In one room, Blackberry's main innovations were the keyboard and having mail in your pocket. (BBM being a semi-third, but harder to operate) The mail in your pocket was a goldmine while it was unique, but they never saw themselves as a single trick pony but as BLACKBERRY with some kind of pixie dust magic, and never did much past this. Their vision was short sighted, and got massively run over by companies (google/android, Apple) that saw the computer-in-your-pocket thing better.
So... about the keyboard. Part of me "hey, just a keyboard" and how do you patent that? Part of me realizes that for all their faults, you can tell RIM/BlackBerry spent a lot of time/money specifically engineering that keyboard. Those curves really do help making the keys "bigger" than they are physically. The Typo is a pretty blatant copy (they'll get killed at trial where they're literally saying they want to take the keyboard from a blackberry). Shouldn't BlackBerry get some cash at least as R&D?
Wasn't there a story yesterday that was essentially this? Canadians say "no, we didn't spy on Canadians" but let the NSA spy on a Toronto G8 meeting. I'm sure that was a reciprocal relationship.
Sometimes random unexpected things move you the most.
For me, Mandela's legacy was sealed in The 16th Man. A snapshot of not how he pushed the nation away from apartheid, but how he ran the nation and kept it together. There were so many armed groups just waiting for a flashpoint to descend into civil war. You may have seen it in "Invictus", but for me, seeing people talk about how they were getting ready to kill people, and talking with the actual players (no interviews with Mandela himself tho) made it more real.
It kind of makes you think how he kept the country together when we can't even get our Congress together to make a vote.
ABS will give the shortest braking distance physically possible, with the exception of surfaces like loose gravel, where you want the tires to lock up so they can plow into the gravel, pushing it ahead of the tire, making the car stop.
There are two physics forces at work that make ABS better.
1) the coefficient of static friction (two things pushing against each other, not moving) is higher than sliding friction. If you think about a tire, its contact patch is (nearly) static relative to the ground. You skid, you get rolling friction, less sticky, less able to grab. Only in special situations (gravel snowplow) does this not hold.
2) with ABS, you have dynamic braking at all 4 wheels. You have massively different wheel loads during a turn - good ABS can custom tune for each wheel.
How many bugs are in Windows XP? You don't know, no one knows. Someone needs to do work to figure that out. Some geek needs to spend time to figure out the attack surface and see what breaks. How do you fix it? A harder question, how do you fix it without causing more problems? I've got nearly 15 years of code and machines that support XP. If you don't test, and this breaks, i'm going to be angry at Microsoft. Oh, and this is a Zero day. So I need to be FAST and RIGHT. That doesn't come cheap.
Are you going to pay for that? Are you going to pay for the geeks to fix the holes? If they don't get money, they can get money by selling these exploits to others. Are you going to pay for the matrix of testing? Think of the millions of different PCs there are. Any code change costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to test. You don't get that for free.
A bug by definition is a problem. If you admit there are bugs, you are, in effect, admitting that the OS does not work fine. You just have expectations that they will be fixed before they bite you. Either that, or maybe there's some acceptable level of infestation you're good with on your computer. That may be fine, but don't expect all other users to have the same level of comfort with it.
I don't get that last comment. If you have an old car, and the engine wears out after 10 years, you don't get the money back from GM. You either pay for the repair, or you ride the bus.
Service Pack 2, a.k.a. when XP really became stable, was way back in 2004. SP3 was back in 2008, still 5 years ago. If you think about XP being NT2000 with a nicer GUI, then the design was set way back in 1997 or so, back when dialup was king and an AOL disk was not yet a running joke.
To those that say "well my computer works fine".. umm, no it doesn't. Your OS was designed in 1997-2001, in a relatively much safer Internet environment, and is not designed for always on persistent attacks with billions of dollars available by hacking. As much as I think Microsoft keeps people out to dry, at some point you need to update.
For good and bad (and Mavericks has some things that piss me off) the Apple model of forced upgrades has some reasoning to it.
My mom died of pancreatic cancer. She was well taken care of in the hospice. She had renal failure at the end, so fluids would actually have been cruel to give to her. Pancreatic cancer is obviously an attack on the digestive system, so food wouldn't have helped either. She was well medicated, almost too much - the saddest night for me in the hospice is when they drugged her out at midnight when you could see she wanted to stick around and listen more.
If the patient is well taken care of by drugs, the starvation is more an issue for the family rather than the patient. If you can skip over some of the legal landmines by starvation while taking care of the pain, I think it's the best we can do at this point.
You know that "all in your head" doesn't mean much. A concussion is "all in your head". The brain damage from football that cause beloved Dave Duerson, and Junior Seau to take their own lives was all in their head as well. Go tell an Alzheimer's patient "it's all in your head" and see how much that helps your treatment of them.
The brain is a pattern seeking, pattern matching, pattern forming engine. These patterns are created by chemicals and by creating physical connections in your brain. You can't totally remove physical from any "solely psychological" phenomena.
I agree that x86-64 has cleaned up and killed 64 bit RISC chips (partly by being RISC at their core, with a CISC instruction set), I think you don't remember the timelines. Remember that there was no x86-64 back then.
Itanium came out in 2001. AMD64 (who was going to support AMD in the enterprise?) came out in 2003. The first Intel x86_64 chips came out in 2004.
For "big iron", there was no getting away from 64 bit Apps and servers. You needed > 4GB address spaces. PA-RISC, UltraSparc, MIPS, Alpha, all were 64 bit chips. Now they had real competition with Intel. SGI first wanted to move to the "dominant" Itanium, then when it fizzled went to Xeon only after. PA-RISC by definition got moved because of Itanium. Alpha, well, that's just a mess inside of DEC/Compaq/HP. They wanted a single chip, called Itanium, instead of supporting two chip lines.
It's all relative. Itanium was slated to be *the only* 64 bit chip, replacing x86 with a new architecture. It was supposed to be the only server chip as it cleaned up all the RISC chips out of the market. It kind of did the latter - only Sparc and POWER still really exist, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha are gones.
But the goals were high. Destroy all other chips. even x86. Not have a second vendor (no more AMD making x86 chips) meant all the money went to Andy Grove. They never did close to any of that. Based on the money poured in, and the expectations, it is a failure. Maybe not Apple Newton level failure, but it is a failure.
Err, I know Slashdot doesn't allow editing of comments, but Itanium is definitely an Intel architecture. I assume you really meant to put "non-Intel-x86 compatible". It's still significant since HP helped designed the chips.
I forgot the code names, but the first Itanium was Intel designed. Had really bad performance, landed with a thud. HP (back when they had engineers and not marketers) designed the second set, which actually was a decent chip. HP had a lot vested in this, HP slowly moving away from Itanium is very very big.
Hell, we moved off of 6 sometime this year. We don't personally run Google Apps, but we can't be unique in having IE restrictions such as that.
We're also a Linux firm, and the latest Firefox you can run on our Linux (RedHat AS 5, moving to 6) is Firefox 17. Chrome/Chromium won't even run at all.
Blackberry started out as two or 3 special tricks.
1) it was by far the best way to get corporate email in your pocket. The keyboard was a part of this, easiest way to reply.
2) It also had BBM, which in certain places made it special for cutting down SMS costs (SMS has huge huge margins for carriers).
3) Less important, it had excellent battery life, meaning the older phones could go days without a charge.
Now, all of those specialties are gone.
1) EVERYbody does corporate email. Android and iOS have closed the gap, and in some ways eclipsed Blackberry (iOS 7 per-app vpn - a corporate vpn for a special email account/app obviates some of the need for BES, saving cash).
2) iMessage, Line, Whatsapp, google voice/hangouts.. There are so many competitors in this space. iMessage is so much easier to use. BBM userids is so cryptic some say it's "security through obscurity"
3) People would trade off processor speed and flexibility for battery life. Witness the OctoCore processors on some phones now. Or the battery needed to pump some of the 6" plus screens. If battery life was so critical, you'd have small RAM small screen single core devices winning the sales war.
And the biggest that Blackberry never saw coming:
4+) Apple (and android) have shown that people don't want an email device as much as they want a flexible computer in their pocket. Paraphrasing Balmer, "applications, applications, applications....." If you're gonna have a bulky phone, it might as well do a lot.
So, in a turnaround, what's the core competency they can turn to? a physical keyboard is nice, but cuts down screen real estate for non-typing apps. The fact that no major Android manufacturer has a physical keyboard on their showcase phones shows it's not a requirement. Besides, they could add one if needed. Apple never will, and they sold 10 million phones in about a weekend plus.
BlackBerry is toast. There is no way they will keep making phones. They may soldier on selling BES for a bit.
I'll assume this is a real question from someone that doesn't know the quote.
Turtle = TSA Agent?
There is a legend of how the universe is constructed that the Earth lies on the back of a giant turtle. But wait, what does the turtle stand on? Ummmm, well another turtle. OK, what does that stand on? Eventually you get to "turtles all the way down".
It's become a phrase in some situations where you wave away a hard problem by having more and more layers of the same, turtles all the way down.
I can't confirm now (source is slash dotted) but I don't remember them talking about abuse of "email as authorization" to most Internet sites.
Say I do this. Even if I split my emails out to having a "bank/amazon/eBay" reset email, the IMAP proxy settings seem to me would would let them check my email, and set password resets from my bank. Scary.
Guessing the branch might seem difficult. However, the college I went to, and I assume many others, has a bank offer to sign up all freshmen for free checking accounts with a debit card. All those signing up with get the same first 10 digits (possibly 11 or 12). It leaves very little to guesswork.
I used to work in the bookstore at my university. Some first 4 digit combos are permanently stuck in my brain, such as 4128 (Citibank Visa), 4673 (Citibank gold visa, iirc), 5424 (citibank mastercard.. lot of citicards at my uni). Remember that most cards are run through some bank in North Dakota since ND has lax interest laws. Number of branches is much smaller than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Back when Joel could write, he penned this on what he called the Law of Leaky Abstractions. Related, his rant on Java Schools
Joel's writing was always flawed, never perfect, but usually made you think some.
Im kind of torn about this one.
In one room, Blackberry's main innovations were the keyboard and having mail in your pocket. (BBM being a semi-third, but harder to operate) The mail in your pocket was a goldmine while it was unique, but they never saw themselves as a single trick pony but as BLACKBERRY with some kind of pixie dust magic, and never did much past this. Their vision was short sighted, and got massively run over by companies (google/android, Apple) that saw the computer-in-your-pocket thing better.
So... about the keyboard. Part of me "hey, just a keyboard" and how do you patent that? Part of me realizes that for all their faults, you can tell RIM/BlackBerry spent a lot of time/money specifically engineering that keyboard. Those curves really do help making the keys "bigger" than they are physically. The Typo is a pretty blatant copy (they'll get killed at trial where they're literally saying they want to take the keyboard from a blackberry). Shouldn't BlackBerry get some cash at least as R&D?
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
- Commonly Attributed to Niehls Bohr
I always saw him and Squidward finding some river or something below the ocean.
Wasn't there a story yesterday that was essentially this? Canadians say "no, we didn't spy on Canadians" but let the NSA spy on a Toronto G8 meeting. I'm sure that was a reciprocal relationship.
Sometimes random unexpected things move you the most.
For me, Mandela's legacy was sealed in The 16th Man. A snapshot of not how he pushed the nation away from apartheid, but how he ran the nation and kept it together. There were so many armed groups just waiting for a flashpoint to descend into civil war. You may have seen it in "Invictus", but for me, seeing people talk about how they were getting ready to kill people, and talking with the actual players (no interviews with Mandela himself tho) made it more real.
It kind of makes you think how he kept the country together when we can't even get our Congress together to make a vote.
There are two physics forces at work that make ABS better.
1) the coefficient of static friction (two things pushing against each other, not moving) is higher than sliding friction. If you think about a tire, its contact patch is (nearly) static relative to the ground. You skid, you get rolling friction, less sticky, less able to grab. Only in special situations (gravel snowplow) does this not hold.
2) with ABS, you have dynamic braking at all 4 wheels. You have massively different wheel loads during a turn - good ABS can custom tune for each wheel.
How many bugs are in Windows XP? You don't know, no one knows. Someone needs to do work to figure that out. Some geek needs to spend time to figure out the attack surface and see what breaks. How do you fix it? A harder question, how do you fix it without causing more problems? I've got nearly 15 years of code and machines that support XP. If you don't test, and this breaks, i'm going to be angry at Microsoft. Oh, and this is a Zero day. So I need to be FAST and RIGHT. That doesn't come cheap.
Are you going to pay for that? Are you going to pay for the geeks to fix the holes? If they don't get money, they can get money by selling these exploits to others. Are you going to pay for the matrix of testing? Think of the millions of different PCs there are. Any code change costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to test. You don't get that for free.
A bug by definition is a problem. If you admit there are bugs, you are, in effect, admitting that the OS does not work fine. You just have expectations that they will be fixed before they bite you. Either that, or maybe there's some acceptable level of infestation you're good with on your computer. That may be fine, but don't expect all other users to have the same level of comfort with it.
I don't get that last comment. If you have an old car, and the engine wears out after 10 years, you don't get the money back from GM. You either pay for the repair, or you ride the bus.
Service Pack 2, a.k.a. when XP really became stable, was way back in 2004. SP3 was back in 2008, still 5 years ago. If you think about XP being NT2000 with a nicer GUI, then the design was set way back in 1997 or so, back when dialup was king and an AOL disk was not yet a running joke.
To those that say "well my computer works fine".. umm, no it doesn't. Your OS was designed in 1997-2001, in a relatively much safer Internet environment, and is not designed for always on persistent attacks with billions of dollars available by hacking. As much as I think Microsoft keeps people out to dry, at some point you need to update.
For good and bad (and Mavericks has some things that piss me off) the Apple model of forced upgrades has some reasoning to it.
Hmm, a bug that gets admin rights.... If I were sufficiently evil I would have saved this until April when there's no chance of it being patched ever.
My mom died of pancreatic cancer. She was well taken care of in the hospice. She had renal failure at the end, so fluids would actually have been cruel to give to her. Pancreatic cancer is obviously an attack on the digestive system, so food wouldn't have helped either. She was well medicated, almost too much - the saddest night for me in the hospice is when they drugged her out at midnight when you could see she wanted to stick around and listen more.
If the patient is well taken care of by drugs, the starvation is more an issue for the family rather than the patient. If you can skip over some of the legal landmines by starvation while taking care of the pain, I think it's the best we can do at this point.
An interesting talk about what Tech tends to do and what Tech should do.
You know that "all in your head" doesn't mean much. A concussion is "all in your head". The brain damage from football that cause beloved Dave Duerson, and Junior Seau to take their own lives was all in their head as well. Go tell an Alzheimer's patient "it's all in your head" and see how much that helps your treatment of them.
The brain is a pattern seeking, pattern matching, pattern forming engine. These patterns are created by chemicals and by creating physical connections in your brain. You can't totally remove physical from any "solely psychological" phenomena.
I agree that x86-64 has cleaned up and killed 64 bit RISC chips (partly by being RISC at their core, with a CISC instruction set), I think you don't remember the timelines. Remember that there was no x86-64 back then.
Itanium came out in 2001. AMD64 (who was going to support AMD in the enterprise?) came out in 2003. The first Intel x86_64 chips came out in 2004.
For "big iron", there was no getting away from 64 bit Apps and servers. You needed > 4GB address spaces. PA-RISC, UltraSparc, MIPS, Alpha, all were 64 bit chips. Now they had real competition with Intel. SGI first wanted to move to the "dominant" Itanium, then when it fizzled went to Xeon only after. PA-RISC by definition got moved because of Itanium. Alpha, well, that's just a mess inside of DEC/Compaq/HP. They wanted a single chip, called Itanium, instead of supporting two chip lines.
It's all relative. Itanium was slated to be *the only* 64 bit chip, replacing x86 with a new architecture. It was supposed to be the only server chip as it cleaned up all the RISC chips out of the market. It kind of did the latter - only Sparc and POWER still really exist, MIPS, PA-RISC, and Alpha are gones.
But the goals were high. Destroy all other chips. even x86. Not have a second vendor (no more AMD making x86 chips) meant all the money went to Andy Grove. They never did close to any of that. Based on the money poured in, and the expectations, it is a failure. Maybe not Apple Newton level failure, but it is a failure.
And your fingertips are still burnt. (Itanium as a marshmallow and hotdog heater joke)
Err, I know Slashdot doesn't allow editing of comments, but Itanium is definitely an Intel architecture. I assume you really meant to put "non-Intel-x86 compatible". It's still significant since HP helped designed the chips.
I forgot the code names, but the first Itanium was Intel designed. Had really bad performance, landed with a thud. HP (back when they had engineers and not marketers) designed the second set, which actually was a decent chip. HP had a lot vested in this, HP slowly moving away from Itanium is very very big.
Hell, we moved off of 6 sometime this year. We don't personally run Google Apps, but we can't be unique in having IE restrictions such as that.
We're also a Linux firm, and the latest Firefox you can run on our Linux (RedHat AS 5, moving to 6) is Firefox 17. Chrome/Chromium won't even run at all.
Blackberry started out as two or 3 special tricks.
1) it was by far the best way to get corporate email in your pocket. The keyboard was a part of this, easiest way to reply.
2) It also had BBM, which in certain places made it special for cutting down SMS costs (SMS has huge huge margins for carriers).
3) Less important, it had excellent battery life, meaning the older phones could go days without a charge.
Now, all of those specialties are gone.
1) EVERYbody does corporate email. Android and iOS have closed the gap, and in some ways eclipsed Blackberry (iOS 7 per-app vpn - a corporate vpn for a special email account/app obviates some of the need for BES, saving cash).
2) iMessage, Line, Whatsapp, google voice/hangouts.. There are so many competitors in this space. iMessage is so much easier to use. BBM userids is so cryptic some say it's "security through obscurity"
3) People would trade off processor speed and flexibility for battery life. Witness the OctoCore processors on some phones now. Or the battery needed to pump some of the 6" plus screens. If battery life was so critical, you'd have small RAM small screen single core devices winning the sales war.
And the biggest that Blackberry never saw coming:
4+) Apple (and android) have shown that people don't want an email device as much as they want a flexible computer in their pocket. Paraphrasing Balmer, "applications, applications, applications....." If you're gonna have a bulky phone, it might as well do a lot.
So, in a turnaround, what's the core competency they can turn to? a physical keyboard is nice, but cuts down screen real estate for non-typing apps. The fact that no major Android manufacturer has a physical keyboard on their showcase phones shows it's not a requirement. Besides, they could add one if needed. Apple never will, and they sold 10 million phones in about a weekend plus.
BlackBerry is toast. There is no way they will keep making phones. They may soldier on selling BES for a bit.
I'll assume this is a real question from someone that doesn't know the quote.
There is a legend of how the universe is constructed that the Earth lies on the back of a giant turtle. But wait, what does the turtle stand on? Ummmm, well another turtle. OK, what does that stand on? Eventually you get to "turtles all the way down".
It's become a phrase in some situations where you wave away a hard problem by having more and more layers of the same, turtles all the way down.
Intellectual Property should be subject to a Property tax. If you can buy it, it should be taxed.
Id upgrade it just for avoiding driveby malware attacks. IE6 was/is horrible in this regard, not sure how targetted is FireFox 2.0 on Linux.
I can't confirm now (source is slash dotted) but I don't remember them talking about abuse of "email as authorization" to most Internet sites.
Say I do this. Even if I split my emails out to having a "bank/amazon/eBay" reset email, the IMAP proxy settings seem to me would would let them check my email, and set password resets from my bank. Scary.
I used to work in the bookstore at my university. Some first 4 digit combos are permanently stuck in my brain, such as 4128 (Citibank Visa), 4673 (Citibank gold visa, iirc), 5424 (citibank mastercard.. lot of citicards at my uni). Remember that most cards are run through some bank in North Dakota since ND has lax interest laws. Number of branches is much smaller than you think.
I'll just leave this here
Top Secret, very under the radar movie....