Blackberry's patents are estimated to be worth up to $3 billion. They are also part of Rockstar Constortium Inc., which purchased Nortel's portfolio of over 4000 patents for $4.5 billion in the summer of 2011, and is currently litigating against major Android handset manufacturers.
While some parents home school for worrying religious reasons, I know others who do it because their extremely intelligent children didn't fit in and were bullied at school, or because they school refused to acknowledge cross-gender behavior (Bobby likes dolls, or Suzie likes dump trucks), or because the school was so busy catering to dim-witted dullards that it neglected the problem-free smart kids and left them unchallenged for years on end.
Agreed. Watsa has a good idea what the patent portfolio is worth, and my suspicion is that he's playing a shrewd game. There are only two scenarios: (1) Blackberry pulls a rabbit out of the hat and manages to scratch out a profit as a minor player in the smartphone game, or (2) Blackberry's hardware business collapses and Watsa manages to get his hands on the company's patent portfolio as a discount.
Even though the OP made a cryptic comment about Crashplan not shipping drives to Sweden, the free version works perfectly for just this task. I created the initial backup volume on a portable hard drive to avoid sending the initial backup over a relatively slow ADSL line. After that, I sneakernetted it to a remote machine, copied the backup set onto it and it does the incremental backups once every 24 hours. If the remote machine isn't on, the software is smart enough to wait until it appears on the network and then start the backup. If I need to restore from the remote drive after my house is obliterated by an alien invasion (hopefully without us in it), all I need to do is copy the backup image onto a portable drive and physically attach it to my new machine.
It's a link to a photo found through a web search. I don't give a damn who's hosting it or how tightly the tinfoil is screwed into their noggins. I do, however, find it perplexing how the general population tends to react very strongly against socialism, yet the US military is the largest trickle-down social program in the history of the planet, with millions of engineers, scientists, administrators and soldiers on the public payroll. The same people who become absolutely apoplectic at the thought of universal medicare think nothing of wasting tens of billions of dollars on a fleet of F-35s.
Sometimes we write code quickly as a proof of concept. I enjoy the challenge of "that chip's not powerful enough to do what we need," because it means a day or two of fun to prove the assertion wrong. However, that code might not be pretty simply because my goal is a proof of concept, not a production system. Of course, ever once in a while pieces of that rushed code end up in a production device. At any rate, the early proto-Google systems were all about demonstrating that something was possible. And it worked - they attracted seed money and the rest is history.
Very few younger people wear watches these days, because mobile phones serve as a reasonable replacement. As a result, the sudden interest in wearable tech seems slightly odd. It's almost as if Apple's R&D team prototyped a watch just to see what it would be like, and someone leaked the news in a frantic frenzy, ignoring the fact that it is - by and large - a dumb idea that Apple might very easily shelve (along with the silly notion of an Apple-branded TV set).
Listen, the guy who wrote this blog piece for the Telegraph didn't grow up to become a doctor,engineer, astronaut, scientist or programmer. He writes op-ed pieces for a newspaper. According to LinkedIn, he holds an LLB in law, then pursued an MSc in Business Entrepreneurship and followed up with a brief tenure as a music festival coordinator, PR agency account exec and finally became a freelance TV presenter and magazine editor. It might just be that he considers technically gifted individuals to be "exceptionally dull weirdos" simply because he doesn't understand what they're saying.
I'm sorry, but you're spouting nonsense. The notion that "cradle to grave monitoring" is a liberal idea is farcical. You're falling into the trap that many Americans do when discussing the concept, which is to equate liberalism with the concept of a nanny state and invasive government. In actuality, classical liberalism emphasizes liberty, freedom of the press, equality and *less* government intervention. Your understanding of the term more closely reflects a Marxist-Leninist police state.
Many come because they dream of becoming wealthy or because they're seeking education that allows them to get a good job at home. Honestly, Zurich or Berlin are pretty nice places to be, too.;)
When is Apple going to join the 21st century on memory pricing. $100 per breakpoint is insane. 16 GB baseline is a joke at these premium prices. Attempting to get $100 for 32 GB is a giant fuck you.
Actually, they attempting to get $100 for a 16GB increase. The company doesn't need to reduce their margins unless there's market pressure to do so.
Forget Schneier. The critical question is actually "Can we trust ourselves?" I'd argue not. Many of us post all manner of information about ourselves, our family, friends and work acquaintances on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Four Square and other sites. Our GPS-equipped phones know where we are, where we've been, and can probably predict where we're going and when. Short of unplugging, there's little we can do to assure that we're trustworthy electronic citizens.
I'm a natural born US citizen so not visiting the US isn't really an option for me. I could leave but honestly I've been around the world and as many problems as we have I know we are still #1.
I'll bite. What do you think you're #1 at? The notion of a "natural born US citizen" strikes me as odd, too. Would you consider yourself "natural born" if you were born to American parents while on vacation in Mexico? How about if your mother was Swiss but gave birth to you in the United States?
Proprietary display drivers are a bit of an issue when you're talking about a device that relies on a touch screen for nearly everything. It's a bit like an open source jetliner with proprietary wings.
Rightly or wrongly, they earned a reputation for selling unreliable drives. Last winter I saw quite a few deals on mass market websites that featured refurbished OCZ drives at cut-rate prices -- I suspect they had a return rate that was significantly higher than the industry average.
In all fairness, you get a pretty basic processor for 50 cents - an ARM Cortex M0 core running at 30 MHZ with 4KB of flash memory and 1K of SRAM in an 8-pin package (52 cents, quantity 5000). I am constantly amazed when pricing out designs and discovering that the quite capable little MCU that I budgeted $3 for now costs a mere $1.20.
By "we" I was speaking collectively. I wasn't born until 1971, but the sentiment echoed time and again by hundreds of people is the same: we paid for those episodes, technicians, actors and other production staff slaved over them, and some bean counter years later decided they were worthless. No one stopped to think that some people might have wanted to see them again.
We forget how crude the television industry was fifty years ago. Here's a brief primer. Shows that were shot on videotape were captured on a 2-inch Ampex Quadruplex machine that recorded at 15.625 inches per second. A reel of two inch tape weighed about 14 lbs and was very expensive. Tape was in short supply at the BBC - at one point they had less than 16 reels available, so what typically happened is that after broadcast, the reels were placed in short-term storage to be erased (the tape decks didn't have erase heads). Because of the relative scarcity of tape, this sometimes occurred in as little as 24 hours. If a show was deemed to have value for international broadcast, a handful of 16mm reversal film copies (suitable for telecine projection) were made at 25 fps from the 50i source tape.
Those 16mm film copies were distributed by BBC Commercial (now BBC worldwide) to markets around the world, under draconian terms - the broadcasters were only allowed to show them on air once or twice, and the the film copies were returned to the BBC and sent to another (less profitable) market afterward. Eventually, these films ended up at a broadcast facility in Nigeria that neglected to return them.
The BBC archives were film-based until the late 1970s, so there was no chance that Doctor Who would have been preserved on tape (nor would it have been financially rational to do such a thing). Unless a film copy of a program was specifically made for the archive, the archivists would have to wait until one of the distribution prints was returned and retired before cataloging and filing it. My guess is that this wasn't seen as very important for a plodding space drama like Doctor Who (especially B&W episodes in the early days of colour), compounding the archiving problem.
Any executive worth his/her weight in warm spit would look at the problems Foxconn is constantly having and give a hard second look at producing equipment in the states. Tesla has revolutionized car manufacturing, so could the electronics industry.
Assembly workers at Flextron's new "American" Moto X assembly plant are paid $9 hour and have to work 12-hour rotating day/night shifts. The reality of large scale mass production isn't pretty -- there are very few good jobs to be had in the supply chain, and lots of thinly disguised sweatshop labor.
Unusual events are more common than you think. I remember being on call and receiving a weekend call, because a nuclear facility's environmental monitoring system was "acting up" and monitoring reports were including impossible errors. That sort of stuff can usually be traced back to a data entry or automated import error -- accidentally flagging the data as gigabecquerels instead of terabecquerels, and so on. It's usually a simple issue that can be identified in a couple of minutes, and there's some good natured banter with the tech on the other end while we figure out what's going on.
This time around, there appeared to be no mistakes - - there were inexplicably high radiation levels in an improbable location. Things get pretty serious at that point, and there's a very specific timeline for notifying regulators and taking remedial action. In this case, they verified the readings and determined what had gone wrong within hours. You can't simply fix the fault and continue on as normal, though. There was contamination outside the facility that needed to be addressed according to steps that the federal regulators deemed sufficient, and on an acceptable timeline. In the current shutdown, I'm not sure how well that process would work -- you need a fairly experienced team to work out the most effective remediation solution that balances cost, environmental impact and public safety. There's also the issue that if a regulatory specialist is conducting a site inspection, they aren't available for other work.
It was a process decision, one of those challenging situations where the content experts can provide a very technical answer that appears simple on the surface but is anything but in reality. Those are tricky moments, because no single person in the room has the big picture -- the business analysts hold part of the puzzle, as do the scientists and the IT staff tasked with modeling and building the system.
We've instilled a belief in the general public that scientists and engineers can pull of miracles, and that we know more than them. Science in movies is often almost magical, and people expect our encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric technical systems to translate into quick and easy solutions to difficult problems. About a decade ago, I found myself giving a presentation to a group of nuclear scientists. It was a nerve-wracking experience for a young computer geek, and I presented the team with two alternatives for warehousing environmental data at their facility. There was a brief debate before the most senior member of the group spoke up and said, "You're the expert. What do you recommend?" It didn't matter that there were ten people in the room with PhDs and decades of experience; everyone naturally wants someone else to provide them with an easy path to the best answer. At that point, they were all primed to accept a recommendation from the young whippersnapper who could think quickly on his feet (and was armed with a laser pointer, I might add) I gave them the best recommendations I could, and many were eventually accepted. But deep down I realized that I could quite easily have led them astray at that point. I'm acutely aware that there must be dozens of people like me who have been working at Fukushima for over a year now; the so-called "experts" on the ground who are trying to make the best choices possible. Their job is unenviable because they're facing contamination on a huge scale and many decisions were made in haste in an attempt to limit the scope of the catastrophe. That will make everything harder for those involved in the containment and remediation in the coming decades.
In the early 1970s, there was no home video industry, and a live action drama like Doctor Who wasn't seen as valuable once it had been sold to other markets. The BBC also faced extreme budgetary pressure, forcing them to cut back nonessential services such as archiving. So they focused on the "important" stuff like news clips and current affairs and allowed plodding Saturday night sci-fi to fall through the cracks.
Slashdot Mirror
Blackberry's patents are estimated to be worth up to $3 billion. They are also part of Rockstar Constortium Inc., which purchased Nortel's portfolio of over 4000 patents for $4.5 billion in the summer of 2011, and is currently litigating against major Android handset manufacturers.
While some parents home school for worrying religious reasons, I know others who do it because their extremely intelligent children didn't fit in and were bullied at school, or because they school refused to acknowledge cross-gender behavior (Bobby likes dolls, or Suzie likes dump trucks), or because the school was so busy catering to dim-witted dullards that it neglected the problem-free smart kids and left them unchallenged for years on end.
Agreed. Watsa has a good idea what the patent portfolio is worth, and my suspicion is that he's playing a shrewd game. There are only two scenarios: (1) Blackberry pulls a rabbit out of the hat and manages to scratch out a profit as a minor player in the smartphone game, or (2) Blackberry's hardware business collapses and Watsa manages to get his hands on the company's patent portfolio as a discount.
Even though the OP made a cryptic comment about Crashplan not shipping drives to Sweden, the free version works perfectly for just this task. I created the initial backup volume on a portable hard drive to avoid sending the initial backup over a relatively slow ADSL line. After that, I sneakernetted it to a remote machine, copied the backup set onto it and it does the incremental backups once every 24 hours. If the remote machine isn't on, the software is smart enough to wait until it appears on the network and then start the backup. If I need to restore from the remote drive after my house is obliterated by an alien invasion (hopefully without us in it), all I need to do is copy the backup image onto a portable drive and physically attach it to my new machine.
It's a link to a photo found through a web search. I don't give a damn who's hosting it or how tightly the tinfoil is screwed into their noggins. I do, however, find it perplexing how the general population tends to react very strongly against socialism, yet the US military is the largest trickle-down social program in the history of the planet, with millions of engineers, scientists, administrators and soldiers on the public payroll. The same people who become absolutely apoplectic at the thought of universal medicare think nothing of wasting tens of billions of dollars on a fleet of F-35s.
The arms race simply converted finite physical resources into desert boneyards filled with billions of dollars of scrapped and utterly useless aircraft: http://chemtrailsplanet.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/boneyard-a.jpg
Sometimes we write code quickly as a proof of concept. I enjoy the challenge of "that chip's not powerful enough to do what we need," because it means a day or two of fun to prove the assertion wrong. However, that code might not be pretty simply because my goal is a proof of concept, not a production system. Of course, ever once in a while pieces of that rushed code end up in a production device. At any rate, the early proto-Google systems were all about demonstrating that something was possible. And it worked - they attracted seed money and the rest is history.
Very few younger people wear watches these days, because mobile phones serve as a reasonable replacement. As a result, the sudden interest in wearable tech seems slightly odd. It's almost as if Apple's R&D team prototyped a watch just to see what it would be like, and someone leaked the news in a frantic frenzy, ignoring the fact that it is - by and large - a dumb idea that Apple might very easily shelve (along with the silly notion of an Apple-branded TV set).
Listen, the guy who wrote this blog piece for the Telegraph didn't grow up to become a doctor,engineer, astronaut, scientist or programmer. He writes op-ed pieces for a newspaper. According to LinkedIn, he holds an LLB in law, then pursued an MSc in Business Entrepreneurship and followed up with a brief tenure as a music festival coordinator, PR agency account exec and finally became a freelance TV presenter and magazine editor. It might just be that he considers technically gifted individuals to be "exceptionally dull weirdos" simply because he doesn't understand what they're saying.
I really want to know what you're doing with 4,255 lbs of Composition 4 in a nuclear facility.
I'm sorry, but you're spouting nonsense. The notion that "cradle to grave monitoring" is a liberal idea is farcical. You're falling into the trap that many Americans do when discussing the concept, which is to equate liberalism with the concept of a nanny state and invasive government. In actuality, classical liberalism emphasizes liberty, freedom of the press, equality and *less* government intervention. Your understanding of the term more closely reflects a Marxist-Leninist police state.
Many come because they dream of becoming wealthy or because they're seeking education that allows them to get a good job at home. Honestly, Zurich or Berlin are pretty nice places to be, too. ;)
Not quite. The 64 GB version costs $200 more than the 16 GB baseline you mention and includes 48 GB more memory.
When is Apple going to join the 21st century on memory pricing. $100 per breakpoint is insane. 16 GB baseline is a joke at these premium prices. Attempting to get $100 for 32 GB is a giant fuck you.
Actually, they attempting to get $100 for a 16GB increase. The company doesn't need to reduce their margins unless there's market pressure to do so.
Forget Schneier. The critical question is actually "Can we trust ourselves?" I'd argue not. Many of us post all manner of information about ourselves, our family, friends and work acquaintances on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Four Square and other sites. Our GPS-equipped phones know where we are, where we've been, and can probably predict where we're going and when. Short of unplugging, there's little we can do to assure that we're trustworthy electronic citizens.
I'll bite. What do you think you're #1 at? The notion of a "natural born US citizen" strikes me as odd, too. Would you consider yourself "natural born" if you were born to American parents while on vacation in Mexico? How about if your mother was Swiss but gave birth to you in the United States?
Proprietary display drivers are a bit of an issue when you're talking about a device that relies on a touch screen for nearly everything. It's a bit like an open source jetliner with proprietary wings.
Rightly or wrongly, they earned a reputation for selling unreliable drives. Last winter I saw quite a few deals on mass market websites that featured refurbished OCZ drives at cut-rate prices -- I suspect they had a return rate that was significantly higher than the industry average.
In all fairness, you get a pretty basic processor for 50 cents - an ARM Cortex M0 core running at 30 MHZ with 4KB of flash memory and 1K of SRAM in an 8-pin package (52 cents, quantity 5000). I am constantly amazed when pricing out designs and discovering that the quite capable little MCU that I budgeted $3 for now costs a mere $1.20.
By "we" I was speaking collectively. I wasn't born until 1971, but the sentiment echoed time and again by hundreds of people is the same: we paid for those episodes, technicians, actors and other production staff slaved over them, and some bean counter years later decided they were worthless. No one stopped to think that some people might have wanted to see them again.
We forget how crude the television industry was fifty years ago. Here's a brief primer. Shows that were shot on videotape were captured on a 2-inch Ampex Quadruplex machine that recorded at 15.625 inches per second. A reel of two inch tape weighed about 14 lbs and was very expensive. Tape was in short supply at the BBC - at one point they had less than 16 reels available, so what typically happened is that after broadcast, the reels were placed in short-term storage to be erased (the tape decks didn't have erase heads). Because of the relative scarcity of tape, this sometimes occurred in as little as 24 hours. If a show was deemed to have value for international broadcast, a handful of 16mm reversal film copies (suitable for telecine projection) were made at 25 fps from the 50i source tape.
Those 16mm film copies were distributed by BBC Commercial (now BBC worldwide) to markets around the world, under draconian terms - the broadcasters were only allowed to show them on air once or twice, and the the film copies were returned to the BBC and sent to another (less profitable) market afterward. Eventually, these films ended up at a broadcast facility in Nigeria that neglected to return them.
The BBC archives were film-based until the late 1970s, so there was no chance that Doctor Who would have been preserved on tape (nor would it have been financially rational to do such a thing). Unless a film copy of a program was specifically made for the archive, the archivists would have to wait until one of the distribution prints was returned and retired before cataloging and filing it. My guess is that this wasn't seen as very important for a plodding space drama like Doctor Who (especially B&W episodes in the early days of colour), compounding the archiving problem.
Any executive worth his/her weight in warm spit would look at the problems Foxconn is constantly having and give a hard second look at producing equipment in the states. Tesla has revolutionized car manufacturing, so could the electronics industry.
Assembly workers at Flextron's new "American" Moto X assembly plant are paid $9 hour and have to work 12-hour rotating day/night shifts. The reality of large scale mass production isn't pretty -- there are very few good jobs to be had in the supply chain, and lots of thinly disguised sweatshop labor.
This time around, there appeared to be no mistakes - - there were inexplicably high radiation levels in an improbable location. Things get pretty serious at that point, and there's a very specific timeline for notifying regulators and taking remedial action. In this case, they verified the readings and determined what had gone wrong within hours. You can't simply fix the fault and continue on as normal, though. There was contamination outside the facility that needed to be addressed according to steps that the federal regulators deemed sufficient, and on an acceptable timeline. In the current shutdown, I'm not sure how well that process would work -- you need a fairly experienced team to work out the most effective remediation solution that balances cost, environmental impact and public safety. There's also the issue that if a regulatory specialist is conducting a site inspection, they aren't available for other work.
It was a process decision, one of those challenging situations where the content experts can provide a very technical answer that appears simple on the surface but is anything but in reality. Those are tricky moments, because no single person in the room has the big picture -- the business analysts hold part of the puzzle, as do the scientists and the IT staff tasked with modeling and building the system.
We've instilled a belief in the general public that scientists and engineers can pull of miracles, and that we know more than them. Science in movies is often almost magical, and people expect our encyclopedic knowledge of esoteric technical systems to translate into quick and easy solutions to difficult problems. About a decade ago, I found myself giving a presentation to a group of nuclear scientists. It was a nerve-wracking experience for a young computer geek, and I presented the team with two alternatives for warehousing environmental data at their facility. There was a brief debate before the most senior member of the group spoke up and said, "You're the expert. What do you recommend?" It didn't matter that there were ten people in the room with PhDs and decades of experience; everyone naturally wants someone else to provide them with an easy path to the best answer. At that point, they were all primed to accept a recommendation from the young whippersnapper who could think quickly on his feet (and was armed with a laser pointer, I might add) I gave them the best recommendations I could, and many were eventually accepted. But deep down I realized that I could quite easily have led them astray at that point. I'm acutely aware that there must be dozens of people like me who have been working at Fukushima for over a year now; the so-called "experts" on the ground who are trying to make the best choices possible. Their job is unenviable because they're facing contamination on a huge scale and many decisions were made in haste in an attempt to limit the scope of the catastrophe. That will make everything harder for those involved in the containment and remediation in the coming decades.
In the early 1970s, there was no home video industry, and a live action drama like Doctor Who wasn't seen as valuable once it had been sold to other markets. The BBC also faced extreme budgetary pressure, forcing them to cut back nonessential services such as archiving. So they focused on the "important" stuff like news clips and current affairs and allowed plodding Saturday night sci-fi to fall through the cracks.