I will ask a friend who works in IT if he can help me, but I'm pretty sure he will tell me that he's not familiar enough with SIP to help me out.
Googling for "Asterisk" is a pretty good place to start.
I'm not entirely sure why it's so complicated in this day and age to cut out the middle men and connect with your relatives directly through the Internet, but well, that's the way it is at the moment.
Largely you can blame NAT. Some background on how SIP works when you place a call to someone: 1. The calling phone sends a SIP message to the callee's phone asking it to ring. The SIP message also tells it where (ip address / port) to send the media (audio / video) 2. The callee's phone rings 3. The callee picks up 4. The callee's phone sends a SIP message to the caller's phone telling it that the call has been picked up. The SIP message tells it where (ip address/port) to send the media. 5. Both sides start sending media over RTP to the other, since they have now exchanged media destination address details. 6. The two parties have a conversation. 7. One of the parties hangs up 8. The hanging up phone sends a SIP message to the other phone telling it the call has terminated 9. Both sides stop sending media
This fundamentally does not require any middle-men - you can tell your phone to call someone else's directly if you know its IP address (which you could discover using DNS, for example). However, there are some issues with this simple view on things: A. In the real world, phones don't have static IP addresses, they move around the internet. This problem is fixable with dynamic DNS, although now you've introduced a third party (the DNS server). B. People usually have firewalls between them. If the callee's phone isn't directly accessible from the caller's network, the caller can't send the initial "ring" SIP message. This could be fixed by poking a hole in the firewall for port 5060. More usually its fixed by having a SIP registration server somewhere on the internet - your phone connects to that server and that server is responsible for relaying SIP messages to it. So calling phones actually send the SIP packet to the registration server rather than directly to the callee's phone (this also fixes problem (A) without the need to resort to dynamic DNS too, since the callers nw only need to find the registration server rather than the phone itself). Of course, your registration server is a "middle man", but luckilly only carries the signalling traffic - the media still goes directly between the phones, which is good since it takes the shortest network path, therefore inproving the quality of service. C. This one is the killer - NAT. Remember the phones exchanged addresses to send the media to? Well, the problem is that once you stick NAT in the way, those addresses change... and they change in a way that is completely unpredictable. So now the endpoints have no idea where the hell to send the media. The work around to this is to send the media via a server too. And there you go, the dream of true peer-to-peer VoIP has been completely shot out of the sky.
Once IPv6 is widespread we can go back to just sending the signalling via external servers rather than the entire media stream, but I'm afraid NAT is way too widespread to get away with that on the IPv4 network.
Of course, there's nothing stopping the phones doing end-to-end encryption on the media, which would largely make the existence of a middle-man irrelevant, from a security perspective. On a closed system like Skype, there's no way to know which nodes are able to decrypt/decode the data though, so in that case you're always going to have to trust the vendor to tell you the truth instead of being able to independently confirm the security of the system.
If there is a third party running the server in the middle, there can be no trust. Run your own server if you need security. There are lots...
Then now you just have to worry about how reliable the isp of the server is, if they log your activities and will turn it over in a heartbeat.
If all communication to the server is encrypted and you've configured the server not to record your calls then you can be pretty confident that the security services can't find out what you talked about _before_ you became an interest to them. Of course, once you've become an interest to them they can get the ISP to give them physical access to the machine and you're screwed on any future conversations.
Problem is that video over IP is/was notoriously difficult to make plug and play
The thing is, it shouldn't be - the "difficulty" is largely down to the shitness of the software. I've got hardware VoIP phones from Grandstream that pretty much "Just Work" (you plug 'em in, enter your SIP login details and they do what they are supposed to). Meanwhile all the softphone software I've tried is pretty much balls: on Linux, Ekiga is "ok" but rather too buggy for every day use. On OS X I've yet to find any SIP software that does video except for Xmeeting, which is buggy as hell (to the point of being practically unusable) and doesn't seem to be under development any more. Also, none of the SIP softphones I've come across have half-decent echo cancellation which makes using them as speakerphones a non-option.
It just means we won't have to do jobs that can be done by robots, and those are tedious and repetitive jobs anyway so no biggie.
People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines. It's not robots writing Diablo III, inventing costumes for the Hobbit movie, writing screenplays, and so on. It will enable so much more human productivity, if we don't have to use valuable human minds on robot-like labour any more.
I know that this is a very un-PC comment to make, but it happens to be true: some humans don't have the intelligence to do jobs that couldn't otherwise be done by robots...
Just recently BMG illegally took down a political campaign ad from Barack Obama's opposition. Of course, I know that Barack Obama's minions had nothing to do with this. So no subversion going on here.
Mitt Romney's ad was criticizing Barack Obama, therefore it clearly falls under Section 107 (Fair Use) of US Copyright.
I'm guessing the campaign ad was on youtube or somesuch? The moral of the story is: If you're running a political campaign, host your own damned content.
FYI, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no physical buttons on the front, so it's "1 button on the front instead of 0". All the buttons on the front are virtual.
Thats getting pretty pedantic. They *are* buttons - just because they don't physically go "click" doesn't stop them being buttons - they are permanent and in fixed positions (no software can change the printed legend on each button). I don't think anyone would argue that the touch-sensitive buttons you find in many lifts aren't buttons just because they don't physically push in.
(I for one find Android devices easier to use than iDevices precisely because there are these buttons that always do the same thing and are always in the same place
Are there *other* buttons (including software buttons) on Android devices that show up in the same place always but *don't* do the same thing consistently?
I sure remember seeing on various CNET Tech Reviews of Android products that some were confusing and the buttons *weren't* consistent. But I don't remember more details than that.
Not really. My phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) has 3 hard buttons - volume up, volume down, power - and the usual 4 touch screen buttons (menu, home, back, search). It also has a hard QWERTY keyboard, but I'll ignore that for now because its pretty obvious what that does:)
The volume up/down buttons almost always adjust the volume. Exactly *which* volume they adjust depends a bit on context - for example, if you're on a phone call they adjust the call volume, if you're playing music they adjust the media volume. This all works largely as the user expects though I think. There are minor exceptions to this, for example in the camera the volume buttons have been repurposed to be zoom in/out, which I kind of understand but I don't particularly like overloading the function of buttons in this way. In any case, this minor inconsistency doesn't really seem that important and is quickly learnt IMHO.
Holding down the power button turns the phone on when its completely off. Pressing the power button when the phone is asleep turns the screen on (you still have to unlock it by swiping the screen). If the phone is on and not asleep, pressing power locks it and turns the screen off. Holding down power when the phone is unlocked gives you a menu allowing you to turn on flight mode, silent mode or fully power off the phone. All reasonably consistent I think, and these functions basically never change - the power button always does the same thing, no matter what application you are using.
The "menu" soft-button always brings up a context menu (if there is one available) in the current application.
The "home" soft-button always takes you back to the last visited page of the home screen. Pressing it while you're in the home screen takes you to the home screen's "home page".
The "search" soft-button always accesses the search function for the current application (if there is one). Long-pressing this button launches voice search.
The "back" soft-button is the only one which has a little inconsistency, which is a shame, but largely not noticable. It always takes you back to the previous page, but depending on the app it either takes you back to the previous page you saw (e.g. if you're reading your mail and you press a link it launches the browser, pressing back will get you back to the email you were reading, even though this is not the same app as the browser); or it takes you to the previous page in an application's page hiararchy.
As for on-screen buttons, that's basically down to each individual application, but the main functions are usually accessed through the menu soft-button, so consistency is largely maintained.
I kind of see it the other way around; the logic of "Samsung's device is sufficiently different from Apple's device as to not risk customer confusion" is sound, but the way the judge went about positing it ('Aw man, this Samsung thing isn't as hip and cool and trendy as the iPad my GGD got me for Kwanzaa") is a bit 3rd grade.
I don't quite understand this... Whilst I agree that pretty much no iDevice is going to be confused with an Android device...
The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,”
Both devices are basically a screen with almost no external buttons, plain black frame around the screen, rectangular... I'm not sure how you can get more simple. The only way I can see the iPad being simpler and more understated than the Tab is because it only has 1 button on the front instead of 4, but whilst this is visually simpler, being usably simpler is debatable (I for one find Android devices easier to use than iDevices precisely because there are these buttons that always do the same thing and are always in the same place - note, this isn't a "foo is better than bar" comment, it is simply pointing out that "less buttons == simpler" is very very debatable.
Once you get to the software itself, on the surface iOS and Android are pretty similar - a matrix of application launcher icons, so I'm not sure you can draw any "foor is simpler than bar" conclusions here either.
The judge found that Samsung’s products were distinctive because they were thinner and had “unusual details” on the back.
Apple seem to think that thinner == cooler, with products such as the MacBook Air, so I'm not sure this comment is going to sit well with them.
So on the whole, these devices are different enough to tell apart (as much as any reasonably plain appliance can be told apart - for example, most TVs look pretty similar to each other but this doesn't seem to end with the TV manufacturers suing each other), but the way the judge has gone about deciding this seems... odd.
Asus RT-N16 with TomatoUSB.. works pretty damned well for consumer use... note: I'm not using it for network storage, or for VPN... so can't comment on that.
What part of "when running the stock firmware" was hard to understand?
Not if you don't want to get a cheap and/or gigantic piece of shit that can't even keep things secure, want actual functionality, etc.
Tell me, which consumer-grade routers *don't* fall into the "gigantic piece of shit" category? (when running the stock firmware)
On my list so far:
Linksys - a number of the Linksys routers do crazy stuff like limiting your total number of outgoing connections to about 10.
Netgear - My Netgear router has more bugs than you can shake a stick at: it hard crashes when it receives certain UPnP packets (even when the UPnP server is turned off!). The extent of its logging is "Connected" or "Not Connected" - good luck figuring out why it won't connect. Last time I had to debug a connection fault I had to connect a laptop between the router and DSL modem to see that the PPP stream said "authentication failure" - would it kill them to put this stuff in a log file? The wifi also periodically drops a machine off the network at random for no obvious reason, requiring a reboot of the router. The web interface also doesn't accept CHAP usernames longer than 16 characters, so to enter these you have to dump the config to an XML file, hack it and then upload the XML file again. This router also has a habit of mangling the port numbers in SIP traffic from being correct (determined by the SIP endpoint using the rport extension so it matches the port in the router's NAT table) to being incorrect (doesn't match the port in the router's NAT table so the router ends up dropping the return traffic).
Dlink - My Dlink router has a firewall that periodically starts blocking legitimate traffic after it has decided it is malicious, even though the firewall is completely disabled. The web interface also doesn't support CHAP usernames with a dot in them (luckilly you can get around this by turning off javascript in the browser while entering the username)
TP-Link - Ok, I'll admit that this is a dirt cheap box, but on the face of it it seems to be pretty feature rich. I'm using it as a DSL bridge (the PPP session is terminated on another machine). Unfortunately in the evening the SNR drops on my DSL and the router never bothers to retrain. Eventually all the traffic is arriving at the router as a CRC error and you have to powercycle the router to get it to retrain the connection. The manufacturer tells me that this is the "expected behaviour". I'm guessing they weren't expecting anyone to actually use the "bridge" feature and were relying on the internal PPP daemon blowing up and triggering a retrain if the SNR got too bad - this doesn't work so well when you're not using the internal PPP daemon.
So as yet, I've not found anything that I would describe as fit for purpose at the consumer end of the spectrum (and all these, except TP-Link, are "big name brands"). Billion seem to get good write-ups, but at £150 a pop, I'd hardly call that consumer equipment.
Maybe all smartphone makers should review other companies' patents BEFORE they make a phone. Then if there's something legit, don't put it in your phone. If there's something not legit, try to get the patent invalidated. That would definitely save some money. But I guess "screw it, let's just make a phone and deal with it later" works too.
When I was working for a well known big tech company, their legal department advised us not to look at patents and just to blindly implement away. This advice is based on several premises: 1. There are so many patents, looking through them and figuring out which might be infringing is extremely expensive (if all the engineers do it, the company would be spending way more on looking for patents than they would actually end up paying out on the odd occasion that a court decided they were infringing). 2. If the company gets sued for patent infringement, and it is discovered that the company had looked at the patent they were infringing, the court will probably impose a much harsher penalty than if you infringed by accident. 3. In the software world at least (and I imagine this is also largely true in other sectors, for example, sectors where you can patent rectangles with rounded corners), it is basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without infringing a great number of patents. So the entire software industry revolves around the principle that you _are_ infringing someone else's patents and you just hope they don't notice and sue you for it. If they do sue you for it, then you're better off if you didn't know which patent you were infringing (see (2)).
Point (1) is also one good reason why patents have become a waste of time for society. It used to be that if you had a good invention, you patented it and the patent documented lots of detail about how it works. If someone else wanted to build something similar after the patent had expired, they could do so from the detail in the patent. These days, patents have become so numerous and trivial that if you want to implement something it is usually easier to just figure out how to implement it yourself rather than find a relevant expired patent. Coupled with the fact that modern patents are so vague it's basically impossible to implement them based soley on the description in the patent, and that technology is so fast paced that by the time a patent expires, the thing it is describing is probably useless and has been superceeded many times over.
A truely fair patent system would recognise the difference between something you invented independently (even if someone else had, unbeknownst to you, already invented it) and something you copied. Unfortunately proving which is which is a problem, so I'm of the opinion that its about time to scrap the entire patent system - it no longer does what it was intended to do, is being openly abused and is harmful to society.
Either way, you are using android 1.6. That's over 3 years old. So, back then, it might have happened what you said. Now, it doesn't, so don't talk as if you know anything about it.
So you're saying that backward compatibility is handled perfectly so long as everyone upgrades regularly?
Then you're in the realm of religion. You know the device you use has a problem, so you assume the problem must be worse on the other device, even though you have no evidence of it.
Not really. I've experienced backward compatibility problems on Android, PalmOS, Linux, Solaris, Windows, DOS and MacOS (amoungst others). It isn't unreasonable to conclude that iOS isn't immune to similar problems. I freely admit that I have very little experience of iOS, but drawing from many decades working with computers I struggle to believe that iOS is different from practically every other system in this regard.
No. I mean that the second hand device she bought from eBay would have an older version of iOS on, and she could restore the app (and any associated data) using the iTunes app.
Not if it was upgraded by the previous owner: If Apple release an upgrade that works on current hardware, but breaks this app, this consumer has the option to avoid upgrading their hardware. But when that hardware breaks, the chances are all the second hand hardware will have already been upgraded, and various other posts have pointed out that Apple do not allow downgrading of the OS, so you're screwed in that case.
Android won't LET you sell in the market for a target that came before the one you specified. Stop trying to sound reasonable while saying bullshit.
Did you actually read what I said? Let me repeat:
Market allows application vendors to set a minimum supported version of Android. This is good - it means that Market won't let people with earlier versions of Android upgrade to (or install) this version of the app. Unfortunately, a lot of application vendors set the minimum supported version to something very low without bothering to test if it actually works. The result is that a number of working applications on my Android 1.6 device upgraded themselves to versions that only work on Android 2.
Apps generally don't stop working when an new OS or device comes out.
I'm not convinced about any of that. I know a number of old Android apps won't work on new versions of Android (yes, I'm aware we're not talking about Android, but I have even less faith in Apple maintaining compatibility). Also the same is true the other way around - various apps spontaneously stopped working on my old HTC Dream then the authors pushed our updates for them without bothering to check whether they actually worked on Android versions prior to 2.0 (Market actually allows the vendors to specify which versions of Android the update is compatible with, but unfortunately a lot of (most?) authors just seem to claim its compatible with everything without checking.)
she can buy an older one second hand.
Second hand hardware is only available for a reasonably short period, in the grand scheme of things.
And restore from iTunes.
I'm not familiar with Apple's software, would this restore the exact OS version you were using along with any apps even if they have been withdrawn from the appstore?
So do not update your iOS. Keep your iDevice how it is right now. If its that important to you, treat it as a non up-datable speech tool. It will work as it does right now...
Right up until your iDevice fails at the end of its 3 year design life and you have to replace it with something incompatable
Of course there are plenty of 3D CAD programs available, but for those of us who aren't professional draughtsmen, few approach the ease-of-use that Sketchup has.
I've yet to find any vaguely competent free 3D CAD software for Linux...
because the international standards organization correctly left out any mention of network compatibility, becuase had they attempted to include it with so many various proticols, then the standard could never be standard
You're correct that the definition of 4G is based on peak data rates (100Mbps for moving devices, 1Gbps for static devices).
However, I'm not sure how you can say that they "correctly" didn't include compatibility so that they could standardise it. What's actually the point in a standard if it doesn't guarantee some kind of compatibility? In a global economy (which we are in, even if the phone vendors seem to think that its a good idea to restrict particular models of phone to particular countries), you should be able to buy a device advertised as "4G" and have it work on any network advertised as "4G" - this is the whole point of standards. This is what we have with other standards - 802.11g is 802.11g the world over (ok, there are some minor differences in frequencies at the top and bottom ends of the band, but generally you can buy an 802.11g device anywhere in the world and have it work on an 802.11g network anywhere else in the world).
At the moment you can buy a device labelled as "4G" and find that it doesn't even work on half the 4G networks in the country you bought it from, let alone anywhere else in the world (because LTE and WiMax seem to be being rolled out in parallel, and most 4G devices only support one or the other). Whilst your average techie can research this and figure out what type of 4G he needs for his chosen network, the average consumer can't.
The only truly functional alternatives while keeping the same basic use are a clamshell and a slider, and both make for a heavier and larger device. In this day and age, people seem to want smaller, thinner, lighter devices, and so the bar is winning out as the most popular design.
Oddly, I was just trying to find a suitable replacement for my dead HTC Dream. It turns out that here in europe there are basically no qwerty slider phones - just the Desire Z and Xperia, which are both ancient technology. In a weird change to normal, the US seems to have a better selection of phones and has stacks and stacks of qwerty sliders. So in the end I'm having to import a Samsung Captivate Glide from the US (and the US being typically crap when handling the rest of the world, virtually no US company will post internationally). I don't understand this at all - I can't be the only person in Europe who finds touch screen keyboards horrendous.
The (rather wealthy) area already has access to *faster* full-fibre technology broadband. Virgin cable is a full fibre service, whereas this is "fibre to the cabinet": BT lay the fibre to these new cabinets, and then use copper as normal, using VDSL technology.
I know Virgin have been advertising "fibre optic internet" for many years, but no, it isn't "full" fibre, its basically just FTTC. The only real difference between Virgin's and BT's network is that BT runs fibre to the cabinet and then VDSL over a copper pair to the premises whilst Virgin run fibre to the cabinet and then do DOCSIS over coax... Wake me up when FTTP gets widespread.
Maybe we should drop the term "carbon neutral" and call it environmentalism.
Also, is global warming, if it exists, man-made or not? Does it matter? Environmentalism for the sake of less pollution. I don't care if being "green" stops global warming. Stop pollution for the sake of stopping pollution.
I agree that pollution can't be good, so we should stop it irrespective of whether it can be proved to be actually linked to specific badness like climate change. However, Using the term "environmentalism" is a bad idea - to most people, an "environmentalist" is a wannabe do-gooder with no real grasp of reality. You know, the sort that seem to think we should ditch nuclear power because everyone knows that *every* power station chernobyls after a few years and that we can supply our entire power demand with windmills.
And businesses should focus on being more efficient rather than dealing with "offsets".
The whole offsetting or plant-a-tree thing is a complete fraud anyway. You want to be "carbon neutral", so you pay someone to plant a tree. You get a nice feel good glow. In 10-20 years time, someone chops that tree down and uses it for firewood, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere. Unless you can *guarantee* those trees will be protected over geological timescales (hint: you can't), its all a bit of a waste of time and money. Far better to spend that money *actually* reducing your carbon (or other pollution) footprint.
It's not that they captured some broadcast data, anyone can do that. It's that they systematically drove around and captured A LOT of broadcast data and correlated it to location information, with the intent that it could be mined for business purposes in the future.
"A lot" divided by the number of households they drove passed == practically nothing from each household. Given that they drive around in the middle of the day, the vast majority of wifi networks are going to be almost entirely idle, so they probably won't get anything from them other than the beacon. The beacon packet basically contains the SSIDs of the network (which they use to identify an access point for their wifi geolocation system), and contains no other useful data. Occasionally (probably every one in a few thousand networks) they might pick up something like a UPnP broadcast packet, which might tell you the brand of a device on the network. On networks where someone is surfing the web (again, middle of the day, so not that many), they might pick up a couple of packets from the middle of a session - its pretty unlikley that these packets are going to have much useful data in them, maybe a *fragment* of an email or something, more likley just a lump of javascript or part of an image from some random web page. On networks where someone is torrenting data, they will get a lump of binary data from somewhere in the middle of that torrent, again, doesn't really seem that useful to anyone.
Then we combine the above fact that they would've captured very little data from the average network (even less of any use) with the fact that the vast majority of the networks are encrypted, and you can see that they probably captured very little of value. Even if this was intentional, it was probably capturing the traffic "because we can" rather than them actually expecting to be able to use it for anything.
Scale matters when it comes to the consequences of your actions.
Yes, but I can't see any consequence here. Anyone who thinks google got a serious amount of useful data from this exercise is deluded and doesn't understand (a) how little time the Google car would've stayed in range of each network, (b) how little traffic the average network would've produced in that length of time, and (c) how tiny the proportion of personal data vs. random useless crap is in the average stream of network traffic.
Slashdot Mirror
I will ask a friend who works in IT if he can help me, but I'm pretty sure he will tell me that he's not familiar enough with SIP to help me out.
Googling for "Asterisk" is a pretty good place to start.
I'm not entirely sure why it's so complicated in this day and age to cut out the middle men and connect with your relatives directly through the Internet, but well, that's the way it is at the moment.
Largely you can blame NAT. Some background on how SIP works when you place a call to someone:
1. The calling phone sends a SIP message to the callee's phone asking it to ring. The SIP message also tells it where (ip address / port) to send the media (audio / video)
2. The callee's phone rings
3. The callee picks up
4. The callee's phone sends a SIP message to the caller's phone telling it that the call has been picked up. The SIP message tells it where (ip address/port) to send the media.
5. Both sides start sending media over RTP to the other, since they have now exchanged media destination address details.
6. The two parties have a conversation.
7. One of the parties hangs up
8. The hanging up phone sends a SIP message to the other phone telling it the call has terminated
9. Both sides stop sending media
This fundamentally does not require any middle-men - you can tell your phone to call someone else's directly if you know its IP address (which you could discover using DNS, for example). However, there are some issues with this simple view on things:
A. In the real world, phones don't have static IP addresses, they move around the internet. This problem is fixable with dynamic DNS, although now you've introduced a third party (the DNS server).
B. People usually have firewalls between them. If the callee's phone isn't directly accessible from the caller's network, the caller can't send the initial "ring" SIP message. This could be fixed by poking a hole in the firewall for port 5060. More usually its fixed by having a SIP registration server somewhere on the internet - your phone connects to that server and that server is responsible for relaying SIP messages to it. So calling phones actually send the SIP packet to the registration server rather than directly to the callee's phone (this also fixes problem (A) without the need to resort to dynamic DNS too, since the callers nw only need to find the registration server rather than the phone itself). Of course, your registration server is a "middle man", but luckilly only carries the signalling traffic - the media still goes directly between the phones, which is good since it takes the shortest network path, therefore inproving the quality of service.
C. This one is the killer - NAT. Remember the phones exchanged addresses to send the media to? Well, the problem is that once you stick NAT in the way, those addresses change... and they change in a way that is completely unpredictable. So now the endpoints have no idea where the hell to send the media. The work around to this is to send the media via a server too. And there you go, the dream of true peer-to-peer VoIP has been completely shot out of the sky.
Once IPv6 is widespread we can go back to just sending the signalling via external servers rather than the entire media stream, but I'm afraid NAT is way too widespread to get away with that on the IPv4 network.
Of course, there's nothing stopping the phones doing end-to-end encryption on the media, which would largely make the existence of a middle-man irrelevant, from a security perspective. On a closed system like Skype, there's no way to know which nodes are able to decrypt/decode the data though, so in that case you're always going to have to trust the vendor to tell you the truth instead of being able to independently confirm the security of the system.
they have a TCP tunnel that you can use to go through firewalls and specifically NAT.
Sending voice/video over TCP is a monumentally silly idea, (and doesn't really offer an advantage over UDP for NAT traversal)
If there is a third party running the server in the middle, there can be no trust. Run your own server if you need security. There are lots...
Then now you just have to worry about how reliable the isp of the server is, if they log your activities and will turn it over in a heartbeat.
If all communication to the server is encrypted and you've configured the server not to record your calls then you can be pretty confident that the security services can't find out what you talked about _before_ you became an interest to them. Of course, once you've become an interest to them they can get the ISP to give them physical access to the machine and you're screwed on any future conversations.
Problem is that video over IP is/was notoriously difficult to make plug and play
The thing is, it shouldn't be - the "difficulty" is largely down to the shitness of the software. I've got hardware VoIP phones from Grandstream that pretty much "Just Work" (you plug 'em in, enter your SIP login details and they do what they are supposed to). Meanwhile all the softphone software I've tried is pretty much balls: on Linux, Ekiga is "ok" but rather too buggy for every day use. On OS X I've yet to find any SIP software that does video except for Xmeeting, which is buggy as hell (to the point of being practically unusable) and doesn't seem to be under development any more. Also, none of the SIP softphones I've come across have half-decent echo cancellation which makes using them as speakerphones a non-option.
It just means we won't have to do jobs that can be done by robots, and those are tedious and repetitive jobs anyway so no biggie.
People will be freed up for creative jobs, jobs that involve human intelligence which can't be done by machines. It's not robots writing Diablo III, inventing costumes for the Hobbit movie, writing screenplays, and so on. It will enable so much more human productivity, if we don't have to use valuable human minds on robot-like labour any more.
I know that this is a very un-PC comment to make, but it happens to be true: some humans don't have the intelligence to do jobs that couldn't otherwise be done by robots...
Just recently BMG illegally took down a political campaign ad from Barack Obama's opposition. Of course, I know that Barack Obama's minions had nothing to do with this. So no subversion going on here.
Mitt Romney's ad was criticizing Barack Obama, therefore it clearly falls under Section 107 (Fair Use) of US Copyright.
I'm guessing the campaign ad was on youtube or somesuch? The moral of the story is: If you're running a political campaign, host your own damned content.
FYI, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no physical buttons on the front, so it's "1 button on the front instead of 0". All the buttons on the front are virtual.
Thats getting pretty pedantic. They *are* buttons - just because they don't physically go "click" doesn't stop them being buttons - they are permanent and in fixed positions (no software can change the printed legend on each button). I don't think anyone would argue that the touch-sensitive buttons you find in many lifts aren't buttons just because they don't physically push in.
(I for one find Android devices easier to use than iDevices precisely because there are these buttons that always do the same thing and are always in the same place
Are there *other* buttons (including software buttons) on Android devices that show up in the same place always but *don't* do the same thing consistently?
I sure remember seeing on various CNET Tech Reviews of Android products that some were confusing and the buttons *weren't* consistent. But I don't remember more details than that.
Not really. My phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) has 3 hard buttons - volume up, volume down, power - and the usual 4 touch screen buttons (menu, home, back, search). It also has a hard QWERTY keyboard, but I'll ignore that for now because its pretty obvious what that does :)
The volume up/down buttons almost always adjust the volume. Exactly *which* volume they adjust depends a bit on context - for example, if you're on a phone call they adjust the call volume, if you're playing music they adjust the media volume. This all works largely as the user expects though I think. There are minor exceptions to this, for example in the camera the volume buttons have been repurposed to be zoom in/out, which I kind of understand but I don't particularly like overloading the function of buttons in this way. In any case, this minor inconsistency doesn't really seem that important and is quickly learnt IMHO.
Holding down the power button turns the phone on when its completely off. Pressing the power button when the phone is asleep turns the screen on (you still have to unlock it by swiping the screen). If the phone is on and not asleep, pressing power locks it and turns the screen off. Holding down power when the phone is unlocked gives you a menu allowing you to turn on flight mode, silent mode or fully power off the phone. All reasonably consistent I think, and these functions basically never change - the power button always does the same thing, no matter what application you are using.
The "menu" soft-button always brings up a context menu (if there is one available) in the current application.
The "home" soft-button always takes you back to the last visited page of the home screen. Pressing it while you're in the home screen takes you to the home screen's "home page".
The "search" soft-button always accesses the search function for the current application (if there is one). Long-pressing this button launches voice search.
The "back" soft-button is the only one which has a little inconsistency, which is a shame, but largely not noticable. It always takes you back to the previous page, but depending on the app it either takes you back to the previous page you saw (e.g. if you're reading your mail and you press a link it launches the browser, pressing back will get you back to the email you were reading, even though this is not the same app as the browser); or it takes you to the previous page in an application's page hiararchy.
As for on-screen buttons, that's basically down to each individual application, but the main functions are usually accessed through the menu soft-button, so consistency is largely maintained.
I kind of see it the other way around; the logic of "Samsung's device is sufficiently different from Apple's device as to not risk customer confusion" is sound, but the way the judge went about positing it ('Aw man, this Samsung thing isn't as hip and cool and trendy as the iPad my GGD got me for Kwanzaa") is a bit 3rd grade.
I don't quite understand this... Whilst I agree that pretty much no iDevice is going to be confused with an Android device...
The Galaxy tablets “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,”
Both devices are basically a screen with almost no external buttons, plain black frame around the screen, rectangular... I'm not sure how you can get more simple. The only way I can see the iPad being simpler and more understated than the Tab is because it only has 1 button on the front instead of 4, but whilst this is visually simpler, being usably simpler is debatable (I for one find Android devices easier to use than iDevices precisely because there are these buttons that always do the same thing and are always in the same place - note, this isn't a "foo is better than bar" comment, it is simply pointing out that "less buttons == simpler" is very very debatable.
Once you get to the software itself, on the surface iOS and Android are pretty similar - a matrix of application launcher icons, so I'm not sure you can draw any "foor is simpler than bar" conclusions here either.
The judge found that Samsung’s products were distinctive because they were thinner and had “unusual details” on the back.
Apple seem to think that thinner == cooler, with products such as the MacBook Air, so I'm not sure this comment is going to sit well with them.
On the other hand, I have no idea where the "unusual details" thing came from - the back of both devices looks quite similar, except for the fact that one of them has an apple logo and the other has a samsung logo (i.e. other than the logos, they are pretty plain except for the regulatory info that they both have) Compare: http://blog.actioncreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/galaxyTabBack.jpg http://mobodojo.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ipad_back.jpg
So on the whole, these devices are different enough to tell apart (as much as any reasonably plain appliance can be told apart - for example, most TVs look pretty similar to each other but this doesn't seem to end with the TV manufacturers suing each other), but the way the judge has gone about deciding this seems... odd.
Asus RT-N16 with TomatoUSB .. works pretty damned well for consumer use... note: I'm not using it for network storage, or for VPN... so can't comment on that.
What part of "when running the stock firmware" was hard to understand?
Not if you don't want to get a cheap and/or gigantic piece of shit that can't even keep things secure, want actual functionality, etc.
Tell me, which consumer-grade routers *don't* fall into the "gigantic piece of shit" category? (when running the stock firmware)
On my list so far:
Linksys - a number of the Linksys routers do crazy stuff like limiting your total number of outgoing connections to about 10.
Netgear - My Netgear router has more bugs than you can shake a stick at: it hard crashes when it receives certain UPnP packets (even when the UPnP server is turned off!). The extent of its logging is "Connected" or "Not Connected" - good luck figuring out why it won't connect. Last time I had to debug a connection fault I had to connect a laptop between the router and DSL modem to see that the PPP stream said "authentication failure" - would it kill them to put this stuff in a log file? The wifi also periodically drops a machine off the network at random for no obvious reason, requiring a reboot of the router. The web interface also doesn't accept CHAP usernames longer than 16 characters, so to enter these you have to dump the config to an XML file, hack it and then upload the XML file again. This router also has a habit of mangling the port numbers in SIP traffic from being correct (determined by the SIP endpoint using the rport extension so it matches the port in the router's NAT table) to being incorrect (doesn't match the port in the router's NAT table so the router ends up dropping the return traffic).
Dlink - My Dlink router has a firewall that periodically starts blocking legitimate traffic after it has decided it is malicious, even though the firewall is completely disabled. The web interface also doesn't support CHAP usernames with a dot in them (luckilly you can get around this by turning off javascript in the browser while entering the username)
TP-Link - Ok, I'll admit that this is a dirt cheap box, but on the face of it it seems to be pretty feature rich. I'm using it as a DSL bridge (the PPP session is terminated on another machine). Unfortunately in the evening the SNR drops on my DSL and the router never bothers to retrain. Eventually all the traffic is arriving at the router as a CRC error and you have to powercycle the router to get it to retrain the connection. The manufacturer tells me that this is the "expected behaviour". I'm guessing they weren't expecting anyone to actually use the "bridge" feature and were relying on the internal PPP daemon blowing up and triggering a retrain if the SNR got too bad - this doesn't work so well when you're not using the internal PPP daemon.
So as yet, I've not found anything that I would describe as fit for purpose at the consumer end of the spectrum (and all these, except TP-Link, are "big name brands"). Billion seem to get good write-ups, but at £150 a pop, I'd hardly call that consumer equipment.
Maybe all smartphone makers should review other companies' patents BEFORE they make a phone. Then if there's something legit, don't put it in your phone. If there's something not legit, try to get the patent invalidated. That would definitely save some money. But I guess "screw it, let's just make a phone and deal with it later" works too.
When I was working for a well known big tech company, their legal department advised us not to look at patents and just to blindly implement away. This advice is based on several premises:
1. There are so many patents, looking through them and figuring out which might be infringing is extremely expensive (if all the engineers do it, the company would be spending way more on looking for patents than they would actually end up paying out on the odd occasion that a court decided they were infringing).
2. If the company gets sued for patent infringement, and it is discovered that the company had looked at the patent they were infringing, the court will probably impose a much harsher penalty than if you infringed by accident.
3. In the software world at least (and I imagine this is also largely true in other sectors, for example, sectors where you can patent rectangles with rounded corners), it is basically impossible to write any non-trivial piece of software without infringing a great number of patents. So the entire software industry revolves around the principle that you _are_ infringing someone else's patents and you just hope they don't notice and sue you for it. If they do sue you for it, then you're better off if you didn't know which patent you were infringing (see (2)).
Point (1) is also one good reason why patents have become a waste of time for society. It used to be that if you had a good invention, you patented it and the patent documented lots of detail about how it works. If someone else wanted to build something similar after the patent had expired, they could do so from the detail in the patent. These days, patents have become so numerous and trivial that if you want to implement something it is usually easier to just figure out how to implement it yourself rather than find a relevant expired patent. Coupled with the fact that modern patents are so vague it's basically impossible to implement them based soley on the description in the patent, and that technology is so fast paced that by the time a patent expires, the thing it is describing is probably useless and has been superceeded many times over.
A truely fair patent system would recognise the difference between something you invented independently (even if someone else had, unbeknownst to you, already invented it) and something you copied. Unfortunately proving which is which is a problem, so I'm of the opinion that its about time to scrap the entire patent system - it no longer does what it was intended to do, is being openly abused and is harmful to society.
Either way, you are using android 1.6. That's over 3 years old. So, back then, it might have happened what you said. Now, it doesn't, so don't talk as if you know anything about it.
So you're saying that backward compatibility is handled perfectly so long as everyone upgrades regularly?
Then you're in the realm of religion. You know the device you use has a problem, so you assume the problem must be worse on the other device, even though you have no evidence of it.
Not really. I've experienced backward compatibility problems on Android, PalmOS, Linux, Solaris, Windows, DOS and MacOS (amoungst others). It isn't unreasonable to conclude that iOS isn't immune to similar problems. I freely admit that I have very little experience of iOS, but drawing from many decades working with computers I struggle to believe that iOS is different from practically every other system in this regard.
No. I mean that the second hand device she bought from eBay would have an older version of iOS on, and she could restore the app (and any associated data) using the iTunes app.
Not if it was upgraded by the previous owner: If Apple release an upgrade that works on current hardware, but breaks this app, this consumer has the option to avoid upgrading their hardware. But when that hardware breaks, the chances are all the second hand hardware will have already been upgraded, and various other posts have pointed out that Apple do not allow downgrading of the OS, so you're screwed in that case.
Android won't LET you sell in the market for a target that came before the one you specified. Stop trying to sound reasonable while saying bullshit.
Did you actually read what I said? Let me repeat:
Market allows application vendors to set a minimum supported version of Android. This is good - it means that Market won't let people with earlier versions of Android upgrade to (or install) this version of the app. Unfortunately, a lot of application vendors set the minimum supported version to something very low without bothering to test if it actually works. The result is that a number of working applications on my Android 1.6 device upgraded themselves to versions that only work on Android 2.
Apps generally don't stop working when an new OS or device comes out.
I'm not convinced about any of that. I know a number of old Android apps won't work on new versions of Android (yes, I'm aware we're not talking about Android, but I have even less faith in Apple maintaining compatibility). Also the same is true the other way around - various apps spontaneously stopped working on my old HTC Dream then the authors pushed our updates for them without bothering to check whether they actually worked on Android versions prior to 2.0 (Market actually allows the vendors to specify which versions of Android the update is compatible with, but unfortunately a lot of (most?) authors just seem to claim its compatible with everything without checking.)
she can buy an older one second hand.
Second hand hardware is only available for a reasonably short period, in the grand scheme of things.
And restore from iTunes.
I'm not familiar with Apple's software, would this restore the exact OS version you were using along with any apps even if they have been withdrawn from the appstore?
So do not update your iOS. Keep your iDevice how it is right now. If its that important to you, treat it as a non up-datable speech tool. It will work as it does right now...
Right up until your iDevice fails at the end of its 3 year design life and you have to replace it with something incompatable
Of course there are plenty of 3D CAD programs available, but for those of us who aren't professional draughtsmen, few approach the ease-of-use that Sketchup has.
I've yet to find any vaguely competent free 3D CAD software for Linux...
Your logic is way screwed up... again, the 4G iPad meets the specifications for 4G hardware, thus, it is 4G hardware,
Can it manage 1Gbps? No? Then it isn't 4G
because the international standards organization correctly left out any mention of network compatibility, becuase had they attempted to include it with so many various proticols, then the standard could never be standard
You're correct that the definition of 4G is based on peak data rates (100Mbps for moving devices, 1Gbps for static devices).
However, I'm not sure how you can say that they "correctly" didn't include compatibility so that they could standardise it. What's actually the point in a standard if it doesn't guarantee some kind of compatibility? In a global economy (which we are in, even if the phone vendors seem to think that its a good idea to restrict particular models of phone to particular countries), you should be able to buy a device advertised as "4G" and have it work on any network advertised as "4G" - this is the whole point of standards. This is what we have with other standards - 802.11g is 802.11g the world over (ok, there are some minor differences in frequencies at the top and bottom ends of the band, but generally you can buy an 802.11g device anywhere in the world and have it work on an 802.11g network anywhere else in the world).
At the moment you can buy a device labelled as "4G" and find that it doesn't even work on half the 4G networks in the country you bought it from, let alone anywhere else in the world (because LTE and WiMax seem to be being rolled out in parallel, and most 4G devices only support one or the other). Whilst your average techie can research this and figure out what type of 4G he needs for his chosen network, the average consumer can't.
WiMax2 is 4G. WiMax is somewhere around 3.9G (by the ITU's criteria for 4G networks). Wimax2 hasn't been deployed anywhere yet.
The only truly functional alternatives while keeping the same basic use are a clamshell and a slider, and both make for a heavier and larger device. In this day and age, people seem to want smaller, thinner, lighter devices, and so the bar is winning out as the most popular design.
Oddly, I was just trying to find a suitable replacement for my dead HTC Dream. It turns out that here in europe there are basically no qwerty slider phones - just the Desire Z and Xperia, which are both ancient technology. In a weird change to normal, the US seems to have a better selection of phones and has stacks and stacks of qwerty sliders. So in the end I'm having to import a Samsung Captivate Glide from the US (and the US being typically crap when handling the rest of the world, virtually no US company will post internationally). I don't understand this at all - I can't be the only person in Europe who finds touch screen keyboards horrendous.
The (rather wealthy) area already has access to *faster* full-fibre technology broadband. Virgin cable is a full fibre service, whereas this is "fibre to the cabinet": BT lay the fibre to these new cabinets, and then use copper as normal, using VDSL technology.
I know Virgin have been advertising "fibre optic internet" for many years, but no, it isn't "full" fibre, its basically just FTTC. The only real difference between Virgin's and BT's network is that BT runs fibre to the cabinet and then VDSL over a copper pair to the premises whilst Virgin run fibre to the cabinet and then do DOCSIS over coax... Wake me up when FTTP gets widespread.
Maybe we should drop the term "carbon neutral" and call it environmentalism.
Also, is global warming, if it exists, man-made or not? Does it matter? Environmentalism for the sake of less pollution. I don't care if being "green" stops global warming. Stop pollution for the sake of stopping pollution.
I agree that pollution can't be good, so we should stop it irrespective of whether it can be proved to be actually linked to specific badness like climate change. However, Using the term "environmentalism" is a bad idea - to most people, an "environmentalist" is a wannabe do-gooder with no real grasp of reality. You know, the sort that seem to think we should ditch nuclear power because everyone knows that *every* power station chernobyls after a few years and that we can supply our entire power demand with windmills.
And businesses should focus on being more efficient rather than dealing with "offsets".
The whole offsetting or plant-a-tree thing is a complete fraud anyway. You want to be "carbon neutral", so you pay someone to plant a tree. You get a nice feel good glow. In 10-20 years time, someone chops that tree down and uses it for firewood, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere. Unless you can *guarantee* those trees will be protected over geological timescales (hint: you can't), its all a bit of a waste of time and money. Far better to spend that money *actually* reducing your carbon (or other pollution) footprint.
It's not that they captured some broadcast data, anyone can do that. It's that they systematically drove around and captured A LOT of broadcast data and correlated it to location information, with the intent that it could be mined for business purposes in the future.
"A lot" divided by the number of households they drove passed == practically nothing from each household. Given that they drive around in the middle of the day, the vast majority of wifi networks are going to be almost entirely idle, so they probably won't get anything from them other than the beacon. The beacon packet basically contains the SSIDs of the network (which they use to identify an access point for their wifi geolocation system), and contains no other useful data. Occasionally (probably every one in a few thousand networks) they might pick up something like a UPnP broadcast packet, which might tell you the brand of a device on the network. On networks where someone is surfing the web (again, middle of the day, so not that many), they might pick up a couple of packets from the middle of a session - its pretty unlikley that these packets are going to have much useful data in them, maybe a *fragment* of an email or something, more likley just a lump of javascript or part of an image from some random web page. On networks where someone is torrenting data, they will get a lump of binary data from somewhere in the middle of that torrent, again, doesn't really seem that useful to anyone.
Then we combine the above fact that they would've captured very little data from the average network (even less of any use) with the fact that the vast majority of the networks are encrypted, and you can see that they probably captured very little of value. Even if this was intentional, it was probably capturing the traffic "because we can" rather than them actually expecting to be able to use it for anything.
Scale matters when it comes to the consequences of your actions.
Yes, but I can't see any consequence here. Anyone who thinks google got a serious amount of useful data from this exercise is deluded and doesn't understand (a) how little time the Google car would've stayed in range of each network, (b) how little traffic the average network would've produced in that length of time, and (c) how tiny the proportion of personal data vs. random useless crap is in the average stream of network traffic.