Yes, yes I am. For most consumers (most, not all, yes you know this guy and he's an exception, I got it) the loss of a couple gigs of pictures, home movies, and MP3s is going to pale in comparison to the other losses sustained in a major disaster of this magnitude. They're also relatively uncommon disasters. It's much more likely that you'll accidentally delete a file or lose a hard drive than that your home will be destroyed.
Remember the golden rule of security, it's never perfect but it should be sufficient to account for a combination of the level of risk (a major disaster is fairly unlikely) and the value of the data (most data on most consumer machines is not all that valuable). If you happen to have invaluable data on your personal hard drive, an offsite backup solution may be called for. If you happen to live in area where the risk of losing an onsite backup is high (maybe a really high crime area), an offsite backup solution might be called for. For most people, under most circumstances Time Machine is sufficient.
Realistically that's considerably more complicated than:
1)Plug in USB drive. 2)Answer "yes" to the question: "Should this drive be used for backups?"
Again, it's not "hard" in Linux just slightly "harder". Also not many "consumers" have a "server side". You do, I do, but it's not common and I have a feeling that you, like me, are a professional in addition to being a consumer.
Personally I think the backup thing is a red herring in the consumer market. How hard is it to plug a USB hard drive in and use Time Machine/Windows Backup? It's a little more complicated in Linux, but not much and anyone with the technical chops to get Linux working in the first place can almost certainly handle it. Since Windows 7 (maybe Vista? I dunno, never used Vista seriously) and OSX 10.5 backups on the two major consumer OSes are incredibly easy. Granted, if you are hit by some major natural disaster or fire you might still lose data; but for most consumers that's probably the least of their worries when they're hit by something so serious.
To be fair, I do have a "cloud" data account. I used my Dropbox mainly for things that I feel like I might want to have available to me anywhere. There's definite advantages to being able to access my resume from my phone, for instance.
Perhaps I've been lucky, but in general when I've had a manager or executive with a large office, they mostly used it as a meeting room. I actually feel sorry for my current boss. We're so short of conference room space, that people schedule his office for smaller meetings. He essentially has to put up with the distraction or work somewhere else. Of course this place is generally really reasonable. I have an 8x8 full height cube to myself with plenty of room for a Windows and Linux box, dual monitors on both, and some work space.
I think you're misunderstanding the OP's (admittedly colorful and not entirely well explained) point about what constitutes a "shitass" country. He isn't trying to say that the people in the country are bad, or that there aren't intelligent and successful people within them, but rather that these countries treat their workers, especially working class factory workers, like shit. Unsafe conditions, exceptionally poor pay, and long hours are the rule in most developing countries, and the ones he lists are particularly well known for them. His point (again, colorfully expressed) is that most companies will treat people as poorly as they can get away with. Here in the US (and even more so in Europe and some other countries) we have laws and some level of enforcement to ensure that there is a reasonable bottom limit to how badly you can be treated. In most "shitass" countries it's even worse.
Words can, and often do have more than one meaning. "Broadband" means one thing to a network engineer in the course of his work, another thing to people in general. Indeed, if the network engineer wishes to communicate about the matter with "people in general" he must be able to switch contexts, and understand that what $randomperson on the street means when they say "broadband" is not what $colleague means. Much like many technical terms ("Virus" is a good one, "Hacker" one that particularly infuriates some people here) "broadband" has a slightly different definition to most people than is does to subject matter experts. Because you *are* a subject matter expert it behooves *you* to understand both definitions and be able to use the word as appropriate in different contexts.
If you go around telling random people on the street that they are misusing the term, all you're accomplishing is looking like a pedantic ass to those of use who both understand the both the technical and common definition of the term. I'm sure your mom, or that guy at your neighbor's party are thrilled to learn that "broadband" actually refers to whether or not a network transmission is digital, and will find this incredibly useful when calling their cable company to get Internet service.
But again, this doesn't explain why Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc don't have any real high speed Internet options. Texas is huge, and parts of it have very spread out populations, but *most* Texans live in one of the cities, which have perfectly reasonable population densities. Yet the best broadband options in most of those cities are 15/1.5 or worse. The common argument here is that lack of population density makes it hard for broadband to be deployed here. The simple fact of the matter though, is that like 20% of Americans live in low population density areas.
If a report stated that 15% or even 20% of Americans don't have access to broadband, we could say, "Oh, well, those people live in low population density areas... It's hard to get them broadband". Reports more typically say that 50-60% of Americans don't have access to broadband, and that number is likely to jump now that they've actually redefined "Broadband" to a reasonable number. That leaves us with a delta of 30-40% of the population (more now) that live in areas with perfectly normal population densities, yet can't get broadband.
That's just using the US Government's definition of broadband. On top of that, very few Americans, even in the highest population density areas (New York, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc), can get the kind of speed that is actually considered to be "normal" in other parts of the world. Lots of places in Europe and Asia have 100mbs+ speeds available to the home. Many can even get 200mbs+. There are precious few places in the US where you can get that kind of speed regardless of population density.
Whatever the reasons are for poor broadband access in this country, population density is pretty low on the list.
And for those comparing this to Apple's lockdown, that's ridiculous - Apple actively tries to prevent you from jailbreaking, while anyone can mod the Chrome OS.
Anyone can modify Linux, that doesn't mean that if you give me a Linux box with locked down guest account access, no alternate boot methods, and don't tell me the root password that I can modify this *particular* Linux installation. The fact that Chrome is Open Source won't help me install applications on my Chrome device. Unless I go out and install my own custom ChromeOS on the device, at which point why did I buy this thing? I could have just bought a conventional laptop and put Fedora on it.
I'm not quite clear on what you're saying here. The article pretty explicitly states that users will not be able to install applications:
In contrast, Chrome OS assumes that applications and users can't be trusted. And it has just one application: the browser. "There's a cascade of things that happen when you make this core assumption," says Linus Upson, a Google VP of engineering working on the project, from making it easier to protect against malware, to reducing the need for users to act as administrator for their own system.
It's got one application: the web browser. The only way to get more "applications" is web apps. So you've gone from Apple's "You can only install the apps we allow" to "you can't install apps". You're right, it prevents people from getting around the "UAC" concept: by not letting them get to the point where the system asks if you're sure you want to install the app.
Now if there's more to the story and you can install other app somehow, that's fine and dandy, but at least according to the information in this article, that's not the case.
After reading the article, I can't come to any other conclusion. This is *way* more closed than the iFamily stuff. It's on par with the attitude that Apple took with the initial release of the iPhone, before the App Store. Even then, Apple provided a fair number of local apps that you could use to perform a lot of basic PDA functions. This is literally a computer with one application installed. It has a web browser, that's it.
This is... pretty yucky. I mean... I consider the iPhone's level of lock down to be acceptable on a phone or PDA, but somewhat limiting on a tablet (one reason I don't have an iPad yet). This is a full fledged laptop and it's even more locked down?
Louisiana allows drinking on the streets, but requires plastic cups or bottles for safety reasons. A fair compromise I think. Of course Louisiana has some of the most liberal alcohol laws in the country. Bars in tourist areas like the French Quarter typically keep a supply of "go-cups" (disposable plastic party cups) on hand so you can pour your [beer, wine, mixed drink] in for the walk to the next bar. I miss living in New Orleans...
Then why haven't HTC and the like released Android PDAs that piggyback on their phone development? Samsung announced the Galaxy Player a couple months ago, but I've never seen it. The best excuse I've read is that Google blocks Android Market access from devices that don't have a GPS and some other expensive components that are more useful on a phone than on a PDA.
You don't see the irony here? The reason is the opposite side of the coin of Apple's highly integrated model. You're complaining because Apple's model of controlling all the verticals (hardware, OS, and apps) doesn't give you the freedom you want, but the flip side is that Apple can say "Meh, it doesn't cost much more to throw a PDA out there too while we're at it." and release the iPod touch. They aren't beholden to anyone, so they can do what they want.
Android manufacturers are limited by what Google allows. Everything is give and take, everything is partnership with someone else. The model has lots of advantages, but it also has disadvantages. The lack of Android PDA is a result of a combination of limited market for them and one of the disadvantages of the Android Model. Google's current policy is that "official" Android devices *must* have a cell phone chip. Unless or until they change that policy there won't be "official" (ie able to access the official app store) Android PDAs.
No, it's not anyone's "fault." It's a result of measures that, like everything else in this world, aren't perfect. My point wasn't that regulated monopolies suck, they don't always. The same local governments that "screwed up" granting those monopolies in Louisiana are also working to try and fix the situation, quite successfully in some cases. Though you probably wouldn't like their solution which is moving from a regulated monopoly to a government backed utility.
There is no perfect solution. The market can't or won't "fix it" in every situation. Federal regulation, local regulation, market forces, none of them exist in a vacuum and all of them have their places. Sometimes people rely to much on one or the other, and stuff gets screwy. When enough people feel like enough stuff is screwy then they start leaning on one of the other forces to fix it. Your original post seemed to imply that somehow Federal regulation and the current regulated monopoly situation in most areas were somehow one and the same. They're not, local governments create the monopolies; and for a great number of people, probably a majority of people, those monopolies are better or on par with the alternative.
Which is usually either nothing, or a government utility. Because big telecoms don't like to spend a fortune running cable to every home in a low population density area unless they can feel comfortable with a guaranteed ROI.
The regulated monopolies came mostly from the local governments that you "Limited Government" types love so much in preference to the Feds. A lot of the rest are because no telecoms want to pay to lay cable in places with lowish population densities unless they get guaranteed pay-back. Cox in Southern Louisiana was so bad that, after trying to get someone, anyone, to come in and compete with them, the local governments for a lot of little hick towns (and Lafayette, which is a mid sized, semi-hick, city) are at the forefront of fiber to the home efforts. I left Lafayette before they finished the build out, but you could already start to see the effects when I was leaving. Cox, which was notorious for poor service, lack of community participation, and reluctance to upgrade its network was suddenly improving in every area trying desperately to convince people that there was no need to switch to LUS (Lafayette Utility Service) Fiber.
Since there isn't, and can't be in most cases, any competition in most localities for broadband, we're pretty much stuck hoping the Feds will protect us.
It would appear that HP still makes the iPAQ. $300 with Window Mobile, WiFi, Mobile Office, Bluetooth, USB port and SD slot. You can still get most of the last run of Palm's stuff too. Or a SIMless smartphone I guess. Really, I think "pure" PDAs are a dying market. Most people prefer smartphones. IMO Apple only makes the iPod Touch because it's a cheap to engineer also-ran piggy backing on their iPhone development. (And they make nice giveaways. I swear it seem like you can't turn around without Apple coming up with a new reason to give one away with a Mac purchase).
But how is that Apple's problem? It keeps coming back to this. People's argument often (not always, plenty of people just don't like iDevices, which in my opinion is a much more reasonable position to hold) boil down to: "Apple makes the best in class device, and I want the best in class device, but I don't like how Apple manages their device. Therefore Apple should be forced to manage their device in a way that is more appealing to me, so I don't fell bad about buying this thing that I really want"
If there's no direct alternative to the iPod Touch on the market than you option is "buy something that's close, but not as nice, or which costs more". In and of itself, the fact that the iPod Touch or the iPhone are best in class devices (which is not true in the case of iPhone, by most definitions of "best", but simplifies the argument) does not make Apple a monopoly in any "market" that most courts would accept. There are many alternative devices and many people own them. The fact that they don't meet some particular arbitrary requirement of yours is fairly immaterial.
On a personal level I'd love to see Apple open up to additional app stores, or open up their own app store so that it's content neutral. It's not a deal breaker for me, my iPhone does everything I need it too, but more options are always good. On a legal level, I don't see any good argument to *force* Apple to do either of these things. "People who own iDevices" isn't a market. "People who own smartphones/tablets/PDAs" are markets, but there are plenty of alternatives to Apple in all of them.
There are two primary reason that a lot of apps are popular, despite basically showing the same info you could get from a web site.
1) Time 2) Money
If I go to weather.com to see what today's weather will be like, I have to download the whole page. Layout, images, stupid flash adds that won't even display because my phone doesn't have flash installed, all of it. If I open the Weather.com app, the layout and images are already on the phone, and the ads are really tiny custom designed jobs intended for the really small amount of space they've been given. All my phone is downloading is the actual weather information, and maybe a small banner jpeg. Much less data.
Since most cell networks are still relatively slow data pipes, and since some people still pay for limited data plans, less data saves time and money. Probably not a lot of either I'll grant you (unless you have really bad coverage or a really bad data plan), but hey.
I have,once, from a really anal company that included both upper and lower case letters in their keys. Their keys were like 25 characters long and included upper case, lower case, numeric, and I think a few special characters. They were really, really paranoid about people stealing their software. Which was kind of ironic, because they were a pretty small company that made a mostly failed competitor to AutoCAD. By all accounts it was excellent software; but the users were a small, loyal fan base that refused to switch to the far more popular competitor and were fairly unlikely to steal licenses.
SQL statements are traditionally typed in all caps. At any rate the command portions are, references to the actual database structure are lower case. So you get statement that look like "SELECT first_name FROM users WHERE last_name = 'Smith';" to print out the first name of everyone in the table "users" who has a last name "Smith". Frankly there's about a million theories as to the easiest way to produce theses irritating as Hell to type statements, but caps lock figures in a lot of them.
I was thinking this too. SQL statements and C statics were the main things I could think of that are typically caps locked. Though to be fair, this device doesn't look like it was designed for doing a lot of coding, and in both cases the all caps format for these statements is more a matter of convention than necessity. As far as the SQL interpreter on most modern databases is concerned "select", "SELECT", and "SeLeCt" all mean the same thing. C static names are, of course, case sensitive, but as long as you call "SaTiC2" the same thing through the whole program the compiler doesn't care what case you use.
The military doesn't *typically* buy video games systems for soldiers. We briefly considered using some of our MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) funds in Iraq to buy a couple of game systems and some other stuff to put together a lounge type area for our troops, but it turned out to be nearly impossible to do. The rules surrounding the use of MWR funds make such a thing... difficult. Soldiers buy their own PS3s.
I still wish I could have been a fly on the wall when this purchase order went through:
Purchasing Agent: Excuse me Colonel, I just got a purchase order signed by you for 1,700 video games systems, I don't know how that happened but I wanted to call and correct...
Colonel: No, that's correct, 1760 PS3 video game systems, you see we're building a...
PA: I can't buy you 1760 video game consoles, they'll fire me.
C: No really, it's a valid project, you see we're going to build a huge cell process...
PA: Colonel, please... Let's send this to over to Bob and let him buy it... I never liked Bob anyways...
C: No really look, this all really technical and...
PA: It's no problem, Colonel, I transferred the PO to Bob. He'll set you up...
C:...:click::Colonel's phone rings:
Bob: Hey Colonel, it's Bob in purchasing, I just got a PO signed by you for 1700 video game systems and I wanted...
Assuming they can provide believable numbers to indicate that they can bring in X number of dollars in tourism business, then they could, I assume, get the same tax incentives.
They may do that occasionally, but every time we called them, they just blew the device in place or used a "destructive disarming" technique like a water cannon. They sometimes collected the pieces though, you can get a lot of info even after the device is detonated.
That is, indeed, the real question. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to answer in fashion timely enough to be useful. The best we can do is take the word of the Governor that he would give such a theme park the same consideration. It's just not feasible to do otherwise. Even assuming you could make a case that such a place would be a huge tourism draw, it would take months if not years to get it far enough along to start applying for these kinds of incentives.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, yes I am. For most consumers (most, not all, yes you know this guy and he's an exception, I got it) the loss of a couple gigs of pictures, home movies, and MP3s is going to pale in comparison to the other losses sustained in a major disaster of this magnitude. They're also relatively uncommon disasters. It's much more likely that you'll accidentally delete a file or lose a hard drive than that your home will be destroyed.
Remember the golden rule of security, it's never perfect but it should be sufficient to account for a combination of the level of risk (a major disaster is fairly unlikely) and the value of the data (most data on most consumer machines is not all that valuable). If you happen to have invaluable data on your personal hard drive, an offsite backup solution may be called for. If you happen to live in area where the risk of losing an onsite backup is high (maybe a really high crime area), an offsite backup solution might be called for. For most people, under most circumstances Time Machine is sufficient.
Realistically that's considerably more complicated than:
1)Plug in USB drive.
2)Answer "yes" to the question: "Should this drive be used for backups?"
Again, it's not "hard" in Linux just slightly "harder". Also not many "consumers" have a "server side". You do, I do, but it's not common and I have a feeling that you, like me, are a professional in addition to being a consumer.
Personally I think the backup thing is a red herring in the consumer market. How hard is it to plug a USB hard drive in and use Time Machine/Windows Backup? It's a little more complicated in Linux, but not much and anyone with the technical chops to get Linux working in the first place can almost certainly handle it. Since Windows 7 (maybe Vista? I dunno, never used Vista seriously) and OSX 10.5 backups on the two major consumer OSes are incredibly easy. Granted, if you are hit by some major natural disaster or fire you might still lose data; but for most consumers that's probably the least of their worries when they're hit by something so serious.
To be fair, I do have a "cloud" data account. I used my Dropbox mainly for things that I feel like I might want to have available to me anywhere. There's definite advantages to being able to access my resume from my phone, for instance.
Perhaps I've been lucky, but in general when I've had a manager or executive with a large office, they mostly used it as a meeting room. I actually feel sorry for my current boss. We're so short of conference room space, that people schedule his office for smaller meetings. He essentially has to put up with the distraction or work somewhere else. Of course this place is generally really reasonable. I have an 8x8 full height cube to myself with plenty of room for a Windows and Linux box, dual monitors on both, and some work space.
I think you're misunderstanding the OP's (admittedly colorful and not entirely well explained) point about what constitutes a "shitass" country. He isn't trying to say that the people in the country are bad, or that there aren't intelligent and successful people within them, but rather that these countries treat their workers, especially working class factory workers, like shit. Unsafe conditions, exceptionally poor pay, and long hours are the rule in most developing countries, and the ones he lists are particularly well known for them. His point (again, colorfully expressed) is that most companies will treat people as poorly as they can get away with. Here in the US (and even more so in Europe and some other countries) we have laws and some level of enforcement to ensure that there is a reasonable bottom limit to how badly you can be treated. In most "shitass" countries it's even worse.
Words can, and often do have more than one meaning. "Broadband" means one thing to a network engineer in the course of his work, another thing to people in general. Indeed, if the network engineer wishes to communicate about the matter with "people in general" he must be able to switch contexts, and understand that what $randomperson on the street means when they say "broadband" is not what $colleague means. Much like many technical terms ("Virus" is a good one, "Hacker" one that particularly infuriates some people here) "broadband" has a slightly different definition to most people than is does to subject matter experts. Because you *are* a subject matter expert it behooves *you* to understand both definitions and be able to use the word as appropriate in different contexts.
If you go around telling random people on the street that they are misusing the term, all you're accomplishing is looking like a pedantic ass to those of use who both understand the both the technical and common definition of the term. I'm sure your mom, or that guy at your neighbor's party are thrilled to learn that "broadband" actually refers to whether or not a network transmission is digital, and will find this incredibly useful when calling their cable company to get Internet service.
But again, this doesn't explain why Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc don't have any real high speed Internet options. Texas is huge, and parts of it have very spread out populations, but *most* Texans live in one of the cities, which have perfectly reasonable population densities. Yet the best broadband options in most of those cities are 15/1.5 or worse. The common argument here is that lack of population density makes it hard for broadband to be deployed here. The simple fact of the matter though, is that like 20% of Americans live in low population density areas.
If a report stated that 15% or even 20% of Americans don't have access to broadband, we could say, "Oh, well, those people live in low population density areas... It's hard to get them broadband". Reports more typically say that 50-60% of Americans don't have access to broadband, and that number is likely to jump now that they've actually redefined "Broadband" to a reasonable number. That leaves us with a delta of 30-40% of the population (more now) that live in areas with perfectly normal population densities, yet can't get broadband.
That's just using the US Government's definition of broadband. On top of that, very few Americans, even in the highest population density areas (New York, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc), can get the kind of speed that is actually considered to be "normal" in other parts of the world. Lots of places in Europe and Asia have 100mbs+ speeds available to the home. Many can even get 200mbs+. There are precious few places in the US where you can get that kind of speed regardless of population density.
Whatever the reasons are for poor broadband access in this country, population density is pretty low on the list.
And for those comparing this to Apple's lockdown, that's ridiculous - Apple actively tries to prevent you from jailbreaking, while anyone can mod the Chrome OS.
Anyone can modify Linux, that doesn't mean that if you give me a Linux box with locked down guest account access, no alternate boot methods, and don't tell me the root password that I can modify this *particular* Linux installation. The fact that Chrome is Open Source won't help me install applications on my Chrome device. Unless I go out and install my own custom ChromeOS on the device, at which point why did I buy this thing? I could have just bought a conventional laptop and put Fedora on it.
I'm not quite clear on what you're saying here. The article pretty explicitly states that users will not be able to install applications:
In contrast, Chrome OS assumes that applications and users can't be trusted. And it has just one application: the browser. "There's a cascade of things that happen when you make this core assumption," says Linus Upson, a Google VP of engineering working on the project, from making it easier to protect against malware, to reducing the need for users to act as administrator for their own system.
It's got one application: the web browser. The only way to get more "applications" is web apps. So you've gone from Apple's "You can only install the apps we allow" to "you can't install apps". You're right, it prevents people from getting around the "UAC" concept: by not letting them get to the point where the system asks if you're sure you want to install the app.
Now if there's more to the story and you can install other app somehow, that's fine and dandy, but at least according to the information in this article, that's not the case.
After reading the article, I can't come to any other conclusion. This is *way* more closed than the iFamily stuff. It's on par with the attitude that Apple took with the initial release of the iPhone, before the App Store. Even then, Apple provided a fair number of local apps that you could use to perform a lot of basic PDA functions. This is literally a computer with one application installed. It has a web browser, that's it.
This is... pretty yucky. I mean... I consider the iPhone's level of lock down to be acceptable on a phone or PDA, but somewhat limiting on a tablet (one reason I don't have an iPad yet). This is a full fledged laptop and it's even more locked down?
Louisiana allows drinking on the streets, but requires plastic cups or bottles for safety reasons. A fair compromise I think. Of course Louisiana has some of the most liberal alcohol laws in the country. Bars in tourist areas like the French Quarter typically keep a supply of "go-cups" (disposable plastic party cups) on hand so you can pour your [beer, wine, mixed drink] in for the walk to the next bar. I miss living in New Orleans...
Then why haven't HTC and the like released Android PDAs that piggyback on their phone development? Samsung announced the Galaxy Player a couple months ago, but I've never seen it. The best excuse I've read is that Google blocks Android Market access from devices that don't have a GPS and some other expensive components that are more useful on a phone than on a PDA.
You don't see the irony here? The reason is the opposite side of the coin of Apple's highly integrated model. You're complaining because Apple's model of controlling all the verticals (hardware, OS, and apps) doesn't give you the freedom you want, but the flip side is that Apple can say "Meh, it doesn't cost much more to throw a PDA out there too while we're at it." and release the iPod touch. They aren't beholden to anyone, so they can do what they want.
Android manufacturers are limited by what Google allows. Everything is give and take, everything is partnership with someone else. The model has lots of advantages, but it also has disadvantages. The lack of Android PDA is a result of a combination of limited market for them and one of the disadvantages of the Android Model. Google's current policy is that "official" Android devices *must* have a cell phone chip. Unless or until they change that policy there won't be "official" (ie able to access the official app store) Android PDAs.
No, it's not anyone's "fault." It's a result of measures that, like everything else in this world, aren't perfect. My point wasn't that regulated monopolies suck, they don't always. The same local governments that "screwed up" granting those monopolies in Louisiana are also working to try and fix the situation, quite successfully in some cases. Though you probably wouldn't like their solution which is moving from a regulated monopoly to a government backed utility.
There is no perfect solution. The market can't or won't "fix it" in every situation. Federal regulation, local regulation, market forces, none of them exist in a vacuum and all of them have their places. Sometimes people rely to much on one or the other, and stuff gets screwy. When enough people feel like enough stuff is screwy then they start leaning on one of the other forces to fix it. Your original post seemed to imply that somehow Federal regulation and the current regulated monopoly situation in most areas were somehow one and the same. They're not, local governments create the monopolies; and for a great number of people, probably a majority of people, those monopolies are better or on par with the alternative.
Which is usually either nothing, or a government utility. Because big telecoms don't like to spend a fortune running cable to every home in a low population density area unless they can feel comfortable with a guaranteed ROI.
The regulated monopolies came mostly from the local governments that you "Limited Government" types love so much in preference to the Feds. A lot of the rest are because no telecoms want to pay to lay cable in places with lowish population densities unless they get guaranteed pay-back. Cox in Southern Louisiana was so bad that, after trying to get someone, anyone, to come in and compete with them, the local governments for a lot of little hick towns (and Lafayette, which is a mid sized, semi-hick, city) are at the forefront of fiber to the home efforts. I left Lafayette before they finished the build out, but you could already start to see the effects when I was leaving. Cox, which was notorious for poor service, lack of community participation, and reluctance to upgrade its network was suddenly improving in every area trying desperately to convince people that there was no need to switch to LUS (Lafayette Utility Service) Fiber.
Since there isn't, and can't be in most cases, any competition in most localities for broadband, we're pretty much stuck hoping the Feds will protect us.
It would appear that HP still makes the iPAQ. $300 with Window Mobile, WiFi, Mobile Office, Bluetooth, USB port and SD slot. You can still get most of the last run of Palm's stuff too. Or a SIMless smartphone I guess. Really, I think "pure" PDAs are a dying market. Most people prefer smartphones. IMO Apple only makes the iPod Touch because it's a cheap to engineer also-ran piggy backing on their iPhone development. (And they make nice giveaways. I swear it seem like you can't turn around without Apple coming up with a new reason to give one away with a Mac purchase).
But how is that Apple's problem? It keeps coming back to this. People's argument often (not always, plenty of people just don't like iDevices, which in my opinion is a much more reasonable position to hold) boil down to: "Apple makes the best in class device, and I want the best in class device, but I don't like how Apple manages their device. Therefore Apple should be forced to manage their device in a way that is more appealing to me, so I don't fell bad about buying this thing that I really want"
If there's no direct alternative to the iPod Touch on the market than you option is "buy something that's close, but not as nice, or which costs more". In and of itself, the fact that the iPod Touch or the iPhone are best in class devices (which is not true in the case of iPhone, by most definitions of "best", but simplifies the argument) does not make Apple a monopoly in any "market" that most courts would accept. There are many alternative devices and many people own them. The fact that they don't meet some particular arbitrary requirement of yours is fairly immaterial.
On a personal level I'd love to see Apple open up to additional app stores, or open up their own app store so that it's content neutral. It's not a deal breaker for me, my iPhone does everything I need it too, but more options are always good. On a legal level, I don't see any good argument to *force* Apple to do either of these things. "People who own iDevices" isn't a market. "People who own smartphones/tablets/PDAs" are markets, but there are plenty of alternatives to Apple in all of them.
There are two primary reason that a lot of apps are popular, despite basically showing the same info you could get from a web site.
1) Time
2) Money
If I go to weather.com to see what today's weather will be like, I have to download the whole page. Layout, images, stupid flash adds that won't even display because my phone doesn't have flash installed, all of it. If I open the Weather.com app, the layout and images are already on the phone, and the ads are really tiny custom designed jobs intended for the really small amount of space they've been given. All my phone is downloading is the actual weather information, and maybe a small banner jpeg. Much less data.
Since most cell networks are still relatively slow data pipes, and since some people still pay for limited data plans, less data saves time and money. Probably not a lot of either I'll grant you (unless you have really bad coverage or a really bad data plan), but hey.
I have,once, from a really anal company that included both upper and lower case letters in their keys. Their keys were like 25 characters long and included upper case, lower case, numeric, and I think a few special characters. They were really, really paranoid about people stealing their software. Which was kind of ironic, because they were a pretty small company that made a mostly failed competitor to AutoCAD. By all accounts it was excellent software; but the users were a small, loyal fan base that refused to switch to the far more popular competitor and were fairly unlikely to steal licenses.
SQL statements are traditionally typed in all caps. At any rate the command portions are, references to the actual database structure are lower case. So you get statement that look like "SELECT first_name FROM users WHERE last_name = 'Smith';" to print out the first name of everyone in the table "users" who has a last name "Smith". Frankly there's about a million theories as to the easiest way to produce theses irritating as Hell to type statements, but caps lock figures in a lot of them.
I was thinking this too. SQL statements and C statics were the main things I could think of that are typically caps locked. Though to be fair, this device doesn't look like it was designed for doing a lot of coding, and in both cases the all caps format for these statements is more a matter of convention than necessity. As far as the SQL interpreter on most modern databases is concerned "select", "SELECT", and "SeLeCt" all mean the same thing. C static names are, of course, case sensitive, but as long as you call "SaTiC2" the same thing through the whole program the compiler doesn't care what case you use.
The military doesn't *typically* buy video games systems for soldiers. We briefly considered using some of our MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation) funds in Iraq to buy a couple of game systems and some other stuff to put together a lounge type area for our troops, but it turned out to be nearly impossible to do. The rules surrounding the use of MWR funds make such a thing... difficult. Soldiers buy their own PS3s.
I still wish I could have been a fly on the wall when this purchase order went through:
Purchasing Agent: Excuse me Colonel, I just got a purchase order signed by you for 1,700 video games systems, I don't know how that happened but I wanted to call and correct...
Colonel: No, that's correct, 1760 PS3 video game systems, you see we're building a...
PA: I can't buy you 1760 video game consoles, they'll fire me.
C: No really, it's a valid project, you see we're going to build a huge cell process...
PA: Colonel, please... Let's send this to over to Bob and let him buy it... I never liked Bob anyways...
C: No really look, this all really technical and...
PA: It's no problem, Colonel, I transferred the PO to Bob. He'll set you up...
C: ... :click: :Colonel's phone rings:
Bob: Hey Colonel, it's Bob in purchasing, I just got a PO signed by you for 1700 video game systems and I wanted...
Assuming they can provide believable numbers to indicate that they can bring in X number of dollars in tourism business, then they could, I assume, get the same tax incentives.
They may do that occasionally, but every time we called them, they just blew the device in place or used a "destructive disarming" technique like a water cannon. They sometimes collected the pieces though, you can get a lot of info even after the device is detonated.
That is, indeed, the real question. Unfortunately it's nearly impossible to answer in fashion timely enough to be useful. The best we can do is take the word of the Governor that he would give such a theme park the same consideration. It's just not feasible to do otherwise. Even assuming you could make a case that such a place would be a huge tourism draw, it would take months if not years to get it far enough along to start applying for these kinds of incentives.