When you try to separate good science from pseudoscience, look for citations, folks. That's the lesson.
Actually, look for experimental tests, particularly ones which might falsify the theory.
(Of course, the global-warming-is-down-to-CO2 people come out well ahead here as well, especially as most of the counter argument comes down to "there might be experiments which could falsify this": well, erm, that's kind of the point.)
More than half of Apple's income comes from iPods. The `PC' market may be enormous but the profit margins are tiny, and Macs run a severe danger of being commoditised the way other PCs have (and the way laptops are being at present). I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple leave the `PC' hardware market in the next few years (and I'm speaking as a Mac owner).
Although I was as irritated as anyone by the obviously-bogus-looking claims, it's significant that being able to do this kind of incremental thing is pretty interesting (and other people do related things). Given ballooning data volumes, frequently faulty internal accounting (not charging for backup volume/retention/recovery-time) and increasingly fussy regulatory environments, backup volumes are often becoming a serious problem. Even relatively small organisations can end up putting away tens of terabytes a week, and large ones must be frightening. So tricks which can reduce the storage requirement this way may be well worth doing. Although probably not as worth doing as fixing the underlying stupidity which causes the problems in the first place in many cases. But fixing stupidity is hard.
Physicists are smart folk, but are hideous at PR. Most of the web pages intended to be a PR front fail miserably, and are indecipherable to anyone except physicists. There was even a movement a few years back to get physicsts to name their experiments in more public-friendly ways, which failed miserably.
We figure that after inventing the web we don't really need any more PR. Better to lie low for a while after a mistake that big.
I know this is slashdot, but try to think for a minute: it's not about the hardware. It's about the design and about the human cost. Design is hard, and people are expensive - both people who can do the design and people who can then maintain whatever you designed. The biggest cost of almost all IT companies is salary, by quite a long way.
You might be up to designing a storage system which performs well and putting it together out of commodity boxes, but not many people are. So, OK, you can hire someone who can do that. Which will be quite expensive, especially since you probably want them on a short-term contract: more expensive than the hardware. Or, well, you could find a company who have a proven design, and just buy it: reinventing the wheel gets to drag after a while.
Now, so you've got your system, and your redundant second copy of it and all your spare disks (which you are storing, of course, in your very expensive datacentre real-estate, because you probably don't want to deal with the logistics of getting it there when it dies). Now a disk dies at 11PM, on Saturday. So, OK, you send one of your staff to site (at 2AM on Sunday morning now) to replace the disk. And now they start bitching at you about on-call allowances and out-of-hours rates, and charging you double time and travel and that kind of crap. Oh, and your staff have to live close to your datacentre, of course. Money money money. Perhaps you could just, like, contract out this support to a company who will turn up at short notice day or night, and will deal with all the logistics to get parts to you without you having to store them. Outsourcing: youy've probably heard of it, right? Very fashionable, I hear.
Now it's a couple of years down the line, and your storage needs have increased. You need an upgrade path. Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy (for it will be a guy, I seriously can't imagine a woman being quite this dumb) who designed it. So he will design you a new system (because you can't get the bits to grow the old one as it was commodity stuff), and then you can work out how to do the migration, and if you're lucky he'll have thought about that and made it easy. Money money. But, well, several things are more likely than that: either he wasn't so smart after all, and he didn't think about upgrade or anything, so suddenly it's a bunch more expensive to do it; or he was smart and now he's gone off and works for a storage vendor; or may be he was a consultant in the first place, and he'll gladly quote you (quite a lot, hmm) for consulting on the upgrade. Or may be you could choose a vendor based on their long term support & upgrade offerings, so none of this happens.
And, even more amazing, you can sit down and do the sums, and discover that buying the stuff from a decent vendor, outsourcing the support to that vendor (or another) turns out to be cheaper.
Almost no storage system vendors make hard drives. Many of them probably don't actually make anything in terms of hardware. What they `make' is several things which turn out to be a good deal more important than hardware:
a system which has actually been properly designed in terms of performance, scalability and so on;
a system which they will support, so you don't have to grovel around finding a replacement for some disk that has died and which turns out to not be a current part any more;
a system which isn't designed by some spotty teenager who (a) will have no idea about the above two issues, and (b) will then leave or (worse) have some kind of tantrum and refuse to support it any more.
If your data is worth anything at all, and you are not in the commercially unusual position of being able to do your own system and support it etc (I'm ruling out google here, right) yourself, then it is very unlikely that the spotty-teen approach is better than the storage-system-vendor one, despite the latter having a higher up-front cost and being less fashionable on slashdot. Whether Apple are such a vendor I don't know: I guess they'd like to be.
Re:Free as what? cool as what?
on
Debian GNU/Solaris
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, did you check this, or are you just bullshitting? Oh, look, you're just bullshitting aren't you? For instance, let's see. www.opensolaris.org, there's a download link, with some blurb and... links to various things, including http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html which has tar files. Or of course you could have a (free, yes, really) login on opensolaris.org and got it from there or the SDLC.
But, hey, it's Sun and it's fashionable to slag them off in your little cult isn't it?
`Certain SLRs' don't *have* batteries, so they have really no problem at all if they run out. Even my humble Pentax MX only uses its battery to drive the meter, so you can use it without one if you can judge exposure. Of course, you don't get fancy exposure control, autofocus, motor drive &c &c...
Seriously: I wonder how many people realise how bad the problems with batteries can be? For instance: what's the life of a typical camera battery in the arctic? Not very long I guess, if it willl work at all. I once worked on a bit of hand-held battery-powered military equipment, where they took things like this seriously - long storage life, working in extreme conditions and so on. The batteries were *very* expensive...
Well, if the OS they roll it into is Solaris, then it probably will be coming back, since Solaris is open source (well, all the bits they can open source without violating license agreements they've signed are or will be).
Yes, they are typically very vulnerable to be being poisoned, as you say. Mass specs are historically also not good for this sort of thing as molecules get broken up into smaller ones to be analysed which makes life much harder as you're looking for decay products not the original (large) molecules. May be their clever new trickery deals with this.
But the main issue is 25lb, in a back pack. That's big, heavy and almost certainly very expensive. That means you can't give one to everyone. It's much better to give everyone something, even if what they have doesn't work very well. By far the best deterrent is the fear of getting caught.
The mobile network was not turned off, I think it just got clobbered by load as you'd expect - everyone in London has a phone and all of them tried to use it at the same time.
I'm in central London (I heard what I think was the Tavistock place explosion), and my phones (company one on Vodaphone and personal on Orange) have worked intermittently for most of the time. Indeed I got SMS messages saying I should stay at home while it was happening! Generally calls don't work but SMS does.
It's interesting though that they didn't turn off the network, because mobiles are a really good way to trigger things (though not generally in the tube of course - no signal).
In fact, one has to wonder at the competence of the authorities here: why did they not turn off mobiles given what they know? I suppose that there's a tradeoff - if you turn the networks off, then no one can ring their partners saying they're OK but will be late home etc, but on the other hand the bad guys can still use them to set things off.
The obvious approach would have been to forbid monbile to mobile calls but allow mobile to landline, and to have advertised this in advance. I imagine they didn't think about this because the last time we had serious terrorist issues (the IRA) was long enough ago that mobiles were not so common, and of course they are busy working out how to fight the last war in the standard way, instead of thinking ahead.
And, of course, our government would prefer to obsess away about ID cards and rubbish like that which reinforces their fantasies of control, rather than work out what they should actually do in a case like this. Sigh.
I saw it yesterday, in a cinema (`theater' for Americans I guess).
I can't really comment on the effects, but the sheer visual quality of it was horrible. Every time there were near-horizontal or near-vertical lines on the screen there were fairly obvious `moiré' patterns (not really the right word I think, what I mean is that you could see the steps in the lines where they crossed scan-lines). There were significant artifacts for 45-degree lines too - various helmets etc looked really crap.
Perhaps this is common, though I don't recall it in other effects-laden films (matrix &c), where I've sat equally close to the front (third row).
Perhaps also it's just the `print' I saw, I don't know. It was really hard to watch after a bit though.
He's quite probably right about the developing world.
The owner of the copyright is free to license it however they like. In particular they can do the standard dual-licensing trick that is done by people like sleepycat, with a GPLd version which is free as well as a more liberal one, which you pay for. Other people are not free to do this.
Most code will (initially, anyway) originate in the developed world. People in the developing world are poor, and will therefore very likely use it under the GPL, and therefore contribute changes back to the developed world (and to the developing world of course). Users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version.
This would not happen with a BSD-style license, for instance.
SMS is popular in the EU because it is CHEAPER then making a call. In the US SMS is not popular because it is MORE EXPENSIVE than making a voice call.
Unfortunately the article is grossly oversimplifying the situation (to the point of being wrong).
It's true that SMS was once cheaper than calls for many purposes, and this may have been instrumental in the rapid takeup of SMS. But SMS costs have gone up a lot, and it's not really cheaper any more - I think an SMS costs me 10p for 160 chars, while I get something like 1500 minutes per month for L20/month, so about 1.3p/minute. I can say a bunch more than 160 chars in a minute!
So in fact SMS isn't cheaper than calling in Europe in any reasonable sense, so it clearly can't be more popular because it's cheaper. It might have initially become popular because it was once cheaper, but its continuing success is nothing to to with cost differences.
The truth is that SMS is not like calling someone at all. What it is more like is personal email which is always with you. In particular SMS is no more like phoning someone than email is like phoning someone - there is some overlap, but the two things are really completely different.
So a better way of thinking of it is perhaps that in Europe there is a pervasive personal (in the sense that it travels with you everywhere, `email' culture, while in the US there isn't, or if there is it's a very different one.
The old google groups used to have a fairly high latency before articles (posted from it) appeared. The new one (google groups beta?) is much better. But only in this respect, the interface sucks in all the ways described above.
And this will kill phones in due course, the same way it is killing email. Email means that the cost of writing a letter to someone is effectively zero, and the result of this is spam. VOIP means that the cost of *talking* to someone becomes effectively zero, and the result of this will be voice spam.
The solution to both these problems is blindingly simple and non-technical: make it cost a little bit to communicate with someone.
I live in the UK, and I go to the cinema probably about once a week, to our local multiplex (so, not to some art cinema full of people who would make a huge fuss). I can remember a time when mobiles were a problem in cinemas, theatres and so on, but not in the last few years. This isn't because I've got used to phones ringing, it's because social pressure has worked to make sure people don't talk on phones (and set them to vibrate) in cinemas and similar environments. Very occasionally someone will send texts and the screen will be annoying, but even this is pretty rare. I can't remember when I last heard a phone ring in a cinema. We do have (network-sponsored, and often very funny) ads/warnings to remind people to turn their phones off, but these are reminders - people know to do this but occasionally forget.
Noisy popcorn eating is a much worse problem than phones in cinemas in the UK.
This is very different than the situation in trains and so on, where people do use phones, even in the `quiet' coaches. There is clearly more social pressure in cinemas, and it has worked.
Of course, it may just be that British people are very polite: we like to think so, anyway.
I think many of these cases happen because people are very bad at driving support contracts. I remember the ecache issues too, and in fact we had machines break because of this. I rang them up and told tem that they were going to replace the relevant bits, because it was clearly a HW issue, and no, we weren't about to install some workaround thank you. The main problem was working out whether we wanted the engineer overnight or next morning. OK, this was on a gold contract, but the only difference is response time: if the machine has a HW issue *tell them to replace it* don't piss around with workarounds. If they argue (they won't, nowadays, but they used to 10-15 years ago) point out how much your paying them and that you might just stop and/or mail someone senior (they do read their mail, even very senior people).
I suppose it may be that you didn't *have* a support contract. Well, sorry, I have about the same sympathy for you as I would if your house burnt down and you hadn't bothered insuring it.
There's nothing about WAP that makes it cost any particular amount per minute. For instance, I have a fairly old phone which does WAP, and has GPRS. GPRS is charged (at least in the UK) by byte and the typical charing model is that you get a certain number of bytes per month. I forget how many I have, but it was the smallest amount that the network offered. The result is that I use WAP a fair amount, although generally for only one or two sites (actually, really only one: the BBC news). It's a way of passing the time on trains &c. I've never got anywhere *near* my GPRS limit because of WAP (I have easily gone over it using it for CVS tunnelled through ssh over over GPRS though, so I could work in the the middle of nowhere).
I think that the lack of a commonly available charged-by-amount-of-data-transferred bearer for WAP was a significant barrier to its use (as well as it being just grotty and mis-sold of course), but this has gone away now, at least in countries with GPRS or better networks.
These aren't the same thing at all. It actually costs rather a lot of money to keep, say, a communications network based on horses going - you need horses, food for them, roads, staging posts (I used to live in a fairly small village 20-30 miles out of london which once had 30 or so pubs, since it was about a day's journey by horse out of London, so *lots* of people needed to stop there).
It also costs money to broadcast RF, of course, but hugely less than it costs to run a horse-based system. But RF spectrum is *very* expensive at the moment - look at how much the 3G licenses which were auctioned in 2000 in the UK went for! If RF spectrum were free, how much would it actually cost to set up the transmitting part of a radio station? My guess is from a few hundred to perhaps some tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know about the US, but people in the UK run pirate radio stations from tall buildings which can be heard across most of London by pretty mundane equipment. These things don't cost much money to set up, clearly.
So RF isn't going away on cost grounds.
A much better argument is made by some of the other followups to my message - RF won't go away, but it will become increasingly indistinguishable from noise as we make better and better use of the spectrum in an information-theory sense. That would indicate (to me) that we ought to be doing some analysis of what a civilisation which uses RF efficiently would `sound' like to someone listening. If it really does end up as noise (and I can't see why it shouldn't) then there's a problem, I guess, although there's probably hope because it wouldn't look like the sort of noise that is generated by purely natural processes.
The idea here seems to be that at some point we'll just decide to abandon the whole RF spectrum because we have better mechanisms of comminucating. This is implausible to the point of silliness. We *will* have better mechanisms, but the RF specrum is still there, and still as usable as it ever was, and if no one is using it, why, it will be very cheap. So people *will* use it, of course.
Imagine, for instance, that UHF TV goes away, and non one wants the spectrum any more. Now you can build a local TV system for the cost of a transmitter (which you can get as cheap surplus). So lots of people will do that, so there will be lots of use of the UHF spectrum. It will just be by people doing more interesting thigns than it was before.
No. If you could do this, then you would have worked out how to automatically parallelize arbitrary applications and you'd be extremely rich and famous.
This isn't the point of these things. As lots of people have pointed out, It's pretty easy to detect a phone at short range, as anyone with any kind of small-signal audio system (microphone amplifier, probably even line-level things or higher) can tell you. In fact the first phone I had used to make my (CRT in those days) screen flicker when it was close enough.
But that's not what these things are for. There are plenty of environments where you are *not* meant to have mobiles turned on because: inside planes or in hospitals (both places where there is critically important small-signal electronics), in exams (no electronics, but pervasive cheating by text message), and in many other places. For those environments you want something which will detect a phone at significant range, and you *can't* assume that you can hear someone or the phone ringing: someone trying to cheat in an exam won't have the phone set to ring, and won't be talking into it.
Of course, you can get detectors already, but they're significantly expensive - hundreds of pounds. And you need plenty of them, too. Think about an exam: one for the room itself, one for each toilet, and probably at least one more for the corridors between the room and toilets. 4 or 5, minimum, or several thousand pounds. How many exam rooms does a school use at once? Maybe 5? So they might need 15-20 of these things. Not a small amount of money for a school. Similar things are true for hospitals and so on.
Reducing the cost by a factor of 10 or more, as these people have done, is a *major* advance. So yes, this is news.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, look for experimental tests, particularly ones which might falsify the theory.
(Of course, the global-warming-is-down-to-CO2 people come out well ahead here as well, especially as most of the counter argument comes down to "there might be experiments which could falsify this": well, erm, that's kind of the point.)
More than half of Apple's income comes from iPods. The `PC' market may be enormous but the profit margins are tiny, and Macs run a severe danger of being commoditised the way other PCs have (and the way laptops are being at present). I wouldn't be at all surprised if Apple leave the `PC' hardware market in the next few years (and I'm speaking as a Mac owner).
Although I was as irritated as anyone by the obviously-bogus-looking claims, it's significant that being able to do this kind of incremental thing is pretty interesting (and other people do related things). Given ballooning data volumes, frequently faulty internal accounting (not charging for backup volume/retention/recovery-time) and increasingly fussy regulatory environments, backup volumes are often becoming a serious problem. Even relatively small organisations can end up putting away tens of terabytes a week, and large ones must be frightening. So tricks which can reduce the storage requirement this way may be well worth doing. Although probably not as worth doing as fixing the underlying stupidity which causes the problems in the first place in many cases. But fixing stupidity is hard.
We figure that after inventing the web we don't really need any more PR. Better to lie low for a while after a mistake that big.
You have, of course, missed the point.
I know this is slashdot, but try to think for a minute: it's not about the hardware. It's about the design and about the human cost. Design is hard, and people are expensive - both people who can do the design and people who can then maintain whatever you designed. The biggest cost of almost all IT companies is salary, by quite a long way.
You might be up to designing a storage system which performs well and putting it together out of commodity boxes, but not many people are. So, OK, you can hire someone who can do that. Which will be quite expensive, especially since you probably want them on a short-term contract: more expensive than the hardware. Or, well, you could find a company who have a proven design, and just buy it: reinventing the wheel gets to drag after a while.
Now, so you've got your system, and your redundant second copy of it and all your spare disks (which you are storing, of course, in your very expensive datacentre real-estate, because you probably don't want to deal with the logistics of getting it there when it dies). Now a disk dies at 11PM, on Saturday. So, OK, you send one of your staff to site (at 2AM on Sunday morning now) to replace the disk. And now they start bitching at you about on-call allowances and out-of-hours rates, and charging you double time and travel and that kind of crap. Oh, and your staff have to live close to your datacentre, of course. Money money money. Perhaps you could just, like, contract out this support to a company who will turn up at short notice day or night, and will deal with all the logistics to get parts to you without you having to store them. Outsourcing: youy've probably heard of it, right? Very fashionable, I hear.
Now it's a couple of years down the line, and your storage needs have increased. You need an upgrade path. Well, let's say you were smart enough to keep on the guy (for it will be a guy, I seriously can't imagine a woman being quite this dumb) who designed it. So he will design you a new system (because you can't get the bits to grow the old one as it was commodity stuff), and then you can work out how to do the migration, and if you're lucky he'll have thought about that and made it easy. Money money. But, well, several things are more likely than that: either he wasn't so smart after all, and he didn't think about upgrade or anything, so suddenly it's a bunch more expensive to do it; or he was smart and now he's gone off and works for a storage vendor; or may be he was a consultant in the first place, and he'll gladly quote you (quite a lot, hmm) for consulting on the upgrade. Or may be you could choose a vendor based on their long term support & upgrade offerings, so none of this happens.
And, even more amazing, you can sit down and do the sums, and discover that buying the stuff from a decent vendor, outsourcing the support to that vendor (or another) turns out to be cheaper.
If your data is worth anything at all, and you are not in the commercially unusual position of being able to do your own system and support it etc (I'm ruling out google here, right) yourself, then it is very unlikely that the spotty-teen approach is better than the storage-system-vendor one, despite the latter having a higher up-front cost and being less fashionable on slashdot. Whether Apple are such a vendor I don't know: I guess they'd like to be.
So, did you check this, or are you just bullshitting? Oh, look, you're just bullshitting aren't you? For instance, let's see. www.opensolaris.org, there's a download link, with some blurb and ... links to various things, including http://www.genunix.org/mirror/index.html which has tar files. Or of course you could have a (free, yes, really) login on opensolaris.org and got it from there or the SDLC.
But, hey, it's Sun and it's fashionable to slag them off in your little cult isn't it?
`Certain SLRs' don't *have* batteries, so they have really no problem at all if they run out. Even my humble Pentax MX only uses its battery to drive the meter, so you can use it without one if you can judge exposure. Of course, you don't get fancy exposure control, autofocus, motor drive &c &c...
Seriously: I wonder how many people realise how bad the problems with batteries can be? For instance: what's the life of a typical camera battery in the arctic? Not very long I guess, if it willl work at all. I once worked on a bit of hand-held battery-powered military equipment, where they took things like this seriously - long storage life, working in extreme conditions and so on. The batteries were *very* expensive...
--tim
Well, if the OS they roll it into is Solaris, then it probably will be coming back, since Solaris is open source (well, all the bits they can open source without violating license agreements they've signed are or will be).
Yes, they are typically very vulnerable to be being poisoned, as you say. Mass specs are historically also not good for this sort of thing as molecules get broken up into smaller ones to be analysed which makes life much harder as you're looking for decay products not the original (large) molecules. May be their clever new trickery deals with this.
But the main issue is 25lb, in a back pack. That's big, heavy and almost certainly very expensive. That means you can't give one to everyone. It's much better to give everyone something, even if what they have doesn't work very well. By far the best deterrent is the fear of getting caught.
--tim
The mobile network was not turned off, I think it just got clobbered by load as you'd expect - everyone in London has a phone and all of them tried to use it at the same time.
I'm in central London (I heard what I think was the Tavistock place explosion), and my phones (company one on Vodaphone and personal on Orange) have worked intermittently for most of the time. Indeed I got SMS messages saying I should stay at home while it was happening! Generally calls don't work but SMS does.
It's interesting though that they didn't turn off the network, because mobiles are a really good way to trigger things (though not generally in the tube of course - no signal).
In fact, one has to wonder at the competence of the authorities here: why did they not turn off mobiles given what they know? I suppose that there's a tradeoff - if you turn the networks off, then no one can ring their partners saying they're OK but will be late home etc, but on the other hand the bad guys can still use them to set things off.
The obvious approach would have been to forbid monbile to mobile calls but allow mobile to landline, and to have advertised this in advance. I imagine they didn't think about this because the last time we had serious terrorist issues (the IRA) was long enough ago that mobiles were not so common, and of course they are busy working out how to fight the last war in the standard way, instead of thinking ahead.
And, of course, our government would prefer to obsess away about ID cards and rubbish like that which reinforces their fantasies of control, rather than work out what they should actually do in a case like this. Sigh.
I saw it yesterday, in a cinema (`theater' for Americans I guess).
I can't really comment on the effects, but the sheer visual quality of it was horrible. Every time there were near-horizontal or near-vertical lines on the screen there were fairly obvious `moiré' patterns (not really the right word I think, what I mean is that you could see the steps in the lines where they crossed scan-lines). There were significant artifacts for 45-degree lines too - various helmets etc looked really crap.
Perhaps this is common, though I don't recall it in other effects-laden films (matrix &c), where I've sat equally close to the front (third row).
Perhaps also it's just the `print' I saw, I don't know. It was really hard to watch after a bit though.
No contagion in a BSD license, so you do not have to distribute your modifications under the BSD license.
He's quite probably right about the developing world.
The owner of the copyright is free to license it however they like. In particular they can do the standard dual-licensing trick that is done by people like sleepycat, with a GPLd version which is free as well as a more liberal one, which you pay for. Other people are not free to do this.
Most code will (initially, anyway) originate in the developed world. People in the developing world are poor, and will therefore very likely use it under the GPL, and therefore contribute changes back to the developed world (and to the developing world of course). Users in the developed world, who are generally richer, can avoid doing this by paying for a liberal version.
This would not happen with a BSD-style license, for instance.
Unfortunately the article is grossly oversimplifying the situation (to the point of being wrong).
It's true that SMS was once cheaper than calls for many purposes, and this may have been instrumental in the rapid takeup of SMS. But SMS costs have gone up a lot, and it's not really cheaper any more - I think an SMS costs me 10p for 160 chars, while I get something like 1500 minutes per month for L20/month, so about 1.3p/minute. I can say a bunch more than 160 chars in a minute!
So in fact SMS isn't cheaper than calling in Europe in any reasonable sense, so it clearly can't be more popular because it's cheaper. It might have initially become popular because it was once cheaper, but its continuing success is nothing to to with cost differences.
The truth is that SMS is not like calling someone at all. What it is more like is personal email which is always with you. In particular SMS is no more like phoning someone than email is like phoning someone - there is some overlap, but the two things are really completely different.
So a better way of thinking of it is perhaps that in Europe there is a pervasive personal (in the sense that it travels with you everywhere, `email' culture, while in the US there isn't, or if there is it's a very different one.
The old google groups used to have a fairly high latency before articles (posted from it) appeared. The new one (google groups beta?) is much better. But only in this respect, the interface sucks in all the ways described above.
And this will kill phones in due course, the same way it is killing email. Email means that the cost of writing a letter to someone is effectively zero, and the result of this is spam. VOIP means that the cost of *talking* to someone becomes effectively zero, and the result of this will be voice spam.
The solution to both these problems is blindingly simple and non-technical: make it cost a little bit to communicate with someone.
I live in the UK, and I go to the cinema probably about once a week, to our local multiplex (so, not to some art cinema full of people who would make a huge fuss). I can remember a time when mobiles were a problem in cinemas, theatres and so on, but not in the last few years. This isn't because I've got used to phones ringing, it's because social pressure has worked to make sure people don't talk on phones (and set them to vibrate) in cinemas and similar environments. Very occasionally someone will send texts and the screen will be annoying, but even this is pretty rare. I can't remember when I last heard a phone ring in a cinema. We do have (network-sponsored, and often very funny) ads/warnings to remind people to turn their phones off, but these are reminders - people know to do this but occasionally forget.
Noisy popcorn eating is a much worse problem than phones in cinemas in the UK.
This is very different than the situation in trains and so on, where people do use phones, even in the `quiet' coaches. There is clearly more social pressure in cinemas, and it has worked.
Of course, it may just be that British people are very polite: we like to think so, anyway.
I think many of these cases happen because people are very bad at driving support contracts. I remember the ecache issues too, and in fact we had machines break because of this. I rang them up and told tem that they were going to replace the relevant bits, because it was clearly a HW issue, and no, we weren't about to install some workaround thank you. The main problem was working out whether we wanted the engineer overnight or next morning. OK, this was on a gold contract, but the only difference is response time: if the machine has a HW issue *tell them to replace it* don't piss around with workarounds. If they argue (they won't, nowadays, but they used to 10-15 years ago) point out how much your paying them and that you might just stop and/or mail someone senior (they do read their mail, even very senior people).
I suppose it may be that you didn't *have* a support contract. Well, sorry, I have about the same sympathy for you as I would if your house burnt down and you hadn't bothered insuring it.
Or you could just check http://docs.sun.com:
(from the Solaris 9 9/04 system administrator collection).
But, hey, flaming is easier.
There's nothing about WAP that makes it cost any particular amount per minute. For instance, I have a fairly old phone which does WAP, and has GPRS. GPRS is charged (at least in the UK) by byte and the typical charing model is that you get a certain number of bytes per month. I forget how many I have, but it was the smallest amount that the network offered. The result is that I use WAP a fair amount, although generally for only one or two sites (actually, really only one: the BBC news). It's a way of passing the time on trains &c. I've never got anywhere *near* my GPRS limit because of WAP (I have easily gone over it using it for CVS tunnelled through ssh over over GPRS though, so I could work in the the middle of nowhere).
I think that the lack of a commonly available charged-by-amount-of-data-transferred bearer for WAP was a significant barrier to its use (as well as it being just grotty and mis-sold of course), but this has gone away now, at least in countries with GPRS or better networks.
These aren't the same thing at all. It actually costs rather a lot of money to keep, say, a communications network based on horses going - you need horses, food for them, roads, staging posts (I used to live in a fairly small village 20-30 miles out of london which once had 30 or so pubs, since it was about a day's journey by horse out of London, so *lots* of people needed to stop there).
It also costs money to broadcast RF, of course, but hugely less than it costs to run a horse-based system. But RF spectrum is *very* expensive at the moment - look at how much the 3G licenses which were auctioned in 2000 in the UK went for! If RF spectrum were free, how much would it actually cost to set up the transmitting part of a radio station? My guess is from a few hundred to perhaps some tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know about the US, but people in the UK run pirate radio stations from tall buildings which can be heard across most of London by pretty mundane equipment. These things don't cost much money to set up, clearly.
So RF isn't going away on cost grounds.
A much better argument is made by some of the other followups to my message - RF won't go away, but it will become increasingly indistinguishable from noise as we make better and better use of the spectrum in an information-theory sense. That would indicate (to me) that we ought to be doing some analysis of what a civilisation which uses RF efficiently would `sound' like to someone listening. If it really does end up as noise (and I can't see why it shouldn't) then there's a problem, I guess, although there's probably hope because it wouldn't look like the sort of noise that is generated by purely natural processes.
The idea here seems to be that at some point we'll just decide to abandon the whole RF spectrum because we have better mechanisms of comminucating. This is implausible to the point of silliness. We *will* have better mechanisms, but the RF specrum is still there, and still as usable as it ever was, and if no one is using it, why, it will be very cheap. So people *will* use it, of course.
Imagine, for instance, that UHF TV goes away, and non one wants the spectrum any more. Now you can build a local TV system for the cost of a transmitter (which you can get as cheap surplus). So lots of people will do that, so there will be lots of use of the UHF spectrum. It will just be by people doing more interesting thigns than it was before.
No. If you could do this, then you would have worked out how to automatically parallelize arbitrary applications and you'd be extremely rich and famous.
This isn't the point of these things. As lots of people have pointed out, It's pretty easy to detect a phone at short range, as anyone with any kind of small-signal audio system (microphone amplifier, probably even line-level things or higher) can tell you. In fact the first phone I had used to make my (CRT in those days) screen flicker when it was close enough.
But that's not what these things are for. There are plenty of environments where you are *not* meant to have mobiles turned on because: inside planes or in hospitals (both places where there is critically important small-signal electronics), in exams (no electronics, but pervasive cheating by text message), and in many other places. For those environments you want something which will detect a phone at significant range, and you *can't* assume that you can hear someone or the phone ringing: someone trying to cheat in an exam won't have the phone set to ring, and won't be talking into it.
Of course, you can get detectors already, but they're significantly expensive - hundreds of pounds. And you need plenty of them, too. Think about an exam: one for the room itself, one for each toilet, and probably at least one more for the corridors between the room and toilets. 4 or 5, minimum, or several thousand pounds. How many exam rooms does a school use at once? Maybe 5? So they might need 15-20 of these things. Not a small amount of money for a school. Similar things are true for hospitals and so on.
Reducing the cost by a factor of 10 or more, as these people have done, is a *major* advance. So yes, this is news.