Another way of interpreting the data you present might be to say the following:
According to Bill's Big List of Firefox 2.0 Extensions, users of more than 700 extensions had to wait up to 40 days for their favorite extensions to become usable on Firefox 2.0.
Er. Ok. So your Lowe's store is particularly trusting; mine is not.
When I go to Lowe's and pay with my debit card, they always ask me to hand it to them. And then they look at the back of it, see that my signature is vague/distorted/old, and ask to see my license. Every fucking time. Therefore, both items (the bank card and the license card) need to match.
And: The cardholder name is recorded on the mag stripe, and is often shown various POS displays during the sale, and is trivially compared to the name on file in the VISA database by the POS software. Obviously, if VISA detects a different name on the magstripe than they themselves wrote to it at issuance, Big Red Flags will go up.
So, to answer your question regarding why this superflous hassle is necessary: A successful thief is one who does not get caught.
But you must realize that none of these cards are really very secure.
I can only speak of Ohio, but: Driver's licenses here are produced using commercial, off-the-shelf printers. There's barcodes and a magstripe, but those are hardly authentication mechanisms. The information contained in those stripes and barcodes is only a plaintext copy in industry-standard form of some of the same information that is printed plainly on the front of the card, and is therefore useless for authentication. There's a special holographic laminate that goes over top of the whole mess which ostensibly provides a layer of security, but the laminates are known to fail after a few years of use and are therefore in various stages of disrepair even on perfectly legimate licenses, and are therefore not trustworthy to begin with. Further, there is little in the way of security at the average Ohio BMV to preclude one from walking out with a box full of "secure" laminate material so as to enable one to produce "authentic" licenses at home. Thefts of this laminate have occured in the past.
Credit cards are only slightly secure, but probably actually a bit better than an Ohio license. They're just a plastic card with layered printing and embossed letters, with a hologram. The embossing can be accomplished with a COTS machine not dissimilar to that which the local public library had when I was younger to produce their membership cards. Special characters (the stylized V on VISA cards, for instance) are easily produced by anyone with sufficient time and motivation, given access to basic fabrication implements (a file, drill, dremel, etc) and a small amount of machinable brass. And since they're just plastic, it's fairly easy to work the material around using heat; it should therefore be possible to transfer the fancy ("secure") hologram images from an any old card card to another, completely falsified card.
Printable credit card blanks and the printers themselves are available here.
While I might wish that it weren't so easy, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is currently trying very hard to prevent people from fabricating the cards themselves. As long as this is the case, simply comparing one card to another of a different type will not reliably protect against the more cunning thief.
By saying that Windows is finished, you are also, by extension, saying that computers are finished.
And that's just not so. Hardware is still more difficult than it should be to configure, and software still crashes. I still don't have a flying car, and my games are not photorealistically rendered with real depth in the air in around me.
Really, now. Saying that Windows is finished is like saying that the Internet is complete. That cars are done. That there is nothing left to learn about medicine. Or spaceflight. Or whatever.
I think that Visa and Mastercard and banks with billions of dollars at stake in this game have a financial incentive to display statistics which are favorable toward increasing the acceptance and use of credit card transactions. I think they take a percentage cut from every credit card sale made through their systems from the retailer, and I think they charge the consumer in a much more up-front fashion with line-item card fees when conducting an ATM debit-card-style transaction. I think that these merchant and debit fees are what keeps companies like Visa afloat.
I think, therefore, that their statistics are a crock of shit. I think, by extension of that, that any theory based upon those statistics is also a crock of shit. That's what I think.
Page zooming is horribly broken in every browser I've used, except for Opera, which manages to get it right most of the time.
But, see, it has always been broken.
That it is still broken is really not a problem new to IE 7.
And it's really not a surprise that they didn't catch this variation of brokenness, because this stuff has been so broken for so many years in so many browsers that one could only reasonably be lead to conclude that developers in general have nothing but disdain for the Zoom function.
I know we hear it over and over again, but it must not have sunken in yet: Correlation != causation. But throw a wild assertion or two in there, and any statistic, no matter how benign or biased, can be molded to prove your point.
I have friends in a wide variety of income brackets. The poorest of them buy everything with cash, because their credit is so fucked that nobody will give them a card with their name on it under -any- terms. They're obviously going to spend more of their money buying inexpensive food essentials than on expensive hard goods, because that's what they can afford (if they're lucky).
But I'm sure his lack of money, credit, and plastic is purely psychological.
Personally, I would prefer to do everything with cash, but find that it can be pretty difficult to deal with these days. Earlier this year I cashed a $2,200 IRS check and was questioned sternly be two different people about it, at my own bank. Things like that put a damper on buying expensive items using cash, simply because it is difficult to accumulate a large quantity of cash without a concerted effort.
So when I recently bought spent $315 on a digital camera, I didn't bother with cash. But it had little to do with psychology; it was just simply less of a pain in the ass to use a credit card instead.
The box is a web-browser and reliable, though rudimentary, general-purpose computer. It probably does these tasks rather well. It's not so much for running arbitrary software.
I doubt that it even has critical moving parts.
You want storage? You've already mocked the idea, but flash drives are cheap and absolutely perfect for personal data storage. Remember, 1 gig of data is still an entire fuckload, unless your data consists of games, Microsoft products, or a media library. With 1-gig flash drives at less than $20, I fail to see a problem.
And external hard drives, bulky? The whole machine, fully equipped with its potentially massive conflagration of external USB Mass Storage Device, is still going to be extremely small.
You want more options than that? Buy a real fucking computer. It's not like they're expensive anymore.
I'd like to add that the reasons for moving a cable from one patch panel to another are always wrong, and always stupid. So just don't do it.
If, knowing this, the cable still needs to be moved, then run another one. Or use additional patch panels to work around it.
This is expensive. But, then again, so are messy racks.
I have always been under the impression that one of the basic concepts of this whole "structured cabling" thing was that the infrastructure cabling goes from point A (a walljack, say) to point B (typically a patch panel), and then IS NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH. EVER.
Using this simple mentality will automatically save you from a large percentage of wiring problems, and prevent most temptation to fuck with all those nicely-tied wires, as they needn't be fucked with because they're not fucked up because NOBODY HAS EVER FUCKED WITH THEM.
Hogwash. By those standards, nothing (except, perhaps, BSD's/bin/sh and a few other ancient works) deserves to be version >=1, because modern software is very seldom ever quite finished.
1.0 should be used to indicate that the software won't destroy your porn collection, empty your checking account, wreck your car, rape your wife, or burn your house down. It should be used to communicate to potential users that the software is finally considered ready for general use by the public for whatever unique purpose it is that made people start looking at the software in the first place.
In the particular case of MythTV, 1.0 should not mean that it is feature-complete, plays DVDs, produces audio-backed slideshows (WTF?), or anything else. I've ALREADY got machines that do a fantastic job of playing DVDs, and I've got software for any slideshow purpose I can imagine (along with most anyone who has recently purchased a retail-boxed DVD-R drive, or who runs just about any modern Linux distribution) in case I want to bore my in-laws with my lousy photos. I don't NEED these features, and I'm pretty sure that I don't WANT them, either.
Remember: The main reason anyone ever looks at something like MythTV in the first place is that it is a capable DVR. 1.0 should indicate that this DVR function -- which once again is the point of the thing -- works and is stable and is usable by sane people, and that any additional features which manage to be included are similarly polished.
Waiting for complete and total doneness before releasing MythTV 1.0 is like waiting for Emacs to include a BitTorrent client: Although both are likely to be inevitable, nobody will give a shit by the time it finally happens.
Leave the DVD playing for the DVD players, and the slideshowing to the slideshow programs, until those features are ALSO done, and then include them in a point release, a plugin, an add-on, or whatever. I've already got a kitchen sink and it works fine - I therefore am obviously not breathlessly awaiting the release of MythTV.21 (Now With Instant Hot Water).
All that I want, as Joe Smith with 2.3 kids, a wife, a house, two cars, and no free time, is a DVR. MythTV might be a good one, but at version.2, it sure as fuck doesn't sound like it.[1]
1: From reading the comments here, it seems like the DVR aspects are actually working pretty well these days, and that packages like KnoppMyth take a lot of the pain out of setting it up. Is it ready for feature-culling and general use? I don't know - I don't have time to evaluate it. That's what version numbers are SUPPOSED TO HELP ME WITH.
2-way radios are old, well-understood technology. If the building that the repeater is in falls down, one can build another repeater in minutes. They're bloody simple, and can be constructed by anyone with their wits about them given a pair of radios, a set of appropriate connectors, and a few bits of wire. ANY radio service shop (and I'm sure NYC has more than a few good ones) has the parts laying around to do this, along with the learned individuals who can assemble this stuff in their sleep (and whom are are employed under the EXPECTATION that they respond in an emergency).
What's more, is that the law enforcement/public safety folks have such radio shops on speed dial, just for the routine emergencies encountered daily with radio: Lightning attacking towers, basement radio rooms flooding, dispatcher microphones wigging out, patrol cars popping fuses, dead batteries, power outages, And nevermind all the back-and-forth with routine adjustments and installations -- radio people are easy to find.
And the radios themselves run by default from 12VDC, and needn't weigh more than a few pounds. So it is absolutely bloody simple to carry a fully-functional repeater under one arm into a disaster area, plug it into -any- available vehicle (running or not), stick a pair of magnetic antennas to the roof (which, again, are cheap, stock items) and have a solid, local repeater. Even a largish linear amp to boost the power of the repeater rig will run from a defacto 12VDC. Power is absolutely no problem whatsoever for radio gear, whenever there's cars nearby. Later on, as time permits, more featureful repeaters can be configured and tested alongside the functional temporary rig and brought online without noticable service interruption.
Even the small company I work for has a couple of capable, small, 40-Watt repeaters sitting around, just in case, much like a networking company might have a stout switch, a Cisco router, or a CSU/DSU kicking about. If the local equivilent of 9/11 happened around here, particularly during business hours like that, my boss would insist that people stop what they were doing and begin mobilizing IMMEDIATELY, armed with repeater hardware, and radios to work with it. The laptop computers and cables to program other radios in the field to work with whatever channels are available are already in the service trucks. And, try though I might, I can't imagine any other radio shop would behave differently - those aren't just people, policemen, or firefighters out there in distress, but customers...and big customers, at that.
There's lots of good reasons why communication is difficult during such a disaster, but lack of a simple repeater is not among them - at least, not for very long.
Network. Fucking. Everything. Walk up with your 802.11 laptop and drop it anywhere on the network and you're done. The only thing missing is a VGA adapter with an Ethernet jack on it.
There is no task performed by USB (with, or without wires) which cannot be performed -- better -- by ethernet.
We've got USB and we've got gigabit ethernet and we've got 802.11 (and psuedo-802.11n) and we've got Bluetooth. If that's not enough, there's still multiple variations of Firewire, SCSI, and fibre-channel.
Tell me: In what way is this UWB mumbo-jumbo superior to a networked USB port and a fast standards-based wireless network connection?
I realize that the goal of simplicity dictates that this sort of thing is not in the flashy GUI user configuration screens and pushed out-of-the-way.
But then, is there a singular place where such eccentric settings (and additions) are documented? about:config is too vast for individuals to be adding stuff to it without documentation.
Suppose for a second that we're actually USING the calendar as a way to track and schedule appointments and meetings and other daily activities.
Now suppose that the Intar-web is borken, and Google can't be reached. Suddenly, I can't tell my ass from a hole in the ground - I've got no idea where I'm supposed to be, or who's coming to see me. I can't schedule anything new, and I can't take care of anything already scheduled. (I could avoid this problem by keeping a redundant schedule/calender, but if I wanted to jot things down twice I'd just DO SO, on paper, and be done with entrusting these computers with important things.)
Meanwhile, Outlook still works, and the same information is still in my Palm from the last time they sync'd, in case the computer catches fire, and backed up remotely semi-nightly in case they both go tits up together.
As much as I'd like to, I can't put all of my eggs in Google's basket. Without some sort of local, redundant copy of the data, there's no way I'm going to do anything important with it.
Contrary to popular belief, just because a device uses flash memory does not mean that it cannot fail safely.
Trash an area on flash due to power failure, bad firmware image, or dried dog snot bridging the contacts of the memory chip?
No problem. The bootloader, in a protected area of flash, sees that the checksum is bad and just Does The Right Thing by loading good data from a (also protected) portion of the flash, and the device boots up to a state which may not be latest-and-greatest, or even fully functional, but is at least adequate to re-flash.
The only problem with this is that it is somewhat inefficient use of flash memory space, but the stuff is obviously far cheaper than it used to be (I'd wager that it passed "cheap enough" years ago).
Similar methods are in place in all kinds of consumer goods, including the venerable Linksys WRT54G, and generally work by allowing you to load good firmware using TFTP, even after everything has gone all wrong[2].
Just because you've had warnings about interrupted PC BIOS flashing and video game saves burned into your head, does not mean that it's all that hard to do safely.
2: And if you really hose things by killing the bootloader, you get to build a TSOP cable and, with a bit of prayer, write to the flash chip directly using a parallel port. Failing to recover a bricked WRT54G is actually hard to do, no matter how bad it gets fucked up.
Having recently been forced to cut down an 80' elm tree which died and was threatening to wreck my home, my neighbor's garage, the local power grid, and an above-ground swimming pool, I can say exactly why it is that people don't plant big trees next to their houses:
The LCD screen. It's mounted in the phone sideways.
Maybe I'm just hypersensitive to such things, but LCD displays are supposed to be used with the widest viewing angle being from side-to-side. This is so that both of your eyes can see roughly the same thing, and are able to focus and collect a stable image.
The Q's LCD display is narrowest in viewing angle from side-to-side. This means that both eyes see different images (different contrast, different coloration), which is quite hard to look at.
Rotating the phone 90 degrees corrects the that visual aberration, and shows the display to be of rather good quality. But then the device isn't useful in that orientation...
Blackberry's screen does not seem to suffer in such a fashion.
Slashdot Mirror
Thriving, eh?
Another way of interpreting the data you present might be to say the following:
According to Bill's Big List of Firefox 2.0 Extensions, users of more than 700 extensions had to wait up to 40 days for their favorite extensions to become usable on Firefox 2.0.
Impressive developer support, indeed.
Er. Ok. So your Lowe's store is particularly trusting; mine is not.
When I go to Lowe's and pay with my debit card, they always ask me to hand it to them. And then they look at the back of it, see that my signature is vague/distorted/old, and ask to see my license. Every fucking time. Therefore, both items (the bank card and the license card) need to match.
And: The cardholder name is recorded on the mag stripe, and is often shown various POS displays during the sale, and is trivially compared to the name on file in the VISA database by the POS software. Obviously, if VISA detects a different name on the magstripe than they themselves wrote to it at issuance, Big Red Flags will go up.
So, to answer your question regarding why this superflous hassle is necessary: A successful thief is one who does not get caught.
Perhaps.
But you must realize that none of these cards are really very secure.
I can only speak of Ohio, but: Driver's licenses here are produced using commercial, off-the-shelf printers. There's barcodes and a magstripe, but those are hardly authentication mechanisms. The information contained in those stripes and barcodes is only a plaintext copy in industry-standard form of some of the same information that is printed plainly on the front of the card, and is therefore useless for authentication. There's a special holographic laminate that goes over top of the whole mess which ostensibly provides a layer of security, but the laminates are known to fail after a few years of use and are therefore in various stages of disrepair even on perfectly legimate licenses, and are therefore not trustworthy to begin with. Further, there is little in the way of security at the average Ohio BMV to preclude one from walking out with a box full of "secure" laminate material so as to enable one to produce "authentic" licenses at home. Thefts of this laminate have occured in the past.
Credit cards are only slightly secure, but probably actually a bit better than an Ohio license. They're just a plastic card with layered printing and embossed letters, with a hologram. The embossing can be accomplished with a COTS machine not dissimilar to that which the local public library had when I was younger to produce their membership cards. Special characters (the stylized V on VISA cards, for instance) are easily produced by anyone with sufficient time and motivation, given access to basic fabrication implements (a file, drill, dremel, etc) and a small amount of machinable brass. And since they're just plastic, it's fairly easy to work the material around using heat; it should therefore be possible to transfer the fancy ("secure") hologram images from an any old card card to another, completely falsified card.
Printable credit card blanks and the printers themselves are available here.
While I might wish that it weren't so easy, it doesn't seem to me that anyone is currently trying very hard to prevent people from fabricating the cards themselves. As long as this is the case, simply comparing one card to another of a different type will not reliably protect against the more cunning thief.
If I want to paste a logo onto my yard, that's my problem. And if I want to paste a Really Big logo onto my Really Big yard, that's also my problem.
Methinks that it's probably the best use that the landowner has ever gotten out of that particular stitch of property.
No.
By saying that Windows is finished, you are also, by extension, saying that computers are finished.
And that's just not so. Hardware is still more difficult than it should be to configure, and software still crashes. I still don't have a flying car, and my games are not photorealistically rendered with real depth in the air in around me.
Really, now. Saying that Windows is finished is like saying that the Internet is complete. That cars are done. That there is nothing left to learn about medicine. Or spaceflight. Or whatever.
It's absurd.
You're new here, aren't you?
I think that Visa and Mastercard and banks with billions of dollars at stake in this game have a financial incentive to display statistics which are favorable toward increasing the acceptance and use of credit card transactions. I think they take a percentage cut from every credit card sale made through their systems from the retailer, and I think they charge the consumer in a much more up-front fashion with line-item card fees when conducting an ATM debit-card-style transaction. I think that these merchant and debit fees are what keeps companies like Visa afloat.
I think, therefore, that their statistics are a crock of shit. I think, by extension of that, that any theory based upon those statistics is also a crock of shit. That's what I think.
Page zooming is horribly broken in every browser I've used, except for Opera, which manages to get it right most of the time.
But, see, it has always been broken.
That it is still broken is really not a problem new to IE 7.
And it's really not a surprise that they didn't catch this variation of brokenness, because this stuff has been so broken for so many years in so many browsers that one could only reasonably be lead to conclude that developers in general have nothing but disdain for the Zoom function.
I know we hear it over and over again, but it must not have sunken in yet: Correlation != causation. But throw a wild assertion or two in there, and any statistic, no matter how benign or biased, can be molded to prove your point.
I have friends in a wide variety of income brackets. The poorest of them buy everything with cash, because their credit is so fucked that nobody will give them a card with their name on it under -any- terms. They're obviously going to spend more of their money buying inexpensive food essentials than on expensive hard goods, because that's what they can afford (if they're lucky).
But I'm sure his lack of money, credit, and plastic is purely psychological.
Personally, I would prefer to do everything with cash, but find that it can be pretty difficult to deal with these days. Earlier this year I cashed a $2,200 IRS check and was questioned sternly be two different people about it, at my own bank. Things like that put a damper on buying expensive items using cash, simply because it is difficult to accumulate a large quantity of cash without a concerted effort.
So when I recently bought spent $315 on a digital camera, I didn't bother with cash. But it had little to do with psychology; it was just simply less of a pain in the ass to use a credit card instead.
Microsoft has been giving away Virtual PC for some time now.
Wake up, Slashdot.
(-1, Retarded)
Back to your cave, troll.
The box is a web-browser and reliable, though rudimentary, general-purpose computer. It probably does these tasks rather well. It's not so much for running arbitrary software.
I doubt that it even has critical moving parts.
You want storage? You've already mocked the idea, but flash drives are cheap and absolutely perfect for personal data storage. Remember, 1 gig of data is still an entire fuckload, unless your data consists of games, Microsoft products, or a media library. With 1-gig flash drives at less than $20, I fail to see a problem.
And external hard drives, bulky? The whole machine, fully equipped with its potentially massive conflagration of external USB Mass Storage Device, is still going to be extremely small.
You want more options than that? Buy a real fucking computer. It's not like they're expensive anymore.
I agree completely.
I'd like to add that the reasons for moving a cable from one patch panel to another are always wrong, and always stupid. So just don't do it.
If, knowing this, the cable still needs to be moved, then run another one. Or use additional patch panels to work around it.
This is expensive. But, then again, so are messy racks.
I have always been under the impression that one of the basic concepts of this whole "structured cabling" thing was that the infrastructure cabling goes from point A (a walljack, say) to point B (typically a patch panel), and then IS NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH. EVER.
Using this simple mentality will automatically save you from a large percentage of wiring problems, and prevent most temptation to fuck with all those nicely-tied wires, as they needn't be fucked with because they're not fucked up because NOBODY HAS EVER FUCKED WITH THEM.
LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE.
(thank you)
Hogwash. By those standards, nothing (except, perhaps, BSD's /bin/sh and a few other ancient works) deserves to be version >=1, because modern software is very seldom ever quite finished.
.21 (Now With Instant Hot Water).
.2, it sure as fuck doesn't sound like it.[1]
1.0 should be used to indicate that the software won't destroy your porn collection, empty your checking account, wreck your car, rape your wife, or burn your house down. It should be used to communicate to potential users that the software is finally considered ready for general use by the public for whatever unique purpose it is that made people start looking at the software in the first place.
In the particular case of MythTV, 1.0 should not mean that it is feature-complete, plays DVDs, produces audio-backed slideshows (WTF?), or anything else. I've ALREADY got machines that do a fantastic job of playing DVDs, and I've got software for any slideshow purpose I can imagine (along with most anyone who has recently purchased a retail-boxed DVD-R drive, or who runs just about any modern Linux distribution) in case I want to bore my in-laws with my lousy photos. I don't NEED these features, and I'm pretty sure that I don't WANT them, either.
Remember: The main reason anyone ever looks at something like MythTV in the first place is that it is a capable DVR. 1.0 should indicate that this DVR function -- which once again is the point of the thing -- works and is stable and is usable by sane people, and that any additional features which manage to be included are similarly polished.
Waiting for complete and total doneness before releasing MythTV 1.0 is like waiting for Emacs to include a BitTorrent client: Although both are likely to be inevitable, nobody will give a shit by the time it finally happens.
Leave the DVD playing for the DVD players, and the slideshowing to the slideshow programs, until those features are ALSO done, and then include them in a point release, a plugin, an add-on, or whatever. I've already got a kitchen sink and it works fine - I therefore am obviously not breathlessly awaiting the release of MythTV
All that I want, as Joe Smith with 2.3 kids, a wife, a house, two cars, and no free time, is a DVR. MythTV might be a good one, but at version
1: From reading the comments here, it seems like the DVR aspects are actually working pretty well these days, and that packages like KnoppMyth take a lot of the pain out of setting it up. Is it ready for feature-culling and general use? I don't know - I don't have time to evaluate it. That's what version numbers are SUPPOSED TO HELP ME WITH.
I call bullshit.
2-way radios are old, well-understood technology. If the building that the repeater is in falls down, one can build another repeater in minutes. They're bloody simple, and can be constructed by anyone with their wits about them given a pair of radios, a set of appropriate connectors, and a few bits of wire. ANY radio service shop (and I'm sure NYC has more than a few good ones) has the parts laying around to do this, along with the learned individuals who can assemble this stuff in their sleep (and whom are are employed under the EXPECTATION that they respond in an emergency).
What's more, is that the law enforcement/public safety folks have such radio shops on speed dial, just for the routine emergencies encountered daily with radio: Lightning attacking towers, basement radio rooms flooding, dispatcher microphones wigging out, patrol cars popping fuses, dead batteries, power outages, And nevermind all the back-and-forth with routine adjustments and installations -- radio people are easy to find.
And the radios themselves run by default from 12VDC, and needn't weigh more than a few pounds. So it is absolutely bloody simple to carry a fully-functional repeater under one arm into a disaster area, plug it into -any- available vehicle (running or not), stick a pair of magnetic antennas to the roof (which, again, are cheap, stock items) and have a solid, local repeater. Even a largish linear amp to boost the power of the repeater rig will run from a defacto 12VDC. Power is absolutely no problem whatsoever for radio gear, whenever there's cars nearby. Later on, as time permits, more featureful repeaters can be configured and tested alongside the functional temporary rig and brought online without noticable service interruption.
Even the small company I work for has a couple of capable, small, 40-Watt repeaters sitting around, just in case, much like a networking company might have a stout switch, a Cisco router, or a CSU/DSU kicking about. If the local equivilent of 9/11 happened around here, particularly during business hours like that, my boss would insist that people stop what they were doing and begin mobilizing IMMEDIATELY, armed with repeater hardware, and radios to work with it. The laptop computers and cables to program other radios in the field to work with whatever channels are available are already in the service trucks. And, try though I might, I can't imagine any other radio shop would behave differently - those aren't just people, policemen, or firefighters out there in distress, but customers...and big customers, at that.
There's lots of good reasons why communication is difficult during such a disaster, but lack of a simple repeater is not among them - at least, not for very long.
You're really missing the point.
Network. Fucking. Everything. Walk up with your 802.11 laptop and drop it anywhere on the network and you're done. The only thing missing is a VGA adapter with an Ethernet jack on it.
There is no task performed by USB (with, or without wires) which cannot be performed -- better -- by ethernet.
We don't need any more bloody protocols, thanks!
We've got USB and we've got gigabit ethernet and we've got 802.11 (and psuedo-802.11n) and we've got Bluetooth. If that's not enough, there's still multiple variations of Firewire, SCSI, and fibre-channel.
Tell me: In what way is this UWB mumbo-jumbo superior to a networked USB port and a fast standards-based wireless network connection?
Just curious.
I realize that the goal of simplicity dictates that this sort of thing is not in the flashy GUI user configuration screens and pushed out-of-the-way.
But then, is there a singular place where such eccentric settings (and additions) are documented? about:config is too vast for individuals to be adding stuff to it without documentation.
Suppose for a second that we're actually USING the calendar as a way to track and schedule appointments and meetings and other daily activities.
Now suppose that the Intar-web is borken, and Google can't be reached. Suddenly, I can't tell my ass from a hole in the ground - I've got no idea where I'm supposed to be, or who's coming to see me. I can't schedule anything new, and I can't take care of anything already scheduled. (I could avoid this problem by keeping a redundant schedule/calender, but if I wanted to jot things down twice I'd just DO SO, on paper, and be done with entrusting these computers with important things.)
Meanwhile, Outlook still works, and the same information is still in my Palm from the last time they sync'd, in case the computer catches fire, and backed up remotely semi-nightly in case they both go tits up together.
As much as I'd like to, I can't put all of my eggs in Google's basket. Without some sort of local, redundant copy of the data, there's no way I'm going to do anything important with it.
I once sent $3 to suck.com.
In return, they sent a suck.com sticker, a suck.com membership card, a suck.com beermat, and a suck.com-branded Gold Circle Coin condom. Details here.
In contrast, nobody that actually made the list ever sent me squat.
In Ohio, it is illegal to take photographs in an establishment which is showing a motion picture.
FYI.
Oh, cool.
So when the flash-containing controller chip wears out after n writes, you get to buy a new motherboard. Awesome.
Just think of all the new chipsets Intel will be able to sell that way!
Contrary to popular belief, just because a device uses flash memory does not mean that it cannot fail safely.
Trash an area on flash due to power failure, bad firmware image, or dried dog snot bridging the contacts of the memory chip?
No problem. The bootloader, in a protected area of flash, sees that the checksum is bad and just Does The Right Thing by loading good data from a (also protected) portion of the flash, and the device boots up to a state which may not be latest-and-greatest, or even fully functional, but is at least adequate to re-flash.
The only problem with this is that it is somewhat inefficient use of flash memory space, but the stuff is obviously far cheaper than it used to be (I'd wager that it passed "cheap enough" years ago).
Similar methods are in place in all kinds of consumer goods, including the venerable Linksys WRT54G, and generally work by allowing you to load good firmware using TFTP, even after everything has gone all wrong[2].
Just because you've had warnings about interrupted PC BIOS flashing and video game saves burned into your head, does not mean that it's all that hard to do safely.
2: And if you really hose things by killing the bootloader, you get to build a TSOP cable and, with a bit of prayer, write to the flash chip directly using a parallel port. Failing to recover a bricked WRT54G is actually hard to do, no matter how bad it gets fucked up.
Having recently been forced to cut down an 80' elm tree which died and was threatening to wreck my home, my neighbor's garage, the local power grid, and an above-ground swimming pool, I can say exactly why it is that people don't plant big trees next to their houses:
Because they're fucking expensive.
HTH, HAND.
Backslash: Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\
Also bad:
The LCD screen. It's mounted in the phone sideways.
Maybe I'm just hypersensitive to such things, but LCD displays are supposed to be used with the widest viewing angle being from side-to-side. This is so that both of your eyes can see roughly the same thing, and are able to focus and collect a stable image.
The Q's LCD display is narrowest in viewing angle from side-to-side. This means that both eyes see different images (different contrast, different coloration), which is quite hard to look at.
Rotating the phone 90 degrees corrects the that visual aberration, and shows the display to be of rather good quality. But then the device isn't useful in that orientation...
Blackberry's screen does not seem to suffer in such a fashion.