FWIW e-readers and tablets are different markets, IMO. While, professionally, I've been considering getting a tablet, there's no doubt in my mind it wouldn't replace my Kindle. A useful tablet is too big, and has entirely the wrong type of screen. It doesn't surprise me you see people on the bus with e-readers, I wouldn't lump them in with tablet owners any more than I'd lump tablet owners in with touchscreen-phone users.
I have to agree with the GP. Of all the people I know, only one - a big Apple fan and graphic designer - actually has an iPad and even that seems to be mostly for show. I know a friend's wife has an iPad, but reportedly doesn't use it that much, and a colleague bought a Nook Color as a cheap Android tablet, something he's brought in once shortly after he bought it but doesn't appear to actually do anything with in real life.
Now I'm not going to go quite as far as to extrapolate that nobody will ultimately use the things to the levels the industry predicts, but my view right now is that they're just not ready for prime time, early adopters are buying them and largely finding they're not as useful as they are slick. And I'm going to make a rather bold claim: given the lack of difference in terms of power and functionality between the iPad and its Android, RIM, and webOS rivals (indeed, by most metrics, one would argue the non-iPad tablets offer considerably greater choices of power, size, and economy), one has to wonder whether the iPad is selling in large part because of the Apple logo, and its rivals aren't selling because... well, it's just not a good concept right now.
The questions for those pushing the things at the moment really revolve in explaining exactly what role they're supposed to have. I'm not sure I've heard an answer yet that doesn't cover functionality people would find better suited to a pocketable touchscreen phone or a netbook. But...
Have you bought a Lenovo lately? Their quality has plummeted in the last three or four years.
I'm more of a fan of Dell these days. They make solid, standard, hardware. HP - the one machine I tried was on the cheap end of the scale but I don't have any complaints. But HP is HP, it's made up of four of the most innovative computer companies in America - the original HP, DEC, Compaq, and Palm - yet it behaves as if it's Gateway. This is a sad end to a great story in the computer industry. Maybe if Carly hadn't fucked things up...
I went to Best Buy this weekend. I can't say any of the tablets looked like each other, in any respect. Quite honestly, the flat screen TVs looked more alike than the tablets did. The tablets had different sizes, aspect ratios, borders, colors, thicknesses, etc; their user interfaces were very different. There was even a fairly substantial discrepancy between the "standard" way of holding the things, with most Android tablets apparently being oriented towards landscape use, while the iPad seemed to be primarily designed for portrait use.
I'm not sure what an "casual observer" is supposed to be, but given the length of time most people spend agonizing over which flat screen TV to get, I suspect you're wrong in ascribing to the "casual observer" the lack of ability to distinguish between tablets.
Further, I think the industry "gets it" too. That's why, for example, Google felt obliged to rush out Android Honeycomb when tablet makers like Samsung were putting out Froyo based devices. These two platforms - which fundamentally run the same operating system - are nothing like one another from a user standpoint. Google was right that Froyo was, for all kinds of reasons, not ready to be a tablet operating system. Whether Honeycomb is the right answer is open to question, but it's a fair attempt to produce something that works on a larger screen.
I don't think a "casual observer" will be unable to distinguish between the different tablets, any more than they can't between different SUVs, different three bedroom two story townhouses, different flat screen TVs, or different T-shirts.
You could override the "OR" search in Altavista using the "+" symbol. eg. "+hp +laserjet +5l +windows +nt +drivers" would give you only the pages with all six keywords present.
This, unfortunately, isn't the case with Google. If you do use "+", Google treats it as a "This might be important" hint, rather than a definitive "The search results absolutely must have this keyword on the page" command.
Conversely, I rarely end up with a Google search that doesn't send me to what I want to find.
Rarely? Seriously?
Because in my case, Google has the extremely annoying habit around 30%+ of the time of changing my search query to something largely unrelated. And even when it doesn't say "Searching for XXX. Click here to search for YYY", 90% of the time it pretends words in my search query aren't actually relevant. It's a rare query where I don't have to make multiple goes at it, trying to figure out how to make Google actually take notice of the parts of the query that are actually important.
Google is about as fucking useless as search engines can get these days. It promotes quantity over quality, failing miserably to provide a half way useful service. About the only times you can get it to "find" something relevant are:
If there's a Wikipedia page on the subject, preferably one with the same name as what you're looking for
If there's an IMDB entry on the person or work
About 50% of the time, "business name" "zipcode" generates a useful result
If you're searching for images instead of web pages
And you know what? I could probably "create" a search engine that does the first three pretty easily too.
Add to that the fuck-up that means a simple click-to-focus results in your browser screeching to a halt for a few seconds as it renders a thumbnail allowing you to check the color scheme of one of the search results (SRSLY?! WTF?), and you have to seriously wonder what their priorities are.
I don't want to rag on Google. They've provided an excellent email system, Google Apps is an awesome concept and idea, Google Docs likewise. I love Android, I really do. But the thing that's missing from their portfolio is a quality search engine.
I could create a better, more useful, search engine than Google. I'm not saying that because I have a high opinion of myself, I don't, it's just I can pretty much guarantee that while my search engine would suck, it would just suck less. The real question is not "Why is Bing better than Google", it's "How much better would Bing be if it wasn't trying to copy Google"?
From what I'm seeing, the relationship with Microsoft right now is one of friendly rivalry. Mozilla and Microsoft generally work together on the W3C, and Microsoft themselves are making a concerted effort to ensure their stuff works well in Firefox - something they're emphatically not doing with Chrome (for example, Outlook Web Access works just like the desktop app in Firefox and IE, but has to be run in a stripped down mode looking more like standard web mail in any other browsers.)
I think it's extremely important to notice the changes going on at Microsoft at the moment. They're accepting, finally, that the threat to Windows has little to do with whether people use IE or not, and repositioning themselves to enter the markets that most likely will replace it. Hence Office on the web. Hence a complete review - a virtual rewrite - of their mobile platform. They're not even pushing.NET over emerging web standards in the same way as they had been.
In that context, fighting Mozilla, rather than partnering with them, over something as minor as "writing an alternative to something we bundle for free with our OS", when Mozilla could be providing opportunities (like directing serious amounts of traffic to Bing) is utterly absurd. There's no cause to do it.
It's a positive development. Personally, I'd be more than happy to see Microsoft sponsor Mozilla. And while I'm sure it'd be a shock to many on Slashdot, I suspect the only thing blocking it is Google's wallet.
The economy was better off when people DID put money under their mattresses. History does not lie.
Generally speaking, the last time people did put money under their mattresses was the 1930s. It... well, it wasn't pleasant.
From the early forties onwards, the West experienced extraordinary growth, and people generally put more and more of their money into banks and pension schemes, indirect ways of putting money into commerce. So far as I'm aware, other than a period during the 19th Century when the entire first world was in recession, when America bucked the trend and had growth during currency appreciation (that "world in recession" thing tends to buck the notion that this is a useful counter example) there's never been a case where deflation and a healthy economy co-existed.
And a good example would be now. Inflation is extremely low, core inflation even more so. What are businesses doing? Are they loss making? Well, no, most American businesses are actually extremely healthy right now. They're making money hand over fist.
What are these businesses doing with their money? They're sitting on it. Without inflation, and with current low levels of demand, there's no incentive for them to invest in their own businesses, no incentive to grow. The money is being used for share buybacks, and increased dividends, and pretty much everything except growth.
I know that's anathema to the supply-siders who seem to have taken over government of late, but that's just how things are.
First I've heard about that. He's been the one screeching *crisis* *crisis* *crisis*
That hardly contradicts what the GP said. By the logic you're using, anyone calling 911 to report a fire should be arrested for arson.
Oh, and lest you forget - the issue with the debt ceiling crisis wasn't that Obama wanted to raise the debt, it was that he was being mandated to make certain payments that couldn't be paid if either the debt ceiling or taxes or both were not raised. If congress wanted him to borrow less, all they had to do was pass a new budget.
The "debt ceiling" fight was entirely a congressional thing, a device to artificially create a crisis. Congress that wanted to have its cake and eat it, appear "responsible" by refusing to raise one figure while refusing to actually increase revenues to reduce the amount of borrowing.
It's fairly transparent. What's amazing to me is that the teabaggers still think it's worth defending their irresponsible congressional representatives by pretending this had anything to do with Obama.
And listen: the economy is up shit creek. We have high unemployment, yet we have almost zero inflation at the moment. There's no risk of crowding out, companies are sitting on piles of cash, interest rates are lower than they've ever been in recent history. A little spending right now, borrowing now when we can't afford not to, to pay back later when we can afford to, would be a good thing.
Question. Is the level of non-participation because...
(1) People don't have opinions on how the country should be run and are perfectly happy to allow extremists to do their own thing in government.
or
(2) People are tuning out a ruling establishment that's not remotely representative of their interests, in part because they have a choice of two parties both of which are, essentially, representative of that ruling establishment?
Look at Democrats. Every couple of decades, a motivated liberal base hears "the right thing" from the person running as the Democratic Presidential candidate and votes him into power, only to find that person wholly ignores their mandate and adopts extreme right wing policies instead. Will Liberals turn out to vote at the next election? Maybe, but only because the "other side" seems so much more insane than usual, and in lower numbers than in 2008.
As long as neither party fights for democracy, free speech, stability, and against the threats that hurt ordinary people, be that unemployment, a lack of access to essential services, or crime and fraud, you're not going to get a sizable number of people to care enough to actually get out and vote. And as long as they pretend to when running for office, and then turn around and do the opposite once they have power, they will turn people away.
That should read: and shifting that marker only punishes savers and rewards debtors, dammit
I figured;-)
Actually, for the most part, a little inflation is a good thing. Savers fall into two types - those who take small green pieces of paper out of the economy by sticking them under the mattress, and those who invest their money into businesses, either via banks, or directly via stocks, bonds, associated ETFs, and other entities.
The former are the scourge of society. Not putting money to work helps nobody whatsoever, and causes the economy to stagnate and die. The latter are not affected by inflation.
Read that again. The latter are NOT affected by inflation. If you're investing money, then the value of your investment will always be linked to the current value of the dollar (unless you do something stupid like put your money in a no-interest savings account, but, well, that's hardly our fault!)
Helping debtors isn't exactly a problem either, especially when - as in our current society - we have huge amounts of debt generated as a result of deflation in one specific area, notably housing prices. How do you help these people and improve their ability to turn their generated wealth (wages) into money that can be injected into the active economy, rather than spent on repaying a "debt"? Well, you reduce the real value of the debt.
Does anyone lose because of this? Well, not necessarily. It's easy to think the banks would have problems with this particular course of action, after all, they're the people owed the money that will "lose" value, but this particular localized deflation has caused significant problems for them anyway - people are going bankrupt left right and center, and others are simply walking away from their commitments. Massive deflation has caused far more problems than low inflation would ever do. And given a typical mortgage rate of around 6-8% (that is, of mortgages prior to the housing collapse), there's a lot of wiggle room in terms of how high inflation can go without causing banks to actually lose money on those mortgages.
Moderate inflation has generally driven economies because it discourages hoarding and encourages people to put money to work. Inflation is only bad when it gets so high it makes it impossible to plan for the future. Unfortunately, the inflation "debate" seems to be full of people who think that that 5-10% inflation is the same thing as the inflation of Zimbabwe and the Wiemar Republic, or that believe that inflation is linked to money creation, which is... well, not false, but an extremely misleading exaggeration. The Fed is "printing" money like mad right now, but mysteriously in a market where jobs are scarce and there are few unions to force up wages, somehow inflation isn't happening outside of a small number of sectors affected by external factors (wars and oil, weather and food.)
All those people complaining that the minting of trillion dollar coins will cause inflation have no idea how much more attractive they're making the idea. We have a personal debt crisis in this country, and a large number of businesses and others sitting on hoards of cash, unwilling to invest it. It's time for some healthy, not over the top, inflation.
Nobody's suggesting they should be banned from having the Internet, merely that they should pay what it costs.
In any case, this isn't really about farmers, it's about people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere because they can count on government to build roads to the middle of nowhere, and for that government to insist that utilities serve those locations, at their efficient customer's expense. We live in a country that mandates the subsidization of suburban and rural living, for no good reason. And we wonder why we're so dependent on foreign oil, and why our cost of living is so high compared to the rest of the world?
No, that's not the right argument. In the first place it's false, it's a confusion of the argument about the limits of the first amendment (which really does apply to governments) - censorship can be practiced by anyone, be it a third world dictator or an editor of Wikipedia.
But more importantly the reason this isn't censorship is that nobody's talking about suppressing speech. The News of the World isn't having its finances cut in an effort to stop its reporters from speaking, it's having its finances cut to punish it for hacking into people's private voicemail systems, for messing with its victims heads in an effort to invent news.
If Android isn't open because a minority of phone makers lock the bootloader and because it's almost always bundled with some, entirely optional, proprietary software, then Linux isn't open because TiVo locks its bootloader, and always bundles a proprietary application with it.
And even if it were the case that this logic applies, it's still the height of stupidity to, as the AC did earlier, claim that Android is no more open than iOS. You can loosen some of the restrictions with iOS by hacking it, you can't loosen all of them, and third parties will always have difficulty building a market for their applications if Apple doesn't approve of them, and the only people they can sell to are those who have hacked their devices.
Obviously some phones are restricted, but in general you couldn't be more wrong. The great thing about Android is that - as long as you pick an open phone - you can generally upgrade your phone's OS even if the manufacturer doesn't support it.
I'm running Gingerbread on my T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, and was running it before HTC came out with the Froyo update. I'll leave it to you to figure out how. And the myTouch isn't even one of the open phones (although HTC has announced all of their future phones will be)
I must have missed the alternate universe where IE was banned in 1999.
Microsoft wanted to protect its market and decided to do so by using its existing monopoly to control a likely future threat, by developing a web browser in competition with Netscape's and then doing what it could to ensure its browser, and not Netscape, would become standard, in particular using its control over a product it had a monopoly in to promote IE and suppress Netscape.
This is somewhat different from Apple, who doesn't really have a monopoly in anything deciding to enter a new market so that it can sell its products and services there. Microsoft did the same thing without anti-trust criticism in the form of the X-Box. There's nothing illegal or anti-competitive about that.
BTW, interesting fact: what got Microsoft so heated up about Netscape was that it was genuinely concerned that the web might become an environment in which an open, or at least not-controlled-by-Microsoft platform for software in the future. If the platform was not under Microsoft's control, then people might very well cease to be tied to Windows.
And that's exactly what's happened since the anti-trust suit. The move to an entirely web based infrastructure has been slow, but much of the success of Apple in the 21st Centursy has been attributable to the decreasing need to use Windows as the browser becomes the major tool that everyone uses for an increasing percentage of their work (in some cases all of it.) Are we there yet? Obviously not, but when John Carmack releases Doom 7, available for all HTML7 browsers, complaining that the W3C Net3DObjects API sucks the big one, I suspect it'll be largely game over.
Would that be true if Microsoft hadn't been sued? If Microsoft had been allowed to bury Mozilla the same way it did Netscape? If Apple hadn't bothered with WebKit/KHTML because, frankly, nothing out there of any significance worked in anything other than Trident? Would smartphones still be the unpopular devices of geeks and CEOs?
Well, I don't find it a compelling device, but nonetheless I can think of a few uses for it. If someone gave me one, I'd be tempted to:
Use it as a portable media platform
Use it as a portable gaming device
The "Local copy of Wikipedia" thing others have mentioned certainly isn't a bad idea
Those are three applications it would appear to be more than adequate at. I wouldn't be inclined to use it as the eBook reader others have mentioned - the lack of an eInk screen and the poor resolution/size kinda works against that.
My major reservations are not your's. I don't think the "Costs the same as a smartphone on contract" thing is reasonable, given it clearly doesn't (unless the contract is for a dollar a month or something!) But, on the other hand, if you want an Android tablet, there are things like this that cost less than the device and are genuinely more capable. What would make me pick the NanoNote over the Archos? Well, in my case, I wouldn't buy either, which means I'm not really qualified to address the question. And I think the same applies to you too.
It's an inexpensive device, it appears to have a certain amount of flexibility, it's not ideal, but it's a form factor worth playing with. I'd give it a second look if:
The screen was high resolution eInk, and preferably touchscreen
The device has Ethernet
The device has a USB host controller
I think all of the above are quite possible, so I'll watch the platform with some interest.
Firefox is important not so much because it's another choice, as the fact it makes other choices possible. If Firefox hadn''t been successful on Windows, the web would, truly, have ended up being IE only, with all that entails. Firefox's success under Windows meant that other browsers, including Konqueror, stood a fighting chance of being able to render the web.
And, no, Apple coopting KHTML into WebKit, wouldn't have done the same thing because Apple wouldn't have done it to begin with. Why would they, if KHTML wasn't able to render the vast majority of web sites people used? Apple would have had to stick with Microsoft for the Mac OS X Internet browser.
Don't underestimate what Firefox did. Firefox sucked people away from IE in droves, forcing web designers to eschew ActiveX and the bugs and features of IE, and have them adopt Internet standards. Opera? Would have gone the same way as Netscape, and KHTML, as an obscure technology used by the less popular of the two desktops for an obscure technie's operating system, would never have taken the web where Mozilla did.
HSPA+ is backward compatible with HSPA (it's just an extension of the protocol, not a completely different system.) An iPhone 4 that supported the AWS bands would, indeed, work well on T-Mobile, taking full advantage of the 3G speeds, but, alas, the iPhone 4 doesn't support those frequencies.
I suspect with AT&T planning to buy and close T-Mobile within the next year, Apple has no incentive to make the iPhone 5 support the AWS frequencies, but it would have been interesting to see if they would have done if AT&T hadn't proposed doing that.
T-Mobile offers "Even More Plus" plans, albeit you now have to ask for them over the phone (you can't select them from the website.) These are plans that are what you describe - lower cost plans with no contract and no subsidy, costing around $10-20 per month per device less than their regular plans.
Up to a point. Look, if Firefox is using 66% of my memory, and nothing else is, then that's one thing, but most users are using more than one application, and if all take the same mindset, then how is this good?
Further, Firefox with a few (10-15) tabs open currently consumes around 1.5G of RAM on my older laptop. What's the justification for this? Exactly what can it possibly be caching that would take up 1.5G? That's 100 megs per tab! What, exactly, about each tab takes 100 megs to store? What the hell is it doing, converting all of the internal binary data structures into XML or something?
The reality is this, with Firefox 4 I now have regular crashes on every computer I run it on, crashes that usually occur when I'm away from the computer. I have regular stalls where the browser becomes unusable for a minute or two while the harddrive spins, presumably reflecting the operating system coping with a memory hogging app. I've set the memory preferences in about:config to no avail, it still does this crap all the time. And I'm not seeing some dramatic improvement in performance, Firefox 4 appears, to me, to be no faster than Firefox 1.x was, and that didn't regularly stall on me.
Firefox 4.0 has a very nice UI and a lot of nice fixes. There's no reason for me to prefer Chrome in a normal world, but I've found myself using Chrome more and more of late because it works and Firefox doesn't, and it's the memory issue that's killing Firefox.
Stateless configuration - which uses the MAC address and prefix to determine the IP, is the recommended way of configuring a network. It's simple, it's more reliable than a dynamic stateful protocol, and I don't think anyone can seriously say that a MAC address is a seriously useful tool for hackers.
DHCPv6 is not needed to detect DNS servers. RFC6106, which is implemented by virtually all route advertisement daemons I've come across, describes how to advertise DNS servers.
It's great but not a land grab. It might have been had the address been face:b00c::1.
The first part of the address is the prefix. This is the part that's assigned by your ISP or ARIN. It's a 64 bit number, and is used to route packets over the public (ie ISP/trunked/etc) Internet. In the above, it's 2620:0:1c00:0:.
The other part of the address (the "face:b00c::" bit above), is a 64 bit number that's used to route packets within the part of the Internet owned by the person running the host (ie Facebook's Ethernet network.) These numbers are assigned by the network admin.
And that's what happened here. Usually the latter part of the IP address is based on the host's MAC address, but for some cases, specific services etc, they're often assigned manually, and Facebook has done this to assign an appropriate address to their server cluster. When you get your own network prefix (which you will when you get IPv6 on your DSL connection) you'll be able to do the same thing, even creating something that's {your prefix}:face:b00c if you want.
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FWIW e-readers and tablets are different markets, IMO. While, professionally, I've been considering getting a tablet, there's no doubt in my mind it wouldn't replace my Kindle. A useful tablet is too big, and has entirely the wrong type of screen. It doesn't surprise me you see people on the bus with e-readers, I wouldn't lump them in with tablet owners any more than I'd lump tablet owners in with touchscreen-phone users.
I have to agree with the GP. Of all the people I know, only one - a big Apple fan and graphic designer - actually has an iPad and even that seems to be mostly for show. I know a friend's wife has an iPad, but reportedly doesn't use it that much, and a colleague bought a Nook Color as a cheap Android tablet, something he's brought in once shortly after he bought it but doesn't appear to actually do anything with in real life.
Now I'm not going to go quite as far as to extrapolate that nobody will ultimately use the things to the levels the industry predicts, but my view right now is that they're just not ready for prime time, early adopters are buying them and largely finding they're not as useful as they are slick. And I'm going to make a rather bold claim: given the lack of difference in terms of power and functionality between the iPad and its Android, RIM, and webOS rivals (indeed, by most metrics, one would argue the non-iPad tablets offer considerably greater choices of power, size, and economy), one has to wonder whether the iPad is selling in large part because of the Apple logo, and its rivals aren't selling because... well, it's just not a good concept right now.
The questions for those pushing the things at the moment really revolve in explaining exactly what role they're supposed to have. I'm not sure I've heard an answer yet that doesn't cover functionality people would find better suited to a pocketable touchscreen phone or a netbook. But...
Have you bought a Lenovo lately? Their quality has plummeted in the last three or four years.
I'm more of a fan of Dell these days. They make solid, standard, hardware. HP - the one machine I tried was on the cheap end of the scale but I don't have any complaints. But HP is HP, it's made up of four of the most innovative computer companies in America - the original HP, DEC, Compaq, and Palm - yet it behaves as if it's Gateway. This is a sad end to a great story in the computer industry. Maybe if Carly hadn't fucked things up...
I went to Best Buy this weekend. I can't say any of the tablets looked like each other, in any respect. Quite honestly, the flat screen TVs looked more alike than the tablets did. The tablets had different sizes, aspect ratios, borders, colors, thicknesses, etc; their user interfaces were very different. There was even a fairly substantial discrepancy between the "standard" way of holding the things, with most Android tablets apparently being oriented towards landscape use, while the iPad seemed to be primarily designed for portrait use.
I'm not sure what an "casual observer" is supposed to be, but given the length of time most people spend agonizing over which flat screen TV to get, I suspect you're wrong in ascribing to the "casual observer" the lack of ability to distinguish between tablets.
Further, I think the industry "gets it" too. That's why, for example, Google felt obliged to rush out Android Honeycomb when tablet makers like Samsung were putting out Froyo based devices. These two platforms - which fundamentally run the same operating system - are nothing like one another from a user standpoint. Google was right that Froyo was, for all kinds of reasons, not ready to be a tablet operating system. Whether Honeycomb is the right answer is open to question, but it's a fair attempt to produce something that works on a larger screen.
I don't think a "casual observer" will be unable to distinguish between the different tablets, any more than they can't between different SUVs, different three bedroom two story townhouses, different flat screen TVs, or different T-shirts.
You could override the "OR" search in Altavista using the "+" symbol. eg. "+hp +laserjet +5l +windows +nt +drivers" would give you only the pages with all six keywords present.
This, unfortunately, isn't the case with Google. If you do use "+", Google treats it as a "This might be important" hint, rather than a definitive "The search results absolutely must have this keyword on the page" command.
Rarely? Seriously?
Because in my case, Google has the extremely annoying habit around 30%+ of the time of changing my search query to something largely unrelated. And even when it doesn't say "Searching for XXX. Click here to search for YYY", 90% of the time it pretends words in my search query aren't actually relevant. It's a rare query where I don't have to make multiple goes at it, trying to figure out how to make Google actually take notice of the parts of the query that are actually important.
Google is about as fucking useless as search engines can get these days. It promotes quantity over quality, failing miserably to provide a half way useful service. About the only times you can get it to "find" something relevant are:
And you know what? I could probably "create" a search engine that does the first three pretty easily too.
Add to that the fuck-up that means a simple click-to-focus results in your browser screeching to a halt for a few seconds as it renders a thumbnail allowing you to check the color scheme of one of the search results (SRSLY?! WTF?), and you have to seriously wonder what their priorities are.
I don't want to rag on Google. They've provided an excellent email system, Google Apps is an awesome concept and idea, Google Docs likewise. I love Android, I really do. But the thing that's missing from their portfolio is a quality search engine.
I could create a better, more useful, search engine than Google. I'm not saying that because I have a high opinion of myself, I don't, it's just I can pretty much guarantee that while my search engine would suck, it would just suck less. The real question is not "Why is Bing better than Google", it's "How much better would Bing be if it wasn't trying to copy Google"?
No, there's also CenturyLink, which bought Qwest, which bought US West, which owned Mountain Bell, Northwestern Bell, and Pacific Northwest Bell.
Once CenturyLink, Verizon, and AT&T merge, that's it for the 1983 divestiture.
From what I'm seeing, the relationship with Microsoft right now is one of friendly rivalry. Mozilla and Microsoft generally work together on the W3C, and Microsoft themselves are making a concerted effort to ensure their stuff works well in Firefox - something they're emphatically not doing with Chrome (for example, Outlook Web Access works just like the desktop app in Firefox and IE, but has to be run in a stripped down mode looking more like standard web mail in any other browsers.)
I think it's extremely important to notice the changes going on at Microsoft at the moment. They're accepting, finally, that the threat to Windows has little to do with whether people use IE or not, and repositioning themselves to enter the markets that most likely will replace it. Hence Office on the web. Hence a complete review - a virtual rewrite - of their mobile platform. They're not even pushing .NET over emerging web standards in the same way as they had been.
In that context, fighting Mozilla, rather than partnering with them, over something as minor as "writing an alternative to something we bundle for free with our OS", when Mozilla could be providing opportunities (like directing serious amounts of traffic to Bing) is utterly absurd. There's no cause to do it.
It's a positive development. Personally, I'd be more than happy to see Microsoft sponsor Mozilla. And while I'm sure it'd be a shock to many on Slashdot, I suspect the only thing blocking it is Google's wallet.
Generally speaking, the last time people did put money under their mattresses was the 1930s. It... well, it wasn't pleasant.
From the early forties onwards, the West experienced extraordinary growth, and people generally put more and more of their money into banks and pension schemes, indirect ways of putting money into commerce. So far as I'm aware, other than a period during the 19th Century when the entire first world was in recession, when America bucked the trend and had growth during currency appreciation (that "world in recession" thing tends to buck the notion that this is a useful counter example) there's never been a case where deflation and a healthy economy co-existed.
And a good example would be now. Inflation is extremely low, core inflation even more so. What are businesses doing? Are they loss making? Well, no, most American businesses are actually extremely healthy right now. They're making money hand over fist.
What are these businesses doing with their money? They're sitting on it. Without inflation, and with current low levels of demand, there's no incentive for them to invest in their own businesses, no incentive to grow. The money is being used for share buybacks, and increased dividends, and pretty much everything except growth.
I know that's anathema to the supply-siders who seem to have taken over government of late, but that's just how things are.
Do you really want an economy where hoarding little green pieces of paper is better for you in the long run than investing it in commerce?
People think inflation is a bug. Predictable, controlled, inflation is a feature, not a bug.
That hardly contradicts what the GP said. By the logic you're using, anyone calling 911 to report a fire should be arrested for arson.
Oh, and lest you forget - the issue with the debt ceiling crisis wasn't that Obama wanted to raise the debt, it was that he was being mandated to make certain payments that couldn't be paid if either the debt ceiling or taxes or both were not raised. If congress wanted him to borrow less, all they had to do was pass a new budget.
The "debt ceiling" fight was entirely a congressional thing, a device to artificially create a crisis. Congress that wanted to have its cake and eat it, appear "responsible" by refusing to raise one figure while refusing to actually increase revenues to reduce the amount of borrowing.
It's fairly transparent. What's amazing to me is that the teabaggers still think it's worth defending their irresponsible congressional representatives by pretending this had anything to do with Obama.
And listen: the economy is up shit creek. We have high unemployment, yet we have almost zero inflation at the moment. There's no risk of crowding out, companies are sitting on piles of cash, interest rates are lower than they've ever been in recent history. A little spending right now, borrowing now when we can't afford not to, to pay back later when we can afford to, would be a good thing.
(1) People don't have opinions on how the country should be run and are perfectly happy to allow extremists to do their own thing in government.
or
(2) People are tuning out a ruling establishment that's not remotely representative of their interests, in part because they have a choice of two parties both of which are, essentially, representative of that ruling establishment?
Look at Democrats. Every couple of decades, a motivated liberal base hears "the right thing" from the person running as the Democratic Presidential candidate and votes him into power, only to find that person wholly ignores their mandate and adopts extreme right wing policies instead. Will Liberals turn out to vote at the next election? Maybe, but only because the "other side" seems so much more insane than usual, and in lower numbers than in 2008.
As long as neither party fights for democracy, free speech, stability, and against the threats that hurt ordinary people, be that unemployment, a lack of access to essential services, or crime and fraud, you're not going to get a sizable number of people to care enough to actually get out and vote. And as long as they pretend to when running for office, and then turn around and do the opposite once they have power, they will turn people away.
I figured ;-)
Actually, for the most part, a little inflation is a good thing. Savers fall into two types - those who take small green pieces of paper out of the economy by sticking them under the mattress, and those who invest their money into businesses, either via banks, or directly via stocks, bonds, associated ETFs, and other entities.
The former are the scourge of society. Not putting money to work helps nobody whatsoever, and causes the economy to stagnate and die. The latter are not affected by inflation.
Read that again. The latter are NOT affected by inflation. If you're investing money, then the value of your investment will always be linked to the current value of the dollar (unless you do something stupid like put your money in a no-interest savings account, but, well, that's hardly our fault!)
Helping debtors isn't exactly a problem either, especially when - as in our current society - we have huge amounts of debt generated as a result of deflation in one specific area, notably housing prices. How do you help these people and improve their ability to turn their generated wealth (wages) into money that can be injected into the active economy, rather than spent on repaying a "debt"? Well, you reduce the real value of the debt.
Does anyone lose because of this? Well, not necessarily. It's easy to think the banks would have problems with this particular course of action, after all, they're the people owed the money that will "lose" value, but this particular localized deflation has caused significant problems for them anyway - people are going bankrupt left right and center, and others are simply walking away from their commitments. Massive deflation has caused far more problems than low inflation would ever do. And given a typical mortgage rate of around 6-8% (that is, of mortgages prior to the housing collapse), there's a lot of wiggle room in terms of how high inflation can go without causing banks to actually lose money on those mortgages.
Moderate inflation has generally driven economies because it discourages hoarding and encourages people to put money to work. Inflation is only bad when it gets so high it makes it impossible to plan for the future. Unfortunately, the inflation "debate" seems to be full of people who think that that 5-10% inflation is the same thing as the inflation of Zimbabwe and the Wiemar Republic, or that believe that inflation is linked to money creation, which is... well, not false, but an extremely misleading exaggeration. The Fed is "printing" money like mad right now, but mysteriously in a market where jobs are scarce and there are few unions to force up wages, somehow inflation isn't happening outside of a small number of sectors affected by external factors (wars and oil, weather and food.)
All those people complaining that the minting of trillion dollar coins will cause inflation have no idea how much more attractive they're making the idea. We have a personal debt crisis in this country, and a large number of businesses and others sitting on hoards of cash, unwilling to invest it. It's time for some healthy, not over the top, inflation.
Nobody's suggesting they should be banned from having the Internet, merely that they should pay what it costs.
In any case, this isn't really about farmers, it's about people who choose to live in the middle of nowhere because they can count on government to build roads to the middle of nowhere, and for that government to insist that utilities serve those locations, at their efficient customer's expense. We live in a country that mandates the subsidization of suburban and rural living, for no good reason. And we wonder why we're so dependent on foreign oil, and why our cost of living is so high compared to the rest of the world?
No, that's not the right argument. In the first place it's false, it's a confusion of the argument about the limits of the first amendment (which really does apply to governments) - censorship can be practiced by anyone, be it a third world dictator or an editor of Wikipedia.
But more importantly the reason this isn't censorship is that nobody's talking about suppressing speech. The News of the World isn't having its finances cut in an effort to stop its reporters from speaking, it's having its finances cut to punish it for hacking into people's private voicemail systems, for messing with its victims heads in an effort to invent news.
If Android isn't open because a minority of phone makers lock the bootloader and because it's almost always bundled with some, entirely optional, proprietary software, then Linux isn't open because TiVo locks its bootloader, and always bundles a proprietary application with it.
And even if it were the case that this logic applies, it's still the height of stupidity to, as the AC did earlier, claim that Android is no more open than iOS. You can loosen some of the restrictions with iOS by hacking it, you can't loosen all of them, and third parties will always have difficulty building a market for their applications if Apple doesn't approve of them, and the only people they can sell to are those who have hacked their devices.
Obviously some phones are restricted, but in general you couldn't be more wrong. The great thing about Android is that - as long as you pick an open phone - you can generally upgrade your phone's OS even if the manufacturer doesn't support it.
I'm running Gingerbread on my T-Mobile myTouch 3G Slide, and was running it before HTC came out with the Froyo update. I'll leave it to you to figure out how. And the myTouch isn't even one of the open phones (although HTC has announced all of their future phones will be)
I must have missed the alternate universe where IE was banned in 1999.
Microsoft wanted to protect its market and decided to do so by using its existing monopoly to control a likely future threat, by developing a web browser in competition with Netscape's and then doing what it could to ensure its browser, and not Netscape, would become standard, in particular using its control over a product it had a monopoly in to promote IE and suppress Netscape.
This is somewhat different from Apple, who doesn't really have a monopoly in anything deciding to enter a new market so that it can sell its products and services there. Microsoft did the same thing without anti-trust criticism in the form of the X-Box. There's nothing illegal or anti-competitive about that.
BTW, interesting fact: what got Microsoft so heated up about Netscape was that it was genuinely concerned that the web might become an environment in which an open, or at least not-controlled-by-Microsoft platform for software in the future. If the platform was not under Microsoft's control, then people might very well cease to be tied to Windows.
And that's exactly what's happened since the anti-trust suit. The move to an entirely web based infrastructure has been slow, but much of the success of Apple in the 21st Centursy has been attributable to the decreasing need to use Windows as the browser becomes the major tool that everyone uses for an increasing percentage of their work (in some cases all of it.) Are we there yet? Obviously not, but when John Carmack releases Doom 7, available for all HTML7 browsers, complaining that the W3C Net3DObjects API sucks the big one, I suspect it'll be largely game over.
Would that be true if Microsoft hadn't been sued? If Microsoft had been allowed to bury Mozilla the same way it did Netscape? If Apple hadn't bothered with WebKit/KHTML because, frankly, nothing out there of any significance worked in anything other than Trident? Would smartphones still be the unpopular devices of geeks and CEOs?
Well, I don't find it a compelling device, but nonetheless I can think of a few uses for it. If someone gave me one, I'd be tempted to:
Those are three applications it would appear to be more than adequate at. I wouldn't be inclined to use it as the eBook reader others have mentioned - the lack of an eInk screen and the poor resolution/size kinda works against that.
My major reservations are not your's. I don't think the "Costs the same as a smartphone on contract" thing is reasonable, given it clearly doesn't (unless the contract is for a dollar a month or something!) But, on the other hand, if you want an Android tablet, there are things like this that cost less than the device and are genuinely more capable. What would make me pick the NanoNote over the Archos? Well, in my case, I wouldn't buy either, which means I'm not really qualified to address the question. And I think the same applies to you too.
It's an inexpensive device, it appears to have a certain amount of flexibility, it's not ideal, but it's a form factor worth playing with. I'd give it a second look if:
I think all of the above are quite possible, so I'll watch the platform with some interest.
No, those would be long dead too.
Firefox is important not so much because it's another choice, as the fact it makes other choices possible. If Firefox hadn''t been successful on Windows, the web would, truly, have ended up being IE only, with all that entails. Firefox's success under Windows meant that other browsers, including Konqueror, stood a fighting chance of being able to render the web.
And, no, Apple coopting KHTML into WebKit, wouldn't have done the same thing because Apple wouldn't have done it to begin with. Why would they, if KHTML wasn't able to render the vast majority of web sites people used? Apple would have had to stick with Microsoft for the Mac OS X Internet browser.
Don't underestimate what Firefox did. Firefox sucked people away from IE in droves, forcing web designers to eschew ActiveX and the bugs and features of IE, and have them adopt Internet standards. Opera? Would have gone the same way as Netscape, and KHTML, as an obscure technology used by the less popular of the two desktops for an obscure technie's operating system, would never have taken the web where Mozilla did.
HSPA+ is backward compatible with HSPA (it's just an extension of the protocol, not a completely different system.) An iPhone 4 that supported the AWS bands would, indeed, work well on T-Mobile, taking full advantage of the 3G speeds, but, alas, the iPhone 4 doesn't support those frequencies.
I suspect with AT&T planning to buy and close T-Mobile within the next year, Apple has no incentive to make the iPhone 5 support the AWS frequencies, but it would have been interesting to see if they would have done if AT&T hadn't proposed doing that.
T-Mobile offers "Even More Plus" plans, albeit you now have to ask for them over the phone (you can't select them from the website.) These are plans that are what you describe - lower cost plans with no contract and no subsidy, costing around $10-20 per month per device less than their regular plans.
Up to a point. Look, if Firefox is using 66% of my memory, and nothing else is, then that's one thing, but most users are using more than one application, and if all take the same mindset, then how is this good?
Further, Firefox with a few (10-15) tabs open currently consumes around 1.5G of RAM on my older laptop. What's the justification for this? Exactly what can it possibly be caching that would take up 1.5G? That's 100 megs per tab! What, exactly, about each tab takes 100 megs to store? What the hell is it doing, converting all of the internal binary data structures into XML or something?
The reality is this, with Firefox 4 I now have regular crashes on every computer I run it on, crashes that usually occur when I'm away from the computer. I have regular stalls where the browser becomes unusable for a minute or two while the harddrive spins, presumably reflecting the operating system coping with a memory hogging app. I've set the memory preferences in about:config to no avail, it still does this crap all the time. And I'm not seeing some dramatic improvement in performance, Firefox 4 appears, to me, to be no faster than Firefox 1.x was, and that didn't regularly stall on me.
Firefox 4.0 has a very nice UI and a lot of nice fixes. There's no reason for me to prefer Chrome in a normal world, but I've found myself using Chrome more and more of late because it works and Firefox doesn't, and it's the memory issue that's killing Firefox.
Stateless configuration - which uses the MAC address and prefix to determine the IP, is the recommended way of configuring a network. It's simple, it's more reliable than a dynamic stateful protocol, and I don't think anyone can seriously say that a MAC address is a seriously useful tool for hackers.
DHCPv6 is not needed to detect DNS servers. RFC6106, which is implemented by virtually all route advertisement daemons I've come across, describes how to advertise DNS servers.
Telneting to port 80 works too. I just spoofed an HTTP request without problems.
What kinds of problems are you getting?
It's great but not a land grab. It might have been had the address been face:b00c::1.
The first part of the address is the prefix. This is the part that's assigned by your ISP or ARIN. It's a 64 bit number, and is used to route packets over the public (ie ISP/trunked/etc) Internet. In the above, it's 2620:0:1c00:0:.
The other part of the address (the "face:b00c::" bit above), is a 64 bit number that's used to route packets within the part of the Internet owned by the person running the host (ie Facebook's Ethernet network.) These numbers are assigned by the network admin.
And that's what happened here. Usually the latter part of the IP address is based on the host's MAC address, but for some cases, specific services etc, they're often assigned manually, and Facebook has done this to assign an appropriate address to their server cluster. When you get your own network prefix (which you will when you get IPv6 on your DSL connection) you'll be able to do the same thing, even creating something that's {your prefix}:face:b00c if you want.