Regardless, he's not wrong. Google does have a legitimate content problem. They run the risk of being outfoxed by competitors with content deals - including the Xbox 360 of all things - if they can't get the cable providers on-board.
Normally Mary-Jo Foley is right on the money, but not in this case. Microsoft has made it very clear that ARM devices will only be able to acquire applications from the Microsoft Store (they're doing the Walled Garden) and that the Microsoft Store will only offer Metro applications for download. The desktop tile is enabled on ARM devices in some builds because of the shared codebase, but you won't find it on the retail version.
You should note that Win8/ARM won't run "desktop" style applications anyhow, so an emulator won't do you any good. The only applications it will run are Metro applications, which are already going to support ARM. ARM + Windows is Metro from day 1, so you need only be concerned with new applications.
Bingo. Google needs content, and a lot more than they have now. YouTube rentals only fill a very narrow part of the spectrum; they need partnerships with Comcast, Verizon, and other cable operators like Microsoft has for their Xbox 360 media initiative to get access to their streaming libraries. Not to mention the major networks, Hulu, Major League Baseball, Amazon, and a bunch of smaller operators.
Without content their box is just a useless hunk of plastic and silicon. Throwing it in a bunch of TVs won't change the status quo.
I'm sorry, but it's not nonsense. The article is spot on.
WebOS as a GUI design absolutely has its merits (the cards really are fantastic) - but then that's not what the article is claiming. The article's claim is that WebOS was immature and slow and that's absolutely the case.
Just booting the damn thing takes 77 seconds (versus 31s on a Galaxy Tab). Never mind the anemic performance of their WebKit implementation - which carries right on over to application performance since most applications are written against WebKit - which is why at best it's less than half as fast as an iPad 2 with similar performing hardware and still spends most of the time trailing the now-ancient iPad 1.
The 3.0.4 update fixed this somewhat, but not a ton. It's still slow and it still chugs, it just does so somewhat less often than with the shipping software. The poor thing can't even play YouTube videos above 480p most of the time.
Though you're not entirely off base; you are absolutely right about the applications also being a problem. The IM client is probably the best part and it only gets worse from there. The PDF reader is especially atrocious as you noted, and a big part of that is because they're rendering everything in WebKit, saving the result to an image file, and then displaying that to the end user.
Anyhow, no, WeOS is not a fine OS. It's yet another collection of interesting concepts that weren't executed on correctly and require a level of performance today's hardware can't provide. Relying on WebKit for so much of the OS - and thereby a combination of interpretation and JIT compiling - was a stupid idea. These are still fundamentally embedded systems, and with embedded systems the closer you can be to the metal the better off you're going to be. Of course in Palm/HP's case all of this was punctuated by particularly inane decisions like logging every last thing to MLC Flash memory that doesn't like small writes.
As a TouchPad owner I'm doing little at the moment besides waiting for someone to port Ice Cream Sandwich to it. It may not have the slick multitasking of WebOS, but at least Android has the performance to actually handle multitasking along with everything else a tablet should be able to do smoothly. WebOS is crap.
There's a giant fucking DDoS bug in the hash table implementations of Java, PHP5, and Windows, and Slashdot presents it as a Windows security update?! Get your priorities straight and fix the title and the summary you nitwits, so that other admins see that this article is important. This is going to affect a lot more of us than just the Windows users.
Throughout the development of the "white space" spectrum, one thing that has never been clear to me is what it's going to be used for. It keeps getting compared to Wi-Fi, but then you'll have articles like this one that talk about commercial uses.
The launch of commercial white spaces services marks a victory for big technology companies
So which is it? Am I going to be able to drop a router in my house and run my wireless LAN on different frequencies, or is this just going to be another segment of licensed spectrum for selling wireless broadband?
They would just be hiring grunts. The NC Apple data center only has about 50 employees, as the only on-site people they need are techies to keep the servers up. Data centers themselves are capital-intensive but require little in the way of permanent labor beyond the skeleton crew, as the only big labor pushes would be construction and whatever you bring in if you overhaul the systems.
CarrierIQ is relatively new, and Apple is rather conservative. As surprised as I am that they have it in the first place, it's unlikely that it's in anything pre-dating iOS 5.
Just to add to the parent, you also have to factor in contractually obligated allocations. Western Digital and Seagate already signed contracts with OEMs for Q4 (if not beyond) - at this point they're locked into selling a specific number of drives at a specific price. Short of going bankrupt, breach of contract is rarely the better option.
So while there may be a 25% shortage overall, what we're really looking at is supplies and prices in the retail market (anyone selling "retail" drives), and the spot market (OEMs, white box builders, and e-tailers like Amazon that sell "OEM" drives), the two of which are for all intents and purposes the open market. The result of those OEM contracts means that the entire 25% shortage needs to be absorbed by the open market. And since most hard drives are sold on contract to OEMs in the first place, the actual shortage in the open market is easily 50% if not more.
This compounded with the portion of drive sales that are inelastic, and some dealer panic/greed are what has driven up prices so high. 150% in these circumstances is quite high (and there's no getting around that), but it's completely rational for such a major shortage.
If it makes you feel any better, the OEMs will be getting screwed when they start their new contracts. At that point the OEM and open markets will be back in equilibrium - OEMs won't be able to suck up drives for cheap - and the shortage will be better shared by both parties. Drives will still be expensive, but they shouldn't be quite as expensive as they are now.
The software giant has a habit of sending cakes to Mozilla after the foundation ships an update to its Firefox browser. Mozilla's recent Firefox 8 release has stemmed the flow of cupcakes from Redmond. Microsoft didn't ship a cupcake to Mozilla for its Firefox 8 release. "We didn't do it since we thought it was getting to be overkill," said a Microsoft spokesperson. "Every six weeks is a lot of cupcakes", they added.
It's unclear if authorities obtained a warrant to track Gregâ(TM)s vehicle
Nowhere in the article does it say they don't have a warrant, merely that Wired doesn't know. Surveillance warrants don't require informing the suspect.
What does a citizen have to do to get this kind of personalized attention from the government?
Be involved in a crime.
His cousin is a fugitive in Mexico, where the owner has been to recently in the SUV. The DEA obviously considers him a suspect or a person of interest that will lead them to the cousin.
Even though the site is the usual mix of MS inaccuracies, one thing it does do a good job pointing out is that Firefox is the odd man out right now when it comes to sandboxing. IE has it, Chrome has it, Safari on the Mac has it. Yet Firefox as the #2/#3 browser in the world lacks it. And while it's of limited use in protecting against attacks on plugins (which are the most common vector), it means it's easier to exploit the browser itself.
The FF devs should be working on getting Firefox appropriately sandboxed, even if it's Windows-only at the start. It would go a long way towards bringing it up to par with Chrome, which is Firefox's real competition.
Scoff all you want, but it would do all the youngins here good to read the whole Blue Box article from front to back. Not only does it provide a great historical context to modern hacking - and proof that the motivations haven't changed even though the technology has - but it's also an example of an extremely well written article, something the modern blogosphere is incapable of creating. Even if it takes the death of Steve Jobs, it's exactly the kind of article that should be posted on Slashdot.
Citi's report is not wrong, but how they go about counting things is naive at best. The crux of the matter is that there's a lot of crap spectrum that carriers basically got for free or close to it. But before we get too far ahead, let's answer an easier question: what is good spectrum.
1) The ideal spectrum is below 1GHz, as these frequencies have the best building and tree penetration. 1GHz-2GHz is usable, but it's not ideal because you start taking notable losses indoors and customers who've given up on landlines can't reliably use their phones indoors everywhere. Anything over 2GHz is effectively useless for mobile wireless because it's so poor at penetrating obstacles. It's best used for fixed point wireless where obstacles can be planned around and/or removed.
2) The ideal spectrum is nationwide. A patchwork of spectrum is not usable spectrum because it means you can only use narrow (lower bandwidth) channels, and requires a great deal more effort to plan, operate, and maintain a wireless network.
2b) Local spectrum is only useful when it abuts nationwide spectrum so that carriers can use it by simply activating more channels in high population areas.
Case in point, 194MHz of the spectrum Citi says is available is above 2GHz: "Citigroup's description of 194 MHz available in the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) and Educational Broadband Service (EBS) bands between 2.4 and 2.7 GHz". This also goes hand-in-hand with Citi's weird method of counting spectrum in use: they're multiplying it by the percent of the population that the spectrum covers. "The two used averages to come up with spectrum use estimates; if a carrier has a 10 MHz nationwide block, but is only delivering service to half the U.S. population, the report considers that 5 MHz of used spectrum, Rollins said."
Ultimately the carriers are being wasteful at times, but not nearly to the degree that Citi says they are. The carriers need more national allocations if they're to run a 3rd network simultaneously, and those allocations need to be at least 40MHz wide so that they can operate two sets of wideband (10MHz) LTE channels. Smaller allocations mean that they're going to have to use smaller channels, and that's going to greatly limit network performance.
1) VIA's ace in the hole was a patent they picked up from S3 (the guys who made the infamous ViRGE), which was deemed fundamental to Itanium; they've basically kept Intel at the table with only that single patent. That patent will be expiring soon, and it's unclear whether they even still own it or if it went with S3 to HTC earlier this year. The rest of VIA's patent portfolio is not strong and/or untested (which is what makes this specific suit so interesting).
2) Unfortunately VIA is not doing nearly as well as it used to; there's no real market for 3rd party chipsets anymore, and VIA's CPUs are going nowhere. Business in China keeps them afloat... for now. If Wen is Steve Jobs, then VIA is mid-90s Apple.
PCMag's work made for a useful location-specific test, but it's still lacking in details. Specifically, how wide are the channels AT&T and Verizon are using in that area? If AT&T is using wider channels then of course they're going to have more bandwidth*, but because channel widths are location specific (AT&T and Verizon don't have the same allocations everywhere), it's entirely non-representative if AT&T or Verizon's channel widths were significantly different from the national average.
* If the T-Mo merger does go through, this will be one of the big benefits for AT&T: they will be able to put together wider channels at lower frequencies
I second the opinion. Along with what everyone else has said, the Airport Extreme is one of only a couple 3x3:3 routers - meaning it supports 3 spatial streams up and down on 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which means it can max out the capabilities of 802.11n so long as the other end is similarly equipped (otherwise the extra streams are used for noise cancellation). As far as hardware goes you really can't top it in the consumer space, the only thing more powerful would require a CCNA to operate.
The E4200 is close (and is probably your best bet if you want something to tinker with), but the CPU is slower and the overall build quality isn't quite as good as it's up to Linksys standards as opposed to Apple standards.
I love my quad core desktop processor, but I find myself scratching my head at the idea of quad core CPU in a tablet. Even with iOS 5's enhancements there's no true multitasking in it or any other tablet/phone OS - every application is interacted with in a full-screen monolithic manner.
Dual core CPUs allow the OS to do one thing in the background and not bog down the device for the running application, but what on earth are you going to do with 4 CPUs when you can only interact with 1 program at a time? This seems like it would only be of benefit to games and a couple other niche uses, otherwise a processor with fewer cores and higher per-core performance like the A15 mentioned in the article would be far more beneficial.
Indeed. Apple maintains to this day that the iTunes/App Store is largely revenue neutral - after paying developers and operational costs, they make little if anything on it. All that profit Apple is making is on the hardware; between the iPhone and the iPad they purchase parts in such a massive volume that they can get parts for cheaper than anyone else. There's no subsidy going on, Apple legitimately makes a killing off of the iPad in hardware sales alone and that's why it's so far been impossible to beat Apple.
Hence the need for a study to focus not just on technology, but ethics. Is it ethical to grow people and force them to continue a task someone else started?
You're leaving with a ship full of people who want to be explorers; you're ending with a ship full of people who are doomed to be explorers.
That's because the only workable solution is to replace the SSN with another government issued ID - Real ID. And that went over like a lead balloon in a lot of places, as people tend to freak out when you explicitly tell them that they will be issued a unique ID number. If it's an SSN people don't freak out because they've had it since birth and accept it as a normal part of life.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless, he's not wrong. Google does have a legitimate content problem. They run the risk of being outfoxed by competitors with content deals - including the Xbox 360 of all things - if they can't get the cable providers on-board.
Normally Mary-Jo Foley is right on the money, but not in this case. Microsoft has made it very clear that ARM devices will only be able to acquire applications from the Microsoft Store (they're doing the Walled Garden) and that the Microsoft Store will only offer Metro applications for download. The desktop tile is enabled on ARM devices in some builds because of the shared codebase, but you won't find it on the retail version.
You should note that Win8/ARM won't run "desktop" style applications anyhow, so an emulator won't do you any good. The only applications it will run are Metro applications, which are already going to support ARM. ARM + Windows is Metro from day 1, so you need only be concerned with new applications.
Bingo. Google needs content, and a lot more than they have now. YouTube rentals only fill a very narrow part of the spectrum; they need partnerships with Comcast, Verizon, and other cable operators like Microsoft has for their Xbox 360 media initiative to get access to their streaming libraries. Not to mention the major networks, Hulu, Major League Baseball, Amazon, and a bunch of smaller operators.
Without content their box is just a useless hunk of plastic and silicon. Throwing it in a bunch of TVs won't change the status quo.
I'm sorry, but it's not nonsense. The article is spot on.
WebOS as a GUI design absolutely has its merits (the cards really are fantastic) - but then that's not what the article is claiming. The article's claim is that WebOS was immature and slow and that's absolutely the case.
Just booting the damn thing takes 77 seconds (versus 31s on a Galaxy Tab). Never mind the anemic performance of their WebKit implementation - which carries right on over to application performance since most applications are written against WebKit - which is why at best it's less than half as fast as an iPad 2 with similar performing hardware and still spends most of the time trailing the now-ancient iPad 1.
The 3.0.4 update fixed this somewhat, but not a ton. It's still slow and it still chugs, it just does so somewhat less often than with the shipping software. The poor thing can't even play YouTube videos above 480p most of the time.
Though you're not entirely off base; you are absolutely right about the applications also being a problem. The IM client is probably the best part and it only gets worse from there. The PDF reader is especially atrocious as you noted, and a big part of that is because they're rendering everything in WebKit, saving the result to an image file, and then displaying that to the end user.
Anyhow, no, WeOS is not a fine OS. It's yet another collection of interesting concepts that weren't executed on correctly and require a level of performance today's hardware can't provide. Relying on WebKit for so much of the OS - and thereby a combination of interpretation and JIT compiling - was a stupid idea. These are still fundamentally embedded systems, and with embedded systems the closer you can be to the metal the better off you're going to be. Of course in Palm/HP's case all of this was punctuated by particularly inane decisions like logging every last thing to MLC Flash memory that doesn't like small writes.
As a TouchPad owner I'm doing little at the moment besides waiting for someone to port Ice Cream Sandwich to it. It may not have the slick multitasking of WebOS, but at least Android has the performance to actually handle multitasking along with everything else a tablet should be able to do smoothly. WebOS is crap.
There's a giant fucking DDoS bug in the hash table implementations of Java, PHP5, and Windows, and Slashdot presents it as a Windows security update?! Get your priorities straight and fix the title and the summary you nitwits, so that other admins see that this article is important. This is going to affect a lot more of us than just the Windows users.
Hopefully someone can clear this up for me.
Throughout the development of the "white space" spectrum, one thing that has never been clear to me is what it's going to be used for. It keeps getting compared to Wi-Fi, but then you'll have articles like this one that talk about commercial uses.
So which is it? Am I going to be able to drop a router in my house and run my wireless LAN on different frequencies, or is this just going to be another segment of licensed spectrum for selling wireless broadband?
It's Nokia, so I'll take delusional for $2000, Alex.
They would just be hiring grunts. The NC Apple data center only has about 50 employees, as the only on-site people they need are techies to keep the servers up. Data centers themselves are capital-intensive but require little in the way of permanent labor beyond the skeleton crew, as the only big labor pushes would be construction and whatever you bring in if you overhaul the systems.
CarrierIQ is relatively new, and Apple is rather conservative. As surprised as I am that they have it in the first place, it's unlikely that it's in anything pre-dating iOS 5.
Just to add to the parent, you also have to factor in contractually obligated allocations. Western Digital and Seagate already signed contracts with OEMs for Q4 (if not beyond) - at this point they're locked into selling a specific number of drives at a specific price. Short of going bankrupt, breach of contract is rarely the better option.
So while there may be a 25% shortage overall, what we're really looking at is supplies and prices in the retail market (anyone selling "retail" drives), and the spot market (OEMs, white box builders, and e-tailers like Amazon that sell "OEM" drives), the two of which are for all intents and purposes the open market. The result of those OEM contracts means that the entire 25% shortage needs to be absorbed by the open market. And since most hard drives are sold on contract to OEMs in the first place, the actual shortage in the open market is easily 50% if not more.
This compounded with the portion of drive sales that are inelastic, and some dealer panic/greed are what has driven up prices so high. 150% in these circumstances is quite high (and there's no getting around that), but it's completely rational for such a major shortage.
If it makes you feel any better, the OEMs will be getting screwed when they start their new contracts. At that point the OEM and open markets will be back in equilibrium - OEMs won't be able to suck up drives for cheap - and the shortage will be better shared by both parties. Drives will still be expensive, but they shouldn't be quite as expensive as they are now.
It's not just funny, it's true!
From TFA:
Nowhere in the article does it say they don't have a warrant, merely that Wired doesn't know. Surveillance warrants don't require informing the suspect.
Be involved in a crime.
His cousin is a fugitive in Mexico, where the owner has been to recently in the SUV. The DEA obviously considers him a suspect or a person of interest that will lead them to the cousin.
Even though the site is the usual mix of MS inaccuracies, one thing it does do a good job pointing out is that Firefox is the odd man out right now when it comes to sandboxing. IE has it, Chrome has it, Safari on the Mac has it. Yet Firefox as the #2/#3 browser in the world lacks it. And while it's of limited use in protecting against attacks on plugins (which are the most common vector), it means it's easier to exploit the browser itself.
The FF devs should be working on getting Firefox appropriately sandboxed, even if it's Windows-only at the start. It would go a long way towards bringing it up to par with Chrome, which is Firefox's real competition.
Scoff all you want, but it would do all the youngins here good to read the whole Blue Box article from front to back. Not only does it provide a great historical context to modern hacking - and proof that the motivations haven't changed even though the technology has - but it's also an example of an extremely well written article, something the modern blogosphere is incapable of creating. Even if it takes the death of Steve Jobs, it's exactly the kind of article that should be posted on Slashdot.
Citi's report is not wrong, but how they go about counting things is naive at best. The crux of the matter is that there's a lot of crap spectrum that carriers basically got for free or close to it. But before we get too far ahead, let's answer an easier question: what is good spectrum.
Case in point, 194MHz of the spectrum Citi says is available is above 2GHz: "Citigroup's description of 194 MHz available in the Broadband Radio Service (BRS) and Educational Broadband Service (EBS) bands between 2.4 and 2.7 GHz". This also goes hand-in-hand with Citi's weird method of counting spectrum in use: they're multiplying it by the percent of the population that the spectrum covers. "The two used averages to come up with spectrum use estimates; if a carrier has a 10 MHz nationwide block, but is only delivering service to half the U.S. population, the report considers that 5 MHz of used spectrum, Rollins said."
Ultimately the carriers are being wasteful at times, but not nearly to the degree that Citi says they are. The carriers need more national allocations if they're to run a 3rd network simultaneously, and those allocations need to be at least 40MHz wide so that they can operate two sets of wideband (10MHz) LTE channels. Smaller allocations mean that they're going to have to use smaller channels, and that's going to greatly limit network performance.
2 things:
1) VIA's ace in the hole was a patent they picked up from S3 (the guys who made the infamous ViRGE), which was deemed fundamental to Itanium; they've basically kept Intel at the table with only that single patent. That patent will be expiring soon, and it's unclear whether they even still own it or if it went with S3 to HTC earlier this year. The rest of VIA's patent portfolio is not strong and/or untested (which is what makes this specific suit so interesting).
2) Unfortunately VIA is not doing nearly as well as it used to; there's no real market for 3rd party chipsets anymore, and VIA's CPUs are going nowhere. Business in China keeps them afloat... for now. If Wen is Steve Jobs, then VIA is mid-90s Apple.
PCMag's work made for a useful location-specific test, but it's still lacking in details. Specifically, how wide are the channels AT&T and Verizon are using in that area? If AT&T is using wider channels then of course they're going to have more bandwidth*, but because channel widths are location specific (AT&T and Verizon don't have the same allocations everywhere), it's entirely non-representative if AT&T or Verizon's channel widths were significantly different from the national average.
* If the T-Mo merger does go through, this will be one of the big benefits for AT&T: they will be able to put together wider channels at lower frequencies
I second the opinion. Along with what everyone else has said, the Airport Extreme is one of only a couple 3x3:3 routers - meaning it supports 3 spatial streams up and down on 2.4GHz and 5GHz, which means it can max out the capabilities of 802.11n so long as the other end is similarly equipped (otherwise the extra streams are used for noise cancellation). As far as hardware goes you really can't top it in the consumer space, the only thing more powerful would require a CCNA to operate.
The E4200 is close (and is probably your best bet if you want something to tinker with), but the CPU is slower and the overall build quality isn't quite as good as it's up to Linksys standards as opposed to Apple standards.
I love my quad core desktop processor, but I find myself scratching my head at the idea of quad core CPU in a tablet. Even with iOS 5's enhancements there's no true multitasking in it or any other tablet/phone OS - every application is interacted with in a full-screen monolithic manner.
Dual core CPUs allow the OS to do one thing in the background and not bog down the device for the running application, but what on earth are you going to do with 4 CPUs when you can only interact with 1 program at a time? This seems like it would only be of benefit to games and a couple other niche uses, otherwise a processor with fewer cores and higher per-core performance like the A15 mentioned in the article would be far more beneficial.
Indeed. Apple maintains to this day that the iTunes/App Store is largely revenue neutral - after paying developers and operational costs, they make little if anything on it. All that profit Apple is making is on the hardware; between the iPhone and the iPad they purchase parts in such a massive volume that they can get parts for cheaper than anyone else. There's no subsidy going on, Apple legitimately makes a killing off of the iPad in hardware sales alone and that's why it's so far been impossible to beat Apple.
Hence the need for a study to focus not just on technology, but ethics. Is it ethical to grow people and force them to continue a task someone else started?
You're leaving with a ship full of people who want to be explorers; you're ending with a ship full of people who are doomed to be explorers.
That's because the only workable solution is to replace the SSN with another government issued ID - Real ID. And that went over like a lead balloon in a lot of places, as people tend to freak out when you explicitly tell them that they will be issued a unique ID number. If it's an SSN people don't freak out because they've had it since birth and accept it as a normal part of life.
If you have a better suggestion for the music and film industries, I'm all ears. In all seriousness it gets the point across in far fewer words.