They're all evil for pushing a mandatory data plan on smartphones despite these phones generally having wi-fi already built in.
I know this spoils the Slashdot anti-corporate groupthink storyline, but the cellular carriers don't just do this stuff for the sake of being evil. The fact is that telcos pay a lot more for smartphones than they do for dumb phones, but customers generally still want "a phone" to cost anywhere between $0 and $200. So the telcos lose more money on every smartphone sale and in order to make that money back they make sure you are forced to have a data plan. The majority - although clearly not you - of cellular customers with smartphones want that anyway, so not a big deal. If they weren't charging you for a data plan they would be extending the length of the contract or something else... it's not being evil just for fun, it's making sure they get their money back on subsidizing your new shiny toy.
Here's a hint - if you want a smartphone and no data plan, buy a non-carrier-branded version unlocked at full price, then take it to one of the US GSM carriers and away you go. (With most GSM carriers, the smartphone plan automatic enforcement is based on serial numbers of subsidized phone models so if you buy some unlocked GSM smartphone that carrier doesn't sell, you should be fine.) Just don't expect the carrier to sell you a $700 phone for $100 and not charge you for a data plan and a two-year contract to make that money back for them plus interest.
At some point, someone in an MDM-using company is likely to notice that all their users have transitioned to iPhones and Droids and will wonder why they're paying for both Exchange and the RIM software which does mostly just the same thing.
Exchange and MDM systems like BlackBerry BES, Good For Enterprise etc. only "do the same thing" if all you care about is basics like push e-mail and passwords/locking. Any company that takes mobile device management seriously (e.g. device application restrictions, e-mail/URL filtering, etc.) will always need more than the basic Exchange functionality. So they are always going to have Exchange PLUS *some* MDM system, but what they won't want to have is Exchange + BES + some other MDM for all the other devices. Since today BES only works with BlackBerries and those other MDM systems work with all the other devices, companies are forced to either support two or choose between them. This is a smart move for RIM, given that those companies might end up ditching BlackBerries so they don't have to pay for two MDM systems and now they can have one MDM system that will work for all devices.
I hate to read TFA and I hate to defend the DEA (did we learn nothing from Prohibition?) but once again this is a sloppy and wholly misleading article summary (thanks Slashdot!) To wit:
The DEA doesn't think he's running a meth lab, they think people who run meth labs are buying his product to use.
The DEA has started keeping a much tighter rein on the active ingredient in his product in order to keep it out of the hands of the aforementioned meth labs (just like they did a couple years back with buying decongestants using psuedoephedrine). His response was:
He was supposed to pay $1200 for a license to handle this chemical and refused.
He was asked to keep tabs on who bought the product to the extent that he would report "suspicious" bulk purchasers. He refused.
The DEA asked him for proof that he has security where his product is made to keep people from stealing the active ingredient. He sent them a picture of his dog sitting in front of his garage.
He also does not appear to be able to tell the difference between the DEA and the TSA, as the article points out. This does not suggest he is good at dealing with bureaucracy.
As much as I like this guy and his sense of humor, it seems much less sinister than the Slashdot linkbait summary indicates. It appears to be a pretty simple case of "government restricts chemical that can be used in meth labs, old guy making product in his garage with said product doesn't want to deal with the government bureaucracy and is surprised when the government shuts off his access to that chemical."
he was very good at combining other people's ideas and making something unique out of it.
That's partly true but misses the big picture. If you read the biography - and I strongly recommend you do, it isn't just "Jobs is an a**hole" anecdotes, there's some really fascinating stuff in there - you see that Isaacson portrays Jobs as having two key strengths.
The first was that Jobs had a strong intuition about what people wanted (e.g. a mass-market GUI computer with the Mac or a fully licensed, easy-to-use music download store with iTunes, etc.) so he pushed for Apple to build those things where they previously didn't exist. That's why he's cited as "innovative" even though other people did the actual work. The second was that he was a perfectionist - to the point of near-insanity actually - so he pushed people really hard to build stuff that it was so good that people didn't just like it, (some) people LOVED it... hence the Cult of Mac, etc. Very few if any big companies these days have perfectionists at the helm who insist they make things "insanely great" or don't make them at all, and that's why he was unique.
The flipside to this is that, as Isaacson repeatedly shows, Jobs was more or less a complete fail as a human being. The book is pretty clear that his infantile and sociopathic behavior was tolerated throughout his life precisely because he was so good at the other two things, and it built his legacy at the expense of his ever "growing up" into a decent person. So it's a really nuanced picture of the guy and very very much worth a read if you're interested in a more sophisticated view of Jobs than "he didn't do anything but market shiny things and yell at people."
The Sectera Edge is certified for classified communications... in fact, it's the only "smartphone" that is certified for Top Secret comms. That fact is half of what they're trying to get around here.
The good news is that the US government takes information assurance really, really seriously. The bad news is that they take it seriously enough that the only mobile device you can read your Top Secret e-mail on is a government-only, multi-thousand dollar Windows PDA that's many years behind the times because it took that long to jump through all the high-level government certification hoops.
Fortunately, the government has lately caught on to the idea that they will always be behind on mobile technology if they don't find a way to build their requirements on top of consumer platforms rather than trying to build the whole thing government-specific from the ground up. This effort is part of their attempt to stop falling way behind the innovation curve that off the shelf iOS, Android, etc. devices are delivering, and it seems to be working. Good on them.
I think what people - and maybe Ron Paul - are missing is axing these programs at a Federal level and devolving their responsibilities to the states will just be robbing Peter to pay Paul (no pun intended). The states can't afford to do the things they're responsible for already today!
Say you cut Federal taxes, axe those departments and hand some or all of those duties back to the states. What are the states going to do? Raise your taxes to pay for all the new unfunded mandates they just got handed. Now you're back to square one except with even more inefficiencies... imagine that each state had to run its own equivalent of the CDC, or the FDA, or the FAA... incredible redundancy and it might end up costing even more than it does at the Federal level.
There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
Hi there. Several years ago, I wanted Sid Meier's "Pirates" for the PC. Right after the game came out, I picked up the game in a cracked version while I was on a trip to Asia because it was easy and cost 40 cents. I played it for a while and enjoyed it okay, but not enough that I ever got around to buying it to make my purchase legit. I have copied music and games from my friends many times before, and since I have some disposable income I really do try to buy copies when I enjoy them. But this is one case where I just didn't.
I am quite certain that had I not had easy access to the pirated version (in the great computer market at Panthip Plaza in Bangkok) at the time the game came out, I would definitely have bought it.
So the next time you plan to say that there is NO evidence that anyone who ever pirated a game was going to buy it otherwise, do us all a favor and shut the f**k up. That way you won't make the arguments of the rest of us who do "try before we buy" look stupid when you make asinine assertions that nobody actually pirates anything.
The solution is legally enforced sharing of knowledge. That is, you can steal anyone's ideas and they can steal yours right back.
That's not workable because economically you have just made absolutely everything an issue of scale and cost of goods sold. Say I work in my garage and invent a doohickey. $GIANTCORP sees it and immediately produces it in volumes of millions at a drastically reduced cost that I can never compete with, so I don't reap the benefits of my innovation with commensurate sales. It doesn't matter that I can copy their stuff, it doesn't do me any good since I couldn't compete with $GIANTCORP on price anyway! My R&D is in effect wasted and nobody has any incentive to build new things, just to copy existing stuff cheaper.
We have innumerable examples that markets for identical durable goods, mechanical products, pharmaceuticals, etc. are going to be won by the manufacturer with the lowest costs and widest distribution networks. Why are almost all electronics being manufactured in places like China? Why did Dell - with its notorious lack of actual R&D - become the giant of the consumer PC market? Why is Wal-Mart a huge success? Answer: they all offer the same items as other retailers, but at bigger scale and hence a lower price.
This is how the fashion industry works
Bully for the fashion industry. It works that way in the restaurant industry too. But that's not exactly where patents are an issue, are they? I hope we can all agree that most industries - least of all technology - are NOT very much like the fashion industry...
the notion that "big guys will steal your precious ideas" is shown to be bogus.
Citation definitely needed. I can point to my above examples of "big and cheap wins the day when selling functionally identical goods" as my examples. What are yours?
According to the report, the "wrong hands" with control of spectrum that isn't being used or is underutilized are:
Clearwire (133 MHz)
Lightsquared (59 MHz)
Dish Network (47 MHz)
Almost all of the above spectrum is in the less-desirable 2 GHz+ ranges. Clearwire may be underutilizing, but Lightsquared and Dish haven't gotten to launch their services yet so you can't really say it's underutilized when it's still in process of being developed.
All in all, this report actually seems to make the case of the big carriers that there is still a shortage of "good" (especially less than 1 GHz) spectrum for broadband. Much of that is locked up by the broadcasters for stuff that is comparatively useless (anyone watching UHF television still these days?) versus having it available for mobile broadband.
It's a darker side of the Occam's Razor - you get rid of unnecessary things, sure, but how do you determine whether they are unnecessary?
This is where the Sherlock Holmes principle comes into play: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Hotspot add-on plans are nothing more than a means to double charge you for the same data service you already have.
I think your perspective makes sense. However, I can tell you how the cellphone companies look at it:
"I bought a ticket to an all-you-can-eat buffet for $X. But I brought along a big Tupperware bucket to more food into also. How DARE those bastards make me pay $X + $Y?"
Not saying it's right or wrong, but telling you what the rationalization is for tethering plans...
I was actually planning on paying for tethering and dropping my land line internet once sprint brought 4g to my city.
I feel your pain but I don't understand why the smart, otherwise technically savvy people on Slashdot seem to not understand this:
Wireless is not and will not be a replacement for wireline broadband. They are fundamentally different economically and technically.
With wireline (cable/DSL/FiOS/leased line/whatever) broadband, an ISP can cram as much data down each of those pipes as their upstream/downstream terminal gear (VDSL, DOCSIS 3.0, GPON, etc.) can handle and their upstream bandwidth can take. Bandwidth allowances to individual customers have comparatively small impact on other users, so you can get very high speeds and large data caps
With wireless, ISPs are functionally limited by their available licensed spectrum within each market area. Currently there is more thirst for cellular data than there is available spectrum, so in most cellsites in any moderately populated area, you are going to be fighting for bandwidth with everyone who is streaming HD NetFlix. You can solve that with more spectrum, but at least in the US, spectrum coasts a s**tload of money, and there is a shortage of it available to the wireless providers already. You could help the issue with more cell towers, but those cost a lot of money to put up and even if you want to spend the cash, in many areas all the tinfoil hat brigades complain about their cell service but then make carriers go through three years of environmental impact studies to put more towers up if ever.
So for practical purposes, wireless bandwidth is a much more constrained resource than wireline bandwidth is, and what each user "eats" may be taking off the plate of the next user, so that's why you get caps/throttling/whatever. There is no secret conspiracy to make wireless users' lives miserable, all the carriers have these same frustrating data policies because... they all have to deal with the same spectrum limitations, regulatory limitations, and the need to make money.
This statement presumes that our votes actually mean *anything*.
I know it's cool and all to be cynical, but please provide your factual evidence that there is massive electoral fraud sufficient to sway every election and therefore that our votes in the United States don't "mean anything." Otherwise, our votes do in fact mean *everything* to how the executive and legislative branches of our state and Federal governments are constituted. You or I may not like who gets elected, but that's called... you know... democracy.
You need to create an environment where someone with a good idea can work on it and turn it into a success (or at least try). Where you can work on interesting things, instead of spending all day every day figuring out how to advertise to people.... All the new CEO has to do is attract good talent and get out of their way. Remove their barriers that are distracting them from day to day.
No offense, but Google is just now belatedly realizing that this is not what you should do. They are shutting down "products" left and right because for years they have greenlit seemingly every neat idea that an engineer had, and basically none of them except AdWords and Android have positively impacted the bottom line. We would all like to work at companies like you describe, but it turns out that creating that type of environment doesn't help unless you do have managers who are exactly "barriers" to the bad ideas and letting the good ones through. And those are very hard to find...
In finance 101, the goal of a company is always to increase its share price to make daytraders happy. It is never to make money.
Very, very, very incorrect. I know it must seem that way sometimes but if you do actually take Finance 101 sometime - and I actually did as part of my MBA - or work in a large public corporation, you will find that the truth is quite different.
First, nobody gives a shit about day traders. Second, a public company's responsibility is to its shareholders, the vast numerical majority of which are not daytraders or even shmoes like you and me, but large institutional investors. These companies buy millions of shares and typically hold them for years at a time. They have two interests in a stock: 1.) if the company pays dividends that those dividends are as large as possible; and 2.) the price of the stock itself will appreciate faster than the market average so the managers of those funds look smart to their investors.
Even if it doesn't seem like it, CEOs do have bosses, and they are the fund managers who own zillions and zillions of shares, enough such that if they get pissed enough they can vote in a new board of directors who will fire the CEO. These investors want to hold the stock for many years but they need to show regular evidence that the company's management is doing the "right thing," so they put pressure on to see each quarter's dividend payments to be equal or greater than the last quarter's, and for the company's share price to rise over time faster than inflation at a minimum, and faster than the market average ideally. So ultimately it is not a short term view but all companies do have short-term milestones along the way. So that's why it seems that every company's view is short term.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of where all that unlit fiber is. Virtually all that unlit fiber is long-haul trunks running between metro areas, not last-mile deployments. These companies laid fiber during the dot-com boom to support backbone networks, not home/end-user ISP service. It's not like everyone has a fiber optic cable running to their house and nobody wants to light it up and provide service... that Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is simply not there for the vast majority of US residential users. And in areas where copper to the home has been replaced with FTTH (e.g. Verizon's FiOS service areas), it has proven to be marginally profitable or unprofitable. So the existence of all that dark fiber doesn't bring you or me any closer to getting a gigabit drop to the home.
There is no unholy conspiracy by telcos, cable MSOs, wireless providers, etc. to deny rural users broadband. The payback just isn't there for those businesses, plain and simple.
And it isn't a question of allowing other providers to use the incumbent's fiber... in nearly all places in the US, that fiber simply isn't there to share if you wanted to. For the typical US residential location, you have three wires going into your house. One is a copper wire from the telco, another is a coaxial cable from the cableco, and the third is a copper cable delivering electricity. You can install equipment on each of those infrastructures to deliver Internet of some kind, but it's not the same thing as FTTH, which means a truck roll and an infrastructure upgrade.
So as far as fiber to the home goes, let's look at where this is happening (or not happening) in the US. Verizon did it with FiOS, starting with high-population density areas in the most population-dense part of the country... and then they stopped building out new areas. They said publicly that they needed to start making more money on the areas they had already fibered up before they could think about extending it to more rural areas. AT&T didn't even go fiber to the home in their Uverse areas, they went fiber to the neighborhood then VDSL over copper to the home. Qwest/CenturyLink, covering the lowest population density parts of the country, never even bothered trying. Comcast and the other cablecos are still trying to jam more bandwidth down their existing coaxial physical plant.
Why? The truth of the matter is it costs a heckuva lot of money to run fiber to your door (at least in a country like the US). These organizations all have lots of people who know the costs of these efforts and know what people are willing to pay for that broadband/TV/whatever... and they just don't add up to be profitable for those companies. Simple as that.
With that being said - Google can do it.. but only because they can do it and not make money off it. It's a science project for them, not a business, so they can throw cash at it and say "meh." But that only goes so far - at some point the money they're throwing away does actually start to noticeably impact their profitability, so don't expect Google to do this forever and everywhere. Enjoy it if you have it, but otherwise just understand that unless installing new fiber to the door gets a lot less expensive, or people start being willing to pay a LOT more for their broadband... it just won't get done by for-profit companies. And if the government does it, then the bill is in effect shifted to all the taxpayers rather than individual subscribers.
But if you don't buy enough songs, you get on the list where they sue you and accuse you publicly of possessing child pornography. And that is extortion.
1. [Citation needed]
2. What? I mean, we all dislike DRM on music, but your statement is... wait, what?
3. Who was arrested for child pornography as a result of "not buy[ing] enough songs?"
4. No really, what are you talking about?
5. While we're at it, that would technically be blackmail, not extortion
To get #3 they won't have to push them retail, just push them on corporate which has always been MS territory anyway.
Except... it's, like, the exact opposite of that.
Four years ago smartphone purchases were driven by businesses. BlackBerries were the early smartphone leader, and MS entered the game with WinCE then Windows Mobile, which was chock full of enterprise-centric features. WM5/6 was an atrocious piece of dung from a usability standpoint, but it gathered a fair amount of enterprise IT mind/marketshare and was actually the preferred smartphone app developer platform until...
The iPhone came along and actually made a smartphone user-friendly, sparking the whole "consumerization of IT" trend we're still seeing today with mobile devices. By two years ago, the majority of smartphone purchasers were consumers instead of businesses, which meant that the way to win marketshare was by appealing to consumers. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile were still mainly aimed at business... and iPhone OS and Android originally had absolutely terrible (practically non-existent) enterprise feature support... but nonetheless iOS and Android became the big winners in the smartphone wars. (Later versions of iOS and Android started to make them more enterprise-friendly, but their primary appeal is still to consumers.)
This in turn spurred Microsoft to actually ditch their enterprise-friendly WM6.5 platform and replace it with the consumer-centric Windows Phone 7, ditching app backward compatibility, enterprise administration and lots of other corporate features in the process. So they have in fact done THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you're suggesting. RIM by contrast stuck with their super enterprise-friendly OS but tried to bolt-consumer friendly features on top of it... and you can see how well that is(n't) working out. Neither MS nor RIM are in great strategic shape at the moment, but given the trends in the mobile world I think Microsoft's abandonment of enterprise in favor of consumers is actually a better long-term play in terms of driving volume and application development.
Your typical American... has no capacity for logical thought... Teaching your typical USian football-and-church-and-cable-news trash is done in much the same way as you would approach someone in a classroom environment who has been diagnosed as SLD (slow learning disorder).
Add to that the fact that I live in "the Great State of Alabama"
Hello, and welcome to the United States! We collectively as a nation are sorry that you ended up in Alabama - we tried to let them secede 150 years ago but Abraham Lincoln ruined it.
However, we feel it only right to let you know that if you think Alabama is representative of the United States as a whole, you are neither as brilliant nor geographically savvy as you think you are. It turns out that statistically, we "USians" as a country 1.) are more represented by the populations of large metro areas on the coasts like New York or San Francisco than we are by Alabama, and 2.) still somehow manage to drive most of the world's technology economy despite our massive learning disabilities which you have so politely pointed out to us.
Regardless, we are sorry that you have been subject to the dual misfortunes of being forced against your will to live in the US, and having to suffer through being so much smarter than everyone around you. We "USians" - that's what we call ourselves too and we don't at all think you're a douchebag for using that made-up term - hope that whatever nation you come from which is blessedly free of racists, evangelists and "football"-obsessed dullards surely misses your presence. Hopefully you can return there soon!
P.S. Seriously, not even other Southerners in the US consider Alabama a leader in anything other than college football, Federal welfare subsidies and advanced tooth decay.
Complete, Open Source implementations such as Cyanogen exist, and are relatively popular.
Relatively is the key word there. Cyanogen or other OSS variants of Android are popular as after-market installations for the more computer-literate and tinkering-inclined Android phone users. But to my knowledge none of them are included on shipping mass-market devices, or have ever gone through carrier acceptance testing that is required to sell them through those channels. I think there is a pretty broad gap between you or me installing Cyanogen and a big phone manufacturer basing their investment in a new phone on it.
So now that I've answered your questions, how about answering mine? If we do away with Affirmative Action, what is your brilliant idea for upholding the Civil Rights Act and preventing discrimination? When you run across a company that is 98% white, including all of the executives and even mid-level management, and its painfully obvious that there is discrimination going on, what do you do? Nothing?
Fair question but one that is so speculative in the details as to be very difficult to answer. What are the demographics of the area? It may be reasonable to expect that a company's demographics follow that of its hiring area(s)... and some towns are 95%+ white, and others are 75%+ minority. Statistically, a fairly hiring company should mirror the demographics of its locations, assuming it is large enough to have statistical sampling be relevant. If you think you have to legislate fair hiring, then say that all companies over x00 employees need to at least mirror their operating area's demographics in minority full-time employees. When it comes to college admissions, etc., I believe that mandated minority admissions should be as a bonus - e.g. you can mandate that your student body be X% ethnicity Y, but that should be done by expanding class sizes rather than denying equally qualified students of ethnicity Z.
But the current rules seem to me to be a straw man (in the true classical sense) with little real-world application in either the direction for or against "fairness." Nobody seems to be going after Microsoft, Google or Apple for their grossly disproportionate share of whites and Asians vs. blacks, Latinos or Native Americans. Conversely, nobody has attacked BET, or your neighborhood ethnic restaurants for their lack of balanced hiring. And when you talk about companies needing to have a certain percentage of "executives" be minorities (or women, which are a majority), that is a complete fail. Jockeying for executive jobs at big companies is as competitive a sport as you will find off an athletic field, and mandating the "winners" is as inane as suggesting that the results of the Olympics should be distributed by racial quotas.
I guess my big quibble here is that to be fair, you need to either say that:
1.) All minorities (maybe including women, who are actually the majority in the US) are disadvantaged by virtue of being discriminated against by whites/men. Therefore we need to have appointments/jobs/scholarships/whatever apportioned on a racially proportionate basis, because it is harder for them than the majority/men; or
2.) Some minorities have a harder time than others, and they don't all need to have representative levels of Affirmative Action. This of course raises a very thorny set of question about why that is, and whether being un-white/un-male is a universal disadvantage or not, and if not why for some and not for others.
So to answer your question - I think proportional representation at a statistically significant level is reasonable. Your thoughts?
Slashdot Mirror
They're all evil for pushing a mandatory data plan on smartphones despite these phones generally having wi-fi already built in.
I know this spoils the Slashdot anti-corporate groupthink storyline, but the cellular carriers don't just do this stuff for the sake of being evil. The fact is that telcos pay a lot more for smartphones than they do for dumb phones, but customers generally still want "a phone" to cost anywhere between $0 and $200. So the telcos lose more money on every smartphone sale and in order to make that money back they make sure you are forced to have a data plan. The majority - although clearly not you - of cellular customers with smartphones want that anyway, so not a big deal. If they weren't charging you for a data plan they would be extending the length of the contract or something else... it's not being evil just for fun, it's making sure they get their money back on subsidizing your new shiny toy.
Here's a hint - if you want a smartphone and no data plan, buy a non-carrier-branded version unlocked at full price, then take it to one of the US GSM carriers and away you go. (With most GSM carriers, the smartphone plan automatic enforcement is based on serial numbers of subsidized phone models so if you buy some unlocked GSM smartphone that carrier doesn't sell, you should be fine.) Just don't expect the carrier to sell you a $700 phone for $100 and not charge you for a data plan and a two-year contract to make that money back for them plus interest.
The parent commenter is correct. I think you are conflating the economic concepts of free market and perfect market.
At some point, someone in an MDM-using company is likely to notice that all their users have transitioned to iPhones and Droids and will wonder why they're paying for both Exchange and the RIM software which does mostly just the same thing.
Exchange and MDM systems like BlackBerry BES, Good For Enterprise etc. only "do the same thing" if all you care about is basics like push e-mail and passwords/locking. Any company that takes mobile device management seriously (e.g. device application restrictions, e-mail/URL filtering, etc.) will always need more than the basic Exchange functionality. So they are always going to have Exchange PLUS *some* MDM system, but what they won't want to have is Exchange + BES + some other MDM for all the other devices. Since today BES only works with BlackBerries and those other MDM systems work with all the other devices, companies are forced to either support two or choose between them. This is a smart move for RIM, given that those companies might end up ditching BlackBerries so they don't have to pay for two MDM systems and now they can have one MDM system that will work for all devices.
I hate to read TFA and I hate to defend the DEA (did we learn nothing from Prohibition?) but once again this is a sloppy and wholly misleading article summary (thanks Slashdot!) To wit:
As much as I like this guy and his sense of humor, it seems much less sinister than the Slashdot linkbait summary indicates. It appears to be a pretty simple case of "government restricts chemical that can be used in meth labs, old guy making product in his garage with said product doesn't want to deal with the government bureaucracy and is surprised when the government shuts off his access to that chemical."
he was very good at combining other people's ideas and making something unique out of it.
That's partly true but misses the big picture. If you read the biography - and I strongly recommend you do, it isn't just "Jobs is an a**hole" anecdotes, there's some really fascinating stuff in there - you see that Isaacson portrays Jobs as having two key strengths.
The first was that Jobs had a strong intuition about what people wanted (e.g. a mass-market GUI computer with the Mac or a fully licensed, easy-to-use music download store with iTunes, etc.) so he pushed for Apple to build those things where they previously didn't exist. That's why he's cited as "innovative" even though other people did the actual work. The second was that he was a perfectionist - to the point of near-insanity actually - so he pushed people really hard to build stuff that it was so good that people didn't just like it, (some) people LOVED it... hence the Cult of Mac, etc. Very few if any big companies these days have perfectionists at the helm who insist they make things "insanely great" or don't make them at all, and that's why he was unique.
The flipside to this is that, as Isaacson repeatedly shows, Jobs was more or less a complete fail as a human being. The book is pretty clear that his infantile and sociopathic behavior was tolerated throughout his life precisely because he was so good at the other two things, and it built his legacy at the expense of his ever "growing up" into a decent person. So it's a really nuanced picture of the guy and very very much worth a read if you're interested in a more sophisticated view of Jobs than "he didn't do anything but market shiny things and yell at people."
The Sectera Edge is certified for classified communications... in fact, it's the only "smartphone" that is certified for Top Secret comms. That fact is half of what they're trying to get around here.
The good news is that the US government takes information assurance really, really seriously. The bad news is that they take it seriously enough that the only mobile device you can read your Top Secret e-mail on is a government-only, multi-thousand dollar Windows PDA that's many years behind the times because it took that long to jump through all the high-level government certification hoops.
Fortunately, the government has lately caught on to the idea that they will always be behind on mobile technology if they don't find a way to build their requirements on top of consumer platforms rather than trying to build the whole thing government-specific from the ground up. This effort is part of their attempt to stop falling way behind the innovation curve that off the shelf iOS, Android, etc. devices are delivering, and it seems to be working. Good on them.
I think what people - and maybe Ron Paul - are missing is axing these programs at a Federal level and devolving their responsibilities to the states will just be robbing Peter to pay Paul (no pun intended). The states can't afford to do the things they're responsible for already today!
Say you cut Federal taxes, axe those departments and hand some or all of those duties back to the states. What are the states going to do? Raise your taxes to pay for all the new unfunded mandates they just got handed. Now you're back to square one except with even more inefficiencies... imagine that each state had to run its own equivalent of the CDC, or the FDA, or the FAA... incredible redundancy and it might end up costing even more than it does at the Federal level.
Suuuure - religious fundie muslims are going to nuke the holy land. You DO know it's holy to them, too, right?
Nothing holy to them about Tel Aviv...
That is purely bullshit.
There is no evidence that the people who are pirating games would otherwise buy them.
Hi there. Several years ago, I wanted Sid Meier's "Pirates" for the PC. Right after the game came out, I picked up the game in a cracked version while I was on a trip to Asia because it was easy and cost 40 cents. I played it for a while and enjoyed it okay, but not enough that I ever got around to buying it to make my purchase legit. I have copied music and games from my friends many times before, and since I have some disposable income I really do try to buy copies when I enjoy them. But this is one case where I just didn't.
I am quite certain that had I not had easy access to the pirated version (in the great computer market at Panthip Plaza in Bangkok) at the time the game came out, I would definitely have bought it.
So the next time you plan to say that there is NO evidence that anyone who ever pirated a game was going to buy it otherwise, do us all a favor and shut the f**k up. That way you won't make the arguments of the rest of us who do "try before we buy" look stupid when you make asinine assertions that nobody actually pirates anything.
The solution is legally enforced sharing of knowledge. That is, you can steal anyone's ideas and they can steal yours right back.
That's not workable because economically you have just made absolutely everything an issue of scale and cost of goods sold. Say I work in my garage and invent a doohickey. $GIANTCORP sees it and immediately produces it in volumes of millions at a drastically reduced cost that I can never compete with, so I don't reap the benefits of my innovation with commensurate sales. It doesn't matter that I can copy their stuff, it doesn't do me any good since I couldn't compete with $GIANTCORP on price anyway! My R&D is in effect wasted and nobody has any incentive to build new things, just to copy existing stuff cheaper.
We have innumerable examples that markets for identical durable goods, mechanical products, pharmaceuticals, etc. are going to be won by the manufacturer with the lowest costs and widest distribution networks. Why are almost all electronics being manufactured in places like China? Why did Dell - with its notorious lack of actual R&D - become the giant of the consumer PC market? Why is Wal-Mart a huge success? Answer: they all offer the same items as other retailers, but at bigger scale and hence a lower price.
This is how the fashion industry works
Bully for the fashion industry. It works that way in the restaurant industry too. But that's not exactly where patents are an issue, are they? I hope we can all agree that most industries - least of all technology - are NOT very much like the fashion industry...
the notion that "big guys will steal your precious ideas" is shown to be bogus.
Citation definitely needed. I can point to my above examples of "big and cheap wins the day when selling functionally identical goods" as my examples. What are yours?
I you read my original post - or TFA - you would realize I was talking about the amount of spectrum in MHz, not its specific frequency.
According to the report, the "wrong hands" with control of spectrum that isn't being used or is underutilized are:
Almost all of the above spectrum is in the less-desirable 2 GHz+ ranges. Clearwire may be underutilizing, but Lightsquared and Dish haven't gotten to launch their services yet so you can't really say it's underutilized when it's still in process of being developed.
All in all, this report actually seems to make the case of the big carriers that there is still a shortage of "good" (especially less than 1 GHz) spectrum for broadband. Much of that is locked up by the broadcasters for stuff that is comparatively useless (anyone watching UHF television still these days?) versus having it available for mobile broadband.
It's a darker side of the Occam's Razor - you get rid of unnecessary things, sure, but how do you determine whether they are unnecessary?
This is where the Sherlock Holmes principle comes into play: "Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Hotspot add-on plans are nothing more than a means to double charge you for the same data service you already have.
I think your perspective makes sense. However, I can tell you how the cellphone companies look at it:
"I bought a ticket to an all-you-can-eat buffet for $X. But I brought along a big Tupperware bucket to more food into also. How DARE those bastards make me pay $X + $Y?"
Not saying it's right or wrong, but telling you what the rationalization is for tethering plans...
I was actually planning on paying for tethering and dropping my land line internet once sprint brought 4g to my city.
I feel your pain but I don't understand why the smart, otherwise technically savvy people on Slashdot seem to not understand this:
Wireless is not and will not be a replacement for wireline broadband. They are fundamentally different economically and technically.
With wireline (cable/DSL/FiOS/leased line/whatever) broadband, an ISP can cram as much data down each of those pipes as their upstream/downstream terminal gear (VDSL, DOCSIS 3.0, GPON, etc.) can handle and their upstream bandwidth can take. Bandwidth allowances to individual customers have comparatively small impact on other users, so you can get very high speeds and large data caps
With wireless, ISPs are functionally limited by their available licensed spectrum within each market area. Currently there is more thirst for cellular data than there is available spectrum, so in most cellsites in any moderately populated area, you are going to be fighting for bandwidth with everyone who is streaming HD NetFlix. You can solve that with more spectrum, but at least in the US, spectrum coasts a s**tload of money, and there is a shortage of it available to the wireless providers already. You could help the issue with more cell towers, but those cost a lot of money to put up and even if you want to spend the cash, in many areas all the tinfoil hat brigades complain about their cell service but then make carriers go through three years of environmental impact studies to put more towers up if ever.
So for practical purposes, wireless bandwidth is a much more constrained resource than wireline bandwidth is, and what each user "eats" may be taking off the plate of the next user, so that's why you get caps/throttling/whatever. There is no secret conspiracy to make wireless users' lives miserable, all the carriers have these same frustrating data policies because... they all have to deal with the same spectrum limitations, regulatory limitations, and the need to make money.
This statement presumes that our votes actually mean *anything*.
I know it's cool and all to be cynical, but please provide your factual evidence that there is massive electoral fraud sufficient to sway every election and therefore that our votes in the United States don't "mean anything." Otherwise, our votes do in fact mean *everything* to how the executive and legislative branches of our state and Federal governments are constituted. You or I may not like who gets elected, but that's called ... you know... democracy.
You need to create an environment where someone with a good idea can work on it and turn it into a success (or at least try). Where you can work on interesting things, instead of spending all day every day figuring out how to advertise to people. ... All the new CEO has to do is attract good talent and get out of their way. Remove their barriers that are distracting them from day to day.
No offense, but Google is just now belatedly realizing that this is not what you should do. They are shutting down "products" left and right because for years they have greenlit seemingly every neat idea that an engineer had, and basically none of them except AdWords and Android have positively impacted the bottom line. We would all like to work at companies like you describe, but it turns out that creating that type of environment doesn't help unless you do have managers who are exactly "barriers" to the bad ideas and letting the good ones through. And those are very hard to find...
In finance 101, the goal of a company is always to increase its share price to make daytraders happy. It is never to make money.
Very, very, very incorrect. I know it must seem that way sometimes but if you do actually take Finance 101 sometime - and I actually did as part of my MBA - or work in a large public corporation, you will find that the truth is quite different.
First, nobody gives a shit about day traders. Second, a public company's responsibility is to its shareholders, the vast numerical majority of which are not daytraders or even shmoes like you and me, but large institutional investors. These companies buy millions of shares and typically hold them for years at a time. They have two interests in a stock: 1.) if the company pays dividends that those dividends are as large as possible; and 2.) the price of the stock itself will appreciate faster than the market average so the managers of those funds look smart to their investors.
Even if it doesn't seem like it, CEOs do have bosses, and they are the fund managers who own zillions and zillions of shares, enough such that if they get pissed enough they can vote in a new board of directors who will fire the CEO. These investors want to hold the stock for many years but they need to show regular evidence that the company's management is doing the "right thing," so they put pressure on to see each quarter's dividend payments to be equal or greater than the last quarter's, and for the company's share price to rise over time faster than inflation at a minimum, and faster than the market average ideally. So ultimately it is not a short term view but all companies do have short-term milestones along the way. So that's why it seems that every company's view is short term.
I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of where all that unlit fiber is. Virtually all that unlit fiber is long-haul trunks running between metro areas, not last-mile deployments. These companies laid fiber during the dot-com boom to support backbone networks, not home/end-user ISP service. It's not like everyone has a fiber optic cable running to their house and nobody wants to light it up and provide service... that Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is simply not there for the vast majority of US residential users. And in areas where copper to the home has been replaced with FTTH (e.g. Verizon's FiOS service areas), it has proven to be marginally profitable or unprofitable. So the existence of all that dark fiber doesn't bring you or me any closer to getting a gigabit drop to the home.
There is no unholy conspiracy by telcos, cable MSOs, wireless providers, etc. to deny rural users broadband. The payback just isn't there for those businesses, plain and simple.
And it isn't a question of allowing other providers to use the incumbent's fiber... in nearly all places in the US, that fiber simply isn't there to share if you wanted to. For the typical US residential location, you have three wires going into your house. One is a copper wire from the telco, another is a coaxial cable from the cableco, and the third is a copper cable delivering electricity. You can install equipment on each of those infrastructures to deliver Internet of some kind, but it's not the same thing as FTTH, which means a truck roll and an infrastructure upgrade.
So as far as fiber to the home goes, let's look at where this is happening (or not happening) in the US. Verizon did it with FiOS, starting with high-population density areas in the most population-dense part of the country... and then they stopped building out new areas. They said publicly that they needed to start making more money on the areas they had already fibered up before they could think about extending it to more rural areas. AT&T didn't even go fiber to the home in their Uverse areas, they went fiber to the neighborhood then VDSL over copper to the home. Qwest/CenturyLink, covering the lowest population density parts of the country, never even bothered trying. Comcast and the other cablecos are still trying to jam more bandwidth down their existing coaxial physical plant.
Why? The truth of the matter is it costs a heckuva lot of money to run fiber to your door (at least in a country like the US). These organizations all have lots of people who know the costs of these efforts and know what people are willing to pay for that broadband/TV/whatever... and they just don't add up to be profitable for those companies. Simple as that.
With that being said - Google can do it.. but only because they can do it and not make money off it. It's a science project for them, not a business, so they can throw cash at it and say "meh." But that only goes so far - at some point the money they're throwing away does actually start to noticeably impact their profitability, so don't expect Google to do this forever and everywhere. Enjoy it if you have it, but otherwise just understand that unless installing new fiber to the door gets a lot less expensive, or people start being willing to pay a LOT more for their broadband... it just won't get done by for-profit companies. And if the government does it, then the bill is in effect shifted to all the taxpayers rather than individual subscribers.
But if you don't buy enough songs, you get on the list where they sue you and accuse you publicly of possessing child pornography. And that is extortion.
To get #3 they won't have to push them retail, just push them on corporate which has always been MS territory anyway.
Except... it's, like, the exact opposite of that.
Four years ago smartphone purchases were driven by businesses. BlackBerries were the early smartphone leader, and MS entered the game with WinCE then Windows Mobile, which was chock full of enterprise-centric features. WM5/6 was an atrocious piece of dung from a usability standpoint, but it gathered a fair amount of enterprise IT mind/marketshare and was actually the preferred smartphone app developer platform until...
The iPhone came along and actually made a smartphone user-friendly, sparking the whole "consumerization of IT" trend we're still seeing today with mobile devices. By two years ago, the majority of smartphone purchasers were consumers instead of businesses, which meant that the way to win marketshare was by appealing to consumers. BlackBerry and Windows Mobile were still mainly aimed at business... and iPhone OS and Android originally had absolutely terrible (practically non-existent) enterprise feature support... but nonetheless iOS and Android became the big winners in the smartphone wars. (Later versions of iOS and Android started to make them more enterprise-friendly, but their primary appeal is still to consumers.)
This in turn spurred Microsoft to actually ditch their enterprise-friendly WM6.5 platform and replace it with the consumer-centric Windows Phone 7, ditching app backward compatibility, enterprise administration and lots of other corporate features in the process. So they have in fact done THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what you're suggesting. RIM by contrast stuck with their super enterprise-friendly OS but tried to bolt-consumer friendly features on top of it... and you can see how well that is(n't) working out. Neither MS nor RIM are in great strategic shape at the moment, but given the trends in the mobile world I think Microsoft's abandonment of enterprise in favor of consumers is actually a better long-term play in terms of driving volume and application development.
Your typical American ... has no capacity for logical thought ... Teaching your typical USian football-and-church-and-cable-news trash is done in much the same way as you would approach someone in a classroom environment who has been diagnosed as SLD (slow learning disorder).
Add to that the fact that I live in "the Great State of Alabama"
Hello, and welcome to the United States! We collectively as a nation are sorry that you ended up in Alabama - we tried to let them secede 150 years ago but Abraham Lincoln ruined it.
However, we feel it only right to let you know that if you think Alabama is representative of the United States as a whole, you are neither as brilliant nor geographically savvy as you think you are. It turns out that statistically, we "USians" as a country 1.) are more represented by the populations of large metro areas on the coasts like New York or San Francisco than we are by Alabama, and 2.) still somehow manage to drive most of the world's technology economy despite our massive learning disabilities which you have so politely pointed out to us.
Regardless, we are sorry that you have been subject to the dual misfortunes of being forced against your will to live in the US, and having to suffer through being so much smarter than everyone around you. We "USians" - that's what we call ourselves too and we don't at all think you're a douchebag for using that made-up term - hope that whatever nation you come from which is blessedly free of racists, evangelists and "football"-obsessed dullards surely misses your presence. Hopefully you can return there soon!
P.S. Seriously, not even other Southerners in the US consider Alabama a leader in anything other than college football, Federal welfare subsidies and advanced tooth decay.
Complete, Open Source implementations such as Cyanogen exist, and are relatively popular.
Relatively is the key word there. Cyanogen or other OSS variants of Android are popular as after-market installations for the more computer-literate and tinkering-inclined Android phone users. But to my knowledge none of them are included on shipping mass-market devices, or have ever gone through carrier acceptance testing that is required to sell them through those channels. I think there is a pretty broad gap between you or me installing Cyanogen and a big phone manufacturer basing their investment in a new phone on it.
So now that I've answered your questions, how about answering mine? If we do away with Affirmative Action, what is your brilliant idea for upholding the Civil Rights Act and preventing discrimination? When you run across a company that is 98% white, including all of the executives and even mid-level management, and its painfully obvious that there is discrimination going on, what do you do? Nothing?
Fair question but one that is so speculative in the details as to be very difficult to answer. What are the demographics of the area? It may be reasonable to expect that a company's demographics follow that of its hiring area(s)... and some towns are 95%+ white, and others are 75%+ minority. Statistically, a fairly hiring company should mirror the demographics of its locations, assuming it is large enough to have statistical sampling be relevant. If you think you have to legislate fair hiring, then say that all companies over x00 employees need to at least mirror their operating area's demographics in minority full-time employees. When it comes to college admissions, etc., I believe that mandated minority admissions should be as a bonus - e.g. you can mandate that your student body be X% ethnicity Y, but that should be done by expanding class sizes rather than denying equally qualified students of ethnicity Z.
But the current rules seem to me to be a straw man (in the true classical sense) with little real-world application in either the direction for or against "fairness." Nobody seems to be going after Microsoft, Google or Apple for their grossly disproportionate share of whites and Asians vs. blacks, Latinos or Native Americans. Conversely, nobody has attacked BET, or your neighborhood ethnic restaurants for their lack of balanced hiring. And when you talk about companies needing to have a certain percentage of "executives" be minorities (or women, which are a majority), that is a complete fail. Jockeying for executive jobs at big companies is as competitive a sport as you will find off an athletic field, and mandating the "winners" is as inane as suggesting that the results of the Olympics should be distributed by racial quotas.
I guess my big quibble here is that to be fair, you need to either say that:
So to answer your question - I think proportional representation at a statistically significant level is reasonable. Your thoughts?