When I've done that, the response from the waiter has usually been, "pardon?" I've often wondered if they're trained to do that, to "shame" diners into buying a drink which costs money. But probably it's just because it's fairly unusual.
On my first trip to the States in 2000, I was delighted at the habit in most diners across the Midwest and South West, of bringing you a glass of iced water as soon as you were seated, without asking, before you even see the menu.
That, to me, was a great example of how America knows how to run a great Service industry. I haven't noticed it so much in other parts of the USA, so I think it might be related to climate (when you step out of the Arizona sun, you need a cold drink, and fast).
I seem to recall something in the news a while back about Coca Cola sending promotional material to restaurants advising them not to do this. Bastards.
One source in the UK is Tarquin -- primarily an educational supplier. http://www.tarquin-books.demon.co.uk/books/tarquin mathstime.html
They (and companies like them) also sell dice in bulk, even blank dice, spinners, pawns etc.
I don't know the ins and outs of printing onto a single blank card. My Epson inkjet has a special mode for printing cardboard (instead of using the sheet feeder, the card passes in a straight line under the print head), but I've never tried it with anything as small as a playing card.
Still, a couple of years is a long time in terms of electronics.
It is in terms of desktop PCs (mostly because software developers just love to take advantage of Moore's Law) -- but I don't agree that it's true about electronics in general.
I've had the same CD deck for the last 7 years, and I've no reason to replace it. I've owned my record deck ten years. My main amp is a DTS reciever/amp which I bought quite recently, but I also inherited a Bang & Olufsen amp from my grandfather which dates from the 1970s and still sounds terrific.
My minidisc walkman is 7 years old. New ones are smaller, but the old one is "small enough" and does everything I could want it to. Like the iPod, it runs of a non-standard rechargeable battery, but unlike the ipod, you can slide open the battery compartment to slot in a new one.
The point of the iPod (at least to me) is *not* that it is the latest thing: if it was, buying a new one every 2 years would be understandable. The point of the iPod is that it's highly portable, and it stores as much music as you could ever need. In 10 years' time, those requirements won't have changed.
The article doesn't specify whether they're using the Kermit protocol, or whether they are using the Kermit protocol to handle a different protocol. I guess the Kermit protocol is well suited to the kind of point-to-point comms required by space missions, but it's not made explicit.
In recent years, the Internet and the World Wide Web have surpassed Kermit as a popular desktop communications tool for "ordinary users," but Kermit continues to be an invaluable asset in more specialized areas, such as the Space Station experiment.
CU's C-Kermit and Kermit95 products support all kinds of protocols. I develop and support a commercial service based around FTP/TLS. We strive to be client-agnostic, but my personal recommendation would usually be Kermit -- it does the protocol right, it doesn't get in the way, and it's extremely scriptable. The support structure is excellent too, even for non-paying users.
The only problem for me is that the full documentation is only available in a book, which is out of print. Bah.
TiVo's filesystem is proprietary and closed source. Kernel modules need to be GPL, although there are some grey areas that Linus acknowledges. It's unlikely that a new filsystem would have fallen into one of those grey areas.
So, TiVo solved the problem in a novel way. They hacked the NFS client code in the kernel so that instead of communicating with an NFS server over TCP/IP, it communicates with a local userland process. They released this code under the GPL.
Then they wrote the filesystem code to run in userland, and kept that closed source, as is their right.
I can understand some people saying Debian, in it's current state is difficult to install.
But I cringe when I hear that from a fellow computer person. I mean honestly, just because it's not using framebuffer and a mouse on install?
Well, dselect could be friendlier: it's not so much that it's text based, but that the interface itself is alien to most people. It's a good interface, like vi is a good interface: but it's not quick and easy to pick up, and if you skip past the instructions, you're in trouble.
But that's not the worst thing about the Debian install. It's been proved that auto-detecting hardware can be done in Linux, yet to install Woody I needed to manually specify an Ethernet driver and select an appropriate X server. That's really not good enough, and would scupper a lot of people, computer professionals or not.
This may be fixed in Sarge: someone reply and tell me.
Coding is not a "low-skill" job. Far from it. Programming in C is a high-skill job. Programming in C++ is a high-skill job. Heck, even programming in C# is a high-skill job. Ditto for PHP, Perl, Python, etc.
You're right, for certain definitions of coding: the skilled job you do is a mixture of design and coding.
I bet you've hit situations where the creative element disappears from your coding, and you just have to spend hours crossing "t"s and dotting "i"s, converting your brilliant design into code in the most mechanical way. I know I have, and I'd love to have a code monkey on hand to give that slog to.
I believe the idea of this kind of outsourcing is that you separate design and code, create cast-iron class specifications (for example) and ship them off to be implemented. I'm not sure it can work (I always find coding reveals flaws in designs), but that's the idea.
But OTOH, if it was merely a matter of low-skill labour, then we could find low-paid staff to do it in the west. The appeal of China and India is that *skilled* labour is available at low prices. To suggest that they're getting given the job because it is too easy for Westeners is the worst kind of racism.
Because it gives you two modes of operation that are unacceptable to me:
(1) Leave your TV switched on. I don't want this. Even a blank screen is a distraction, and CRTs do make a sound.
(2) Every time you want to interact with your MP3 player, turn on the TV, do your stuff, then turn it off again. My Sony TV takes 5-8 seconds to get to the point where it could display an Xbox picture (warm up screen, display terrestrial picture, autodetect aux signal, switch over). That's longer than it takes me to locate a CD from the shelf, put it in the tray and hit play.
My university accommodation c.1993 had a 3A power supply (at 240V). All I needed to to do avoid tripping the circuit was to avoid switching both PC and monitor on at once (as in, flick the switches simultaneously: monitors take quite a lot of power as they start up, but then settle down to quite a low drain).
Obviously we didn't plug in hairdriers or electric fires (hairdriers and vacuum cleaners got plugged into the 13A sockets in the hallway).
If you're always using 4800W, you should think long and hard about your impact on the environment.
Is this my first ever troll?
on
iPod-Jacked
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I have "karma: excellent", so it feels ugly to say this, but:
I always thought Mac users were odd, and this proves it.
have you ever met a developer that didn't think think he was a UI expert?
Here I am!
Pretty much everything I write either implements the server side of a protocol, or reads from an input stream and writes to an output stream (maybe looking at some command line parameters).
(OK arguably the command line parameters constitute UI, but not in the spirit of the article)
I know a bad UI when I see it (and I'm vocal in my criticism when I do) -- but there's no way I could design good UI myself. Leave that to the experts!
Nothing more. As far as I can tell there's nothing here that you couldn't do just as well with an off the shelf PC. In any event you still need the mixer, speakers, mics, playback equipment, processing, and transmitter that aren't included with the WVRS.... with an off the shelf PC, a couple of soundcards, a couple of microphones, and a Dyne:bolic boot CD, you could be broadcasting onto the Internet in under an hour.
I understand that dialup has enough bandwidth to upload a low bitrate stream to a re-streaming service.
Well, Africa - which for the most part is where most of this stuff originates from - is a long, long way away.... but that depends entirely where you live. I've seen way too much of this lately, from/.'ers referring to "the other side of the pond" without specifying which side is their own, to journalists saying that the North of England is a long way to go, without considering that for a number of their readers, it won't be.
I never really understood why violence can possibly be more socially acceptable than the human body, it boogles my mind.
But porn is not always just about images of naked bodies -- nor even about naked bodies enjoying consentual and mutually rewarding contact. Some porn is, but a lot of porn, is about lots more besides.
I've seen porn on the Internet that I know would have damaged me as a child -- even as a relatively older child. I know that if I'd seen much of that stuff at the age of 15 I would have developed ideas about a woman's "role" that would have seriously hampered any relationships I may have developed. A lot of porn nowadays is made to look "amateur" making it even harder for impressionable minds to remember that real life is not like porn. Even as a 30 year old who enjoys porn, I have to keep reminding myself of this.
Are you going to tell me that some ivory-tower egg head (Homer Simpson says it best) hasn't come up with a highly reliable computerized voting architecture based around public/private keys, solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem, and other distributed algorithms?
Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.
Since when did Londoners (or Englishmen for that matter) need a valid excuse to get drunk?
Blow up Parliament? Have a party. Fail to blow up Parliament? Have a party.
It's all the same.
Great innit?
But Nov 5th isn't traditionally a big drinking night: the bonfire parties are usually family and community affairs, and it's tricky to keep kids away from lit rockets and stop them from sticking sparklers in each others' eyes when you're blind drunk.
"In one of the more peculiar of English habits, Guy Fawkes is celebrated with his own day of national remembrance for his role in a failed scheme to dispose of King James I and the House of Lords. You'd think they'd celebrate the foiler of the attempt rather than one of its enactors, but then "1st Earl of Salisbury Day" or "Lord Monteagle Day" just don't have the same ring."
We don't exactly celebrate Guy Fawkes -- the tradition is, after all, to burn his effigy. When we're not burning effigies of ethnic minorities that is...
The article does not say that he claimed Linux wasn't ready for "the desktop", he claimed that Linux wasn't ready for "home use".... which I'd agree with, for the reasons he states. I'd love to recommend Linux to my Dad, but I can't right now -- to do so would be to create an arduous support role for myself (field constant "I've broken it" calls, or to be a BSOD to his luser on his own hardware (keep the root password for myself, insist that all software installation be done by me).
The average home user *likes* to be using the mainstream platform; s/he would *not* be happy with the idea that you can't pick up a made-with-macromedia edutainment title off the shelf at a supermarket, pop it in the CD drive and run it.
OTOH "the desktop" is a completely different niche. I believe Linux is 100% ready for a vast swathe of office desktops -- there are millions of people out there earning a crust doing nothing but word processing and working with email. Don't give them root, make them a locked-down desktop, and you can give them a Linux desktop they can be productive on, and that's cheap. Knoppix proves what can be done.
I was going to say "Nobody mentioned the EU until you did", but that stat was for the EU, so well caught! As another poster pointed out, though, there are big empty places in Europe: Norway, Scotland, Finland...
You've plucked that 10% figure out of thin air... and pointed out that I was doing so at the time. I also plucked the 90% figure out of thin air. Someone with more time than me can chase up the real figures...
On the contrary, you have an odd definition of "public space" which is not the same thing as open space. The original poster talked about the European model of using public spaces,
I think/.'s moderation-based filtering is causing you to think I was responding to a different post to the one I did respond to.
The post I responded to is (at time of writing) rated -1, with one "overrated" moderation. Pretty harsh, when someone thinks a score of 0 is overrated;)
The post I responded to seemed to suggest (by inference) that the town planning that gives Europeans piazzas and so forth, is because Europe has so much more room for open spaces in cities than the US. But this is nonsense. Admittedly I may have misunderstood, after all I'm not sure what verb he meant to use when he used "belies".
Incidentally I've seen a few public spaces along the lines of the European piazza in American cities. In New York - Central Park, the square outside the Rockerfeller Centre, etc. In LA, many of the beachside areas. Navy Pier in Chicago... but it's not ubiquitous as it is in France or Italy (nor is it in the UK, by the way -- we don't have the weather for it).
I think that's more to do with population than any real social tendencies. The US is a highly populated area, perhaps the 4th largest country in the world. Europe with a smaller population HAS more open space, which belies the installation of large hard wired network: witness the lower takeup of cable services in europe. Wireless networks just make sense in that situation alot of the time
You've got odd ideas about the amount of open space in the USA. I found some stats here: Europe's overall population density is 115 people per square km (and that number is pulled *right* down by sparsely populated areas such as Iceland), compared the USA's density of 29 people per square km.
Europe just doesn't do wide open spaces like the US does. As a Briton who's travelled a fair amount in mainland Europe, and whos driven across the USA twice (take the hi-line across Montana then tell me the USA is densely populated), those figures tally pretty well with my expectations.
At this early stage, however, nobody expects WiFi in the back of beyond. Hotspots in towns is where it's going to happen. Perhaps this article is using the wrong measurement. Rather than raw investment figures, or investment per square km, they should be measuring investment per unit of population.
The danger of this, of course, is the same thing as what's happening with broadband. British Telecom brags that 90% of the population has a DSL enabled exchange. Unfortunately those 90% of the population live on 10% of the land: i.e. reaching the remaining 10% of the population is going to be a hell of a job. (stats in last paragraph dredged from memory, approximate, illustrative only).
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When I've done that, the response from the waiter has usually been, "pardon?" I've often wondered if they're trained to do that, to "shame" diners into buying a drink which costs money. But probably it's just because it's fairly unusual.
On my first trip to the States in 2000, I was delighted at the habit in most diners across the Midwest and South West, of bringing you a glass of iced water as soon as you were seated, without asking, before you even see the menu.
That, to me, was a great example of how America knows how to run a great Service industry. I haven't noticed it so much in other parts of the USA, so I think it might be related to climate (when you step out of the Arizona sun, you need a cold drink, and fast).
I seem to recall something in the news a while back about Coca Cola sending promotional material to restaurants advising them not to do this. Bastards.
You *can* get blank playing cards.
n mathstime.html
One source in the UK is Tarquin -- primarily an educational supplier. http://www.tarquin-books.demon.co.uk/books/tarqui
They (and companies like them) also sell dice in bulk, even blank dice, spinners, pawns etc.
I don't know the ins and outs of printing onto a single blank card. My Epson inkjet has a special mode for printing cardboard (instead of using the sheet feeder, the card passes in a straight line under the print head), but I've never tried it with anything as small as a playing card.
Still, a couple of years is a long time in terms of electronics.
It is in terms of desktop PCs (mostly because software developers just love to take advantage of Moore's Law) -- but I don't agree that it's true about electronics in general.
I've had the same CD deck for the last 7 years, and I've no reason to replace it. I've owned my record deck ten years. My main amp is a DTS reciever/amp which I bought quite recently, but I also inherited a Bang & Olufsen amp from my grandfather which dates from the 1970s and still sounds terrific.
My minidisc walkman is 7 years old. New ones are smaller, but the old one is "small enough" and does everything I could want it to. Like the iPod, it runs of a non-standard rechargeable battery, but unlike the ipod, you can slide open the battery compartment to slot in a new one.
The point of the iPod (at least to me) is *not* that it is the latest thing: if it was, buying a new one every 2 years would be understandable. The point of the iPod is that it's highly portable, and it stores as much music as you could ever need. In 10 years' time, those requirements won't have changed.
I wrote:
whether they are using the Kermit protocol to handle a different protocol.
Gah. I meant "using the Kermit program to handle a different protocol".
The article doesn't specify whether they're using the Kermit protocol, or whether they are using the Kermit protocol to handle a different protocol. I guess the Kermit protocol is well suited to the kind of point-to-point comms required by space missions, but it's not made explicit.
In recent years, the Internet and the World Wide Web have surpassed Kermit as a popular desktop communications tool for "ordinary users," but Kermit continues to be an invaluable asset in more specialized areas, such as the Space Station experiment.
CU's C-Kermit and Kermit95 products support all kinds of protocols. I develop and support a commercial service based around FTP/TLS. We strive to be client-agnostic, but my personal recommendation would usually be Kermit -- it does the protocol right, it doesn't get in the way, and it's extremely scriptable. The support structure is excellent too, even for non-paying users.
The only problem for me is that the full documentation is only available in a book, which is out of print. Bah.
So they distributed a system with the userland process part of the kernel
i.e. they linked it using local IPC.
You've extended the definition of linking beyond that of any GPL advocate, including RMS.
Do any of the free PVR applications run well on the Tivo hardware?
I'm sure this used to be on the Freevo roadmap, but it seems to have disappeared.
their kernel modules are probably GPL
TiVo's filesystem is proprietary and closed source.
Kernel modules need to be GPL, although there are some grey areas that Linus acknowledges. It's unlikely that a new filsystem would have fallen into one of those grey areas.
So, TiVo solved the problem in a novel way. They hacked the NFS client code in the kernel so that instead of communicating with an NFS server over TCP/IP, it communicates with a local userland process. They released this code under the GPL.
Then they wrote the filesystem code to run in userland, and kept that closed source, as is their right.
I can understand some people saying Debian, in it's current state is difficult to install.
But I cringe when I hear that from a fellow computer person. I mean honestly, just because it's not using framebuffer and a mouse on install?
Well, dselect could be friendlier: it's not so much that it's text based, but that the interface itself is alien to most people. It's a good interface, like vi is a good interface: but it's not quick and easy to pick up, and if you skip past the instructions, you're in trouble.
But that's not the worst thing about the Debian install. It's been proved that auto-detecting hardware can be done in Linux, yet to install Woody I needed to manually specify an Ethernet driver and select an appropriate X server. That's really not good enough, and would scupper a lot of people, computer professionals or not.
This may be fixed in Sarge: someone reply and tell me.
Coding is not a "low-skill" job. Far from it. Programming in C is a high-skill job. Programming in C++ is a high-skill job. Heck, even programming in C# is a high-skill job. Ditto for PHP, Perl, Python, etc.
You're right, for certain definitions of coding: the skilled job you do is a mixture of design and coding.
I bet you've hit situations where the creative element disappears from your coding, and you just have to spend hours crossing "t"s and dotting "i"s, converting your brilliant design into code in the most mechanical way. I know I have, and I'd love to have a code monkey on hand to give that slog to.
I believe the idea of this kind of outsourcing is that you separate design and code, create cast-iron class specifications (for example) and ship them off to be implemented. I'm not sure it can work (I always find coding reveals flaws in designs), but that's the idea.
But OTOH, if it was merely a matter of low-skill labour, then we could find low-paid staff to do it in the west. The appeal of China and India is that *skilled* labour is available at low prices. To suggest that they're getting given the job because it is too easy for Westeners is the worst kind of racism.
Why is needing a tv a problem?
Because it gives you two modes of operation that are unacceptable to me:
(1) Leave your TV switched on. I don't want this. Even a blank screen is a distraction, and CRTs do make a sound.
(2) Every time you want to interact with your MP3 player, turn on the TV, do your stuff, then turn it off again. My Sony TV takes 5-8 seconds to get to the point where it could display an Xbox picture (warm up screen, display terrestrial picture, autodetect aux signal, switch over). That's longer than it takes me to locate a CD from the shelf, put it in the tray and hit play.
20A? Continuously? What the hell are you doing?
My university accommodation c.1993 had a 3A power supply (at 240V). All I needed to to do avoid tripping the circuit was to avoid switching both PC and monitor on at once (as in, flick the switches simultaneously: monitors take quite a lot of power as they start up, but then settle down to quite a low drain).
Obviously we didn't plug in hairdriers or electric fires (hairdriers and vacuum cleaners got plugged into the 13A sockets in the hallway).
If you're always using 4800W, you should think long and hard about your impact on the environment.
I have "karma: excellent", so it feels ugly to say this, but:
I always thought Mac users were odd, and this proves it.
have you ever met a developer that didn't think think he was a UI expert?
Here I am!
Pretty much everything I write either implements the server side of a protocol, or reads from an input stream and writes to an output stream (maybe looking at some command line parameters).
(OK arguably the command line parameters constitute UI, but not in the spirit of the article)
I know a bad UI when I see it (and I'm vocal in my criticism when I do) -- but there's no way I could design good UI myself. Leave that to the experts!
Nothing more. As far as I can tell there's nothing here that you couldn't do just as well with an off the shelf PC. In any event you still need the mixer, speakers, mics, playback equipment, processing, and transmitter that aren't included with the WVRS. ... with an off the shelf PC, a couple of soundcards, a couple of microphones, and a Dyne:bolic boot CD, you could be broadcasting onto the Internet in under an hour.
I understand that dialup has enough bandwidth to upload a low bitrate stream to a re-streaming service.
In the tips section, it reads:
... but that depends entirely where you live. I've seen way too much of this lately, from /.'ers referring to "the other side of the pond" without specifying which side is their own, to journalists saying that the North of England is a long way to go, without considering that for a number of their readers, it won't be.
Well, Africa - which for the most part is where most of this stuff originates from - is a long, long way away.
I never really understood why violence can possibly be more socially acceptable than the human body, it boogles my mind.
But porn is not always just about images of naked bodies -- nor even about naked bodies enjoying consentual and mutually rewarding contact. Some porn is, but a lot of porn, is about lots more besides.
I've seen porn on the Internet that I know would have damaged me as a child -- even as a relatively older child. I know that if I'd seen much of that stuff at the age of 15 I would have developed ideas about a woman's "role" that would have seriously hampered any relationships I may have developed. A lot of porn nowadays is made to look "amateur" making it even harder for impressionable minds to remember that real life is not like porn. Even as a 30 year old who enjoys porn, I have to keep reminding myself of this.
And of course, some porn is about violence too.
Are you going to tell me that some ivory-tower egg head (Homer Simpson says it best) hasn't come up with a highly reliable computerized voting architecture based around public/private keys, solutions to the Byzantine Generals Problem, and other distributed algorithms?
Kinda. Not public/private keys (voting is anonymous) but... Voter Verified Electronic Election is Ivory Tower Egghead stuff that you might like.
Since when did Londoners (or Englishmen for that matter) need a valid excuse to get drunk?
Blow up Parliament? Have a party.
Fail to blow up Parliament? Have a party.
It's all the same.
Great innit?
But Nov 5th isn't traditionally a big drinking night: the bonfire parties are usually family and community affairs, and it's tricky to keep kids away from lit rockets and stop them from sticking sparklers in each others' eyes when you're blind drunk.
"In one of the more peculiar of English habits, Guy Fawkes is celebrated with his own day of national remembrance for his role in a failed scheme to dispose of King James I and the House of Lords. You'd think they'd celebrate the foiler of the attempt rather than one of its enactors, but then "1st Earl of Salisbury Day" or "Lord Monteagle Day" just don't have the same ring."
We don't exactly celebrate Guy Fawkes -- the tradition is, after all, to burn his effigy.
When we're not burning effigies of ethnic minorities that is...
The article does not say that he claimed Linux wasn't ready for "the desktop", he claimed that Linux wasn't ready for "home use". ... which I'd agree with, for the reasons he states. I'd love to recommend Linux to my Dad, but I can't right now -- to do so would be to create an arduous support role for myself (field constant "I've broken it" calls, or to be a BSOD to his luser on his own hardware (keep the root password for myself, insist that all software installation be done by me).
The average home user *likes* to be using the mainstream platform; s/he would *not* be happy with the idea that you can't pick up a made-with-macromedia edutainment title off the shelf at a supermarket, pop it in the CD drive and run it.
OTOH "the desktop" is a completely different niche. I believe Linux is 100% ready for a vast swathe of office desktops -- there are millions of people out there earning a crust doing nothing but word processing and working with email. Don't give them root, make them a locked-down desktop, and you can give them a Linux desktop they can be productive on, and that's cheap. Knoppix proves what can be done.
Iceland isn't part of the EU.
... and pointed out that I was doing so at the time. I also plucked the 90% figure out of thin air. Someone with more time than me can chase up the real figures...
I was going to say "Nobody mentioned the EU until you did", but that stat was for the EU, so well caught! As another poster pointed out, though, there are big empty places in Europe: Norway, Scotland, Finland...
You've plucked that 10% figure out of thin air
On the contrary, you have an odd definition of "public space" which is not the same thing as open space. The original poster talked about the European model of using public spaces,
/.'s moderation-based filtering is causing you to think I was responding to a different post to the one I did respond to.
;)
I think
The post I responded to is (at time of writing) rated -1, with one "overrated" moderation. Pretty harsh, when someone thinks a score of 0 is overrated
The post I responded to seemed to suggest (by inference) that the town planning that gives Europeans piazzas and so forth, is because Europe has so much more room for open spaces in cities than the US. But this is nonsense. Admittedly I may have misunderstood, after all I'm not sure what verb he meant to use when he used "belies".
Incidentally I've seen a few public spaces along the lines of the European piazza in American cities. In New York - Central Park, the square outside the Rockerfeller Centre, etc. In LA, many of the beachside areas. Navy Pier in Chicago...
but it's not ubiquitous as it is in France or Italy (nor is it in the UK, by the way -- we don't have the weather for it).
I think that's more to do with population than any real social tendencies. The US is a highly populated area, perhaps the 4th largest country in the world. Europe with a smaller population HAS more open space, which belies the installation of large hard wired network: witness the lower takeup of cable services in europe. Wireless networks just make sense in that situation alot of the time
You've got odd ideas about the amount of open space in the USA. I found some stats here:
Europe's overall population density is 115 people per square km (and that number is pulled *right* down by sparsely populated areas such as Iceland), compared the USA's density of 29 people per square km.
Europe just doesn't do wide open spaces like the US does. As a Briton who's travelled a fair amount in mainland Europe, and whos driven across the USA twice (take the hi-line across Montana then tell me the USA is densely populated), those figures tally pretty well with my expectations.
At this early stage, however, nobody expects WiFi in the back of beyond. Hotspots in towns is where it's going to happen. Perhaps this article is using the wrong measurement. Rather than raw investment figures, or investment per square km, they should be measuring investment per unit of population.
The danger of this, of course, is the same thing as what's happening with broadband. British Telecom brags that 90% of the population has a DSL enabled exchange. Unfortunately those 90% of the population live on 10% of the land: i.e. reaching the remaining 10% of the population is going to be a hell of a job. (stats in last paragraph dredged from memory, approximate, illustrative only).
A friend of mine summarised a low carb diet thus:
"You can't eat chips, you can't eat pizza".
He meant chips in the British sense: what Americans call "French Fries".
Under those circumstances, is it any wonder people lose weight?