Power (handset vs phone)
on
Death of the PDA?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I agree with you one hundred per cent over the handset issue. However that leads me to the next problem and that is battery power. A modern phone can easily last a week if used very lightly and three days or so with moderate use. Bluetooth increases the drain significantly (of course only when the phone is used).
However a PDA doesn't usually have much stamina. It last three days or so with light use, and like the phone - it is usually running in a standby mode rather than being comeletely off. If you start to make much use of the PDA, the power consumption needed can drain the battery within a day (especially if its a Microsoft operating system). End result of combining the two is something that doesn't want to go to far from a charger.
A Phone/PDA combo is a great idea, particularly with some kind of headset (either wired or bluetooth), however the big let down is the 'phone' mode. It is clear that you don't want to listen to MP3s while on the phone, but you definitely want full access to your appointments schedules and contact lists while talking.
Many mobile phones (like my older Nokia) have modal dialogues which make it difficult to do other things while speaking.
I'm aware of this and know that Paul Allen has been behind some reasonably respectable projects but I don't know his attitude to open source.
There is certainly a limit to which direct finance can be given to SCO by Microsoft. Microsoft can't invest in SCO, it can at best buy SCO products at over inflated prices. Indirect mechanisms will be needed to continue to finance SCO through their law suit.
I like your vision better but that is from an official document. One bank at least has been a heavy Mac user (Citibank) in the trading room. They are less likely to see Macs as expensive designer toys, however that is just one bank - and thats where the money is.
The word from people who have worked there is that Merrill Lynch likes Linux because it leverages cheap hardware. They seem to be going very much in the direction of Linux servers and Windows on the desktop. Sun was seen to be too expensive.
At the bank where I currently work, lets just say somewhat larger than Merrills, they see a future of Microsoft and Linux. They do not see other Unixes like Solaris, AIX or whatever.
Banking used be very big for Sun and they still do those E10Ks, but I dons't see many Suns on the desktop now (they used be very popular in trading rooms).
I worked with options and worked on the delta-neutral products at Eurex. You are quite right that with a dnp, you are buying and selling volatility. You can make serious money out of the price movements of the underlying share. SCOX is one of the most volatile shares on the market at the moment. However, any options would be OTC rather than exchange based which has some disadvantages.
The greatest advantage that Linux has over BSD and other operating systems is that the license obliges all mods to be put back as source code into the public domain (yes this is a simplification, I'm aware of all the actual complications and the LGPL).
Yes, the toolchain is great - but it is the license that brings it altogether and stops anyone from embracing and extending the code in closed and very proprietary ways.
I'm clear that distributions may include BSD licensed software, Artistic licensed software as well as MPL and others. However, that the key elements are preserved under the GPL is STallman's stroke of genius.
I think the Electric Chair is probably one of my least favourite ways of dying, but I wouldn't be that happy about the Guillotine either.
An experiment was once performed with a condemned man who agreed to blink his eyes. It appears that a person takes some 25 to 30 seconds to die. Although the spine is severed, the nature of the cut to the spinal cord would lead to some serious pain reactions with the nerves firing randomly.
I had thought that the lethal injection was the way to go, but even that can be badly botched because if the sedative isn't strong enough, you may still be aware but paralyzed when the pain from the curare hits you (this is known from operations where the anasthetic wasn't sufficient). The potassium solution used to stop the heart would also be incredibly painful.
Even bullets to the head may not work (enough soldiers have survived even that), so it is reasonable to say that execution tends to be a painful process.
I tend to agree with the earlier poster that Edison's promotion of the Chair to associate AC with death is one of the lowest and most cynical moves ever.
I have no idea what is happening here but Deutsche Bank is a major IBM user, both of mainframes as well as AIX systems. One of their main trading systems (Global Equities) runs on AIX (but they probably don't know it because all they have in the trading room is Winders with an X server).
Personally I reckon the analyst made a typo - look on the numeric keypad, 4 and 1 are adjacent. I reckon he meant $15. However the recommendation went out and they must stick by it.
I believe you. I have certainly come across officers who routinely lie in court. Some law men feel themselves above the law but see someone who they feel that it is "their turn to go down". The victim concerned has probably committed a number of minor offences but this time are guilty of nothing more than being a PITA to law officers.
So law officers perjure themselves, knowing that even if their falsehoods are discovered they are written off as nothing more than excessive zeal and at worst they get a 'talking to'.
Regrettably, current legislation makes it remarkably easy to get someone who uses a computer professionally thrown in jail. You have namap on your computer, oh you are possibly guilty of cyber-breakins. Some idiot at the local military base has downloaded a trojan so that can now become terrorism.
You have a (clothed) photo of a young girl on your computer - it doesn't matter that you have it with the rest of her family and she is your niece, sorry you are now a suspected pedophile.
Either way, eventually the charges may never be brought. However, you face confiscation of computer equipment, possibly even a ban like Mitnick. You can even end up inside waiting.
The problem is that the claim, which essentially mean cookies and session ids now belong to Microsoft is that their claim may be contested by large companies but not the small. A smaller company would find it hard to come up with $100K or so to have the claims shown to be irrelevant.
Lets just take Slashdot. The server has state. It knows who I am and I can leave a cookie on a system so that Slashdot can know that I am the normal user on that system. Slashdot tailors its output depending upon my stored preferences.
I don't know when Slash started all its per user customisations, but there were definitely other web systems that could deliver content based on user preferences seven years ago.
The best that is being oferred is a little like the DECT phones. Great, but you are logged into one base station only. If you move (or the RF moves), your call is lost.
The thing about GSM or whatever is that there is a transport protocol and a mechanism for allowing your call to be effortlessly handed off to another access point. However with GSM, you login to a network of base stations when you switch the telephone on. You can't roam to another provider's base station unless you logout and log back in.
What is needed first is better handover between accesspoints. Reauthentication and association delays can cause call interruptions. If you pay for 802.11 access, there needs to be a way of transparently roaming - to allow mini-providers. Again stuff is being done there, but it isn't ready yet.
The photo I have seen of the launch looks quite typical of a modern liquid fueled rocket. There is no 'smoke' as there are no solids. The plume as such (mostly condensed water) starts a long way after the engine nozzle. On the pad, deflectors send this to the side so it isn't so easy to see unless you zoom out.
It would be very difficult to fake a luanch these days. Too many countries are looking up (and down). We can be 100% certain that there is a capsule in space orbiting the earth. Whether it is manned is another question, however although vehicle to ground communications may be encrypted, it can be clear that transmissions are coming from the capsule.
Ok, the chinese are credited with gunpowder and rockets as well as the magnetic compass and a lot of early work on navigation. China wasn't so interested in colonies though, more in trading posts, which have a tendancy to be more transient. Their neighbours, in Mongolia (relevant, they ran China for a while) were somewhat more 'adventurous' reaching the gates of Vienna - they weren't sea explorers, but that is still a vast space to cover.
This is something that the CISCO lawyers should have done before completing the take over. If they didn't, and that is what it appears, then they are open to be sued by shareholders.
Ok, MSI have a wonderful little gadget that does this (at a price) but if the original poster feels comfortable there is little here beyond what it takes to wire up lights or a hifi. The only problem is avoiding hum loops and the rule is just to connect the earths of both power supplies together, so the CD player stays powered by the brick.
This is further information on something already reported in this artcle.
The point is that there are now others looking at the use of passive radar. It appears to be viable (Roke Manor has been doing defence related electronics back through the second world war with emphasis on radar and comms) and it is very interesting. Particularly as not only reflection can be used but the RF opacity of the target - generally if something is stealth, it absorbs radar.
HARM type missles chase down radiating radar transmitters and destroy them. If every RF source can be a potential RADAR emitter then it means that all cell transmitters, TV and VHF radio transmitters would need to be destroyed - a very large number and blurring the line between civillian and military targets. Note that the Serbs rigged microwave ovens (essentially just with disabled door interlocks) as decoys against HARMs.
Development houses using the MS.NET stuff _do not want_ alternatives. If they wanted alternatives, they would be using Java, Python, etc.
I have been an MS Developer in the past and still occasionally do MS stuff now. Not so often now because all the new stuff in the MS world is.NET, whether you like it or not. Sometimes I can roll out solutions without the person paying for development caring for what it is written in and can get away with other stuff but that isn't often now.
Developers in the boutique business (tailored software solutions) often have to provide source code and the languages may be specified by PHBs. Microsoft ensure that their best API support goes into their latest thing and o an extent, developers are forced into this by being fashion victims.
What it comes down to is that to split a Win Server across many actual boxes, it means spending a lot of money. Frequently I have had problems with ghosts (Clients that have gone away, but are still taking up licenses) also with servers being themselves clients. Resetting the license server helps but it gets tedious.
I'm afraid that for many specific jobs Win2K3 is too expensive (and I haven't even mentioned resource usage). Businesses are struggling now and although I would admit that 2K3 has a lot of nice features, I'll only deploy it now if I really have to (for example, when an Exchange Server user needs to upgrade).
that Samba/Linux charge. The performance boost is just a nice plus.
A frequent rule in the Windows business is to split systems up over many machines. Which is great for Microsoft because essentially, you pay per client connection. With Linux/Samba, you pay according to the support that you want.
The really good thing in 3.0 was allowing the participation in ADS networks (Win 2K) as well as NT4.0. Domain controller support could be better for ADS, but otherwise it is fine.
I work with HA systems too. My original background was VMS which could put Solaris to shame over uptime. However Digital lost out because they were too expensive for the performance. Now Sun is going the same way. Applications are becoming more distributed anyway so having a single large system isn't so important and failover tends to be transparent.
The thing is that now everyone is concerned about cost. Big Iron running Solaris or anything else is rather too expensive now. The PC as an architecture has many faults, but the economies of scale mean that it will always be cheaper to produce. All the major elements from the processor through to the interface cards enjoy significant levels of competition which keeps prices low.
Last point is support. Solaris is great, but it is hardly just one system (I have worked on and off with it since SunOS days). Linux support is variable, but I can elect to have something like RH's Enterprise level support all the way down through self support.
However, it is the last option that is interesting. A large organisation can easily have people on staff that can hack kernels. Sometimes during application development (or deployment) you really need to dig down to source. You can easily do that with Linux because of the IP. With commercial licenses it is much more difficult, even if you have full source access. Sure you can get consultants from the vendor, but they usually know squat about your business/ap so can't really understand the problem and spend a lot of your money coming up with useless suggestions.
I saw that as well. What would interest me is whether the preloads could be patched during manufacturing. This might dent the 45MB of fixes an XP Home user has to download before starting.
In any case, shouldn't the patch CD be distributed with the PC?
The thing is that whilst German consumer protection isn't bad, XP is usually sold 'OEM' so the shop ends up supporting it (or not, in the case of Media-Markt). If the manufacturers kept their preloads updated, they might put some pressure on their supplier. With lean manufacturing most PCs are only built a month or two before shipping.
I sometimes fix friends' computers. Very few have been patched at all and the XP firewall is disabled. They often don't even bother to enable Windows Update (it takes too long).
It is interesting that a TV program, Planetopia, a fairly mainstream program is featuring this. Perhaps the consumer organisations might pressure to ensure that computers are reasonably up to date with patches when they leave the shop.
Before some Linux basher pops in with the amount of patches needed to bring a Linux distribution up to date (Like, say Linux 9.0), this is arguably the same. However, the system defaults to having the iptables firewall enabled and unwanted servers turned off. Linux is easier to patch, (None of this stupid "This patch must be installed independently of other patches" stuff) - and whether you use up2date or apt4rpm the patches are cached locally before installation so having to restart a download isn't so painful.
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However a PDA doesn't usually have much stamina. It last three days or so with light use, and like the phone - it is usually running in a standby mode rather than being comeletely off. If you start to make much use of the PDA, the power consumption needed can drain the battery within a day (especially if its a Microsoft operating system). End result of combining the two is something that doesn't want to go to far from a charger.
Many mobile phones (like my older Nokia) have modal dialogues which make it difficult to do other things while speaking.
There is certainly a limit to which direct finance can be given to SCO by Microsoft. Microsoft can't invest in SCO, it can at best buy SCO products at over inflated prices. Indirect mechanisms will be needed to continue to finance SCO through their law suit.
Not just that but No.1 was apparently Vulcan Capital, Paul Allen's VC company. Yes, that Paul Allen, buddy of Bill.
I like your vision better but that is from an official document. One bank at least has been a heavy Mac user (Citibank) in the trading room. They are less likely to see Macs as expensive designer toys, however that is just one bank - and thats where the money is.
At the bank where I currently work, lets just say somewhat larger than Merrills, they see a future of Microsoft and Linux. They do not see other Unixes like Solaris, AIX or whatever.
Banking used be very big for Sun and they still do those E10Ks, but I dons't see many Suns on the desktop now (they used be very popular in trading rooms).
I worked with options and worked on the delta-neutral products at Eurex. You are quite right that with a dnp, you are buying and selling volatility. You can make serious money out of the price movements of the underlying share. SCOX is one of the most volatile shares on the market at the moment. However, any options would be OTC rather than exchange based which has some disadvantages.
Not Just that, their no. 1 investor is Vulcan Capital which is Paul Allen's investment vehicle. Allen was co-founder of Microsoft.
Yes, the toolchain is great - but it is the license that brings it altogether and stops anyone from embracing and extending the code in closed and very proprietary ways.
I'm clear that distributions may include BSD licensed software, Artistic licensed software as well as MPL and others. However, that the key elements are preserved under the GPL is STallman's stroke of genius.
An experiment was once performed with a condemned man who agreed to blink his eyes. It appears that a person takes some 25 to 30 seconds to die. Although the spine is severed, the nature of the cut to the spinal cord would lead to some serious pain reactions with the nerves firing randomly.
I had thought that the lethal injection was the way to go, but even that can be badly botched because if the sedative isn't strong enough, you may still be aware but paralyzed when the pain from the curare hits you (this is known from operations where the anasthetic wasn't sufficient). The potassium solution used to stop the heart would also be incredibly painful.
Even bullets to the head may not work (enough soldiers have survived even that), so it is reasonable to say that execution tends to be a painful process.
I tend to agree with the earlier poster that Edison's promotion of the Chair to associate AC with death is one of the lowest and most cynical moves ever.
Personally I reckon the analyst made a typo - look on the numeric keypad, 4 and 1 are adjacent. I reckon he meant $15. However the recommendation went out and they must stick by it.
I believe you. I have certainly come across officers who routinely lie in court. Some law men feel themselves above the law but see someone who they feel that it is "their turn to go down". The victim concerned has probably committed a number of minor offences but this time are guilty of nothing more than being a PITA to law officers.
So law officers perjure themselves, knowing that even if their falsehoods are discovered they are written off as nothing more than excessive zeal and at worst they get a 'talking to'.
Regrettably, current legislation makes it remarkably easy to get someone who uses a computer professionally thrown in jail. You have namap on your computer, oh you are possibly guilty of cyber-breakins. Some idiot at the local military base has downloaded a trojan so that can now become terrorism.
You have a (clothed) photo of a young girl on your computer - it doesn't matter that you have it with the rest of her family and she is your niece, sorry you are now a suspected pedophile.
Either way, eventually the charges may never be brought. However, you face confiscation of computer equipment, possibly even a ban like Mitnick. You can even end up inside waiting.
Lets just take Slashdot. The server has state. It knows who I am and I can leave a cookie on a system so that Slashdot can know that I am the normal user on that system. Slashdot tailors its output depending upon my stored preferences.
I don't know when Slash started all its per user customisations, but there were definitely other web systems that could deliver content based on user preferences seven years ago.
The thing about GSM or whatever is that there is a transport protocol and a mechanism for allowing your call to be effortlessly handed off to another access point. However with GSM, you login to a network of base stations when you switch the telephone on. You can't roam to another provider's base station unless you logout and log back in.
What is needed first is better handover between accesspoints. Reauthentication and association delays can cause call interruptions. If you pay for 802.11 access, there needs to be a way of transparently roaming - to allow mini-providers. Again stuff is being done there, but it isn't ready yet.
It would be very difficult to fake a luanch these days. Too many countries are looking up (and down). We can be 100% certain that there is a capsule in space orbiting the earth. Whether it is manned is another question, however although vehicle to ground communications may be encrypted, it can be clear that transmissions are coming from the capsule.
Ok, the chinese are credited with gunpowder and rockets as well as the magnetic compass and a lot of early work on navigation. China wasn't so interested in colonies though, more in trading posts, which have a tendancy to be more transient. Their neighbours, in Mongolia (relevant, they ran China for a while) were somewhat more 'adventurous' reaching the gates of Vienna - they weren't sea explorers, but that is still a vast space to cover.
This is something that the CISCO lawyers should have done before completing the take over. If they didn't, and that is what it appears, then they are open to be sued by shareholders.
Btw, your 2c sounds like my $20!!
The point is that there are now others looking at the use of passive radar. It appears to be viable (Roke Manor has been doing defence related electronics back through the second world war with emphasis on radar and comms) and it is very interesting. Particularly as not only reflection can be used but the RF opacity of the target - generally if something is stealth, it absorbs radar.
HARM type missles chase down radiating radar transmitters and destroy them. If every RF source can be a potential RADAR emitter then it means that all cell transmitters, TV and VHF radio transmitters would need to be destroyed - a very large number and blurring the line between civillian and military targets. Note that the Serbs rigged microwave ovens (essentially just with disabled door interlocks) as decoys against HARMs.
Developers in the boutique business (tailored software solutions) often have to provide source code and the languages may be specified by PHBs. Microsoft ensure that their best API support goes into their latest thing and o an extent, developers are forced into this by being fashion victims.
I'm afraid that for many specific jobs Win2K3 is too expensive (and I haven't even mentioned resource usage). Businesses are struggling now and although I would admit that 2K3 has a lot of nice features, I'll only deploy it now if I really have to (for example, when an Exchange Server user needs to upgrade).
A frequent rule in the Windows business is to split systems up over many machines. Which is great for Microsoft because essentially, you pay per client connection. With Linux/Samba, you pay according to the support that you want.
The really good thing in 3.0 was allowing the participation in ADS networks (Win 2K) as well as NT4.0. Domain controller support could be better for ADS, but otherwise it is fine.
The thing is that now everyone is concerned about cost. Big Iron running Solaris or anything else is rather too expensive now. The PC as an architecture has many faults, but the economies of scale mean that it will always be cheaper to produce. All the major elements from the processor through to the interface cards enjoy significant levels of competition which keeps prices low.
Last point is support. Solaris is great, but it is hardly just one system (I have worked on and off with it since SunOS days). Linux support is variable, but I can elect to have something like RH's Enterprise level support all the way down through self support.
However, it is the last option that is interesting. A large organisation can easily have people on staff that can hack kernels. Sometimes during application development (or deployment) you really need to dig down to source. You can easily do that with Linux because of the IP. With commercial licenses it is much more difficult, even if you have full source access. Sure you can get consultants from the vendor, but they usually know squat about your business/ap so can't really understand the problem and spend a lot of your money coming up with useless suggestions.
In any case, shouldn't the patch CD be distributed with the PC?
The thing is that whilst German consumer protection isn't bad, XP is usually sold 'OEM' so the shop ends up supporting it (or not, in the case of Media-Markt). If the manufacturers kept their preloads updated, they might put some pressure on their supplier. With lean manufacturing most PCs are only built a month or two before shipping.
I sometimes fix friends' computers. Very few have been patched at all and the XP firewall is disabled. They often don't even bother to enable Windows Update (it takes too long).
It is interesting that a TV program, Planetopia, a fairly mainstream program is featuring this. Perhaps the consumer organisations might pressure to ensure that computers are reasonably up to date with patches when they leave the shop.
Before some Linux basher pops in with the amount of patches needed to bring a Linux distribution up to date (Like, say Linux 9.0), this is arguably the same. However, the system defaults to having the iptables firewall enabled and unwanted servers turned off. Linux is easier to patch, (None of this stupid "This patch must be installed independently of other patches" stuff) - and whether you use up2date or apt4rpm the patches are cached locally before installation so having to restart a download isn't so painful.
This is very interesting but I have no mod points.