I like mine and get they're virtually maintenance free, but I can also see where a 'standard' iPad with a set of 5-6 third party apps would be a colossal headache to manage centrally if you had more than a dozen or so devices. If you were talking 100 or more? It'd be a full time job keeping them in iOS updates. I can't imagine what a "new school year" type imaging program would look like.
Let's assume the government isn't interested in defending liberty; historically, they really haven't been.
What kind of technical security do any phones have, especially against aggressive portable electronics that can do raw flash reads?
Assuming my iPhone 4 (running latest 4.x iOS) has Data Protection enabled and my phone is turned off when the police get ahold of it, how secure is my data? My understanding is that the flash can be read, but data like mail and contacts are encrypted.
DIE on organic poison gas Serpent's egg's already hatched You will croak, you little clown When you mess with President Brown When you mess with President Brown
In terms of China, there really has been amazing growth there since 1999. I read someplace where they were essentially building a mid-sized city every few months from scratch (I think it was an analogy to describe the volume of building, materials and energy consumption, not specifically that they were building a city from scatch per se).
There are a lot of stats like that with regard to China, so with even normal commodities speculation in the mix, their consumption puts a huge draw on global commodities.
I'd say it's Google's fault, since they are the new kid on the block vying for attention.
Facebook has an API for third party posting and integration, Google could have written yet another hunk of javascript that enabled just that -- pull posts from Facebook when I log into G+, display them, and allow me to post new or follow up to them.
I don't expect Facebook to do this; I'm sure they'd do something to block it, since it would make it easier for users to migrate off Facebook, but maybe they wouldn't care or Google would execute it in a way that made it difficult to block without breaking third party Facebook apps.
I'd stick to Google+ instead of Facebook if I could read and respond to Facebook from Google+.
As it stands, nobody is active on Google+, so you go to Facebook to read everything and if you want to be active on Google+ you are essentially doing twice the work, three times the work if you are active on Twitter, which seems to have some kind of cross-posting feature for Facebook.
How about tossing him in the deep end of the pool and see how adaptable AND smart he is -- have him start attending a graduate level seminar on Goethe. In German.
When he does that well, he could produce a new translation of the works of Tacitus.
After that, perhaps a new translation of Thucydides, drawing on any remaining ancient Greek texts of course.
Yeah, I yearned for it, and now I have it. Tethering has been in since 4.2.
But even if I did yearn for it, what aspect of free software would have given me tethering if it wasn't an option? I could not have written it myself and unless the "free software movement" gave me a working solution that was stable and reliable, I'd still be waiting for it because I could not have coded it myself.
Tethering's kind of a bad example, though, as it directly ties into the cell phone carriers whose influence can't easily be separated from the "walled garden" concept, and this probably extends to a lot of other issues.
And it's not that I necessarily like it, but it's just One More Thing that I don't have the time or energy to get worked up about.
What surprises me about this is it seems like they're not doing a good job of marketing.
When they decide to change the flip-top on a bottle of low-budget shampoo, most places do polls, focus groups, read consulting reports and so on before they ever make the change.
You would think that Netflix would be doing the same thing if they were considering such a change.
My instinct tells me that something's wrong there. Take your pick -- Reed Hastings thinks of himself as a prophet and rejects advice from marketing, only hires yes-men for marketing.
Or it goes beyond Reed and the company as a whole doesn't seek outside information and they have become an echo-chamber and they only hear their own ideas. The echo around enough until it sounds like a good idea.
How much of this is about what he said and how much of this is just antipathy for Richard Stallman's status as an ideologue and Ayatollah of Free Software?
For the record, I think he has something of a point about Jobs, at least relative to the ideology of free software. Jobs was about control, and the iPhone/iPad are really tightly controlled platforms with highly regulated applications and a single-source application marketplace.
That being said, I like to think I agree with Stallman in many ways, yet I own an iPhone and an iPad and really haven't felt constrained in any of the ways I should be constrained. I can only think off the top of my head of one app I wish Apple would allow (a Wifi scanning utility) and one other thing that makes me crazy, the arbitrary and unchangeable list of alert sounds.
My overall sense is that people look at these devices for what they do for them and don't consider, don't care or don't understand the philosophical concepts that go into them.
I also think that some of Stallman's Free Software concepts while philosophically sound are becoming somewhat practically irrelevant in a modern world with so many computerized devices. Even assuming I have the technical skill as a programmer, I have neither time nor inclination to access, modify or even wrap my head around all the software I interact with and more than I have the time or inclination to wrap my head around the chemistry or engineering of all the man-made items in my life.
I think Stallman's free software philosophies seem more relevant to a smaller computing universe of the 1970s and 1980s when software was less complicated and the idea that you had the time and ability to actually modify it.
I guess I'm missing what great features it was supposed to have that it didn't end up with.
More screen real estate would have been nice, but really isn't a make-or-break feature. The CPU and RAM upgrades are great, and the iOS overhauls and additions sound very feature-packed.
I have a 4 (that my wife will inherit) and I pre-ordered a 4S.
It's not just massive RAM, there's no need to transfer applications between disk and RAM. Even with a SSD, there's I/O time and the penalty of switching from disk context to RAM to execute or manipulate.
Sure, today's performance is nothing to sneeze at but you could easily chop 1/3 of your overhead if you had a memory with the speed of RAM and the size & persistence of disk.
Even if you decided to maintain a VM system, the idea of a unified storage system (DRAM+DISK as one device) is pretty fascinating.
You could theoretically install a program in an already running state. All your programs could be running simultaneously -- "quitting" an application may just be telling the kernel to stop scheduling it; launching it again would mean just scheduling it again to execute, where it would pick up exactly where it left off.
Obviously a lot of software would have to be rewritten to take advantage of this, but some of the possibilities are fascinating.
That is a bit harsh, but what problem exactly are the solar car racers attempting to solve? Solar is eons away from being a power source for cars anyone could actually use.
Is there an application here for solar power or automobiles that's unique?
They were just copping an attitude from the Replacements, the record holder and still world leader for drunken concerts.
Even when they should have known better, after Tim, they played the Orpheum so drunk Paul fell into the orchestra pit. I don't know if they finished any songs.
The only thing I can think of is that pricing for these kinds of products is incredibly complex.
With a physical widget you can determine the material costs of the inputs, the labor costs of assembly and the overhead costs of manufacturing plus the administrative costs of the business and come up with a reasonable cost per unit.
With internet access, it's a lot harder -- the product has no material costs, the subscribers have to pay the overall cost of the infrastructure even though their personal "product" may only use a fraction of it ($modern_medium_town may subsidize $ancient_derelict_city or $spread_out_small_town).
With cable internet, it's even more complicated because there are essentially two businesses (television and internet) sharing the same infrastructure and those businesses have totally different revenue models, competition, etc.
My guess is a big part of the business is still dominated by entertainment, movies -- the tv part. The internet part is huge growth and lots of infrastructure costs but probably narrower revenue streams because you've just got subscription fees, where TV has advertising as well as subscriptions, the channels that pay to be on cable, etc.
I hate the cable companies like everyone else does, but:
Cable internet has the same cable plant costs to your house that cable TV does. It's not any cheaper or different to provide you with a broadband connection that only uses DOCSIS assigned frequencies. Plus it has a more elaborate infrastructure cost than just one-way television.
And their pricing is structured -- basic cable may be a loss leader to get you into the product; they may actually be pricing at or below what it costs them to deliver it to you.
My neighbor's daughter became a nurse and I'm always amazed when I see her Facebook postings "Whew -- just finished 3 16s and a 24, ready to enjoy 14 days off."
I'm surprised that staffing works like that. One, is it really helpful to have a nurse be awake and on the job for 16 hours? I get punchy doing IT work after about 12 hours. 24 hours? That seems crazy.
How does it work that she can work 3-4 days and then have like two weeks off? This seems to happen a lot, and while not all shifts are as crazy long as above, it seems like she's constantly off work for runs of 4-5 days, even when she appears to only have clocked 50 hours in 4-5 days.
I may be misinformed, but it strikes me that this kind of staffing would be extremely expensive compared to more uniform staffing levels and shift lengths.
Grocery stores generally don't sell meals, though, they sell ingredients for meals. In this way, they're kind of like a parts retailer, not like Apple.
The food equivalent of Apple would be something like TGIFriday's ("Flinger's") -- they really aren't anything more than a brand. They sell complete meals supplied to them by food service vendors; the only thing they provide is the branding.
If Netflix had been on a run of announcing a half-dozen studio deals for streaming, they could have gotten away with the price hikes and the Qwikster split.
As it stands now, especially with the sunset of the Starz deal, Netflix streaming is of marginal value. Most of the movie content is lame and the TV content is even hit or miss -- all of Mad Men and Lost, but I gotta get DVDs for Barney Miller, a show off the air for 30 years with a cast that's half dead and no complicated licensing issues like music?
I'm just not convinced that Netflix has the market muscle, cash, talent, connections or relationships with studios to negotiate streaming deals in the face of studio greed.
Not the "I got bamboozled" lessons, but the deeper lesson that maybe the reason the fake CFO was so good was that in reality, he was an outsider and not a product of whatever B-school/corporate sausage machine produces CFOs.
And that perhaps in hiring employees, rather than simply accept the next drone from the MBA/corporate assembly line, the CEO ought to think outside the box.
How about Google buying it? Or maybe not even Google, but a private equity syndicate led by Brin, et al and other like-minded technology people, with someone brought it to run it as a "not evil" company.
Other less palatable concepts are Comcast buying it; I get a full court press from Comcast sales droids for phone and they always seem slightly annoyed that I'm all cellular, this would allow them into all voice markets. I'm not saying this is a "good" idea but it would be something of a business fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it even possible to 'image' an iPad?
I like mine and get they're virtually maintenance free, but I can also see where a 'standard' iPad with a set of 5-6 third party apps would be a colossal headache to manage centrally if you had more than a dozen or so devices. If you were talking 100 or more? It'd be a full time job keeping them in iOS updates. I can't imagine what a "new school year" type imaging program would look like.
Let's assume the government isn't interested in defending liberty; historically, they really haven't been.
What kind of technical security do any phones have, especially against aggressive portable electronics that can do raw flash reads?
Assuming my iPhone 4 (running latest 4.x iOS) has Data Protection enabled and my phone is turned off when the police get ahold of it, how secure is my data? My understanding is that the flash can be read, but data like mail and contacts are encrypted.
Is this even remotely "good enough?
DIE on organic poison gas
Serpent's egg's already hatched
You will croak, you little clown
When you mess with President Brown
When you mess with President Brown
California Ãoeber Alles!
In terms of China, there really has been amazing growth there since 1999. I read someplace where they were essentially building a mid-sized city every few months from scratch (I think it was an analogy to describe the volume of building, materials and energy consumption, not specifically that they were building a city from scatch per se).
There are a lot of stats like that with regard to China, so with even normal commodities speculation in the mix, their consumption puts a huge draw on global commodities.
So basically he's learning about music and the arts the same way an average high school student in a better district did in 1955.
I'd say it's Google's fault, since they are the new kid on the block vying for attention.
Facebook has an API for third party posting and integration, Google could have written yet another hunk of javascript that enabled just that -- pull posts from Facebook when I log into G+, display them, and allow me to post new or follow up to them.
I don't expect Facebook to do this; I'm sure they'd do something to block it, since it would make it easier for users to migrate off Facebook, but maybe they wouldn't care or Google would execute it in a way that made it difficult to block without breaking third party Facebook apps.
I'd stick to Google+ instead of Facebook if I could read and respond to Facebook from Google+.
As it stands, nobody is active on Google+, so you go to Facebook to read everything and if you want to be active on Google+ you are essentially doing twice the work, three times the work if you are active on Twitter, which seems to have some kind of cross-posting feature for Facebook.
How about tossing him in the deep end of the pool and see how adaptable AND smart he is -- have him start attending a graduate level seminar on Goethe. In German.
When he does that well, he could produce a new translation of the works of Tacitus.
After that, perhaps a new translation of Thucydides, drawing on any remaining ancient Greek texts of course.
Yeah, I yearned for it, and now I have it. Tethering has been in since 4.2.
But even if I did yearn for it, what aspect of free software would have given me tethering if it wasn't an option? I could not have written it myself and unless the "free software movement" gave me a working solution that was stable and reliable, I'd still be waiting for it because I could not have coded it myself.
Tethering's kind of a bad example, though, as it directly ties into the cell phone carriers whose influence can't easily be separated from the "walled garden" concept, and this probably extends to a lot of other issues.
And it's not that I necessarily like it, but it's just One More Thing that I don't have the time or energy to get worked up about.
What surprises me about this is it seems like they're not doing a good job of marketing.
When they decide to change the flip-top on a bottle of low-budget shampoo, most places do polls, focus groups, read consulting reports and so on before they ever make the change.
You would think that Netflix would be doing the same thing if they were considering such a change.
My instinct tells me that something's wrong there. Take your pick -- Reed Hastings thinks of himself as a prophet and rejects advice from marketing, only hires yes-men for marketing.
Or it goes beyond Reed and the company as a whole doesn't seek outside information and they have become an echo-chamber and they only hear their own ideas. The echo around enough until it sounds like a good idea.
How much of this is about what he said and how much of this is just antipathy for Richard Stallman's status as an ideologue and Ayatollah of Free Software?
For the record, I think he has something of a point about Jobs, at least relative to the ideology of free software. Jobs was about control, and the iPhone/iPad are really tightly controlled platforms with highly regulated applications and a single-source application marketplace.
That being said, I like to think I agree with Stallman in many ways, yet I own an iPhone and an iPad and really haven't felt constrained in any of the ways I should be constrained. I can only think off the top of my head of one app I wish Apple would allow (a Wifi scanning utility) and one other thing that makes me crazy, the arbitrary and unchangeable list of alert sounds.
My overall sense is that people look at these devices for what they do for them and don't consider, don't care or don't understand the philosophical concepts that go into them.
I also think that some of Stallman's Free Software concepts while philosophically sound are becoming somewhat practically irrelevant in a modern world with so many computerized devices. Even assuming I have the technical skill as a programmer, I have neither time nor inclination to access, modify or even wrap my head around all the software I interact with and more than I have the time or inclination to wrap my head around the chemistry or engineering of all the man-made items in my life.
I think Stallman's free software philosophies seem more relevant to a smaller computing universe of the 1970s and 1980s when software was less complicated and the idea that you had the time and ability to actually modify it.
I guess I'm missing what great features it was supposed to have that it didn't end up with.
More screen real estate would have been nice, but really isn't a make-or-break feature. The CPU and RAM upgrades are great, and the iOS overhauls and additions sound very feature-packed.
I have a 4 (that my wife will inherit) and I pre-ordered a 4S.
It's not just massive RAM, there's no need to transfer applications between disk and RAM. Even with a SSD, there's I/O time and the penalty of switching from disk context to RAM to execute or manipulate.
Sure, today's performance is nothing to sneeze at but you could easily chop 1/3 of your overhead if you had a memory with the speed of RAM and the size & persistence of disk.
I AM a betting man - my day job is as a trader.
So the critics are right, Wall St. really is nothing more than a casino? And all the crap about investment selection, etc. is really just a sheen?
Even if you decided to maintain a VM system, the idea of a unified storage system (DRAM+DISK as one device) is pretty fascinating.
You could theoretically install a program in an already running state. All your programs could be running simultaneously -- "quitting" an application may just be telling the kernel to stop scheduling it; launching it again would mean just scheduling it again to execute, where it would pick up exactly where it left off.
Obviously a lot of software would have to be rewritten to take advantage of this, but some of the possibilities are fascinating.
That is a bit harsh, but what problem exactly are the solar car racers attempting to solve? Solar is eons away from being a power source for cars anyone could actually use.
Is there an application here for solar power or automobiles that's unique?
They were just copping an attitude from the Replacements, the record holder and still world leader for drunken concerts.
Even when they should have known better, after Tim, they played the Orpheum so drunk Paul fell into the orchestra pit. I don't know if they finished any songs.
The only thing I can think of is that pricing for these kinds of products is incredibly complex.
With a physical widget you can determine the material costs of the inputs, the labor costs of assembly and the overhead costs of manufacturing plus the administrative costs of the business and come up with a reasonable cost per unit.
With internet access, it's a lot harder -- the product has no material costs, the subscribers have to pay the overall cost of the infrastructure even though their personal "product" may only use a fraction of it ($modern_medium_town may subsidize $ancient_derelict_city or $spread_out_small_town).
With cable internet, it's even more complicated because there are essentially two businesses (television and internet) sharing the same infrastructure and those businesses have totally different revenue models, competition, etc.
My guess is a big part of the business is still dominated by entertainment, movies -- the tv part. The internet part is huge growth and lots of infrastructure costs but probably narrower revenue streams because you've just got subscription fees, where TV has advertising as well as subscriptions, the channels that pay to be on cable, etc.
Is it that clear?
I hate the cable companies like everyone else does, but:
Cable internet has the same cable plant costs to your house that cable TV does. It's not any cheaper or different to provide you with a broadband connection that only uses DOCSIS assigned frequencies. Plus it has a more elaborate infrastructure cost than just one-way television.
And their pricing is structured -- basic cable may be a loss leader to get you into the product; they may actually be pricing at or below what it costs them to deliver it to you.
My neighbor's daughter became a nurse and I'm always amazed when I see her Facebook postings "Whew -- just finished 3 16s and a 24, ready to enjoy 14 days off."
I'm surprised that staffing works like that. One, is it really helpful to have a nurse be awake and on the job for 16 hours? I get punchy doing IT work after about 12 hours. 24 hours? That seems crazy.
How does it work that she can work 3-4 days and then have like two weeks off? This seems to happen a lot, and while not all shifts are as crazy long as above, it seems like she's constantly off work for runs of 4-5 days, even when she appears to only have clocked 50 hours in 4-5 days.
I may be misinformed, but it strikes me that this kind of staffing would be extremely expensive compared to more uniform staffing levels and shift lengths.
Grocery stores generally don't sell meals, though, they sell ingredients for meals. In this way, they're kind of like a parts retailer, not like Apple.
The food equivalent of Apple would be something like TGIFriday's ("Flinger's") -- they really aren't anything more than a brand. They sell complete meals supplied to them by food service vendors; the only thing they provide is the branding.
...not after.
If Netflix had been on a run of announcing a half-dozen studio deals for streaming, they could have gotten away with the price hikes and the Qwikster split.
As it stands now, especially with the sunset of the Starz deal, Netflix streaming is of marginal value. Most of the movie content is lame and the TV content is even hit or miss -- all of Mad Men and Lost, but I gotta get DVDs for Barney Miller, a show off the air for 30 years with a cast that's half dead and no complicated licensing issues like music?
I'm just not convinced that Netflix has the market muscle, cash, talent, connections or relationships with studios to negotiate streaming deals in the face of studio greed.
She also says you have a little dick and don't cum unless she fingers your ass.
Do you think the CEO took any lessons from that?
Not the "I got bamboozled" lessons, but the deeper lesson that maybe the reason the fake CFO was so good was that in reality, he was an outsider and not a product of whatever B-school/corporate sausage machine produces CFOs.
And that perhaps in hiring employees, rather than simply accept the next drone from the MBA/corporate assembly line, the CEO ought to think outside the box.
Probably not.
How about Google buying it? Or maybe not even Google, but a private equity syndicate led by Brin, et al and other like-minded technology people, with someone brought it to run it as a "not evil" company.
Other less palatable concepts are Comcast buying it; I get a full court press from Comcast sales droids for phone and they always seem slightly annoyed that I'm all cellular, this would allow them into all voice markets. I'm not saying this is a "good" idea but it would be something of a business fit.