You're trying to compare this idea to the keyboard you would use on a laptop or desktop computer. I think that's not really a great comparison.
Instead, try comparing the idea of typing a quick 2 paragraph email with a "virtual keyboard" to the idea of laboriously pecking out a one sentence email on the numeric keypad on your cell phone.
Look, in 1996 a friend of mine and I sat down and produced a multi-thousand-page hand-coded web site that won basically every web award there was at the time.
We are both self-taught at both web programming and visual design.
At present we're doing a different site. It gets half a million hits a day. We're doing a redesign now, intended to increase traffic by making the site more attractive. It hasn't had a facelift in 6 or 7 years. The site sells nothing and has no paid ads.
There's no reason why a "personal" web site can't be done just as professionally and using just as good technology as any commercial site out there. If a site author can't be bothered to learn how to code a site correctly or design it well, I have no problem with avoiding the site.
Now that it looks like P3P may actually catch on, I'll learn how it works and implement it.
I don't know about Canada, but my understanding is that in the United States, FAA regulations require only that airport security personnel must hand-inspect *film* and *cameras* if requested.
Many larger photographic shops can sell you a luggage tag with the FAA regulation printed on it, which can come in handy when you run into idiot security personnel who flat out refuse to hand-inspect anything or flatly demand that their x-ray machine is safe and that you must have your film x-rayed. (Most x-ray machines *are* safe, but a few aren't, you can't trust the signs on them, and some film seems mysteriously more sensitive.)
All things considered, however, I think before taking anything Steve Mann says seriously we should hear a report on him from someone from the MIT wearable computers group. The many people I've met from the group do not speak of him in warm fuzzy terms, to put it extremely mildly.
The town I live in has choice of three phone companies, two cable companies (both of which offer cable modems), and a variety of other ISPs which offer various forms of connection including DSL or dual ISDN.
Funny, but our rates are lower than surrounding communities. Imagine that.
When I called the major monopolistic cable company and had problems with their customer service, I just called their competition instead and got more channels for a lower price.
All of this happened because immediately after cable was deregulated, when the cable company's town monopoly contract came up for renewal, the town said "no, we're allowing competition now."
If you don't have competition in your town, blame your town. Call your local representatives and demand to know why you don't have choice. Nag them when the monopoly contracts for the utilities come up. Get your neighbors involved. You might be surprised.
Look, I think what we need to be thinking about here is why we have nuclear weapons in the first place.
Nuclear weapons came out of WW2. They were created because we had two implacable enemies who had indicated their willingness to fight us to the death of their last man, and our leaders were concerned that we were going to have to send hundreds of thousands of our finest young men to their deaths for no good reason other than that there wasn't any other way.
When Germany surrendered, they had complete plans for a jet bomber that could have reached New York. When Japan surrendered, they not only were within months of completing actual bombers that could have reached California, they also had biological weapons ready to be deployed that could have killed millions, and plans to use them on San Diego. They also were planning that every man, woman, and child in Japan was going to fight to the death to prevent a US invasion.
The decision to drop nukes on Japan was made because it was believed that dropping nukes would kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, but invading would kill millions from both sides.
Nuclear weapons are a terrible thing and I sincerely hope we never have to use them again. Yet, I think it's entirely reasonable for the United States to openly make a statement such as "if you attack the united states or our territories, we will nuke you no questions asked," I rather doubt any nation would want to mess around with us. It may not deter terrorists, but it may deter nations from harboring them.
Nuclear bombs were created to scare the beejabbers out of our enemies so they might think twice about attacking us, or moreover so that if we are at war they will be cowed into submission. If we act like we're afraid to use these weapons, we have made these weapons worthless. If we indicate our willingness to use them without hesitation in limited, correct circumstances, we could be a safer people. Consequently, while I think this report is a bad way for this message to get out, I think it's a correct message for us to be expressing.
I thought telemarketing to cell phones was already illegal. Would anyone care to enlighten us on the details? I searched on google and found a number of references to this ban, but no actual spec of the law.
I rather doubt you'd have any problem convincing a judge that SMS spam to a cell phone is legally the same as calling it to try to sell you stuff.
Look, you don't have to make this decision. Install a solution, default it to "off" for all customers, put up a web-form for them to turn it on FOR THEIR INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNT if desired, and send all customers instructions including a full and accurate description of the consequences.
If they don't want to live with the possibility of not getting their invitation to the family reunion, well, fine, they can live with the spam. If they're willing to risk losing that invitation in order to kill the corresponding 50 spams that they would receive with it, great, they can turn on the solition for themselves and then they have no right to complain if some legitimate email gets lost because, well, YOU WARNED THEM.
how long can Apple keep a leash on a potential money-maker?
I think what you're not getting is that Apple does not view this as a potential money-maker: they're recognizing that the licensing model is sufficiently flawed that to use it would do harm to their business goals.
So, if you want to know how long Apple can afford not to release the product, the answer is "forever": they can go with some other codec and rework the product. Then they can advertise that *their* system is free for use, unlike everyone else's.
The thing is though, if it weren't for the United Statees' EPCA (Electronic Privacy Communications Act), there would be no expectation of privacy when talking on a cellular phone anyway.
[snip]
There is _plenty_ of RF Scanning gear that was sold commercially before the EPCA came into effect that is still in private and corporate hands that can listen to the cellular portions of the 800MHz band.
You're talking about old-style cellular, which most people are moving away from except as a fallback. The rules have changed now.
I use GSM on the 1900 MHz band. I know that my conversations have several layers of encryption and are transmitted over a spread-spectrum link with the cell. I know that breaking the encryption is difficult, and intercepting the transmission has never been accomplished even under laboratory conditions. I have *every* expectation of privacy for the radio leg of my call.
OTOH I know they can tap my call at the cellular company's switch. The cell company is not supposed to allow this without a court order. So, I damn well expect a well-behaved law enforcement agency to go to an ordinary judge and talk the judge into issuing a clear warrant ordering my phone to be tapped before it can happen.
If the NSA were to be going around recording my calls randomly, I would want them crucified for it.
It would be a completely different birth. No mother-screaming-in-pain. No panic. No grandparents-rushing-to-hospital-later. You could assemble the whole family, everyone could be relaxed and ready, and the baby could be "hatched" into the arms of its happy, fully aware, ready-to-nurture parents.
On the other hand, the mother, if any, wouldn't be lactating. Oh well. That can be dealt with I suppose.
For the record, how many guys do you know who come out saying 'Man, I'd love to have kids.. but its those damn _women_ I can't stand. Pussy? Who needs pussy! I just want a baby to cuddle!'
I want all the people who are so busy trying to convince me I have to give my wife a box of chocolates or a dozen roses for valentines day that they haven't stopped to notice I'm gay and I'm single and I'm damn tired of being reminded of the latter to get dumped by their spouse on the 13th.
I think that would make a perfect valentines day gift for me.
1) Hire an intellectual property lawyer to tell them in precise legal terms how to shove it up their posterior regions.
2) Get said lawyer to draw up an agreement to use with all of your current and beta testers that makes them explicitly grant you rights to all of their future comments and suggestions about the product, so this doesn't happen again. You then make them all sign it or take away their beta copy and drop them from the beta program.
3) Make all of your clients *pay* for all future beta versions. It doesn't matter *what* they pay, you can charge them a dollar, but make them pay for it. They have a harder time claiming that you're getting something from them when they're provably paying you for the privilige.
4) Dump the client who's trying to claim they own your stuff. Never do business with them again. Do not sell them any future versions of your products. With friends like that, who needs enemies? If you absolutely have to give them tech support, give them the bare legal minimum you have to for only as long as your contract with them requires. Once you're done with every single obligation to them, tell them you're dropping them as a client so they know not to bother you any more.
I don't want a unit with that whole set of tightly integrated features. I don't want a phone with everything built in. I want a modular system of digital tools.
I want a little black box with no particular features that I can drop in a pocket that connects to a 3G network on one end and creates a bluetooth cloud around me on the other. It doesn't have to have any real interface.
I want a handsfree bluetooth earpiece which interfaces with the black box.
I want a bluetooth PDA which interfaces with the earpiece and the black box to provide directory and dialing services, and to browse the web and do wireless email.
I want a bluetooth digital camera which interfaces with the black box to transmit my photos to my mac, so when I get home the photos are already in iPhoto. Perhaps it could cache them in local storage and transmit them when I happened to have the bandwidth available. That would also give me the opportunity to review them and delete any duds, and mark pictures I want printed so the mac could know to send a copy directly to Kodak for me. It would also be nice if the camera would interface with the PDA so I could use the PDA's more comfortable screen and interface to manipulate my photos (delete some, select others for printing) before they get sent to my machine at home.
I want all of this stuff to be separate so I can choose whatever manufacturers, models, and features I want, but to communicate seamlessly so I can use it pretty effortlessly together.
I don't expect to ever get what I want. It would be too... consumer focused. Manufactuers want to sell you an all-encompassing, proprietary device to ensure you pay *them* for everything you want. I'm looking for an open, standards-based system of interchangable devices to perform specific tasks well and interoperate smoothly. It'll never happen.
Firstly, a news agency is not excused from stupid reporting by inserting words like "claims" and "seems" in the appropriate places to qualify their statements. It's their responsibility to realize the guy is obviously a kook and not waste our time with it.
Also, it's high time news agencies accept the fact that when they report things, a lot of people aren't smart enough to evaluate the information and just treat is as gospel truth, ignoring the qualifiers because they're too subtle. Reporters need to analyse the information they're reporting on and provide a solid explanation of the principles involved.
I'm always astounded that reporters will go to great length to rehash all of the historical details that lead up to whatever they're reporting about, even if nobody on the planet with an IQ above single digits could possibly have missed it, but don't even bother to check the basic facts they're reporting *on*.
Politics is another subject about which reporting is particularly egrigious in this manner. Politicians make statements that are flat-out lies about verifiable topics, and reporters come along and report what they're saying without checking any of the facts. The unknowledgable reader comes away having heard only the lies and won't necessarily know it's bs.
It's high time that during elections newspapers should start running reports to the effect of "last night candidate A said this and that, and this is true but that isn't..." I'm sure it would improve the overall quality of our government if our elected officials were regularly called out for their lies.
But for science, it's even more inexcusable. If a reporter wants to report on somebody claiming to have broken the laws of thermodynamics, they should damn well stop to check it out before publishing.
The post office does not run on tax dollars, it runs on what you pay for postage and services. It also probably makes a profit on Microsoft's advertising.
On the other hand my personal concern is, they're still the local office of the federal governement, technically, so how come they have ads up for a company and product that the federal government just successfully sued for being in violation of federal law?
It's television. It's not bread, water or sleep. It isn't procreation. It isn't required to subsist. It *isn't an inalienable right*.
Actually, it *is*. The FCC grants the right to use the airwaves to television stations on the basis that they are supposed to serve the public. They're allowed to make a profit on doing so, but they're supposed to serve us. If they're going to take away our fair-use rights, the FCC should look at taking away their licenses to broadcast.
The market for PDAs in the states is collapsing, and Handspring's wireless devices are depending on a functioning GSM network, which is still semi-mythical in the states.
GSM may be one of the least popular systems in the US, but it's the system everywhere else. Why do you think every other country has more advanced phones than we do? Because phone manufacturers can make one model and sell it all over the world, but then they have to re-engineer it five different ways to make five different models to bring it to market in the US.
So, mostly they don't bother - they sell all their interesting models everywhere else, and sell a few models in the US that are most easily re-engineered to work here.
My friends at Nokia tell me the phones we have here are 2 or 3 years behind Europe.
I signed up as a GSM phone customer with Omnipoint three years ago this week. They were since acquired by Voicestream.
Other than some minor problems with customer service, which were no worse or better than the problems my friends have had with Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, (and were much less severe than my friends have had with Cingular), I've been extremely happy. In three years I have never had a problem getting a circuit, and having tried phones from all the competing carriers I believe that GSM offers generally superior voice quality. (In theory, Sprint's system can offer superior voice quality, but in practice I don't feel it does.)
Sprint has had some really cool phones over the last few years, and since I like to replace my phone with a hot new model phone regularly (hey, some people have vanity laptops, I have vanity phones) they've had the opportunity to lure me away at any time... but I have yet to see a phone good enough to lure me away from the GSM system.
Oh, and I guess I don't travel much into very rural areas any more, but I hardly ever fail to get GSM service anywhere I go any more, including my father's house in rural Georgia or my middle-of-nowhere hometown in northern New Jersey. GSM penetration has gotten pretty good and it's quite possible it may be just great for your needs.
I'm very interested in the new Handspring phones and will take a close look at them when they get to the US market.
I must agree with your insightful remarks here - I don't go to concerts by major artists any more, and I never cared about a concert being a multimedia extravaganza with huge video screens and zillions of dancers and smoke and lasers. I care even less to pay upwards of $75 a ticket. I don't have $75 to blow on a concert ticket, and even if I did I'm sure I can come up with something more interesting to do with the money.
On the other hand I went to three concerts this year. The tickets to each concert cost $15 each. At two of the three there was no assigned seating, at the third I got the tickets late and got crummy seats. The band I went to see didn't use lasers and barely had any change of lighting, they don't have any dancers, and there were no huge video screens. They bring their sound guy with them and that's their entourage.
The concerts were sold-out and the crowds were ecstatic and everyone left happy. At one concert in a small venue, so many people showed up that there were people sitting in the trees outside the windows to see the concert. After two of the three concerts, the band came out to sign autographs and chat with the fans.
They charged less. They used less. They performed well so we felt that we got more for less. Their audiences keep getting bigger and they keep playing bigger venues and more gigs. Who's losing?
If you're a teenager, Web designer, film editor or visual arts major, or even a loving Grandma, it's great that the iMac allows you to create your own DVDs, organize and edit digital pictures, play CDs or convert MP3's, turn home videotapes into high-quality edited films. What's less clear is whether or not the public -- especially that critical middle-class chunk of it -- wants to do those things on a computer, or is confident about its ability to use machinery that's still more complicated and problematic than its makers seem able to admit.
I look at my aunt as an example of what middle class users can and will do with a computer. She doesn't take my advice about what computer to buy, and indeed she often does precisely what I was hoping she wouldn't, so what she actually does is of interest to me.
She has a nice digital camera - it takes higher-resolution pictures than mine. She takes lots of pictures. She has problems organizing them and until recently had no idea that there are professional services that can turn your digital pictures into photographic prints, so she printed her pictures on her color printer at home.
She is excited about e-books and six months ago declared that she was going to read only e-books from now on.
She thinks this MP3 thing is a cute idea but doesn't use them. She has CD players in her house and car and doesn't see the need to listen to her music from a computer. She does have a CD burner and uses it to make mix cd's. Ogg Vorbis vs MP3 is an incomprehensible argument to her.
She uses her computer to watch her DVDs because she likes the way they look on her flat panel display. She doesn't want to ever look at a CRT again. She doesn't want to get VHS tapes any more but still buys a few if she can't find equivalent DVDs. I've explained the whole RIAA and DVD versus fair use rights conflict to her, and she says that's too bad, but doesn't do anything about it.
She takes lots of videos of family events with her quite-conventional camcorder. She has heard that it's now possible to make your own DVDs and wants to be able to do that, but thinks it's too expensive to get the appropriate software and equipment for her Windows PC.
She uses Windows 98. I doubt she will ever upgrade her OS before replacing the computer.
She managed to accidentally unplug her amplified computer speaker set from the electric outlet once. Her computer sat silent for several months until I came to visit and took care of it for her. Other family members had looked at it, but after verifying that the speakers were connected to the computer, they were baffled.
Behind her computer is a tangled mass of cables, which is never moved. I don't even know if all the cables actually go anywhere - legacy cables may live there forever.
She has a WinCE based PDA with as much additional storage as she could make it accept. She uses it to read e-books. I think that might be all she uses it for. She didn't like the e-book reader dedicated hardware because none of the readers would accept all formats.
Now, how does my aunt feel about the Mac?
On the day the new iMac came out, she messaged me with AIM to say hi and ask me what I was up to. I told her I was installing iPhoto, and told her about it. She wants it. She wants it now.
I told her about the new iMac and explained that I thought she'd like one. She laughed and said I'd pry her Windows machine from her cold dead hands. I told her about the DVD burner. I told her about iMovie and iDVD being free. Now she wants me to bring my titanium powerbook for her to try out MacOS.
I absolutely agree that money is what voters are going to care about: talking to them about open-source software is like talking to them in Martian, but if you start talking asking why the local government is using "expensive" Microsoft software instead of "free linux", they will at least notice.
Another reduced cost is reduced cost of hardware: since Linux runs nicely on less powerful hardware, older computers could potentially be put back into service if they're on hand, and existing computers could be kept in service longer because they won't be made obselete immediately by rapidly bloating commercial software. A lot of constituents have purchased computers. A lot of them will have had the experience of buying what they think is an expensive new computer, only to find it's obselete (or at least out of date) in six months to a year. Remind them of this experience and point out that their city goes through the same thing... and explain how Linux can save their tax money by greatly slowing down that new-to-obselete cycle.
As a secondary issue, if the current operating system of choice for the city is from Microsoft, you could start asking why the city government is spending tax money on an illegal monopoly - "giving your tax money to lawbreakers!"
Finally, I'd say don't be unrealistically optimistic: the change to Linux will involve some staff time, possibly bringing on some temporary IT staff to help with the changeover, and possibly retraining existing IT staff or hiring an additional sysadmin or two, and at least minor internal retraining for all staff about applications. Stress that by making a minor outlay to make the change now, the many kinds of long-term savings we've enumerated here can occur in the future.
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You're trying to compare this idea to the keyboard you would use on a laptop or desktop computer. I think that's not really a great comparison.
Instead, try comparing the idea of typing a quick 2 paragraph email with a "virtual keyboard" to the idea of laboriously pecking out a one sentence email on the numeric keypad on your cell phone.
Now is it a little more desirable? I thought so.
When I read about the user inferface I thought it was a joke.
Look, in 1996 a friend of mine and I sat down and produced a multi-thousand-page hand-coded web site that won basically every web award there was at the time.
We are both self-taught at both web programming and visual design.
At present we're doing a different site. It gets half a million hits a day. We're doing a redesign now, intended to increase traffic by making the site more attractive. It hasn't had a facelift in 6 or 7 years. The site sells nothing and has no paid ads.
There's no reason why a "personal" web site can't be done just as professionally and using just as good technology as any commercial site out there. If a site author can't be bothered to learn how to code a site correctly or design it well, I have no problem with avoiding the site.
Now that it looks like P3P may actually catch on, I'll learn how it works and implement it.
I don't know about Canada, but my understanding is that in the United States, FAA regulations require only that airport security personnel must hand-inspect *film* and *cameras* if requested.
Many larger photographic shops can sell you a luggage tag with the FAA regulation printed on it, which can come in handy when you run into idiot security personnel who flat out refuse to hand-inspect anything or flatly demand that their x-ray machine is safe and that you must have your film x-rayed. (Most x-ray machines *are* safe, but a few aren't, you can't trust the signs on them, and some film seems mysteriously more sensitive.)
All things considered, however, I think before taking anything Steve Mann says seriously we should hear a report on him from someone from the MIT wearable computers group. The many people I've met from the group do not speak of him in warm fuzzy terms, to put it extremely mildly.
The town I live in has choice of three phone companies, two cable companies (both of which offer cable modems), and a variety of other ISPs which offer various forms of connection including DSL or dual ISDN.
Funny, but our rates are lower than surrounding communities. Imagine that.
When I called the major monopolistic cable company and had problems with their customer service, I just called their competition instead and got more channels for a lower price.
All of this happened because immediately after cable was deregulated, when the cable company's town monopoly contract came up for renewal, the town said "no, we're allowing competition now."
If you don't have competition in your town, blame your town. Call your local representatives and demand to know why you don't have choice. Nag them when the monopoly contracts for the utilities come up. Get your neighbors involved. You might be surprised.
Look, I think what we need to be thinking about here is why we have nuclear weapons in the first place.
Nuclear weapons came out of WW2. They were created because we had two implacable enemies who had indicated their willingness to fight us to the death of their last man, and our leaders were concerned that we were going to have to send hundreds of thousands of our finest young men to their deaths for no good reason other than that there wasn't any other way.
When Germany surrendered, they had complete plans for a jet bomber that could have reached New York. When Japan surrendered, they not only were within months of completing actual bombers that could have reached California, they also had biological weapons ready to be deployed that could have killed millions, and plans to use them on San Diego. They also were planning that every man, woman, and child in Japan was going to fight to the death to prevent a US invasion.
The decision to drop nukes on Japan was made because it was believed that dropping nukes would kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, but invading would kill millions from both sides.
Nuclear weapons are a terrible thing and I sincerely hope we never have to use them again. Yet, I think it's entirely reasonable for the United States to openly make a statement such as "if you attack the united states or our territories, we will nuke you no questions asked," I rather doubt any nation would want to mess around with us. It may not deter terrorists, but it may deter nations from harboring them.
Nuclear bombs were created to scare the beejabbers out of our enemies so they might think twice about attacking us, or moreover so that if we are at war they will be cowed into submission. If we act like we're afraid to use these weapons, we have made these weapons worthless. If we indicate our willingness to use them without hesitation in limited, correct circumstances, we could be a safer people. Consequently, while I think this report is a bad way for this message to get out, I think it's a correct message for us to be expressing.
I thought telemarketing to cell phones was already illegal. Would anyone care to enlighten us on the details? I searched on google and found a number of references to this ban, but no actual spec of the law.
I rather doubt you'd have any problem convincing a judge that SMS spam to a cell phone is legally the same as calling it to try to sell you stuff.
Look, you don't have to make this decision. Install a solution, default it to "off" for all customers, put up a web-form for them to turn it on FOR THEIR INDIVIDUAL ACCOUNT if desired, and send all customers instructions including a full and accurate description of the consequences.
If they don't want to live with the possibility of not getting their invitation to the family reunion, well, fine, they can live with the spam. If they're willing to risk losing that invitation in order to kill the corresponding 50 spams that they would receive with it, great, they can turn on the solition for themselves and then they have no right to complain if some legitimate email gets lost because, well, YOU WARNED THEM.
So, if you want to know how long Apple can afford not to release the product, the answer is "forever": they can go with some other codec and rework the product. Then they can advertise that *their* system is free for use, unlike everyone else's.
The thing is though, if it weren't for the United Statees' EPCA (Electronic Privacy Communications Act), there would be no expectation of privacy when talking on a cellular phone anyway.
[snip]
There is _plenty_ of RF Scanning gear that was sold commercially before the EPCA came into effect that is still in private and corporate hands that can listen to the cellular portions of the 800MHz band.
You're talking about old-style cellular, which most people are moving away from except as a fallback. The rules have changed now.
I use GSM on the 1900 MHz band. I know that my conversations have several layers of encryption and are transmitted over a spread-spectrum link with the cell. I know that breaking the encryption is difficult, and intercepting the transmission has never been accomplished even under laboratory conditions. I have *every* expectation of privacy for the radio leg of my call.
OTOH I know they can tap my call at the cellular company's switch. The cell company is not supposed to allow this without a court order. So, I damn well expect a well-behaved law enforcement agency to go to an ordinary judge and talk the judge into issuing a clear warrant ordering my phone to be tapped before it can happen.
If the NSA were to be going around recording my calls randomly, I would want them crucified for it.
It would be a completely different birth. No mother-screaming-in-pain. No panic. No grandparents-rushing-to-hospital-later. You could assemble the whole family, everyone could be relaxed and ready, and the baby could be "hatched" into the arms of its happy, fully aware, ready-to-nurture parents.
On the other hand, the mother, if any, wouldn't be lactating. Oh well. That can be dealt with I suppose.
Deal with it.
I want all the people who are so busy trying to convince me I have to give my wife a box of chocolates or a dozen roses for valentines day that they haven't stopped to notice I'm gay and I'm single and I'm damn tired of being reminded of the latter to get dumped by their spouse on the 13th.
I think that would make a perfect valentines day gift for me.
Ok, solving this problem is a 4 part process:
1) Hire an intellectual property lawyer to tell them in precise legal terms how to shove it up their posterior regions.
2) Get said lawyer to draw up an agreement to use with all of your current and beta testers that makes them explicitly grant you rights to all of their future comments and suggestions about the product, so this doesn't happen again. You then make them all sign it or take away their beta copy and drop them from the beta program.
3) Make all of your clients *pay* for all future beta versions. It doesn't matter *what* they pay, you can charge them a dollar, but make them pay for it. They have a harder time claiming that you're getting something from them when they're provably paying you for the privilige.
4) Dump the client who's trying to claim they own your stuff. Never do business with them again. Do not sell them any future versions of your products. With friends like that, who needs enemies? If you absolutely have to give them tech support, give them the bare legal minimum you have to for only as long as your contract with them requires. Once you're done with every single obligation to them, tell them you're dropping them as a client so they know not to bother you any more.
I don't want a unit with that whole set of tightly integrated features. I don't want a phone with everything built in. I want a modular system of digital tools.
I want a little black box with no particular features that I can drop in a pocket that connects to a 3G network on one end and creates a bluetooth cloud around me on the other. It doesn't have to have any real interface.
I want a handsfree bluetooth earpiece which interfaces with the black box.
I want a bluetooth PDA which interfaces with the earpiece and the black box to provide directory and dialing services, and to browse the web and do wireless email.
I want a bluetooth digital camera which interfaces with the black box to transmit my photos to my mac, so when I get home the photos are already in iPhoto. Perhaps it could cache them in local storage and transmit them when I happened to have the bandwidth available. That would also give me the opportunity to review them and delete any duds, and mark pictures I want printed so the mac could know to send a copy directly to Kodak for me. It would also be nice if the camera would interface with the PDA so I could use the PDA's more comfortable screen and interface to manipulate my photos (delete some, select others for printing) before they get sent to my machine at home.
I want all of this stuff to be separate so I can choose whatever manufacturers, models, and features I want, but to communicate seamlessly so I can use it pretty effortlessly together.
I don't expect to ever get what I want. It would be too... consumer focused. Manufactuers want to sell you an all-encompassing, proprietary device to ensure you pay *them* for everything you want. I'm looking for an open, standards-based system of interchangable devices to perform specific tasks well and interoperate smoothly. It'll never happen.
Firstly, a news agency is not excused from stupid reporting by inserting words like "claims" and "seems" in the appropriate places to qualify their statements. It's their responsibility to realize the guy is obviously a kook and not waste our time with it.
Also, it's high time news agencies accept the fact that when they report things, a lot of people aren't smart enough to evaluate the information and just treat is as gospel truth, ignoring the qualifiers because they're too subtle. Reporters need to analyse the information they're reporting on and provide a solid explanation of the principles involved.
I'm always astounded that reporters will go to great length to rehash all of the historical details that lead up to whatever they're reporting about, even if nobody on the planet with an IQ above single digits could possibly have missed it, but don't even bother to check the basic facts they're reporting *on*.
Politics is another subject about which reporting is particularly egrigious in this manner. Politicians make statements that are flat-out lies about verifiable topics, and reporters come along and report what they're saying without checking any of the facts. The unknowledgable reader comes away having heard only the lies and won't necessarily know it's bs.
It's high time that during elections newspapers should start running reports to the effect of "last night candidate A said this and that, and this is true but that isn't..." I'm sure it would improve the overall quality of our government if our elected officials were regularly called out for their lies.
But for science, it's even more inexcusable. If a reporter wants to report on somebody claiming to have broken the laws of thermodynamics, they should damn well stop to check it out before publishing.
The post office does not run on tax dollars, it runs on what you pay for postage and services. It also probably makes a profit on Microsoft's advertising.
On the other hand my personal concern is, they're still the local office of the federal governement, technically, so how come they have ads up for a company and product that the federal government just successfully sued for being in violation of federal law?
So, mostly they don't bother - they sell all their interesting models everywhere else, and sell a few models in the US that are most easily re-engineered to work here.
My friends at Nokia tell me the phones we have here are 2 or 3 years behind Europe.
Yeah, and my Newton still blows away all the PDAs on the current market, IMHO.
I signed up as a GSM phone customer with Omnipoint three years ago this week. They were since acquired by Voicestream.
Other than some minor problems with customer service, which were no worse or better than the problems my friends have had with Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T, (and were much less severe than my friends have had with Cingular), I've been extremely happy. In three years I have never had a problem getting a circuit, and having tried phones from all the competing carriers I believe that GSM offers generally superior voice quality. (In theory, Sprint's system can offer superior voice quality, but in practice I don't feel it does.)
Sprint has had some really cool phones over the last few years, and since I like to replace my phone with a hot new model phone regularly (hey, some people have vanity laptops, I have vanity phones) they've had the opportunity to lure me away at any time... but I have yet to see a phone good enough to lure me away from the GSM system.
Oh, and I guess I don't travel much into very rural areas any more, but I hardly ever fail to get GSM service anywhere I go any more, including my father's house in rural Georgia or my middle-of-nowhere hometown in northern New Jersey. GSM penetration has gotten pretty good and it's quite possible it may be just great for your needs.
I'm very interested in the new Handspring phones and will take a close look at them when they get to the US market.
I must agree with your insightful remarks here - I don't go to concerts by major artists any more, and I never cared about a concert being a multimedia extravaganza with huge video screens and zillions of dancers and smoke and lasers. I care even less to pay upwards of $75 a ticket. I don't have $75 to blow on a concert ticket, and even if I did I'm sure I can come up with something more interesting to do with the money.
On the other hand I went to three concerts this year. The tickets to each concert cost $15 each. At two of the three there was no assigned seating, at the third I got the tickets late and got crummy seats. The band I went to see didn't use lasers and barely had any change of lighting, they don't have any dancers, and there were no huge video screens. They bring their sound guy with them and that's their entourage.
The concerts were sold-out and the crowds were ecstatic and everyone left happy. At one concert in a small venue, so many people showed up that there were people sitting in the trees outside the windows to see the concert. After two of the three concerts, the band came out to sign autographs and chat with the fans.
They charged less. They used less. They performed well so we felt that we got more for less. Their audiences keep getting bigger and they keep playing bigger venues and more gigs. Who's losing?
I look at my aunt as an example of what middle class users can and will do with a computer. She doesn't take my advice about what computer to buy, and indeed she often does precisely what I was hoping she wouldn't, so what she actually does is of interest to me.
She has a nice digital camera - it takes higher-resolution pictures than mine. She takes lots of pictures. She has problems organizing them and until recently had no idea that there are professional services that can turn your digital pictures into photographic prints, so she printed her pictures on her color printer at home.
She is excited about e-books and six months ago declared that she was going to read only e-books from now on.
She thinks this MP3 thing is a cute idea but doesn't use them. She has CD players in her house and car and doesn't see the need to listen to her music from a computer. She does have a CD burner and uses it to make mix cd's. Ogg Vorbis vs MP3 is an incomprehensible argument to her.
She uses her computer to watch her DVDs because she likes the way they look on her flat panel display. She doesn't want to ever look at a CRT again. She doesn't want to get VHS tapes any more but still buys a few if she can't find equivalent DVDs. I've explained the whole RIAA and DVD versus fair use rights conflict to her, and she says that's too bad, but doesn't do anything about it.
She takes lots of videos of family events with her quite-conventional camcorder. She has heard that it's now possible to make your own DVDs and wants to be able to do that, but thinks it's too expensive to get the appropriate software and equipment for her Windows PC.
She uses Windows 98. I doubt she will ever upgrade her OS before replacing the computer.
She managed to accidentally unplug her amplified computer speaker set from the electric outlet once. Her computer sat silent for several months until I came to visit and took care of it for her. Other family members had looked at it, but after verifying that the speakers were connected to the computer, they were baffled.
Behind her computer is a tangled mass of cables, which is never moved. I don't even know if all the cables actually go anywhere - legacy cables may live there forever.
She has a WinCE based PDA with as much additional storage as she could make it accept. She uses it to read e-books. I think that might be all she uses it for. She didn't like the e-book reader dedicated hardware because none of the readers would accept all formats.
Now, how does my aunt feel about the Mac?
On the day the new iMac came out, she messaged me with AIM to say hi and ask me what I was up to. I told her I was installing iPhoto, and told her about it. She wants it. She wants it now.
I told her about the new iMac and explained that I thought she'd like one. She laughed and said I'd pry her Windows machine from her cold dead hands. I told her about the DVD burner. I told her about iMovie and iDVD being free. Now she wants me to bring my titanium powerbook for her to try out MacOS.
I absolutely agree that money is what voters are going to care about: talking to them about open-source software is like talking to them in Martian, but if you start talking asking why the local government is using "expensive" Microsoft software instead of "free linux", they will at least notice.
Another reduced cost is reduced cost of hardware: since Linux runs nicely on less powerful hardware, older computers could potentially be put back into service if they're on hand, and existing computers could be kept in service longer because they won't be made obselete immediately by rapidly bloating commercial software. A lot of constituents have purchased computers. A lot of them will have had the experience of buying what they think is an expensive new computer, only to find it's obselete (or at least out of date) in six months to a year. Remind them of this experience and point out that their city goes through the same thing... and explain how Linux can save their tax money by greatly slowing down that new-to-obselete cycle.
As a secondary issue, if the current operating system of choice for the city is from Microsoft, you could start asking why the city government is spending tax money on an illegal monopoly - "giving your tax money to lawbreakers!"
Finally, I'd say don't be unrealistically optimistic: the change to Linux will involve some staff time, possibly bringing on some temporary IT staff to help with the changeover, and possibly retraining existing IT staff or hiring an additional sysadmin or two, and at least minor internal retraining for all staff about applications. Stress that by making a minor outlay to make the change now, the many kinds of long-term savings we've enumerated here can occur in the future.
According to the law, Microsoft MUST sue in order to avoid what is known as trademark abandonment.
Sure. But they're also entirely welcome to accept that "Lindows" isn't an infringement and let it go.
The law doesn't prohibit them from being reasonable.