Responding to some of the (typically) under-informed criticisms...
(Why bother to understand a topic when you can quickly post an opinion?)
This isnt intended to replace all traffic management, for instance at airports, just to lessen the overhead of overseeing the more predictable long stretches in-between.
Aircraft spacing would be lessened under the proposed system but still be considerable. Therefore even if GPS accuracy were degraded by the US Military it wouldnt have much practical effect. Besides accuracy to a few hundred feet is already problematic when youre traveling that far every second.
The new systems arent any more susceptible to interference from solar flares or other natural phenomena then current systems; indeed theyre predicted to be more robust.
Finally, 40 billion dollars US does seem like a lot of money. But considering the FAAs historic phenomenal mind-bogglingly beyond-grossly-incompetent record at managing system deployments its probably a low-ball on a cost-plus contract...
Pop star George Michael said the same thing to BBC radio in 2004, talking about his impending retirement from commercial music.
"I think it's ("Patience") going to be my last commercial promoted release. I've been very well remunerated for my talents over the years so I really don't need the public's money," he said.
Now, he added, he would "really like to have something on the internet with charitable donation optional, where anyone can download my music for free".
"Believe me, in the modern world if you take yourself out of the financial aspect of things, ie. if you're not in anybody's chart, you're not making anybody any money, you're not losing anybody any money, believe me, I'll be of very little interest to the press in a certain number of years."
Frankly I don't see why not. Once you've got "enough" money why not sell-out entirely to your own creative impulses? It's certainly better then wearily pumping out material you're no longer interested in just because you've become accustomed to life as a hamster on a pop-star wheel.
I thasnk Mr. Michael, Prince, and every other artist for sharing their talent with us. If their non-commercial expressions discomfort trade cartels and music store chains then so be it, artists have no obligation to support music industry chattel. Perhaps the record stores would like to have parents stop singing non-commercial lullabyes and birds be required to have performance licenses.
Determine needs. How many users in an area. What kind of usage?
Do a site plan. Where will access points be placed. How will they be networked? How will they be powered?
Test signal propagation. Are there competing nodes? Are there reflections/absorbers?
Evaluate hardware. Is the firmware stable? Are the antennas good enough? How much heat does it produce/can it take? How is it all managed?
Set expectationsof the IT staff, of the managers, of the users.
Plan for hardware failures. I anticipate a 24 month lifespan of each access point, and plan for an up to 10% failure rate in any month.
Monitor, both the internal networks and the general environment. Have a running watch of all access points with alerts for rogue ones, particularly dupes.
Put in dedicated services for visitors with instructions conspicuously posted in conference areas (along with sufficient power supplies.) Inform staff if they are caught using these open systems their devices will be taken away, and if they relied upon such to do their jobs they will then be unsuitable for continued employment.
Finally, consider alternatives to WiFi. There are any number of products that will carry WiFi-equivalent bandwidth over residential wiring. If youre looking to connect fixed devices without running ethernet then these are a no-hassle approach with competitive costs.
Why would a home broadband customer want to turn their connection into a free wireless hot-spot?
Acessability. In return for sharing one's service one gets access to other's hotspots.
Neighborliness. Let the neighbor who brought home a laptop from work fire it up and check their email.
The sheer geekiness of this (this is/.)
I've got two net connections to my house, 6MB down/.5MB up & 20MB down/2MB up, so a typical 802.11g connection or two isn't gonna be much of a hit. The net traffic most hotspots see is quite bursty, rarely a sustained file transfer or p2p swarm. Also most hotspots start to saturate at about a dozen clients so there's another limit. Throw a little QOS & traffic shaping on there and I'm not gonna notice a thing.
However in this neighborhood it's all single family residential; a stranger in a parked car in front of a house for any extended period would cause one of the neighbors to call for a police car to wander by. However previously I lived next to a large pubic park, and was interested in sharing service to it via Île Sans Fil.
However in both locations my Terms Of Service forbid such, and not wanting any hassle I've refrained. However should my ISP enable such, or even encourage it with a reciprocity system, I'd be interested. Particularly with the knowledge that folks using my connection would have an audit trail associated with 'em in case of problem.
It was an obvious idea at the time for Apple to repackage the Mac into a gaming platform, license it out, let others build a market for it. Doing so was little risk on Apple's part and could have paid off handsomely.
The Pippin was part of a larger push at Apple to expand it's market in all sorts of directions. There was demand for classes hardware that Apple was unwilling, or unable, to produce. So the strategy became to license out the platform and let other's invest their resources into filling in those niches. This way Apple could emulate the thriving IBM PC clone market without losing control (and revenue) from it like IBM had.
So companies like DayStar came up with multi-processor Macs to service the very high-end, a market Radius (later Umax) also served. Power Computing originally aimed for the low end of the market, which Apple was happy to cede to them, but soon began cannibalizing Apple's bread-&-butter market. Other licensees were hoped to open international markets as local vendors offering Mac products & services in regions Apple was having trouble getting traction in.
All the while Apple R&D was happily designing reference platforms for everything from network appliances (an alternative use of the Pippin platform) to industrial-strength servers. In the heady days of the AIM alliance and the successful migration to PowerPC anything seemed possible, even a gaming machine.
However Bandai was never able to build much support for their uneasy hybrid of a very low-end Mac and an ill-suited gaming box. It was neither fish nor fowl and so satisfied no one. But "hyped"? Only hardcore gamers of the era ever knew of it in the US, and then only from specialty magazines doing exhaustive comparison reviews.
Tellingly IBM also bought a Pippin license, which they never used. Their interest may have been as a smart terminal, a particularly versatile front end complete with GUI & multimedia capabilities. X-Windows, NeWS, and other advanced windowing client interfaces were a competing vision of the future of the market, a Pippin-based client could have been an interesting hybrid.
But the Bandai Pippin unsuccessful as a gaming platform? Sure that's a fair assessment. But it was hardly Apple's fault - they just licensed the reference design, it was the client's to make a go of it or not.
"KiteGen", a kite-driven rotating carousel generating electricity. The kites, at altitudes up to 2Km, could be quickly maneuvered to avoid aircraft, even individual birds. An initial cost of 360,000 euros for a 100m model could generate.5Gw of electricity. A 2 Km version could generate 5 Gw. A proposed initial site is the former Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant, already a no-fly zone.
Had the airliner been exactly 30 seconds (or whatever) ahead of schedule...
But not a fraction of a degree to either side, or a 29 seconds earlier or 31 seconds earlier, assuming the report in in any way accurate.
Seriously, while disturbing, the odds of the two paths intersecting simultaneously are, ahem, astronomically low.
... we would be reading about an airliner that got shot down by what appears to be a missile.
No, we'd probably be reading about an aircraft that suffered a sudden, mysterious, possibly catastrophic failure in flight.
The likely first suspicion would be a bomb aboard the aircraft, or some sort of structural failure. A missile, far out over the ocean, fired upon a commercial airliner, at high altitude, far from any area of combat, would be one of the least likely causes considered.
Apparently/. is low on pageviews for the month so the editors are looking for a thousand IANAL (half of whome will give legal advice anyhow, a further half of whom are unable to comprehend that US law isn't universal (not for wont of trying.))
Pay the money, try and save what you can your employer's (your friend) reputation by fixing this as quickly and as quietly for the client as possible.
In the future, put big watermarks all over material unsuitable for public display - something like "NOT for publication / MUST license from CORBIS"
Spend a sum equal to the fine on a gift for your employer/friend who has been professionally injured by your carelessness.
I've had several friends in academic journal publishing, and so have heard a bit of this from their side:
Editing is hard work. Maintaining a consistently high quality of writing, articles that are appropriately in-depth but accessible to the readership, sniffing out the studies that define or redefine the field.
Copy editing is brutal. Technical terms abound, the language mustn't be turgid but a certain level of gravitas is often excpected, understanding those nuances is a specialized skill.
Typsesetting can be a misery when working with formulas & like content that has gone through several cycles of review & fine-tuning. Journals shouldn't read like ransom notes.
Reviewers do cost. Finding them, vetting them, coordinating them.
Illustrations are worth a thousand words, but a consistently good technical illustrator is a rare bird to be treasured.
Fact-checking, background-reviews, identifying possible conflicts-of-interest, that's a lot of hard-work administrivia that is expected now.
Then there are the basic internal administrative costs of keeping the lights on, payroll met, licensing the typefaces, getting the parking lot snowplowed, the PCs virus-free, handling the morass of profit/non-profit taxes & exemptions, all are yet more staff.
Subscriber services is everyone's horror. What do you do when a professor or researcher passes out their personal subscription password to everyone, and suddenly you've got 60 sites around the world using that password? Or when Harvard wants a campus-wide subscription, but has several dozen domains folks will be coming in from, not to mention home users?
And printing on dead-trees is an expensive proposition, but still the media-of-record. In-house the press is easily a million dollars, not to mention paper, ink, staff, space, insurance, maintenance, distribution, capitol depreciation, etc. Reprints can earn top dollar but those require quality printing and must be accounted for.
Blithely thinking this can all be replaced with a few emails and a database is probably woefully optimistic. Doubtless there is room for journals produced thus, but ones with an active editorial process and rather richer content are probably around for while too; their ecological niche is still a valuable one to their communities.
Using a Broadcom-based router, installing 3rd party firmware, and upping your transmitting power might help.
Might.
However it is not a panacea.
802.11-whichever is a two-way system & you'd only be upping the router's outgoing signal strength, doing nothing for improving the client's signal. Furthermore you can easily over-power your transmitter and end up with literally more noise then signal. Plus the additional load can overheat your router and lead to premature failure.
A different strategy is to improve your antenna. For nothing-$40 you can significantly improve transmission & reception. Websites like www.freeantenna.org list easy-to-make reflectors, or you can purchase replacement antenna(s) with better characteristics then the stock ones.
Of course improving the local environment can have an immediate & significant effect.
The signal is transmitted from your router in an omni directional plane, roughly pancake-shaped. Therefore getting everything on somewhat the same level is useful, such as on the same floor of the building.
Removing obstructions like metal sheeting (filing cabinets, refrigerators, nearby ductwork) will help, as well as avoiding transmitting through dense material like concrete/masonry walls, packed bookshelves. Simply putting a router up on a shelf can occasionally make a huge difference.
As nearly every other poster has noted, picking the right channel helps tremendously. Use 1, 6, or 11, whichever is least congested. Keep in mind this can change as your neighbor gets home and turns on their equipment so re-survey regularly.
Then there is not using WiFi. If wireless is just a way to avoid cabling a place then consider on of the Ethernet-over-electrical-lines. Basically shortwave using your household wiring as an antenna it offers good speeds at high reliability. Adapters are about $40 each & if you're already tethered to an electrical outlet then this is a natural fit.
Finally, as everyone is promoting their favorite flavor of firmware, let me suggest Tomato. It isn't burdened with every feature possible; instead it is fast, easy to configure, has great reporting, and most importantly, is extremely reliable (unlike some other distribs). If your goal is just "a better router" and not lots of other services then it's a great choice.
Why is it... that when articles are posted that include obscure software titles and ambiguous acronyms that the editors can't insert a quick phrase explaining what the hell the whole thing is about?
Because this is/. not CNet.
Besides, do you imagine the "Editors" would get descriptions even somewhat correct? They regularly mangle submissions, add inflammatory/incorrect commentary, and/or (re)post old, absurd, or widely discredited material.
Bashing is having four guys come after you as you walk out a door. Bashing is having a board used as a baseball bat on your skull. Bashing is waking up in a hospital covered in cuts & bruises with broken ribs, arm, and a skull fracture. Bashing is an eye that will never again focus properly, becoming deaf in one ear, and most importantly, permanently losing short-term memory.
That's "Bashing"
Pointing out that the US portable market is skewed towards desktop replacements and "the rest of the world typically wants..." smaller/lighter machines is just market analysis and easily confirmed when you look at portable offerings broken down by manufacturer & region sold in. Asia & Europe love ultraportables, the US market is largely indifferent.
You however, wow, "asshole", "bashing", - get help. Out of proportion, needlessly aggressive, confusing your purchasing desires with the aggregate buying habits of a nation, that's real 'alarm bell' stuff.
Oh, and the bashing? I've several friends who've been bashed & twice been in situations where I coulda been. The description I used was specifically of my buddy Doug. What I didn't note that when he came to he was also informed that as he'd been gay-bashed while unconscious his evangelical christian family had disowned him and the US Military, of which he was on active duty with, had begun the process of issuing him dishonorable discharge.
That you confuse something like that with my post can only be described as ill.
First, rumor has it is all this is. An analyst put it in a report and everyone is passing it on a valid. Especially with Apple folks should know that rumors & speculation are just that.
Next it was widely reported a few years ago when Apple made a huuuge futures purchase on flash memory getting an excellent price and assuring their supply. Someone more motivated then I can crunch the numbers but even with however many million iPods sold I'm guessing Apple still has flash memory to play with and a decent price.
Then there's the non-US market. Yes, Americans want 21" screens, 6 speakers, 200 GB hard drives, and accept 30 minute battery life from their portables (oftentimes too big even for American laps). The rest of the world typically wants really small, really light, just enough computing enough power for on-the-road use, and 12 hour battery life. Thus an ultraportable will fill a huge hole in the Apple product line, one many posters to/. may not even be fully aware of.
With all of that in mind do I expect Apple will come out with some sort of clever new device that is small, robust, and runs for longer then others on the market? I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has innovated time & time again, particularly on laptops, and part of their market is remarkably price-insensitive (I've rarely heard "Get me the best Dell, whatever the price!", I've heard that regularly about Macs.) What starts at the top often soon moves down.
Finally, Apple still does largely design their own motherboards, owns their own OS, can implement a new technology without needing to coordinate it among many parties. But do I think J. Random Analyst is going to be all that insightful about Apple's hardware future? Not particularly, he's just an excuse to post another story about everyone's favorite conundrum.
Not to play into the Mac baiting/idiolatry, but Apple does have some of the highest customer satisfaction numbers in the industry, year after year.
I'm sure there will be dozens of horror stories posted about here Macs & Apple, we can do the same for any brand. The truth is in numbers and again, Apple leads the industry in customer satisfaction and retention.
Your issue seems to be a mismatch between what you bought and the service you want.
You didn't buy a system with a business support contract. Apple does have those, but they're not in the Apple Stores. Instead like every other large vendor they have a division dedicated to business customers & their specific needs.
Instead you did the equivalent of going to BestBuy (albeit a much nicer looking one with staff far beyond any "Geek Squad" bufoonery) and are getting standard consumer service. Actually it's far better then you'd get from BestBuy et al, and if you sprang the extra $99 for AppleCare you'll get even better, but it's still walk-in service.
Your complaint really has nothing to do with Apple per se and instead with consumer customer service. Replace "Apple" with "HP" or "Gateway" and the store with "Best Buy", "CompUSA", "Microcenter", or whatever, and suddenly your complaint becomes much clearer
I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience with your Mac. I've friends who buy the kind of support you're looking for, where there is next-day service at their office for their Apple products. I've other friends who are certified in Mac repair, who give the kind of service you're looking for, show up, crack open your Mac, if they have the part handy replace it on the spot or if not retrieve it from a depot.
Instead you purchased we'll-look-at-it/fiddle-with-it/send-away-for-part s/send-the-machine-away-for-repair.
He bluffs that he has been offered a large sum to turn the Moon into a massive billboard using a rocket which scatters black dust on the surface in patterns. To the owner of the "Moka-Cola" company he implies that the culprit is the rival soft drink maker "6+". To a fervent anti-Communist, he suggests that the Russians may be capable of printing the hammer and sickle across the face of the Moon if they get a lead in rocket technology.
How will 3rd world inhabitants react to this lunar eclipse?
Presumably with complete calm and mild interest, just like their condescending 1st world neighbors.
It's not like lunar eclipses aren't particularly rare, about two happen a year. A full eclipse is less frequent but still happens often enough to have been already experienced by most adults.
Indeed folks in poorer areas are usually less impressed by celestial phenomena because they are well familiar with such. Lighting costs money and so isn't as wasted as it is in many 1st world places, leaving the skies that much darker and their contents that much more visible.
Want to see someone freak out over the contents of a night sky? Take a young person from any large first world city far out into the countryside on a clear evening, let their eyes dark adjust, and then show them the night sky. That prompts "some pretty interesting responses".
Adobe did - it's called "Photoshop Elements". The features most mere mortals (as opposed to Photoshop Gods) use at a price appropriate to our budgets.
That you've not heard of it leads me to assume you probably don't have much need for sophisticated image editing and are as unlikely to buy a $75-$100 product as you are a $300-$500 one.
Of course online isn't the appropriate place to edit "professional" material, ie giant files, projects requiring esoteric plug-ins, local fonts, a multitude of resources embedded in the image, etc. The "professionals" will do what they always do: Purchase the right tools and get on with it.
However for non-"professionals" this is an interesting development. There are already other online photo-editing sites out there, using Java applications or clever Web 2.0 AJAX-ey stuff (and probably some older technology upload-and-refresh ones) but Adobe does have the brand name everyone knows and they do have a good concentration of code, coders, UI folks, etc. to pull it off with.
As others have pointed out it'll probably be in Adobe's Flash product, which already has a lot of basic image manipulation built into it. If it will be entirely client-based or if there will be backend processing will be interesting to find out.
From a business perspective how much Adobe will tie this to other services like photo storing & sharing, buy-a-tea-towel-with-the-picture-on-it, etc. is the big question. Will Adobe just have 3rd party banner advertising or will they build in hooks for 3rd party services, the tea-towel sellers & such? Will those services require licensing deals with Adobe or will Photoshop Online be a 'web service' open to other websites to integrate as part of their own offerings a la Google Maps.
I'm looking forward to Photoshop Online, if only as another tool in the progress towards increasingly sophisticated online client applications. They don't seem ready to entirely supplant desktop applications yet, but for occasional-use situations they're already viable, and this is just one more category soon to have multiple 'real' options.
Traveling hives exist for the exact same reason migrant human workers do: They go where the work is.
With 'modern' farming & orchard practices (meaning the past several hundred years) there is a need for a large number of bees to pollinate the local crop at a specific time, and outside of that short period they are superfluous, indeed would starve. Thus the hives are moved from location to location as crop & climate require. The bees respond quite well to this travel, always enjoying a hearty food supply, much as cattle are moved from pasture to pasture.
Generally apiarists are quite aware of the health of their hives, which is why these suddenly empty hives are such a shock.
Even under the most dire/optimistic scenarios a lunar facility isn't gonna be much of a viable 'lifeboat' for generations yet. Indeed if things go seriously awry it's probably the most untenable place to be for any calamity except a fast-acting/highly-virulent/fatal terrestrial biohazard, and then you'd likely just get to live somewhat longer and die a premature death of a different cause. After a terrestrial catastrophe a lunar facility likely won't contribute much to future generations but an interesting monument. Rather a planet of 6 billion with a huge biosphere has so much more in the way of odd nooks & corners for refugees & resources.
There's doing research and rehearsals for manned exploration further out. I certainly wouldn't want to venture to Mars or the asteroids without technology tested a little closer to home first.
Except a lunar facility is going to be markedly different then anything space-based. Significant gravity, a surface, 2 week bright/dark cycles, huge dust & debris issues; except for lack of atmosphere they're almost entirely different problem sets. A space station is certainly the better R&D environment for spacefaring development. As to Martian R&D Earth as good, and substantially cheaper/more-amenable venue then the moon offers.
Raw materials -- He3 (as fusion fuel) is one possibility. As a source for raw materials (silicon, aluminum, etc) for building solar powersats is another.
Except that asteroids are probably a far better materials supply source and can be got roboticly, with their materials easier separated, refined, and then sent on to Earth in space then from the moon. Furthermore while He3 is promising we've yet to achieve fusion that could take advantage of it and those power sats would probably do as good a job with less complexity then a lunar-fueled terrestrial fusion system anyhow.
>Astronomical research -- lunar farside is the best place in the solar system for radio telescopes, it's shielded from Earth's noise. It's also a pretty good place for telescopes at all other wavelengths, especially if there's a manned base to swap out instruments, repair cameras, etc.
Except any manned base is going to be fouling up the local environment and require far more support then just installing spares & alternatives for everything. Again, the moon is good, space is likely better.
A frontier. People need one, even if only a few actually pioneer it. Earth will go crazy even faster without one.
Because the moon is the only possible frontier? Not our oceans, deserts, mountain ranges, arctic & antarctic regions? Not more abstract frontiers like science, technology, sociology, psychology, diplomacy, etc.?
I'm honestly not trying to be contrarian but your reasons strike me more as rationalizations. Nearly all could be done better/cheaper using unmanned systems or directly in space. I'd hate to see a lunar base become another dead end like our hopelesly compromised space station, doing expensive science of minimal import or quality.
The problem is, expansion is driven by population pressure.
Sometimes. Even more frequently it is economic in nature, looking for new resources and new markets.
... colonies that are so far away that you'd never be able to engage in any sort of trade or cultural exchange.
Only if you narrowly define trade & cultural exchange as physical, such as dilithium crystals or visiting dance troupes.
If you accept any broader definition then non-material exchange is already going on hugely within our single planet. Japanese game shows on US television, software developed in Estonia, Chinese factories owned by Taiwanese entrepreneurs based in Canada with design teams in the US selling manufacturing expertise to Malaysian factories overseen by German engineers assembled with local labor.
Heck, the participants in this exchange come from multiple cultures, the communications are time-lagged and while it's value is debatable it's lack of physical instantation isn't.
Sure the lag times for interstellar communications would be years, but that just brings us back to the old sailing ship days. Then along with the spices and dyes there was lots of trade in ideas and technologies that substantially enriched the cultures, philosophies, and technologies of the participants.
Compare & contrast has always been a hugely useful tool. With the Earth's cultures coalescing into a global village with local variations 'outside' perspectives will eventually be invaluable, even if time-lagged by decades. By the time we're ready to go interstellar I expect we'll already have ex
It's not clear that Cisco "owns" the name "iPhone" in this case.
Apple's product isn't particularly close to the "iPhone" product Cisco now holds the trademark for.
There are several other trademarked "iPhone" products also slightly dissimilar that Cisco hasn't challenged (nor have they challenged Cisco).
Cisco hadn't exercised their trademarked "iPhone" until they rushed a rebranded product out just in advance of Apple's announcement. This was clearly done entirely to support any claim to the "iPhone" name as the packaging was nothing more then crack-n-peel stickers pasted over the product's original name, not a particularly credible product.
Cisco's goal appears to be assuring their interoperability with this, and later, versions of Apple's iPhone line.
Assured interoperability could prove highly valuable should Apple's iPhone product line eventually encompass VOIP technologies, something most folks expect will happen sooner rather then later.
On the other hand such an obligated partnership could well prove onerous to Apple; greatly complicating future technology directions and post-AT&T-committment/other-region carrier negotiations.
Apple has historically not been a great hardware partner, witness their repeated difficulties with Motorola (the rocky AIM alliance, their unilateral cancellation of Motorola's license to build 3rd party Mac motherboards, the dismal limitations and stunted marketing of the ROKR phone capped with Apple's decision to build a competing phone. ) A forced partnership with Cisco doesn't inspire much confidence of a better relationship.
The trademark issue is unlikely to have any immediate effect on Apple's "iPhone" marketing or consumers, it's all IMHO a tempest-in-a-teapot.
For the reasons above Cisco is unlikely to get either an injunction against Apple continuing to market the name "iPhone" or a summary judgement in Ciscio's favor. Instead this is likely to drag out for years in legal actions & responses.
While Apple has begun their marketing for the iPhone it hasn't even entered production yet, so any branding changes to another name is still entirely possible, and will only create more hype.
The most likely end result of this whole exercise is Apple either winning the right to use "iPhone" as a a different product then the one Cisco now holds the trademark for, or Apple in a few years pays Cisco some sum of money to make up for damages and makes the whole thing go away.
Frankly this whole discussion seems a product of the extreme interest in Apple's iPhone and no new real news to report on it, so instead everyone natters on about a trademark issue as if it has any substantive effect.
What interests me far more is what Apple has done then what it is named.
Apple has changed the relationship between phone makers and carriers. They got Cingular, now AT&T, to change their backend specifically to accomodate the iPhone's front-end features. That's big. That cracks open the door to carriers finally starting to get smart about expanding services in partnership with handset makers instead of simply dictating what of the standard feature sets they will & will not support.
Apple seems poised to deliver a mass market portable web browser. No, they're not the first, but to a large extant this is the first one most consumers will be aware of. Finally a decent browser, not the ugly-stepsister WAP stuff, with a good sized screen and able to connect to both the 'net & local networks.
And yeah, it's a wide-screen(ish, it's a bit of an odd ratio) iPod video player. A larger, very high quality, screen, abandonment of the defining circular touchpad, a refreshed interface and video now becoming a peer to audio instead of being an afterthought.
Indeed, what is most suprising to me is that Apple even chose
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Because licking semi-frozen bovine lactate flavored with macerated orchid seed pods isnt weird ?
No need for thousands of "All good in Kalamazoo" & "Up to date in Kansas City" posts.
Responding to some of the (typically) under-informed criticisms...
(Why bother to understand a topic when you can quickly post an opinion?)
This isnt intended to replace all traffic management, for instance at airports, just to lessen the overhead of overseeing the more predictable long stretches in-between.
Aircraft spacing would be lessened under the proposed system but still be considerable. Therefore even if GPS accuracy were degraded by the US Military it wouldnt have much practical effect. Besides accuracy to a few hundred feet is already problematic when youre traveling that far every second.
The new systems arent any more susceptible to interference from solar flares or other natural phenomena then current systems; indeed theyre predicted to be more robust.
Finally, 40 billion dollars US does seem like a lot of money. But considering the FAAs historic phenomenal mind-bogglingly beyond-grossly-incompetent record at managing system deployments its probably a low-ball on a cost-plus contract...
Pop star George Michael said the same thing to BBC radio in 2004, talking about his impending retirement from commercial music.
Frankly I don't see why not. Once you've got "enough" money why not sell-out entirely to your own creative impulses? It's certainly better then wearily pumping out material you're no longer interested in just because you've become accustomed to life as a hamster on a pop-star wheel.
I thasnk Mr. Michael, Prince, and every other artist for sharing their talent with us. If their non-commercial expressions discomfort trade cartels and music store chains then so be it, artists have no obligation to support music industry chattel. Perhaps the record stores would like to have parents stop singing non-commercial lullabyes and birds be required to have performance licenses.
Rules of WiFi:
Put in dedicated services for visitors with instructions conspicuously posted in conference areas (along with sufficient power supplies.) Inform staff if they are caught using these open systems their devices will be taken away, and if they relied upon such to do their jobs they will then be unsuitable for continued employment.
Finally, consider alternatives to WiFi. There are any number of products that will carry WiFi-equivalent bandwidth over residential wiring. If youre looking to connect fixed devices without running ethernet then these are a no-hassle approach with competitive costs.
I've got two net connections to my house, 6MB down/.5MB up & 20MB down/2MB up, so a typical 802.11g connection or two isn't gonna be much of a hit. The net traffic most hotspots see is quite bursty, rarely a sustained file transfer or p2p swarm. Also most hotspots start to saturate at about a dozen clients so there's another limit. Throw a little QOS & traffic shaping on there and I'm not gonna notice a thing.
However in this neighborhood it's all single family residential; a stranger in a parked car in front of a house for any extended period would cause one of the neighbors to call for a police car to wander by. However previously I lived next to a large pubic park, and was interested in sharing service to it via Île Sans Fil.
However in both locations my Terms Of Service forbid such, and not wanting any hassle I've refrained. However should my ISP enable such, or even encourage it with a reciprocity system, I'd be interested. Particularly with the knowledge that folks using my connection would have an audit trail associated with 'em in case of problem.
The Bandai Pippin had "much hype"?
It was an obvious idea at the time for Apple to repackage the Mac into a gaming platform, license it out, let others build a market for it. Doing so was little risk on Apple's part and could have paid off handsomely.
The Pippin was part of a larger push at Apple to expand it's market in all sorts of directions. There was demand for classes hardware that Apple was unwilling, or unable, to produce. So the strategy became to license out the platform and let other's invest their resources into filling in those niches. This way Apple could emulate the thriving IBM PC clone market without losing control (and revenue) from it like IBM had.
So companies like DayStar came up with multi-processor Macs to service the very high-end, a market Radius (later Umax) also served. Power Computing originally aimed for the low end of the market, which Apple was happy to cede to them, but soon began cannibalizing Apple's bread-&-butter market. Other licensees were hoped to open international markets as local vendors offering Mac products & services in regions Apple was having trouble getting traction in.
All the while Apple R&D was happily designing reference platforms for everything from network appliances (an alternative use of the Pippin platform) to industrial-strength servers. In the heady days of the AIM alliance and the successful migration to PowerPC anything seemed possible, even a gaming machine.
However Bandai was never able to build much support for their uneasy hybrid of a very low-end Mac and an ill-suited gaming box. It was neither fish nor fowl and so satisfied no one. But "hyped"? Only hardcore gamers of the era ever knew of it in the US, and then only from specialty magazines doing exhaustive comparison reviews.
Tellingly IBM also bought a Pippin license, which they never used. Their interest may have been as a smart terminal, a particularly versatile front end complete with GUI & multimedia capabilities. X-Windows, NeWS, and other advanced windowing client interfaces were a competing vision of the future of the market, a Pippin-based client could have been an interesting hybrid.
But the Bandai Pippin unsuccessful as a gaming platform? Sure that's a fair assessment. But it was hardly Apple's fault - they just licensed the reference design, it was the client's to make a go of it or not.
October 10, 2006, Wired: Generating Power From Kites
"KiteGen", a kite-driven rotating carousel generating electricity. The kites, at altitudes up to 2Km, could be quickly maneuvered to avoid aircraft, even individual birds. An initial cost of 360,000 euros for a 100m model could generate .5Gw of electricity. A 2 Km version could generate 5 Gw. A proposed initial site is the former Trino Vercellese nuclear power plant, already a no-fly zone.
But not a fraction of a degree to either side, or a 29 seconds earlier or 31 seconds earlier, assuming the report in in any way accurate.
Seriously, while disturbing, the odds of the two paths intersecting simultaneously are, ahem, astronomically low.
No, we'd probably be reading about an aircraft that suffered a sudden, mysterious, possibly catastrophic failure in flight.
The likely first suspicion would be a bomb aboard the aircraft, or some sort of structural failure. A missile, far out over the ocean, fired upon a commercial airliner, at high altitude, far from any area of combat, would be one of the least likely causes considered.
Apparently /. is low on pageviews for the month so the editors are looking for a thousand IANAL (half of whome will give legal advice anyhow, a further half of whom are unable to comprehend that US law isn't universal (not for wont of trying.))
I've had several friends in academic journal publishing, and so have heard a bit of this from their side:
Editing is hard work. Maintaining a consistently high quality of writing, articles that are appropriately in-depth but accessible to the readership, sniffing out the studies that define or redefine the field.
Copy editing is brutal. Technical terms abound, the language mustn't be turgid but a certain level of gravitas is often excpected, understanding those nuances is a specialized skill.
Typsesetting can be a misery when working with formulas & like content that has gone through several cycles of review & fine-tuning. Journals shouldn't read like ransom notes.
Reviewers do cost. Finding them, vetting them, coordinating them.
Illustrations are worth a thousand words, but a consistently good technical illustrator is a rare bird to be treasured.
Fact-checking, background-reviews, identifying possible conflicts-of-interest, that's a lot of hard-work administrivia that is expected now.
Then there are the basic internal administrative costs of keeping the lights on, payroll met, licensing the typefaces, getting the parking lot snowplowed, the PCs virus-free, handling the morass of profit/non-profit taxes & exemptions, all are yet more staff.
Subscriber services is everyone's horror. What do you do when a professor or researcher passes out their personal subscription password to everyone, and suddenly you've got 60 sites around the world using that password? Or when Harvard wants a campus-wide subscription, but has several dozen domains folks will be coming in from, not to mention home users?
And printing on dead-trees is an expensive proposition, but still the media-of-record. In-house the press is easily a million dollars, not to mention paper, ink, staff, space, insurance, maintenance, distribution, capitol depreciation, etc. Reprints can earn top dollar but those require quality printing and must be accounted for.
Blithely thinking this can all be replaced with a few emails and a database is probably woefully optimistic. Doubtless there is room for journals produced thus, but ones with an active editorial process and rather richer content are probably around for while too; their ecological niche is still a valuable one to their communities.
Using a Broadcom-based router, installing 3rd party firmware, and upping your transmitting power might help.
Might.
However it is not a panacea.
802.11-whichever is a two-way system & you'd only be upping the router's outgoing signal strength, doing nothing for improving the client's signal. Furthermore you can easily over-power your transmitter and end up with literally more noise then signal. Plus the additional load can overheat your router and lead to premature failure.
A different strategy is to improve your antenna. For nothing-$40 you can significantly improve transmission & reception. Websites like www.freeantenna.org list easy-to-make reflectors, or you can purchase replacement antenna(s) with better characteristics then the stock ones.
Of course improving the local environment can have an immediate & significant effect.
The signal is transmitted from your router in an omni directional plane, roughly pancake-shaped. Therefore getting everything on somewhat the same level is useful, such as on the same floor of the building.
Removing obstructions like metal sheeting (filing cabinets, refrigerators, nearby ductwork) will help, as well as avoiding transmitting through dense material like concrete/masonry walls, packed bookshelves. Simply putting a router up on a shelf can occasionally make a huge difference.
As nearly every other poster has noted, picking the right channel helps tremendously. Use 1, 6, or 11, whichever is least congested. Keep in mind this can change as your neighbor gets home and turns on their equipment so re-survey regularly.
Then there is not using WiFi. If wireless is just a way to avoid cabling a place then consider on of the Ethernet-over-electrical-lines. Basically shortwave using your household wiring as an antenna it offers good speeds at high reliability. Adapters are about $40 each & if you're already tethered to an electrical outlet then this is a natural fit.
Finally, as everyone is promoting their favorite flavor of firmware, let me suggest Tomato. It isn't burdened with every feature possible; instead it is fast, easy to configure, has great reporting, and most importantly, is extremely reliable (unlike some other distribs). If your goal is just "a better router" and not lots of other services then it's a great choice.
Because this is /. not CNet.
Besides, do you imagine the "Editors" would get descriptions even somewhat correct? They regularly mangle submissions, add inflammatory/incorrect commentary, and/or (re)post old, absurd, or widely discredited material.
Again, this is /. not CNet.
Wow - get over-sensitive much?
Bashing is having four guys come after you as you walk out a door. Bashing is having a board used as a baseball bat on your skull. Bashing is waking up in a hospital covered in cuts & bruises with broken ribs, arm, and a skull fracture. Bashing is an eye that will never again focus properly, becoming deaf in one ear, and most importantly, permanently losing short-term memory.
That's "Bashing"
Pointing out that the US portable market is skewed towards desktop replacements and "the rest of the world typically wants..." smaller/lighter machines is just market analysis and easily confirmed when you look at portable offerings broken down by manufacturer & region sold in. Asia & Europe love ultraportables, the US market is largely indifferent.
You however, wow, "asshole", "bashing", - get help. Out of proportion, needlessly aggressive, confusing your purchasing desires with the aggregate buying habits of a nation, that's real 'alarm bell' stuff.
Oh, and the bashing? I've several friends who've been bashed & twice been in situations where I coulda been. The description I used was specifically of my buddy Doug. What I didn't note that when he came to he was also informed that as he'd been gay-bashed while unconscious his evangelical christian family had disowned him and the US Military, of which he was on active duty with, had begun the process of issuing him dishonorable discharge.
That you confuse something like that with my post can only be described as ill.
First, rumor has it is all this is. An analyst put it in a report and everyone is passing it on a valid. Especially with Apple folks should know that rumors & speculation are just that.
Next it was widely reported a few years ago when Apple made a huuuge futures purchase on flash memory getting an excellent price and assuring their supply. Someone more motivated then I can crunch the numbers but even with however many million iPods sold I'm guessing Apple still has flash memory to play with and a decent price.
Then there's the non-US market. Yes, Americans want 21" screens, 6 speakers, 200 GB hard drives, and accept 30 minute battery life from their portables (oftentimes too big even for American laps). The rest of the world typically wants really small, really light, just enough computing enough power for on-the-road use, and 12 hour battery life. Thus an ultraportable will fill a huge hole in the Apple product line, one many posters to /. may not even be fully aware of.
With all of that in mind do I expect Apple will come out with some sort of clever new device that is small, robust, and runs for longer then others on the market? I wouldn't be surprised. Apple has innovated time & time again, particularly on laptops, and part of their market is remarkably price-insensitive (I've rarely heard "Get me the best Dell, whatever the price!", I've heard that regularly about Macs.) What starts at the top often soon moves down.
Finally, Apple still does largely design their own motherboards, owns their own OS, can implement a new technology without needing to coordinate it among many parties. But do I think J. Random Analyst is going to be all that insightful about Apple's hardware future? Not particularly, he's just an excuse to post another story about everyone's favorite conundrum.
Not to play into the Mac baiting/idiolatry, but Apple does have some of the highest customer satisfaction numbers in the industry, year after year.
I'm sure there will be dozens of horror stories posted about here Macs & Apple, we can do the same for any brand. The truth is in numbers and again, Apple leads the industry in customer satisfaction and retention.
Your issue seems to be a mismatch between what you bought and the service you want.
You didn't buy a system with a business support contract. Apple does have those, but they're not in the Apple Stores. Instead like every other large vendor they have a division dedicated to business customers & their specific needs.
Instead you did the equivalent of going to BestBuy (albeit a much nicer looking one with staff far beyond any "Geek Squad" bufoonery) and are getting standard consumer service. Actually it's far better then you'd get from BestBuy et al, and if you sprang the extra $99 for AppleCare you'll get even better, but it's still walk-in service.
Your complaint really has nothing to do with Apple per se and instead with consumer customer service. Replace "Apple" with "HP" or "Gateway" and the store with "Best Buy", "CompUSA", "Microcenter", or whatever, and suddenly your complaint becomes much clearer
I'm sorry to hear you've had a bad experience with your Mac. I've friends who buy the kind of support you're looking for, where there is next-day service at their office for their Apple products. I've other friends who are certified in Mac repair, who give the kind of service you're looking for, show up, crack open your Mac, if they have the part handy replace it on the spot or if not retrieve it from a depot.
Instead you purchased we'll-look-at-it/fiddle-with-it/send-away-for-part s/send-the-machine-away-for-repair.
Plot element in The Man Who Sold the Moon, Robert A. Heinlein, 1951
Clever except that "hacking" predates software coding as a trade and calling certain folks "Crackers" predates both.
Nicely formatted tho'.
How will 3rd world inhabitants react to this lunar eclipse?
Presumably with complete calm and mild interest, just like their condescending 1st world neighbors.
It's not like lunar eclipses aren't particularly rare, about two happen a year. A full eclipse is less frequent but still happens often enough to have been already experienced by most adults.
Indeed folks in poorer areas are usually less impressed by celestial phenomena because they are well familiar with such. Lighting costs money and so isn't as wasted as it is in many 1st world places, leaving the skies that much darker and their contents that much more visible.
Want to see someone freak out over the contents of a night sky? Take a young person from any large first world city far out into the countryside on a clear evening, let their eyes dark adjust, and then show them the night sky. That prompts "some pretty interesting responses".
Adobe did - it's called "Photoshop Elements". The features most mere mortals (as opposed to Photoshop Gods) use at a price appropriate to our budgets.
That you've not heard of it leads me to assume you probably don't have much need for sophisticated image editing and are as unlikely to buy a $75-$100 product as you are a $300-$500 one.
Cluephone ringing!
Of course online isn't the appropriate place to edit "professional" material, ie giant files, projects requiring esoteric plug-ins, local fonts, a multitude of resources embedded in the image, etc. The "professionals" will do what they always do: Purchase the right tools and get on with it.
However for non-"professionals" this is an interesting development. There are already other online photo-editing sites out there, using Java applications or clever Web 2.0 AJAX-ey stuff (and probably some older technology upload-and-refresh ones) but Adobe does have the brand name everyone knows and they do have a good concentration of code, coders, UI folks, etc. to pull it off with.
As others have pointed out it'll probably be in Adobe's Flash product, which already has a lot of basic image manipulation built into it. If it will be entirely client-based or if there will be backend processing will be interesting to find out.
From a business perspective how much Adobe will tie this to other services like photo storing & sharing, buy-a-tea-towel-with-the-picture-on-it, etc. is the big question. Will Adobe just have 3rd party banner advertising or will they build in hooks for 3rd party services, the tea-towel sellers & such? Will those services require licensing deals with Adobe or will Photoshop Online be a 'web service' open to other websites to integrate as part of their own offerings a la Google Maps.
I'm looking forward to Photoshop Online, if only as another tool in the progress towards increasingly sophisticated online client applications. They don't seem ready to entirely supplant desktop applications yet, but for occasional-use situations they're already viable, and this is just one more category soon to have multiple 'real' options.
Traveling hives exist for the exact same reason migrant human workers do: They go where the work is.
With 'modern' farming & orchard practices (meaning the past several hundred years) there is a need for a large number of bees to pollinate the local crop at a specific time, and outside of that short period they are superfluous, indeed would starve. Thus the hives are moved from location to location as crop & climate require. The bees respond quite well to this travel, always enjoying a hearty food supply, much as cattle are moved from pasture to pasture.
Generally apiarists are quite aware of the health of their hives, which is why these suddenly empty hives are such a shock.
Even under the most dire/optimistic scenarios a lunar facility isn't gonna be much of a viable 'lifeboat' for generations yet. Indeed if things go seriously awry it's probably the most untenable place to be for any calamity except a fast-acting/highly-virulent/fatal terrestrial biohazard, and then you'd likely just get to live somewhat longer and die a premature death of a different cause. After a terrestrial catastrophe a lunar facility likely won't contribute much to future generations but an interesting monument. Rather a planet of 6 billion with a huge biosphere has so much more in the way of odd nooks & corners for refugees & resources.
Except a lunar facility is going to be markedly different then anything space-based. Significant gravity, a surface, 2 week bright/dark cycles, huge dust & debris issues; except for lack of atmosphere they're almost entirely different problem sets. A space station is certainly the better R&D environment for spacefaring development. As to Martian R&D Earth as good, and substantially cheaper/more-amenable venue then the moon offers.
Except that asteroids are probably a far better materials supply source and can be got roboticly, with their materials easier separated, refined, and then sent on to Earth in space then from the moon. Furthermore while He3 is promising we've yet to achieve fusion that could take advantage of it and those power sats would probably do as good a job with less complexity then a lunar-fueled terrestrial fusion system anyhow.
Except any manned base is going to be fouling up the local environment and require far more support then just installing spares & alternatives for everything. Again, the moon is good, space is likely better.
Because the moon is the only possible frontier? Not our oceans, deserts, mountain ranges, arctic & antarctic regions? Not more abstract frontiers like science, technology, sociology, psychology, diplomacy, etc.?
I'm honestly not trying to be contrarian but your reasons strike me more as rationalizations. Nearly all could be done better/cheaper using unmanned systems or directly in space. I'd hate to see a lunar base become another dead end like our hopelesly compromised space station, doing expensive science of minimal import or quality.
Sometimes. Even more frequently it is economic in nature, looking for new resources and new markets.
Only if you narrowly define trade & cultural exchange as physical, such as dilithium crystals or visiting dance troupes.
If you accept any broader definition then non-material exchange is already going on hugely within our single planet. Japanese game shows on US television, software developed in Estonia, Chinese factories owned by Taiwanese entrepreneurs based in Canada with design teams in the US selling manufacturing expertise to Malaysian factories overseen by German engineers assembled with local labor.
Heck, the participants in this exchange come from multiple cultures, the communications are time-lagged and while it's value is debatable it's lack of physical instantation isn't.
Sure the lag times for interstellar communications would be years, but that just brings us back to the old sailing ship days. Then along with the spices and dyes there was lots of trade in ideas and technologies that substantially enriched the cultures, philosophies, and technologies of the participants.
Compare & contrast has always been a hugely useful tool. With the Earth's cultures coalescing into a global village with local variations 'outside' perspectives will eventually be invaluable, even if time-lagged by decades. By the time we're ready to go interstellar I expect we'll already have ex
Coupla thoughts:
It's not clear that Cisco "owns" the name "iPhone" in this case.
Cisco's goal appears to be assuring their interoperability with this, and later, versions of Apple's iPhone line.
The trademark issue is unlikely to have any immediate effect on Apple's "iPhone" marketing or consumers, it's all IMHO a tempest-in-a-teapot.
Frankly this whole discussion seems a product of the extreme interest in Apple's iPhone and no new real news to report on it, so instead everyone natters on about a trademark issue as if it has any substantive effect.
What interests me far more is what Apple has done then what it is named.
Apple has changed the relationship between phone makers and carriers. They got Cingular, now AT&T, to change their backend specifically to accomodate the iPhone's front-end features. That's big. That cracks open the door to carriers finally starting to get smart about expanding services in partnership with handset makers instead of simply dictating what of the standard feature sets they will & will not support.
Apple seems poised to deliver a mass market portable web browser. No, they're not the first, but to a large extant this is the first one most consumers will be aware of. Finally a decent browser, not the ugly-stepsister WAP stuff, with a good sized screen and able to connect to both the 'net & local networks.
And yeah, it's a wide-screen(ish, it's a bit of an odd ratio) iPod video player. A larger, very high quality, screen, abandonment of the defining circular touchpad, a refreshed interface and video now becoming a peer to audio instead of being an afterthought.
Indeed, what is most suprising to me is that Apple even chose