The scheme has so many flaws (apart from the privacy one), that I hunch they're using this as a scam to soften the blow when they add a new gas tax.
CA (think): "Need to get more gas tax". CA (says): " We're going to track your asses with GPS". People (yell):"WAAH WAAH WAAH priivacy! Why not just raise the gas tax"
CA:"The people have spoken they want us to raise the gas tax."
The problem with this is that *you* don't own the data kept about you. You might have the right to view the data, but you don't own it. Since just about forever, various companies have been tracking various info about people (buying habits, credit history etc). They track these for their benefit (and their customers) - not yours.
When they lose the data, as far as they are concerned they have lost some of their business information (ie. someone accessed their data without paying).
That the data is about you, and could be damaging to you is incosequential to them. Anyone could have bought the data from them anyway.
Convergence makes sense because there is such a huge overlap between the guts of most mobile devices. All cameras, PDAs, phones, MP3 players need CPU + RAM + flash + battery. By combining these you only need one set to support all the functionality and makes for one lump of stuff in your pocket.
Divergence makes sense because some people just want a phone that does the phone function well. I don't really care for carrying around a shitty camera. I don't use a PDA. I don't like music. I therefore bought me a Nokia 1100 phone. Dumb as a rock phone with BW screen no bluetooth etc. Small, cheap and lasts for a month on a single charge (my mileage). When I do carry a digital camera, I want pretty good photos and carry a real digital camera.
If you look at hunting knives, you'll see a wide spectrum of just-a-blade knives to Swiss Army (does everything, but not very well). I expect that phone vendors will continue to mnake just-a-phone, but the incremental addition of a MP3 player etc is getting cheaper and adds a bunch of functionality (as well as a way to sell services), so the richer feature set will continue to grow too.
Plants can reproduce sexually (flowers, pollen and seedds) or asexually (regrows from a root etc). Potatoes are generally reproduced asexually. This means that the potatoes lack diversity and all fell to the black rot.
Sexually reproduced potatoes (ie those from the potato seeds) are generally very poor in quality and quantity.
While miracle breaktrougs are useful, we don't have to wait for them to do something useful. We can already build faster/cheaper/lower power computers than we do today.
Anyone else remember the "touchy-feely" stuff that Carly swamped HP with at the time she joined? The "I'm Carly" page with the "send me mail" clicks. When I first saw this I thought hp.com had been hacked and this was a spoof to make Carly look like a phone sex babe.
Maybe she should have just stuck to that part of the business.
The killer for me was when it was delared that HP now stands for HP and not Hewlette Packard, the two great guys who were an inspiration that defined the spurut of the true HP.
Uber Geeks like Turning did all their computational theory using mechanical models of symbols, moving tapes etc. The move to electromechanical devices (relays) then to electronics (vacuum tubes) was just a progression of driven by the desire to realise faster computers. Relays could switch faster than mechanical latches and had the benefit of being easy to connect (wire instead of mechanical linkages). Vacuum tubes could switch many times faster than relays because they don't bounce and have mechanical inertia issues.
DGPS does not do this. This is not what the coast guard operate.
The coast guard send out GPS correction data on their radio beacons. This improves the positions, but does not replace satellites. That is, you still need sufficient satellites to get a GPS position to use the radio beacon correction info.
Pseudolites, on the other hand, look just like satellites as fas as GPS is concerned.
Look at Bill's presentations etc at COMDEX etc over the last few years. It's been a lot of yacking about SPOT watches, WinCE devices, tablets etc. None of these make money.
The "boring stuff" that makes MS money (ie the business software) is not what Bill gets excited about, nor is it an easy market to expand.
In the long term, securing the mobile stuff is critical to keeping their dominance.
You can bet that MS corporate strategy will follow Bill's pet projects. Bill is seriously into the handheld device, so you can be sure that MS effort will be put into that.
MS has screwed up so many times in the handheld arena, but now the technology is getting to the point where maybe they can get their bloatware to work: i. mobile devices are getting powerful enough and cheap enough; ii. 3G and effective wireless netweorking are getting to the stage where they are reasonable as mobile data carriers.
MS has been losing money in mobile for many years. This might give them an edge in the future.
For around ~$20 you can buy a nice 400MIPS PowerPC CPU with a FPU or a nice ARM. These run at ~1W. Add $10 of SDRAM and $10 of NAND flash and you have a nice computer core that is low cost and does not need a lot of power. Hence no fan, less battery cheaper charging etc.
Bloatly code and x86 are a terrible combo for a laptop.
Shaving pennies is as much part of Detroit (fsck the spelling) as it is part of Redmont.
Some of these problems have a historic basis. eg. look at the temperature sensor. In the first iteration, ie how it was designed, the temp sensor was probably only used as part of the dash display (ie. still used a mechanical bimetallic sensor for actually doing stuff in the engine). That's OK becuase a broken dash display is non-critical.
Next engineer comes along and makes an electronic temperature controller with an independent temp sensor. That's ok too.
Third engineer comes along with the brief to cut costs. He sees two sensors in the system, "we only need one right?". Throws out the more expensive one and uses the dash one. Shit happens.
It is easy though to go blame poor engineering. AT the end of the day electronic and mechanical stuff both break. The only difference is that mechanical breakage is not newsworthy. If a bimetallic thermostat broke and caused an engine to overheat (the do quite often) - it would not make the news.
Memory protection and 32 bit addressing are very cheap. In fact, running 16-bit virtual CPUs and "thunking" within a 32-bit CPU is slower than running as 32-bits by a long way. Based on those factors, Win3.1 should run like a dog.
The real difference is that Win3.1 was written by people with a very frugal mindset. More recent offerings are written by people who care little about speed and efficiency.
You can have a very efficient wizzy, safe system. An Amiga running RISCOS on a 200MHz CPU is far slicker than Win XP running on a 2GHz CPU.
What is bloat though is the shitty code behind these. Nice bloaty STl C++ class implmentation that does, in 200 line, 5kbytes and 5000 cycles what a tight bit oc C can do in 20 lines, 100 bytes and 200 cycles.
Bloating isn't just in RAM, CPU and diskspace. It's now happening to other resources like network bandwidth too. Ten to 15 years ago I could do a lot of very useful stuff with a 1200baud dial up. Now 50k dialup is pure crap for many purposes, mainly because of bloat.
The reason the DOD customers are so expensive and the small business ones are the cheapest is because the DOD customers are the most expensive to service/support and the small business typically are the cheapest.
DOD customers are a pain to deal with. Mounds of paperwork etc to execute an order. High hassle factor customers.
Small business, at the other end, have relatively straight forward paperwork etc, low risk, typically reasonably tech savvy.
There's a lot of M$ slagging in these posts. IMHO they deserve it.
They obviously plan to make shitty software. Their RF mouse has a reboot button on it. Most designers would use a watchdog or other reboot strategy, but obviously MS needs their reboot button.
SPI temperature sensors are low cost and easy to use. If one of these goes wrong, you'll typically get back either all zero bits = 0 or all one bits == -1. Both are acceptable temperatures.
All systems, mechanical or electronic, will fail. It's just that the electronic/software systems fail in less obvious ways...
Sounds like the old business plan thing again. Take some relatively obvious ideas, dress them up with nice sound-bitey names, books, speaking engagements, profit.
Slashdot Mirror
CA (think): "Need to get more gas tax". CA (says): " We're going to track your asses with GPS". People (yell):"WAAH WAAH WAAH priivacy! Why not just raise the gas tax"
CA:"The people have spoken they want us to raise the gas tax."
sqeeze the fat out of your next hamburger.
It is not really metamorphesis. They have not stopped VxWorks. They just offer Embedded Linux too.
When they lose the data, as far as they are concerned they have lost some of their business information (ie. someone accessed their data without paying).
That the data is about you, and could be damaging to you is incosequential to them. Anyone could have bought the data from them anyway.
Divergence makes sense because some people just want a phone that does the phone function well. I don't really care for carrying around a shitty camera. I don't use a PDA. I don't like music. I therefore bought me a Nokia 1100 phone. Dumb as a rock phone with BW screen no bluetooth etc. Small, cheap and lasts for a month on a single charge (my mileage). When I do carry a digital camera, I want pretty good photos and carry a real digital camera.
If you look at hunting knives, you'll see a wide spectrum of just-a-blade knives to Swiss Army (does everything, but not very well). I expect that phone vendors will continue to mnake just-a-phone, but the incremental addition of a MP3 player etc is getting cheaper and adds a bunch of functionality (as well as a way to sell services), so the richer feature set will continue to grow too.
I'd love for those fsckers to go try sell health insurance to a bunch of dead people.
Sexually reproduced potatoes (ie those from the potato seeds) are generally very poor in quality and quantity.
While miracle breaktrougs are useful, we don't have to wait for them to do something useful. We can already build faster/cheaper/lower power computers than we do today.
Maybe she should have just stuck to that part of the business.
The killer for me was when it was delared that HP now stands for HP and not Hewlette Packard, the two great guys who were an inspiration that defined the spurut of the true HP.
These same kids go say the pledge of allegiance... and we expect them to belive it! No wonder the kids of today grow up all depressed and twisted.
Uber Geeks like Turning did all their computational theory using mechanical models of symbols, moving tapes etc. The move to electromechanical devices (relays) then to electronics (vacuum tubes) was just a progression of driven by the desire to realise faster computers. Relays could switch faster than mechanical latches and had the benefit of being easy to connect (wire instead of mechanical linkages). Vacuum tubes could switch many times faster than relays because they don't bounce and have mechanical inertia issues.
Electra isn't a robot either. It didn't act autonomously. Equating sex kittens with porn is about the same as calling Electra a robot.
The coast guard send out GPS correction data on their radio beacons. This improves the positions, but does not replace satellites. That is, you still need sufficient satellites to get a GPS position to use the radio beacon correction info.
Pseudolites, on the other hand, look just like satellites as fas as GPS is concerned.
The "boring stuff" that makes MS money (ie the business software) is not what Bill gets excited about, nor is it an easy market to expand.
In the long term, securing the mobile stuff is critical to keeping their dominance.
MS has screwed up so many times in the handheld arena, but now the technology is getting to the point where maybe they can get their bloatware to work: i. mobile devices are getting powerful enough and cheap enough; ii. 3G and effective wireless netweorking are getting to the stage where they are reasonable as mobile data carriers.
MS has been losing money in mobile for many years. This might give them an edge in the future.
For around ~$20 you can buy a nice 400MIPS PowerPC CPU with a FPU or a nice ARM. These run at ~1W. Add $10 of SDRAM and $10 of NAND flash and you have a nice computer core that is low cost and does not need a lot of power. Hence no fan, less battery cheaper charging etc.
Bloatly code and x86 are a terrible combo for a laptop.
... or more relevant... pseudolites. These are pseudo GPS satellites that can be used to add more "satellites" to the GPS solution.
Some of these problems have a historic basis. eg. look at the temperature sensor. In the first iteration, ie how it was designed, the temp sensor was probably only used as part of the dash display (ie. still used a mechanical bimetallic sensor for actually doing stuff in the engine). That's OK becuase a broken dash display is non-critical.
Next engineer comes along and makes an electronic temperature controller with an independent temp sensor. That's ok too.
Third engineer comes along with the brief to cut costs. He sees two sensors in the system, "we only need one right?". Throws out the more expensive one and uses the dash one. Shit happens.
It is easy though to go blame poor engineering. AT the end of the day electronic and mechanical stuff both break. The only difference is that mechanical breakage is not newsworthy. If a bimetallic thermostat broke and caused an engine to overheat (the do quite often) - it would not make the news.
The real difference is that Win3.1 was written by people with a very frugal mindset. More recent offerings are written by people who care little about speed and efficiency.
You can have a very efficient wizzy, safe system. An Amiga running RISCOS on a 200MHz CPU is far slicker than Win XP running on a 2GHz CPU.
Bloating isn't just in RAM, CPU and diskspace. It's now happening to other resources like network bandwidth too. Ten to 15 years ago I could do a lot of very useful stuff with a 1200baud dial up. Now 50k dialup is pure crap for many purposes, mainly because of bloat.
DOD customers are a pain to deal with. Mounds of paperwork etc to execute an order. High hassle factor customers.
Small business, at the other end, have relatively straight forward paperwork etc, low risk, typically reasonably tech savvy.
They obviously plan to make shitty software. Their RF mouse has a reboot button on it. Most designers would use a watchdog or other reboot strategy, but obviously MS needs their reboot button.
All systems, mechanical or electronic, will fail. It's just that the electronic/software systems fail in less obvious ways...
Sounds like the old business plan thing again. Take some relatively obvious ideas, dress them up with nice sound-bitey names, books, speaking engagements, profit.
Different radiation at different levels have different results. You would not want to expose your unprotected body to whats in the ionosphere.
Ignorance, arrogance and powerful toys == a bad recipe.