Mobile telephony in the US: expensive, poor phone choices, consumer lock-in. Mostly an unregulated market. Pretty much the only major regulation imposed on mobile carriers here in the past decade was number portability, and that was a boon for consumers. Compare that to Europe: cheaper plans and can take your phone to any carrier. Not to mention much better coverage. That's what a smartly regulated market looks like.
On the other hand, poor regulation can lead to monopolies/duopolies, like the ones we enjoy for broadband net access in the US.
And give up at least $80/mo/user? I don't think so. Plus they won't be able to charge ETF, since nothing these users do is against the agreement. Plus the bad publicity they'll get. Nah it'll be like shooting themselves in the foot.
Besides, the users who are susceptible to pull this prank are the ones that know how to jailbreak/unlock their iphones. They'll go to T-Mobile in an instant. I know I would.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down..... So the regulation creates the problem
Actually you can say that a change in regulation brought your bill down. It was government regulation that forced AT&T to open up their network to third party long distance providers. It basically decoupled local service, which remained in the hands of local monopolies, and long distance service, which was opened up for competition. Pretty much what the FCC intends to do now with Network Neutrality rules.
Bottom line is that there is such things as bad and good regulation.
One of the things your local government gets by granting exclusive licenses to telcos is the guarantee that every residence in a neighborhood is covered. Otherwise companies would cherry pick customers based on all sorts of factors. How would you like to not have that shiny new fiber service because your neighbors don't make enough money to make it profitable for the telco to wire your side of the street?
I'm not saying that local exclusive licenses is a good thing, on the contrary, they're a major obstacle in spreading broadband. But it's not that clear cut.
Tesla Roadster is more like a proof of concept/exotic car. Electric cars don't (yet) make sense as long haul vehicles, simply because the infrastructure for recharging them is not there yet. Not to mention charge times measured in hours vs minutes. I don't see people hanging around at highway recharge stations for hours. But they do make perfect sense as commuter cars, and, for that, a range of 300 miles is good enough for even the most extreme commuters.
Actually, I wouldn't be so sure. Urban driving means low speeds, which means lower air drag. Also, stop and go gives regenerative braking a chance to do its job. I wouldn't be surprised if an electric car would go further in city driving than on the highway...
The only thing that the people of Europe are beginning to question is the bureaucracy related to running a business. Outside of that, they LIKE their health care system. They LIKE their social safety nets. All the Europeans i've talked to were horrified by the situation in the US and stated they would never switch to something similar.
You speak of higher taxes... but look at the average paycheck. I looked at mine, and after all the federal and state taxes, employee provided health insurance premiums, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, 401k deduction and a bunch of other small things, my net pay was about 50% of gross. About the same as in countries like Finland. So basically I am paying the same amount of money for what are arguably inferior services and inferior social security net. Most of which I stand to lose, if I ever lose my job.
I'm not sure how you can claim that people of Finland are less free. What is it you can do, that they cannot? What powers does the Finnish government have, that the US Government does not have?
I believe that depends on the technology. CDMA networks are designed so that phones talk to multiple towers simultaneously. In fact, there is no single frequency a phone will use at any given time, rather each phone will transmit on the entire allocated band. Of course, the devil is in the details, and I'm no CDMA expert so it's entirely possible that I'm wrong.
I think that the ban on the use of cell phones in planes stems from two different issues. One is the fact that planes travel fast and that creates some problems with handovers between cell sites. Another is the good old low frequency GSM interference (the brrrrap noise you hear in poorly shielded speakers when you have a GSM phone nearby).
I know this is a nitpick, but voice recording only works for incoming calls. I wish it would have worked for outgoing as well, I always wanted to record all those conversations with various customer service departments...
Don't get me wrong, I agree with many of the points you're making. As a matter of fact, I am currently involved in the development of a rich client/server architecture.
However, I still maintain that the costs of dealing with server side deployment/scalability/upgrade issues is lower than dealing with rich clients in many instances.
I admit that my stance is biased by the fact that we use only basic open source building blocks for our deployments and we code the rest in house. We don't have to deal with various vendors and if something doesn't work quite right, we can always patch it up. We try to use tools like Erlang/OTP as much as we can for our server side business logic, which makes deployments and maintenance a breeze and helps a lot with scaling and redundancy.
I believe it is all a matter of costs and benefits. I can see certain applications that would not make sense in a browser, but for others, if you can get away with it, it makes a lot of sense to push them into "the cloud"
With thin clients, people already have a (somewhat) standardized client. You don't have to worry about deployment issues, software updates, system compatibility issues, etc. It's there and it mostly works. If you can develop your application within the constrains of a thin client, you have already bypassed a huge pile of potential headaches. Even more, your users won't have to go through the trouble of installing yet another piece of software, just to try your app.
Electricity costs me $0.19 per KWH and it takes 10KWH to fully charge Volt's batteries, for a total of $1.90 Gas around here is about $2.50/gallon, so a full charge is equivalent to 0.76 gallons of regular. Which means 52.6 mpg at my current gas and electricity costs. After the charge is exhausted, the car is rated for 50 mpg.
However, I live NJ, so our gas is cheap and electricity expensive. In other places the math might be drastically different.
There's a $7500 federal tax credit for this car. GM's warranty covers the battery for 10 years/150K miles. You might want to adjust your math. In theory, the Volt will be cheaper over 10 years than your $20K gasoline only car. Of course, we'll se how it'll pan out when the Volt really becomes available, but _on paper_ it looks OK.
Compared to England, 90% of America IS serious wilderness. But yeah, I hear you. Our cell phone service is craptastic. Only two companies (Verizon and AT&T) can claim any resemblance of decent coverage. The other two (Sprint and T-Mobile) cease to matter once you get out of major cities.
However, if your experience has been as bad as you describe, I suspect you picked one of the shittier providers.
How many corporations use gmail as their email system? Personally, I use Gmail, but I still want my files to be on my computers and on my own backups. Especially since Gmail lost about 4 years of my mail archives and couldn't be bothered to restore them from backup (if they ever have backups)
Then please explain to me how can I stop paying for incoming texts that my idiot friends with unlimited texting plans keep sending me. It's not like I have a choice receiving them. And speaking of SMS, how come the non bundle cost is $0.20 for ALL carriers? Surely one would realize that reducing the price would mean more customers and we all know that the cost of carrying them is practically 0. Oh, and funny how the price went up to $0.20 with ALL carriers AT THE SAME TIME...
And speaking of voice plans, how come I can't select my international provider? I have been able to do that on my landline forever now, which is why it costs me $0.03/minute to call my family in Europe. Calling from my cell phone? $1.50/minute. I know about (and use) calling cards, but why can't I just call directly?
Finally, why can't I buy an unlocked phone directly from the carrier? I signed the damn contract, which means I'm on the hook anyway. Even worse, some carriers will not unlock phones even after the contract expires - i'm looking at you AT&T.
I would be perfectly OK with government regulation that would address these points. Yes, it will probably eat into carriers' profits, but tough nuggets, life's like that.
The code itself is not a big deal, the trading strategy behind it is. A competitor would be able to know in advance how Goldman Sachs' trading systems will respond to any given situation so will be able to adjust its strategy to counteract GS's. Given the fast pace of real time trading and the volume that GS does, this could lead to immense losses pretty quickly. Which is why GS probably had to shut down or alter their real time trading system already. Even if no outsiders have actually seen that code, it would be irresponsible for GS not to take action... which means that either way, they're screwed.
This is simply false. I've never made such a mistake, not in 20 years of coding. When I'm the technical lead or architect for a project, there are no memory leaks in the project (or at leats none where I have authority).
Yeah, right, and also your poop doesn't smell and comes out in pretty pastel colors.
Anywhere with a large enough population density. The US people's problem is that their country is mostly empty.
If they lived in reasonable cities where services could be easily centralised, this would work. But post-ww2, the big thing was the suburbs, going by car everywhere, spreading the population all over the place...
Maybe we should stop using this tired argument. There are high density places in the US that don't have a highly competitive consumer broadband market. New York City, for example. It's more a problem of business/franchising model than anything else.
What I would like to see is rollover data. Right now I'm paying $30/mo for an "Unlimited" data plan (which is really just 5GB/mo). My average cellular data usage is around 60-70MB/mo. 95% of my time is spent in places that have wifi coverage. If they would offer a 100MB plan for $10/mo with rollover data I'd be on it in a heartbeat.
I'm sorry to say this, but Theora it's not even close to H.264 when it comes to internet streaming and video conferences. Sure, it is a nice codec for recording and storing video, but its architecture makes it very hard to use it for any realtime application. This is mostly due to three reasons. First, it requires sending a pretty sizable header in front of the stream, which makes it hard to have a client connect in while a stream transmission is in progress. Secondly, it has no support for fragmentation, i.e. splitting encoded frames into UDP sized chunks. Finally, it has no resilience to packet loss. There's more, but these three are the most important ones.
I really wish there would be a free alternative to H.264, but, unfortunately, Theora ain't it.
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Mobile telephony in the US: expensive, poor phone choices, consumer lock-in. Mostly an unregulated market. Pretty much the only major regulation imposed on mobile carriers here in the past decade was number portability, and that was a boon for consumers. Compare that to Europe: cheaper plans and can take your phone to any carrier. Not to mention much better coverage. That's what a smartly regulated market looks like.
On the other hand, poor regulation can lead to monopolies/duopolies, like the ones we enjoy for broadband net access in the US.
And give up at least $80/mo/user? I don't think so. Plus they won't be able to charge ETF, since nothing these users do is against the agreement. Plus the bad publicity they'll get. Nah it'll be like shooting themselves in the foot.
Besides, the users who are susceptible to pull this prank are the ones that know how to jailbreak/unlock their iphones. They'll go to T-Mobile in an instant. I know I would.
I'm sick of the population density argument. By that logic, NYC, Chicago and LA should be broadband heavens, and they're not.
I'm not that familiar with the history AT&T, other than the deregulation of long-distance calling sure did bring my phone bill down..... So the regulation creates the problem
Actually you can say that a change in regulation brought your bill down. It was government regulation that forced AT&T to open up their network to third party long distance providers. It basically decoupled local service, which remained in the hands of local monopolies, and long distance service, which was opened up for competition. Pretty much what the FCC intends to do now with Network Neutrality rules.
Bottom line is that there is such things as bad and good regulation.
One of the things your local government gets by granting exclusive licenses to telcos is the guarantee that every residence in a neighborhood is covered. Otherwise companies would cherry pick customers based on all sorts of factors. How would you like to not have that shiny new fiber service because your neighbors don't make enough money to make it profitable for the telco to wire your side of the street?
I'm not saying that local exclusive licenses is a good thing, on the contrary, they're a major obstacle in spreading broadband. But it's not that clear cut.
Tesla Roadster is more like a proof of concept/exotic car. Electric cars don't (yet) make sense as long haul vehicles, simply because the infrastructure for recharging them is not there yet. Not to mention charge times measured in hours vs minutes. I don't see people hanging around at highway recharge stations for hours. But they do make perfect sense as commuter cars, and, for that, a range of 300 miles is good enough for even the most extreme commuters.
Actually, I wouldn't be so sure. Urban driving means low speeds, which means lower air drag. Also, stop and go gives regenerative braking a chance to do its job. I wouldn't be surprised if an electric car would go further in city driving than on the highway...
The only thing that the people of Europe are beginning to question is the bureaucracy related to running a business. Outside of that, they LIKE their health care system. They LIKE their social safety nets. All the Europeans i've talked to were horrified by the situation in the US and stated they would never switch to something similar.
You speak of higher taxes... but look at the average paycheck. I looked at mine, and after all the federal and state taxes, employee provided health insurance premiums, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, 401k deduction and a bunch of other small things, my net pay was about 50% of gross. About the same as in countries like Finland. So basically I am paying the same amount of money for what are arguably inferior services and inferior social security net. Most of which I stand to lose, if I ever lose my job.
I'm not sure how you can claim that people of Finland are less free. What is it you can do, that they cannot? What powers does the Finnish government have, that the US Government does not have?
I don't think there are many people with beach houses near Newark.
Maybe because Newark is nowhere near the shore.
I believe that depends on the technology. CDMA networks are designed so that phones talk to multiple towers simultaneously. In fact, there is no single frequency a phone will use at any given time, rather each phone will transmit on the entire allocated band. Of course, the devil is in the details, and I'm no CDMA expert so it's entirely possible that I'm wrong.
I think that the ban on the use of cell phones in planes stems from two different issues. One is the fact that planes travel fast and that creates some problems with handovers between cell sites. Another is the good old low frequency GSM interference (the brrrrap noise you hear in poorly shielded speakers when you have a GSM phone nearby).
I know this is a nitpick, but voice recording only works for incoming calls. I wish it would have worked for outgoing as well, I always wanted to record all those conversations with various customer service departments...
Don't get me wrong, I agree with many of the points you're making. As a matter of fact, I am currently involved in the development of a rich client/server architecture.
However, I still maintain that the costs of dealing with server side deployment/scalability/upgrade issues is lower than dealing with rich clients in many instances.
I admit that my stance is biased by the fact that we use only basic open source building blocks for our deployments and we code the rest in house. We don't have to deal with various vendors and if something doesn't work quite right, we can always patch it up. We try to use tools like Erlang/OTP as much as we can for our server side business logic, which makes deployments and maintenance a breeze and helps a lot with scaling and redundancy.
I believe it is all a matter of costs and benefits. I can see certain applications that would not make sense in a browser, but for others, if you can get away with it, it makes a lot of sense to push them into "the cloud"
With thin clients, people already have a (somewhat) standardized client. You don't have to worry about deployment issues, software updates, system compatibility issues, etc. It's there and it mostly works. If you can develop your application within the constrains of a thin client, you have already bypassed a huge pile of potential headaches. Even more, your users won't have to go through the trouble of installing yet another piece of software, just to try your app.
- Turn by turn directions with voice guidance
- Built in maps, so you don't need data coverage to use it
- Automatic rerouting in case of wrong turns
Still too expensive, considering that a standalone unit can be bought for less than $100 with car kit included
Electricity costs me $0.19 per KWH and it takes 10KWH to fully charge Volt's batteries, for a total of $1.90
Gas around here is about $2.50/gallon, so a full charge is equivalent to 0.76 gallons of regular. Which means 52.6 mpg at my current gas and electricity costs. After the charge is exhausted, the car is rated for 50 mpg.
However, I live NJ, so our gas is cheap and electricity expensive. In other places the math might be drastically different.
There's a $7500 federal tax credit for this car. GM's warranty covers the battery for 10 years /150K miles. You might want to adjust your math. In theory, the Volt will be cheaper over 10 years than your $20K gasoline only car. Of course, we'll se how it'll pan out when the Volt really becomes available, but _on paper_ it looks OK.
Compared to England, 90% of America IS serious wilderness.
But yeah, I hear you. Our cell phone service is craptastic. Only two companies (Verizon and AT&T) can claim any resemblance of decent coverage. The other two (Sprint and T-Mobile) cease to matter once you get out of major cities.
However, if your experience has been as bad as you describe, I suspect you picked one of the shittier providers.
How many corporations use gmail as their email system?
Personally, I use Gmail, but I still want my files to be on my computers and on my own backups.
Especially since Gmail lost about 4 years of my mail archives and couldn't be bothered to restore them from backup (if they ever have backups)
The thing is carriers absolutely loathe the idea of being relegated to the status of infrastructure providers.
Then please explain to me how can I stop paying for incoming texts that my idiot friends with unlimited texting plans keep sending me. It's not like I have a choice receiving them. And speaking of SMS, how come the non bundle cost is $0.20 for ALL carriers? Surely one would realize that reducing the price would mean more customers and we all know that the cost of carrying them is practically 0. Oh, and funny how the price went up to $0.20 with ALL carriers AT THE SAME TIME...
And speaking of voice plans, how come I can't select my international provider? I have been able to do that on my landline forever now, which is why it costs me $0.03/minute to call my family in Europe. Calling from my cell phone? $1.50/minute. I know about (and use) calling cards, but why can't I just call directly?
Finally, why can't I buy an unlocked phone directly from the carrier? I signed the damn contract, which means I'm on the hook anyway. Even worse, some carriers will not unlock phones even after the contract expires - i'm looking at you AT&T.
I would be perfectly OK with government regulation that would address these points. Yes, it will probably eat into carriers' profits, but tough nuggets, life's like that.
The code itself is not a big deal, the trading strategy behind it is. A competitor would be able to know in advance how Goldman Sachs' trading systems will respond to any given situation so will be able to adjust its strategy to counteract GS's. Given the fast pace of real time trading and the volume that GS does, this could lead to immense losses pretty quickly. Which is why GS probably had to shut down or alter their real time trading system already. Even if no outsiders have actually seen that code, it would be irresponsible for GS not to take action... which means that either way, they're screwed.
This is simply false. I've never made such a mistake, not in 20 years of coding. When I'm the technical lead or architect for a project, there are no memory leaks in the project (or at leats none where I have authority).
Yeah, right, and also your poop doesn't smell and comes out in pretty pastel colors.
Anywhere with a large enough population density. The US people's problem is that their country is mostly empty.
If they lived in reasonable cities where services could be easily centralised, this would work. But post-ww2, the big thing was the suburbs, going by car everywhere, spreading the population all over the place...
Maybe we should stop using this tired argument. There are high density places in the US that don't have a highly competitive consumer broadband market. New York City, for example. It's more a problem of business/franchising model than anything else.
What I would like to see is rollover data. Right now I'm paying $30/mo for an "Unlimited" data plan (which is really just 5GB/mo). My average cellular data usage is around 60-70MB/mo. 95% of my time is spent in places that have wifi coverage. If they would offer a 100MB plan for $10/mo with rollover data I'd be on it in a heartbeat.
I'm sorry to say this, but Theora it's not even close to H.264 when it comes to internet streaming and video conferences. Sure, it is a nice codec for recording and storing video, but its architecture makes it very hard to use it for any realtime application. This is mostly due to three reasons. First, it requires sending a pretty sizable header in front of the stream, which makes it hard to have a client connect in while a stream transmission is in progress. Secondly, it has no support for fragmentation, i.e. splitting encoded frames into UDP sized chunks. Finally, it has no resilience to packet loss. There's more, but these three are the most important ones.
I really wish there would be a free alternative to H.264, but, unfortunately, Theora ain't it.