My sense is that they jumped the shark by failing to either make BES free or eliminate it and dependence on RIMs network completely.
I can remember the pre-active sync days when it got ugly within organizations when the last BES license got used up. They were expensive and buying another block wasn't always viable.
Just as soon as Activesync became viable and the onslaught of WinMo phones that supported it came out I began to see customers at the mid/small level abandon the expensive and complicated BES for direct SSL communication. No more dedicated BES server, no more expensive licenses.
Had BES become free to use it might have helped prevent the loss of those markets; eliminating it completely would have been even more beneficial.
Can that device just be connected to an iPhone and actually read the whole filesystem? How does data protection affect access to presumably encrypted data like mail stores, etc?
I keep reading mixed things with nothing terribly definitive.
"...but for some time, many companies that owned Siemens equipment were left wondering what, if any measures, they should take to protect themselves from the new worm."
The implication of this statement is that DHS didn't have an immediate answer (outside of pedantic default answers like "unplug your equipment" or "reload software" or anything else from answers.com).
Gee, let's see -- a new worm never seen before, apparently written by a sophisticated group from the intelligence community and someone's actually surprised that there was no immediate 5 step fix or concrete and specific guidance?
I *know* the Intraweb age has increased everyone's sense of entitlement and expectation of an easy fix on the first Google search page, but instead of trying to blame someone else for not being able to tell you what to do, completely, comprehensively and correctly, NOW, maybe these companies could have taken CEO bonus dollars and done their own research.
Wal Mart always seems to be a suburban and rural phenomenon. I know they have faced a lot of political opposition to expanding in some/many cities. And their business model of big lots on cheap land selling large quantities of cheap goods isn't always urban friendly, either.
If they could tweak the model for urban areas they might have a shot at more growth; multi-level stores, smaller packaging, or more upscale products they might have a chance at a whole new market segment.
There's only two Wal Marts even remotely close to where I live and they're totally inconvenient to get to. The store with the new remdoel is quite nice, nicer than the a Target, even. It would be nice to have as an alternative to Target.
Usually, though, hot tubs, pools, and other extensive "features" don't add value. They all age, are expensive to reapir, and limit the home's resale appeal to peole who want those kind of features.
The same is true of elaborate home automation or HVAC solutions. My guess is a solar power add-on that offered a substantial cut in power bills on a monthly basis with minimal maintenance costs might be a wash at best; anything less that, it's just an albatross to a buyer, something he doesn't want that will cost him money; some might even a demand a sale price discount equal to the cost of removing it.
The brand names of products or installers are also not there for these products. It's not like you buy a GE Profile solar power systems installed by the local plumbing or electrical installer. I'm sure theres good gear and installers, but because it's still growing they aren't common knowledge nor do many have a long history.
A geek or a solar power guy may pay a premium, but I think most home buyers would not pay any premium for a house with solar power. Yet; I think some kind of home generation technology will probably become a necessity eventually.
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
Don't work there. Nobody forces you to do that job.
That was my first idea, too -- what happens when a 1500 mAh battery discharges into the data pins in 2 seconds? While smoking one of their multihousand dollar devices sounds like a good idea, I'm sure it would cause other problems..
A better idea is a device that mimics the data protocol of the phone model it represents but instead outputs 1000 or more times of data, ideally canned data, like copies of the constitution, video of the Rodney King beating, etc
Re:This is not the logic you are looking for
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
I last smoked a cigarette about five years ago.
Although I was never a typical smoker (I rolled my own and at my peak maxed out at about 6-8 per day; the last five years I was at 3-4 per day), those draconian laws I think did hasten my final days of smoking as bars were the last refuge I could smoke in.
Smoking at home was out; I hadn't smoked in the house since I was single, and my wife hated me smoking, so even outside wasn't any good. I did get away with smoking in the car and I think the last year I smoked it was pretty much in the car or at a bar.
Once the bar was no longer an option, it was in the car or not at all, and eventually not at all became a better option.
Philosophically I disagree with forcing bars & restaurants no smoking; about half were non-smoking by popular demand by then, and I think if people want to smoke, fine, let them. But from a practical sense, making them smoke only at home makes it inconvenient enough that it might actually be beneficial.
They won't use it; any actual hostile detonation, either public or via subterfuge is almost guaranteed to result in a potentially culture-ending retaliatory nuclear strike.
Any strategic use as a threat or bluff or other lever to achieve a military or diplomatic goal is likely to result in pre-emptive conventional strikes with the point above communicated in no uncertain terms.
Iran will never develop enough strategic delivery systems to participate in a MAD style long term confrontation, either.
It strikes me that Iran would have been much better off investing those resources in conventional weapons systems and military forces. Homegrown, cheap and plentiful cruise missiles and man-portable missle systems would have been far more effective.
The problem with buying the labels is that you have to kind of keep running them labels as they are now, at least in the near term. Artists have contracts with them, employees have contracts with them -- you can't just say "I own this and it's all different today." And Google will find it HARD to run the business differently, especially negotiating with $rising_stars who want "the same deal $current_star got, only more".
The main problem with buying the labels is that after some period of N years (5? 10?) the artists they have will be as uninteresting and essentially non-salable as Peaches and Herb, Christopher Cross and many other "stars" that sold a bunch of records and then disappeared. Tastes and trends will change.
What Google needs to do instead is think long and hard about what's broken in the music industry -- it goes way beyond simply suing some ignorant single mother for $10 million dollars because she ran limewire -- and invent a label that does it differently top to bottom to begin with -- treats talent better, treats fans better, and "gets" the internet better.
This way they start with a stable of musicians philosophically aligned with them and chances are pretty good they will be able to attract other musicians (eg, Radiohead), too.
Unless you actually have kids, your opinion about what is right and wrong involving raising kids means less than nothing. It's a bunch of assumptions glued together with logic that has absolutely no bearing on what it's really like to raise children.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of bad parenting out there -- but knee-jerk reactions saying "BAD PARENTS" is so naive it's almost not worth the trouble to respond to.
Why wouldn't they, given how much money they have?
How much would it cost them to have a build of the kernel for every major CPU architecture out there? Even if the only purpose is to keep the kernel architecture agnostic so that if they wanted/needed to in the future port to some new CPU they could.
It might be a little impractical to have a fully running install given the number of "custom" hardware platforms out there, but again, if one platform becomes more interesting than others, I can see where they might make a run at getting a minimal install actually running.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had managed to hack iPads to boot Windows, for example, or if they've had full installs running on SPARC or Power CPUs.
Doesn't the whole negative Facebook profile issue go away when it becomes normative?
Party pictures, outrageous statements, etc -- it's not like people haven't been doing and saying those things forever. It seems shocking when the first group of people to do it more or less en masse get noticed, but after a while, doesn't it just stop becoming an issue of concern?
When our city passed the plan to have wireless installed city-wide, I called my council member to complain about it.
I asked her why the city needed to subsidize this plan (the gimmick was that the wifi provider would also provide private wifi for city purposes like cop cars, building inspectors, etc) when there was already cable or DSL available citywide.
She told me that they wanted to make internet access available inexpensively for the poor. When I asked her how she was going to make the computers used to access the internet available to the poor, the line went silent.
The other reason left out are the number of doctors who are prima donna assholes and insist that going to med school has made them CERTIFIABLE GENIUSES IN EVERY FIELD.
I work for a small consulting firm and we've had a half-dozen clients in the medical & dental fields and without exception they have all been complete assholes, the dentists worse than the doctors.
One guy literally tried to physically intimidate me to the point I had to actually push him away. I walked from the office 20 minutes later and told my boss and our owner what happened and that I wasn't going back. We finally quit that account after every single guy assigned to that account refused to go back.
I'm not sure how many of them we have left, but I pretty much refuse to work at any of them due to their arrogant attitudes.
Nah, the Soviet T-34 was the best overall tank in WWII.
The King Tiger was impressive from an armor and gun perspective, but mechanically it was too rushed with borrowed pieces from lighter tanks that couldn't hold up and it was vulnerable to flanking maneuvers,
Like so many other aspects of German WW II technology, had they had the chance to refine their technology by another two years it could have been devastating -- jet fighters, guided rockets, and infantry armed with real assault rifles.
It's 20mm @ 4500 RPM, but the magazines only hold 1550 rounds.
My sense is that a 5 second burst (or maybe 3 two second bursts) is all they really plan to fire at any single target -- anything more than that and you end up almost in a denial or service situation where the magazines are drained so fast the system is ineffective.
In many ways, I also think its a relatively inexpensive weapons system -- on a per-target basis, you're talking maybe a couple of hundred rounds of 20mm ammo. That's nothing, and I'm sure the military burns a 100k rounds of 20mm ammo in training alone in any given month.
The presumption is work pays for this; in big companies with bureaucracies where policies get developed, they will probably pay for most things as they have thorough through the issues and come up with answers for most everything, and/or legal has told them to pay for it if they want any control over it.
That being said, I've talked to various people who get the go-ahead to "work from home" in smaller companies, only to find out that the issues aren't well addressed.
One employer simply assumed that this was merely a money saver for them, and they wouldn't supply anything or provide reimbursement (the joy of being at home was supposed to offset all the personal costs), down to wanting the employee to supply copies of software used in the office.
The others were saner, but the people I talked to felt a little nickled and dimed because they felt like they were spending real money on items that work should have been covering.
I've worked out of my house and it should really come with a RAISE, not a pay cut.
First of all, who pays for high speed internet access? It can be a drag when someone in the house decides to stream a HD movie or some other bandwidth suck that slows network access. Sure, you can get another connection, but who pays for it? And in some cases, the broadband provider (yes, singular) won't deliver service to the same address twice, no matter how you explain it.
What about the computer equipment required? Am I supposed to use my home PC or will I be provided with a computer? What kind? Printer? Color, laser, etc?
Telephone? In some cases, a mobile would work, but in a lot of cases mobiles blow -- voice lag, weak signals, the whole laundry list of problems.
Then there's the SPACE issue. Most people I know don't have a huge empty spare room in their house they can put a proper desk, computer, printer, phone and all the crap associated with many jobs. If you have a wife and kids you definitely need to have a totally seperate room with a door you can close.
And then who pays for the other items? Electricity? Heat and A/C? Heat is significant -- I turn mine down WAY LOW in the daytime. Misc office supplies (paper, staples, pens, toner, etc)?
I doubt I'll ever be in the position to negotiate for it, but if someone said "we want you to work with us but its a telecommute position" I'd almost be tempted to negotiate the price of a small apartment and turn that into an office, or find one of those one-man-band offices that are kind of like a studio apartment.
There's so many BS small items associated with working from home that really add up you can't take a pay cut.
I think the emotional appeal depends on the "time and logistics" component. I've known people who commute ~3 hours a day in & out of Manhattan, riding subways, trains and walking no small distances. Is gaining 750+ hours of time back per year worthwhile? Nearly 3 hours a day? I'm sure it is to them, or at least seems that way.
But then there are "average" commutes of 20-30 minutes where you drive you own vehicle, traffic only marginally sucks where it balances back the other way or only seems marginally appealing.
My commute is more like the latter, and although I technically work out of my house, I always prefer to be at client locations because I get much more done.
Carriers' marketing and sales departments have total control over the handsets and know just enough to want to "BRAND" them without any idea of what this does to usability.
Rule 4: Make sure you know the sales person's personal information -- home phone number, home address, name of wife and kids, car make, model & tag.
Rule 5: Make sure you know same about owner.
When they screw up on this scale, have your "consultants" make unannounced solo visits to places they park their car to discuss how their company will make up for your loss.
Be sure your consultants are unknown to company officials but address them on a friendly, first-name basis, and let them know that the "recent data loss is totally unacceptable." Assure them you know that they will "make sure they have the first cash payment of $50,000 ready by Friday" and that to keep things convenient, you're willing to "pick it up at their cute house on Elm Lane with the patio in the back yard or perhaps at the daycare or school little Johnny attends."
This lets them know you care about them and have all of their most important interests at heart and that while you understand this might require some short-term sacrifices on their part, by making you whole again, you're willing to help keep them safe.
I think you're right that that kind of modularity is coming, the "soon" part being what's up for debate.
It reminds me of the PowerBook Duo. I inherited one at work (a bastard stepchild bought as an experiment for an exec who didn't like it) and I loved it. As a laptop it was ideal for travel, especially compared to similar laptops of its era.
I'm wondering if it will come from Apple, though, at least while Jobs is alive. His obsession with form and design will make it difficult to see how an iPhone could be merged with an iPad on an ad-hoc basis without making it to heavy/thick, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My sense is that they jumped the shark by failing to either make BES free or eliminate it and dependence on RIMs network completely.
I can remember the pre-active sync days when it got ugly within organizations when the last BES license got used up. They were expensive and buying another block wasn't always viable.
Just as soon as Activesync became viable and the onslaught of WinMo phones that supported it came out I began to see customers at the mid/small level abandon the expensive and complicated BES for direct SSL communication. No more dedicated BES server, no more expensive licenses.
Had BES become free to use it might have helped prevent the loss of those markets; eliminating it completely would have been even more beneficial.
Can that device just be connected to an iPhone and actually read the whole filesystem? How does data protection affect access to presumably encrypted data like mail stores, etc?
I keep reading mixed things with nothing terribly definitive.
"...but for some time, many companies that owned Siemens equipment were left wondering what, if any measures, they should take to protect themselves from the new worm."
The implication of this statement is that DHS didn't have an immediate answer (outside of pedantic default answers like "unplug your equipment" or "reload software" or anything else from answers.com).
Gee, let's see -- a new worm never seen before, apparently written by a sophisticated group from the intelligence community and someone's actually surprised that there was no immediate 5 step fix or concrete and specific guidance?
I *know* the Intraweb age has increased everyone's sense of entitlement and expectation of an easy fix on the first Google search page, but instead of trying to blame someone else for not being able to tell you what to do, completely, comprehensively and correctly, NOW, maybe these companies could have taken CEO bonus dollars and done their own research.
How good is their urban presence?
Wal Mart always seems to be a suburban and rural phenomenon. I know they have faced a lot of political opposition to expanding in some/many cities. And their business model of big lots on cheap land selling large quantities of cheap goods isn't always urban friendly, either.
If they could tweak the model for urban areas they might have a shot at more growth; multi-level stores, smaller packaging, or more upscale products they might have a chance at a whole new market segment.
There's only two Wal Marts even remotely close to where I live and they're totally inconvenient to get to. The store with the new remdoel is quite nice, nicer than the a Target, even. It would be nice to have as an alternative to Target.
Usually, though, hot tubs, pools, and other extensive "features" don't add value. They all age, are expensive to reapir, and limit the home's resale appeal to peole who want those kind of features.
The same is true of elaborate home automation or HVAC solutions. My guess is a solar power add-on that offered a substantial cut in power bills on a monthly basis with minimal maintenance costs might be a wash at best; anything less that, it's just an albatross to a buyer, something he doesn't want that will cost him money; some might even a demand a sale price discount equal to the cost of removing it.
The brand names of products or installers are also not there for these products. It's not like you buy a GE Profile solar power systems installed by the local plumbing or electrical installer. I'm sure theres good gear and installers, but because it's still growing they aren't common knowledge nor do many have a long history.
A geek or a solar power guy may pay a premium, but I think most home buyers would not pay any premium for a house with solar power. Yet; I think some kind of home generation technology will probably become a necessity eventually.
Don't work there. Nobody forces you to do that job.
That was my first idea, too -- what happens when a 1500 mAh battery discharges into the data pins in 2 seconds? While smoking one of their multihousand dollar devices sounds like a good idea, I'm sure it would cause other problems..
A better idea is a device that mimics the data protocol of the phone model it represents but instead outputs 1000 or more times of data, ideally canned data, like copies of the constitution, video of the Rodney King beating, etc
I last smoked a cigarette about five years ago.
Although I was never a typical smoker (I rolled my own and at my peak maxed out at about 6-8 per day; the last five years I was at 3-4 per day), those draconian laws I think did hasten my final days of smoking as bars were the last refuge I could smoke in.
Smoking at home was out; I hadn't smoked in the house since I was single, and my wife hated me smoking, so even outside wasn't any good. I did get away with smoking in the car and I think the last year I smoked it was pretty much in the car or at a bar.
Once the bar was no longer an option, it was in the car or not at all, and eventually not at all became a better option.
Philosophically I disagree with forcing bars & restaurants no smoking; about half were non-smoking by popular demand by then, and I think if people want to smoke, fine, let them. But from a practical sense, making them smoke only at home makes it inconvenient enough that it might actually be beneficial.
What use will they get out of a nuclear weapon?
They won't use it; any actual hostile detonation, either public or via subterfuge is almost guaranteed to result in a potentially culture-ending retaliatory nuclear strike.
Any strategic use as a threat or bluff or other lever to achieve a military or diplomatic goal is likely to result in pre-emptive conventional strikes with the point above communicated in no uncertain terms.
Iran will never develop enough strategic delivery systems to participate in a MAD style long term confrontation, either.
It strikes me that Iran would have been much better off investing those resources in conventional weapons systems and military forces. Homegrown, cheap and plentiful cruise missiles and man-portable missle systems would have been far more effective.
The problem with buying the labels is that you have to kind of keep running them labels as they are now, at least in the near term. Artists have contracts with them, employees have contracts with them -- you can't just say "I own this and it's all different today." And Google will find it HARD to run the business differently, especially negotiating with $rising_stars who want "the same deal $current_star got, only more".
The main problem with buying the labels is that after some period of N years (5? 10?) the artists they have will be as uninteresting and essentially non-salable as Peaches and Herb, Christopher Cross and many other "stars" that sold a bunch of records and then disappeared. Tastes and trends will change.
What Google needs to do instead is think long and hard about what's broken in the music industry -- it goes way beyond simply suing some ignorant single mother for $10 million dollars because she ran limewire -- and invent a label that does it differently top to bottom to begin with -- treats talent better, treats fans better, and "gets" the internet better.
This way they start with a stable of musicians philosophically aligned with them and chances are pretty good they will be able to attract other musicians (eg, Radiohead), too.
Unless you actually have kids, your opinion about what is right and wrong involving raising kids means less than nothing. It's a bunch of assumptions glued together with logic that has absolutely no bearing on what it's really like to raise children.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of bad parenting out there -- but knee-jerk reactions saying "BAD PARENTS" is so naive it's almost not worth the trouble to respond to.
Why wouldn't they, given how much money they have?
How much would it cost them to have a build of the kernel for every major CPU architecture out there? Even if the only purpose is to keep the kernel architecture agnostic so that if they wanted/needed to in the future port to some new CPU they could.
It might be a little impractical to have a fully running install given the number of "custom" hardware platforms out there, but again, if one platform becomes more interesting than others, I can see where they might make a run at getting a minimal install actually running.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they had managed to hack iPads to boot Windows, for example, or if they've had full installs running on SPARC or Power CPUs.
Doesn't the whole negative Facebook profile issue go away when it becomes normative?
Party pictures, outrageous statements, etc -- it's not like people haven't been doing and saying those things forever. It seems shocking when the first group of people to do it more or less en masse get noticed, but after a while, doesn't it just stop becoming an issue of concern?
When our city passed the plan to have wireless installed city-wide, I called my council member to complain about it.
I asked her why the city needed to subsidize this plan (the gimmick was that the wifi provider would also provide private wifi for city purposes like cop cars, building inspectors, etc) when there was already cable or DSL available citywide.
She told me that they wanted to make internet access available inexpensively for the poor. When I asked her how she was going to make the computers used to access the internet available to the poor, the line went silent.
The other reason left out are the number of doctors who are prima donna assholes and insist that going to med school has made them CERTIFIABLE GENIUSES IN EVERY FIELD.
I work for a small consulting firm and we've had a half-dozen clients in the medical & dental fields and without exception they have all been complete assholes, the dentists worse than the doctors.
One guy literally tried to physically intimidate me to the point I had to actually push him away. I walked from the office 20 minutes later and told my boss and our owner what happened and that I wasn't going back. We finally quit that account after every single guy assigned to that account refused to go back.
I'm not sure how many of them we have left, but I pretty much refuse to work at any of them due to their arrogant attitudes.
Nah, the Soviet T-34 was the best overall tank in WWII.
The King Tiger was impressive from an armor and gun perspective, but mechanically it was too rushed with borrowed pieces from lighter tanks that couldn't hold up and it was vulnerable to flanking maneuvers,
Like so many other aspects of German WW II technology, had they had the chance to refine their technology by another two years it could have been devastating -- jet fighters, guided rockets, and infantry armed with real assault rifles.
It's 20mm @ 4500 RPM, but the magazines only hold 1550 rounds.
My sense is that a 5 second burst (or maybe 3 two second bursts) is all they really plan to fire at any single target -- anything more than that and you end up almost in a denial or service situation where the magazines are drained so fast the system is ineffective.
In many ways, I also think its a relatively inexpensive weapons system -- on a per-target basis, you're talking maybe a couple of hundred rounds of 20mm ammo. That's nothing, and I'm sure the military burns a 100k rounds of 20mm ammo in training alone in any given month.
I thought you learned to eat raw fish and make friends with a ball.
The presumption is work pays for this; in big companies with bureaucracies where policies get developed, they will probably pay for most things as they have thorough through the issues and come up with answers for most everything, and/or legal has told them to pay for it if they want any control over it.
That being said, I've talked to various people who get the go-ahead to "work from home" in smaller companies, only to find out that the issues aren't well addressed.
One employer simply assumed that this was merely a money saver for them, and they wouldn't supply anything or provide reimbursement (the joy of being at home was supposed to offset all the personal costs), down to wanting the employee to supply copies of software used in the office.
The others were saner, but the people I talked to felt a little nickled and dimed because they felt like they were spending real money on items that work should have been covering.
I've worked out of my house and it should really come with a RAISE, not a pay cut.
First of all, who pays for high speed internet access? It can be a drag when someone in the house decides to stream a HD movie or some other bandwidth suck that slows network access. Sure, you can get another connection, but who pays for it? And in some cases, the broadband provider (yes, singular) won't deliver service to the same address twice, no matter how you explain it.
What about the computer equipment required? Am I supposed to use my home PC or will I be provided with a computer? What kind? Printer? Color, laser, etc?
Telephone? In some cases, a mobile would work, but in a lot of cases mobiles blow -- voice lag, weak signals, the whole laundry list of problems.
Then there's the SPACE issue. Most people I know don't have a huge empty spare room in their house they can put a proper desk, computer, printer, phone and all the crap associated with many jobs. If you have a wife and kids you definitely need to have a totally seperate room with a door you can close.
And then who pays for the other items? Electricity? Heat and A/C? Heat is significant -- I turn mine down WAY LOW in the daytime. Misc office supplies (paper, staples, pens, toner, etc)?
I doubt I'll ever be in the position to negotiate for it, but if someone said "we want you to work with us but its a telecommute position" I'd almost be tempted to negotiate the price of a small apartment and turn that into an office, or find one of those one-man-band offices that are kind of like a studio apartment.
There's so many BS small items associated with working from home that really add up you can't take a pay cut.
I think the emotional appeal depends on the "time and logistics" component. I've known people who commute ~3 hours a day in & out of Manhattan, riding subways, trains and walking no small distances. Is gaining 750+ hours of time back per year worthwhile? Nearly 3 hours a day? I'm sure it is to them, or at least seems that way.
But then there are "average" commutes of 20-30 minutes where you drive you own vehicle, traffic only marginally sucks where it balances back the other way or only seems marginally appealing.
My commute is more like the latter, and although I technically work out of my house, I always prefer to be at client locations because I get much more done.
Carriers' marketing and sales departments have total control over the handsets and know just enough to want to "BRAND" them without any idea of what this does to usability.
A long time ago Slashdot posted a funny fake story on April Fools and it was pretty good and fooled some people.
Since then, it's been an attempt to go more over the time every year and after about the second year it was beyond annoying.
Rule 4: Make sure you know the sales person's personal information -- home phone number, home address, name of wife and kids, car make, model & tag.
Rule 5: Make sure you know same about owner.
When they screw up on this scale, have your "consultants" make unannounced solo visits to places they park their car to discuss how their company will make up for your loss.
Be sure your consultants are unknown to company officials but address them on a friendly, first-name basis, and let them know that the "recent data loss is totally unacceptable." Assure them you know that they will "make sure they have the first cash payment of $50,000 ready by Friday" and that to keep things convenient, you're willing to "pick it up at their cute house on Elm Lane with the patio in the back yard or perhaps at the daycare or school little Johnny attends."
This lets them know you care about them and have all of their most important interests at heart and that while you understand this might require some short-term sacrifices on their part, by making you whole again, you're willing to help keep them safe.
I think you're right that that kind of modularity is coming, the "soon" part being what's up for debate.
It reminds me of the PowerBook Duo. I inherited one at work (a bastard stepchild bought as an experiment for an exec who didn't like it) and I loved it. As a laptop it was ideal for travel, especially compared to similar laptops of its era.
I'm wondering if it will come from Apple, though, at least while Jobs is alive. His obsession with form and design will make it difficult to see how an iPhone could be merged with an iPad on an ad-hoc basis without making it to heavy/thick, etc.