...but how long will any mobile phone technology last? Will you find yourself having to re-do it all every 5 years as phone/carrier makers obsolete what you developed for?
Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.
Building your software to target a specific phone technology just seems terribly shortsighted for something like a house.
(IMHO, the real answer is "none" -- home automation is of limited value past a programmable thermostat and ultimately an albatross of shit that doesn't work and is expensive and time-consuming to fix. Its frightfully expensive to maintain ordinary systems like windows, gutters, and roofs, let alone a whole complex automation system).
What fucking lower class mother three has the time or energy for two hours of blog maintenance every night? Maybe if her kids are all over the age of 16 she might have the time, but if most or all are younger than that, especially if they're under say, 10, she's got her hands full taking care of them and likely does not have the time or energy to devote to this fantasy blog maintenance.
I'm from what's probably considered an upper-income middle class household with one 4 year old, and I can barely find the time to keep the house up and going let alone spend 15 hours a week keeping some online presence going.
Now I can see a true upper class mom doing this, but that presumes her upper-class income provides her with a lot of time-saving luxuries, like a live-in nanny who does the cooking, cleaning and childcare. But this woman is even worse off in the future economic nightmare, since her "survival skills" are limited to getting to the gym often so that her ass stays MILFy enough to keep her husband's income around.
I go to bed somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 pm. After about 9 PM I'm generally too tired to do anything but watch TV, and even that usually puts me to sleep.
But I get up around 5 AM and my most productive time seems to be between about 6 AM and about 10 AM. I feel the most alert and productive then, possibly because I'm enjoying the benefits of sleep + coffee (without being overcaffeinated or relying on it for energy) and I'm not "bogged down" psychologically by all of the bullshit and stress accumulated during the course of the day.
Now that I'm fully entering old farthood (41), I'm guessing the study conclusions must be biased towards the under-30 set, since most people I know in my age/lifestyle category (over 40 with kids) are largely in my same situation with regard to being dead by about 10 PM, although most don't seem to be up at 5.
I think the original plan with TSA was to make it more of a police-type organization, to provide a more law enforcement feel to airport security.
What we ended up with was just a replacement for the shopping mall security that individual airports had used before -- a dead end, low-wage job, poorly performed by a statistically over-represented number of minorities, now featuring uniform attire from airport to airport, a more surly attitude and all the personnel efficiencies of government bureaucracy, unionization and hiring mandates like affirmative action.
Yuck. Every airport I've been they've always been total losers: surly, slow, uncooperative and sometimes uninformed of TSA procedures.
I wonder what impact the use of those big scanners on the ticketing concourse has on stealing. I think bags that pass those scanners get shunted directly to airport baggage handlers, where theft from luggage may be procedurally more difficult. If the scanning takes place once ticketing has taken your bag, especially if its done in a separate area, I think you're at much greater risk, since they can open bags largely at will.
IEDs have their place, but primarily as an area denial weapon (as a hindrance to movement) and a way to defeat armor.
But you can't have an effective insurgency without small arms. They ARE effective. We're failing to win in Afghanistan largely against irregular units with small arms. Your.22 rifle with a scope is an effective sniping weapon, especially with a home-made suppressor.
What's not effective and probably hasn't been ever is trying to fight a "stand up" battle against regular armed forces. This is what they are trained to fight and superiority of firepower and logistics generally can defeat irregulars in a set piece battle.
But look at what's happened to US law enforcement forces when they've faced small arms -- at Waco, for example, they got their hats handed to them despite superior numbers, weapons and training. They've "won" by employing largely heavy armored weapons, but it was a stand-off at best facing civilians. (I use this as an example since we don't really have any examples of American civilians fighting against military forces).
It seems like software evolves something like this:
Real v1.0 -- First version, fairly buggy but generally usable. Vendor labeled version 1.0. v1.1 -- Minor improvements, bug fixes. Labeled version 2.0. v1.2 -- More of the same, minor new features. Labeled version 3.0. v1.3 -- Well-honed release, new features in v1.2 now flawless, no noticable bugs. Labeled version 4.0.
At this point, they have basically the finished product they should have released as version 1.0 but based on their release schedule should really be v1.3 and not version 4.0. But since its finished and works, nobody will buy a version 5.0 that basically repeats "actual" version v1.2 or v1.3 changes.
So the vendor releases version 5.0, which is a total rewrite with a new UI, mimicking whatever the most popular eye candy "skin" out there they can find, a few new features and a ton of new bugs and problems. In reality, released version 5.0 is more like a new program with the same name with a real version of 1.0. In this second iteration they repeat the general steps of "real" versions 1.1->1.3, but often quickly and often using a point versioning system.
By the time they do version 6.0, they are fully cycling the product with major changes but actually just releasing a 1.0 product. They also seem to do this quickly enough that they never get past "real".1 point release improvements before cycling again.
I mean come on, let's label this what it is, an organized criminal conspiracy, and let's bring the really harsh laws to bear on these people. The best part is all the assholes in legitimate business colluding with them get to be members of the same conspiracy.
My only guess is a "make money while you can" mindset. People are hooked on SMS. I know people who can hardly open a web browser but can reply with a 100 character SMS message from a standard keypad phone in under a minute.
And there's probably some worry that "cell phones" as we know it may only have a time horizon of another 10 years before open devices capable of working on alternative networks take over.
That fact that it is such an obvious racketeering case and we've never seen a RICO prosecution leads me to believe there's just too much money being made by the spammers "air supply" generally above-board business partners.
The article's author talks about hosting providers having "secret agreements" with spammers or other complicity. THIS is the leverage needed to hobble spammers.
Spam is almost *always* a come-on for some fraudulent enterprise (stock schemes, fake/illegal pills, or other outright identity theft or fraud). In order to perpetrate frauds like this on an ongoing basis, you need complicity with: hosting providers, credit card processors, banks, and various other middle men.
What's needed are RICO prosecutions that demonstrate this complicity so that the *entire chain* can be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise. Once a few spammers and their secret partners go down in a RICO prosecution ($250k fines, 20 pound-me-in-the-ass years in federal prison) you can believe that these businesses operating in the shadows and providing legitimate business support for spammers and their clients will seriously second guess their involvement in this and decide that 20 long years in prison and crippling financial penalties and forfeitures just isn't worth it for whatever pocket change they get from some guy who wants to send spam.
Spam just doesn't work as a purely underground phenomenon, it requires complicity with the "legitimate" world in order to process payments, send email and so on. If you cut that air supply off or make it much more expensive, you may make the margin small enough that it stops being viable.
Will it stop everything? Of course not, but it will make what's left far easier to isolate.
The economy, maybe? Hell, a guy I know who sells Volvos says its almost impossible to write a lease on a car and bank financing for purchases has gotten trickier with the credit crunch. Even guys with more or less guaranteed six figure incomes (like tenured full professors) are also sucking up the inflationary increases like the rest of us.
And there may be some of the "what's new, anyway?" mindset. I don't think a 2 year old Prius is missing much from a new one, although I admit to not caring, gas costs nothing to me, and the environmental impact doesn't matter, either.
That's really a measure of how much Carter sucked, and it doesn't take into the years of high approval ratings for Bush. It's not that it's rosy -- clearly it is pretty much all over as we once knew it, and Bush helped. But comparing Bush to Carter really just reminds us of what a gutless fuckup Carter was and how little time it took him to mismanage everything.
Don't get me wrong, he's a fabulous benevolent humanitarian. But he was an impossibly bad president.
My Vegas experience isn't extensive, but in a long weekend of staying at the Bellagio I didn't get a single comped drink, and I spent a lot of time at the slots (I only lost $20 all weekend). At the Hilton, I did get a couple of comped drinks (Absolute & Tonic!) but that was over another long weekend of fairly extensive slot play, too.
I sometimes wonder if comped drinks weren't for people doing real wagering at the tables or perhaps something from the 80s and earlier.
Just get married and have a child. That bandwidth cap will look completely unobtainable and your list of activities will not be a day or a week, but biennial to-do list.
You have to wonder, though, if caps and all the "Bu$ine$$ Cla$$" tiers providers create to get around them aren't just an attempt to prop up their margins in a world they know will be bandwidth-demanding and likely to pay for it. At least in the near term (5-10 years), there just aren't a lot of FTH-type alternatives broadly available or planned (or even financable in the current capital market..).
Not to mention in the case of cable, propping up their existing content distribution system. (nice snarky way to influence your content vendors trying to send shows on the internet when you can cripple their viewers ability to download them, thus forcing them to be reliant on your TV distribution system).
I like to believe in the free market too, but the manipulated and highly regulated "free market" we actually have seems to be more about making rich insiders wealthy and buttfucking everyone else.
There's a lot of problems with that. It's great to forward all the extra power into the grid during the day, but all this does is cut the amount of fuel used by central generating stations at night when solar can't work or when the wind doesn't blow. "The grid" can't store energy and the "excess" power you describe at night isn't excess power but a lack of consumption, and that doesn't create power to be sent back to residences -- it still has to be generated somehow.
Also, there's a colossal inefficiency in feeding the grid from thousands of homes, each supplying some puny sub-5 kW of excess power. A lot of transmission loss and inability to channel it where its needed.
IMHO, it's energy *storage* that matters more than generation. It seems like over time, even "normal" solar cells or wind power could build up an excess of energy that would cover night time, air conditioning, clouds, etc, but there's no practical way of storing the generated energy to use later.
That's the whole lie to all of it. Unless you have been living an all-cash existence for the last 10 years, you are so tracked and databased that the idea of withholding your driver's license (which changes every time they re-issue it in my state) on any one transaction is just kind of naive.
There's wisdom to not handing out your SSN to everyone that asks (its even on the ATF gun transfer form, but you can refuse, and I do whenever I buy a gun) unless they are granting you credit.
But, again, I was making an exchange and not getting a refund. I was trading them something worth $X for something worth $(X-0.07).
No, you were trading them something YOU believed was worth more. I don't know, but maybe they have policies about not selling personal care items (or any at all) of an unknown origin? Your diapers could have been counterfeit, not containing what you believed they were, etc.
To allow them to record the information like they wanted to do?
Sorry honey, but the kid will have to just shit himself because I'm taking a stand? Do you live some kind of anonymous, cash-only existence off the info grid?
Basically an iPhone with a slide-out keyboard. I just cannot manage the on-screen keyboard for love or money. I'd even settle for a Blackberry-type format of half screen half keyboard.
Unfortunately I know that with Jobs we'll never see an iPhone with a keyboard of any kind, so it looks like I'm stuck with WM for a while. My Moto Q mostly sucks (calls you can't end, crashing, slow), but ActiveStink works pretty well and the phone part generally works.
Baby stuff is very frequently shoplifted; low-income people have kids (lots!) that soil themselves as often as rich people's kids do, and they don't like cloth nappies any more than you do. So even though it doesn't make "sense", they had no idea what the providence of your diapers were; you could have bought them stolen for 20 cents on the dollar.
How hard was it to show them a driver's license, anyway?
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...but how long will any mobile phone technology last? Will you find yourself having to re-do it all every 5 years as phone/carrier makers obsolete what you developed for?
Web based makes sense since you could possibly transition to some other technology, or, more likely, a mobile device's web access will only get better making it in-place upgradable for a long time.
Building your software to target a specific phone technology just seems terribly shortsighted for something like a house.
(IMHO, the real answer is "none" -- home automation is of limited value past a programmable thermostat and ultimately an albatross of shit that doesn't work and is expensive and time-consuming to fix. Its frightfully expensive to maintain ordinary systems like windows, gutters, and roofs, let alone a whole complex automation system).
Don't you just love it when someone tries to use drugs as an analogy for some behavior and they just highlight the idiotic nature of drug hysteria?
What fucking lower class mother three has the time or energy for two hours of blog maintenance every night? Maybe if her kids are all over the age of 16 she might have the time, but if most or all are younger than that, especially if they're under say, 10, she's got her hands full taking care of them and likely does not have the time or energy to devote to this fantasy blog maintenance.
I'm from what's probably considered an upper-income middle class household with one 4 year old, and I can barely find the time to keep the house up and going let alone spend 15 hours a week keeping some online presence going.
Now I can see a true upper class mom doing this, but that presumes her upper-class income provides her with a lot of time-saving luxuries, like a live-in nanny who does the cooking, cleaning and childcare. But this woman is even worse off in the future economic nightmare, since her "survival skills" are limited to getting to the gym often so that her ass stays MILFy enough to keep her husband's income around.
I go to bed somewhere between 9:30 and 10:00 pm. After about 9 PM I'm generally too tired to do anything but watch TV, and even that usually puts me to sleep.
But I get up around 5 AM and my most productive time seems to be between about 6 AM and about 10 AM. I feel the most alert and productive then, possibly because I'm enjoying the benefits of sleep + coffee (without being overcaffeinated or relying on it for energy) and I'm not "bogged down" psychologically by all of the bullshit and stress accumulated during the course of the day.
Now that I'm fully entering old farthood (41), I'm guessing the study conclusions must be biased towards the under-30 set, since most people I know in my age/lifestyle category (over 40 with kids) are largely in my same situation with regard to being dead by about 10 PM, although most don't seem to be up at 5.
I think the original plan with TSA was to make it more of a police-type organization, to provide a more law enforcement feel to airport security.
What we ended up with was just a replacement for the shopping mall security that individual airports had used before -- a dead end, low-wage job, poorly performed by a statistically over-represented number of minorities, now featuring uniform attire from airport to airport, a more surly attitude and all the personnel efficiencies of government bureaucracy, unionization and hiring mandates like affirmative action.
Yuck. Every airport I've been they've always been total losers: surly, slow, uncooperative and sometimes uninformed of TSA procedures.
I wonder what impact the use of those big scanners on the ticketing concourse has on stealing. I think bags that pass those scanners get shunted directly to airport baggage handlers, where theft from luggage may be procedurally more difficult. If the scanning takes place once ticketing has taken your bag, especially if its done in a separate area, I think you're at much greater risk, since they can open bags largely at will.
IEDs have their place, but primarily as an area denial weapon (as a hindrance to movement) and a way to defeat armor.
But you can't have an effective insurgency without small arms. They ARE effective. We're failing to win in Afghanistan largely against irregular units with small arms. Your .22 rifle with a scope is an effective sniping weapon, especially with a home-made suppressor.
What's not effective and probably hasn't been ever is trying to fight a "stand up" battle against regular armed forces. This is what they are trained to fight and superiority of firepower and logistics generally can defeat irregulars in a set piece battle.
But look at what's happened to US law enforcement forces when they've faced small arms -- at Waco, for example, they got their hats handed to them despite superior numbers, weapons and training. They've "won" by employing largely heavy armored weapons, but it was a stand-off at best facing civilians. (I use this as an example since we don't really have any examples of American civilians fighting against military forces).
It seems like software evolves something like this:
Real v1.0 -- First version, fairly buggy but generally usable. Vendor labeled version 1.0.
v1.1 -- Minor improvements, bug fixes. Labeled version 2.0.
v1.2 -- More of the same, minor new features. Labeled version 3.0.
v1.3 -- Well-honed release, new features in v1.2 now flawless, no noticable bugs. Labeled version 4.0.
At this point, they have basically the finished product they should have released as version 1.0 but based on their release schedule should really be v1.3 and not version 4.0. But since its finished and works, nobody will buy a version 5.0 that basically repeats "actual" version v1.2 or v1.3 changes.
So the vendor releases version 5.0, which is a total rewrite with a new UI, mimicking whatever the most popular eye candy "skin" out there they can find, a few new features and a ton of new bugs and problems. In reality, released version 5.0 is more like a new program with the same name with a real version of 1.0. In this second iteration they repeat the general steps of "real" versions 1.1->1.3, but often quickly and often using a point versioning system.
By the time they do version 6.0, they are fully cycling the product with major changes but actually just releasing a 1.0 product. They also seem to do this quickly enough that they never get past "real" .1 point release improvements before cycling again.
I mean come on, let's label this what it is, an organized criminal conspiracy, and let's bring the really harsh laws to bear on these people. The best part is all the assholes in legitimate business colluding with them get to be members of the same conspiracy.
My only guess is a "make money while you can" mindset. People are hooked on SMS. I know people who can hardly open a web browser but can reply with a 100 character SMS message from a standard keypad phone in under a minute.
And there's probably some worry that "cell phones" as we know it may only have a time horizon of another 10 years before open devices capable of working on alternative networks take over.
That fact that it is such an obvious racketeering case and we've never seen a RICO prosecution leads me to believe there's just too much money being made by the spammers "air supply" generally above-board business partners.
The article's author talks about hosting providers having "secret agreements" with spammers or other complicity. THIS is the leverage needed to hobble spammers.
Spam is almost *always* a come-on for some fraudulent enterprise (stock schemes, fake/illegal pills, or other outright identity theft or fraud). In order to perpetrate frauds like this on an ongoing basis, you need complicity with: hosting providers, credit card processors, banks, and various other middle men.
What's needed are RICO prosecutions that demonstrate this complicity so that the *entire chain* can be prosecuted as a criminal enterprise. Once a few spammers and their secret partners go down in a RICO prosecution ($250k fines, 20 pound-me-in-the-ass years in federal prison) you can believe that these businesses operating in the shadows and providing legitimate business support for spammers and their clients will seriously second guess their involvement in this and decide that 20 long years in prison and crippling financial penalties and forfeitures just isn't worth it for whatever pocket change they get from some guy who wants to send spam.
Spam just doesn't work as a purely underground phenomenon, it requires complicity with the "legitimate" world in order to process payments, send email and so on. If you cut that air supply off or make it much more expensive, you may make the margin small enough that it stops being viable.
Will it stop everything? Of course not, but it will make what's left far easier to isolate.
But OWA has a much thinner feature set, and over time, they will spend more time using OWA than waiting for Citrix.
The economy, maybe? Hell, a guy I know who sells Volvos says its almost impossible to write a lease on a car and bank financing for purchases has gotten trickier with the credit crunch. Even guys with more or less guaranteed six figure incomes (like tenured full professors) are also sucking up the inflationary increases like the rest of us.
And there may be some of the "what's new, anyway?" mindset. I don't think a 2 year old Prius is missing much from a new one, although I admit to not caring, gas costs nothing to me, and the environmental impact doesn't matter, either.
Another benefit is that the drug tests aren't "Have you?" they are "How much do you want?"
That's really a measure of how much Carter sucked, and it doesn't take into the years of high approval ratings for Bush. It's not that it's rosy -- clearly it is pretty much all over as we once knew it, and Bush helped. But comparing Bush to Carter really just reminds us of what a gutless fuckup Carter was and how little time it took him to mismanage everything.
Don't get me wrong, he's a fabulous benevolent humanitarian. But he was an impossibly bad president.
My Vegas experience isn't extensive, but in a long weekend of staying at the Bellagio I didn't get a single comped drink, and I spent a lot of time at the slots (I only lost $20 all weekend). At the Hilton, I did get a couple of comped drinks (Absolute & Tonic!) but that was over another long weekend of fairly extensive slot play, too.
I sometimes wonder if comped drinks weren't for people doing real wagering at the tables or perhaps something from the 80s and earlier.
Just get married and have a child. That bandwidth cap will look completely unobtainable and your list of activities will not be a day or a week, but biennial to-do list.
You have to wonder, though, if caps and all the "Bu$ine$$ Cla$$" tiers providers create to get around them aren't just an attempt to prop up their margins in a world they know will be bandwidth-demanding and likely to pay for it. At least in the near term (5-10 years), there just aren't a lot of FTH-type alternatives broadly available or planned (or even financable in the current capital market..).
Not to mention in the case of cable, propping up their existing content distribution system. (nice snarky way to influence your content vendors trying to send shows on the internet when you can cripple their viewers ability to download them, thus forcing them to be reliant on your TV distribution system).
I like to believe in the free market too, but the manipulated and highly regulated "free market" we actually have seems to be more about making rich insiders wealthy and buttfucking everyone else.
There's a lot of problems with that. It's great to forward all the extra power into the grid during the day, but all this does is cut the amount of fuel used by central generating stations at night when solar can't work or when the wind doesn't blow. "The grid" can't store energy and the "excess" power you describe at night isn't excess power but a lack of consumption, and that doesn't create power to be sent back to residences -- it still has to be generated somehow.
Also, there's a colossal inefficiency in feeding the grid from thousands of homes, each supplying some puny sub-5 kW of excess power. A lot of transmission loss and inability to channel it where its needed.
IMHO, it's energy *storage* that matters more than generation. It seems like over time, even "normal" solar cells or wind power could build up an excess of energy that would cover night time, air conditioning, clouds, etc, but there's no practical way of storing the generated energy to use later.
That's the whole lie to all of it. Unless you have been living an all-cash existence for the last 10 years, you are so tracked and databased that the idea of withholding your driver's license (which changes every time they re-issue it in my state) on any one transaction is just kind of naive.
There's wisdom to not handing out your SSN to everyone that asks (its even on the ATF gun transfer form, but you can refuse, and I do whenever I buy a gun) unless they are granting you credit.
But, again, I was making an exchange and not getting a refund. I was trading them something worth $X for something worth $(X-0.07).
No, you were trading them something YOU believed was worth more. I don't know, but maybe they have policies about not selling personal care items (or any at all) of an unknown origin? Your diapers could have been counterfeit, not containing what you believed they were, etc.
To allow them to record the information like they wanted to do?
Sorry honey, but the kid will have to just shit himself because I'm taking a stand? Do you live some kind of anonymous, cash-only existence off the info grid?
Basically an iPhone with a slide-out keyboard. I just cannot manage the on-screen keyboard for love or money. I'd even settle for a Blackberry-type format of half screen half keyboard.
Unfortunately I know that with Jobs we'll never see an iPhone with a keyboard of any kind, so it looks like I'm stuck with WM for a while. My Moto Q mostly sucks (calls you can't end, crashing, slow), but ActiveStink works pretty well and the phone part generally works.
Baby stuff is very frequently shoplifted; low-income people have kids (lots!) that soil themselves as often as rich people's kids do, and they don't like cloth nappies any more than you do. So even though it doesn't make "sense", they had no idea what the providence of your diapers were; you could have bought them stolen for 20 cents on the dollar.
How hard was it to show them a driver's license, anyway?
I'd even settle for just the passports, but when you can get multi-national citizenship, then you're in pretty good shape.