Ataxic cerebral palsy usually affects muscular coordination, and the symptoms (poor balance, shakiness, poor coordination) [...] Apparently she is pretty smart and plays the piano well.
I don't have a cerebral palsy (or anything else) but I can't play the piano, well or not well or even in a most awful way. She appears to have better muscular coordination than average. I can't imagine that being a problem with any job.
we don't know enough facts, and it's none of our business.
I have to agree. But in general if a child doesn't like her parent she just stays away, goes her own way and so on. In this case the girl wants it both ways - independence and support. She appears to be a perfect fit with the OWS people.
As many already said, this has nothing to do with net neutrality. However it has everything to deal with fraud.
You, as a customer, are buying a cell phone and a plan that comes with it. You are expecting certain performance of the wireless link, and you are getting it for the moment. But later the cell operator decides to sell your bandwidth to the highest bidder! In the end everybody pays the "turbo" fee to get any bandwidth at all, but everybody is back to square one... except the cell company who has now more money. Time for the "hyper-turbo" sales campaign then, to fleece the sheep once more?
If you are shopping for anything except a commodity it's a waste of time and money. A century ago it was common to go to a local general store and ask the proprietor to mail-order a special product for you from one of his contacts in the industry. It was expensive and took forever. Nobody is interested in going back to that kind of shopping.
Terrorists might bring 500 tons of TNT into a nuclear plant and set it off.
What is more practical from the terrorist's POV?
1) Bring 500 tons of TNT into a guarded, monitored, secure territory that is in the middle of nowhere. Take your time to deploy these 500 tons by hand through narrow service corridors. Install charges near a meter-thick reactor vessel that is designed to survive just such explosions. Detonate the thing and scare all the nearby rabbits because the powerplant is so far from anything of value.
2) Divide 500 tons of TNT into 500 pieces, load onto 500 trucks, freely drive those trucks into unprotected cities and explode at will. Carnage and terror will ensue.
Now can some what explain to me why the F*ck 40% of a supposed advanced nation still deny it's existence?
Religion offers an easy way to become immortal. Science promises nothing of the sort, and atheists must be comfortable knowing that their death is final and there is no afterlife. See Pascal's Wager.
Yes, but our Overlords will suffer when we perish and aren't around for them to exploit anymore.
What use could possibly Overlords have for a gaggle of slum dwellers? Right now an Overlord who is in control of machines and property would do exceedingly well employing only top 10% of the population.
Let's assume the Overlord being a computer - it is perfectly logical but has no feelings or morals. It is driven only by reason.
The problem then is that every man who wants to consume $x needs to produce $y, and the worth of $x should be about equal to the worth of $y. Every set of people has individuals who can produce a lot and those who can't produce a thing. The latter group, in theory, should die. In practice it forms ghettos and lives on handouts (willful or not) of the former group. Ghetto people contribute nothing, and an Overlord would have every logical reason to exterminate them. The rest doesn't need to eat fish from Hudson, they produce enough to exchange their money for a decent food.
This approach is known in some human societies. Revolutionaries of the 20th century often proclaimed: "Who doesn't work doesn't eat." To some extent that was the case in USSR. Jobs were always available, but the society had no government assistance or entitlements, aside from an old age pension. Everyone who was medically fit for work had to work, however little and however lightly. As an extreme case, you could work as a night guard at a kindergarten. That job would net you enough cash to rent a small room and have your daily meal. Not much else, but what would you expect if you hardly do anything? In Stalin's time those who avoided work could be shot or sent to Siberia to learn what the word "work" really means.
Humans have evolved a resistance to being shot in the head, it's just not a simple mechanical/physiological resistance. It's called society.
To prove that you need to take a group of newborn children and raise them using only robots. Your theory will be proven if they form a society that abhors violence.
But something tells me that even if such an experiment is run you will not get much more than a snapshot of a ghetto where violence is the king.
it's inarguable that societies have evolved strategies to generally protect their members
This is not a biological evolution. We aren't born pacifists; quite the opposite, actually. A society certainly can evolve, and so does the "Life" game in a computer. This has nothing to do with biological evolution as people understand it. The rules of the enlightened society are not living in genes. At best our genetic tendency to form societies is not much different from the desire of dogs to form packs. Both are in genes because they are advantageous.
This is often the case with people who are sufficiently competent in what they are doing. I have my own domain, mail and Web server. I'm running an Ubuntu LTS distribution. I don't have support - never even considered it. First, the server is not mission-critical to that extent. Sure, it would be sad if it crashes and burns. However the monetary loss to me would be nearly zero. Second, I can fix most of the common problems myself, being somewhat aware of Linux and using it since 1997, probably (don't even remember.)
We don't know what that "large project" is for. The fact that it's large doesn't mean that it's mission-critical or that it uses one server and a million of terminals. If the latter I can understand using Red Hat - you need only one or two servers. But what if that "large project" requires installing one server in each out of 10,000 little stores that the company owns? Well, that becomes a very different story; licenses on *that* would kill you pretty fast. The OP doesn't elaborate on the economics of the project, but the CIO of course has that in mind.
Then they're free to fall on their own sword IMO.
Perhaps they have a backup plan. Red Hat is not the only source of support. There are consultants that are ready and willing, for an appropriate fee, to jump in and fix whatever needs to be fixed. That fee is generally known. The CIO is likely to be aware of it, and his decision to skip the RH support necessarily includes the plan how to fix things when they inevitably fail.
Note also that the RH support does not work by magic. People at RH don't just read a spell from a grimoire and your server fixes itself. People at RH require someone competent near the broken server. And if the tech is that competent he probably can fix the problem himself. Another possibility is to simply swap the bad server for a new one, out of a pool of spares. With CentOS that costs you nothing. It would be actually a good way to fix things because this covers hardware failures too, and the repair time can be very low and predictable. The backups, configuration and such should be already set up to cover the hardware failure because that's the most likely cause of a problem anyway.
The RH support is also different from IBM support. In the IBM case all you need to do to fix the problem is to unlock the server room door to let the IBM guy in. You pay a lot but you know what you are getting (a guarantee.) But RH can't guarantee anything hardware-related, and they won't be sending anyone with spare parts and tools. They can only advise. The value of that advice may vary from reasonably high (you need to reconfigure something on a live server) to abysmally low ("your RAM is probably bad, or something else.")
The levels required for the address and data inputs are TTL.
That's all good when you are programming only one type of the IC. However if you need to program 12,000 different ICs (with perhaps a hundred pinouts and a hundred of slightly different methods, voltages and timings) then your hardware needs to be pretty flexible. Ideally you'd want every pin to be capable of every function. If you can't afford that then you start switching, building plug-in cartridges with special wiring and pin drivers, and all that stuff. In a perfect world you'd want a RAMDAC on every pin, and with programmable clock too:-)
Fortunately we are out of that mess now. It's just a piece of history. And yes, in the old days I built a programmer for UV EPROMs that I needed to program. It was controlled by a variant of MCS48, IIRC.
The M27W401 has been designed to be fully compatible with the M27C4001 and has the
same electronic signature. As a result the M27W401 can be programmed as the M27C4001
on the same programming equipment applying 12.75V on VPP and 6.25V on VCC by the use of the same PRESTO II algorithm. [...] Programming with Presto II consists of
applying a sequence of 100us program pulses to each byte until a correct verify occurs
Even some modern parts (Atmel AVR MCUs) support high voltage (12V) programming. This link explains what it is for, and the datasheet has far more to say.
Flash is just EEPROM that you can't erase a byte at a time
As I understand the OP wants a programmer that can program UV PROMs as well. The devil there is in details. Each part requires unique conditions for programming; some of them are onerous, like 15V, 1us pulses with certain rise/fall times. It takes a careful design of the hardware to be able to program those. Modern EEPROM or Flash is a piece of cake (which is a lie) compared to those old ones. Worst of all, some are OTP PROMs - which means that you burn them once and that's it. If you want to experiment with programming of those you need to have a fat wallet first. That's why it's best to defer to a good old programmer that had been not just "tested" on those parts but specifically designed to program them. I worked with programmers that supported hundreds of devices and came with several plug-in trays, each with ten different sockets (ZIF usually) for all kinds of packages.
Some of these programmers are manufactured and sold even today, for example ALL-100. Per manufacturer's claim they support over 12,000 different parts. Note that they mention "pin drivers" - this is the key word here; it means they know what they are doing. Every pin is programmatically controlled in terms of high and low voltage, slew rate and perhaps other settings (a DAC is commonly used.) It's not trivial to make these drivers - some of them need to source and sink the full Icc of the part, which means low output impedance.
The cost of ALL-100 is $1K. I'd say it's money well spent if you want a new programmer. As I said, an old one can be often had for a song; I got a few pieces of test equipment this way.
Very few people need EEPROM programmers these days. You, with your restoration projects, are one of few exceptions.
I very much doubt that there is a modern design that can reliably do what you need. The problem is not in building the thing but in testing it on chips that don't exist today outside of dusty old boards.
Your best bet is to buy an old programmer. I'd think many companies are junking this equipment left and right, so you should be able to find it in surplus stores, flea markets, on the Internet, etc. The key part is that it must be old today - and from the same century as the ICs that you are programming with it.
seems like the radio could be limited on it's own and have a known method to talk to it thus limiting the ability to turn up the power
Sure it can. Build it on a separate PCB, put it into a separate metal enclosure, plug it into your phone and you are good to go. Unfortunately the phone will have to be on wheels.
In practice it's far cheaper to have everything connected to everything. The MCU of the phone would have direct hardware access to the RF processor and would be able to configure all its registers over SPI or whatever. Isolation costs money, and there is no market for such a thing. Why would you want to have two MCUs in the phone if one will do just fine? It's not like phones are a market with fat margins and you can throw hardware at any imaginary problem.
I've been sold what is effectively a pocket computer - no way I'm going to be happy with the status quo when my phone can be made better.
Approximately 100% of phone users (minus the rounding error of/. readers) don't want any updates on their phones. First, they got used to the phone. Second, they know what works and what doesn't. Third, they invested in software that works on their phone and they don't want to risk their investment. Fourth, they don't want to risk their data (even if they have a backup - how does it work across the upgrade?)
The truth is that most people just don't care. As long as the phone does its phoney thing they are happy. They don't upgrade their PCs either (outside of invisible to them security updates from MS.) They know that phones get scratched, damaged, lost, and in two years most likely they will be given a new phone for a low, low price of a new contract. So they don't lose sleep over a phone.
Yes, there are people (like you) who insist on a pocket computer that also may be used as a phone if for some reason someone dials a wrong number and ends up calling them. Those people need Bash, VNC, RDP, SSH/SCP and a host of other applications that are far beyond what a common man can even comprehend, let alone need or be able to use. Those people may indeed need the latest and greatest. And those people are in trouble, according to this article. Perhaps they are. However the rest of the world doesn't care. We don't get automatic upgrades of firmware in our cars, for example, even though the car makers are improving things all the time. Our TV sets, our coffee makers, our Roombas aren't upgraded either. In fact, very few products have remote upgrades. There is value in stability.
I'm writing this from a laptop near a pool and the text is nearly invisible
You are probably right that most wars between the e-ink and the LCD are waged over a rift in usage scenarios. I personally read books in bed, before going to sleep. The lights in the room are off, and the Galaxy Tab (as well as my other tablet) have the correct backlight setting for that. I wouldn't like a bright light either. What I want is a good contrast and quick screen redraws. E-ink is bad on both accounts. As an experiment I just took the Galaxy Tab outside and set to the maximum brightness. Under direct sunlight the screen is a bit washed out, but if I put it into my own shadow then it's perfect.
With regard to the "going for a week without power" - I don't know what kind of cave he lived in, in what wilderness - with candle light perhaps? Most people are always within a few feet from the power; if not at their home or office then at least in their car. I recharge the tablet during the day, and reading for several hours, with WiFi on (to check my email) is not seriously draining the battery. Edge cases like your friend are immaterial; there is always someone that needs something special.
I have no idea what games one could play on a tablet - the games that I might be interested in require considerably more CPU, something like PS3:-)
I'm currently working at a business where it can easily take half a year between the first contact and the purchase order. The customer is not unhappy to talk to us - he has a real need and we make a product that fits the bill. It simply takes time to get funding on his end, and we also may need to make a few changes here and there to meet his specific requirements. Sometimes we even design a new product for the customer if it makes sense.
There are much simpler scenarios. Sales & Marketing people like (and have to) stay in touch with the customers. Tech support people have to answer support emails. Buyers are required to email suppliers in search of parts. The CEO is sending updates about the company's finances to lawyers and accountants. This can easily reach 500 on any given day, unless your company is very small (or does nothing:-)
I have a Galaxy Tab here. I installed Foliant on it, and this is perfect for reading books. I like the LCD with the backlight, and I never liked e-ink screens. If Kobo makes yet another tablet then it's fine, but they are competing in a cutthroat market. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference, in principle, between the Galaxy Tab and the Kobo product. It's the software that does the work - and you can use any software you like.
I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems, class warfare, engineered famines, etc by breaking the cycle of mindless procreation by people who don't have their heads on straight.
Your math is suspect. The probability of a child being a genius is more or less a constant. The more children are born, the more geniuses are among us. One genius can invent a Warp drive, or LENR, or a neural network for machine intelligence for the whole civilization. By limiting the population you reduce your own chances to live a better or longer life. Did you notice that acceleration of progress of this civilization is related to the size of the population, among other factors?
I am also optimistic that I could sell tons of useless crap to his kids
That doesn't work either. The ratio of producers to consumers is also fixed. If he has three kids one of them will compete against you.
Wow, wow, your average GPS is nowhere near 1 cm accuracy
If you look at the receiver that I provided the link for you will see that it is not "your average GPS":-)
The only way this technology gets to 1cm accuracy is through a number of techniques built on to the GPS technology.
It can do it, and indeed corrections and RTK and multiple calibrated antennas - all of that is used. I worked for a large GPS manufacturer and know this for a fact. These GPS setups are actively used in construction. Builders can live with an error of a few centimeters but they can't tolerate an error of a few meters.
I might be within a millimeter on all of my measurements, but over time that error propagates, because I have no way to do triangulation on a point 100 miles away due to the curvature of the Earth.
During the triangulation you establish a network of reference points. All angles and all distances between those calculated locations should add up. If you started at A and surveyed paths to B and C, you can now start at B and independently derive the location of C. It should match the one determined earlier. If it does not then you made a mistake somewhere.
Not if the map is also off by 18 meters. How do they put the roads on the map in the first place? Most likely, by GPS, or whatever GPS was calibrated against when it was implemented.
The current datum for GPS is WGS84. Locations of many places on Earth were carefully measured for centuries, using astronomy and trigonometry. I don't know if they are accurate enough to calibrate the GPS.
A systematic, uniform error, like a translation of the entire datum, would have no effect on the OPERA experiment - however you slide or rotate the outer shell of a sphere it doesn't change the distance between two points. It would require a systematic but non-uniform error to cause this effect. I guess it is possible, since there is no explanation so far of the OPERA results. Such an error has to be location-specific and it should be invisible to the WAAS.
Slashdot Mirror
Ataxic cerebral palsy usually affects muscular coordination, and the symptoms (poor balance, shakiness, poor coordination) [...] Apparently she is pretty smart and plays the piano well.
I don't have a cerebral palsy (or anything else) but I can't play the piano, well or not well or even in a most awful way. She appears to have better muscular coordination than average. I can't imagine that being a problem with any job.
we don't know enough facts, and it's none of our business.
I have to agree. But in general if a child doesn't like her parent she just stays away, goes her own way and so on. In this case the girl wants it both ways - independence and support. She appears to be a perfect fit with the OWS people.
As many already said, this has nothing to do with net neutrality. However it has everything to deal with fraud.
You, as a customer, are buying a cell phone and a plan that comes with it. You are expecting certain performance of the wireless link, and you are getting it for the moment. But later the cell operator decides to sell your bandwidth to the highest bidder! In the end everybody pays the "turbo" fee to get any bandwidth at all, but everybody is back to square one... except the cell company who has now more money. Time for the "hyper-turbo" sales campaign then, to fleece the sheep once more?
Stop shopping online. Shop local.
If you are shopping for anything except a commodity it's a waste of time and money. A century ago it was common to go to a local general store and ask the proprietor to mail-order a special product for you from one of his contacts in the industry. It was expensive and took forever. Nobody is interested in going back to that kind of shopping.
Terrorists might bring 500 tons of TNT into a nuclear plant and set it off.
What is more practical from the terrorist's POV?
1) Bring 500 tons of TNT into a guarded, monitored, secure territory that is in the middle of nowhere. Take your time to deploy these 500 tons by hand through narrow service corridors. Install charges near a meter-thick reactor vessel that is designed to survive just such explosions. Detonate the thing and scare all the nearby rabbits because the powerplant is so far from anything of value.
2) Divide 500 tons of TNT into 500 pieces, load onto 500 trucks, freely drive those trucks into unprotected cities and explode at will. Carnage and terror will ensue.
Now can some what explain to me why the F*ck 40% of a supposed advanced nation still deny it's existence?
Religion offers an easy way to become immortal. Science promises nothing of the sort, and atheists must be comfortable knowing that their death is final and there is no afterlife. See Pascal's Wager.
Yes, but our Overlords will suffer when we perish and aren't around for them to exploit anymore.
What use could possibly Overlords have for a gaggle of slum dwellers? Right now an Overlord who is in control of machines and property would do exceedingly well employing only top 10% of the population.
Let's assume the Overlord being a computer - it is perfectly logical but has no feelings or morals. It is driven only by reason.
The problem then is that every man who wants to consume $x needs to produce $y, and the worth of $x should be about equal to the worth of $y. Every set of people has individuals who can produce a lot and those who can't produce a thing. The latter group, in theory, should die. In practice it forms ghettos and lives on handouts (willful or not) of the former group. Ghetto people contribute nothing, and an Overlord would have every logical reason to exterminate them. The rest doesn't need to eat fish from Hudson, they produce enough to exchange their money for a decent food.
This approach is known in some human societies. Revolutionaries of the 20th century often proclaimed: "Who doesn't work doesn't eat." To some extent that was the case in USSR. Jobs were always available, but the society had no government assistance or entitlements, aside from an old age pension. Everyone who was medically fit for work had to work, however little and however lightly. As an extreme case, you could work as a night guard at a kindergarten. That job would net you enough cash to rent a small room and have your daily meal. Not much else, but what would you expect if you hardly do anything? In Stalin's time those who avoided work could be shot or sent to Siberia to learn what the word "work" really means.
Humans have evolved a resistance to being shot in the head, it's just not a simple mechanical/physiological resistance. It's called society.
To prove that you need to take a group of newborn children and raise them using only robots. Your theory will be proven if they form a society that abhors violence.
But something tells me that even if such an experiment is run you will not get much more than a snapshot of a ghetto where violence is the king.
it's inarguable that societies have evolved strategies to generally protect their members
This is not a biological evolution. We aren't born pacifists; quite the opposite, actually. A society certainly can evolve, and so does the "Life" game in a computer. This has nothing to do with biological evolution as people understand it. The rules of the enlightened society are not living in genes. At best our genetic tendency to form societies is not much different from the desire of dogs to form packs. Both are in genes because they are advantageous.
Be prepared to seek employment should you decide to let the "CIO" read this story.
It's very likely that a CIO who knows the difference between CentOS and RH and can take a risk of skipping support reads Slashdot on his own.
The boss doesn't believe in support.
This is often the case with people who are sufficiently competent in what they are doing. I have my own domain, mail and Web server. I'm running an Ubuntu LTS distribution. I don't have support - never even considered it. First, the server is not mission-critical to that extent. Sure, it would be sad if it crashes and burns. However the monetary loss to me would be nearly zero. Second, I can fix most of the common problems myself, being somewhat aware of Linux and using it since 1997, probably (don't even remember.)
We don't know what that "large project" is for. The fact that it's large doesn't mean that it's mission-critical or that it uses one server and a million of terminals. If the latter I can understand using Red Hat - you need only one or two servers. But what if that "large project" requires installing one server in each out of 10,000 little stores that the company owns? Well, that becomes a very different story; licenses on *that* would kill you pretty fast. The OP doesn't elaborate on the economics of the project, but the CIO of course has that in mind.
Then they're free to fall on their own sword IMO.
Perhaps they have a backup plan. Red Hat is not the only source of support. There are consultants that are ready and willing, for an appropriate fee, to jump in and fix whatever needs to be fixed. That fee is generally known. The CIO is likely to be aware of it, and his decision to skip the RH support necessarily includes the plan how to fix things when they inevitably fail.
Note also that the RH support does not work by magic. People at RH don't just read a spell from a grimoire and your server fixes itself. People at RH require someone competent near the broken server. And if the tech is that competent he probably can fix the problem himself. Another possibility is to simply swap the bad server for a new one, out of a pool of spares. With CentOS that costs you nothing. It would be actually a good way to fix things because this covers hardware failures too, and the repair time can be very low and predictable. The backups, configuration and such should be already set up to cover the hardware failure because that's the most likely cause of a problem anyway.
The RH support is also different from IBM support. In the IBM case all you need to do to fix the problem is to unlock the server room door to let the IBM guy in. You pay a lot but you know what you are getting (a guarantee.) But RH can't guarantee anything hardware-related, and they won't be sending anyone with spare parts and tools. They can only advise. The value of that advice may vary from reasonably high (you need to reconfigure something on a live server) to abysmally low ("your RAM is probably bad, or something else.")
The levels required for the address and data inputs are TTL.
That's all good when you are programming only one type of the IC. However if you need to program 12,000 different ICs (with perhaps a hundred pinouts and a hundred of slightly different methods, voltages and timings) then your hardware needs to be pretty flexible. Ideally you'd want every pin to be capable of every function. If you can't afford that then you start switching, building plug-in cartridges with special wiring and pin drivers, and all that stuff. In a perfect world you'd want a RAMDAC on every pin, and with programmable clock too :-)
Fortunately we are out of that mess now. It's just a piece of history. And yes, in the old days I built a programmer for UV EPROMs that I needed to program. It was controlled by a variant of MCS48, IIRC.
This is old stuff so high/low will only be 0V and 5V.
Generalizations are always false. For example:
Even some modern parts (Atmel AVR MCUs) support high voltage (12V) programming. This link explains what it is for, and the datasheet has far more to say.
Flash is just EEPROM that you can't erase a byte at a time
As I understand the OP wants a programmer that can program UV PROMs as well. The devil there is in details. Each part requires unique conditions for programming; some of them are onerous, like 15V, 1us pulses with certain rise/fall times. It takes a careful design of the hardware to be able to program those. Modern EEPROM or Flash is a piece of cake (which is a lie) compared to those old ones. Worst of all, some are OTP PROMs - which means that you burn them once and that's it. If you want to experiment with programming of those you need to have a fat wallet first. That's why it's best to defer to a good old programmer that had been not just "tested" on those parts but specifically designed to program them. I worked with programmers that supported hundreds of devices and came with several plug-in trays, each with ten different sockets (ZIF usually) for all kinds of packages.
Some of these programmers are manufactured and sold even today, for example ALL-100. Per manufacturer's claim they support over 12,000 different parts. Note that they mention "pin drivers" - this is the key word here; it means they know what they are doing. Every pin is programmatically controlled in terms of high and low voltage, slew rate and perhaps other settings (a DAC is commonly used.) It's not trivial to make these drivers - some of them need to source and sink the full Icc of the part, which means low output impedance.
The cost of ALL-100 is $1K. I'd say it's money well spent if you want a new programmer. As I said, an old one can be often had for a song; I got a few pieces of test equipment this way.
Very few people need EEPROM programmers these days. You, with your restoration projects, are one of few exceptions.
I very much doubt that there is a modern design that can reliably do what you need. The problem is not in building the thing but in testing it on chips that don't exist today outside of dusty old boards.
Your best bet is to buy an old programmer. I'd think many companies are junking this equipment left and right, so you should be able to find it in surplus stores, flea markets, on the Internet, etc. The key part is that it must be old today - and from the same century as the ICs that you are programming with it.
seems like the radio could be limited on it's own and have a known method to talk to it thus limiting the ability to turn up the power
Sure it can. Build it on a separate PCB, put it into a separate metal enclosure, plug it into your phone and you are good to go. Unfortunately the phone will have to be on wheels.
In practice it's far cheaper to have everything connected to everything. The MCU of the phone would have direct hardware access to the RF processor and would be able to configure all its registers over SPI or whatever. Isolation costs money, and there is no market for such a thing. Why would you want to have two MCUs in the phone if one will do just fine? It's not like phones are a market with fat margins and you can throw hardware at any imaginary problem.
I've been sold what is effectively a pocket computer - no way I'm going to be happy with the status quo when my phone can be made better.
Approximately 100% of phone users (minus the rounding error of /. readers) don't want any updates on their phones. First, they got used to the phone. Second, they know what works and what doesn't. Third, they invested in software that works on their phone and they don't want to risk their investment. Fourth, they don't want to risk their data (even if they have a backup - how does it work across the upgrade?)
The truth is that most people just don't care. As long as the phone does its phoney thing they are happy. They don't upgrade their PCs either (outside of invisible to them security updates from MS.) They know that phones get scratched, damaged, lost, and in two years most likely they will be given a new phone for a low, low price of a new contract. So they don't lose sleep over a phone.
Yes, there are people (like you) who insist on a pocket computer that also may be used as a phone if for some reason someone dials a wrong number and ends up calling them. Those people need Bash, VNC, RDP, SSH/SCP and a host of other applications that are far beyond what a common man can even comprehend, let alone need or be able to use. Those people may indeed need the latest and greatest. And those people are in trouble, according to this article. Perhaps they are. However the rest of the world doesn't care. We don't get automatic upgrades of firmware in our cars, for example, even though the car makers are improving things all the time. Our TV sets, our coffee makers, our Roombas aren't upgraded either. In fact, very few products have remote upgrades. There is value in stability.
as long as you meet the minimum requirements.
"Our minimum requirement today is $17,252.06 - how you are going to pay, cash or credit card?"
I'm writing this from a laptop near a pool and the text is nearly invisible
You are probably right that most wars between the e-ink and the LCD are waged over a rift in usage scenarios. I personally read books in bed, before going to sleep. The lights in the room are off, and the Galaxy Tab (as well as my other tablet) have the correct backlight setting for that. I wouldn't like a bright light either. What I want is a good contrast and quick screen redraws. E-ink is bad on both accounts. As an experiment I just took the Galaxy Tab outside and set to the maximum brightness. Under direct sunlight the screen is a bit washed out, but if I put it into my own shadow then it's perfect.
With regard to the "going for a week without power" - I don't know what kind of cave he lived in, in what wilderness - with candle light perhaps? Most people are always within a few feet from the power; if not at their home or office then at least in their car. I recharge the tablet during the day, and reading for several hours, with WiFi on (to check my email) is not seriously draining the battery. Edge cases like your friend are immaterial; there is always someone that needs something special.
I have no idea what games one could play on a tablet - the games that I might be interested in require considerably more CPU, something like PS3 :-)
I'm currently working at a business where it can easily take half a year between the first contact and the purchase order. The customer is not unhappy to talk to us - he has a real need and we make a product that fits the bill. It simply takes time to get funding on his end, and we also may need to make a few changes here and there to meet his specific requirements. Sometimes we even design a new product for the customer if it makes sense.
There are much simpler scenarios. Sales & Marketing people like (and have to) stay in touch with the customers. Tech support people have to answer support emails. Buyers are required to email suppliers in search of parts. The CEO is sending updates about the company's finances to lawyers and accountants. This can easily reach 500 on any given day, unless your company is very small (or does nothing :-)
I have a Galaxy Tab here. I installed Foliant on it, and this is perfect for reading books. I like the LCD with the backlight, and I never liked e-ink screens. If Kobo makes yet another tablet then it's fine, but they are competing in a cutthroat market. There doesn't seem to be much of a difference, in principle, between the Galaxy Tab and the Kobo product. It's the software that does the work - and you can use any software you like.
I am totally optimistic that we can solve the world's resource problems, class warfare, engineered famines, etc by breaking the cycle of mindless procreation by people who don't have their heads on straight.
Your math is suspect. The probability of a child being a genius is more or less a constant. The more children are born, the more geniuses are among us. One genius can invent a Warp drive, or LENR, or a neural network for machine intelligence for the whole civilization. By limiting the population you reduce your own chances to live a better or longer life. Did you notice that acceleration of progress of this civilization is related to the size of the population, among other factors?
I am also optimistic that I could sell tons of useless crap to his kids
That doesn't work either. The ratio of producers to consumers is also fixed. If he has three kids one of them will compete against you.
this site being a threat to the integrity of the police
I would say that something else, and not a Web site, is a threat to the integrity of the police.
Wow, wow, your average GPS is nowhere near 1 cm accuracy
If you look at the receiver that I provided the link for you will see that it is not "your average GPS" :-)
The only way this technology gets to 1cm accuracy is through a number of techniques built on to the GPS technology.
It can do it, and indeed corrections and RTK and multiple calibrated antennas - all of that is used. I worked for a large GPS manufacturer and know this for a fact. These GPS setups are actively used in construction. Builders can live with an error of a few centimeters but they can't tolerate an error of a few meters.
I might be within a millimeter on all of my measurements, but over time that error propagates, because I have no way to do triangulation on a point 100 miles away due to the curvature of the Earth.
During the triangulation you establish a network of reference points. All angles and all distances between those calculated locations should add up. If you started at A and surveyed paths to B and C, you can now start at B and independently derive the location of C. It should match the one determined earlier. If it does not then you made a mistake somewhere.
Not if the map is also off by 18 meters. How do they put the roads on the map in the first place? Most likely, by GPS, or whatever GPS was calibrated against when it was implemented.
The current datum for GPS is WGS84. Locations of many places on Earth were carefully measured for centuries, using astronomy and trigonometry. I don't know if they are accurate enough to calibrate the GPS.
A systematic, uniform error, like a translation of the entire datum, would have no effect on the OPERA experiment - however you slide or rotate the outer shell of a sphere it doesn't change the distance between two points. It would require a systematic but non-uniform error to cause this effect. I guess it is possible, since there is no explanation so far of the OPERA results. Such an error has to be location-specific and it should be invisible to the WAAS.