Come on, a four or five finger gesture to return to the home screen is totally undiscoverable and many younger, older or somehow disabled users won't be able to use it reliably at all.
That's pretty funny. If the US wanted him "renditioned", they would have had him already from the UK. He's much more likely to be safe from US rendition in Sweden.
Really?
From cable 07STOCKHOLM506:
"Swedish military and civilian intelligence organizations are strong and reliable partners on a range of key issues[...]. Due to domestic political considerations, the extent of this cooperation in not widely known within the Swedish government and it would be useful to acknowledge this cooperation privately, as public mention of the cooperation would open up the government to domestic criticism."
Think what you want, but the demand for 3G bandwidth is growing too fast to satisfy it. With ever more smartphones and very soon a flood of tablets sold you can not have unlimited data if you really use it.
What I don't get is the methods they're applying here. They should offer cheap 300 MB, not so cheap 2 GB and not at all cheap 10 GB or so. And then they shouldn't just cut you off but throttle speed to EDGE speeds if you hit your allowance. Nobody would complain then. In fact in Germany almost all carriers do exactly that and most people seem to see such offers as quite reasonable especially since the lower bandwidth offers are rather cheap (like 7 Euro a month for 500 MB 3G and unlimited EDGE after that).
Anyway, the practice of selling phones with contracts bites the customer here. If you outright buy an unlocked handset and then buy your bandwidth month by month where it's cheapest there's some real competition. If enough people are bound by a 2-year contract or so there's hardly any.
Easily. They have the users, they have the infrastructure -- photo hosting, chat, calendars, email, they have everything. They haven't really tried yet, that's all.
Basically what Facebook (and whatever comes after it) shows is that any social networking platform gets the more useful the more users it has and the more data it has. There is great potential in that and great danger, of course. But who has the most data in the most dimensions? Google. Google will suck up everything like a black whole sucks up everything.
2 years max. No, I don't have a citation. It is a prediction, pure and simple. I actually believe Rushkoff is correct and these things do ramp up, peak for some period of time, then die off. I'm putting my 1 cent on Facebook already being at that peak.
I could believe that, but I think FB will die by being replaced with something else that does more or less the same. I do not think FB and what it does will just vanish.
Or to put it a different way, what's so hard about telling your friends, in person, through email, or using Facebook, that your user ID on some new service is joe@example.com?
Because you can do that only with people you're already in contact with?
For all the users who don't type much (that is for about 95% of all users) the touchscreen will replace the keyboard, no doubt. Devices without keyboards have less buttons (good), you can press, drag and touch where you're looking (good), there are no moving parts (good), the devices are much easier to clean (good) and the devices look better (good). For the typical user a real keyboard is ugly, complex and hard to use. Most people just forget all the effort they had to invest to learn to use it.
Those who type much and fast will still use keyboards. They're a minority, but a loud one.
Thing is, you have seen those apps - but they were called Shareware. Everyone was saying there was real trouble selling them. But now they're called Free and Premium Apps and suddenly they're hotcakes.
I am starting to think it's the Mall sales experience of the App Stores (plural) making a difference.
The trouble with Shareware is and was the fact that as a developer you can't get the word out, you have to set up your own licensing and money handling infrastructure (or to trust your users...), users aren't that willing to hand money over to some unknown guy... in the end you just don't make much money.
Having Apple handle the distribution, licensing and money handling and getting in a big store can help to make money while offering your software for cheap. The whole iPhone/iPad App Store has proven that small, simple apps for a few bucks is something people are actually prepared to BUY. I think this is a good thing for all involved.
Like using smartphones for a mesh/P2P network without involving the carriers at all. It would be a very spotty and dynamic "Internet" with totally different contraints, but it would be unregulated and totally grassroots. Physical distance would be expensive for data to travel (at least for large bandwidth), but this would make any centrally controlled resources very hard to implement, which would be good.
Of course you don't have enough control over the radios in smartphones to do that. Or do you?
What if my device is password protected? Can I be compelled to hand over the password? Because I won't.
What do they need the password for? They don't want to use the thing, they want the data. As long as you don't have your data encrypted having the device is more than enough for them, no password needed.
I'm much happier because of specific things the phone can do, which required a jailbreak on the iPhone or was otherwise just blocked off. That said, I do think the iPhone has an advantage still. This will be with non-technical users who want to do some technically involved things, and don't want to troubleshoot or customize their phones.
It's not only the non-technical users. There are also lots of rather technical users who just don't fancy tinkering around with their phones but treat them as an appliance. If you're dealing all day long with computers and software dealing the same way with the phone in your pocket soon feels like madness. There's a point where you have (or want) to stop being technical and a smartphone is for many people beyond this point.
I mean, there is no doubt that Android will be on more devices sold. With uncounted devices from uncounted companies and carriers this is to be expected.
What's interesting is if there will be *one* model of an Android phone that will sell better than the iPhone. If the iPhone will stay the best selling smartphone in 2011, well, it's still the bestselling smartphone.
I'm totally expecting the prices for smartphones spiralling down. An unlocked Android smartphone for $99 with no contract should be possible. It will have crappy battery life, a crappy touchscreen and a crappy camera, though.
It's both. China is since quite some time now a capitalist's wet dream with some people getting filthy rich. It's also a state wishing for control and monitoring. Actually both companies and politicians from the west stare at China with naked envy.
Really. Online dating is not rare or anything, this profile is actually quite funny and honest, so what's wrong with it? I'm pretty sure that many Assange-/WL-haters have profiles on such sites and many of them would be more painful to read.
Of course, you're going to need some kind of DNS. Things will only get worse when IPv6 gets going.
Why do you need some kind of DNS actually? Do you have DNS for phone numbers? You don't, you just have phone numbers you'll never remember and you don't have to because your phone does that for you.
DNS is overrated. With IPv6 and no shortage of adresses the only ones who *need* DNS are those who badly want you to remember their spiffy domain names, so they can put it an ads.
But of course doing away with DNS wouldn't change anything. If your IP gets grounded, you're fucked anyway and you can't host your stuff elsewhere then and just point your domain name there.
The problem is not a technical one and there won't be a technical solution to it.
The new site doesn't appear to have anything to do with Assange's arrest. It's more about a disagreement regarding how to handle leaked information. OpenLeaks is looking to provide information to interested parties, e.g., journalists, whereas WikiLeaks is there to disseminate the information to everyone.
So why has WikiLeaks given the 250000 cables only to five newspapers and publishes every cable only after one of those newspaper did publish it? And why have only about 1000 of these now been published? Where are the other 249000 cables?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but WikiLeaks isn't "the press" is it?
I don't know any government that has told the media that they can publish whatever government secrets they want.
I'm not necessarily supporting nor disparaging the treatment of WikiLeaks. I'm attempting to say it's not fair to pretend that WikiLeaks does the same thing a given journalist does. Maybe they overlap at times, sure.
Furthermore, "the press" does not equal "the media." There's a lot of media that's not "the press."
What about Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the Washington Post? They have all the leaked cables and they're publishing them. Where's the difference?
Could it possible change intercontinental flying times? Instead of 20 hours to get to Australia from Washington DC, could you jump on a "Space Craft" - get into low orbit and get across in an hour or two.
Granted, the price point and that kind of technology are a ways off. But one could dream...
Well, if you have a fully reusable craft and lots of flights it's basically just all the fuel you're burning through for that, although even this would be expensive enough.
And then you'd have a REALLY uncomfortable flight with a high-g launch, a bit of weightlessness just long enough to make you vomit and a rather uncomfortable and nerve-wrecking reentry and landing.
Surely fascinating but I can't really see the business case here.
> supply and personnel lines to the ISS are secured
You do know that other nations have been supplying the ISS for a long time now? This is about the US being able to match their capabilities, not about "securing supply to the ISS".
Another thing is that there is *no* serious downmass capacity without the Shuttle. Soyuz can only return very little cargo and ATV just burns up in the atmosphere. Dragon can return tons. This is important for returning experiments and also defective equipment (to analyse why it actually failed).
Anyway, SpaceX is one of the very few good news with spaceflight lately.
I really like this thing, but looking at Google web apps running in a browser looks extremly last century. Google is just *so* desinterested and uninspired with its webapps that it almost hurts.
I mean you are technically correct with your addition, but let's be honest.. most likely you pointed out that minor group to imply that the OP himself is insecure about his masculinity. I don't get why people do that. It's very immature.
I think you're reading too much into my comment.
IMHO you *can* design a product to appeal on a higher level than that. Some smart, elegant simplicity can be appeal to both men and women. It's actually easier to design something to look either bad-ass (large, black and red) or cute (rounded, pink, flowers), but basically you're appealing then to only half of your potential customers.
And yes, many men are insecure. This is not a minor group. It's easy to exploit that and many products do it.
I surely didn't mean to single out the OP, especially since it was *him* to say that "Macs suit women, gays, and/or artists"...
If Google were serious about Chrome OS, shouldn't that one have been aimed for the phones and tablets, with Android for the netbooks? Chrome OS is at least the OS that does less, and is more simple to the end user. It can basically only run a web browser (and all underlying stuff that's necessary to run that web browser compiled for Linux, of course).
I think Google was somewhat surprised by the success of Android. As so often Google threw lots of things at the wall and then looked what kept sticking. Android stuck extremely good and then Google looked at it and noticed they can't profit that much from it.
Google is all about the Web and Chrome OS is nothing than a web browser. Use Chrome and you use the web and nothing else, which means you're bound to get served ads by Google and that's what Google wants. Use Android with lots of apps and the browser being just one app among others is not helping Google much.
Google has never been really excited about Android being used on tablets, they actually tried very hard to convince everyone to use it only on smartphones. And now they still try to get Chrome OS at least onto netbooks.
I don't think anyone will care much about what Google wants. Smartphone, tablet, netbook... running nothing but webapps sucks on all of them.
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Come on, a four or five finger gesture to return to the home screen is totally undiscoverable and many younger, older or somehow disabled users won't be able to use it reliably at all.
That's pretty funny. If the US wanted him "renditioned", they would have had him already from the UK. He's much more likely to be safe from US rendition in Sweden.
Really?
From cable 07STOCKHOLM506:
"Swedish military and civilian intelligence organizations are strong and reliable partners on a range of
key issues[...]. Due to domestic political considerations, the extent of this cooperation in not widely known within the Swedish government and it would be useful to acknowledge this cooperation privately, as
public mention of the cooperation would open up the government to domestic criticism."
Think what you want, but the demand for 3G bandwidth is growing too fast to satisfy it. With ever more smartphones and very soon a flood of tablets sold you can not have unlimited data if you really use it.
What I don't get is the methods they're applying here. They should offer cheap 300 MB, not so cheap 2 GB and not at all cheap 10 GB or so. And then they shouldn't just cut you off but throttle speed to EDGE speeds if you hit your allowance. Nobody would complain then. In fact in Germany almost all carriers do exactly that and most people seem to see such offers as quite reasonable especially since the lower bandwidth offers are rather cheap (like 7 Euro a month for 500 MB 3G and unlimited EDGE after that).
Anyway, the practice of selling phones with contracts bites the customer here. If you outright buy an unlocked handset and then buy your bandwidth month by month where it's cheapest there's some real competition. If enough people are bound by a 2-year contract or so there's hardly any.
Easily. They have the users, they have the infrastructure -- photo hosting, chat, calendars, email, they have everything. They haven't really tried yet, that's all.
Basically what Facebook (and whatever comes after it) shows is that any social networking platform gets the more useful the more users it has and the more data it has. There is great potential in that and great danger, of course. But who has the most data in the most dimensions? Google. Google will suck up everything like a black whole sucks up everything.
2 years max. No, I don't have a citation. It is a prediction, pure and simple. I actually believe Rushkoff is correct and these things do ramp up, peak for some period of time, then die off. I'm putting my 1 cent on Facebook already being at that peak.
I could believe that, but I think FB will die by being replaced with something else that does more or less the same. I do not think FB and what it does will just vanish.
Or to put it a different way, what's so hard about telling your friends, in person, through email, or using Facebook, that your user ID on some new service is joe@example.com?
Because you can do that only with people you're already in contact with?
For all the users who don't type much (that is for about 95% of all users) the touchscreen will replace the keyboard, no doubt. Devices without keyboards have less buttons (good), you can press, drag and touch where you're looking (good), there are no moving parts (good), the devices are much easier to clean (good) and the devices look better (good). For the typical user a real keyboard is ugly, complex and hard to use. Most people just forget all the effort they had to invest to learn to use it.
Those who type much and fast will still use keyboards. They're a minority, but a loud one.
Next question please.
Really. They can offer this as a service and all the "Internet" that matters to FB-users will use it anyway, safe or not safe.
Thing is, you have seen those apps - but they were called Shareware. Everyone was saying there was real trouble selling them. But now they're called Free and Premium Apps and suddenly they're hotcakes.
I am starting to think it's the Mall sales experience of the App Stores (plural) making a difference.
The trouble with Shareware is and was the fact that as a developer you can't get the word out, you have to set up your own licensing and money handling infrastructure (or to trust your users...), users aren't that willing to hand money over to some unknown guy... in the end you just don't make much money.
Having Apple handle the distribution, licensing and money handling and getting in a big store can help to make money while offering your software for cheap. The whole iPhone/iPad App Store has proven that small, simple apps for a few bucks is something people are actually prepared to BUY. I think this is a good thing for all involved.
Like using smartphones for a mesh/P2P network without involving the carriers at all. It would be a very spotty and dynamic "Internet" with totally different contraints, but it would be unregulated and totally grassroots. Physical distance would be expensive for data to travel (at least for large bandwidth), but this would make any centrally controlled resources very hard to implement, which would be good.
Of course you don't have enough control over the radios in smartphones to do that. Or do you?
What if my device is password protected? Can I be compelled to hand over the password? Because I won't.
What do they need the password for? They don't want to use the thing, they want the data. As long as you don't have your data encrypted having the device is more than enough for them, no password needed.
I'm much happier because of specific things the phone can do, which required a jailbreak on the iPhone or was otherwise just blocked off. That said, I do think the iPhone has an advantage still. This will be with non-technical users who want to do some technically involved things, and don't want to troubleshoot or customize their phones.
It's not only the non-technical users. There are also lots of rather technical users who just don't fancy tinkering around with their phones but treat them as an appliance. If you're dealing all day long with computers and software dealing the same way with the phone in your pocket soon feels like madness. There's a point where you have (or want) to stop being technical and a smartphone is for many people beyond this point.
I mean, there is no doubt that Android will be on more devices sold. With uncounted devices from uncounted companies and carriers this is to be expected.
What's interesting is if there will be *one* model of an Android phone that will sell better than the iPhone. If the iPhone will stay the best selling smartphone in 2011, well, it's still the bestselling smartphone.
I'm totally expecting the prices for smartphones spiralling down. An unlocked Android smartphone for $99 with no contract should be possible. It will have crappy battery life, a crappy touchscreen and a crappy camera, though.
It's both. China is since quite some time now a capitalist's wet dream with some people getting filthy rich. It's also a state wishing for control and monitoring. Actually both companies and politicians from the west stare at China with naked envy.
Really. Online dating is not rare or anything, this profile is actually quite funny and honest, so what's wrong with it? I'm pretty sure that many Assange-/WL-haters have profiles on such sites and many of them would be more painful to read.
So get over it.
Of course, you're going to need some kind of DNS. Things will only get worse when IPv6 gets going.
Why do you need some kind of DNS actually? Do you have DNS for phone numbers? You don't, you just have phone numbers you'll never remember and you don't have to because your phone does that for you.
DNS is overrated. With IPv6 and no shortage of adresses the only ones who *need* DNS are those who badly want you to remember their spiffy domain names, so they can put it an ads.
But of course doing away with DNS wouldn't change anything. If your IP gets grounded, you're fucked anyway and you can't host your stuff elsewhere then and just point your domain name there.
The problem is not a technical one and there won't be a technical solution to it.
The new site doesn't appear to have anything to do with Assange's arrest. It's more about a disagreement regarding how to handle leaked information. OpenLeaks is looking to provide information to interested parties, e.g., journalists, whereas WikiLeaks is there to disseminate the information to everyone.
So why has WikiLeaks given the 250000 cables only to five newspapers and publishes every cable only after one of those newspaper did publish it? And why have only about 1000 of these now been published? Where are the other 249000 cables?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but WikiLeaks isn't "the press" is it?
I don't know any government that has told the media that they can publish whatever government secrets they want.
I'm not necessarily supporting nor disparaging the treatment of WikiLeaks. I'm attempting to say it's not fair to pretend that WikiLeaks does the same thing a given journalist does. Maybe they overlap at times, sure.
Furthermore, "the press" does not equal "the media." There's a lot of media that's not "the press."
What about Le Monde, El Pais, The Guardian, Der Spiegel and the Washington Post? They have all the leaked cables and they're publishing them. Where's the difference?
Could it possible change intercontinental flying times? Instead of 20 hours to get to Australia from Washington DC, could you jump on a "Space Craft" - get into low orbit and get across in an hour or two.
Granted, the price point and that kind of technology are a ways off. But one could dream...
Well, if you have a fully reusable craft and lots of flights it's basically just all the fuel you're burning through for that, although even this would be expensive enough.
And then you'd have a REALLY uncomfortable flight with a high-g launch, a bit of weightlessness just long enough to make you vomit and a rather uncomfortable and nerve-wrecking reentry and landing.
Surely fascinating but I can't really see the business case here.
> supply and personnel lines to the ISS are secured
You do know that other nations have been supplying the ISS for a long time now? This is about the US being able to match their capabilities, not about "securing supply to the ISS".
Another thing is that there is *no* serious downmass capacity without the Shuttle. Soyuz can only return very little cargo and ATV just burns up in the atmosphere. Dragon can return tons. This is important for returning experiments and also defective equipment (to analyse why it actually failed).
Anyway, SpaceX is one of the very few good news with spaceflight lately.
I really like this thing, but looking at Google web apps running in a browser looks extremly last century. Google is just *so* desinterested and uninspired with its webapps that it almost hurts.
I mean you are technically correct with your addition, but let's be honest.. most likely you pointed out that minor group to imply that the OP himself is insecure about his masculinity. I don't get why people do that. It's very immature.
I think you're reading too much into my comment.
IMHO you *can* design a product to appeal on a higher level than that. Some smart, elegant simplicity can be appeal to both men and women. It's actually easier to design something to look either bad-ass (large, black and red) or cute (rounded, pink, flowers), but basically you're appealing then to only half of your potential customers.
And yes, many men are insecure. This is not a minor group. It's easy to exploit that and many products do it.
I surely didn't mean to single out the OP, especially since it was *him* to say that "Macs suit women, gays, and/or artists"...
If Google were serious about Chrome OS, shouldn't that one have been aimed for the phones and tablets, with Android for the netbooks? Chrome OS is at least the OS that does less, and is more simple to the end user. It can basically only run a web browser (and all underlying stuff that's necessary to run that web browser compiled for Linux, of course).
I think Google was somewhat surprised by the success of Android. As so often Google threw lots of things at the wall and then looked what kept sticking. Android stuck extremely good and then Google looked at it and noticed they can't profit that much from it.
Google is all about the Web and Chrome OS is nothing than a web browser. Use Chrome and you use the web and nothing else, which means you're bound to get served ads by Google and that's what Google wants. Use Android with lots of apps and the browser being just one app among others is not helping Google much.
Google has never been really excited about Android being used on tablets, they actually tried very hard to convince everyone to use it only on smartphones. And now they still try to get Chrome OS at least onto netbooks.
I don't think anyone will care much about what Google wants. Smartphone, tablet, netbook... running nothing but webapps sucks on all of them.
My guess is, that it is for the same reasons Macs suit women, gays, and/or artists.
Sorry if it is a cliché, statistically bound, by the way.
And those man who are not that insecure that they need to announce their manhood by their choice of "masculine" gadgets...
I certainly agree that they're well-written, often better than you'd expect even from journalists.
But what's published so far already *is* selected. This is only a small part of what got leaked to WL.