While Apple licenced their "fairplay" secret sauce and iTunes sync for the project, Motorola puked up the actual device firmware. That is never a good sign. Those guys Just. Cannot. Do. Software.
While Motorola has a proud history of some superb RF hardware designs, they(for reasons unclear) decided to blow their big chance on the Apple market by dusting off one of their brutally mediocre midrange handsets and just giving it a new firmware and a new sticker. Not a high point in their history of industrial design. They didn't even bother to update for USB2 support, despite knowing that large file transfers were going to be a central use case...
Also for reasons unclear, Apple was willing to allow the project(since their DRM was involved, their consent was required); but seemed petulantly unwilling to let it succeed. They imposed a 100 song limit, in order to keep the phone from being a serious alternative to any but (perhaps) the smallest capacity shuffle, and then they announced the Nano at the same event(a comparison of Jobs' demeanor during the two unveilings is rather striking...) One wonders what sort of byzantine internal politics prevented them from killing it quietly, rather than letting it bleed out in public...
When assessing a company's engineering capacity, neither its market cap, its employee count(without further detail), nor its annual revenue are really all that useful. Indirectly related; but not directly informative.
Apple's retail employees, for instance, are quite numerous; but they are utterly irrelevant to the question of how many distinct platforms Apple could hypothetically deliver high-quality builds of iOS on. Market cap and annual revenue are, if anything, higher because of their ability to succeed while delivering a very small number of products.
Using "relatively small" without qualification was unclear of me; but in the context of the engineering work that would be involved in keeping an OS playing nice on multiple embedded platforms Apple is, in fact, relatively small. They are a large company; but once you subtract their retail people, product/industrial designers, and software engineers working on non-OS related stuff(final cut, aperture, iLife, iWork, etc.) the remainder isn't particularly large.
I'm pretty sure that Kin makes up less than.001% of that. WM 6.5, while pretty sucky, was(until fairly recently) your option for Exchange integration unless you could afford BES. Totally unsurprising to see some of that still floating around.
Unless Apple suddenly decides that they are going to abandon their strategy of focusing exclusively on premium markets, Android isn't likely to go anywhere(though the ground is going to get a lot rougher for 'flagship' android devices that land at or above iPhone price-points and attempt to go toe-to-toe on hardware and features...)
What all the bloviating about smartphones ignores is that there is a Gigantic pool of dumbphones and low end featurephones out there(and that a nontrivial slice of "smartphones" are the cheapest blackberry hardware available, being blown out as part of RIM's attempt to keep subscriber acquisition numbers up). Google has a strong interest in getting the users of these phones online, where they can contribute advertising revenue on the go just as they do at home, and there are plenty of OEMs who know how to make cheap hardware but have sucky or nonexistent software and localization skills who are perfectly happy to take advantage of the fact that you can be Google's hardware bitch for free, while MS wants to charge you per-phone for the same privilege.
Two issues with that line of thinking: One, it isn't clear that there is all that much gold in "getting the software on as many units as possible"(at least if you have to compromise as much as Google has to do so. We'll see whether MS ever makes any money on their more or less traditionally OEM licenced 'Windows Phone 7' product; but Google is basically giving it away, so much that they won't even have the 'give away razors, sell blades' strategy. There are already 3-4 competing app stores, and carriers can do whatever the fuck they want in terms of munging their builds. Only through branding arrangements or superior engineering can Google even keep the majority of 'Android' devices as 'Google Android' devices...)
Second, it isn't clear that Apple would be capable of creating the products that they do if they had to play nice with third parties that have their own agendas. Basically every part of the iPhone that AT&T has had a hand in(no tethering, using app store control to keep especially bandwidth heavy or voice-minutes threatening stuff nonexistent or wifi only, etc.) has been seen as among the suckiest aspects of the device. Similarly, they achieve spec and UI consistency(to the degree that they do, Apple has frankly gone soft about being the 'UI leader' after decades of competition with Microsoft...) by means of crushing third-party 'skins' and 'value added software' and carrier preloads and so forth. They also control all updates, and push them pretty aggressively. Were they deprived of these advantages, it isn't clear that a company of Apple's(relatively small) size could possibly manage what they presently do.
My personal suspicion RE: Android vs. Apple is as follows:
When Apple first released the iPhone, their stance was "Our applications only, everyone else can do webapps or go home crying, what're you gonna do about it, switch to Windows Mobile?" With this as Apple's stance, it was easy for Google and Apple to be bestest-ever buddies: Apple got premium integration of desireable Google properties(native youtube, native Maps), and Google got the first smash-hit internet-enabled phone that had virtually zero carrier control pushing people toward WAP-crap carrier stores or anything else that would keep mobile users away from the open internet, where Google scored its sweet, sweet adwords money.
At that point, Android was a relatively low-priority project, basically aimed at using the ex-Danger guys to build a phone OS with a good web browser, minimally acceptable other features, and good integration with google stuff(maps, gmail, bookmarks, etc.) Google had no real reason to try to go head to head with Apple, who had a markedly superior product(that relied heavily on Google services and drove well-heeled mobile users right onto the open internet where Google knew how to make money...); but they had a strong interest in giving the vast 'featurephone' and 'dumbphone' market that Apple would never deign to touch a major kick in the ass. As long as most wireless users had a worse-than-useless browser that was largely designed to dump them right in the carrier's walled garden 'o suck, they would be useless to Google. And thus, they shot relatively low in terms of specs and terms and conditions, and aimed to replace proprietary dumb and feature OSes as fast as possible.
However, once Apple opened their App Store(whether this was the plan all along, or in response to jailbreakers is unclear); Google had a problem: A huge percentage of "apps" were basically views of some entity's website; but iPhoneized. There were, and are, a lot that are much closer to traditional applications; but a lot are simply little chunks of the web that(because of the iPhone's commanding market share for web connected phones) could be iPhone only and still represent a viable "mobile strategy" for whoever put them out. At that point Google, sensibly enough, saw a real threat. To counter, they stepped up their android efforts and(while not cracking down on the low end, since the original objec
Stylus-based products are holding extremely strong in their niches, it is just that one isn't all that big and the other isn't all that exciting...
Among digital artist types, stylus input is the name of the game. Wacom's 'Cintiq' is probably the exemplar of that niche, if the $2k price of entry doesn't bother you. If it does, they have some cheaper seats.
Then you have the endless, largely nameless, stylus input screens, often monochrome, for taking signatures on POS devices, those handhelds the UPS guy has, and whatnot. There, it is all about ruggedness and getting close enough to vaguely looking like the user's signature. Probably a few hundred million of the things floating around; but not exactly the tip of the spear, technologically...
The ones that seem largely to have died are the wintel laptops with active digitizers.
I'm not sure why they were provisioned for voice at all. One would think that any fault reporting tasks could be more easily and cheaply handled as SMSes or GPRS transfers of a kb or two...
It isn't like there is a tiny little man in the control box who has to call when he is out of sandwiches or anything...
GSM data isn't cheap; but(at least in reasonably densely settled areas) it works more or less everywhere and the modules needed to add support for it are quite cheap.
More importantly, if the description that these were a 'fault alert' system is accurate, this is not a data-heavy application. Perhaps a few SMSes, per unit, per year, unless the units are really crap, or have to survive an especially brutal environment.
While(at least in the US) most telcoes wouldn't bother to spit on you if you asked for such a plan in quantity 1, I would strongly suspect that "We need 600 units, with the possibility of some thousands more over the coming years if things go well, SMS/GPRS only, low per-node usage" would get you a price that would be pretty favorable compared to rolling your own infrastructure.
If your plan is to put a battery of surveillance cameras on every streetlamp, or create some grand-unified-city-sensor-net, then cellular isn't going to be so hot; but it actually works pretty well for low frequency data reporting in settled areas...
The problem with the manufacturer's view(banks seem to approach ATM skimmers with the same naivete) is that it only takes somebody with technical skills to do the actual cryptoanalysis, followed by some opportunist with a shady supply chain to "productize" the hack into something that you'll be able to buy over the internet for a few hundred or thousand dollars and operate with about as much difficulty as the average MP3 player...
Obviously, if every thief had to make his own tools, the intersection between people who can analyze novel(if flawed) cryptosystems and then build attack hardware that puts out sufficiently clean RF output exploiting whatever vulnerabilities exist and the people who steal cars for a living is pretty much zero. Stealing cars just isn't lucrative enough, unless times are very hard for engineers of reasonable talent.
That isn't the way it works, though. The guys doing the break-n'-grab are just peons using tools created by others(apparently, with ATM skimmers, there are even "franchise" style setups, where you get access to the hardware in exchange for uploading a percentage of your skims to your sponsor...) And, building sophisticated electronic tools is a perfectly fine business, definitely worth the time of talented people, particularly ones in locales with weakish rule of law and relatively low local wages...
Analyzing a system's security by saying "eh, how many carjackers are cryptoanalysts?" is sort of like dismissing the risks of a bad neighborhood by saying "Eh, how many muggers are machinists and gunsmiths?" It is true that the answer is "Not many, possibly zero"; but that won't exactly keep you from getting shot.
The main push for touchscreen keyboards seems to be in applications where there is contention for screen space(and niche applications where a keyboard would be difficult to keep clean or unvandalized).
That pretty much means phones, handhelds, and maybe laptops(for laptops, you run into the problem that the comfortable position for a keyboard and the comfortable position for a screen are quite different, and switching between the two will take a disruptive several seconds...)
For anything without such contention, the idea that dirt-cheap and tactilely excellent physical keyswitches are going to be replaced by touch panels just so that the world can look more futuristic seems unlikely at best. Possibly, hard key labels will be replaced, in certain applications, with little screens, for application specific keymap/shortcut changes; but that is still a mechanical keyboard.
The real question determining the future of touchscreen "keyboards", to my mind, is whether haptics and such similar trickery advance faster than do technological alternatives that simply eliminate the screen-size contention. You have been able to get for some years, for instance, glasses with displays in them. Unfortunately, current models suffer from low resolution and making you look like a giant dork. However, with easy-to-imagine incremental improvements, you could get something that just looks like an ordinary pair of glasses/sunglasses; but can paint pixels on your eyes small enough that they aren't perceptible as pixels. If that became cheap, your phone could be 100% keyboard. Same thing would apply for various hypothetical microprojectors/folding screens/wireless display panels/etc/etc.
For whatever reason, the first wave of attempts to resolve the screen/keyboard space contention issue attacked the keyboard rather than the screen; but there is no reason, in principle, why you could not instead attack the screen in favor of a larger, clickier, nicer keyboard. We'll see whose tech develops faster...
You do have to pity the chaps responsible for repainting the runways of aircraft carriers whenever their orientation relative to the earth's magnetic field changes...
Another little historical irony... The word you mention is the root of the term "economics"; but, despite the fact that the root word explicitly applied to household management, one now must specify Home Economics, or something having to do with investment banking and currency arbitrage is assumed...
Given the debacle about "Windows Vista Capable" vs. "Windows Vista Ready" I, for one, trust that there will be no customer confusion regarding what software and peripherals are supported on Windows 8/ARM vs. Windows 8/x86...
While I suspect that MS will be delighted to gradually kill off CE in all but the most constrained environments, and go the way that everybody else is going(same/extremely similar kernel across all devices, with only library and UI differences to suit the form factor in question), since WinCE kind of sucked compared to NT, and NT's base system requirements are now pretty attainable for almost anything that is called a "SoC" rather than a "microcontroller".
However, while I'm seeing the incremental savings and conveniences, I'm not seeing the "game changer"... NT/ARM will have an overwhelmingly tiny application base, unless MS does a truly heroic job of kicking third-party ass(look at how long it took to get the wintel vendors on board the relatively minor changes required to comply with Vista/7, and the number of applications that still aren't 64 bit, and the length of time, and discarding of peripherals, that it took for 64bit drivers to actually be available...) Even.net stuff, which will theoretically benefit from the agnosticism of the CLR, is usually packaged behind one or more layers of x86 win32 installer wrappers. With some hacking, you can often get around those; but even the relative minority of beautifully clean.net stuff, with no win32 dependencies, architectural assumptions, or kernel drivers, will require a vendor re-release of the installer to be usable by Joe User on an NT/ARM system...
Furthermore, while consolidating kernels will likely be a long term benefit, has kernel quality actually been the deciding factor in any of the skirmishes in the PDA, smartphone, or tablet wars thus far? It seems, from what I've been able to observe, that virtually all the fighting has been in the areas of UI quality, developer base, and hooks to various other ecosystems(ie. blackberries kind of suck; but they have BBM and an integrated email service, Windows Mobile was traditionally the best bet for Exchange integration and policy control for any IT shop that couldn't afford/support a full BES instance. Android has its Google overlord's services integrated, iDevices have iTunes and ITMS...)
Now that mobile devices are getting substantially more powerful than the hardware that NT was originally developed on, it seems perfectly reasonable to start prepping CE for the hospice and/or very low end embedded devices, and consolidating kernel work on NT; but without a new UI, userland legacy support, or similar, this seems about as significant as a version bump in the CE kernel. Will it be a better kernel? Certainly. Will that change the user experience? Not so clear...
I suspect two reasons: 1)(and most important): This is being published by Infoworld, ergo it focuses on IT stuff. 2) Much of the worst rot in IT is largely invisible to the layman.
Slow computers with styles that were pretty neato back in 2000 are obvious to the poor office drones who have to endure them; but anything that new can, largely, be forklift upgraded for the cost of the new systems and some grunt labor. Turning a 3 year desktop refresh cycle into a 5 year(or 7 year, *cough* *cough*) desktop refresh cycle doesn't make anybody happy(particularly once warranties run out, the scavenging and improvising begins); but is architecturally a small problem. You don't really accrue much "debt" over time. The cost will be "1 forklift upgrade to present day PCs" whether that upgrade takes you one generation ahead or three.
It's the complex software, the highly specialized proprietary industrial controller cards, and suchlike widgetry where there is real hell to pay, and most of that is invisible...
"Husbandry" is "the management of domestic affairs and resources".
Historically, both your wife and your livestock were classified under "domestic affairs and resources". Today, we tend to step carefully around the lingering etymological implication that "husbands" are those who engage in wife management, unless some other sort of husbandry is specified; but that is still why the word is what it is, even though women have actually been promoted to human status in a number of parts of the world.
I really don't understand why these sorts of mistakes keep getting made.
From the perspective of game designers, Blizzard clearly has several advantages that will be difficult to overcome: 1. Already having had years to iterate and refine their game and engine. 2. A large paying audience, which means that the costs of implementing content X or upgrade Y are, per subscriber, tiny. Any game designer who thinks that those can be overcome by any means except doing something quite different(EVE: online, which went for a totally different player base, or any of the random browser-based grind games which go for being radically less expensive to produce and to play) is suffering from some serious hubris.
From the perspective of the management types, Blizzard clearly has several advantages that will be difficult to overcome: 1. Network effects: because so many people play WoW, if your friends play any MMORPG, that is probably the one. Barring specific hatred of some aspect of WoW, you will default to playing the one that your friends are playing. 2. Substantial costs already amortized: They have a (more or less) fully functional engine, stuffed full of art assets and flavortext and whatnot, all paid off. Any new player that they can attract is, other than some slight server and bandwidth load, basically free until they have ground through a fairly large chunk of gameworld. Any competitor is starting from a far weaker position, attempting to get their engine and flavor to playable levels on borrowed or advanced money. 3. Large player base over which to divide fixed costs: Games, like movies, are heavy on fixed costs. The engine costs the same even if noone ever uses it. That dialog tree costs the same even if noone ever reads it. The more subscribers you have, the lower your fixed costs per subscriber(or, alternately, the higher your quality for the same fixed cost per subscriber as your inferior competitors).
That's what I don't understand: All but the most delusionally hubristic game-design guys should easily realize that any 'me-too' attempt is going to go badly. They are probably inclined to be a bit optimistic about how original their work really is; but they should know that 'me-too' is suicide. At the same time, even the management types who know absolutely nothing about games should, purely with basic EC101 type considerations, be able to see that this is not a market where there is much room for imitative product. Blizzard hardly has a monopoly on "games"; but the idea that the market will support multiple "clearly WoW-like games" is hard to support.
Given that even outrageously hubristic game designers tend to depend on suits for money(at least until the game is ready to sell) and that even the dullest suits need a bunch of game designers willing to take the risk of having a real fuckup on their CV, I don't understand how these projects get off the ground. In almost any case, I would expect one party or the other to (sensibly) get cold feet quite early, if they even get the idea at all.
We are so eager to, um, impose absolutely no restrictions at all in a totally open and transparent manner that registration is now mandatory. If it weren't mandatory, we would be not imposing absolutely no restrictions at all, and you would actually be less free! Doesn't it all make perfect sense?
Unless the blackberry contains evidence of a real serious crime(importation of a few keys of colombia's finest, pile of dead hookers in the basement, etc.) That would be a terrible plan.
I'm pretty sure that destruction of evidence is a crime in virtually all jurisdictions, so they could nail you for that alone, not to mention the fact that a bunch of cops telling the judge that you freaked out and wiped your phone would probably be enough to get them a warrant to search their merry way through the rest of your stuff.
Most likely true. A good backdoor is a terrible thing to waste.
The only hypothetical concern(more likely with modestly high value suspects) would be backdoor + plausible cover story: ie. 1. Use backdoor to break system. 2. Tell media that we A)cleverly analyzed keyboard wear patterns with our science microscopes, all very technical... B)Built a customized password database based on an analysis of the subject's background and psychologically likely password sources. All very sophisticated, you understand...
In any case, I'd expect that, in your basic stop and bother operation, the cop would either give up, intimidate the passphrase out of them, or just have the phone dumped in the forensics queue for its entire relevant lifespan(incidentally, would terminating your contract, or having your carrier provision a different phone, both of which would stop the flow of evidence to your phone, potentially qualify as evidence tampering?)
It sure would be an awful pity if the dashboard camera were to suffer a "technical malfunction" just before I ask you for your passphrase again, boy. People get hurt resisting arrest...
Unlike computers, where encryption is a fairly recent addition(obviously, computers have been capable of encryption for longer than cell phones have existed; but the idea that somebody's home directory is going to be encrypted and unusable with any degree of frequency is quite new, and still probably isn't true most of the time), the cellphones that do security at all often do it fairly well.
Particularly now that RIM has started selling cut-price blackberries to all and sundry to make up for their fall from grace in the elite-smartphone market, the odds that J. Scumbag is carrying a phone with encryption that was originally designed to appease Mr. Wallstreet's IT gestapo are quite good.
If RIM is secretly backdoored, or the unlock code is visible in touchscreen fingerprint grease and/or worn physical keys, that won't help; but the only thing a random beat cop is going to be able to do about it is either intimidate/beat you into divulging the passcode, or just seize the device for 24 months while Forensics works through the backlog.
Unless the suspect is a dumbass, or has a very downmarket phone, or is (gasp, shock, horror) actually just going about his business and hasn't considered having to secure his phone against cops, there are plenty of "you can beat the rap; but you can't beat the ride" style intimidation/harassment/de-facto perpetual seizure strategies; but actually getting any data could be pretty tricky...
My understanding is that(unlike the US where, in the case noted above, the Supreme Court ruled that 'creativity' was an essential quality, without which something could not fall under the scope of the constitution's authorization of copyright law), the UK is, at least to some degree, a 'sweat of one's brow' jurisdiction, where the difficulty and labor of compiling a work, even if purely mechanistic and uncreative, can make it copyright-protectable.
It could also just be that, while scraping works well on people who don't know or don't care, it is an area where the defender likely has the advantage(particularly for 'legitimate' operations, where tactics like using a cloud of compromised hosts in residential IP blocks to conceal your activity isn't really an option. All but the dullest admins can probably figure out something amusing to do with that 100Mb/s stream of requests from a single host in a known competitor's IP block... Particularly for something like banking or insurance, if you want to offer the service, you have to be right nearly all the time. If the target is fucking with you, that can be difficult.
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The "ROKR" arguably suffered a triple blow:
While Apple licenced their "fairplay" secret sauce and iTunes sync for the project, Motorola puked up the actual device firmware. That is never a good sign. Those guys Just. Cannot. Do. Software.
While Motorola has a proud history of some superb RF hardware designs, they(for reasons unclear) decided to blow their big chance on the Apple market by dusting off one of their brutally mediocre midrange handsets and just giving it a new firmware and a new sticker. Not a high point in their history of industrial design. They didn't even bother to update for USB2 support, despite knowing that large file transfers were going to be a central use case...
Also for reasons unclear, Apple was willing to allow the project(since their DRM was involved, their consent was required); but seemed petulantly unwilling to let it succeed. They imposed a 100 song limit, in order to keep the phone from being a serious alternative to any but (perhaps) the smallest capacity shuffle, and then they announced the Nano at the same event(a comparison of Jobs' demeanor during the two unveilings is rather striking...) One wonders what sort of byzantine internal politics prevented them from killing it quietly, rather than letting it bleed out in public...
When assessing a company's engineering capacity, neither its market cap, its employee count(without further detail), nor its annual revenue are really all that useful. Indirectly related; but not directly informative.
Apple's retail employees, for instance, are quite numerous; but they are utterly irrelevant to the question of how many distinct platforms Apple could hypothetically deliver high-quality builds of iOS on. Market cap and annual revenue are, if anything, higher because of their ability to succeed while delivering a very small number of products.
Using "relatively small" without qualification was unclear of me; but in the context of the engineering work that would be involved in keeping an OS playing nice on multiple embedded platforms Apple is, in fact, relatively small. They are a large company; but once you subtract their retail people, product/industrial designers, and software engineers working on non-OS related stuff(final cut, aperture, iLife, iWork, etc.) the remainder isn't particularly large.
I'm pretty sure that Kin makes up less than .001% of that. WM 6.5, while pretty sucky, was(until fairly recently) your option for Exchange integration unless you could afford BES. Totally unsurprising to see some of that still floating around.
Unless Apple suddenly decides that they are going to abandon their strategy of focusing exclusively on premium markets, Android isn't likely to go anywhere(though the ground is going to get a lot rougher for 'flagship' android devices that land at or above iPhone price-points and attempt to go toe-to-toe on hardware and features...)
What all the bloviating about smartphones ignores is that there is a Gigantic pool of dumbphones and low end featurephones out there(and that a nontrivial slice of "smartphones" are the cheapest blackberry hardware available, being blown out as part of RIM's attempt to keep subscriber acquisition numbers up). Google has a strong interest in getting the users of these phones online, where they can contribute advertising revenue on the go just as they do at home, and there are plenty of OEMs who know how to make cheap hardware but have sucky or nonexistent software and localization skills who are perfectly happy to take advantage of the fact that you can be Google's hardware bitch for free, while MS wants to charge you per-phone for the same privilege.
Two issues with that line of thinking: One, it isn't clear that there is all that much gold in "getting the software on as many units as possible"(at least if you have to compromise as much as Google has to do so. We'll see whether MS ever makes any money on their more or less traditionally OEM licenced 'Windows Phone 7' product; but Google is basically giving it away, so much that they won't even have the 'give away razors, sell blades' strategy. There are already 3-4 competing app stores, and carriers can do whatever the fuck they want in terms of munging their builds. Only through branding arrangements or superior engineering can Google even keep the majority of 'Android' devices as 'Google Android' devices...)
Second, it isn't clear that Apple would be capable of creating the products that they do if they had to play nice with third parties that have their own agendas. Basically every part of the iPhone that AT&T has had a hand in(no tethering, using app store control to keep especially bandwidth heavy or voice-minutes threatening stuff nonexistent or wifi only, etc.) has been seen as among the suckiest aspects of the device. Similarly, they achieve spec and UI consistency(to the degree that they do, Apple has frankly gone soft about being the 'UI leader' after decades of competition with Microsoft...) by means of crushing third-party 'skins' and 'value added software' and carrier preloads and so forth. They also control all updates, and push them pretty aggressively. Were they deprived of these advantages, it isn't clear that a company of Apple's(relatively small) size could possibly manage what they presently do.
My personal suspicion RE: Android vs. Apple is as follows:
When Apple first released the iPhone, their stance was "Our applications only, everyone else can do webapps or go home crying, what're you gonna do about it, switch to Windows Mobile?" With this as Apple's stance, it was easy for Google and Apple to be bestest-ever buddies: Apple got premium integration of desireable Google properties(native youtube, native Maps), and Google got the first smash-hit internet-enabled phone that had virtually zero carrier control pushing people toward WAP-crap carrier stores or anything else that would keep mobile users away from the open internet, where Google scored its sweet, sweet adwords money.
At that point, Android was a relatively low-priority project, basically aimed at using the ex-Danger guys to build a phone OS with a good web browser, minimally acceptable other features, and good integration with google stuff(maps, gmail, bookmarks, etc.) Google had no real reason to try to go head to head with Apple, who had a markedly superior product(that relied heavily on Google services and drove well-heeled mobile users right onto the open internet where Google knew how to make money...); but they had a strong interest in giving the vast 'featurephone' and 'dumbphone' market that Apple would never deign to touch a major kick in the ass. As long as most wireless users had a worse-than-useless browser that was largely designed to dump them right in the carrier's walled garden 'o suck, they would be useless to Google. And thus, they shot relatively low in terms of specs and terms and conditions, and aimed to replace proprietary dumb and feature OSes as fast as possible.
However, once Apple opened their App Store(whether this was the plan all along, or in response to jailbreakers is unclear); Google had a problem: A huge percentage of "apps" were basically views of some entity's website; but iPhoneized. There were, and are, a lot that are much closer to traditional applications; but a lot are simply little chunks of the web that(because of the iPhone's commanding market share for web connected phones) could be iPhone only and still represent a viable "mobile strategy" for whoever put them out. At that point Google, sensibly enough, saw a real threat. To counter, they stepped up their android efforts and(while not cracking down on the low end, since the original objec
Stylus-based products are holding extremely strong in their niches, it is just that one isn't all that big and the other isn't all that exciting...
Among digital artist types, stylus input is the name of the game. Wacom's 'Cintiq' is probably the exemplar of that niche, if the $2k price of entry doesn't bother you. If it does, they have some cheaper seats.
Then you have the endless, largely nameless, stylus input screens, often monochrome, for taking signatures on POS devices, those handhelds the UPS guy has, and whatnot. There, it is all about ruggedness and getting close enough to vaguely looking like the user's signature. Probably a few hundred million of the things floating around; but not exactly the tip of the spear, technologically...
The ones that seem largely to have died are the wintel laptops with active digitizers.
I'm not sure why they were provisioned for voice at all. One would think that any fault reporting tasks could be more easily and cheaply handled as SMSes or GPRS transfers of a kb or two...
It isn't like there is a tiny little man in the control box who has to call when he is out of sandwiches or anything...
GSM data isn't cheap; but(at least in reasonably densely settled areas) it works more or less everywhere and the modules needed to add support for it are quite cheap.
More importantly, if the description that these were a 'fault alert' system is accurate, this is not a data-heavy application. Perhaps a few SMSes, per unit, per year, unless the units are really crap, or have to survive an especially brutal environment.
While(at least in the US) most telcoes wouldn't bother to spit on you if you asked for such a plan in quantity 1, I would strongly suspect that "We need 600 units, with the possibility of some thousands more over the coming years if things go well, SMS/GPRS only, low per-node usage" would get you a price that would be pretty favorable compared to rolling your own infrastructure.
If your plan is to put a battery of surveillance cameras on every streetlamp, or create some grand-unified-city-sensor-net, then cellular isn't going to be so hot; but it actually works pretty well for low frequency data reporting in settled areas...
The problem with the manufacturer's view(banks seem to approach ATM skimmers with the same naivete) is that it only takes somebody with technical skills to do the actual cryptoanalysis, followed by some opportunist with a shady supply chain to "productize" the hack into something that you'll be able to buy over the internet for a few hundred or thousand dollars and operate with about as much difficulty as the average MP3 player...
Obviously, if every thief had to make his own tools, the intersection between people who can analyze novel(if flawed) cryptosystems and then build attack hardware that puts out sufficiently clean RF output exploiting whatever vulnerabilities exist and the people who steal cars for a living is pretty much zero. Stealing cars just isn't lucrative enough, unless times are very hard for engineers of reasonable talent.
That isn't the way it works, though. The guys doing the break-n'-grab are just peons using tools created by others(apparently, with ATM skimmers, there are even "franchise" style setups, where you get access to the hardware in exchange for uploading a percentage of your skims to your sponsor...) And, building sophisticated electronic tools is a perfectly fine business, definitely worth the time of talented people, particularly ones in locales with weakish rule of law and relatively low local wages...
Analyzing a system's security by saying "eh, how many carjackers are cryptoanalysts?" is sort of like dismissing the risks of a bad neighborhood by saying "Eh, how many muggers are machinists and gunsmiths?" It is true that the answer is "Not many, possibly zero"; but that won't exactly keep you from getting shot.
The main push for touchscreen keyboards seems to be in applications where there is contention for screen space(and niche applications where a keyboard would be difficult to keep clean or unvandalized).
That pretty much means phones, handhelds, and maybe laptops(for laptops, you run into the problem that the comfortable position for a keyboard and the comfortable position for a screen are quite different, and switching between the two will take a disruptive several seconds...)
For anything without such contention, the idea that dirt-cheap and tactilely excellent physical keyswitches are going to be replaced by touch panels just so that the world can look more futuristic seems unlikely at best. Possibly, hard key labels will be replaced, in certain applications, with little screens, for application specific keymap/shortcut changes; but that is still a mechanical keyboard.
The real question determining the future of touchscreen "keyboards", to my mind, is whether haptics and such similar trickery advance faster than do technological alternatives that simply eliminate the screen-size contention. You have been able to get for some years, for instance, glasses with displays in them. Unfortunately, current models suffer from low resolution and making you look like a giant dork. However, with easy-to-imagine incremental improvements, you could get something that just looks like an ordinary pair of glasses/sunglasses; but can paint pixels on your eyes small enough that they aren't perceptible as pixels. If that became cheap, your phone could be 100% keyboard. Same thing would apply for various hypothetical microprojectors/folding screens/wireless display panels/etc/etc.
For whatever reason, the first wave of attempts to resolve the screen/keyboard space contention issue attacked the keyboard rather than the screen; but there is no reason, in principle, why you could not instead attack the screen in favor of a larger, clickier, nicer keyboard. We'll see whose tech develops faster...
You do have to pity the chaps responsible for repainting the runways of aircraft carriers whenever their orientation relative to the earth's magnetic field changes...
Another little historical irony... The word you mention is the root of the term "economics"; but, despite the fact that the root word explicitly applied to household management, one now must specify Home Economics, or something having to do with investment banking and currency arbitrage is assumed...
Given the debacle about "Windows Vista Capable" vs. "Windows Vista Ready" I, for one, trust that there will be no customer confusion regarding what software and peripherals are supported on Windows 8/ARM vs. Windows 8/x86...
While I suspect that MS will be delighted to gradually kill off CE in all but the most constrained environments, and go the way that everybody else is going(same/extremely similar kernel across all devices, with only library and UI differences to suit the form factor in question), since WinCE kind of sucked compared to NT, and NT's base system requirements are now pretty attainable for almost anything that is called a "SoC" rather than a "microcontroller".
.net stuff, which will theoretically benefit from the agnosticism of the CLR, is usually packaged behind one or more layers of x86 win32 installer wrappers. With some hacking, you can often get around those; but even the relative minority of beautifully clean .net stuff, with no win32 dependencies, architectural assumptions, or kernel drivers, will require a vendor re-release of the installer to be usable by Joe User on an NT/ARM system...
However, while I'm seeing the incremental savings and conveniences, I'm not seeing the "game changer"... NT/ARM will have an overwhelmingly tiny application base, unless MS does a truly heroic job of kicking third-party ass(look at how long it took to get the wintel vendors on board the relatively minor changes required to comply with Vista/7, and the number of applications that still aren't 64 bit, and the length of time, and discarding of peripherals, that it took for 64bit drivers to actually be available...) Even
Furthermore, while consolidating kernels will likely be a long term benefit, has kernel quality actually been the deciding factor in any of the skirmishes in the PDA, smartphone, or tablet wars thus far? It seems, from what I've been able to observe, that virtually all the fighting has been in the areas of UI quality, developer base, and hooks to various other ecosystems(ie. blackberries kind of suck; but they have BBM and an integrated email service, Windows Mobile was traditionally the best bet for Exchange integration and policy control for any IT shop that couldn't afford/support a full BES instance. Android has its Google overlord's services integrated, iDevices have iTunes and ITMS...)
Now that mobile devices are getting substantially more powerful than the hardware that NT was originally developed on, it seems perfectly reasonable to start prepping CE for the hospice and/or very low end embedded devices, and consolidating kernel work on NT; but without a new UI, userland legacy support, or similar, this seems about as significant as a version bump in the CE kernel. Will it be a better kernel? Certainly. Will that change the user experience? Not so clear...
I suspect two reasons: 1)(and most important): This is being published by Infoworld, ergo it focuses on IT stuff. 2) Much of the worst rot in IT is largely invisible to the layman.
Slow computers with styles that were pretty neato back in 2000 are obvious to the poor office drones who have to endure them; but anything that new can, largely, be forklift upgraded for the cost of the new systems and some grunt labor. Turning a 3 year desktop refresh cycle into a 5 year(or 7 year, *cough* *cough*) desktop refresh cycle doesn't make anybody happy(particularly once warranties run out, the scavenging and improvising begins); but is architecturally a small problem. You don't really accrue much "debt" over time. The cost will be "1 forklift upgrade to present day PCs" whether that upgrade takes you one generation ahead or three.
It's the complex software, the highly specialized proprietary industrial controller cards, and suchlike widgetry where there is real hell to pay, and most of that is invisible...
"Husbandry" is "the management of domestic affairs and resources".
Historically, both your wife and your livestock were classified under "domestic affairs and resources". Today, we tend to step carefully around the lingering etymological implication that "husbands" are those who engage in wife management, unless some other sort of husbandry is specified; but that is still why the word is what it is, even though women have actually been promoted to human status in a number of parts of the world.
Um... Happy Wednesday, everybody?
I really don't understand why these sorts of mistakes keep getting made.
From the perspective of game designers, Blizzard clearly has several advantages that will be difficult to overcome: 1. Already having had years to iterate and refine their game and engine. 2. A large paying audience, which means that the costs of implementing content X or upgrade Y are, per subscriber, tiny. Any game designer who thinks that those can be overcome by any means except doing something quite different(EVE: online, which went for a totally different player base, or any of the random browser-based grind games which go for being radically less expensive to produce and to play) is suffering from some serious hubris.
From the perspective of the management types, Blizzard clearly has several advantages that will be difficult to overcome: 1. Network effects: because so many people play WoW, if your friends play any MMORPG, that is probably the one. Barring specific hatred of some aspect of WoW, you will default to playing the one that your friends are playing. 2. Substantial costs already amortized: They have a (more or less) fully functional engine, stuffed full of art assets and flavortext and whatnot, all paid off. Any new player that they can attract is, other than some slight server and bandwidth load, basically free until they have ground through a fairly large chunk of gameworld. Any competitor is starting from a far weaker position, attempting to get their engine and flavor to playable levels on borrowed or advanced money. 3. Large player base over which to divide fixed costs: Games, like movies, are heavy on fixed costs. The engine costs the same even if noone ever uses it. That dialog tree costs the same even if noone ever reads it. The more subscribers you have, the lower your fixed costs per subscriber(or, alternately, the higher your quality for the same fixed cost per subscriber as your inferior competitors).
That's what I don't understand: All but the most delusionally hubristic game-design guys should easily realize that any 'me-too' attempt is going to go badly. They are probably inclined to be a bit optimistic about how original their work really is; but they should know that 'me-too' is suicide. At the same time, even the management types who know absolutely nothing about games should, purely with basic EC101 type considerations, be able to see that this is not a market where there is much room for imitative product. Blizzard hardly has a monopoly on "games"; but the idea that the market will support multiple "clearly WoW-like games" is hard to support.
Given that even outrageously hubristic game designers tend to depend on suits for money(at least until the game is ready to sell) and that even the dullest suits need a bunch of game designers willing to take the risk of having a real fuckup on their CV, I don't understand how these projects get off the ground. In almost any case, I would expect one party or the other to (sensibly) get cold feet quite early, if they even get the idea at all.
We are so eager to, um, impose absolutely no restrictions at all in a totally open and transparent manner that registration is now mandatory. If it weren't mandatory, we would be not imposing absolutely no restrictions at all, and you would actually be less free! Doesn't it all make perfect sense?
Unless the blackberry contains evidence of a real serious crime(importation of a few keys of colombia's finest, pile of dead hookers in the basement, etc.) That would be a terrible plan.
I'm pretty sure that destruction of evidence is a crime in virtually all jurisdictions, so they could nail you for that alone, not to mention the fact that a bunch of cops telling the judge that you freaked out and wiped your phone would probably be enough to get them a warrant to search their merry way through the rest of your stuff.
Most likely true. A good backdoor is a terrible thing to waste.
The only hypothetical concern(more likely with modestly high value suspects) would be backdoor + plausible cover story: ie. 1. Use backdoor to break system. 2. Tell media that we A)cleverly analyzed keyboard wear patterns with our science microscopes, all very technical... B)Built a customized password database based on an analysis of the subject's background and psychologically likely password sources. All very sophisticated, you understand...
In any case, I'd expect that, in your basic stop and bother operation, the cop would either give up, intimidate the passphrase out of them, or just have the phone dumped in the forensics queue for its entire relevant lifespan(incidentally, would terminating your contract, or having your carrier provision a different phone, both of which would stop the flow of evidence to your phone, potentially qualify as evidence tampering?)
*cough*"Quantico circuit"*cough*...
It sure would be an awful pity if the dashboard camera were to suffer a "technical malfunction" just before I ask you for your passphrase again, boy. People get hurt resisting arrest...
Unlike computers, where encryption is a fairly recent addition(obviously, computers have been capable of encryption for longer than cell phones have existed; but the idea that somebody's home directory is going to be encrypted and unusable with any degree of frequency is quite new, and still probably isn't true most of the time), the cellphones that do security at all often do it fairly well.
Particularly now that RIM has started selling cut-price blackberries to all and sundry to make up for their fall from grace in the elite-smartphone market, the odds that J. Scumbag is carrying a phone with encryption that was originally designed to appease Mr. Wallstreet's IT gestapo are quite good.
If RIM is secretly backdoored, or the unlock code is visible in touchscreen fingerprint grease and/or worn physical keys, that won't help; but the only thing a random beat cop is going to be able to do about it is either intimidate/beat you into divulging the passcode, or just seize the device for 24 months while Forensics works through the backlog.
Unless the suspect is a dumbass, or has a very downmarket phone, or is (gasp, shock, horror) actually just going about his business and hasn't considered having to secure his phone against cops, there are plenty of "you can beat the rap; but you can't beat the ride" style intimidation/harassment/de-facto perpetual seizure strategies; but actually getting any data could be pretty tricky...
How is the battery life after you install a pump for the coolant and a fan for the radiator?
My understanding is that(unlike the US where, in the case noted above, the Supreme Court ruled that 'creativity' was an essential quality, without which something could not fall under the scope of the constitution's authorization of copyright law), the UK is, at least to some degree, a 'sweat of one's brow' jurisdiction, where the difficulty and labor of compiling a work, even if purely mechanistic and uncreative, can make it copyright-protectable.
It could also just be that, while scraping works well on people who don't know or don't care, it is an area where the defender likely has the advantage(particularly for 'legitimate' operations, where tactics like using a cloud of compromised hosts in residential IP blocks to conceal your activity isn't really an option. All but the dullest admins can probably figure out something amusing to do with that 100Mb/s stream of requests from a single host in a known competitor's IP block... Particularly for something like banking or insurance, if you want to offer the service, you have to be right nearly all the time. If the target is fucking with you, that can be difficult.