I've maintained corporate systems which relied heavily upon specialized software, and virtually none of the employees needed an office suite for the official business functions. Yet they insisted upon using such software to jot down quick notes or make quick calculations. Things that they really could have used calculator or notepad for, but they were more productive using the office suite (if for no other reason than they weren't wasting their and our time complaining about it).
I could easily imagine that being the case here. After all, if the hospitals' operations depended upon that proprietary office suite, it would be a bugger to switch to LibreOffice.
I remember the days when gamers lusted for a 50 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM. (Cameras. Ha! Touchscreen. Giggle! Dual analog sticks? Only if you had a joystick in each hand.)
What really matters is how much fun the game is. And here's the crazy part: different people have different definitions of fun. So the vast majority are just going to yawn at Sony's new gizmo and go back to gaming on their phone.
(Granted, from my limited experience with games on the cell phone, they do suck. But that has more to do with developers wanting to make cheap games for an audience that'll pay a buck or two for anything.)
I love gadgets, but I've learnt my lesson from using obscure and discontinued hardware before: it's lots of fun to play with in the beginning, but there is no room for growth so it's a tosser as soon as I get bored with it.
Now if you had a specific purpose in mind, that's a different story.
To add what others have said: people will lose PDFs for the exact same reason that they lose print magazines. They are too lazy to maintain them. In the case of PDFs, it will be backing them up. In the case of physical magazines, it will be moving them or storing them.
That isn't to say that I would buy a PDF magazine. Even though I love reading novels on an ereader, the heavy formatting and different flow of reading a magazine means that I love print versions. Then again, I never read this rag so my opinion doesn't count.;)
TFA notes that you can download a PDF version of the periodical, which means that you can keep the issues indefinitely.
So what it really comes down to is a business decision, and they think that they'd be better off in an all digital format. And I think that the only people who have the right to complain about that are the ones who are going to end up with their remaining print subscriptions transitioned to digital (because that sure ain't what they asked for).
Seriously, most good literature includes an element of telling the story before it's told. That is called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing gives and element of believability because it implies that a certain sequence of events creates a foregone conclusion. Which, in turn, aides to suspension of disbelief.
All of these things are valuable tools to writers, and (oddly enough) includes spoilers. So I don't think that this is is incredibly insightful result.
While I can't speak for BART, since I've never been there, the passenger rail systems that I've seen are more comparable to an industrial workplace than a public street. The only thing separating a person from death or injury is literally a narrow yellow line. If you fall over that line you are immediately exposed to high voltage, high current electrical systems that have minimal protection, and that says nothing of a potential (albeit, thankfully, low speed) collision with a massive chunk of machinery.
While I agree that there are problems with limiting free speech to areas where their voices will go unheard, it is a far greater issue when that speech places people's lives in danger. These are people's lives after all, and not property damage like smashed windows or overturned cars (which involve a conscious decision anyhow).
How about protesting outside station entrances? It is doubtful that the cellular providers would disable service at street level. Protesters also wouldn't disrupt physical transit service, though they can still make their point by disrupting individual commuters.
Most important of all: it doesn't endanger the lives of people, since platforms can be a dangerous place.
I remember hearing stories from a friend in a third world nation. When the government did something wrong they started destroying the trains in protest. The thing is, that destruction meant bugger all to the government (they don't use trains) so it really only made the lives of the protesters and the people who they claimed to represent worse. Which is exactly the sort of thing that Anonymous is doing. While it isn't quite that extreme yet, it could be within a few years if protesters keep upping the ante.
A bit of computer history: Honeywell and Sperry Rand battled over fundamental patents for computers. The courts essentially said, 'Atanansoff created those ideas years ago. Oh, and Dr. Atanasoff, it's too late for you to patent those ideas. Ta-ta.' From what I've been told, that 'ta-ta' was just a polite way of giving all of the parties the finger because the courts realized that allowing Sperry Rand to enforce their patents would hold back the computer industry by decades.
I can tell that you've never commuted on a bicycle. They can be remarkably faster than cars under common traffic conditions, and exceptionally dangerous. (Never forget that a significant amount of engineering is devoted to automobile safety, virtually no consideration is given to bicycle safety.)
There are also hybrid methods of transportation: motorized bicycles are becoming more common, to tackle the hills; transit systems facilitate cyclists on both busses and trains; park-and-ride lots for motorists who can do part of the commute on trains; and so forth.
The final consideration is that cities are unfriendly to alternative forms of transportation because they were designed for the private automobile, and things aren't really going to change because the lobby groups that support the automobile (including people like yourself) fight tooth and nail against accomodations being made for other modes of transportation.
Is this a reference to the research vehicle sharing the road with unsuspecting motorists? If so, I agree that could be a problem.
On the other hand, those fatal "automobile-travel systems" are fatal when humans are behind the wheel. One factor was cited in the article: reaction times. Human motorists also tend to violate traffic laws at whim and make judgement calls that are contradictory to best practices. That isn't a lack of ethics (as in the case of a machine), it is contrary to ethics.
I beg to differ since their crime is violating trademarks (to swindle the consumer). They definitely did not create a clone of the iPhone.
Besides, how do we know what the quality is like? I've never really trusted the, 'it feels cheap,' test because most people equate weight and sturdyness with quality. Which means that you could make a steel frame and suddenly have something that's well built (even if the design or manufacturing process is faulty).
Traditionally, all police radio communications were unencrypted and anybody could buy a scanner from RadioShack to listen in. My understanding is that the press commonly used them and would publish what they learnt from it. And that was a good thing, because it forced the police to be a little more accountable.
Companies like Samsung could argue that consumers did not want a hardware keyboard, and a tablet/phone without a hardware keyboard reduces to an iPad/iPhone like design.
Granted, some of those devices do look uncannily like an iPad/iPhone. That doesn't really have to be the case. Imagine an ereader with a different display technology, and they provide variations on the physical design of tablets. Or look at PDA designs, and they provide variations on what an iPhone looks like.
Then again, how similar is similar? Just look at how laptops. Modern designs are quite different from those in the late 1980's, so much so that modern laptops look almost identical outside of the branding. Which suggests that all modern laptops have a common ancestor -- a ripped off design. And they probably do.
I am under the impression that these certificates are supposed to verify the authenticity of the host that you're connected to. Yet when I asked a major bank who issued their certificate, never mind to verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. In that case, what's the point of them? I am still subject to man-in-the-middle attacks after all.
Changing dark streaks. Cool. Something is going on down there that fundamentally changes our perception of Mars as a planet that's frozen in time. (Well, except for the dust storms and the seasonal variations in the polar caps.)
The thing is, this doesn't say 'water' to me because it could very well be some other physical phenomena which isn't all that different from Lowell's canals or the face on Mars. They really should do proper science and wait for something more concrete, such as spectroscopic data, before making such announcements.
I'm sure that Branson has done his research and there's a good chance that it would work in London or New York. But the original post just said USA.
American cities are notoriously low density. There are maybe three cities with over 500,000 people and a population density greater than London. Cities like New York and London are also relatively rich, so there's a good chance of recovering costs. Most parts of the USA aren't so rich (and I'm guessing the same goes for the UK).
So I'm not questioning what Branson is doing. I'm questioning the people who think that someone should provide free wireless to them without doing their own research to see if it would turn a profit in their area. (And if it wouldn't, are they really entitled to free wireless?)
Entrepreneurs usually want to make money, and don't want to lose it. So here's some basic questions that you should ask before praising Branson and bemoaning the lack of free WiFi in your home town:
1) Does the density justify it. Too few people per square mile means that you'll never recover the cost of infrastructure.
2) Are enough people willing to pay. Note the tiered system, that's because someone has to pay for it. Maybe Londoners are more willing to pay than Americans (or even people in other parts of the U.K.).
Branson does NOT want freeloaders, but he may be willing to put up with them to get through bureaucratic hurdles. The people who really matter to him though are the paying customers.
Woke up on the paranoid side of the bed this morning I see. Granted, we are talking about Anonymous and I suppose that they'd pull out all of the stops for that. Then again... is Anonymous really naive enough to consistently hit the same access points or leave identifying information on their computers? Now I don't know much about Anonymous, but I'm going to assume that they at least did some research on the Anonymous part.
I can sort of see your point, and I also think that it's irrelevant. I mean yeah, it's kinda scary that someone can take a photo and attach a name to it only to have someone else take that photo and that name to attach that name to another photo. And that other person may be stalking you for any nefarious reason.
The thing is, it happens anyhow. People started identifying you the first day you went to school, the teacher called your name and you said, "here." Some of the kids who were in the classroom when you identified yourself pointed you out and identified you to other kids during recess. That sort of thing happens all of the time in the adult world too.
So you can't really treat your likeness or your name as private. It simply isn't realistic.
You don't use Facebook because you see it as a privacy violation. That's perfectly fine, and I'll respect you for that.
What I do disagree with is the "my so-called 'friends'" comment. If they snagged a photo of you, they probably did so because you interacted with them. At that point, what you do is public knowledge. The degree to which it is public depends upon the context and your friends. If they snapped a photo of you while you were walking down the street, deal with it because that is a public space and anyone could have done that. If they snapped a photo of you while in your home, well, it kinda sucks that they don't respect your wishes. And it kinda leaves you with a choice: are you so fanatical about privacy that you are willing to give up any form of social life because of what happens? Or are you going to accept that there is no such thing as absolute privacy?
To answer your unasked question, he did use KDE a few years back (and I think that he had some rather harsh words for GNOME at the the time). Thing is, he left KDE when it had its radical overhaul.
I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work. It also strikes me that Torvalds is the type of guy who works pretty hard, so neither environment is suitable for him anymore.
Gadgeteer seems more like an NXT killer because it is about plugging in modules and writing the software.
Arduino, well, that attracts a different crowd. In some ways, Arduino users seem to be a bit more simplistic. You're limited to one shield (unless you do careful planning), the IDE is very straight forward, etc.. In other ways Aduino users are more sophisticated. It is easier to build a small circuit on a breadboard and connect it to the Arduino with jumper wires. You could do that with the Gadgeteer hardware, but it doesn't look quite as simple so I doubt as many people will do it.
I think that the Windows only bit will limit its use too. Have the people who called the Gadgeteer an Arduino killer really looked at the Arduino userbaseà Lots of Windows users, sure. Tonnes of artists and geeks who use Mac or Linux too.
Slashdot Mirror
I've maintained corporate systems which relied heavily upon specialized software, and virtually none of the employees needed an office suite for the official business functions. Yet they insisted upon using such software to jot down quick notes or make quick calculations. Things that they really could have used calculator or notepad for, but they were more productive using the office suite (if for no other reason than they weren't wasting their and our time complaining about it).
I could easily imagine that being the case here. After all, if the hospitals' operations depended upon that proprietary office suite, it would be a bugger to switch to LibreOffice.
I remember the days when gamers lusted for a 50 MHz processor and 16 MB of RAM. (Cameras. Ha! Touchscreen. Giggle! Dual analog sticks? Only if you had a joystick in each hand.)
What really matters is how much fun the game is. And here's the crazy part: different people have different definitions of fun. So the vast majority are just going to yawn at Sony's new gizmo and go back to gaming on their phone.
(Granted, from my limited experience with games on the cell phone, they do suck. But that has more to do with developers wanting to make cheap games for an audience that'll pay a buck or two for anything.)
I love gadgets, but I've learnt my lesson from using obscure and discontinued hardware before: it's lots of fun to play with in the beginning, but there is no room for growth so it's a tosser as soon as I get bored with it.
Now if you had a specific purpose in mind, that's a different story.
To add what others have said: people will lose PDFs for the exact same reason that they lose print magazines. They are too lazy to maintain them. In the case of PDFs, it will be backing them up. In the case of physical magazines, it will be moving them or storing them.
That isn't to say that I would buy a PDF magazine. Even though I love reading novels on an ereader, the heavy formatting and different flow of reading a magazine means that I love print versions. Then again, I never read this rag so my opinion doesn't count. ;)
TFA notes that you can download a PDF version of the periodical, which means that you can keep the issues indefinitely.
So what it really comes down to is a business decision, and they think that they'd be better off in an all digital format. And I think that the only people who have the right to complain about that are the ones who are going to end up with their remaining print subscriptions transitioned to digital (because that sure ain't what they asked for).
Seriously, most good literature includes an element of telling the story before it's told. That is called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing gives and element of believability because it implies that a certain sequence of events creates a foregone conclusion. Which, in turn, aides to suspension of disbelief.
All of these things are valuable tools to writers, and (oddly enough) includes spoilers. So I don't think that this is is incredibly insightful result.
In a case like this, violence is not the issue.
While I can't speak for BART, since I've never been there, the passenger rail systems that I've seen are more comparable to an industrial workplace than a public street. The only thing separating a person from death or injury is literally a narrow yellow line. If you fall over that line you are immediately exposed to high voltage, high current electrical systems that have minimal protection, and that says nothing of a potential (albeit, thankfully, low speed) collision with a massive chunk of machinery.
While I agree that there are problems with limiting free speech to areas where their voices will go unheard, it is a far greater issue when that speech places people's lives in danger. These are people's lives after all, and not property damage like smashed windows or overturned cars (which involve a conscious decision anyhow).
How about protesting outside station entrances? It is doubtful that the cellular providers would disable service at street level. Protesters also wouldn't disrupt physical transit service, though they can still make their point by disrupting individual commuters.
Most important of all: it doesn't endanger the lives of people, since platforms can be a dangerous place.
I remember hearing stories from a friend in a third world nation. When the government did something wrong they started destroying the trains in protest. The thing is, that destruction meant bugger all to the government (they don't use trains) so it really only made the lives of the protesters and the people who they claimed to represent worse. Which is exactly the sort of thing that Anonymous is doing. While it isn't quite that extreme yet, it could be within a few years if protesters keep upping the ante.
A bit of computer history: Honeywell and Sperry Rand battled over fundamental patents for computers. The courts essentially said, 'Atanansoff created those ideas years ago. Oh, and Dr. Atanasoff, it's too late for you to patent those ideas. Ta-ta.' From what I've been told, that 'ta-ta' was just a polite way of giving all of the parties the finger because the courts realized that allowing Sperry Rand to enforce their patents would hold back the computer industry by decades.
I can tell that you've never commuted on a bicycle. They can be remarkably faster than cars under common traffic conditions, and exceptionally dangerous. (Never forget that a significant amount of engineering is devoted to automobile safety, virtually no consideration is given to bicycle safety.)
There are also hybrid methods of transportation: motorized bicycles are becoming more common, to tackle the hills; transit systems facilitate cyclists on both busses and trains; park-and-ride lots for motorists who can do part of the commute on trains; and so forth.
The final consideration is that cities are unfriendly to alternative forms of transportation because they were designed for the private automobile, and things aren't really going to change because the lobby groups that support the automobile (including people like yourself) fight tooth and nail against accomodations being made for other modes of transportation.
Is this a reference to the research vehicle sharing the road with unsuspecting motorists? If so, I agree that could be a problem.
On the other hand, those fatal "automobile-travel systems" are fatal when humans are behind the wheel. One factor was cited in the article: reaction times. Human motorists also tend to violate traffic laws at whim and make judgement calls that are contradictory to best practices. That isn't a lack of ethics (as in the case of a machine), it is contrary to ethics.
I don't know how many of these are relevant, but Motorola has thousands of patents with the keyword radio since 1991:
Results of Search in US Patent Collection db for:
((AN/motorola AND radio) AND ISD/19910101->20110101): 7329 patents.
I beg to differ since their crime is violating trademarks (to swindle the consumer). They definitely did not create a clone of the iPhone.
Besides, how do we know what the quality is like? I've never really trusted the, 'it feels cheap,' test because most people equate weight and sturdyness with quality. Which means that you could make a steel frame and suddenly have something that's well built (even if the design or manufacturing process is faulty).
Traditionally, all police radio communications were unencrypted and anybody could buy a scanner from RadioShack to listen in. My understanding is that the press commonly used them and would publish what they learnt from it. And that was a good thing, because it forced the police to be a little more accountable.
There are arguments that can be made either way.
Companies like Samsung could argue that consumers did not want a hardware keyboard, and a tablet/phone without a hardware keyboard reduces to an iPad/iPhone like design.
Granted, some of those devices do look uncannily like an iPad/iPhone. That doesn't really have to be the case. Imagine an ereader with a different display technology, and they provide variations on the physical design of tablets. Or look at PDA designs, and they provide variations on what an iPhone looks like.
Then again, how similar is similar? Just look at how laptops. Modern designs are quite different from those in the late 1980's, so much so that modern laptops look almost identical outside of the branding. Which suggests that all modern laptops have a common ancestor -- a ripped off design. And they probably do.
I am under the impression that these certificates are supposed to verify the authenticity of the host that you're connected to. Yet when I asked a major bank who issued their certificate, never mind to verify the authenticity of the certificate itself, they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. In that case, what's the point of them? I am still subject to man-in-the-middle attacks after all.
Changing dark streaks. Cool. Something is going on down there that fundamentally changes our perception of Mars as a planet that's frozen in time. (Well, except for the dust storms and the seasonal variations in the polar caps.)
The thing is, this doesn't say 'water' to me because it could very well be some other physical phenomena which isn't all that different from Lowell's canals or the face on Mars. They really should do proper science and wait for something more concrete, such as spectroscopic data, before making such announcements.
I'm sure that Branson has done his research and there's a good chance that it would work in London or New York. But the original post just said USA.
American cities are notoriously low density. There are maybe three cities with over 500,000 people and a population density greater than London. Cities like New York and London are also relatively rich, so there's a good chance of recovering costs. Most parts of the USA aren't so rich (and I'm guessing the same goes for the UK).
So I'm not questioning what Branson is doing. I'm questioning the people who think that someone should provide free wireless to them without doing their own research to see if it would turn a profit in their area. (And if it wouldn't, are they really entitled to free wireless?)
So you're basically saying that the police would be doing Anonymous a favour by culling the idiots?
Entrepreneurs usually want to make money, and don't want to lose it. So here's some basic questions that you should ask before praising Branson and bemoaning the lack of free WiFi in your home town:
1) Does the density justify it. Too few people per square mile means that you'll never recover the cost of infrastructure.
2) Are enough people willing to pay. Note the tiered system, that's because someone has to pay for it. Maybe Londoners are more willing to pay than Americans (or even people in other parts of the U.K.).
Branson does NOT want freeloaders, but he may be willing to put up with them to get through bureaucratic hurdles. The people who really matter to him though are the paying customers.
Woke up on the paranoid side of the bed this morning I see. Granted, we are talking about Anonymous and I suppose that they'd pull out all of the stops for that. Then again ... is Anonymous really naive enough to consistently hit the same access points or leave identifying information on their computers? Now I don't know much about Anonymous, but I'm going to assume that they at least did some research on the Anonymous part.
I can sort of see your point, and I also think that it's irrelevant. I mean yeah, it's kinda scary that someone can take a photo and attach a name to it only to have someone else take that photo and that name to attach that name to another photo. And that other person may be stalking you for any nefarious reason.
The thing is, it happens anyhow. People started identifying you the first day you went to school, the teacher called your name and you said, "here." Some of the kids who were in the classroom when you identified yourself pointed you out and identified you to other kids during recess. That sort of thing happens all of the time in the adult world too.
So you can't really treat your likeness or your name as private. It simply isn't realistic.
I'm sorry, but I whole heartedly disagree.
You don't use Facebook because you see it as a privacy violation. That's perfectly fine, and I'll respect you for that.
What I do disagree with is the "my so-called 'friends'" comment. If they snagged a photo of you, they probably did so because you interacted with them. At that point, what you do is public knowledge. The degree to which it is public depends upon the context and your friends. If they snapped a photo of you while you were walking down the street, deal with it because that is a public space and anyone could have done that. If they snapped a photo of you while in your home, well, it kinda sucks that they don't respect your wishes. And it kinda leaves you with a choice: are you so fanatical about privacy that you are willing to give up any form of social life because of what happens? Or are you going to accept that there is no such thing as absolute privacy?
To answer your unasked question, he did use KDE a few years back (and I think that he had some rather harsh words for GNOME at the the time). Thing is, he left KDE when it had its radical overhaul.
I think the problem is that GNOME/KDE decided to become the DEs for the rest of us: environments that are more suitable to entertainment than actual work. It also strikes me that Torvalds is the type of guy who works pretty hard, so neither environment is suitable for him anymore.
Gadgeteer seems more like an NXT killer because it is about plugging in modules and writing the software.
Arduino, well, that attracts a different crowd. In some ways, Arduino users seem to be a bit more simplistic. You're limited to one shield (unless you do careful planning), the IDE is very straight forward, etc.. In other ways Aduino users are more sophisticated. It is easier to build a small circuit on a breadboard and connect it to the Arduino with jumper wires. You could do that with the Gadgeteer hardware, but it doesn't look quite as simple so I doubt as many people will do it.
I think that the Windows only bit will limit its use too. Have the people who called the Gadgeteer an Arduino killer really looked at the Arduino userbaseà Lots of Windows users, sure. Tonnes of artists and geeks who use Mac or Linux too.