Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the Department of Homeland Security ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Unisys alone makes over one million dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the Department of Homeland Security ransom for.....One Point Seven BILLION DOLLARS!!
... and another stupid Woz story results. Can't the guy get a second geek handler to keep him from looking like a dope every time the first one gets a cold or something?
1) Lobby Congress with many millions of dollars over many years so that your industry, an entirely artificial creation of oligopolies over which you have no influence, can fuck up your life with their piss poor security and even random errors in their "system"
2) Watch as consumers get their lives fucked up when bad guys exploit an entirely different but also screwed up monopoly that entered your life and over which you have no control or influence (Windows)
3) Charge people a fee every time they need to "start" and "stop" your "service" to protect them from item 2
4) Profit!
Hrm... damage. Is that what we call it now, when AAPL shares continue to rise? I bet the shareholders would like more and more of that damage. Is that "Rat Tart?" Can I have his spam? I like spam.
Yes, it's ending. The reason it will end is because handheld wireless devices will (really already have) become powerful enough to do what most people want to do with their computer, which is communicate in various ways, play games, find information on the web. Look at people in their teens and twenties to see what's happening, they are ahead of this curve. They have cell phones, not land lines. They might have a laptop, but they use it occasionally. They spend a lot more time communicating with their cell phone than their laptop. Banks will start optimizing their online account services to work from these handheld devices. The overly complex and clunky PC will be all but abandoned by ordinary users. Nobody will think that they need a PC like they need other "standard" appliances in a home.
Among those that do use laptops, they tend to be used as glorified typewriters. Many of them don't even have a real email address, due to the effect of spam they've migrated en masse to private email-like systems such as MySpace and FaceBook. (At first blush there may appear to be a hint of irony there, migrating their email communications to MySpace to get away from spam? Since the spam isn't in their inbox, it's not a pain, and it's not really ironic when you realize they've traded annoying spam for other forms of spamvertising that are easier to ignore. )
Sure, there may long be a workstation market that serves power users, but most people are not power users.
iPhone doesn't currently support picture-via-SMS messaging. Although I would like that feature, its lack doesn't seem to bother people all that much in the U.S. because SMS picture service *still* doesn't work reliably between different telcos. The messages sometimes go missing no matter what the handset is on either end. iPhone users send plenty of pictures via email which works no matter who you send it to and no matter if you are on same or different telcos. Presumably this feature could be added to iPhone via a software update. Presumably also, Apple chose not to include it precisely because it isn't yet reliable (cuts down on tech support calls).
Video messaging is also not supported on current iPhone. iPhone camera doesn't record videos, either. Presumably these features could be added via a software update, although the camera is on the wrong side (back) of the phone for the typical "Hi, Mom!" phone vids so I don't expect to see this added until future iPhone hardware updates.
Although I agree with you regarding the particular narrow broadcast-only function of a current generation television network, I should probably clarify a bit. I was not really referring to the technical details, but rather the support that those technical details provide to the business model, which is after all why the broadcasters are afraid of a modern competitor and will move to block it if they can. They will not and cannot provide modern services on their current technology. Google and others certainly could provide broadcast services on a packet network, and link those broadcasts to all manner of fascinating interactive services as well. Sure, for raw broadcast performance the current tv networks are very efficient. However, the businesses are *not* efficient at providing any interesting service and they are not efficient at increasing shareholder value by bringing new services based on their expensive infrastructure to market. They are held back by both their imaginations and their technology. I was perhaps not clear on that point.
Anything the broadcasters can do, a packet network can do better. A new wireless broadband network which spanned the country threatens to not only provide entirely new services which could beam a Star Trek like future right into your pocket, but also to slurp the last bit of creme from their audiences. The broadcasters know they are not innovative enough to survive a technology revolution like this. They will be relegated to milking the declining revenue streams from their aging content libraries, until, finally, they are no longer relevant and have no influence. They will be bought by Google or some upstart that hasn't been founded yet.
Ooops... I meant to be a smart alec, but also to be informative... then I hit "submit" instead of "preview" before I was finished. Here's are two interesting articles, submitted for serious consideration on the (off topic) question that you raised.
Mr. Krugman is an economist and writes regularly and eloquently about health care issues. You may or may not agree with his policy recommendations, but his analysis of the issues with our current system is always interesting. Health care is more expensive than it probably should be for a few reasons. One is that our system in the United States is based on the concept of health insurance. This drives up costs in several ways, some of which are explored by the two articles above.
Moderator Dude. Like, this was so totally funny. Haven't you ever watched The Colbert Report? Who hates America more, you or the asshat who trolls about the iPhone killing people because it's a cell phone? Cell phones don't kill people. Morons kill people.
iPhone isn't the only phone to support traditional IMAP and POP3 using a polling or "pull" protocols to fetch the email. This is a useful feature. Some people want support for these because their email server (which they may not control) doesn't support a more modern mobile-friendly protocol like Push IMAP or Lemonade, yet. These people shouldn't be punished by a $4800 dollar phone bill. The rates are insane. The billing policies are screwed up. The phone software should warn you somehow. There are several contributing factors to this problem, but really, push vs. pull email isn't the biggest one.
Also, iPhone supports a push email service, although it is only offered through Yahoo email at present, and is believed to be a proprietary protocol rather than the somewhat open P-IMAP or fully open Lemonade. (iPhone users should all start bugging Apple to expand their support for Lemonade and P-IMAP, both. It's curious that Apple's own.Mac service doesn't even offer push email.)
For users who get $4800 worth of email while roaming, push email won't solve this problem anyway. They'll just get billed for lots of emails pushed to their gadget when they come in, rather than pulled from the server by the gadget at regular polling intervals. Maybe the bill would be slightly reduced, but maybe not. Email trickles in all day long. Would he really have been that much happier with a $3000 phone bill? Or even a $1000 phone phone bill? I doubt it.
The really sad part is that a lot of that expensive email bill is probably for spam. I wonder if phone companies (who also happen to be major ISPs) are not very aggressive about stopping spam spewing botnets because they generate a revenue stream for the telco when we all have to pay to download spam (at least that remainder spam that leaks through several layers of filtering) to our mobile devices.
There is no reason to believe that the Verizon billing system ever had this particular issue. However, if it did, its very likely that Verizon would have solved these problems a couple years ago when they started rolling our their EVDO network. At that time the early adopter EVDO customers were laptop users who did use the service to surf the web and send/receive email extensively. Of course, there is also no reason to suspect that the AT&T billing system had this issue.
Regarding bad press, I'd say there has been plenty of bad press about both of these iPhone issues. I was merely pondering why these issues only showed up with the iPhone, when in point of fact, AT&T have sold several million WIndows Mobile and other devices that, in theory, offer their users the same services. If those users had been, oh, routinely using the data access features to surf the web and so forth they would have seen 300 page bills and the problem would have been fixed ages ago. Clearly it wasn't. I find that interesting. I think we'll see a few more of these types of issues crop up as the iPhone population grows, but also as other new phones come on the market which make it easier for people to actually use these network services.
Yes, I think lots of devices in hospitals go through very long design cycles. There undoubtedly many devices in hospitals today which suffer from design assumptions that are no longer true (e.g. people now carry transmitting radios with them everywhere). I'm aware that it's a problem, I simply suggest that the right place to fix the problem is in the device design with proper shielding. Relying on the millions of worried people to remember when they can and can't use their device, and relying on them to know how to turn it off when they have other things weighing heavily on their minds is a poor strategy which can only fail, over and over and over.
Nah, old words. Just took them out for a walk to amuse myself. The phrase "adroit and vigilant" will be recognized by students of political theory or the cold war. It was used in 1947 by George F. Kennan, the architect of the "containment" strategy. Here's the original paper: The Sources of Soviet Conduct.
I suspect this problem is related in a curious way to the 300 page phone bill issue, in that it reveals billing-process (or, arguably, "user training") issues which are unintended consequences of the success of some of the design goals of the device. This may sound a bit odd, but let me explain.
Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone
People have been using their iPhone for weeks without realizing that there is a difference between sleep/wake and power-off. That's really pretty interesting. iPhone is not different from other devices in maintaining this distinction, PalmOS devices have it, for example. However, with a Palm OS device one learns pretty quickly about the difference because they lock up and you gotta reboot 'em. Even people who have owned an iPhone since June 29 may never have had to power cycle their iPhone, and may not realize that the little Sleep/Wake button is not a "Power Off" button. It would be pretty hard to own a PalmOS device for eight or nine weeks without learning that distinction. Probably nobody at Apple thought of that, because they are all geeks and they are intimately familiar with the intended behavior of the device (e.g. how to turn it off when roaming) so they never saw this happen.
The really interesting part is that nobody at AT&T realized this would happen to people, because it probably doesn't happen to other people using other devices. Why not? Well, it certainly isn't because they don't have devices that automatically fetch IMAP or POP email. It's because they were trained by other quirks of the device to learn the difference between OFF and Sleep right away. This "trained" the users to overcome deficiencies in the AT&T billing process (and policies, really). It shouldn't cost that much to use your iPhone anywhere in the world at this point. Those rates are "rape and pillage" rates and phone companies will need to fix that by coming up with more reasonable roaming policies and prices.
300 page phone bill
It's interesting that none of the trade press analysts like that keen John C. Dvorak dude haven't stopped to ponder why nobody else in the history of AT&T customer smart phone users ever got a 300 page phone bill. The billing system was the same, iPhone users were just a type of customer with a type of device in the system.
As with the sleep/wake issue, again here nobody at AT&T realized this would happen because users of other smart phone devices are clearly not using them the way iPhone users use the iPhone. iPhone users caught AT&T by surprise because they are clearly surfing the web more often than users of other smart phones, as evidenced by the scale of the paper bill problem. This difference will probably start showing up in the web browser usage statistics within a few months once there are a couple million iPhone users, enough to compare to other platforms. The stats will reveal undeniably different usage patterns, as though it were not a pain in the ass and they could actually read the web pages they fetched.
These issues are really more interesting than they seem on the surface, not merely as iPhone/AT&T/Apple screw-ups (which they admittedly are) but as a really curious class of screw-ups: growing pains. iPhone is causing AT&T some pain because it's bringing a whole bunch of new users to their expensive cell network services who actually use the service, not merely pay for having the service available for rare occasions where the need is so high it overcomes the pain in the ass factor. Sure, there were a handful of geek Treo users who checked email and surfed web pages every day, but they probably turned their paper-bills off after the first big one and moved on, problem "solved" for them because they really were gadget geeks.
Suddenly AT&T has a million ordinary non-geek users surfing the web on their phone every day (including google maps). That's what broke their billing system. The sleep/wake issue is just like that. A million smartphone users who haven't had to power cycle their device in two months so they don't even realize that sleep mode isn't "off". It hasn't happened before, apparently.
Oh, dude's not alone. I'd much rather have hospital equipment designed such that it doesn't malfunction in the presence of a cell phone, than I would rely on the adroit and vigilant shepherding of electronic gadgets by worried family and friends who come to visit me in hospital. In this situation you fix the problem in the place where it's relatively easy to fix in a reliable way (i.e. by shielding the electronic gear from other signals at manufacturing time) rather in than in a zillion places (random heads of random unpredictable people) which are, every single one of them, prone to human error.
Since you seem so inclined, I suggest you instead thank the gods that these decisions are not up to you. The fact that other people make them might save your life one day.
A quick Google search shows that there seem to be studies about lighting and crime. Sure the topic probably merits additional study, but discounting the work that has been done based on an unsourced sentence leading a wikipedia article probably isn't helping further the discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes there is:
Solar Power Satellite
Reinventing the Solar Power Satellite
Dr. Evil: Here's the plan. We get the warhead, and we hold the Department of Homeland Security ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
No.2: Ahem...well, don't you think we should maybe ask for *more* than a million dollars? I mean, a million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Unisys alone makes over one million dollars a year!
Dr. Evil: Really?
No.2: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Evil: That's a number. Okay then. We hold the Department of Homeland Security ransom for.....One Point Seven BILLION DOLLARS!!
... and another stupid Woz story results. Can't the guy get a second geek handler to keep him from looking like a dope every time the first one gets a cold or something?
1) Lobby Congress with many millions of dollars over many years so that your industry, an entirely artificial creation of oligopolies over which you have no influence, can fuck up your life with their piss poor security and even random errors in their "system" 2) Watch as consumers get their lives fucked up when bad guys exploit an entirely different but also screwed up monopoly that entered your life and over which you have no control or influence (Windows) 3) Charge people a fee every time they need to "start" and "stop" your "service" to protect them from item 2 4) Profit!
Hrm... damage. Is that what we call it now, when AAPL shares continue to rise? I bet the shareholders would like more and more of that damage. Is that "Rat Tart?" Can I have his spam? I like spam.
So are you going to enlighten us as to the statements he made which were incorrect, due to his bias? Ah, no.
Yes, it's ending. The reason it will end is because handheld wireless devices will (really already have) become powerful enough to do what most people want to do with their computer, which is communicate in various ways, play games, find information on the web. Look at people in their teens and twenties to see what's happening, they are ahead of this curve. They have cell phones, not land lines. They might have a laptop, but they use it occasionally. They spend a lot more time communicating with their cell phone than their laptop. Banks will start optimizing their online account services to work from these handheld devices. The overly complex and clunky PC will be all but abandoned by ordinary users. Nobody will think that they need a PC like they need other "standard" appliances in a home.
Among those that do use laptops, they tend to be used as glorified typewriters. Many of them don't even have a real email address, due to the effect of spam they've migrated en masse to private email-like systems such as MySpace and FaceBook. (At first blush there may appear to be a hint of irony there, migrating their email communications to MySpace to get away from spam? Since the spam isn't in their inbox, it's not a pain, and it's not really ironic when you realize they've traded annoying spam for other forms of spamvertising that are easier to ignore. )
Sure, there may long be a workstation market that serves power users, but most people are not power users.
Sure, he uses the word "fucktard" but he does use it correctly.
iPhone doesn't currently support picture-via-SMS messaging. Although I would like that feature, its lack doesn't seem to bother people all that much in the U.S. because SMS picture service *still* doesn't work reliably between different telcos. The messages sometimes go missing no matter what the handset is on either end. iPhone users send plenty of pictures via email which works no matter who you send it to and no matter if you are on same or different telcos. Presumably this feature could be added to iPhone via a software update. Presumably also, Apple chose not to include it precisely because it isn't yet reliable (cuts down on tech support calls).
Video messaging is also not supported on current iPhone. iPhone camera doesn't record videos, either. Presumably these features could be added via a software update, although the camera is on the wrong side (back) of the phone for the typical "Hi, Mom!" phone vids so I don't expect to see this added until future iPhone hardware updates.
Good grief. We all, us iPhone users, carry iPhone in our pockets. Get a real nit to pick.
Although I agree with you regarding the particular narrow broadcast-only function of a current generation television network, I should probably clarify a bit. I was not really referring to the technical details, but rather the support that those technical details provide to the business model, which is after all why the broadcasters are afraid of a modern competitor and will move to block it if they can. They will not and cannot provide modern services on their current technology. Google and others certainly could provide broadcast services on a packet network, and link those broadcasts to all manner of fascinating interactive services as well. Sure, for raw broadcast performance the current tv networks are very efficient. However, the businesses are *not* efficient at providing any interesting service and they are not efficient at increasing shareholder value by bringing new services based on their expensive infrastructure to market. They are held back by both their imaginations and their technology. I was perhaps not clear on that point.
It might be more along the lines of...
39% of dotheads begin posting without reading the article at all.
8% of dotheads read the wrong article and post anyway.
Anything the broadcasters can do, a packet network can do better. A new wireless broadband network which spanned the country threatens to not only provide entirely new services which could beam a Star Trek like future right into your pocket, but also to slurp the last bit of creme from their audiences. The broadcasters know they are not innovative enough to survive a technology revolution like this. They will be relegated to milking the declining revenue streams from their aging content libraries, until, finally, they are no longer relevant and have no influence. They will be bought by Google or some upstart that hasn't been founded yet.
Ooops... I meant to be a smart alec, but also to be informative... then I hit "submit" instead of "preview" before I was finished. Here's are two interesting articles, submitted for serious consideration on the (off topic) question that you raised.
Paul Krugman: Death by Insurance
Million-Dollar Murray
Mr. Krugman is an economist and writes regularly and eloquently about health care issues. You may or may not agree with his policy recommendations, but his analysis of the issues with our current system is always interesting. Health care is more expensive than it probably should be for a few reasons. One is that our system in the United States is based on the concept of health insurance. This drives up costs in several ways, some of which are explored by the two articles above.
Heh... I wonder if you're one of those guys who thinks they understand why medical treatment is so expensive.
Moderator Dude. Like, this was so totally funny. Haven't you ever watched The Colbert Report? Who hates America more, you or the asshat who trolls about the iPhone killing people because it's a cell phone? Cell phones don't kill people. Morons kill people.
- iPhone isn't the only phone to support traditional IMAP and POP3 using a polling or "pull" protocols to fetch the email. This is a useful feature. Some people want support for these because their email server (which they may not control) doesn't support a more modern mobile-friendly protocol like Push IMAP or Lemonade, yet. These people shouldn't be punished by a $4800 dollar phone bill. The rates are insane. The billing policies are screwed up. The phone software should warn you somehow. There are several contributing factors to this problem, but really, push vs. pull email isn't the biggest one.
- Also, iPhone supports a push email service, although it is only offered through Yahoo email at present, and is believed to be a proprietary protocol rather than the somewhat open P-IMAP or fully open Lemonade. (iPhone users should all start bugging Apple to expand their support for Lemonade and P-IMAP, both. It's curious that Apple's own
.Mac service doesn't even offer push email.)
- For users who get $4800 worth of email while roaming, push email won't solve this problem anyway. They'll just get billed for lots of emails pushed to their gadget when they come in, rather than pulled from the server by the gadget at regular polling intervals. Maybe the bill would be slightly reduced, but maybe not. Email trickles in all day long. Would he really have been that much happier with a $3000 phone bill? Or even a $1000 phone phone bill? I doubt it.
The really sad part is that a lot of that expensive email bill is probably for spam. I wonder if phone companies (who also happen to be major ISPs) are not very aggressive about stopping spam spewing botnets because they generate a revenue stream for the telco when we all have to pay to download spam (at least that remainder spam that leaks through several layers of filtering) to our mobile devices.To turn the radio off one goes to the settings panel and toggles the Airplane Mode. It's the very first setting on that screen.
There is no reason to believe that the Verizon billing system ever had this particular issue. However, if it did, its very likely that Verizon would have solved these problems a couple years ago when they started rolling our their EVDO network. At that time the early adopter EVDO customers were laptop users who did use the service to surf the web and send/receive email extensively. Of course, there is also no reason to suspect that the AT&T billing system had this issue.
Regarding bad press, I'd say there has been plenty of bad press about both of these iPhone issues. I was merely pondering why these issues only showed up with the iPhone, when in point of fact, AT&T have sold several million WIndows Mobile and other devices that, in theory, offer their users the same services. If those users had been, oh, routinely using the data access features to surf the web and so forth they would have seen 300 page bills and the problem would have been fixed ages ago. Clearly it wasn't. I find that interesting. I think we'll see a few more of these types of issues crop up as the iPhone population grows, but also as other new phones come on the market which make it easier for people to actually use these network services.
Yes, I think lots of devices in hospitals go through very long design cycles. There undoubtedly many devices in hospitals today which suffer from design assumptions that are no longer true (e.g. people now carry transmitting radios with them everywhere). I'm aware that it's a problem, I simply suggest that the right place to fix the problem is in the device design with proper shielding. Relying on the millions of worried people to remember when they can and can't use their device, and relying on them to know how to turn it off when they have other things weighing heavily on their minds is a poor strategy which can only fail, over and over and over.
Nah, old words. Just took them out for a walk to amuse myself. The phrase "adroit and vigilant" will be recognized by students of political theory or the cold war. It was used in 1947 by George F. Kennan, the architect of the "containment" strategy. Here's the original paper: The Sources of Soviet Conduct.
- Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone
- 300 page phone bill
These issues are really more interesting than they seem on the surface, not merely as iPhone/AT&T/Apple screw-ups (which they admittedly are) but as a really curious class of screw-ups: growing pains. iPhone is causing AT&T some pain because it's bringing a whole bunch of new users to their expensive cell network services who actually use the service, not merely pay for having the service available for rare occasions where the need is so high it overcomes the pain in the ass factor. Sure, there were a handful of geek Treo users who checked email and surfed web pages every day, but they probably turned their paper-bills off after the first big one and moved on, problem "solved" for them because they really were gadget geeks.People have been using their iPhone for weeks without realizing that there is a difference between sleep/wake and power-off. That's really pretty interesting. iPhone is not different from other devices in maintaining this distinction, PalmOS devices have it, for example. However, with a Palm OS device one learns pretty quickly about the difference because they lock up and you gotta reboot 'em. Even people who have owned an iPhone since June 29 may never have had to power cycle their iPhone, and may not realize that the little Sleep/Wake button is not a "Power Off" button. It would be pretty hard to own a PalmOS device for eight or nine weeks without learning that distinction. Probably nobody at Apple thought of that, because they are all geeks and they are intimately familiar with the intended behavior of the device (e.g. how to turn it off when roaming) so they never saw this happen.
The really interesting part is that nobody at AT&T realized this would happen to people, because it probably doesn't happen to other people using other devices. Why not? Well, it certainly isn't because they don't have devices that automatically fetch IMAP or POP email. It's because they were trained by other quirks of the device to learn the difference between OFF and Sleep right away. This "trained" the users to overcome deficiencies in the AT&T billing process (and policies, really). It shouldn't cost that much to use your iPhone anywhere in the world at this point. Those rates are "rape and pillage" rates and phone companies will need to fix that by coming up with more reasonable roaming policies and prices.
It's interesting that none of the trade press analysts like that keen John C. Dvorak dude haven't stopped to ponder why nobody else in the history of AT&T customer smart phone users ever got a 300 page phone bill. The billing system was the same, iPhone users were just a type of customer with a type of device in the system.
As with the sleep/wake issue, again here nobody at AT&T realized this would happen because users of other smart phone devices are clearly not using them the way iPhone users use the iPhone. iPhone users caught AT&T by surprise because they are clearly surfing the web more often than users of other smart phones, as evidenced by the scale of the paper bill problem. This difference will probably start showing up in the web browser usage statistics within a few months once there are a couple million iPhone users, enough to compare to other platforms. The stats will reveal undeniably different usage patterns, as though it were not a pain in the ass and they could actually read the web pages they fetched.
Suddenly AT&T has a million ordinary non-geek users surfing the web on their phone every day (including google maps). That's what broke their billing system. The sleep/wake issue is just like that. A million smartphone users who haven't had to power cycle their device in two months so they don't even realize that sleep mode isn't "off". It hasn't happened before, apparently.
Oh, dude's not alone. I'd much rather have hospital equipment designed such that it doesn't malfunction in the presence of a cell phone, than I would rely on the adroit and vigilant shepherding of electronic gadgets by worried family and friends who come to visit me in hospital. In this situation you fix the problem in the place where it's relatively easy to fix in a reliable way (i.e. by shielding the electronic gear from other signals at manufacturing time) rather in than in a zillion places (random heads of random unpredictable people) which are, every single one of them, prone to human error.
Since you seem so inclined, I suggest you instead thank the gods that these decisions are not up to you. The fact that other people make them might save your life one day.
A quick Google search shows that there seem to be studies about lighting and crime. Sure the topic probably merits additional study, but discounting the work that has been done based on an unsourced sentence leading a wikipedia article probably isn't helping further the discussion.
Here are a couple papers which each include several references:
THE EFFECT OF BETTER STREET LIGHTING ON CRIME AND FEAR: A REVIEW
EVIDENCE-BASED CRIME PREVENTION: SCIENTIFIC BASIS, TRENDS, RESULTS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR CANADA
I'm all in favor of a darker sky, but we are not going to win many converts if we keep lying about something that can be so trivially debunked.