"I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin."
This has been the historic problem with the nuclear power industry from the beginning through today. Corruption among the people who build the plants (forged x-rays on essential piping welds, forged documentation on cabling, forged tests on concrete, forged documentation on reinforcing bars, etc.) as well as among the people who inspect the work and then continuing on to the people who manage the plants who refuse, over and over, to release information concerning the mistakes and/or problems encountered. And they wonder why the public has so little confidence in them.
1. Burgle. Your smartphone can determine whether the occupants of a house are away for just an hour or on vacation. 2. Swindle. This App uses the Internet as a database to uncover Social Security numbers (in the USA) and identity earmarks (elsewhere). 3. Stalkem. This is a swell app to determine whether someone is stalkable; provides phone numbers and addresses of potential victims. 4. Gettem.... 5. Hurttem...
Especially routing information. They store the results of ARP requests too. And they process information to decide how to forward packets. Apparently the judge wasn't too clear on how routers work.
All communications systems change languages but especially the technical forms. The telegraph changed the language for those who used it - and for those who came after. The abbreviation "tks" or "tnx" or simply "tu" for "thank you" was a telegraphic form that started with wire-based telegraphy and migrated into radio telegraphy and then into satellite communications and now it's made its way into cell phone texting. When I learned this abbreviation in the 1950s I never expected it to fall into common use.
One of the most interesting things about this is that these abbreviations crossed language lines; usually the English format being understood by everyone else regardless of language. This seems to be continuing in texting and computer chat.
Two other communications-based forms that crossed over into common use would be "10-4" and "roger that" for "I understand". Saying "roger" was to use the phonetic for the letter "R" which wire telegraphers began to use back in the 19th century when they wanted to acknowledge receipt of a message. Even though wire-based "Morse" was much different than the "Morse" used in radio telegraphy many operators (including me) moved between them and brought along their abbreviations and customs.
Making "Google" into a verb is simply a continuation... not something new.
I wonder if smoke signals changed native American languages.
Which has resulted in the "jailbreak" phenomenon that gives some of us the tools we really do need. Like ssh, tethering, etc. Plus gives some users the ability to really personalize their devices. I have an iPhone and I'm seriously considering moving to Android just because the jailbreaking I needed to get tethering and ssh (so I can remotely administer routers and servers) also results in making upgrades to the iPhone OS problematic.
I operated a small ISP for nearly 8 years and was finally driven out of business by my upstream provider (a municipality in the form of a PUD) which illegally subsidized a competitor and illegally created another competitor. This PUD had invited a competitor into the area and created fake "contracts" that covered up a secret agreement to repay the competitor for 110% of its costs to compete with me. The competitor created invoices for "work performed" under the contracts that just happened to cover their costs; plus ten percent. The PUD also sent their own employees to work on the competitor's systems. This was (and is) actually against the state constitution, not just illegal. Unfortunately no state entity was willing to investigate this activity or prosecute the perpetrators and when we tried to sue we discovered that municipalities are protected from pesky problems like anti-trust and racketeering so the suits were dismissed.
Only four of the managers of the PUD were discharged over this and no one went to jail or was even prosecuted despite having substantial written evidence provided by whistle blowers inside the PUD (who released documents before the PUD could act to cover them up).
We sold out for pennies on the dollar of our investment and felt lucky to get even that because by the time we bailed virtually all the other smaller ISPs had also been driven out of business.
Would regulation have helped me? There was (and is) plenty of regulation but there was not even a token attempt to enforce them. We were told, off the record, by a state investigator that the problems were so big that it would have been economically disastrous to the entire state if they regulations were enforced.
This, mind you, in the state (Washington) which has had numerous scandals involving public utility districts; including the infamous Washington Public Power System repudiating $200 million in municipal bonds some 30 years ago. (WPPS still exists under a new name.)
I don't know enough about the extent of the ash cloud to make a decision about this. In fact, I suspect no one knows much about it and that's the crux of the dilemma. I do know that when Mt. St. Helens erupted the area where I live was seriously impacted by the ash and many vehicles were severely damaged. Of course, this area was only 150 miles east of the volcano and the ash cloud was dense enough to block out the sun. The ash cloud over Europe is likely to be much less dense. I have been an airplane and glider pilot since 1970 and I, personally, would not want to risk flying until I understood more about the risk.
it turns out that 95% of the Slashdot users think the report was about all internet content instead of just user generated content and they responded to that instead.
I'm guessing that 99% of you have never actually seen what a "full body scan" looks like. I'm also guessing that a significant percentage of you believe that the x-ray glasses you see ads for in comic books really work. For some education - instead of hype - you might want to take a look at the NPR piece broadcast this morning about full body scans. This link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122289282 references a transcript and includes an image of one of the scans.
I suppose some slashdotters might consider this porn. Then again, in 1914 a woman's bare leg was considered porn.
The Internet has given everyone just enough information for them to think that they're as expert in whatever field as anyone else and the forum to broadcast their opinion. A Stanford researcher not too long ago discovered that ignorant people have no idea that they are ignorant and this plays well on the Internet. With no real ability to discern pseudo science from actual science, your average Joe Schmoe still feels perfectly qualified to commend on anything that he's read on a blog or watched on the History channel.
Welcome to the 21st Century... everything is politics.
I don't know all the details of this but a decade or so ago I was a (volunteer) administrator of the IT system at our local rural school district. Sometimes I'd take computers home to install software so I could play with the kids while the software installed instead of sitting on my ass (for free) at the (empty) school and do it. Besides, they locked the schools up and wouldn't give me a key.
I discovered that the kids could find porn so used a proxy and some regexp filters to try to keep porn at bay. But it turned out that the kids could find porn faster than I could block it so I started grepping the logs for the seven bad words you can't say on television and then adding those sites. Then I started making headway. The HS math teacher was involved in this too. We'd see a suspicious site in the log, check the site for content and if it was porn we'd block it using a regexp expression. Simple and cheap.
But that took time... so I'd add them at home remotely (everything, including the routers, was on Linux boxes that I built and installed) but the teacher who was helping was observed after working hours going through thi process. Unfortunately the person watching thought the teacher was surfing porn (instead of checking sites for content) and turned him in. Quite the brouhaha. One parent was incensed that we used the students to "find porn". Good grief!!!
That incident very nearly cost the teacher his job but I attended the school board meeting that addressed the issue and explained what we were doing and why (no money in the budget for servers, software, etc.). The teacher kept his job and we got to buy some blocking software to work with the proxy and I didn't have to spend an hour every night checking logs. One problem solved.
The administrator in this particular case probably faced some of the same issues as I did. So they found school property at his house (they would have at mine too) and are investigating him for downloading porn (they would have probably done the same to me). I think getting the cops after him was overkill.
$1M in expenses for running SETI is ridiculous. However according to the newspaper report from his home town he was instructed by a former school district administrator to remove the software and did not. Of course, that admin might just be trying to cover his own ass. But at least someone knew SETI was on those boxes prior to the new Superintendent taking office.
So I suppose that a pair of $9.95 reading glasses from Wal-Mart is out of the question, huh? I use a 1.25x pair which is about perfect for looking at a computer screen (which is normally farther away than a book or magazine would be).
In the very early 70s our engineering group was interested in using the new 4004 to simplify the production of control systems for heavy machinery (windlasses, hydraulic systems, etc). The machinery itself was slightly different from contract to contract and even from item to item within a contract so we had to design a new control system for each unit. When the 4004 came out we were excited to see if we couldn't do it cheaper and faster using a microprocessor.
We had moved from relays and discrete wiring to CMOS components on printed circuit boards and thought that was a big step. CMOS could be run at 15vdc which meant that the noise inherent in the environments our machinery worked in would not be quite as big a problem.
Unfortunately we discovered that we had several problems including the limited instruction set and memory capabilities of the 4004 along with the lower voltages needed so we stuck to CMOS until I left a couple of years later.
Still, the 4004 was my introduction to microprocessors and that changed the course of my career from electronics and electronic control systems to digital control systems and computers.
It's been an exciting ride, too. I am grateful to have grown up with the technology.
When those television ads for Verizon first appeared I noticed that the AT&T map that appeared in the commercial was significantly different than the AT&T coverage map depicted on the "coverage" page of the AT&T website. It should come as no surprise that the Verizon's version of the map showed markedly less 3G coverage than the map AT&T presented.
So the only question was: "Which map is right?" If the map in Verizon's commercials map was correct we'd hear nothing more about it but if Verizon had either deliberately tampered with the AT&T coverage map depicted in their commercials or used a very old version to gain a competitive advantage then there would likely be litigation. This answers that question.
So it's not that AT&T is just suing Verizon instead of updating their 3G network. It's looks like it's a case of a major ad campaign targeting potential and/or existing AT&T customers using deliberately falsified material.
And that is against U.S. Federal law so AT&T is apparently taking this to court.
There's an app for that.
What a good manager can never manage....
on
Microsoft's Lost Decade
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
Why haven't they tried spinning up a spacecraft to simulate gravity? It seems like a logical step but NASA has been quiet about doing this. At least it would ameliorate (heh... I get points for using that word) some of the issues with long periods of time in zero gravity.
I have, if I can remember correctly, seven separate GPS units including two in each car (Magellan), two handheld units that are waterproof for sea kayaking (both Garmin but one has all the US marine charts and both do tracking), one stand-alone Garmin for our 1974 Carver 25-foot cabin cruiser that can take inputs from depth sounder and radar plus contains maps and charts for the entire west coast of North America (Garmin), one aviation-oriented Garmin that contains aviation charts and interfaces with my glider's computer, and one Magellan hand-held that my business used when we did a wireless ISP.
Even though my iPhone has a very inexpensive GPS application for marine charts (with downloadable maps), and even though I often take it (in a water-tight enclosure) with me sea kayaking, it's not likely to replace the hand held waterproof Garmins because they have specialized features (trip counters, currents, etc) that are easier to access and screens made for use in bright sunlight.
Similarly, the GPS units made specifically for aviation and marine use are not likely to be replaced by a combination cell phone/GPS. You need more than turn-by-turn instructions when flying from thermal to thermal in a glider, for instance.
And although many late model cars come with built-in GPS systems these are expensive to upgrade and do not allow any changes while the car is moving (even by the passenger). Their screens can be fabulous but the annoyance of having to pull over and stop if something changes has made several of my friends go buy a Nuvi just so they can get the functionality they want. So all their built-in units do is track and display speed, direction, etc. The turn-by-turn is left up to the stand-alone unit mounted on the windshield.
The biggest hurdle to mass use of cell phone GPS devices is likely to be the simple fact that 3G coverage is going to be spotty for a long time to come. Rural Oregon, Idaho, Nevada or Montana is not likely to have either wifi or 3G except along the main Interstate highways or in larger cities. And the same will hold true for many other states. Combine this with the handicap of the cell phone screen which is often too small to be seen when mounted 2 or 3 feet away on the dashboard or windshield and you will have people buying stand-alone GPS systems for a long time to come.
But the market for the stand-alone units is likely to shrink. Pedestrians or byclists who stay in town would take their cell phone anyway and having it track their rides or walks would make them unlikely to buy one of the Garmin wrist-mounted units. And if I traveled to a large city on business I'd take my iPhone but probably not a GPS unit; the iPhone could do whatever I needed it to do with the likelihood of 3G coverage.
Oh good. Yet another iteration of a Microsoft product. They can't just add features or make the old ones better; they have to put them in new places. Take the "Run" command and put it somewhere new. Change the Control Panel. Screw up the Networking configuration screens beyond belief. Change for change's sake. They do this crap in all their products not just the OS; Outlook, Office, etc. It's to the point that customers don't want to upgrade because they don't want to have to re-learn everything.
People ask me how I can remember all the Unix/Linux command line instructions and I tell them that it's easy. They have not changed much in 25 years. Once you learn them, you've learned them.... all you need is to learn any new ones or any new switches to the old, reliable commands. Contrast this with every Microsoft product ever stole...er, innovated where you'll find new locations for old commands. We know what we need to do but we can't find the stupid command to click on to make it work.
MS has truly lost their way. The single greatest Apple commercial was the one where John Hodges decided to put all the money on PR and spend nothing to fix the product. It's so typical.
with your cell phone can be an expensive proposition if you do not have access to a plan that covers both countries. I commonly use a boat in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle. The western edges of these islands is closer to Victoria (on the southern end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada) than it is to any US locations and boaters commonly "roam" into Canadian cell systems. Friends who have done some internet browsing without noticing that they are roaming have reported incredibly high charges - in the thousands of dollars - for data. This can also apply to Canadians who inadvertently roam into the USA cell systems.
So whatever you do don't blithely cross the border while naively relying on your 3G network. You might get a big surprise when you get your next bill.
Slashdot Mirror
"I'm fine with nuclear power. I'm not fine with nuclear power plants being run by greedy assholes that put the profit margin above the safety margin."
This has been the historic problem with the nuclear power industry from the beginning through today. Corruption among the people who build the plants (forged x-rays on essential piping welds, forged documentation on cabling, forged tests on concrete, forged documentation on reinforcing bars, etc.) as well as among the people who inspect the work and then continuing on to the people who manage the plants who refuse, over and over, to release information concerning the mistakes and/or problems encountered. And they wonder why the public has so little confidence in them.
Why, then, are there no Apps for the following:
1. Burgle. Your smartphone can determine whether the occupants of a house are away for just an hour or on vacation.
2. Swindle. This App uses the Internet as a database to uncover Social Security numbers (in the USA) and identity earmarks (elsewhere).
3. Stalkem. This is a swell app to determine whether someone is stalkable; provides phone numbers and addresses of potential victims.
4. Gettem....
5. Hurttem...
A wide-open field for app developers.
Especially routing information. They store the results of ARP requests too. And they process information to decide how to forward packets. Apparently the judge wasn't too clear on how routers work.
Nice chunk of change to modify an Eggdrop IRC bot. Of course, the entire scheme will backfire and the story will unfold on WikiLeaks.
Someone might want to explain that it isn't time that changes... just the hands on a watch (or clock). The "circadian" stuff stays exactly the same.
All communications systems change languages but especially the technical forms. The telegraph changed the language for those who used it - and for those who came after. The abbreviation "tks" or "tnx" or simply "tu" for "thank you" was a telegraphic form that started with wire-based telegraphy and migrated into radio telegraphy and then into satellite communications and now it's made its way into cell phone texting. When I learned this abbreviation in the 1950s I never expected it to fall into common use.
One of the most interesting things about this is that these abbreviations crossed language lines; usually the English format being understood by everyone else regardless of language. This seems to be continuing in texting and computer chat.
Two other communications-based forms that crossed over into common use would be "10-4" and "roger that" for "I understand". Saying "roger" was to use the phonetic for the letter "R" which wire telegraphers began to use back in the 19th century when they wanted to acknowledge receipt of a message. Even though wire-based "Morse" was much different than the "Morse" used in radio telegraphy many operators (including me) moved between them and brought along their abbreviations and customs.
Making "Google" into a verb is simply a continuation... not something new.
I wonder if smoke signals changed native American languages.
Which has resulted in the "jailbreak" phenomenon that gives some of us the tools we really do need. Like ssh, tethering, etc. Plus gives some users the ability to really personalize their devices. I have an iPhone and I'm seriously considering moving to Android just because the jailbreaking I needed to get tethering and ssh (so I can remotely administer routers and servers) also results in making upgrades to the iPhone OS problematic.
I operated a small ISP for nearly 8 years and was finally driven out of business by my upstream provider (a municipality in the form of a PUD) which illegally subsidized a competitor and illegally created another competitor. This PUD had invited a competitor into the area and created fake "contracts" that covered up a secret agreement to repay the competitor for 110% of its costs to compete with me. The competitor created invoices for "work performed" under the contracts that just happened to cover their costs; plus ten percent. The PUD also sent their own employees to work on the competitor's systems. This was (and is) actually against the state constitution, not just illegal. Unfortunately no state entity was willing to investigate this activity or prosecute the perpetrators and when we tried to sue we discovered that municipalities are protected from pesky problems like anti-trust and racketeering so the suits were dismissed.
Only four of the managers of the PUD were discharged over this and no one went to jail or was even prosecuted despite having substantial written evidence provided by whistle blowers inside the PUD (who released documents before the PUD could act to cover them up).
We sold out for pennies on the dollar of our investment and felt lucky to get even that because by the time we bailed virtually all the other smaller ISPs had also been driven out of business.
Would regulation have helped me? There was (and is) plenty of regulation but there was not even a token attempt to enforce them. We were told, off the record, by a state investigator that the problems were so big that it would have been economically disastrous to the entire state if they regulations were enforced.
This, mind you, in the state (Washington) which has had numerous scandals involving public utility districts; including the infamous Washington Public Power System repudiating $200 million in municipal bonds some 30 years ago. (WPPS still exists under a new name.)
I don't know enough about the extent of the ash cloud to make a decision about this. In fact, I suspect no one knows much about it and that's the crux of the dilemma. I do know that when Mt. St. Helens erupted the area where I live was seriously impacted by the ash and many vehicles were severely damaged. Of course, this area was only 150 miles east of the volcano and the ash cloud was dense enough to block out the sun. The ash cloud over Europe is likely to be much less dense. I have been an airplane and glider pilot since 1970 and I, personally, would not want to risk flying until I understood more about the risk.
They all get outmoded.
"lift your arm up and hold it there for 30 minutes."
I presume that you are not a kayaker. For us it's nothing to hold our arms up for hours at a time. With a paddle in them, even. :D
People actually print out their emails?
it turns out that 95% of the Slashdot users think the report was about all internet content instead of just user generated content and they responded to that instead.
No big surprise there, huh?
I'm guessing that 99% of you have never actually seen what a "full body scan" looks like. I'm also guessing that a significant percentage of you believe that the x-ray glasses you see ads for in comic books really work. For some education - instead of hype - you might want to take a look at the NPR piece broadcast this morning about full body scans. This link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122289282 references a transcript and includes an image of one of the scans.
I suppose some slashdotters might consider this porn. Then again, in 1914 a woman's bare leg was considered porn.
trust the Russians.
The Internet has given everyone just enough information for them to think that they're as expert in whatever field as anyone else and the forum to broadcast their opinion. A Stanford researcher not too long ago discovered that ignorant people have no idea that they are ignorant and this plays well on the Internet. With no real ability to discern pseudo science from actual science, your average Joe Schmoe still feels perfectly qualified to commend on anything that he's read on a blog or watched on the History channel.
Welcome to the 21st Century... everything is politics.
I don't know all the details of this but a decade or so ago I was a (volunteer) administrator of the IT system at our local rural school district. Sometimes I'd take computers home to install software so I could play with the kids while the software installed instead of sitting on my ass (for free) at the (empty) school and do it. Besides, they locked the schools up and wouldn't give me a key.
I discovered that the kids could find porn so used a proxy and some regexp filters to try to keep porn at bay. But it turned out that the kids could find porn faster than I could block it so I started grepping the logs for the seven bad words you can't say on television and then adding those sites. Then I started making headway. The HS math teacher was involved in this too. We'd see a suspicious site in the log, check the site for content and if it was porn we'd block it using a regexp expression. Simple and cheap.
But that took time... so I'd add them at home remotely (everything, including the routers, was on Linux boxes that I built and installed) but the teacher who was helping was observed after working hours going through thi process. Unfortunately the person watching thought the teacher was surfing porn (instead of checking sites for content) and turned him in. Quite the brouhaha. One parent was incensed that we used the students to "find porn". Good grief!!!
That incident very nearly cost the teacher his job but I attended the school board meeting that addressed the issue and explained what we were doing and why (no money in the budget for servers, software, etc.). The teacher kept his job and we got to buy some blocking software to work with the proxy and I didn't have to spend an hour every night checking logs. One problem solved.
The administrator in this particular case probably faced some of the same issues as I did. So they found school property at his house (they would have at mine too) and are investigating him for downloading porn (they would have probably done the same to me). I think getting the cops after him was overkill.
$1M in expenses for running SETI is ridiculous. However according to the newspaper report from his home town he was instructed by a former school district administrator to remove the software and did not. Of course, that admin might just be trying to cover his own ass. But at least someone knew SETI was on those boxes prior to the new Superintendent taking office.
So I suppose that a pair of $9.95 reading glasses from Wal-Mart is out of the question, huh? I use a 1.25x pair which is about perfect for looking at a computer screen (which is normally farther away than a book or magazine would be).
In the very early 70s our engineering group was interested in using the new 4004 to simplify the production of control systems for heavy machinery (windlasses, hydraulic systems, etc). The machinery itself was slightly different from contract to contract and even from item to item within a contract so we had to design a new control system for each unit. When the 4004 came out we were excited to see if we couldn't do it cheaper and faster using a microprocessor.
We had moved from relays and discrete wiring to CMOS components on printed circuit boards and thought that was a big step. CMOS could be run at 15vdc which meant that the noise inherent in the environments our machinery worked in would not be quite as big a problem.
Unfortunately we discovered that we had several problems including the limited instruction set and memory capabilities of the 4004 along with the lower voltages needed so we stuck to CMOS until I left a couple of years later.
Still, the 4004 was my introduction to microprocessors and that changed the course of my career from electronics and electronic control systems to digital control systems and computers.
It's been an exciting ride, too. I am grateful to have grown up with the technology.
When those television ads for Verizon first appeared I noticed that the AT&T map that appeared in the commercial was significantly different than the AT&T coverage map depicted on the "coverage" page of the AT&T website. It should come as no surprise that the Verizon's version of the map showed markedly less 3G coverage than the map AT&T presented.
So the only question was: "Which map is right?" If the map in Verizon's commercials map was correct we'd hear nothing more about it but if Verizon had either deliberately tampered with the AT&T coverage map depicted in their commercials or used a very old version to gain a competitive advantage then there would likely be litigation. This answers that question.
So it's not that AT&T is just suing Verizon instead of updating their 3G network. It's looks like it's a case of a major ad campaign targeting potential and/or existing AT&T customers using deliberately falsified material.
And that is against U.S. Federal law so AT&T is apparently taking this to court.
There's an app for that.
The one thing a good manager cannot manage is creativity; they've either got it or they don't. In MS's case they never had it unless you count buying up the ideas others had come up with (DOS, SQL, Excel, Word, and on and on). This problem is compounded when, at some point, HR steps in with focus on credentials instead of competence and further strangles any new ideas. Go ahead, tell your HR department to hire more creative people and watch them demand more credentials from every applicant.
Google has managed to attract the best and brightest because they've promoted a sense of excitement and stressed competence. But at some point HR at Google will get the upper hand too. Art History majors always prevail.
Why haven't they tried spinning up a spacecraft to simulate gravity? It seems like a logical step but NASA has been quiet about doing this. At least it would ameliorate (heh... I get points for using that word) some of the issues with long periods of time in zero gravity.
I have, if I can remember correctly, seven separate GPS units including two in each car (Magellan), two handheld units that are waterproof for sea kayaking (both Garmin but one has all the US marine charts and both do tracking), one stand-alone Garmin for our 1974 Carver 25-foot cabin cruiser that can take inputs from depth sounder and radar plus contains maps and charts for the entire west coast of North America (Garmin), one aviation-oriented Garmin that contains aviation charts and interfaces with my glider's computer, and one Magellan hand-held that my business used when we did a wireless ISP.
Even though my iPhone has a very inexpensive GPS application for marine charts (with downloadable maps), and even though I often take it (in a water-tight enclosure) with me sea kayaking, it's not likely to replace the hand held waterproof Garmins because they have specialized features (trip counters, currents, etc) that are easier to access and screens made for use in bright sunlight.
Similarly, the GPS units made specifically for aviation and marine use are not likely to be replaced by a combination cell phone/GPS. You need more than turn-by-turn instructions when flying from thermal to thermal in a glider, for instance.
And although many late model cars come with built-in GPS systems these are expensive to upgrade and do not allow any changes while the car is moving (even by the passenger). Their screens can be fabulous but the annoyance of having to pull over and stop if something changes has made several of my friends go buy a Nuvi just so they can get the functionality they want. So all their built-in units do is track and display speed, direction, etc. The turn-by-turn is left up to the stand-alone unit mounted on the windshield.
The biggest hurdle to mass use of cell phone GPS devices is likely to be the simple fact that 3G coverage is going to be spotty for a long time to come. Rural Oregon, Idaho, Nevada or Montana is not likely to have either wifi or 3G except along the main Interstate highways or in larger cities. And the same will hold true for many other states. Combine this with the handicap of the cell phone screen which is often too small to be seen when mounted 2 or 3 feet away on the dashboard or windshield and you will have people buying stand-alone GPS systems for a long time to come.
But the market for the stand-alone units is likely to shrink. Pedestrians or byclists who stay in town would take their cell phone anyway and having it track their rides or walks would make them unlikely to buy one of the Garmin wrist-mounted units. And if I traveled to a large city on business I'd take my iPhone but probably not a GPS unit; the iPhone could do whatever I needed it to do with the likelihood of 3G coverage.
Oh good. Yet another iteration of a Microsoft product. They can't just add features or make the old ones better; they have to put them in new places. Take the "Run" command and put it somewhere new. Change the Control Panel. Screw up the Networking configuration screens beyond belief. Change for change's sake. They do this crap in all their products not just the OS; Outlook, Office, etc. It's to the point that customers don't want to upgrade because they don't want to have to re-learn everything.
People ask me how I can remember all the Unix/Linux command line instructions and I tell them that it's easy. They have not changed much in 25 years. Once you learn them, you've learned them.... all you need is to learn any new ones or any new switches to the old, reliable commands. Contrast this with every Microsoft product ever stole...er, innovated where you'll find new locations for old commands. We know what we need to do but we can't find the stupid command to click on to make it work.
MS has truly lost their way. The single greatest Apple commercial was the one where John Hodges decided to put all the money on PR and spend nothing to fix the product. It's so typical.
with your cell phone can be an expensive proposition if you do not have access to a plan that covers both countries. I commonly use a boat in the San Juan Islands north of Seattle. The western edges of these islands is closer to Victoria (on the southern end of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada) than it is to any US locations and boaters commonly "roam" into Canadian cell systems. Friends who have done some internet browsing without noticing that they are roaming have reported incredibly high charges - in the thousands of dollars - for data. This can also apply to Canadians who inadvertently roam into the USA cell systems.
So whatever you do don't blithely cross the border while naively relying on your 3G network. You might get a big surprise when you get your next bill.