But it's interesting to me that you seem to imply that you are happy to do business with an evil company, but not a stupid one.
Interesting point and worth an explanation. I don't generally tar all of Sony with the same brush as Sony Music. I work in a large enough company to know that one group usually has nothing to do with the others, so I don't hold division A responsible for the misdeeds of division B. For example, I seriously doubt the people at Sony making televisions have any involvement with or clout over the people at the record label.
Therefore I choose to think of Sony Music as evil and Sony Computer Entertainment as either negligent or (if they did indeed leave passwords in plaintext) stupid. I find it far more fair to boycott the products of the division I dislike - and I don't buy Sony Music products - than to boycott all the products of the company as a whole, so at least my displeasure is registered against the particular offending organization.
What do you mean "even Sony"? This is the same company that decided a rootkit on their audio CDs was a great way to stop piracy.
Putting rootkits on CDs is evil. Storing passwords in plaintext is stupid. Being evil doesn't make you stupid.
Exactly how much do you really think Sony cares about you or your information?
They care exactly to the extent that they can be subject to an expensive class-action lawsuit or government fines over the exposure. So, again, Sony's consumer-unfriendly attitude does not indicate that they would take reckless chances with protecting information that they face potential liability claims over. I don't get why their history with rootkits has anything to do with the fact that I seriously doubt they stored passwords in plaintext.
Go ahead, ask me why I never bought a Playstation, or any other Sony device
As a previously happy PS3 user, I'm infuriated at their shoddy handling of this whole thing. The delay in notifying customers was inexcusable, and I still don't understand how passwords could have been compromised... I refuse to believe that even Sony would have stored them in plaintext. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they were stored in hashes but Sony is concerned that the hashed passwords are subject to brute force attacks. I spent a good chunk of last night changing all my online passwords that were the same as the one used in my PS3 account, and that meant dozens of accounts. (Thank goodness none of them were bank-related.) I guess that I should have moved to a system of unique passwords for each site before, and this finally forced me to do it.
I am struggling to find a bright spot anywhere in this, but if I were to find one it would be that Sony must understand how badly they have pooched this situation. I would expect some serious mea culpas and free crap out of them (like free PlayStation Plus for a year or something) out of this. I don't know whether I actually want that, but it should be interesting to watch them grovel for my online trust and/or business back.
Why on earth would you have iTunes on a work computer?
You may need to have it if your employer uses iOS products. iTunes is required to activate an iPhone (or iPad), as well as for backing up the on-device storage and doing certain other things. I have a work-issued iPhone and I'm actually required to have iTunes on my work PC for syncing the iPhone and loading on corporate-signed apps from outside the public app store.
Since you worked on the iPhone, you should know enough to understand that AT&T's pitch on buying T-Mobile is that they're saying the bottleneck is spectrum, and there's not enough new spectrum available today so the only way they can get it is by acquisition of existing license holders. This isn't about the number of towers (these would be consolidated in any acquisition anyway), it's about the depth of licensed spectrum available... especially since with LTE deeper contiguous spectrum increases the network efficiency in a greater than linear fashion.
AT&T drastically underestimated the network load of the iPhone when it first launched. The way the original iPhone handled keepalives and push messaging certainly didn't help - as you should know.;-) Since then they have tried to make up for it, and while they have only partially succeeded, anyone with cellular industry experience knows how difficult and ridiculously expensive putting in new towers, buying new spectrum and upgrading backhaul to every tower is - and that there are no simple "duh they should just upgrade the network" answers in the real-world of wireless.
All the big cellular carriers in the US spend tens of billions of dollars every year on their network. I know everybody on Slashdot prefers to imagine them as Uncle Scrooge McDuck on his money lake or something, and but for whatever reason you choose to hate them (there are many) lack of network upgrade investments is not one.
No, it should be buy a phone, then buy service, like the Europeans have. One phone works on all their providers
The US market is the way it is for a reason - believe it or not, it's what Joe and Jane Sixpack Cellphone User actually want.
Nothing is stopping American cellphone users from buying a GSM phone unsubsidized and unlocked at full price. They can they price-shop between T-Mobile (who even offers SIM-only plans at a nice discount) and AT&T (although they don't offer a SIM-only discount, the tradeoff may be worthwhile in some areas for coverage). Almost any GSM phone can be used on either network, although it may not get 3G data due to T-Mobile's wacky 1700 MHz band for UMTS.*
The fact of the matter is that most people in the US - rightly or wrongly - want to pay the kind of price for a phone that entails a carrier subsidy and contract. If you want a $650 phone for $300, you are going to have contract, simple math.
BTW as far as lack of interoperability, that's not some anti-consumer conspiracy. It was a technology choice for Sprint and Verizon to choose CDMA technology instead of GSM like pretty much all of Europe and AT&T/T-Mobile in the US. GSM and CDMA each have their technology tradeoffs - you see one of the pluses for CDMA in Verizon's voice quality - while the notable downsides include a lack of compatibility with the rest of the world unless you buy a dual-mode CDMA/GSM phone.
* Yes I know AT&T is proposing to buy T-Mobile. This may not be true next year. But I'm talking about the market as it is today and as it has been for the last 5+ years.
Instead it CUT it's deployment spending over the past few years
[citation needed]
That would explain a lot but I looked it up and there appears to be no indication that's the culprit (not sure what is). Here's a linkor twoor three that says AT&T has increased its wireless capital spending. I found one article claiming what you say in the headline but if you read the article the jist is that the reduction in capital spending was due to a slowdown in their U-verse home fiber buildout.
Hard to miss in Atlanta, it's the building with the giant gold dome as a roof.
I think you mean capitol with an "o." The capital with an "a" generally refers to the city or district where the seat of government is, and the capitol is the actual buiding. Pedanticism FTW!
The rates you're getting sound very good - much better than typical US prepaid rates. However, the pricing from the submission is a typical Slashdot sensationalist headline (and hackjob Infoworld article) and is not really comparable. The actual pricing from TFA is:
$25 for 500MB
$15 for 100MB
$5 for 10MB
So it's only $500/GB if you buy it in 10 MB increments... kind of like how you'll pay about $150 for a bottle of bourbon if you buy it as shots vs. $25 buying the whole bottle at the liquor store.* But pointing that out evidently doesn't generate outrage and pageviews. Again, not nearly as good as 1 Euro per GB, but also not "$500 per GB."
I know it's a lot to expect Slashdot to actually read things before posting, but I foolishly continue to hold out hope.
* Happy hour and dive bars excluded. Add 50% if you are in New York City and 100% if you are in a trendy bar in New York City. Just give up if you are in Tokyo.
10 million people aren't worth having as customers.
No, it means that the companies in question would lose money instead of making it by deploying those services to the low-population-density areas where those 10 million people live. Telcos do a ridiculous amount of data modeling, backed by years of results, to determine where they can make money by deploying infrastructure and where they can't. Some businesses require a certain customer density to recoup investment costs and this is one of them. It's not anything personal against the people who live in those areas, it's just economics.
While it's true that connectivity to remote areas is subsidized by taxpayers, remember that the Universal Service Fund in the US currently only pays for POTS connectivity, not broadband data. If we wanted the USF to subsidize 20 Mbps broadband everywhere, the bill would be passed by Congress onto users and we'd all be paying a lot more on our broadband service bills to subsidize that.
Any content written by a US government employee in the course of their job is public domain.
Not just false, but extremely, incredibly, amazingly false.
While US government information is not assigned copyright protection per se, that does not make it public domain in terms of rights for distribution. The US government has the rights by law to restrict dissemination of government information based on its classification of the sensitivity of that information. There are extensive and rigorous legal and operational protections for classified information in the United States as well as in most other countries. So in your example above when Amazon talks about Amazon "not control[ling] all the rights" to the content, that's what they mean, not its copyright status.
But DRM is just plain evil and no amount of it is acceptable.
So your position is that any technology a software publisher use to validate that you are authorized to use the software is inherently "evil?" The "honor system" is the only thing you find acceptable?
Anyone that tells you they are paying for music means they are still on a dial-up connection at home or are simply ignorant.
Um... some of us do actually feel some strange obligation to, you know, pay for stuff we enjoy. I buy songs off the Amazon MP3 marketplace at least once a month when I find stuff that I like.
it is the way human social dynamics work - the easiest, most accommodating, most open gets adopted eventually.
Exactly, that's why 10+ years into the MP3 player market, the vast majority of devices sold are Archos, SanDisk or iRiver devices. Just like the PC OS market is dominated by the "easiest... most open" product, Microsoft Windows DOES NOT COMPUTE DOES NOT COMPUTE NOMAD WILL SELF DESTRUCT
This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.
I see this all the time on Slashdot but I don't see why it's a bizarre idea that companies want to grow. Many companies want to grow because it makes them more efficient - better economies of scale, better leverage with their suppliers, etc. But the main reason is just math and investment 101.
All companies are not required to grow, but public companies typically do because it makes their stock attractive. Public companies are owned by their shareholders and have a responsibility to maximize the value for their shareholders. Shareholders have their choice of companies to buy shares in, and they will pick the companies they expect to provide them the best return on their investment.
Why does growth play into it? When you buy a stock, you have paid money for it, and the way you get money back (your return on investment) is if a.) the company pays a dividend per share, or b.) you sell the stock to someone else.
If a company pays dividends, then the return on that dividend is always paying the shareholder back and provides a baseline value for the share - but dividends by themselves don't mean enough to make a huge return... companies that don't grow but pay dividends are more like buying a savings bond, and are usually don't offer a very good long-term return. If a company doesn't pay dividends - and many tech companies don't - the only way you make money is if somebody else is willing to pay you more for that stock than you bought it for. The only way typically THAT happens is if the company grows and increases in value. Even companies that do pay dividends want to grow so they can likely grow their future dividend payments in order to provide a greater return to shareholders. At a minimum, if earnings don't grow faster than inflation, they are actually shrinking. Hence the push for growth.
So in (oversimplified) summation - growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.
If I purchase something, I own it and therefore have the right to use it as I see fit, not as someone else does. The way Apple wants it to work is that you are in effect leasing from them.
I see this argument on Slashdot all the time and it drives me batty. Not being able to do everything you want with a product != you don't own it.
For example, I purchased a car. Every time the GPS in the dash comes on, I have to touch yes to agree to a screen that says I shouldn't be fiddling with it while I'm driving. I hate that but I can't turn it off. Similarly, there is an annoying beeping sound that comes on when I'm driving without my seatbelt on. That's irritating and I wish I could turn it off but I can't do that either. Does this mean I'm leasing my car? Oh, and while I'm at it, if you want to get technical, I'm sure my auto mechanic might be able to turn those things off... but that's analogous to "jailbreaking" - which I could do on my phone as well. So how do these manufacturer restrictions mean I don't own my car?
So you really think micropayments whenever there is contention would keep this network functioning? How do you pay for the towers, backup generators and electricity which have costs every day even if there's no incoming revenue? The people who run and fix the network might also want to get paid. Do people look on Google for their customer support when there's an outage? And what if you need, say, billions of dollars for new equipment to upgrade like carriers do?
There is actually a reason cellphone service costs money. The vast majority goes into buying spectrum, equipment and keeping things running. If you cut out all the marketing and sales, that's still just a tiny amount off your current bill.
Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products.
I happen to agree with you that many of Microsoft's new produts are big improvements over their previous entries when evaluated individually. However, I think Microsoft's problem is that new mass-market computer products can't be evaluated as "standalone" anymore. It's all about the "ecosystem." This is why the Zune and pretty much every other standalone MP3 player has such a tiny marketshare, and why Microsoft tablets have lost out as well.
In the brave new computing world (His Steveness likes to call it the "post-PC world"), success is about an ecosystem of products that work together, and the more you use them all, the greater the value. Only three companies really get this: Apple, Google and Microsoft.
MSFT has been dominant in the PC world for so long because they had a brilliant business-centric ecosystem: Windows + Office + Exchange. For a while, they even had a smartphone dominance (remember 2007?) because Windows Mobile hooked into those things and mainly business users bought smartphones. But their consumer "media"/portable ecosystem sucked: Zune + ZunePass + Underpants Gnomes? Or even PlaysForSureAsLongAsItsNotAZune? (To be fair: they also held something of a consumer PC dominance with an ecosystem of Windows + Visual Studio + DirectX, but that has not helped them with Zune or phones.)
In the new world where mobile devices (including MP3 players) are based on consumer ecosystems, Apple has: MacOS X + iLife Applications + iOS + iTunes App Store + even Apple TV now that all work together and add collective value... the more parts of that ecosystem you use, the better they work together and the greater value you as a user get. (e.g. an iPhone/iPad syncs up all your iTunes music/videos and iPhoto pics brilliantly and you can play them on the Apple TV as well.) Similarly, Google has Google search + amazing Google apps (Gmail, their first "killer app;" GTalk; Google Maps; Picasa; Google Docs; etc.) + Android + marketplaces + Google TV on some newer TVs. These two ecosystems have sucked up the new consumer markets and are now bleeding over even further into enterprise spaces. Google even has Chromium to enter the PC space... you can see how they really "get" the ecosystem thing and both companies are now duking it out for the throne. (I also think this is why you see RIM losing out in the smartphone market now... they nailed one part of the equation but had no answer for the others.)
To your point... these are better products now from Microsoft, and there is more of a consumer ecosystem today (XBOX + Windows Phone 7 WP7 App Store + Bing + Silverlight) than there was before. But Microsoft's problem is they didn't "get" the consumer ecosystem space until too late, and their offerings have all been a day late and a dollar short.
P.S.: you'll note that neither Apple nor Google have "gotten" social networking as part of their ecosystem. (Microsoft at least had the sense to buy part of Facebook a few years ago.) I firmly believe that if either Apple or Google ever co-opt social networking through partnerships or acquisitions, the game will be over.
P.P.S.: when some Gartner consultant reads this and figures out what the "big strategic issue" is for Microsoft and puts it in a research note, please send me a check.
If nothing else, wikileaks made our rulers look like idiots, and their army's stopped supporting them.
That's right! Wikileaks made the US government look bad, and they stopped obeying the President. Err... I mean, they showed the Saudis secretly dealing with the US, and their military... um...
I mean, Wikileaks showed a lot of malfeasance by the Egyptian government! Oh, er, no. That revolution came after weeks of massive civilian protests. Rather, Wikileaks has shown a trove of cables about the Libyan government showing... oh, wait, it didn't. Er, I mean, Wikileaks really skewered the Algerian government... uh.... I got nothing.
As the GP said: the former head of MI6 suggested that there was a relationship between the Internet (and its attendant weaking of control over communications and power) and the rise of revolutions in politically oppressed nations. You may personally applaud Wikileaks, but the recent rash of revolutions has NOTHING to do with Wikileaks directly - just as it has nothing to do with the previous US administration's efforts to "spread democracy in the Middle East as some have suggested. Let's applaud the Internet as a whole and its users - and not single out individual actors here.
Someone suggested that the HAARP array (or something like it) was used to reach out and "crush" the Russian's test rocket in mid flight. Status-quo defenders will snicker and laugh at such a proposition
Yes. Yes I will snicker and laugh. It's either because a.) I am a brainwashed or naive tool of a massive government conspiracy which thinks that its best use of time is to rebut posters on Slashdot; or b.) I'm just someone who knows enough about basic RF physics to conclude that the conspiracy theories about HAARP are all total crap.
It is left to the reader and their judicious use of Occam's Razor to determine which of the above is more likely.
P.S. Private message me for the location of the freezer where we keep the remains of the Cigarette Smoking Man for experiments with the Black Oil!
And another thing - I don't know if you've heard, but the head of Haliburton is no longer running the government.
Are you sure?
YES. YES WE ARE. Yes we are sure that Barack Obama is not, and has never been, the head of Halliburton. Yes we are sure that the President is actually running the government and not some cabal of Dick Cheney, J.R. Ewing, Mr. Burns and the Daleks. While I'm at it - and this will come as a shock to many, many Slashdotters - we are also sure that the moon landing was not faked, NORAD did not shoot down Santa Claus in 1986 and neither the Jews, Freemasons nor the Yale Skull and Bones Club are trying to beam mind control waves at you that force you to use the iTunes App Store.
Most Slashdotters should be smart enough to exercise critical thinking skills. Please just take off the damn tinfoil hat and try it.
P.S. - I'm sure I'm committing karma suicide already, so while I'm at it: Julian Assange is being extradited to Sweden because two women, rightly or wrongly, are claiming he sexually assaulted them. Not because the NSA, CIA, FBI, US Postal Service, MPAA, Major League Baseball, the Stonecutters or any foreign entity are secretly controlling the Swedish government. To be fair to the conspiracy-minded, none of the above rules out a sinister plot by the former members of ABBA.
The US constitution doesn't permit warrantless seizure of property, either, but the DHS can do it within 100 miles of the border.
The Constitution is not as malleable as this example appears to show it is. The Constitution protects citizens against "unreasonable" search and seizure, not warrantless search and seizure. If courts have determined that within 100 miles of the border there is a high incidence of smuggling, human trafficking etc. that justifies warrantless seizure in some cases then legally that is considered "reasonable."
It's funny to me how both the American far Right and the left-leaning Slashdot both somehow see the Obama administration as this engine of terror and lawlessness that is unstoppable in its quest to deprive them of life, liberty and property (real or downloaded)... Honestly, the weather here is really not that bad once you take off the tinfoil hat.
Yeah that sounds like a good idea because everything [amtrak.com] else [usps.com] That the federal government has become involved in works so well.
I'm about the last one to suggest the Federal government manages much of anything cost-effectively, but the two examples cited above are not a good representation.
Specifically, that's because Amtrak and the US Postal Service are government-sponsored organizations that lose money because the government is subsidizing them to do things that inherently are money-losers but are seen as in the public interest (inter-city rail service and delivering postal mail, respectively). Amtrak is under a lot of pressure to stop losing money and has basically said "fine, let us focus on our money-making Eastern Seaboard commuter routes and we'll drop all those Seattle-To-Chicago boondogles" but the government has told them no. The USPS has similarly tried to cut losses by proposing things that make business sense such as increased postage rates and reduced delivery days, but has faced a great deal of public/government pressure not to.
To your point, I believe the place of the government is actually to do those things that need to be paid for by taxpayers as an infrastructure/service because no sane business can make a profit doing them... and USPS/Amtrak qualify in this sense. But if someone else can make money doing something that the government loses money on (I'm looking at you, SpaceX...) then the government should get out of that business to the greatest degree possible.
Even if you scrape up the money to buy a geosynchronous satellite and move it, it still costs a fair amount of money to keep the satellite in orbit and on station. You also will need to have acquired an orbital slot to where you want to move it. And you also have to maintain one or more earth stations from which the data traffic relayed up to/back from the satellite has to travel and all the associated bandwidth. Much more expensive (most likely) are "landing rights" for each country where you want to provide service - each nation controls rights to the airwaves over their territory, and you will need to license it - and that ain't cheap (and in many countries, especially in the developing world they will shake you down for a "joint venture" or foreign investment in their country to get the licenses). Oh, and of course there is (presumably) a need to manufacture satellite data terminals and subsidize them enough so that the people in these countries can afford them...
And they want to provide free service, or at least service affordable in developing countries? Are the underpants gnomes their business case consultants?
I really do love the idea here but it sounds like yet another exercise in wishful thinking where nobody with any real knowledge of the satellite industry bothered to think it through. Not a good use of time or money.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's interesting to me that you seem to imply that you are happy to do business with an evil company, but not a stupid one.
Interesting point and worth an explanation. I don't generally tar all of Sony with the same brush as Sony Music. I work in a large enough company to know that one group usually has nothing to do with the others, so I don't hold division A responsible for the misdeeds of division B. For example, I seriously doubt the people at Sony making televisions have any involvement with or clout over the people at the record label.
Therefore I choose to think of Sony Music as evil and Sony Computer Entertainment as either negligent or (if they did indeed leave passwords in plaintext) stupid. I find it far more fair to boycott the products of the division I dislike - and I don't buy Sony Music products - than to boycott all the products of the company as a whole, so at least my displeasure is registered against the particular offending organization.
What do you mean "even Sony"? This is the same company that decided a rootkit on their audio CDs was a great way to stop piracy.
Putting rootkits on CDs is evil. Storing passwords in plaintext is stupid. Being evil doesn't make you stupid.
Exactly how much do you really think Sony cares about you or your information?
They care exactly to the extent that they can be subject to an expensive class-action lawsuit or government fines over the exposure. So, again, Sony's consumer-unfriendly attitude does not indicate that they would take reckless chances with protecting information that they face potential liability claims over. I don't get why their history with rootkits has anything to do with the fact that I seriously doubt they stored passwords in plaintext.
Go ahead, ask me why I never bought a Playstation, or any other Sony device
Is it OK if I don't?
As a previously happy PS3 user, I'm infuriated at their shoddy handling of this whole thing. The delay in notifying customers was inexcusable, and I still don't understand how passwords could have been compromised... I refuse to believe that even Sony would have stored them in plaintext. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they were stored in hashes but Sony is concerned that the hashed passwords are subject to brute force attacks. I spent a good chunk of last night changing all my online passwords that were the same as the one used in my PS3 account, and that meant dozens of accounts. (Thank goodness none of them were bank-related.) I guess that I should have moved to a system of unique passwords for each site before, and this finally forced me to do it.
I am struggling to find a bright spot anywhere in this, but if I were to find one it would be that Sony must understand how badly they have pooched this situation. I would expect some serious mea culpas and free crap out of them (like free PlayStation Plus for a year or something) out of this. I don't know whether I actually want that, but it should be interesting to watch them grovel for my online trust and/or business back.
Why on earth would you have iTunes on a work computer?
You may need to have it if your employer uses iOS products. iTunes is required to activate an iPhone (or iPad), as well as for backing up the on-device storage and doing certain other things. I have a work-issued iPhone and I'm actually required to have iTunes on my work PC for syncing the iPhone and loading on corporate-signed apps from outside the public app store.
Sorry, but as someone who worked on the iPhone
Since you worked on the iPhone, you should know enough to understand that AT&T's pitch on buying T-Mobile is that they're saying the bottleneck is spectrum, and there's not enough new spectrum available today so the only way they can get it is by acquisition of existing license holders. This isn't about the number of towers (these would be consolidated in any acquisition anyway), it's about the depth of licensed spectrum available... especially since with LTE deeper contiguous spectrum increases the network efficiency in a greater than linear fashion.
AT&T drastically underestimated the network load of the iPhone when it first launched. The way the original iPhone handled keepalives and push messaging certainly didn't help - as you should know. ;-) Since then they have tried to make up for it, and while they have only partially succeeded, anyone with cellular industry experience knows how difficult and ridiculously expensive putting in new towers, buying new spectrum and upgrading backhaul to every tower is - and that there are no simple "duh they should just upgrade the network" answers in the real-world of wireless.
Here's a thought: AT&T should upgrade their network.
Jebus, does nobody around here actually research anything before they post on it?
It turns out that AT&T has spent and is spending many billions of dollars on spectrum and equipment and backhaul for upgrading their network. So is Verizon. So is Sprint.
All the big cellular carriers in the US spend tens of billions of dollars every year on their network. I know everybody on Slashdot prefers to imagine them as Uncle Scrooge McDuck on his money lake or something, and but for whatever reason you choose to hate them (there are many) lack of network upgrade investments is not one.
No, it should be buy a phone, then buy service, like the Europeans have. One phone works on all their providers
The US market is the way it is for a reason - believe it or not, it's what Joe and Jane Sixpack Cellphone User actually want.
Nothing is stopping American cellphone users from buying a GSM phone unsubsidized and unlocked at full price. They can they price-shop between T-Mobile (who even offers SIM-only plans at a nice discount) and AT&T (although they don't offer a SIM-only discount, the tradeoff may be worthwhile in some areas for coverage). Almost any GSM phone can be used on either network, although it may not get 3G data due to T-Mobile's wacky 1700 MHz band for UMTS.*
The fact of the matter is that most people in the US - rightly or wrongly - want to pay the kind of price for a phone that entails a carrier subsidy and contract. If you want a $650 phone for $300, you are going to have contract, simple math.
BTW as far as lack of interoperability, that's not some anti-consumer conspiracy. It was a technology choice for Sprint and Verizon to choose CDMA technology instead of GSM like pretty much all of Europe and AT&T/T-Mobile in the US. GSM and CDMA each have their technology tradeoffs - you see one of the pluses for CDMA in Verizon's voice quality - while the notable downsides include a lack of compatibility with the rest of the world unless you buy a dual-mode CDMA/GSM phone.
* Yes I know AT&T is proposing to buy T-Mobile. This may not be true next year. But I'm talking about the market as it is today and as it has been for the last 5+ years.
Instead it CUT it's deployment spending over the past few years
[citation needed]
That would explain a lot but I looked it up and there appears to be no indication that's the culprit (not sure what is). Here's a link or two or three that says AT&T has increased its wireless capital spending. I found one article claiming what you say in the headline but if you read the article the jist is that the reduction in capital spending was due to a slowdown in their U-verse home fiber buildout.
Hard to miss in Atlanta, it's the building with the giant gold dome as a roof.
I think you mean capitol with an "o." The capital with an "a" generally refers to the city or district where the seat of government is, and the capitol is the actual buiding. Pedanticism FTW!
The rates you're getting sound very good - much better than typical US prepaid rates. However, the pricing from the submission is a typical Slashdot sensationalist headline (and hackjob Infoworld article) and is not really comparable. The actual pricing from TFA is:
So it's only $500/GB if you buy it in 10 MB increments ... kind of like how you'll pay about $150 for a bottle of bourbon if you buy it as shots vs. $25 buying the whole bottle at the liquor store.* But pointing that out evidently doesn't generate outrage and pageviews. Again, not nearly as good as 1 Euro per GB, but also not "$500 per GB."
I know it's a lot to expect Slashdot to actually read things before posting, but I foolishly continue to hold out hope.
* Happy hour and dive bars excluded. Add 50% if you are in New York City and 100% if you are in a trendy bar in New York City. Just give up if you are in Tokyo.
10 million people aren't worth having as customers.
No, it means that the companies in question would lose money instead of making it by deploying those services to the low-population-density areas where those 10 million people live. Telcos do a ridiculous amount of data modeling, backed by years of results, to determine where they can make money by deploying infrastructure and where they can't. Some businesses require a certain customer density to recoup investment costs and this is one of them. It's not anything personal against the people who live in those areas, it's just economics.
While it's true that connectivity to remote areas is subsidized by taxpayers, remember that the Universal Service Fund in the US currently only pays for POTS connectivity, not broadband data. If we wanted the USF to subsidize 20 Mbps broadband everywhere, the bill would be passed by Congress onto users and we'd all be paying a lot more on our broadband service bills to subsidize that.
Any content written by a US government employee in the course of their job is public domain.
Not just false, but extremely, incredibly, amazingly false.
While US government information is not assigned copyright protection per se, that does not make it public domain in terms of rights for distribution. The US government has the rights by law to restrict dissemination of government information based on its classification of the sensitivity of that information. There are extensive and rigorous legal and operational protections for classified information in the United States as well as in most other countries. So in your example above when Amazon talks about Amazon "not control[ling] all the rights" to the content, that's what they mean, not its copyright status.
But DRM is just plain evil and no amount of it is acceptable.
So your position is that any technology a software publisher use to validate that you are authorized to use the software is inherently "evil?" The "honor system" is the only thing you find acceptable?
Anyone that tells you they are paying for music means they are still on a dial-up connection at home or are simply ignorant.
Um... some of us do actually feel some strange obligation to, you know, pay for stuff we enjoy. I buy songs off the Amazon MP3 marketplace at least once a month when I find stuff that I like.
I guess I'm just ignorant and not as cool as you.
it is the way human social dynamics work - the easiest, most accommodating, most open gets adopted eventually.
Exactly, that's why 10+ years into the MP3 player market, the vast majority of devices sold are Archos, SanDisk or iRiver devices. Just like the PC OS market is dominated by the "easiest ... most open" product, Microsoft Windows DOES NOT COMPUTE DOES NOT COMPUTE NOMAD WILL SELF DESTRUCT
This bizarre notion we have in this country that all companies must always be earning more and more every year than before and always growing and profits must be more than any other company is unsustainable. It does no good for society and is the wrong way to go about things.
I see this all the time on Slashdot but I don't see why it's a bizarre idea that companies want to grow. Many companies want to grow because it makes them more efficient - better economies of scale, better leverage with their suppliers, etc. But the main reason is just math and investment 101.
All companies are not required to grow, but public companies typically do because it makes their stock attractive. Public companies are owned by their shareholders and have a responsibility to maximize the value for their shareholders. Shareholders have their choice of companies to buy shares in, and they will pick the companies they expect to provide them the best return on their investment.
Why does growth play into it? When you buy a stock, you have paid money for it, and the way you get money back (your return on investment) is if a.) the company pays a dividend per share, or b.) you sell the stock to someone else.
If a company pays dividends, then the return on that dividend is always paying the shareholder back and provides a baseline value for the share - but dividends by themselves don't mean enough to make a huge return ... companies that don't grow but pay dividends are more like buying a savings bond, and are usually don't offer a very good long-term return. If a company doesn't pay dividends - and many tech companies don't - the only way you make money is if somebody else is willing to pay you more for that stock than you bought it for. The only way typically THAT happens is if the company grows and increases in value. Even companies that do pay dividends want to grow so they can likely grow their future dividend payments in order to provide a greater return to shareholders. At a minimum, if earnings don't grow faster than inflation, they are actually shrinking. Hence the push for growth.
So in (oversimplified) summation - growth is what stockholders want to see. So public companies want to make their shareholders happy.
If I purchase something, I own it and therefore have the right to use it as I see fit, not as someone else does. The way Apple wants it to work is that you are in effect leasing from them.
I see this argument on Slashdot all the time and it drives me batty. Not being able to do everything you want with a product != you don't own it.
For example, I purchased a car. Every time the GPS in the dash comes on, I have to touch yes to agree to a screen that says I shouldn't be fiddling with it while I'm driving. I hate that but I can't turn it off. Similarly, there is an annoying beeping sound that comes on when I'm driving without my seatbelt on. That's irritating and I wish I could turn it off but I can't do that either. Does this mean I'm leasing my car? Oh, and while I'm at it, if you want to get technical, I'm sure my auto mechanic might be able to turn those things off ... but that's analogous to "jailbreaking" - which I could do on my phone as well. So how do these manufacturer restrictions mean I don't own my car?
So you really think micropayments whenever there is contention would keep this network functioning? How do you pay for the towers, backup generators and electricity which have costs every day even if there's no incoming revenue? The people who run and fix the network might also want to get paid. Do people look on Google for their customer support when there's an outage? And what if you need, say, billions of dollars for new equipment to upgrade like carriers do?
There is actually a reason cellphone service costs money. The vast majority goes into buying spectrum, equipment and keeping things running. If you cut out all the marketing and sales, that's still just a tiny amount off your current bill.
Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products.
I happen to agree with you that many of Microsoft's new produts are big improvements over their previous entries when evaluated individually. However, I think Microsoft's problem is that new mass-market computer products can't be evaluated as "standalone" anymore. It's all about the "ecosystem." This is why the Zune and pretty much every other standalone MP3 player has such a tiny marketshare, and why Microsoft tablets have lost out as well.
In the brave new computing world (His Steveness likes to call it the "post-PC world"), success is about an ecosystem of products that work together, and the more you use them all, the greater the value. Only three companies really get this: Apple, Google and Microsoft.
MSFT has been dominant in the PC world for so long because they had a brilliant business-centric ecosystem: Windows + Office + Exchange. For a while, they even had a smartphone dominance (remember 2007?) because Windows Mobile hooked into those things and mainly business users bought smartphones. But their consumer "media"/portable ecosystem sucked: Zune + ZunePass + Underpants Gnomes? Or even PlaysForSureAsLongAsItsNotAZune? (To be fair: they also held something of a consumer PC dominance with an ecosystem of Windows + Visual Studio + DirectX, but that has not helped them with Zune or phones.)
In the new world where mobile devices (including MP3 players) are based on consumer ecosystems, Apple has: MacOS X + iLife Applications + iOS + iTunes App Store + even Apple TV now that all work together and add collective value ... the more parts of that ecosystem you use, the better they work together and the greater value you as a user get. (e.g. an iPhone/iPad syncs up all your iTunes music/videos and iPhoto pics brilliantly and you can play them on the Apple TV as well.) Similarly, Google has Google search + amazing Google apps (Gmail, their first "killer app;" GTalk; Google Maps; Picasa; Google Docs; etc.) + Android + marketplaces + Google TV on some newer TVs. These two ecosystems have sucked up the new consumer markets and are now bleeding over even further into enterprise spaces. Google even has Chromium to enter the PC space... you can see how they really "get" the ecosystem thing and both companies are now duking it out for the throne. (I also think this is why you see RIM losing out in the smartphone market now... they nailed one part of the equation but had no answer for the others.)
To your point ... these are better products now from Microsoft, and there is more of a consumer ecosystem today (XBOX + Windows Phone 7 WP7 App Store + Bing + Silverlight) than there was before. But Microsoft's problem is they didn't "get" the consumer ecosystem space until too late, and their offerings have all been a day late and a dollar short.
P.S.: you'll note that neither Apple nor Google have "gotten" social networking as part of their ecosystem. (Microsoft at least had the sense to buy part of Facebook a few years ago.) I firmly believe that if either Apple or Google ever co-opt social networking through partnerships or acquisitions, the game will be over.
P.P.S.: when some Gartner consultant reads this and figures out what the "big strategic issue" is for Microsoft and puts it in a research note, please send me a check.
If nothing else, wikileaks made our rulers look like idiots, and their army's stopped supporting them.
That's right! Wikileaks made the US government look bad, and they stopped obeying the President. Err... I mean, they showed the Saudis secretly dealing with the US, and their military ... um...
I mean, Wikileaks showed a lot of malfeasance by the Egyptian government! Oh, er, no. That revolution came after weeks of massive civilian protests. Rather, Wikileaks has shown a trove of cables about the Libyan government showing... oh, wait, it didn't. Er, I mean, Wikileaks really skewered the Algerian government... uh.... I got nothing.
As the GP said: the former head of MI6 suggested that there was a relationship between the Internet (and its attendant weaking of control over communications and power) and the rise of revolutions in politically oppressed nations. You may personally applaud Wikileaks, but the recent rash of revolutions has NOTHING to do with Wikileaks directly - just as it has nothing to do with the previous US administration's efforts to "spread democracy in the Middle East as some have suggested. Let's applaud the Internet as a whole and its users - and not single out individual actors here.
Someone suggested that the HAARP array (or something like it) was used to reach out and "crush" the Russian's test rocket in mid flight. Status-quo defenders will snicker and laugh at such a proposition
Yes. Yes I will snicker and laugh. It's either because a.) I am a brainwashed or naive tool of a massive government conspiracy which thinks that its best use of time is to rebut posters on Slashdot; or b.) I'm just someone who knows enough about basic RF physics to conclude that the conspiracy theories about HAARP are all total crap.
It is left to the reader and their judicious use of Occam's Razor to determine which of the above is more likely.
P.S. Private message me for the location of the freezer where we keep the remains of the Cigarette Smoking Man for experiments with the Black Oil!
And another thing - I don't know if you've heard, but the head of Haliburton is no longer running the government.
Are you sure?
YES. YES WE ARE. Yes we are sure that Barack Obama is not, and has never been, the head of Halliburton. Yes we are sure that the President is actually running the government and not some cabal of Dick Cheney, J.R. Ewing, Mr. Burns and the Daleks. While I'm at it - and this will come as a shock to many, many Slashdotters - we are also sure that the moon landing was not faked, NORAD did not shoot down Santa Claus in 1986 and neither the Jews, Freemasons nor the Yale Skull and Bones Club are trying to beam mind control waves at you that force you to use the iTunes App Store.
Most Slashdotters should be smart enough to exercise critical thinking skills. Please just take off the damn tinfoil hat and try it.
P.S. - I'm sure I'm committing karma suicide already, so while I'm at it: Julian Assange is being extradited to Sweden because two women, rightly or wrongly, are claiming he sexually assaulted them. Not because the NSA, CIA, FBI, US Postal Service, MPAA, Major League Baseball, the Stonecutters or any foreign entity are secretly controlling the Swedish government. To be fair to the conspiracy-minded, none of the above rules out a sinister plot by the former members of ABBA.
The US constitution doesn't permit warrantless seizure of property, either, but the DHS can do it within 100 miles of the border.
The Constitution is not as malleable as this example appears to show it is. The Constitution protects citizens against "unreasonable" search and seizure, not warrantless search and seizure. If courts have determined that within 100 miles of the border there is a high incidence of smuggling, human trafficking etc. that justifies warrantless seizure in some cases then legally that is considered "reasonable."
It's funny to me how both the American far Right and the left-leaning Slashdot both somehow see the Obama administration as this engine of terror and lawlessness that is unstoppable in its quest to deprive them of life, liberty and property (real or downloaded) ... Honestly, the weather here is really not that bad once you take off the tinfoil hat.
Yeah that sounds like a good idea because everything [amtrak.com] else [usps.com] That the federal government has become involved in works so well.
I'm about the last one to suggest the Federal government manages much of anything cost-effectively, but the two examples cited above are not a good representation.
Specifically, that's because Amtrak and the US Postal Service are government-sponsored organizations that lose money because the government is subsidizing them to do things that inherently are money-losers but are seen as in the public interest (inter-city rail service and delivering postal mail, respectively). Amtrak is under a lot of pressure to stop losing money and has basically said "fine, let us focus on our money-making Eastern Seaboard commuter routes and we'll drop all those Seattle-To-Chicago boondogles" but the government has told them no. The USPS has similarly tried to cut losses by proposing things that make business sense such as increased postage rates and reduced delivery days, but has faced a great deal of public/government pressure not to.
To your point, I believe the place of the government is actually to do those things that need to be paid for by taxpayers as an infrastructure/service because no sane business can make a profit doing them... and USPS/Amtrak qualify in this sense. But if someone else can make money doing something that the government loses money on (I'm looking at you, SpaceX...) then the government should get out of that business to the greatest degree possible.
Even if you scrape up the money to buy a geosynchronous satellite and move it, it still costs a fair amount of money to keep the satellite in orbit and on station. You also will need to have acquired an orbital slot to where you want to move it. And you also have to maintain one or more earth stations from which the data traffic relayed up to/back from the satellite has to travel and all the associated bandwidth. Much more expensive (most likely) are "landing rights" for each country where you want to provide service - each nation controls rights to the airwaves over their territory, and you will need to license it - and that ain't cheap (and in many countries, especially in the developing world they will shake you down for a "joint venture" or foreign investment in their country to get the licenses). Oh, and of course there is (presumably) a need to manufacture satellite data terminals and subsidize them enough so that the people in these countries can afford them...
And they want to provide free service, or at least service affordable in developing countries? Are the underpants gnomes their business case consultants?
I really do love the idea here but it sounds like yet another exercise in wishful thinking where nobody with any real knowledge of the satellite industry bothered to think it through. Not a good use of time or money.