The problem with Clear's model is that there was never any evidence to speak of that the TSA cared about traveler's identities, at least not enough to allow them to bypass any meaningful amount of screening that they would otherwise perform. All the "Clear" screening bypassed, as far as I was ever able to determine, was the no-fly list check. As such the only advantage (unless you had a name that tended to cause false positives on the no-fly list) was that you got to cut the queue. Then you put up with the same removal of shoes, millimeter wave scan, and other indignities and fourth amendment violations as everyone else.
Internet connectivity in Minnesota is so bad that broadband wireless service, with its slow speed, download caps, and unpredictable coverage, is still an improvement.
Most slashdot readers are probably not aware of what Kodachrome is, which is necessary to understand in order to see why Kodak is discontinuing it.
Kodachrome uses chemical technology that is essentially unchanged from the 1930s. Instead of embedded dye in the film emulsion, as is done in all other color films in use today, the film is essentially black and white, with filter layers, and the dyes are added during processing. Further complicating processing is a requirement for exposure to light of particular colors and intensities between chemical baths. Because of the complicated processing and the tight coupling between the nature of the film and the details of the processing steps, there has been no change to the Kodachrome technology since the introduction of the rarely-used higher speed Kodachrome in the early 1970s.
Meanwhile, competing slide films (Velvia, metioned upthread, also Kodak's older Ektachrome and more recent Lumiere and E100VS series films) continued to improve at least through the late 1990s. In addition to processing easy enough that it can be done in a home lab, these films are higher speed, higher resolution, less grainy, and offer more saturated colors. Continued production of Kodachrome (or, more likely, continued release of emulsions that have been in climate controlled storage for many years) has mainly served a tiny niche of photographers who have built a personal style around the film, plus a few curious newcomers.
Aside from the aforementioned "personal photographic style" considerations, Kodachrome has been practically obsolete for around 30 years, because starting around 1975 or so the last of the serious problems with E-6 process films (Ektachrome etc) -- stability during lengthy archival storage and shadow detail -- were solved.
The presence of good alternatives in other transparency films makes this a non-event. Should we see the day when transparency film is categorically unavailable, that will be an occasion for much greater wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The issue of net neutrality is about carriers requiring payment for some types of content. This is problematic because content sources that are not large enough to negotiate favorable deals with carriers are adversely affected, which is why it is a big deal.
ESPN charging (or trying to charge) some carriers for content is an unrelated problem except that it potentially creates problems for some categories of ISPs. I don't see the problem. It's ESPN's content and they can charge for it however they want. Me, I'll go out of my way to find an ISP that doesn't pay extra for it.
From TFA: "documentation is missing or incomplete, source code is missing leaving only the binary executables, or conversely the source exists but the compilation tools to reconstruct the executables are missing."
Sounds like any number of projects I've had the pleasure of working on over the years.
The outcome ultimately is justice through online voting and consensus systems, like the moderation system here, or the various systems of community sanctions over at Wikipedia. The problem is not that these systems are unfair, since they are arguably no worse than traditional legal systems (whose track record is far from perfect). The problem is that they are open to manipulation by people who have the willingness and the knowhow to game the system.
Less obvious than a bell though probably not "more humanizing." The loss of liberties has historically started with the powerless. Prisoners, the sick, the mentally ill. Then the military and the working class people. You're next.
The problem is that the metric never quite matches the goal. Anyone who's been in software development long enough has seen one or more "objective performance metrics" management fads come and go. With these there are incentives tied to making the dates, writing x lines of code, having fewer than y bugs, or whatever. What happens is that people make sure they pass the metrics. The trouble is that the metrics don't measure the desired behavior, just an imperfect proxy for it, and people figure out how to game the system. With programmers, they under commit, won't make changes, won't provide support, and won't work with their peers (though the exact nature of the dysfunction varies depending on the incentive structure). With students, the test becomes the goal and other aspects of learning are neglected.
Unless Intel decides to get as serious about the embedded world as they have been historically about the desktop, this amounts to last rites for Wind River. Starting with the 80186 in 1982, Intel's embedded processor offerings have been adaptations of desktop technology that have failed to stimulate the imagination of anyone building anything more sexy than a cash register. The needs of the embedded device market differ considerably and Intel does not understand them. Intel's idea of having a more highly integrated northbridge/southbridge/CPU package is just wrong. The embedded market needs products that don't have architectures that complicated rather than band-aids.
At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing. The nominally higher levels of integration and sophistication of commercial products aren't worth it.
The problem is not so much access to historical records in these situations as it is workflow. After all, a patient sent to another hospital will not have the benefit of medical history records created at another hospital or clinic.
Workflow is where there is trouble. If you're reading this you probably use a GPS or Google maps to get around, probably both. Do you still have any paper roadmaps? I don't. Your process for getting to a new place depends on the technology. Same with hospitals. They increasingly depend on automated workflows for scheduling, for dispensing drugs, for managing lab and x-ray orders and results, and so on.
Hospitals have switched to these systems because they require fewer staff. They have largely dismantled the paper+clipboard+courier systems that preceded them. These older systems were complex and cannot be resurrected quickly. There aren't enough people to implement them. The institutional memory on how to use them is lost.
I would guess that, in this particular case, they've gone back to paper prescriptions, signed by doctors, and taken by courier to the pharmacy, with a paper label on the dispensed drugs. That must be scary, because all the safeguards in the automated system -- checks for allergies, interactions, appropriate dosage for patient weight, not to mention barcode scans at multiple points to guard against mistakes -- are gone. Who will do the manual crosschecking? Have they been trained?
As Isaac Asimov once wrote, ""I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
They might make good AM radio antennas. You know, the kind of radio where you can listen to ideas too far off in the ideological fringes to make it onto the Internet.
The demographic segment that characterizes their customer base is already accustomed to buying Chinese-made products from clothing to blow molded lawn ornaments.
In other news, somebody in China thinks the price of oil is headed down.
The delay in integration is because spectrum and construction costs for wireless broadband are still high enough to allow it to compete economically with wired alternatives. Wireless broadband has been and still is a product for people more concerned with ubiquity and convenience than cost or bandwidth.
Um, let's see, you suggest perpetrating MITM fraud using a service that requires a 1 year subscription and a credit check in an area where "free public wifi" is already available for you to use as a backhaul?
Oh, I get it. The embedded platform of the MiFi router is easier to write MITM exploits for than your laptop.
On the other hand, carriers can (in most cases) reduce congestion by splitting cells when the traffic justifies it, just as they do with voice traffic.
I'll probably go out and buy one before long. Despite the expense, the 5GB monthly cap, and the onerous contract terms, the only broadband choices where I live are EVDO and an older wireless system using Alvarion gear. I got my Alvarion setup five years ago and have been gladly paying $44 a month for, at best, 320kbps, using a rooftop parabolic antenna pointed at the nearest tower. I have a laptop with an EVDO setup but still have the Alvarion gear for other household members. I would love to get rid of it.
Aside from people like me who can't get cable or DSL, devices like this work well for occasional users who are more concerned about convenience of installation than blazingly high speeds or the ability to download mountains of data. Clearwire has been selling similar services for quite some time.
Has anyone found anything on how Android applications dependent on cell phone-ish hardware (like GPS location and the like) will be handled inside a device like the eee PC?
Well, the Android developers' kit includes emulation software so you can punch in whatever coordinates you like for testing, and there are plenty of cheap, small GPS modules on the market. I would imagine that application compatibility problems will manifest in other areas, like display size and performance, since software developers who initially targeted the G1 have not had an opportunity to test on unrelated devices until recently.
Most of the acoustic couplers back in the day were fairly picky about the telephone handset used.
I make it a point to get rid of old digital gear, but I do have a telephone from the 1920s. It's still hooked up, and is one of the few reasons I still have a landline. It has the rayon-covered cord and everything.
TFA raises a valid point but overstates the case.
ICANN's work is indeed politicized, and one need look no further than the disparate fates of the.sex and.info TLDs to see that. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that something run by the U.N. would be any better.
In reality, though, DNS has lost much of its original importance. This becomes clear when you consider that all but a handful of Alexa's top 20 sites have names that have no real connection to the business. They're just rarely used words that lack much meaning in everyday life (Google, Amazon) or entirely made up (wikipedia, ebay). There are already alternative public root servers, and while these lack popularity, it shows how easy it would be for a distributed naming system to gain a foothold.
The real outcome of handing the rootservers over to an international committee would be to hasten the day when there is no longer one unified DNS, a day we'll probably see before too long anyway.
... are the two limitations of small projectors. They claim 10 lumens while most conventional mains-powered projectors are typically 1000-2000 lumens. That makes the product usable alone in a darkened room but not much of anywhere else. Their claim of "movie capable" battery life rather than a specific time period leads me to conclude that they watch shorter than average movies.
I predict that, like the pen scanner, this proves to be a geeky cool but practically useless device.
WiMAX was designed to handle VoIP traffic, and has specific traffic categories on the airlink for isochronous flows, like RTP and other VoIP payload streams. Unlike something like Ethernet, which is CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access, with collision detection), traffic is scheduled by the carrier network. For uplink data, your WiMAX card goes through a process of requesting bandwidth on what amounts to a hailing channel, and then gets a bandwidth allocation it can use. In theory, a small but constant amount of bandwidth can be allocated for VoIP at the airlink level, resulting in low jitter, low latency, and low frame loss.
There are a couple of problems with this.
The first problem is that not all WiMAX cards on the market today (in fact, quite possibly none of them) have sufficient sophistication in their device drivers and microcontrollers to send the RTP (or Skype, or whatever VoIP protocol you're using) packets on an isochronous service flow while the balance of the packets travel on a general-purpose service flow. As a result, the RTP (etc) packets have to compete with whatever else your machine is doing, either stuff you're initiating with the browser, or background things like checking email or updating the Vista weather widget, or checking for updates of one kind or another. It doesn't help matters that no operating system has a network stack that implements the service flow concept.
The second problem is that low-speed isochronous flows over the WiMAX OFDMA airlink depend upon sharing a fairly large timeslot with other users transmitting simultaneously on the uplink using a different set of carriers, at least if the system is going to be economically feasible for the carrier. Allocating an entire timeslot often enough to keep the delay below half a second or so would result in considerable wasted bandwidth, so the idea is to have users share a timeslot by have each one use only a fraction of the available carriers. Decoding the resulting burst at the base station then depends upon maintaining orthogonality between OFDM carriers, which means that exact frequency synchronization is required between multiple users. While each user's WiMAX card synchronizes its clock with the base station, doppler shift due to changes in speed or direction or a changing multipath environment can change the received frequency at the base station enough to compromise orthogonality and make the burst impossible to decode.
The result of all this is, from your perspective, is that your VoIP traffic could be jittery and have long delays and high packet loss, especially when the carrier's network is heavily loaded.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Clear's model is that there was never any evidence to speak of that the TSA cared about traveler's identities, at least not enough to allow them to bypass any meaningful amount of screening that they would otherwise perform. All the "Clear" screening bypassed, as far as I was ever able to determine, was the no-fly list check. As such the only advantage (unless you had a name that tended to cause false positives on the no-fly list) was that you got to cut the queue. Then you put up with the same removal of shoes, millimeter wave scan, and other indignities and fourth amendment violations as everyone else.
Internet connectivity in Minnesota is so bad that broadband wireless service, with its slow speed, download caps, and unpredictable coverage, is still an improvement.
Most slashdot readers are probably not aware of what Kodachrome is, which is necessary to understand in order to see why Kodak is discontinuing it.
Kodachrome uses chemical technology that is essentially unchanged from the 1930s. Instead of embedded dye in the film emulsion, as is done in all other color films in use today, the film is essentially black and white, with filter layers, and the dyes are added during processing. Further complicating processing is a requirement for exposure to light of particular colors and intensities between chemical baths. Because of the complicated processing and the tight coupling between the nature of the film and the details of the processing steps, there has been no change to the Kodachrome technology since the introduction of the rarely-used higher speed Kodachrome in the early 1970s.
Meanwhile, competing slide films (Velvia, metioned upthread, also Kodak's older Ektachrome and more recent Lumiere and E100VS series films) continued to improve at least through the late 1990s. In addition to processing easy enough that it can be done in a home lab, these films are higher speed, higher resolution, less grainy, and offer more saturated colors. Continued production of Kodachrome (or, more likely, continued release of emulsions that have been in climate controlled storage for many years) has mainly served a tiny niche of photographers who have built a personal style around the film, plus a few curious newcomers.
Aside from the aforementioned "personal photographic style" considerations, Kodachrome has been practically obsolete for around 30 years, because starting around 1975 or so the last of the serious problems with E-6 process films (Ektachrome etc) -- stability during lengthy archival storage and shadow detail -- were solved.
The presence of good alternatives in other transparency films makes this a non-event. Should we see the day when transparency film is categorically unavailable, that will be an occasion for much greater wailing and gnashing of teeth.
The issue of net neutrality is about carriers requiring payment for some types of content. This is problematic because content sources that are not large enough to negotiate favorable deals with carriers are adversely affected, which is why it is a big deal. ESPN charging (or trying to charge) some carriers for content is an unrelated problem except that it potentially creates problems for some categories of ISPs. I don't see the problem. It's ESPN's content and they can charge for it however they want. Me, I'll go out of my way to find an ISP that doesn't pay extra for it.
From TFA: "documentation is missing or incomplete, source code is missing leaving only the binary executables, or conversely the source exists but the compilation tools to reconstruct the executables are missing."
Sounds like any number of projects I've had the pleasure of working on over the years.
The outcome ultimately is justice through online voting and consensus systems, like the moderation system here, or the various systems of community sanctions over at Wikipedia. The problem is not that these systems are unfair, since they are arguably no worse than traditional legal systems (whose track record is far from perfect). The problem is that they are open to manipulation by people who have the willingness and the knowhow to game the system.
Less obvious than a bell though probably not "more humanizing." The loss of liberties has historically started with the powerless. Prisoners, the sick, the mentally ill. Then the military and the working class people. You're next.
People behave the way they're compensated.
The problem is that the metric never quite matches the goal. Anyone who's been in software development long enough has seen one or more "objective performance metrics" management fads come and go. With these there are incentives tied to making the dates, writing x lines of code, having fewer than y bugs, or whatever. What happens is that people make sure they pass the metrics. The trouble is that the metrics don't measure the desired behavior, just an imperfect proxy for it, and people figure out how to game the system. With programmers, they under commit, won't make changes, won't provide support, and won't work with their peers (though the exact nature of the dysfunction varies depending on the incentive structure). With students, the test becomes the goal and other aspects of learning are neglected.
At this point, I'll take Linux with a GCC toolchain over VxWorks for any embedded project just to avoid the single-company support choke point and the costs and hassles with licensing. The nominally higher levels of integration and sophistication of commercial products aren't worth it.
That will work great, because you can't just go out and buy blank recordable CD/DVDs or EPROMs. Oh, wait...
The problem is not so much access to historical records in these situations as it is workflow. After all, a patient sent to another hospital will not have the benefit of medical history records created at another hospital or clinic.
Workflow is where there is trouble. If you're reading this you probably use a GPS or Google maps to get around, probably both. Do you still have any paper roadmaps? I don't. Your process for getting to a new place depends on the technology. Same with hospitals. They increasingly depend on automated workflows for scheduling, for dispensing drugs, for managing lab and x-ray orders and results, and so on.
Hospitals have switched to these systems because they require fewer staff. They have largely dismantled the paper+clipboard+courier systems that preceded them. These older systems were complex and cannot be resurrected quickly. There aren't enough people to implement them. The institutional memory on how to use them is lost.
I would guess that, in this particular case, they've gone back to paper prescriptions, signed by doctors, and taken by courier to the pharmacy, with a paper label on the dispensed drugs. That must be scary, because all the safeguards in the automated system -- checks for allergies, interactions, appropriate dosage for patient weight, not to mention barcode scans at multiple points to guard against mistakes -- are gone. Who will do the manual crosschecking? Have they been trained?
As Isaac Asimov once wrote, ""I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them."
They might make good AM radio antennas. You know, the kind of radio where you can listen to ideas too far off in the ideological fringes to make it onto the Internet.
The demographic segment that characterizes their customer base is already accustomed to buying Chinese-made products from clothing to blow molded lawn ornaments.
In other news, somebody in China thinks the price of oil is headed down.
The delay in integration is because spectrum and construction costs for wireless broadband are still high enough to allow it to compete economically with wired alternatives. Wireless broadband has been and still is a product for people more concerned with ubiquity and convenience than cost or bandwidth.
Um, let's see, you suggest perpetrating MITM fraud using a service that requires a 1 year subscription and a credit check in an area where "free public wifi" is already available for you to use as a backhaul?
Oh, I get it. The embedded platform of the MiFi router is easier to write MITM exploits for than your laptop.
On the other hand, carriers can (in most cases) reduce congestion by splitting cells when the traffic justifies it, just as they do with voice traffic.
I'll probably go out and buy one before long. Despite the expense, the 5GB monthly cap, and the onerous contract terms, the only broadband choices where I live are EVDO and an older wireless system using Alvarion gear. I got my Alvarion setup five years ago and have been gladly paying $44 a month for, at best, 320kbps, using a rooftop parabolic antenna pointed at the nearest tower. I have a laptop with an EVDO setup but still have the Alvarion gear for other household members. I would love to get rid of it.
Aside from people like me who can't get cable or DSL, devices like this work well for occasional users who are more concerned about convenience of installation than blazingly high speeds or the ability to download mountains of data. Clearwire has been selling similar services for quite some time.
Has anyone found anything on how Android applications dependent on cell phone-ish hardware (like GPS location and the like) will be handled inside a device like the eee PC?
Well, the Android developers' kit includes emulation software so you can punch in whatever coordinates you like for testing, and there are plenty of cheap, small GPS modules on the market. I would imagine that application compatibility problems will manifest in other areas, like display size and performance, since software developers who initially targeted the G1 have not had an opportunity to test on unrelated devices until recently.
... to try to save a dying business model.
The reporters can always get day jobs and keep their writing game up at wikinews.
Most of the acoustic couplers back in the day were fairly picky about the telephone handset used.
I make it a point to get rid of old digital gear, but I do have a telephone from the 1920s. It's still hooked up, and is one of the few reasons I still have a landline. It has the rayon-covered cord and everything.
TFA raises a valid point but overstates the case. ICANN's work is indeed politicized, and one need look no further than the disparate fates of the .sex and .info TLDs to see that. On the other hand, it's hard to believe that something run by the U.N. would be any better.
In reality, though, DNS has lost much of its original importance. This becomes clear when you consider that all but a handful of Alexa's top 20 sites have names that have no real connection to the business. They're just rarely used words that lack much meaning in everyday life (Google, Amazon) or entirely made up (wikipedia, ebay). There are already alternative public root servers, and while these lack popularity, it shows how easy it would be for a distributed naming system to gain a foothold.
The real outcome of handing the rootservers over to an international committee would be to hasten the day when there is no longer one unified DNS, a day we'll probably see before too long anyway.
And I'm not going to let powerful third parties control how my computer works and what I can see and do.
More power to Jetpack.
... are the two limitations of small projectors. They claim 10 lumens while most conventional mains-powered projectors are typically 1000-2000 lumens. That makes the product usable alone in a darkened room but not much of anywhere else. Their claim of "movie capable" battery life rather than a specific time period leads me to conclude that they watch shorter than average movies.
I predict that, like the pen scanner, this proves to be a geeky cool but practically useless device.
Rotating or oscillating mirrors to cause the beam to scan, similar to what laser barcode scanners use.
WiMAX was designed to handle VoIP traffic, and has specific traffic categories on the airlink for isochronous flows, like RTP and other VoIP payload streams. Unlike something like Ethernet, which is CSMA/CD (carrier sense multiple access, with collision detection), traffic is scheduled by the carrier network. For uplink data, your WiMAX card goes through a process of requesting bandwidth on what amounts to a hailing channel, and then gets a bandwidth allocation it can use. In theory, a small but constant amount of bandwidth can be allocated for VoIP at the airlink level, resulting in low jitter, low latency, and low frame loss.
There are a couple of problems with this.
The first problem is that not all WiMAX cards on the market today (in fact, quite possibly none of them) have sufficient sophistication in their device drivers and microcontrollers to send the RTP (or Skype, or whatever VoIP protocol you're using) packets on an isochronous service flow while the balance of the packets travel on a general-purpose service flow. As a result, the RTP (etc) packets have to compete with whatever else your machine is doing, either stuff you're initiating with the browser, or background things like checking email or updating the Vista weather widget, or checking for updates of one kind or another. It doesn't help matters that no operating system has a network stack that implements the service flow concept.
The second problem is that low-speed isochronous flows over the WiMAX OFDMA airlink depend upon sharing a fairly large timeslot with other users transmitting simultaneously on the uplink using a different set of carriers, at least if the system is going to be economically feasible for the carrier. Allocating an entire timeslot often enough to keep the delay below half a second or so would result in considerable wasted bandwidth, so the idea is to have users share a timeslot by have each one use only a fraction of the available carriers. Decoding the resulting burst at the base station then depends upon maintaining orthogonality between OFDM carriers, which means that exact frequency synchronization is required between multiple users. While each user's WiMAX card synchronizes its clock with the base station, doppler shift due to changes in speed or direction or a changing multipath environment can change the received frequency at the base station enough to compromise orthogonality and make the burst impossible to decode.
The result of all this is, from your perspective, is that your VoIP traffic could be jittery and have long delays and high packet loss, especially when the carrier's network is heavily loaded.