Hmm... Apple supports their products with updates and rewards their end users for staying current with better software and better apps.... I suppose that the downside to that is that you are SOL if you don't want to upgrade.
On the other hand with Android products you are just plain SOL because you don't get the choice to upgrade at all for the most part.
I can read my epub books on all manner of devices. Loose a device? Who cares buy another and download the book I'm currently reading and I'm off.
Or for some books I go with Amazon.. and read it with a Kindle app on whatever device I like (iPod Touch is good for fiction I find.) Kindle format is fun because if I misplace or forget my device and grab another I just login and point at the book I'm reading and it knows where I left off last time.
Isn't the point with hidden volumes to have two of them?
One with data that is not incriminating and one with?
And neither should "fit" exactly into the empty part of the enclosing hard disk.
If pressed you can provide the position information and pass phrase for one of them. Can they prove that another exists?
Maybe you have dozens of small encrypted volumes. Again only one of which has the data the court wants to look at. But can they tell when and where that one is or that you have given them ALL of the pass phrases and positions for ALL of the encrypted volumes. A multi-terabyte drive can contain a large number of randomly placed gigabyte volumes.
Measuring 250 km (160 mi) long by 50 km (30 mi) wide at its widest point, and covering an area of 15,690 km2 (6,060 sq mi), it is similar in area to Lake Ontario, but with over three times the volume. The average depth is 344 m (1,129 ft). It has an estimated volume of 5,400 km3 (1,300 cu mi).[4] The lake is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The liquid water over the ridge is about 200 m (700 ft), compared to roughly 400 m (1,300 ft) deep in the northern basin and 800 m (2,600 ft) deep in the southern.
So we are talking literally TONS of contamination in 5400 cubic kilometers of H2O. Do the math. This is not going to be the oil spill from hell.
Exactly. And once autonomous cars are safer then MAHD (Mothers Against Human Drivers) will kick in with a huge marketing campaign to get humans out of the driver seat because that could save maybe thirty-forty THOUSAND people a year from being killed (compared to about twenty thousand that MADD goes after with their Drunk Driving campaign.)
No they don't. You are obviously the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO HAS EVER CONSIDERED THIS POSSIBILITY!
The conclusion is that we should never ever ever do this because obviously the people looking at these problems are brain dead and simply won't think about things like this. So the precautionary principle says what is unknown is going to be worse than what we have.. just DON'T DO IT!
Well multi-year contracts for iPhones are not that bad. I'm just about finished on my 3 year iPhone 3GS contract and Apple is not only still supporting it they are still selling it!
What other Smartphone manufacturer is doing either (actively supporting, updating and selling a phone introduced in 2009.)
When (if) I upgrade this summer I'll be able to sell my 3GS via Craigslist. And it will probably last a few more years. Apple will probably continue to actively support it for a least another two years.
And presumably IFF the Android folks make an aBook authoring tool available there would be no impediment to an author producing TWO versions of their textbook. One for sale in the Apple store and another for the Android store (and maybe even publishing a PDF or on paper or...).
If authors find it worthwhile to markup the book for sale in the Apple store they will.
If authors find it worthwhile to markup the book for sale in the Android store they will do that too!
The ONLY lock in will be if authors are too lazy to do it for more than one store. Either because the tools are not available for the other (Android) store or because they don't feel there are enough sales to make it worthwhile.
The conspiratorial theory would be that this was timed to prove the absolute need for SOPA / PIPA... get piracy in front of people's face, grab some headlines that the SOPA / PIPA people can use to push their new law enforcement tools.
On the other hand this also demonstrates that law enforcement does quite well without SOPA / PIPA... so perhaps this was badly timed or thought out.
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
The problem at the local school level is the corrupt process for certification. Jobs viewed this as a way around that. Simply give the books away as part of the iPad.
Right, what student needs more than an abacus, slate and a piece of chalk! Anything past that is just fancy modern junk that has no place in a modern learning establishment.
You'll NEVER convince creationists unless at the same time you convince them that their religion is incorrect (or at least their interpretation thereof.)
You'll CAN convince skeptics by providing evidence and facts that support your theories.
There are of course people on both ends of the Warmist / Denial spectrum who ARE very close to treating this as religion and simply won't be swayed.
There are of course people on both ends of the Warmist / Denial spectrum who have VESTED interests and simply won't be swayed.
We can only hope that most people are in the middle and are willing to both look at the data skeptically and able to change their minds as needed.
To quote Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
And WRT to AGW the facts are continuing to change.
To bring this back to yesterdays discussion of robotic cars (which temporarily hijacked the airbus article...)
Reading the above just points out why life will be so much safer once we let the robots take over. They won't be tempted to run yellow lights. They won't run red lights. They won't slam on brakes to avoid red-light camera. They'll follow the rules and generally we won't have to worry about them mis-interpreting them or not following them or ignoring them completely like human drivers do.:-)
Arguably China and India by refusing to join in the first place and the US for not ratifying it. Kyoto has been on life support since day one. This is just pulling the plug before we need to pony up six billion in penalties for not living up to the treaty that they (China, India, US etc) refused to sign in the first place.
The government of the day that signed the treaty did so thinking it would help keep them in power. It did. But they never made any plans to actually lower our carbon emissions.
Realistically ANY Canadian government today would make the same decision. Stay in, pay $6 billion, for zero benefit to Canada (or really anyone other than the UN mandarins who get to distribute the cash to their favorite green funds.) Or pull out and save $6 billion. The math is easy.
Of course since it IS a different party, they didn't hesitate to paint the original government as incompetent etc.
My venerable IBM Klicky keyboards have been in constant use for just under two decades... I keep thinking I should by some backups (UniComp still makes them) but they just refuse to stop working.
Literally if you have enough light to see the technology to harvest it and put it to good use for telemetry exists.... See Cymbet's paper on the design of an Intra Ocular Pressure Sensor here: http://www.cymbet.com/pdfs/eeweb-article.pdf. Something small enough to fit in your eye, report pressure wirelessly and last 10 years without a battery.
From the paper:
To extend lifetime, the IOPM harvests light energy entering the eye with an integrated 0.07 square millimeter solar cell that recharges the battery. Given the ultra-small solar cell size, energy autonomy requires average power consumption of less than 10nW. For the majority of its lifetime, the IOPM is in a 3.65nW standby mode where mixed-signal circuits are disabled, digital logic is powergated, and 2.4fW/bitcell SRAM retains IOP instructions and data. The average system power with pressure measurements every 15 minutes and daily wireless data transmissions is 5.3nW. When sunny, the solar cells supply 80.6nW to the battery. The combination of energy harvesting and low-power operation allows the IOPM to achieve zero-net energy operation in low light. The IOPM requires 10 hours of indoor lighting or 1.5 hours of sunlight per day to achieve energy-autonomy
This would certainly be usable to keep something like a keyboard working forever with a solar cell that was barely noticeable.
2. CableCo's charge EXTRA for HD... who the hell has a NON-HD TV these days... all TV stations are broadcasting in HD. They need to do more work to downgrade the signal to SD so they can give me that and charge extra for the HD channel.
3. Internet based TV like NetFlix and Hulu work great and are cheap BUT only when you use them through your PC. Trying to find an elegant (read simple to use and usable) solution for the big screen that doesn't require a little screen (laptop) next to the big screen is like pulling teeth. Hey guys it really needs to be as easy as running the PVR.
4. Since there is no one integrated solution the various boxes needed to implement the home theater need to get along better. HDMI-CEC may help but it appears to be early days for this (Western Digital and Tivo ARE YOU LISTENING?)
5. Presets. We want presets. There are several common things we do that we don't want to have to navigate too EVERY TIME WE WANT TO DO THEM... Turn on the News. Turn on Netflix. Turn on my favorite radio station. These need to be simple and accessible from the remote without having to interact with the TV.
I'm just going through the process of down grading my CableCo to Internet Only status... I am getting 10+ OTA channels. Feeding that into a Tivo. The Tivo works better than the old (Motorola) PVR the CableCo provided.
We're going to Netflix for the movies. But that is painful on the Tivo... (effectively go to the office, find a movie, add to instant queue, go back to living room, go through a bunch of menus to load NetFlix program, find the movie in the instant queue and voila! five minutes later you are watching a movie!)
The WD TV Live Plus is slightly better. But unless you leave it on 24/7 it takes some time to turn on. Then you need to scroll down to Internet Media, then down and left to find NetFlix... Load up, and then find the movie in the Instant Queue.. It does have a Search option though. So possibly almost worth while.
And some other simple things.Presets... when the TV is not on we like to have the receiver set to FM and bring in some nice Jazz station... used to do that by tuning to a station that the CableCo brought in. Can't get that OTA here... so I need to do that via the Internet. Both Tivo and WD TV Live are more than happy to do it too. But you can't do it through the remote to a preset... Turn the TV on. Select source (Tivo or WD), make sure they are on... fumble through the menus to find the application you want for that Internet Media source (e.g. Tunein) and run it... Fumble through that set of menus to get to your presets and hey presto five minutes later you now have your music... Just turn the TV off and you are good to go.
This is just what IBM did with Lenovo, spin off the PC business to a (most likely) Asian partner. The partner has the headaches but gets to use the HP branding for as long as it makes sense.
Mostly the scare campaigns will be generated by people with other agendas... Think teamsters wanting to protect jobs for drivers. There are a *lot* of people who stand to loose their living once self driving cars start to be deployed.
You can see prototype scare campaigns of this sort anywhere that has contemplated driverless mass transit systems.
I suspect that in some jurisdictions (where unions have political pull) we will see laws enacted that require a human "driver" be available to override the controls for vehicles larger than say a small delivery truck or more than 6 passengers. Jobs for the boys.
Which reminds me of the old joke about the robotic factory that had a guard and a dog... The guard was there to protect the robots and the dog was there to bite the guard if he touched anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Apple supports their products with updates and rewards their end users for staying current with better software and better apps.... I suppose that the downside to that is that you are SOL if you don't want to upgrade.
On the other hand with Android products you are just plain SOL because you don't get the choice to upgrade at all for the most part.
I can read my epub books on all manner of devices. Loose a device? Who cares buy another and download the book I'm currently reading and I'm off.
Or for some books I go with Amazon.. and read it with a Kindle app on whatever device I like (iPod Touch is good for fiction I find.) Kindle format is fun because if I misplace or forget my device and grab another I just login and point at the book I'm reading and it knows where I left off last time.
Better yet, what if the disk drive partition in question is named "Random Data"?
Just change the intersections to Pedestrian Scrambles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_scramble.
Automated cars use the intersection (interleaved with an automated reservation system) for a couple of minutes.
Then pedestrians get the intersection for a amount of time based on the number of people using it.
This is really old school. And not that hard.
Isn't the point with hidden volumes to have two of them?
One with data that is not incriminating and one with?
And neither should "fit" exactly into the empty part of the enclosing hard disk.
If pressed you can provide the position information and pass phrase for one of them. Can they prove that another exists?
Maybe you have dozens of small encrypted volumes. Again only one of which has the data the court wants to look at. But can they tell when and where that one is or that you have given them ALL of the pass phrases and positions for ALL of the encrypted volumes. A multi-terabyte drive can contain a large number of randomly placed gigabyte volumes.
From wikipedia:
Measuring 250 km (160 mi) long by 50 km (30 mi) wide at its widest point, and covering an area of 15,690 km2 (6,060 sq mi), it is similar in area to Lake Ontario, but with over three times the volume. The average depth is 344 m (1,129 ft). It has an estimated volume of 5,400 km3 (1,300 cu mi).[4] The lake is divided into two deep basins by a ridge. The liquid water over the ridge is about 200 m (700 ft), compared to roughly 400 m (1,300 ft) deep in the northern basin and 800 m (2,600 ft) deep in the southern.
So we are talking literally TONS of contamination in 5400 cubic kilometers of H2O. Do the math. This is not going to be the oil spill from hell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigBee
Lower power and cost. Suitable for sensors, but unlikely to see it integrated into tablets or netbooks though.
Exactly. And once autonomous cars are safer then MAHD (Mothers Against Human Drivers) will kick in with a huge marketing campaign to get humans out of the driver seat because that could save maybe thirty-forty THOUSAND people a year from being killed (compared to about twenty thousand that MADD goes after with their Drunk Driving campaign.)
No they don't. You are obviously the ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO HAS EVER CONSIDERED THIS POSSIBILITY!
The conclusion is that we should never ever ever do this because obviously the people looking at these problems are brain dead and simply won't think about things like this. So the precautionary principle says what is unknown is going to be worse than what we have.. just DON'T DO IT!
Whatever.
Well multi-year contracts for iPhones are not that bad. I'm just about finished on my 3 year iPhone 3GS contract and Apple is not only still supporting it they are still selling it!
What other Smartphone manufacturer is doing either (actively supporting, updating and selling a phone introduced in 2009.)
When (if) I upgrade this summer I'll be able to sell my 3GS via Craigslist. And it will probably last a few more years. Apple will probably continue to actively support it for a least another two years.
Exactly. You can take your content and publish via the (presumably) up and coming Android format and put that into the Android store.
Or even publish via any of the normal epub formats via any channel you like.
The ONLY restriction is that IFF you create an iBook version you can only distribute THAT version via Apple (or for free.)
Think of it like an app... You can only sell your Angry Birds IOS app via Apple. But you can sell your Angry Birds Android app anyway you like.
What I like about reading books on an iPad is that I don't need to keep the lights on when in bed.
And I don't have to put on reading glasses because I can make the font bigger.
And the embedded video is so much better than any pop-ups!
Boy, more straw man arguments.
I can carry an iPad with 200-300 text books loaded on to it.
I wouldn't want to put 200-300 text books into my back pack and try walking anywhere.
I can search through any of the 200-300 text books quickly and easily for any search term.
I wouldn't want to do that manually one book at a time to find all the references in those 200-300 text books.
See you can come up with straw man arguments for either side of this debate.
And presumably IFF the Android folks make an aBook authoring tool available there would be no impediment to an author producing TWO versions of their textbook. One for sale in the Apple store and another for the Android store (and maybe even publishing a PDF or on paper or...).
If authors find it worthwhile to markup the book for sale in the Apple store they will.
If authors find it worthwhile to markup the book for sale in the Android store they will do that too!
The ONLY lock in will be if authors are too lazy to do it for more than one store. Either because the tools are not available for the other (Android) store or because they don't feel there are enough sales to make it worthwhile.
Interesting timing or coincidence?
The conspiratorial theory would be that this was timed to prove the absolute need for SOPA / PIPA... get piracy in front of people's face, grab some headlines that the SOPA / PIPA people can use to push their new law enforcement tools.
On the other hand this also demonstrates that law enforcement does quite well without SOPA / PIPA... so perhaps this was badly timed or thought out.
From: http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/19/apples-textbook-announcement-later-today-new-iosmac-software-rumored/
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
The problem at the local school level is the corrupt process for certification. Jobs viewed this as a way around that. Simply give the books away as part of the iPad.
Right, what student needs more than an abacus, slate and a piece of chalk! Anything past that is just fancy modern junk that has no place in a modern learning establishment.
Amen!
You'll NEVER convince creationists unless at the same time you convince them that their religion is incorrect (or at least their interpretation thereof.)
You'll CAN convince skeptics by providing evidence and facts that support your theories.
There are of course people on both ends of the Warmist / Denial spectrum who ARE very close to treating this as religion and simply won't be swayed.
There are of course people on both ends of the Warmist / Denial spectrum who have VESTED interests and simply won't be swayed.
We can only hope that most people are in the middle and are willing to both look at the data skeptically and able to change their minds as needed.
To quote Keynes: When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
And WRT to AGW the facts are continuing to change.
To bring this back to yesterdays discussion of robotic cars (which temporarily hijacked the airbus article...)
Reading the above just points out why life will be so much safer once we let the robots take over. They won't be tempted to run yellow lights. They won't run red lights. They won't slam on brakes to avoid red-light camera. They'll follow the rules and generally we won't have to worry about them mis-interpreting them or not following them or ignoring them completely like human drivers do. :-)
Arguably China and India by refusing to join in the first place and the US for not ratifying it. Kyoto has been on life support since day one. This is just pulling the plug before we need to pony up six billion in penalties for not living up to the treaty that they (China, India, US etc) refused to sign in the first place.
The government of the day that signed the treaty did so thinking it would help keep them in power. It did. But they never made any plans to actually lower our carbon emissions.
Realistically ANY Canadian government today would make the same decision. Stay in, pay $6 billion, for zero benefit to Canada (or really anyone other than the UN mandarins who get to distribute the cash to their favorite green funds.) Or pull out and save $6 billion. The math is easy.
Of course since it IS a different party, they didn't hesitate to paint the original government as incompetent etc.
My venerable IBM Klicky keyboards have been in constant use for just under two decades... I keep thinking I should by some backups (UniComp still makes them) but they just refuse to stop working.
Literally if you have enough light to see the technology to harvest it and put it to good use for telemetry exists.... See Cymbet's paper on the design of an Intra Ocular Pressure Sensor here: http://www.cymbet.com/pdfs/eeweb-article.pdf. Something small enough to fit in your eye, report pressure wirelessly and last 10 years without a battery.
From the paper:
To extend lifetime, the IOPM harvests light energy
entering the eye with an integrated 0.07 square millimeter
solar cell that recharges the battery. Given the ultra-small
solar cell size, energy autonomy requires average power
consumption of less than 10nW. For the majority of its
lifetime, the IOPM is in a 3.65nW standby mode where
mixed-signal circuits are disabled, digital logic is powergated,
and 2.4fW/bitcell SRAM retains IOP instructions
and data. The average system power with pressure
measurements every 15 minutes and daily wireless
data transmissions is 5.3nW. When sunny, the solar cells
supply 80.6nW to the battery. The combination of energy
harvesting and low-power operation allows the IOPM
to achieve zero-net energy operation in low light. The
IOPM requires 10 hours of indoor lighting or 1.5 hours of
sunlight per day to achieve energy-autonomy
This would certainly be usable to keep something like a keyboard working forever with a solar cell that was barely noticeable.
1. CableCo's charge too much! FAR FAR too much.
2. CableCo's charge EXTRA for HD... who the hell has a NON-HD TV these days... all TV stations are broadcasting in HD. They need to do more work to downgrade the signal to SD so they can give me that and charge extra for the HD channel.
3. Internet based TV like NetFlix and Hulu work great and are cheap BUT only when you use them through your PC. Trying to find an elegant (read simple to use and usable) solution for the big screen that doesn't require a little screen (laptop) next to the big screen is like pulling teeth. Hey guys it really needs to be as easy as running the PVR.
4. Since there is no one integrated solution the various boxes needed to implement the home theater need to get along better. HDMI-CEC may help but it appears to be early days for this (Western Digital and Tivo ARE YOU LISTENING?)
5. Presets. We want presets. There are several common things we do that we don't want to have to navigate too EVERY TIME WE WANT TO DO THEM... Turn on the News. Turn on Netflix. Turn on my favorite radio station. These need to be simple and accessible from the remote without having to interact with the TV.
I'm just going through the process of down grading my CableCo to Internet Only status... I am getting 10+ OTA channels. Feeding that into a Tivo. The Tivo works better than the old (Motorola) PVR the CableCo provided.
We're going to Netflix for the movies. But that is painful on the Tivo... (effectively go to the office, find a movie, add to instant queue, go back to living room, go through a bunch of menus to load NetFlix program, find the movie in the instant queue and voila! five minutes later you are watching a movie!)
The WD TV Live Plus is slightly better. But unless you leave it on 24/7 it takes some time to turn on. Then you need to scroll down to Internet Media, then down and left to find NetFlix... Load up, and then find the movie in the Instant Queue.. It does have a Search option though. So possibly almost worth while.
And some other simple things.Presets... when the TV is not on we like to have the receiver set to FM and bring in some nice Jazz station... used to do that by tuning to a station that the CableCo brought in. Can't get that OTA here... so I need to do that via the Internet. Both Tivo and WD TV Live are more than happy to do it too. But you can't do it through the remote to a preset... Turn the TV on. Select source (Tivo or WD), make sure they are on... fumble through the menus to find the application you want for that Internet Media source (e.g. Tunein) and run it... Fumble through that set of menus to get to your presets and hey presto five minutes later you now have your music... Just turn the TV off and you are good to go.
This is just what IBM did with Lenovo, spin off the PC business to a (most likely) Asian partner. The partner has the headaches but gets to use the HP branding for as long as it makes sense.
Mostly the scare campaigns will be generated by people with other agendas... Think teamsters wanting to protect jobs for drivers. There are a *lot* of people who stand to loose their living once self driving cars start to be deployed.
You can see prototype scare campaigns of this sort anywhere that has contemplated driverless mass transit systems.
I suspect that in some jurisdictions (where unions have political pull) we will see laws enacted that require a human "driver" be available to override the controls for vehicles larger than say a small delivery truck or more than 6 passengers. Jobs for the boys.
Which reminds me of the old joke about the robotic factory that had a guard and a dog... The guard was there to protect the robots and the dog was there to bite the guard if he touched anything.