It would be better if you rode the bus to the library. But that would be inconvenient. It says a lot about the issue that everybody (except all the kneejerk "skeptics" that will soon post on this story) cares about curbing greenhouse gases, but nobody is willing to make the troublesome lifestyle changes necessary to make a real difference. Instead, we nibble around the edges of the problem, with marginal changes like "shrinking our carbon footprint" (hence this story and the strong market for hybrid cars) and spending money on "offsets".
I personally boil my tea and coffee water in the microwave. I do this because it's fast, because it gets the water to exactly the right temperature (if you have one of those boiling water sensors in your oven) and because the calcium accumulation in a teakettle is gross. But it does reduce my carbon footprint, though I have no idea how much.
While the user interface enhancements sound nice, they no longer seem like a reason to get it over say XP, OSX, or Linux.
Dude, Windows interface enhancements are no longer a reason to get it over MS-DOS! Many of the UI enhancements in Vista are also very good. That doesn't even begin to outweigh the little fact that the OS as a whole is a nightmare to work with. If I didn't own a tablet (and if Vista wasn't the only released version of Windows with decent handwriting recognition) I'd never use it.
When people evaluate operating systems, they need to spend less time talking about the fancy UI bells and whistles and more time talking about boring but essential issues like side-by-side libraries, device driver corruption, and application compatibility. These have all been headaches for me from XP on. Windows 7 will live or die based on whether it does better in these issues than XP, never mind Vista.
CDMA (as in cdmaOne and CDMA2000 with 1xRTT) is technologically superior than GSM/GPRS/EDGE.
I've heard that argued (mainly by CDMA technology vendors). The biggest claim I've heard is that you can cram more calls into a smaller airspace than with GSM. I suppose the absence of that famous GSM speaker buzz is also a factor.
I don't have to expertise to judge the validity of these arguments, but I suspect that cell networks lose more in extra hardware costs than they gain in CDMA's various advantages. CDMA has something like 10-20% of the global users that GSM has. That's got to hurt when you're buying equipment.
Also, when you compare CDMA and GSM, you should really look at the baseline, not the recent bells and whistles. My first phone (2000) was CDMA, and my biggest disappointment was that there was no SMS. Texting has been big with GSM from day one. In many third world countries, the cell networks get more income from texting than they do from calls. I heard an interview with one Philippines politico who was disconcerted to find that his children could text faster than he could type!
Unfortunately CDMA as implemented by US carriers is lacking user friendly features (namely SIMs). From what I understand, the signalling protocols on top of the air interface are much closer to the old U.S. analog AMPS system - of which Verizon had tons of until the FCC permitted carriers to shut off analog service last year.
Two issues here. First, I suspect that the lack of SIM cards (or the equivalent) is by design. U.S. carriers are notorious for making it difficult for customers to change carriers, and for wanting to bundle all their services and hardware together; SIM cards interfere with both objectives.
Second, the signaling protocol is symptomatic of a country having to support legacy infrastructure. Not an issue with countries that don't have the legacy infrastructure, either because they didn't have the resources to build it (developing world) or because they were slow to modernize their telecom system (western Europe).
It occurs to me that a system without SIM cards would never fly in Europe. People there travel across international borders a lot, and having to carry separate phones for every local network would be a pain.
There's no special network-specific implementation needed for devices on Verizon and Sprint's CDMA networks as of now
I have no idea what you're saying here. Are you saying that there's nothing particularly special about GSM versus CDMA devices? If so, why aren't there any inexpensive GSM/CDMA phones?
Just about all the carriers will be moving over to the same technology when they start using LTE.
If I'm reading the Google article you linked correctly (possibly not) LTE will be implemented on top of GSM and CDMA, much as TCP/IP is currently implemented on top of diverse network layers. That doesn't remove the compatibility issue at the bottom of the stack.
They could choose to exclude 2/3 of the US market, like Apple did. The iPhone 3G works in nearly every country, including China and South Korea.
That's not a realistic alternative for most companies that aren't Apple. Apple's whole business model revolves around creating technology that works they way they want it to work, and hoping that it will catch on. This is typified in their computers (the only vendor that still doesn't officially support third-party OSs), their PDAs (that one didn't quite work out!), their MP3 players (that one certainly did) and now their phones.
If Palm were to function that way, they'd have to write off their relationships with Sprint and Verizon. That's never going to happen, because if it doesn't work out, they don't have other product lines to fall back on. Plus, their contracts with these companies probably helps pay their development costs, either through direct subsidy or the fact that these contracts make it easier to find financing. Probably a bit of both.
The Centro was also CDMA-only at first. (The initial partner was Sprint, if I remember correctly.) This is the only way you can introduce a new smart phone that's intended for the U.S. market, where CDMA is far and away the leading technology. Unless you have money to burn (which Palm certainly does not!) you introduce the phone for one kind of network and start production on the next version later.
The exception is phones that are designed for one particular network and never have versions for other networks. I could be mistaken, but I think most phones actually are designed that way.
This is a natural result of the fact that the U.S. chose not to standardize on a single cellular technology, unlike most of the rest of the planet, which uses GSM. (Some Slashdotters will remember attempt at CDMA imperialism just before the U.S. invaded Iraq.) This is a bone of contention in many corners. For example, Vodafone, a British company that owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, would very much like to see Verizon migrate to GSM, since that Verizon's infrastructure costs would then benefit from the huge economies of scale already seen by Vodafone's GSM operation in other countries. And of course Palm would save big bucks if they didn't have to create multiple versions of each new phone.
Somehow, our continuing resistance to the metric system comes to mind!
Re:Free version of the book
on
Using Drupal
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· Score: 1
I don't think people who buy books instead of searching online "can't seek out information on the own". I mean, how hard is it? Does anybody outside of Myranmar and Ask Slashdot not know how to use Google? Some people just have to have hard copy. Where I work, all employees have Safari Books Online accounts that give them unlimited access to to electronic versions of all the IT titles from O'Reilly, Prentice-Hall, Microsoft Press, and about 20 other publishers. Safari's web versions are well done, too, much better than browsing PDFs. But there are lots of people who just won't use it. Have to have the dead tree version.
There seem to be a lot of authors who don't think that having free versions of their books online hurts their sales. Some actually think it helps.
That was actually the plan. The sad fact is that BeOS just didn't provide the basis for a good mobile OS.
I'm unimpressed by this new phone. Even if I weren't, I've been disappointed by Palm too many times to care. My first PDA, a Palm V, was great overall, but even it had stupid physical design flaws. (When your up button turns on the device, you don't want it sticking out so far!) Every Palm product since then has been less and less usable, and crammed with feature bloat that added to cost and reduced battery life without contributing to the overall usability of the device. Now their product line is dominated by smartphones that are descended from the Treo invented at Handspring — and Handspring always had even worse awareness of usability issues than the core Palm team!
I just gave up on my Centro. It was shoddy all the way through: the muddled UI (how can a phone not have one-button access to the dialer?!), the too-flexible stylus, the MicroSD slot that was hard to access and eventually stopped working, and (last straw) the headset port that malfunctioned, forcing the device into permanent handsfree mode. I will never go near any Palm product again.
I mostly know functional programming from studying Scheme and Logo. These languages facilitates stateless programming by making it easy to avoid state variables. (Really, the word "variable" means something quite different in these languages.) Textbooks that I've read that are based on these languages (SICP being the most famous example) simply don't talk about traditional loops — all iteration is done with tail recursion. Perhaps other functional languages are different, but these are the only two I know anything about.
All beside the point. As a half-dozen posts have already pointed out, I was wrong to describe R as a functional language. It's an imperative language with lots of vector operations. That's where it's looplessness comes from.
Seriously unless you plan on using this thing on the go there's no reason to rely on a battery.
Did you miss the part about it connecting wirelessly to your TV? That's the utility of having it run off battery. No product that requires power outlets in your couch is going to fly.
I don't really want to pay $99 for a dedicated Netflix box but if it could be used as a regular PC as well then that's more reasonable.
Again, you seem to have overlooked the clutter factor. If you want to watch Netflix streams on your TV, a dedicated box is a lot less hassle than connecting a PC. A hundred bucks (one should always round off these prices) is not a lot to pay for that kind of convenience factor. And the actual cost is offset by the fact that you don't have to buy the adapter hardware to connect your PC to your TV (or buy a PC with said hardware built in).
Let me guess, you refuse to buy a dedicated router, because you have an old PC running Linux that does the job just as well, right?
I can't picture Turing going for Jeff Stryker. Too butch. Besides, the NSA would never hire somebody like Turing, even as a zombie. The zombie J. Edgar Hoover would never stand for it!
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
That's a feature of functional languages, a class that also includes Scheme and XSLT. The basic idea is that programs should not have state, because state makes them harder to debug. A for or while loop, by definition, has state, so you have to do your iteration some other way, namely Tail Recursion.
I suppose that makes sense, but I've never been able to teach myself to think that way. It's the main reason I never managed to get through The Wizard Book.
Re:Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 1
A Linux computer with the correct commodity hardware and configuration (PCI Express interfaces, MSI interrupts, etc...) can easily route hundreds of megabits
Which is a fraction of what any router at Google needs to be able to handle. This you miss the part where I pointed out that they have half a million servers?
Of course it doesn't, but that's not the point.
The point I was rebutting was the assertion that Google might sell an external version of the router, because they were already selling an external version of the search engine. (Which is not true.) If that wasn't your point, what was?
I've had several phones and PDAs with external SD or MicroSD slots. These come with media players, and if you use them as such, and you happen to have an SD slot in your main computer (many laptops come with them) that's probably the fastest way to load media. And if you're going on a road trip, you'll want to load up a bunch of them in advance. Come to think of it, I'll be on a 12-hour plane ride next year...
Same with cameras. Had a niece take a trip to Paris, and it took her less than a week to fill up a 2GB card.
Have you actually tried the solution you think is so obvious? I haven't, but I can think of a ton of problems with it:
Labels help you remember what you intended to use the card for. They don't help you remember what you actually used the card for. They don't prevent you from forgetting where you put them. Or from them just getting lost, which they're likely to do if you stick in your wallet credit card slot.
SD slots tend to be pretty tight. I'd be afraid that the label would scrape off, maybe making the slot useless in the process. Oops, there goes my $300 camera!
Can you really write small enough to put a useful label on MicroSD card? And can you read it without a magnifying glass?
You're either a humorless nitpicker or a karma whore. And since ACs don't get karma...
Re:Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 1
I'd bet that a Google router platform would be based on a commodity PC with a few PCI Express gigabit ethernet adapters, installed with open-source routing software.
I'm not an expert on this, but it's my understanding that a cost-efficient router is very different from a commodity system. Any computer can work as a router, but to route a lot of traffic cheaply you need specialized hardware. That's why the dominant player in the router marketplace is Cisco: they were the first to realize that there was a market niche that was never going to be filled by general-purpose computers.
If ordinary data centers with a few thousand servers don't find it cost effective to use general-purpose computers as routers, it's hard to see why they'd work any better with Google's half-million servers.
They also may consider selling it, just like they sell their Google search boxes.
Their search appliance bears no resemblance to the systems they use in-house. It's a simplified search application (which I think they used to sell as software, though I could be misremembering) that comes pre-installed on a generic server that I'm sure they outsource. It's not something that would scale up to the trillion-page indexing that Google itself does.
Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers
on
Google Router Rumors
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Everybody seems to be assuming that these new routers will be for sale. That's obviously not going to happen — there just isn't room in the marketplace for a new player, even if that player is Google. Breaking into a new hardware marketplace is hard. You have to develop sales channels, create a hardware support organization, set up an operations organization to manage production, etc. etc.
I know about these things because for the last couple of years my job has been to document some of Sun's hardware products. Before that I mostly documented software, and the shear complexity of designing, building, distributing, selling and supporting actual physical products still boggles my mind. At product team meetings I sometimes feel at sea, even though the technical concepts I have to deal with are actually much simpler than those I faced when I was on software product teams. The logistics are just mind boggling.
Google isn't set up to be "in the hardware business". They make their own servers because there are no manufacturers that are able to meet their specialized needs. Now they seem to have decided that their routers also require specialized in-house designs. They haven't tried to sell these servers to other companies, and they won't try to sell their routers. Even if they could hope to compete, it would mean building up the kind of technical bureaucracy that Google's top echelon has no interest in managing.
Hell, they don't really have a proper bureaucracy for the much simpler job of creating and distributing their software products. If they actually charged money for most of them, they'd be trouble.
And Android? How does Android count as being "in the hardware business"? Is Google selling a cell phone I haven't heard about?
Please. If they were the Gestapo they'd have cool uniforms. If they were thought police they'd make you do situps like in 1984.
I'm no fan of DHS, but have some perspective. As repressive police state functionaries go, DHS doesn't even rate. I'd put them somewhere between a pre-Miranda rural US Sheriff's Office and the Canadian Mounties.
Excuse me? I don't see the level of drama you're complaining about. Yes, cybercrime is less important than people getting killed and dismembered. But it's still pretty darn important.
I have read up on it. And the issues are a lot more ambiguous than you claim. To cite one simple example: what do you do with radioactive waste? Storage remains a major issue. Does "Yucca Mountain" ring a bell?
Anyway, you've completely missed my point. In fact, your reply is pretty much an example of what I was talking about.
Convincing people to let the government/power agency to bury "nuclear" ANYTHING near a town is like a huge red flag to conservationsists and the 'anti-establishement' people.
That's the stereotype. It has little basis in reality. For years, it's been convenient for the nuclear industry and its fanboys with this ad hominem argument: opponents to nuclear power are tree-huggers and hippies who are afraid of stuff they're too technologically illiterate to understand.
There are indeed people who fit this stereotype, but harping on it is not an intelligent way to respond to thoughtful, well-educated people with legitimate concerns about nuclear waste disposal, WMD proliferation, and accidental releases of radiation. If nuclear proponents stopped this ad hominem crap and started honestly addressing people's concerns (assuming that it's possible to do so; I haven't seen a lot of hard facts between the insults) then maybe, maybe you'll stop getting a NIMBY response every time you use the word "nuclear".
Slashdot Mirror
It would be better if you rode the bus to the library. But that would be inconvenient. It says a lot about the issue that everybody (except all the kneejerk "skeptics" that will soon post on this story) cares about curbing greenhouse gases, but nobody is willing to make the troublesome lifestyle changes necessary to make a real difference. Instead, we nibble around the edges of the problem, with marginal changes like "shrinking our carbon footprint" (hence this story and the strong market for hybrid cars) and spending money on "offsets".
I personally boil my tea and coffee water in the microwave. I do this because it's fast, because it gets the water to exactly the right temperature (if you have one of those boiling water sensors in your oven) and because the calcium accumulation in a teakettle is gross. But it does reduce my carbon footprint, though I have no idea how much.
While the user interface enhancements sound nice, they no longer seem like a reason to get it over say XP, OSX, or Linux.
Dude, Windows interface enhancements are no longer a reason to get it over MS-DOS! Many of the UI enhancements in Vista are also very good. That doesn't even begin to outweigh the little fact that the OS as a whole is a nightmare to work with. If I didn't own a tablet (and if Vista wasn't the only released version of Windows with decent handwriting recognition) I'd never use it.
When people evaluate operating systems, they need to spend less time talking about the fancy UI bells and whistles and more time talking about boring but essential issues like side-by-side libraries, device driver corruption, and application compatibility. These have all been headaches for me from XP on. Windows 7 will live or die based on whether it does better in these issues than XP, never mind Vista.
CDMA (as in cdmaOne and CDMA2000 with 1xRTT) is technologically superior than GSM/GPRS/EDGE.
I've heard that argued (mainly by CDMA technology vendors). The biggest claim I've heard is that you can cram more calls into a smaller airspace than with GSM. I suppose the absence of that famous GSM speaker buzz is also a factor.
I don't have to expertise to judge the validity of these arguments, but I suspect that cell networks lose more in extra hardware costs than they gain in CDMA's various advantages. CDMA has something like 10-20% of the global users that GSM has. That's got to hurt when you're buying equipment.
Also, when you compare CDMA and GSM, you should really look at the baseline, not the recent bells and whistles. My first phone (2000) was CDMA, and my biggest disappointment was that there was no SMS. Texting has been big with GSM from day one. In many third world countries, the cell networks get more income from texting than they do from calls. I heard an interview with one Philippines politico who was disconcerted to find that his children could text faster than he could type!
Unfortunately CDMA as implemented by US carriers is lacking user friendly features (namely SIMs). From what I understand, the signalling protocols on top of the air interface are much closer to the old U.S. analog AMPS system - of which Verizon had tons of until the FCC permitted carriers to shut off analog service last year.
Two issues here. First, I suspect that the lack of SIM cards (or the equivalent) is by design. U.S. carriers are notorious for making it difficult for customers to change carriers, and for wanting to bundle all their services and hardware together; SIM cards interfere with both objectives.
Second, the signaling protocol is symptomatic of a country having to support legacy infrastructure. Not an issue with countries that don't have the legacy infrastructure, either because they didn't have the resources to build it (developing world) or because they were slow to modernize their telecom system (western Europe).
It occurs to me that a system without SIM cards would never fly in Europe. People there travel across international borders a lot, and having to carry separate phones for every local network would be a pain.
There's no special network-specific implementation needed for devices on Verizon and Sprint's CDMA networks as of now
I have no idea what you're saying here. Are you saying that there's nothing particularly special about GSM versus CDMA devices? If so, why aren't there any inexpensive GSM/CDMA phones?
Just about all the carriers will be moving over to the same technology when they start using LTE.
If I'm reading the Google article you linked correctly (possibly not) LTE will be implemented on top of GSM and CDMA, much as TCP/IP is currently implemented on top of diverse network layers. That doesn't remove the compatibility issue at the bottom of the stack.
They could choose to exclude 2/3 of the US market, like Apple did. The iPhone 3G works in nearly every country, including China and South Korea.
That's not a realistic alternative for most companies that aren't Apple. Apple's whole business model revolves around creating technology that works they way they want it to work, and hoping that it will catch on. This is typified in their computers (the only vendor that still doesn't officially support third-party OSs), their PDAs (that one didn't quite work out!), their MP3 players (that one certainly did) and now their phones.
If Palm were to function that way, they'd have to write off their relationships with Sprint and Verizon. That's never going to happen, because if it doesn't work out, they don't have other product lines to fall back on. Plus, their contracts with these companies probably helps pay their development costs, either through direct subsidy or the fact that these contracts make it easier to find financing. Probably a bit of both.
The Centro was also CDMA-only at first. (The initial partner was Sprint, if I remember correctly.) This is the only way you can introduce a new smart phone that's intended for the U.S. market, where CDMA is far and away the leading technology. Unless you have money to burn (which Palm certainly does not!) you introduce the phone for one kind of network and start production on the next version later.
The exception is phones that are designed for one particular network and never have versions for other networks. I could be mistaken, but I think most phones actually are designed that way.
This is a natural result of the fact that the U.S. chose not to standardize on a single cellular technology, unlike most of the rest of the planet, which uses GSM. (Some Slashdotters will remember attempt at CDMA imperialism just before the U.S. invaded Iraq.) This is a bone of contention in many corners. For example, Vodafone, a British company that owns 45% of Verizon Wireless, would very much like to see Verizon migrate to GSM, since that Verizon's infrastructure costs would then benefit from the huge economies of scale already seen by Vodafone's GSM operation in other countries. And of course Palm would save big bucks if they didn't have to create multiple versions of each new phone.
Somehow, our continuing resistance to the metric system comes to mind!
I don't think people who buy books instead of searching online "can't seek out information on the own". I mean, how hard is it? Does anybody outside of Myranmar and Ask Slashdot not know how to use Google? Some people just have to have hard copy. Where I work, all employees have Safari Books Online accounts that give them unlimited access to to electronic versions of all the IT titles from O'Reilly, Prentice-Hall, Microsoft Press, and about 20 other publishers. Safari's web versions are well done, too, much better than browsing PDFs. But there are lots of people who just won't use it. Have to have the dead tree version.
There seem to be a lot of authors who don't think that having free versions of their books online hurts their sales. Some actually think it helps.
That was actually the plan. The sad fact is that BeOS just didn't provide the basis for a good mobile OS.
I'm unimpressed by this new phone. Even if I weren't, I've been disappointed by Palm too many times to care. My first PDA, a Palm V, was great overall, but even it had stupid physical design flaws. (When your up button turns on the device, you don't want it sticking out so far!) Every Palm product since then has been less and less usable, and crammed with feature bloat that added to cost and reduced battery life without contributing to the overall usability of the device. Now their product line is dominated by smartphones that are descended from the Treo invented at Handspring — and Handspring always had even worse awareness of usability issues than the core Palm team!
I just gave up on my Centro. It was shoddy all the way through: the muddled UI (how can a phone not have one-button access to the dialer?!), the too-flexible stylus, the MicroSD slot that was hard to access and eventually stopped working, and (last straw) the headset port that malfunctioned, forcing the device into permanent handsfree mode. I will never go near any Palm product again.
I mostly know functional programming from studying Scheme and Logo. These languages facilitates stateless programming by making it easy to avoid state variables. (Really, the word "variable" means something quite different in these languages.) Textbooks that I've read that are based on these languages (SICP being the most famous example) simply don't talk about traditional loops — all iteration is done with tail recursion. Perhaps other functional languages are different, but these are the only two I know anything about.
All beside the point. As a half-dozen posts have already pointed out, I was wrong to describe R as a functional language. It's an imperative language with lots of vector operations. That's where it's looplessness comes from.
Do I have to give my karma points back?
Seriously unless you plan on using this thing on the go there's no reason to rely on a battery.
Did you miss the part about it connecting wirelessly to your TV? That's the utility of having it run off battery. No product that requires power outlets in your couch is going to fly.
I don't really want to pay $99 for a dedicated Netflix box but if it could be used as a regular PC as well then that's more reasonable.
Again, you seem to have overlooked the clutter factor. If you want to watch Netflix streams on your TV, a dedicated box is a lot less hassle than connecting a PC. A hundred bucks (one should always round off these prices) is not a lot to pay for that kind of convenience factor. And the actual cost is offset by the fact that you don't have to buy the adapter hardware to connect your PC to your TV (or buy a PC with said hardware built in).
Let me guess, you refuse to buy a dedicated router, because you have an old PC running Linux that does the job just as well, right?
I can't picture Turing going for Jeff Stryker. Too butch. Besides, the NSA would never hire somebody like Turing, even as a zombie. The zombie J. Edgar Hoover would never stand for it!
I remember once years ago freaking my colleagues out with a largish app written in R... with nary a loop anywhere.
That's a feature of functional languages, a class that also includes Scheme and XSLT. The basic idea is that programs should not have state, because state makes them harder to debug. A for or while loop, by definition, has state, so you have to do your iteration some other way, namely Tail Recursion.
I suppose that makes sense, but I've never been able to teach myself to think that way. It's the main reason I never managed to get through The Wizard Book.
A Linux computer with the correct commodity hardware and configuration (PCI Express interfaces, MSI interrupts, etc...) can easily route hundreds of megabits
Which is a fraction of what any router at Google needs to be able to handle. This you miss the part where I pointed out that they have half a million servers?
Of course it doesn't, but that's not the point.
The point I was rebutting was the assertion that Google might sell an external version of the router, because they were already selling an external version of the search engine. (Which is not true.) If that wasn't your point, what was?
I've had several phones and PDAs with external SD or MicroSD slots. These come with media players, and if you use them as such, and you happen to have an SD slot in your main computer (many laptops come with them) that's probably the fastest way to load media. And if you're going on a road trip, you'll want to load up a bunch of them in advance. Come to think of it, I'll be on a 12-hour plane ride next year...
Same with cameras. Had a niece take a trip to Paris, and it took her less than a week to fill up a 2GB card.
Have you actually tried the solution you think is so obvious? I haven't, but I can think of a ton of problems with it:
You're either a humorless nitpicker or a karma whore. And since ACs don't get karma...
I'd bet that a Google router platform would be based on a commodity PC with a few PCI Express gigabit ethernet adapters, installed with open-source routing software.
I'm not an expert on this, but it's my understanding that a cost-efficient router is very different from a commodity system. Any computer can work as a router, but to route a lot of traffic cheaply you need specialized hardware. That's why the dominant player in the router marketplace is Cisco: they were the first to realize that there was a market niche that was never going to be filled by general-purpose computers.
If ordinary data centers with a few thousand servers don't find it cost effective to use general-purpose computers as routers, it's hard to see why they'd work any better with Google's half-million servers.
They also may consider selling it, just like they sell their Google search boxes.
Their search appliance bears no resemblance to the systems they use in-house. It's a simplified search application (which I think they used to sell as software, though I could be misremembering) that comes pre-installed on a generic server that I'm sure they outsource. It's not something that would scale up to the trillion-page indexing that Google itself does.
Everybody seems to be assuming that these new routers will be for sale. That's obviously not going to happen — there just isn't room in the marketplace for a new player, even if that player is Google. Breaking into a new hardware marketplace is hard. You have to develop sales channels, create a hardware support organization, set up an operations organization to manage production, etc. etc.
I know about these things because for the last couple of years my job has been to document some of Sun's hardware products. Before that I mostly documented software, and the shear complexity of designing, building, distributing, selling and supporting actual physical products still boggles my mind. At product team meetings I sometimes feel at sea, even though the technical concepts I have to deal with are actually much simpler than those I faced when I was on software product teams. The logistics are just mind boggling.
Google isn't set up to be "in the hardware business". They make their own servers because there are no manufacturers that are able to meet their specialized needs. Now they seem to have decided that their routers also require specialized in-house designs. They haven't tried to sell these servers to other companies, and they won't try to sell their routers. Even if they could hope to compete, it would mean building up the kind of technical bureaucracy that Google's top echelon has no interest in managing.
Hell, they don't really have a proper bureaucracy for the much simpler job of creating and distributing their software products. If they actually charged money for most of them, they'd be trouble.
And Android? How does Android count as being "in the hardware business"? Is Google selling a cell phone I haven't heard about?
I shouldn't criticize my own upmods, but this one got 1 "funny" (as it was meant to) 1 "insightful" (huh?) and 1 "informative" (of what?).
You called me a name! Police misconduct! You'll be hearing from my lawyer!
Please. If they were the Gestapo they'd have cool uniforms. If they were thought police they'd make you do situps like in 1984.
I'm no fan of DHS, but have some perspective. As repressive police state functionaries go, DHS doesn't even rate. I'd put them somewhere between a pre-Miranda rural US Sheriff's Office and the Canadian Mounties.
All your data are belong to us!
Excuse me? I don't see the level of drama you're complaining about. Yes, cybercrime is less important than people getting killed and dismembered. But it's still pretty darn important.
How about a nice game of chess?
I have read up on it. And the issues are a lot more ambiguous than you claim. To cite one simple example: what do you do with radioactive waste? Storage remains a major issue. Does "Yucca Mountain" ring a bell?
Anyway, you've completely missed my point. In fact, your reply is pretty much an example of what I was talking about.
That's some heavy thinking. You must have a massive intellect.
Convincing people to let the government/power agency to bury "nuclear" ANYTHING near a town is like a huge red flag to conservationsists and the 'anti-establishement' people.
That's the stereotype. It has little basis in reality. For years, it's been convenient for the nuclear industry and its fanboys with this ad hominem argument: opponents to nuclear power are tree-huggers and hippies who are afraid of stuff they're too technologically illiterate to understand.
There are indeed people who fit this stereotype, but harping on it is not an intelligent way to respond to thoughtful, well-educated people with legitimate concerns about nuclear waste disposal, WMD proliferation, and accidental releases of radiation. If nuclear proponents stopped this ad hominem crap and started honestly addressing people's concerns (assuming that it's possible to do so; I haven't seen a lot of hard facts between the insults) then maybe, maybe you'll stop getting a NIMBY response every time you use the word "nuclear".