While I agree that Microsoft will likely never "go away", to a large degree the statement that "the next generation.. will not be dominated by Microsoft" has already come true. The vast majority of new "screens" that people are viewing content on, surfing the Internet on, and generally "using" in their day-to-day life are smartphones and tablets. And Microsoft is being pummeled by Android and Apple. People are looking at what they used to buy laptops for and deciding "hey, I can do 90% of this with an iPad/GalaxyTab, and the 10% that I need to use a keyboard for my old laptop works just fine."
Behind the scenes HP (and the other manufacturers) would respond to Microsoft by saying "look, Samsung is killing us. Apple is killing us. Let us sell Windows 7 or our next new product is a laptop that runs Android."
They're still getting valuable data. As I understand it, part of what they're doing is using your physical location in the store triangulated from your phone. While using a VPN does limit SOME of the information they're gathering, it doesn't eliminate all of it.
We have this impression of the reliability and stability of the POTS network partially because it is ubiquitous and invisible. Yet, as someone who has spent most of my adult life working in and around copper twisted pair, I can tell you POTS isn't as "reliable" as you think.
You have the impression that POTS is reliable because there's a small army of men and women maintaining it. AT&T is claiming that it is costing them a fortune to maintain the copper twisted pair infrastructure to the standards dictated by the FCC for a rapidly dwindling number of customers. People are leaving copper-pair services by the thousands every day: some are going wireless, some are going to pure-play VoIP providers, and even the "cable company" (or the telephone company's own fiber).
Copper wire only lasts 20-30 years hanging from the side of a pole, on average, before it will likely need to be replaced. Especially in urban areas, where cable replacement isn't cheap, most of the landline phone companies are staring down the barrel of 50-60 year old copper infrastructure that may have as many as 75% of the pairs condemned.
Let me put it this way. No IT department for a business in a 100-year-old building facing a phone rewire job would replace all that 50-year-old 25-pair with.. more Category 2. The minimum they'd pull is Cat5e or "6", and even more likely they'd pull a significant amount of fiber, if not to the desk at least to a departmental wiring closet. That's the same decision the phone companies want to make.
From a strictly technical/engineering perspective, it's 100% the right choice. Copper loop is functionally obsolete in almost every way.
It has already had the practical "chilling effect" of making all the large 3D-printable object sites from not having anything that even remotely could be a gun part restrict.. gun parts.
I can tell you for a fact that at least one of the "big four" is buying way more than a single T1 for their towers, at least where I live. They buy a fairly large amount of dark fiber from the company I work for to connect a number of towers on the outskirts of town.
Granted, they could be running a single T1 over every fiber. But I somehow doubt that.
So, it's Google's fault the consumer didn't read the dialogue box that says "Turning location services on will transmit your location to Google. For more information, see our website" in a large font?
I think a lot of people take the "personal responsibility" wharrglbe a bit far sometimes, but in this case, it's hard to have sympathy for consumers that turn a feature on, are told what it does, and are surprised when told later that's what it does.
This on all three counts. Google is very transparent about what they're doing and spells it out (at least on the Android platform). You can argue the functionality of using an Android device without these services turned on, but that's the bargain. You get the cool ability to search for a tiki bar near your location because Google already KNOWS your location.
That's the glory of what they're doing. They CAN make money off of you knowing that you bought work clothes at Goodwill and a sandwich at Char-hut. If you can't figure out how, you don't completely understand what they're actually doing.
Funny, I was aware that's exactly what was going on when I turned on the Android feature that sends location data to Google. They don't exactly hide it, either, which is why I'm wondering why this story is even news. When you "check-in" or somesuch, it's doing right what it says on the tin.
This just in: Water is wet, dogs sometimes bite, and Comcast customer service sucks.
You may very well be right, but let me ask you this.
How do you propose we fix it? We tried the other approach, and as you point out downthread there's disadvantages to a monopoly carrier approach as well (it doesn't matter if that monopoly was the Bell System or the government, the results would largely be the same). I'd love to hear a viable approach for fixing things.
Well, because water and sewer lines don't need to connect to a national network, and the "hard work" of building the phone infrastructure was paid for when we had a different regulatory regime. In fact, most small towns in the US would still have small independent exchanges with poor (or no) connectivity to the national network if it wasn't for some key regulatory decisions made in the 1930's and 1940's.
It IS, in fact, too big given our current way our telecommunications infrastructure is paid for. The only incentive telecom companies have is a profit motive, and spending $10 million to pull a high-capacity fiber or build a digital microwave relay to a place like Burns, Oregon to only service a few hundred subscribers doesn't return the kind of investment today's stockholders want, even if there was a local "last mile" solution to deliver it (which there likely isn't). Burns is over 100 miles away from it's nearest big city (Bend, Oregon) which is, itself, 160 miles from the nearest city with a peering point.
I own a Pebble. The Pebble does many of the things on your list well (albeit a few of those functions are third-party apps). It lacks a camera, and with it's black-and-white transflective display doesn't have the resolution for map data. But the combination of the Pebble, the "Pebble Dialer" app, and a Bluetooth headset is the "killer app" for a smartwatch. The basic music app on the watch is "good enough", but Music Boss adds extra features that makes it indispensable. Throw in the whole way it handles notifications from other apps and it's a great augment to an Android cell phone.
There's an immediate problem with simply recording the mileage and charging a flat 1.5 cents per mile.
For starters, Oregon's major metropolitan area crosses a state line. Unless Washington State enacts a similar tax, you're going to have a situation where people buy gas in Oregon (which will have cheaper fuel as a result of not charging per gallon) and being registered in Washington (therefore not paying the per mile tax). Or, you'll have people who are Oregon residents who purchase fuel in Washington paying a per gallon tax AND a per mile tax EVEN FOR MILES THEY DRIVE IN WASHINGTON. There's a similar problem for people who live on the eastern edge of Oregon with Boise's western suburbs and Ontario, Oregon.
How do you make the system equitable for Oregon drivers who drive a significant amount of miles in neighboring states without some kind of GPS tracking?
Nobody likes your "Top Stories" thing now. People perpetually complain about how they're missing "updates" from friends because they don't know about this "feature". And even those of us who do know about it can't turn it off because you don't make the setting "sticky". And even those of us who know about it and know about ways to make the setting "sticky" are getting a little tired of you fucking with those tools to break them.
I infrequently have to use Starband. Considering where I'm at when I'm using it, I get a pretty solid 1.5M down. But getting around 300ms round trip packet time AT MINIMUM really sucks.
But have you looked at the footprint of some of these cable companies like Comcast? Here in Oregon, you have five choices based on where you live.
1. Live in a big city in the Willamette Valley, and your two choices are Comcast (soft caps) and CenturyLink (soft caps, limited availability of speeds higher than 12M 2. Live in Beaverton, where your choices are Comcast (soft caps) or Frontier's FiOS (no stated cap, but rumors are that since Verizon's sale there has been a significant decrease in overall speed) 3. Live within coverage of Clear or one of the other LTE/WiMAX providers (all of whom use aggressive traffic shaping and/or very stingy caps) 4. Live in one of the rural areas with a small independent a long way from the job centers, and even then you may have a choice between a cable company that caps (BendBroadband, which for example has a 100Mb product with a 250GB hard cap) or doesn't (such as Crestview, which only does 12), and the phone company. You may have the option in #3 available as well, depending. 5. Get lucky, find a fiber provider that offers a solution that doesn't cap and pay a premium fee for Metro Ethernet or PON service, where available.
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While I agree that Microsoft will likely never "go away", to a large degree the statement that "the next generation .. will not be dominated by Microsoft" has already come true. The vast majority of new "screens" that people are viewing content on, surfing the Internet on, and generally "using" in their day-to-day life are smartphones and tablets. And Microsoft is being pummeled by Android and Apple. People are looking at what they used to buy laptops for and deciding "hey, I can do 90% of this with an iPad/GalaxyTab, and the 10% that I need to use a keyboard for my old laptop works just fine."
Behind the scenes HP (and the other manufacturers) would respond to Microsoft by saying "look, Samsung is killing us. Apple is killing us. Let us sell Windows 7 or our next new product is a laptop that runs Android."
Actually, if the sales numbers are to be believed, people just aren't buying new PCs at all.
Spammers didn't typically scan the phone book and use automated bots to email all the people in it.
No, but spammers and scammers do use automated bots to CALL all the people in the phone book.
Let me make sure I understand this.
Congress is waging war over $2 billion in budget cuts. In a budget that is around $3 trillion. The deficit alone is $680 billion.
Let's frame this in context. This is arguing over a 2 cent line item on a $300 bill.
And we wonder why our government is the laughing stock of the free world.
They're still getting valuable data. As I understand it, part of what they're doing is using your physical location in the store triangulated from your phone. While using a VPN does limit SOME of the information they're gathering, it doesn't eliminate all of it.
> Mt. Gox? Seriously? How do you even pronounce it?
"Magic the Gathering Online Exchange."
That should scare you.
We have this impression of the reliability and stability of the POTS network partially because it is ubiquitous and invisible. Yet, as someone who has spent most of my adult life working in and around copper twisted pair, I can tell you POTS isn't as "reliable" as you think.
You have the impression that POTS is reliable because there's a small army of men and women maintaining it. AT&T is claiming that it is costing them a fortune to maintain the copper twisted pair infrastructure to the standards dictated by the FCC for a rapidly dwindling number of customers. People are leaving copper-pair services by the thousands every day: some are going wireless, some are going to pure-play VoIP providers, and even the "cable company" (or the telephone company's own fiber).
Copper wire only lasts 20-30 years hanging from the side of a pole, on average, before it will likely need to be replaced. Especially in urban areas, where cable replacement isn't cheap, most of the landline phone companies are staring down the barrel of 50-60 year old copper infrastructure that may have as many as 75% of the pairs condemned.
Let me put it this way. No IT department for a business in a 100-year-old building facing a phone rewire job would replace all that 50-year-old 25-pair with.. more Category 2. The minimum they'd pull is Cat5e or "6", and even more likely they'd pull a significant amount of fiber, if not to the desk at least to a departmental wiring closet. That's the same decision the phone companies want to make.
From a strictly technical/engineering perspective, it's 100% the right choice. Copper loop is functionally obsolete in almost every way.
All batteries are DC.
Unless you know of some alien technology even Tesla himself wasn't privvy to.
It has already had the practical "chilling effect" of making all the large 3D-printable object sites from not having anything that even remotely could be a gun part restrict.. gun parts.
This is sort of my pet peeve with this whole thing.
It's not the SPEEDS that suck, dear FCC, it's the stingy caps. I'd be happy with 1-2Mb down if I wasn't hard capped at 1.5GB per month.
I can tell you for a fact that at least one of the "big four" is buying way more than a single T1 for their towers, at least where I live. They buy a fairly large amount of dark fiber from the company I work for to connect a number of towers on the outskirts of town.
Granted, they could be running a single T1 over every fiber. But I somehow doubt that.
I've told the IT department where I work they can have my Blackberry Bold when they pry it from my cold dead hands.
So, it's Google's fault the consumer didn't read the dialogue box that says "Turning location services on will transmit your location to Google. For more information, see our website" in a large font?
I think a lot of people take the "personal responsibility" wharrglbe a bit far sometimes, but in this case, it's hard to have sympathy for consumers that turn a feature on, are told what it does, and are surprised when told later that's what it does.
This on all three counts. Google is very transparent about what they're doing and spells it out (at least on the Android platform). You can argue the functionality of using an Android device without these services turned on, but that's the bargain. You get the cool ability to search for a tiki bar near your location because Google already KNOWS your location.
That's the glory of what they're doing. They CAN make money off of you knowing that you bought work clothes at Goodwill and a sandwich at Char-hut. If you can't figure out how, you don't completely understand what they're actually doing.
Funny, I was aware that's exactly what was going on when I turned on the Android feature that sends location data to Google. They don't exactly hide it, either, which is why I'm wondering why this story is even news. When you "check-in" or somesuch, it's doing right what it says on the tin.
This just in: Water is wet, dogs sometimes bite, and Comcast customer service sucks.
You may very well be right, but let me ask you this.
How do you propose we fix it? We tried the other approach, and as you point out downthread there's disadvantages to a monopoly carrier approach as well (it doesn't matter if that monopoly was the Bell System or the government, the results would largely be the same). I'd love to hear a viable approach for fixing things.
Well, because water and sewer lines don't need to connect to a national network, and the "hard work" of building the phone infrastructure was paid for when we had a different regulatory regime. In fact, most small towns in the US would still have small independent exchanges with poor (or no) connectivity to the national network if it wasn't for some key regulatory decisions made in the 1930's and 1940's.
It IS, in fact, too big given our current way our telecommunications infrastructure is paid for. The only incentive telecom companies have is a profit motive, and spending $10 million to pull a high-capacity fiber or build a digital microwave relay to a place like Burns, Oregon to only service a few hundred subscribers doesn't return the kind of investment today's stockholders want, even if there was a local "last mile" solution to deliver it (which there likely isn't). Burns is over 100 miles away from it's nearest big city (Bend, Oregon) which is, itself, 160 miles from the nearest city with a peering point.
I own a Pebble. The Pebble does many of the things on your list well (albeit a few of those functions are third-party apps). It lacks a camera, and with it's black-and-white transflective display doesn't have the resolution for map data. But the combination of the Pebble, the "Pebble Dialer" app, and a Bluetooth headset is the "killer app" for a smartwatch. The basic music app on the watch is "good enough", but Music Boss adds extra features that makes it indispensable. Throw in the whole way it handles notifications from other apps and it's a great augment to an Android cell phone.
There's an immediate problem with simply recording the mileage and charging a flat 1.5 cents per mile.
For starters, Oregon's major metropolitan area crosses a state line. Unless Washington State enacts a similar tax, you're going to have a situation where people buy gas in Oregon (which will have cheaper fuel as a result of not charging per gallon) and being registered in Washington (therefore not paying the per mile tax). Or, you'll have people who are Oregon residents who purchase fuel in Washington paying a per gallon tax AND a per mile tax EVEN FOR MILES THEY DRIVE IN WASHINGTON. There's a similar problem for people who live on the eastern edge of Oregon with Boise's western suburbs and Ontario, Oregon.
How do you make the system equitable for Oregon drivers who drive a significant amount of miles in neighboring states without some kind of GPS tracking?
Blackberry did this: they allowed you to CHOOSE what permissions you granted apps, not present you with a "take it or leave it" all-or-nothing choice.
If RIM figured it out a decade ago, I'm sure everybody else can.
Nobody likes your "Top Stories" thing now. People perpetually complain about how they're missing "updates" from friends because they don't know about this "feature". And even those of us who do know about it can't turn it off because you don't make the setting "sticky". And even those of us who know about it and know about ways to make the setting "sticky" are getting a little tired of you fucking with those tools to break them.
Right. Isn't California actually trying to do something like this? So, your point is?
And the lag. Oh gods, the lag.
I infrequently have to use Starband. Considering where I'm at when I'm using it, I get a pretty solid 1.5M down. But getting around 300ms round trip packet time AT MINIMUM really sucks.
Which is a great theory.
But have you looked at the footprint of some of these cable companies like Comcast? Here in Oregon, you have five choices based on where you live.
1. Live in a big city in the Willamette Valley, and your two choices are Comcast (soft caps) and CenturyLink (soft caps, limited availability of speeds higher than 12M
2. Live in Beaverton, where your choices are Comcast (soft caps) or Frontier's FiOS (no stated cap, but rumors are that since Verizon's sale there has been a significant decrease in overall speed)
3. Live within coverage of Clear or one of the other LTE/WiMAX providers (all of whom use aggressive traffic shaping and/or very stingy caps)
4. Live in one of the rural areas with a small independent a long way from the job centers, and even then you may have a choice between a cable company that caps (BendBroadband, which for example has a 100Mb product with a 250GB hard cap) or doesn't (such as Crestview, which only does 12), and the phone company. You may have the option in #3 available as well, depending.
5. Get lucky, find a fiber provider that offers a solution that doesn't cap and pay a premium fee for Metro Ethernet or PON service, where available.
That's an awesome set of choices we have here.