my android phone lasts 3 days if i don't run games or listen to music. also, i can recharge it on any USB port in the world, a compatible cable (micro USB) is dirt cheap.
and i only have to carry one device.
there was a time that i'd rather have an ipod for music a phone for calls, since most "feature phones" of the time had crappy music players with shitty sound.
today, most phone have comparable sound quality to ipods, have pretty decent screens that i can read well even in the sun, plus very decent mobile browsers. so my pockets are a little less crowded, if the price to pay for it is recharge more often, so be it.
android as a plataform allows the user (or the phone manufacturer) to install an alternative app store in place of android market, or even side-by-side with it.
if you download a trully stock android from the developer site, it barelly have a browser and phone app. google have _zero_ controll over android and over what apps goes with the handsets. that's the beauty of opensource.
AND... if the summary is right (won't bother reading TFA), it's a _LOCAL_ exploit. which means, if you don't run telnetd, have all system accounts locked and have a strong passwords on your user's account, even if you have sshd running it shouldn't be a big deal.
now, if:
- you have a webserver; - it allows uploads OR allows users's code to create files on/tmp; - whatever temp dir the webserver uses allows execution (i.e. doesn't have "noexec" on/etc/fstab); - your PHP/phyton/ruby whatever is not configured to deny execution of system commands;
then you DESERVE to be rooted, just so you can learn how to properly secure your server the next time;
It's not necessarily a fault from the users perspective; you may well really like one particular UI. It's a weakness of the brand though, it that it dilutes what it means to be an "Adroid" phone just as only allowing applications like Skype to run on specific models of Android phones.
you didn't get the point. manufacturers DON'T CARE for the android brand. they care for THEIR brand. android for them is just another checkbox on the features list, like:
They can offer a wide range of phones all with a consistent UI. That's different from Apple (which has consistent UI but not a large range of phones) and from Android (which offers a wide range of phones now but with divergent UI).
the part of "divergent UIs" is not android's fault, even because it's not a fault at all. in a higly competitive market, where any of the other oferings have the basics covered, purchase decisions are based on details. this means making your phone look different, but still interoperable with the competitors is crucial. for what i understand, MS won't allow vendors to customize the UI, and this can be winphone's undoing. if all handsets have the same hardware, the same OS, the same interface, how will the consumer diferentiate them ? it'll cause the same problem that plagues PC makers. undiferentiated products with razor thin margins, and phone makers don't want this to happen to them. android allows customization, so manufacturers can diferentiate their offerings, while keeping compatibility.
Make no mistake, Android has taken over what Microsoft sees as ITS market (making phone OS'es for multiple vendors) and badly wants it back. And they still have a ton of money to make the attempt. And they have the same controls over application quality that has helped Apple in the application space.
wishing doesn't make it true. they _whished_ the market was theirs, when in truth, it belonged to symbian; and now it's shared between symbian and android. they can't "take back" something they never had. they were just one more player among many. and what'll keep them as a minor player here, is everything android has going for it that winphone doesn't have: free form factor (phones and tablets of all sizes, with varying capabilities), pricing (it's free and open source after all) and possibility of customization.
people used to buy disposable batteries for electronics in decades past, so if a fuel cell lasts something like a week in a moderatelly powerfull notebook and were cheap enough, i wouldn't mind.
now, your idea of a home algae tank is unfeasible. methanol is an alcohol. you can make alcohol at home. home made alcohol goes by the handles "beer" and "wine", depending on the source material (grains or fruits/sugars) and the yeast used. but it'll be diluted enough to be useless to power anything other than yourself at a party. methanol producing algae would be the same. they'd start to die by the time the concentration reached a critical level, leaving a solution of mostly water and some methanol.
to be used as fuel, it'd need to be distilled, a time and power consuming activity, with hazardous/poluting by-products. ask anyone who ever made moonshine.
if they really want those, they can buy detailed copies from the russians. do you really think the KGB or it's successor agency, the FSB, didn't invested enourmous resources in obtaining them ?
and trust me, if they could infiltrate the manhatan project, NASA was a piece of cake for them.
two things comes to my mind. one is to make it more dificult for other countries to kickstart their own space programs, even if it's just for research or comercial purposes.
the other, is to keep a few large compnies like boeing and lockheed from having competition inside US. since the expense of keeping track of all those kinds of documents and regulations can be too much for small startups, only the big guys will do it, because they have the resources.
business people in US keep babling about how they're against regulation. but that's only when those reduce their bottom line. but when regulation prevents competion and increases their profit margins, the more the better.
but would Kurt Westergaard's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad also violate Rackspace's AUP? How about Christopher Hitchens' Slate articles? Could articles from one-time Rackspace poster child The Onion pass muster?"
that pastor's call for koran burning is hate speech. here in basil he'd be in jail for it by now.
i don't about hitchens, but the onion is satire, something that's constitutionaly protected here and, IIRC, in US as well.
instead, you'll strugle with HP's crap. those are getting as bad as everybody else's.
IBM won't buy them. IBM wants nothing to do with the same PCs they invented nearly 30 years ago, that's why they sold the PC business to lenovo. found out that their market is with corporations, not consumers. when the largest buyers of printers, PCs and notebooks became end-users (instead of their bosses), they jumped ship. and i don't blame them.
i just got out of linuxcon brasil, and i saw an idea there that could save dell if they pull it right. it came from john maddog hall (funny guy, BTW. loved his talk).
it's one of the ideas he's pushing as part of project cauã. really small, ultra low power computers that can remainin an always on state running linux (of course) attached to the back of TVs or small monitors, with really nice broadband, so you can watch videos, listen to music, play games on the TV, control home automation, VoIP, cell phones (with a buil-in femtocell), and other stuff. also make a tablet that can sync sith the little thing behind the TV, and who knows ?
of course, they'd be competing with apple on that, but if they play it right, make the vertical integration work as well as apples and leverage the low cost of opensource, it might just work.
i live in a house with other 2 roommates, so it was classified as a "colective residence", this caused some problems for the 2 enumarators (a nice midle-aged lady and a 20 something boy). seems the interface is very linear, they have to input avery answer ano after another, and if they need to correct anything, it's kinda confusing.
i don't know if it's by design (to avoid fraud) or a typical case of good programers that are lousy at interface design.
but, minor annoyances appart, i'm still satified with the process and proud of it.
by experience, i can say that wages here in brasil are about 4x lower for the same job than in US, so if labor was the reason for the high cost of US census, it should have costed 4 gigadolars, not 13.
other factors, to take into account:
population size:
brasil has an estimated 200 million inhabitans, US 300, barely 30% difference the largest states are also the ones with lower population density, but the state of amazonas dwarfs alaska. i doubt that alaskan landscape makes it as dificult to reach the population as the amazon forest does here no matter how much people in US complaints, their roads are much better tha ours, movement is easier across the nation
all put togheter, the US census still is disproportionately more expensive than ours. score that for digital technology.
by the way, in the field of government automation, is brasil 2 X 0 US (the other point being our all-electronic elections)
by your reasoning, general elections wouldn't be necessary either. asimov wrote in a short tale that in an unspecified future, computers were so good, statistical tools so sofisticated, that the elections were decided by interviewing a SINGLE person.
but the real world doesn't work like that. unless you interview (or count the votes of) the whole population, there's an enourmous margin for abuse and fraud.
and don't come with "oh, but the sample will be selected randomly". by whom, may i ask ? by a computed that can be hacked to "randomly" select a bigger number of white, wealthy people ? or a smaller number of immigrants (legal or not) ? or exclude whole parts of the country ?
if elections the way they are already get abused, imagine a partial census, sosmething that doesn't get nearly as many attention from oversight bodies.
there's somethings worth paying for, and accurate census data is one of them.
some programas can be "decompiled" into a more human readable text.
if you have a *NIX/linux box around, try running something through strace. see all those system and library calls? that and an automated analysis of how the program flows can give you something close to the original source program. now, if the binary still have the debug symbols (i.e. it's not a stripped binary), it's even easier.
are you fucking insane ? hospitals are not datacenters, dude. those tubes need to sterilized in well equiped facilities, then wrapped in sterile bags that can only be opened when it's time to use.
do their job and not make mistakes,
ok, now i know you're a troll. obviously you never worked anywhere where you could be subject to enourmous pressures, having only a split second to make a vital decision. if you had, you'd know that under those circumstances, even the best trained professional can make mistakes. nurses are human beings, not machines.
won't work with the iphone for the same reason it won't work with android or winCE. those are phones. their primary function is talking, browsing the web, reading e-mail and sending messages.
all 4 tasks are covered by industry standards over which apple has no power. if people get fed up with apple for some reason, they can just buy an android, winCE 7 phone, palm or symbian. they lose a small investment in applications from the appstore, so what ?
apple have bigger chances with locking users on the ipad than on the iphone, to tell the truth
no. i didn't say we _DO_ mandate, but we could mandate if necessary a standard that only an opensource general OS can satisfy. or a proprietary OS, as long as the vendor hands the code to a government body responsible for auditing it, speacully in what regards to security.
i remember some talk about the US military considering banning windows, then balmer himself ordered MSFT to come up with a hardened windows XP that passes the pentagon's requirements.
i'm not talking about banning windows, i'm just saying that governments should THREAT banning it. nothing brings a private company to it's best game than the threat of losing government sales.
banning a particular vendor in many countries would constitute discrimination.
ok, maybe i'm generalizing by saying "many", but here in brasil you bet this is the case. IANAL, but both my brother and sister are, my roommate's girlfriend is and a software engineer in the company i work also have a law degree, so if you want, i can check with them.
try to imagine this scenario:
1) brasil's govt bans MSFT products by name 2) MSFT sues on grounds of discrimination 3)... 4) PROFIT!!!
if there ever was a case where the "profit" meme fitted, is this.
now, there's an indirect approach. since transportation and other industries that have the potential to affect the lives of thousands/millions are usually regulated, the mission critical systems that keep them running can be too.
the government can simply create such an iron-clad specification (that involves handing the full source code of everything), that MSFT would never be able to comply.
and wouldn't be able to sue on grounds of discrimination, specially if stuff like opensolaris, openBSD and linux passes the approval process. in case of a lawsuit, the government would simply point all the comapnies capable of following the standard and ask for dismissal.
Slashdot Mirror
my android phone lasts 3 days if i don't run games or listen to music. also, i can recharge it on any USB port in the world, a compatible cable (micro USB) is dirt cheap.
and i only have to carry one device.
there was a time that i'd rather have an ipod for music a phone for calls, since most "feature phones" of the time had crappy music players with shitty sound.
today, most phone have comparable sound quality to ipods, have pretty decent screens that i can read well even in the sun, plus very decent mobile browsers. so my pockets are a little less crowded, if the price to pay for it is recharge more often, so be it.
what about "Document Office" ?
can anyone check if it's taken ?
android as a plataform allows the user (or the phone manufacturer) to install an alternative app store in place of android market, or even side-by-side with it.
if you download a trully stock android from the developer site, it barelly have a browser and phone app. google have _zero_ controll over android and over what apps goes with the handsets. that's the beauty of opensource.
because it is ?
AND... if the summary is right (won't bother reading TFA), it's a _LOCAL_ exploit. which means, if you don't run telnetd, have all system accounts locked and have a strong passwords on your user's account, even if you have sshd running it shouldn't be a big deal.
now, if:
- you have a webserver; /tmp; /etc/fstab);
- it allows uploads OR allows users's code to create files on
- whatever temp dir the webserver uses allows execution (i.e. doesn't have "noexec" on
- your PHP/phyton/ruby whatever is not configured to deny execution of system commands;
then you DESERVE to be rooted, just so you can learn how to properly secure your server the next time;
disclaimer: yeah, this is how i learned.
It's not necessarily a fault from the users perspective; you may well really like one particular UI. It's a weakness of the brand though, it that it dilutes what it means to be an "Adroid" phone just as only allowing applications like Skype to run on specific models of Android phones.
you didn't get the point. manufacturers DON'T CARE for the android brand. they care for THEIR brand. android for them is just another checkbox on the features list, like:
* compatible with android: Yes.
They can offer a wide range of phones all with a consistent UI. That's different from Apple (which has consistent UI but not a large range of phones) and from Android (which offers a wide range of phones now but with divergent UI).
the part of "divergent UIs" is not android's fault, even because it's not a fault at all. in a higly competitive market, where any of the other oferings have the basics covered, purchase decisions are based on details. this means making your phone look different, but still interoperable with the competitors is crucial. for what i understand, MS won't allow vendors to customize the UI, and this can be winphone's undoing. if all handsets have the same hardware, the same OS, the same interface, how will the consumer diferentiate them ? it'll cause the same problem that plagues PC makers. undiferentiated products with razor thin margins, and phone makers don't want this to happen to them. android allows customization, so manufacturers can diferentiate their offerings, while keeping compatibility.
Make no mistake, Android has taken over what Microsoft sees as ITS market (making phone OS'es for multiple vendors) and badly wants it back. And they still have a ton of money to make the attempt. And they have the same controls over application quality that has helped Apple in the application space.
wishing doesn't make it true. they _whished_ the market was theirs, when in truth, it belonged to symbian; and now it's shared between symbian and android. they can't "take back" something they never had. they were just one more player among many. and what'll keep them as a minor player here, is everything android has going for it that winphone doesn't have: free form factor (phones and tablets of all sizes, with varying capabilities), pricing (it's free and open source after all) and possibility of customization.
newspeak=doubleplusungood
FTFY
people used to buy disposable batteries for electronics in decades past, so if a fuel cell lasts something like a week in a moderatelly powerfull notebook and were cheap enough, i wouldn't mind.
now, your idea of a home algae tank is unfeasible. methanol is an alcohol. you can make alcohol at home. home made alcohol goes by the handles "beer" and "wine", depending on the source material (grains or fruits/sugars) and the yeast used. but it'll be diluted enough to be useless to power anything other than yourself at a party. methanol producing algae would be the same. they'd start to die by the time the concentration reached a critical level, leaving a solution of mostly water and some methanol.
to be used as fuel, it'd need to be distilled, a time and power consuming activity, with hazardous/poluting by-products. ask anyone who ever made moonshine.
if they really want those, they can buy detailed copies from the russians. do you really think the KGB or it's successor agency, the FSB, didn't invested enourmous resources in obtaining them ?
and trust me, if they could infiltrate the manhatan project, NASA was a piece of cake for them.
two things comes to my mind. one is to make it more dificult for other countries to kickstart their own space programs, even if it's just for research or comercial purposes.
the other, is to keep a few large compnies like boeing and lockheed from having competition inside US. since the expense of keeping track of all those kinds of documents and regulations can be too much for small startups, only the big guys will do it, because they have the resources.
business people in US keep babling about how they're against regulation. but that's only when those reduce their bottom line. but when regulation prevents competion and increases their profit margins, the more the better.
but would Kurt Westergaard's cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad also violate Rackspace's AUP? How about Christopher Hitchens' Slate articles? Could articles from one-time Rackspace poster child The Onion pass muster?"
that pastor's call for koran burning is hate speech. here in basil he'd be in jail for it by now.
i don't about hitchens, but the onion is satire, something that's constitutionaly protected here and, IIRC, in US as well.
well, then chalk this as another missed opportunity for dell.
mike dell seems to have a talent to be always behind the curve.
instead, you'll strugle with HP's crap. those are getting as bad as everybody else's.
IBM won't buy them. IBM wants nothing to do with the same PCs they invented nearly 30 years ago, that's why they sold the PC business to lenovo. found out that their market is with corporations, not consumers. when the largest buyers of printers, PCs and notebooks became end-users (instead of their bosses), they jumped ship. and i don't blame them.
i just got out of linuxcon brasil, and i saw an idea there that could save dell if they pull it right. it came from john maddog hall (funny guy, BTW. loved his talk).
it's one of the ideas he's pushing as part of project cauã. really small, ultra low power computers that can remainin an always on state running linux (of course) attached to the back of TVs or small monitors, with really nice broadband, so you can watch videos, listen to music, play games on the TV, control home automation, VoIP, cell phones (with a buil-in femtocell), and other stuff. also make a tablet that can sync sith the little thing behind the TV, and who knows ?
of course, they'd be competing with apple on that, but if they play it right, make the vertical integration work as well as apples and leverage the low cost of opensource, it might just work.
don't give them ideas man. please.
it's bad enough to have facebook tracking your every move on the interwebs as it is.
make it opensource and i'll do my best to collaborate.
I can say without equivocation that my knowledge of those subjects is second to none.
[citation needed]
not as well designed as you might think.
i live in a house with other 2 roommates, so it was classified as a "colective residence", this caused some problems for the 2 enumarators (a nice midle-aged lady and a 20 something boy). seems the interface is very linear, they have to input avery answer ano after another, and if they need to correct anything, it's kinda confusing.
i don't know if it's by design (to avoid fraud) or a typical case of good programers that are lousy at interface design.
but, minor annoyances appart, i'm still satified with the process and proud of it.
by experience, i can say that wages here in brasil are about 4x lower for the same job than in US, so if labor was the reason for the high cost of US census, it should have costed 4 gigadolars, not 13.
other factors, to take into account:
population size:
brasil has an estimated 200 million inhabitans, US 300, barely 30% difference
the largest states are also the ones with lower population density, but the state of amazonas dwarfs alaska.
i doubt that alaskan landscape makes it as dificult to reach the population as the amazon forest does here
no matter how much people in US complaints, their roads are much better tha ours, movement is easier across the nation
all put togheter, the US census still is disproportionately more expensive than ours. score that for digital technology.
by the way, in the field of government automation, is brasil 2 X 0 US (the other point being our all-electronic elections)
by your reasoning, general elections wouldn't be necessary either. asimov wrote in a short tale that in an unspecified future, computers were so good, statistical tools so sofisticated, that the elections were decided by interviewing a SINGLE person.
but the real world doesn't work like that. unless you interview (or count the votes of) the whole population, there's an enourmous margin for abuse and fraud.
and don't come with "oh, but the sample will be selected randomly". by whom, may i ask ? by a computed that can be hacked to "randomly" select a bigger number of white, wealthy people ? or a smaller number of immigrants (legal or not) ? or exclude whole parts of the country ?
if elections the way they are already get abused, imagine a partial census, sosmething that doesn't get nearly as many attention from oversight bodies.
there's somethings worth paying for, and accurate census data is one of them.
dude, just because it's _legal_ doesn't mean it's _ethical_.
we can and do bitch about unethical atitudes, regardless of legality.
some programas can be "decompiled" into a more human readable text.
if you have a *NIX/linux box around, try running something through strace. see all those system and library calls? that and an automated analysis of how the program flows can give you something close to the original source program. now, if the binary still have the debug symbols (i.e. it's not a stripped binary), it's even easier.
stock a huge spool and cut it in place ???
are you fucking insane ? hospitals are not datacenters, dude. those tubes need to sterilized in well equiped facilities, then wrapped in sterile bags that can only be opened when it's time to use.
do their job and not make mistakes,
ok, now i know you're a troll. obviously you never worked anywhere where you could be subject to enourmous pressures, having only a split second to make a vital decision. if you had, you'd know that under those circumstances, even the best trained professional can make mistakes. nurses are human beings, not machines.
won't work with the iphone for the same reason it won't work with android or winCE. those are phones. their primary function is talking, browsing the web, reading e-mail and sending messages.
all 4 tasks are covered by industry standards over which apple has no power. if people get fed up with apple for some reason, they can just buy an android, winCE 7 phone, palm or symbian. they lose a small investment in applications from the appstore, so what ?
apple have bigger chances with locking users on the ipad than on the iphone, to tell the truth
no. i didn't say we _DO_ mandate, but we could mandate if necessary a standard that only an opensource general OS can satisfy. or a proprietary OS, as long as the vendor hands the code to a government body responsible for auditing it, speacully in what regards to security.
i remember some talk about the US military considering banning windows, then balmer himself ordered MSFT to come up with a hardened windows XP that passes the pentagon's requirements.
i'm not talking about banning windows, i'm just saying that governments should THREAT banning it. nothing brings a private company to it's best game than the threat of losing government sales.
banning a particular vendor in many countries would constitute discrimination.
ok, maybe i'm generalizing by saying "many", but here in brasil you bet this is the case. IANAL, but both my brother and sister are, my roommate's girlfriend is and a software engineer in the company i work also have a law degree, so if you want, i can check with them.
try to imagine this scenario:
1) brasil's govt bans MSFT products by name ...
2) MSFT sues on grounds of discrimination
3)
4) PROFIT!!!
if there ever was a case where the "profit" meme fitted, is this.
now, there's an indirect approach. since transportation and other industries that have the potential to affect the lives of thousands/millions are usually regulated, the mission critical systems that keep them running can be too.
the government can simply create such an iron-clad specification (that involves handing the full source code of everything), that MSFT would never be able to comply.
and wouldn't be able to sue on grounds of discrimination, specially if stuff like opensolaris, openBSD and linux passes the approval process. in case of a lawsuit, the government would simply point all the comapnies capable of following the standard and ask for dismissal.