My experience has been similar to yours. Most likely, Wal-Mart will offer:
Cheap hardware of inferior quality Good quality hardware that can't compete in price with that which is available at major electronics retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City Good quality hardware that can't even remotely compete in price with NewEgg.
Sadly, even the project's home page has spelling errors. I'd be willing to take a look at the project in the future if the original/. posting (which is full of blatant spelling and grammar errors) didn't come from a core developer of the project, but even the project's home page hasn't been checked for spelling or grammar errors at all.
I agree that a spellchecker is not the end-all of looking for mistakes (their vs. there and so on aren't caught), but for the developers of the project to put "developper" on their front page doesn't say much about their skill set.
Forget the DRM, do ratio enforcement where you pay, say, 50 cents for every 350M. (i.e. 50 cents per ep). There are plenty of solutions nowadays for setting up a tracker that restricts a person's access if they leech too much, simply add the ability to buy bandwidth and you have a commercial solution that has all of the advantages of BT but lets you make a profit.
Give people credit for uploading, essentially paying others for hosting your content by giving them credit towards further downloads. Maybe 50 cents per 350M down and 10 cents per 350M up.
Yes, people can in theory still copy and pirate the video, but if it's reasonably priced, easy to get, and CONSISTENT (so that someone can, for example, set up automatic downloading of new episodes) and people will pay for it.
One of the biggest problems in the PC world with respect to virus propagation has been the homgenous nature of desktop PCs. 90%+ of the desktops in the world (and a decent percentage of servers, especailly a very high percentage of servers in small businesses) are running one software architecture (Win32) on one hardware architecture (x86). This means that viruses don't encounter compatibility problems when trying to propagate.
In the mobile phone market, this is not the case. There are at least three major smartphone software architectures (PocketPC/Windows Mobile, Symbian, PalmOS) each of which run on multiple hardware architectures. (PalmOS is only on ARM machines unless you count old m68k PalmOS smartphones, but I'm positive PPC/Windows Mobile supports at least 2-3 different CPU architectures and I believe Symbian does too.) Let's not forget the huge variety of "dumb" phones out there, where every manufacturer has their own custom OS and chances are that even compatibility of malware between a manufacturer's phones isn't guaranteed.
Yes there are hardware/software abstraction layers such as J2ME and (to some degree) BREW which allow an application to run on multiple manufacturer's phones, but both have varying degrees of sandboxing for those abstracted applications, and in the case of J2ME, compatibility STILL can't be guaranteed. (Look at the sites that offer Java games for mobile phones - Many of them have a slightly different download for every phone!)
Even if the phones didn't have ANY security features built into them at all, the heterogenous software/hardware environment that phone malware would have to live in presents large barriers to malware propagation.
Considering that the Symantec (specifically Norton) products preinstalled on my E1705 were the worst behaving (and most difficult to remove - in fact I couldn't completely and cleanly remove them) components of Dell's preinstall, the fact that they are leaving an antivirus in their preinstall doesn't really help much. Antivirus programs are notorious for causing performance problems.
Wonderful how Dell is charging you more to offer less. The hardware in the XPS M1710 isn't nearly good enough to justify the 1.5-2x price difference between a similar E1705 configuration (with the only difference being an Nvidia 7800GT vs. 7900GTX).
I haven't been able to figure out yet what major advantages NMM has (if any) over UPnP.
Whether it does or not, UPnP is a standard that is beginning to be widely supported by new PC software and embedded hardware devices, while NMM is going to be stillborn unless it can achieve the market penetration that UPnP has.
Who cares about network-oriented decentralized multimedia when nothing on the network except your PC supports it?
The KDE developers would be much better off focusing on improving UPnP support so that KDE can "play nice" with other devices/software coming on the market, and THEN start researching replacements for UPnP.
EN-MOU (Minute Only Usage) was phased out long ago. People who had MOU were grandfathered in and still have MOU, but new users will only have either Pay-Per-KB or one of the data packages.
I believe VZW TOS does forbid using the PDA/Smartphone Express Network plans with a PC.
I am not sure about other hardware, but hacked Bluetooth is the ONLY way to have tethered mode with a Treo 650 and a Mac. The T650 does not support DUN via the USB sync cable. While there is a third-party hack (PDANet) that enables this for the 600 and 650, it does not make the phone emulate a standard modem. As a result, special software is needed on both the phone AND on the PC, and currently PDANet is Windows-only.
There have been times in the past where desktop machines DID have CPUs that were soldered onto the motherboard. Compaq was notorious for this for a while. (Why? That connector costs a few bucks.)
(It may no longer be possible to do this with modern machines though.)
Um, Dell, you don't use AMD chips in any of your products. (I'm not counting Alienware here, since they were purchased long after AMD64 and EM64T came out.) AMD was the first company to release 64-bit extensions to IA32.
Dell also had nothing to do with IA64, considering Intel's primary partner for that was Dell's competitor HP.
They most definately do not use the same infrastructure.
UMTS operates in the 2.1 GHz band, which means that any UMTS installation will require new base stations and new antennas. In short, the entire infrastructure must be rebuilt from scratch.
Mapopolis uses Navtec data and so far my experience is that it is on par with DeLorme's road data, if not better. Both do such a good job that it's hard to tell.
Recent Garmin street mapping products derive their data from Navtec also, I believe. I know MapSource MetroGuide 5 did, even its non-Navtec predecessor MetroGuide 4 was pretty accurate, although a bit out of date. Not sure about the products that come with their Que packages. Garmin's user interfaces and maps are very good though from past experience, and I once met a person that had one of their integrated Que units and loved it.
Personally, if I didn't already have a Holux GPSlim236, I would seriously consider one of Garmin's Que packages. (The bad thing about Garmin's Que packages is that you must buy it with their Bluetooth receiver, which isn't as good as one based on a SiRF Star III chipset. Star III-based receivers have insane sensitivity, I can get signal locks in the middle of my apartment.) I didn't consider the Garmin GPS 10 package when I bought my GPS because at that point they only supported Windows Mobile and I have a PalmOS-based device. They do support PalmOS now, too late for me though.
Both TomTom and Lowrance MapCreate (the software for Lowrance's GPS receivers) use Tele-Atlas as their data source for roads and POIs.
Both of them have HORRIBLY inaccurate data. POIs will be often off by over a mile, and in some cases will not even be on the correct road. For example, TomTom thinks my local Pizza Hut is on an access road in the middle of a river. In one case I had TomTom route me one mile along a road and then make a U-turn, only to pass my initial starting point. (This road had no turn restrictions and was two-way. No, I didn't actually FOLLOW the route...) Both TomTom and Lowrance's software have incredibly annoying DRM that makes anything a chore even for a single average user. (For example, Lowrance requires a special USB SD card reader to work with their DRM. Forget about using your nice convenient built-in SD reader or a portable reader like the SanDisk MobileMate series - Lowrance's is HUGE. TomTom requires device-specific map activation, so if your device gets damaged or you upgrade, you're screwed.) I'll admit, I tried TomTom in a less-than-legal fashion, so a legit version might be improved, but research I've done indicates that this is not the case. I've seen a lot of similar complaints from people who bought the software and are out $150 on a nice-looking piece of junk with a great user interface. (Yes, TomTom's UI is light years ahead of anything else I've tried so far, but the data is so inaccurate that it doesn't matter. I could get better directions using a TIGER/Line dataset, and TIGER doesn't contain any information on turn restrictions and one-way roads! TomTom's turn restrictions and one-way info are just plain WRONG.)
Mapopolis doesn't have the best user interface, at least not on PalmOS. I don't know about WM5. The next-turn info takes up over half the screen, leaving little room for the actual map. On PalmOS devices, Mapopolis is barely aware of the 5-way nav pad, as a result there is no way to do most things without the stylus. (To be honest, TomTom is also touchscreen-intensive, but they make the icons and touch areas large enough for fingernail operation.) Unlike TomTom, Mapopolis allows for time-limited demos.
DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2006 Handheld has some great features and some major deficiencies. SA2006HH is by far the most compatible with the PalmOS 5-way nav pad. It used to have major compatibility problems with WM5, but DeLorme just released an update on Friday. DeLorme's data is by far the most accurate I have ever used. Unfortunately, their routing engine is pretty slow and their POI search engine is so slow that it might as well not exist. (To DeLorme's credit, TomTom's POI search engine is so inaccurate that it may as well not exist either.) SA2006HH also has the slowest map redraw of any of the handheld software packages I've used. SA2006HH's saving grace - it is the only package that supports topographic maps if you also buy DeLorme's Topo USA. TUSA is the best topographic mapping software I've used to date. TUSA 6.0 + SA2006HH costs less than TomTom ($99 for TUSA, $39 for SA2006HH. If you're already a DeLorme customer you can probably get a significant discount on those, most likely including if you purchase one and then the other once you've registered the first.)
So what do I use? DeLorme for hiking and geocaching, and I'm going to purchase Mapopolis for driving soon. I'll probably wait until this summer though, DeLorme usually releases new versions during late summer, so SA2007HH might come out with significant improvements then.
It's a protocol and modulation suite that happens to include a defined codec, often referred to simply as the "GSM codec", since it is the codec used by the GSM suite.
I'm 90% positive that the protocol for UMTS has no connection to GSM either.
In short, UMTS is an entirely different standard than GSM, the only thing in common is the name, as UMTS is considered "3G GSM". The protocol is different, and so is the underlying modulation. (In the case of changing to CDMA modulation, you have to change the protocol to take full advantage of the new modulation scheme.)
The merger is nowhere close to final for a multitude of reasons, and may not even happen. The two companies have agreed to merge, but they cannot until the FTC (and the French equivalent), plus possible other government entities, agree to the merger.
Given that the French and U.S. governments don't get along and both companies do a lot of government business, it is a very distinct possibility that the merger will not happen.
In short, the two companies are still independent of each other.
Well, Lucent has done quite a lot of splitting, so I guess the number could be down to 14k by now.
Back in the AT&T pre-trivestiture days, it was in the 35-40k+ count. Post AT&T-trivestiture, post-Avaya, and post-Agere, it could now be down to 14k.
For a long time, Bell Labs averaged 2-3 patents per DAY. And these were good, sensible, technical patents, not patents on double-clicking or junk like that.
People who expect to be involved with patent work at a company that understands the patent system well are expected to keep pretty thorough records of their work (notebooks signed and dated daily, for example), as a way of proving when something was actually invented.
These changes sound a lot like a variant of Flashblock to me.
Yeah, that's right, these changes that "worsen the user experience" are almost identical to the functionality of a rather popular Firefox extension.
I consider requiring user input to run ActiveX controls to be a Good Thing. Thank you Eolas for finally forcing MS to make drive-by malware autoinstallation more difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
My experience has been similar to yours. Most likely, Wal-Mart will offer:
Cheap hardware of inferior quality
Good quality hardware that can't compete in price with that which is available at major electronics retailers like Best Buy and Circuit City
Good quality hardware that can't even remotely compete in price with NewEgg.
Sadly, even the project's home page has spelling errors. I'd be willing to take a look at the project in the future if the original /. posting (which is full of blatant spelling and grammar errors) didn't come from a core developer of the project, but even the project's home page hasn't been checked for spelling or grammar errors at all.
I agree that a spellchecker is not the end-all of looking for mistakes (their vs. there and so on aren't caught), but for the developers of the project to put "developper" on their front page doesn't say much about their skill set.
Some companies are now selling products that can identify traffic in near real-time based on its contents.
i.e. it can automatically detect when you change your default BT ports.
Forget the DRM, do ratio enforcement where you pay, say, 50 cents for every 350M. (i.e. 50 cents per ep). There are plenty of solutions nowadays for setting up a tracker that restricts a person's access if they leech too much, simply add the ability to buy bandwidth and you have a commercial solution that has all of the advantages of BT but lets you make a profit.
Give people credit for uploading, essentially paying others for hosting your content by giving them credit towards further downloads. Maybe 50 cents per 350M down and 10 cents per 350M up.
Yes, people can in theory still copy and pirate the video, but if it's reasonably priced, easy to get, and CONSISTENT (so that someone can, for example, set up automatic downloading of new episodes) and people will pay for it.
No clue, but my experiences are:
Flash videos are usually pretty bad quality.
Anything meant to stream in realtime over normal last-mile connections will be crap quality.
UPnP isn't about multimedia?
I suggest you do a google search for djmount or Windows Media Connect.
UPnP may not be solely for multimedia, but it does contain a multimedia component called UPnP AV.
So what if phones do more?
One of the biggest problems in the PC world with respect to virus propagation has been the homgenous nature of desktop PCs. 90%+ of the desktops in the world (and a decent percentage of servers, especailly a very high percentage of servers in small businesses) are running one software architecture (Win32) on one hardware architecture (x86). This means that viruses don't encounter compatibility problems when trying to propagate.
In the mobile phone market, this is not the case. There are at least three major smartphone software architectures (PocketPC/Windows Mobile, Symbian, PalmOS) each of which run on multiple hardware architectures. (PalmOS is only on ARM machines unless you count old m68k PalmOS smartphones, but I'm positive PPC/Windows Mobile supports at least 2-3 different CPU architectures and I believe Symbian does too.) Let's not forget the huge variety of "dumb" phones out there, where every manufacturer has their own custom OS and chances are that even compatibility of malware between a manufacturer's phones isn't guaranteed.
Yes there are hardware/software abstraction layers such as J2ME and (to some degree) BREW which allow an application to run on multiple manufacturer's phones, but both have varying degrees of sandboxing for those abstracted applications, and in the case of J2ME, compatibility STILL can't be guaranteed. (Look at the sites that offer Java games for mobile phones - Many of them have a slightly different download for every phone!)
Even if the phones didn't have ANY security features built into them at all, the heterogenous software/hardware environment that phone malware would have to live in presents large barriers to malware propagation.
Given the recent article about the fake NEC, it isn't as funny as it seems.
Also keep in mind that ATM card/PIN farming is not unheard of.
Considering that the Symantec (specifically Norton) products preinstalled on my E1705 were the worst behaving (and most difficult to remove - in fact I couldn't completely and cleanly remove them) components of Dell's preinstall, the fact that they are leaving an antivirus in their preinstall doesn't really help much. Antivirus programs are notorious for causing performance problems.
Wonderful how Dell is charging you more to offer less. The hardware in the XPS M1710 isn't nearly good enough to justify the 1.5-2x price difference between a similar E1705 configuration (with the only difference being an Nvidia 7800GT vs. 7900GTX).
A clean E1705 would've been WONDERFUL.
I haven't been able to figure out yet what major advantages NMM has (if any) over UPnP.
Whether it does or not, UPnP is a standard that is beginning to be widely supported by new PC software and embedded hardware devices, while NMM is going to be stillborn unless it can achieve the market penetration that UPnP has.
Who cares about network-oriented decentralized multimedia when nothing on the network except your PC supports it?
The KDE developers would be much better off focusing on improving UPnP support so that KDE can "play nice" with other devices/software coming on the market, and THEN start researching replacements for UPnP.
EN-MOU (Minute Only Usage) was phased out long ago. People who had MOU were grandfathered in and still have MOU, but new users will only have either Pay-Per-KB or one of the data packages.
I believe VZW TOS does forbid using the PDA/Smartphone Express Network plans with a PC.
I am not sure about other hardware, but hacked Bluetooth is the ONLY way to have tethered mode with a Treo 650 and a Mac. The T650 does not support DUN via the USB sync cable. While there is a third-party hack (PDANet) that enables this for the 600 and 650, it does not make the phone emulate a standard modem. As a result, special software is needed on both the phone AND on the PC, and currently PDANet is Windows-only.
What brand and at what time was this?
There have been times in the past where desktop machines DID have CPUs that were soldered onto the motherboard. Compaq was notorious for this for a while. (Why? That connector costs a few bucks.)
(It may no longer be possible to do this with modern machines though.)
Um, Dell, you don't use AMD chips in any of your products. (I'm not counting Alienware here, since they were purchased long after AMD64 and EM64T came out.) AMD was the first company to release 64-bit extensions to IA32.
Dell also had nothing to do with IA64, considering Intel's primary partner for that was Dell's competitor HP.
95% of users have no need to trim the kernel to save a few K of memory.
The $100 computer project is developing an entire new hardware platform, I'm sure compiling a custom kernel won't be too difficult for them.
They most definately do not use the same infrastructure.
UMTS operates in the 2.1 GHz band, which means that any UMTS installation will require new base stations and new antennas. In short, the entire infrastructure must be rebuilt from scratch.
Mapopolis uses Navtec data and so far my experience is that it is on par with DeLorme's road data, if not better. Both do such a good job that it's hard to tell.
Recent Garmin street mapping products derive their data from Navtec also, I believe. I know MapSource MetroGuide 5 did, even its non-Navtec predecessor MetroGuide 4 was pretty accurate, although a bit out of date. Not sure about the products that come with their Que packages. Garmin's user interfaces and maps are very good though from past experience, and I once met a person that had one of their integrated Que units and loved it.
Personally, if I didn't already have a Holux GPSlim236, I would seriously consider one of Garmin's Que packages. (The bad thing about Garmin's Que packages is that you must buy it with their Bluetooth receiver, which isn't as good as one based on a SiRF Star III chipset. Star III-based receivers have insane sensitivity, I can get signal locks in the middle of my apartment.) I didn't consider the Garmin GPS 10 package when I bought my GPS because at that point they only supported Windows Mobile and I have a PalmOS-based device. They do support PalmOS now, too late for me though.
Both TomTom and Lowrance MapCreate (the software for Lowrance's GPS receivers) use Tele-Atlas as their data source for roads and POIs.
Both of them have HORRIBLY inaccurate data. POIs will be often off by over a mile, and in some cases will not even be on the correct road. For example, TomTom thinks my local Pizza Hut is on an access road in the middle of a river. In one case I had TomTom route me one mile along a road and then make a U-turn, only to pass my initial starting point. (This road had no turn restrictions and was two-way. No, I didn't actually FOLLOW the route...) Both TomTom and Lowrance's software have incredibly annoying DRM that makes anything a chore even for a single average user. (For example, Lowrance requires a special USB SD card reader to work with their DRM. Forget about using your nice convenient built-in SD reader or a portable reader like the SanDisk MobileMate series - Lowrance's is HUGE. TomTom requires device-specific map activation, so if your device gets damaged or you upgrade, you're screwed.) I'll admit, I tried TomTom in a less-than-legal fashion, so a legit version might be improved, but research I've done indicates that this is not the case. I've seen a lot of similar complaints from people who bought the software and are out $150 on a nice-looking piece of junk with a great user interface. (Yes, TomTom's UI is light years ahead of anything else I've tried so far, but the data is so inaccurate that it doesn't matter. I could get better directions using a TIGER/Line dataset, and TIGER doesn't contain any information on turn restrictions and one-way roads! TomTom's turn restrictions and one-way info are just plain WRONG.)
Mapopolis doesn't have the best user interface, at least not on PalmOS. I don't know about WM5. The next-turn info takes up over half the screen, leaving little room for the actual map. On PalmOS devices, Mapopolis is barely aware of the 5-way nav pad, as a result there is no way to do most things without the stylus. (To be honest, TomTom is also touchscreen-intensive, but they make the icons and touch areas large enough for fingernail operation.) Unlike TomTom, Mapopolis allows for time-limited demos.
DeLorme Street Atlas USA 2006 Handheld has some great features and some major deficiencies. SA2006HH is by far the most compatible with the PalmOS 5-way nav pad. It used to have major compatibility problems with WM5, but DeLorme just released an update on Friday. DeLorme's data is by far the most accurate I have ever used. Unfortunately, their routing engine is pretty slow and their POI search engine is so slow that it might as well not exist. (To DeLorme's credit, TomTom's POI search engine is so inaccurate that it may as well not exist either.) SA2006HH also has the slowest map redraw of any of the handheld software packages I've used. SA2006HH's saving grace - it is the only package that supports topographic maps if you also buy DeLorme's Topo USA. TUSA is the best topographic mapping software I've used to date. TUSA 6.0 + SA2006HH costs less than TomTom ($99 for TUSA, $39 for SA2006HH. If you're already a DeLorme customer you can probably get a significant discount on those, most likely including if you purchase one and then the other once you've registered the first.)
So what do I use? DeLorme for hiking and geocaching, and I'm going to purchase Mapopolis for driving soon. I'll probably wait until this summer though, DeLorme usually releases new versions during late summer, so SA2007HH might come out with significant improvements then.
It's a protocol and modulation suite that happens to include a defined codec, often referred to simply as the "GSM codec", since it is the codec used by the GSM suite.
Not quite correct.
I'm 90% positive that the protocol for UMTS has no connection to GSM either.
In short, UMTS is an entirely different standard than GSM, the only thing in common is the name, as UMTS is considered "3G GSM". The protocol is different, and so is the underlying modulation. (In the case of changing to CDMA modulation, you have to change the protocol to take full advantage of the new modulation scheme.)
Nextel is not GSM-based, they use Motorola iDEN, which is its own standard.
I believe that in terms of modulation schemes, iDEN is a close relative of GSM, and GSM phones are notorious for these problems.
The merger is nowhere close to final for a multitude of reasons, and may not even happen. The two companies have agreed to merge, but they cannot until the FTC (and the French equivalent), plus possible other government entities, agree to the merger.
Given that the French and U.S. governments don't get along and both companies do a lot of government business, it is a very distinct possibility that the merger will not happen.
In short, the two companies are still independent of each other.
Well, Lucent has done quite a lot of splitting, so I guess the number could be down to 14k by now.
Back in the AT&T pre-trivestiture days, it was in the 35-40k+ count. Post AT&T-trivestiture, post-Avaya, and post-Agere, it could now be down to 14k.
For a long time, Bell Labs averaged 2-3 patents per DAY. And these were good, sensible, technical patents, not patents on double-clicking or junk like that.
People who expect to be involved with patent work at a company that understands the patent system well are expected to keep pretty thorough records of their work (notebooks signed and dated daily, for example), as a way of proving when something was actually invented.
Backpacks for 17" machines are hard to come by.
That said, I just bought a Targus XL and it's VERY nice.
These changes sound a lot like a variant of Flashblock to me.
Yeah, that's right, these changes that "worsen the user experience" are almost identical to the functionality of a rather popular Firefox extension.
I consider requiring user input to run ActiveX controls to be a Good Thing. Thank you Eolas for finally forcing MS to make drive-by malware autoinstallation more difficult.