But they typically shun computers in general, let alone 802.11n deployments.
It's possible that the OP is an Amish youth in his "rumspringa" wilding phase. His clueless use of buzzwords (eg "enterprise size") supports this theory.
On the other hand, he might just be another brainless corporate shmuck who is way out of his depth in a technical decision-making role. A prime candidate for immediate firing.
The correct meaning of bake-off is when many different makes of a device that are supposed to support a standard are paired off to see if they actually inter-operate.
Nah, that's called a "hoedown".
Once you've identified the interoperable parties, you can then invite them to a "barn raising".
Your folks are just lucky that they live near a DSLAM. A subscriber who is 3km from the DSLAM would be lucky to get 1.5Mbps, if they could get DSL at all.
The phone company (at least in the U.S.) does not record the time of a call unless it's a billiable long distance call (i.e. not part of an unlimited long distance plan).
For every landline that I have ever had (personal or business, at least a dozen lines in the US over the years) the service provider has always given me a monthly statement of every call with #, time, and duration. I dunno what provider you use that does NOT give you these statements, but they are simply not sending the log to you. They still keep your phone records, which can be subpoenaed.
The information printed on the fax from the sender is all from information that was entered by the sender, and is thus rather easy to spoof.
If their intent from the beginning was malicious, sure, they could spoof it. Of course you'd see that info on the fax, and if you care, you could ask them why the fax came from FraudCo instead of GenuineCo.
And how is a fax immune to "digital forgery" when it is basically a digital format? Not only can you not verify the identity of the sender, you can't even be sure that the receiver will print it out on actual paper.
If you are the receiver, you can absolutely ensure that your faxes print on paper. What matters is that YOU get the signed faxed document on printed paper. Physical forensics can verify the source and age of the physical document if it becomes necessary.
Standard practice for long-distance business contracts is to execute immediately by fax, then follow up with a signed copy by fedex.
...which only proves that the fax wasn't all that verifiable after all. It's merely a way to say "here's some circumstantial evidence right now that I signed something, with the original document to follow later".
No. A faxed signed contract is a legally binding document with the full force of the paper & ink copy that follows. The courts recognize it.
To be clear...I would rather see a system based on digital signatures. But I don't see that happening anytime soon for most folks. Honestly...how many people do you know who have a digital signature certified by a trusted authority?
Also...there are plenty of practical reasons to have a fax. It's often the simplest mechanism for e.g. small businesses who take constant customer orders. Receive a faxed order, hand it off to the stockroom/kitchen/etc who fulfill it. No computers, no separate printing step. You have hardcopy immediately. And a phone line & fax machine are generally more reliable than a computer system & internet connection.
Imagine that you execute a contract with another party, who later decides to back out and says they never signed it.
If you executed that contract via email from your server to the other party's server, no one else has a record of it. They can claim you forged the email.
If you executed that contract via snail mail, again no one has a record of it. At best you have a certified mail receipt or fedex bill to prove that a document was sent.
When you execute via fax, the phone company has a record of the sender/receiver/time, and also the length of the call which gives some indication of the number of pages. Plus most of this information is printed on the fax itself and can be examined by forensics for physical forgery, which is more difficult than digital forgery.
Standard practice for long-distance business contracts is to execute immediately by fax, then follow up with a signed copy by fedex.
Is it inefficient? Yes. Just like carrying airbags in your car is inefficient...until you need them.
Wow I'm Surprised...That all of Slashdot seems to want these to be as heavily restricted as firearms.
I don't know where you live, but in the USA these lasers are ~already~ MORE heavily restricted than firearms. See above posts re: FDA regulations. I could buy a shotgun at walmart more easily than I could buy a 100mW laser online.
where should we draw the line?
Somewhere before "toys that can cause serious permanent physical damage during normal use".
If you need a high-powered laser for research, even home hobbyist research, you ~can~ buy one. They aren't prohibited, just regulated.
If you want it as a toy, chances are that you are too lazy to find out what the regulations are and where you can buy it. The comments to this thread clearly prove that point. And that is exactly as it should be. Making >5mW lasers easily available to the casual/lazy/stupid consumer would be reckless, because they have absolutely no idea how dangerous it is.
Most folks know that cars and guns and bandsaws are dangerous. This is because those objects have practical mainstream uses, so education about their dangers is pervasive. Any teenager can tell you that a gun or car can kill people, and a bandsaw can amputate your hand.
But practically no adults have a clue how much damage a 1W laser can do to your retina in less than 1 second. And they probably never will, since a 1W laser has zero practical use for most folks. Hence regulation is appropriate.
Usually I would agree with you about rampant fear-mongering, but not in this case.
Let's look at the numbers.
Have you ever glanced accidentally at the sun? Your eyeblink reflex protects you in about 100ms, and you probably see some colored spots for a few 10s of seconds afterwards. No big deal.
Now, this laser is marketed as "8000 times brighter than the sun". Let's pretend they're telling the truth. That means the light energy is equivalent to looking at the sun for 8000*100ms = more than 13 MINUTES before your eyelids close.
In reality it is even worse, because all of that energy is burning onto your retina in just 100ms.
But if you want to get a rough idea, just go outside, hold your eyelids open, and stare at the sun for 13 minutes. Let us know how that turns out.
I'm stunned that it took ~300 posts before someone mentioned that the US FDA prohibits sales of laser pointers with more than 5mW output power.
Extra credit to the AC for linking the FDA import alert that calls out "Wicked Lasers" by name. AND includes their business address in Shanghai, China.
It's an obvious scam to anyone with 2 brain cells. Slashdot was used as a dumbshit advertising tool. Whatever idiot approved this article should be bitch-slapped, and suspended for a year.:P
Don't project ~your~ temper onto other people. It puts you in the same class as the narrow-minded poster I originally replied to, who had called someone a hypocrite because he projected his own situation onto them.
Other people are not clones of yourself. Consider that before you challenge them for doing something that really only ~you~ do, or feeling something that really only ~you~ feel.
And you are complicit in THAT thievery by sitting in front of your computer, probably someplace where it is air conditioned, posting your asinine banalities on Slashdot. Or do you have one of those new-fangled computers that run without electricity?
Some of us live in climates that require neither heating in the winter nor cooling in the summer, and we can power our computers easily from solar.
eg: My ULV thinkpad consumes less than 15w running full-bore with the screen turned up all the way. Each set of cheap amorphous solar panels cost me less than a new oem laptop battery, and put out enough power to run 2 or 3 laptops, depending on the season.
Please don't project your stupidity and ignorance onto others. Thanks.
Cut me some slack. When I saw that the story was only 23 minutes old, I almost peed my pants and rushed to submit it to Slashdot....The fact that I'm strutting around right now as if I'd won the Superbowl must give you a sense of how rich and full my life is.
Dude...I almost feel for you.
But your credibility was just pwned. It's a freakin' CNET article, advertising a local restaurant with a picture, a link to their site, and even a detailed description of their food.
My main point was that a 10m rock from space poses no threat to life on earth.
If you're stuck on terminology, yeah, it can be a bit fuzzy. But here are the wikipedia sections on asteroids and meteoroids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid#Terminology "Traditionally, small bodies orbiting the Sun were classified as asteroids, comets or meteoroids, with anything smaller than ten metres across being called a meteoroid.[15]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Meteoroid "As of 2011[update] the International Astronomical Union officially defines a meteoroid as 'a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom'.[1][2] Beech and Steel, writing in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, proposed a new definition where a meteoroid is between 100 m and 10 m across.[3] The NEO definition includes larger objects, up to 50 m in diameter, in this category."
Back to my main point, that article (from NASA/JPL) says:
"As a rule, the most common types of stony asteroids would not be expected to cause ground damage unless their diameters were about 25 meters in diameter or larger."
Hence, any fear-mongering about the destructive potential of a hypothetical mission to intelligently nudge a 10m asteroid 2 moon orbits from earth, is just plain stupid.:)
But as others have already pointed out, it's not the only stupid thing about this thread, article, or concept.:P
Since such a thing would be put the entire planet at risk... Far too risky to be talking about it...
Um, no, wrong.
TFA says they are hoping to nudge "a 10-meter object called 2008EA9" into earth orbit. Actually, NEO objects less than 50m diameter are meteroids, not asteroids. A 5-10m diameter meteoroid "hits" earth atmosphere about once annually (see Nature reference in Wikipedia article). They typically explode and entirely burn up in the atmosphere.
Gross Domestic Product of USA = $14.66 trillion $383 million / $14.66 trillion = 0.0026% of GDP 0.0026% of Dominica's $376M GDP = $9823 $9823 / 10 years = $982
I guarantee you, the most talented people on Dominica make more than $982 annual income. Get some perspective, and try thinking before you post.
On the video front, I totally agree with you that the current tablets can't do heavy lifting. I recently bought my first non-laptop computer in more than 12 years, so I could have the horsepower and thermal dissipation to transcode our DVDs to the latest standards (h264 & mpeg4, via ffmpeg & x264) without waiting days and burning up our laptops. So I totally understand the issues with hardcore video processing.
I'm not a "fan" of any specific OS. Our household runs Windows, OSX, and Kubuntu, and I've burned through many small devices over the last 20 years...Sharp Wizard, Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, Microsoft/Dell PocketPC, currently a bunch of iDevices, soon an Android device too.
So...do you have any good suggestions for Android photo and video editing apps? Or do you think tablets suck at this because you've only used Android tablets?
fwiw I'm not talking about professional editing and retouching. I think I'm a fairly mainstream user of these tools, in that 95+% of my photo editing is simply cropping and fixing the exposure.
Sometimes I'll boost saturation for the eye-popping postcard effect, or boost sharpness to intensify detail, or convert to BW or sepia. But that's all simple stuff too.
I haven't seriously pursued and ipad app or workflow yet (still mostly using Picasa on laptop) but on our last trip I used the free Photoshop Express app and it worked just fine. At some point I'll have to look more closely at other apps like Filterstorm, Photogene, and PhotoForge and see what works best for us.
As for video...like I said, I haven't done it yet...but from a quick search the top apps I saw were iMovie (duh), ReelDirector, and Splice.
Maybe our standards are different. I only do quick & basic edits to photos/video to get the big coarse improvements so I can share them with family & friends. Not polishing to gallery or broadcast standards.:)
Quid pro quo: You said that you've been looking at these apps. Which ones have you tried?
Basically the tablet is a content consumption device, with a teensy bit of interactivity and form filling thrown in.
That was my first impression. And it is true that a tablet makes a great book/magazine reader, music player, video player, and gaming device.
But then my partner got an iPad so she could mark-up and edit PDFs for work. Also to do email and word processing on an ultralight device (sometimes paired with an ultralight bluetooth keyboard). And then I started using it to edit/crop/filter our DSLR photos on-the-fly while traveling.
And I realized...it's actually a decent content creation & editing system.
I haven't used it to seriously edit video yet, though apparently that is possible with several different apps.
At this point the only thing I can imagine NOT doing on a tablet is programming. And mostly that's because I want 2 or 3 large monitors when coding.
Slashdot Mirror
who the hell calls it a bakeoff?
The Amish, mostly.
But they typically shun computers in general, let alone 802.11n deployments.
It's possible that the OP is an Amish youth in his "rumspringa" wilding phase. His clueless use of buzzwords (eg "enterprise size") supports this theory.
On the other hand, he might just be another brainless corporate shmuck who is way out of his depth in a technical decision-making role. A prime candidate for immediate firing.
The correct meaning of bake-off is when many different makes of a device that are supposed to support a standard are paired off to see if they actually inter-operate.
Nah, that's called a "hoedown".
Once you've identified the interoperable parties, you can then invite them to a "barn raising".
Remember to provide lots of lemonade.
Facebook is the VHS of the social network wars. And if they don't pick their act up g+ will end up being the DVD
Fixed that for ya.
Your folks are just lucky that they live near a DSLAM. A subscriber who is 3km from the DSLAM would be lucky to get 1.5Mbps, if they could get DSL at all.
The phone company (at least in the U.S.) does not record the time of a call unless it's a billiable long distance call (i.e. not part of an unlimited long distance plan).
For every landline that I have ever had (personal or business, at least a dozen lines in the US over the years) the service provider has always given me a monthly statement of every call with #, time, and duration. I dunno what provider you use that does NOT give you these statements, but they are simply not sending the log to you. They still keep your phone records, which can be subpoenaed.
The information printed on the fax from the sender is all from information that was entered by the sender, and is thus rather easy to spoof.
If their intent from the beginning was malicious, sure, they could spoof it. Of course you'd see that info on the fax, and if you care, you could ask them why the fax came from FraudCo instead of GenuineCo.
And how is a fax immune to "digital forgery" when it is basically a digital format? Not only can you not verify the identity of the sender, you can't even be sure that the receiver will print it out on actual paper.
If you are the receiver, you can absolutely ensure that your faxes print on paper. What matters is that YOU get the signed faxed document on printed paper. Physical forensics can verify the source and age of the physical document if it becomes necessary.
Standard practice for long-distance business contracts is to execute immediately by fax, then follow up with a signed copy by fedex.
...which only proves that the fax wasn't all that verifiable after all. It's merely a way to say "here's some circumstantial evidence right now that I signed something, with the original document to follow later".
No. A faxed signed contract is a legally binding document with the full force of the paper & ink copy that follows. The courts recognize it.
To be clear...I would rather see a system based on digital signatures. But I don't see that happening anytime soon for most folks. Honestly...how many people do you know who have a digital signature certified by a trusted authority?
Also...there are plenty of practical reasons to have a fax. It's often the simplest mechanism for e.g. small businesses who take constant customer orders. Receive a faxed order, hand it off to the stockroom/kitchen/etc who fulfill it. No computers, no separate printing step. You have hardcopy immediately. And a phone line & fax machine are generally more reliable than a computer system & internet connection.
Yup, it's all about that 3rd-party verification.
Imagine that you execute a contract with another party, who later decides to back out and says they never signed it.
If you executed that contract via email from your server to the other party's server, no one else has a record of it. They can claim you forged the email.
If you executed that contract via snail mail, again no one has a record of it. At best you have a certified mail receipt or fedex bill to prove that a document was sent.
When you execute via fax, the phone company has a record of the sender/receiver/time, and also the length of the call which gives some indication of the number of pages. Plus most of this information is printed on the fax itself and can be examined by forensics for physical forgery, which is more difficult than digital forgery.
Standard practice for long-distance business contracts is to execute immediately by fax, then follow up with a signed copy by fedex.
Is it inefficient? Yes. Just like carrying airbags in your car is inefficient...until you need them.
Wow I'm Surprised...That all of Slashdot seems to want these to be as heavily restricted as firearms.
I don't know where you live, but in the USA these lasers are ~already~ MORE heavily restricted than firearms. See above posts re: FDA regulations. I could buy a shotgun at walmart more easily than I could buy a 100mW laser online.
where should we draw the line?
Somewhere before "toys that can cause serious permanent physical damage during normal use".
If you need a high-powered laser for research, even home hobbyist research, you ~can~ buy one. They aren't prohibited, just regulated.
If you want it as a toy, chances are that you are too lazy to find out what the regulations are and where you can buy it. The comments to this thread clearly prove that point. And that is exactly as it should be. Making >5mW lasers easily available to the casual/lazy/stupid consumer would be reckless, because they have absolutely no idea how dangerous it is.
Most folks know that cars and guns and bandsaws are dangerous. This is because those objects have practical mainstream uses, so education about their dangers is pervasive. Any teenager can tell you that a gun or car can kill people, and a bandsaw can amputate your hand.
But practically no adults have a clue how much damage a 1W laser can do to your retina in less than 1 second. And they probably never will, since a 1W laser has zero practical use for most folks. Hence regulation is appropriate.
Oh yes, they're doing their job.
They just aren't working for the people that you think they're working for. ;)
Usually I would agree with you about rampant fear-mongering, but not in this case.
Let's look at the numbers.
Have you ever glanced accidentally at the sun? Your eyeblink reflex protects you in about 100ms, and you probably see some colored spots for a few 10s of seconds afterwards. No big deal.
Now, this laser is marketed as "8000 times brighter than the sun". Let's pretend they're telling the truth. That means the light energy is equivalent to looking at the sun for 8000*100ms = more than 13 MINUTES before your eyelids close.
In reality it is even worse, because all of that energy is burning onto your retina in just 100ms.
But if you want to get a rough idea, just go outside, hold your eyelids open, and stare at the sun for 13 minutes. Let us know how that turns out.
Not everything is fearmongering.
It does...but now you can't see ~anything~. Doh!
^ Mod this up.
I'm stunned that it took ~300 posts before someone mentioned that the US FDA prohibits sales of laser pointers with more than 5mW output power.
Extra credit to the AC for linking the FDA import alert that calls out "Wicked Lasers" by name. AND includes their business address in Shanghai, China.
It's an obvious scam to anyone with 2 brain cells. Slashdot was used as a dumbshit advertising tool. Whatever idiot approved this article should be bitch-slapped, and suspended for a year. :P
Don't project ~your~ temper onto other people. It puts you in the same class as the narrow-minded poster I originally replied to, who had called someone a hypocrite because he projected his own situation onto them.
Other people are not clones of yourself. Consider that before you challenge them for doing something that really only ~you~ do, or feeling something that really only ~you~ feel.
Peace.
And you are complicit in THAT thievery by sitting in front of your computer, probably someplace where it is air conditioned, posting your asinine banalities on Slashdot. Or do you have one of those new-fangled computers that run without electricity?
Some of us live in climates that require neither heating in the winter nor cooling in the summer, and we can power our computers easily from solar.
eg: My ULV thinkpad consumes less than 15w running full-bore with the screen turned up all the way. Each set of cheap amorphous solar panels cost me less than a new oem laptop battery, and put out enough power to run 2 or 3 laptops, depending on the season.
Please don't project your stupidity and ignorance onto others. Thanks.
it's more than the income of than 7626 median income US households
1) That sentence does not parse.
2) How many "median income US households" are there?
3) Reference?
The point of my earlier reply seems to have flown well over your head. Look back quick, and you might still see it.
Cut me some slack. When I saw that the story was only 23 minutes old, I almost peed my pants and rushed to submit it to Slashdot....The fact that I'm strutting around right now as if I'd won the Superbowl must give you a sense of how rich and full my life is.
Dude...I almost feel for you.
But your credibility was just pwned. It's a freakin' CNET article, advertising a local restaurant with a picture, a link to their site, and even a detailed description of their food.
It's an ad. Not news.
Wow. I had no idea that you knew I was thinking you knew I knew what you thought I was thinking.
Modern marketing techniques!
The perceived value comes from the hype, not the manufacturing process.
And the ~real~ value comes from the design, not the hype nor manufacturing.
My main point was that a 10m rock from space poses no threat to life on earth.
If you're stuck on terminology, yeah, it can be a bit fuzzy. But here are the wikipedia sections on asteroids and meteoroids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid#Terminology
"Traditionally, small bodies orbiting the Sun were classified as asteroids, comets or meteoroids, with anything smaller than ten metres across being called a meteoroid.[15]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteoroid#Meteoroid
"As of 2011[update] the International Astronomical Union officially defines a meteoroid as 'a solid object moving in interplanetary space, of a size considerably smaller than an asteroid and considerably larger than an atom'.[1][2] Beech and Steel, writing in Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, proposed a new definition where a meteoroid is between 100 m and 10 m across.[3] The NEO definition includes larger objects, up to 50 m in diameter, in this category."
But then you get articles like this one, which covers a fairly recent Earth collision with a 10m "asteroid":
http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news165.html
Back to my main point, that article (from NASA/JPL) says:
"As a rule, the most common types of stony asteroids would not be expected to cause ground damage unless their diameters were about 25 meters in diameter or larger."
Hence, any fear-mongering about the destructive potential of a hypothetical mission to intelligently nudge a 10m asteroid 2 moon orbits from earth, is just plain stupid. :)
But as others have already pointed out, it's not the only stupid thing about this thread, article, or concept. :P
Since such a thing would be put the entire planet at risk... Far too risky to be talking about it...
Um, no, wrong.
TFA says they are hoping to nudge "a 10-meter object called 2008EA9" into earth orbit. Actually, NEO objects less than 50m diameter are meteroids, not asteroids. A 5-10m diameter meteoroid "hits" earth atmosphere about once annually (see Nature reference in Wikipedia article). They typically explode and entirely burn up in the atmosphere.
So...this is not a risk.
Sigh.
Gross Domestic Product of USA = $14.66 trillion
$383 million / $14.66 trillion = 0.0026% of GDP
0.0026% of Dominica's $376M GDP = $9823
$9823 / 10 years = $982
I guarantee you, the most talented people on Dominica make more than $982 annual income. Get some perspective, and try thinking before you post.
whoosh!
Yeah, but it's gotta be stress-inducing when he gets conflicting directives from different banks.
On the video front, I totally agree with you that the current tablets can't do heavy lifting. I recently bought my first non-laptop computer in more than 12 years, so I could have the horsepower and thermal dissipation to transcode our DVDs to the latest standards (h264 & mpeg4, via ffmpeg & x264) without waiting days and burning up our laptops. So I totally understand the issues with hardcore video processing.
I'm not a "fan" of any specific OS. Our household runs Windows, OSX, and Kubuntu, and I've burned through many small devices over the last 20 years...Sharp Wizard, Apple Newton, Palm Pilot, Microsoft/Dell PocketPC, currently a bunch of iDevices, soon an Android device too.
So...do you have any good suggestions for Android photo and video editing apps? Or do you think tablets suck at this because you've only used Android tablets?
fwiw I'm not talking about professional editing and retouching. I think I'm a fairly mainstream user of these tools, in that 95+% of my photo editing is simply cropping and fixing the exposure.
Sometimes I'll boost saturation for the eye-popping postcard effect, or boost sharpness to intensify detail, or convert to BW or sepia. But that's all simple stuff too.
I haven't seriously pursued and ipad app or workflow yet (still mostly using Picasa on laptop) but on our last trip I used the free Photoshop Express app and it worked just fine. At some point I'll have to look more closely at other apps like Filterstorm, Photogene, and PhotoForge and see what works best for us.
As for video...like I said, I haven't done it yet...but from a quick search the top apps I saw were iMovie (duh), ReelDirector, and Splice.
Maybe our standards are different. I only do quick & basic edits to photos/video to get the big coarse improvements so I can share them with family & friends. Not polishing to gallery or broadcast standards. :)
Quid pro quo: You said that you've been looking at these apps. Which ones have you tried?
Basically the tablet is a content consumption device, with a teensy bit of interactivity and form filling thrown in.
That was my first impression. And it is true that a tablet makes a great book/magazine reader, music player, video player, and gaming device.
But then my partner got an iPad so she could mark-up and edit PDFs for work. Also to do email and word processing on an ultralight device (sometimes paired with an ultralight bluetooth keyboard). And then I started using it to edit/crop/filter our DSLR photos on-the-fly while traveling.
And I realized...it's actually a decent content creation & editing system.
I haven't used it to seriously edit video yet, though apparently that is possible with several different apps.
At this point the only thing I can imagine NOT doing on a tablet is programming. And mostly that's because I want 2 or 3 large monitors when coding.
ymmv.