The future car computer is an iPhone/Android dock.
Exactly. Cars last over a decade but that's a century in silicon-years. When I was shopping for used cars recently many of them boasted GPS maps built in, only they needed updating from non-existant dvd updates made for them. Pointless when my smart phone does a much better job and knows what the price of hotel, and hours places are open and where the coffees shops are. In a few years my smart phone will be google glass. The car cannot possibly keep up.
On the other hand I love my hands free voice activated phon calling that just piggybacks on the smart phones address book.
So what you need is a versatile interface definition to the smart phone that can use voice and video in the car but not supply any og the intelligence from the car. the car is just an input and out put device. these evolve less fast. consider the video screen, mouse and KB. not much has changed in decades.
Stop using methicillin and the resistance will go away. Microbiology 101.
It takes less than 10 divisions for the microbe not producing resistance to take over since it has a fitness advantage of not needing to invest energy in resistance.
Un fortunately that is not true. Now it is true that for some types of drug resistance that can happen. But in general some types of resistance, like for example eflux pumps, are so generic and cover so many function in the bug that they mechanism won't go away just because one drug is removed.
If they want to set the defaults that is fine, but to prevent me from doing at all unless I use their one true way is why I will never buy and iOS device.
You are not their customer. So by all means roll your own.
Apple customers don't want the hassle of monitoring their major apps for good behaviour, reading TOMS hardware every 3 months and changing things. They do get upset if their battery is going down faster than apple said it would and they don't know what is causing it.
I'm a computer geek and I'm in that class. All I want out of my cell phone is very very high reliability, battery life and security. If I want to dink around and experiment on a mobile system I can buy an android phone or jail brake it. But for the one in my pocket, I want high usability with reliable behaviour, not jet packs.
On mobile the best browser is not the fastest browser. What matters is that it is fast enough while consuming the least power, memory, and bandwidth, having a good resume-and-hibernate behaviour, and not achieve it's abilities by reaching out of its sandbox. A recent study I saw said that Safari had something like half the bandwidth usage as another common browser, as well as lower power usage. things that agressively pre-load pages, spawan zilions of rendering threads and so forth can consume more power for very little extra perfromance. I'm fairly sure these are the reasons Apple limits the browser. They want to assure phone owners get good battery life.
The article states an observational fact: less mega upload results in less purchases of second tier films. But the implication is that "piracy is good and not a crime". It is a crime whether you think it's good or not. Moreover even if it helped some sellers it may not have helped others (blockbuster owners). So one cannot point to a net increase in sales as being beninficial to all. FOr all we know the per sale profit is also lower of selling cheaper titles. The bottom line however it ultimately it's the copyright holder's decision not yours on whether to sell a movie or not. They are free to act contrary to their own interests. That's the point of giving then the control in the first place.
In other news North Korea Finally invents a Spam solution for e-mail that doesn't fall pray to the standard checklist of reasons spam filters will fail.
This is also why the afterthought attempt to "fix" electornic voting systems by adding a toilet paper roll printer to them fails. It's entirely possible to take a photo of the paper tape with both your vote and the marking that says it is your final vote. This is unlike a paper ballot where a photo of the ballot does not prove you submitted that ballot into the ballot box.
Do you go to the $5 barber or the $25 barber? After all the cost for the barber's equipment is rougtly the same. Is the $25 barber overcharging you or delivering you something the $5 barber could not deliver? The cost of parts doesn't determine the skill of the design.
That all voting machines are shit? Because that's the GIST I'm getting.
I'm pretty sure I could build a better voting machine in my garage for under $100, bet these things cost tens of thousands.
It's been done. See Open voting consortium or Open voting solutions. But the problem is vastly harder than you estimate, to get it right. It's not that it has to be complex. It's the many pitfalls most people fail to anticipate, even one of which, destroys the whole concept.
First that letter was all about setting up a legal and public relations basis to question the election later.
Second, yes voting machines need calibration. Different types require different kinds.
For example the touchscreens, usually older resistive touch screens get mis calibrated on position. You have to remeber these things get locks in closets and sit in non-temperature controlled ware houses for a couple years at a time between elections, then they are jostled in trucks, cleaned with cleaners, and sometime run off various power sources. Empirically they do go out of calibration.
I personally have a ballot I saved from an AUtomark paper ballot printer in which all the votes are off by one oval width. that is 100% of the votes are incorrect and you can tell because a few are printed past the range of ovals.
Opscans are fairly easy to allign since they have relatively few degrees of freedom but they do get misalligned and become sensitive to printing tolerances.
Old lever machines used to have the gears wear down.
The solution to all this is not to require perfect everything but to have ways to check things. hand marked Paper ballots and some sampled recounts of those paper ballots such as is done in New Mexico is I believe the best compromise between transparency, robustness and simplicity. It's robust against human and machine errors so mere mortals can carry out very transparent elections. It's also robust against voter turnout variations too since it only takes more pencils to let more people vote, and if a machine breaks, you can still gather the ballots, so you dont get long lines at the polls.
I'm assuming that this happens because the server is trusting client stored data. That's approximately the same as not validating ones inputs in a fill-out-form. Why in this millennium would anyone ever trust data stored on a client without validating it first? Isn't this 2012? Or is there some other way this could happen?
The surface is the tablet many consumers need. But it is not the one they want.
Because the surface OS can morph between tablet and desktop style and has video out and USB, it does make a very practical desktop replacement when paired with a screen. That keyboard cover is really clever but it really only pays off if there's also a desktop mode for it to be a true laptop replacement deserving a separate KB. The Windows machine is the only machine that has logins for different users making it able to be shared by a family as the desktop replacement. And while the RT won't run current apps, the apps that it will run will resemble your current apps. So it's perfect for people who have an old crappy dell and want to join the modern world of tablet computing. it fully replaces the cheapo dell with the minimum change in OS and works for shared user situations.
But really once you get above $450 you'd have to be stupid not to get the best tablet with the most apps. That's apple's pad.
personally: I'm very excited the nexus 10 is under that figure. Makes the cost benefit trade worthy of considering.
Apparently you have not seen the new retina screen. Nothing prepares you for it because you can't see it on any monitor you have now. Letters look like they are carved in the glass with a diamond stylus. They just pop with sharpness you never knew you were missing.
The microsoft people are just blathering about anti-aliasing on fonts. You can take a tiff of that and it will look how it looks on your screen.
For the same reasons, this also could make a great bussiness machine. You can have a desktop and you can take it too meetings like a laptop, but you can also walk the floor with it and interact with in your hands like a clipboard. It's travel friendly. And it's got all the verstaile behaviour of a tablet like orientation sensing, touch, etc... And you can lock it in the drawer if it has confidential info.
I think at least half the people in my company could replace their desktops with this.
The only disadvantages are:
1) will it be an unsupported zune left in the dust of android and ipad.
2) will MS fumble the ball on the goal line as usual. It's has to work well.
if it can beat those inertial barriers it actually is a great idea.
An older relative has been asking me what pad he should get.
I had written off the surface for myself but this forced me to reconsider. The surface has 2.5 advantages that in his case might be the killer app.
First it has that amazingly clever keayboard + kickstand that lets you have your cake and eat it to. It's got the access modality of a laptop. No weight and clumsiness penalty like the fliptops or ultrabooks.
second, it's the only tablet that has both a bonfied tablet interface (metro), and a bonified desktop interface.
this last one is killer. it lets you use this as a servicable desktop or laptop replacement. jack in a real screen, KB, and usb disk and you have a desktop computer that is probably better than the 4 year old peice of dell junk your older relative is using now.
and 2.5 it lets you use your old applications. Now granted you might want to buy new tablet optimized ones. but if you are very familiar and comfortable with a keyboard driven internet explorer, or office program or payroll program or genealogy program, you are going to want a desktop mode.
Notice that will all the other tablets you have to have a secondary computer. your genealogy program or payroll program just isn't going to work on the tablet. without a desktop mode You won't have access to the file system so you can't store and edit and send bulk things like photos easily.
With surface you can get by with just the tablet.
FOr someone like me, my preferrences are 1) 7" tablet = Fire HD (no video out on the nexus, better screen, sound, and faster internet than nexus). 2) 10" tablet apple ipad3. If you are paying more than $200 for a tablet, you want a good one, and apple is the best overall. an extra hundred or so to get the least dissapointing one is not worth worrying about when you just paid atleast 499.
Nokia stock has gone way down. By most estimates its value is near book value and that it's patents alone (which are not included in book value) have a worth that exceeds the book value. Nokia goofed on symbian and they made a choice to not compete on the android platform with samsung. Now considering that they did very well in the low end market (and still do) it's slightly surprising they were averse to sheer price competition. However one has to realize that Samsung is backed by an in house fab so they might have made the right decision.
Windows 8 gives them a chance to draw on some strengths by adding value from other assets they own. At the time there were 5. 1) superior mapping, 2) superior camera 3) superior enterprise connection via Siemens network 4) a history of strong design 5) a very strong patent portfolio that might allow better comms.
The siemens argument if floundering. The mapping one has not been exploited as much as it could be but I think it is latent, waiting for win 8 to release. So they still have 4 of the 5 cyllinders.
The problem they have is the rise of the smart phone. It's inevitable this will creep into their vast low end market. So they were doomed. They may have accelerated this fal however by bad management.
The problem with their stock price was the cratering of their profit centers by announcing the end of symbian prematurely. THey have been selling off and or leasing off assets to maintain cash flow. They are closing facilities in europe but opening them in 2nd world countries. So they are really squeezed on cash.
hence the stock is teetering.
But when they return to profitability with win 8 release, perhaps as a leaner company, I think their stock price should rise enormously from it's under -book value at present. THey have very serious competitive advantages for the technologies they can intergrate into win8.
You have a very simple minded vision. those jobs that were created meant more than 1 year's employment. The money spent was re-spent many times. The labor of some person was harvested for the benefit of the GDP with that money (as opposed to giving them money for free). And it maintained bussiness enterprises as functional, preserving other jobs. It helped jumpstart new industries like green power.
More importantly, cities can't deficit spend (have to use bonds). Hence in recessions when revenues fall, cities have to lay off. Which makes the recession jobs spiral worse. In cities where the tax base doesn't fall in a recession (property tax) then this also take smore money out of the disretioanry economy and bussinesses fail. Stimulus money is thus a way for the tax payers to loan the city money (the feds rpovide it, and future taxes pay it back).
Slashdot Mirror
Why do they bother?
The future car computer is an iPhone/Android dock.
Exactly. Cars last over a decade but that's a century in silicon-years. When I was shopping for used cars recently many of them boasted GPS maps built in, only they needed updating from non-existant dvd updates made for them. Pointless when my smart phone does a much better job and knows what the price of hotel, and hours places are open and where the coffees shops are. In a few years my smart phone will be google glass. The car cannot possibly keep up.
On the other hand I love my hands free voice activated phon calling that just piggybacks on the smart phones address book.
So what you need is a versatile interface definition to the smart phone that can use voice and video in the car but not supply any og the intelligence from the car. the car is just an input and out put device. these evolve less fast. consider the video screen, mouse and KB. not much has changed in decades.
Well they will plan to make the Brethalyzer app but instead they retire as billionaires from the $3 "rate my fart, bro" app and lose interest.
Stop using methicillin and the resistance will go away. Microbiology 101.
It takes less than 10 divisions for the microbe not producing resistance to take over since it has a fitness advantage of not needing to invest energy in resistance.
Un fortunately that is not true. Now it is true that for some types of drug resistance that can happen. But in general some types of resistance, like for example eflux pumps, are so generic and cover so many function in the bug that they mechanism won't go away just because one drug is removed.
If they want to set the defaults that is fine, but to prevent me from doing at all unless I use their one true way is why I will never buy and iOS device.
You are not their customer. So by all means roll your own.
Apple customers don't want the hassle of monitoring their major apps for good behaviour, reading TOMS hardware every 3 months and changing things. They do get upset if their battery is going down faster than apple said it would and they don't know what is causing it.
I'm a computer geek and I'm in that class. All I want out of my cell phone is very very high reliability, battery life and security. If I want to dink around and experiment on a mobile system I can buy an android phone or jail brake it. But for the one in my pocket, I want high usability with reliable behaviour, not jet packs.
On mobile the best browser is not the fastest browser. What matters is that it is fast enough while consuming the least power, memory, and bandwidth, having a good resume-and-hibernate behaviour, and not achieve it's abilities by reaching out of its sandbox. A recent study I saw said that Safari had something like half the bandwidth usage as another common browser, as well as lower power usage. things that agressively pre-load pages, spawan zilions of rendering threads and so forth can consume more power for very little extra perfromance. I'm fairly sure these are the reasons Apple limits the browser. They want to assure phone owners get good battery life.
The article states an observational fact: less mega upload results in less purchases of second tier films. But the implication is that "piracy is good and not a crime". It is a crime whether you think it's good or not. Moreover even if it helped some sellers it may not have helped others (blockbuster owners). So one cannot point to a net increase in sales as being beninficial to all. FOr all we know the per sale profit is also lower of selling cheaper titles. The bottom line however it ultimately it's the copyright holder's decision not yours on whether to sell a movie or not. They are free to act contrary to their own interests. That's the point of giving then the control in the first place.
They keep leaving the "t" out.
In other news North Korea Finally invents a Spam solution for e-mail that doesn't fall pray to the standard checklist of reasons spam filters will fail.
This is also why the afterthought attempt to "fix" electornic voting systems by adding a toilet paper roll printer to them fails. It's entirely possible to take a photo of the paper tape with both your vote and the marking that says it is your final vote. This is unlike a paper ballot where a photo of the ballot does not prove you submitted that ballot into the ballot box.
Do you go to the $5 barber or the $25 barber? After all the cost for the barber's equipment is rougtly the same. Is the $25 barber overcharging you or delivering you something the $5 barber could not deliver? The cost of parts doesn't determine the skill of the design.
That all voting machines are shit? Because that's the GIST I'm getting.
I'm pretty sure I could build a better voting machine in my garage for under $100, bet these things cost tens of thousands.
It's been done. See Open voting consortium or Open voting solutions. But the problem is vastly harder than you estimate, to get it right. It's not that it has to be complex. It's the many pitfalls most people fail to anticipate, even one of which, destroys the whole concept.
First that letter was all about setting up a legal and public relations basis to question the election later.
Second, yes voting machines need calibration. Different types require different kinds.
For example the touchscreens, usually older resistive touch screens get mis calibrated on position. You have to remeber these things get locks in closets and sit in non-temperature controlled ware houses for a couple years at a time between elections, then they are jostled in trucks, cleaned with cleaners, and sometime run off various power sources. Empirically they do go out of calibration.
I personally have a ballot I saved from an AUtomark paper ballot printer in which all the votes are off by one oval width. that is 100% of the votes are incorrect and you can tell because a few are printed past the range of ovals.
Opscans are fairly easy to allign since they have relatively few degrees of freedom but they do get misalligned and become sensitive to printing tolerances.
Old lever machines used to have the gears wear down.
The solution to all this is not to require perfect everything but to have ways to check things. hand marked Paper ballots and some sampled recounts of those paper ballots such as is done in New Mexico is I believe the best compromise between transparency, robustness and simplicity. It's robust against human and machine errors so mere mortals can carry out very transparent elections. It's also robust against voter turnout variations too since it only takes more pencils to let more people vote, and if a machine breaks, you can still gather the ballots, so you dont get long lines at the polls.
I'm assuming that this happens because the server is trusting client stored data. That's approximately the same as not validating ones inputs in a fill-out-form. Why in this millennium would anyone ever trust data stored on a client without validating it first? Isn't this 2012? Or is there some other way this could happen?
The surface is the tablet many consumers need. But it is not the one they want.
Because the surface OS can morph between tablet and desktop style and has video out and USB, it does make a very practical desktop replacement when paired with a screen. That keyboard cover is really clever but it really only pays off if there's also a desktop mode for it to be a true laptop replacement deserving a separate KB. The Windows machine is the only machine that has logins for different users making it able to be shared by a family as the desktop replacement. And while the RT won't run current apps, the apps that it will run will resemble your current apps. So it's perfect for people who have an old crappy dell and want to join the modern world of tablet computing. it fully replaces the cheapo dell with the minimum change in OS and works for shared user situations.
But really once you get above $450 you'd have to be stupid not to get the best tablet with the most apps. That's apple's pad.
personally: I'm very excited the nexus 10 is under that figure. Makes the cost benefit trade worthy of considering.
Apparently you have not seen the new retina screen. Nothing prepares you for it because you can't see it on any monitor you have now. Letters look like they are carved in the glass with a diamond stylus. They just pop with sharpness you never knew you were missing.
The microsoft people are just blathering about anti-aliasing on fonts. You can take a tiff of that and it will look how it looks on your screen.
I can't tell if you are being serious or not. Would you sell this bitcoin ETF using bitcoin?
I'm hoarding mine because their early mint dates will make they collectors items someday. worth a lot more than face value.
I meant legacy desktop apps. It will use Win8 desktop apps.
Only the Surface Pro runs the Windows desktop. The Surface/WinRT machine mentioned is Metro-only.
Well that's not true. It does have a desktop mode. However, it is true that the RT will not use desktop apps.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/10/3296443/windows-rt-arm-tablets-no-desktop-mode
Using your eyes, look at the surface keyboard. Notice how thin it is. How much travel could there possibly be?
Well maybe that's why they have the touch cover and the type cover, the difference being mechanical key action.
http://www.microsoft.com/Surface/en-US/accessories/type-cover
For the same reasons, this also could make a great bussiness machine. You can have a desktop and you can take it too meetings like a laptop, but you can also walk the floor with it and interact with in your hands like a clipboard. It's travel friendly. And it's got all the verstaile behaviour of a tablet like orientation sensing, touch, etc... And you can lock it in the drawer if it has confidential info.
I think at least half the people in my company could replace their desktops with this.
The only disadvantages are:
1) will it be an unsupported zune left in the dust of android and ipad.
2) will MS fumble the ball on the goal line as usual. It's has to work well.
if it can beat those inertial barriers it actually is a great idea.
An older relative has been asking me what pad he should get.
I had written off the surface for myself but this forced me to reconsider. The surface has 2.5 advantages that in his case might be the killer app.
First it has that amazingly clever keayboard + kickstand that lets you have your cake and eat it to. It's got the access modality of a laptop. No weight and clumsiness penalty like the fliptops or ultrabooks.
second, it's the only tablet that has both a bonfied tablet interface (metro), and a bonified desktop interface.
this last one is killer. it lets you use this as a servicable desktop or laptop replacement. jack in a real screen, KB, and usb disk and you have a desktop computer that is probably better than the 4 year old peice of dell junk your older relative is using now.
and 2.5 it lets you use your old applications. Now granted you might want to buy new tablet optimized ones. but if you are very familiar and comfortable with a keyboard driven internet explorer, or office program or payroll program or genealogy program, you are going to want a desktop mode.
Notice that will all the other tablets you have to have a secondary computer. your genealogy program or payroll program just isn't going to work on the tablet. without a desktop mode You won't have access to the file system so you can't store and edit and send bulk things like photos easily.
With surface you can get by with just the tablet.
FOr someone like me, my preferrences are
1) 7" tablet = Fire HD (no video out on the nexus, better screen, sound, and faster internet than nexus).
2) 10" tablet apple ipad3. If you are paying more than $200 for a tablet, you want a good one, and apple is the best overall. an extra hundred or so to get the least dissapointing one is not worth worrying about when you just paid atleast 499.
Nokia stock has gone way down. By most estimates its value is near book value and that it's patents alone (which are not included in book value) have a worth that exceeds the book value. Nokia goofed on symbian and they made a choice to not compete on the android platform with samsung. Now considering that they did very well in the low end market (and still do) it's slightly surprising they were averse to sheer price competition. However one has to realize that Samsung is backed by an in house fab so they might have made the right decision.
Windows 8 gives them a chance to draw on some strengths by adding value from other assets they own. At the time there were 5. 1) superior mapping, 2) superior camera 3) superior enterprise connection via Siemens network 4) a history of strong design 5) a very strong patent portfolio that might allow better comms.
The siemens argument if floundering. The mapping one has not been exploited as much as it could be but I think it is latent, waiting for win 8 to release. So they still have 4 of the 5 cyllinders.
The problem they have is the rise of the smart phone. It's inevitable this will creep into their vast low end market. So they were doomed. They may have accelerated this fal however by bad management.
The problem with their stock price was the cratering of their profit centers by announcing the end of symbian prematurely. THey have been selling off and or leasing off assets to maintain cash flow. They are closing facilities in europe but opening them in 2nd world countries. So they are really squeezed on cash.
hence the stock is teetering.
But when they return to profitability with win 8 release, perhaps as a leaner company, I think their stock price should rise enormously from it's under -book value at present. THey have very serious competitive advantages for the technologies they can intergrate into win8.
Thanks!
You have a very simple minded vision. those jobs that were created meant more than 1 year's employment. The money spent was re-spent many times. The labor of some person was harvested for the benefit of the GDP with that money (as opposed to giving them money for free). And it maintained bussiness enterprises as functional, preserving other jobs. It helped jumpstart new industries like green power.
More importantly, cities can't deficit spend (have to use bonds). Hence in recessions when revenues fall, cities have to lay off. Which makes the recession jobs spiral worse. In cities where the tax base doesn't fall in a recession (property tax) then this also take smore money out of the disretioanry economy and bussinesses fail. Stimulus money is thus a way for the tax payers to loan the city money (the feds rpovide it, and future taxes pay it back).