Where do you get this ridiculous $200/month price?
Obviously with Verizon and AT&T...
Browsing Verizon's website, a smartphone with a 10GB data plan is advertised as $140/mo, and that's BEFORE Verizon factors in their fees and taxes.
MetroPCS isn't the best network, but covers (sub)urban California pretty well.
In fact I'd say MetroPCS is the worst of the worst... If you want to go for cheap, prepaid service, you could go T-Mobile, but Sprint (Boost, Virgin, etc) usually has the best deals with decent nationwide coverage.
If you get a contract ( like most people do ) you can get one for free
Most people IN THE USA do that. Everywhere else in the world, they do not, and have to pay for their own damn hardware.
When you're just swapping pre-paid SIM cards to go from one provider to another, there's nobody to subsidize your phones for you.
If you cant do either, you most likely cant afford the smart phone data charge either so the point is moot.
We're not talking about the USA/Europe here. Head to Africa, and you'll find that cell service is cheap... With terrible exchange rates, and dirt-cheap labor, locally provided services are reasonably priced, while any imported items are very expensive. When people survive on an income of less than $100, you can buy a (locally produced) Coke for $0.12, but an imported iPhone is still $600+, you start to see the problem.
The low-end approach means Firefox OS will run on phones with 256M of memory and a single core 700 â" 800MHz CPU, the kind of system which is underpowered when compared with iOS or Android.
This is nuts. They're not targeting feature-phones at all... I was expecting something really low-end, with a fast HTML5 interpreter, instead of mobile java. Instead, they're targeting the low-end of current 1st world smart phones.
Those specs are better than the Samsung Replenish, going for $80 on Boost Mobile or the Alcatel Venture, going for $30 on Virgin Mobile. Those are unsubsidized prices, too, meaning you can go out any buy as many of those as you want, without ever signing-up for service.
So think of it this way... Do you want some phone specificaly designed for poor people, which doesn't have any apps, or a generation-old Android phone, which is much cheaper because they recouped their R&D selling it in the USA/Europe for years, and because the specs are slightly lower? A device which can run most of the millions of regular Android applications out there...
It's pretty clear which way to go. Of course cell phone makers are nuts, and will try anything once, because the successes are so damn profitable.
I think the FirefoxOS guys just know they don't have a product, so they're saying it's for poor people, so they can pretend they don't have to compete with Android, because nobody believes they have a snowball's chance in hell of competing with Android, here or in the 3rd world.
Magnetic north would only be an issue in the far north and very large maps.
I don't see how being far north would make this any more or less of an issue, except for those specifically looking to reach the pole. The difference between magnetic north and true north is significantly different from Florida to Texas, both of which are near the tropics and not far north at all.
Even at my last job where we had a design based on multiple SPOFs we lost machines to PSU or drive/RAID failure several times, but never network, except for the one site that did "redundant" NICs.
I've never seen anyone "failing at bonding", and any such misconfiguration would be picked-up by the monitoring system before a given server went live, so your trained-monkeys appear to be highly defective, and you clearly need to get them traded-in for better ones.
At my last job, where we were a nicely clustered environment, I've seen a signficant number of switches either failing suddenly, or at least rebooting for no apparent reason (dual power sullpies, btw). In addition to that, I've seen a small number of network cables suddenly go out, and just as many cases of 1 of the 2 ethernet ports on the mobo just dying.
You can yell "cluster" all you want, but it won't magically make any of this a non-issue. Redundancy gets you a small grace period to deal with a problem, not an open-ended opportunity to let everything fall apart. Hey, the most recent switch failure was one of the two switches serving up data between the Oracle RAC containing all our live customer data. Having a second, working network path saved us from being forced to operate with all our eggs in a single basket, on your nice cheap servers with questionable UPSes and the like, until someone could fly out to the datacenter with a new switch.
Like I said, if you've got Google's level of clustering, where you can fail-over to a redundant DATACENTER, or if you're just doing simple batch compute jobs, then cheap servers are for you. If you're any smaller, and uptime really matters, then several machines disappearing over a busy weekend is going to cause you some problems. Even nicely distributed file systems typically only handle 2 nodes going down without data loss, and changing it to get more redundancy will quickly eat into the money you thought you saved by going cheap.
With an attitude like yours, it's pretty clear you've never run anything that really was mission critical. Me and my millions of customers expecting 99.999% uptime, would like to kindly ask you to stay far, far away from our servers and networking.
I've always been appalled by the way PCs rely on big, hot, wasteful noisy internal power supplies.
I don't follow your complaint. I'm sure you don't have a MORE EFFICIENT, SMALLER and QUIETER, PASSIVE, EXTERNAL power supply. Obviously, you threw in at least one trait that isn't possible in combination with the rest. In particular, it's incredible just how much air and heat a tiny little 12v fan can move, even the almost completely silent ones (see: SWiF2-1200 or 800).
And while I've long lamented the inefficiency of PC PSUs, that stopped being the case over a decade ago. A nice 80+ PSU isn't a lot more expensive than the cheapest crap PSUs out there, these days, and Seasonic's are extremely quiet, and extremely reliable. Servers are even getting 90+ and 95+% efficience PSUs these days, which is about the best you could possibly hope for.
I'm quite happy to have internal PSUs... The cables dangling everywhere are enough of a mess, an power bricks ala laptops would be a nightmare. Hell, on a low-enough power system, you can even remote the fans all-together. I've got one system like that, drawing about 5W, which I use as a firewall/NAT/router. But with nice quiet fans available, I no longer believe it's worth the effort to drastically compromise performance (CPU speed), to shave that last 7db off the noise floor.
And standarized PSUs have been a real boon for lab electronics and other projects. It's amazing how many amps you can draw at 12 and 5v from a little $10 commoditized box. It certainly works well for RVs.
If Google sold servers, HP and Dell would die overnight.
No. You're wrong on so many levels, it's hard to believable.
Google's solution is cheap, UNRELIABLE servers. I liked the idea of a built-in battery for about 5 seconds, until I realized that the PSU isn't going to have any way to do a weekly self-test of the battery, or allow hot-swapping it... the features that separate decent UPSes from low-end consumer crap. I liked the idea of motherboards stripped of unnecessary components, until I saw it only had a single Ethernet port (can't even do bonded/trunked NICs). I liked the all-14V power supply, until I noticed there's only a single PSU, no hot-swap.
If any of the above sounds like a good idea to you, you're not a Dell/HP/IBM customer. Even though my company does extensive clustering and has plenty of redundancy, we're not Google-scale, where it would be perfectly okay if a bunch of servers just crap out one night... If you've got your own compute-farms, fair enough, but my experience says there are fleetingly few companies who can make economic use of cheap junk servers, and many who want to try it are instead making a decision of false-economy that will come back to bite them.
Just the "12volt-only" power supplies with built-in batteries with "12volt-only" motherboards makes them more reliable than anything out there.
Have you ever touched a rack of servers before? Two big UPSes at the bottom of the rack, connected to two PDUs, connected, alternately, to each of the two hot-swap power supplies in each server. It's a pretty standard configuration, which is EXTREMELY reliable (unless the UPSes are complete crap, and they both run their self-tests at the same time--I'm looking at you APC!).
This configuration is infinitely more reliable than Google servers. Google's form of redundancy is switching to an entirely different DATACENTER at a moment's notice... The batteries are only there to smooth out minor power fluxuations, and soften the fall, so ALL the servers in a datacenter don't drop at the exact same moment in time.
HP and Dell either can't or won't license this from Google.
Probably BOTH. Like I said, the reliability just isn't there. If you don't care, you're probably a SuperMicro customer, rather than a Dell/HP/IBM customer.
But if your workload does fit with the Google server model, you can actually go one step-up, and get Facebook servers solutions, thanks to the Open Compute project they put together.
The big difference being that, instead of an internal battery, Facebook has a rack of batteries for every two racks of servers, which connect to the DC-input of the PSUs. This is clearly more reliable than the Google model, because the centralized batteries allow you to routinely test, before they're needed, and swap dead batteries without taking any servers down. And since the smarts are in the (inexpensive) PSUs, you don't need special 12v-only motherboard designs at all.
You can see it all in-action in a number of Youtube videos, such as this one:
As I am not made of money, we cheesed it and coaxed an old ATX power supply with molex plugs into working for us
That's the epitome of false-economy...
You can get an 80%+ efficient Seasonic PSU shipped to you for $45. The savings in electricity makes it easily worth it, and the reliability and extremely low noise make it an extremely good investment.
I'd like to think that a large number of countries would be up in arms should Russia suddenly start violating treaties it has signed, and basically invading foreign countries.
Besides, this isn't the USSR. Economic sanctions against Russia would be severely damaging. And Canada is certainly capable of defending against an invasion force, though it wouldn't be pretty.
All the experts will tell you that China's economy is due for a crash, any time now. We just don't know when. They'll also tell you that increasing wages and energy costs have led to some manufactures moving their US production from China to Mexico. Additionally, even Chinese firms are moving manufacturing to lower-cost countries, like Brazil, Vietnam, etc.
In addition, it's widely believed (but I admit, not a sure thing) that manufacturing will move back to the US in a big way, as soon as advanced robots fall in price and become cost-competitive with 3rd world labor... Robots are superior in many ways, and reducing transportation and import issues is worth quite a bit, so once the price is even close, China will be cut out. This is part of the reason the government is trying so hard to develop domestic consumerism, so they aren't relying on export markets, and technology to replace them.
And into the ring I'd throw 3D printers. With some additional development, they could eliminate a lot of the simple/cheap items we currently import from China, and replace it with a superior, customized product, every time.
The next few years should prove to be very interesting.
The US isn't #1 in *anything* right now except military spending and wealth concentration.
The US is #1 among all countries in overall GDP, overall manufacturing, aerospace, information technology, music, movies, TV, video games, automotive last I checked (GM, Ford, Chrysler combined), most heavy machinery (eg. CATerpillar) and many, many others.
I doubt they are eating into amazon or Ebay's customers, all they are doing is expanding into the china and Asian markets where they have very little if any serious competition
No, they aren't REMOTELY similar to Amazon or EBay. It's a site for Business-to-business (B2B) sales of bulk item shipments. Sure, you'll find Android tablets on there, but there will be a 1,000 unit minimum order, and they'll already have factored in the cost to SHIP TO THE USA. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes on the site should know exactly what Alibaba is, and Amazon they aint.
What's the big deal about this?
Nothing... Absolutely, positively, NOTHING about this story is noteworthy in the SLIGHTEST. But that's most of what we get on/. these days. If, say, Ars Technica and Popular Science used slashcode or some other moderated system, with comments featured promiently, I would stop comming here in a second...
It's long been the defacto industry standard, as the poor-man's Postscript. This is mainly because HP has thrown all its weight behind it, and almost ALL their laser printers (and most other high-end printers) since the beginning of time fully support the latest version of PCL. It doesn't hurt that it's also fully and freely documented from day-1, rather than kept secret, as many other printer languagues are.
Like, say, VT100, there's absolutely no shortage of printers from other (non-HP) manufacturers I can list, which emulate PCL. Postscript is still the best option, and with cheap CPUs and memory these days, I don't understand the draw of PCL. But still, it's just a fact that with low-end, workgroup, and personal printers, you're much more likely to find (even non-HP) printers emulating PCL rather than supporting full PS.
For in-flight, the ban on cellular phones is actually technical in reason: each cell tower can only handle so many connected devices at once, even if they're not actively communicating with the tower. Cell phones use line-of-sight frequencies, which means that on the ground, any given phone is only going to see (and consume "slots" on) a handful of towers. In the air, every phone that's turned on will blanket a huge number of towers.
Bull. It's not line-of-sight that keeps cell phones from hammering every tower out there, it's the smarts in the cell phone, which restrict it to transmitting with just enough power to reach the nearest tower without high error rates. If they didn't do that, like primitive two-way radios, they'd have a near-far problem, where the transmitters closet to the tower would be so powerful that distant transmissions couldn't be picked-up. The fact that it saves battery life is just a happy accident. Cell companies will also very often install several cell towers in an urban area, to increase capacity... they make no effort to use directional antennas or similar to reduce the number of cell phones hitting each. In fact the redundancy offered is a good thing, as people are less likely to lose service in various scenarios, like when one is briefly down during late-night maintenance windows.
Even if that was the issue, it wouldn't be an FAA regulation requiring cell phones be off. Maybe the FCC would create such a rule, or even a federal regulation. The FAA wouldn't unnecessarily burden themselves with helping out the telcos.
DISCLAIMER: I may have a telecommunications background, and may work or previously have work for one or more US-based cell phone companies, but my statements are my own personal opinions, and do not represent my current or previous employers.
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No other phone ad ALL the features iPhone did when it was released.
Hell, I had PDAs long, long before the iPhone came out, which had damn near all the features of the iPhone. Pinch-to-zoom wasn't one of them, but only because resistive touch screens still ruled the world.
Just try to name some PATENTABLE features the iPhone had, which weren't already existing in some phone or PDA, somewhere.
The triumph of the iPhone was that they put together the top of the line technology at just the right time. They waited until everyone was carrying around a cell phone already, they waited until capacitive touch-screens were available, they convinced Corning there would be a market if they resurected Gorilla Glass, they waited until 3G was available, so internet speeds were fast enough to stream music, and comfortable web browing speeds, instead of 2G's fax-modem speeds. They waited until WiFi had become common, and blluetooth was available. They waited until flash was cheap enough that you could store a music collection. They waited until memory and CPU were cheap and fast enough that a non-cripped web browser on mobile devices was practical. They waited until LCD DPI had gotten high enough that you could squeeze a decent amount of text on a PDA screen, and people wouldn't mind reading it. They waited until LiIon batteries had gotten cheap and high capacity enough that you could have a PDA that keeps running for a full day on a charge with just the screen turned off (where PDAs actually suspended when you hit the power button), etc.
Apple came along, and put the top-of-the-line components, that had been advailable to everyone, from off the shelf, into their device, at just the right time when all the stars were aligned. I commend them for seeing the opportunity that others had missed, and jumping into the written-off PDA market after all others had tried and failed to make a go of it. But they didn't have any revolutionary technology from in-house which made it all possible. Their contribution was to figure out the best mixture of primitive POS touch UIs, and the PocketPC method of a full desktop UI squeezed into a PDA, picking the best tech to throw in, and a bit of good luck with Corning, that other companies may not have had.
And let's not forget that Apple was only too happy to copy good UI elements from Android, like the notification bar/tray.
Yep, I miss IRDA. More than a decade ago, I was typing up full documents with embedded charts and hand-drawn graphics on my Psion5MX, and printing them out directly to a nearby HP Laserjet4, with IRDA, using PCL.
I'm still diasappointed it went away. Just think, if every computer device you bought had an IRDA port on all 4 sides, all our devices would just ad-hoc connect to every other device in the same room, with no setup. Plug in a new set or speakers, and sound from your computer, or TV, or whatever, just starts playing. Practically no security concerns, since IR doesn't penetrate walls, at all. We would have needed some higher-speed IRDA standards, but it would have worked quite well. We're only just now starting to get things like WiFi to be remotely as user-friendly, and it's still fighting it out with Bluetooth.
Sadly, we've got even more printer protocols than we did back then. Even as networked printers get more powerful, they often don't support a common interoperable protocol like Postscript or PCL. Who'd have thought?
What's with all the contrarians? Why do we need wireless charging? For the same reasons your phone has WiFi and not an RJ45 port...
As a heavy Android phone user, I'm anxiously awaiting some wireless charging standard. I have wall-warts all over my house, so that wherever I sit, I can plug-in... Because cell phones just can't handle even a half day of heavy use between recharges. And even if one could, I wouldn't want to cut it that close.
So now, my cell is perpetually tethered to a microUSB cable, getting pulled off tables onto the floor, getting tugged when I try to move it and there's not enough slack, getting stress on the cable and socket when I want to set it on the armrest right where the plug is sticking out, and always fumbling with putting the connector in the right way, and pulling it out when I go, or it becomes a particular nusiance, maybe 10x a day.
What's more is the nusiance of travel... I've got a cigarette lighter to microUSB plug for driving, then I've got to carry a wall adapter for motel rooms, conference rooms, or whatnot, and then supplament that with a AA battery to microUSB adapter when I'm not within reach of a power outlet, but still need to use my phone heavily. Times like flying in particular.
All that stuff is much, much larger than my cell phone, and could be eliminated from my bag if restaurants, hotels, cars, passenger jets, and conference rooms had them built-in.
Now let's consider that I carry two or more devices around... One phone needs one charger, while the other phone won't charge from it at all. Wall chargers break USB specs in multiple, and mutually incompatible ways. That's why we have items like the Skiva QuadPower, which has one port that works on Apple devices, one port that works on Android devices, and two generic USB ports that are needed for Palm/Blackberry/BREW/Nokia/etc devices, that won't charge from the other ports.
And that's just getting started. Throw in tablets, or netbooks/ultrabooks, or even laptops. Tablets are almost always able to charge from USB, even if only very slowly, because we've built the modern world on the non-standard USB charging standard, and everyone wants to be able to get some charge out of it in the worst case. But the low voltage and power of USB leads to far more contortions than even smartphones have to contend with... And all because USB is such a poor charging standard. I'd sure love a universal charger, but even low power netbooks/ultrabooks don't even try to use USB, because the voltage is far too low, and they'd have to go nuts to add more special-cases to USB wall chargers.
We clearly need something better... Something that can supply more than 5v, and a whole lot of amps.
Who wouldn't want to have a flat pad they can put on their coffee table, that automatically starts charging any device you set on it? Laptop, cell phone, tablet, maybe laptop batteries not currently connected, etc. Throw in TV remote controls, flashlights, cordless keyboards/mice, console game controllers, etc., for good measure. It would be an incredible improvement over the current disjointed charging situation. And don't start complaining about efficiency... Even if it's got high losses, being able to top-off everywhere you go is much more efficient than having your battery get drained.
Sadly the only android phones that come with a physical keyboard are marketed towards teenagers and thus manufactured as one grade up from trash.
What in the hell are you talking about? The entire Droid line has qwerty keyboards, and they were long the flagship android phones, built like tanks.
There aren't as many phones with a physical keyboard as without, but there's still a LOT of them, and ample selection for anyone, on any carrier, to get a good one.
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Obviously with Verizon and AT&T...
Browsing Verizon's website, a smartphone with a 10GB data plan is advertised as $140/mo, and that's BEFORE Verizon factors in their fees and taxes.
In fact I'd say MetroPCS is the worst of the worst... If you want to go for cheap, prepaid service, you could go T-Mobile, but Sprint (Boost, Virgin, etc) usually has the best deals with decent nationwide coverage.
Most people IN THE USA do that. Everywhere else in the world, they do not, and have to pay for their own damn hardware.
When you're just swapping pre-paid SIM cards to go from one provider to another, there's nobody to subsidize your phones for you.
We're not talking about the USA/Europe here. Head to Africa, and you'll find that cell service is cheap... With terrible exchange rates, and dirt-cheap labor, locally provided services are reasonably priced, while any imported items are very expensive. When people survive on an income of less than $100, you can buy a (locally produced) Coke for $0.12, but an imported iPhone is still $600+, you start to see the problem.
From TFA:
This is nuts. They're not targeting feature-phones at all... I was expecting something really low-end, with a fast HTML5 interpreter, instead of mobile java. Instead, they're targeting the low-end of current 1st world smart phones.
Those specs are better than the Samsung Replenish, going for $80 on Boost Mobile or the Alcatel Venture, going for $30 on Virgin Mobile. Those are unsubsidized prices, too, meaning you can go out any buy as many of those as you want, without ever signing-up for service.
So think of it this way... Do you want some phone specificaly designed for poor people, which doesn't have any apps, or a generation-old Android phone, which is much cheaper because they recouped their R&D selling it in the USA/Europe for years, and because the specs are slightly lower? A device which can run most of the millions of regular Android applications out there...
It's pretty clear which way to go. Of course cell phone makers are nuts, and will try anything once, because the successes are so damn profitable.
I think the FirefoxOS guys just know they don't have a product, so they're saying it's for poor people, so they can pretend they don't have to compete with Android, because nobody believes they have a snowball's chance in hell of competing with Android, here or in the 3rd world.
Using a gas is self-regulating... Using mechanical or electrical means to position the heads means you need the most ridiculous precision ever.
Try playing a video on your e Ink display, and let me know how that works out for you.
I don't see how being far north would make this any more or less of an issue, except for those specifically looking to reach the pole. The difference between magnetic north and true north is significantly different from Florida to Texas, both of which are near the tropics and not far north at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination
I've never seen anyone "failing at bonding", and any such misconfiguration would be picked-up by the monitoring system before a given server went live, so your trained-monkeys appear to be highly defective, and you clearly need to get them traded-in for better ones.
At my last job, where we were a nicely clustered environment, I've seen a signficant number of switches either failing suddenly, or at least rebooting for no apparent reason (dual power sullpies, btw). In addition to that, I've seen a small number of network cables suddenly go out, and just as many cases of 1 of the 2 ethernet ports on the mobo just dying.
You can yell "cluster" all you want, but it won't magically make any of this a non-issue. Redundancy gets you a small grace period to deal with a problem, not an open-ended opportunity to let everything fall apart. Hey, the most recent switch failure was one of the two switches serving up data between the Oracle RAC containing all our live customer data. Having a second, working network path saved us from being forced to operate with all our eggs in a single basket, on your nice cheap servers with questionable UPSes and the like, until someone could fly out to the datacenter with a new switch.
Like I said, if you've got Google's level of clustering, where you can fail-over to a redundant DATACENTER, or if you're just doing simple batch compute jobs, then cheap servers are for you. If you're any smaller, and uptime really matters, then several machines disappearing over a busy weekend is going to cause you some problems. Even nicely distributed file systems typically only handle 2 nodes going down without data loss, and changing it to get more redundancy will quickly eat into the money you thought you saved by going cheap.
With an attitude like yours, it's pretty clear you've never run anything that really was mission critical. Me and my millions of customers expecting 99.999% uptime, would like to kindly ask you to stay far, far away from our servers and networking.
I don't follow your complaint. I'm sure you don't have a MORE EFFICIENT, SMALLER and QUIETER, PASSIVE, EXTERNAL power supply. Obviously, you threw in at least one trait that isn't possible in combination with the rest. In particular, it's incredible just how much air and heat a tiny little 12v fan can move, even the almost completely silent ones (see: SWiF2-1200 or 800).
And while I've long lamented the inefficiency of PC PSUs, that stopped being the case over a decade ago. A nice 80+ PSU isn't a lot more expensive than the cheapest crap PSUs out there, these days, and Seasonic's are extremely quiet, and extremely reliable. Servers are even getting 90+ and 95+% efficience PSUs these days, which is about the best you could possibly hope for.
I'm quite happy to have internal PSUs... The cables dangling everywhere are enough of a mess, an power bricks ala laptops would be a nightmare. Hell, on a low-enough power system, you can even remote the fans all-together. I've got one system like that, drawing about 5W, which I use as a firewall/NAT/router. But with nice quiet fans available, I no longer believe it's worth the effort to drastically compromise performance (CPU speed), to shave that last 7db off the noise floor.
And standarized PSUs have been a real boon for lab electronics and other projects. It's amazing how many amps you can draw at 12 and 5v from a little $10 commoditized box. It certainly works well for RVs.
No. You're wrong on so many levels, it's hard to believable.
Google's solution is cheap, UNRELIABLE servers. I liked the idea of a built-in battery for about 5 seconds, until I realized that the PSU isn't going to have any way to do a weekly self-test of the battery, or allow hot-swapping it... the features that separate decent UPSes from low-end consumer crap. I liked the idea of motherboards stripped of unnecessary components, until I saw it only had a single Ethernet port (can't even do bonded/trunked NICs). I liked the all-14V power supply, until I noticed there's only a single PSU, no hot-swap.
If any of the above sounds like a good idea to you, you're not a Dell/HP/IBM customer. Even though my company does extensive clustering and has plenty of redundancy, we're not Google-scale, where it would be perfectly okay if a bunch of servers just crap out one night... If you've got your own compute-farms, fair enough, but my experience says there are fleetingly few companies who can make economic use of cheap junk servers, and many who want to try it are instead making a decision of false-economy that will come back to bite them.
Have you ever touched a rack of servers before? Two big UPSes at the bottom of the rack, connected to two PDUs, connected, alternately, to each of the two hot-swap power supplies in each server. It's a pretty standard configuration, which is EXTREMELY reliable (unless the UPSes are complete crap, and they both run their self-tests at the same time--I'm looking at you APC!).
This configuration is infinitely more reliable than Google servers. Google's form of redundancy is switching to an entirely different DATACENTER at a moment's notice... The batteries are only there to smooth out minor power fluxuations, and soften the fall, so ALL the servers in a datacenter don't drop at the exact same moment in time.
Probably BOTH. Like I said, the reliability just isn't there. If you don't care, you're probably a SuperMicro customer, rather than a Dell/HP/IBM customer.
But if your workload does fit with the Google server model, you can actually go one step-up, and get Facebook servers solutions, thanks to the Open Compute project they put together.
http://opencompute.org/
The big difference being that, instead of an internal battery, Facebook has a rack of batteries for every two racks of servers, which connect to the DC-input of the PSUs. This is clearly more reliable than the Google model, because the centralized batteries allow you to routinely test, before they're needed, and swap dead batteries without taking any servers down. And since the smarts are in the (inexpensive) PSUs, you don't need special 12v-only motherboard designs at all.
You can see it all in-action in a number of Youtube videos, such as this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZUX3n2yAzY
That's the epitome of false-economy...
You can get an 80%+ efficient Seasonic PSU shipped to you for $45. The savings in electricity makes it easily worth it, and the reliability and extremely low noise make it an extremely good investment.
Russia is a signatory to the treaty that assigns Canada (and themselves) a significant portion of the Arctic.
http://geology.com/articles/who-owns-the-arctic.shtml
I'd like to think that a large number of countries would be up in arms should Russia suddenly start violating treaties it has signed, and basically invading foreign countries.
Besides, this isn't the USSR. Economic sanctions against Russia would be severely damaging. And Canada is certainly capable of defending against an invasion force, though it wouldn't be pretty.
All the experts will tell you that China's economy is due for a crash, any time now. We just don't know when. They'll also tell you that increasing wages and energy costs have led to some manufactures moving their US production from China to Mexico. Additionally, even Chinese firms are moving manufacturing to lower-cost countries, like Brazil, Vietnam, etc.
In addition, it's widely believed (but I admit, not a sure thing) that manufacturing will move back to the US in a big way, as soon as advanced robots fall in price and become cost-competitive with 3rd world labor... Robots are superior in many ways, and reducing transportation and import issues is worth quite a bit, so once the price is even close, China will be cut out. This is part of the reason the government is trying so hard to develop domestic consumerism, so they aren't relying on export markets, and technology to replace them.
And into the ring I'd throw 3D printers. With some additional development, they could eliminate a lot of the simple/cheap items we currently import from China, and replace it with a superior, customized product, every time.
The next few years should prove to be very interesting.
The EU isn't a country, and the limitations of a civil union have been on full display for the past couple of years now.
And if the EU should qualify, why not all of North America, thanks to NAFTA?
The US is #1 among all countries in overall GDP, overall manufacturing, aerospace, information technology, music, movies, TV, video games, automotive last I checked (GM, Ford, Chrysler combined), most heavy machinery (eg. CATerpillar) and many, many others.
No, they aren't REMOTELY similar to Amazon or EBay. It's a site for Business-to-business (B2B) sales of bulk item shipments. Sure, you'll find Android tablets on there, but there will be a 1,000 unit minimum order, and they'll already have factored in the cost to SHIP TO THE USA. Anyone who has spent 5 minutes on the site should know exactly what Alibaba is, and Amazon they aint.
Nothing... Absolutely, positively, NOTHING about this story is noteworthy in the SLIGHTEST. But that's most of what we get on /. these days. If, say, Ars Technica and Popular Science used slashcode or some other moderated system, with comments featured promiently, I would stop comming here in a second...
It's long been the defacto industry standard, as the poor-man's Postscript. This is mainly because HP has thrown all its weight behind it, and almost ALL their laser printers (and most other high-end printers) since the beginning of time fully support the latest version of PCL. It doesn't hurt that it's also fully and freely documented from day-1, rather than kept secret, as many other printer languagues are.
Like, say, VT100, there's absolutely no shortage of printers from other (non-HP) manufacturers I can list, which emulate PCL. Postscript is still the best option, and with cheap CPUs and memory these days, I don't understand the draw of PCL. But still, it's just a fact that with low-end, workgroup, and personal printers, you're much more likely to find (even non-HP) printers emulating PCL rather than supporting full PS.
I don't see your objection. You'll have to clarify if you want a response.
Bull. It's not line-of-sight that keeps cell phones from hammering every tower out there, it's the smarts in the cell phone, which restrict it to transmitting with just enough power to reach the nearest tower without high error rates. If they didn't do that, like primitive two-way radios, they'd have a near-far problem, where the transmitters closet to the tower would be so powerful that distant transmissions couldn't be picked-up. The fact that it saves battery life is just a happy accident. Cell companies will also very often install several cell towers in an urban area, to increase capacity... they make no effort to use directional antennas or similar to reduce the number of cell phones hitting each. In fact the redundancy offered is a good thing, as people are less likely to lose service in various scenarios, like when one is briefly down during late-night maintenance windows.
Even if that was the issue, it wouldn't be an FAA regulation requiring cell phones be off. Maybe the FCC would create such a rule, or even a federal regulation. The FAA wouldn't unnecessarily burden themselves with helping out the telcos.
DISCLAIMER: I may have a telecommunications background, and may work or previously have work for one or more US-based cell phone companies, but my statements are my own personal opinions, and do not represent my current or previous employers.
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The only winners here are the law firms. T
Apple, getting $1bln from Samsung, while stiffling their competitors, seems like a big winner to me.
The lawyers are big winners, too. And worst of all, they win no matter who loses, a lot like IBM consultants...
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No other phone ad ALL the features iPhone did when it was released.
Hell, I had PDAs long, long before the iPhone came out, which had damn near all the features of the iPhone. Pinch-to-zoom wasn't one of them, but only because resistive touch screens still ruled the world.
Just try to name some PATENTABLE features the iPhone had, which weren't already existing in some phone or PDA, somewhere.
The triumph of the iPhone was that they put together the top of the line technology at just the right time. They waited until everyone was carrying around a cell phone already, they waited until capacitive touch-screens were available, they convinced Corning there would be a market if they resurected Gorilla Glass, they waited until 3G was available, so internet speeds were fast enough to stream music, and comfortable web browing speeds, instead of 2G's fax-modem speeds. They waited until WiFi had become common, and blluetooth was available. They waited until flash was cheap enough that you could store a music collection. They waited until memory and CPU were cheap and fast enough that a non-cripped web browser on mobile devices was practical. They waited until LCD DPI had gotten high enough that you could squeeze a decent amount of text on a PDA screen, and people wouldn't mind reading it. They waited until LiIon batteries had gotten cheap and high capacity enough that you could have a PDA that keeps running for a full day on a charge with just the screen turned off (where PDAs actually suspended when you hit the power button), etc.
Apple came along, and put the top-of-the-line components, that had been advailable to everyone, from off the shelf, into their device, at just the right time when all the stars were aligned. I commend them for seeing the opportunity that others had missed, and jumping into the written-off PDA market after all others had tried and failed to make a go of it. But they didn't have any revolutionary technology from in-house which made it all possible. Their contribution was to figure out the best mixture of primitive POS touch UIs, and the PocketPC method of a full desktop UI squeezed into a PDA, picking the best tech to throw in, and a bit of good luck with Corning, that other companies may not have had.
And let's not forget that Apple was only too happy to copy good UI elements from Android, like the notification bar/tray.
Yep, I miss IRDA. More than a decade ago, I was typing up full documents with embedded charts and hand-drawn graphics on my Psion5MX, and printing them out directly to a nearby HP Laserjet4, with IRDA, using PCL.
I'm still diasappointed it went away. Just think, if every computer device you bought had an IRDA port on all 4 sides, all our devices would just ad-hoc connect to every other device in the same room, with no setup. Plug in a new set or speakers, and sound from your computer, or TV, or whatever, just starts playing. Practically no security concerns, since IR doesn't penetrate walls, at all. We would have needed some higher-speed IRDA standards, but it would have worked quite well. We're only just now starting to get things like WiFi to be remotely as user-friendly, and it's still fighting it out with Bluetooth.
Sadly, we've got even more printer protocols than we did back then. Even as networked printers get more powerful, they often don't support a common interoperable protocol like Postscript or PCL. Who'd have thought?
What's with all the contrarians? Why do we need wireless charging? For the same reasons your phone has WiFi and not an RJ45 port...
As a heavy Android phone user, I'm anxiously awaiting some wireless charging standard. I have wall-warts all over my house, so that wherever I sit, I can plug-in... Because cell phones just can't handle even a half day of heavy use between recharges. And even if one could, I wouldn't want to cut it that close.
So now, my cell is perpetually tethered to a microUSB cable, getting pulled off tables onto the floor, getting tugged when I try to move it and there's not enough slack, getting stress on the cable and socket when I want to set it on the armrest right where the plug is sticking out, and always fumbling with putting the connector in the right way, and pulling it out when I go, or it becomes a particular nusiance, maybe 10x a day.
What's more is the nusiance of travel... I've got a cigarette lighter to microUSB plug for driving, then I've got to carry a wall adapter for motel rooms, conference rooms, or whatnot, and then supplament that with a AA battery to microUSB adapter when I'm not within reach of a power outlet, but still need to use my phone heavily. Times like flying in particular.
All that stuff is much, much larger than my cell phone, and could be eliminated from my bag if restaurants, hotels, cars, passenger jets, and conference rooms had them built-in.
Now let's consider that I carry two or more devices around... One phone needs one charger, while the other phone won't charge from it at all. Wall chargers break USB specs in multiple, and mutually incompatible ways. That's why we have items like the Skiva QuadPower, which has one port that works on Apple devices, one port that works on Android devices, and two generic USB ports that are needed for Palm/Blackberry/BREW/Nokia/etc devices, that won't charge from the other ports.
And that's just getting started. Throw in tablets, or netbooks/ultrabooks, or even laptops. Tablets are almost always able to charge from USB, even if only very slowly, because we've built the modern world on the non-standard USB charging standard, and everyone wants to be able to get some charge out of it in the worst case. But the low voltage and power of USB leads to far more contortions than even smartphones have to contend with... And all because USB is such a poor charging standard. I'd sure love a universal charger, but even low power netbooks/ultrabooks don't even try to use USB, because the voltage is far too low, and they'd have to go nuts to add more special-cases to USB wall chargers.
We clearly need something better... Something that can supply more than 5v, and a whole lot of amps.
Who wouldn't want to have a flat pad they can put on their coffee table, that automatically starts charging any device you set on it? Laptop, cell phone, tablet, maybe laptop batteries not currently connected, etc. Throw in TV remote controls, flashlights, cordless keyboards/mice, console game controllers, etc., for good measure. It would be an incredible improvement over the current disjointed charging situation. And don't start complaining about efficiency... Even if it's got high losses, being able to top-off everywhere you go is much more efficient than having your battery get drained.
I firmly believe you're mistaken. Looking at the MAP, I don't see more than two adjacent green states anywhere:
http://cache.jalopnik.com/assets/images/12/2012/01/ea322ffba38e281e28da19cf0114502b.jpg
Also:
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
I do so on a regular basis.
What in the hell are you talking about? The entire Droid line has qwerty keyboards, and they were long the flagship android phones, built like tanks.
There aren't as many phones with a physical keyboard as without, but there's still a LOT of them, and ample selection for anyone, on any carrier, to get a good one.