I've just taken away my parents' PVR which was bought because their favourite TV programmes usually ran past their bed times - they never used it. The first major hurdle is that it required one set of glasses to see the legend on the remote control and a different set of glasses to read the menu on the TV. Not really a problem for navigating the TV - you remember eventually where the "channel up" and "channel down" buttons are, but the PVR interface actually required identifying speciific buttons for specific tasks (not just up/down/left/right/fire) in response to on-screen menus, so a non-starter. The PVR remote had two very similar red buttons - one for record and one the red teletext button - no end of confusion there, especially when you're trying to offer advice over the phone - and a selection of buttons with curious legends that could only be explained by reference to the handbook. Like other digital receivers it would pop up message occasionally about new channels or new firmware being available - but not in a way that explained what this might mean or what should be done. The UI was sluggish and so when they did press the right buttons often nothing would happen for a while, so they'd press the button again and suddently they'd get two keypresses registered and be confused about what had happened. The EPG was slow and awkward to navigate with no obvious way to go directly to a specific day or time so it was inconvenient to set up a recording of a programme for a few days hence.
You probably have electronic devices with similar issues and get along with them just fine. The real difference is that (some) elderly people don't actually see sufficient benefit in the device to put up with the poor implementation - they've lived long enough without them not to be in thrall to the technology. If it's easier to buy a cheap analogue travel alarm clock, stay up a bit later for the end of the TV programme or wait for it to come out on DVD then they will. It's not worth their effort to wrestle with technology for a marginal return.
The problem is not with old people - it's the rest of us who are prepared to accept poor usability because the gadget is shiny and will perform a neat trick if you learn how to treat it right.The problem won't go away because the current generation has grown up with technology - the stuff they grew up with is going to look quaint and bizarre in a few decades.
Because xPads are being sold primarily as media-consumption devices - handy personal TVs you can pick up when you feel like a quick burst of Hollywood. They make it easier to consume streaming video on impulse and so people who wouldn't sit in front of a PC to watch a movie will sit in bed watching their mobile device - more convenience = more use.
Real-time streaming also has requirements on network performance (in particular latency) that exceed torrent download. It's not just about the bitcount.
And, just to be cynical for a moment, you have to do something to justify to yourself the cost of your xPad, and what else are you going to do with it?
And, since it requires the Catalyst driver, I assume it's tied to X (like VDPAU) which means that integrating into something like DirectFB isn't going to be possible. As far as I can tell the APIs are not only different in detail but different in the way they are abstracted which means it's quite difficult to have them "work together" in any meaningful way.
Unfortunately, there's this thing called the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive which has been adopted by the EU and must be incorporated in some way into local law in all EU countries. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/video_regulation/
The directive is intended to put the regulation of "TV-like" services delivered over the Internet on the same basis as TV services delivered by traditional broadcast. This includes regulation of content (for balance as well as decency). The directive is not particularly clear on what a "TV-like" service is but does appear to cover non-linear services.
It's up to each country how they decide to enact the legislation, but I think you'll see more stuff like this popping up across Europe - particularly where the established media are in the control of politicians or the state.
Given that just about anyone with an opinion can start a video blog, I'm not sure exactly why the EU believes it needs to ensure the "proper" regulation of Internet-based services; perhaps traditional broadcasters are no longer able to control the political opinions available to their audiences and have been lobbying.
Early drafts of the Digital Economy Bill would have had all ISPs liable for data retention and, more onerously, require they could identify individual subscribers in the event of complaints about "illegal" downloading. Inability to comply would have meant the ISP taking full liability for their users actions. This would have been the end of collective Internet provision in a whole range of settings (hotels, cafes, managed business premises,...) where the costs of compliance would outweigh the revenue generated.
In its late stages, the bill was changed to exempt all but the larger ISPs from its provisions. Which is equally absurd because if you don't want your data retained and do want to download the latest Hollywood yawnfest then you sign up with one of the smaller ISPs.
Having hotels police the Internet is not really different to requiring them to have an old lady sitting on each landing noting the movement of people in and out of their rooms, a common practice in Eastern Europe back in the Cold War days.
... then how can the relatively-fast delployment of DVB-T be explained in Europe (something which had to pass through much the same process).
The problems with DAB are technical (poor bandwidth utilisation meaning that, in the UK, at least, the quality of DAB is mostly worse than FM; insufficient transmitters; poor propagation), economic (cost of building additional transmitters at a time when commercial radio is declining), lack of demand and lack of suitable receivers (at a reasonable price, not eating batteries at an enormous rate, not requiring regular reboots and installed by default in cars).
It's the perfect example of a poor technical solution to an imaginary problem.
Whenever a new technology comes along some government functionary (often several at the same time) decide it will be a career-enhancing move to show how modern and cutting-edge they can be by splurging some of their departmental budget on it.
This is justified either as "pump priming" to help create new businesses specialising in the new technology or, if that won't wash, as a necessary step along the road to the "digital economy". The main goal is usually to ensure that a photograph results of said functionary or his patron standing next to something shiny.
The resulting project is either marketed as being ultimately self-sustaining (in other words the government is competing with the private businesses it is supposed to be assisting to develop a commercial service) or as a technology-proving ground (in other words the government is diverting private business from projects that might ultimately be self-sustaining to work on something that by definition is not).
Fortunately, in this case, it doesn't seem to have seriously impacted anything very much (certainly not in the way that government spending has distorted the web industry) . Merely wasting money to no effect is actually quite a good outcome compared with typical government exercises of this nature
When I entered University, it was only possible to take a one year course in Computer Science - it wasn't considered there was enough of it to warrant a longer course. You were expected to do something more academic first. After I completed a year of Engineering, they managed to find enough new material to extend the CS course to two years. Although the course material would now appear to be woefully dated at first sight (anyone still have a use for a detailed analysis of the Fortran spec from 1966?), it concentrated mainly on principles - algorithms, data structures, complexity, numerical analysis, OS fundamentals, compiler design - rather than on simply teaching a programming language.
There's a fair amount happened in CS since then (but rather less than most people seem to imagine) but those principles remain true and relevant.
As CS courses have grown, they seem to have turned CS from an academic subject into a training course for specific vendor products. This might get people jobs in the short term in a period of economic growth but it doesn't really prepare people for long terms jobs (as the products the know about become increasingly relegated to legacy status) or career progression. Despite the glut of CS graduates, I know many employers who find it next-to-impossible to hire people for other than IT grunt work. Although there's a perception that the computer industry is for young people who've grown up with the latest technology [anecdotal evidence alert] I know fewer CS grads now in their 50s who are short of work prospects than those in their 20s.
As far as I understand it, it's not an open standard at all in that it's not going to be available, even to purchase, without signing some sort of agreement on restricting its implementation.
Much as you don't get access to the Freesat or Freeview HD Huffman tables without signing up to the BBC (sorry, "industry"), restrictions on the products you can produce.
I realise it isn't entirely the BBC's fault that it's got a political mandate to create the fiction of an independent "meeja" industry in the UK, but it is disingenuous to pretend that it's promoting open standards or even innovating when all it's seeking to do is to carve out a chunk of money for self-appointed luvvies.
And indeed when I was at university back in the late '70s the time-sharing system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_%28computer%29) had a model of charging users (in "credits" rather than actual money) at a variable rate depending not only on the time of day but on a complex model that took into account historic usage patterns on different days of the week and times of the year.
If you wanted to do most of your CS project work during the day you had to do all your dataprep offline by punching it onto card or paper tape so you could save your peak-hour compute cycles for debugging...
... because Walmart cannot (yet) stop you buying the stuff it doesn't want you to have elsewhere.
Mind you, if you want to look at a penis on your iPad, just draw a large cock and balls on the screen with a Magic Marker. It's not as if you're going to be using it for much else...
It's really only a monopoly in emergency cases - if someone's bleeding to death you just want an ambulance to arrive, you're not going to send out a request to tender and wait for the best offer. And the way the system works in that case islargely a matter of public concern over the quality of the response.
If some part of society is receiving a poorer medical service than another part of society then there in an outcry about "postcode lotteries" in service provision; equality of treatment is considered important. The increased centralisation of the NHS and the imposition of uniform metrics (which may only relate tangentially to actual patient care) is a response to public demand.
The real issue is that there is no incentive to exceed the baseline metrics or to improve in areas which are not directly measured and the managers have developed a "compliance" mindset which simply involves ticking boxes. There's actually a fear that overriding "approved" systems might be seen as an attempt to rig the metrics.
For elective care you do have much more choice over the hospital in which you're treated although the local hospital trusts (much like US insurance companies) prefer you to be treated where they incur least cost.
If you do have private medical insurance in the UK (and, contrary to widespread US belief, you're perfectly entitled to it though it won't be much use in an emergency) you'll find the bureaucracy is far worse (you essentially have to get all your treatment pre-approved by your insurer down to the exact medical procedure) owing to the competition to drive down costs.
You can't sell an iPhone app unless Apple agrees. Someone doesn't like your app and writes a water-muddying letter to Apple. Apple doesn't like muddy water and pulls app from store. No other means of distribution. Geek squashed.
Ergo, don't buy an iPhone and don't produce apps for iPhones. Problem solved.
... the IPv4 address space has been "about" to run out. And indeed, the "officially" allocated address space is depleting, though the correlation between "allocated" and "necessarily in use" is tenuous.
However, even if the number of addresses available for "necessarily in use" interfaces were disappearing fast, it does not automatically follow that IPv6 is the solution.
The real drawback with IPv6 is that, as long as 32 bits are enough, there's no incentive to consider all the training/testing/form-filling that's required to deploy something you won't use - but unless everyone (or pretty much everyone) deploys it before a 33rd bit is inevitable, the "post apocalypse" guys on the network are in some sort of partitioned wilderness. You're not going to get a wide uptake of IPv6 by IPv4 users unless there's a real threat that their IPv4 address will stop working and that's not going to happen.
It's also not the case that we currently have a fully-connected and addressable network of endpoints. In fact it's pretty disconnected and some truly atrocious hacks are required to get application-layer protocols to deal with address-translated networks. IPv6 isn't going to make that go away.
It's much more likely that IPv4 will stay as a network access protocol and there'll be some further application-level hackery (faking DNS results to return temporarirly-assigned IPv4 addresses, etc) which allows the network to transition to a larger number of endpoints in an evolutionary fashion. It won't be entirely pretty, but at least it will be (humanly) possible.
Unfortunately, the more time people spend peddling the idea of IPv6 as a solution, the less time there'll be to cobble together the inevitable grubby hack.
Indeed. I overheard someone the other day saying to his colleague - "Windows Vista saves documents using some.docx format that XP doesn't understand".
If people can't distinguish between entirely separate product families, they can hardly be expected to distinguish between different versions of a single product.
Interestingly, though, failure to distinguish between Office and the OS is actually a *positive* for Microsoft in the sense of "owing the desktop", though perhaps a negative in the sense of getting people to realise that Office isn't in fact a freely-downloadable Vista add-on.
... these cards are widely used in physical access control systems: determining who is allowed into buildings or parts thereof. As one of the researchers explained today, part of the delay is to allow extra physical security to be deployed at sensitive locations.
I don't think anyone has started to calculate the potential cost of all this, though there are probably one or two lawyers ordering yacht catalogues...
"I thought the advantage of standards was to reduce divergence in systems"
Hardly. The CCITT (and later ISO) networking standards encompassed two separate flavours of network layer, 5 classes of transport protocol and a couple of protocol layers that no-one has ever had much need for. Implementation of those standards would pretty much guarantee divergence.
Standards are in the end created for vendors who want to sell implementations. Where multiple vendors are involved, the standard will be a messy compromise resulting from horse-trading over perceived entrenched advantages of particular companies in particular marketplaces.
In this case there's only one vendor involved essentially and the standard is not really implementable in its entirety by anyone else. So what? No-one else is obliged to implement it any more than Slashdot is obliged to run CCITT Transport Class 2 over X.25.
Standards aren't produced in an academic environment. People who work on them have to have their time and travel paid for - and their membership fees. They're there to sell product and in the end the dominant product will determine the dominant standard. It's naive to imagine anything else.
I think it's got more to do with awareness and analysis than destructivness.
I remember some years ago now gently trying to persuade a colleague that it was inappropriate to have forwarded the infamous Craig Shergold chain e-mail. Despite widespread publicity, the colleague absolutely refused to believe that there could be anything amiss and insisted I was being mean and cruel to deny the child (even by then cured and in his late teens) his "dying wish" and denounced my callousness to other co-workers.
There's an advertisement for an animal welfare organisation on British TV at present with pictures of pathetic looking dogs who have been badly beaten ("it's the worst case I've ever seen" says the voice-over) or "used as an ashtray". Finally, at the end of the advertisement the confession, "these are not real cases" - followed with a demand for money anyway, now the viewers have been "softened up".
Being a sucker for a sob-story isn't "constructive"; knowing that it can be exploited for social engineering isn't "destructive" - unless you regard human gullibility as a postive trait - though it sure can make you unpopular!
Provided you only intend to use the card for "Pay as you go" or a Travelcard of 7 days or fewer, you *should* not be required to register the card - simply pick it up at a ticket office (paying a deposit of GBP 3).
When London's congestion-charge cameras were introduced, the privacy of the recorded information was loudly proclaimed - now it's routinely shared with police: it was only a matter of time before Oyster was dragged into the net. Even using an anonymous Oyster card (if they continue to exist) topped up with cash will not allow you to hide - since every interaction with the transport system is timestamped, a simple CCTV crosscheck will provide a visual identification.
Potentially more worrying is the attitude of future govemernments to UK Biobank. At present they're trying to engage millions of UK citizens in an ongoing medical research programme tracking their health over decades and attempting to correlate it with lifestyle and genetic patterns (the latter courtesy of a retained blood sample). I can't really believe that a database containing the DNA of a sizeable proportion of the UK population is going to remain off-limits to the security services, despite Biobank's assertion that
We will not grant access to the police, the security services or to lawyers unless forced to do so by the courts . After all, think of the children. Just not the ones who might benefit from the medical research that privacy-conscious individuals might choose to opt out of...
It's possible to find DTV converter boxes in the UK (where we've just started switching off analogue transmitters) that cost less than $40 (even at the present rate of exchange), so are US retailers planning to give change?
I guess that owing to the lack of direct video/RGB input (the SCART aka Peritel aka EuroConnector), US converters will have the additional cost of an NTSC encoder and RF modulator, but otherwise the requirements are not dissimilar so it seems like there's a lot of fat in that pork barrel.
Slashdot Mirror
I've just taken away my parents' PVR which was bought because their favourite TV programmes usually ran past their bed times - they never used it. The first major hurdle is that it required one set of glasses to see the legend on the remote control and a different set of glasses to read the menu on the TV. Not really a problem for navigating the TV - you remember eventually where the "channel up" and "channel down" buttons are, but the PVR interface actually required identifying speciific buttons for specific tasks (not just up/down/left/right/fire) in response to on-screen menus, so a non-starter. The PVR remote had two very similar red buttons - one for record and one the red teletext button - no end of confusion there, especially when you're trying to offer advice over the phone - and a selection of buttons with curious legends that could only be explained by reference to the handbook. Like other digital receivers it would pop up message occasionally about new channels or new firmware being available - but not in a way that explained what this might mean or what should be done. The UI was sluggish and so when they did press the right buttons often nothing would happen for a while, so they'd press the button again and suddently they'd get two keypresses registered and be confused about what had happened. The EPG was slow and awkward to navigate with no obvious way to go directly to a specific day or time so it was inconvenient to set up a recording of a programme for a few days hence.
You probably have electronic devices with similar issues and get along with them just fine. The real difference is that (some) elderly people don't actually see sufficient benefit in the device to put up with the poor implementation - they've lived long enough without them not to be in thrall to the technology. If it's easier to buy a cheap analogue travel alarm clock, stay up a bit later for the end of the TV programme or wait for it to come out on DVD then they will. It's not worth their effort to wrestle with technology for a marginal return.
The problem is not with old people - it's the rest of us who are prepared to accept poor usability because the gadget is shiny and will perform a neat trick if you learn how to treat it right.The problem won't go away because the current generation has grown up with technology - the stuff they grew up with is going to look quaint and bizarre in a few decades.
Because xPads are being sold primarily as media-consumption devices - handy personal TVs you can pick up when you feel like a quick burst of Hollywood. They make it easier to consume streaming video on impulse and so people who wouldn't sit in front of a PC to watch a movie will sit in bed watching their mobile device - more convenience = more use.
Real-time streaming also has requirements on network performance (in particular latency) that exceed torrent download. It's not just about the bitcount.
And, just to be cynical for a moment, you have to do something to justify to yourself the cost of your xPad, and what else are you going to do with it?
And, since it requires the Catalyst driver, I assume it's tied to X (like VDPAU) which means that integrating into something like DirectFB isn't going to be possible. As far as I can tell the APIs are not only different in detail but different in the way they are abstracted which means it's quite difficult to have them "work together" in any meaningful way.
Unfortunately, there's this thing called the Audio-Visual Media Services Directive which has been adopted by the EU and must be incorporated in some way into local law in all EU countries. See http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/18/video_regulation/
The directive is intended to put the regulation of "TV-like" services delivered over the Internet on the same basis as TV services delivered by traditional broadcast. This includes regulation of content (for balance as well as decency). The directive is not particularly clear on what a "TV-like" service is but does appear to cover non-linear services.
It's up to each country how they decide to enact the legislation, but I think you'll see more stuff like this popping up across Europe - particularly where the established media are in the control of politicians or the state.
Given that just about anyone with an opinion can start a video blog, I'm not sure exactly why the EU believes it needs to ensure the "proper" regulation of Internet-based services; perhaps traditional broadcasters are no longer able to control the political opinions available to their audiences and have been lobbying.
No, following the end of "don't ask, don't tell", they'll be insisting that access to Grindr is essential for soldiers' "personal protection"...
Early drafts of the Digital Economy Bill would have had all ISPs liable for data retention and, more onerously, require they could identify individual subscribers in the event of complaints about "illegal" downloading. Inability to comply would have meant the ISP taking full liability for their users actions. This would have been the end of collective Internet provision in a whole range of settings (hotels, cafes, managed business premises,...) where the costs of compliance would outweigh the revenue generated.
In its late stages, the bill was changed to exempt all but the larger ISPs from its provisions. Which is equally absurd because if you don't want your data retained and do want to download the latest Hollywood yawnfest then you sign up with one of the smaller ISPs.
Having hotels police the Internet is not really different to requiring them to have an old lady sitting on each landing noting the movement of people in and out of their rooms, a common practice in Eastern Europe back in the Cold War days.
... then how can the relatively-fast delployment of DVB-T be explained in Europe (something which had to pass through much the same process).
The problems with DAB are technical (poor bandwidth utilisation meaning that, in the UK, at least, the quality of DAB is mostly worse than FM; insufficient transmitters; poor propagation), economic (cost of building additional transmitters at a time when commercial radio is declining), lack of demand and lack of suitable receivers (at a reasonable price, not eating batteries at an enormous rate, not requiring regular reboots and installed by default in cars).
It's the perfect example of a poor technical solution to an imaginary problem.
Whenever a new technology comes along some government functionary (often several at the same time) decide it will be a career-enhancing move to show how modern and cutting-edge they can be by splurging some of their departmental budget on it.
This is justified either as "pump priming" to help create new businesses specialising in the new technology or, if that won't wash, as a necessary step along the road to the "digital economy". The main goal is usually to ensure that a photograph results of said functionary or his patron standing next to something shiny.
The resulting project is either marketed as being ultimately self-sustaining (in other words the government is competing with the private businesses it is supposed to be assisting to develop a commercial service) or as a technology-proving ground (in other words the government is diverting private business from projects that might ultimately be self-sustaining to work on something that by definition is not).
Fortunately, in this case, it doesn't seem to have seriously impacted anything very much (certainly not in the way that government spending has distorted the web industry) . Merely wasting money to no effect is actually quite a good outcome compared with typical government exercises of this nature
When I entered University, it was only possible to take a one year course in Computer Science - it wasn't considered there was enough of it to warrant a longer course. You were expected to do something more academic first. After I completed a year of Engineering, they managed to find enough new material to extend the CS course to two years. Although the course material would now appear to be woefully dated at first sight (anyone still have a use for a detailed analysis of the Fortran spec from 1966?), it concentrated mainly on principles - algorithms, data structures, complexity, numerical analysis, OS fundamentals, compiler design - rather than on simply teaching a programming language.
There's a fair amount happened in CS since then (but rather less than most people seem to imagine) but those principles remain true and relevant.
As CS courses have grown, they seem to have turned CS from an academic subject into a training course for specific vendor products. This might get people jobs in the short term in a period of economic growth but it doesn't really prepare people for long terms jobs (as the products the know about become increasingly relegated to legacy status) or career progression. Despite the glut of CS graduates, I know many employers who find it next-to-impossible to hire people for other than IT grunt work. Although there's a perception that the computer industry is for young people who've grown up with the latest technology [anecdotal evidence alert] I know fewer CS grads now in their 50s who are short of work prospects than those in their 20s.
I think it's more likely to be:
Social networking site acquires "buddy" algorithm....
As far as I understand it, it's not an open standard at all in that it's not going to be available, even to purchase, without signing some sort of agreement on restricting its implementation.
Much as you don't get access to the Freesat or Freeview HD Huffman tables without signing up to the BBC (sorry, "industry"), restrictions on the products you can produce.
I realise it isn't entirely the BBC's fault that it's got a political mandate to create the fiction of an independent "meeja" industry in the UK, but it is disingenuous to pretend that it's promoting open standards or even innovating when all it's seeking to do is to carve out a chunk of money for self-appointed luvvies.
And indeed when I was at university back in the late '70s the time-sharing system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_%28computer%29) had a model of charging users (in "credits" rather than actual money) at a variable rate depending not only on the time of day but on a complex model that took into account historic usage patterns on different days of the week and times of the year.
If you wanted to do most of your CS project work during the day you had to do all your dataprep offline by punching it onto card or paper tape so you could save your peak-hour compute cycles for debugging...
... because Walmart cannot (yet) stop you buying the stuff it doesn't want you to have elsewhere.
Mind you, if you want to look at a penis on your iPad, just draw a large cock and balls on the screen with a Magic Marker. It's not as if you're going to be using it for much else...
There are no kilometers in Utah.
There may, however, be a kill-o-meter in Mountain View...
It's really only a monopoly in emergency cases - if someone's bleeding to death you just want an ambulance to arrive, you're not going to send out a request to tender and wait for the best offer. And the way the system works in that case islargely a matter of public concern over the quality of the response.
If some part of society is receiving a poorer medical service than another part of society then there in an outcry about "postcode lotteries" in service provision; equality of treatment is considered important. The increased centralisation of the NHS and the imposition of uniform metrics (which may only relate tangentially to actual patient care) is a response to public demand.
The real issue is that there is no incentive to exceed the baseline metrics or to improve in areas which are not directly measured and the managers have developed a "compliance" mindset which simply involves ticking boxes. There's actually a fear that overriding "approved" systems might be seen as an attempt to rig the metrics.
For elective care you do have much more choice over the hospital in which you're treated although the local hospital trusts (much like US insurance companies) prefer you to be treated where they incur least cost.
If you do have private medical insurance in the UK (and, contrary to widespread US belief, you're perfectly entitled to it though it won't be much use in an emergency) you'll find the bureaucracy is far worse (you essentially have to get all your treatment pre-approved by your insurer down to the exact medical procedure) owing to the competition to drive down costs.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxjet
And: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverjet
For possible answers to your question....
You can't sell an iPhone app unless Apple agrees. Someone doesn't like your app and writes a water-muddying letter to Apple. Apple doesn't like muddy water and pulls app from store. No other means of distribution. Geek squashed.
Ergo, don't buy an iPhone and don't produce apps for iPhones. Problem solved.
... the IPv4 address space has been "about" to run out. And indeed, the "officially" allocated address space is depleting, though the correlation between "allocated" and "necessarily in use" is tenuous.
However, even if the number of addresses available for "necessarily in use" interfaces were disappearing fast, it does not automatically follow that IPv6 is the solution.
The real drawback with IPv6 is that, as long as 32 bits are enough, there's no incentive to consider all the training/testing/form-filling that's required to deploy something you won't use - but unless everyone (or pretty much everyone) deploys it before a 33rd bit is inevitable, the "post apocalypse" guys on the network are in some sort of partitioned wilderness. You're not going to get a wide uptake of IPv6 by IPv4 users unless there's a real threat that their IPv4 address will stop working and that's not going to happen.
It's also not the case that we currently have a fully-connected and addressable network of endpoints. In fact it's pretty disconnected and some truly atrocious hacks are required to get application-layer protocols to deal with address-translated networks. IPv6 isn't going to make that go away.
It's much more likely that IPv4 will stay as a network access protocol and there'll be some further application-level hackery (faking DNS results to return temporarirly-assigned IPv4 addresses, etc) which allows the network to transition to a larger number of endpoints in an evolutionary fashion. It won't be entirely pretty, but at least it will be (humanly) possible.
Unfortunately, the more time people spend peddling the idea of IPv6 as a solution, the less time there'll be to cobble together the inevitable grubby hack.
Indeed. I overheard someone the other day saying to his colleague - "Windows Vista saves documents using some .docx format that XP doesn't understand".
If people can't distinguish between entirely separate product families, they can hardly be expected to distinguish between different versions of a single product.
Interestingly, though, failure to distinguish between Office and the OS is actually a *positive* for Microsoft in the sense of "owing the desktop", though perhaps a negative in the sense of getting people to realise that Office isn't in fact a freely-downloadable Vista add-on.
... these cards are widely used in physical access control systems: determining who is allowed into buildings or parts thereof. As one of the researchers explained today, part of the delay is to allow extra physical security to be deployed at sensitive locations. I don't think anyone has started to calculate the potential cost of all this, though there are probably one or two lawyers ordering yacht catalogues...
Hardly. The CCITT (and later ISO) networking standards encompassed two separate flavours of network layer, 5 classes of transport protocol and a couple of protocol layers that no-one has ever had much need for. Implementation of those standards would pretty much guarantee divergence.
Standards are in the end created for vendors who want to sell implementations. Where multiple vendors are involved, the standard will be a messy compromise resulting from horse-trading over perceived entrenched advantages of particular companies in particular marketplaces.
In this case there's only one vendor involved essentially and the standard is not really implementable in its entirety by anyone else. So what? No-one else is obliged to implement it any more than Slashdot is obliged to run CCITT Transport Class 2 over X.25.
Standards aren't produced in an academic environment. People who work on them have to have their time and travel paid for - and their membership fees. They're there to sell product and in the end the dominant product will determine the dominant standard. It's naive to imagine anything else.
I think it's got more to do with awareness and analysis than destructivness.
I remember some years ago now gently trying to persuade a colleague that it was inappropriate to have forwarded the infamous Craig Shergold chain e-mail. Despite widespread publicity, the colleague absolutely refused to believe that there could be anything amiss and insisted I was being mean and cruel to deny the child (even by then cured and in his late teens) his "dying wish" and denounced my callousness to other co-workers.
There's an advertisement for an animal welfare organisation on British TV at present with pictures of pathetic looking dogs who have been badly beaten ("it's the worst case I've ever seen" says the voice-over) or "used as an ashtray". Finally, at the end of the advertisement the confession, "these are not real cases" - followed with a demand for money anyway, now the viewers have been "softened up".
Being a sucker for a sob-story isn't "constructive"; knowing that it can be exploited for social engineering isn't "destructive" - unless you regard human gullibility as a postive trait - though it sure can make you unpopular!
Provided you only intend to use the card for "Pay as you go" or a Travelcard of 7 days or fewer, you *should* not be required to register the card - simply pick it up at a ticket office (paying a deposit of GBP 3).
Potentially more worrying is the attitude of future govemernments to UK Biobank. At present they're trying to engage millions of UK citizens in an ongoing medical research programme tracking their health over decades and attempting to correlate it with lifestyle and genetic patterns (the latter courtesy of a retained blood sample). I can't really believe that a database containing the DNA of a sizeable proportion of the UK population is going to remain off-limits to the security services, despite Biobank's assertion that
We will not grant access to the police, the security services or to lawyers unless forced to do so by the courts . After all, think of the children. Just not the ones who might benefit from the medical research that privacy-conscious individuals might choose to opt out of...It's possible to find DTV converter boxes in the UK (where we've just started switching off analogue transmitters) that cost less than $40 (even at the present rate of exchange), so are US retailers planning to give change? I guess that owing to the lack of direct video/RGB input (the SCART aka Peritel aka EuroConnector), US converters will have the additional cost of an NTSC encoder and RF modulator, but otherwise the requirements are not dissimilar so it seems like there's a lot of fat in that pork barrel.