I don't know why anyone makes a fuss about this stuff. The majority of the large tech companies all feed the patent trolls, themselves, frequently enough that they get what they deserve.
If a company stood it's ground and began an advertising campaign centered around exposing dumb patents and stopping their own dumb patent litigation, I could respect the situation then.
Motorola should just do what has been done a dozen times now. Dig out some worthless patents of their own that they think they can stick in Microsoft's face and setup a cross-licensing agreement. If the patents were really worth anything, these companies wouldn't be trading and sharing them like baseball cards.
Correct me if I am wrong, but understandable sentences only constitute weak passwords if the attacker is aware of the likelihood of a sentence based password or if the encryption algorithm can be attacked by partial password fragments. I know old school NTLM was a terrible example of this since it could be attacked by fragments.
Assuming proper encryption in the authentication system and attacker ignorance of the target personality, a moderately long password requirement of just >12 characters, would be much better than relatively common required >7 characters with at least 1 number and 1 punctuation mark.
Similarly, a secondary password based on a CAPTCHA would probably increase things by a few orders of magnitude. By this I mean something similar to a sign in key, symbol, glyph, swatch or color, etcetera, which the user has created responses to, but with less requirement than the password itself. Each symbol would obviously have invalid reserve words during setup. E.g. a picture of a stop sign cannot have "stop", "sign", "brakes" or any combination, but the word "arrest" could be valid. After entering a username, the system could render the symbol from your selections, for example, there are 30 available symbols, you must pick 4 and create unique responses for each. Further, the authentication system should be ambiguous as to which field was incorrectly filled out. Actually it shouldn't even know if the passwords are used to salt each other uniquely.
HP actually has a hell of an R&D division, even in house. The problem is the same type of attitudes which prevailed over 30 years ago with they turned down Wozniak on the Apple PC. The plan goes like this. Ignore anything that is too different from what you have now. For other things, invest some money, but slightly less than necessary to have a complete and potentially successful product. Look at the tech demo and say, yeah you have some nice ideas there. Every now in then make the rest of the investment to get the product on the market, but with no backing to support the product through a complete life cycle.
A lot of people will hear this and think immediately of the HP Touchpad, for which this applies. WebOS should at most have been an additional interface or framework in Android, similar to HTC Sense (for all the hate, Sense is not bad). It would have also allowed more focus on HP exclusive Android applications instead of building a complete OS. After 6 months on the market, they could even start selling their top of the line HP exclusive apps on the market for other Android tablets at a premium, or worked with top tier competitors to license and re-brand them, like Lenovo and Acer.
Same thing is true for their other game changer tablet, the HP Slate 500. People were literally on wait lists to get full retail paid products for 3-4 months because they had no foresight to ramp production.
Not to mention that they botched 2 or 3 parts of the HP Slate 500, which corrected, would have really opened up the market. 1) The graphics drivers, especially for video (Intel's fault, can't even output 720P video, again in a 2010 device? WTF?). 2) The poor TN LCD quality, even for it's day (2005 quality LCD in a 2010 device). 3) Poor additional support of touch in gesture in Windows 7. The N-trig N-act software came late and buggy to the game. If it just did the very simple gesture and multitouch functionality it is supposed to support, and do it well, and have been there at launch, it would have been a killer feature.
(I should mention I own a Slate 500 and love it, but I got it knowing and accepting it's flaws ahead of time in favor of all the things it does PERFECT.)
Further still in the tablet direction, HP has produced the best refinements on the convertible tablet class. All of that said, each one has too many unique flaws, and feels incomplete in some way.
HP R&D needs to really sort out actually reducing the variety of release products, finding the best blend of the half dozen ideas they currently decide to fund and make just one or two great devices. This includes turning down more potentially revolutionary ideas, but instead take some of the extra development money now available, and let those ideas incubate in the lab until they fit a whole product (whole in the broad sense of coherent, complete, good, etc.). Last, put the money aside to support the product 100% through one full sales cycle, let's say 12-18 months before dropping support to skeleton crew maintenance only.
What you actually have to mentally imagine is lighting a match inside a container in slow motion. Now think of the bell curve of intensity in the flame. Now imagine the container is sealed, but has some portion which can be expanded. If the whole match tip exploded in a faster instant, the container would be burst, or the shock wave would expand out in such a way that the expandable portion barely moved. You want a slow flame front which pushes the expandable portion out, at least in current conventional gasoline engines.
The combustion characteristics in engines are based on sound. There are ways by changing the flame propagation which allows more energy to be extracted as work. You have to think about the expanding pressure wave coming from the flame, and consider how it strikes and deforms the other surfaces in the cylinder as well as reflects off them, potentially putting more power into the piston... or not.
Factors like constructive and destructive sound wave interference all play in. This is why from a field of 10, 20, 30 cars all built under the same requirements, there is only one winner of the race. We think it is all meta-game and diving, but there are substantial differences in power output curves and totals based on the tuning and differences.
Further, to understand the time scales you must imagine, for a combustion engine engineer, the process or moving air through the engine is like stirring honey. The fluid is viscous, sticky, and demonstrates all kinds of other properties not perceived by the lay person.
That is a completely stupid way to look at it. It is the same thing a lot of people said with caps first came to cell phones. I don't use half of that cap today, so it will be just fine.
How ignorant do you have to be to see you may well be using 500-600 GB / month in 12-18 months. Look at the change in average usage from 3 years ago to today. Did you just completely skip past reading the post halfway further up the page about 600 MB caps in 2009 or the change from 1.5 GB / month average from around the same time to nearly 50 GB / month average now.
Shortsighted fools like you are why they are able to pull this shit. Stop being a dumb consumer.
Caps would only be reasonable if they incremented automatically on a set scale that matched usage. In other words, if ~50 GB / month is average, then the cap should stay a quarterly rolling average of 6x average usage, their 300 GB number (frankly 8-10x average seems more fair due to large scale disparities in use). If a year later, average usage was 150 GB, then the cap should be 900 GB. This would maintain competitive use by emerging technologies, i.e., Netflix, Prime, etc.
Unfortunately the BBB in the US is a complete crock. When I see a BBB placard on a business' front door, it's usually a sign of poor service and corruption. Before NewEgg, every mom & pop PC parts dealer I dealt with that sold used merchandise, remarked CPUs, and factory seconds had one. See here, http://money.howstuffworks.com/better-business-bureau5.htm
Some of the suggestions to call the PUC & FCC aren't too bad though.
Most of your post was alright, if a bit insider myopic.
BUT, please stop propagating the 90% of the US now has broadband lie. Those are numbers completely made up the last couple years or so since the FCC started applying pressure for rural broadband. 3G DOES NOT COUNT AS RESIDENTIAL / RURAL BROADBAND! NEITHER DOES SATELLITE!
Pretty much any service that is not within around 30% of the speed, price, usage terms, and latency of mainstream suburban / urban broadband is not really broadband. Rural extended range DSL at 128 kbps (on a good day) shouldn't be called broadband (deluxe narrowband at least). It can't count as rurally available broadband if the cost is 3x what people 20 miles closer to town pay for double the speed. 2 GB/month caps on 3g/4g... then you really can't use it as broadband, because your aren't going to get to ditch Dish for Netflix and Prime.
There need to be hard requirements for what is broadband.... Under $40-60 a month (base price tiers). Average latency to major websites below 300 ms (generous spec, rules out satellite at > 1000ms). Daily peak speeds of at least 1.5 mb/s down, 128 kbps up. Daily minimum speeds of 600 kbps down / 80 kbps up. Connection uptime, monthly calculation, 95% (rules out a lot of 3g/4g in rural areas) Usage / transfer caps NONE. (completely rules out 3g/4g when you factor verizon's latest and 2g reduction on T-Mo)
I couldn't think of a good conventional way, so obviously the answer was a Kickstarter project. Here's the gist.
Open a call center in India tasked as customer support -support. For $60 yearly or $40 for 6 months you can subscribe. You call or e-mail with an issue with service with a vendor, give them the appropriate vendor support number and your details as needed (you've paid, so they keep your personal information secure). You even have the option to setup a profile where all this is available to the service, speeding up your time logging the ticket (vendor names / numbers / account numbers).
THEY (India call center techs) call your vendor to handle the complaint process on your behalf. They handle the time waiting on hold, arguing, negotiating, demanding, etc. They could even call you back to conference you in as necessary (authorizing them to speak on your behalf, etc.). They will handle all of the uncomfortable discussions, demanding to be escalated to a manager, getting credits to your account, everything.
In many cases, the business model would even save money because the calls would be local!!!
Further, they could e-mail you links to recordings of the calls for your approval later. "Calls may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance." YOU BET!
For particularly difficult situations, like a vendor with a horrible cancellation policy, captive market, or just crappy service, they can call up to 4 times daily on your behalf, brow-beating the vendor's support infrastructure. For $10 extra, we will "call bomb" them with a minimum of 10 calls a day for a week.
AMD is also in a nice position to do more work in the ultraportable (think tablets, maybe phones in the future) market. Intel has repeatedly dropped the ball with Atom architecture, especially with their garbage implementations of PowerVR graphics cores. AMD may be skiddish to compete with Atom and various ARM architectures, but the risk could be worth the payoff.
Beating ARM performance is trivial, though performance per watt is a much more difficult task, especially using an x86 instruction set. Beating Atom is not too hard, as even Intel admits they keep missing goals at nearly every step. AMD has a huge amount of low power graphics IP to pull from as well as multiple established paths to scalable graphics. It would be great for OEMs to tout a tablet with equal or better than Atom battery life (>7 hours, 10 hours being the crown) and better than iPad 3 GPU power, even if the battery life drops in half playing let's say an Infinity Blade grade AAA game title. ARM architectures are also heavily constrained by crappy, crappy, interconnect bandwidth to storage and RAM.
Even on a lowly Atom z540, Android x86 cold boots in sub 12 second range because the x86 architectures have good bandwidth to the SSD (PATA no less!). Compare this to ARM tablets with 2-4x cores taking 25-60 seconds. Alternately consider the smattering of ARM based NAS boxes which top out at 20-40 MB/s over GbE with 4x 2 TB hdd in RAID 5, when each drive supports >70 MB/s transfers.
So a suitable analogy would be locks easily defeated by a blank key then?
That would appease your safety / personal injury requirement as well as be an example which has actually happened. I don't think consumers would be happy with an easily stolen automobile either.
It still follows that the manufacturer failed their due diligence to provide a safe, working product to consumers. Safety includes security against having control arbitrarily taken by third parties without consent. While we reasonably consider physical safety paramount, financial safety follows closely. Getting hacked by a software exploit certainly comprises a loss of financial safety. Consider all those lacking the knowledge to clean their computers of a worm, virus, or similar exploit who end up spending money having the Geek Squad clean their computer.
I should note, I work for an MSP and I regularly bill out pretty nice sums of money to clean malware which has infected customer PCs. If there was some tort reform for software designers regarding security holes, they might have a chance at recovering some of the loss they incur.
If I was a mechanic fixing a known defect on an automobile, I wouldn't even be billing them in many cases, or they would be submitting the repair bill to the manufacturer for reimbursement. For example, I have a '96 Mustang which I could have been party to a class action against Ford for defectively designed water cross overs on late 90's 4.6L V8s. The lawsuit would have paid for a replacement with a properly durable design should I have repaired / replaced it up to 7 years after production (metal instead of plastic).
I just go with a policy of buying new copies of software every several versions. If I need a feature or bug fix from a version in between buying cycles, I have no moral issues obtaining an upgrade through alternate channels.
Pretty much the way I look at it is, if I buy a product with a manufacturer defect, there should be no limitations on my ability to obtain a refund for the product. In the case of software, I don't find it unreasonable to skip past the unreasonable methods I would need to pursue to obtain a refund and purchase a fixed version.
Lemon laws don't exist to protect consumers from the idea that an automobile is a failure, but rather to prevent consumers from being burdened by unreasonable processes for obtaining a working automobile pursuant to the arrangements they made at purchase.
Also, no one should ever feel respect or bound to an EULA. The practice itself is inherently outside of common and established legal practices. If I were presented the license at the time of purchase, prior to paying, I might be able to respect it. Based on the concept of the EULA, I could have my PC pass a counter EULA to the installer or e-mailed to the vendor which outlined my requirements of their software in order to occupy space on my hard drive. If the installer continues, can I not consider their consent to be implied.
It's the same reason, no one thinks twice about installing an ad-block on their browser. They have a right to control what content runs and executes on their computing device. I've voiced the opinion for quite some time that advertisements which attempt to get around ad-blocking actually constitute violations of most computer hacking laws (use of processing time on a computing system without authorization).
Definitely agreed here. There is plenty of movement away from Java towards C#. Microsoft is working hard to be fair to the community and let the language become a real standard without severe restriction.
Also, C# lets you develop on a wide array of platforms, Windows, WP7/8, iOS (Mono), OSX (Mono), Android (Mono), Linux (Mono again).
Versus Java, C# affords a better opportunity to stay within one language for the entirety of a program. Higher performance doesn't mix with Java, video games for example, frequently need modules coded in C/C++ in order to achieve reasonable performance levels. Some of the Java -> C# porting has shown massive performance gains.
Unless Oracle changes their policies regarding Java, the language is likely to languish as it has for the past several years.
I'm not a fan of Python like others. I've always felt the language doesn't encourage the best coding practices because of the ease and lax style. I will give it credit as probably one of the faster to implement languages for one-off rapid application development. C# strikes me a better language to continue your existing knowledge while modernizing and have a path forward.
The scary part, aside from the fact that sailing has them completely pwn'd is that they probably aimed straight for the ocean currents which would give them the best speed boost.
As I said elsewhere, trash makes it's way across the Pacific between California and Hawaii faster than this ship did!
My apologies for the double post... but I would hope that by the 24th century we are properly using hydrophobic / oleophobic / self cleaning substrates for touchscreens. Titanium dioxide and micro texturing have all but solved that problem here in the 21st century when manufacturers choose to implement them.
I've come to realize that while in certain use cases, touch screens are great (basically any general computing situation where the user chooses apps). They are only useful in a small minority of industrial design scenarios.
Industrial design engineers are increasingly using lcd+touchscreen as a kludge because they lack the intellect to fully step back and imagine the full breath of use cases for a device at the beginning of a project. The only industrial design use case where lcd+touchscreen belongs is where an image or similar visual media need to be manipulated by panning, zooming, or placing indicators by hand or finger. If you need a touchscreen to operate functions of an automobile while driving, you have failed as an engineer.
I'm waiting to see how many posts pile up about voice recognition being the way to go in automobiles. It is arguably a better alternative to controlling multimedia functions in a car, definitely better than anything touch screen based. Frankly I wish the legislators would wise up and ban all touch input built into cars going forward. It is a disaster. Hard buttons are the safest way to control auxiliary functions in an automobile. I am being a bit hypocritical though, as I have considered integrating a really cheap Android tablet into my car for GPS and music. I also don't see there being a chance for any kind of ban given the propensity of GPS to use touch input.
Really, their just need to be better UI design guidelines for automotive use. Car mode on Android is alright, but still offers too much for the average mind to scan and pick from. I always thought the UI styles used in most GPS units was best, never really more than 2-4 choices at a time on the screen.
I could see a TTS system reading feeds from twitter, facebook, rss, etcetera being useful and cool even if I would never use it. Get in the car, get on the morning commute and get your/. feed instead of AM talk radio I suppose.
I joke about voice recognition and commands because as many here are aware, vocalization takes 80% of the average person's brain processing power. That is why so many people can't talk on the phone and drive (besides the fact that they are self-centered, spoiled a-holes).
Something tells me graphene is substantially closer to primetime for the suggested use cases (10-20 years off I suppose). Outside that I could maybe see the patterns being used by an exotic loom for existing kevlar or similar.
The visualization from Taco linked to above could be perfected with a feed from RSS or some easily updated CSV (not that the current code is remotely difficult to modify). Then the nodes need to be placed geographically correct with graphics from Wargames (the true 1983 Wargames that is).
I'm surprised the cell phone companies haven't implemented something similar on their towers to reduce backhaul. Have dozens of towers in a given area relay optically to a super node tower with amazing backhaul. Have them relay to a few others in a standard mesh network layout for redundancy. Might even reduce their spectrum need if they are using channels to talk tower to tower. May have some issues with rain I suppose though, but that could be mitigated if laser wavelengths for which water is not refractive exist. Or just use laser arrays with heavy multiplexing and parallel signal reinforcement.
Voice recognition is at it limits phonetically, really it has been since the late 90's. The perceived improvements come entirely from context sensitive assumptions. Siri was better than Google Voice and search for the first 90 days or so due to more brute force behind the context engine. They pulled the CPU allocation at Apple and it has been behind Google Voice ever since.
A Pentium II 450 Mhz running Dragon Naturally Speaking on XP circa 1999 interprets your voice just as well as Google Voice or Siri (given similar microphones / adc's), the difference has entirely been in the guesses the software makes when it doubts recognition of a word within a phrase. A propagation of high quality mics and adc's into phones versus a crap Labtec mics on 90's era PC's constitutes the rest of the difference.
Context interpretation requires an enormous database of phrase fragment search capabilities. Providing better search results is merely the act of making better command keyword extrapolation. E.g., "I want to go to," and going straight to a map to the (nearest current GPS), rather than requiring a structured query such as, "Map to near "
There is no real intelligence or revolution being discussed here, it is rather all the correct application of large amounts of brute force processing power. It all comes down to an extension of the system which made Google #1 over Altavista and Hotbot back in the day, that is processing power driven context sensitivity as opposed to pure keyword frequency.
The only revolution is the linear improvement of CPU power/RAM/storage per $ which makes it affordable to do for free or cheap.
Sounds very similar to the delayed choice quantum eraser experiments performed by Wheeler et al. The main difference sounds like the use of polarized filters instead of the double slit diffraction.
Assuming their battery concept is the real deal and comes to fruition, why not come up with a system which retains the ability both to charge overnight and instantly fill up.
The swappable battery bank idea is silly. Charge deltas, consistency, fraud, monitoring... it is all too much work.
The design of the battery could be adept at being literally tanked up. Create an apparatus for purging the oxygen rich Lithium ions while replacing with full charged ones in some gas or liquid carrier.
The filling hose would need to have at least 3 lines and fit on sealed. One line in, one line out, and one for a purge liquid or gas (to get Oxygen out of the fittings)... I think liquid nitrogen would do the trick. Even the concept of Octane ratings could be maintained. Lithium certified at multiple levels of charge (relative to carrier fluid), 80%, 90%, 95%... etc. Gas stations could use their own large scale batteries to recharge the waste Li2O2 back to Li2 overnight, or in electrically remote areas, get it trucked in.
If we have the materials science to build the batteries, then containment, storage, and disbursement should equally be within reach.
The only real issue one could argue is the inherent danger in transporting Li2, but we've worked around that with gasoline (though it is substantially less reactive).
Heck, even fathers could still scald their children for running their batteries into the ground by not buying premium at the pump.
I would apply for the patent myself, but I don't really feel like doing the work to figure out the correct and safe working fluid for happy go boomy Li2.
Really, I have it on a HP Slate 500 with a lowly single core Atom and it starts in about 5-6 seconds.
I just wish that the N-trig Stylus / Digitizer was as mature as Wacom's stuff (namely has issues with ghost clicks and stray marks from nearly 5mm off the screen).
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I don't know why anyone makes a fuss about this stuff. The majority of the large tech companies all feed the patent trolls, themselves, frequently enough that they get what they deserve.
If a company stood it's ground and began an advertising campaign centered around exposing dumb patents and stopping their own dumb patent litigation, I could respect the situation then.
Motorola should just do what has been done a dozen times now. Dig out some worthless patents of their own that they think they can stick in Microsoft's face and setup a cross-licensing agreement. If the patents were really worth anything, these companies wouldn't be trading and sharing them like baseball cards.
Correct me if I am wrong, but understandable sentences only constitute weak passwords if the attacker is aware of the likelihood of a sentence based password or if the encryption algorithm can be attacked by partial password fragments. I know old school NTLM was a terrible example of this since it could be attacked by fragments.
Assuming proper encryption in the authentication system and attacker ignorance of the target personality, a moderately long password requirement of just >12 characters, would be much better than relatively common required >7 characters with at least 1 number and 1 punctuation mark.
Similarly, a secondary password based on a CAPTCHA would probably increase things by a few orders of magnitude. By this I mean something similar to a sign in key, symbol, glyph, swatch or color, etcetera, which the user has created responses to, but with less requirement than the password itself. Each symbol would obviously have invalid reserve words during setup. E.g. a picture of a stop sign cannot have "stop", "sign", "brakes" or any combination, but the word "arrest" could be valid. After entering a username, the system could render the symbol from your selections, for example, there are 30 available symbols, you must pick 4 and create unique responses for each. Further, the authentication system should be ambiguous as to which field was incorrectly filled out. Actually it shouldn't even know if the passwords are used to salt each other uniquely.
HP actually has a hell of an R&D division, even in house. The problem is the same type of attitudes which prevailed over 30 years ago with they turned down Wozniak on the Apple PC. The plan goes like this. Ignore anything that is too different from what you have now. For other things, invest some money, but slightly less than necessary to have a complete and potentially successful product. Look at the tech demo and say, yeah you have some nice ideas there. Every now in then make the rest of the investment to get the product on the market, but with no backing to support the product through a complete life cycle.
A lot of people will hear this and think immediately of the HP Touchpad, for which this applies. WebOS should at most have been an additional interface or framework in Android, similar to HTC Sense (for all the hate, Sense is not bad). It would have also allowed more focus on HP exclusive Android applications instead of building a complete OS. After 6 months on the market, they could even start selling their top of the line HP exclusive apps on the market for other Android tablets at a premium, or worked with top tier competitors to license and re-brand them, like Lenovo and Acer.
Same thing is true for their other game changer tablet, the HP Slate 500. People were literally on wait lists to get full retail paid products for 3-4 months because they had no foresight to ramp production.
Not to mention that they botched 2 or 3 parts of the HP Slate 500, which corrected, would have really opened up the market.
1) The graphics drivers, especially for video (Intel's fault, can't even output 720P video, again in a 2010 device? WTF?).
2) The poor TN LCD quality, even for it's day (2005 quality LCD in a 2010 device).
3) Poor additional support of touch in gesture in Windows 7. The N-trig N-act software came late and buggy to the game. If it just did the very simple gesture and multitouch functionality it is supposed to support, and do it well, and have been there at launch, it would have been a killer feature.
(I should mention I own a Slate 500 and love it, but I got it knowing and accepting it's flaws ahead of time in favor of all the things it does PERFECT.)
Further still in the tablet direction, HP has produced the best refinements on the convertible tablet class. All of that said, each one has too many unique flaws, and feels incomplete in some way.
HP R&D needs to really sort out actually reducing the variety of release products, finding the best blend of the half dozen ideas they currently decide to fund and make just one or two great devices. This includes turning down more potentially revolutionary ideas, but instead take some of the extra development money now available, and let those ideas incubate in the lab until they fit a whole product (whole in the broad sense of coherent, complete, good, etc.). Last, put the money aside to support the product 100% through one full sales cycle, let's say 12-18 months before dropping support to skeleton crew maintenance only.
Actually no.
What you actually have to mentally imagine is lighting a match inside a container in slow motion. Now think of the bell curve of intensity in the flame. Now imagine the container is sealed, but has some portion which can be expanded. If the whole match tip exploded in a faster instant, the container would be burst, or the shock wave would expand out in such a way that the expandable portion barely moved. You want a slow flame front which pushes the expandable portion out, at least in current conventional gasoline engines.
The combustion characteristics in engines are based on sound. There are ways by changing the flame propagation which allows more energy to be extracted as work. You have to think about the expanding pressure wave coming from the flame, and consider how it strikes and deforms the other surfaces in the cylinder as well as reflects off them, potentially putting more power into the piston... or not.
Factors like constructive and destructive sound wave interference all play in. This is why from a field of 10, 20, 30 cars all built under the same requirements, there is only one winner of the race. We think it is all meta-game and diving, but there are substantial differences in power output curves and totals based on the tuning and differences.
Further, to understand the time scales you must imagine, for a combustion engine engineer, the process or moving air through the engine is like stirring honey. The fluid is viscous, sticky, and demonstrates all kinds of other properties not perceived by the lay person.
That is a completely stupid way to look at it. It is the same thing a lot of people said with caps first came to cell phones. I don't use half of that cap today, so it will be just fine.
How ignorant do you have to be to see you may well be using 500-600 GB / month in 12-18 months. Look at the change in average usage from 3 years ago to today. Did you just completely skip past reading the post halfway further up the page about 600 MB caps in 2009 or the change from 1.5 GB / month average from around the same time to nearly 50 GB / month average now.
Shortsighted fools like you are why they are able to pull this shit. Stop being a dumb consumer.
Caps would only be reasonable if they incremented automatically on a set scale that matched usage. In other words, if ~50 GB / month is average, then the cap should stay a quarterly rolling average of 6x average usage, their 300 GB number (frankly 8-10x average seems more fair due to large scale disparities in use). If a year later, average usage was 150 GB, then the cap should be 900 GB. This would maintain competitive use by emerging technologies, i.e., Netflix, Prime, etc.
Unfortunately the BBB in the US is a complete crock. When I see a BBB placard on a business' front door, it's usually a sign of poor service and corruption. Before NewEgg, every mom & pop PC parts dealer I dealt with that sold used merchandise, remarked CPUs, and factory seconds had one. See here, http://money.howstuffworks.com/better-business-bureau5.htm
Some of the suggestions to call the PUC & FCC aren't too bad though.
Most of your post was alright, if a bit insider myopic.
BUT, please stop propagating the 90% of the US now has broadband lie. Those are numbers completely made up the last couple years or so since the FCC started applying pressure for rural broadband. 3G DOES NOT COUNT AS RESIDENTIAL / RURAL BROADBAND! NEITHER DOES SATELLITE!
Pretty much any service that is not within around 30% of the speed, price, usage terms, and latency of mainstream suburban / urban broadband is not really broadband. Rural extended range DSL at 128 kbps (on a good day) shouldn't be called broadband (deluxe narrowband at least). It can't count as rurally available broadband if the cost is 3x what people 20 miles closer to town pay for double the speed. 2 GB/month caps on 3g/4g... then you really can't use it as broadband, because your aren't going to get to ditch Dish for Netflix and Prime.
There need to be hard requirements for what is broadband....
Under $40-60 a month (base price tiers).
Average latency to major websites below 300 ms (generous spec, rules out satellite at > 1000ms).
Daily peak speeds of at least 1.5 mb/s down, 128 kbps up.
Daily minimum speeds of 600 kbps down / 80 kbps up.
Connection uptime, monthly calculation, 95% (rules out a lot of 3g/4g in rural areas)
Usage / transfer caps NONE. (completely rules out 3g/4g when you factor verizon's latest and 2g reduction on T-Mo)
I couldn't think of a good conventional way, so obviously the answer was a Kickstarter project. Here's the gist.
Open a call center in India tasked as customer support -support. For $60 yearly or $40 for 6 months you can subscribe. You call or e-mail with an issue with service with a vendor, give them the appropriate vendor support number and your details as needed (you've paid, so they keep your personal information secure). You even have the option to setup a profile where all this is available to the service, speeding up your time logging the ticket (vendor names / numbers / account numbers).
THEY (India call center techs) call your vendor to handle the complaint process on your behalf. They handle the time waiting on hold, arguing, negotiating, demanding, etc. They could even call you back to conference you in as necessary (authorizing them to speak on your behalf, etc.). They will handle all of the uncomfortable discussions, demanding to be escalated to a manager, getting credits to your account, everything.
In many cases, the business model would even save money because the calls would be local!!!
Further, they could e-mail you links to recordings of the calls for your approval later. "Calls may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance." YOU BET!
For particularly difficult situations, like a vendor with a horrible cancellation policy, captive market, or just crappy service, they can call up to 4 times daily on your behalf, brow-beating the vendor's support infrastructure. For $10 extra, we will "call bomb" them with a minimum of 10 calls a day for a week.
AMD is also in a nice position to do more work in the ultraportable (think tablets, maybe phones in the future) market. Intel has repeatedly dropped the ball with Atom architecture, especially with their garbage implementations of PowerVR graphics cores. AMD may be skiddish to compete with Atom and various ARM architectures, but the risk could be worth the payoff.
Beating ARM performance is trivial, though performance per watt is a much more difficult task, especially using an x86 instruction set. Beating Atom is not too hard, as even Intel admits they keep missing goals at nearly every step. AMD has a huge amount of low power graphics IP to pull from as well as multiple established paths to scalable graphics. It would be great for OEMs to tout a tablet with equal or better than Atom battery life (>7 hours, 10 hours being the crown) and better than iPad 3 GPU power, even if the battery life drops in half playing let's say an Infinity Blade grade AAA game title. ARM architectures are also heavily constrained by crappy, crappy, interconnect bandwidth to storage and RAM.
Even on a lowly Atom z540, Android x86 cold boots in sub 12 second range because the x86 architectures have good bandwidth to the SSD (PATA no less!). Compare this to ARM tablets with 2-4x cores taking 25-60 seconds. Alternately consider the smattering of ARM based NAS boxes which top out at 20-40 MB/s over GbE with 4x 2 TB hdd in RAID 5, when each drive supports >70 MB/s transfers.
So a suitable analogy would be locks easily defeated by a blank key then?
That would appease your safety / personal injury requirement as well as be an example which has actually happened. I don't think consumers would be happy with an easily stolen automobile either.
It still follows that the manufacturer failed their due diligence to provide a safe, working product to consumers. Safety includes security against having control arbitrarily taken by third parties without consent. While we reasonably consider physical safety paramount, financial safety follows closely. Getting hacked by a software exploit certainly comprises a loss of financial safety. Consider all those lacking the knowledge to clean their computers of a worm, virus, or similar exploit who end up spending money having the Geek Squad clean their computer.
I should note, I work for an MSP and I regularly bill out pretty nice sums of money to clean malware which has infected customer PCs. If there was some tort reform for software designers regarding security holes, they might have a chance at recovering some of the loss they incur.
If I was a mechanic fixing a known defect on an automobile, I wouldn't even be billing them in many cases, or they would be submitting the repair bill to the manufacturer for reimbursement. For example, I have a '96 Mustang which I could have been party to a class action against Ford for defectively designed water cross overs on late 90's 4.6L V8s. The lawsuit would have paid for a replacement with a properly durable design should I have repaired / replaced it up to 7 years after production (metal instead of plastic).
I just go with a policy of buying new copies of software every several versions. If I need a feature or bug fix from a version in between buying cycles, I have no moral issues obtaining an upgrade through alternate channels.
Pretty much the way I look at it is, if I buy a product with a manufacturer defect, there should be no limitations on my ability to obtain a refund for the product. In the case of software, I don't find it unreasonable to skip past the unreasonable methods I would need to pursue to obtain a refund and purchase a fixed version.
Lemon laws don't exist to protect consumers from the idea that an automobile is a failure, but rather to prevent consumers from being burdened by unreasonable processes for obtaining a working automobile pursuant to the arrangements they made at purchase.
Also, no one should ever feel respect or bound to an EULA. The practice itself is inherently outside of common and established legal practices. If I were presented the license at the time of purchase, prior to paying, I might be able to respect it. Based on the concept of the EULA, I could have my PC pass a counter EULA to the installer or e-mailed to the vendor which outlined my requirements of their software in order to occupy space on my hard drive. If the installer continues, can I not consider their consent to be implied.
It's the same reason, no one thinks twice about installing an ad-block on their browser. They have a right to control what content runs and executes on their computing device. I've voiced the opinion for quite some time that advertisements which attempt to get around ad-blocking actually constitute violations of most computer hacking laws (use of processing time on a computing system without authorization).
Definitely agreed here. There is plenty of movement away from Java towards C#. Microsoft is working hard to be fair to the community and let the language become a real standard without severe restriction.
Also, C# lets you develop on a wide array of platforms, Windows, WP7/8, iOS (Mono), OSX (Mono), Android (Mono), Linux (Mono again).
Versus Java, C# affords a better opportunity to stay within one language for the entirety of a program. Higher performance doesn't mix with Java, video games for example, frequently need modules coded in C/C++ in order to achieve reasonable performance levels. Some of the Java -> C# porting has shown massive performance gains.
Unless Oracle changes their policies regarding Java, the language is likely to languish as it has for the past several years.
I'm not a fan of Python like others. I've always felt the language doesn't encourage the best coding practices because of the ease and lax style. I will give it credit as probably one of the faster to implement languages for one-off rapid application development. C# strikes me a better language to continue your existing knowledge while modernizing and have a path forward.
The scary part, aside from the fact that sailing has them completely pwn'd is that they probably aimed straight for the ocean currents which would give them the best speed boost.
As I said elsewhere, trash makes it's way across the Pacific between California and Hawaii faster than this ship did!
My apologies for the double post... but I would hope that by the 24th century we are properly using hydrophobic / oleophobic / self cleaning substrates for touchscreens. Titanium dioxide and micro texturing have all but solved that problem here in the 21st century when manufacturers choose to implement them.
I've come to realize that while in certain use cases, touch screens are great (basically any general computing situation where the user chooses apps). They are only useful in a small minority of industrial design scenarios.
Industrial design engineers are increasingly using lcd+touchscreen as a kludge because they lack the intellect to fully step back and imagine the full breath of use cases for a device at the beginning of a project. The only industrial design use case where lcd+touchscreen belongs is where an image or similar visual media need to be manipulated by panning, zooming, or placing indicators by hand or finger. If you need a touchscreen to operate functions of an automobile while driving, you have failed as an engineer.
My hat is off to you sir.
The 614 reviews are a nice touch.
I'm waiting to see how many posts pile up about voice recognition being the way to go in automobiles. It is arguably a better alternative to controlling multimedia functions in a car, definitely better than anything touch screen based. Frankly I wish the legislators would wise up and ban all touch input built into cars going forward. It is a disaster. Hard buttons are the safest way to control auxiliary functions in an automobile. I am being a bit hypocritical though, as I have considered integrating a really cheap Android tablet into my car for GPS and music. I also don't see there being a chance for any kind of ban given the propensity of GPS to use touch input.
Really, their just need to be better UI design guidelines for automotive use. Car mode on Android is alright, but still offers too much for the average mind to scan and pick from. I always thought the UI styles used in most GPS units was best, never really more than 2-4 choices at a time on the screen.
I could see a TTS system reading feeds from twitter, facebook, rss, etcetera being useful and cool even if I would never use it. Get in the car, get on the morning commute and get your /. feed instead of AM talk radio I suppose.
I joke about voice recognition and commands because as many here are aware, vocalization takes 80% of the average person's brain processing power. That is why so many people can't talk on the phone and drive (besides the fact that they are self-centered, spoiled a-holes).
Something tells me graphene is substantially closer to primetime for the suggested use cases (10-20 years off I suppose). Outside that I could maybe see the patterns being used by an exotic loom for existing kevlar or similar.
The visualization from Taco linked to above could be perfected with a feed from RSS or some easily updated CSV (not that the current code is remotely difficult to modify). Then the nodes need to be placed geographically correct with graphics from Wargames (the true 1983 Wargames that is).
I'm surprised the cell phone companies haven't implemented something similar on their towers to reduce backhaul. Have dozens of towers in a given area relay optically to a super node tower with amazing backhaul. Have them relay to a few others in a standard mesh network layout for redundancy. Might even reduce their spectrum need if they are using channels to talk tower to tower. May have some issues with rain I suppose though, but that could be mitigated if laser wavelengths for which water is not refractive exist. Or just use laser arrays with heavy multiplexing and parallel signal reinforcement.
Voice recognition is at it limits phonetically, really it has been since the late 90's. The perceived improvements come entirely from context sensitive assumptions. Siri was better than Google Voice and search for the first 90 days or so due to more brute force behind the context engine. They pulled the CPU allocation at Apple and it has been behind Google Voice ever since.
A Pentium II 450 Mhz running Dragon Naturally Speaking on XP circa 1999 interprets your voice just as well as Google Voice or Siri (given similar microphones / adc's), the difference has entirely been in the guesses the software makes when it doubts recognition of a word within a phrase. A propagation of high quality mics and adc's into phones versus a crap Labtec mics on 90's era PC's constitutes the rest of the difference.
Context interpretation requires an enormous database of phrase fragment search capabilities. Providing better search results is merely the act of making better command keyword extrapolation. E.g., "I want to go to ," and going straight to a map to the (nearest current GPS), rather than requiring a structured query such as, "Map to near "
There is no real intelligence or revolution being discussed here, it is rather all the correct application of large amounts of brute force processing power. It all comes down to an extension of the system which made Google #1 over Altavista and Hotbot back in the day, that is processing power driven context sensitivity as opposed to pure keyword frequency.
The only revolution is the linear improvement of CPU power/RAM/storage per $ which makes it affordable to do for free or cheap.
Sounds very similar to the delayed choice quantum eraser experiments performed by Wheeler et al. The main difference sounds like the use of polarized filters instead of the double slit diffraction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser
Assuming their battery concept is the real deal and comes to fruition, why not come up with a system which retains the ability both to charge overnight and instantly fill up.
The swappable battery bank idea is silly. Charge deltas, consistency, fraud, monitoring... it is all too much work.
The design of the battery could be adept at being literally tanked up. Create an apparatus for purging the oxygen rich Lithium ions while replacing with full charged ones in some gas or liquid carrier.
The filling hose would need to have at least 3 lines and fit on sealed. One line in, one line out, and one for a purge liquid or gas (to get Oxygen out of the fittings)... I think liquid nitrogen would do the trick. Even the concept of Octane ratings could be maintained. Lithium certified at multiple levels of charge (relative to carrier fluid), 80%, 90%, 95%... etc. Gas stations could use their own large scale batteries to recharge the waste Li2O2 back to Li2 overnight, or in electrically remote areas, get it trucked in.
If we have the materials science to build the batteries, then containment, storage, and disbursement should equally be within reach.
The only real issue one could argue is the inherent danger in transporting Li2, but we've worked around that with gasoline (though it is substantially less reactive).
Heck, even fathers could still scald their children for running their batteries into the ground by not buying premium at the pump.
I would apply for the patent myself, but I don't really feel like doing the work to figure out the correct and safe working fluid for happy go boomy Li2.
Gummy bear manufacturers inexplicably inundated with requests for large, softball sized gummy products.
In truth though, I really hope they are scanning the sub-dermal print rather than the surface.
Really, I have it on a HP Slate 500 with a lowly single core Atom and it starts in about 5-6 seconds.
I just wish that the N-trig Stylus / Digitizer was as mature as Wacom's stuff (namely has issues with ghost clicks and stray marks from nearly 5mm off the screen).