribed, allows some other, big and rich country to install missiles and other war machines right on Chinese border. Chinese government knows that well, having Taiwan as an example. That just isn't going to happen.
So none of these issues present any danger to the PRC's government. There is only one process that does - the economy. As long as China is getting richer, everyone is happy as a clam.
So they system is "protecting" patients right out of being able to afford treatment [...] It's a sure sign that the medical system is itself quite ill
Not as much medical system as legal. The doctor won't take a guess at your problem and give you pills that probably will help. This is because if he is wrong you will sue him for $1M, his insurance will pay, and you buy a nice house on proceeds. The doctor, of course, is ruined.
Because of that every doctor practices CYA. He doesn't need your $50 (vs. regular $500 with full tests) if those $50 can destroy him. If you follow the line, the worst case is when a doctor gives advices for free, with hardly any look at the patient. He'll earn nothing, and will lose his license as soon as the lawyers reach the courthouse.
But I'm suggesting that "good enough" may very well be good enough.
It depends on what you are measuring. A scale is indeed measuring only one parameter, but a balance board can easily measure several. You need syncronized access to all sensors to recreate your movements on the board, you can't just poll them one at a time.
If we're talking about a scale, do we really need to spend $10,000 for FDA testing and approval? It measures weight... Can't you pretty much verify that with another scale or two?
Doctors who treat people with excessive weight need to know the exact numbers, especially as the readings are taken mid-course. They tell the doctor how effective the drugs and methods are. Half a pound is probably an unacceptable and unjustifiable error. And you can't use "another scale or two" because they can be also wrong. Here is something to read about it. A proper multi-device setup would be great, but it would cost more than one device that is accurate enough.
Also the cost of the equipment is spread among many patients who use it over years. Let's say the balance board costs $20K and it is used for 10 years and then written off. Every day one measurement is taken. $20K / 3600 days = $5 per patient. Is this something to lose sleep over?
Holy smokes, that's nowhere near the "$18,000 medical device" price.
There are other issues that the manufacturer has to deal with For example:
The demand for the product will be very low - nowhere like 200,000. I'd say, 20,000 over the whole life of the product. That could be a few thousand units per year. You incur costs during this time, so your meager sales must bring enough cash to keep the lights on.
Small demand also implies multiple, small production runs. Rarely you order 20,000 units, pay for them up front and then sell them for 10 years. But if you order 2,000 per year then your manufacturing costs go up.
You can't sit on your design for 10 years and sell one or two per day. You need to do R&D and produce a newer, better product. You need money for that.
Even though your sales are low, your sales expenses are high. You need to fly sales reps to all hospitals, demo the thing and wine & dine doctors, preferrably at strip clubs. This costs a lot of money. You can't sell such a thing through Amazon.
Slashdot Mirror
We've been using radio for a little over a century for communication. Now we're quickly reaching the point where the use of low-power devices means what we "leak" into space is going to be radically reduced.
Leakage into space is waste. As the civilization matures it finds ways to minimize waste. That's why we use antennas that have carefully shaped diagrams, frequencies and modulations that carry maximum information, and just enough power to ensure reliable communication. This is partly driven by the fact that our cell phones don't have much power. And majority of our long-haul communications are done in wire (or glass.) What wireless channels we still have, they are mostly microwave links to and from satellites, very wideband, using high gain / narrow beam antennas, and again using just enough power for reliable communication. If we want we can have radios (DSSS) with signals that are completely buried in the noise, and that can be only received by another radio of the same type and using the same code.
You know I think my reply sounds snippier than I intended.
I have no way of knowing what you intended, but I double-checked your comment, and my meter of snippiness is steadily showing zero :-)
As I said, it is not my purpose in life to stop you from buying a tablet :-) I just want to tell more about how well (or not) those devices perform in real world. The iPad - which nobody has, so far - may be better or worse in some aspects, but until it starts selling we won't know. That's why most of my concerns center around the generalities - how you hold it, how you use it. And of course we already know that it is a closed ecosystem.
A tablet, in general I mean not just the iPad, has a better form factor for doing things like looking up information or doing small chunks of data entry.
I believe I mentioned that I have a tablet myself, and it has practically the same weight as the iPad. I can tell you, it is an awful fit for any computing "on the go". Too heavy to begin with, then iPad is hard to hold with one hand (my UMPC has grip space, thankfully). And it's just awkward all around to walk with the thing. I use my tablet for reading in bed, and I hold it with both hands, like a book. If you believe any data input is possible "on the go" - it just isn't so. You want to sit down, put the thing on the table (my UMPC has a flap on the back for that) and then you use the stylus (provided with mine) or the greasy fingers to work it.
I don't know how people are supposed to use the iPad. The keyboard demo shows that it should be standing nearly vertically (maybe at 75-80 degrees), but how do you do that without the keyboard stand? If you sit somewhere, like at a coffee shop, do you need to stack books behind it, or you must hold it in your hand all the time? If the latter, it sounds not very ergonomic. I understand that crew in ST:TNG are carrying tablets all the time, but rarely they are shown actually working on them; a tablet is mostly used to glance at. The computer in Captain's ready room is a desktop.
This is not something iPhone users are encountering because their device is small, and it doesn't need to be held for long (only while you dial a number, and do some other occasional computing.) Most of the time iPhone spends in the pocket, even if it plays music.
Then again, I'd much rather have one of those than a netbook. (I'd rather have a 17" laptop than both of them combined.)
As matter of fact, my main computer (that I type this on) is a 17" Fujitsu LifeBook. This was actually a nice purchase, previously I had only desktops. But now I know that there is a lot of value in a "desktop replacement" type of a notebook. I can carry it if necessary, but usually it sits on the desk and I use it as a desktop. It's plenty fast. The other computer, as I said, is the UMPC, and I have a PDA also. That's why I am so sure that the tablet idea is so limited and limiting - I have the thing for several years.
Funny thing is, the lowest-priced entry-level iPad would be more useful to me than a typical netbook. Heh.
Well, of course it's your decision, I only point out that the iPad will not have the selection of software that Windows/Linux users are familiar with, and it won't have a keyboard, and it won't have USB host or camera - something that netbooks usually have; even my Q1 tablet has all of the above, along with WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, VGA output, *stereo* speakers and *stereo* microphones.
Having IPv6 doesn't mean that your v4 devices are going to stop working. They'll still be able to make outgoing v4 connections even when every consumer network is double-NAT'd.
That's what I meant when I said "you'd need some serious 6 to 4 bridging". This stuff is not for consumers, and the first paragraph of your comment just caused a headache :-) Nearly tl;dr. Yes, if you must keep an IPv4 device on your network then you need to have an IPv4 gateway which, hopefully, knows how to translate a bogus server IP address that your IP phone sends out into an IPv6 address that the SIP registrar or SER actually uses on the new Internet. It's way more painful than an IPv4 NAT.
With regard to mixing protocols, this was done by experienced professionals, at ISPs, and even then very sparingly. IPX, for example, was primarily used by Novell and was limited to its NetWare. But if the world migrates to IPv6 this chore will belong to the end user, and no ISP would want to support him (not for any reasonable money, at least.) The end user may need to dump his IPv4 peripherals - it could be cheaper than to figure out how to use them. This is particularly bad with SIP phones because they are supposed to talk to each other, directly (SIP is only setting up the connection.)
It doesn't matter if it is 1" smaller or larger than competing netbooks (of which there are many, of all sizes.) What matters is "does it do what I need it to do?" I think it doesn't. iPad is a pure consumption device; you can only consume services with it, but not create new stuff and not be creative generally. It doesn't even have a keyboard, which clearly shows that Apple doesn't intend you to type much (though you can buy an external kb.)
A netbook, on the other hand, is a complete small computer that can be used for anything that a computer is good for. You can type, you can browse, you can open PDFs (a big deal, actually!) and you can use Web sites that require Flash (there aren't many of those, but they do exist; some use Flash for perfectly good reasons;) I don't recall if iPad has Java - probably not, for the same reason as Flash. You can't have an interpreter on iPad, so Perl or Python or some other scripting language of choice is not possible. If you have a netbook, for example, you can pull photos out of your camera, edit them in Paint.Net (or GIMP) and email them on the go - with the iPad you can't do that. Lack of wire interfaces also makes the iPad useless as a controller for peripherals - no external HDD, no microphone or camera, no printer, etc. It's just for pure consumption - "sit still and consume what we tell you to." Hardly empowering.
So iPad can be used as a "tertiary" computer in an ultra-rich household, where it is fashionable to have a tablet for just browsing around. Those are the same people who bought Segways and pet rocks, I guess. Great market :-) Seriously, the world is large, and you can always sell any junk, the question is only "how many units."
I think Apple got blinded with success of iPhone. However iPhone's main advantage is that it is a phone; the fact that you can *also* run other programs on it is secondary. But iPad makes it a primary function, and I don't see too many people who want to spend around a $1K ($800 + taxes + data plan) just to run primitive software that is developed for iPhone and sold exactly for what it is worth.
I also don't know if it "gets you to the point" faster than the competition. I have an old Sansung Q1 UMPC; it needs about 45 seconds to come out of *hibernation* (and a couple of seconds from sleep) - I doubt that anyone is that much short on time to see any difference if he is setting down to do some work. My UMPC runs Windows (Vista, unfortunately - I haven't tried other options yet, want another HDD for that) but I can (and do) install any software that I need; I have several ebook readers (LIT from MS, for example) and Firefox with every adblocker under the Sun, etc. etc. That's value. I don't care if the Apple's tablet is thinner and lighter (it is lighter by 0.25 lb - big deal!) but I do care that my computer does what I want it to do.
I have yet to understand why new military technology is so widely publicized.
Other comments already mentioned some aspects of why. I can only add that it's pointless to try to hide the existence of such a program - it's large, and it will produce airplanes that will be manufactured, deployed and eventually flown, so that anyone with a camera can take a picture.
What is secret is exact capabilities - how fast and how far it can fly with what load, how much it can carry, how fast it can climb, how many targets it can simultaneously track and fire upon, etc. Numbers are important when you have two comparable airplanes chasing each other.
But the whole point of the article seems to be to find possible uses for this product, in this case as a board game platform, which makes me wonder what usage it has in the first place.
Since the iPad is not the first tablet on the market, you should be able to just look around and see usage examples of other tablets. Here is the set that I know of: [ ]
And that is because manufacturers of tablets are searching for many years for such usage. The only semi-alive example is hospitals, where nurses need access to patients' charts as they move from one patient to another. Well, of course the traditional way of doing it is just to hang the chart onto the patient's bed...
But tablets aren't very popular in real world. Primarily because they limit the user too much. It is nice to have a tablet to read /. in bed at night, but are you willing to spend $800 on it? Note that the tablet won't be of any use beyond reading; its I/O functionality is minimal, on-screen keyboards are OK only for short messages, and the iPad will lack all the software that you find dear to you and that lives happily on your main computer. Other tablets haven't hurt themselves that way, and still they haven't found the customer.
Which means that you don't have any limitations you have with IPv4 while hosting stuff
It also means that ISPs can now charge you per computer, instead of per IP (that you then NAT to cover your whole house.)
If your router supports IPv6 of course
I have three routers, none of them support IPv6, and without specifically searching I don't know any that do (except Airport.) Often it's hard to tell even holding the box in hands at the store.
I don't think that network appliances are the problem.
Unless, of course, you have such appliances. There are millions of devices that are IPv4-only. Support for IPv6 just started, and there is zero chance that earlier products will be upgraded (they are out of warranty by now.)
Things like mobile devices (for which IPv6 would be great)
Mobile devices (cell phones) are self-contained, so they are welcome to have whatever IPv$x they want. These devices are not a problem, and they indeed benefit from IPv6. However everyone else, industrial and residential PC and gadget users, will be in need of some serious 6 to 4 bridging. There are just too many embedded devices which are IPv4 only *and* out of maintenance. We also should remember that majority of network-aware applications are IPv4 only. This is even more true in niche, expensive applications, those that use networked license servers, for example. In their market even if a newer app is available and supports IPv6 you have to buy it again; support on that level is not free.
Have him email it to you. Or FTP it somewhere. There's plenty of ways to get things on your iphone/touch without syncing.
It is mighty stupid to have to email a multi-megabyte file when you hold the phone in one hand and the USB cable in another. On my planet such a product would be reviewed as "poorly done."
I thought it was the Chinese because it was after the accounts of Chinese Human rights activists.
Chinese government has full control inside the country, except at the offices of Google. So what is easier to do:
This reasoning shows that the attack is most useful not to the Chinese government but to people who want to put Google and China on a collision course. If the government watches some people it never lets them know that they are watched.
What we have here is a recreation of Litvinenko's poisoning, only done on the Net. In both cases countries were blamed, though any intelligent observer instantly sees that such an extravagant method is not something that secret services ever use. If a secret service wants someone dead, the guy just commits suicide.
Once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere.
I'm guessing that GP's point is that our current space technologies are so awfully expensive that though technically we, as a society, can once in a lifetime do a stunt like trip to the Moon (or now Mars,) it has near-zero practical use.
It is my personal belief that we won't be flying to planets until we design a propulsion technology that is good enough for SSTO. Then it will be also good enough to move between orbits and land on planets and take off again. The current chemical rockets are not even close. Getting to the LEO is pointless if we have nowhere to go from there.
To offer an analogy, it is possible to cross the Atlantic ocean on a raft, or in a rubber boat - it had been done - but if Europeans were limited to those technologies we'd never see Americas.
IMO, the money should be spent primarily on fundamental science, and a smaller part of it - on good, complex robots that can be launched from time to time to other planets. We need to know how this Universe works. An antigravity-based propulsion would solve all our problems, for example. Teleportation or FTL would also come (or definitively not come) from the same pool of knowledge. I'd even settle on a Space Elevator that we will be able to put together out of new materials. We need to stop paddling our reed canoe across the Atlantic for a moment and instead think if there is a better way.
If anything goes wrong, who does the owner expect will make his data automagically rise from any proverbial ashes? GeekSquad?
I know that you weren't serious about Geek Squad, but there is nothing strange if the owner of the company uses an outside consultant to take care of his notebook, if he can't do it himself. Backups are easy these days, buy a terabyte USB drive and it comes with a backup software. You don't even need to select what you back up - choose to backup the whole laptop, incrementally, on each connect, and the job is done. It's not like laptops are sold only to companies with IT staff.
There can be plenty of confidential data on an owner's laptop - personal data of employees, his business emails, his documents, QuickBooks, taxes, maybe his PGP keyrings... plenty of reasons to not give it to a hired help. The admin should instead focus on running the other 20-30 computers in the company, that contain only production data that is not that secret.
As I understand, the policy is about computers that are reused, and the prior data loss occurred because someone quit, and nobody bothered to preserve the data on his computer until it was too late.
If the owners of the company neglect this rule as they change their own computers, not much you can do or need to do. Just send them a few reminders, and if you hear nothing back, desist. It's their company after all.
The owners may want to do that if the computers were used for storing some confidential information. Such a backup cannot be stored on your shelf among books and other assorted DVDs. If the owners know what they are doing, they perform backup of those computers themselves, and keep the media at home.
Look at the source at that URL :-)
Could it be because we are on the OUTSIDE of the UNIVERSE?
No. The Universe is defined as the thing that we are in.
If something that like that could be created by these cosmically insignificant energy levels and actually survive long enough to eat planets, the universe would already be pretty darn empty.
You know, the universe *is* pretty darn empty.
And in many cases, the same community that is governed by those laws also write the same laws as well as provide the men that make up the law enforcement force.
That statement is a bit idealistic. Gang members are not welcome in police forces; at the same time police officers spent a lot of time working gang-related cases. Looking at the community at large is not productive, just as if you are looking at both sides in a war. The distinction between a felon and a non-felon is quite obvious, especially in legal and rights areas.
If we were driven by this behavior, law and law enforcement would never exist.
On the other hand, if we were NOT driven by this behavior, law and law enforcement would never exist either. The truth is in between: most of the society wants peace, but a small (and dangerous!) part of the society wants war. In most modern social groups criminals, if left unchecked, overrun the peaceful citizens. In ancient times villagers were known to brutally kill thieves, that kept the balance. Nowadays it's not legal any more, so criminals have an advantage.
They make up part of what humanity is but they do not define it.
There aren't that many criminals in an average society, actually. But their influence is far exceeding the actual harm they do. For example, one sexual predator or a serial killer can terrorize millions of people and change their ways of life forever. If you add actual and potential harm together you will see that criminals define *a lot* of what's going on in the society. As an example, look at 9/11 terrorists. They killed 3,000 people, but look at the changes they unleashed onto the society!
There are also secondary effects of crime. Peaceful citizens arm and train themselves and eventually become more violent. Movies and books are made about crime, making it into a glorious adventure. And so on. Violence is an integral part of a human society, and it defines a lot of what humans are. History of humanity is history of wars, that ought to mean something.
Finally:
The notion that humanity is fundamentally inclined to self destructive anarchy is in direct conflict [...]
It is not in conflict with human history. We can go back as far as records exist, and we see violence, war and crime all over them. Crime is a permanent fixture of a human society. The only known alternative to king's guards is brutality of small prehistoric tribes. Remove the force of law and witness Rwanda, Sudan and Somalia.
Hundreds of hurricanes hit the Gulf Coast before Katrina, and yet nobody shot at the rescuers. Usually, there weren't any rescuers at all
So you answer your own question. Nobody shot at rescuers because the damage was minor and the society survived.
But consider the disaster like in Haiti. The society is in ruins, just like the buildings. Consider this scenario, for example:
A man with a bag full of food encounters a starving family. Children will die without food. The man refuses to share or sell his food. The father of the children is armed. There is nobody else around. What is the ethical solution of this situation, and what is the *likely* solution?
And despite all this dumb, irrational, self-centered nature we have thousands of years of civilized society.
All civilized societies (save a couple of communes like Amish) enforce law and order; in medieval times it was military (guards) patrolling towns; now it is police. A society hopes, of course, that its members will behave, but hope isn't enough.
There were times when police wasn't around - during wars, or in remote lands. Then the law of the jungle takes over.
Make a thought experiment. Take a large city, like New York, and remove all LEO from it. The control of the city will be up for grabs. What will happen, who (if anyone) will reach for that control?
It's software; the number of copies made has nothing whatsoever to do with the effort required to create it.
Poor choice of words on my part. By "volume" I mean amount of time spent on developing F/OSS. Indeed it doesn't matter how many times the bits were downloaded. But your time is finite, and short of leaving your day job you can do only so much.
Because their customers CHOOSE to pay them for their services
I can only confirm that. At my last job an expensive multi-core server got RH installed; in part thanks to Xilinx supporting their toolchain on Linux. Everyone is happy. And the IT people needed that support from RH when they had a problem integrating with the Windows infrastructure (domain) already in place. The Windows Server option was considered and rejected because it supports *less* functionality than Linux, and that is because some UNIX heads at Xilinx (who I met) chose to use some UNIX technologies that are poorly done in Windows.
And how many of those commercial jobs done in months were rush jobs that were released full of holes and bugs?
True, that happens pretty often (we don't need to go beyond Windows Update to prove that.) But overall, commercial outfits are driven by the need for revenue, and as a side effect it also pleases the customers who get the product sooner. It is important to note that most customers don't need perfect software that is too late, they'd rather use imperfect software now, as long as they can manage the crashes. This is not a guess on my part, most of my professional experience is surrounded by such software. I'd gladly take an app that is perfect and does what I need, but there is no such thing (examples: CST, Xilinx etc.)
Even in less exotic areas the GIMP is often rejected by power users in favor of Photoshop because, for example, Photoshop has more smarts to do things, whereas the GIMP gives you mostly the basic tools to move pixels around. The billion dollar company can throw money at the problem to add intelligence into the product, whereas GIMP is limited by a few factors, such as the number of man-hours of coders, expertise of coders (how many of them do AI for image recognition?) and by interests of those coders, because the work is voluntary. If only the GIMP project could afford to pay a top notch AI specialist to code the advanced tools of Photoshop. But they can't, and even the GUI of the GIMP is not as polished as Photoshop's, even though probably everyone on GIMP's team is qualified to code that.
I like the second option better!
And like many commons, it won't last. Someone, somewhere must pay the developer, because people who choose to live for free are not likely to contribute much to Linux or to anything else.
This can be swept under the rug if the volume of freely given software is small. If I'm employeed by Ty Coon Corp. 40 hours per week, I can afford to spend 1-2 hours per week to develop something and release it under some open source license. But if the work requires 30 hours per week, I need to make it my primary job, and then who is going to keep the lights on? Obviously at that level of involvement some business model is required; RH, for example, has one, and other players also found something that works.
The sad truth is that any good software requires a lot of effort, and that means either money or time. For some time OSS developers chose the time, thus dragging projects for years (while competing commercial jobs were done in months.) I'm not going to complain if some developers now can shorten the development process by spending money on it.
To add to shutdown's comment:
The PRC will certainly be a major player in the years to come, but unless they can work out their human rights abuses and their stance on things like Tibet they're only setting themselves up to pop [...]
The majority of population of any country can't possibly care less about "human rights abuses" unless it involves them personally. In 1938 Stalin had millions of regular people arrested, taken out of their beds at night and sent to Gulag - and even then "the masses" did nothing. So a government can safely abuse human rights of a small group of people, as long as the large group of people is OK with that, or just doesn't care.
And with regard to Tibet, it's something that Chinese and Tibetans will eventually work out. However from purely economic POV Tibet, being situated mostly in mountains, needs China more than China needs Tibet. Per Wikipedia, China invests a lot of money into the economy of Tibet - something that independent Tibet wouldn't be able to do (not without selling most of its mineral rights to foreigners, at least.) And from the military POV, one must be insane to think that China will let Tibet to go free, because the very next moment the new government of Tibet, properly bribed, allows some other, big and rich country to install missiles and other war machines right on Chinese border. Chinese government knows that well, having Taiwan as an example. That just isn't going to happen.
So none of these issues present any danger to the PRC's government. There is only one process that does - the economy. As long as China is getting richer, everyone is happy as a clam.
So they system is "protecting" patients right out of being able to afford treatment [...] It's a sure sign that the medical system is itself quite ill
Not as much medical system as legal. The doctor won't take a guess at your problem and give you pills that probably will help. This is because if he is wrong you will sue him for $1M, his insurance will pay, and you buy a nice house on proceeds. The doctor, of course, is ruined.
Because of that every doctor practices CYA. He doesn't need your $50 (vs. regular $500 with full tests) if those $50 can destroy him. If you follow the line, the worst case is when a doctor gives advices for free, with hardly any look at the patient. He'll earn nothing, and will lose his license as soon as the lawyers reach the courthouse.
But I'm suggesting that "good enough" may very well be good enough.
It depends on what you are measuring. A scale is indeed measuring only one parameter, but a balance board can easily measure several. You need syncronized access to all sensors to recreate your movements on the board, you can't just poll them one at a time.
If we're talking about a scale, do we really need to spend $10,000 for FDA testing and approval? It measures weight... Can't you pretty much verify that with another scale or two?
Doctors who treat people with excessive weight need to know the exact numbers, especially as the readings are taken mid-course. They tell the doctor how effective the drugs and methods are. Half a pound is probably an unacceptable and unjustifiable error. And you can't use "another scale or two" because they can be also wrong. Here is something to read about it. A proper multi-device setup would be great, but it would cost more than one device that is accurate enough.
Also the cost of the equipment is spread among many patients who use it over years. Let's say the balance board costs $20K and it is used for 10 years and then written off. Every day one measurement is taken. $20K / 3600 days = $5 per patient. Is this something to lose sleep over?
Holy smokes, that's nowhere near the "$18,000 medical device" price.
There are other issues that the manufacturer has to deal with For example:
The demand for the product will be very low - nowhere like 200,000. I'd say, 20,000 over the whole life of the product. That could be a few thousand units per year. You incur costs during this time, so your meager sales must bring enough cash to keep the lights on.
Small demand also implies multiple, small production runs. Rarely you order 20,000 units, pay for them up front and then sell them for 10 years. But if you order 2,000 per year then your manufacturing costs go up.
You can't sit on your design for 10 years and sell one or two per day. You need to do R&D and produce a newer, better product. You need money for that.
Even though your sales are low, your sales expenses are high. You need to fly sales reps to all hospitals, demo the thing and wine & dine doctors, preferrably at strip clubs. This costs a lot of money. You can't sell such a thing through Amazon.