The Hacks just prove that there is a rush to implement new technology without considering the security implications of the tech.
This is just history repeating itself. Every company wants to be the first to announce this brand new, 'cool' feature, but none will wait for the 'geeks' to test it for security issues.
The irksome thing is that, while NFC is mildly novel in terms of the RF tricks(supporting both active/passive RFID-type use cases and short-range active/active ones), and I could see there being some teething pains on that side, these attacks are on NFC as an external data bus that wasn't attended to properly... Some sort of 'specially crafted responses cause hard lockup on $FOOCORP NFIC123 chips with firmware 1.0A' attack would be bad; but more or less par for the course. A more generic 'Hi guys! We added another wireless interface to your phone that happily talks to anything nearby by default, and even automatically executes certain local commands based on what it hears, that's cool, right?" mistake is... unimpressive.
NFC may be new; but the fact that an easily accessible external bus would be an attack vector, against which you should be on your guard, sure isn't. It's less clunky that having some 80's 25-pin RS-232 port on the back of your phone; but it's conceptually pretty similar.
I'm pretty sure that Branson is covering up the existence of the hot alien babes.
If he has any intention of 'starting a population on Mars', anything that attracts one Mr. James Kirk will have to be avoided at all costs, or Branson will be stuck on earth, crying into his champaign on whatever wacky vehicle/vessel he is into this week. Hence the subterfuge.
(current tech allows for simply sending women - no sperm required
The only downside with that scheme is that (while current tech does allow you to synthesize what are effectively sperm cells, sufficient to fertilize eggs at least, from eggs, I'm honestly a bit surprised that there hasn't been more 'controversy' about this...), it doesn't allow you to synthesize y-chromosome bearing gametes from double X progenitor cells. That ties you to an all-female population that can only reproduce through fairly sophisticated technical means for the indefinite future. It's a very cool technology, and the 'zOMG lesbians spawning amazonian baby swarms without men!!!' factor gets traditionalists riled up in the most amusing way; but the cost and complexity compare rather unfavorably with boring sperm-samples-in-cryo approaches(which, if combined with sperm sorting before freezing, should allow for something like 95% accurate sex selection, per sample, for all your social engineering needs).
As for the sociology of highly atypical societies crammed into hamster habitubes for long periods on nigh-uninhabitable worlds, well, I'd definitely stock up on psycho-pharmacologists and their wares before trying it, and probably a sidearm with the last bullet reserved for me, just in case...
"Remember kids, blue collar crime does not pay; and, honestly, most of the lower rungs of white collar crime are only classified that way so that they can keep you on salary rather than pay overtime and don't pay all that well either."
Except you wouldn't get any work done without men. Especially not any work that involves manual labor or operating machinery, such as building a colony.
I suspect that if you manage to fill a colony ship with women who can't handle manual labor in.38g, presumably with robotic assistance, or operate machinery even with tech support only a few light-minutes away, there is something deeply wrong with your selection criteria...
I'd be a little nervous about the teratogenic potential of the radiation you'd run into on the way; but (all joking aside) a plan like 'colonize mars' is really starting to get into the territory where somewhat... unconventional choices in order to save space/life support/etc. might start to be come eminently sensible.
Barring truly impressive recycling/life support systems, for instance, you could ship a hell of a lot of sperm specimens in cryo for the same payload cost that a single man and supplies to last the trip would occupy, with the additional advantage of far more genetic diversity than any single father could provide. Sooner or later, because of the finite shelf life of cryopreserved sperm cells, you'd need to re introduce males into your population; but it would seem somewhat inefficient to have any for the first generation, possibly even the first several generations...
If I hadn't grown out of my...thermally adventurous... computing phase, I'd be lamenting the fact that the RPi's Package-on-Package SoC design means that the RAM is on top of the CPU, which severely limits the amount of fanatically-careful lapping to perfect the thermal transfer between the CPU die and the somewhat outrageous heatsink I could perform without destroying the system RAM and making it fairly useless....
(More generally, does anybody know how much headroom these weedy little power-constrained chips have? Are they generally frequency limited by comparatively cheap fab processes, or design tradeoffs of various sorts, or could somebody willing to feed them 30 watts rather than.3watts and provide them with a heatsink larger than the cellphone they were designed to power hit a genuinely substantial overclock?)
The thing that I find very strange about Apple's UI peoples' obsession with ultra-tacky stitched leather borders, disgustingly twee fake paper calendars, little 'wooden' shelves for ebooks, and similar rot, is how sharply it differs from their hardware guys...
On the hardware side, Apple's aesthetic is one of a practically brutalist honesty to their materials, and a fairly relentless drive to unify surface and structural elements(ie. aluminum unibodies, rather than ABS-clad magnesium or steel skeleton designs, that sort of thing). It is really quite jarring. Their hardware guys appear to be iterating toward the monolith from 2001, and then you turn the device on and *BAM* punched in the face by '90s shareware UI...
I am not paying a leasing fee for software, thanks.
C'mon dude, remember how, uh, totally bitchin' the "Vista Ultimate Extras" that the suckers who shelled out for Vista Ultimate eventually received were? I'm guessing that the unspecified updates will be at least as exciting, if not more so. Who knows? Maybe clip art, maybe the unrated deleted scenes from Clippy's gritty reboot? It'll rule!
I think that that one was filed under "Poor Steve was hitting the Vicodin a bit hard toward the end" and forgotten about. Last anybody checked, it was some combination of SIP and XMPP carrying lumps of pure proprietary like shit through a goose...
I can only assume that somebody lost an epic power struggle in the bowels of Redmond HQ; but at present it does not. There isn't even(as currently announced) any "Professional" version you can buy, software-assurance-customer-only option you can obtain, CAL you can purchase, to turn it on.
I don't think that anybody was surprised that the consumer-facing SKUs wouldn't be able to; but that capability simply isn't for sale, period. x86 tablet? Sure. ARM tablet? No.
I would suspect that some of the work in in-air refuelling, along with the less technological jockeying for airbase rights in assorted allies, neutrals, and frenemies, is driven by the desire to still have an air force that works without carriers...
Aside from that, though, the answer may be "Just because it's obsolete doesn't mean that a replacement is available".
The thesis of the missile pessimists is that there are no presently available or near future defenses against presently available or near future missiles...
Part of the reason that carriers remain relevant is that, while they do have their own weapons, their MAIN weaponry is the planes that they carry. And it's easier to upgrade those planes (subject to limitations such as the elevators, etc...) than it would have been to upgrade a BB's weaponry.
It probably also helps them remain relevant that nobody has let a single one get any closer to something dangerous than they absolutely had to since the second world war... The concern is not so much that aircraft carriers are not powerful; but that they are so questionably survivable in the face of today's more sophisticated missiles that there may or may not be an aircraft carrier to come back to within the time it takes for the aircraft to go out and back.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
Android tablet with Bluetooth, then paired with a Bluetooth keyboard.
If you can get one keyboard per student, they can practice the fingering even when not attached to a tablet. They can share tablets (1 tablet per 3 or 4 kids), and practice fingering the rest of the time.
If cost is an issue, I'd see if you could find a tablet that works with USB OTG. "Bluetooth" seems to quadruple the price of a keyboard, and usually implies that it will be designed for thinness, not ergonomics. USB keyboards are cheap as dirt by contrast.
New alphasmarts are hilariously overpriced; but used ones can easily be a factor of ten cheaper, so that isn't a bad route to go down. You'll need to fleabay or otherwise scrounge; but you can get them at pleasingly low prices.
Another option, if the locals have some TVs, might be 'famiclones' or their slightly more modern ilk. The ones that just have controllers are no good; but there is a genre of 'c64' styled keyboard-based ones. RF and/or composite out to a TV, keyboard, usually some sort of BASIC or other typing environment of some degree of not-entirely-useless. Nasty; but cheap, cheap, cheap at the right dodgy flea market.
Unless they've backed down on Active Directory on Windows RT, Team corporate IT is going to avoid these things like the plague unless specifically forced by user demand...
I would assume a price sheet from ASUS would contain prices decided on by ASUS. Why are people blaming MS when it's the vendor's choice to go with these price points?
Probably because Microsoft is the sole provider of one of the more expensive items on the BoM, and the one over which there was the greatest price uncertainty and the greatest room for a decision between lower prices or higher margins. A few of the hardware bits are probably more expensive in absolute terms(a good IPS panel with a capacitive sensor isn't cheap, not that 1366x768 is 'good'); but the component vendors have comparatively little margin and less room to move on pricing.
Windows RT will come in Office 2013 Preview which would also be up-gradable to the final version when it launches.
Inconveniently, though, Office 2013 matters somewhat less to home users and Windows RT(since it can't be bound to a domain or controlled by standard group policy for any price) is of somewhat less interest to business users...
I'm not saying that they won't sell any; but by gimping AD in favor of some goofy 'Yeah, sure, go ahead and pretend its a smartphone or something, I hate you.' management 'app', they've substantially spoiled the appeal for the IT-heavy we-cannot-use-any-software-not-feature-identical-to-Office-and-ideally-compatible-with-IE6-so-we-can-still-get-to-our-cutting-edge-'intranet portal' segment, and at $600 for mediocre specs(2 GB of RAM is high by tablet standards; but cheap shit by Windows-machine standards) they'll need a pretty compelling argument that I need 100% Office, rather than the Office-compatibleish offerings on iDevices or Android things, since the same $600 will get me a shiny new 32GB iPad or a Transformer prime infinity from Asus' android side...
The fact that business intelligence tools are also well suited to monitoring dumb animals dedicated to a life of exploitation and eventual slaughter is just one of those crazy coincidences, and has no deeper implications.
Seems plausible. I don't doubt that there is something wrong with it, if they aren't shipping by default(since Chrome is superior to the Android default, and it isn't as though Google is going to try to block it for being 3rd party or anything), I'm just a bit surprised that Intel's efforts to push into phone territory didn't include an effort to get at least high-profile Android components working nice and smoothly on x86, which is something that they could have started working on well before the silicon made it to handset release. Presumably they'll iron it out at some point.
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By 'upgrade', you mean the new handset that you get for 'free' when you sign my two-year service contract, right consumer?
The Hacks just prove that there is a rush to implement new technology without considering the security implications of the tech.
This is just history repeating itself. Every company wants to be the first to announce this brand new, 'cool' feature, but none will wait for the 'geeks' to test it for security issues.
The irksome thing is that, while NFC is mildly novel in terms of the RF tricks(supporting both active/passive RFID-type use cases and short-range active/active ones), and I could see there being some teething pains on that side, these attacks are on NFC as an external data bus that wasn't attended to properly... Some sort of 'specially crafted responses cause hard lockup on $FOOCORP NFIC123 chips with firmware 1.0A' attack would be bad; but more or less par for the course. A more generic 'Hi guys! We added another wireless interface to your phone that happily talks to anything nearby by default, and even automatically executes certain local commands based on what it hears, that's cool, right?" mistake is... unimpressive.
NFC may be new; but the fact that an easily accessible external bus would be an attack vector, against which you should be on your guard, sure isn't. It's less clunky that having some 80's 25-pin RS-232 port on the back of your phone; but it's conceptually pretty similar.
I'm pretty sure that Branson is covering up the existence of the hot alien babes.
If he has any intention of 'starting a population on Mars', anything that attracts one Mr. James Kirk will have to be avoided at all costs, or Branson will be stuck on earth, crying into his champaign on whatever wacky vehicle/vessel he is into this week. Hence the subterfuge.
(current tech allows for simply sending women - no sperm required
The only downside with that scheme is that (while current tech does allow you to synthesize what are effectively sperm cells, sufficient to fertilize eggs at least, from eggs, I'm honestly a bit surprised that there hasn't been more 'controversy' about this...), it doesn't allow you to synthesize y-chromosome bearing gametes from double X progenitor cells. That ties you to an all-female population that can only reproduce through fairly sophisticated technical means for the indefinite future. It's a very cool technology, and the 'zOMG lesbians spawning amazonian baby swarms without men!!!' factor gets traditionalists riled up in the most amusing way; but the cost and complexity compare rather unfavorably with boring sperm-samples-in-cryo approaches(which, if combined with sperm sorting before freezing, should allow for something like 95% accurate sex selection, per sample, for all your social engineering needs).
As for the sociology of highly atypical societies crammed into hamster habitubes for long periods on nigh-uninhabitable worlds, well, I'd definitely stock up on psycho-pharmacologists and their wares before trying it, and probably a sidearm with the last bullet reserved for me, just in case...
"Remember kids, blue collar crime does not pay; and, honestly, most of the lower rungs of white collar crime are only classified that way so that they can keep you on salary rather than pay overtime and don't pay all that well either."
Except you wouldn't get any work done without men. Especially not any work that involves manual labor or operating machinery, such as building a colony.
I suspect that if you manage to fill a colony ship with women who can't handle manual labor in .38g, presumably with robotic assistance, or operate machinery even with tech support only a few light-minutes away, there is something deeply wrong with your selection criteria...
Your contract will probably be the equivalent of: "You work for us for 30 years for crappy pay in order to pay us back for transportation to Mars.
The pay is actually excellent. Buying oxygen at the company store, though...
I'd be a little nervous about the teratogenic potential of the radiation you'd run into on the way; but (all joking aside) a plan like 'colonize mars' is really starting to get into the territory where somewhat... unconventional choices in order to save space/life support/etc. might start to be come eminently sensible.
Barring truly impressive recycling/life support systems, for instance, you could ship a hell of a lot of sperm specimens in cryo for the same payload cost that a single man and supplies to last the trip would occupy, with the additional advantage of far more genetic diversity than any single father could provide. Sooner or later, because of the finite shelf life of cryopreserved sperm cells, you'd need to re introduce males into your population; but it would seem somewhat inefficient to have any for the first generation, possibly even the first several generations...
If I hadn't grown out of my...thermally adventurous... computing phase, I'd be lamenting the fact that the RPi's Package-on-Package SoC design means that the RAM is on top of the CPU, which severely limits the amount of fanatically-careful lapping to perfect the thermal transfer between the CPU die and the somewhat outrageous heatsink I could perform without destroying the system RAM and making it fairly useless....
(More generally, does anybody know how much headroom these weedy little power-constrained chips have? Are they generally frequency limited by comparatively cheap fab processes, or design tradeoffs of various sorts, or could somebody willing to feed them 30 watts rather than .3watts and provide them with a heatsink larger than the cellphone they were designed to power hit a genuinely substantial overclock?)
The thing that I find very strange about Apple's UI peoples' obsession with ultra-tacky stitched leather borders, disgustingly twee fake paper calendars, little 'wooden' shelves for ebooks, and similar rot, is how sharply it differs from their hardware guys...
On the hardware side, Apple's aesthetic is one of a practically brutalist honesty to their materials, and a fairly relentless drive to unify surface and structural elements(ie. aluminum unibodies, rather than ABS-clad magnesium or steel skeleton designs, that sort of thing). It is really quite jarring. Their hardware guys appear to be iterating toward the monolith from 2001, and then you turn the device on and *BAM* punched in the face by '90s shareware UI...
Why would you trust anybody who(voluntarily no less) describes themselves as an 'SEO Consultant?
Surely such people would be as laboriously excluded from polite company as their abominable creations are from search indices and email queues?
I am not paying a leasing fee for software, thanks.
C'mon dude, remember how, uh, totally bitchin' the "Vista Ultimate Extras" that the suckers who shelled out for Vista Ultimate eventually received were? I'm guessing that the unspecified updates will be at least as exciting, if not more so. Who knows? Maybe clip art, maybe the unrated deleted scenes from Clippy's gritty reboot? It'll rule!
I think that that one was filed under "Poor Steve was hitting the Vicodin a bit hard toward the end" and forgotten about. Last anybody checked, it was some combination of SIP and XMPP carrying lumps of pure proprietary like shit through a goose...
I can only assume that somebody lost an epic power struggle in the bowels of Redmond HQ; but at present it does not. There isn't even(as currently announced) any "Professional" version you can buy, software-assurance-customer-only option you can obtain, CAL you can purchase, to turn it on.
I don't think that anybody was surprised that the consumer-facing SKUs wouldn't be able to; but that capability simply isn't for sale, period. x86 tablet? Sure. ARM tablet? No.
I would suspect that some of the work in in-air refuelling, along with the less technological jockeying for airbase rights in assorted allies, neutrals, and frenemies, is driven by the desire to still have an air force that works without carriers...
Aside from that, though, the answer may be "Just because it's obsolete doesn't mean that a replacement is available".
The thesis of the missile pessimists is that there are no presently available or near future defenses against presently available or near future missiles...
Part of the reason that carriers remain relevant is that, while they do have their own weapons, their MAIN weaponry is the planes that they carry. And it's easier to upgrade those planes (subject to limitations such as the elevators, etc...) than it would have been to upgrade a BB's weaponry.
It probably also helps them remain relevant that nobody has let a single one get any closer to something dangerous than they absolutely had to since the second world war... The concern is not so much that aircraft carriers are not powerful; but that they are so questionably survivable in the face of today's more sophisticated missiles that there may or may not be an aircraft carrier to come back to within the time it takes for the aircraft to go out and back.
They are better than battleships for beating up on hilariously outmatched little countries, since their range is longer; but that, along with saber rattling, is all they've been used for for quite some time.
Android tablet with Bluetooth, then paired with a Bluetooth keyboard.
If you can get one keyboard per student, they can practice the fingering even when not attached to a tablet.
They can share tablets (1 tablet per 3 or 4 kids), and practice fingering the rest of the time.
If cost is an issue, I'd see if you could find a tablet that works with USB OTG. "Bluetooth" seems to quadruple the price of a keyboard, and usually implies that it will be designed for thinness, not ergonomics. USB keyboards are cheap as dirt by contrast.
New alphasmarts are hilariously overpriced; but used ones can easily be a factor of ten cheaper, so that isn't a bad route to go down. You'll need to fleabay or otherwise scrounge; but you can get them at pleasingly low prices.
Another option, if the locals have some TVs, might be 'famiclones' or their slightly more modern ilk. The ones that just have controllers are no good; but there is a genre of 'c64' styled keyboard-based ones. RF and/or composite out to a TV, keyboard, usually some sort of BASIC or other typing environment of some degree of not-entirely-useless. Nasty; but cheap, cheap, cheap at the right dodgy flea market.
Unless they've backed down on Active Directory on Windows RT, Team corporate IT is going to avoid these things like the plague unless specifically forced by user demand...
I would assume a price sheet from ASUS would contain prices decided on by ASUS. Why are people blaming MS when it's the vendor's choice to go with these price points?
Probably because Microsoft is the sole provider of one of the more expensive items on the BoM, and the one over which there was the greatest price uncertainty and the greatest room for a decision between lower prices or higher margins. A few of the hardware bits are probably more expensive in absolute terms(a good IPS panel with a capacitive sensor isn't cheap, not that 1366x768 is 'good'); but the component vendors have comparatively little margin and less room to move on pricing.
Windows RT will come in Office 2013 Preview which would also be up-gradable to the final version when it launches.
Inconveniently, though, Office 2013 matters somewhat less to home users and Windows RT(since it can't be bound to a domain or controlled by standard group policy for any price) is of somewhat less interest to business users...
I'm not saying that they won't sell any; but by gimping AD in favor of some goofy 'Yeah, sure, go ahead and pretend its a smartphone or something, I hate you.' management 'app', they've substantially spoiled the appeal for the IT-heavy we-cannot-use-any-software-not-feature-identical-to-Office-and-ideally-compatible-with-IE6-so-we-can-still-get-to-our-cutting-edge-'intranet portal' segment, and at $600 for mediocre specs(2 GB of RAM is high by tablet standards; but cheap shit by Windows-machine standards) they'll need a pretty compelling argument that I need 100% Office, rather than the Office-compatibleish offerings on iDevices or Android things, since the same $600 will get me a shiny new 32GB iPad or a Transformer prime infinity from Asus' android side...
Are you saying that I should invite the interns to the company barbecue after all?
The fact that business intelligence tools are also well suited to monitoring dumb animals dedicated to a life of exploitation and eventual slaughter is just one of those crazy coincidences, and has no deeper implications.
Seems plausible. I don't doubt that there is something wrong with it, if they aren't shipping by default(since Chrome is superior to the Android default, and it isn't as though Google is going to try to block it for being 3rd party or anything), I'm just a bit surprised that Intel's efforts to push into phone territory didn't include an effort to get at least high-profile Android components working nice and smoothly on x86, which is something that they could have started working on well before the silicon made it to handset release. Presumably they'll iron it out at some point.