My father's computer is running Vista. I tried to upgrade him to Win 7, but lack of drivers for his Samsung laptop meant that his USB dropped to USB 1.0, no drivers for his printer, no drivers for his scanner, and no drivers for his wifi. The color calibration system he uses wouldn't work on Win 7. Upgrading to Win 7 also forced him to upgrade his Creative Suite, which then wouldn't support the RAW format on his very expensive DSLR.
This isn't just a matter of "clinging to old technologies". To support high end photography, he buys expensive cameras, scanners, printers, color calibration systems, and more. Upgrading isn't just an afternoon of work. It would involve throwing out thousands of dollars worth of hardware and software, and starting over.
Businesses run into these kind of situation all the time. Multiply it to thousands of employees, and the costs can be staggering.
The problem with intel, and why people are "bashing" them has little to do with what is required of them. It is because Intel is clearly seeking to make money off of Android which was built by others contributions, and being selfish pricks in the process. Android has hundreds of millions (maybe billions?) of dollars worth of investment and contributions in it by people and companies not named Intel. Intel is making some minor changes, running around telling everyone how great those changes are, and then saying they aren't willing to contribute those changes back. At best, that's deserving of some amount of criticism.
They may be well within their rights, but they have to expect some criticism as a result.
Caching the route does work. At least it does on every Android phone I've owned. When you drive through parts of the southwest United States, you often travel for hundreds of miles with no cell coverage at all. Google Maps keeps chugging along, as long as I don't end navigation on my current route.
So you are suggesting the solution to privacy issues is a proprietary black box, where one benevolent corporation, who is trying to eek every bit of profit out their platform, is the only one in control? That's the solution? Really? Have we already forgotten the situation where iOS was keeping a log of the phone's location?
At least with Android I know I can flash a new (AOSP) ROM where every line of code is OSS, and know what is truly happening with my device.
And if the market for devices capable of creation shrinks, prices for such devices will likely rise due to loss of economies of scale.
So Amazon shouldn't try to slim tablet features down to hit a $199 price point, and instead charge 5-600 for a full-featured tablet like everyone else, because if they do it might theoretically drive the price of content-creation devices up? You...kill...me.
Do you all whine like this because a Ford Fiesta doesn't have the same features as a BMW 3 Series? Should economy cars not be built because they are a barrier of entry for those that want a rear view camera and a high fidelity sound system so they can park in a tight spot while their ears are delighted? Amazon is putting out a very attractively priced tablet with slimed-down features. If you want the additional features, go pay $500 for an IPad or a Xoom. This has been done in every competitive market before - stop acting like it's a new abomination.
At least this exercise taught us one thing: The wrong way to transition a product to open source. Google should have made this announcement and the prior "cancellation" announcement one single communication. Instead, they freaked out their community and received a bunch of negative reaction. All the time, they were doing the exact thing we always hope companies will do: release a proprietary product as open source.
Very true. I suspect the more likely scenario is that traditional nuclear power goes away from reactions to Fukashima, and in the future we use safer thorium reactors. In the meantime we make plugin electric cars that are usable/useful by the masses and have extended range, which are powered by thorium plants feeding the grid rather than the carbon-producing coal plants that dominate today. Cars powered by thorium, though indirectly.
For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to get +5. I was just responding to the comment. The sad thing is the +5 has more to do with my comment being high on the thread. Try to get +5 by adding a comment near the bottom of a long thread; it's almost impossible. That's why so many people reply to early comments when their reply isn't at all related to what they are replying to.
No, you have to charge 43% extra to break even when Apple takes a 30% cut. For instance, if a book is 1.00 normally, you need to charge 1.43 because 1.43 *.3 =.429. This means the margin is so high it's not even close to competitive with Apple's own products.
NFC has yet to see a deployment by any major consumer hardware manufacturer.
Sort of. The difference is, NFC is in wide circulation with MasterCard PayPass and Visa Paywaive.
People seem to be ignoring the massive difficulty and investment in bringing the point-of-sale in alignment with the mobile device. Google has solved this by partnering with MasterCard to allow their wallet to work via NFC with PayPass POS devices which were already deployed at many merchants. It is difficult to imagine that BT4 could compete with that built-in install base. Apple would be smart to integrate NFC rather than attempting to blaze their own trail. It certainly is not impossible, but it doesn't make much sense.
And all have their hardware, or use hardware, manufactured in China...
Isn't that the way we want it? High wage white collar engineering jobs in the U.S. and laborers working at low wages in bad conditions so they can make us glorious technology that only we can afford?
It sure seems en vogue for Americans to hate on the American experience while living in the most affluent country in the history of the world. Sad, really.
Even if the information carried by inaudible sound waves is "cryptographically sound", it's certainly not a secure "wallet". Bragging that it doesn't rely on a chip may sound great, but there's more to Google Wallet's NFC chip than simple radio communications. The chip also serves as what Google calls a "Secure Element". This allows Google Wallet to securely store your card details and payment details inside a completely secure chip that's sandboxed from the OS itself.
If this technology is secure at communicating, but not secure at storing your card details, it's pretty useless (imho). Unless you think entering your card details every time you want to pay is better than carrying the card in your wallet.
Tonido plug is an open source wal mart server, similar to PogoPlug. I've never used it, but it sounds like exactly what you are looking for. FLOSS Weekly had a nice episode on Tonido. They have web, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry clients and are completely OSS, including the server and clients.
Being an employee of a major corporation, I'd offer a different theory. I've watched us go from no-Macs to maybe 100 Macs in the past quarter. It has nothing to do "I have a Mac at home". It has everything to do with iOS development. iPhones and iPads are now supported devices in the enterprise. We can now receive our corporate email on iOS devices, where previously this was restricted to BlackBerry devices.
As a result, internal corporate applications are being developed in iOS. The iPad in particular is attractive as a business tool. Carrying one to a corporate meeting is as easy as carrying a notebook, and the company doesn't even have to pay for the hardware because many people already bring their own to work.
Since Apple has created a situation where you can only develop for iOS on OSX, voila, we have a large number of OSX machines by necessity.
Both were built as an alternative to a dominate proprietary product owned by an onerous, tight-fisted corporate entity. The same could be said for Open Office, XMPP, Apache HTTP, Android, and a variety of products that "prevailed". Thus, they had a groundswell of community support.
The difference here is, Java is a GPL product. A number of alternative languages built on the JVM have cropped up, but they are competing with "free" (the freedom and beer variety). I've yet to see any do much "killing" of Java. Scala, Groovy, and Clojure are all popular in their own right, but haven't made a dent on the enormous Java community. Further, most of them depend heavily on an inherent ability to utilize the S2JDK.
I personally think this is all about tethering. The telcos are charging an obscene $20 - $30 to use the bandwidth you already paid for. And a lot of people want to tether, even the average Joe who normally doesn't know the first thing about ROMs and bootloaders.
The telcos are aware that rooted phones can tether for free. I know several people who are completely non-technical who have rooted Android to tether for free. There is significant money on the table. Money that most of us feel is raping and pillaging, but money none the less.
You've given a reasonable case against Motorola. Who do you recommend (for Android)? Who has a good track record of delivering what they promise? Perhaps more importantly, who has a good track record of supporting updates for phones that are no longer being sold?
I have a Motorola Droid, and I've had no problem because I've just rooted it and installed my own upgrades. My bigger concern with Motorola is their trend of attempting to DRM lock the bootloader to prevent rooting. They make it harder for us to support ourselves when they no longer do it sufficiently. The Bionic looks like a great device, but they are apparently locking it pretty heavily, making it very unattractive for me.
I think it quite likely has slowed down piracy. I used to download pirated movies many years ago. But as I've grown older and gained a house, cars, stock funds and 401ks, and meanwhile watched many people get sued over piracy, I've definitely changed my ways. I've come to realize that $15 for a DVD, or better yet $8.99/month for Netflix streaming, isn't worth worrying about versus potentially losing my house by getting sued into bankruptcy. Perhaps the risk is minor, but it's still a risk, and the lawsuits are what made that risk real in my mind. Granted this is anecdotal, but I would bet I'm not alone.
The point of enforcement is to decrease the amount, not eliminate the criminal element. There will always be criminals willing to break the law Prosecuting people who contribute to Anonymous will have the same effect of making some people think twice about joining a DDOS network, just like I think twice about accessing copyrighted material on a P2P network.
Because you often need specific configuration for hardware, not *just* the network. For instance, a wifi device may connect to the same network but requires an essid and encryption key. Further, two devices sometimes connect to the same network for performance reasons.
Mac address is the preferable identifier, in my opinion. "Slot" is a terrible identifier for desktops due to USB network devices, but is probably okay for servers (who uses USB networking on a server?). But Fedora is intended for use in both, so this just doesn't make much sense to me.
If we are going to be green and morbid, we might as well go all the way. The real green way to dispose of bodies is to mulch them. Humans are rich with nutrients, and mulching takes less energy than incineration. Our public parks would benefit greatly with grandma feeding the dogwoods.
I'm not suggesting that us bringing our own personal computer into work is the right solution. I'm recommending that IT policy makers look at options that don't make life on a corporate desktop so unbearable that we all want to bring in our own computers. If you chose alternatives that weren't so security challenged that they require you to neuter them, then we wouldn't want to bring in our own computers in the first place. Who really wants to lug a computer back and forth every day? Not me. But I'll take it over the current standard corporate desktop which is nearly unusable.
I didn't say I could only be innovative on OSX/Linux. I can't be *as* innovative on a machine that is completely neutered, and unresponsive. Unfortunately, this is always the case with Windows in a corporate environment due to the policies and software that is put on it to keep it safe.
Safety for Windows in a corporate environment comes at a cost that is so high as to greatly diminish the value of the computer.
My home computer runs Linux, and many of us run Linux or OSX, particularly in technology companies. Our computers aren't malware and virus infected. Using them is not going to hurt "your network". The fact that you call it "your network" alone should give us pause.
Corporate asset managers like you are the very reason why large companies are painful to be an innovative developer at. You are the reason why startups with 10 developers often have an advantage over gigantic companies with thousands of developers. You think that your safety blanket of Windows XP with a mountain of scanner software churning cycles, a ten year old IE 6 browser, and policies that neuter the OS significantly to disallow the computer to be used by anyone for anything, is the ONLY WAY. Running an alternative desktop that starts out secure is unacceptable because you read a CIO Mag article 5 years ago that told you the TCO is higher.
Sorry to go on a tirade, but it's just very frustrating.
Slashdot Mirror
My father's computer is running Vista. I tried to upgrade him to Win 7, but lack of drivers for his Samsung laptop meant that his USB dropped to USB 1.0, no drivers for his printer, no drivers for his scanner, and no drivers for his wifi. The color calibration system he uses wouldn't work on Win 7. Upgrading to Win 7 also forced him to upgrade his Creative Suite, which then wouldn't support the RAW format on his very expensive DSLR.
This isn't just a matter of "clinging to old technologies". To support high end photography, he buys expensive cameras, scanners, printers, color calibration systems, and more. Upgrading isn't just an afternoon of work. It would involve throwing out thousands of dollars worth of hardware and software, and starting over.
Businesses run into these kind of situation all the time. Multiply it to thousands of employees, and the costs can be staggering.
I get that no one on Slashdot RTFA, but this time even the description says "200 miles of flowing hydrocarbons."
The problem with intel, and why people are "bashing" them has little to do with what is required of them. It is because Intel is clearly seeking to make money off of Android which was built by others contributions, and being selfish pricks in the process. Android has hundreds of millions (maybe billions?) of dollars worth of investment and contributions in it by people and companies not named Intel. Intel is making some minor changes, running around telling everyone how great those changes are, and then saying they aren't willing to contribute those changes back. At best, that's deserving of some amount of criticism.
They may be well within their rights, but they have to expect some criticism as a result.
Caching the route does work. At least it does on every Android phone I've owned. When you drive through parts of the southwest United States, you often travel for hundreds of miles with no cell coverage at all. Google Maps keeps chugging along, as long as I don't end navigation on my current route.
So you are suggesting the solution to privacy issues is a proprietary black box, where one benevolent corporation, who is trying to eek every bit of profit out their platform, is the only one in control? That's the solution? Really? Have we already forgotten the situation where iOS was keeping a log of the phone's location?
At least with Android I know I can flash a new (AOSP) ROM where every line of code is OSS, and know what is truly happening with my device.
And the TMobile Sidekick by Danger (now Microsoft) did it many years before Opera. Nothing to see here. Move along.
So Amazon shouldn't try to slim tablet features down to hit a $199 price point, and instead charge 5-600 for a full-featured tablet like everyone else, because if they do it might theoretically drive the price of content-creation devices up? You...kill...me.
Do you all whine like this because a Ford Fiesta doesn't have the same features as a BMW 3 Series? Should economy cars not be built because they are a barrier of entry for those that want a rear view camera and a high fidelity sound system so they can park in a tight spot while their ears are delighted? Amazon is putting out a very attractively priced tablet with slimed-down features. If you want the additional features, go pay $500 for an IPad or a Xoom. This has been done in every competitive market before - stop acting like it's a new abomination.
At least this exercise taught us one thing: The wrong way to transition a product to open source. Google should have made this announcement and the prior "cancellation" announcement one single communication. Instead, they freaked out their community and received a bunch of negative reaction. All the time, they were doing the exact thing we always hope companies will do: release a proprietary product as open source.
Very true. I suspect the more likely scenario is that traditional nuclear power goes away from reactions to Fukashima, and in the future we use safer thorium reactors. In the meantime we make plugin electric cars that are usable/useful by the masses and have extended range, which are powered by thorium plants feeding the grid rather than the carbon-producing coal plants that dominate today. Cars powered by thorium, though indirectly.
For what it's worth, I wasn't trying to get +5. I was just responding to the comment. The sad thing is the +5 has more to do with my comment being high on the thread. Try to get +5 by adding a comment near the bottom of a long thread; it's almost impossible. That's why so many people reply to early comments when their reply isn't at all related to what they are replying to.
No, you have to charge 43% extra to break even when Apple takes a 30% cut. For instance, if a book is 1.00 normally, you need to charge 1.43 because 1.43 * .3 = .429. This means the margin is so high it's not even close to competitive with Apple's own products.
NFC has yet to see a deployment by any major consumer hardware manufacturer.
Sort of. The difference is, NFC is in wide circulation with MasterCard PayPass and Visa Paywaive.
People seem to be ignoring the massive difficulty and investment in bringing the point-of-sale in alignment with the mobile device. Google has solved this by partnering with MasterCard to allow their wallet to work via NFC with PayPass POS devices which were already deployed at many merchants. It is difficult to imagine that BT4 could compete with that built-in install base. Apple would be smart to integrate NFC rather than attempting to blaze their own trail. It certainly is not impossible, but it doesn't make much sense.
Isn't that the way we want it? High wage white collar engineering jobs in the U.S. and laborers working at low wages in bad conditions so they can make us glorious technology that only we can afford?
It sure seems en vogue for Americans to hate on the American experience while living in the most affluent country in the history of the world. Sad, really.
Even if the information carried by inaudible sound waves is "cryptographically sound", it's certainly not a secure "wallet". Bragging that it doesn't rely on a chip may sound great, but there's more to Google Wallet's NFC chip than simple radio communications. The chip also serves as what Google calls a "Secure Element". This allows Google Wallet to securely store your card details and payment details inside a completely secure chip that's sandboxed from the OS itself.
If this technology is secure at communicating, but not secure at storing your card details, it's pretty useless (imho). Unless you think entering your card details every time you want to pay is better than carrying the card in your wallet.
Tonido plug is an open source wal mart server, similar to PogoPlug. I've never used it, but it sounds like exactly what you are looking for. FLOSS Weekly had a nice episode on Tonido. They have web, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry clients and are completely OSS, including the server and clients.
Being an employee of a major corporation, I'd offer a different theory. I've watched us go from no-Macs to maybe 100 Macs in the past quarter. It has nothing to do "I have a Mac at home". It has everything to do with iOS development. iPhones and iPads are now supported devices in the enterprise. We can now receive our corporate email on iOS devices, where previously this was restricted to BlackBerry devices.
As a result, internal corporate applications are being developed in iOS. The iPad in particular is attractive as a business tool. Carrying one to a corporate meeting is as easy as carrying a notebook, and the company doesn't even have to pay for the hardware because many people already bring their own to work.
Since Apple has created a situation where you can only develop for iOS on OSX, voila, we have a large number of OSX machines by necessity.
Both were built as an alternative to a dominate proprietary product owned by an onerous, tight-fisted corporate entity. The same could be said for Open Office, XMPP, Apache HTTP, Android, and a variety of products that "prevailed". Thus, they had a groundswell of community support.
The difference here is, Java is a GPL product. A number of alternative languages built on the JVM have cropped up, but they are competing with "free" (the freedom and beer variety). I've yet to see any do much "killing" of Java. Scala, Groovy, and Clojure are all popular in their own right, but haven't made a dent on the enormous Java community. Further, most of them depend heavily on an inherent ability to utilize the S2JDK.
I find this to be much ado about nothing.
I personally think this is all about tethering. The telcos are charging an obscene $20 - $30 to use the bandwidth you already paid for. And a lot of people want to tether, even the average Joe who normally doesn't know the first thing about ROMs and bootloaders.
The telcos are aware that rooted phones can tether for free. I know several people who are completely non-technical who have rooted Android to tether for free. There is significant money on the table. Money that most of us feel is raping and pillaging, but money none the less.
You've given a reasonable case against Motorola. Who do you recommend (for Android)? Who has a good track record of delivering what they promise? Perhaps more importantly, who has a good track record of supporting updates for phones that are no longer being sold?
I have a Motorola Droid, and I've had no problem because I've just rooted it and installed my own upgrades. My bigger concern with Motorola is their trend of attempting to DRM lock the bootloader to prevent rooting. They make it harder for us to support ourselves when they no longer do it sufficiently. The Bionic looks like a great device, but they are apparently locking it pretty heavily, making it very unattractive for me.
I think it quite likely has slowed down piracy. I used to download pirated movies many years ago. But as I've grown older and gained a house, cars, stock funds and 401ks, and meanwhile watched many people get sued over piracy, I've definitely changed my ways. I've come to realize that $15 for a DVD, or better yet $8.99/month for Netflix streaming, isn't worth worrying about versus potentially losing my house by getting sued into bankruptcy. Perhaps the risk is minor, but it's still a risk, and the lawsuits are what made that risk real in my mind. Granted this is anecdotal, but I would bet I'm not alone.
The point of enforcement is to decrease the amount, not eliminate the criminal element. There will always be criminals willing to break the law Prosecuting people who contribute to Anonymous will have the same effect of making some people think twice about joining a DDOS network, just like I think twice about accessing copyrighted material on a P2P network.
Because you often need specific configuration for hardware, not *just* the network. For instance, a wifi device may connect to the same network but requires an essid and encryption key. Further, two devices sometimes connect to the same network for performance reasons.
Mac address is the preferable identifier, in my opinion. "Slot" is a terrible identifier for desktops due to USB network devices, but is probably okay for servers (who uses USB networking on a server?). But Fedora is intended for use in both, so this just doesn't make much sense to me.
If we are going to be green and morbid, we might as well go all the way. The real green way to dispose of bodies is to mulch them. Humans are rich with nutrients, and mulching takes less energy than incineration. Our public parks would benefit greatly with grandma feeding the dogwoods.
I'm not suggesting that us bringing our own personal computer into work is the right solution. I'm recommending that IT policy makers look at options that don't make life on a corporate desktop so unbearable that we all want to bring in our own computers. If you chose alternatives that weren't so security challenged that they require you to neuter them, then we wouldn't want to bring in our own computers in the first place. Who really wants to lug a computer back and forth every day? Not me. But I'll take it over the current standard corporate desktop which is nearly unusable.
I didn't say I could only be innovative on OSX/Linux. I can't be *as* innovative on a machine that is completely neutered, and unresponsive. Unfortunately, this is always the case with Windows in a corporate environment due to the policies and software that is put on it to keep it safe.
Safety for Windows in a corporate environment comes at a cost that is so high as to greatly diminish the value of the computer.
My home computer runs Linux, and many of us run Linux or OSX, particularly in technology companies. Our computers aren't malware and virus infected. Using them is not going to hurt "your network". The fact that you call it "your network" alone should give us pause.
Corporate asset managers like you are the very reason why large companies are painful to be an innovative developer at. You are the reason why startups with 10 developers often have an advantage over gigantic companies with thousands of developers. You think that your safety blanket of Windows XP with a mountain of scanner software churning cycles, a ten year old IE 6 browser, and policies that neuter the OS significantly to disallow the computer to be used by anyone for anything, is the ONLY WAY. Running an alternative desktop that starts out secure is unacceptable because you read a CIO Mag article 5 years ago that told you the TCO is higher.
Sorry to go on a tirade, but it's just very frustrating.