By laying off 6,000 people, they are showing cowardice and a lack of confidence in their existing workforce. They would sooner send 6,000 people to the unemployment line then work work with a known, reliable quantity.
If you have a hardware design (say, cooling) engineer and whole world moves to the new fancy software networking (say, you need a COBOL programmer), it might not quite work to shift existing person to a completely new area of knowledge. Part of adapting to new conditions is changing what has to be delivered to customers, instead of trying to keep selling them a hammer just because you have a hammer.
As for "replace people with cheaper people", that's the way capitalism seems to work. This is not even enforced from the top by corporations, but from the bottom by customers, who will buy anything that's cheaper, even if lower quality. Same thing happened in other industries.
Whether this move is shortsighgted or not, remains to be seen in a year or two, when restructurization effects come into force.
AFAIK this limit was for _selling_ photos commercially, not for taking them. Those satellites could already take photos at higher resolution (25cm or better), they just had to be provided to USA government and noone else. 50cm images sold commercially were probably upsampled from 25cm photos anyway.
Limit was also only applicable in USA (obviously), and was changed to allow USA companies to compete with rest of the world as technologies advance.
Russian military apparently does not participate in ICAO in that area and their weapon systems only recognize friend=russian military, foe=anything else, including civilian.
This crime was done with a russian-made weapon system, as far as is known for now.
"I am surrounded by time - on my computer, the TV guide, cell phone, clock on microwave, clock on stove, clock on standard phone"
Once you get out of parents basement, time is not everywhere;-)
It's true though that there will be people who find utility in wearing watches, and those who don't. Enforcing one solution for all will not make people happy - if you don't want a watch on your wrist, why wear it?
Interesting to see whether smartwaches would need to be turned off at an airplane... they use radio for some of functionality.
Reason Google is behind this drive is that it will allow them (and NSA) to reach more consumers.
Similar to how USA and other countries' corporations were happy to make Iron Curtain fail - not exactly for political/goodwill reasons, but to reach more consumers.
Cisco is still more advanced on hardware front, but they lag a lot on software. Standards implementation (even if created by Cisco) in particular, although given how many products they have to cover partially explains those problems.
Juniper usually did "cheap but good enough" trick to gain a lot of ground. Cisco's products were often better engineered, but customers did not care for those better features, or did not understand them, which resulted in Juniper gaining a lot of market share. They have not passed Cisco though (yet) - in 2014 they have about 17% in edge (19% Cisco) and 28% in core routers (62% Cisco).
Markets are in transition anyway (buzzword compliancy), so next 2-3 years will show who got it right. Regardless of checking out competitors' products.
Company in any area would be pretty silly if they don't buy and check how competitors' equipment works. Car analogy actually works here there - people selling Abcd cars would drive Bghj and Celkj cars, so they can better compare them and advise customers of faults in others.
Even TFA says: purchasing a competitor's products for testing and reverse engineering is not only a common and accepted practice, but "an important component of entrepreneurial capitalism" in the IT industry. "This is part of what makes markets work," he said. "You're supposed to know how your competitor's products work and incorporate as much as you can to make the next generation of your product better."
Regarding intelectual property Cisco seems far more advanced on hardware level, so obtaining gear from competitor is not really going to move things forward. Article also does not mention (unless I missed it) obtaining equipment which is in developement. The best way for commercial spying is information exchanged by people - engineers from all those networking Silicon Valley companies know each other, they gossip, they betray secrets. This is how most of information leaks through, straight from the sources, not via reverse-engineering.
You can be also completely sure that Juniper bought Cisco equipment for the same purposes, and so did other companies. Even TFA mentions Alcatel-Lucent buying Cisco. It was an all-out activity.
Given that China is the 3rd most visited country in the world, this is probably not nationwide problem, but also for tourists who have been there and have paid with credit card at this China bistro chain.
It's good that such a problem hasn't happened in one of European countries, or in USA, because the problem would have likely been much bigger due to larger base of people using credit cards.
(here's hopelessly hoping that editors do better job writing "articles" outside their US-only minds)
> This means that if ISPs want happy customers and companies want their internet product to work properly, they have to ensure that there's enough room on the entire network to deliver those services adequately.
This is exactly what is running ISPs to ground today.
Companies like Google and other content providers charge end-users directly for their service, and use common-cost Internet to deliver it. Huge increase in traffic (hello MP3, hello video, hello torrents) causes ISPs to inflict costly upgrades of the network to keep the same income from end-users (who expect prices to go down). The same user who is trying to save every penny on internet connectivity will now gladly pay X$ for, say, internet radio service. ISP doesn't see any of that extra income, only increased costs.
The only solution is to share the income and the cost.
Asking ISPs to carry the burden themselves will run them to the ground, or cause market consolidaiton until you have monopoly (similar to what happens in USA).
> Every individual company owning a network will have different priorities.
Concept you described is wrong. It doesn't matter what are those priorities, nobody is proposing to have thousands of priorities. If you read the article this is also not what person from Cisco was proposing directly.
The way it happens in reality is twofold: - when you get a "circuit", you can pay extra for guaranteed bandwidth. If a video or other content provider wants to have guaranteed bandwidth, they can pay for that, and receive that. All such requests being equal, as long as bandwidth is available. If it runs out, ISP should be earning enough to increas capacity. - within each content provider traffic you can declare several classes with differing characteristics. Voice will require low bandwidth but top priority for minimum delay/variation. Video will require high or adaptive bandwidth, delay can be higher but with low variation. Content provider can pay for different classes differently, and receive certain bandwidth guarantees for each class.
Both those models exist for a long time (over 15 years) are actively used in existing ISP networks and actively sold - except that whole Internet is usually just one class of service without any specific guarantees.
There should be no problem introducing classes of traffic to the Internet. If video provider 1 wants to pay for lower class than video provider 2, saving money because they think quality should be ok - let that be. If they both pay for the same class, there would be no preference for one or the other though. This is net neutrality.
Existing networking vendors gear can already (a bit better or worse) carry this out in practice. Obstacle is in financial/political layer - how to make payments for that work on a larger inter-provider scale, including ISPs and content providers.
> Try connecting thousands of private networks with different priorities and different technologies to achieve those and make that work.
> chances that it will ever work are close to zero.
It already works on global scale in the internet, just not on public internet. ISPs have years of practice implementing just that.
> Sorry, no, that's not the *internet* you are talking about Cisco. That's a private network in which some company gets to say what they think is important.
"Public Internet" is already a large private network (collection of smaller ones), where each ISP on the path of the packet can decide whatever he wants to do with it. There is not much public about it in reality.
I've travelled in many countries, and the alarms so far were raised overwhelmingly when card transactions were made in USA.
Bank usually calls when the card has been used in USA, as card security in that country is a big fail - no PIN, just signature that nobody can check. Clerks request and pretend to check your ID for name match, but since they know nothing about non-USA IDs, any fraudulent user can show them any bit of plastic with name matching that on card. At gas pumps you are required to enter "ZIP Code" as security measure (lol), and of course none is valid for a non-USA card. Big joke overall, no wonder that card issuer wants to verify those transactions
Another example were rental car companies. When you rented car in European country, they still charged your card through their USA HQ, resulting in transaction blockage or a call from the bank to clarify fraud (card suddenly used in a country far away, known for fraud).
Stockholm (among others) has a fiber network built and owned by the city. It is neutral, and various providers can sell services over it.
Selecting and switching service is simple. Moving patchcord is out of fashion, you just reprogram devices to redirect traffic where it should go - no need for physical action.
It looks that you are looking for a device to read scientifical documents/papers, or to learn/study using such books. You are right that e-book readers are not currently targeted at that audience, they are constructed more for either linear reading (e.g. novels) or as a pure reference (bookmarks + search capability).
There is ongoing work on colour e-ink displays, but technology price point is not favourable yet it seems.
Recently I saw a colour e-ink device from Ukrainian company PocketBook. It was either "Color Lux", or a prototype of the next version, and it displayed colours on 8 inch e-ink display. Colours are, obviously, not as vivid as on other types of screens, but they add a very nice touch to what you see compared to shades-of-grey display. PDF engine also seems much improved over Kindle, it offers a few reflow options for example.
The main problem is price. Those readers costs as much as a tablet, and people prefer to buy tablets and have much more functionality than "just" an ebook reader, even colour.
It seems that currently there are two markets: - ebook readers (original Kindle-type) with B/W e-ink display, for reading books/novels/poetry/newspapers. They are single-tasked, power-efficient, replace linear reading of books. - tablets with reader functions (including Kindle Fire and such) that allow for much wider range of content consumption activities. Tablets are also more suited for content creation at the moment.
Neither is as good as paper material for writing notes, making annotations and doing all other things.
In future it might be possible for those two to merge, producing a third category of devices with colour e-ink based touch display and tablet-like content creation/processing capabilities.
This seems to cover what you expect, but it would NOT be a Kindle Killer! This would appeal to a new niche market of people. Kindle type devices will still be used by people who just want to read, and tablet type devices by multimedia content consumers/always connected life.
Maybe you need tablet, not ebook reader?
on
I Want a Kindle Killer
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Ebook readers (the real ones based on e-ink) are good as they are. The less features the better, bookmarks and integration with vocabularies are enough for reading through a book.
If you need fancy stuff - get a tablet, it has features that you mentioned and much more.
Amazon doesn't sell e/books. They provide a service for reading e/books. In some countries e/books are even taxed as a service instead of a physical good, at a higher rate.
There is a push now to charge higher tax only for service-type e/books (DRM-ladden, restricted to device/user, not resellable) and lower tax for proper e/books (no DRM, at most a watermark, can be passed around). It would not only be fair, but also appropriately reflect what you are actually paying for.
Mr Piskorski has often commented that "Ukraine is a fallen country". He appeared on Russia Today tv station as "western expert" claiming Maidan was inspired by Western countries, and repeating Putin rhetorics.
He was accused of being Russian agent since 2007. He is collaborating with CIS-EMO, who go to "observe" various elections in Russia, and produce reports positive for Russia.
All in all - those observers were likely just used by Russians to validate "elections".
People (=masses, as in democracy) tend to buy from the cheapest source. A home-printed 3D object is not going to be cheaper than a mass-produced trinket imported from China, at least not for a long time.
Niche is perhaps in manufacturing specific custom shapes that cannot be satisfied by mass-manufacturing.
Interestingly enough, perhaps Apple users will be the seed market - they are people with money and willing to spend a lot on expensive novelties.
> Clearly the proper metric that used here is to charge for LTE > data use per individual
Change service provider, or probably country;-)
Some operators have not just "per device" but even "per family" plans. You purchase mobile subscription where the fee for data transfer can be shared between multiple devices belonging to multiple persons within family. You just pay small fee (~3$) for extra SIM cards. Limit is 4 cards.
There are also various promotions, for example during the first 6 months LTE data is free (but capped to 100GB before throttling to 2Mbit/s).
Oh, and there is no minimum lenght of subscription, so you are not tied for 12/24/36 months.
Of course majority of operators will make every attempt to milk you, and make you pay for every "service" they perceive.
Slashdot Mirror
By laying off 6,000 people, they are showing cowardice and a lack of confidence in their existing workforce. They would sooner send 6,000 people to the unemployment line then work work with a known, reliable quantity.
If you have a hardware design (say, cooling) engineer and whole world moves to the new fancy software networking (say, you need a COBOL programmer), it might not quite work to shift existing person to a completely new area of knowledge.
Part of adapting to new conditions is changing what has to be delivered to customers, instead of trying to keep selling them a hammer just because you have a hammer.
As for "replace people with cheaper people", that's the way capitalism seems to work. This is not even enforced from the top by corporations, but from the bottom by customers, who will buy anything that's cheaper, even if lower quality.
Same thing happened in other industries.
Whether this move is shortsighgted or not, remains to be seen in a year or two, when restructurization effects come into force.
AFAIK this limit was for _selling_ photos commercially, not for taking them. Those satellites could already take photos at higher resolution (25cm or better), they just had to be provided to USA government and noone else.
50cm images sold commercially were probably upsampled from 25cm photos anyway.
Limit was also only applicable in USA (obviously), and was changed to allow USA companies to compete with rest of the world as technologies advance.
Capitalism at work. As simple as that :-/
Russian military apparently does not participate in ICAO in that area and their weapon systems only recognize friend=russian military, foe=anything else, including civilian.
This crime was done with a russian-made weapon system, as far as is known for now.
And the best hack was the a-ma-zing RealSound system created by Access Software guys (of Tex Murphy fame).
It could even reproduce very good quality speech on that flimsy PC speaker, truly impressive feat at the time.
Soon sound cards got cheap enough and popular, as gamers took over PCs from businessmen/programmers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Metric conversion for those who prefer simpler numbers.
Oh, and that's a furload of Libraries of Congress per time period.
TrueCrypt Hidden Volume.
Oh wait, TrueCrypt is now Not Secure As :-(
"I am surrounded by time - on my computer, the TV guide, cell phone, clock on microwave, clock on stove, clock on standard phone"
Once you get out of parents basement, time is not everywhere ;-)
It's true though that there will be people who find utility in wearing watches, and those who don't. Enforcing one solution for all will not make people happy - if you don't want a watch on your wrist, why wear it?
Interesting to see whether smartwaches would need to be turned off at an airplane... they use radio for some of functionality.
Reason Google is behind this drive is that it will allow them (and NSA) to reach more consumers.
Similar to how USA and other countries' corporations were happy to make Iron Curtain fail - not exactly for political/goodwill reasons, but to reach more consumers.
Apple themselves warn that non-genuine chargers can lead to overheating and other problems:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT...
Apple even still recommends Apple chargers.
http://www.apple.com/support/u...
"we recommend getting an Apple USB power adapter."
Talk about throwing rocks, glass houses, shooting yourself in a foot...
Sounds Turkish or Albanian to me. ;-)
I guess car companies will run out of fancy names soon, and people will drive Ford Celkj or Fiat Celkj
Thanks, missed the beta reference on first read.
Cisco is still more advanced on hardware front, but they lag a lot on software. Standards implementation (even if created by Cisco) in particular, although given how many products they have to cover partially explains those problems.
Juniper usually did "cheap but good enough" trick to gain a lot of ground. Cisco's products were often better engineered, but customers did not care for those better features, or did not understand them, which resulted in Juniper gaining a lot of market share. They have not passed Cisco though (yet) - in 2014 they have about 17% in edge (19% Cisco) and 28% in core routers (62% Cisco).
Markets are in transition anyway (buzzword compliancy), so next 2-3 years will show who got it right. Regardless of checking out competitors' products.
Company in any area would be pretty silly if they don't buy and check how competitors' equipment works. Car analogy actually works here there - people selling Abcd cars would drive Bghj and Celkj cars, so they can better compare them and advise customers of faults in others.
Even TFA says:
purchasing a competitor's products for testing and reverse engineering is not only a common and accepted practice, but "an important component of entrepreneurial capitalism" in the IT industry. "This is part of what makes markets work," he said. "You're supposed to know how your competitor's products work and incorporate as much as you can to make the next generation of your product better."
Regarding intelectual property Cisco seems far more advanced on hardware level, so obtaining gear from competitor is not really going to move things forward. Article also does not mention (unless I missed it) obtaining equipment which is in developement.
The best way for commercial spying is information exchanged by people - engineers from all those networking Silicon Valley companies know each other, they gossip, they betray secrets. This is how most of information leaks through, straight from the sources, not via reverse-engineering.
You can be also completely sure that Juniper bought Cisco equipment for the same purposes, and so did other companies. Even TFA mentions Alcatel-Lucent buying Cisco. It was an all-out activity.
Given that China is the 3rd most visited country in the world, this is probably not nationwide problem, but also for tourists who have been there and have paid with credit card at this China bistro chain.
It's good that such a problem hasn't happened in one of European countries, or in USA, because the problem would have likely been much bigger due to larger base of people using credit cards.
(here's hopelessly hoping that editors do better job writing "articles" outside their US-only minds)
> This means that if ISPs want happy customers and companies want their internet product to work properly, they have to ensure that there's enough room on the entire network to deliver those services adequately.
This is exactly what is running ISPs to ground today.
Companies like Google and other content providers charge end-users directly for their service, and use common-cost Internet to deliver it. Huge increase in traffic (hello MP3, hello video, hello torrents) causes ISPs to inflict costly upgrades of the network to keep the same income from end-users (who expect prices to go down). The same user who is trying to save every penny on internet connectivity will now gladly pay X$ for, say, internet radio service. ISP doesn't see any of that extra income, only increased costs.
The only solution is to share the income and the cost.
Asking ISPs to carry the burden themselves will run them to the ground, or cause market consolidaiton until you have monopoly (similar to what happens in USA).
> Every individual company owning a network will have different priorities.
Concept you described is wrong. It doesn't matter what are those priorities, nobody is proposing to have thousands of priorities. If you read the article this is also not what person from Cisco was proposing directly.
The way it happens in reality is twofold:
- when you get a "circuit", you can pay extra for guaranteed bandwidth. If a video or other content provider wants to have guaranteed bandwidth, they can pay for that, and receive that. All such requests being equal, as long as bandwidth is available. If it runs out, ISP should be earning enough to increas capacity.
- within each content provider traffic you can declare several classes with differing characteristics. Voice will require low bandwidth but top priority for minimum delay/variation. Video will require high or adaptive bandwidth, delay can be higher but with low variation. Content provider can pay for different classes differently, and receive certain bandwidth guarantees for each class.
Both those models exist for a long time (over 15 years) are actively used in existing ISP networks and actively sold - except that whole Internet is usually just one class of service without any specific guarantees.
There should be no problem introducing classes of traffic to the Internet. If video provider 1 wants to pay for lower class than video provider 2, saving money because they think quality should be ok - let that be. If they both pay for the same class, there would be no preference for one or the other though.
This is net neutrality.
Existing networking vendors gear can already (a bit better or worse) carry this out in practice. Obstacle is in financial/political layer - how to make payments for that work on a larger inter-provider scale, including ISPs and content providers.
> Try connecting thousands of private networks with different priorities and different technologies to achieve those and make that work.
> chances that it will ever work are close to zero.
It already works on global scale in the internet, just not on public internet. ISPs have years of practice implementing just that.
> Sorry, no, that's not the *internet* you are talking about Cisco. That's a private network in which some company gets to say what they think is important.
"Public Internet" is already a large private network (collection of smaller ones), where each ISP on the path of the packet can decide whatever he wants to do with it. There is not much public about it in reality.
It's often the opposite to what's in the summary.
I've travelled in many countries, and the alarms so far were raised overwhelmingly when card transactions were made in USA.
Bank usually calls when the card has been used in USA, as card security in that country is a big fail - no PIN, just signature that nobody can check. Clerks request and pretend to check your ID for name match, but since they know nothing about non-USA IDs, any fraudulent user can show them any bit of plastic with name matching that on card. At gas pumps you are required to enter "ZIP Code" as security measure (lol), and of course none is valid for a non-USA card. Big joke overall, no wonder that card issuer wants to verify those transactions
Another example were rental car companies. When you rented car in European country, they still charged your card through their USA HQ, resulting in transaction blockage or a call from the bank to clarify fraud (card suddenly used in a country far away, known for fraud).
Stockholm (among others) has a fiber network built and owned by the city. It is neutral, and various providers can sell services over it.
Selecting and switching service is simple. Moving patchcord is out of fashion, you just reprogram devices to redirect traffic where it should go - no need for physical action.
http://www.investstockholm.com...
This is how this should work. Sadly with various EU laws in effect this model is much harder to replicate now.
Thanks for clarifications!
It looks that you are looking for a device to read scientifical documents/papers, or to learn/study using such books. You are right that e-book readers are not currently targeted at that audience, they are constructed more for either linear reading (e.g. novels) or as a pure reference (bookmarks + search capability).
There is ongoing work on colour e-ink displays, but technology price point is not favourable yet it seems.
Recently I saw a colour e-ink device from Ukrainian company PocketBook. It was either "Color Lux", or a prototype of the next version, and it displayed colours on 8 inch e-ink display. Colours are, obviously, not as vivid as on other types of screens, but they add a very nice touch to what you see compared to shades-of-grey display.
PDF engine also seems much improved over Kindle, it offers a few reflow options for example.
The main problem is price. Those readers costs as much as a tablet, and people prefer to buy tablets and have much more functionality than "just" an ebook reader, even colour.
It seems that currently there are two markets:
- ebook readers (original Kindle-type) with B/W e-ink display, for reading books/novels/poetry/newspapers. They are single-tasked, power-efficient, replace linear reading of books.
- tablets with reader functions (including Kindle Fire and such) that allow for much wider range of content consumption activities. Tablets are also more suited for content creation at the moment.
Neither is as good as paper material for writing notes, making annotations and doing all other things.
In future it might be possible for those two to merge, producing a third category of devices with colour e-ink based touch display and tablet-like content creation/processing capabilities.
This seems to cover what you expect, but it would NOT be a Kindle Killer! This would appeal to a new niche market of people. Kindle type devices will still be used by people who just want to read, and tablet type devices by multimedia content consumers/always connected life.
Ebook readers (the real ones based on e-ink) are good as they are. The less features the better, bookmarks and integration with vocabularies are enough for reading through a book.
If you need fancy stuff - get a tablet, it has features that you mentioned and much more.
An excellent point!
Amazon doesn't sell e/books. They provide a service for reading e/books. In some countries e/books are even taxed as a service instead of a physical good, at a higher rate.
There is a push now to charge higher tax only for service-type e/books (DRM-ladden, restricted to device/user, not resellable) and lower tax for proper e/books (no DRM, at most a watermark, can be passed around). It would not only be fair, but also appropriately reflect what you are actually paying for.
Mr Piskorski has often commented that "Ukraine is a fallen country". He appeared on Russia Today tv station as "western expert" claiming Maidan was inspired by Western countries, and repeating Putin rhetorics.
He was accused of being Russian agent since 2007. He is collaborating with CIS-EMO, who go to "observe" various elections in Russia, and produce reports positive for Russia.
All in all - those observers were likely just used by Russians to validate "elections".
> Symbian was never great.
It was great when it was still called EPOC and ran on Psion palmtops.
> Which promptly puts up to 45 Watts of power into the data pins.
That's why it's called "FIREwire" ;-)
People (=masses, as in democracy) tend to buy from the cheapest source. A home-printed 3D object is not going to be cheaper than a mass-produced trinket imported from China, at least not for a long time.
Niche is perhaps in manufacturing specific custom shapes that cannot be satisfied by mass-manufacturing.
Interestingly enough, perhaps Apple users will be the seed market - they are people with money and willing to spend a lot on expensive novelties.
> Clearly the proper metric that used here is to charge for LTE
> data use per individual
Change service provider, or probably country ;-)
Some operators have not just "per device" but even "per family" plans. You purchase mobile subscription where the fee for data transfer can be shared between multiple devices belonging to multiple persons within family. You just pay small fee (~3$) for extra SIM cards. Limit is 4 cards.
There are also various promotions, for example during the first 6 months LTE data is free (but capped to 100GB before throttling to 2Mbit/s).
Oh, and there is no minimum lenght of subscription, so you are not tied for 12/24/36 months.
Of course majority of operators will make every attempt to milk you, and make you pay for every "service" they perceive.