Google would ban an app that GAVE YOU CONTROL OF THE LEAK.
Apple... Google.... all of it! Just gonna lead to a rape of your privacy rights. No corporation is going to listen to the custie when they get moar monies from raping you than they got selling you the stupid shit in the first place.
You paid for it.... you screamed for freedom and you got freedom.... now you get to pay for it.... with obfuscation, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
All ya all fanbois bought it hook line and sinker.
Key ID reference, and offset into key material: "AOAKN 27 1525/6
Gonna be real hard to crack this without knowing what the key material was, or what typical material might have been. Could have been a popular book, or even a poem... (ala poem code) though the ACA stats don't point to a pure poem code.
Some odd bits:
The time codes: "lib 1625" (liberation? of the pigeons) Time of Origination: "1522" This makes sense as time stamps for the process of the time from the command to write/encipher the message, until the time the birds were given their payloads and released.
However the "27 1525/6" trailing the message body does not make sense as a time stamp.
The pigeon serial numbers: NURP 40TW 194 NURP 37DK 76
Indicate one pigeon was commissioned in 1940, and the other in 1937. The ex-pidgeon was 40TW 194... Depending on how well the RAF took care of their birds, this message could have been coded anytime between 1940 and then end of the war. Wild pigeons live 3 - 5 years, but domesticated ones can live typically 10 - 15 years without difficulty. I'm gonna guess mortality rate was fairly high. so bird 37DK 76 places a stiffer upper limit on the date... but it still might have been near D-Day.
The raw histograms doesn't point to a OTP... it looks all wrong for a 125 char message. it should be much flatter. And there would be no need for the "AOAKN" header and footer. Also OTP is really not very good idea for a forward SOE unit... too easy to lose, or be caught with.
Another odd bit about this whole story. Historians who have commented on this story elsewhere seem to think it was extremely rare for birds to carry enciphered payloads. The vast majority during WW2 carried plaintext. I am assuming that this was due to protocol rather than some notion that birds were considered a secure transport.
You raise an interesting point with the "kill switch"
One interesting facets of working with "live" (scripted and physical) objects in SecondLife is all the extra work you have to go through to avoid accidentally griefing, spamming a Sim, or having your workpiece go blasting across a Sim and wedging itself Linden knows where.
Anyone who engages in the development of such crazy types of objects has funny stories about them getting loose even when prudent precautions were taken to keep things under control.
Having worked as the Director of Ops for an an inbound call center, I can confirm that CallID is easily spoofed at the switch, and Call center service providers who provide call switch services for call centers (Like UCN or Oracle CCOD) have no liability for what their customers do with the service and line provisioning they offer their clients. These systems are easy to automate and relatively cheap to subscribe to. The service provider's attitude is don't ask, don't tell. They provide CallID spoofing so that you can have an outbound agent (or robo call) redirect to an inbound agent or call queue. This provides flexibility for designing call flows. Since the service provider is not liable for what their customers do with the provisioned resources they have no incentive to kick spammers and scammers off their networks.
Even worse: Legitimate but sloppy/hungery Call Centers are often tricked into participating in Spam or Scam campaigns by some seemingly legitimate businesses. Several times I had to say "fuck no!" to the President of the call center because they got suckered by a potential client, who was setting us up to perform a scam campaign, or to be the closer (inbound agent) on an spam/scam refinancing fraud scheme.
Once we did get suckered. The client declined to share example copies of the mail they were sending in their campaign. They claimed the design proprietary, blah... And when we insisted, they gave us some mocked up shite. It looked fishy to me, but I didn't have enough evidence to convince the Pres. that we were being had again.
We only figured it out when one of our floor managers took some initiative asked an angry caller to fax us a copy of the document they had received. The document was a scary looking forgery of a "Notice of Default." It didn't look like anything they had sent us and our agents had been trained from their other materials to deal with distressed home owners who were calling in on a mail offer for refinancing assistance. Our agents were getting hammered with fuming angry calls on this campaign for over a week at this point. As soon as I figured out what was going on I demanded that we drop the client.
Now all of this was over 5 years ago. I can only imagine how much more slime has attached itself to the Call Center service market.
The way to solve this problem is to make Call Routing services like UCN and Oracle CCOD just as culpable for the call traffic as the customer who initiated the outbound call. These services are not intended or affordable for consumers soI do not believe it is unreasonable for the service providers to be forced to police their platforms. And there should be a mandatory platform code in the CID that identifies the platform provider that initiated the call on behalf of the client. The client would have no control over that ID.
The service platform provider should never allow the client to specify a CID that is NOT assigned to their call flow graph.
As of 5 years ago every platform I evaluated had absolutely NO controls on CID content... the client can put anything they damn well please in the ID fields.
Short of suing your local phone co there is no way you will get the activity log that tells you where that call really came from.
The Pi was never intended to meet RT constraints. Though, when they get all the problems ironed out of the drivers, it might not be too bad for ~10ms latency applications. If you want RT response from a PI-based system you add a daughter board hanging off the GPIO to handle the RT stuff and do your executive/UI/visualization stuff on the PI. In fact it is quite reasonable to hang an Arduino off the PI-GPIO and set up a rather powerful embedded system for dirt cheap.
Power supply (capacitor aging) and for really old APs you could suffer bit rot in the FLASH(causing complete failure). FLASH only holds an image reliably for ~10 years. Some devices may not even hold an image that long. I have seen a number of old USB devices that were stored properly just completely fail to come ready, while showing signs that, electrically speaking, they were fine.
I would think Intel prefers to penetrate with 300mm ingots of Si.
(However; Intel is going to risk running afoul of Anti-trust laws if AMD folds... It will make it much harder to claim that they don't hold a monopoly in the desktop class computing market. I don't think Intel would like being similarly penetrated by some blindfolded chick using a marble sword. )
Had this been any previous launch vehicle, it would have had to abort and splash down in the ocean somewhere because it wouldn't be able to compensate and continue on.
IIRC the shuttle system could tolerate losing a main engine and still reach targeted orbit. As some one pointed out earlier in one of the branch threads, it actually happened on a launch late in the program.
I'm probably not going to get much love for saying so, but my cynical side says, "That is exactly what is expected." The MIC wins, financially when their products generate more conflict than they suppress.
The powers that be won't loose the ICBMs, but I have little doubt that agitating the ME states with drones is quite desirable, from a economic standpoint.
With a bit of hacking it is possible to break out the mics and the speakers.
With that done one would just need to build out some hardware to digitize the mic inputs and process them appropriately to produce some useful amplification/filtering functions.
I have used them for binaural recording, they work quite well. Others who have heard the recordings say it was just like being there. For those who are familiar with binaural filter arrays, it it far from perfect. However, as is often the case that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good enough'. YMMV
I think a decent processing system could be developed using a XMOS L2 device and a Cirrus Logic 24 bit codec. Bonus points for adding recording functions and audio file playback. A more advanced device might add dual-channel bluetooth to the mix.
Look at the high cost of loud open plan cube farms... imagine being able to lower your salary costs by 10% to 30% by productivity increases, merely by providing a more humane working environment.
Isn't it odd that you never hear people complaining, "I'm trying to concentrate here, so make a bunch of noise, OK?"
Funny you mention this.
Over the years I have gotten a lot of grief from women I know (who generally have never had to work in cube farms) who get very disconcerted at the way I can so completely tune out external distractions while I am read/coding/gaming that I don't even realize that they were speaking.
This 'laser brain' focus is so complete and automatic, that I literally will fail to process verbal input if I am also trying to read something that is not directly related to the conversation the speaker is attempting to have with me. (ie. discussion of code, a reading, etc)
While I am not positive, but I think my ability to do this came from working in cube farms for over 20 years. Friends and SOs universally find is disturbing UNLESS they have worked long term in cube farms. Fellow cube farmers learn a social technique called "knocking." By which I mean making a overtly distracting noise before entering someone's personal space.. say literally knocking on the edge of a cube wall, door frame, or wall to announce their presence, rather than walking in and starting to talk anon.
For my part, to address them, I must stop looking at whatever I was focused on, or I will literally get sucked right back into it, without realizing I have done so.
I had a similar experience in my late 20's. Smoked a cigarette dipped in diluted "brown sugar" A cigarette prepared in this manner used to be called a 'Sherm'. (maybe still is)
It was fantastic. The most amazing most peaceful clarity of mind and spirit I could have imagined at that point in my life. Of course it was the drug messing with my brain chemistry. I knew very well it was highly addictive. It scared me really badly that I liked it so much. I would go so far as to say it haunted me that I liked it so much.
I very quickly distanced myself from those that had anything to do with it or any other opiates. I never tried it again.
The only way I'd ever put opiates (licit or illicit) in my body again is if I was on death's door, with no hope of survival, and I needed that kind of relief to be at peace.
I have had broken ribs, back injury etc. since then... I'd rather deal with the pain (meditation works surprisingly well at least for me) than risk another dance with that Succubus.
I still don't really understand the rationale behind the new connector.
..and that is obvious from your comment.
Using a Lightening port may have form factor considerations, but the key reason for using it is that it dramatically increases the available bandwidth (10Gb/s) and flexibility of the iDevice interface port.
The way to think about Lightening is as a ePCI interface piped through a LVDS PHYS. It is signal compatible with Display Port/HDMI as well as being able to support docking stations with multiple I/O interfaces. This is something that is actually very difficult to do with the 30 pin interface because it only had a single USB OTG port and a dog's breakfast of analog / low-speed digital interfaces.
What apple has done is push most of that 30 pins of crap to the external device where it belongs. Doing so frees up precious space on the iDevice that can be used to increase battery life, reduce parts count, and reduce the complexity of the iDevice motherboard.
Do recall that Apple did this before with the iPod line when they went from a FireWire based docking port to a USB OTG based docking port so that they could support Wintel hosts* as well as more advanced external docking stations.
While I dislike that Apple keeps the external interface developers on a very short leash, I expect to see a lot of excellent docking stations that make stuff like this: http://www.alesis.com/iodock look like a joke.
TL;DR: There are a lot of really good reasons to go with Lightening. Good change is good.
IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing.
Re-image history much?
IBM had no intention of "helping" clone makers. What happened is that IBM was following an old script: to be taken seriously in the market back then you had to publish detailed theory of operation documents. The original technical manual for the PC contained complete schematics and BIOS ROM listings. It was still believed at the time that Copyright and patent holdings would prevent clone makers from entering the market. This was true of all computers back then including consumer oriented systems.
Apple had done the same thing with the Apple ][,][+ but the clone market had not really come up yet. By the time the//e and//c came out it was a non-issue. The Apple ][ was obsolete and the//e and//c had custom ICs in them which, at the time, made it almost impossible to clone them. There were clones made of the ][ and ][+ but this was well after the ][ series was irrelevant. There were attempts to clone the//c but Apple was able to shut them down.
The market was moving towards Atari, and Commodore for consumers and PC for business computers. All of those machines had detailed tech ref manuals either in the box, or readily available at the time of purchase.
By the time the PC became a standard with DOS the clone makers figured out that all they really needed to do is clean-room duplicate the BIOS and avoid a few patents in the hardware to enter the market. Unlike the other dominant players in the market, the PC did not have any custom ICs and was built using commodity discrete logic. There was no secret sauce in it at all. IBM lost control of the platform not long after that, even after attempting to sue a few of the smaller clone makers into oblivion.
MS laughed all the way to the bank. They had no particular allegiance to IBM and there was no exclusive license for DOS. They happily negotiated DOS licenses for any clone maker who wanted to play and viciously destroyed those that tried to bypass the DOS lock-in. PCs quickly took over the consumer market as the clone makers competed on price and clock speed. It also helped that Intel became the de facto owner of the platform, and provided significant engineering reference designs for the clone makers.
The PS/2 disaster was a deliberate attempt by IBM to start over and create a new standard that could not be overrun by the clone makers. The remaining players including Apple did pretty much the same thing. However, it was too late. The PC had already taken over, led by Intel and the clones, while flying the MS flag.
My parents have been doing this for two years in a 24' class-B RV. They have no problems remaining connected via WiFi as they travel. My dad being a retired analog radio engineer -- and thus not very computer savvy -- had very few issues creating a reliable mobile server/router to handle secure local services, and secure uplink through WiFi or data-modem.
You can have an opinion piece that makes some sort of interesting argument about why this feature really changes the computing experience, and how its absence in windows renders the OS unworthy to use, ok, that could actually be interesting. But TFA spends 3/4ths of its length on superficial discussions of things - and the places where a serious and sensible discussion could be made are given no real treatment.
Dude minimized the serious part of the discussion, but forgot how to restore it.
See, it's easier for a teenager to buy pot than it is an adult. A dealer will be paranoid of an adult, because he could be the secret police, but there are no teenaged police officers.
Two examples that I am aware of that show this assumption to be false: a) When I was in high school an undercover cop infiltrated the school as a junior. Very young looking woman supposedly a transfer from another school in the district. She attended classes, and was in one of my classes. She attended classes all semester. At the end of the semester 8 students were arrested on drug charges along with several adults that had no direct connection to the school. I presume they were the adult dealers. Other students who witnessed one of the arrests stated that the young woman appeared in uniform the day of the arrests. The next day this undercover was no longer in classes.
b) My brother was caught up in a similar sting 10 years later where a young-looking male undercover infiltrated the school he attended. However, my brother was not involved in dealing(or using) drugs... he just had the misfortune of knowing who at school was a source, and telling this undercover who to talk to, thinking it was a fellow student. This person was known to him as a fellow student, and was present in uniform when he was arrested for "facilitating" a drug deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Google would ban an app that GAVE YOU CONTROL OF THE LEAK.
Apple... Google.... all of it! Just gonna lead to a rape of your privacy rights. No corporation is going to listen to the custie when they get moar monies from raping you than they got selling you the stupid shit in the first place.
You paid for it.... you screamed for freedom and you got freedom.... now you get to pay for it.... with obfuscation, lies, damn lies, and statistics.
All ya all fanbois bought it hook line and sinker.
cipher text body:
"HVPKD FNFJU YIDDC RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH NLXKG NENKK ONOIB AKEEQ UAGTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ KLDTS GQIRU"
Key ID reference, and offset into key material:
"AOAKN 27 1525/6
Gonna be real hard to crack this without knowing what the key material was, or what typical material might have been. Could have been a popular book, or even a poem... (ala poem code) though the ACA stats don't point to a pure poem code.
Some odd bits:
The time codes:
"lib 1625" (liberation? of the pigeons)
Time of Origination: "1522"
This makes sense as time stamps for the process of the time from the command to write/encipher the message, until the time the birds were given their payloads and released.
However the "27 1525/6" trailing the message body does not make sense as a time stamp.
The pigeon serial numbers:
NURP 40TW 194
NURP 37DK 76
Indicate one pigeon was commissioned in 1940, and the other in 1937. The ex-pidgeon was 40TW 194...
Depending on how well the RAF took care of their birds, this message could have been coded anytime between 1940 and then end of the war.
Wild pigeons live 3 - 5 years, but domesticated ones can live typically 10 - 15 years without difficulty. I'm gonna guess mortality rate was fairly high. so bird 37DK 76 places a stiffer upper limit on the date... but it still might have been near D-Day.
from: http://bionsgadgets.appspot.com/gadget_forms/refscore.html
Number of standard deviations from averages for each cipher type:
RunningKey 4
Periodic gromark 5
Progkey beaufort 5
Progressivekey 5
Randomtext 5
[...]
The raw histograms doesn't point to a OTP... it looks all wrong for a 125 char message. it should be much flatter. And there would be no need for the "AOAKN" header and footer. Also OTP is really not very good idea for a forward SOE unit... too easy to lose, or be caught with.
Another odd bit about this whole story. Historians who have commented on this story elsewhere seem to think it was extremely rare for birds to carry enciphered payloads. The vast majority during WW2 carried plaintext. I am assuming that this was due to protocol rather than some notion that birds were considered a secure transport.
I find debuggers useful for catching library and compiler bugs.... but other than that... a waste of time.
You raise an interesting point with the "kill switch"
One interesting facets of working with "live" (scripted and physical) objects in SecondLife is all the extra work you have to go through to avoid accidentally griefing, spamming a Sim, or having your workpiece go blasting across a Sim and wedging itself Linden knows where.
Anyone who engages in the development of such crazy types of objects has funny stories about them getting loose even when prudent precautions were taken to keep things under control.
Having worked as the Director of Ops for an an inbound call center, I can confirm that CallID is easily spoofed at the switch, and Call center service providers who provide call switch services for call centers (Like UCN or Oracle CCOD) have no liability for what their customers do with the service and line provisioning they offer their clients. These systems are easy to automate and relatively cheap to subscribe to. The service provider's attitude is don't ask, don't tell. They provide CallID spoofing so that you can have an outbound agent (or robo call) redirect to an inbound agent or call queue. This provides flexibility for designing call flows. Since the service provider is not liable for what their customers do with the provisioned resources they have no incentive to kick spammers and scammers off their networks.
Even worse: Legitimate but sloppy/hungery Call Centers are often tricked into participating in Spam or Scam campaigns by some seemingly legitimate businesses. Several times I had to say "fuck no!" to the President of the call center because they got suckered by a potential client, who was setting us up to perform a scam campaign, or to be the closer (inbound agent) on an spam/scam refinancing fraud scheme.
Once we did get suckered. The client declined to share example copies of the mail they were sending in their campaign. They claimed the design proprietary, blah... And when we insisted, they gave us some mocked up shite. It looked fishy to me, but I didn't have enough evidence to convince the Pres. that we were being had again.
We only figured it out when one of our floor managers took some initiative asked an angry caller to fax us a copy of the document they had received. The document was a scary looking forgery of a "Notice of Default." It didn't look like anything they had sent us and our agents had been trained from their other materials to deal with distressed home owners who were calling in on a mail offer for refinancing assistance. Our agents were getting hammered with fuming angry calls on this campaign for over a week at this point.
As soon as I figured out what was going on I demanded that we drop the client.
Now all of this was over 5 years ago. I can only imagine how much more slime has attached itself to the Call Center service market.
The way to solve this problem is to make Call Routing services like UCN and Oracle CCOD just as culpable for the call traffic as the customer who initiated the outbound call. These services are not intended or affordable for consumers soI do not believe it is unreasonable for the service providers to be forced to police their platforms. And there should be a mandatory platform code in the CID that identifies the platform provider that initiated the call on behalf of the client. The client would have no control over that ID.
The service platform provider should never allow the client to specify a CID that is NOT assigned to their call flow graph.
As of 5 years ago every platform I evaluated had absolutely NO controls on CID content... the client can put anything they damn well please in the ID fields.
Short of suing your local phone co there is no way you will get the activity log that tells you where that call really came from.
The Pi was never intended to meet RT constraints. Though, when they get all the problems ironed out of the drivers, it might not be too bad for ~10ms latency applications. If you want RT response from a PI-based system you add a daughter board hanging off the GPIO to handle the RT stuff and do your executive/UI/visualization stuff on the PI. In fact it is quite reasonable to hang an Arduino off the PI-GPIO and set up a rather powerful embedded system for dirt cheap.
[scottish burr]
I am wearin' the Kilt ye insensitive fook!
[/scottish burr]
Power supply (capacitor aging) and for really old APs you could suffer bit rot in the FLASH(causing complete failure). FLASH only holds an image reliably for ~10 years. Some devices may not even hold an image that long. I have seen a number of old USB devices that were stored properly just completely fail to come ready, while showing signs that, electrically speaking, they were fine.
I would think Intel prefers to penetrate with 300mm ingots of Si.
(However; Intel is going to risk running afoul of Anti-trust laws if AMD folds... It will make it much harder to claim that they don't hold a monopoly in the desktop class computing market. I don't think Intel would like being similarly penetrated by some blindfolded chick using a marble sword. )
you forgot one:
6. T-shirts for non-participants.
You forgot to list anal probing.
I believe that would be covered under "... Intrusive FBI probes..."
Had this been any previous launch vehicle, it would have had to abort and splash down in the ocean somewhere because it wouldn't be able to compensate and continue on.
IIRC the shuttle system could tolerate losing a main engine and still reach targeted orbit. As some one pointed out earlier in one of the branch threads, it actually happened on a launch late in the program.
EveOnline is closer to the Libertarian Ideal.
Limited policing only in core systems. You don't like the popo? Stay out of hi-sec.
The GMs don't give a shit about ISK scamming unless it involves RL cash transfers. Anything goes.
Everyone is armed to the teeth and gang violence is common. Whats not to love?
Hey man, nice troll.
Typical mathematician. Your English cannot be parsed into efficient comprehension. In other words, your compiler sux. ;)
I'm probably not going to get much love for saying so, but my cynical side says, "That is exactly what is expected." The MIC wins, financially when their products generate more conflict than they suppress.
The powers that be won't loose the ICBMs, but I have little doubt that agitating the ME states with drones is quite desirable, from a economic standpoint.
the USA please turn off the Blinkinlights.
Some time ago I ran across these interesting earbuds:
http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/smartpen/pulse/accessories.html
With a bit of hacking it is possible to break out the mics and the speakers.
With that done one would just need to build out some hardware to digitize the mic inputs and process them appropriately to produce some useful amplification/filtering functions.
I have used them for binaural recording, they work quite well. Others who have heard the recordings say it was just like being there. For those who are familiar with binaural filter arrays, it it far from perfect. However, as is often the case that 'perfect' is the enemy of 'good enough'. YMMV
I think a decent processing system could be developed using a XMOS L2 device and a Cirrus Logic 24 bit codec. Bonus points for adding recording functions and audio file playback. A more advanced device might add dual-channel bluetooth to the mix.
Look at the high cost of loud open plan cube farms... imagine being able to lower your salary costs by 10% to 30% by productivity increases, merely by providing a more humane working environment.
Isn't it odd that you never hear people complaining, "I'm trying to concentrate here, so make a bunch of noise, OK?"
Funny you mention this.
Over the years I have gotten a lot of grief from women I know (who generally have never had to work in cube farms) who get very disconcerted at the way I can so completely tune out external distractions while I am read/coding/gaming that I don't even realize that they were speaking.
This 'laser brain' focus is so complete and automatic, that I literally will fail to process verbal input if I am also trying to read something that is not directly related to the conversation the speaker is attempting to have with me. (ie. discussion of code, a reading, etc)
While I am not positive, but I think my ability to do this came from working in cube farms for over 20 years. Friends and SOs universally find is disturbing UNLESS they have worked long term in cube farms. Fellow cube farmers learn a social technique called "knocking." By which I mean making a overtly distracting noise before entering someone's personal space.. say literally knocking on the edge of a cube wall, door frame, or wall to announce their presence, rather than walking in and starting to talk anon.
For my part, to address them, I must stop looking at whatever I was focused on, or I will literally get sucked right back into it, without realizing I have done so.
I had a similar experience in my late 20's. Smoked a cigarette dipped in diluted "brown sugar" A cigarette prepared in this manner used to be called a 'Sherm'. (maybe still is)
It was fantastic. The most amazing most peaceful clarity of mind and spirit I could have imagined at that point in my life. Of course it was the drug messing with my brain chemistry. I knew very well it was highly addictive. It scared me really badly that I liked it so much. I would go so far as to say it haunted me that I liked it so much.
I very quickly distanced myself from those that had anything to do with it or any other opiates. I never tried it again.
The only way I'd ever put opiates (licit or illicit) in my body again is if I was on death's door, with no hope of survival, and I needed that kind of relief to be at peace.
I have had broken ribs, back injury etc. since then... I'd rather deal with the pain (meditation works surprisingly well at least for me) than risk another dance with that Succubus.
I still don't really understand the rationale behind the new connector.
..and that is obvious from your comment.
Using a Lightening port may have form factor considerations, but the key reason for using it is that it dramatically increases the available bandwidth (10Gb/s) and flexibility of the iDevice interface port.
The way to think about Lightening is as a ePCI interface piped through a LVDS PHYS.
It is signal compatible with Display Port/HDMI as well as being able to support docking stations with multiple I/O interfaces. This is something that is actually very difficult to do with the 30 pin interface because it only had a single USB OTG port and a dog's breakfast of analog / low-speed digital interfaces.
What apple has done is push most of that 30 pins of crap to the external device where it belongs. Doing so frees up precious space on the iDevice that can be used to increase battery life, reduce parts count, and reduce the complexity of the iDevice motherboard.
Do recall that Apple did this before with the iPod line when they went from a FireWire based docking port to a USB OTG based docking port so that they could support Wintel hosts* as well as more advanced external docking stations.
While I dislike that Apple keeps the external interface developers on a very short leash, I expect to see a lot of excellent docking stations that make stuff like this:
http://www.alesis.com/iodock
look like a joke.
TL;DR: There are a lot of really good reasons to go with Lightening. Good change is good.
*(at the time few PC systems supported FireWire)
IBM and Microsoft won that fight by... let's see... -helping their competitors- through allowing the "clone" market to flourish, from which the efficiencies of scale took care of the rest, driving down the prices and making Apple's pricing look even worse by comparison. Xerox PARC's concepts (you may erroneously know them as "Apple's concepts") were nice, but not nice enough to be cost-justifying compared to the PC-compatible market's pricing.
Re-image history much?
IBM had no intention of "helping" clone makers. What happened is that IBM was following an old script: to be taken seriously in the market back then you had to publish detailed theory of operation documents. The original technical manual for the PC contained complete schematics and BIOS ROM listings. It was still believed at the time that Copyright and patent holdings would prevent clone makers from entering the market. This was true of all computers back then including consumer oriented systems.
Apple had done the same thing with the Apple ][,][+ but the clone market had not really come up yet. By the time the //e and //c came out it was a non-issue. The Apple ][ was obsolete and the //e and //c had custom ICs in them which, at the time, made it almost impossible to clone them. There were clones made of the ][ and ][+ but this was well after the ][ series was irrelevant. There were attempts to clone the //c but Apple was able to shut them down.
The market was moving towards Atari, and Commodore for consumers and PC for business computers. All of those machines had detailed tech ref manuals either in the box, or readily available at the time of purchase.
By the time the PC became a standard with DOS the clone makers figured out that all they really needed to do is clean-room duplicate the BIOS and avoid a few patents in the hardware to enter the market. Unlike the other dominant players in the market, the PC did not have any custom ICs and was built using commodity discrete logic. There was no secret sauce in it at all. IBM lost control of the platform not long after that, even after attempting to sue a few of the smaller clone makers into oblivion.
MS laughed all the way to the bank. They had no particular allegiance to IBM and there was no exclusive license for DOS. They happily negotiated DOS licenses for any clone maker who wanted to play and viciously destroyed those that tried to bypass the DOS lock-in. PCs quickly took over the consumer market as the clone makers competed on price and clock speed. It also helped that Intel became the de facto owner of the platform, and provided significant engineering reference designs for the clone makers.
The PS/2 disaster was a deliberate attempt by IBM to start over and create a new standard that could not be overrun by the clone makers. The remaining players including Apple did pretty much the same thing. However, it was too late. The PC had already taken over, led by Intel and the clones, while flying the MS flag.
My parents have been doing this for two years in a 24' class-B RV. They have no problems remaining connected via WiFi as they travel. My dad being a retired analog radio engineer -- and thus not very computer savvy -- had very few issues creating a reliable mobile server/router to handle secure local services, and secure uplink through WiFi or data-modem.
You can have an opinion piece that makes some sort of interesting argument about why this feature really changes the computing experience, and how its absence in windows renders the OS unworthy to use, ok, that could actually be interesting. But TFA spends 3/4ths of its length on superficial discussions of things - and the places where a serious and sensible discussion could be made are given no real treatment.
Dude minimized the serious part of the discussion, but forgot how to restore it.
See, it's easier for a teenager to buy pot than it is an adult. A dealer will be paranoid of an adult, because he could be the secret police, but there are no teenaged police officers.
Two examples that I am aware of that show this assumption to be false:
a) When I was in high school an undercover cop infiltrated the school as a junior. Very young looking woman supposedly a transfer from another school in the district. She attended classes, and was in one of my classes. She attended classes all semester. At the end of the semester 8 students were arrested on drug charges along with several adults that had no direct connection to the school. I presume they were the adult dealers. Other students who witnessed one of the arrests stated that the young woman appeared in uniform the day of the arrests. The next day this undercover was no longer in classes.
b) My brother was caught up in a similar sting 10 years later where a young-looking male undercover infiltrated the school he attended. However, my brother was not involved in dealing(or using) drugs... he just had the misfortune of knowing who at school was a source, and telling this undercover who to talk to, thinking it was a fellow student. This person was known to him as a fellow student, and was present in uniform when he was arrested for "facilitating" a drug deal.