There was always growth potential with Amazon. There was a huge market for them to take, industries to crush.
Yes, but they were also an upstart e-tailer fighting against lots and lots of other more established businesses with profitable track records. Think about it - even in its early post-IPO days, Amazon had to not only beat established book retailers (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.) to succeed, it also had to beat music/video retailers/e-tailers (Suncoast, Circuit City, Best Buy, Tower Records, and anybody remember CDNow?). And then as it expanded it brought itself into conflict with every established mega-retailer from Wal-Mart to Safeway (if you have Amazon Fresh in your area, which is awesome). I would in fact argue that Amazon was a much riskier bet than Facebook, which is at least the existing established leader in a category.
Where is the growth potential for Facebook? As far as I can tell, they are most probably at their peak
Related to the above question... personally, I 100% agree with you. Then again, I would have agreed with you if you had said in 2006 that the post-iPod Apple had nowhere left "up" to go. So don't listen to me for your investment advice.
A bunch of investors throwing tons of money after dot-com companies on the belief that these companies, despite having no earnings, would somehow grow big.
To be fair, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Amazon.com, for example, once fit exactly this description. In fact, it lost a lot of money for a long time before it ever turned a profit... by that account, Facebook is actually ahead of the game.
The more important issue is that only one out of every 20-50 of these companies ever ends up realizing their promise. If you are an investor who understands that risk, then it's fine to invest in tech startups with big dreams and little or no positive cashflow.
You can't take your phone to another carrier because the current ones don't do voice over LTE
You're kinda right. Like AT&T, Verizon uses 3G (CDMA EVDO Rev A for VZ, HSPA/HSPA+ for AT&T) for circuit-switched voice, and LTE for packet data. I presume that's what you mean - that 3G CDMA/GSM incompatibility is the reason you couldn't switch networks with a LTE phone.
The real reason, though, has nothing to do with VoLTE. The reason you can't take your LTE phone to another US carrier is that the carriers use different frequency bands for LTE, and your phone will only carry the antennas to support the carrier who sold it. Extra antennas/filters take up space in the device, so OEMs aren't keen on including them if they don't have to... and carriers get no benefit from subsidizing a device that you could easily take over to another carrier. And as long as American consumers want $99 smartphones instead of $399 smartphones, carriers are going to keep selling the phones and locking them. So, sadly, don't expect that to change anytime soon.
And just to spread the blame around properly - it's not the US carriers who solely decided to use incompatible frequencies for LTE. For that, you can thank the FCC's f***ed up spectrum policies over the last decade (under both Republican and Democratic administrations). There are no angels in the "why can't I switch my phone between carriers?" debate in the US.
Also, what is your suggestion for a proper [BitTorrent] analogy?
Banning guns because they're used in so many crimes.
You, sir, win the Internet post of the day award. Any analogy that will piss off both sides of the political spectrum must have at least a grain of uncomfortable truth to it.
There was no intent to "badmouth" CDMA. As you correctly point out, Wideband CDMA ultimately won the day as a technology. Your recap of the technologies' comparative strengths is very well written.
But when I spoke of CDMA as having dead-ended, I was referring to the vendor technology path, not the underlying technology itself. Most people are only familiar with "CDMA" and "GSM" as the two competing cellular technology families in the US, without necessarily understanding what that means (other than "one has a SIM card and the other doesn't.") Telling them that their 2G "GSM" is really EDGE - and their 3G HSPA acts more like CDMA than GSM - will for most audiences just confuse the issue. So I stand by my assertion that "CDMA" the technology path is dead, and "GSM" is moving forward, but there's no value judgement on the technologies underlying that implicit in my comments.
Doesn't LTE actually converge these 2 standards - CDMA and GSM into one?
Nope. LTE is part of the GSM family - CDMA has functionally dead-ended (at least in the US) with EVDO Rev B. It seems like it's a convergence because you will eventually finally have all four major US carriers using a single 4G technology. But having LTE on a phone doesn't make 2G/3G CDMA and GSM technologies any more compatible.
This is especially important because in the US right now, none of the major carriers have implemented Voice over LTE (VoLTE), so when you use a data connection it's routed over the LTE network... but your voice calls use the 3G circuit-switched network instead. No compatible 3G = no phone calls. Also remember that the US carriers are all deploying LTE on different bands so an LTE phone designed for one won't necessarily work with the other.
The problem with your thesis is that surgery, for example, is a field where the results generated by an individual contributor and their experience can be very easily quantified. If you look at radiology, where the delta between an experienced onsite radiologist and a cheap outsourced radiologist is hard to quantify, they are in fact doing the same thing as they are in software development. (Going for cheap quantity over expensive quality.)
Unfortunately, software or hardware engineering is so complex and team-oriented (was it successful because of the programmers? The product managers? The project managers? Or was it just the right product at the right time?) it is very hard to quantify the bottom-line difference quantify the quality of individual contributors.
Best Buy needs to make their shopping experience not akin to a trip to the dentist. Stop with the aggressive push for add-ons. Stop with the gun to the head warranty pushes... Fire the disinterested teenagers. Reward knowledgeable stales staff... Start being what Amazon is - an easy, convenient, stress-free shopping experience.
Not to defend Best Buy here, but these things are not necessarily compatible with cheap prices in a big-box physical retail environment. For example, all the stores I visit with cheap prices try to upsell the high-margin junk so they can make money. All the stores I shop that have knowledgeable sales people and good customer service - think Nordstrom's - aren't cheap. Amazon has cheap prices and no pushy come-ons but they also don't have to pay for retail space and sales employees. It seems that you can have physical stores, good customer experience or cheap prices but not all three.
Yes, AT&T has always unlocked phones except for the iPhone - this was a legacy of their early exclusivity with Apple. Now they unlock iPhones too. It has never been terribly hard from my experience (with two non-iPhones over the past 10 years).
But remember this is Slashdot. If it the article is about AT&T, Microsoft, Apple or any cableco, the story must be written such that even if the company is doing something good the summary must be negative. I'm guessing there is a step two for Slashdot somewhere and step three is profit.
Too bad the books are specifically tied to a particular device, not non-physical data that can be transfered and gain a new life...
What books are you talking about? Amazon eBooks are tied to your Amazon account, not a device. I have dozens of e-books from Amazon's Kindle store that I have downloaded and can read at any time on my Kindle Fire, my work PC, my home iPad and my work iPad. The great thing is it auto-syncs between them so whatever page I was on most recently on one device becomes the page I pick up on the next device. I have only a couple Apple iBook purchases, but they work the same way (minus the PC or Kindle reader clients).
people should no more be prohibited from modifying their own software than they should be from fixing their own cars.
Not trolling, genuinely curious... I am not legally prohibited from fixing my own car (thank goodness). But I am legally prohibited from certain kinds of tinkering. I can't disable the seatbelt warning. I can't remove the muffler. I can't disable the distracted driving warnings on my GPS system. I can't change it in ways that would make it violate emissions laws.
If you return to the software/car analogy, do you think there are things like the above that *are* fair game to prevent people from tinkering with? Do you think that no modifications should be prevented legally to the car that you own? Or do you think the analogy is inapt?
You're correct... satellite broadband can be had in the US for far less than $400/month. ViaSat and WildBlue's services (may or may not qualify as "broadband" depending on your definition) start at around $50/month. The GP's citation of $400/month for satellite broadband refers to "business class" VSAT data service. Residential satellite Internet is heavily oversubscribed, often north of 100:1. Also note the Fair Access Policy terms under which you will be throttled for excessive data usage.
For some use cases, the results will be indistinguishable at the lower price point; for others they will be very different. Think of the difference between the two as being T1 service from a business provider vs. home cable or DSL service.
I'm on T-Mobile, btw, which has roaming agreements with AT&T, so I get both networks...
Actually, you don't - at least not in most places. In order to decrease roaming charges (and prevent phones from draining battery deciding between two sets of towers) your home carrier only allows roaming in geographic areas (called LACs) where they have no infrastructure at all and another carrier does. So your carrier could have only two towers in a county and another carrier has 50, but since your carrier has some infrastructure there you are not going to see any towers from the other carrier. You are only going to see the "other network" in areas where your carrier has no presence at all, so when you see you are on "other carrier's network" you see their coverage in that particular area, but you have no idea if their coverage is good or bad in other areas.
All the US carriers have detailed coverage maps on their websites and that's probably the best way to figure out who has what where.
Slashdot's usual BS political linkbait headline has nothing to do link the actual story. This is not about French vs. US aircraft, France vs. the US in general, or anything like that. If you read either of the linked TFAs, they say specifically that:
India had a multi-stage competition for their medium multirole combat aircraft (MMRCA) program with many bidders to replace their previous fleet of Russian MiG-21s and French Mirage 2000s.
In April, they deselected a variety of applicants including the Swedish Saab, the Russian OAO United Aircraft, and the American Boeing and LockMart.
The final stage of the competition was between the French Rafale and the Eurofighter Typhoon (built in UK, Germany, Italy and Spain). Indian law requires the contract to go the lowest bidder, so the Rafale won.
Both of TFAs talk about how this decision is a blow to the Eurofighter, not to the US - not anymore than it is to Sweden or Russia. It is just another poorly edited (or edited at all?) Slashdot anti-US linkbait, flamebait article.
I swear I'm almost done with Slashdot except that it still has some informative comments on science stories, I need to just browse that section and ignore the rest since they just piss me off.
I told myself I was never going to engage in a Slashdot "information wants to be free" debate again, and I know this is karma suicide, but what the heck. This post tees up the question perfectly.
If work can be reproduced infinitely at practically no cost, should it still cost money?
If the person who made it says it should, then yes. If you don't like that, you should download the work of someone else who doesn't think that it should cost money.
Who decides what is fair ?
That's the whole part of "fair" that I think most Slashdotters either don't get or willfully ignore. If you make a thing, you should get to decide under what terms other people can use it - you can say what it costs or if it's free, just like you can say that code you write is GPL or closed. You made it, so that's your right (at least for the time specified under current copyright law). I hope that everyone who has written software and published it under a certain license should agree with that.
If I don't like it, I should go find a GPL-licensed alternative to your closed source/payware software, or a creative-commons alternative to your payware entertainment. It is not my right, however, to say "you think your creation is closed but it should be open" or "you think your thing is worth $X but I don't so I will just take it." Just like it is not someone else's right to say the GPL-licensed code you wrote should actually be BSD or closed. If you made this thing, you should get to decide how it is distributed. That's what I think is fair.
And please note that I say this as a once-upon-a-time ravenous Napster downloader. I pirated - or whatever you want to call it - lots of music because 1.) it was free and easy, 2.) there was no legal equivalent, and 3.) I wanted to. But I never tried to delude myself that I was fighting a war against copyright or the corrupt MPAA or anything like that... I just wanted free music and it was easy and I was poor, so I did it.Ten years later I'm not poor so now I try to buy everything I want that's digitally available, and in fact have over the years bought most of the stuff I downloaded illegally over the years which I ended up actually listening to.
I have never condemned anyone for downloading music/videos/whatever illegally - how can I when I used to do it myself? What I do condemn people for is deluding themselves that the people who make things have no rights as to how those things should be distributed. I think that is just being dishonest and pasting an ideological justification on top of a very human behavior as an excuse.
Who? Seriously. Think about the parties involved. AT&T threw everything it had to get it to pass. Verizon sat on the sidelines, as did Google and the other big tech players. The only ones in really vocal opposition were Sprint and lots of consumer groups - are you really suggesting they out-spent AT&T?
Or is it maybe just possible that the US political system is not the simplistic "which corporations spent the most buying politicians" you seem to think it is? Can't you honestly just admit that sometimes - sometimes - it isn't all black and white?
We don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here.
I applaud your sentiment since SOPA/PIPA etc. are stupid. But your comment is not reflective of reality. Google is based in the USA. So is Apple. So is Intel. So is Cisco. So is Facebook. So is Microsoft. So is Oracle. So is Red Hat. So is Qualcomm. So is Yahoo!. The list goes on and on.
There are a lot of good arguments against the current US Intellectual Property/patent policies, but "tech companies won't exist in the US" is not one of them.
We've had a coup and the corporations have taken over.
I know it's super cool on Slashdot to talk about how the US is the worst country in the world, it's a fascist dictatorship, all elections are run by corporations, Soylent Green is made by the Federal Reserve, etc. But honestly that is a very simplistic view of things that fails to account for the complex interlocking of interests that makes up US public policy.
If corporations really did "own" the US government...
Why did the government deny AT&T's merger request with T-Mobile, even with the $millions AT&T spends on lobbying?
Why do Federal and state governments keep laying taxes on tobacco, even with the $millions the tobacco companies spend on lobbying?
Why did the Sarbanes-Oxley act pass when all big corporations absolutely hate it and lobbied against it?
Why did the government reject the Keystone Pipeline from Canada to the US when the oil industry spent $millions lobbying for it?
The truth is that corporations or other interest groups that spend a lot on lobbying often get their way. But they don't always get their way or "own" the government - when enough people speak out against it, it does actually make a difference. We do have a democracy in the United States... even if you don't like the outcomes sometimes. That means you should convince your fellow Americans to make smarter voting choices, not blithely dismiss the system as corrupt.
These phase shifts are introduced electronically, no physical movement needed.
You are correct sir. I was thinking about gimballed self-pointing dishes when I wrote this, you are right about phased array antennas having no moving parts.
Although such antennas are more expensive than normal fixed antennae (due to the additional electronics), the difference is nowhere as big as you make it... So, the technology can't be that expensive (once it is mass-produced), or else it would never be able to compete with multi-LNB dishes.
I have seen some pretty expensive ($20K+) phased array antennas. If you see these being mass-produced, let me know since I have yet to see these get over the chicken-and-egg hurdle of pricing to reach anything approaching a mass market.
A LEO satellite will be much nearer, thus less loss due to distance, so you'd actually need less transmitter power rather than more.
I'm not sure I agree there. Once you're out of the atmosphere, the main source of signal attenuation for Ku/Ka bands is gone so the distance between 250 miles and 22,300 miles is not the main factor. It's more about compensating for doppler change and potentially needing to have the power to track multiple satellites to get around the issue of losing lock all the time and switching to a new bird.
Probably, this has more to do with the fact that there are no mass-market LEO constellations available yet... Once a major player gets into this market, prices will drop, and bitrates will go up.
I think this is another chicken-and-the-egg issue... I assume you are not considering Iridium or Globalstar as "mass market?" And O3B IIRC is intended for ISPs, not end users. I'm not aware of any other LEO data constellations under development precisely for the reasons I outlined above about the higher cost of these systems. It's much simpler and cheaper right now to deliver satellite broadband via GEO birds, and while doing this over LEO may be technically feasible there are so many cost hurdles vs. 400-500 ms latency that I doubt anyone is going to spend the billions of dollars to do it
Just how hard would it be to use a phased array antenna instead of a dish and track the orbit?
The issue isn't so much that it's hard - nor is it for the convenience of the NSA like one of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade suggested elsewhere. It's cost and reliability.
That fixed VSAT.75m or so dish you get installed outside your house for satellite TV or Internet is a reliable kit with no moving parts that costs at wholesale anywhere from $100 to $300 (excluding the satellite modem) for most configurations. (Some areas or situations require larger dishes that can run into the many hundreds or thousands of $$$.) You pay an installer $150 or so to come out and point it at the right satellite and test the system, and away you go for about $500 tops.
A phased array antenna, however, has LOTS of moving parts that can break or freeze up in bad weather. It also costs anywhere between $5000 and $30000 depending on your specifics, especially given that you need to bump up the transmitter power vs. an equivalent GEO radio to get equivalent data rates. Top that off with the fact that you're going to lose your connection everytime the LEO bird your dish was tracking goes over the horizon and it needs to lock onto a different satellite.
Long story short - you can shave 400 ms off your ping time at the cost of probably $5000-$15000 upfront cost. And that's just not a trade-off most people are interested in making. Never mind that I'm unaware of any commercial LEO data systems available today that provide greater than 9.6 kbps data rates...
accepting calls and emails after hours at no extra pay
See, I don't see it like that. There are many after-hours work calls or e-mails that I actually *want* to get because someone is helping me resolve a time-sensitive issue or because we are in different timezones and our calendars are all full during the day. The calls/e-mails after hours that I don't want, I simply ignore until the next morning. I also travel frequently for work and we will have all-day travel plus customer meetings/dinner that adds up to some very long days. But I have never tried to say that I won't be on an airplane or doing work-related tasks outside of 9-5 pm Monday-Friday.
My colleagues all have the same attitude, where work outside business hours is expected but nobody seems to mind too much, since generally if we put in a lot of extra hours one week, most of us will leave early or otherwise dial back some other week to make up for it. I get paid a pretty good salary to work outside strict "business hours" but I wouldn't put up with being called at 3 am for a firedrill or anything like that.
I'm very genuinely curious about this... whenever I see this discussed on Slashdot, I get the feeling that the majority of posters seem to be IT workers who are upset about being called/interrupted to resolve issues off-hours and hence the mindset about the extra work for no extra pay (that would certainly bother me too). It's definitely not the way I think about my job (I'm a product manager) but I get the feeling my situation is not the norm here. Is the issue that most Slashdotters are "on the clock"/have different job types than me, or is it just the attitude towards work in general?
all the DRM and bloatware and crapware and bandwidth throttlers and tethering blockers and Carrier IQ loggers... all designed to BREAK your phone or compromise its security
This comment shows pretty clearly you have never actually been involved with cellular device/OS certification testing with a wireless carrier. Nobody likes carrier crapware, but certifying carrier-specific tweaks (whatever they may be) is a tiny tiny fraction of the actual cert process and why it takes so long.
First, carrier device and OS certifications doesn't even start until the device OEM thinks the updated software build is 100% done, which can take months. Secondly, the wireless carrier certifications take so long because the carriers are the ones that usually get the phone call when something doesn't work on the phone. Therefore they do a lot of network performance testing for the OS and its included key apps, UI/stability testing and (when the radio firmware is touched) RF testing to each new software build from the handset OEM. A single significant bug may end up costing a carrier tens of thousands of dollars or more in phone support employee time, so they are strongly motivated to test the crap out of the new software loads.
Comparing release cycles for CyanogenMod vs. carriers suggests of a lack of understanding of the different audiences and responsibilities. CM doesn't have to worry about fielding potentially hundreds of thousands of support phone calls and customer e-mails from paying customers who (rightly) expect their issues to be resolved promptly. But wireless carriers do, which is why the time delta is so large. It's like comparing the release cycle for some 3rd party MS Excel add-in software vs. the release cycle for a service pack to Office itself.
Slashdot Mirror
There was always growth potential with Amazon. There was a huge market for them to take, industries to crush.
Yes, but they were also an upstart e-tailer fighting against lots and lots of other more established businesses with profitable track records. Think about it - even in its early post-IPO days, Amazon had to not only beat established book retailers (Barnes & Noble, Borders, etc.) to succeed, it also had to beat music/video retailers/e-tailers (Suncoast, Circuit City, Best Buy, Tower Records, and anybody remember CDNow?). And then as it expanded it brought itself into conflict with every established mega-retailer from Wal-Mart to Safeway (if you have Amazon Fresh in your area, which is awesome). I would in fact argue that Amazon was a much riskier bet than Facebook, which is at least the existing established leader in a category.
Where is the growth potential for Facebook? As far as I can tell, they are most probably at their peak
Related to the above question... personally, I 100% agree with you. Then again, I would have agreed with you if you had said in 2006 that the post-iPod Apple had nowhere left "up" to go. So don't listen to me for your investment advice.
A bunch of investors throwing tons of money after dot-com companies on the belief that these companies, despite having no earnings, would somehow grow big.
To be fair, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Amazon.com, for example, once fit exactly this description. In fact, it lost a lot of money for a long time before it ever turned a profit... by that account, Facebook is actually ahead of the game.
The more important issue is that only one out of every 20-50 of these companies ever ends up realizing their promise. If you are an investor who understands that risk, then it's fine to invest in tech startups with big dreams and little or no positive cashflow.
If you actually read my comment, I said different frequency bands for LTE, not the 2G/3G stuff they are running over 850 MHz.
You can't take your phone to another carrier because the current ones don't do voice over LTE
You're kinda right. Like AT&T, Verizon uses 3G (CDMA EVDO Rev A for VZ, HSPA/HSPA+ for AT&T) for circuit-switched voice, and LTE for packet data. I presume that's what you mean - that 3G CDMA/GSM incompatibility is the reason you couldn't switch networks with a LTE phone.
The real reason, though, has nothing to do with VoLTE. The reason you can't take your LTE phone to another US carrier is that the carriers use different frequency bands for LTE, and your phone will only carry the antennas to support the carrier who sold it. Extra antennas/filters take up space in the device, so OEMs aren't keen on including them if they don't have to... and carriers get no benefit from subsidizing a device that you could easily take over to another carrier. And as long as American consumers want $99 smartphones instead of $399 smartphones, carriers are going to keep selling the phones and locking them. So, sadly, don't expect that to change anytime soon.
And just to spread the blame around properly - it's not the US carriers who solely decided to use incompatible frequencies for LTE. For that, you can thank the FCC's f***ed up spectrum policies over the last decade (under both Republican and Democratic administrations). There are no angels in the "why can't I switch my phone between carriers?" debate in the US.
Also, what is your suggestion for a proper [BitTorrent] analogy?
Banning guns because they're used in so many crimes.
You, sir, win the Internet post of the day award. Any analogy that will piss off both sides of the political spectrum must have at least a grain of uncomfortable truth to it.
There was no intent to "badmouth" CDMA. As you correctly point out, Wideband CDMA ultimately won the day as a technology. Your recap of the technologies' comparative strengths is very well written. But when I spoke of CDMA as having dead-ended, I was referring to the vendor technology path, not the underlying technology itself. Most people are only familiar with "CDMA" and "GSM" as the two competing cellular technology families in the US, without necessarily understanding what that means (other than "one has a SIM card and the other doesn't.") Telling them that their 2G "GSM" is really EDGE - and their 3G HSPA acts more like CDMA than GSM - will for most audiences just confuse the issue. So I stand by my assertion that "CDMA" the technology path is dead, and "GSM" is moving forward, but there's no value judgement on the technologies underlying that implicit in my comments.
Doesn't LTE actually converge these 2 standards - CDMA and GSM into one?
Nope. LTE is part of the GSM family - CDMA has functionally dead-ended (at least in the US) with EVDO Rev B. It seems like it's a convergence because you will eventually finally have all four major US carriers using a single 4G technology. But having LTE on a phone doesn't make 2G/3G CDMA and GSM technologies any more compatible.
This is especially important because in the US right now, none of the major carriers have implemented Voice over LTE (VoLTE), so when you use a data connection it's routed over the LTE network... but your voice calls use the 3G circuit-switched network instead. No compatible 3G = no phone calls. Also remember that the US carriers are all deploying LTE on different bands so an LTE phone designed for one won't necessarily work with the other.
The problem with your thesis is that surgery, for example, is a field where the results generated by an individual contributor and their experience can be very easily quantified. If you look at radiology, where the delta between an experienced onsite radiologist and a cheap outsourced radiologist is hard to quantify, they are in fact doing the same thing as they are in software development. (Going for cheap quantity over expensive quality.)
Unfortunately, software or hardware engineering is so complex and team-oriented (was it successful because of the programmers? The product managers? The project managers? Or was it just the right product at the right time?) it is very hard to quantify the bottom-line difference quantify the quality of individual contributors.
Best Buy needs to make their shopping experience not akin to a trip to the dentist. Stop with the aggressive push for add-ons. Stop with the gun to the head warranty pushes ... Fire the disinterested teenagers. Reward knowledgeable stales staff ... Start being what Amazon is - an easy, convenient, stress-free shopping experience.
Not to defend Best Buy here, but these things are not necessarily compatible with cheap prices in a big-box physical retail environment. For example, all the stores I visit with cheap prices try to upsell the high-margin junk so they can make money. All the stores I shop that have knowledgeable sales people and good customer service - think Nordstrom's - aren't cheap. Amazon has cheap prices and no pushy come-ons but they also don't have to pay for retail space and sales employees. It seems that you can have physical stores, good customer experience or cheap prices but not all three.
Yes, AT&T has always unlocked phones except for the iPhone - this was a legacy of their early exclusivity with Apple. Now they unlock iPhones too. It has never been terribly hard from my experience (with two non-iPhones over the past 10 years).
But remember this is Slashdot. If it the article is about AT&T, Microsoft, Apple or any cableco, the story must be written such that even if the company is doing something good the summary must be negative. I'm guessing there is a step two for Slashdot somewhere and step three is profit.
How do you push in an antenna in software?
Too bad the books are specifically tied to a particular device, not non-physical data that can be transfered and gain a new life...
What books are you talking about? Amazon eBooks are tied to your Amazon account, not a device. I have dozens of e-books from Amazon's Kindle store that I have downloaded and can read at any time on my Kindle Fire, my work PC, my home iPad and my work iPad. The great thing is it auto-syncs between them so whatever page I was on most recently on one device becomes the page I pick up on the next device. I have only a couple Apple iBook purchases, but they work the same way (minus the PC or Kindle reader clients).
What eBook store ties purchases to the device?
people should no more be prohibited from modifying their own software than they should be from fixing their own cars.
Not trolling, genuinely curious... I am not legally prohibited from fixing my own car (thank goodness). But I am legally prohibited from certain kinds of tinkering. I can't disable the seatbelt warning. I can't remove the muffler. I can't disable the distracted driving warnings on my GPS system. I can't change it in ways that would make it violate emissions laws.
If you return to the software/car analogy, do you think there are things like the above that *are* fair game to prevent people from tinkering with? Do you think that no modifications should be prevented legally to the car that you own? Or do you think the analogy is inapt?
You're correct... satellite broadband can be had in the US for far less than $400/month. ViaSat and WildBlue's services (may or may not qualify as "broadband" depending on your definition) start at around $50/month. The GP's citation of $400/month for satellite broadband refers to "business class" VSAT data service. Residential satellite Internet is heavily oversubscribed, often north of 100:1. Also note the Fair Access Policy terms under which you will be throttled for excessive data usage.
For some use cases, the results will be indistinguishable at the lower price point; for others they will be very different. Think of the difference between the two as being T1 service from a business provider vs. home cable or DSL service.
I'm on T-Mobile, btw, which has roaming agreements with AT&T, so I get both networks...
Actually, you don't - at least not in most places. In order to decrease roaming charges (and prevent phones from draining battery deciding between two sets of towers) your home carrier only allows roaming in geographic areas (called LACs) where they have no infrastructure at all and another carrier does. So your carrier could have only two towers in a county and another carrier has 50, but since your carrier has some infrastructure there you are not going to see any towers from the other carrier. You are only going to see the "other network" in areas where your carrier has no presence at all, so when you see you are on "other carrier's network" you see their coverage in that particular area, but you have no idea if their coverage is good or bad in other areas.
All the US carriers have detailed coverage maps on their websites and that's probably the best way to figure out who has what where.
Slashdot's usual BS political linkbait headline has nothing to do link the actual story. This is not about French vs. US aircraft, France vs. the US in general, or anything like that. If you read either of the linked TFAs, they say specifically that:
Both of TFAs talk about how this decision is a blow to the Eurofighter, not to the US - not anymore than it is to Sweden or Russia. It is just another poorly edited (or edited at all?) Slashdot anti-US linkbait, flamebait article.
I swear I'm almost done with Slashdot except that it still has some informative comments on science stories, I need to just browse that section and ignore the rest since they just piss me off.
I told myself I was never going to engage in a Slashdot "information wants to be free" debate again, and I know this is karma suicide, but what the heck. This post tees up the question perfectly.
If work can be reproduced infinitely at practically no cost, should it still cost money?
If the person who made it says it should, then yes. If you don't like that, you should download the work of someone else who doesn't think that it should cost money.
Who decides what is fair ?
That's the whole part of "fair" that I think most Slashdotters either don't get or willfully ignore. If you make a thing, you should get to decide under what terms other people can use it - you can say what it costs or if it's free, just like you can say that code you write is GPL or closed. You made it, so that's your right (at least for the time specified under current copyright law). I hope that everyone who has written software and published it under a certain license should agree with that.
If I don't like it, I should go find a GPL-licensed alternative to your closed source/payware software, or a creative-commons alternative to your payware entertainment. It is not my right, however, to say "you think your creation is closed but it should be open" or "you think your thing is worth $X but I don't so I will just take it." Just like it is not someone else's right to say the GPL-licensed code you wrote should actually be BSD or closed. If you made this thing, you should get to decide how it is distributed. That's what I think is fair.
And please note that I say this as a once-upon-a-time ravenous Napster downloader. I pirated - or whatever you want to call it - lots of music because 1.) it was free and easy, 2.) there was no legal equivalent, and 3.) I wanted to. But I never tried to delude myself that I was fighting a war against copyright or the corrupt MPAA or anything like that... I just wanted free music and it was easy and I was poor, so I did it.Ten years later I'm not poor so now I try to buy everything I want that's digitally available, and in fact have over the years bought most of the stuff I downloaded illegally over the years which I ended up actually listening to.
I have never condemned anyone for downloading music/videos/whatever illegally - how can I when I used to do it myself? What I do condemn people for is deluding themselves that the people who make things have no rights as to how those things should be distributed. I think that is just being dishonest and pasting an ideological justification on top of a very human behavior as an excuse.
Somebody else spent more on lobbying.
Who? Seriously. Think about the parties involved. AT&T threw everything it had to get it to pass. Verizon sat on the sidelines, as did Google and the other big tech players. The only ones in really vocal opposition were Sprint and lots of consumer groups - are you really suggesting they out-spent AT&T?
Or is it maybe just possible that the US political system is not the simplistic "which corporations spent the most buying politicians" you seem to think it is? Can't you honestly just admit that sometimes - sometimes - it isn't all black and white?
We don't want your business. We don't want any tech companies to set up here.
I applaud your sentiment since SOPA/PIPA etc. are stupid. But your comment is not reflective of reality. Google is based in the USA. So is Apple. So is Intel. So is Cisco. So is Facebook. So is Microsoft. So is Oracle. So is Red Hat. So is Qualcomm. So is Yahoo!. The list goes on and on.
There are a lot of good arguments against the current US Intellectual Property/patent policies, but "tech companies won't exist in the US" is not one of them.
Karma suicide in 3, 2, 1...
We've had a coup and the corporations have taken over.
I know it's super cool on Slashdot to talk about how the US is the worst country in the world, it's a fascist dictatorship, all elections are run by corporations, Soylent Green is made by the Federal Reserve, etc. But honestly that is a very simplistic view of things that fails to account for the complex interlocking of interests that makes up US public policy.
If corporations really did "own" the US government...
The truth is that corporations or other interest groups that spend a lot on lobbying often get their way. But they don't always get their way or "own" the government - when enough people speak out against it, it does actually make a difference. We do have a democracy in the United States ... even if you don't like the outcomes sometimes. That means you should convince your fellow Americans to make smarter voting choices, not blithely dismiss the system as corrupt.
These phase shifts are introduced electronically, no physical movement needed.
You are correct sir. I was thinking about gimballed self-pointing dishes when I wrote this, you are right about phased array antennas having no moving parts.
Although such antennas are more expensive than normal fixed antennae (due to the additional electronics), the difference is nowhere as big as you make it ... So, the technology can't be that expensive (once it is mass-produced), or else it would never be able to compete with multi-LNB dishes.
I have seen some pretty expensive ($20K+) phased array antennas. If you see these being mass-produced, let me know since I have yet to see these get over the chicken-and-egg hurdle of pricing to reach anything approaching a mass market.
A LEO satellite will be much nearer, thus less loss due to distance, so you'd actually need less transmitter power rather than more.
I'm not sure I agree there. Once you're out of the atmosphere, the main source of signal attenuation for Ku/Ka bands is gone so the distance between 250 miles and 22,300 miles is not the main factor. It's more about compensating for doppler change and potentially needing to have the power to track multiple satellites to get around the issue of losing lock all the time and switching to a new bird.
Probably, this has more to do with the fact that there are no mass-market LEO constellations available yet ... Once a major player gets into this market, prices will drop, and bitrates will go up.
I think this is another chicken-and-the-egg issue ... I assume you are not considering Iridium or Globalstar as "mass market?" And O3B IIRC is intended for ISPs, not end users. I'm not aware of any other LEO data constellations under development precisely for the reasons I outlined above about the higher cost of these systems. It's much simpler and cheaper right now to deliver satellite broadband via GEO birds, and while doing this over LEO may be technically feasible there are so many cost hurdles vs. 400-500 ms latency that I doubt anyone is going to spend the billions of dollars to do it
Just how hard would it be to use a phased array antenna instead of a dish and track the orbit?
The issue isn't so much that it's hard - nor is it for the convenience of the NSA like one of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade suggested elsewhere. It's cost and reliability.
That fixed VSAT .75m or so dish you get installed outside your house for satellite TV or Internet is a reliable kit with no moving parts that costs at wholesale anywhere from $100 to $300 (excluding the satellite modem) for most configurations. (Some areas or situations require larger dishes that can run into the many hundreds or thousands of $$$.) You pay an installer $150 or so to come out and point it at the right satellite and test the system, and away you go for about $500 tops.
A phased array antenna, however, has LOTS of moving parts that can break or freeze up in bad weather. It also costs anywhere between $5000 and $30000 depending on your specifics, especially given that you need to bump up the transmitter power vs. an equivalent GEO radio to get equivalent data rates. Top that off with the fact that you're going to lose your connection everytime the LEO bird your dish was tracking goes over the horizon and it needs to lock onto a different satellite.
Long story short - you can shave 400 ms off your ping time at the cost of probably $5000-$15000 upfront cost. And that's just not a trade-off most people are interested in making. Never mind that I'm unaware of any commercial LEO data systems available today that provide greater than 9.6 kbps data rates...
accepting calls and emails after hours at no extra pay
See, I don't see it like that. There are many after-hours work calls or e-mails that I actually *want* to get because someone is helping me resolve a time-sensitive issue or because we are in different timezones and our calendars are all full during the day. The calls/e-mails after hours that I don't want, I simply ignore until the next morning. I also travel frequently for work and we will have all-day travel plus customer meetings/dinner that adds up to some very long days. But I have never tried to say that I won't be on an airplane or doing work-related tasks outside of 9-5 pm Monday-Friday.
My colleagues all have the same attitude, where work outside business hours is expected but nobody seems to mind too much, since generally if we put in a lot of extra hours one week, most of us will leave early or otherwise dial back some other week to make up for it. I get paid a pretty good salary to work outside strict "business hours" but I wouldn't put up with being called at 3 am for a firedrill or anything like that.
I'm very genuinely curious about this... whenever I see this discussed on Slashdot, I get the feeling that the majority of posters seem to be IT workers who are upset about being called/interrupted to resolve issues off-hours and hence the mindset about the extra work for no extra pay (that would certainly bother me too). It's definitely not the way I think about my job (I'm a product manager) but I get the feeling my situation is not the norm here. Is the issue that most Slashdotters are "on the clock"/have different job types than me, or is it just the attitude towards work in general?
all the DRM and bloatware and crapware and bandwidth throttlers and tethering blockers and Carrier IQ loggers ... all designed to BREAK your phone or compromise its security
This comment shows pretty clearly you have never actually been involved with cellular device/OS certification testing with a wireless carrier. Nobody likes carrier crapware, but certifying carrier-specific tweaks (whatever they may be) is a tiny tiny fraction of the actual cert process and why it takes so long.
First, carrier device and OS certifications doesn't even start until the device OEM thinks the updated software build is 100% done, which can take months. Secondly, the wireless carrier certifications take so long because the carriers are the ones that usually get the phone call when something doesn't work on the phone. Therefore they do a lot of network performance testing for the OS and its included key apps, UI/stability testing and (when the radio firmware is touched) RF testing to each new software build from the handset OEM. A single significant bug may end up costing a carrier tens of thousands of dollars or more in phone support employee time, so they are strongly motivated to test the crap out of the new software loads.
Comparing release cycles for CyanogenMod vs. carriers suggests of a lack of understanding of the different audiences and responsibilities. CM doesn't have to worry about fielding potentially hundreds of thousands of support phone calls and customer e-mails from paying customers who (rightly) expect their issues to be resolved promptly. But wireless carriers do, which is why the time delta is so large. It's like comparing the release cycle for some 3rd party MS Excel add-in software vs. the release cycle for a service pack to Office itself.
And they'll still get that tech anyway
Eventually, but remember that to get Stealth you need to have researched Combustion and Lasers. You don't get it automatically any more.
Wait, were we talking about something else?