The problem with that idea isn't that it doesn't make sense, but that it would have a negative psychological appeal. Everyone who isn't a 10+ millionaire would suddenly stop being a millionaire. Million dollar houses wouldn't be.
And who wants to work for $10,000 per year? Or work for 75 cents an hour on minimum wage?
I think geography would be more important than numbers.
Based on the last election and basic demography, the "left" has large quantities of poor people in urban cities. The right has much smaller population densities but controls the Southern coast and large swaths of resource-rich central US.
I would think any protracted stalemate or conflict would leave the left with a large population it couldn't feed and a serious lack of energy resources. The right would have a fairly well-armed indigenous population that could feed itself but may find itself numerically outnumbered.
After a month of conflict it's not hard to see the left struggling to maintain control over a large, poor urban population with inadequate food and energy resources.
The military is the toss-up. They volunteer army has both a large, rural White contingent AND a large Hispanic and African American contingent. It's easy to see a splintering of the military or even possibly sitting out the conflict to avoid division or to maintain external threat protection.
It's hard to see generic Federal armed forces, even in full paramilitary mode, easily dealing with 20 million armed Americans without at least the logistical support of the military if not material and weapons.
The 20 million number is loosely based on 1/3 of Romney's popular vote, minus 5 million who wouldn't participate plus 5 million who wouldn't vote for him because he was too liberal or a Mormon but would be considered to support armed resistance due to their philosophical leanings.
...is to pass a law which states that the government will not provide material support or assistance to companies who offshore their profits.
Your container ship full of product headed to Europe gets hijacked by Somali pirates? Well, you can either ask the Liberian government (your ship's flag of convenience) or the Cayman Islands government (your international HQ) to help rescue your ship.
Website breached or attacked? The FBI isn't going to help.
The Chinese pirating your IP out the back door? Sorry, the State Department won't be lobbying China on your behalf.
You want a real government's help? OK, well then you have to pay taxes to the real government. Having a shiny sign on some skyscraper where 1% of your workforce lives, 50% of your profit is generated and nearly none of your income tax is paid means you're really not a local entity and won't get the government on your side.
Most "keyless entry" systems are remotes that unlock the doors and disarm any security system the car might have. Otherwise, the car is as normal and has physical keys, physical locks on the doors and requires a mechanical key to operate the ignition.
My Volvo has what Volvo calls "Personal Car Communicator" -- a wireless proximity key that allows the doors to be opened and car started without any button press other than the starter button. The key can stay in your pocket.
Now in the case of my Volvo, the "normal" starting process for non-PCC cars, the same keyfob fits a slot on the dash. There's no mechanical bypass, although I assume starting would work without any battery in the keyfob.
The door locks are all electronic and unless you've read the manual, you might not realize that the keyfob's "key ring" is actually a slim metal key that can be removed from the keyfob and used to mechanically unlock the door.
With a system like this, common to many high end luxury cars, I can see nontechnical people freaking out and saying their car doesn't work, either not letting them in because they don't know the bypass exists or not starting because they don't know the non-wireless starting method (ie, fob in slot or similar).
Or they may just be really high strung people who figure that anything that doesn't work is Mercedes' problem and they need to get the car and give them a loaner.
I've used Tyan (although my last one was a dual P3), Gigabyte and Asus and I finally just switched to Intel boards, primarily to not have to ever use a Realtek (aka Realdreck) ethernet chipset again.
My Gigabyte and Asus boards used Realtek ethernet chipsets and they were total shit, both at the hardware level and at the software level. I ended up buying Intel cards and disabling/uninstalling the Realtek shit as much as possible.
Now I just buy Intel boards and get a decent Intel NIC, although Intel can be a PITA about releasing server OS drivers for what they call "consumer" NICs. The side benefit has been less weird shit and documentation in better English.
Intel boards may not be great "values" (relative to maximum features or overclockability) but they have always been super stable and worked right.
Someone more business savvy than me told me that while "self storage" facilities weren't a bad business considering how much junk people have, they are often setup primarily for "parking" real estate until something more valuable can be constructed on the site.
Storage brings in some revenue to pay property taxes and basic maintenance and the facilities themselves have very low overhead costs as most are just a vast network of non-climate controlled one-story garage-type structures with a fence around them. Plus it keeps local officials from bitching about undeveloped or poorly maintained property.
Now, there are more elaborate storage centers run as legitimate businesses in their own right and some of these may have more elaborate facilities (climate control, electricity, etc), but a lot of the plain/simple ones are just holding places for real estate investors.
It always cracks me up to see someone up on their soap box about some health or nutrition issue and then start throwing "saturated fat" and "cholesterol".
You know that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol aren't bad for us, don't you? That the conventional wisdom on obesity and cardiovascular health relative to saturated fat and cholesterol is junk science?
It's not "saving lives" it's rewarding intolerance by showing sensitivity to intolerance. It also creates a precedence that says that you recognize their intolerance and will react affirmatively to it again in the future, guaranteeing another intolerant reaction.
Is it wrong to purposefully offend someone? Sure, that's Ethics 101.
But Ethics 201 asks more questions about what intent means and what it means to be offended and how far you can go to react to that offense.
By most civilized standards, rioting and killing people in response to a video is also unacceptable.
It's too early for the new connector to have done visible damage, however, I think that after a period of time long time users will have second thoughts about an upgrade if the kinds of accessories they want aren't available, and accessory makers outside of a small big names may make fewer accessories or stop making them at all.
I still think its possible for Apple to maintain some kind of control over the use of the interface (ie, blocking connectors that circumvent DRM, that may damage the phone or are of poor quality) but at the same time make it easier for developers to develop products that use it in generally approved ways (ie, charging cases or sound docks).
It just kind of staggers me why they've chosen to execute the plan for this connector in a way that hinders the platform. It kind of makes me question how much of his decision-making rationale Steve Jobs actually shared with the rest of Apple's management.
Current management kind of reminds me of young children playing a game where they pretend to be adults -- they mimic their actions, but there's no real understanding of the rationale for any of them and the actions they take are always weirdly exaggerated. Tim Cook is mimicking Steve Jobs, but without the kind of understanding Steve had.
Forget the Maps debacle, in my opinion it's the Lightning connector that will ultimately do more damage.
And it's not the connector's technical design -- I think it works pretty slick and is a definite improvement mechanically over the 30 pin connector and superior to MicroUSB as well.
It's the overall handling of Lightning that I think is an issue. First of all, shouldn't Lightning have been on the iPad 3 first? IMHO, the iPads are slightly less connector-centric and a release on iPad would have given accessory developers enough lead time to get products designed and through Apple's approval process in time for actual accessories and adapters to be available at iPhone 5 launch. As far as I know, there are very few Lightning accessories available right now -- some car chargers (who hasn't switched to a USB connector by now?) and maybe a Bose dock, but not much else.
The other thing is -- why is Apple being so difficult with device approvals? One thing Apple had going for it was a kind of network effect, where one of things that made iPhone/iPad appealing was a broad range of accessories available for it. By making accessory development difficult, they hurt innovation, which means less stuff, and in theory the Lightning connector should make for innovative products because of its digital nature.
IMHO this is really what will hurt Apple, not Maps, which will be good enough for most people as-is (it's always worked well for me), as well as get better over time.
I thought TrueCrypt,et al were smarter with their RAM-based keys than that and made them more difficult to sniff in RAM, as this has long been a well-known weakness of any encryption software.
Or is there something about whole-disk encryption software that makes this more difficult (which I can see from a performance perspective)?
You would think they would randomize memory locations or have some kind of method of encrypting the keys in-memory and decrypting them and wiping as they did disk I/O. A race condition that would expose them, but with a smaller window for exploitation than leaving them in memory.
When HTTP was first developed, wouldn't continuous encryption have been considered too expensive, computationally?
I am not a web site guru, but IIRC there was a good market for encryption offload cards at one time but I don't know how common they are anymore given the use of virtualization and the general increase in CPU power over past systems.
It was probably also a headache from a certificate perspective. You can use it with self-signed certificates, but you have to generate them, etc and traditionally this has been more difficult (perhaps "badly documented" is a better way of saying it) and browsers barf on them.
It might have made more sense if HTTP had been setup similar to the way SSH works where the encryption is handled more automagically, then everything would have been encrypted by default, and HTTPS could have been used for "trusted" SSL sessions with the usual certificate stuff.
What innovators are knocking Apple off their perch?
Based on iPhone 5 sales and iPad Mini sales, Apple doesn't seem to be hurting per se.
I think they've made some mistakes recently -- Maps isn't what it should have been (but is less bad than the media hype) and I think the Lightning connector introduction was handled very poorly (3 months after iPhone 5 was released, there are very few accessories available that use it).
Philosophically, I disagree with some of the constraints placed on it (no removable storage, no bluetooth mouse support) and design goals (ie, thinner and lighter seems valued over battery capacity).
But it's hard to call Samsung an "innovator" knocking Apple off their perch -- the OS they get from Google, and their hardware isn't obviously superior to Apple's (without getting into an argument as to whether phone screen size is a technology or a design). They mainly are a big company, capable of integrating top-line technologies vs. coming up with any kind of innovation.
With cellular communications, I think it would make a lot of sense to run the actual wireless communication part the way electrical utilities have traditionally been run -- as highly regulated sanctioned monopolies with a more-or-less fixed profit margin. Let this national entity run the towers and backhaul network.
This would allow for a common cellular communications standard and eliminate the variability we have traditionally seen in standards (CDMA/GSM) and spectrum use, as well as being far more resource efficient -- carriers need enough spectrum and backhaul for some maximum utilization per cell site, yet the sum of all spectrum and backhaul across all carriers for the same footprint likely has a large surplus.
The less regulated portion of this business would involve everything from the wireless backhaul network on down stream -- call routing, text messaging, retail sales, internet access, customer support, etc, and would allow the
It would greatly lower the barrier to entry to the "cell phone" business because you wouldn't need to consider any of the tower-based portions of the technology. Now, it wouldn't be *trivial* -- a good product would still require a sophisticated voice handling network and multiple points of access to the tower backhaul network for efficiency.
But because the largest and most complicated part of the cell business would be handled by a single entity, costs would actually reflect what it takes to deliver retail services. In theory it should be possible for very low cost providers to enter the market; ie, data-only plans for those who don't care for a voice product, or providers focusing solely on low-speed data and so on.
It astounds me that someone could defend the efficiency of the free market and look at the cell phone business and see anything remotely efficient. The duplication of resources there, especially spectrum consumption, is hurt-my-head stupid, not to mention the intentional lack of compatibility.
To me it seems like they really are only interested in the large enterprise market or those entities primed to enter that market.
IMHO, the market they should have been interested was the SMB market -- why they would choose to give away that market to Netgear and Dlink and the other similar players is beyond me.
It seemed like 10 years ago, Cisco gear was everywhere, even in small places -- because everyone had to have an access router and Cisco was a very common choice.
Once DSL and cable-based internet became common for business, Cisco started disappearing from those environments. Their PIX line had some penetration, but it was complicated to manage compared to a wide variety of web GUI devices and the support agreements were expensive.
In switching they seemed less prevalent until you got into organizations that needed L3 routing or extensive L2 management, but cost conscious organizations (common at the lower end) went with HP or other brands with similar features and cheaper support.
When they bought Linksys, I assumed it was to create an "entry level" brand with light feature sets or limited expandability to win business at the level that outright won't even look at Cisco due to perceived complexity and cost relative to competition from HP, Netgear, DLink, Dell's PowerConnect line, etc. In many cases those products aren't cheap but cheaper in terms of support and feature wise very deep.
It seems like this wasn't the strategy at all, just a "steering" brand to capture some of the low end market from a revenue perspective and try to convert these users into Cisco users. Apparently they've given up on this market.
I think so many of those HOAs become an insider's racket. A group gets control of the board and makes kickback deals with the "providers" of services, if not owning the service business outright.
With the right tweaks to the HOA rules, it's nearly impossible to kick them out and they count on most people being too absorbed in their own life to give a shit.
...but I find his answer less than compelling, frankly.
I find it hard to believe that he can operate in Russia totally freely without being leaned on by the FSB or Putin's administration.
They threw Khodorkovsky in the gulag over money and have killed investigative journalists, you mean to tell me that a top computer security guy can just do as he pleases?
IMHO, the Apple maps app is far better than the media and the naysayers would have you believe.
Every time I've used turn-by-turn, including in suburban areas with idiotic short streets and those are-they-roads-or-parking-lots near shopping centers, it's been spot-on.
"What about transit info?" Transit info in the old Google maps app blew, at least as far as subway info in NYC went. Missing/mismarked entrances, etc. "iTransNYC" worked far, far better and there are similar apps for major city rail systems. Outside of that, how many people REALLY own iPhones and ride the bus? In most metro areas outside of those served by urban rail, the bus service blows. Everybody drives.
I had plenty of mismarked locations with Google maps, not just 4 years ago, but in the last year. It was far from perfect, as have most standalone GPS devices I've used in rental cars.
To me, this seems like resistance to change or just anti-Apple ranting. I downloaded the Google app to check it out, but IMHO I still like the Apple app better, especially visually.
The concept of an ultra-wide monitor makes me think of one of the frustration I have with increasingly large displays and window arrangement.
It's all well and good to have a huge display or several of them at high resolutions, but it's super annoying to layout windows in a way that lets you see multiple application windows on the screen at the same time. I have two 1600xwhatever displays, but there are times where it would seem more beneficial to have three 1024x768 displays for application window management, even though it would be marginally lower total resolution.
It would be nice to be able to split a display, especially wide screen displays, into virtual monitors so that arranging app windows would be easier. I've found some utilities that seem able to remember window positions, but that assumes I always want the same layout (almost never) and they almost always suffer from the usual glitchyness.
The US telcos have long had a similar kind of arrangement, although not for texts. They open their billing system to third parties who then cram services onto your phone bill that you never wanted.
I dealt with this nearly 10 years ago with a corporate phone bill -- nearly every month I'd have bullshit tacked onto the phone bill for stuff like internet access, "yellow pages" listings and so on. I'd spend an hour on the phone getting each charge reversed.
It was never a big problem on the home phone bill, although about six months ago my cell bill got one of these charges on it. AT&T told me I had "signed up" and I said I hadn't; they told me I got a text and opened it and this was the same as signing up! Fortunately they were able to put a block on all my cell numbers that disabled being signed up for these services.
Anyway, I think the phone company makes about 50% on every dollar they bill for third parties, so they have no incentive to fix the system.
Back when I was battling this on a corporate phone bill, I actually talked to a friend about doing this to make money. I figured we could set up a plausible business to prove the service wasn't outright fraudulent (ie, some weak dialup internet or lame web site) and then get it crammed on phone bills. If you can get $10/month out of a few thousand people every month it becomes real money fast.
The US government should simply announce that they are prioritizing their overseas support of US business based on perecent of revenue booked in the US.
When Microsoft or Apple get pissed about piracy or knockoffs overseas, the US should simply tell them that they can ask Bermudan or Cayman Islands officials to take care of the issue.
"To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
â" William T. Sherman , Military Division of the Mississippi Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864.
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The problem with that idea isn't that it doesn't make sense, but that it would have a negative psychological appeal. Everyone who isn't a 10+ millionaire would suddenly stop being a millionaire. Million dollar houses wouldn't be.
And who wants to work for $10,000 per year? Or work for 75 cents an hour on minimum wage?
I think geography would be more important than numbers.
Based on the last election and basic demography, the "left" has large quantities of poor people in urban cities. The right has much smaller population densities but controls the Southern coast and large swaths of resource-rich central US.
I would think any protracted stalemate or conflict would leave the left with a large population it couldn't feed and a serious lack of energy resources. The right would have a fairly well-armed indigenous population that could feed itself but may find itself numerically outnumbered.
After a month of conflict it's not hard to see the left struggling to maintain control over a large, poor urban population with inadequate food and energy resources.
The military is the toss-up. They volunteer army has both a large, rural White contingent AND a large Hispanic and African American contingent. It's easy to see a splintering of the military or even possibly sitting out the conflict to avoid division or to maintain external threat protection.
It's hard to see generic Federal armed forces, even in full paramilitary mode, easily dealing with 20 million armed Americans without at least the logistical support of the military if not material and weapons.
The 20 million number is loosely based on 1/3 of Romney's popular vote, minus 5 million who wouldn't participate plus 5 million who wouldn't vote for him because he was too liberal or a Mormon but would be considered to support armed resistance due to their philosophical leanings.
...is to pass a law which states that the government will not provide material support or assistance to companies who offshore their profits.
Your container ship full of product headed to Europe gets hijacked by Somali pirates? Well, you can either ask the Liberian government (your ship's flag of convenience) or the Cayman Islands government (your international HQ) to help rescue your ship.
Website breached or attacked? The FBI isn't going to help.
The Chinese pirating your IP out the back door? Sorry, the State Department won't be lobbying China on your behalf.
You want a real government's help? OK, well then you have to pay taxes to the real government. Having a shiny sign on some skyscraper where 1% of your workforce lives, 50% of your profit is generated and nearly none of your income tax is paid means you're really not a local entity and won't get the government on your side.
There's different kinds of "keyless" systems.
Most "keyless entry" systems are remotes that unlock the doors and disarm any security system the car might have. Otherwise, the car is as normal and has physical keys, physical locks on the doors and requires a mechanical key to operate the ignition.
My Volvo has what Volvo calls "Personal Car Communicator" -- a wireless proximity key that allows the doors to be opened and car started without any button press other than the starter button. The key can stay in your pocket.
Now in the case of my Volvo, the "normal" starting process for non-PCC cars, the same keyfob fits a slot on the dash. There's no mechanical bypass, although I assume starting would work without any battery in the keyfob.
The door locks are all electronic and unless you've read the manual, you might not realize that the keyfob's "key ring" is actually a slim metal key that can be removed from the keyfob and used to mechanically unlock the door.
With a system like this, common to many high end luxury cars, I can see nontechnical people freaking out and saying their car doesn't work, either not letting them in because they don't know the bypass exists or not starting because they don't know the non-wireless starting method (ie, fob in slot or similar).
Or they may just be really high strung people who figure that anything that doesn't work is Mercedes' problem and they need to get the car and give them a loaner.
I've used Tyan (although my last one was a dual P3), Gigabyte and Asus and I finally just switched to Intel boards, primarily to not have to ever use a Realtek (aka Realdreck) ethernet chipset again.
My Gigabyte and Asus boards used Realtek ethernet chipsets and they were total shit, both at the hardware level and at the software level. I ended up buying Intel cards and disabling/uninstalling the Realtek shit as much as possible.
Now I just buy Intel boards and get a decent Intel NIC, although Intel can be a PITA about releasing server OS drivers for what they call "consumer" NICs. The side benefit has been less weird shit and documentation in better English.
Intel boards may not be great "values" (relative to maximum features or overclockability) but they have always been super stable and worked right.
Someone more business savvy than me told me that while "self storage" facilities weren't a bad business considering how much junk people have, they are often setup primarily for "parking" real estate until something more valuable can be constructed on the site.
Storage brings in some revenue to pay property taxes and basic maintenance and the facilities themselves have very low overhead costs as most are just a vast network of non-climate controlled one-story garage-type structures with a fence around them. Plus it keeps local officials from bitching about undeveloped or poorly maintained property.
Now, there are more elaborate storage centers run as legitimate businesses in their own right and some of these may have more elaborate facilities (climate control, electricity, etc), but a lot of the plain/simple ones are just holding places for real estate investors.
It always cracks me up to see someone up on their soap box about some health or nutrition issue and then start throwing "saturated fat" and "cholesterol".
You know that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol aren't bad for us, don't you? That the conventional wisdom on obesity and cardiovascular health relative to saturated fat and cholesterol is junk science?
It's not "saving lives" it's rewarding intolerance by showing sensitivity to intolerance. It also creates a precedence that says that you recognize their intolerance and will react affirmatively to it again in the future, guaranteeing another intolerant reaction.
Is it wrong to purposefully offend someone? Sure, that's Ethics 101.
But Ethics 201 asks more questions about what intent means and what it means to be offended and how far you can go to react to that offense.
By most civilized standards, rioting and killing people in response to a video is also unacceptable.
It's too early for the new connector to have done visible damage, however, I think that after a period of time long time users will have second thoughts about an upgrade if the kinds of accessories they want aren't available, and accessory makers outside of a small big names may make fewer accessories or stop making them at all.
It does have something of a Betamax feel to it.
I still think its possible for Apple to maintain some kind of control over the use of the interface (ie, blocking connectors that circumvent DRM, that may damage the phone or are of poor quality) but at the same time make it easier for developers to develop products that use it in generally approved ways (ie, charging cases or sound docks).
It just kind of staggers me why they've chosen to execute the plan for this connector in a way that hinders the platform. It kind of makes me question how much of his decision-making rationale Steve Jobs actually shared with the rest of Apple's management.
Current management kind of reminds me of young children playing a game where they pretend to be adults -- they mimic their actions, but there's no real understanding of the rationale for any of them and the actions they take are always weirdly exaggerated. Tim Cook is mimicking Steve Jobs, but without the kind of understanding Steve had.
Forget the Maps debacle, in my opinion it's the Lightning connector that will ultimately do more damage.
And it's not the connector's technical design -- I think it works pretty slick and is a definite improvement mechanically over the 30 pin connector and superior to MicroUSB as well.
It's the overall handling of Lightning that I think is an issue. First of all, shouldn't Lightning have been on the iPad 3 first? IMHO, the iPads are slightly less connector-centric and a release on iPad would have given accessory developers enough lead time to get products designed and through Apple's approval process in time for actual accessories and adapters to be available at iPhone 5 launch. As far as I know, there are very few Lightning accessories available right now -- some car chargers (who hasn't switched to a USB connector by now?) and maybe a Bose dock, but not much else.
The other thing is -- why is Apple being so difficult with device approvals? One thing Apple had going for it was a kind of network effect, where one of things that made iPhone/iPad appealing was a broad range of accessories available for it. By making accessory development difficult, they hurt innovation, which means less stuff, and in theory the Lightning connector should make for innovative products because of its digital nature.
IMHO this is really what will hurt Apple, not Maps, which will be good enough for most people as-is (it's always worked well for me), as well as get better over time.
I thought TrueCrypt,et al were smarter with their RAM-based keys than that and made them more difficult to sniff in RAM, as this has long been a well-known weakness of any encryption software.
Or is there something about whole-disk encryption software that makes this more difficult (which I can see from a performance perspective)?
You would think they would randomize memory locations or have some kind of method of encrypting the keys in-memory and decrypting them and wiping as they did disk I/O. A race condition that would expose them, but with a smaller window for exploitation than leaving them in memory.
When HTTP was first developed, wouldn't continuous encryption have been considered too expensive, computationally?
I am not a web site guru, but IIRC there was a good market for encryption offload cards at one time but I don't know how common they are anymore given the use of virtualization and the general increase in CPU power over past systems.
It was probably also a headache from a certificate perspective. You can use it with self-signed certificates, but you have to generate them, etc and traditionally this has been more difficult (perhaps "badly documented" is a better way of saying it) and browsers barf on them.
It might have made more sense if HTTP had been setup similar to the way SSH works where the encryption is handled more automagically, then everything would have been encrypted by default, and HTTPS could have been used for "trusted" SSL sessions with the usual certificate stuff.
What innovators are knocking Apple off their perch?
Based on iPhone 5 sales and iPad Mini sales, Apple doesn't seem to be hurting per se.
I think they've made some mistakes recently -- Maps isn't what it should have been (but is less bad than the media hype) and I think the Lightning connector introduction was handled very poorly (3 months after iPhone 5 was released, there are very few accessories available that use it).
Philosophically, I disagree with some of the constraints placed on it (no removable storage, no bluetooth mouse support) and design goals (ie, thinner and lighter seems valued over battery capacity).
But it's hard to call Samsung an "innovator" knocking Apple off their perch -- the OS they get from Google, and their hardware isn't obviously superior to Apple's (without getting into an argument as to whether phone screen size is a technology or a design). They mainly are a big company, capable of integrating top-line technologies vs. coming up with any kind of innovation.
With cellular communications, I think it would make a lot of sense to run the actual wireless communication part the way electrical utilities have traditionally been run -- as highly regulated sanctioned monopolies with a more-or-less fixed profit margin. Let this national entity run the towers and backhaul network.
This would allow for a common cellular communications standard and eliminate the variability we have traditionally seen in standards (CDMA/GSM) and spectrum use, as well as being far more resource efficient -- carriers need enough spectrum and backhaul for some maximum utilization per cell site, yet the sum of all spectrum and backhaul across all carriers for the same footprint likely has a large surplus.
The less regulated portion of this business would involve everything from the wireless backhaul network on down stream -- call routing, text messaging, retail sales, internet access, customer support, etc, and would allow the
It would greatly lower the barrier to entry to the "cell phone" business because you wouldn't need to consider any of the tower-based portions of the technology. Now, it wouldn't be *trivial* -- a good product would still require a sophisticated voice handling network and multiple points of access to the tower backhaul network for efficiency.
But because the largest and most complicated part of the cell business would be handled by a single entity, costs would actually reflect what it takes to deliver retail services. In theory it should be possible for very low cost providers to enter the market; ie, data-only plans for those who don't care for a voice product, or providers focusing solely on low-speed data and so on.
It astounds me that someone could defend the efficiency of the free market and look at the cell phone business and see anything remotely efficient. The duplication of resources there, especially spectrum consumption, is hurt-my-head stupid, not to mention the intentional lack of compatibility.
You may lack grammatical skills but the idea would come across with some consistency.
Let's eat people! Let's eat, people!
Admittedly a smaller risk in a spoken language, but spoken proficiency alone doesn't cut it.
To me it seems like they really are only interested in the large enterprise market or those entities primed to enter that market.
IMHO, the market they should have been interested was the SMB market -- why they would choose to give away that market to Netgear and Dlink and the other similar players is beyond me.
It seemed like 10 years ago, Cisco gear was everywhere, even in small places -- because everyone had to have an access router and Cisco was a very common choice.
Once DSL and cable-based internet became common for business, Cisco started disappearing from those environments. Their PIX line had some penetration, but it was complicated to manage compared to a wide variety of web GUI devices and the support agreements were expensive.
In switching they seemed less prevalent until you got into organizations that needed L3 routing or extensive L2 management, but cost conscious organizations (common at the lower end) went with HP or other brands with similar features and cheaper support.
When they bought Linksys, I assumed it was to create an "entry level" brand with light feature sets or limited expandability to win business at the level that outright won't even look at Cisco due to perceived complexity and cost relative to competition from HP, Netgear, DLink, Dell's PowerConnect line, etc. In many cases those products aren't cheap but cheaper in terms of support and feature wise very deep.
It seems like this wasn't the strategy at all, just a "steering" brand to capture some of the low end market from a revenue perspective and try to convert these users into Cisco users. Apparently they've given up on this market.
I think so many of those HOAs become an insider's racket. A group gets control of the board and makes kickback deals with the "providers" of services, if not owning the service business outright.
With the right tweaks to the HOA rules, it's nearly impossible to kick them out and they count on most people being too absorbed in their own life to give a shit.
...but I find his answer less than compelling, frankly.
I find it hard to believe that he can operate in Russia totally freely without being leaned on by the FSB or Putin's administration.
They threw Khodorkovsky in the gulag over money and have killed investigative journalists, you mean to tell me that a top computer security guy can just do as he pleases?
IMHO, the Apple maps app is far better than the media and the naysayers would have you believe.
Every time I've used turn-by-turn, including in suburban areas with idiotic short streets and those are-they-roads-or-parking-lots near shopping centers, it's been spot-on.
"What about transit info?" Transit info in the old Google maps app blew, at least as far as subway info in NYC went. Missing/mismarked entrances, etc. "iTransNYC" worked far, far better and there are similar apps for major city rail systems. Outside of that, how many people REALLY own iPhones and ride the bus? In most metro areas outside of those served by urban rail, the bus service blows. Everybody drives.
I had plenty of mismarked locations with Google maps, not just 4 years ago, but in the last year. It was far from perfect, as have most standalone GPS devices I've used in rental cars.
To me, this seems like resistance to change or just anti-Apple ranting. I downloaded the Google app to check it out, but IMHO I still like the Apple app better, especially visually.
The concept of an ultra-wide monitor makes me think of one of the frustration I have with increasingly large displays and window arrangement.
It's all well and good to have a huge display or several of them at high resolutions, but it's super annoying to layout windows in a way that lets you see multiple application windows on the screen at the same time. I have two 1600xwhatever displays, but there are times where it would seem more beneficial to have three 1024x768 displays for application window management, even though it would be marginally lower total resolution.
It would be nice to be able to split a display, especially wide screen displays, into virtual monitors so that arranging app windows would be easier. I've found some utilities that seem able to remember window positions, but that assumes I always want the same layout (almost never) and they almost always suffer from the usual glitchyness.
Is there anything that does this?
The US telcos have long had a similar kind of arrangement, although not for texts. They open their billing system to third parties who then cram services onto your phone bill that you never wanted.
I dealt with this nearly 10 years ago with a corporate phone bill -- nearly every month I'd have bullshit tacked onto the phone bill for stuff like internet access, "yellow pages" listings and so on. I'd spend an hour on the phone getting each charge reversed.
It was never a big problem on the home phone bill, although about six months ago my cell bill got one of these charges on it. AT&T told me I had "signed up" and I said I hadn't; they told me I got a text and opened it and this was the same as signing up! Fortunately they were able to put a block on all my cell numbers that disabled being signed up for these services.
Anyway, I think the phone company makes about 50% on every dollar they bill for third parties, so they have no incentive to fix the system.
Back when I was battling this on a corporate phone bill, I actually talked to a friend about doing this to make money. I figured we could set up a plausible business to prove the service wasn't outright fraudulent (ie, some weak dialup internet or lame web site) and then get it crammed on phone bills. If you can get $10/month out of a few thousand people every month it becomes real money fast.
The US government should simply announce that they are prioritizing their overseas support of US business based on perecent of revenue booked in the US.
When Microsoft or Apple get pissed about piracy or knockoffs overseas, the US should simply tell them that they can ask Bermudan or Cayman Islands officials to take care of the issue.
"To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility."
â" William T. Sherman , Military Division of the Mississippi Special Field Order 120, November 9, 1864.
This is how you conquer a people.