If a customer buys a new phone and finds it doesn't work with his expensive car, he is going to take the phone back and get a new phone (from another manufacturer) that does work with his car.
They shouldn't be locking your phone whilst on contract. Since you are on contract, you are still paying them back through your monthly fees regardless of which carrier you are using your phone on.
Only time they need to lock a phone is when its subsidized but not on a contract (e.g. discounted prepaid phones).
The carriers exert a LOT of influence over the manufacturers. Carrier says "give us that phone but remove the WiFi chip and disable the GPS please". Manufacturer has to say "yes" else carrier says "OK, then, we wont sell your phones"
Only manufacturers at this point that MIGHT be able to say NO to carriers would be RIM (because the Blackberry is so important to business customers and unlike Windows Mobile there is no alternative supplier) and Apple (who has a phone so hot that AT&T cant afford not to keep carrying it)
Knowing the government, they would either pick a crap standard (or one with a crap implementation) *cough*CDMA*cough* or they would try to invent something new and get it wrong. Even if they did the right thing and picked GSM and UMTS as the standards, what frequencies should they pick? 1900? 1700? 850? 700? (all 4 are currently in use for UMTS in the USA or will be in the future). Or would they just mandate multi-band UMTS phones (which makes the phones a lot bigger and more expensive)
I did work a few years ago for an unnamed handset maker and I can tell you that standards aren't always followed to the letter. There was at least one incident where we had to fix something in our bit of the handset software because it wouldnt work correctly with the in-car cellphone connect of a certain model of luxury car. So just because its supposedly a "standard" doesn't mean there wont be incompatibilities in some places or certain edge cases.
It should be deals (including the way spectrum auctions are carried out and regulated) that result in carriers *cough*Verizon*cough* getting a monopoly (or near monopoly) in certain areas just because they are the only carrier with coverage. (like the deals various carriers have made to get exclusives in subway systems, high-rises and other places where extra equipment is needed to give sufficient coverage)
Also, Microsoft has not (as far as I know) announced what audio and video formats they would support in HTML5. Its a good bet that they will support Windows Media and would only support alternatives (i.e. MPEG) if they need to in order for to work. They would never support OGG or Theora (because those formats just wont gain any traction in the commercial world)
The way to go is to introduce a new ground-up API (ala Apple) and have all the legacy stuff run via something similar to WINE (only built with the real Windows XP/Vista/etc source).
If a data card costs 30 bucks a month with 5GB of data, the carrier should allow people to tether and pay that same 30 bucks a month for the same 5GB of tethered data. Simple and means people dont have to carry a data card AND a phone around.
Having experienced both the 68000 and the x86 (in both old-school segmented mode and 386/486 32-bit flat mode), I agree with the statement that the 68000 is the superior CPU.
What I want to see is for someone (Intel maybe) to invent a new PC that gets rid of all the legacy cruft.
It would be a PC without any support for (even in the CPU/chip-set/etc): Floppy Disk Controller/Floppy Disk Drive IDE port PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports Serial and Parallel ports PCI and ISA slots VGA port Interrupt Controller (or is that still used even today with PCI Express?) Internal software modems Etc
Also, it would use Intel EFI and not the legacy BIOS. It would use all the modern technology (SATA for disks, USB for peripherals, latest Intel CPU, DVI or HDMI for display output, PCI express for add-in cards etc). In addition it would transition from real mode straight into 64 bit flat protected mode as the first few instructions executed by the BIOS code. It would be compatible with all current hardware (only possible issue there is finding PCI Express add-in cards that aren't in some way graphics related, e.g. PCI-e WiFi cards) and could work with most current OSs with minimal changes (if any are needed at all).
So its the PC minus all the bits 90% of people don't need anymore and that just take up silicon and board space. Even in 2009 and even on motherboards for the latest Core i7 speed machines from Intel, you still get a Floppy connector AND PS/2 keyboard/mouse connectors. Cant we just move to USB for keyboards and mice and forget that PS/2 (the computer and the keyboard and mouse ports) ever existed? Oh and can we also stop shipping 32 bit operating systems (Vista and 7) on machines that have x86-64 support in the CPUs please?
If you actually NEED a floppy disk or a PS/2 keyboard and mouse port or a serial port or whatever, there would be many other options to pick that DID have the legacy junk. But my idea means those who don't need the legacy junk don't have to get it anymore.
Say what you will about Microsoft software but I have owned a number of Microsoft optical mice over the years and have yet to find a mouse I like better.
Ok, so is there any reason why a proper native OpenJDK port (that works in all the browsers and doesn't use X11) wouldnt be possible? Is it just a case of "patches wanted" or are there undocumented/hidden/internal parts of OSX that only Apple can use that are needed for a full JVM?
Thats the OPs point, that it likely costs the cinema more (staff, counting the money, whatever) when you buy a ticket from the ticket counter than it does when you buy on-line yet you the consumer pay more for the on-line ticket (which is cheaper for the cinema) vs the paper ticket (which is more expensive for the cinema).
Although it may be that they want to encourage people to buy the ticket at the box office since those people are more likely to buy the popcorn, chips, cola and other products that are sitting there on the counter right next to the ticket seller.
The number one problem with health care in the USA is the lack of competition. Too many people are stuck with a company health plan or otherwise locked into their health insurance for whatever reason.
If there was more competition (including removing any barriers to entry for new health insurers who want to enter the market, stopping/banning any anti-competitive activity or collusion currently taking place and changing the tax rules so people can get exactly the same tax benefit by choosing their own health fund as they do now by being on the company plan), the forces of the free market take over. Someone (either a new player or an established player) recognizes that they can get an increased market share by offering better service (i.e. actually giving people health care when they need it) and make more total profit (even if they may make less profit per person)
Economics 101 shows that markets which have competition generally have better value for consumers than markets which do not have competition.
Maybe its time for Sun (who DO control Java) to tell Apple to change its ways (and give control of Java on the Mac to Sun so that Sun can fix stuff without having to wait for Apple). Its not like Sun needs Apple in order to produce Java for the Mac.
Or is this like the graphics drivers where only Apple has access to the "secret bits" necessary for a JVM to do all the things that the current Mac JVM does? How hard would it be to just port OpenJDK/IceTea/whatever to Mac and be done with it?
When I bought a prepaid phone from Telstra, I didnt have to show any ID to get the phone. But to actually activate the service, there WAS an ID check required (exactly what level of check it was I forget). And there has been talk about tightening the requirements to get a prepaid phone even more so that its easier for law enforcement to track down the real owner of a prepaid phone (both because of the terrorist aspect and because of criminals buying prepaid phones and SIMs, using them for a while and then throwing them away)
One of the reasons for Real ID was because some state drivers licenses were too easily to fake. And in some states, the identity checks you have to take to get the license were too lax. (i.e. the "can you drive" parts were more important than the "are you who you claim to be" parts)
By requiring minimum standards for license design and features and for identity checks, it makes it harder for people to get fake drivers licenses to then use as ID in the many places where you DO have to show ID such as entering certain government buildings, boarding many domestic airline flights, buying alcohol or tobacco in many states or paying with certain forms of payment (especially checks).
What they do in Australia for getting various forms of ID (including passports) is require you to take some passport size photos and have them signed by someone who is vouching that you are who you say you are and that they have known you in some capacity for at least a certain amount of time.
There are rules about what sort of person is allowed to do this also, it has to be someone from a specific list of jobs that are supposedly in good standing in the community (I dont know of the specific list but I know it includes people like university professors)
The real problem in the US is that its too easy to get and use all sorts of things (including credit cards and prepaid mobile phones) with very little ID checking.
As a programmer, having someone else look at my code is good since there will always be mistakes I just cant see from looking at it. Someone else looking at it might pick them up when I cant, especially if they have more knowledge of bits of the codebase than I do.
Something that forces companies holding private data to think about security (both physical and electronic). Something that would force companies to stop making web apps with security holes wide enough to drive a 747 through. Something that would force companies to actually give a stuff about phishing. Something that would force companies to put stronger locks on the rooms holding all those personal files they have on you so that people cant steal those. Etc.
Its not about AT&T wanting to charge for MMS, its about the fact that their MMSC servers arent up to the task of all those iPhone users sending MMSs. And the fact that there is no easy way to disable the MMS redirect only for phones that have MMS support.
That means funding research into electric cars (including those that use things like biofuel powered internal combustion engines as a backup) That means funding research into (and building) new nuclear reactor designs that can take all the harmful waste (both from power generation and nuclear weapons) currently sitting in cooling ponds, storage facilities and vaults all over the US and turn it into more electricity (and into waste that will become radiation free in a much shorter time). That means funding research into sustainable biofuels (both for vehicles and power plants) including hemp and switch-grass but NOT biofuels like corn that replace food crops That means funding research into solar technology (and covering all that empty desert in the southwestern USA with solar collectors)
Most of all it means telling all the vested interests to go jump. The anti-drug campaigners who refuse to allow hemp to be grown because of its ties to marijuana. The anti-nuclear campaigners who fail to see that its possible to build a new nuclear reactor with a modern design (which is far less likely to fail in a way that releases radiation than the dinosaurs operating today) and then (and the new reactors come on stream) shut down the old dinosaurs (the ones that the ant-nuclear campaigners love to hate). It means telling the corn lobby (who seem to have the misguided belief that corn biofuels should be part of the energy equation into the future), the coal lobby (who believe that coal can be made "clean") and others to get stuffed.
The problem is all the crap Adobe has shoehorned into the PDF format like JavaScript and all those plugins. If PDF went back to what it should be, a document format with no extra crap, the problems will go away.
PDF and Acrobat need to go back to a core focus on being a way to represent documents and other things in a way that looks the same no matter what OS, screen resolution or browser you are running and ditch all the extra garbage that has made Acrobat and Acrobat Reader so bloated.
A number of people who are beta testing 3.0 (officially or unofficially) who were able to convince AT&T to turn on MMS (before AT&T and/or apple put a stop to it) and it worked perfectly fine. So the only excuse is that AT&T hasn't figured out how much they should charge iPhone customers for MMS.
Or maybe AT&T bought the el-cheapo option when they installed their MMS kit and it cant handle all those new iPhones suddenly sending all those MMSs...
If they really want to block these sites, cant they just add some more firewall rules to the great firewall of china like they do for all the other "subversive" sites?
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If a customer buys a new phone and finds it doesn't work with his expensive car, he is going to take the phone back and get a new phone (from another manufacturer) that does work with his car.
They shouldn't be locking your phone whilst on contract. Since you are on contract, you are still paying them back through your monthly fees regardless of which carrier you are using your phone on.
Only time they need to lock a phone is when its subsidized but not on a contract (e.g. discounted prepaid phones).
The carriers exert a LOT of influence over the manufacturers. Carrier says "give us that phone but remove the WiFi chip and disable the GPS please". Manufacturer has to say "yes" else carrier says "OK, then, we wont sell your phones"
Only manufacturers at this point that MIGHT be able to say NO to carriers would be RIM (because the Blackberry is so important to business customers and unlike Windows Mobile there is no alternative supplier) and Apple (who has a phone so hot that AT&T cant afford not to keep carrying it)
Knowing the government, they would either pick a crap standard (or one with a crap implementation) *cough*CDMA*cough* or they would try to invent something new and get it wrong. Even if they did the right thing and picked GSM and UMTS as the standards, what frequencies should they pick? 1900? 1700? 850? 700? (all 4 are currently in use for UMTS in the USA or will be in the future). Or would they just mandate multi-band UMTS phones (which makes the phones a lot bigger and more expensive)
I did work a few years ago for an unnamed handset maker and I can tell you that standards aren't always followed to the letter.
There was at least one incident where we had to fix something in our bit of the handset software because it wouldnt work correctly with the in-car cellphone connect of a certain model of luxury car. So just because its supposedly a "standard" doesn't mean there wont be incompatibilities in some places or certain edge cases.
It should be deals (including the way spectrum auctions are carried out and regulated) that result in carriers *cough*Verizon*cough* getting a monopoly (or near monopoly) in certain areas just because they are the only carrier with coverage. (like the deals various carriers have made to get exclusives in subway systems, high-rises and other places where extra equipment is needed to give sufficient coverage)
Also, Microsoft has not (as far as I know) announced what audio and video formats they would support in HTML5. Its a good bet that they will support Windows Media and would only support alternatives (i.e. MPEG) if they need to in order for to work. They would never support OGG or Theora (because those formats just wont gain any traction in the commercial world)
The way to go is to introduce a new ground-up API (ala Apple) and have all the legacy stuff run via something similar to WINE (only built with the real Windows XP/Vista/etc source).
If a data card costs 30 bucks a month with 5GB of data, the carrier should allow people to tether and pay that same 30 bucks a month for the same 5GB of tethered data. Simple and means people dont have to carry a data card AND a phone around.
Having experienced both the 68000 and the x86 (in both old-school segmented mode and 386/486 32-bit flat mode), I agree with the statement that the 68000 is the superior CPU.
What I want to see is for someone (Intel maybe) to invent a new PC that gets rid of all the legacy cruft.
It would be a PC without any support for (even in the CPU/chip-set/etc):
Floppy Disk Controller/Floppy Disk Drive
IDE port
PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports
Serial and Parallel ports
PCI and ISA slots
VGA port
Interrupt Controller (or is that still used even today with PCI Express?)
Internal software modems
Etc
Also, it would use Intel EFI and not the legacy BIOS. It would use all the modern technology (SATA for disks, USB for peripherals, latest Intel CPU, DVI or HDMI for display output, PCI express for add-in cards etc). In addition it would transition from real mode straight into 64 bit flat protected mode as the first few instructions executed by the BIOS code. It would be compatible with all current hardware (only possible issue there is finding PCI Express add-in cards that aren't in some way graphics related, e.g. PCI-e WiFi cards) and could work with most current OSs with minimal changes (if any are needed at all).
So its the PC minus all the bits 90% of people don't need anymore and that just take up silicon and board space. Even in 2009 and even on motherboards for the latest Core i7 speed machines from Intel, you still get a Floppy connector AND PS/2 keyboard/mouse connectors. Cant we just move to USB for keyboards and mice and forget that PS/2 (the computer and the keyboard and mouse ports) ever existed? Oh and can we also stop shipping 32 bit operating systems (Vista and 7) on machines that have x86-64 support in the CPUs please?
If you actually NEED a floppy disk or a PS/2 keyboard and mouse port or a serial port or whatever, there would be many other options to pick that DID have the legacy junk. But my idea means those who don't need the legacy junk don't have to get it anymore.
Say what you will about Microsoft software but I have owned a number of Microsoft optical mice over the years and have yet to find a mouse I like better.
Ok, so is there any reason why a proper native OpenJDK port (that works in all the browsers and doesn't use X11) wouldnt be possible? Is it just a case of "patches wanted" or are there undocumented/hidden/internal parts of OSX that only Apple can use that are needed for a full JVM?
Thats the OPs point, that it likely costs the cinema more (staff, counting the money, whatever) when you buy a ticket from the ticket counter than it does when you buy on-line yet you the consumer pay more for the on-line ticket (which is cheaper for the cinema) vs the paper ticket (which is more expensive for the cinema).
Although it may be that they want to encourage people to buy the ticket at the box office since those people are more likely to buy the popcorn, chips, cola and other products that are sitting there on the counter right next to the ticket seller.
The number one problem with health care in the USA is the lack of competition.
Too many people are stuck with a company health plan or otherwise locked into their health insurance for whatever reason.
If there was more competition (including removing any barriers to entry for new health insurers who want to enter the market, stopping/banning any anti-competitive activity or collusion currently taking place and changing the tax rules so people can get exactly the same tax benefit by choosing their own health fund as they do now by being on the company plan), the forces of the free market take over. Someone (either a new player or an established player) recognizes that they can get an increased market share by offering better service (i.e. actually giving people health care when they need it) and make more total profit (even if they may make less profit per person)
Economics 101 shows that markets which have competition generally have better value for consumers than markets which do not have competition.
Maybe its time for Sun (who DO control Java) to tell Apple to change its ways (and give control of Java on the Mac to Sun so that Sun can fix stuff without having to wait for Apple).
Its not like Sun needs Apple in order to produce Java for the Mac.
Or is this like the graphics drivers where only Apple has access to the "secret bits" necessary for a JVM to do all the things that the current Mac JVM does?
How hard would it be to just port OpenJDK/IceTea/whatever to Mac and be done with it?
When I bought a prepaid phone from Telstra, I didnt have to show any ID to get the phone. But to actually activate the service, there WAS an ID check required (exactly what level of check it was I forget). And there has been talk about tightening the requirements to get a prepaid phone even more so that its easier for law enforcement to track down the real owner of a prepaid phone (both because of the terrorist aspect and because of criminals buying prepaid phones and SIMs, using them for a while and then throwing them away)
One of the reasons for Real ID was because some state drivers licenses were too easily to fake. And in some states, the identity checks you have to take to get the license were too lax. (i.e. the "can you drive" parts were more important than the "are you who you claim to be" parts)
By requiring minimum standards for license design and features and for identity checks, it makes it harder for people to get fake drivers licenses to then use as ID in the many places where you DO have to show ID such as entering certain government buildings, boarding many domestic airline flights, buying alcohol or tobacco in many states or paying with certain forms of payment (especially checks).
What they do in Australia for getting various forms of ID (including passports) is require you to take some passport size photos and have them signed by someone who is vouching that you are who you say you are and that they have known you in some capacity for at least a certain amount of time.
There are rules about what sort of person is allowed to do this also, it has to be someone from a specific list of jobs that are supposedly in good standing in the community (I dont know of the specific list but I know it includes people like university professors)
The real problem in the US is that its too easy to get and use all sorts of things (including credit cards and prepaid mobile phones) with very little ID checking.
As a programmer, having someone else look at my code is good since there will always be mistakes I just cant see from looking at it. Someone else looking at it might pick them up when I cant, especially if they have more knowledge of bits of the codebase than I do.
Something that forces companies holding private data to think about security (both physical and electronic). Something that would force companies to stop making web apps with security holes wide enough to drive a 747 through. Something that would force companies to actually give a stuff about phishing. Something that would force companies to put stronger locks on the rooms holding all those personal files they have on you so that people cant steal those. Etc.
Its not about AT&T wanting to charge for MMS, its about the fact that their MMSC servers arent up to the task of all those iPhone users sending MMSs. And the fact that there is no easy way to disable the MMS redirect only for phones that have MMS support.
That means funding research into electric cars (including those that use things like biofuel powered internal combustion engines as a backup)
That means funding research into (and building) new nuclear reactor designs that can take all the harmful waste (both from power generation and nuclear weapons) currently sitting in cooling ponds, storage facilities and vaults all over the US and turn it into more electricity (and into waste that will become radiation free in a much shorter time).
That means funding research into sustainable biofuels (both for vehicles and power plants) including hemp and switch-grass but NOT biofuels like corn that replace food crops
That means funding research into solar technology (and covering all that empty desert in the southwestern USA with solar collectors)
Most of all it means telling all the vested interests to go jump. The anti-drug campaigners who refuse to allow hemp to be grown because of its ties to marijuana. The anti-nuclear campaigners who fail to see that its possible to build a new nuclear reactor with a modern design (which is far less likely to fail in a way that releases radiation than the dinosaurs operating today) and then (and the new reactors come on stream) shut down the old dinosaurs (the ones that the ant-nuclear campaigners love to hate). It means telling the corn lobby (who seem to have the misguided belief that corn biofuels should be part of the energy equation into the future), the coal lobby (who believe that coal can be made "clean") and others to get stuffed.
The problem is all the crap Adobe has shoehorned into the PDF format like JavaScript and all those plugins. If PDF went back to what it should be, a document format with no extra crap, the problems will go away.
PDF and Acrobat need to go back to a core focus on being a way to represent documents and other things in a way that looks the same no matter what OS, screen resolution or browser you are running and ditch all the extra garbage that has made Acrobat and Acrobat Reader so bloated.
A number of people who are beta testing 3.0 (officially or unofficially) who were able to convince AT&T to turn on MMS (before AT&T and/or apple put a stop to it) and it worked perfectly fine. So the only excuse is that AT&T hasn't figured out how much they should charge iPhone customers for MMS.
Or maybe AT&T bought the el-cheapo option when they installed their MMS kit and it cant handle all those new iPhones suddenly sending all those MMSs...
If they really want to block these sites, cant they just add some more firewall rules to the great firewall of china like they do for all the other "subversive" sites?