You're suggesting that the 6 hours per household per day of TV watching, across over 100 million households, is practical to do via TCP/IP, a dozen routers, and thousands of miles of cable, but not practical to do via one giant tower that lets them pluck it from the air?
Consider this: in the US the average household watches 6.8 hours of TV per day, and there are some 110 million households. That's 748 million hours of programming per day. We will say by some grace that it's concentrated on half of the day (its probably a lot closer to the same 6 hours +/-3) but let's say 12. That's 60 million 'channels' of programming to distribute to each user. Even if they want to watch different things the content is probably coming from a handful of sources (since it's mostly either live or 'new to the ecosystem' and can't be cached.) So let's say there are 60 distribution centers each that need to manage a million TV sessions. If we figure maybe 1/4 is in high def (probably an understatement) that leaves us with about (quick hand waving math, 250kbyte/s for SDTV and 2000kbyte/s for HDTV) 600 GBytes/sec of content that needs to be streamed from each hub.
Gray’s findings run counter to the notion that only those blessed with heightened willpower or self-control are capable of heroism, suggesting instead that simply attempting heroic deeds can confer personal power.
See? You can will yourself to have heroic physical capabilities! Batman *isn't* bullshit! He may have bought his fame, and all his cool gadgets, but that doesn't stop him from willing himself into a superhero. Thank you, modern science, for seeing the light.
So before the iPhone came out, and there were full touchscreen phones on the market that weren't selling well compared to the number of dumbphones out there, did you waste any breath to proclaim "You know, this full touchscreen thing, it's just not as important to most people"... No? That's what I thought. And when high-dpi phones and other handhelds came out, for some reason when they didnt fly off the shelves where were you with "you know this whole high-dpi on a phone just isn't as important to most people"?
You can take *this* to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't important to Apple, and therefore not important to their followers. There are a ton of people who see through their noise, though, and that's why Apple is still a niche player when it comes to smartphones. You can pry my properly multitasking phone from my cold, dead hand.
Because it's not "like looking at print on paper"... if you hold the thing a x inches your retina will not be able to distinguish the pixels. The same went for the Droid (albeit at a slightly farther distance) and the same has applied for any LCD at any point in history. It's not as good as print, for one because modern printers use 600 dpi; 300dpi is 80's technology. For two because even when you print at a given DPI, there is chemical dithering that takes place to make the edges indistinguishable. A LCD cannot do that, even if it too ran at 600dpi.
But no, all of a sudden Apple declares "this is the most pixel density you will ever need" and people are falling over themselves proclaiming how awesome he is for coming up with the concept. It may be the highest density display, it may look fantastic, but get a grip already. There will be another phone in another year that does it all better.
This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?
Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.
How about using the BitDefender rescue disk, (available in ISO format, but portable to a USB key) and asking the customer to reboot the PC and allow it to boot entirely from the USB key?
Licensing may be a grey area on that one though, depending on how widely you are distributing it.
One problem with using a windows application is that it may be up against a virus that is entrenched and will simply stop the cleaning from taking place. If this is the case, you need something that will activate on boot, or better yet boot on it's own (like the Bitdefender.)
There is probably a more elegant solution though, since this is a highly controlled environment. Maybe more restrictive user level controls are in order, forcing the users to log in with minimal privileges?
Let's see, at 20 cents a message that test only cost them $16,000 worth of messages! And they managed to move all of 10MB... If my math is right. They should just spring for the pay-as-you-go data plan at the bargain basement cost of $1.99 a MB, they would cut the "cost" down to 20 bucks!
Are rural, developing countries really selling unlimited txting plans for affordable rates? If so, why is it that we let carriers in the developed world get away with robbing us blind?
You quoted the guy out of context and made up a nice little straw man out of it.
Wow, just like you are trying to say that I insisted somewhere that personally auditing all source code is the only way to be sure an open source app isn't malicious? I see what you did there!
I used code auditing as an example, since it should never be taken for granted that something is secure unless you or *someone you trust* has audited it. You basically mirrored my argument by assuming the opposite, and then tried to accuse *me* of engaging in a turf war. How cute.
Ask yourself this: Are a few web pages and emails worth 30 bucks a month? Yes, there are a ton of shit apps, for Iphone and even Android and Blackberry. However, there are plenty of useful, non-web apps that can really add value to your smartphone. One I love to death that serves as a good example is WeatherBug for blackberry. Instead of visiting a web page if I want to know the weather, it automatically updates an icon on my main screen with the current conditions and forecast, and will download more information in an instant since it's just transferring a few bytes instead of a whole page. And, it will automatically ping me with severe weather alerts, without having to manage an email subscription and with the ability to take priority over other notifications. Integration is key, many apps don't bother and are very well worthless. The ones that get it right make the phone better even when you're doing something else with it. That's where the value comes from.
Have you ever looked at the splash screen of two different programs, saw that one was GPLed and the source was published, and thought to your self "well I will use that one, it must be secure, it's open source". This is what the OP was suggesting by dismissing all open source software as inherently secure with the line "If its open source, is it really a threat?"
That's what you were defending, suggesting it's "beating a dead horse" to question the security of open source programs since, after all, someone COULD look at the source so the author must have been 100% honest!
Yee haw! Because we can expect that any malicious app will pop to the foreground and proclaim "hahah stupid user, your private info has been raped by this app!" and the secret will be out after the first person runs it. The open source community will then come to the rescue, fix the person's phone, and track down the author and chop off his fingers so he can never write bad code again.
Assuming that just because it's open source it will be malware-free (as the OP did) is just as stupid as assuming that closed source commercial software will be secure because someone is getting paid to write it well.
Both ideas are pretty f*ing stupid, how hard is that to miss?
Preview button hard to find? If I take a stab at what you meant, you again tried to insist that someone said "the data has been exposed to malicious parties". This is not what anyone has yet said.
Let me take one last chance at explaining something that is apparently not as simple as it seems. The data is still where it belongs (on your phone) but the opportunity for a breach is at the mercy of the app authors; a few errant lines of code in an otherwise innocuous app could result in a complete leak of all the private data on the phone. This is what they are saying, in an admittedly sensationalist way. The app creation and installation process, as it is today, is ripe for a clever malware author to take advantage of less educated users. To insist that the problem is nonexistent and merely "flawed logic" is ignorant to the extreme.
This would have been funny if not for your epically bad subject line, which suggests that you thought the article was about *five* apps that expose data.
It was the Cnet article that made the leap from the report, which stated "x number of apps have the ability to access information in a way that could be harmful to keeping it private", all the way to "20 percent of android apps expose your private information". Actually, both of these things are true since they never really said to what the information was exposed to (in this case, it's simply the internals of a third party app).
Seems like you fail at over-reaching. Smobile started it, Cnet ran with it, Slashdot wound it up into a flame-filled frenzy, and you slam dunked it with "1. So because something has the ability to do something, that means that it DOES do it?" which no one ever specifically said was the case (they said it was possible).
If 10,000 other people have installed it and everybody rates it 5-stars and there are no issues mentioned with it on the web, you can probably guess that it's not doing anything nasty with your information.
The way my mind works - when I read this, I couldn't help but think: "What, if any, kind of permissions warning do you get if the app is capable of going on to the market as you and rating itself 5 stars in your name?"
Disclaimer for the humor impaired: Mind you this is more of a joke than a suggestion of something that's at all likely.
His argument was laughable. You make the exact point that's needed; there is nothing to stop 10,000 genuinely happy, completely ignorant users from "loving" an app that makes fart noises while it secretly gathers contact lists or does other nefarious things completely behind the scenes. The users won't know there's a problem until it's too late; their private data will be in the wild. Then, all the 1-scores or "report app" dings that the app gets won't get their data back.
Assuming that a gaggle of non-experts can give you a good assessment of the security of the app is ludicrous. Maybe, if there were a "score by developers" rating where other registered devs that have looked at the code and given it a brief audit for security purposes, it would put my mind at ease a *little*.
Gosh, if only there were some sort of knowledgeable repository for information, sorted into easily searched pieces to allow for quickly findingwhatyouwant...
You could have just said "the dictionary is wrong" if that's what you were getting at. What are you getting at? I've heard homeless people give more convincing arguments.
Let me simplify it, irony is "the opposite of what you expect". An ironic situation (as this one is) is one where you would expect the legitimate content publishers to be the ones creating convincing, effective distribution methods but it is instead those that steal the content that produce the most compelling distribution methods.
so the 10.000km^2 of solar cells in the sahara will increase the temperature of the earth by less than a thousandth of a degree centigrade.
Wow, you really had me going there. Right until the end when you completely ignored the original question (regional cooling) and instead jumped straight to global warming (through decreased albedo). How about looking at the albedo of desert sand (which should be somewhat high) and then at the effective albedo of a solar thermal plant? The locally dissipated energy is probably pretty close to the background albedo, yielding no net change in local ambient temperature. If there were one (and local temps went down), it would only be good for the system (until clouds formed) thanks to the increased efficiency of the thermal conversion process.
Yeah, look at that poor, deprived United States, with their non-existant natural resources. They sure made something out of nothing. </sarcasm>
It's highly interesting (to me at least) to investigate what happens to countries with 'new money' like Oil deposits, coal, diamonds, whatever. They pretty universally fail to prosper in a meaningful way, with the exception of a few lucky Arabian states that have borderline prosperity thanks to ungodly amounts of money being spent on infrastructure like skyscrapers and resorts. But why is the success rate so low? Are these resources truly cursed? Surely, not every nation blessed with a resource ends up wasting it all before it does them any good?
One of the more interesting ideas was covered on a recent episode of Planet Money, wherein they built a case for simply taking every dollar earned from the resource and dividing it equally amongst every last citizen. This would prevent the government from spending the money in any way it wanted to, and require them to again coax revenue from the people in the form of taxation. Taxation with representation, it is argued, is the best way for citizens to be engaged in government.
And this goes back to the thesis that "free money" from natural resources is a bad thing. "Free money" when it's piped straight to the government coffers and they do with it what they please, is the bad thing. The US is quite disgustingly blessed with "free money" resources, from oil (most of which is gone, admittedly) to fertile land, coal, sunshine, timber, you name it. And what happened with that little experiment? The money, specifically, did not go to the government. It went to the people, and the government had to earn it. As a result, the people prospered and the government was kept in check (for most of the 200-some-odd-year experiment, at least). But that's enough spoilers, I won't tell you how it ends.
True, Arabic is the official language, but I have yet to meet a Moroccan not speaking French. As per Wikipedia, it's the country's "second unofficial language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco#Languages
What is Morocco's first unofficial language? Wiki link, pls. kthxbai
In the last year or so there's been a new battery research story every month promising longer lasting batteries that are smaller and usually cheaper. Yet the most advanced you can buy are still just play Lithium Polymer batteries which seem to power my Android phone for about 15 minutes.
How weird. The tiny lithium battery I put in my smartphone a year ago still powers it for at least a day's worth of use on a full charge, if not more depending on how little browsing and video watching I do. I won't spoil the ending and tell you what kind of phone I have; I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And for what it's worth, it may feel like an eternity but no less than 10 years ago we had no such fancy-fangled inexpensive lithium batteries for our phones/laptops. If you wanted one, it was gonna cost you, it wasn't going to hold much energy, and it would be dead with about 6 months of regular use. Today's very cheap, highly durable, very energetic lithium polymer batteries are the result of continuous un-sexy research that made headlines in the 80s and 90s, but is still undergoing a lot of change and improvement. The next revolution in battery storage will probably also happen without much fanfare; I hope your phone holds out until then!
Slashdot Mirror
You're suggesting that the 6 hours per household per day of TV watching, across over 100 million households, is practical to do via TCP/IP, a dozen routers, and thousands of miles of cable, but not practical to do via one giant tower that lets them pluck it from the air?
Consider this: in the US the average household watches 6.8 hours of TV per day, and there are some 110 million households. That's 748 million hours of programming per day. We will say by some grace that it's concentrated on half of the day (its probably a lot closer to the same 6 hours +/-3) but let's say 12. That's 60 million 'channels' of programming to distribute to each user. Even if they want to watch different things the content is probably coming from a handful of sources (since it's mostly either live or 'new to the ecosystem' and can't be cached.) So let's say there are 60 distribution centers each that need to manage a million TV sessions. If we figure maybe 1/4 is in high def (probably an understatement) that leaves us with about (quick hand waving math, 250kbyte/s for SDTV and 2000kbyte/s for HDTV) 600 GBytes/sec of content that needs to be streamed from each hub.
Sounds efficient.
Gray’s findings run counter to the notion that only those blessed with heightened willpower or self-control are capable of heroism, suggesting instead that simply attempting heroic deeds can confer personal power.
See? You can will yourself to have heroic physical capabilities! Batman *isn't* bullshit! He may have bought his fame, and all his cool gadgets, but that doesn't stop him from willing himself into a superhero. Thank you, modern science, for seeing the light.
For more tip's, be sure to check out this great, informative guide: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
So before the iPhone came out, and there were full touchscreen phones on the market that weren't selling well compared to the number of dumbphones out there, did you waste any breath to proclaim "You know, this full touchscreen thing, it's just not as important to most people"... No? That's what I thought. And when high-dpi phones and other handhelds came out, for some reason when they didnt fly off the shelves where were you with "you know this whole high-dpi on a phone just isn't as important to most people"?
You can take *this* to mean that multitasking on a phone isn't important to Apple, and therefore not important to their followers. There are a ton of people who see through their noise, though, and that's why Apple is still a niche player when it comes to smartphones. You can pry my properly multitasking phone from my cold, dead hand.
Because it's not "like looking at print on paper"... if you hold the thing a x inches your retina will not be able to distinguish the pixels. The same went for the Droid (albeit at a slightly farther distance) and the same has applied for any LCD at any point in history. It's not as good as print, for one because modern printers use 600 dpi; 300dpi is 80's technology. For two because even when you print at a given DPI, there is chemical dithering that takes place to make the edges indistinguishable. A LCD cannot do that, even if it too ran at 600dpi.
But no, all of a sudden Apple declares "this is the most pixel density you will ever need" and people are falling over themselves proclaiming how awesome he is for coming up with the concept. It may be the highest density display, it may look fantastic, but get a grip already. There will be another phone in another year that does it all better.
This is just buying into the hype. Apple came out with a new phone that happens to have the highest pixel density yet (325 ppi). The next closest is the Motorola Droid at 265 ppi. About 20% higher than the competition... Not really a groundbreaking move by Apple, just them taking another step toward higher density displays. It's what any company would have done. Where was the news story when the Droid came out, besting Apples then best display on the 3GS (of 163ppi) by 40%?
Disclaimer: I don't have an Iphone, or a Droid, but I do have a brain and I tend to use it when I smell hype.
How about using the BitDefender rescue disk, (available in ISO format, but portable to a USB key) and asking the customer to reboot the PC and allow it to boot entirely from the USB key?
Licensing may be a grey area on that one though, depending on how widely you are distributing it.
One problem with using a windows application is that it may be up against a virus that is entrenched and will simply stop the cleaning from taking place. If this is the case, you need something that will activate on boot, or better yet boot on it's own (like the Bitdefender.)
There is probably a more elegant solution though, since this is a highly controlled environment. Maybe more restrictive user level controls are in order, forcing the users to log in with minimal privileges?
Let's see, at 20 cents a message that test only cost them $16,000 worth of messages! And they managed to move all of 10MB... If my math is right. They should just spring for the pay-as-you-go data plan at the bargain basement cost of $1.99 a MB, they would cut the "cost" down to 20 bucks!
Are rural, developing countries really selling unlimited txting plans for affordable rates? If so, why is it that we let carriers in the developed world get away with robbing us blind?
You quoted the guy out of context and made up a nice little straw man out of it.
Wow, just like you are trying to say that I insisted somewhere that personally auditing all source code is the only way to be sure an open source app isn't malicious? I see what you did there!
I used code auditing as an example, since it should never be taken for granted that something is secure unless you or *someone you trust* has audited it. You basically mirrored my argument by assuming the opposite, and then tried to accuse *me* of engaging in a turf war. How cute.
Ask yourself this: Are a few web pages and emails worth 30 bucks a month? Yes, there are a ton of shit apps, for Iphone and even Android and Blackberry. However, there are plenty of useful, non-web apps that can really add value to your smartphone. One I love to death that serves as a good example is WeatherBug for blackberry. Instead of visiting a web page if I want to know the weather, it automatically updates an icon on my main screen with the current conditions and forecast, and will download more information in an instant since it's just transferring a few bytes instead of a whole page. And, it will automatically ping me with severe weather alerts, without having to manage an email subscription and with the ability to take priority over other notifications. Integration is key, many apps don't bother and are very well worthless. The ones that get it right make the phone better even when you're doing something else with it. That's where the value comes from.
Have you ever looked at the splash screen of two different programs, saw that one was GPLed and the source was published, and thought to your self "well I will use that one, it must be secure, it's open source". This is what the OP was suggesting by dismissing all open source software as inherently secure with the line "If its open source, is it really a threat?"
That's what you were defending, suggesting it's "beating a dead horse" to question the security of open source programs since, after all, someone COULD look at the source so the author must have been 100% honest!
Do you read what you replied to?
Yee haw! Because we can expect that any malicious app will pop to the foreground and proclaim "hahah stupid user, your private info has been raped by this app!" and the secret will be out after the first person runs it. The open source community will then come to the rescue, fix the person's phone, and track down the author and chop off his fingers so he can never write bad code again.
Assuming that just because it's open source it will be malware-free (as the OP did) is just as stupid as assuming that closed source commercial software will be secure because someone is getting paid to write it well.
Both ideas are pretty f*ing stupid, how hard is that to miss?
Preview button hard to find? If I take a stab at what you meant, you again tried to insist that someone said "the data has been exposed to malicious parties". This is not what anyone has yet said.
Let me take one last chance at explaining something that is apparently not as simple as it seems. The data is still where it belongs (on your phone) but the opportunity for a breach is at the mercy of the app authors; a few errant lines of code in an otherwise innocuous app could result in a complete leak of all the private data on the phone. This is what they are saying, in an admittedly sensationalist way. The app creation and installation process, as it is today, is ripe for a clever malware author to take advantage of less educated users. To insist that the problem is nonexistent and merely "flawed logic" is ignorant to the extreme.
This would have been funny if not for your epically bad subject line, which suggests that you thought the article was about *five* apps that expose data.
Too much faith in Cnet, he is guilty of.
It was the Cnet article that made the leap from the report, which stated "x number of apps have the ability to access information in a way that could be harmful to keeping it private", all the way to "20 percent of android apps expose your private information". Actually, both of these things are true since they never really said to what the information was exposed to (in this case, it's simply the internals of a third party app).
Seems like you fail at over-reaching. Smobile started it, Cnet ran with it, Slashdot wound it up into a flame-filled frenzy, and you slam dunked it with "1. So because something has the ability to do something, that means that it DOES do it?" which no one ever specifically said was the case (they said it was possible).
If 10,000 other people have installed it and everybody rates it 5-stars and there are no issues mentioned with it on the web, you can probably guess that it's not doing anything nasty with your information.
The way my mind works - when I read this, I couldn't help but think: "What, if any, kind of permissions warning do you get if the app is capable of going on to the market as you and rating itself 5 stars in your name?"
Disclaimer for the humor impaired: Mind you this is more of a joke than a suggestion of something that's at all likely.
His argument was laughable. You make the exact point that's needed; there is nothing to stop 10,000 genuinely happy, completely ignorant users from "loving" an app that makes fart noises while it secretly gathers contact lists or does other nefarious things completely behind the scenes. The users won't know there's a problem until it's too late; their private data will be in the wild. Then, all the 1-scores or "report app" dings that the app gets won't get their data back.
Assuming that a gaggle of non-experts can give you a good assessment of the security of the app is ludicrous. Maybe, if there were a "score by developers" rating where other registered devs that have looked at the code and given it a brief audit for security purposes, it would put my mind at ease a *little*.
If its open source, is it really a threat?
Have you read the source to all the open source apps you use? If your answer is no, then the answer to your question is yes.
Gosh, if only there were some sort of knowledgeable repository for information, sorted into easily searched pieces to allow for quickly finding what you want...
You could have just said "the dictionary is wrong" if that's what you were getting at. What are you getting at? I've heard homeless people give more convincing arguments.
Wow, you must be a lot of fun at parties. Are you Lewis Carroll's ghost? You make a convincing opium addict, I will give you that.
Let me simplify it, irony is "the opposite of what you expect". An ironic situation (as this one is) is one where you would expect the legitimate content publishers to be the ones creating convincing, effective distribution methods but it is instead those that steal the content that produce the most compelling distribution methods.
That's what irony means. Get over it.
so the 10.000km^2 of solar cells in the sahara will increase the temperature of the earth by less than a thousandth of a degree centigrade.
Wow, you really had me going there. Right until the end when you completely ignored the original question (regional cooling) and instead jumped straight to global warming (through decreased albedo). How about looking at the albedo of desert sand (which should be somewhat high) and then at the effective albedo of a solar thermal plant? The locally dissipated energy is probably pretty close to the background albedo, yielding no net change in local ambient temperature. If there were one (and local temps went down), it would only be good for the system (until clouds formed) thanks to the increased efficiency of the thermal conversion process.
Yeah, look at that poor, deprived United States, with their non-existant natural resources. They sure made something out of nothing. </sarcasm>
It's highly interesting (to me at least) to investigate what happens to countries with 'new money' like Oil deposits, coal, diamonds, whatever. They pretty universally fail to prosper in a meaningful way, with the exception of a few lucky Arabian states that have borderline prosperity thanks to ungodly amounts of money being spent on infrastructure like skyscrapers and resorts. But why is the success rate so low? Are these resources truly cursed? Surely, not every nation blessed with a resource ends up wasting it all before it does them any good?
One of the more interesting ideas was covered on a recent episode of Planet Money, wherein they built a case for simply taking every dollar earned from the resource and dividing it equally amongst every last citizen. This would prevent the government from spending the money in any way it wanted to, and require them to again coax revenue from the people in the form of taxation. Taxation with representation, it is argued, is the best way for citizens to be engaged in government.
And this goes back to the thesis that "free money" from natural resources is a bad thing. "Free money" when it's piped straight to the government coffers and they do with it what they please, is the bad thing. The US is quite disgustingly blessed with "free money" resources, from oil (most of which is gone, admittedly) to fertile land, coal, sunshine, timber, you name it. And what happened with that little experiment? The money, specifically, did not go to the government. It went to the people, and the government had to earn it. As a result, the people prospered and the government was kept in check (for most of the 200-some-odd-year experiment, at least). But that's enough spoilers, I won't tell you how it ends.
True, Arabic is the official language, but I have yet to meet a Moroccan not speaking French.
As per Wikipedia, it's the country's "second unofficial language": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morocco#Languages
What is Morocco's first unofficial language? Wiki link, pls. kthxbai
In the last year or so there's been a new battery research story every month promising longer lasting batteries that are smaller and usually cheaper. Yet the most advanced you can buy are still just play Lithium Polymer batteries which seem to power my Android phone for about 15 minutes.
How weird. The tiny lithium battery I put in my smartphone a year ago still powers it for at least a day's worth of use on a full charge, if not more depending on how little browsing and video watching I do. I won't spoil the ending and tell you what kind of phone I have; I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
And for what it's worth, it may feel like an eternity but no less than 10 years ago we had no such fancy-fangled inexpensive lithium batteries for our phones/laptops. If you wanted one, it was gonna cost you, it wasn't going to hold much energy, and it would be dead with about 6 months of regular use. Today's very cheap, highly durable, very energetic lithium polymer batteries are the result of continuous un-sexy research that made headlines in the 80s and 90s, but is still undergoing a lot of change and improvement. The next revolution in battery storage will probably also happen without much fanfare; I hope your phone holds out until then!