Probably more efficient to just put in a single, larger battery, and simply have the phone toss up a warning if you try to use the power-draining extras when the battery is under 20% or whatever.
In short: Intel apparently has a similar technology (presumably with the flash memory being on the motherboard, rather than in the hard drive, which seems like a better idea), and it's rumored Apple is working with them to get it implemented for next year's Mac laptops.
They wouldn't have to force them to do anything. Oil is taxed far higher in most other developed nations. I haven't noticed oil companies refusing to sell to Western Europe.
Yes, and it's a misleading analogy. The man without the rules or the books is the equivalent of a computer without any software. Nobody is interested in the question of whether a computer without any software can be intelligent. Rather, the question is whether a computational process (software implemented on hardware) can be intelligent.
Kurzweil estimates the computing power of the human brain to be around 20 petaflops on the high side. IBM is building a 1.6 petaflop system right now. And keep in mind, the first teraflop machine was only built 10 years ago... the new IBM system will be 1600 times as fast. We're well within striking distance now.
Of course, once you have the computing power, you still have to solve the software problem. How long that will take is anyone's guess. Having huge machines available for research (to simulate neural networks as complex as the brain in real time, etc.) is probably a necessary prerequisite to making serious progress there though, so the fact that we haven't made much progress in the absence of such machines doesn't necessarily demonstrate that this problem is extremely difficult. (Though it may turn out to be.)
Searle's Chinese Room is just misdirection. The fact that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese does not demonstrate that the system as a whole doesn't understand Chinese. The thought experiment relies on the fact that people will intuitively assume that if the system understands Chinese, the person in the room will have a conscious experience of this, but if you think this through, there's no reason why it should be true.
You are the first post to try to answer the main question - why would Microsoft 'abandon' their PlaysForSure ecosystem? And I think you give a good answer: they simply want to dominate the market, and don't want to share it with any of their PlaysForSure partners.
I've got a better answer: Their PlaysForSure ecosystem isn't doing anything useful for them. Apple has 88% of the legal online music sales market, and this has gone up, not down, since Microsoft started trying to build its multivendor music platform.
The success of iTunes demonstrates at the very least that consumers don't mind a single-vendor solution, and in fact may prefer one. Apple's approach lets them offer one huge feature that Microsoft's multivendor approach hasn't been able to match: simplicity. You go to the Apple web site or an Apple retail store (where you can actually touch one!) and pick a player out of a handful of models... and that's it. You don't have to think about what software to use with it, where to buy your music, etc. because you're buying into a complete system where the vendor has figured that stuff out for you, and has lots of nice clear material explaining exactly what you'll get.
In contrast, with a PlaysForSure device, you have to select a player out of dozens or hundreds of models (scattered across the Internet, with maybe a couple of models sitting under glass at your local retail store. Most of these vendor's web sites are not nearly as clear as Apple's, particularly about software. The players offer a myriad selection of geek features typical consumers don't understand. The buying experience at a store like BestBuy is not at all like the buying experience at an Apple retail store. The software situation is more muddled. You probably have to read terms of service agreements to figure out what you'll be able to do with the songs you buy at different stores. (Some individual PlaysForSure stores even have different terms for different songs!) You get the point.
I'm aware most of the Slashdot crowd probably values flexibility and openness over simplicity and clarity... but regular consumers, I think it's the other way around. And Microsoft seems to have come to this conclusion as well.
Thing is, sometimes the line between 'survey' and 'marketing' is pretty slim. I was push-polled about net neutrality a couple of months ago. The call wasn't trying to sell me a specific product, but it was certainly aimed at advocating a specific corporate agenda, rather than at legitimately determining my opinion about an issue.
But it's a myth that local stuff is reliable. Really. Many people's computers are full of spyware. They don't have redundant hardware, they're living with the daily threat of Windows flaking out, etc. And people mostly don't have the technical knowledge to fix their computers when things go wrong, so they could be idle for days, and paying other people lots of money, to get back up and running. And most people don't even have backups. Even the people who are on top of their tech stuff occasionally have to waste hours tracking down whacky behaviors, etc.
Even with most corporate infrastructure stuff, the IT guys rarely have the budget they need for really great reliability, and often they don't have the manpower or the necessary expertise to run serious high availability systems.
Google and the other companies providing these hosted services can run high availability systems. It's what they do. It's virtually certain that Google Calendar, GMail, etc. are going to be more reliable and more secure than your in-house Exchange server. And you don't even have to pay the salaries of the people who maintain them! Use a bit of the money you save to buy redundant Internet access, to make sure you've never cut off, and you'll still come out way ahead.
And the "user is an idiot" mentality wins out again.
Sorry, anyone who doesn't want to manually manage a giant music library is an idiot how, exactly?
My point is that most people have a music collection, they have stuff ripped and downloaded, and they have a way of managing it. If they go out and buy an MP3 player, do you think they want a new, completely different program to take over their collection, take over ripping, convert everything to its own format, and make the decisions as to what goes on the player? Or do you think they want to just take their existing collection and copy whatever they want onto the player?
Are you under the impression that iTunes doesn't let you choose what goes on the player? Not only can you do so manually (by having the iPod only sync with certain playlists), but you can do so automatically, by constructing queries (with a few clicks) that create what Apple calls 'smart playlists'. If you have, say, a 4 GB nano, you can have iTunes automatically select 1 GB of one genre of music, with your top-rated songs, two gigs of music by a list of four specific artists, and top things off with another gig of music that you haven't listen to much, based on the play count.
Apple has done a very good job of offering both ease-of-use and power-user features in iTunes. And yes, I think to get these benefits, many people are more than willing to switch from whatever they were using before. (And this typically doesn't require format conversion -- Apple doesn't consider MP3 a second-class format which needs to be converted to AAC; it's natively supported by iTunes and the iPod).
"Leopard takes 64-bit computing to the next level, while maintaining full performance and compatibility for your existing 32-bit applications and drivers."
Third parties can't really do this, as it would require cracking OS X's copy protection and violating OS X's license agreement.
It might be interesting if Apple licensed someone's virtualization tech and used it to create a sort of downloadable "demo" version of OS X that Windows users could play around with, though. Can virtualized operating systems take advantage of GPU acceleration? Seems like that would be necessary for such an application, as OS X is somewhat less impressive for demo purposes without its GPU-accellerated eye candy.
Well, no, that's not how it works. If you just shove something out of Earth orbit, it doesn't fall and hit the Sun, it just ends up in a different orbit around the Sun. If you start in the same orbit around the Sun as the Earth, and you want to get something to actually fall into the Sun, you have to cancel out a velocity equivalent to the orbital velocity of the Earth. This actually requires more delta-v than firing something out of the solar system completely.
The cheapest safe approach to space disposal is probably to just lob the stuff at the moon, but even that's prohibitively expensive.
The best near-term solution is to develop the technology to bury the stuff in lifeless, geologically stable mud-flats, which cover significant portions of the ocean floor.
The full semantic web scheme really ignores a lot of what the Internet has taught us about what technologies succeed. It's not about grand visions and long specifications, it's about simple stuff that solves real problems of limited scope. Look at RSS, for instance; it's about the simplest thing which could do the job it does.
I think we'll eventually realize most of the benefits of the semantic web, but it won't be a result of a grand vision imposed from the top down and implemented all at once. It'll probably be though increasing adoption of microformats, which don't try to classify and specify everything, and are implemented entirely using existing web standards.
Decoding H.264 in real-time is a lot of work, but it's the CPU's job. Any modern video hardware, even cheap integrated stuff, won't have a problem blasting the pixels to the screen once they're decoded. As such, the MacBook will do just as well as the MacBook Pro. And it's nice that Apple's entire line-up should now be able to play high-def H.264 video, because the G4-based machines couldn't.
Don't take the Xbench OpenGL scores Ars reports too seriously. In MacWorld's benchmarks with real-world OpenGL (UT2004), the MacBook Pro, with real video, delivered three times the framerate of the MacBook.
Of course, those kinds of jobs could always be done by robots (made in China) controlled from India. And then, a few years later, they'll just be controlled by software (written in India).
Have we gotten silly enough yet? Seriously, aren't there diminishing returns to outsourcing, once you cross some line? I'm thinking we've probably crossed it already.
Mac rumors sites have made mistakes like this before. There was one famous case where they confidently predicted the iMac was being canceled, because some sources at the company which had the manufacturing contract reported that the contract wasn't being renewed. Of course, it turned out that was because Apple had signed a new production contract with someone else.
I suspect the discussion over at Ars is right, and this is really just a reorganization. A lot of the technologies Aperture uses (including RAW image processing) are actually operating system features, so it might make sense to fold the people working on that stuff into the OS development team. The article rather overstates Aperture's problems. I find it to be a very useful program. The RAW processing was never all that bad (at least for my camera), and got better with the 1.1 release. I seriously doubt the program would require major rewrites to 'fix', since there really isn't all that much wrong with it.
The article also sort of tries to spin Apple's price cut as evidence that maybe the app is in trouble, but I'd say it actually shows the opposite. If Apple didn't care anymore, they wouldn't have bothered. To me, the price cut says they're trying to pick up as many users as they can, in preparation for the battle with Adobe that we'll see when Lightroom is completed.
Open source is about sharing source code, which is inherently useful for all sorts of reasons; it means there are more eyes to spot bugs, it reduces duplication of effort, it allows tech-savvy users to customize stuff to meet their needs, etc.
There's also a kind of ideology of open community that has grown up around open source, and in general I think this has been beneficial. But there's also room for other models, which might be more attractive to certain types of organizations. Free software licensing allows for this; you don't have to take the ideology along with the code.
Some people don't really see it this way; they want to see the source code used as an incentive to get people to buy into their utopian visions of information freedom. I've always considered this a bit misguided; if the open community models really work better, they'll win out in the long run. Allowing experimentation with different models will bring this about faster, not slower.
What might be happening here is that society is just starting to adapt to the pervasive use of computing technology. As that happens, I'd expect "computer science" as a distinct discipline to decline, but advanced computer skills to be increasingly taught within the contexts of other disciplines where they're useful.
In other words, computer science specialists might be going the way of 'scribes' -- people who were essentially professional readers and writers in societies were most people were illiterate. The US educational system isn't graduating many scribes today, but I don't think anyone views this as a major problem.
Of course, there will always be a need for people who actually specialize in computer science, rather than just using it as a tool in some other wider context. But the demand for such people will end up being much smaller if they're no longer used for pretty much any job in any field that requires advanced computer skills.
Jobs has said he wants all of Apple's computer products to have 'Mac' in their names, so iMac stays, but iBook presumably goes. My guess for the naming scheme would be:
Desktop: Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro (the G5 tower replacement) Laptop: iMacBook, MacBook Pro
Maybe we'll see a 'MacBook mini' as well, if Apple decides to release one of those tiny 10" notebooks.
Exactly. We have VoD service here (Time Warner Cable in New York City). It costs $4 to get a movie for 24 hours, and there are only maybe a hundred choices at any given time. They seem to skew toward bad movies. Worse still, the quality is terrible. The signal is hugely over-compressed, and widescreen movies are letterboxed, not any kind of native widescreen, so by the time you're done, you've got maybe 200-something pixels of vertical resolution. So, it's like VHS, with the addition of MPEG-2 compression artifacts.
No thanks.
With Netflix, even with throttling and broken discs and all the rest of that nonsense, I still manage to get movies for less than $1.50 each. The selection is huge, and I'm getting a real DVD, with decent quality and all the extras that come on the disc.
I expect the gap to widen even more in the next couple of years; Netflix has a system that will scale to HD content much better than what the cable companies can provide. They don't need to dig up streets, or replace millions of set-top boxes, or build huge data centers. They just need to start sticking HD-DVD and BluRay discs in envelopes, which doesn't cost any more than sticking regular DVDs in envelopes.
I'm sure everyone on Slashdot has heard the ancient adage "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". Well, never underestimate the bandwidth of millions of red envelopes full of optical discs. Seriously.
Well, there is one important difference. 15 years ago, robbing a regular middle-class guy would get you maybe $30-60 in cash and a $100 watch. These days, you have every other college student or white collar employee carrying around a $400 cell phone, a $300 music player, and possibly a $1500 computer. And they're using all of this stuff in public. This makes mugging people a lot more profitable than it used to be.
Of course, presumably burglary is now less profitable than it used to be, since people carry more of their expensive stuff around with them instead of leaving it unattended at home when they go out.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably more efficient to just put in a single, larger battery, and simply have the phone toss up a warning if you try to use the power-draining extras when the battery is under 20% or whatever.
See rumor here.
In short: Intel apparently has a similar technology (presumably with the flash memory being on the motherboard, rather than in the hard drive, which seems like a better idea), and it's rumored Apple is working with them to get it implemented for next year's Mac laptops.
They wouldn't have to force them to do anything. Oil is taxed far higher in most other developed nations. I haven't noticed oil companies refusing to sell to Western Europe.
Yes. Or at any rate, the thought experiment does nothing to demonstrate that this is not the case.
Yes, and it's a misleading analogy. The man without the rules or the books is the equivalent of a computer without any software. Nobody is interested in the question of whether a computer without any software can be intelligent. Rather, the question is whether a computational process (software implemented on hardware) can be intelligent.
Kurzweil estimates the computing power of the human brain to be around 20 petaflops on the high side. IBM is building a 1.6 petaflop system right now. And keep in mind, the first teraflop machine was only built 10 years ago... the new IBM system will be 1600 times as fast. We're well within striking distance now.
Of course, once you have the computing power, you still have to solve the software problem. How long that will take is anyone's guess. Having huge machines available for research (to simulate neural networks as complex as the brain in real time, etc.) is probably a necessary prerequisite to making serious progress there though, so the fact that we haven't made much progress in the absence of such machines doesn't necessarily demonstrate that this problem is extremely difficult. (Though it may turn out to be.)
Searle's Chinese Room is just misdirection. The fact that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese does not demonstrate that the system as a whole doesn't understand Chinese. The thought experiment relies on the fact that people will intuitively assume that if the system understands Chinese, the person in the room will have a conscious experience of this, but if you think this through, there's no reason why it should be true.
You are the first post to try to answer the main question - why would Microsoft 'abandon' their PlaysForSure ecosystem? And I think you give a good answer: they simply want to dominate the market, and don't want to share it with any of their PlaysForSure partners.
I've got a better answer: Their PlaysForSure ecosystem isn't doing anything useful for them. Apple has 88% of the legal online music sales market, and this has gone up, not down, since Microsoft started trying to build its multivendor music platform.
The success of iTunes demonstrates at the very least that consumers don't mind a single-vendor solution, and in fact may prefer one. Apple's approach lets them offer one huge feature that Microsoft's multivendor approach hasn't been able to match: simplicity. You go to the Apple web site or an Apple retail store (where you can actually touch one!) and pick a player out of a handful of models... and that's it. You don't have to think about what software to use with it, where to buy your music, etc. because you're buying into a complete system where the vendor has figured that stuff out for you, and has lots of nice clear material explaining exactly what you'll get.
In contrast, with a PlaysForSure device, you have to select a player out of dozens or hundreds of models (scattered across the Internet, with maybe a couple of models sitting under glass at your local retail store. Most of these vendor's web sites are not nearly as clear as Apple's, particularly about software. The players offer a myriad selection of geek features typical consumers don't understand. The buying experience at a store like BestBuy is not at all like the buying experience at an Apple retail store. The software situation is more muddled. You probably have to read terms of service agreements to figure out what you'll be able to do with the songs you buy at different stores. (Some individual PlaysForSure stores even have different terms for different songs!) You get the point.
I'm aware most of the Slashdot crowd probably values flexibility and openness over simplicity and clarity... but regular consumers, I think it's the other way around. And Microsoft seems to have come to this conclusion as well.
Thing is, sometimes the line between 'survey' and 'marketing' is pretty slim. I was push-polled about net neutrality a couple of months ago. The call wasn't trying to sell me a specific product, but it was certainly aimed at advocating a specific corporate agenda, rather than at legitimately determining my opinion about an issue.
But it's a myth that local stuff is reliable. Really. Many people's computers are full of spyware. They don't have redundant hardware, they're living with the daily threat of Windows flaking out, etc. And people mostly don't have the technical knowledge to fix their computers when things go wrong, so they could be idle for days, and paying other people lots of money, to get back up and running. And most people don't even have backups. Even the people who are on top of their tech stuff occasionally have to waste hours tracking down whacky behaviors, etc.
Even with most corporate infrastructure stuff, the IT guys rarely have the budget they need for really great reliability, and often they don't have the manpower or the necessary expertise to run serious high availability systems.
Google and the other companies providing these hosted services can run high availability systems. It's what they do. It's virtually certain that Google Calendar, GMail, etc. are going to be more reliable and more secure than your in-house Exchange server. And you don't even have to pay the salaries of the people who maintain them! Use a bit of the money you save to buy redundant Internet access, to make sure you've never cut off, and you'll still come out way ahead.
And the "user is an idiot" mentality wins out again.
Sorry, anyone who doesn't want to manually manage a giant music library is an idiot how, exactly?
My point is that most people have a music collection, they have stuff ripped and downloaded, and they have a way of managing it. If they go out and buy an MP3 player, do you think they want a new, completely different program to take over their collection, take over ripping, convert everything to its own format, and make the decisions as to what goes on the player? Or do you think they want to just take their existing collection and copy whatever they want onto the player?
Are you under the impression that iTunes doesn't let you choose what goes on the player? Not only can you do so manually (by having the iPod only sync with certain playlists), but you can do so automatically, by constructing queries (with a few clicks) that create what Apple calls 'smart playlists'. If you have, say, a 4 GB nano, you can have iTunes automatically select 1 GB of one genre of music, with your top-rated songs, two gigs of music by a list of four specific artists, and top things off with another gig of music that you haven't listen to much, based on the play count.
Apple has done a very good job of offering both ease-of-use and power-user features in iTunes. And yes, I think to get these benefits, many people are more than willing to switch from whatever they were using before. (And this typically doesn't require format conversion -- Apple doesn't consider MP3 a second-class format which needs to be converted to AAC; it's natively supported by iTunes and the iPod).
http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/64bit.html
"Leopard takes 64-bit computing to the next level, while maintaining full performance and compatibility for your existing 32-bit applications and drivers."
Third parties can't really do this, as it would require cracking OS X's copy protection and violating OS X's license agreement.
It might be interesting if Apple licensed someone's virtualization tech and used it to create a sort of downloadable "demo" version of OS X that Windows users could play around with, though. Can virtualized operating systems take advantage of GPU acceleration? Seems like that would be necessary for such an application, as OS X is somewhat less impressive for demo purposes without its GPU-accellerated eye candy.
Well, no, that's not how it works. If you just shove something out of Earth orbit, it doesn't fall and hit the Sun, it just ends up in a different orbit around the Sun. If you start in the same orbit around the Sun as the Earth, and you want to get something to actually fall into the Sun, you have to cancel out a velocity equivalent to the orbital velocity of the Earth. This actually requires more delta-v than firing something out of the solar system completely.
The cheapest safe approach to space disposal is probably to just lob the stuff at the moon, but even that's prohibitively expensive.
The best near-term solution is to develop the technology to bury the stuff in lifeless, geologically stable mud-flats, which cover significant portions of the ocean floor.
The full semantic web scheme really ignores a lot of what the Internet has taught us about what technologies succeed. It's not about grand visions and long specifications, it's about simple stuff that solves real problems of limited scope. Look at RSS, for instance; it's about the simplest thing which could do the job it does.
I think we'll eventually realize most of the benefits of the semantic web, but it won't be a result of a grand vision imposed from the top down and implemented all at once. It'll probably be though increasing adoption of microformats, which don't try to classify and specify everything, and are implemented entirely using existing web standards.
Yes, the illustration you provide is simple, clear, and wrong.
Decoding H.264 in real-time is a lot of work, but it's the CPU's job. Any modern video hardware, even cheap integrated stuff, won't have a problem blasting the pixels to the screen once they're decoded. As such, the MacBook will do just as well as the MacBook Pro. And it's nice that Apple's entire line-up should now be able to play high-def H.264 video, because the G4-based machines couldn't.
Don't take the Xbench OpenGL scores Ars reports too seriously. In MacWorld's benchmarks with real-world OpenGL (UT2004), the MacBook Pro, with real video, delivered three times the framerate of the MacBook.
Of course, those kinds of jobs could always be done by robots (made in China) controlled from India. And then, a few years later, they'll just be controlled by software (written in India).
Have we gotten silly enough yet? Seriously, aren't there diminishing returns to outsourcing, once you cross some line? I'm thinking we've probably crossed it already.
Mac rumors sites have made mistakes like this before. There was one famous case where they confidently predicted the iMac was being canceled, because some sources at the company which had the manufacturing contract reported that the contract wasn't being renewed. Of course, it turned out that was because Apple had signed a new production contract with someone else.
I suspect the discussion over at Ars is right, and this is really just a reorganization. A lot of the technologies Aperture uses (including RAW image processing) are actually operating system features, so it might make sense to fold the people working on that stuff into the OS development team. The article rather overstates Aperture's problems. I find it to be a very useful program. The RAW processing was never all that bad (at least for my camera), and got better with the 1.1 release. I seriously doubt the program would require major rewrites to 'fix', since there really isn't all that much wrong with it.
The article also sort of tries to spin Apple's price cut as evidence that maybe the app is in trouble, but I'd say it actually shows the opposite. If Apple didn't care anymore, they wouldn't have bothered. To me, the price cut says they're trying to pick up as many users as they can, in preparation for the battle with Adobe that we'll see when Lightroom is completed.
Open source is about sharing source code, which is inherently useful for all sorts of reasons; it means there are more eyes to spot bugs, it reduces duplication of effort, it allows tech-savvy users to customize stuff to meet their needs, etc.
There's also a kind of ideology of open community that has grown up around open source, and in general I think this has been beneficial. But there's also room for other models, which might be more attractive to certain types of organizations. Free software licensing allows for this; you don't have to take the ideology along with the code.
Some people don't really see it this way; they want to see the source code used as an incentive to get people to buy into their utopian visions of information freedom. I've always considered this a bit misguided; if the open community models really work better, they'll win out in the long run. Allowing experimentation with different models will bring this about faster, not slower.
Maybe not.
What might be happening here is that society is just starting to adapt to the pervasive use of computing technology. As that happens, I'd expect "computer science" as a distinct discipline to decline, but advanced computer skills to be increasingly taught within the contexts of other disciplines where they're useful.
In other words, computer science specialists might be going the way of 'scribes' -- people who were essentially professional readers and writers in societies were most people were illiterate. The US educational system isn't graduating many scribes today, but I don't think anyone views this as a major problem.
Of course, there will always be a need for people who actually specialize in computer science, rather than just using it as a tool in some other wider context. But the demand for such people will end up being much smaller if they're no longer used for pretty much any job in any field that requires advanced computer skills.
Jobs has said he wants all of Apple's computer products to have 'Mac' in their names, so iMac stays, but iBook presumably goes. My guess for the naming scheme would be:
Desktop: Mac mini, iMac, Mac Pro (the G5 tower replacement)
Laptop: iMacBook, MacBook Pro
Maybe we'll see a 'MacBook mini' as well, if Apple decides to release one of those tiny 10" notebooks.
Exactly. We have VoD service here (Time Warner Cable in New York City). It costs $4 to get a movie for 24 hours, and there are only maybe a hundred choices at any given time. They seem to skew toward bad movies. Worse still, the quality is terrible. The signal is hugely over-compressed, and widescreen movies are letterboxed, not any kind of native widescreen, so by the time you're done, you've got maybe 200-something pixels of vertical resolution. So, it's like VHS, with the addition of MPEG-2 compression artifacts.
No thanks.
With Netflix, even with throttling and broken discs and all the rest of that nonsense, I still manage to get movies for less than $1.50 each. The selection is huge, and I'm getting a real DVD, with decent quality and all the extras that come on the disc.
I expect the gap to widen even more in the next couple of years; Netflix has a system that will scale to HD content much better than what the cable companies can provide. They don't need to dig up streets, or replace millions of set-top boxes, or build huge data centers. They just need to start sticking HD-DVD and BluRay discs in envelopes, which doesn't cost any more than sticking regular DVDs in envelopes.
I'm sure everyone on Slashdot has heard the ancient adage "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway". Well, never underestimate the bandwidth of millions of red envelopes full of optical discs. Seriously.
Well, there is one important difference. 15 years ago, robbing a regular middle-class guy would get you maybe $30-60 in cash and a $100 watch. These days, you have every other college student or white collar employee carrying around a $400 cell phone, a $300 music player, and possibly a $1500 computer. And they're using all of this stuff in public. This makes mugging people a lot more profitable than it used to be.
Of course, presumably burglary is now less profitable than it used to be, since people carry more of their expensive stuff around with them instead of leaving it unattended at home when they go out.