The car electronics companies gave away the market. I was in car audio for years while in college. I sold and installed almost every brand you can stick into a dashboard - that was in the 90s.
Mobile electronics interfaces are still stuck in the 90s. The mobile industry has completely ignored the user interface advancements of the last 10 years. Take a look at the average aftermarket radio - buttons and dot-matrix LED displays that should have been replaced years ago.
Don't even get me started about bluetooth in car - absolutely no mobile manufacturer makes a stable bluetooth implementation. They all universally suck.
The best thing I put into my car was a bracket to hold my smartphone. After trying 5 different headunits, I finally gave up trying to find one that approaches the functionality and usability of my Nexus and iOS devices.
The mobile electronics companies screwed this up - apple stole nothing from them.
Barriers to entry. Comcast and Netflix have now raised the barriers to entry for any newcomers. Comcast gets paid, Netflix passes on the costs (eventually that will happen) and any newcomers will need to have a similar arrangement or their service will never get off the ground.
This is about preserving the status quo for all involved and locking out any new competition.
'I use a third-party firewall, a free virus checker, and run Housecall periodically,' says Appel. 'My Firefox browser uses Keyscrambler, HTTPS Anywhere, Ghostery, and Disconnect. I also have a VPN account (PIA) when traveling. For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening. All the "experts" say I am crazy.
And this is less work than installing and learning a modern Linux distribution?
I understand people not wanting another learning curve, but this guy might be better served by spending his copious amounts of free time learning something current.
We still have microsoft in the server closet, but in the past two years we've dumped our Terminal server/SQL farm for cloud based apps, and moved off of exchange to Google Apps.
We're now rolling out chromebooks as a replacement for MacBooks in the classroom. The combination of quick boot time, instant data save to the cloud, low acquisition costs, and no ongoing costs simply can't be beat.
We can buy 5 chromebooks for the cost of one MacBook - with a lot less administrative overhead.
Sure, there are creative areas where MacBooks still make sense, but handing a child a $1000 laptop no longer makes sense. There is enough stuff in the cloud to teach kids how to research, write, and learn.
Besides, we need to stop teaching kids "Microsoft" or "Apple" and we need to teach them how to learn. The tool should be irrelevant.
and look out a window. The last time I landed in Las Vegas I was stunned at how much of the us is completely and totally unoccupied.
Drive out to state college PA sometime - nothing but trees on either side of you for hours on end.
I heard a stat a few years ago saying the entire population of the world could fit into the state of Texas at the density of NYC. Yes, that doesn't account for infrastructure, and food production, but the point is that the entire world would be left over for that.
There is lots of room on this blue marble. Technology will find a way to support us all.
Almost daily I read something telling me that my car will become obsolete, my suburban house will plummet in value, and my suburban lifestyle is heading the way of the dodo. Meanwhile, the suburban neighborhood I currently live in didn't exist 10 years ago. Could it be that people actually like living in the suburbs?
The problem with this "urban utopia" concept is that cities suck. They are generally crowded, noisy, smelly, expensive, and all-around unpleasant. Sure, if you are young and don't mind having 3-4 roommates, or you are a history professor type that loves walking everywhere - they by all means - live in a city.
I loved NYC until I had to work there. Holy crap - what a disaster that place is. The experience was so bad, I ran to the suburbs to raise kids - and I'm never going back.
It's no surprise that tech companies, flush with cash, can seek better alternatives. I actually applaud these companies. There are talented employees all over the country - not just in cities. If companies want to bus in their workers - that's great. Government should just get out of the way and keep the roads paved.
Or they deployed Chromebooks for the reasons we did:
1. Low hardware cost - our Samsungs cost $249 each. 2. Enough web based software to do the job (google apps plus 3rd party apps are VERY good in an education environment). 3. Central data storage that doesn't require lots of backup hardware and software or server hardware. 4. Great management tools for deploying policies and apps. 5. The big one - FREE after the initial hardware purchase - WITH SUPPORT.
Show me another ecosystem that offers this much for so little cost.
If Google is beating us with a stick, I'll take it any day of the week over the Microsoft/Apple stuff we were running.
I work for a private school. While it is not a charter, I have seen many parents of children in mediocre schools profess their love for charters.
Why would a parent love a school that performs, statistically, no better than the school they previously attended?
The answer is choice. Parents choose to put their children in those schools, and the administrators and teachers know that if they do not bend to the needs and wants of the student and the parent, then the student placement is put at risk.
One parent compared her local school district to the phone company. She said "before charter schools, the school district was like the phone company, they didn't have to care, they were the only game in town".
Charters give parents without means choice. That means the teachers and administrators of those schools have to be "nice" or the student walks. All else being equal, a parent of a C/D student in either environment prefers the charter school.
Will ending telecommuting now be the sign of a C suite that is out of ideas? As far as I can tell, Mayer at Yahoo and Whitman at HP both are scrambling for ways to justify their enormous salaries. I guess the hail-mary strategy is end telecommuting and piss off the stars in the company.
In a Libertarian system, there would be no mandatory public schools. You would have the choice of any number of private schools. Don't like the tuition or curriculum? Place your kids in another school. Yes - an oversimplification, but no Libertarians that I know would have Government force anyone into any public school system.
What you are describing is Fascism. It's a mix of Corporate and Government rule - the worst of all worlds.
There is no activity in a free society that is without risk. We could increase the size of our highway patrols 10 fold and we would not eliminate deaths on our roads.
The question is always one of acceptable risk vs costs. The opportunity cost of reducing highway fatalities by increasing police presence is a reduced presence in high-crime areas.
With a 1 in 100 chance that you will be injured in a car accident, driving is a risky activity. I argue that we as a society don't care that much about the risk - especially not enough to fund a massive increase in our police forces. Smoking kills far more people than car accidents, but I don't see much of a public push to rid the world of that habit. Why is that?
Simply, it is because we value our freedom over absolute security and we sure as hell do not want to pay for more police than is necessary to hold down violent crime.
We use FIOS for our internet connectivity, but we still rely on MPLS over T1s to interconnect our offices and handle our VOIP traffic. VPN over the public internet simply had too much latency to be useful. It's archaic, but it works.
"Silly" 30-round bushmaster? Really? You know an AR-15 is just a semi-auto version of the full-auto version that soldiers carry right? If it is so "silly" why is it the largest and longest deployed infantry weapon ever (with the possible exception of the AK-47)?
Militaries must be really stupid. You should go consult with them and offer your suggestions as to what lightweight, reliable, easy to use, and lethal weapon system you prefer. I'm sure all the branches of the armed services would like to know.
By the way, my firearms are stored unloaded in fire-resistant gun safes that are either bolted to a concrete floor, or installed in the wall of the house. I can get to my upstairs weapon in under 30 seconds, and my kids do not have access to ANY of my firearms.
I follow all the rules of gun ownership, and my wife and I are doing quite well thanks - as are millions of other responsible gun owners.
I'm way more likely to be killed in a car accident, and my kids are WAY more likely to be killed by the pool in the back yard, yet none of us is ready to give up driving or swimming.
Tasers are very limited tool, and inappropriate for the following reasons:
1. Lack of availability. In my state, Tasers are flat-out banned. Even law enforcement is not allowed to have them. There are a few law enforcement agencies that are evaluating them for use, but civilian use is and probably will continue to be forbidden.
2. Single-shot capability. A taser, when used in law-enforcement is designed to give an officer a less-lethal option before drawing his sidearm. In a multiple assailant scenario, the officer would not even draw the taser as the presence of multiple assailants gives the officer the go-ahead to use lethal force to defend himself.
3. In a self-defense scenario, I would use NO force at all unless lethal force was needed. If a guy breaks into my house, and wants my TV - go ahead take it - I don't care. My defense plans are - 1. call 911 and report the intruder 2. Secure the family 3. Get armed and prevent the bad guy(s) from coming up the stairs. If the guy is coming up the stairs after I warn him, then lethal force is justified since I am trapped on my second floor. I have no intentions of clearing my house with a non-lethal weapon. I'm not SWAT and it's not worth the potential hazards simply to protect my "stuff".
What is being discovered with tasers is that officers are misusing them. They are deploying tasers to "control" otherwise non-violent people. They are using them simply because they are non-lethal and available. The availability of non-lethal tools has escalated the response of officers that otherwise would not deploy force in those situations.
The stats came from NY's "highly trained" police. Are you suggesting that NY's finest are a threat to all those around them?
People that are not familiar with firearms often think they are magical one-shot, one-kill devices. The reality is that they are a force-multiplying tool. It allows the weak to defend against the strong.
To those that suggest that every bullet should strike its intended target, I would suggest a bit of range time. Until then, your suggestions of expected marksmanship have no merit.
So explain to me why it is difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple assailants would require 3-5 shots each to disable or kill. I have a natural born right to self-defense and defense of my loved ones. I want the absolute best tool for the job. If the best tool has a standard magazine capacity of 30 rounds - I want it. My possession of the tools of self defense harms no one.
It's nice that you live in a nice, crime-free area of the world, but it is absolutely improper to think that everyone lives in the same situation.
We recently decommissioned a perfectly good Sonicwall CDP-6080 with 4TB of backup storage. We were only using about half of the device's available storage, and it was plenty fast for our needs, yet Sonicwall/Dell would not renew our service contract for the device. We were simply told to buy the replacement model in the lineup.
At the time (4 years ago), it was one of the few backup appliances that could handle AD/Exchange/SQL/Linux off-site backup and manual external archiving to disk. It was expensive but it fit the bill perfectly, and it wasn't Backup Exec...
Fast forward a few years, and we've put our web server, RDP/SQL farm, and email in the cloud. We figured we would simply keep the CDP appliance as an AD/file server backup device. Since Dell/Sonicwall refused our support renewal, we put our backup in the cloud.
I suspect as cloud services become more popular, hardware vendors will have less leverage in pushing unnecessary hardware upgrades on their clients.
Slashdot Mirror
The car electronics companies gave away the market. I was in car audio for years while in college. I sold and installed almost every brand you can stick into a dashboard - that was in the 90s.
Mobile electronics interfaces are still stuck in the 90s. The mobile industry has completely ignored the user interface advancements of the last 10 years. Take a look at the average aftermarket radio - buttons and dot-matrix LED displays that should have been replaced years ago.
Don't even get me started about bluetooth in car - absolutely no mobile manufacturer makes a stable bluetooth implementation. They all universally suck.
The best thing I put into my car was a bracket to hold my smartphone. After trying 5 different headunits, I finally gave up trying to find one that approaches the functionality and usability of my Nexus and iOS devices.
The mobile electronics companies screwed this up - apple stole nothing from them.
Barriers to entry. Comcast and Netflix have now raised the barriers to entry for any newcomers. Comcast gets paid, Netflix passes on the costs (eventually that will happen) and any newcomers will need to have a similar arrangement or their service will never get off the ground.
This is about preserving the status quo for all involved and locking out any new competition.
None of these guys are your friends.
'I use a third-party firewall, a free virus checker, and run Housecall periodically,' says Appel. 'My Firefox browser uses Keyscrambler, HTTPS Anywhere, Ghostery, and Disconnect. I also have a VPN account (PIA) when traveling. For suspicious email attachments, I deploy private proprietary bioware (me!) to analyze before opening. All the "experts" say I am crazy.
And this is less work than installing and learning a modern Linux distribution?
I understand people not wanting another learning curve, but this guy might be better served by spending his copious amounts of free time learning something current.
You can disable ads in the Google Apps for Education admin tool.
We also block ad networks via other means.
Relax - not everything is a conspiracy. Sometimes philanthropy is just that.
And it is fantastic.
We still have microsoft in the server closet, but in the past two years we've dumped our Terminal server/SQL farm for cloud based apps, and moved off of exchange to Google Apps.
We're now rolling out chromebooks as a replacement for MacBooks in the classroom. The combination of quick boot time, instant data save to the cloud, low acquisition costs, and no ongoing costs simply can't be beat.
We can buy 5 chromebooks for the cost of one MacBook - with a lot less administrative overhead.
Sure, there are creative areas where MacBooks still make sense, but handing a child a $1000 laptop no longer makes sense. There is enough stuff in the cloud to teach kids how to research, write, and learn.
Besides, we need to stop teaching kids "Microsoft" or "Apple" and we need to teach them how to learn. The tool should be irrelevant.
and look out a window. The last time I landed in Las Vegas I was stunned at how much of the us is completely and totally unoccupied.
Drive out to state college PA sometime - nothing but trees on either side of you for hours on end.
I heard a stat a few years ago saying the entire population of the world could fit into the state of Texas at the density of NYC. Yes, that doesn't account for infrastructure, and food production, but the point is that the entire world would be left over for that.
There is lots of room on this blue marble. Technology will find a way to support us all.
The SAE has been talking about this for years. This article is from 2012:
http://articles.sae.org/11142/
I think the BMW 7 series has used ethernet for the infotainment systems for a while now.
Almost daily I read something telling me that my car will become obsolete, my suburban house will plummet in value, and my suburban lifestyle is heading the way of the dodo. Meanwhile, the suburban neighborhood I currently live in didn't exist 10 years ago. Could it be that people actually like living in the suburbs?
The problem with this "urban utopia" concept is that cities suck. They are generally crowded, noisy, smelly, expensive, and all-around unpleasant. Sure, if you are young and don't mind having 3-4 roommates, or you are a history professor type that loves walking everywhere - they by all means - live in a city.
I loved NYC until I had to work there. Holy crap - what a disaster that place is. The experience was so bad, I ran to the suburbs to raise kids - and I'm never going back.
It's no surprise that tech companies, flush with cash, can seek better alternatives. I actually applaud these companies. There are talented employees all over the country - not just in cities. If companies want to bus in their workers - that's great. Government should just get out of the way and keep the roads paved.
Is there any business that Kalifornia doesn't hate?
I'm simply amazed at the size of California's economy relative to its anti-business ways.
Or they deployed Chromebooks for the reasons we did:
1. Low hardware cost - our Samsungs cost $249 each.
2. Enough web based software to do the job (google apps plus 3rd party apps are VERY good in an education environment).
3. Central data storage that doesn't require lots of backup hardware and software or server hardware.
4. Great management tools for deploying policies and apps.
5. The big one - FREE after the initial hardware purchase - WITH SUPPORT.
Show me another ecosystem that offers this much for so little cost.
If Google is beating us with a stick, I'll take it any day of the week over the Microsoft/Apple stuff we were running.
I work for a private school. While it is not a charter, I have seen many parents of children in mediocre schools profess their love for charters.
Why would a parent love a school that performs, statistically, no better than the school they previously attended?
The answer is choice. Parents choose to put their children in those schools, and the administrators and teachers know that if they do not bend to the needs and wants of the student and the parent, then the student placement is put at risk.
One parent compared her local school district to the phone company. She said "before charter schools, the school district was like the phone company, they didn't have to care, they were the only game in town".
Charters give parents without means choice. That means the teachers and administrators of those schools have to be "nice" or the student walks. All else being equal, a parent of a C/D student in either environment prefers the charter school.
-ted
Will ending telecommuting now be the sign of a C suite that is out of ideas? As far as I can tell, Mayer at Yahoo and Whitman at HP both are scrambling for ways to justify their enormous salaries. I guess the hail-mary strategy is end telecommuting and piss off the stars in the company.
Good luck with that strategy.
-ted
Second hand smoke?
-ted
Have cigarettes become illegal? I hadn't noticed if they have.
Around where I live you can buy as many cigarettes as you like. No one will stop you from buying the entire store's inventory.
We tax and regulate cigarettes just enough that people won't quit. That's way different than trying to eliminate something.
-ted
In a Libertarian system, there would be no mandatory public schools. You would have the choice of any number of private schools. Don't like the tuition or curriculum? Place your kids in another school. Yes - an oversimplification, but no Libertarians that I know would have Government force anyone into any public school system.
What you are describing is Fascism. It's a mix of Corporate and Government rule - the worst of all worlds.
Morality should be taught at home. Leave the three Rs to schools.
There is no activity in a free society that is without risk. We could increase the size of our highway patrols 10 fold and we would not eliminate deaths on our roads.
The question is always one of acceptable risk vs costs. The opportunity cost of reducing highway fatalities by increasing police presence is a reduced presence in high-crime areas.
With a 1 in 100 chance that you will be injured in a car accident, driving is a risky activity. I argue that we as a society don't care that much about the risk - especially not enough to fund a massive increase in our police forces. Smoking kills far more people than car accidents, but I don't see much of a public push to rid the world of that habit. Why is that?
Simply, it is because we value our freedom over absolute security and we sure as hell do not want to pay for more police than is necessary to hold down violent crime.
We use FIOS for our internet connectivity, but we still rely on MPLS over T1s to interconnect our offices and handle our VOIP traffic. VPN over the public internet simply had too much latency to be useful. It's archaic, but it works.
"Silly" 30-round bushmaster? Really? You know an AR-15 is just a semi-auto version of the full-auto version that soldiers carry right? If it is so "silly" why is it the largest and longest deployed infantry weapon ever (with the possible exception of the AK-47)?
Militaries must be really stupid. You should go consult with them and offer your suggestions as to what lightweight, reliable, easy to use, and lethal weapon system you prefer. I'm sure all the branches of the armed services would like to know.
By the way, my firearms are stored unloaded in fire-resistant gun safes that are either bolted to a concrete floor, or installed in the wall of the house. I can get to my upstairs weapon in under 30 seconds, and my kids do not have access to ANY of my firearms.
I follow all the rules of gun ownership, and my wife and I are doing quite well thanks - as are millions of other responsible gun owners.
I'm way more likely to be killed in a car accident, and my kids are WAY more likely to be killed by the pool in the back yard, yet none of us is ready to give up driving or swimming.
Your risk analysis sucks.
Tasers are very limited tool, and inappropriate for the following reasons:
1. Lack of availability. In my state, Tasers are flat-out banned. Even law enforcement is not allowed to have them. There are a few law enforcement agencies that are evaluating them for use, but civilian use is and probably will continue to be forbidden.
2. Single-shot capability. A taser, when used in law-enforcement is designed to give an officer a less-lethal option before drawing his sidearm. In a multiple assailant scenario, the officer would not even draw the taser as the presence of multiple assailants gives the officer the go-ahead to use lethal force to defend himself.
3. In a self-defense scenario, I would use NO force at all unless lethal force was needed. If a guy breaks into my house, and wants my TV - go ahead take it - I don't care. My defense plans are - 1. call 911 and report the intruder 2. Secure the family 3. Get armed and prevent the bad guy(s) from coming up the stairs. If the guy is coming up the stairs after I warn him, then lethal force is justified since I am trapped on my second floor. I have no intentions of clearing my house with a non-lethal weapon. I'm not SWAT and it's not worth the potential hazards simply to protect my "stuff".
What is being discovered with tasers is that officers are misusing them. They are deploying tasers to "control" otherwise non-violent people. They are using them simply because they are non-lethal and available. The availability of non-lethal tools has escalated the response of officers that otherwise would not deploy force in those situations.
The stats came from NY's "highly trained" police. Are you suggesting that NY's finest are a threat to all those around them?
People that are not familiar with firearms often think they are magical one-shot, one-kill devices. The reality is that they are a force-multiplying tool. It allows the weak to defend against the strong.
To those that suggest that every bullet should strike its intended target, I would suggest a bit of range time. Until then, your suggestions of expected marksmanship have no merit.
"no reason for any civilian to have more than 9 rounds in a firearm"
Either you are the world's best shot, or simple math escapes you. It is common in stressful situations to have a hit rate of less than 20%:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/weekinreview/09baker.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
There have been many times this past year where people defended themselves from multiple assailants like this scenario:
http://thegrio.com/2013/05/20/cops-men-burst-in-beat-up-disable-veteran-in-philly/
So explain to me why it is difficult to imagine a scenario where multiple assailants would require 3-5 shots each to disable or kill. I have a natural born right to self-defense and defense of my loved ones. I want the absolute best tool for the job. If the best tool has a standard magazine capacity of 30 rounds - I want it. My possession of the tools of self defense harms no one.
It's nice that you live in a nice, crime-free area of the world, but it is absolutely improper to think that everyone lives in the same situation.
As a kid - Tandy CoCo2 with Basic - this learning was trial and error learning.
In High School - IBM PCs with Borland Pascal. This was formal programing instruction with emphasis on algorithms and complexity theory.
In College - a formal CS curriculum in Java/C/C++ and Sparc assembly.
We recently decommissioned a perfectly good Sonicwall CDP-6080 with 4TB of backup storage. We were only using about half of the device's available storage, and it was plenty fast for our needs, yet Sonicwall/Dell would not renew our service contract for the device. We were simply told to buy the replacement model in the lineup.
At the time (4 years ago), it was one of the few backup appliances that could handle AD/Exchange/SQL/Linux off-site backup and manual external archiving to disk. It was expensive but it fit the bill perfectly, and it wasn't Backup Exec...
Fast forward a few years, and we've put our web server, RDP/SQL farm, and email in the cloud. We figured we would simply keep the CDP appliance as an AD/file server backup device. Since Dell/Sonicwall refused our support renewal, we put our backup in the cloud.
I suspect as cloud services become more popular, hardware vendors will have less leverage in pushing unnecessary hardware upgrades on their clients.
Verizon started field testing IPv6 on their FIOS network in 2010. I figured it's 2013 - they should be done testing by now.
I called our business services rep about a month ago and asked about IPv6 service for our FIOS connections at our offices.
The rep's response:
"IPv6, what's that?" "Hold on. Let me ask my support engineer."
Support engineer's response:
"IPv6 - What's that?"
I may retire from the IT business before Verizon deploys IPv6.
-ted