Ah yes. It's completely unreasonable for anyone to expect Apple to make a version of their phones with a CDMA (ie. the "wrong standard") radio in it. It's not like any other phone manufacturers build handsets for both standards. Certainly not RIM, Samsung, Palm, Motorola, etc.... Oh wait.
I'm not saying that there's anything _wrong_ with Apple's decision to only address part of the market. If they had to pick only one technology, they'll obviously pick the one with the biggest customer base.
What I'm saying is that the AC's implication that it is somehow strange for DarthVain to expect a phone to support more than one network is kind of ridiculous. It's not strange at all. In fact, Apple is pretty much the only phone manufacturer that sells into North America that doesn't also make CDMA phones. This fact will cost them some sales from people like DarthVain. They obviously know this, and are apparently okay with it.
It is also fairly annoying that it's necessary to hack the phone (jailbreak, whatever) to make it work with an otherwise compatible GSM network though. Vendor lock-in is pretty much par for the course with Apple stuff, though. It's part of why I don't really own any.
What it should say is "iPhone Jailbreaking Could Hurt Providers' Profits".
As numerous posters have pointed out, most GSM handsets are not tied to a particular provider (which is one of the key points behind having a SIM card in the first place). Network armageddon hasn't happened yet.
The providers want this perception to spread though, because it helps them keep their precious lock-in (and allows them to exclude their competitors from getting a slice of the iPhone pie). If they can get some laws written to cement the lock-in, so much the better.
But why would Apple help perpetuate this? My guess is because they needed a provider's help to get the phone off the ground, so this is their end of the bargain. The current arrangement has allowed them to sell millions of handsets and tens of millions of apps, so they have no particular need to encourage competition -- the current model is working out just fine for them.
As a consumer, I'd obviously rather avoid the multi-year contracts and being tied to one provider. It's a large part of the reason I don't have an iPhone. Maybe one of the Android handset makers will eventually get this right.
> But if you also had a gun, they'd be a lot less likely to try to attack you.
How does that work? We've established that the individual with the gun plans to attack you. How would you also having a gun make them any less likely to do so? Because they fear being shot by you? Seems to me like more motivation for them to follow through with their aggressive intentions immediately to prevent you from doing that.
I really don't understand how a gun is supposed to defend you against someone else with a gun. Someone care to fill me in?
Flight duration from Los Angeles to Tokyo is around 12 hours. While it's true that you probably won't be using your computer 100% of the time, I think it's a stretch to say that in all cases there's at least 4h where you won't. Also, that's by no means the longest flight a person can take.
Furthermore, it's "up to" 8h. That usually means that if you have the screen brightness turned way down, have the wireless turned off, don't use the optical drive, avoid using the hard drive and don't do anything too processor-intensive, you might get 7h. Some of that could be true, but I'm going to bet that a really common use for a laptop on a long flight would be "watch a video". That will use one of the hard drive or optical drive, and definitely uses the CPU (possibly lots of it if the video is HD). So you probably don't actually get 8h of battery, even if you can amuse yourself some other way for the other 4h on the flight.
But your poor trans-pacific flight example aside, there are plenty of reasons a person might need more untethered time than that. Anyone who needs to be outdoors all day comes to mind. My company uses laptops for field testing of survey equipment (though we don't use apple laptops, but that's another story).
The reason that all of this is probably okay is that anyone who needs that sort of high-portability on a regular basis likely won't be buying a great big 17" laptop anyway. If I'm not mistaken, the more portable 15" ones *do* have a replaceable battery.
So yes, if you buy the new 17" MBP you're sacrificing some portability because the battery can't be replaced. Probably you already knew that you were sacrificing some portability because you are buying a 17" laptop.
Regardless, though, I can't really see how making it non-replaceable saves them that much space. Some space sure, but I have a feeling they're not being 100% truthful about the 40% savings nonsense. My suspicion is that the extra capacity gained is actually pretty negligible and they really did it for some other reason.
This comment also made me wonder about the cold-weather usefulness of this sort of device. As I write this, it's -20C outside in the middle of the day. Granted, this sort of weather isn't a problem for much of the world but it's quite common here and affects a nontrivial number of people.
The "inefficiency" of a IC engine gets put to some use in that some the "waste" heat is used to heat the inside of the car, and you don't really get that benefit in an electric car (and any hybrid I've been in ran the combustion engine constantly while the heater was on). This problem has existed in the past with air-cooled engines (old Volkswagens come to mind). At the time, it was common to have a separate heater that burned whatever fuel the vehicle ran on. I'm thinking that the same wouldn't work too well on an electric car -- running an electric heater would probably put a really big dent in your range, and it would be a real bummer to freeze to death on the side of the highway because your car's heater killed the "battery". This would be a problem with any sort of electric car, but probably not an insurmountable one.
Probably more serious than that, though, might be the impact on the function of the engine itself. Most IC engines will run fine in cold weather assuming you can get them started. A common problem is that the car's battery (particularly older ones) can't deliver enough power at low temperature to turn the engine. I am a long way from an expert in the effects of temperature on various battery chemistries, and even less of one on how low temperature would impact the capacitor-like devices described in the article. I do know that it would be a fairly serious end-user problem if your car just wouldn't work on a cold day.
Does anyone have any insight into the temperature sensitivity of this kind of scheme, and how it would stack up versus comparable battery-based technologies?
It sounds like a promising idea, but it would be a non-starter in many places if it doesn't perform well in very cold (or very hot) weather.
I used to ride on SkyTrain in Vancouver BC, which is maglev, but only enough to provide propulsion, not a float cushion.
Wrong. The SkyTrain in Vancouver is NOT maglev.
MagLev = Magnetic Levitation
Being maglev *implies* the levitation, or "float cushion" as you describe it.
I think you are confusing maglev with linear induction motors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_motor which the SkyTrain does use. While these type of motors are often (usually?) used in a maglev system, they are also used for more conventional railed systems like the SkyTrain.
Is the lift and reduced friction worth the extra energy to actually levitate it?
Anectodally - Yes. Why else would they bother? The company is obviously not going to spend trillions of yen building a line that they know will be less profitable than the existing one.
More concretely, an earlier poster provided a link to the math, however I can't seem to find it just now. The point was that eliminating the friction is a very big deal.
And, if we put the new invisibility cloaks on these... won't they kill stray cows and small boys and girls trying to flatten pennies on the tracks?
I realize you're kidding, but just because they'd be invisible wouldn't make them silent. The air displacement alone would ensure that these trains would make a nontrivial amount of noise. Furthermore, placing pennies on the tracks wouldn't be too effective in flattening them since the train isn't touching the track. That being said, in the highly unlikely event that I'm ever asked for my opinion in the design of these sort of trains, I'll be sure to suggest that they keep "invisibility cloak" off the feature sheet.
(meanwhile in the US, we get zilch)
The problem in North America is that the vast majority of it lacks the concentrated population centers in fairly close proximity to make this sort of thing even approach economically viable. There are some exceptions to this. In those cases, we're left with:
1. Lack of political will to foot the massive up-front cost for something that won't be completed until someone else's term.
2. Rampant NIMBYism which would make it next to impossible to come up with a viable route through a populated area without getting sued into oblivion.
3. An irrational societal addiction to the automobile despite higher cost and risk to life and limb.
Given enough time, #3 will probably be overcome for one reason or another. #1 might be overcome by some visionary. #2 is a tough one because it either pushes costs even higher, or forces you into a route that is far away from where it's needed. Anything is possible, I suppose.
Agree totally. The alternatives are far from perfect but Telus takes customer hostility to a whole new level.
I'm going on two years now using a $20/month vmobile plan (no contract, no extra BS fees) as my primary phone. It works out cheaper than a basic Telus landline and it's only on the rarest occasion that I miss having a landline (mostly for long distance, but Skype does a decent job of filling that void with only slightly less convenience). Mind you, I don't use the phone much (less than 200min/month). This would work out less well for someone who does.
It seems that this sort of thing depends on a number of factors, and what part of your career you're in is a big one.
When I first graduated from university I sat around looking for jobs for four months in an exremely competitive job market (longest four months of my life). There was even an article in the paper during that time that basically said that anyone that didn't have a job in the current market must be somehow defective. The problem was I had no experience, and anyone looking for engineers wanted someone with five years experience (Yes, I applied anyway). I never even got calls back from the service-industry jobs I applied for because I was overqualified and they assumed (probably correctly) that I wouldn't stick around long. I eventually ended up with a good job, but it took a while and I got pretty lucky to get it.
So now my girlfriend is working at a job she can't stand. She's been there 8 months and it's decent experience, but the work environment sucks. Her manager is a disorganized bully, they're crammed into the office like sardines, and they have rather inhumane work hours policies (office hours will be 7:30-4:45 every day, and you WILL get reamed out if you're five minutes late. Any overtime is unpaid, but you are still expected to work it "for the next six months or so, then things will get better"... riiight.) She complains about the place every day.
So she's obviously looking around, but hasn't had much interest thus far. Her 8 months at that company is basically the sum-total of her related experience. The job market is still pretty strong (it's an oil town) but she can't exactly find a new job "at will" most likely because she's early in her career. My advice to her has been to put your head down and keep at it until you can find something better (which may have been what many of the employees of BigBrotherCo described above were doing). Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a developer... (kidding).
There are certainly factors beyond not liking your current job that may prevent you from getting a better one.
There is certainly an element of that, but I expect it has to do in much larger part with the price. Mobile data simply isn't affordable here in Canada (for sure) and the US (I think). If I want to do something simple like read a normal text-only email (not SMS -- actual email) I have to buy a several-hundred-dollar "smartphone" handset (there's no good reason the cheap normal handsets couln't do email -- the Japanese ones do it, I've seen it myself) and pay for an oppressively expensive "data" plan that costs twice as much per month as my home broadband connection, and even that is just 25MB of data. Probably fine for text-only email, but that'll get used up pretty quick if you try to do something crazy like surf the web and happen to hit any non-"mobile friendly" pages. It's just not a good value proposition to me (although it apparently is to some people). I'd happily use email rather than voice in most cases, but not if it's many times the price.
These sorts of services won't show up here in any real way until they can be reasonably used by the average person with the $50 handset and the $20/month plan. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but not until providers change priorities from "Downloadable Games and Ringtones!" to making services that are actually useful affordable. Sadly, the average North American consumer doesn't appear to be ready to demand that just yet.
While that may be true, it *has* been reported to be a series of tubes. All the government has to do is sit at one end of the tubes and charge you a tax before you're allowed to get any of the internets that come out.
Seriously, though, this sort of thing displays the baffling-and-at-the-same-time-unsurprising lack of comprehension that $GOVERNMENT seems to have with regard to anything more technically sophisticated than a pen. This is obviously impractical on many fronts.
You want to tax internet connections? On what basis? Bytes transferred? That's unfair to Grandma with a pwned Win98 box (unbeknownst to her, of course). Flat rate? That's unfair to low-income earners who can barely afford internet access in the first place so Johnny can get his homework done. And what is "the internet" anyway? If I send an email from my desk to the guy in the next cube, is that taxable? Probably not because it's a private corporate network. How about if I sent an email to my next-door neighbour on the same ISP? The whole transfer lives on the ISP's "private" network, so technically it never hit "the internet", or did it? It's really difficult to adequately define when you're accessing "the internet" versus "some network", and taxing every corporate or, hell, residential network would be completely impractical.
If they try it, though, I propose lining the Canadian side of the 49th Parallel with high-powered wifi antennas pointed south.
Shipping goods across the border? Suppose the goods originated in, say, California and arrived at my place in Alberta, Canada... do I owe California state sales tax? (assuming California even has state sales tax. Pretend it does if not). I already owe fees to customs and Canadian federal sales tax and whatever percentage my bank decides to charge me for the currency conversion (and possibly ludicrous brokerage fees to whichever company did the shipping). This additional sales tax might just make it not worth buying. Maybe it doesn't count as an "internet sale" if I phone them instead? Can I apply a refund as a non-resident if I go through the requisite paperwork hassle? Seems like a pretty good way to kill international trade originating in states with a sales tax -- sellers would just pack up and move to a state without sales tax. I bet the constituents will be happy with that one.
So don't panic guys. This is far too ill-conceived to see the light of day (or to have any real effect if it does).
It certainly is a little bit disappointing that a lot of "disruptive" technologies are being held back for fear of lawsuit because they might be sued for damaging someone else's revenue stream. This sort of thing really seems to be getting out of hand in the US (and to a lesser degree in other places). Hopefully other countries will take advantage of the opening this creates and put out more truly innovative products than the US is able to. Maybe then there will be some concrete example we can point to and say "See! We really are falling behind because we allow this kind of crap to go on."
It's bad enough that there is advertising nearly everywhere you go and in nearly everything you do. It's really troubling that advertisers can now legally (at least through threat of lawsuit) force people to look at them too. I'm a little surprised that "fast forward" functionality isn't illegal yet.
What if he is like me and already has a working, tweeked and otherwise perfected install of linux running. I'm sure there has to be an easier way then trashing that, installing windows first then rebuilding your linux install.
Uh... the windows installer doesn't trash the entire linux install (or even the bootloader). It just overwrites the MBR to point it at the windows bootloader instead of whatever was there before. Incidentally, this is exactly what the linux bootloaders do when they're installed. The "easier way" that you're looking for is to simply overwrite Windows' MBR entry with one that points back at the bootloader that you wanted.
Personaly, I choose to instal lilo onto a floppy (the boot code). Then go in later and move it to the hard drive. This allows me to boot to a boot disk and streight into linux if neccesary. Also it allows for a backup of lilo's config in case windows trashes the partition linux is on.
It turns out that you're close. The simplest way of fixing the MBR after the windows installer overwrites it is to have some bootable media (floppy, CD, USB Drive, whatever) with your bootloader of choice on it. Use that to boot your system, and reinstall it to the MBR.
The whole procedure takes a couple of minutes, and it's much easier than having to re-install linux as all your settings and whatnot are preserved by virtue of never having gone anywhere in the first place.
"None of these issues have a thing to do with honesty. Nada, zero, zip. It just basic economics."
Excellent point. Precisely the reason why I would buy a CD. There are reasons beyond what you've mentioned that make p2p unattractive, but those have been discussed at length elsewhere (inconsistent quality, etc). And realistically, honesty factors into it somewhat as well. Basically, buying the legitimate media makes sense when it is a better value proposition than the alternative.
As I see it, though, DRM changes the balance. It makes the "legitimate" media a lower-value product. Why would I buy a DRM-limited CD, when I could go and get an illegitimate mp3 copy from my favorite p2p site and use the files however I want (even burn them onto a CD to play in my CD player)? Based on the "economics" of it, I would expect to see DRM cause copyright infringement to *increase*, not decrease.
You can't charge more for an inferior product and expect to sell very many. Since you're never going to compete on price with p2p, you'd better make it higher quality and more convenient. DRM, as far as I can tell, essentially does the opposite.
"about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods"
Glad to see that suing everything in sight is working out so well for them.
Back when I was in my first year of university our internet got the crap filtered out of it (port 80 only) because one studio or other made some sweeping threat about suing the university because "someone" was sharing . This sort of annoyed those of us that *weren't* sharing movies and were trying to use the internet for something other than web access (IRC, FTP, etc.) Glad to see that making vague legal threats against people in other countries (I'm in Canada) hasn't paid off for them in the long run.
I hope they'll see it that way too, but I doubt it.
I might point out that arrogance isn't exactly a rare trait in these circles. To make the argument that "I shouldn't support these guys because their leader is arrogant" simply isn't sound. Not if you plan to turn around and say "Go Apple!" -- Steve Jobs isn't exactly known for his humility. While Linus seems to be a pretty humble guy, I think you'd probably have a hard time saying the same about Stallman (Yes, I know... you can use the Linux kernel without GNU software, but I'm pretty sure most of you aren't). I think most here would agree that there's also a measure of arrogance evident in Redmond as well.
As I see it, being in charge of something of this scale either attracts or breeds (I'm not sure which - perhaps both) a certain amount of arrogance. So is Theo arrogant? Maybe, but so are most of his peers. It's hardly fair to hold that against his project and not theirs.
Theo *has* shown himself to be a pretty smart guy. He and his team put out some pretty damn good software (OpenSSH's very wide acceptance is a testament to that). That doesn't necessarily make him a particularly good businessman. The project would probably benefit greatly from having one on board. I don't think anyone will try to tell you that making money on open source software is an easy proposition.
In the meantime I have no problem whatsoever sending a few dollars in the direction of the folks who made pretty good software that I use every day, particularly if they need the help. I don't really think it's asking a lot for the rest of the community to consider doing the same.
"VoIP is hackey because most of the protocols weren't thought out from the start."
I put it to you that a lot of the VOIP hackery was created to allow something resembling transparency on NAT networks.
"Even if it doesn't cost them anything for you to call your 3rd cousins best friend in Timbuktu, they want full control over what you do in your cube."
Er... yes. And my point was that IPv6 does not eliminate this type of control. They don't want you using VOIP or msn or whatever from your cube? Set up the networking equipment to filter ports appropriately. Just because everyone on the network has a "real" IPv6 address doesn't mean that your traffic doesn't still pass through their gateway(s). As I said in my first post: nothing changes from a security/control standpoint.
Re:Private networks and the business case.
on
IPv6 Readiness Report
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, end-to-end connectivity would certainly make VOIP solutions considerably less hacky. Is that a bulletproof business case? Probably not, but it's an example of a useful application and it took me a couple of seconds to come up with it. I'm sure there are others if one were to actually think about it.
While I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on IPv6, I don't believe (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that it makes routers, proxies and firewalls go away. It does make NAT kind of redundant, but it doesn't seem to me as though that has much (any?) of a negative impact on security provided there is a proper firewall in place. It just means that the router doesn't need to do another lookup on each packet to figure out where it's actually supposed to go. NAT works as a stopgap measure, but it won't prevent the inevitable from eventually happening.
I'd be extremely surprised to see RIM do something like that, especially since they have a workaround in case everything goes wrong. Even if NTP wins, they lose. Everybody's lawyers get paid, and some lobby group or other will convince congress to leave patent laws alone in order to maintain America's "competitive advantage" or some such nonsense.
"Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...and he specifically said not everything is going to be faster like the hard drives and memory etc etc. Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere. Or was I the only one that heard him prefacing the results?"
"Oh well, let the Mac bashing continue, blood is in the water."
I don't think most people are bashing Macs here, just misleading sensationalism in marketing. What he said is basically akin to my saying "Bogo-sort beats the pants off quicksort! It gets the right answer in just one iteration! Well, sure, there are cases where it's a little slower than that."
Touting the best case of something while totally ignoring the average- or worst-case is almost always going to be misleading. Sure, the best-case performance of bogo-sort is excellent (if it randomly hits the correct order on the first try), but the average case performance is pretty miserable and in the worst case it never finishes. The same goes for the new Macs. Sure, in a particular canned set of circumstances I don't doubt for a second that it's twice as fast. It sounds like in the "average case" (if there is such a thing for computer usage patterns) it's more along the lines of 20% faster (which is still pretty respectable). It strikes me that this would be a far less misleading basis to market your hardware on.
So is Steve Jobs "lying" to us? No, but the "4x Faster" logo plastered all over the macbook pro page is certainly rather misleading.
Perhaps you should give out "submit points", sorta like mod points. Thus a user would have to make some contribution to the community (meta moderating, etc.) before they could submit stories. This has the combined benefit of putting a limit on the number of stories a particular user could post in a given period of time, and it also means they can't just turn around and make a new user and submit immediately (they'd need to build up the "submit points"). If the system for giving out points is done just right, it would probably also cut down on the total volume of submissions that the editors need to wade through.
Basically it rewards users who are active in the community with the privilege of submitting stories, and not users who are just trying to get their page full of ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible. It's not a perfect system... just figured I'd throw the idea out there in the hopes that it could be refined.
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It's a barely controlled reaction (reaction = explosion).
You *do* know what goes on inside an internal combustion engine, right?
Yeah, and I only have to pay $99 for the privilege of being in the "Standard Program" so that I'm allowed to do Ad Hoc distribution.
Ah yes. It's completely unreasonable for anyone to expect Apple to make a version of their phones with a CDMA (ie. the "wrong standard") radio in it. It's not like any other phone manufacturers build handsets for both standards. Certainly not RIM, Samsung, Palm, Motorola, etc.... Oh wait.
I'm not saying that there's anything _wrong_ with Apple's decision to only address part of the market. If they had to pick only one technology, they'll obviously pick the one with the biggest customer base.
What I'm saying is that the AC's implication that it is somehow strange for DarthVain to expect a phone to support more than one network is kind of ridiculous. It's not strange at all. In fact, Apple is pretty much the only phone manufacturer that sells into North America that doesn't also make CDMA phones. This fact will cost them some sales from people like DarthVain. They obviously know this, and are apparently okay with it.
It is also fairly annoying that it's necessary to hack the phone (jailbreak, whatever) to make it work with an otherwise compatible GSM network though. Vendor lock-in is pretty much par for the course with Apple stuff, though. It's part of why I don't really own any.
But then so is the article.
What it should say is "iPhone Jailbreaking Could Hurt Providers' Profits".
As numerous posters have pointed out, most GSM handsets are not tied to a particular provider (which is one of the key points behind having a SIM card in the first place). Network armageddon hasn't happened yet.
The providers want this perception to spread though, because it helps them keep their precious lock-in (and allows them to exclude their competitors from getting a slice of the iPhone pie). If they can get some laws written to cement the lock-in, so much the better.
But why would Apple help perpetuate this? My guess is because they needed a provider's help to get the phone off the ground, so this is their end of the bargain. The current arrangement has allowed them to sell millions of handsets and tens of millions of apps, so they have no particular need to encourage competition -- the current model is working out just fine for them.
As a consumer, I'd obviously rather avoid the multi-year contracts and being tied to one provider. It's a large part of the reason I don't have an iPhone. Maybe one of the Android handset makers will eventually get this right.
"let the date slip and paint it red."
I'd typically be more than happy to paint it red, but management never seems too interested in letting the date slip.
> But if you also had a gun, they'd be a lot less likely to try to attack you.
How does that work? We've established that the individual with the gun plans to attack you. How would you also having a gun make them any less likely to do so? Because they fear being shot by you? Seems to me like more motivation for them to follow through with their aggressive intentions immediately to prevent you from doing that.
I really don't understand how a gun is supposed to defend you against someone else with a gun. Someone care to fill me in?
You picked a pretty poor example.
Flight duration from Los Angeles to Tokyo is around 12 hours. While it's true that you probably won't be using your computer 100% of the time, I think it's a stretch to say that in all cases there's at least 4h where you won't. Also, that's by no means the longest flight a person can take.
Furthermore, it's "up to" 8h. That usually means that if you have the screen brightness turned way down, have the wireless turned off, don't use the optical drive, avoid using the hard drive and don't do anything too processor-intensive, you might get 7h. Some of that could be true, but I'm going to bet that a really common use for a laptop on a long flight would be "watch a video". That will use one of the hard drive or optical drive, and definitely uses the CPU (possibly lots of it if the video is HD). So you probably don't actually get 8h of battery, even if you can amuse yourself some other way for the other 4h on the flight.
But your poor trans-pacific flight example aside, there are plenty of reasons a person might need more untethered time than that. Anyone who needs to be outdoors all day comes to mind. My company uses laptops for field testing of survey equipment (though we don't use apple laptops, but that's another story).
The reason that all of this is probably okay is that anyone who needs that sort of high-portability on a regular basis likely won't be buying a great big 17" laptop anyway. If I'm not mistaken, the more portable 15" ones *do* have a replaceable battery.
So yes, if you buy the new 17" MBP you're sacrificing some portability because the battery can't be replaced. Probably you already knew that you were sacrificing some portability because you are buying a 17" laptop.
Regardless, though, I can't really see how making it non-replaceable saves them that much space. Some space sure, but I have a feeling they're not being 100% truthful about the 40% savings nonsense. My suspicion is that the extra capacity gained is actually pretty negligible and they really did it for some other reason.
This comment also made me wonder about the cold-weather usefulness of this sort of device. As I write this, it's -20C outside in the middle of the day. Granted, this sort of weather isn't a problem for much of the world but it's quite common here and affects a nontrivial number of people.
The "inefficiency" of a IC engine gets put to some use in that some the "waste" heat is used to heat the inside of the car, and you don't really get that benefit in an electric car (and any hybrid I've been in ran the combustion engine constantly while the heater was on). This problem has existed in the past with air-cooled engines (old Volkswagens come to mind). At the time, it was common to have a separate heater that burned whatever fuel the vehicle ran on. I'm thinking that the same wouldn't work too well on an electric car -- running an electric heater would probably put a really big dent in your range, and it would be a real bummer to freeze to death on the side of the highway because your car's heater killed the "battery". This would be a problem with any sort of electric car, but probably not an insurmountable one.
Probably more serious than that, though, might be the impact on the function of the engine itself. Most IC engines will run fine in cold weather assuming you can get them started. A common problem is that the car's battery (particularly older ones) can't deliver enough power at low temperature to turn the engine. I am a long way from an expert in the effects of temperature on various battery chemistries, and even less of one on how low temperature would impact the capacitor-like devices described in the article. I do know that it would be a fairly serious end-user problem if your car just wouldn't work on a cold day.
Does anyone have any insight into the temperature sensitivity of this kind of scheme, and how it would stack up versus comparable battery-based technologies?
It sounds like a promising idea, but it would be a non-starter in many places if it doesn't perform well in very cold (or very hot) weather.
I used to ride on SkyTrain in Vancouver BC, which is maglev, but only enough to provide propulsion, not a float cushion.
Wrong. The SkyTrain in Vancouver is NOT maglev.
MagLev = Magnetic Levitation
Being maglev *implies* the levitation, or "float cushion" as you describe it.
I think you are confusing maglev with linear induction motors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_motor
which the SkyTrain does use. While these type of motors are often (usually?) used in a maglev system, they are also used for more conventional railed systems like the SkyTrain.
Is the lift and reduced friction worth the extra energy to actually levitate it?
Anectodally - Yes. Why else would they bother? The company is obviously not going to spend trillions of yen building a line that they know will be less profitable than the existing one.
More concretely, an earlier poster provided a link to the math, however I can't seem to find it just now. The point was that eliminating the friction is a very big deal.
And, if we put the new invisibility cloaks on these ... won't they kill stray cows and small boys and girls trying to flatten pennies on the tracks?
I realize you're kidding, but just because they'd be invisible wouldn't make them silent. The air displacement alone would ensure that these trains would make a nontrivial amount of noise. Furthermore, placing pennies on the tracks wouldn't be too effective in flattening them since the train isn't touching the track. That being said, in the highly unlikely event that I'm ever asked for my opinion in the design of these sort of trains, I'll be sure to suggest that they keep "invisibility cloak" off the feature sheet.
(meanwhile in the US, we get zilch)
The problem in North America is that the vast majority of it lacks the concentrated population centers in fairly close proximity to make this sort of thing even approach economically viable. There are some exceptions to this. In those cases, we're left with:
1. Lack of political will to foot the massive up-front cost for something that won't be completed until someone else's term.
2. Rampant NIMBYism which would make it next to impossible to come up with a viable route through a populated area without getting sued into oblivion.
3. An irrational societal addiction to the automobile despite higher cost and risk to life and limb.
Given enough time, #3 will probably be overcome for one reason or another. #1 might be overcome by some visionary. #2 is a tough one because it either pushes costs even higher, or forces you into a route that is far away from where it's needed. Anything is possible, I suppose.
Basically: I wouldn't hold your breath.
Agree totally. The alternatives are far from perfect but Telus takes customer hostility to a whole new level.
I'm going on two years now using a $20/month vmobile plan (no contract, no extra BS fees) as my primary phone. It works out cheaper than a basic Telus landline and it's only on the rarest occasion that I miss having a landline (mostly for long distance, but Skype does a decent job of filling that void with only slightly less convenience). Mind you, I don't use the phone much (less than 200min/month). This would work out less well for someone who does.
It seems that this sort of thing depends on a number of factors, and what part of your career you're in is a big one.
When I first graduated from university I sat around looking for jobs for four months in an exremely competitive job market (longest four months of my life). There was even an article in the paper during that time that basically said that anyone that didn't have a job in the current market must be somehow defective. The problem was I had no experience, and anyone looking for engineers wanted someone with five years experience (Yes, I applied anyway). I never even got calls back from the service-industry jobs I applied for because I was overqualified and they assumed (probably correctly) that I wouldn't stick around long. I eventually ended up with a good job, but it took a while and I got pretty lucky to get it.
So now my girlfriend is working at a job she can't stand. She's been there 8 months and it's decent experience, but the work environment sucks. Her manager is a disorganized bully, they're crammed into the office like sardines, and they have rather inhumane work hours policies (office hours will be 7:30-4:45 every day, and you WILL get reamed out if you're five minutes late. Any overtime is unpaid, but you are still expected to work it "for the next six months or so, then things will get better"... riiight.) She complains about the place every day.
So she's obviously looking around, but hasn't had much interest thus far. Her 8 months at that company is basically the sum-total of her related experience. The job market is still pretty strong (it's an oil town) but she can't exactly find a new job "at will" most likely because she's early in her career. My advice to her has been to put your head down and keep at it until you can find something better (which may have been what many of the employees of BigBrotherCo described above were doing). Incidentally, if anyone is looking for a developer... (kidding).
There are certainly factors beyond not liking your current job that may prevent you from getting a better one.
There is certainly an element of that, but I expect it has to do in much larger part with the price. Mobile data simply isn't affordable here in Canada (for sure) and the US (I think). If I want to do something simple like read a normal text-only email (not SMS -- actual email) I have to buy a several-hundred-dollar "smartphone" handset (there's no good reason the cheap normal handsets couln't do email -- the Japanese ones do it, I've seen it myself) and pay for an oppressively expensive "data" plan that costs twice as much per month as my home broadband connection, and even that is just 25MB of data. Probably fine for text-only email, but that'll get used up pretty quick if you try to do something crazy like surf the web and happen to hit any non-"mobile friendly" pages. It's just not a good value proposition to me (although it apparently is to some people). I'd happily use email rather than voice in most cases, but not if it's many times the price.
These sorts of services won't show up here in any real way until they can be reasonably used by the average person with the $50 handset and the $20/month plan. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but not until providers change priorities from "Downloadable Games and Ringtones!" to making services that are actually useful affordable. Sadly, the average North American consumer doesn't appear to be ready to demand that just yet.
While that may be true, it *has* been reported to be a series of tubes. All the government has to do is sit at one end of the tubes and charge you a tax before you're allowed to get any of the internets that come out.
Seriously, though, this sort of thing displays the baffling-and-at-the-same-time-unsurprising lack of comprehension that $GOVERNMENT seems to have with regard to anything more technically sophisticated than a pen. This is obviously impractical on many fronts.
You want to tax internet connections? On what basis? Bytes transferred? That's unfair to Grandma with a pwned Win98 box (unbeknownst to her, of course). Flat rate? That's unfair to low-income earners who can barely afford internet access in the first place so Johnny can get his homework done. And what is "the internet" anyway? If I send an email from my desk to the guy in the next cube, is that taxable? Probably not because it's a private corporate network. How about if I sent an email to my next-door neighbour on the same ISP? The whole transfer lives on the ISP's "private" network, so technically it never hit "the internet", or did it? It's really difficult to adequately define when you're accessing "the internet" versus "some network", and taxing every corporate or, hell, residential network would be completely impractical.
If they try it, though, I propose lining the Canadian side of the 49th Parallel with high-powered wifi antennas pointed south.
Shipping goods across the border? Suppose the goods originated in, say, California and arrived at my place in Alberta, Canada... do I owe California state sales tax? (assuming California even has state sales tax. Pretend it does if not). I already owe fees to customs and Canadian federal sales tax and whatever percentage my bank decides to charge me for the currency conversion (and possibly ludicrous brokerage fees to whichever company did the shipping). This additional sales tax might just make it not worth buying. Maybe it doesn't count as an "internet sale" if I phone them instead? Can I apply a refund as a non-resident if I go through the requisite paperwork hassle? Seems like a pretty good way to kill international trade originating in states with a sales tax -- sellers would just pack up and move to a state without sales tax. I bet the constituents will be happy with that one.
So don't panic guys. This is far too ill-conceived to see the light of day (or to have any real effect if it does).
Dissatisfied Customer: "How are you gentlemen !! All your [plate glass window] are belong to us. You are on the way to destruction."
It certainly is a little bit disappointing that a lot of "disruptive" technologies are being held back for fear of lawsuit because they might be sued for damaging someone else's revenue stream. This sort of thing really seems to be getting out of hand in the US (and to a lesser degree in other places). Hopefully other countries will take advantage of the opening this creates and put out more truly innovative products than the US is able to. Maybe then there will be some concrete example we can point to and say "See! We really are falling behind because we allow this kind of crap to go on."
It's bad enough that there is advertising nearly everywhere you go and in nearly everything you do. It's really troubling that advertisers can now legally (at least through threat of lawsuit) force people to look at them too. I'm a little surprised that "fast forward" functionality isn't illegal yet.
Uh... the windows installer doesn't trash the entire linux install (or even the bootloader). It just overwrites the MBR to point it at the windows bootloader instead of whatever was there before. Incidentally, this is exactly what the linux bootloaders do when they're installed. The "easier way" that you're looking for is to simply overwrite Windows' MBR entry with one that points back at the bootloader that you wanted.
It turns out that you're close. The simplest way of fixing the MBR after the windows installer overwrites it is to have some bootable media (floppy, CD, USB Drive, whatever) with your bootloader of choice on it. Use that to boot your system, and reinstall it to the MBR.
I don't speak lilo, but in grub it looks like:
root (hd0,0) (or whichever partition grub is installed on)
setup (hd0)
The whole procedure takes a couple of minutes, and it's much easier than having to re-install linux as all your settings and whatnot are preserved by virtue of never having gone anywhere in the first place.
"None of these issues have a thing to do with honesty. Nada, zero, zip. It just basic economics." Excellent point. Precisely the reason why I would buy a CD. There are reasons beyond what you've mentioned that make p2p unattractive, but those have been discussed at length elsewhere (inconsistent quality, etc). And realistically, honesty factors into it somewhat as well. Basically, buying the legitimate media makes sense when it is a better value proposition than the alternative. As I see it, though, DRM changes the balance. It makes the "legitimate" media a lower-value product. Why would I buy a DRM-limited CD, when I could go and get an illegitimate mp3 copy from my favorite p2p site and use the files however I want (even burn them onto a CD to play in my CD player)? Based on the "economics" of it, I would expect to see DRM cause copyright infringement to *increase*, not decrease. You can't charge more for an inferior product and expect to sell very many. Since you're never going to compete on price with p2p, you'd better make it higher quality and more convenient. DRM, as far as I can tell, essentially does the opposite.
>The guy who owns the server, the guy who paid for an account on the server, or the ISP the server colos at or is connected to?
All of the above. In fact, due to the lack of "net neutrality", all of the networks on the way to the audience get a slice too.
Oh sure, it'll inevitably lead to disputes over who owns the associated rights, but the ensuing lawsuit circlejerk will make laywers lots of money.
Yes, I'm kidding (I hope).
"about 75% more than previous estimated losses of $3.5 billion in hard goods"
Glad to see that suing everything in sight is working out so well for them.
Back when I was in my first year of university our internet got the crap filtered out of it (port 80 only) because one studio or other made some sweeping threat about suing the university because "someone" was sharing . This sort of annoyed those of us that *weren't* sharing movies and were trying to use the internet for something other than web access (IRC, FTP, etc.) Glad to see that making vague legal threats against people in other countries (I'm in Canada) hasn't paid off for them in the long run.
I hope they'll see it that way too, but I doubt it.
"Theo de Raadt is an arrogant asshole."
I might point out that arrogance isn't exactly a rare trait in these circles. To make the argument that "I shouldn't support these guys because their leader is arrogant" simply isn't sound. Not if you plan to turn around and say "Go Apple!" -- Steve Jobs isn't exactly known for his humility. While Linus seems to be a pretty humble guy, I think you'd probably have a hard time saying the same about Stallman (Yes, I know... you can use the Linux kernel without GNU software, but I'm pretty sure most of you aren't). I think most here would agree that there's also a measure of arrogance evident in Redmond as well.
As I see it, being in charge of something of this scale either attracts or breeds (I'm not sure which - perhaps both) a certain amount of arrogance. So is Theo arrogant? Maybe, but so are most of his peers. It's hardly fair to hold that against his project and not theirs.
Theo *has* shown himself to be a pretty smart guy. He and his team put out some pretty damn good software (OpenSSH's very wide acceptance is a testament to that). That doesn't necessarily make him a particularly good businessman. The project would probably benefit greatly from having one on board. I don't think anyone will try to tell you that making money on open source software is an easy proposition.
In the meantime I have no problem whatsoever sending a few dollars in the direction of the folks who made pretty good software that I use every day, particularly if they need the help. I don't really think it's asking a lot for the rest of the community to consider doing the same.
"VoIP is hackey because most of the protocols weren't thought out from the start."
I put it to you that a lot of the VOIP hackery was created to allow something resembling transparency on NAT networks.
"Even if it doesn't cost them anything for you to call your 3rd cousins best friend in Timbuktu, they want full control over what you do in your cube."
Er... yes. And my point was that IPv6 does not eliminate this type of control. They don't want you using VOIP or msn or whatever from your cube? Set up the networking equipment to filter ports appropriately. Just because everyone on the network has a "real" IPv6 address doesn't mean that your traffic doesn't still pass through their gateway(s). As I said in my first post: nothing changes from a security/control standpoint.
Well, end-to-end connectivity would certainly make VOIP solutions considerably less hacky. Is that a bulletproof business case? Probably not, but it's an example of a useful application and it took me a couple of seconds to come up with it. I'm sure there are others if one were to actually think about it.
While I don't claim to be the world's leading expert on IPv6, I don't believe (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) that it makes routers, proxies and firewalls go away. It does make NAT kind of redundant, but it doesn't seem to me as though that has much (any?) of a negative impact on security provided there is a proper firewall in place. It just means that the router doesn't need to do another lookup on each packet to figure out where it's actually supposed to go. NAT works as a stopgap measure, but it won't prevent the inevitable from eventually happening.
"what would be best for everyone (IMHO) isn't what's best for RIM, and I doubt they'd take one for the team."
s t_of_the_world.h"
Particularly considering it's a Canadian company. That'd be kind of like taking one for someone else's team.
#include "rant_about_the_usa_ruining_everything_for_the_re
I'd be extremely surprised to see RIM do something like that, especially since they have a workaround in case everything goes wrong. Even if NTP wins, they lose. Everybody's lawyers get paid, and some lobby group or other will convince congress to leave patent laws alone in order to maintain America's "competitive advantage" or some such nonsense.
"Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...and he specifically said not everything is going to be faster like the hard drives and memory etc etc. Just the processors which is why he showed the SPECmarks or whatever this phantom benchmark that, to my knowledge, isn't a free download from anywhere. Or was I the only one that heard him prefacing the results?"
"Oh well, let the Mac bashing continue, blood is in the water."
I don't think most people are bashing Macs here, just misleading sensationalism in marketing. What he said is basically akin to my saying "Bogo-sort beats the pants off quicksort! It gets the right answer in just one iteration! Well, sure, there are cases where it's a little slower than that."
Touting the best case of something while totally ignoring the average- or worst-case is almost always going to be misleading. Sure, the best-case performance of bogo-sort is excellent (if it randomly hits the correct order on the first try), but the average case performance is pretty miserable and in the worst case it never finishes. The same goes for the new Macs. Sure, in a particular canned set of circumstances I don't doubt for a second that it's twice as fast. It sounds like in the "average case" (if there is such a thing for computer usage patterns) it's more along the lines of 20% faster (which is still pretty respectable). It strikes me that this would be a far less misleading basis to market your hardware on.
So is Steve Jobs "lying" to us? No, but the "4x Faster" logo plastered all over the macbook pro page is certainly rather misleading.
Perhaps you should give out "submit points", sorta like mod points. Thus a user would have to make some contribution to the community (meta moderating, etc.) before they could submit stories. This has the combined benefit of putting a limit on the number of stories a particular user could post in a given period of time, and it also means they can't just turn around and make a new user and submit immediately (they'd need to build up the "submit points"). If the system for giving out points is done just right, it would probably also cut down on the total volume of submissions that the editors need to wade through.
Basically it rewards users who are active in the community with the privilege of submitting stories, and not users who are just trying to get their page full of ads in front of as many eyeballs as possible. It's not a perfect system... just figured I'd throw the idea out there in the hopes that it could be refined.