Well you see, if you want o go to Mars, you have to pay for going to Mars. One of the ways to pay for going to Mars is too talk a really good game and see if people pony up some cash. Talking a good game is not sufficient, but absent Bill Gates as a financial backer, it's necessary. (Realistically even Bill couldn't provide sole financial backing for this most likely)
From the full article it looks like they're currently trying to see how far they can go without any surgery at all.
They aim to find out if they will need to have extra nerve endings implanted in a process known as “targeted muscle innervations” to control the robotic limb. The researchers have been surprised with the preliminary findings that show the patients are able to control the ankle joint, which they expected would require surgical implants.
If I'm reading that right, they *can* do what you're talking about, but they're starting to realize that they may not need to. While there might be some advantages to a permanently wired and attached prosthetic like Luke's hand or Steve Austin, there's also something to be said for a non-surgical solution that can be trivially switched out, changed, removed for maintenance, etc.
You can get around on a peg leg, doesn't mean it's the best or most efficient way to do it. The more closely they can mimic our natural capabilities the better for the amputees. Also this is technology that can be pushed farther as time goes on. We can recreate the lower-leg ankle assembly reasonably well with the technology you describe, but from what I understand this system can recreate the knee as well. That's allows people with much higher amputations to use the leg. Hand and arm amputation replacements are very primitive right now, the very best allow a simple "grip/don't grip" binary control, and most not even that. How far is it from this to a hand that can handle much more fine grained dexterity? Even what we would consider very gross movement controls for our natural hands would be a huge improvement for an amputee.
I'd be curious about what level of refined movement they are working with, and how much difference practice makes. I have a non-zero error rate in making movements with my natural limbs, especially when I'm doing very refined work (I've made a typo already in this post and had to correct it), but even gross movement I occasionally over or underestimate a stair height, trip over nothing, whatever. Usually I can correct by using other muscles or something; very rarely, but occasionally, I fall down and make a fool of myself.
Most of us learn to avoid and/or correct for as many of those mistakes as possible in the school of hard knocks. We fall down, it hurts, we try not to do that anymore. As we get older we do it less and less, until by middle childhood it becomes an infrequent and embarrassing event instead of a regular part of life. Once these people have these devices attached for real, and are trying to actually walk with them, I bet they get better faster.
They can, but brain surgery is much more risky than wiring some electrodes to some (now extraneous since the limb is gone) nerve endings. There was a story not long ago about wiring directly to speech center of the brain to give voices to mutes. For allowing the blind to see, the deaf to hear, or the mute to speak, brain surgery is both needed and (probably) worthwhile. There are less invasive ways to handle allowing bionic limbs.
Because you can't rely on the civilian network being there, or being effective. In Iraq we got fair to middling voice coverage on personal cell phones from Iraqna but as far as I know their data service capabilities were extremely spotty. This was also inside the main American camp and very close to Baghdad, I'm told that on conveys, or out in the country, even voice service was spotty. Granted this was a few years ago, during the worst of the insurgency; and before widespread data adoption even here in the US, but still we can't count on things being calm enough for regular cell tower maintenance where we show up. By most stories I've heard Afganistan is even worse. Whole swathes of the country have almost no cell service.
We're saying no ground troops in Libya, but as a thought experiment, what if we did send troops? Until those clever guys from Dubai finally hacked the cell towers, rebel controlled areas were getting no cell service at all. Assuming the area we're fighting in has a working, reliable cell network and we have access to it, how do we keep it functional? The enemy will know we use it, it'll be tempting to blow towers. They aren't placed in defensible positions after all, they're placed to maximize a commercial service. You say they won't "take it out" but they won't have too. Just the towers near us. Not every country has a "multiplicity of networks" either. Iraqna was the main game in town in Baghdad, there were a few other smaller carriers, but they mostly piggy backed on Iraqna's network and paid access fees.
What about a "real" conventional war again against another national army? It's not a likely scenario at the moment, but you shouldn't ignore it either. Who's to say they won't jam civilian frequencies knowing we rely on them? Hell even National Guard deployments to natural disasters in this country can't rely on civilian cell networks for command and control. New Orleans had virtually no cell service in the worst hit areas for weeks after Katrina.
How do they keep the tetanus alive on the flaming scrap? This sounds like a real biotech breakthrough. maybe they should switch fields or open up a subsidiary or something. Granted I'm not sure why you'd want too, but it's impressive.
I'm willing to bet you have a nationalized grid. In the US and Canada (at least I'm pretty sure Canada works this way) the grid is owned by the power companies. I get my power from Huntsville Utilities. They own the grid in my area, but ironically enough, they own no generation facilities. They buy all of their power from The Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns a combination of coal, hydro, and nuclear plants all throughout the region. They also own distribution grids in some places (my in-laws used to pay TVA directly when they lived in Knoxville), but mostly they own generation facilities and sell to distribution networks. So basically I pay the guy who owns the wires hanging on my residence. Where he gets his power from is dependent on several things: whether he owns generation facilities, whether they are sufficient to local demand, etc. If he owns no green generation facilitates he can buy green power from someone who does and resell it too me, but that's largely his options. I have no real control over where he gets his power from.
There's no GPL issue. The military simple doesn't release the software. The GPL allows organizations to keep their source code private as long as they don't try to redistribute the software. What the military does is the functional equivalent of Google making proprietary kernel mods for their internal version of Linux, except the "organization" happens to have a few million employees. Sometimes they do release military software to the public, but in that case if the compiled binary isn't classified, the source has to have been scrubbed for classified information before compilation. So releasing source wouldn't be an issue anyway.
My guess is that the tactical versions of all of this will use a frequency hoping radio in the "phone" and a dedicated military tower infrastructure with encryption. We already have the equivalent of mobile cell towers that can be put up or dropped in thirty minutes or so. There's almost certainly a lot more to this than a few Android apps, but using Android as the base OS on the portable soldier carried device will save a lot of development work.
Write drivers for the Android kernel that abstract away the specialty radio hardware, and suddenly you can do secure tactical communication software development using the same tools that make Angry Birds. better still this stuff can be tested, proof of concepted, even trained on back in the US using cheap commercial hardware, then put on ruggedized equipment with more secure radio hardware in theater.
Big Software is all on the receiving end of this, and all the big players are starting realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot with how broad software patents have become (except maybe Oracle, they seem to be playing their own game. Maybe they think that since they dominate their chosen area they're safer). I believe MS was just in court recently with a similar problem. The mutually assured destruction patent portfolios that everyone built up to protect themselves against each other are useless against the trolls, because the trolls never develop anything to infringe. They just sue other people.
It'll probably still take a few years for the momentum to be redirected and the ship to be turned around, but I think in the next 5-10 year you'll see MS and the other big software players changing their tune on this. Apple and Google never liked the game much to begin with (though they both willing play for the moment), and I don't think it'll take too many more trolls winning cases to convince MS and IBM.
I don't think I'd miss the slot on a tablet, but I can tell you why camera manufactures still use them. Shooting raw, my wife can fill a 32GB card quite easily shooting a wedding. A long wedding she can fill it completely and make a dent in a second. Once the photos are culled, cropped, and turned into JPEGs they don't take up anywhere near that much space, but during the event there's really not time for that stuff, nor for downloading pics to a computer.
RPM based distros aren't the same. SuSE puts all their crap in different places than Red Hat/Centos and the RPMs are often incompatible. I am slightly less familiar with.deb based distros, so this may not be the case with them, but among the RPM based distros, unless they are in the same "family" they often don't work together. Sometimes they do, but often switching to something to that "sometimes" works id more effort than just scrapping it all and starting over.
Disclaimer: I manage about 250 Linux boxes, servers and workstations. I am not a Microsoft shill. I use and like Linux, but making ridiculous claims does not help the cause.
Depending on Microsoft is a Hobson's choice: take it or leave it. Depending on a Linux distributor means there will probably be more than one distributor with an acceptable offer.
That's a complete nonsequitor for any significant installation. If I've invested (tens or hundreds of) thousands of dollars and hundreds (or thousands) of man hours designing, building, and deploying a large scale network of say, Red Hat boxes, I'm not just going to be able to trivially switch to Debian if Red Hat disappears or pisses me off. All of my scripts point to Red Hat locations for config and log files, all of my package management is based on RPM and yum, all of my users have designed their workflow around a Red Hat desktop, my kernel parameters are tuned for a Red Hat kernel, etc, etc. Realistically with a hundreds or thousands of systems level installation (not unusual for corporate or large scale lab use) it would be no less trivial to switch from Red hat to Debian, then to switch from Red Hat to MacOS. Once you've locked yourself into a vendor or distribution, whether OSS or proprietary, you've pretty much made your choice for a while. A few outlier systems are easy enough to manage, but you're not switching wholesale from one distro to another without a ton of effort. (Unless you go from Red Hat to CentOS, but there's not a huge lot of point there).
I recently spent $50 at Brookstone for a very nice leather case for my iPhone which contains an amazing secret... a charger. I love the thing. I charge it via mini-USB, and when I need an extra charge for my phone I flip it on. It's not much heavier than most nice leather cases, provides reasonable protection and more than doubles battery life in a pinch. This is the 3G/3GS version, and there's another for the 4. Be sure to get the right one, the shapes are different enough that they're not interchangeable.
The nice(ish) thing about iPads vs iPhones or even most Android phones is that even if you purchase the model with the celluar modem, the data plan is optional, and can be turned on or off as needed (at least on a monthly basis). Going on a trip this month? Call AT&T and turn on the data plan. Spending next month at home with a virtual fire (and wifi)? Call them and turn it off. It's still overpriced, especially since I'm already paying for a data plan on my damned phone, but at least it's somewhat flexible. Anyone know if the same is true for the Honeycomb tablets? Or at least some of them? I'm giving serious consideration to tablet, leaning iPad, but I could be convinced otherwise.
You mean like every single phone manufacturer in the world? Intel doesn't even have horse in the race below the tablet level, ARM is pretty much the only game in town for ultra mobile deceives like phones and PDAs.
I was thinking I could go for them passing out candy bars. Maybe not gold stars or pats on the head, but I like chocolate. Always assuming this does not impact my salary.
Depends on your definition of "older". It's always hardest at either end of the spectrum. Young people just entering the market have little or no marketable experience, and unless they're graduates from a high prestigious school they aren't likely to be first picks. Older people in their 50-60s are often considered problematical by younger managers who don't see them as marketable up to date candidates (fair or not). "Older" people like me (and probably, but necessarily, you) in their late 20's to early to mid 40's have statistically the easiest time. We've got appreciable, marketable experience that we can point at, but aren't perceived as "old" yet by hiring mangers.
Don't counter-offers just make you feel all warm and squishy inside? When I turned in my resignation and my manager sat me down and said "We really like you, and want to keep you... How about we just give you more money and responsibility?" it really made me feel loved. Of course I had to threaten to quit for it to happen, but still... They are in business to make money after all.
There's replaceable and replaceable. Everyone is replaceable if you *have* too, but some people are hard enough to replace that managers will go out of their way to not have too. To use a very high level example, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are replaceable. Indeed, Bill's been replaced, and Apple will have to figure out Steve in the next few years most likely. Doesn't mean MS or Apple want (or wanted) to replace them. Doesn't mean the boards of directors won't go out of their collective ways to avoid it. At lower levels, the only guy who really understands how the network works is really hard to replace and the Manager or CIO over him will go out of their way to avoid having too. He shouldn't exist, and if you're him, and you're smart, you're teaching someone else the network too. Unless you really like your current job and never want to do anything else.
Typically promotions in the military come within a unit (so you're much more likely to go from Squad Leader to Platoon Sergeant, or Company Commander to Battalion Operations Officer inside the same company or battalion), but they move you around every few years anyway. So you may get your promotion to SSG or MAJ when you moved inside of a unit, but next year you're going to Ft. Stewart anyway. It's kind of a combination of both promotion from within, and moving around a lot.
The military is also setup in a way that makes continued and regular advancement relatively easy, if not required. Especially for officers. If I decide I really like being Battalion Communications Officer, that's really too damn bad. When the opportunity comes along for company command I better bloody take it, then take the next job to make Major. After more than a few years of the same job (or more importantly the same rank), my raises stop coming; year or two more and I'm looking for a civilian job.
Using the military as a comparison is really kinda flawed for these reason, as well as a few others (the process of "getting into management" in the military (getting a commission) is not exactly straightforward there either).
Nope, been here for all those years. Somehow after thousands for articles, tens of thousands or comments read and somewhere approaching a thousand comment made, I've never seen or heard of it. Further I've managed to have a long an successful career in the industry without ever having heard of it, so I guess it's not completely indispensable. I've never had a need for the service, I've always worked places where we had or could get the bandwidth to handle our needs. It seems like useful enough technology, now that I know it exists, but I probably won't use it much because it appears that several popular corporate filters don't work with it.
The question of how we define "temporary" is still very germane though. Arguably iPod will have dominated the MP3 player market from the introduction of the device until the effective death of the market. That's not really temporary by any reasonable definition. Especially when you consider that Apple themselves introduced the device which will eventually "kill" the iPod, the iPhone. Foreseeing the likely death of their own market (something like iPhone was bound to come along sooner or later), they hastened the demise by introducing a new product which would usher in the replacement market. Of course they're not dominating the new market like they did the old, they could never have hoped to. It's a much lager market though, so they're making more money selling 18% or whatever of the smartphone market than they made selling 90% of the MPS3 market.
Except that nearly that whole list describes how Microsoft plans to handle developers for WM7. Closed App Store, Windows only development (granted, given Windows ubiquity, not a huge issue, but conceptually the same), probably VS only development... Only the clunky language is missing and there are ways around that. Not to mention that while ObjectiveC may be somewhat clunky, most people admit that Cocoa is pretty spiffy overall once they play with it a bit. It abstracts away most, if certainly not all, of ObjC's warts. In my mind, Microsoft is taking the worst features of Android and iOS and making an all new all "better" OS.
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Well you see, if you want o go to Mars, you have to pay for going to Mars. One of the ways to pay for going to Mars is too talk a really good game and see if people pony up some cash. Talking a good game is not sufficient, but absent Bill Gates as a financial backer, it's necessary. (Realistically even Bill couldn't provide sole financial backing for this most likely)
From the full article it looks like they're currently trying to see how far they can go without any surgery at all.
They aim to find out if they will need to have extra nerve endings implanted in a process known as “targeted muscle innervations” to control the robotic limb. The researchers have been surprised with the preliminary findings that show the patients are able to control the ankle joint, which they expected would require surgical implants.
If I'm reading that right, they *can* do what you're talking about, but they're starting to realize that they may not need to. While there might be some advantages to a permanently wired and attached prosthetic like Luke's hand or Steve Austin, there's also something to be said for a non-surgical solution that can be trivially switched out, changed, removed for maintenance, etc.
You can get around on a peg leg, doesn't mean it's the best or most efficient way to do it. The more closely they can mimic our natural capabilities the better for the amputees. Also this is technology that can be pushed farther as time goes on. We can recreate the lower-leg ankle assembly reasonably well with the technology you describe, but from what I understand this system can recreate the knee as well. That's allows people with much higher amputations to use the leg. Hand and arm amputation replacements are very primitive right now, the very best allow a simple "grip/don't grip" binary control, and most not even that. How far is it from this to a hand that can handle much more fine grained dexterity? Even what we would consider very gross movement controls for our natural hands would be a huge improvement for an amputee.
I'd be curious about what level of refined movement they are working with, and how much difference practice makes. I have a non-zero error rate in making movements with my natural limbs, especially when I'm doing very refined work (I've made a typo already in this post and had to correct it), but even gross movement I occasionally over or underestimate a stair height, trip over nothing, whatever. Usually I can correct by using other muscles or something; very rarely, but occasionally, I fall down and make a fool of myself.
Most of us learn to avoid and/or correct for as many of those mistakes as possible in the school of hard knocks. We fall down, it hurts, we try not to do that anymore. As we get older we do it less and less, until by middle childhood it becomes an infrequent and embarrassing event instead of a regular part of life. Once these people have these devices attached for real, and are trying to actually walk with them, I bet they get better faster.
They can, but brain surgery is much more risky than wiring some electrodes to some (now extraneous since the limb is gone) nerve endings. There was a story not long ago about wiring directly to speech center of the brain to give voices to mutes. For allowing the blind to see, the deaf to hear, or the mute to speak, brain surgery is both needed and (probably) worthwhile. There are less invasive ways to handle allowing bionic limbs.
Because you can't rely on the civilian network being there, or being effective. In Iraq we got fair to middling voice coverage on personal cell phones from Iraqna but as far as I know their data service capabilities were extremely spotty. This was also inside the main American camp and very close to Baghdad, I'm told that on conveys, or out in the country, even voice service was spotty. Granted this was a few years ago, during the worst of the insurgency; and before widespread data adoption even here in the US, but still we can't count on things being calm enough for regular cell tower maintenance where we show up. By most stories I've heard Afganistan is even worse. Whole swathes of the country have almost no cell service.
We're saying no ground troops in Libya, but as a thought experiment, what if we did send troops? Until those clever guys from Dubai finally hacked the cell towers, rebel controlled areas were getting no cell service at all. Assuming the area we're fighting in has a working, reliable cell network and we have access to it, how do we keep it functional? The enemy will know we use it, it'll be tempting to blow towers. They aren't placed in defensible positions after all, they're placed to maximize a commercial service. You say they won't "take it out" but they won't have too. Just the towers near us. Not every country has a "multiplicity of networks" either. Iraqna was the main game in town in Baghdad, there were a few other smaller carriers, but they mostly piggy backed on Iraqna's network and paid access fees.
What about a "real" conventional war again against another national army? It's not a likely scenario at the moment, but you shouldn't ignore it either. Who's to say they won't jam civilian frequencies knowing we rely on them? Hell even National Guard deployments to natural disasters in this country can't rely on civilian cell networks for command and control. New Orleans had virtually no cell service in the worst hit areas for weeks after Katrina.
How do they keep the tetanus alive on the flaming scrap? This sounds like a real biotech breakthrough. maybe they should switch fields or open up a subsidiary or something. Granted I'm not sure why you'd want too, but it's impressive.
I'm willing to bet you have a nationalized grid. In the US and Canada (at least I'm pretty sure Canada works this way) the grid is owned by the power companies. I get my power from Huntsville Utilities. They own the grid in my area, but ironically enough, they own no generation facilities. They buy all of their power from The Tennessee Valley Authority, which owns a combination of coal, hydro, and nuclear plants all throughout the region. They also own distribution grids in some places (my in-laws used to pay TVA directly when they lived in Knoxville), but mostly they own generation facilities and sell to distribution networks. So basically I pay the guy who owns the wires hanging on my residence. Where he gets his power from is dependent on several things: whether he owns generation facilities, whether they are sufficient to local demand, etc. If he owns no green generation facilitates he can buy green power from someone who does and resell it too me, but that's largely his options. I have no real control over where he gets his power from.
There's no GPL issue. The military simple doesn't release the software. The GPL allows organizations to keep their source code private as long as they don't try to redistribute the software. What the military does is the functional equivalent of Google making proprietary kernel mods for their internal version of Linux, except the "organization" happens to have a few million employees. Sometimes they do release military software to the public, but in that case if the compiled binary isn't classified, the source has to have been scrubbed for classified information before compilation. So releasing source wouldn't be an issue anyway.
My guess is that the tactical versions of all of this will use a frequency hoping radio in the "phone" and a dedicated military tower infrastructure with encryption. We already have the equivalent of mobile cell towers that can be put up or dropped in thirty minutes or so. There's almost certainly a lot more to this than a few Android apps, but using Android as the base OS on the portable soldier carried device will save a lot of development work.
Write drivers for the Android kernel that abstract away the specialty radio hardware, and suddenly you can do secure tactical communication software development using the same tools that make Angry Birds. better still this stuff can be tested, proof of concepted, even trained on back in the US using cheap commercial hardware, then put on ruggedized equipment with more secure radio hardware in theater.
Big Software is all on the receiving end of this, and all the big players are starting realize that they're shooting themselves in the foot with how broad software patents have become (except maybe Oracle, they seem to be playing their own game. Maybe they think that since they dominate their chosen area they're safer). I believe MS was just in court recently with a similar problem. The mutually assured destruction patent portfolios that everyone built up to protect themselves against each other are useless against the trolls, because the trolls never develop anything to infringe. They just sue other people.
It'll probably still take a few years for the momentum to be redirected and the ship to be turned around, but I think in the next 5-10 year you'll see MS and the other big software players changing their tune on this. Apple and Google never liked the game much to begin with (though they both willing play for the moment), and I don't think it'll take too many more trolls winning cases to convince MS and IBM.
I don't think I'd miss the slot on a tablet, but I can tell you why camera manufactures still use them. Shooting raw, my wife can fill a 32GB card quite easily shooting a wedding. A long wedding she can fill it completely and make a dent in a second. Once the photos are culled, cropped, and turned into JPEGs they don't take up anywhere near that much space, but during the event there's really not time for that stuff, nor for downloading pics to a computer.
RPM based distros aren't the same. SuSE puts all their crap in different places than Red Hat/Centos and the RPMs are often incompatible. I am slightly less familiar with .deb based distros, so this may not be the case with them, but among the RPM based distros, unless they are in the same "family" they often don't work together. Sometimes they do, but often switching to something to that "sometimes" works id more effort than just scrapping it all and starting over.
Disclaimer: I manage about 250 Linux boxes, servers and workstations. I am not a Microsoft shill. I use and like Linux, but making ridiculous claims does not help the cause.
Depending on Microsoft is a Hobson's choice: take it or leave it. Depending on a Linux distributor means there will probably be more than one distributor with an acceptable offer.
That's a complete nonsequitor for any significant installation. If I've invested (tens or hundreds of) thousands of dollars and hundreds (or thousands) of man hours designing, building, and deploying a large scale network of say, Red Hat boxes, I'm not just going to be able to trivially switch to Debian if Red Hat disappears or pisses me off. All of my scripts point to Red Hat locations for config and log files, all of my package management is based on RPM and yum, all of my users have designed their workflow around a Red Hat desktop, my kernel parameters are tuned for a Red Hat kernel, etc, etc. Realistically with a hundreds or thousands of systems level installation (not unusual for corporate or large scale lab use) it would be no less trivial to switch from Red hat to Debian, then to switch from Red Hat to MacOS. Once you've locked yourself into a vendor or distribution, whether OSS or proprietary, you've pretty much made your choice for a while. A few outlier systems are easy enough to manage, but you're not switching wholesale from one distro to another without a ton of effort. (Unless you go from Red Hat to CentOS, but there's not a huge lot of point there).
I recently spent $50 at Brookstone for a very nice leather case for my iPhone which contains an amazing secret... a charger. I love the thing. I charge it via mini-USB, and when I need an extra charge for my phone I flip it on. It's not much heavier than most nice leather cases, provides reasonable protection and more than doubles battery life in a pinch. This is the 3G/3GS version, and there's another for the 4. Be sure to get the right one, the shapes are different enough that they're not interchangeable.
The nice(ish) thing about iPads vs iPhones or even most Android phones is that even if you purchase the model with the celluar modem, the data plan is optional, and can be turned on or off as needed (at least on a monthly basis). Going on a trip this month? Call AT&T and turn on the data plan. Spending next month at home with a virtual fire (and wifi)? Call them and turn it off. It's still overpriced, especially since I'm already paying for a data plan on my damned phone, but at least it's somewhat flexible. Anyone know if the same is true for the Honeycomb tablets? Or at least some of them? I'm giving serious consideration to tablet, leaning iPad, but I could be convinced otherwise.
You mean like every single phone manufacturer in the world? Intel doesn't even have horse in the race below the tablet level, ARM is pretty much the only game in town for ultra mobile deceives like phones and PDAs.
I was thinking I could go for them passing out candy bars. Maybe not gold stars or pats on the head, but I like chocolate. Always assuming this does not impact my salary.
Depends on your definition of "older". It's always hardest at either end of the spectrum. Young people just entering the market have little or no marketable experience, and unless they're graduates from a high prestigious school they aren't likely to be first picks. Older people in their 50-60s are often considered problematical by younger managers who don't see them as marketable up to date candidates (fair or not). "Older" people like me (and probably, but necessarily, you) in their late 20's to early to mid 40's have statistically the easiest time. We've got appreciable, marketable experience that we can point at, but aren't perceived as "old" yet by hiring mangers.
Don't counter-offers just make you feel all warm and squishy inside? When I turned in my resignation and my manager sat me down and said "We really like you, and want to keep you... How about we just give you more money and responsibility?" it really made me feel loved. Of course I had to threaten to quit for it to happen, but still... They are in business to make money after all.
There's replaceable and replaceable. Everyone is replaceable if you *have* too, but some people are hard enough to replace that managers will go out of their way to not have too. To use a very high level example, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are replaceable. Indeed, Bill's been replaced, and Apple will have to figure out Steve in the next few years most likely. Doesn't mean MS or Apple want (or wanted) to replace them. Doesn't mean the boards of directors won't go out of their collective ways to avoid it. At lower levels, the only guy who really understands how the network works is really hard to replace and the Manager or CIO over him will go out of their way to avoid having too. He shouldn't exist, and if you're him, and you're smart, you're teaching someone else the network too. Unless you really like your current job and never want to do anything else.
Typically promotions in the military come within a unit (so you're much more likely to go from Squad Leader to Platoon Sergeant, or Company Commander to Battalion Operations Officer inside the same company or battalion), but they move you around every few years anyway. So you may get your promotion to SSG or MAJ when you moved inside of a unit, but next year you're going to Ft. Stewart anyway. It's kind of a combination of both promotion from within, and moving around a lot.
The military is also setup in a way that makes continued and regular advancement relatively easy, if not required. Especially for officers. If I decide I really like being Battalion Communications Officer, that's really too damn bad. When the opportunity comes along for company command I better bloody take it, then take the next job to make Major. After more than a few years of the same job (or more importantly the same rank), my raises stop coming; year or two more and I'm looking for a civilian job.
Using the military as a comparison is really kinda flawed for these reason, as well as a few others (the process of "getting into management" in the military (getting a commission) is not exactly straightforward there either).
Nope, been here for all those years. Somehow after thousands for articles, tens of thousands or comments read and somewhere approaching a thousand comment made, I've never seen or heard of it. Further I've managed to have a long an successful career in the industry without ever having heard of it, so I guess it's not completely indispensable. I've never had a need for the service, I've always worked places where we had or could get the bandwidth to handle our needs. It seems like useful enough technology, now that I know it exists, but I probably won't use it much because it appears that several popular corporate filters don't work with it.
The question of how we define "temporary" is still very germane though. Arguably iPod will have dominated the MP3 player market from the introduction of the device until the effective death of the market. That's not really temporary by any reasonable definition. Especially when you consider that Apple themselves introduced the device which will eventually "kill" the iPod, the iPhone. Foreseeing the likely death of their own market (something like iPhone was bound to come along sooner or later), they hastened the demise by introducing a new product which would usher in the replacement market. Of course they're not dominating the new market like they did the old, they could never have hoped to. It's a much lager market though, so they're making more money selling 18% or whatever of the smartphone market than they made selling 90% of the MPS3 market.
Except that nearly that whole list describes how Microsoft plans to handle developers for WM7. Closed App Store, Windows only development (granted, given Windows ubiquity, not a huge issue, but conceptually the same), probably VS only development... Only the clunky language is missing and there are ways around that. Not to mention that while ObjectiveC may be somewhat clunky, most people admit that Cocoa is pretty spiffy overall once they play with it a bit. It abstracts away most, if certainly not all, of ObjC's warts. In my mind, Microsoft is taking the worst features of Android and iOS and making an all new all "better" OS.