It is not only desirable but essential that anonymous posting be allowed. It represents protected political speech. Had the revolutionary treasonous personages that founded the United States not been able to publish under pseudonyms then we would likely have been under British rule for a while longer than we were. It was essential to preserver in day to day life while propagating the injustices of each locality to the whole of the advent nation. In current perspective where shield laws and whistle-blower laws are circumvented by prosecutorial misconduct, abuse of police powers and general guile to obtain the identities that should be protected; where our society huddles in fear and gives away freedom after freedom denying future generations their inalienable rights unless they, like their forbearers, are willing to make personal sacrifices to regain those freedoms for the whole of their society and reestablish a covenant of just freedoms and liberties, we can not and should not consider banning anonymous speech.
Those temporary grants of trespass to our basic rights we give the government in times of dire need are seldom temporary and rarely recovered notwithstanding great protest from the body public.
ObeyMoto works fine, in russian and english, although people look at me funny in the US commanding the phone in russian. They support other languages too of course. No need to move your hands to the phone at all, just tap the BT headset and talk. Very Apple-ish. One button interface.:) And my Nokia does a passable job as well. Not that voice command is always optimal. My roommate used to walk by my home office trying out phrases to shutdown my Macintosh. That is when I decided speaker dependant voice recognition might be appropriate... My Mac is deaf now except when "typing" long documents and that application is a user trained one. And is only better when I am really tired. I make less mistakes talking than typing then. Really, for a car voice would be great. Just optionally have a button initiator. But just one is needed. Keep the kids from opening the trunk while in motion and all that. And the iPhone better support voice input as Apple pioneered voice command to the mass consumer and Motorola and Nokia both support it. Hard to justify it being 5 years a head of the curve (LOL) without voice command. That might be one of the unrevealed "features" too. It would make sense. Not earthshattering but a feature that _should_ be there if Apple hopes to be competitive. And as far as feedback goes my automobile GPS system has a piezoelectric film to provide "buzz" feedback for the onscreen buttons that can be enabled. Touch the button get a tactile buzz.
It is a remanent of a Marovian prototype. Look for more to be found with different ecologies nearby. Besides, nature as well as D&Ders prefer hex formations. Well at least in wilderness areas. And Fullerenes.
While it might not be best to implement the message passing and timer primitives of the transputer as C/C++ language extensions but the "parallel" and "sequential" blocks could be in the same category as many of the other "compiler hint" items. They can't really be pragmas as that gets to be very awkward to read and understand, but as keywords that take a statement or statements (degenerative case is one statement) they can be, usually, safely ignored. It is really a case where a compiler that is aware of multiple core processors and hyper-threaded architectures could shine. Like generative programming with templates it is an area where the compiler design can be better used to implement the function. "Sequential" is for orthagonality and to add only a little bit to the readability and function of the little used "," (comma) operator. "parallel" is a lower level than pthreads, etc. as one does not have the ability to kill a thread or whatever other ancillary functionality might be used at a higher level, as such it is a much lower level (fiber-like, rather than thread-like might be the way to describe it). No separate contexts and so on. It was used for independant operations. Bad things would happen if you tricked the compiler (well non-deterministic) into using the same memory, register or stack location (I know, same difference as the registers were just low memory mapped) between parallel statements. The compiler caught most but not all. Like a compiler should. Modern compiler tech would do a much better job.
Personally I would love to see a modern transputer chip. You could probably get a full switch and 16 transputers with lots of cache on a chip easily a tenth the power of a current generation processor. The digital phase locked loop clock multipliers of today are much better so links of 200 Mhz or better and internal clock speeds of several gigahertz would be killer. The basic patents for the architecture are all expired... might make an interesting PHD project.:) I loved the direction the chip family was taking with specialized transputers for disk I/O and so forth. Maybe update the link architecture to hypertransport as it is an open standard as well. Could make a nice open hardware project too. Transputer GPU, Transputer NPU, Transputer Multi-I/O chip... lots of silicon design reuse potential...
Inmos Transputers C language development had an elegant solution. It should be migrated to mainstream C and C++ in my opinion:
parallel
{/* execute these statements in parallel if possible */
statement1;
statement2; ...
statementn;
}
sequential
{/* execute these statements in order as written */
statement_1;
statement_2; ...
statement_n;
}
Come on, hackers... tear that AppleTV up and make it useful to EVERYONE, please!
While I expect to see several disassembly articles on the Apple TV tomorrow, a much more fun concept is to allow the little box to sit quietly and do its thing and figure out the PROTOCOL instead. Make a iTunes application dopple-ganger (staying in today's DND them) instead. Then make your foriegn device look Apple iTunes-like. But still if you get one, by all means rip it up. I am curious as to _which_ Intel processor is inside, and want hackers to explore methods to add a bigger hard drive. And hey, for all you know the "stolen" engineers had a sense of humor and their is an Easter Egg that allows their old haunts USB TV tuner line to plug and play. <grin>
Because long, thin filaments have large surface areas for holding charge, the spacecraft might look like Einstein's head -- with wiry filaments sticking out at all angles -- or a weird space 'stocking.'
Oh no! The Pastafarians secret spaceship design has leaked out. Now all the acolytes of The Flying Spagetti Monster will know the high inner circle secret that it is HE who travels by the spaceship and not that HE is the spaceship.
Some guy named ocaT rednammoC failed to publish it then. Said something about his cat being dead. Last seen walking backwards through red curtains on a checkerboard floor. Well at least that's what they will say on the street in 2000.
I'll have to remember to charge them $375+ an hour for programming jobs in 2007 based on my 1983 rates. I've actually had to drop my rates for several customers (though it is steadily coming back up to a more sensible value). And I'd guess those NTSC plasma displays that were 40 inches will currently have to sell for well over 40,000 dollars as the originals were in the 16K dollar range.
RIAA, you keep using that math. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you have a.XXX domain it does not but provide revenue for the registry... Adult domains can still be all over the map. You can not (at least here) take a valuable commodity by the use of government intervention and move them to the.xxx TLD without compensating the owners. Well legaly you can't. And we can't regulate.com,.net, etc. use worldwide. It is way way to late for that.
So better would be to have a.kids TLD. And have the registry requirements be such that the information content is kid friendly, and that even ratings tags must be incorporated in all websites in the TLD to further narrow things. Of course these presupposes a worldwide concensus on content that is or is not acceptable to kids and what should or should not be rated with what flags. Violators get there domain blocked, and after a period of appeal, auctioned off. (look for new and interesting ways to destroy the credibility of sites by hackers to cause valued domains to be released!)...
No matter how you look at it, it boils down to there being software to help parents (and leary adults). Parents need to be more involved.
No Netherlands involved. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are German descent. As the article in wikipedia you pointed to notes. It is incorrect corruption in the of the German word for "German" which is "Deutsch". So really no Dutch in volved. I knew that PA state history class would finally pay off!
There is an EU standards group (search for EICTA on this page) that mandates that in order to be able to advertise HD-Ready or HD-capable that the device support another closed standard DRM called HDCP. So if Fairplay is illegal, then so should HDCP be. It denies the fair-use rights that make up half their argument. So that particular standards group seems to be advocating illegal activity in a EU member state.
And not to be the first certainly or the last I'd guess, but from Mac or PC I can use the iTunes store. Ijust need to use iTunes to buy the songs. At that point I can burn the songs to a CD (converts to a higher standard with minimal if any loss in quality, obviously can't take 128Kbit protected AAC and convert it to CD and get better quality, but if the sample rate matches it won't reduce the quality). Then take the CD which now has no DRM and do what you want with it. Rip it back to AAC at the same bitrate as the source and compare it. I'd love to see a group comparision that is double blind pick out the re-ripped versus the original. Maybe, just maybe some golden ear could, but not the folks who play their music for multiple hours per day at over 110dB. Also one could do a quantitative analysis of the original and the re-ripped by doing a laboratory comparision. The analog stage of reproduction will, I would bet but can't guarantee, add more noise and distorion on the average computer speaker setup or portable media player. So Apple does not prevent one from using iTunes purchased music on other player. It just doesn't.
And there are still methods to strip the protection. (Hint: quicktime and its Windows counterpart both allow insertion of custom processing at various stages in the audio train) Just not in widespread use. Make them explicitly legal in Norway if they want to protect fair use. Better than outlawing iTunes and turning people to other DRMful music sources that are more restrictive and have less of a library to draw on, or to pirate operations that deprive artists and labels (though actually somewhat incorrect as some studies show piracy increases purchases and revenue to legitimate music suppliers).
First Google usage would have to exceed SPAM (and DNS traffic). How likely is that?
When the fiber boom of the 90s took place they laid fiber bundles from 22 up to 720 fibers in a cable and often more than one cable. I watched 'em bury 5 conduits and feed 3 of em with high count cables across WY. And there are 12 independant fiber bundles going up the street about 1/2 mile from my house. And I am not in a major city just one around 100K in population. Currently there is so much dark fiber in place that it would take next to no time to upgrade the backbones using those fiber runs to just use more fibers. Currently they almost always increase the capacity of the existing pairs in use through more modern equipment keeping a lot of dark fiber still on the market. So any shortage of bandwidth will be at the "last mile" to the consumer... And fiber to the curb and fiber to the premises will take care of the denser population areas and well, DSL and cable modem service in rural settings already have enough issues to limit their bandwidth they won't be much concern...:-)
Re:The geeks will never get it...
on
iPhone Roundup
·
· Score: 1
Well, the CEO and CTOs might not either. I'd buy one day one, IF I could add the functons I added to my Nokia E61. IM client to do Jabber (the E61 built in client does not do Jabber at the moment). And I have a few custom coded apps I am using to interface to our internal systems. And I have an SSH client (thank-you Putty for the Symbian version!).
Of those only the IM client is full commercial software (ironically talking to an open source IM server). So the IM client will likely appear if Apple opens to third party developers and has some certification program. Our internal software might be ported if the certification fees are low enough and we meet whatever unknown at this time qualification expectations might be for our company. The open source, likely a wash, although I could see some open source projects have a front organization (non-profit of course) that marshalls releases through Apple to get certified. But that means no widespread public day by day releases, and availability of the source code becomes moot. Sure you can have a copy, but there is no way to load it on the platform!
Nokia has been at this a bit longer than Apple and they realized that independant developers are useful. So useful that for Symbian OS phones from Nokia you can use a free development environment. On most carrier shipped phones the user must disable the security checks that prevent unsigned applications from installing, but that makes it the phone users choice. Given enough noise in the marketplace, maybe Apple will do the same. Right now no one can say for sure as there are no real iPhones (from Apple) out playing in the real world. And personally I may wait for the European introduction and buy an unlocked one off eBay! Unless like Cingular did with the RAZR they sell it in an unlocked state (though some they sold aren't, I'll just check when in the store with a t-mobile and a Kyivstar SIM before buying).
And it is more likely the "geeks" you deride will want to SSH into their corporate routers to diagnois some network issue when their boss calls them at all hours expecting they have no life and catching them out at dinner or kayaking in whitewater. (So OTTERBOX, get the iPhone version ready!)
"These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them," he said. above quoted in the/. article. But he also said...
"That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment." Which seems to indicate that maybe there will be a development environment for third party apps. Just some control over them like Symbian signed apps, MS signed device drivers and so on. Still not the best move but not as dire as reported.
My Nokia e61 came with a VOIP client built in. And Nokia has a GPS location/mapping app (requires external GPS for the e61). So VOIP is not to much of a concern to them or apparently the carriers. Note that the e62 castrated the e61 and has no WiFi and is the offering of choice of Cingular, though my e61 works fine on Cingular and I use the WiFi all the time. I was looking at the iPhone as a replacement but the heck with Jobs 5 years in advance phone. I am not STEPPING BACKWARDS in technology to an iPhone. No matter how slick it is. Lack of ability to add a GPS route and map app and to add my own corporate widgets to track my essential activities when out of reach of Edge, GPRS, or WiFi that can then sync when I am back in civilization is a deal breaker. And for the record I am one of those coporate management types that the average/. reader works for. We are slashdotters too. And I can load my own apps onto my phone as well as write them. No pointy-hair here. What is he going to do? Package every iPhone with a black turtleneck sweater too? Steve'o needs to visit rural Ukraine with an iPhone and see how useful it is when it just becomes a voice phone and all the built-in internet apps _require_ a current internet connection and don't accomdate queueing a sale to the corporate database, using the downloaded version of the CIA Factbook to get some info on local economics of the region, and so on. Come on Apple... "THINK DIFFERENT!"...
According to Jobs, 'These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them.' In a similar vein, Jobs said in a MSNBC article that, 'Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.'" So while they run Mac OS X they don't have multi-user protection enabled? Are they running in stand alone mode? Our is Jobs just making excuses? I'd like to know the real reason as Nokia Symbian devices even have a free development environment with crashing the networks the phones are used on even if the phones are resplendent with custom apps written often by the not so elite programmers of the world.
Fado, Fado... I once was interviewed by DEC for a job doing compiler development. I had my minimal college compiler development experience against another candidate interviewing the same day. (They flew me out half way across the country, he was local) The other candidate got the job and they told me why. "Another candidate is being hired. He has more experience in compiler development." Turns out he actually had 5 years of compiler development. Although I understood the job went to someone else, it was still pretty cool to be considered for it. And a different group that had my resume found out I interviewed for Technical Languages and interviewed me rearranging their schedules, my flight back home, and everything else to get me to stay over. I got that job, so all in all it was a great day! Latter I worked with the same group on some "off the scope" projects. So burning bridges from either side is not warranted... The guy you turn down for one position may be sitting next to your cube the very next week anyway!
I have planned datacenters in the past and it is a pretty easy choice for a large government agency. You save taxpayer money in the longrun if you own the facility given the size you are needing (assumption). Hire contractors (hey, we are available!) to set you up and get it organized. Create a handoff plan where your own captive staff or long term contractors are brought in and trained by the folks contracted to create the data center. You don't want the high priced talent long term that is needed for setting up the data center in the first place (but they do save you money in setting one up as the skip all the nasty restarts and common errors). Also decide on what your expectations and requirements will be. Do you need 99.999% uptime, e.g., how many hours / minutes a month or year of downtime is acceptable. Plan for the anticipated capacity. And then make sure you can grow over the next several years without moving. Agency a target for terrorism, located in a area where disaster is a consideration (it really is everywhere)? Then plan an ancillary datacenter in your disaster plan. What disaster plan? Well make one! Look for someone who can tell you the advantages and disadvantages of technology choices. Like what UPS systems are out there, and battery backup versus flywheel based UPSes, and fuel cell vs generators. Make sure environmental (as in HVAC, not bunnies, though they count a bit too) concerns are considered especially capacity planning for heat load and growth. What seems like a great deal in air handling equipment may be limited in the future. Decide on what you can tradeoff in personnel to staff the datacenter versus distributed ownership of datacenter issues. Create a trouble ticket and problem escalation plan. When a small problem is not quickly resolved you need to know why and escalate the issue. Who're you going to call at midnight when the staff is on holiday break and the email goes wonky? Plan in advance with a clear set of requirements. I could add more but this is a start. Oh, and do you need to keep your data securely? In house is arguably better, but in the governments case maybe not. So make sure equipment is properly disposed of if it has had sensitive data. Maybe consider a datacenter architecture and choice of products to make that easier.
Interesting experience at MSFT. As all my work was primarily as a contractor and I was interviewing as a contractor I asked if they would give permission for me to use as future samples code I wrote for them. They understood the issue a bit better then. I did spend 3 of the interview sessions (MSFT can be brutal with all day interviews with loads of people) writing code on a whiteboard. The seemed to focus on approach and problem solving skipping being excruciatingly exact (every semicolon in its place, etc.) in favor of a solution that would work. Some of the tasks did not take small amounts of code. However, the simplest was you read n items off disk and you want to write them back sorted. I just used an appropriate STL construct to store them and iterator to go through on write. I didn't know the MSFT STL was pretty broken at the time. When asked for an alternate solution, I replaced the STL code with a "sort(input_array, output_array_pointer)" When he asked what the sort routine was I just commented "probably quick sort unless there is a compelling reason to use another, and every development environment or OS has one that has been painstakingly optimized, so just adjust it for the Windows flavor of invocation. Why bother reinventing something already done well." Apparently that caused some discussion, but they hired my services anyway.
Target and Walmart are buying a different version of the movie. It is in a tangible, unlimited sharing form. iTunes M Store sells an intangible collection of bits that needed no additional packageing per unit, so cost less to distribute. It has usage restrictions. Tell Target and Walmart to start a download service for movies and quit gripping.
The chip can only be read at a distance of 1 mm, so it avoids many of the privacy concerns of RFID.
And baby monitors only have a range of a hundred feet... right? I have had some aquaintences that could bring up an old style analog wireless phone (remember 49 MHz?) from _miles_ away. Just takes a good radio, the tone generator, and a directional antenna. And if you use a wireless baby monitor. Well, wow! They have very sensitive mikes and pick up everything said in their vicinity, the next room, and sometimes downstairs around the corner in livingroom. And again with a good radio and directional antenna they can be listened to from pretty far away. So the claim of read distance of 1mm begs the question, why not use a real electrical contact, and just how "deaf" is the specified receiver?
That it is software driving the radio most likely that makes the difference. That means a BT device can support Wibree in all likelyhood simultaneously. Just like the degradation of WiFi connection when a WiLAN has mixed 11 Mbps and 54 Mbps... So keep the BT support for ahtw is there already and have a gentle migration through attrition.
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It is not only desirable but essential that anonymous posting be allowed. It represents protected political speech. Had the revolutionary treasonous personages that founded the United States not been able to publish under pseudonyms then we would likely have been under British rule for a while longer than we were. It was essential to preserver in day to day life while propagating the injustices of each locality to the whole of the advent nation. In current perspective where shield laws and whistle-blower laws are circumvented by prosecutorial misconduct, abuse of police powers and general guile to obtain the identities that should be protected; where our society huddles in fear and gives away freedom after freedom denying future generations their inalienable rights unless they, like their forbearers, are willing to make personal sacrifices to regain those freedoms for the whole of their society and reestablish a covenant of just freedoms and liberties, we can not and should not consider banning anonymous speech.
Those temporary grants of trespass to our basic rights we give the government in times of dire need are seldom temporary and rarely recovered notwithstanding great protest from the body public.
ObeyMoto works fine, in russian and english, although people look at me funny in the US commanding the phone in russian. They support other languages too of course. No need to move your hands to the phone at all, just tap the BT headset and talk. Very Apple-ish. One button interface. :) And my Nokia does a passable job as well. Not that voice command is always optimal. My roommate used to walk by my home office trying out phrases to shutdown my Macintosh. That is when I decided speaker dependant voice recognition might be appropriate... My Mac is deaf now except when "typing" long documents and that application is a user trained one. And is only better when I am really tired. I make less mistakes talking than typing then. Really, for a car voice would be great. Just optionally have a button initiator. But just one is needed. Keep the kids from opening the trunk while in motion and all that. And the iPhone better support voice input as Apple pioneered voice command to the mass consumer and Motorola and Nokia both support it. Hard to justify it being 5 years a head of the curve (LOL) without voice command. That might be one of the unrevealed "features" too. It would make sense. Not earthshattering but a feature that _should_ be there if Apple hopes to be competitive. And as far as feedback goes my automobile GPS system has a piezoelectric film to provide "buzz" feedback for the onscreen buttons that can be enabled. Touch the button get a tactile buzz.
It is a remanent of a Marovian prototype. Look for more to be found with different ecologies nearby. Besides, nature as well as D&Ders prefer hex formations. Well at least in wilderness areas. And Fullerenes.
While it might not be best to implement the message passing and timer primitives of the transputer as C/C++ language extensions but the "parallel" and "sequential" blocks could be in the same category as many of the other "compiler hint" items. They can't really be pragmas as that gets to be very awkward to read and understand, but as keywords that take a statement or statements (degenerative case is one statement) they can be, usually, safely ignored. It is really a case where a compiler that is aware of multiple core processors and hyper-threaded architectures could shine. Like generative programming with templates it is an area where the compiler design can be better used to implement the function. "Sequential" is for orthagonality and to add only a little bit to the readability and function of the little used "," (comma) operator. "parallel" is a lower level than pthreads, etc. as one does not have the ability to kill a thread or whatever other ancillary functionality might be used at a higher level, as such it is a much lower level (fiber-like, rather than thread-like might be the way to describe it). No separate contexts and so on. It was used for independant operations. Bad things would happen if you tricked the compiler (well non-deterministic) into using the same memory, register or stack location (I know, same difference as the registers were just low memory mapped) between parallel statements. The compiler caught most but not all. Like a compiler should. Modern compiler tech would do a much better job.
... might make an interesting PHD project. :) I loved the direction the chip family was taking with specialized transputers for disk I/O and so forth. Maybe update the link architecture to hypertransport as it is an open standard as well. Could make a nice open hardware project too. Transputer GPU, Transputer NPU, Transputer Multi-I/O chip ... lots of silicon design reuse potential...
Personally I would love to see a modern transputer chip. You could probably get a full switch and 16 transputers with lots of cache on a chip easily a tenth the power of a current generation processor. The digital phase locked loop clock multipliers of today are much better so links of 200 Mhz or better and internal clock speeds of several gigahertz would be killer. The basic patents for the architecture are all expired
parallel
{/* execute these statements in parallel if possible */
statement1;
statement2;
statementn;
}
sequential
{/* execute these statements in order as written */
statement_1;
statement_2;
statement_n;
}
Come on, hackers... tear that AppleTV up and make it useful to EVERYONE, please!
While I expect to see several disassembly articles on the Apple TV tomorrow, a much more fun concept is to allow the little box to sit quietly and do its thing and figure out the PROTOCOL instead. Make a iTunes application dopple-ganger (staying in today's DND them) instead. Then make your foriegn device look Apple iTunes-like. But still if you get one, by all means rip it up. I am curious as to _which_ Intel processor is inside, and want hackers to explore methods to add a bigger hard drive. And hey, for all you know the "stolen" engineers had a sense of humor and their is an Easter Egg that allows their old haunts USB TV tuner line to plug and play. <grin>
Because long, thin filaments have large surface areas for holding charge, the spacecraft might look like Einstein's head -- with wiry filaments sticking out at all angles -- or a weird space 'stocking.'
Oh no! The Pastafarians secret spaceship design has leaked out. Now all the acolytes of The Flying Spagetti Monster will know the high inner circle secret that it is HE who travels by the spaceship and not that HE is the spaceship.
Some guy named ocaT rednammoC failed to publish it then. Said something about his cat being dead. Last seen walking backwards through red curtains on a checkerboard floor. Well at least that's what they will say on the street in 2000.
Start looking for the "Microwave Safe" logo on your new protesting outfit!
I'll have to remember to charge them $375+ an hour for programming jobs in 2007 based on my 1983 rates. I've actually had to drop my rates for several customers (though it is steadily coming back up to a more sensible value). And I'd guess those NTSC plasma displays that were 40 inches will currently have to sell for well over 40,000 dollars as the originals were in the 16K dollar range.
RIAA, you keep using that math. I do not think it means what you think it means.
If you have a .XXX domain it does not but provide revenue for the registry ... Adult domains can still be all over the map. You can not (at least here) take a valuable commodity by the use of government intervention and move them to the .xxx TLD without compensating the owners. Well legaly you can't. And we can't regulate .com, .net, etc. use worldwide. It is way way to late for that.
.kids TLD. And have the registry requirements be such that the information content is kid friendly, and that even ratings tags must be incorporated in all websites in the TLD to further narrow things. Of course these presupposes a worldwide concensus on content that is or is not acceptable to kids and what should or should not be rated with what flags. Violators get there domain blocked, and after a period of appeal, auctioned off. (look for new and interesting ways to destroy the credibility of sites by hackers to cause valued domains to be released!)...
So better would be to have a
No matter how you look at it, it boils down to there being software to help parents (and leary adults). Parents need to be more involved.
No Netherlands involved. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are German descent. As the article in wikipedia you pointed to notes. It is incorrect corruption in the of the German word for "German" which is "Deutsch". So really no Dutch in volved. I knew that PA state history class would finally pay off!
There is an EU standards group (search for EICTA on this page) that mandates that in order to be able to advertise HD-Ready or HD-capable that the device support another closed standard DRM called HDCP. So if Fairplay is illegal, then so should HDCP be. It denies the fair-use rights that make up half their argument. So that particular standards group seems to be advocating illegal activity in a EU member state.
And not to be the first certainly or the last I'd guess, but from Mac or PC I can use the iTunes store. Ijust need to use iTunes to buy the songs. At that point I can burn the songs to a CD (converts to a higher standard with minimal if any loss in quality, obviously can't take 128Kbit protected AAC and convert it to CD and get better quality, but if the sample rate matches it won't reduce the quality). Then take the CD which now has no DRM and do what you want with it. Rip it back to AAC at the same bitrate as the source and compare it. I'd love to see a group comparision that is double blind pick out the re-ripped versus the original. Maybe, just maybe some golden ear could, but not the folks who play their music for multiple hours per day at over 110dB. Also one could do a quantitative analysis of the original and the re-ripped by doing a laboratory comparision. The analog stage of reproduction will, I would bet but can't guarantee, add more noise and distorion on the average computer speaker setup or portable media player. So Apple does not prevent one from using iTunes purchased music on other player. It just doesn't.
And there are still methods to strip the protection. (Hint: quicktime and its Windows counterpart both allow insertion of custom processing at various stages in the audio train) Just not in widespread use. Make them explicitly legal in Norway if they want to protect fair use. Better than outlawing iTunes and turning people to other DRMful music sources that are more restrictive and have less of a library to draw on, or to pirate operations that deprive artists and labels (though actually somewhat incorrect as some studies show piracy increases purchases and revenue to legitimate music suppliers).
First Google usage would have to exceed SPAM (and DNS traffic). How likely is that?
... And fiber to the curb and fiber to the premises will take care of the denser population areas and well, DSL and cable modem service in rural settings already have enough issues to limit their bandwidth they won't be much concern ... :-)
When the fiber boom of the 90s took place they laid fiber bundles from 22 up to 720 fibers in a cable and often more than one cable. I watched 'em bury 5 conduits and feed 3 of em with high count cables across WY. And there are 12 independant fiber bundles going up the street about 1/2 mile from my house. And I am not in a major city just one around 100K in population. Currently there is so much dark fiber in place that it would take next to no time to upgrade the backbones using those fiber runs to just use more fibers. Currently they almost always increase the capacity of the existing pairs in use through more modern equipment keeping a lot of dark fiber still on the market. So any shortage of bandwidth will be at the "last mile" to the consumer
Well, the CEO and CTOs might not either. I'd buy one day one, IF I could add the functons I added to my Nokia E61. IM client to do Jabber (the E61 built in client does not do Jabber at the moment). And I have a few custom coded apps I am using to interface to our internal systems. And I have an SSH client (thank-you Putty for the Symbian version!).
Of those only the IM client is full commercial software (ironically talking to an open source IM server). So the IM client will likely appear if Apple opens to third party developers and has some certification program. Our internal software might be ported if the certification fees are low enough and we meet whatever unknown at this time qualification expectations might be for our company. The open source, likely a wash, although I could see some open source projects have a front organization (non-profit of course) that marshalls releases through Apple to get certified. But that means no widespread public day by day releases, and availability of the source code becomes moot. Sure you can have a copy, but there is no way to load it on the platform!
Nokia has been at this a bit longer than Apple and they realized that independant developers are useful. So useful that for Symbian OS phones from Nokia you can use a free development environment. On most carrier shipped phones the user must disable the security checks that prevent unsigned applications from installing, but that makes it the phone users choice. Given enough noise in the marketplace, maybe Apple will do the same. Right now no one can say for sure as there are no real iPhones (from Apple) out playing in the real world. And personally I may wait for the European introduction and buy an unlocked one off eBay! Unless like Cingular did with the RAZR they sell it in an unlocked state (though some they sold aren't, I'll just check when in the store with a t-mobile and a Kyivstar SIM before buying).
And it is more likely the "geeks" you deride will want to SSH into their corporate routers to diagnois some network issue when their boss calls them at all hours expecting they have no life and catching them out at dinner or kayaking in whitewater. (So OTTERBOX, get the iPhone version ready!)
above quoted in the
"That doesn't mean there's not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn't mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment."
Which seems to indicate that maybe there will be a development environment for third party apps. Just some control over them like Symbian signed apps, MS signed device drivers and so on. Still not the best move but not as dire as reported.
My Nokia e61 came with a VOIP client built in. And Nokia has a GPS location/mapping app (requires external GPS for the e61). So VOIP is not to much of a concern to them or apparently the carriers. Note that the e62 castrated the e61 and has no WiFi and is the offering of choice of Cingular, though my e61 works fine on Cingular and I use the WiFi all the time. I was looking at the iPhone as a replacement but the heck with Jobs 5 years in advance phone. I am not STEPPING BACKWARDS in technology to an iPhone. No matter how slick it is. Lack of ability to add a GPS route and map app and to add my own corporate widgets to track my essential activities when out of reach of Edge, GPRS, or WiFi that can then sync when I am back in civilization is a deal breaker. And for the record I am one of those coporate management types that the average /. reader works for. We are slashdotters too. And I can load my own apps onto my phone as well as write them. No pointy-hair here. What is he going to do? Package every iPhone with a black turtleneck sweater too? Steve'o needs to visit rural Ukraine with an iPhone and see how useful it is when it just becomes a voice phone and all the built-in internet apps _require_ a current internet connection and don't accomdate queueing a sale to the corporate database, using the downloaded version of the CIA Factbook to get some info on local economics of the region, and so on. Come on Apple... "THINK DIFFERENT!"...
So while they run Mac OS X they don't have multi-user protection enabled? Are they running in stand alone mode? Our is Jobs just making excuses? I'd like to know the real reason as Nokia Symbian devices even have a free development environment with crashing the networks the phones are used on even if the phones are resplendent with custom apps written often by the not so elite programmers of the world.
I call shenanigans on Jobs!
Fado, Fado ... I once was interviewed by DEC for a job doing compiler development. I had my minimal college compiler development experience against another candidate interviewing the same day. (They flew me out half way across the country, he was local) The other candidate got the job and they told me why. "Another candidate is being hired. He has more experience in compiler development." Turns out he actually had 5 years of compiler development. Although I understood the job went to someone else, it was still pretty cool to be considered for it. And a different group that had my resume found out I interviewed for Technical Languages and interviewed me rearranging their schedules, my flight back home, and everything else to get me to stay over. I got that job, so all in all it was a great day! Latter I worked with the same group on some "off the scope" projects. So burning bridges from either side is not warranted ... The guy you turn down for one position may be sitting next to your cube the very next week anyway!
I have planned datacenters in the past and it is a pretty easy choice for a large government agency. You save taxpayer money in the longrun if you own the facility given the size you are needing (assumption). Hire contractors (hey, we are available!) to set you up and get it organized. Create a handoff plan where your own captive staff or long term contractors are brought in and trained by the folks contracted to create the data center. You don't want the high priced talent long term that is needed for setting up the data center in the first place (but they do save you money in setting one up as the skip all the nasty restarts and common errors). Also decide on what your expectations and requirements will be. Do you need 99.999% uptime, e.g., how many hours / minutes a month or year of downtime is acceptable. Plan for the anticipated capacity. And then make sure you can grow over the next several years without moving. Agency a target for terrorism, located in a area where disaster is a consideration (it really is everywhere)? Then plan an ancillary datacenter in your disaster plan. What disaster plan? Well make one! Look for someone who can tell you the advantages and disadvantages of technology choices. Like what UPS systems are out there, and battery backup versus flywheel based UPSes, and fuel cell vs generators. Make sure environmental (as in HVAC, not bunnies, though they count a bit too) concerns are considered especially capacity planning for heat load and growth. What seems like a great deal in air handling equipment may be limited in the future. Decide on what you can tradeoff in personnel to staff the datacenter versus distributed ownership of datacenter issues. Create a trouble ticket and problem escalation plan. When a small problem is not quickly resolved you need to know why and escalate the issue. Who're you going to call at midnight when the staff is on holiday break and the email goes wonky? Plan in advance with a clear set of requirements. I could add more but this is a start. Oh, and do you need to keep your data securely? In house is arguably better, but in the governments case maybe not. So make sure equipment is properly disposed of if it has had sensitive data. Maybe consider a datacenter architecture and choice of products to make that easier.
Interesting experience at MSFT. As all my work was primarily as a contractor and I was interviewing as a contractor I asked if they would give permission for me to use as future samples code I wrote for them. They understood the issue a bit better then. I did spend 3 of the interview sessions (MSFT can be brutal with all day interviews with loads of people) writing code on a whiteboard. The seemed to focus on approach and problem solving skipping being excruciatingly exact (every semicolon in its place, etc.) in favor of a solution that would work. Some of the tasks did not take small amounts of code. However, the simplest was you read n items off disk and you want to write them back sorted. I just used an appropriate STL construct to store them and iterator to go through on write. I didn't know the MSFT STL was pretty broken at the time. When asked for an alternate solution, I replaced the STL code with a "sort(input_array, output_array_pointer)" When he asked what the sort routine was I just commented "probably quick sort unless there is a compelling reason to use another, and every development environment or OS has one that has been painstakingly optimized, so just adjust it for the Windows flavor of invocation. Why bother reinventing something already done well." Apparently that caused some discussion, but they hired my services anyway.
Target and Walmart are buying a different version of the movie. It is in a tangible, unlimited sharing form. iTunes M Store sells an intangible collection of bits that needed no additional packageing per unit, so cost less to distribute. It has usage restrictions. Tell Target and Walmart to start a download service for movies and quit gripping.
Sell the compressed air cheap and charge for the service of putting it into the containers.
The chip can only be read at a distance of 1 mm, so it avoids many of the privacy concerns of RFID.
... right? I have had some aquaintences that could bring up an old style analog wireless phone (remember 49 MHz?) from _miles_ away. Just takes a good radio, the tone generator, and a directional antenna. And if you use a wireless baby monitor. Well, wow! They have very sensitive mikes and pick up everything said in their vicinity, the next room, and sometimes downstairs around the corner in livingroom. And again with a good radio and directional antenna they can be listened to from pretty far away. So the claim of read distance of 1mm begs the question, why not use a real electrical contact, and just how "deaf" is the specified receiver?
And baby monitors only have a range of a hundred feet
That it is software driving the radio most likely that makes the difference. That means a BT device can support Wibree in all likelyhood simultaneously. Just like the degradation of WiFi connection when a WiLAN has mixed 11 Mbps and 54 Mbps ... So keep the BT support for ahtw is there already and have a gentle migration through attrition.