I don't disagree with you at all, but my point was just that the issue would be a lot easier to consider if we just knew what the test case was, as then it would be a simple matter of fact and not one of reputation.
Toyota apparently indicated that they investigate all complaints, and that they haven't come up with any electronic acceleration problems.
Franky, this is just a case of "he said, she said" - it isn't news until Woz publishes a reproducible test case for his problems. Anything else is just a Toyota vs Woz popularity contest.
I dunno - what strategy could they possibly employ? They seem rather clever with their attacks IMHO.
Until we have DRM-enabled hardware in everybody's home, they have to work with conventional PCs. That means that an inspection of a PC will turn up the binary code to the virus, and its operation can be fully studied. Anybody attacking a bot can evesdrop on every aspect of its activity client-side, and can probably trace the network traffic pretty far (with government assistance all the way to the endpoint). In such an environment, the only thing you can do is make the job of tracking down the control node harder - you can't ever obscure it completely (at best you can just make every endpoint a control node of some kind and mixmaster all your traffic, which is only a delaying tactic in itself).
Now, once ordinary citizens no longer own their PCs, that might be a botnet's dream. Just imagine trusted code running over trusted network connections protected by trusted routers! DRM suffers from fundamental limitations, but the next gen of bot hunters might find themselves having to tear apart CPUs and examining them with SEMs to try to figure out what they're doing...
Indeed, and the word "care" lacks definition as well. We have free medical care today, if you define care as whatever you can manage to do for yourself.
When the price of ANY service is TRULY free, there is no way that ANY society that exists could truly afford to provide it. Demand will be infinite, and so will cost. No "free" healthcare system is truly free. Now, it might be lower cost than it is in the US (I'm not fan of the status quo), but don't be under any illusions that there are no tradeoffs.
Frankly, I think the whole "think of the children" is just a distraction from the main issue. I'm not quite sure why it is horrible to screen somebody who is 6573.5 days old, but it is perfectly fine if they are 6574.5 days old.
I think the real issue is whether as a society (as decided by the elected representatives) we feel that this is a fair tradeoff of security for invasion of privacy. The problem is that people cannot seem to talk rationally about such things.
We can't talk rationally about the value of not having our bodies exposed. We can't talk rationally about the value of not having our privacy intruded upon. We can't talk rationally about the value of not having a school kid die in a plane bombing. As a result, we cannot find reasonable tradeoffs between privacy, safety, and cost.
This means that there is never reasonable political dialog on these topics, and instead bureaucrats just end up making these choices for us.
I find all of this fairly hypocritical. The average person will go on and on about how you can't put a price on lives (ie they are infinitely valuable), but they own TVs while kids are starving in Africa. The fact is that we ALL put prices on lives, and our choices clearly reflect those prices. This is apparently perfectly socially acceptable, as long as you don't talk about it.
Hmm - just tried froogle. Haven't actually gone shopping in a while. In any case, I didn't pay a dime for the TV the console is attached to now. I also didn't pay $300 for the console either...
My point is, if the console is going to have an SD interface, then it should support SD resolutions. If MS isn't going to provide a quality SD experience, they shouldn't have an SD output on it...
Uh - you can pick up a standard 27" SD TV for about $200, while an HD equivalent looks like it would cost you closer to $500.
Maybe if you only play your 360 on your desk you might have a point. For a typical sofa/TV setup an HD TV is still a fairly expensive investment - especially when you have an otherwise-fully-functional SD TV available.
I don't see myself going HD for a while still. Sure, it looks nicer, but it is FAR more expensive and I don't really see that you get much for it. Plus, everything is DRMed to death and my DVR will need 10x the disk space just to deliver what I already get today.
I agree with you, but you're not a typical PHB. Just as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever got fired for hiring a college grad with a decent resume.
The goal of the hiring manager usually isn't to take the industry by storm with his new product - his goal is to not lose his job. If hiring that guy with a degree might mean getting a $10k bonus instead of a $15k bonus, but hiring the guy without a degree might result in his termination if the guy didn't work out, the choice will be easy.
The fact is that ANY new hire could turn out to be good or bad. If you were conservative and followed all the rules when you hired the guy, then your boss will say "well, they don't all turn out good." If you fought to hire some guy without a degree and he doesn't turn out, then your boss will say "see, you clearly don't have good managerial judgment."
And in a sufficiently-large organization, it is unlikely that a hiring manager would even be able to lobby for somebody without a degree. They could pitch it to their boss, and push hard, but when their boss pushes it to the next three up the chain of command they won't push nearly as hard, and it will get squashed.
That whole voiding the warranty bit ought to be illegal (in fact, I suspect it probably is in many jurisdictions).
Now, if you brick your phone and the only way to get it to boot is with a JTAG, I can see them not honoring the warranty on that (it isn't a defect in manufacture - you made it that way).
On the other hand, if two weeks after rooting your phone the display dies, then they shouldn't be able to deny coverage because of 3rd-party firmware, unless it can be shown that the firmware caused the problem. That would be like Ford voiding your warranty because you bought non-Ford oil for it.
Just the same, when I was in middle school I learned quite a bit about low-level programming by reading an IBM PC Technical Reference Guide (including the aforementioned BIOS source code - minus the BASIC interpreter). The hardware was simple enough that I could follow it reasonably well despite never having used an assembler (I had to make do with DEBUG). The guide even had the x86/87 instruction set (opcodes and all). Boggles the mind to consider just how many different addressing modes that thing had and what that did to the instruction set...
Uh, if you're looking for a car analogy for replacing the battery on an ipod, instead of talking about the ECU, how about you talk about doing an oil change. It isn't a daily activity, but it is a fairly routine operation that LOTS of people do on their own, and even more will take it to any number of 3rd parties to do it. By law the manufacturer cannot void the warranty for doing this, either, as long as the proper specs for the oil are used (and even then, they can only get out of it if the damage is clearly attributable to the oil).
I'm sorry - Apple has some kind of fetish over making parts non-replaceable - ones that traditionally are trivial to replace. On almost any laptop out there changing the hard drive requires removing just a few screw, and no opening of the guts of the case. On quite a few apple laptops you have to practically tear the whole thing apart. Sure, a replaceable battery might take a tiny bit more space than a non-replaceable one, but virtually every device of any value out there manages to make do - and generally with a decent form factor. Some might require you to remove case screws, but they're not engineered to make replacement something akin to open heart surgery.
Imagine a car that required you to remove the water pump to do an oil change...
In theory one advantage of outsourcing something long-term is that it makes it immune to political changes.
If you just outsource every part, then every two years the whole project is up for cancellation.
If you sign a contract that commits the government to pay $2B for delivery of some launch vehicle that meets a set of specifications, and milestone payments along the way, then it can't be canceled. The government can of course take delivery and throw it away, but that's about it.
In theory the piece-by-piece way is more flexible and the smarter way to go. If it were my money I'd do it that way. However, in politics sometimes this doesn't work out. Given the choice of spending $2B and getting something, or spending $1B on project after project and getting nothing, I'll take the former...
One or two others have hinted at this, but I find that RPN just seems much more natural. The fact that you have a stack means that you can attack a problem in almost any order, without really any sacrifice of keystrokes or hacks like the "Ans->" key or memories or whatever.
Want to start on the outside of a big equation and work your way in? No problem - although you'll have to keep track of a few values on the stack (usually not a big deal unless the expression is very unwieldy). Want to start on the inside and work your way out? That is trivial.
When I see people working with normal calculators and they need to capture intermediate values I often see lots of rounding and re-entry. With an RPN calculator I can see the intermediate values, and yet keep them at full precision without any need for memories/etc.
Seeing all the intermediate values often is useful in real-world situations, as well. For example, often you'll run into equations in real life where some value of interest is a sum or product of lots of components (each of which is the result of a short calc). With an RPN calc you just perform each short calc and end up with a stack full of values, and then you hit + or * 10 times or whatever to sum/product the whole list. However, before you do that you can easily look at the list (or just watch the stack collapse and see the values as you use them). This gives you a quick idea of how the various values contribute to the whole.
When I use infix calculators I find myself having to plan ahead a lot more to do a calculation, or writing out big long strings of math. RPN just fits how I think better.
Well, they're obviously going to be firewalled from the internet at large. However, extra steps were taken to minimize their communication with the internal network in general. The goal is to isolate any virus breakouts so that they don't take out every sort of system like this in a whole company.
Nothing wrong with thin clients - however they really NEED to be thin. The less you depend on fancy browser tricks the less likely your app will be to break when you upgrade the browser.
Alternatively, consider that perhaps using the same software to interface with your ERP and CRM systems and the hotmail.com website might not be a great choice either.
In theory companies could avoid a lot of these problems by:
Deploying both IE6 and firefox on local machines. IE6 points to a proxy that keeps it away from the internet in general. Firefox points to a proxy that allows internet access. Install some helper app that becomes the default for URLs and launches either app as appropriate based on the URL.
Or they could only buy web-based apps that stick to xhtml 1.0 strict and use minimal javascript/ ajax/ etc. Honestly, the more web developers push the envelope with the rendering engines, the more trouble it causes everybody down the road. Your app needs to receive input and display output. That doesn't really require drag-and-drop or whatever. Or, use Citrix or some other platform other than your browser to run the app.
You sell widgets. Somebody offers you a new widget processing application for $3M. It runs on IE6 - great, that's the corporate standard (in 2005)! Sure, the price seems high, but then again if we save $500k per year for 10 years even with time-value-of-money it works out as a great deal.
Now we're in year 5, and just starting to make money back on the deal, and a bunch of IT geeks tell us that we can't use IE6, but we don't have an upgrade path. Oh, the company that sold us the original software is still around, and for another $2M we can upgrade and fix the browser problem. But, the whole basis for selling the original project to management was the 10-year investment, and now it looks like a 5-year investment. Plus, the original product still "works fine," so how exactly are we supposed to sell them on an upgrade?
Now, consider that in addition to the widget processing app you have a general ledger app, an HR app, a bunch of sales CRM apps, some widget R&D apps, and 47 other things like that which all cost a fortune to deploy and are now obsolete - but only technically.
At our company they had a similar mess with win2k and NT. Company buys a dozen $500k machines whose controllers run on NT (slightly stale, but still pretty common back then). Those machines have 15-year depreciation schedules. 5-7 years later the company that makes the machines doesn't offer new controller software - so you're stuck on NT. IT points out, hey - we checked and you can just buy their newer $500k machines and those work great with XP. Only problem is that the machines were financed based on a 15-year investment and the ONLY reason for getting rid of them is the controller OS. So, we firewall the network they are on and cross our fingers. What are we going to do - get into the machine business?
Before you ask - of course we try to avoid this stuff when we make buying decisions! However, when you get into serious amounts of capital you'll find you have 2-3 serious vendors at best, and it is in their interest to build in technical obsolescence. Then you add in the fact that the buying decision usually rests with the people using the machines, which is almost never IT. They'll listen to you, but given a choice between having more features now, or not leaving their successor's successor a big problem, they'll pick the former.
Well, they can look for patterns that suggest that the message contains a certain type of content (for example, frequency analysis would easily identify text of almost any language), although if you have to do that on every key that obviously greatly slows the process, and you can't just run the whole thing on a single block.
Usually you know something about the person sending a message and possible topics under discussion, so that can give you words to grep for, which is probably a lot cheaper than frequency analysis (although you might need to decrypt more than one block).
You can also mount a chosen plaintext attack, although that only works if you know where in a message that will end up, or you check entire messages (which obviously means more work). Think that a competitor is evesdropping on your board meetings? Then you carelessly handle lots of documents with some super-critical project with a unique name that would be easy to spot in a grep, and then see if it turns up in your competitor's encrypted communications.
I assume that unlike android that an app can't intercept SMS messages?
On android even with single-tasking there is an easy way around this issue. Just have your app bind into the SMS interface and look for messages with a unique code in them (sent by Skype). When that message is received the app would launch and connect to the Skype servers to find out what is going on and display an incoming call.
I guess in theory VOIP packets don't NEED to use much more bandwidth than voice packets do (granted, the network isn't optimized for them, and providers might take more bandwidth than they really need, and they are on different bands/etc).
However, since VOIP is close to free what it does do is allow people to consume a whole lot more calling time than their plans would otherwise cover, which means that demand is going to soar.
Yup - I can certainly vouch that this is the case. My biggest pet peeve is that I don't have any control over whether services run short of using a task manager to manually kill them.
Note to devs: you don't really HAVE to have a service for every little thing you write. Let me choose whether I need my weather updated every 30 seconds or whatever...
Sure, except that they don't have to charge $99 to still have that filtering.
Almost all android-based phones will refuse to install anything not cleared by the Google Market by default. The difference is that anybody can go into a menu and change a setting, and now you can install whatever you want from wherever you want.
I'd be fine if Google even wanted to have three tiers - anything goes, anything in the market, and anything in the market that was reviewed by Google for quality. Most linux distros work the same way - ubuntu by default gives you stuff they consider stable, but if you want you can ask for stuff they consider less stable (but still from them), or you can add any repository you'd like or start installing DEBs, or tarballs for that matter.
However, you didn't get the phone for free - you paid $180 for it.
So, if you cancel your plan after three months and keep the phone your cost for the phone is 350+200+180, and in addition to this you paid extra for a few months towards the hardware (since the plan includes a recovery cost).
I'm sure that T-mobile also charges some kind of activation fee, so it isn't like they have all kinds of administrative costs to deal with (assigning a new number, etc), and even if they were it wouldn't be hundreds of dollars a line. Google Voice probably incurs all the same costs and their service is free but for the ads.
Actually, android does have this separation. The radio interface is a separate firmware blob, and this is not open source. Some people have tinkered with it slightly (mainly to fix compatibility issues with changes to the rest of the OS), but for the most part it is a black box.
When you think about it phones have a practical need to isolate these kinds of functions anyway. The phone has to continually interact with the cell network to detect incoming calls/etc, but that doesn't require all the hardware used by the smartphone capabilities of the device. So, separating the two areas of the phone allows it to consume low power when idle.
Yup - if I SERIOUSLY read every contract I signed it would take me three hours to create a gmail or facebook account. It might cost thousands of dollars for a lawyer to review an agreement of sale or a purchase agreement for a house, if it weren't for the fact that these contracts are standardized. And, why are they standardized? Well, before they were standardized buying a house began to resemble a super-high-stakes version of buying a cell phone or cable plan.
When you only have four companies in a particular market, and almost all of their plans with reasonable rates involve two-year lock-ins, then it is time for regulation.
Yup - if I had my way I'd have a law passed: In addition to unbunding phone subsidies and plan costs, I'd also rule that customers cannot be charged more in a month than the lowest price quoted in an ad for the service they have. If you need to charge 37 different "recovery fees" that is fine - just include them in the advertised price.
I'd also let the customer name his maximum bill at the time the contract is signed, and the telco cannot ever exceed it (without agreement in advance in writing - naming a new explicit limit). The customer would HAVE to have the option of making that price the number on the ad. Want to offer add-ons, no problem, the customer is free to allow them or not. However, the responsibility would be on the provider to block unordered services, not on the customer to avoid hitting the web button on their phone or whatever. Likewise for roaming - you name your maximum bill, and if the carrier completes a call that exceeds this then it is free.
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I don't disagree with you at all, but my point was just that the issue would be a lot easier to consider if we just knew what the test case was, as then it would be a simple matter of fact and not one of reputation.
Toyota apparently indicated that they investigate all complaints, and that they haven't come up with any electronic acceleration problems.
Franky, this is just a case of "he said, she said" - it isn't news until Woz publishes a reproducible test case for his problems. Anything else is just a Toyota vs Woz popularity contest.
I dunno - what strategy could they possibly employ? They seem rather clever with their attacks IMHO.
Until we have DRM-enabled hardware in everybody's home, they have to work with conventional PCs. That means that an inspection of a PC will turn up the binary code to the virus, and its operation can be fully studied. Anybody attacking a bot can evesdrop on every aspect of its activity client-side, and can probably trace the network traffic pretty far (with government assistance all the way to the endpoint). In such an environment, the only thing you can do is make the job of tracking down the control node harder - you can't ever obscure it completely (at best you can just make every endpoint a control node of some kind and mixmaster all your traffic, which is only a delaying tactic in itself).
Now, once ordinary citizens no longer own their PCs, that might be a botnet's dream. Just imagine trusted code running over trusted network connections protected by trusted routers! DRM suffers from fundamental limitations, but the next gen of bot hunters might find themselves having to tear apart CPUs and examining them with SEMs to try to figure out what they're doing...
Indeed, and the word "care" lacks definition as well. We have free medical care today, if you define care as whatever you can manage to do for yourself.
When the price of ANY service is TRULY free, there is no way that ANY society that exists could truly afford to provide it. Demand will be infinite, and so will cost. No "free" healthcare system is truly free. Now, it might be lower cost than it is in the US (I'm not fan of the status quo), but don't be under any illusions that there are no tradeoffs.
Frankly, I think the whole "think of the children" is just a distraction from the main issue. I'm not quite sure why it is horrible to screen somebody who is 6573.5 days old, but it is perfectly fine if they are 6574.5 days old.
I think the real issue is whether as a society (as decided by the elected representatives) we feel that this is a fair tradeoff of security for invasion of privacy. The problem is that people cannot seem to talk rationally about such things.
We can't talk rationally about the value of not having our bodies exposed. We can't talk rationally about the value of not having our privacy intruded upon. We can't talk rationally about the value of not having a school kid die in a plane bombing. As a result, we cannot find reasonable tradeoffs between privacy, safety, and cost.
This means that there is never reasonable political dialog on these topics, and instead bureaucrats just end up making these choices for us.
I find all of this fairly hypocritical. The average person will go on and on about how you can't put a price on lives (ie they are infinitely valuable), but they own TVs while kids are starving in Africa. The fact is that we ALL put prices on lives, and our choices clearly reflect those prices. This is apparently perfectly socially acceptable, as long as you don't talk about it.
Hmm - just tried froogle. Haven't actually gone shopping in a while. In any case, I didn't pay a dime for the TV the console is attached to now. I also didn't pay $300 for the console either...
My point is, if the console is going to have an SD interface, then it should support SD resolutions. If MS isn't going to provide a quality SD experience, they shouldn't have an SD output on it...
Uh - you can pick up a standard 27" SD TV for about $200, while an HD equivalent looks like it would cost you closer to $500.
Maybe if you only play your 360 on your desk you might have a point. For a typical sofa/TV setup an HD TV is still a fairly expensive investment - especially when you have an otherwise-fully-functional SD TV available.
I don't see myself going HD for a while still. Sure, it looks nicer, but it is FAR more expensive and I don't really see that you get much for it. Plus, everything is DRMed to death and my DVR will need 10x the disk space just to deliver what I already get today.
I agree with you, but you're not a typical PHB. Just as nobody ever got fired for buying IBM, nobody ever got fired for hiring a college grad with a decent resume.
The goal of the hiring manager usually isn't to take the industry by storm with his new product - his goal is to not lose his job. If hiring that guy with a degree might mean getting a $10k bonus instead of a $15k bonus, but hiring the guy without a degree might result in his termination if the guy didn't work out, the choice will be easy.
The fact is that ANY new hire could turn out to be good or bad. If you were conservative and followed all the rules when you hired the guy, then your boss will say "well, they don't all turn out good." If you fought to hire some guy without a degree and he doesn't turn out, then your boss will say "see, you clearly don't have good managerial judgment."
And in a sufficiently-large organization, it is unlikely that a hiring manager would even be able to lobby for somebody without a degree. They could pitch it to their boss, and push hard, but when their boss pushes it to the next three up the chain of command they won't push nearly as hard, and it will get squashed.
That whole voiding the warranty bit ought to be illegal (in fact, I suspect it probably is in many jurisdictions).
Now, if you brick your phone and the only way to get it to boot is with a JTAG, I can see them not honoring the warranty on that (it isn't a defect in manufacture - you made it that way).
On the other hand, if two weeks after rooting your phone the display dies, then they shouldn't be able to deny coverage because of 3rd-party firmware, unless it can be shown that the firmware caused the problem. That would be like Ford voiding your warranty because you bought non-Ford oil for it.
Agreed with the drawbacks.
Just the same, when I was in middle school I learned quite a bit about low-level programming by reading an IBM PC Technical Reference Guide (including the aforementioned BIOS source code - minus the BASIC interpreter). The hardware was simple enough that I could follow it reasonably well despite never having used an assembler (I had to make do with DEBUG). The guide even had the x86/87 instruction set (opcodes and all). Boggles the mind to consider just how many different addressing modes that thing had and what that did to the instruction set...
Uh, if you're looking for a car analogy for replacing the battery on an ipod, instead of talking about the ECU, how about you talk about doing an oil change. It isn't a daily activity, but it is a fairly routine operation that LOTS of people do on their own, and even more will take it to any number of 3rd parties to do it. By law the manufacturer cannot void the warranty for doing this, either, as long as the proper specs for the oil are used (and even then, they can only get out of it if the damage is clearly attributable to the oil).
I'm sorry - Apple has some kind of fetish over making parts non-replaceable - ones that traditionally are trivial to replace. On almost any laptop out there changing the hard drive requires removing just a few screw, and no opening of the guts of the case. On quite a few apple laptops you have to practically tear the whole thing apart. Sure, a replaceable battery might take a tiny bit more space than a non-replaceable one, but virtually every device of any value out there manages to make do - and generally with a decent form factor. Some might require you to remove case screws, but they're not engineered to make replacement something akin to open heart surgery.
Imagine a car that required you to remove the water pump to do an oil change...
Yes and no.
In theory one advantage of outsourcing something long-term is that it makes it immune to political changes.
If you just outsource every part, then every two years the whole project is up for cancellation.
If you sign a contract that commits the government to pay $2B for delivery of some launch vehicle that meets a set of specifications, and milestone payments along the way, then it can't be canceled. The government can of course take delivery and throw it away, but that's about it.
In theory the piece-by-piece way is more flexible and the smarter way to go. If it were my money I'd do it that way. However, in politics sometimes this doesn't work out. Given the choice of spending $2B and getting something, or spending $1B on project after project and getting nothing, I'll take the former...
One or two others have hinted at this, but I find that RPN just seems much more natural. The fact that you have a stack means that you can attack a problem in almost any order, without really any sacrifice of keystrokes or hacks like the "Ans->" key or memories or whatever.
Want to start on the outside of a big equation and work your way in? No problem - although you'll have to keep track of a few values on the stack (usually not a big deal unless the expression is very unwieldy). Want to start on the inside and work your way out? That is trivial.
When I see people working with normal calculators and they need to capture intermediate values I often see lots of rounding and re-entry. With an RPN calculator I can see the intermediate values, and yet keep them at full precision without any need for memories/etc.
Seeing all the intermediate values often is useful in real-world situations, as well. For example, often you'll run into equations in real life where some value of interest is a sum or product of lots of components (each of which is the result of a short calc). With an RPN calc you just perform each short calc and end up with a stack full of values, and then you hit + or * 10 times or whatever to sum/product the whole list. However, before you do that you can easily look at the list (or just watch the stack collapse and see the values as you use them). This gives you a quick idea of how the various values contribute to the whole.
When I use infix calculators I find myself having to plan ahead a lot more to do a calculation, or writing out big long strings of math. RPN just fits how I think better.
Well, they're obviously going to be firewalled from the internet at large. However, extra steps were taken to minimize their communication with the internal network in general. The goal is to isolate any virus breakouts so that they don't take out every sort of system like this in a whole company.
Nothing wrong with thin clients - however they really NEED to be thin. The less you depend on fancy browser tricks the less likely your app will be to break when you upgrade the browser.
Alternatively, consider that perhaps using the same software to interface with your ERP and CRM systems and the hotmail.com website might not be a great choice either.
In theory companies could avoid a lot of these problems by:
Deploying both IE6 and firefox on local machines. IE6 points to a proxy that keeps it away from the internet in general. Firefox points to a proxy that allows internet access. Install some helper app that becomes the default for URLs and launches either app as appropriate based on the URL.
Or they could only buy web-based apps that stick to xhtml 1.0 strict and use minimal javascript/ ajax/ etc. Honestly, the more web developers push the envelope with the rendering engines, the more trouble it causes everybody down the road. Your app needs to receive input and display output. That doesn't really require drag-and-drop or whatever. Or, use Citrix or some other platform other than your browser to run the app.
Look at it from the company's perspective.
You sell widgets. Somebody offers you a new widget processing application for $3M. It runs on IE6 - great, that's the corporate standard (in 2005)! Sure, the price seems high, but then again if we save $500k per year for 10 years even with time-value-of-money it works out as a great deal.
Now we're in year 5, and just starting to make money back on the deal, and a bunch of IT geeks tell us that we can't use IE6, but we don't have an upgrade path. Oh, the company that sold us the original software is still around, and for another $2M we can upgrade and fix the browser problem. But, the whole basis for selling the original project to management was the 10-year investment, and now it looks like a 5-year investment. Plus, the original product still "works fine," so how exactly are we supposed to sell them on an upgrade?
Now, consider that in addition to the widget processing app you have a general ledger app, an HR app, a bunch of sales CRM apps, some widget R&D apps, and 47 other things like that which all cost a fortune to deploy and are now obsolete - but only technically.
At our company they had a similar mess with win2k and NT. Company buys a dozen $500k machines whose controllers run on NT (slightly stale, but still pretty common back then). Those machines have 15-year depreciation schedules. 5-7 years later the company that makes the machines doesn't offer new controller software - so you're stuck on NT. IT points out, hey - we checked and you can just buy their newer $500k machines and those work great with XP. Only problem is that the machines were financed based on a 15-year investment and the ONLY reason for getting rid of them is the controller OS. So, we firewall the network they are on and cross our fingers. What are we going to do - get into the machine business?
Before you ask - of course we try to avoid this stuff when we make buying decisions! However, when you get into serious amounts of capital you'll find you have 2-3 serious vendors at best, and it is in their interest to build in technical obsolescence. Then you add in the fact that the buying decision usually rests with the people using the machines, which is almost never IT. They'll listen to you, but given a choice between having more features now, or not leaving their successor's successor a big problem, they'll pick the former.
Well, they can look for patterns that suggest that the message contains a certain type of content (for example, frequency analysis would easily identify text of almost any language), although if you have to do that on every key that obviously greatly slows the process, and you can't just run the whole thing on a single block.
Usually you know something about the person sending a message and possible topics under discussion, so that can give you words to grep for, which is probably a lot cheaper than frequency analysis (although you might need to decrypt more than one block).
You can also mount a chosen plaintext attack, although that only works if you know where in a message that will end up, or you check entire messages (which obviously means more work). Think that a competitor is evesdropping on your board meetings? Then you carelessly handle lots of documents with some super-critical project with a unique name that would be easy to spot in a grep, and then see if it turns up in your competitor's encrypted communications.
I assume that unlike android that an app can't intercept SMS messages?
On android even with single-tasking there is an easy way around this issue. Just have your app bind into the SMS interface and look for messages with a unique code in them (sent by Skype). When that message is received the app would launch and connect to the Skype servers to find out what is going on and display an incoming call.
I guess in theory VOIP packets don't NEED to use much more bandwidth than voice packets do (granted, the network isn't optimized for them, and providers might take more bandwidth than they really need, and they are on different bands/etc).
However, since VOIP is close to free what it does do is allow people to consume a whole lot more calling time than their plans would otherwise cover, which means that demand is going to soar.
Yup - I can certainly vouch that this is the case. My biggest pet peeve is that I don't have any control over whether services run short of using a task manager to manually kill them.
Note to devs: you don't really HAVE to have a service for every little thing you write. Let me choose whether I need my weather updated every 30 seconds or whatever...
Sure, except that they don't have to charge $99 to still have that filtering.
Almost all android-based phones will refuse to install anything not cleared by the Google Market by default. The difference is that anybody can go into a menu and change a setting, and now you can install whatever you want from wherever you want.
I'd be fine if Google even wanted to have three tiers - anything goes, anything in the market, and anything in the market that was reviewed by Google for quality. Most linux distros work the same way - ubuntu by default gives you stuff they consider stable, but if you want you can ask for stuff they consider less stable (but still from them), or you can add any repository you'd like or start installing DEBs, or tarballs for that matter.
However, you didn't get the phone for free - you paid $180 for it.
So, if you cancel your plan after three months and keep the phone your cost for the phone is 350+200+180, and in addition to this you paid extra for a few months towards the hardware (since the plan includes a recovery cost).
I'm sure that T-mobile also charges some kind of activation fee, so it isn't like they have all kinds of administrative costs to deal with (assigning a new number, etc), and even if they were it wouldn't be hundreds of dollars a line. Google Voice probably incurs all the same costs and their service is free but for the ads.
Actually, android does have this separation. The radio interface is a separate firmware blob, and this is not open source. Some people have tinkered with it slightly (mainly to fix compatibility issues with changes to the rest of the OS), but for the most part it is a black box.
When you think about it phones have a practical need to isolate these kinds of functions anyway. The phone has to continually interact with the cell network to detect incoming calls/etc, but that doesn't require all the hardware used by the smartphone capabilities of the device. So, separating the two areas of the phone allows it to consume low power when idle.
Yup - if I SERIOUSLY read every contract I signed it would take me three hours to create a gmail or facebook account. It might cost thousands of dollars for a lawyer to review an agreement of sale or a purchase agreement for a house, if it weren't for the fact that these contracts are standardized. And, why are they standardized? Well, before they were standardized buying a house began to resemble a super-high-stakes version of buying a cell phone or cable plan.
When you only have four companies in a particular market, and almost all of their plans with reasonable rates involve two-year lock-ins, then it is time for regulation.
Yup - if I had my way I'd have a law passed: In addition to unbunding phone subsidies and plan costs, I'd also rule that customers cannot be charged more in a month than the lowest price quoted in an ad for the service they have. If you need to charge 37 different "recovery fees" that is fine - just include them in the advertised price.
I'd also let the customer name his maximum bill at the time the contract is signed, and the telco cannot ever exceed it (without agreement in advance in writing - naming a new explicit limit). The customer would HAVE to have the option of making that price the number on the ad. Want to offer add-ons, no problem, the customer is free to allow them or not. However, the responsibility would be on the provider to block unordered services, not on the customer to avoid hitting the web button on their phone or whatever. Likewise for roaming - you name your maximum bill, and if the carrier completes a call that exceeds this then it is free.