There's going to be so much fragmentation on LTE that likely most devices will only support a couple of the frequencies required. Plus the US cell carriers are going to do everything they can to make sure the devices are software locked to their specific service.
Certainly the 'free' contract phones will be like this. Separately, though, it should be possible to build a new version of a 'world phone' that can pick up most of the frequencies. Heck, I had a $40 scanner that could pick up most useful bands.
Ah, so AT&T gets what they wanted out of the T-Mobile deal - more spectrum can be substituted for more towers as far as capacity goes, except they're going to need to get new handset hardware deployed. But, perhaps that's cheaper, including the penalty payment to T-Mobile, than actually buying T-Mobile.
Cheaper in the face of government obstruction, anyway.
The skies aren't safe because of the TSA, it's because nobody really wants to blow up an airplane, jihadi style.
Think about it - the failure rate of the TSA is over 60% at some airports. If the so-called jihadis really want to blow up airplanes, they just need to send 10 people and they'll take out six airplanes, on average.
Or if you believe this liquid explosive nonsense, they can send 10 guys each with 3 oz shampoo bottles.
It may be because ordinary Americans solved the security problem over a field in Shanksville PA just an hour after the 9/11 plot became known.
Or maybe the secure cockpit doors had something to do with it.
Or maybe the 9/11 plot wasn't really carried out by jihadis.
Any of the above could be true, but what's clearly not true is that there currently exists a jihadi threat to airliners.
any drill bits that can withstand the heat much below that
Is this geothermal heat (combined with the heat of drilling, I assume)?
Is the problem that it's too hard to pump coolant down there to keep the drill cool? I really have no idea what the temps are like at that depth - does water flash to steam?
Or maybe it's not hot enough and they just wind up with a pool of really hot water and incredible challenges to pump it back up? I can't imagine pumping water 12km straight up. Actually, any engineering achievement (like this drill) that is 12km tall is hella impressive to start with.
It's been well known to me, for years, that the local chamber of commerce is comprised of local business owners. I'm honestly not sure how anyone could be confused about the non-governmental status of any level of CoC.
Right - I think the more insidious aspect of the name "US Chamber of Commerce" is that it implies for many a parent organization to the local chambers of commerce.
Which isn't true - they're a nasty lobbying organization that happened to pick a name that borders on fraudulent misappropriation of mark. The local chambers have had to pend the past 5 years or so telling their communities, "no, that's not us."
An overt reference to a world wide icon like that sort of blames the inspriration and any similarities to siri on unpatented prior art right out of the gate.
Apple named theirs after an anagram of the research company who worked on the technology.
Google named theirs after a Sci-Fi babe.
Reminds me of Steve Job's story about sharing earbuds. Keep an eye on Google - they might yet amount to something.
and he could be perfectly disassembled and reassembled at a molecular level by a common transporter
Transporters don't work that way - they're basically analog.
They 'energize' the matter and send it as energy to the destination.
This avoids (usually) being able to make copies of people/things as their actual molecules are sent, not disassembled and re-assembled digitally. They can filter for microorganisms and weapons, but apparently that's quasi-analog too.
Exception: the Animated series used a digital model to deus ex machina several of the eps.
Apple used to actually have real researchers, Human Interface Group, Advanced Technology Group, etc. and they did real research (which wasn't always abided by). Steve Jobs disbanded them all and announced that the product teams could always do their own research. But as you point out, that's not really the case. Jobs really just didn't want to have any people with data to override his sensibilities.
Microsoft currently has a Research Group that is similar, except they seem even less product-focus. Google has some hard-science folks, but they're more operations focused (CPU design, etc.) or doing non-Google stuff (driverless cars, solar, etc.)
Right, and if prices are kept down artificially, there's no financial incentive to divert the trucks loaded with plywood from Minnesota to Florida. Or to load up the plywood sitting unused in Minnesota and ship it to Florida.
We had a huge ice storm here a few years ago and some people were without power for three weeks. Some entrepreneurs hired a truck down to New Jersey and bought a truck load of them up here to sell at a profit and the State nearly ruined their efforts.
The bureaucrats were running around shouting, "price gouging! price gouging!" and the willing buyers were shouting back, "frozen pipes are more expensive and you're not doing a damn thing to help!"
Ah, OK, so they've shifted the single point of failure away from the computers and to the sensors. We saw this also with the iced up venturi tube that sent the Air France plane into the ocean.
Chrome's version system doesn't break plugins, in my experience. I have a Firefox plugin that needs to be updated every time Firefox gets updated, for no other reason than a number change in the plugin.
Says who? Your opinion. A valid one, but there are different ones, which also have some merit, e.g. to be able to access all controls when the windows are stacked in a way that one corner is always covered.
Apple used to actually have human user interface engineers working on usability in a scientific way. They worked out the close-button away from the others was the least likely to cause accidental data loss.
Your point is fair: they valued the avoidance of accidental data loss over the value of window manipulation under the stacking conditions you outline.
But I think that's a reasonable default.
It's pretty well-known that Microsoft didn't copy the Macintosh behavior to avoid copying Apple ("innovation, yo"). Same reason they put the Start button in the lower left when it makes sense in the upper left for Western readers (though having menus inside windows makes an argument for bottom-dock more tenable). Menus inside windows violates Fitt's Law, though, so it's a patch on a bad design.
Anybody working on a Qt desktop that follows good usability practices? Sign me up!
Why was an algorithm written that could do something that no one has ever wanted to do?
Two or three times no less... at least that's what I've been told repeatedly, that three independent airplane computer systems are written from spec by different teams, and then given the input they all produce output, and the best 2-out-of-3 results win and cause physical action to happen.
So either at least two teams messed this specific item up the same crazy way, or that airline computer safety story they've been telling is a crock.
I use GPG (Enigmail) for really sensitive stuff but typing my very long passphrase every 15 minutes gets old. Also, those e-mails do not participate in my global search, so I try to keep them as limited as possible. My mail store is on a LUKS volume anyway, so GPG is doing a narrow function.
Occasionally I'll find somebody who speaks S/MIME, and then that happens automagically for me. That's nice, but largely a function of mailer integration.
But, in the meantime, a good half of my e-mail, and most of the important stuff, travels out my network on SMTP/STARTTLS connections, so that window of eavesdropping is closing as well.
Use as much encryption as makes sense (oh, that's the hard part, eh?)
AC already talked about price elasticity, but don't forget that this is also a desirable outcome. When resources are scarce, the pricing mechanism ensures that the available resources are allocated to where they're most needed. This is why government price controls around natural disasters are so dangerous - they let a guy building a dog house in Minnesota pay the same for a sheet of plywood as the guy in Florida who needs to board up his house as the hurricane approaches.
Were there no scarcity none of this would matter, but we can't repeal the first law of economics.
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up
Even if it's spinning you can't erase everything because of automatic bad sector re-allocation, unless your drive supports SMART extended Secure Erase. And that's if you trust Secure Erase, and at least Seagate won't even give you a list of their drives that support it.
When I send a failed drive in for repair, they can see my/boot partition - LUKS takes care of everything else for me.
You couldn't be more wrong. RAID is not backup. Never has been, never will be.
Is Slashcode broken today? It has your comment as being in-reply-to:
It would be cheaper and safer to buy 2 Low Cost Hard Drives and Raid them, than buying an expensive Hard Drive wth extended warrantees!
Which is a valid strategy for dealing with flakey drives (i.e. all drives). Doesn't say anything about backup.
Though, I use RAID to manage backup all the time. My backup volume is on a LUKS volume on a RAID mirror, which gets split and re-combined with drives that cycle offsite.
I HAVE however run into my fair share of HDDs go bad within 3 years and definitely 5 years.
Right, I think almost all of the drives I've bought in the past 5 years have died within 5 years. But a 1-year warranty might as well be a 90-day warranty, in my experience. I keep everything on RAID, so I just accept that every couple months I need to send a few drives off to WD, or Seagate for repair. The anticipated cost of a drive for me is retail-price + $10, roughly the cost of postage for a return (to be accurate: plus the cost of one onsite spare per capacity of drives in use). I've never had to send one to Hitachi, though I only switched to them a year ago - to get away from Seagate. Now that Seagate and WD are approaching cartel status, I guess this policy change isn't too surprising.
Normally I buy the newest biggest drives for my backup system (aside: howto upgrade on the fly) and then trickle down the drives to other volumes/systems. At this point I don't really have any use for 160GB 3.5" drives but 300GB+ are still good. I have a small cache of 300,500,750GB drives for use when I build 1-off systems.
Now, though, with this change, instead of n+$10 for the cost of a drive, it's going to be $1.5n going forward (I'm being generous here - it's really $2n for a given unit but with larger capacities I can often consolidate). That's a huge increase in product price, in a way that's hidden at first glance. Their warranty claims will fall, I'd guess, by 80%.
Hidden price inflation is really nasty, whether it's WD, Seagate, or the Fed that's doing it.
Generally, my hard drive buying priorities are: stability, warranty, capacity, price, heat, sound, performance*, in that order. A vendor that offers a good warranty on a stable drive is going to get my business if their prices are under the $1.5n mark of these now-1-year-warranty bozos. Somebody else mentioned Samsung - I need to look into that.
* I put SSD in front of anything where performance matters
So what if Joe had Localgeek work the Kung-Fu more than five years ago, and switched ISPs less than five years ago. What then? Does that make my argument "not an issue"? Why, or why not?
Then his DynDNS service would have stopped working about five years ago. But first he would have gotten an e-mail at that point warning him of impending deletion (I did for a few months before dd-wrt got a fix in, and so I logged into their website each time and clicked the 'refresh' button).
If his gear survived that period five years ago, then this policy they implemented last year would not have affected him at all.
Switching ISP's doesn't matter - if he's not renewing his 'lease' monthly, if his IP is stable or not, he'd have lost his host already.
read what the fuck I actually wrote, and try to understand that I'm really not biased in this conversation
I didn't suggest that you were - merely pointed out an error in your reasoning. Nothing more, nothing less. I assumed you wanted to have a solid argument.
some folks who keep track of things to the best of their own technical, cognitive, and organizational abilities will be legitimately surprised by this move.
No doubt, but what else is DynDNS to do? Offer a free service once and then commit to keeping it running forever without any opportunity for change? If forever isn't reasonable, is it a century, or a score, or a decade?
Nah, netbooks are still great for portable work. If you travel a lot, and need a computer primarily for office apps and web browsing, then nothing beats a netbook.
I switched from a netbook to a E350-based 13" MSI 'laptop', and I couldn't be happier. Still have the battery life I loved, but the CPU is pretty fast. It's halfway between the weight of the 10" netbook I had 3 years ago and the one I bought two years ago.
It's still light enough and small enough that I never regret putting it in my bag. It's not eeePC 701 small, but I have enough screen space to be generally useful too.
Linux hardware support is almost there (still need open-source ati driver to support audio over HDMI on R6xx).
Slashdot Mirror
There's going to be so much fragmentation on LTE that likely most devices will only support a couple of the frequencies required. Plus the US cell carriers are going to do everything they can to make sure the devices are software locked to their specific service.
Certainly the 'free' contract phones will be like this. Separately, though, it should be possible to build a new version of a 'world phone' that can pick up most of the frequencies. Heck, I had a $40 scanner that could pick up most useful bands.
Ah, so AT&T gets what they wanted out of the T-Mobile deal - more spectrum can be substituted for more towers as far as capacity goes, except they're going to need to get new handset hardware deployed. But, perhaps that's cheaper, including the penalty payment to T-Mobile, than actually buying T-Mobile.
Cheaper in the face of government obstruction, anyway.
This method requires competence on the part of the interrogator though, so in effect that leaves out TSA employees.
And now that they're unionized, good luck with that. When was the last time we saw government voluntarily reduce its size and scope?
The only way this is going to be fixed is by wiping out the whole department. There's a primary coming up a candidate who would do that.
Exactly right. EFF isn't corrupt - we're better off with them than legislation.
In this case market regulation >>>> government regulation.
The skies aren't safe because of the TSA, it's because nobody really wants to blow up an airplane, jihadi style.
Think about it - the failure rate of the TSA is over 60% at some airports. If the so-called jihadis really want to blow up airplanes, they just need to send 10 people and they'll take out six airplanes, on average.
Or if you believe this liquid explosive nonsense, they can send 10 guys each with 3 oz shampoo bottles.
It may be because ordinary Americans solved the security problem over a field in Shanksville PA just an hour after the 9/11 plot became known.
Or maybe the secure cockpit doors had something to do with it.
Or maybe the 9/11 plot wasn't really carried out by jihadis.
Any of the above could be true, but what's clearly not true is that there currently exists a jihadi threat to airliners.
These are all so easy to fake, it's hard to know.
any drill bits that can withstand the heat much below that
Is this geothermal heat (combined with the heat of drilling, I assume)?
Is the problem that it's too hard to pump coolant down there to keep the drill cool? I really have no idea what the temps are like at that depth - does water flash to steam?
Or maybe it's not hot enough and they just wind up with a pool of really hot water and incredible challenges to pump it back up? I can't imagine pumping water 12km straight up. Actually, any engineering achievement (like this drill) that is 12km tall is hella impressive to start with.
Both are sliding
If warranties are sliding, costs are *rising*.
It's been well known to me, for years, that the local chamber of commerce is comprised of local business owners. I'm honestly not sure how anyone could be confused about the non-governmental status of any level of CoC.
Right - I think the more insidious aspect of the name "US Chamber of Commerce" is that it implies for many a parent organization to the local chambers of commerce.
Which isn't true - they're a nasty lobbying organization that happened to pick a name that borders on fraudulent misappropriation of mark. The local chambers have had to pend the past 5 years or so telling their communities, "no, that's not us."
An overt reference to a world wide icon like that sort of blames the inspriration and any similarities to siri on unpatented prior art right out of the gate.
Apple named theirs after an anagram of the research company who worked on the technology.
Google named theirs after a Sci-Fi babe.
Reminds me of Steve Job's story about sharing earbuds. Keep an eye on Google - they might yet amount to something.
and he could be perfectly disassembled and reassembled at a molecular level by a common transporter
Transporters don't work that way - they're basically analog.
They 'energize' the matter and send it as energy to the destination.
This avoids (usually) being able to make copies of people/things as their actual molecules are sent, not disassembled and re-assembled digitally. They can filter for microorganisms and weapons, but apparently that's quasi-analog too.
Exception: the Animated series used a digital model to deus ex machina several of the eps.
Apple used to actually have real researchers, Human Interface Group, Advanced Technology Group, etc. and they did real research (which wasn't always abided by). Steve Jobs disbanded them all and announced that the product teams could always do their own research. But as you point out, that's not really the case. Jobs really just didn't want to have any people with data to override his sensibilities.
Microsoft currently has a Research Group that is similar, except they seem even less product-focus. Google has some hard-science folks, but they're more operations focused (CPU design, etc.) or doing non-Google stuff (driverless cars, solar, etc.)
Right, and if prices are kept down artificially, there's no financial incentive to divert the trucks loaded with plywood from Minnesota to Florida. Or to load up the plywood sitting unused in Minnesota and ship it to Florida.
We had a huge ice storm here a few years ago and some people were without power for three weeks. Some entrepreneurs hired a truck down to New Jersey and bought a truck load of them up here to sell at a profit and the State nearly ruined their efforts.
The bureaucrats were running around shouting, "price gouging! price gouging!" and the willing buyers were shouting back, "frozen pipes are more expensive and you're not doing a damn thing to help!"
Ah, OK, so they've shifted the single point of failure away from the computers and to the sensors. We saw this also with the iced up venturi tube that sent the Air France plane into the ocean.
Chrome's version system doesn't break plugins, in my experience. I have a Firefox plugin that needs to be updated every time Firefox gets updated, for no other reason than a number change in the plugin.
That's a reportable bug now.
Says who? Your opinion. A valid one, but there are different ones, which also have some merit, e.g. to be able to access all controls when the windows are stacked in a way that one corner is always covered.
Apple used to actually have human user interface engineers working on usability in a scientific way. They worked out the close-button away from the others was the least likely to cause accidental data loss.
Your point is fair: they valued the avoidance of accidental data loss over the value of window manipulation under the stacking conditions you outline.
But I think that's a reasonable default.
It's pretty well-known that Microsoft didn't copy the Macintosh behavior to avoid copying Apple ("innovation, yo"). Same reason they put the Start button in the lower left when it makes sense in the upper left for Western readers (though having menus inside windows makes an argument for bottom-dock more tenable). Menus inside windows violates Fitt's Law, though, so it's a patch on a bad design.
Anybody working on a Qt desktop that follows good usability practices? Sign me up!
Honestly, what crap software out there requires a full software update to change tax tables?
They've fired everybody who understood payroll taxes and rely on the vendor to 'make it work'.
Why was an algorithm written that could do something that no one has ever wanted to do?
Two or three times no less ... at least that's what I've been told repeatedly, that three independent airplane computer systems are written from spec by different teams, and then given the input they all produce output, and the best 2-out-of-3 results win and cause physical action to happen.
So either at least two teams messed this specific item up the same crazy way, or that airline computer safety story they've been telling is a crock.
Yes, no, maybe.
I use GPG (Enigmail) for really sensitive stuff but typing my very long passphrase every 15 minutes gets old. Also, those e-mails do not participate in my global search, so I try to keep them as limited as possible. My mail store is on a LUKS volume anyway, so GPG is doing a narrow function.
Occasionally I'll find somebody who speaks S/MIME, and then that happens automagically for me. That's nice, but largely a function of mailer integration.
But, in the meantime, a good half of my e-mail, and most of the important stuff, travels out my network on SMTP/STARTTLS connections, so that window of eavesdropping is closing as well.
Use as much encryption as makes sense (oh, that's the hard part, eh?)
(triple prices after a 25% drop in production)
AC already talked about price elasticity, but don't forget that this is also a desirable outcome. When resources are scarce, the pricing mechanism ensures that the available resources are allocated to where they're most needed. This is why government price controls around natural disasters are so dangerous - they let a guy building a dog house in Minnesota pay the same for a sheet of plywood as the guy in Florida who needs to board up his house as the hurricane approaches.
Were there no scarcity none of this would matter, but we can't repeal the first law of economics.
But seriously I have never returned a drive for warranty as once it fails securely erasing the data can be an issue if ti doesn't spin up
Even if it's spinning you can't erase everything because of automatic bad sector re-allocation, unless your drive supports SMART extended Secure Erase. And that's if you trust Secure Erase, and at least Seagate won't even give you a list of their drives that support it.
When I send a failed drive in for repair, they can see my /boot partition - LUKS takes care of everything else for me.
You couldn't be more wrong. RAID is not backup. Never has been, never will be.
Is Slashcode broken today? It has your comment as being in-reply-to:
Which is a valid strategy for dealing with flakey drives (i.e. all drives). Doesn't say anything about backup.
Though, I use RAID to manage backup all the time. My backup volume is on a LUKS volume on a RAID mirror, which gets split and re-combined with drives that cycle offsite.
I HAVE however run into my fair share of HDDs go bad within 3 years and definitely 5 years.
Right, I think almost all of the drives I've bought in the past 5 years have died within 5 years. But a 1-year warranty might as well be a 90-day warranty, in my experience. I keep everything on RAID, so I just accept that every couple months I need to send a few drives off to WD, or Seagate for repair. The anticipated cost of a drive for me is retail-price + $10, roughly the cost of postage for a return (to be accurate: plus the cost of one onsite spare per capacity of drives in use). I've never had to send one to Hitachi, though I only switched to them a year ago - to get away from Seagate. Now that Seagate and WD are approaching cartel status, I guess this policy change isn't too surprising.
Normally I buy the newest biggest drives for my backup system (aside: howto upgrade on the fly) and then trickle down the drives to other volumes/systems. At this point I don't really have any use for 160GB 3.5" drives but 300GB+ are still good. I have a small cache of 300,500,750GB drives for use when I build 1-off systems.
Now, though, with this change, instead of n+$10 for the cost of a drive, it's going to be $1.5n going forward (I'm being generous here - it's really $2n for a given unit but with larger capacities I can often consolidate). That's a huge increase in product price, in a way that's hidden at first glance. Their warranty claims will fall, I'd guess, by 80%.
Hidden price inflation is really nasty, whether it's WD, Seagate, or the Fed that's doing it.
Generally, my hard drive buying priorities are: stability, warranty, capacity, price, heat, sound, performance*, in that order. A vendor that offers a good warranty on a stable drive is going to get my business if their prices are under the $1.5n mark of these now-1-year-warranty bozos. Somebody else mentioned Samsung - I need to look into that.
* I put SSD in front of anything where performance matters
So what if Joe had Localgeek work the Kung-Fu more than five years ago, and switched ISPs less than five years ago. What then? Does that make my argument "not an issue"? Why, or why not?
Then his DynDNS service would have stopped working about five years ago. But first he would have gotten an e-mail at that point warning him of impending deletion (I did for a few months before dd-wrt got a fix in, and so I logged into their website each time and clicked the 'refresh' button).
If his gear survived that period five years ago, then this policy they implemented last year would not have affected him at all.
Switching ISP's doesn't matter - if he's not renewing his 'lease' monthly, if his IP is stable or not, he'd have lost his host already.
read what the fuck I actually wrote, and try to understand that I'm really not biased in this conversation
I didn't suggest that you were - merely pointed out an error in your reasoning. Nothing more, nothing less. I assumed you wanted to have a solid argument.
some folks who keep track of things to the best of their own technical, cognitive, and organizational abilities will be legitimately surprised by this move.
No doubt, but what else is DynDNS to do? Offer a free service once and then commit to keeping it running forever without any opportunity for change? If forever isn't reasonable, is it a century, or a score, or a decade?
Nah, netbooks are still great for portable work. If you travel a lot, and need a computer primarily for office apps and web browsing, then nothing beats a netbook.
I switched from a netbook to a E350-based 13" MSI 'laptop', and I couldn't be happier. Still have the battery life I loved, but the CPU is pretty fast. It's halfway between the weight of the 10" netbook I had 3 years ago and the one I bought two years ago.
It's still light enough and small enough that I never regret putting it in my bag. It's not eeePC 701 small, but I have enough screen space to be generally useful too.
Linux hardware support is almost there (still need open-source ati driver to support audio over HDMI on R6xx).