I see this as being something more like a stick computer. I have one playing a movie right now, an "MK809" that I bought on Amazon for $35.
I see that there's a potentially *huge* market for small, fix-function, programmable, embedded devices that run on a watt or two of power. (My TV stick is powered by the USB port on the side of the TV)
I am thinking about stuff like household A/C controllers that monitor outside weather, inside temperature, and time of day to optimize internal climate control to save money.
Control the traffic lights to minimize the amount of delay as traffic flows through town?
Monitor humidity levels, time of day, weather forecasts, infrared sensor data, and other variables to manage irrigation to keep plants healthy with a minimum of water usage. (California could *really* use tech like this about now)... and so on...
I don't have a phone line for my home. Instead, I have a VOIP MagicJack that cost me about $20/year for unlimited calls. It is wired in place of my old phone line in my home, the old land line phones work the same way as always.
At my business, we replaced all telephone equipment with VOIP equipment. Audio quality is better than cellular, not quite as good as the old land line, but is plenty good enough, and we can have representatives take calls anywhere over wifi or any other Internet connection.
Over 90% of my use of my cell "phone" is for Internet-related activity, and the phone is really just one of many apps on the phone consuming data.
The idea of a "phone" is already obsolete. Why are we doing this, again?
Describing your excellent battery life, you described my Razr Maxx HD rather well!
Even after 3 years, it powers through a full day with hard use with > 25% battery life, and I *use* my phone. Stuff like GotoMeeting app usage for hours, Nextiva VOIP app over wifi for at least an hour, Skype app all day long, etc.
It's also awesome on the road! Spending an hour or three at the airport, watching TED videos or downloaded movies while on the plane, diving directions after landing, etc. it does *just fine*.
With nightly charging, I think I've had it die between charges perhaps twice in the last 3 years. If I could buy a new one today, I probably would, even though its specs are sub-par to today's flagships!
All the features in the world are for naught if your battery is dead.
"any traffic" implies "all traffic" and it's simply wrong that "big data" is somehow exploiting, for example, the OpenVPN traffic between my laptop and my home mini server, nor are they making use of anything going on over SSH.
And encryption doesn't stop them from watching what you do...
And this is just silly. Of course it does! It is *not* a perfect tool, but it is a damned good one, the engineers did their job. As with any defensive/offensive technique, there are ways to mitigate it, and there are ways to bolster against those mitigations.
It's plainly obvious from the Snowden leaks that the NSA commonly seeks the private keys of common sites. This strongly implies that the root of the CA fortress is relatively secure - otherwise they wouldn't care. And in light of the Snowden leaks, SSL is being scrutinized, and the holes filled in. OpenSSL finally has a budget!
Security is a process, not a product. Don't forget that!
I have used my "previous generation" phone in exactly this capacity every time I upgrade to a new phone. Around these parts on Craigslist, a used Samsung Galaxy S3 costs about $50 to $100. There's nothing preventing you from buying one, setting up the wifi, and using it exactly as you mention.
You could even get a MagicJack or Nextiva VOIP or something and use it as for phone service over wifi for very cheap.
I have a folding bike. While its short wheel base makes it feel "skittish" compared to a lumbering road bike, it's surprisingly fast and I have no trouble keeping up with just about anybody else on bikes.
1) It blows away 10 KPH. Average of 25-30 KPH more the norm, just like a normal road bike. (Hint: 100 PSI tires help a lot)
2) It doesn't have batteries to run out or replace.
3) I get in better shape when I use it.
4) Folded, I can put it next to my desk at work and nobody cares at all. Taking it on an elevator isn't awkward.
5) Even when bikes are "restricted", people seem to treat the folding bike as if it were some kind of medical device. In general, nobody heckles me.
Integrating two different technologies together seamlessly is *extremely difficult*, folks! Roughly 1/3 of the programmers in our company do little more than maintain integration and "bridges" with other vendor products for our clients. They want what we have to offer, and they want it to work with other products, too.
Our database schema is north of 500 tables. Despite having a proper signal/handler based, modular, service oriented architecture, and careful attention to best practices and the willingness to refactor as soon as deemed necessary, keeping all these different parts working together is a *tough job*.
I am not at all surprised that even Google is having trouble integrating their existing voice products with Cell and Wifi. That they are even trying is enough to keep programmers up at night, staring at the ceiling in a state of mild panic.
Comcast basic cable internet is 25 Mbit around here. (they may have upgraded it to 50 a while back)
At 25 Mbit, your "terrible" 1 MB web page takes about 1 second to download. Most of those scripts are then cached, making even your horrible example of a page, in practice, "no big deal".
I remember carefully compressing gif images to get them to download faster on 14.4 Kbps dial up modems. Today's internet is just different you know?
What's confusing about this particular affect of spelling is that, normally, ' is used to show possession, not plurality.
Saying, "It is Sandy's" makes perfect sense. "That' is Bob's shirt".
However, you can say "That is it's shirt because, even though we use a single quote to reference possessions for proper nouns, we don't use them for improper nouns. EG: "That shirt is hers", not "That shirt is her's".
But, because of the use of an apostrophe for possession for proper nouns, it's easy to see why it's confusing to use its correct spelling in a sentence./PEDANTIC
PS: I wonder if this will be down voted to oblivion?
I have a pretty decent phone. A flagship phone that's now 3 years old, the Moto Razr Maxx HD. It's a bit long in the tooth, but it still has a sharp, bright screen, decent battery life, and while it's not lightning fast, it does everything I need smoothly and comfortably.
But Moto doesn't sell it anymore. I'm pretty sure it's EOL anymore, which probably makes me SOL.
But it keeps chugging on, and as a consumer, shorting of reading tech sites like/., I would never know that there's any problem at all. Meanwhile, my security keys are being lifted, my email passwords are stolen, and somebody's posting Donkey pictures on my Facebook account and I have no idea how or why.
But, even if I *weren't* SOL, there's the issue that, while my Linux laptop gets updated daily, and my Windows laptop gets updated weekly, my phone gets updated (perhaps) a few times per year.
See the problem, yet? We're seeing just the bare beginning.
The bright boys at Google need to figure out a way to update Android and bypass the carriers, or at least, provide a side-channel way to roll out security updates, or their whole ecosystem will collapse in an orgy of viruses and malware.
The other thing is that the Internet has a lot of overhead.
When it was originally developed, networking was very slow and unreliable, so small packets were picked. As hardware has improved and available bandwidth has grown exponentially, the benefits of larger packet sizes are mostly lost since, for compatibility reasons, everybody continues to use tiny packet sizes in order to avoid dropped/fragmented packets.
Because in 1981 or so, everybody was pretty sure that this fairly obscure educational network would *never* need more than about 4 billion addresses... and they were *obviously right*.
The discussion about grains of sand or atoms is pretty silly. The reality is that the idea of 1 item, 1 address is already hogwash. It's very typical for one address to host *many somethings* (EG: websites, NAT, etc) and the opposite is also equally true: it's very typical for one something to respond to many addresses.
There are many applications that we likely can't even consider due to today's limitations that may well depend on or benefit from a large address space. IPv6 is a definite step in the right direction, but having seen the transition from 8 -> 16 bit computers, 16 -> 32 bit computers, and the transition from 32 -> 64 bit computers, the reality is that **growth is exponential**.
When 2% of your address space is consumed, you are just over 6 doublings away consumption. Even if you assume an entire decade per doubling, that's less than an average lifetime before you're doing it all over again.
IMHO: what needs to happen next is to have a 16 bit packet header to indicate the size of the address in use. This makes the address space not only dynamic, but MASSIVE without requiring all hardware on the face of the Earth to be updated any time the address space runs out.
I'm using an MK809 Android TV stick that cost me about $35 on Amazon. Plays my Samba shared media over wifi flawlessly, as well as Hulu/Netflix/NBC/CBS, all while using the USB port on my TV as its power supply. It really doesn't get much more efficient than that.
Instead of a TV remote, I use a "flying mouse" that you can find for around $15 on Amazon. Held like a remote, it's a mouse; hold it sideways if you need to type. I leave the TV's volume always on max, and control the audio thru the TV stick.
It's slick, it's easy, it's cheap, and very efficient, and doesn't require *any* expensive hardware nor any cable running.
Being an astrophysicist doesn't make you at all qualified to use a VCR. (Wait, who uses VCRs anymore?! I haven't touched one in almost two decades!) But it *does* mean that we're not talking about an idiot. And if you're trying to target your product to be usable for the average joe, and an astrophysicist can't figure it out, you can assume that you missed your target.
I'm bully on ARM, with the (almost) collapse of AMD as a "first rate" processor, it's good to see Intel get some serious competition in a significant market space.
My only beef with ARM is that comparing CPUs is harder than comparing video cards! the ARM space is so fragmented with licensed cores and seemly random numbers indicating the "version" that I have no idea how, for example, a SnapDragon 808 processor compares to a Cortex A9 or an Apple A7.
Really, I'm lost. But the $40 TV stick with the 4x core A9 works pretty well...
I had Windows Vista up on a (then rather beefy) 3-core 64B Athlon with 3 GB of RAM. IT WAS A DOG. Figure several minutes until it was responsive on boot, etc. Double-click a program and wait for the icon to blink, etc.
Upgrading the machine to Windows 7 without changing *anything* and it was like a new computer! It booted much faster, programs launched quickly enough that the coffee maker started to feel abandoned.
And it was *always* that slow, it wasn't due to malware.
$50k doesn't even cover the cost of MS TV advertisements for a single day. This is roughly the cost of 1/2 to 1/3 of their typical developer salary for a year.
Slashdot Mirror
I see this as being something more like a stick computer. I have one playing a movie right now, an "MK809" that I bought on Amazon for $35.
I see that there's a potentially *huge* market for small, fix-function, programmable, embedded devices that run on a watt or two of power. (My TV stick is powered by the USB port on the side of the TV)
I am thinking about stuff like household A/C controllers that monitor outside weather, inside temperature, and time of day to optimize internal climate control to save money.
Control the traffic lights to minimize the amount of delay as traffic flows through town?
Monitor humidity levels, time of day, weather forecasts, infrared sensor data, and other variables to manage irrigation to keep plants healthy with a minimum of water usage. (California could *really* use tech like this about now) ... and so on ...
I don't have a phone line for my home. Instead, I have a VOIP MagicJack that cost me about $20/year for unlimited calls. It is wired in place of my old phone line in my home, the old land line phones work the same way as always.
At my business, we replaced all telephone equipment with VOIP equipment. Audio quality is better than cellular, not quite as good as the old land line, but is plenty good enough, and we can have representatives take calls anywhere over wifi or any other Internet connection.
Over 90% of my use of my cell "phone" is for Internet-related activity, and the phone is really just one of many apps on the phone consuming data.
The idea of a "phone" is already obsolete. Why are we doing this, again?
Describing your excellent battery life, you described my Razr Maxx HD rather well!
Even after 3 years, it powers through a full day with hard use with > 25% battery life, and I *use* my phone. Stuff like GotoMeeting app usage for hours, Nextiva VOIP app over wifi for at least an hour, Skype app all day long, etc.
It's also awesome on the road! Spending an hour or three at the airport, watching TED videos or downloaded movies while on the plane, diving directions after landing, etc. it does *just fine*.
With nightly charging, I think I've had it die between charges perhaps twice in the last 3 years. If I could buy a new one today, I probably would, even though its specs are sub-par to today's flagships!
All the features in the world are for naught if your battery is dead.
I wish this weren't modded up. Really, I do.
"any traffic" implies "all traffic" and it's simply wrong that "big data" is somehow exploiting, for example, the OpenVPN traffic between my laptop and my home mini server, nor are they making use of anything going on over SSH.
And encryption doesn't stop them from watching what you do...
And this is just silly. Of course it does! It is *not* a perfect tool, but it is a damned good one, the engineers did their job. As with any defensive/offensive technique, there are ways to mitigate it, and there are ways to bolster against those mitigations.
It's plainly obvious from the Snowden leaks that the NSA commonly seeks the private keys of common sites. This strongly implies that the root of the CA fortress is relatively secure - otherwise they wouldn't care. And in light of the Snowden leaks, SSL is being scrutinized, and the holes filled in. OpenSSL finally has a budget!
Security is a process, not a product. Don't forget that!
I have used my "previous generation" phone in exactly this capacity every time I upgrade to a new phone. Around these parts on Craigslist, a used Samsung Galaxy S3 costs about $50 to $100. There's nothing preventing you from buying one, setting up the wifi, and using it exactly as you mention.
You could even get a MagicJack or Nextiva VOIP or something and use it as for phone service over wifi for very cheap.
Bash shell is not a tool for the masses. However, at least one app that lets you have your shell. In fact, there's more than one.
For me, Linux is the OS, and the "Android" part is somewhat analogous to X11 on "normal" Linux.
I have a folding bike. While its short wheel base makes it feel "skittish" compared to a lumbering road bike, it's surprisingly fast and I have no trouble keeping up with just about anybody else on bikes.
1) It blows away 10 KPH. Average of 25-30 KPH more the norm, just like a normal road bike. (Hint: 100 PSI tires help a lot)
2) It doesn't have batteries to run out or replace.
3) I get in better shape when I use it.
4) Folded, I can put it next to my desk at work and nobody cares at all. Taking it on an elevator isn't awkward.
5) Even when bikes are "restricted", people seem to treat the folding bike as if it were some kind of medical device. In general, nobody heckles me.
I'm a developer.
Integrating two different technologies together seamlessly is *extremely difficult*, folks! Roughly 1/3 of the programmers in our company do little more than maintain integration and "bridges" with other vendor products for our clients. They want what we have to offer, and they want it to work with other products, too.
Our database schema is north of 500 tables. Despite having a proper signal/handler based, modular, service oriented architecture, and careful attention to best practices and the willingness to refactor as soon as deemed necessary, keeping all these different parts working together is a *tough job*.
I am not at all surprised that even Google is having trouble integrating their existing voice products with Cell and Wifi. That they are even trying is enough to keep programmers up at night, staring at the ceiling in a state of mild panic.
If they are successful, I will be impressed.
Comcast basic cable internet is 25 Mbit around here. (they may have upgraded it to 50 a while back)
At 25 Mbit, your "terrible" 1 MB web page takes about 1 second to download. Most of those scripts are then cached, making even your horrible example of a page, in practice, "no big deal".
I remember carefully compressing gif images to get them to download faster on 14.4 Kbps dial up modems. Today's internet is just different you know?
PEDANTIC
What's confusing about this particular affect of spelling is that, normally, ' is used to show possession, not plurality.
Saying, "It is Sandy's" makes perfect sense. "That' is Bob's shirt".
However, you can say "That is it's shirt because, even though we use a single quote to reference possessions for proper nouns, we don't use them for improper nouns. EG: "That shirt is hers", not "That shirt is her's".
But, because of the use of an apostrophe for possession for proper nouns, it's easy to see why it's confusing to use its correct spelling in a sentence. /PEDANTIC
PS: I wonder if this will be down voted to oblivion?
I'm sure the $$ wouldn't be all that great, though. You better *really need* that processing power.
I have a pretty decent phone. A flagship phone that's now 3 years old, the Moto Razr Maxx HD. It's a bit long in the tooth, but it still has a sharp, bright screen, decent battery life, and while it's not lightning fast, it does everything I need smoothly and comfortably.
But Moto doesn't sell it anymore. I'm pretty sure it's EOL anymore, which probably makes me SOL.
But it keeps chugging on, and as a consumer, shorting of reading tech sites like /., I would never know that there's any problem at all. Meanwhile, my security keys are being lifted, my email passwords are stolen, and somebody's posting Donkey pictures on my Facebook account and I have no idea how or why.
But, even if I *weren't* SOL, there's the issue that, while my Linux laptop gets updated daily, and my Windows laptop gets updated weekly, my phone gets updated (perhaps) a few times per year.
See the problem, yet? We're seeing just the bare beginning.
The bright boys at Google need to figure out a way to update Android and bypass the carriers, or at least, provide a side-channel way to roll out security updates, or their whole ecosystem will collapse in an orgy of viruses and malware.
For my next phone, I just might make sure I can run Cyanogenmod on it, if for no other reason than the hope of getting security updates in a reasonable timeframe.
The other thing is that the Internet has a lot of overhead.
When it was originally developed, networking was very slow and unreliable, so small packets were picked. As hardware has improved and available bandwidth has grown exponentially, the benefits of larger packet sizes are mostly lost since, for compatibility reasons, everybody continues to use tiny packet sizes in order to avoid dropped/fragmented packets.
Right!
Because in 1981 or so, everybody was pretty sure that this fairly obscure educational network would *never* need more than about 4 billion addresses... and they were *obviously right*.
The discussion about grains of sand or atoms is pretty silly. The reality is that the idea of 1 item, 1 address is already hogwash. It's very typical for one address to host *many somethings* (EG: websites, NAT, etc) and the opposite is also equally true: it's very typical for one something to respond to many addresses.
There are many applications that we likely can't even consider due to today's limitations that may well depend on or benefit from a large address space. IPv6 is a definite step in the right direction, but having seen the transition from 8 -> 16 bit computers, 16 -> 32 bit computers, and the transition from 32 -> 64 bit computers, the reality is that **growth is exponential**.
When 2% of your address space is consumed, you are just over 6 doublings away consumption. Even if you assume an entire decade per doubling, that's less than an average lifetime before you're doing it all over again.
IMHO: what needs to happen next is to have a 16 bit packet header to indicate the size of the address in use. This makes the address space not only dynamic, but MASSIVE without requiring all hardware on the face of the Earth to be updated any time the address space runs out.
I'm using an MK809 Android TV stick that cost me about $35 on Amazon. Plays my Samba shared media over wifi flawlessly, as well as Hulu/Netflix/NBC/CBS, all while using the USB port on my TV as its power supply. It really doesn't get much more efficient than that.
Instead of a TV remote, I use a "flying mouse" that you can find for around $15 on Amazon. Held like a remote, it's a mouse; hold it sideways if you need to type. I leave the TV's volume always on max, and control the audio thru the TV stick.
It's slick, it's easy, it's cheap, and very efficient, and doesn't require *any* expensive hardware nor any cable running.
Being an astrophysicist doesn't make you at all qualified to use a VCR. (Wait, who uses VCRs anymore?! I haven't touched one in almost two decades!) But it *does* mean that we're not talking about an idiot. And if you're trying to target your product to be usable for the average joe, and an astrophysicist can't figure it out, you can assume that you missed your target.
How has being an activist for so many years surprised you? What have you seen that you never expected?
Actually, an i7 processor has an energy density that blow a nuclear reactor away. The nuke reactor only wins because it's huge.
I'm bully on ARM, with the (almost) collapse of AMD as a "first rate" processor, it's good to see Intel get some serious competition in a significant market space.
My only beef with ARM is that comparing CPUs is harder than comparing video cards! the ARM space is so fragmented with licensed cores and seemly random numbers indicating the "version" that I have no idea how, for example, a SnapDragon 808 processor compares to a Cortex A9 or an Apple A7.
Really, I'm lost. But the $40 TV stick with the 4x core A9 works pretty well...
LA has a freeze cycle. It could even be hours of freezing temperatures in some areas, sometimes....
I am amaze.
I had Windows Vista up on a (then rather beefy) 3-core 64B Athlon with 3 GB of RAM. IT WAS A DOG. Figure several minutes until it was responsive on boot, etc. Double-click a program and wait for the icon to blink, etc.
Upgrading the machine to Windows 7 without changing *anything* and it was like a new computer! It booted much faster, programs launched quickly enough that the coffee maker started to feel abandoned.
And it was *always* that slow, it wasn't due to malware.
You can blame the people as much as you like, but failing to consider the power of the media (aka Faux News, CNN, etc) is folly.
I wonder how much of that "ignoramus effect" is due to people actively being spoon fed garbage information?
Watching commentary on any news network is a veritable "here's how" for logical fallacies.
As already said: I've never felt like I wanted to be locked into the (much smaller) Amazon ecosystem.
I'll be honest: I've never felt like I wanted to be locked into the (much smaller) Amazon ecosystem.
$50k doesn't even cover the cost of MS TV advertisements for a single day. This is roughly the cost of 1/2 to 1/3 of their typical developer salary for a year.
This isn't significant; this is laundry lint.