Kind of like ~1998, when manufacturers started shipping PCs with one stick of ram instead of two, no secondary cache, and HSP winmodems that ended up being half the real speed of the nominally-slower PCs they were supposed to replace. Rarely in computer history has there been a similar era when the performance of new computers was so *devastatingly* compromised for the sake of saving so little money. Granted, most of those PCs could be rescued by adding more ram and a $10 COAST module, but still... Jesus H. Christ... it was absolutely *criminal* what PC manufacturers did that year just to save a few bucks.
Windows 8's desktop mode also happens to be butt-ugly compared to Aero Glass. It's like Microsoft took everything they learned about putting a 3D graphics card to good use for desktop window acceleration and eye candy, then flushed it all down the toilet right around the time they finally started to get it right.
Fuck MetroModern. Unless Microsoft gives us back what we have now with Windows 7, Windows 7 will be the last Windows I ever run natively as my real operating system, and future versions will be in a VM under Linux. And if they ever take away my ability to reinstall Windows 7 and refuse to let me buy new copies, I'll be walking away from Windows entirely. When the day comes a few months from now that I'm ready to go buy a 3.8GHz+ i7 with 4-8 cores and pair it with 16 gigs and a 27" monitor flanked by a pair of ~20" monitors rotated into portrait mode, I'll be *damned* if I'm going to step backwards and settle for a new version of Windows that looks like someone ported Bob to Windows 3.1...
Real estate ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be. Remember, owning land (and buildings on it) has ongoing costs of its own... taxes, maintenance, fines for code-enforcement violations you might have never even been told about, etc. Yes, you can grow crops on farmland... and the break-even point where you've grown food with enough value to offset its acquisition and ongoing cost is a couple of decades down the road.
It's also questionable whether classic hyperinflation of freely-convertible currency could even happen anymore absent structural market problems due to something like war. In the past, part of the fuel behind hyperinflation was anticipation of higher prices caused by non-realtime pricing information. Stores marked things up in price on the assumption that they'd sell out anyway regardless, and would cost more to replace. People paid more because they didn't have time to spend their lives comparison-shopping. We now have the equivalent of reverse-arbitrage, courtesy of price search engines and vendors like Amazon.
The most likely outcome of future conditions that, in the past, would have led to hyperinflation is a scenario where traditional retail gets destroyed, and a few vertically-integrated vendors like Amazon open warehouse stores where you do your shopping online, pay electronically, then go to the warehouse and spend the next 5 hours trying to find the stuff you paid for strewn around the store (80-90% where it's supposed to be, and another 10-20% in various states of disorganization, damage, or non-virgin packaging, forcing you to decide whether to take the ones you found, or get the purchase price credited back and take your chances that tomorrow, it might cost more).
Goods with short shelf-lives and inelastic demand would tend to be very expensive, but goods with long shelf-lives or highly-elastic demand might even be cheaper than they are now. Bundle-pricing that practically forces you to buy stuff you don't really want is likely... you might prefer Viva paper towels over Bounty Basic and want 2 rolls, but if Bounty Basic costs $2/roll in pallets of 20 when purchased with a pallet of Charmin Ultra, but a single roll of Viva paper towels costs $7.49 (vs $5.99 for a single roll of Bounty Basic if you don't buy the whole pallet or buy it together with the pallet of Charmin Ultra), you're pretty much stuck with buying a pallet of $2/roll Bounty Basic whether you prefer Viva and/or smaller quantities or not.
The US went from being a bankrupt backwater to a wealthy superpower because it developed the infrastructure necessary to exploit its substantial resource wealth on a large scale (particularly railroads, but also oil), amidst IP laws that mostly looked the other way when American companies infringed upon foreign patents, and large-scale immigration that was an abundant source of cheap domestic labor.
Under those conditions, the US could have declared its currency to be backed by dogshit and gotten away with it. If anything, backing Dollars with dogshit would have been preferable. The gold standard *caused* at least two major depressions during the late 19th century, because the value of (and demand for) American goods & services exploded while the amount of gold in the possession of the US Treasury remained mostly constant. At least the volume of dogshit tends to increase at a linear rate over time... daily input correlates to daily output.;-)
Exactly, and that was the point that's important... more often than not, the companies lobbying the hardest for deregulation are the same ones fighting the hardest to excuse themselves from any mandates to provide any level of service, while simultaneously fighting to make sure that nobody *else* can provide the service/infrastructure they don't want to provide, either.
In a purely rational universe, AT&T's dream should BE for municipalities to shoulder the capital cost of laying fiber everywhere, so they could focus upon wireless and U-verse (providing bundled services via city-owned fiber). At the end of the day, AT&T still owns a shit ton of its own backhaul, has a strong bargaining position with content providers (at least, compared to Joe & Martha's Cable & Internet Company with 12,000 customers spread across a city the size of Atlanta), and has the billing infrastructure to process millions of (relatively) small bills per month, and negotiate better terms with Mastercard & Visa while it's at it. Ultimately, if cities went crazy laying their own fiber, AT&T itself would probably end up winning most of the bids to lay it, just because they already have the heavy equipment to do it cost-effectively, and own plenty of central office facilities that would be prime sites to sell to cities for fiber-termination, then maintain and operate under long-term contracts.
If you think it's hard to attract investment and develop industry amidst inflation, try doing it amidst even mild deflation. The moment currency begins deflating, investment grinds to a halt, because it ends up being safer and more profitable to just lock your cash in a vault and forget about it for a year. What, exactly, do you manufacture for sale when the ultimate retail value of whatever you make is likely to end up being less than the cost of manufacturing it in the first place? You can't spend $30,000 building cars that sell for $25,000 and expect to remain in business for long.
With deflation, any investment with a timeframe longer than "buy hot dogs and buns from Sam's club in the morning, and make sure they're all sold before the prices drop again" becomes extremely risky. Deflation makes long-term capital-intense investments nearly impossible to justify.
High inflation is bad, but it could be argued that sustained (but mild, stable, and predictable) inflation is required for an economy to work, and for currency to function as a medium of exchange rather than end up getting hoarded as a store of value in itself. Just look at Bitcoins... when the value was relatively stable around $10 or so per bitcoin, people began to actually use it as money. The moment its value began skyrocketing up to $100 and beyond, nobody spent them anymore because they didn't want to end up buying a $180,000 pizza like Adolph did;-) ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alc0gG0u48M )
> That means it is possible that if we lowered these burdens, we could see better broadband deployments.
Fine, but let's not forget the biggest and most important regulatory hurdle of all -- the ability for a new company to come in and build new infrastructure along public right-of-way. Deregulating a de-facto monopoly or duopoly is how you end up with neo-feudalism.
In this case, the role of government (local) is simple -- lay fiber from end users to a few locations where any third party can purchase rack space for routers with backup power on fair, open, and neutral terms that are enough to cover the city's costs and upcoming maintenance, then step back and let private companies handle the rest. The City shouldn't be the ISP, nor should it be the cable company. Do the part smaller companies can't do for themselves (lay, own, and maintain the actual fiber through the public right of way), then get out of the way and let private companies handle everything else. With open access and barriers to entry lowered to the point where anyone with $100k to invest can start an ISP, it barely *matters* how evil AT&T might try to be, because almost anybody can laugh and do an end run around them.
Errrrr... I wouldn't go that far. Circa 2002, a high-end best-of-breed corporate laptop was a 500-800MHz P-III with 512mb. Just *try* watching a 1080p30 HD Youtube video on that. My 2GHz Thinkpad T61p can barely play 720p30 h.264 without falling flat on its face and gasping for breath. Anything can play 480p60 MPEG-2, but high-profile 720p60 and 1080p30/i60 h.264 can bring even mighty computers to their knees and leave them stuttering & dropping frames.
And don't even get me STARTED about Ajax and sites that try using Javascript to build the entire DOM from scratch in realtime. A site like Amazon (or Slashdot, in desktop mode, attempting to post) will bring even a Galaxy S3 to its knees & make the soft keyboard choke on every other touch.
^^^ Oh, and I forgot the other detail about gas shortages. Trucking gas in from more distant fuel depots isn't feasible, because hurricanes tend to hit in the middle of summer, when we're stuck with EPA-mandated fuel blends that differ between different metro areas. If BP or Shell sent tanker trucks from Tampa down to Miami or Fort Lauderdale the week after a hurricane with fuel intended for the Tampa-Orlando area, it would be a federal crime for gas stations in Miami or Fort Lauderdale to sell it (this was in the Miami Herald the week after Katrina, when a local journalist wanted to know why, exactly, every gas station south of West Palm Beach was sold out, and tanker trucks were parked at Port Everglades & sitting idle instead of driving up to Tampa or Jacksonville to fill up. The answer was, "It would be against the law". So, instead, individuals had to load up their own pickup trucks with empty gas cans & drive to Fort Pierce (the southernmost metro area where "Central Florida Blend" gas could legally be sold), then drive home with the equivalent of a 5-kiloton liquid bomb.
A robust power transmission network, for one thing. Half the time, even a little baby Category 1 hurricane can take down the power grid in a quarter of the state for days. Backup power is expensive to maintain on your own for something like a datacenter, and would be utterly prohibitive to try and maintain on your own to keep a factory open without commercial power.
There's also the matter of fuel for those generators... most of Florida has no natural gas service, and if we get two hurricanes a week apart (as happened in 2005 with Katrina and Rita), ships can't dock to resupply fuel depots, and gas stations start running out of gas sometime between days 5 and 8. And when a quarter of the residents are buying gas for both their own cars AND another 10-20 gallons per day for their generator at home, depleted gas supplies might start running out EVEN IF there isn't a second hurricane.
We have other problems, but reliable electricity is the big one. Florida has the power grid of a remote rural village in a poor third-world country.
People might *say* taxes and labor are huge factors, but if you look at the real world, things like environmental laws, lawsuit-risk, and legal compliance costs are bigger issues.
If your factory is in Texas and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, they'll get an injunction shutting down your production line and ordering you to surrender or destroy the goods. If your factory is in China and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, you can still probably save the day by shipping them to some other country that doesn't automatically follow the decisions of American patent lawsuits.
If your factory is in California or the EU, and your design depends upon some older component that isn't available/reliable/affordable in RoHS-compliant form, you won't just be prohibited from selling it there... they won't even allow you to MANUFACTURE it there for export to other states/countries.
Put another way, if you do your assembly work in the US, your risk is higher because there are more things that can disrupt your ability to manufacture, sell, or export your products... and more things that can go wrong to disrupt your supply chain.
That's not to say that China doesn't have its own problems (especially in the "sustained quality" department), and that's why countries with significantly higher labor costs and taxes than China, but looser regulatory climates (like Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia) have their manufacturing growing by leaps and bounds. It's why India has lots of call centers and software companies, but struggles to grow its manufacturing -- it has almost as much bureaucracy and legal risk as the US.
The most successful industry in India -- pharmaceuticals -- flourishes mainly because India has appropriate regulations to monitor safety and quality, but nevertheless doesn't blindly buy into American IP laws, so you can make drugs there that Americans would feel safe buying, but lawyers wouldn't allow you to manufacture in the US due to patents. India doesn't recognize "use" patents, only manufacturing-process patents; if somebody in the US gets a new use patent for some old drug in a new dosage, India says, 'that's nice, we'll be selling it next week because it's the same drug.' Ditto, for drugs that are still under patent, but somebody can find a significantly different way to manufacture. In America, you can patent the existence of a molecule. India only allows you to patent the steps that get you from some raw material TO that molecule.
In theory, Florida is a low tax state that should be the land of golden American opportunity for American manufacturing. In reality, our state infrastructure is shit, and the closest thing we have to an industry not related to tourism is limestone and phosphate mining. That's because industry requires infrastructure, and when a state or country doesn't have enough of the right kind of infrastructure to attract factories, the best it can hope for is a low-paying service economy whose only manufacturing comes from low-tech mining and export of the raw materials to somewhere else.
We need another variant of "turn signal" to indicate "I'm making a U-turn to the left (or Right, in left-driving rountries)". Like maybe alter the blink cadence so that if you move the turnsignal-stick one more notch further down (because you really, REALLY mean it when you say you're turning left), every second or third "on" cycle gets replaced by a fast double-blink. Maybe augment it with a few LEDs along the left side that move from front to rear in a marquee-like manner to make it abundantly clear to someone observing the car from the left.
This would be useful to warn drivers who are waiting to turn right that the car in the left-turn lane somewhat ahead of and to the right of them is, in fact, about to turn directly into their path if they proceed with the right turn without being careful.
Whoops... it looks like the celebration might have been a bit premature, and the Photon/Electrify/Atrix2 might still be firmly under Motorola's evil thumb. Unless, of course, THIS exploit ends up inspiring the discover of something similar on the Tegra2 phones (which, AFAIK, *are* built around the MSM 8960 baseband chips, though apparently not in quite the same way as the phones in the referenced article).
Yes, because it's *so* much safer to wrestle with a badly-refolded & unwieldy 3x5 foot sheet of wrinkled paper that has "AAA" printed on it and can't be pinch-zoomed to enlarge microscopic type...
Finally, I can pull my Photon out of the drawer I threw it into in a fit of rage almost a year ago, and let it have the useful Android afterlife denied to it by Motorola. The evil bastards at Moto gimped that poor phone so badly, it couldn't run ADK (despite theoretically having a sufficiently-new kernel... they went out of their way to exclude ADK support it from the kernel), and somehow managed to even have Issues(tm) with IOIO, which is probably the most compatible ADB-based hardware/io bridge you can GET for Android.
Motorola ruined it as a phone, but maybe it can at least be useful now as an embedded hardware controller with touchscreen and full complement of sensors. The sad thing is, had the MoPho been an open phone called the "Nexus M", I would have totally loved it, and lots of us would think Motorola was an awesome company instead of regarding them as the spawn of Satan, sitting at the right hand of Steve Jobs and playing footsie with Steve Ballmer under the table at a dinner party hosted by Verizon.;-)
> My point being, why upgrade the long haul transport when we can't get everyone on?
Because dark fiber isn't equally-available to network service providers. Lots of small, disruptive companies managed to buy up a couple of dark fibers in the days following Worldcom's collapse, before bigger companies snapped up most of the remainder to hoard and maintain scarcity. If a dozen small, disruptive companies that own a fiber or two apiece can make that one fiber do the work of 8, it really doesn't *matter* whether it would be cheaper to just use cheaper and simpler modulation methods on 8 dark fibers than to use exotic equipment to multiplex 8 times the data onto one. In the real world, if you aren't Verizon or AT&T, the cost of acquiring 7 more fibers is likely to be a lot higher than the cost of buying expensive electronics gear and stacking 8 times the data onto the one you already have.
Here's another example: back in the late 70s, the amount of money a big company with offices in New York and Chicago paid to MCI for a virtual trunk line connecting their PBX systems in the two cities was WAY more than what it cost AT&T to actually own and operate a comparable inercity trunk line.. but the amount charged by MCI was less than AT&T charged, and it ended up being several orders of magnitude cheaper for employees in New York to make Chicago calls by picking up their desk phone, connecting directly (via MCI) to their company's PBX in Chicago, hitting 9, and dialing the local Chicago number, than it would have been to have just directly placed a long-distance call through AT&T and paid their per-minute charges and taxes to make the call.
As my dad explained it to me (he used to work for MCI), it was technically against AT&T's TOS back then to run your own intercity bridge and use a PBX in one city to make calls from another... but the Carterfone decision made AT&T's authority to dictate such terms legally questionable, the FCC was in no mood to enforce such terms anyway, by the time the feds started to care about lost excise tax revenue even medium-sized companies were doing it, and AT&T was hoping that if it quietly behaved itself and didn't cause a fuss, it might be able to avoid getting broken up. Later, MCI built switching centers where they allowed companies like IBM and Ford to just lease a colocated PBX (maintained by MCI) so they could purchase leased trunk lines into cities like Miami where they didn't have a direct presence, followed by a whole chain of incremental steps that allowed companies to share their local POP, trunk lines, and pool of local POTS lines with other companies, until finally MCI just started offering outright bulk prepaid long-distance service to companies. At that point, you still had to jump through hoops that basically boiled down to "dial a local number to connect to a local PBX, dial the desired number, let the system switch you over via private trunk lines to the destination city's PBX, which connected you to a local phone line, dialed the local number on your behalf, and connected you to it"... but it worked, and allowed large (and eventually, medium-sized, gradually extending to smaller) companies to place long-distance calls for a fraction of what AT&T charged.
Put another way, the way disruptive companies like MCI did an end run around AT&T was more expensive than the internal efficiencies enjoyed by AT&T, but ended up being cheaper for end users because AT&T didn't pass those efficiencies along, and instead milked them for every mononopolistic rent-seeking penny they could. The same is true with fiber. If you own a fiber and can use it however you please, being able to multiply its capacity is HUGELY disruptive to larger companies whose business plan is to maintain artificial scarcity and keep prices high.
More importantly, much of the local impetus comes from disruptive companies like Google who have more backhaul than they know what to do with who then turn around and make it available to end users in a cit
Flash media, by Sandisk's own reckoning in one of their white papers, has a realistic lifespan of about 10 years (roughly 5 years until the first unrecoverable read error for MLC media, roughly 15 years until the first unrecoverable read error for SLC media, with both unlikely to be directly-readable by any consumer operating system due to accumulated errors after ~20 years and require professional data recovery (SLC takes longer to get to its first hard error, but once the avalanche begins, it accelerates until SLC becomes as unreadable as MLC). Remember, flash media is like a leaky bucket that starts to drip the day you format it. Flash is absolutely NOT even REMOTELY close to being a passive long-term archival medium. The only thing we have RIGHT NOW that can be remotely considered suitable for long-term passive archival storage in the consumer realm are non-LTH BD-R discs.
Has anybody ever reverse-engineered the Scansnap protocol, or at least come up with some way for people like us to either launch their.exe (or maybe use one of their.dlls directly) to tell the scanner, "Scan everything in the feeder as a 300dpi double-sided grayscale.jpg with filenames that follow ${some-template}, then let me know when you're done and how many pages you actually scanned?"
I hate... Hate... HATE the software that came with my ScanSnap FI-5110EOX2, because it makes it a total pain to do anything that resembles bulk scanning. I have crates of old stuff I'd love to scan and toss, but they make it so fsck'ing cumbersome, with so much realtime babysitting required, I've never gotten around to ever making a dent in the mountain. There's no fast & easy way to verify if a page mis-scanned, or two pages stuck together, or whatever, without actually stopping to load the pdf it just created and look at every page. I've wished on countless times I could just count the pages, stick them in the feeder, tell it how many pages it should find in the feeder, and tell it to go... and notify me immediately if the number it finds doesn't match the number I said were supposed to be there.
I could swear I remember a program from ~10 years ago (I think its name was something like MagicDesk or something) that could actually do intelligent human-guided document recognition. Basically, you'd scan a document. If it had no idea what it was, you could tell it, "This is a Capital One bill... look at (select rectangular area for logo) to recognize it as such, and look (select another rectangular area with account #) here to figure out which account it is, and look (select a third rectangular area where the date is). From what I remember, the program's fatal flaw was that it saved data in some proprietary format that couldn't be exported into anything useful, and (from what I remember) it didn't work on newer versions of Windows. The weird thing is, I don't think any program that ever came out since that time ever did anything comparable... and ${deity} knows, I've looked for one. When you have literally two dozen bankers' boxes of old stuff going back 10 years, scanning to one pdf document at a time just isn't going to cut it, nor is any workflow that requires major menu-navigation, dialog-swatting, and staring at a "busy, please wait" screen for a minute or more per document.
There *HAS* to be some better bulk-scanning workflow that lets you split up the scanning and identification/naming into two different parts... say, one part that focuses on scanning everything, with safeguards to avoid missed pages that basically just scans everything to a directory full of color or grayscale jpeg images, then a second step that makes it easy to assemble that directory full of sequentially-named images into coherent documents that you can then walk away from and let it chew on the files after giving it hints and identifying them.
The problem with most businesses is that they want to have their cake & eat it too... they want to get you to opt into paperless statements, but they don't want to allow you to fetch your statements via automated means. They just want to spam you monthly (or more), then make you go to their site, log in, and generally set things up to make it as hard to automate those logins as possible. If companies like CapitalOne and Chase would let you just give them your public key, encrypt your statements with it, and email them directly to you (or allow you to fetch them in some standard manner via a web service), I'd happily let them off the hook and go all-electronic. But I'll be damned if I'm going to settle for statements I have to go out of my way to obtain. At least printed statements can be tossed into a box and ignored for years unless I care enough to look at them, as opposed to ephemeral online statements that go bye-bye after 12 months.
One small detail to add... M-Disk is the best there is *if* you need or care about DVD-ROM compatibility, but for roughly the same price per disc, you can get non-LTH BD-R discs with roughly 5-6x the capacity. M-Disk is basically a non-LTH BD-R disc with the track geometry of a DVD-ROM. Either way, non-LTH BD-R and M-Disk are the way to go if you want long-term passive archivability (ie, the ability to write a disc, throw it in a box, forget about it for 25 years, and still be able to read it. While there aren't any guarantees that DVD or Blu-Ray will be mainstream 25 years from now, I'd feel pretty safe betting that someone will sell drives capable of reading them without drama, even if doing anything useful from that point requires a bit more work.
Non-LTH BD-R discs rock. They're by far the best long-term media we've ever had (well, with the possible exception of Magneto-Optical discs from ~10 years ago, which is basically what non-LTH BD-R discs *are*). LTH discs, though, are pure shit. They exist solely to enable factories to crank out BD-density media using the same unreliable organic dyes that we've been suffering with for ~15 years. They've gotten better, of course, since the first CD-Rs came out 15 years ago, but they aren't anywhere NEAR the same league as magneto-optical technology when it comes to archival stability (MO works by using the laser to melt & liquefy a substrate, then using a magnet to quickly orient reflective particles floating in the melted substrate before it re-solidifies for all eternity. Organic dyes start out light, then darken when burned by the laser... or sunlight... or possibly even slow chemical oxidation over time).
And in 2008, 99.9% of Nokia's phones were GPRS paperweights in the US, because they couldn't do 1700/2100 or 850/1900 MHz UMTS, and couldn't even do EDGE, which left uselessly-slow 9.6-19.2kbps as their only working option here. Nobody sane would have bought such a phone to use here.
Nokia's own sales reps at their Miami store admitted that the store's only purpose was to sell phones to visitors from Latin America. When their sales shift was over, and they were safely out of public view, the AT&T or T-mobile sim came out of their Nokia phone, and went back into their WinMo phone or Treo. Some used it to tether their Nokia via wi-fi, but as stand-alone American phones, Nokia phones were useless here.
Circa 2003, Nokia made a business decision to exit the US, and they suffered *dearly* for it by becoming de-facto nonexistent to most influential magazines, blogs, and web sites with international users that were based in the US.
To a company like HP, the real cost of Windows (Home, at least) is about $20-25... they pay ~$35 to Microsoft, but if they shipped it with Android, they'd have to pay $10 to Microsoft anyway.
Microsoft has only three things to blame for the piss poor sales of Windows 8 (and hardware that ships with it) -- themselves, Metro, and Windows 8 itself. If they'd left well enough alone, and allowed Windows 8 users to change one or two preferences settings and have Windows 7's look and feel back, just about everyone would have upgraded to it without a second thought.
OEMs can go with a long-term losing strategy of lower prices, or they can mount a direct assault on Apple the way Google did with the first Nexus One by raising the hardware bar to some point WAY above the level Apple is willing to allow. A shit netbook is no match for a Macbook. A notebook with 2560x1600 13.3-17" display would turn heads. A notebook with a non-chiclet keyboard that didn't utterly suck for anyone who knows how to type faster than 100wpm would get noticed. A notebook with a second display clamped onto the back of the main one for travel that's powered by a powered USB hub built into the laptop's own power brick would get a standing ovation.
A Macbook is not God's Chosen Computer -- there are plenty of ways to leave Apple in the dust hardware-wise. If you can't make a computer that's a 2/3mm thick laminated-glass slab like Apple, the solution isn't to make one that's 5/6mm thick and try to undercut Apple by $10. The solution is to say 'fuck Apple', make it an inch thick, give it a mechanical keyboard, and pack the empty space inside with 4 pounds of Lithium Ion gel that can run an i7 at full bore for 16 hours without breaking a sweat. Let the bitchy fashion queens who think the world begins and ends with Facebook have their credit-card thickness tablets with soft keyboards, and let people who use their computers to get real things done not be crippled.
Beware... mechanically, a Velociraptor is NOT "enterprise grade". If you try to treat one like it is, disable spin-down, and leave it spinning 24/7, there's a VERY high likelihood that it won't live to see its second birthday. Their build quality is probably a few notches above average consumer drives (which now seem to fail after 6-14 months when kept spinning 24/7), but they also tend to get run a lot harder than average consumer drives, and their failure rate among the nerd elite appears to be a LOT worse than enterprise-class 7200rpm drives. Storagereview.com has been tracking Velociraptor failure rates for years... and they're sobering.
If Microsoft doesn't back down and quit trying to cripple desktop PCs into second-rate tablets, Apple just might beat Microsoft for new desktop and laptop sales in some future year, too. Especially if PC hardware continues its relentless race to the crap commodity bottom & Apple can resist the urge to do the same with its hardware.
Don't laugh. Back in 2008. if you told a group of guys with Windows Mobile phones that it would be dead from Microsoft-induced suicide by 2010, you would have gotten laughed at. The original iPhone was a dumbed-down crippled toy by comparison, and Android was just a whispered rumor. Microsoft had a device that was largely dysfunctional for making voice calls, but one hell of a kick-ass pocket laptop with wireless internet access.Then, right around the time they finally started to look like they were learning how to make a phone... they pulled the plug.
Three years ago, Microsoft crawled from the Vista abyss and gave us Windows 7. The skies parted, the angels sang praises not heard since the midnight release parties of Windows95... then Microsoft threw it all away two years later in the wretched name of Metro.
Microsoft is proof-positive that corporate insanity (or alzheimer's) is real and exists. They're going to put themselves out of business, then wonder how they could have fallen so far, and so completely, in so little time. And if they don't, it'll only be due to thirdparty developers working tirelessly to give us the Windows we actually *want*.
Actually, it's the biggest flaw in American legal theory. In democratic countries that follow Napoleonic Law (guilty until proven innocent), it's understood by everybody -- including legislators -- that prosecutors wield ENORMOUS power of literally life and death, freedom and imprisonment. As a result, they have laws restraining prosecutors, and prosecutors themselves have both enormous discretion to not prosecute AND intentionally-limited resources to force them to prosecute wisely. In America, we have this cherished official ideal that everyone is innocent until proven guilty... except in practice, most people don't actually believe it despite pretending to pay lip service to it, and because we all officially buy into the fiction that the legal system is about bringing criminals (and ONLY criminals) to "justice", we give prosecutors nearly unlimited authority and resources to prosecute anyone for anything without real risk to themselves should they go overboard besides unemployment, then go a step further and subject them to a political culture that rewards prosecutors who are "tough on crime" and achieve a high conviction rate.
We have prosecutors who believe that it's OK to destroy someone's life throwing everything they have at them on the theory that a court will sort everything out, and lawmakers who give prosecutors sweeping powers in the belief that if they don't, somehow, someday, a pedophile ax murderer will sodomize an infant, then kill it, eat it for dinner, and go free unless prosecutors can pull off a "Hail Mary" pass and send him to prison for 25 years on a conviction for transporting an overdue library book across state lines.
The idea of innocence until proven guilty is fundamentally good... but our courts, legislators, and political bodies who pay the salaries of prosecutors need to come to terms with the fact that the reality rarely lives up to the ideal. One way might be for lawmakers to pass new, restrained laws going forward, and textually disambiguate them in a way that allows everyone "downstream" (prosecutors, courts, etc) to recognize laws without them as being unrevised relics from the era of "shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out" laws that need to be interpreted with a healthy dose of skepticism and restraint by everyone downstream. Off the top of my head, rotated (horizontal) CJK angle brackets come to mind as one unambiguous possibility, since they've never previously existed in English before (U+300C and U+300D... basically, "[" minus the bottom, and "]" minus the top). I'd illustrate them here, but Slashdot still can't deal with Unicode.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind of like ~1998, when manufacturers started shipping PCs with one stick of ram instead of two, no secondary cache, and HSP winmodems that ended up being half the real speed of the nominally-slower PCs they were supposed to replace. Rarely in computer history has there been a similar era when the performance of new computers was so *devastatingly* compromised for the sake of saving so little money. Granted, most of those PCs could be rescued by adding more ram and a $10 COAST module, but still... Jesus H. Christ... it was absolutely *criminal* what PC manufacturers did that year just to save a few bucks.
Windows 8's desktop mode also happens to be butt-ugly compared to Aero Glass. It's like Microsoft took everything they learned about putting a 3D graphics card to good use for desktop window acceleration and eye candy, then flushed it all down the toilet right around the time they finally started to get it right.
Fuck MetroModern. Unless Microsoft gives us back what we have now with Windows 7, Windows 7 will be the last Windows I ever run natively as my real operating system, and future versions will be in a VM under Linux. And if they ever take away my ability to reinstall Windows 7 and refuse to let me buy new copies, I'll be walking away from Windows entirely. When the day comes a few months from now that I'm ready to go buy a 3.8GHz+ i7 with 4-8 cores and pair it with 16 gigs and a 27" monitor flanked by a pair of ~20" monitors rotated into portrait mode, I'll be *damned* if I'm going to step backwards and settle for a new version of Windows that looks like someone ported Bob to Windows 3.1...
Real estate ownership isn't all it's cracked up to be. Remember, owning land (and buildings on it) has ongoing costs of its own... taxes, maintenance, fines for code-enforcement violations you might have never even been told about, etc. Yes, you can grow crops on farmland... and the break-even point where you've grown food with enough value to offset its acquisition and ongoing cost is a couple of decades down the road.
It's also questionable whether classic hyperinflation of freely-convertible currency could even happen anymore absent structural market problems due to something like war. In the past, part of the fuel behind hyperinflation was anticipation of higher prices caused by non-realtime pricing information. Stores marked things up in price on the assumption that they'd sell out anyway regardless, and would cost more to replace. People paid more because they didn't have time to spend their lives comparison-shopping. We now have the equivalent of reverse-arbitrage, courtesy of price search engines and vendors like Amazon.
The most likely outcome of future conditions that, in the past, would have led to hyperinflation is a scenario where traditional retail gets destroyed, and a few vertically-integrated vendors like Amazon open warehouse stores where you do your shopping online, pay electronically, then go to the warehouse and spend the next 5 hours trying to find the stuff you paid for strewn around the store (80-90% where it's supposed to be, and another 10-20% in various states of disorganization, damage, or non-virgin packaging, forcing you to decide whether to take the ones you found, or get the purchase price credited back and take your chances that tomorrow, it might cost more).
Goods with short shelf-lives and inelastic demand would tend to be very expensive, but goods with long shelf-lives or highly-elastic demand might even be cheaper than they are now. Bundle-pricing that practically forces you to buy stuff you don't really want is likely... you might prefer Viva paper towels over Bounty Basic and want 2 rolls, but if Bounty Basic costs $2/roll in pallets of 20 when purchased with a pallet of Charmin Ultra, but a single roll of Viva paper towels costs $7.49 (vs $5.99 for a single roll of Bounty Basic if you don't buy the whole pallet or buy it together with the pallet of Charmin Ultra), you're pretty much stuck with buying a pallet of $2/roll Bounty Basic whether you prefer Viva and/or smaller quantities or not.
The US went from being a bankrupt backwater to a wealthy superpower because it developed the infrastructure necessary to exploit its substantial resource wealth on a large scale (particularly railroads, but also oil), amidst IP laws that mostly looked the other way when American companies infringed upon foreign patents, and large-scale immigration that was an abundant source of cheap domestic labor.
Under those conditions, the US could have declared its currency to be backed by dogshit and gotten away with it. If anything, backing Dollars with dogshit would have been preferable. The gold standard *caused* at least two major depressions during the late 19th century, because the value of (and demand for) American goods & services exploded while the amount of gold in the possession of the US Treasury remained mostly constant. At least the volume of dogshit tends to increase at a linear rate over time... daily input correlates to daily output. ;-)
Exactly, and that was the point that's important... more often than not, the companies lobbying the hardest for deregulation are the same ones fighting the hardest to excuse themselves from any mandates to provide any level of service, while simultaneously fighting to make sure that nobody *else* can provide the service/infrastructure they don't want to provide, either.
In a purely rational universe, AT&T's dream should BE for municipalities to shoulder the capital cost of laying fiber everywhere, so they could focus upon wireless and U-verse (providing bundled services via city-owned fiber). At the end of the day, AT&T still owns a shit ton of its own backhaul, has a strong bargaining position with content providers (at least, compared to Joe & Martha's Cable & Internet Company with 12,000 customers spread across a city the size of Atlanta), and has the billing infrastructure to process millions of (relatively) small bills per month, and negotiate better terms with Mastercard & Visa while it's at it. Ultimately, if cities went crazy laying their own fiber, AT&T itself would probably end up winning most of the bids to lay it, just because they already have the heavy equipment to do it cost-effectively, and own plenty of central office facilities that would be prime sites to sell to cities for fiber-termination, then maintain and operate under long-term contracts.
If you think it's hard to attract investment and develop industry amidst inflation, try doing it amidst even mild deflation. The moment currency begins deflating, investment grinds to a halt, because it ends up being safer and more profitable to just lock your cash in a vault and forget about it for a year. What, exactly, do you manufacture for sale when the ultimate retail value of whatever you make is likely to end up being less than the cost of manufacturing it in the first place? You can't spend $30,000 building cars that sell for $25,000 and expect to remain in business for long.
With deflation, any investment with a timeframe longer than "buy hot dogs and buns from Sam's club in the morning, and make sure they're all sold before the prices drop again" becomes extremely risky. Deflation makes long-term capital-intense investments nearly impossible to justify.
High inflation is bad, but it could be argued that sustained (but mild, stable, and predictable) inflation is required for an economy to work, and for currency to function as a medium of exchange rather than end up getting hoarded as a store of value in itself. Just look at Bitcoins... when the value was relatively stable around $10 or so per bitcoin, people began to actually use it as money. The moment its value began skyrocketing up to $100 and beyond, nobody spent them anymore because they didn't want to end up buying a $180,000 pizza like Adolph did ;-) ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alc0gG0u48M )
> That means it is possible that if we lowered these burdens, we could see better broadband deployments.
Fine, but let's not forget the biggest and most important regulatory hurdle of all -- the ability for a new company to come in and build new infrastructure along public right-of-way. Deregulating a de-facto monopoly or duopoly is how you end up with neo-feudalism.
In this case, the role of government (local) is simple -- lay fiber from end users to a few locations where any third party can purchase rack space for routers with backup power on fair, open, and neutral terms that are enough to cover the city's costs and upcoming maintenance, then step back and let private companies handle the rest. The City shouldn't be the ISP, nor should it be the cable company. Do the part smaller companies can't do for themselves (lay, own, and maintain the actual fiber through the public right of way), then get out of the way and let private companies handle everything else. With open access and barriers to entry lowered to the point where anyone with $100k to invest can start an ISP, it barely *matters* how evil AT&T might try to be, because almost anybody can laugh and do an end run around them.
Errrrr... I wouldn't go that far. Circa 2002, a high-end best-of-breed corporate laptop was a 500-800MHz P-III with 512mb. Just *try* watching a 1080p30 HD Youtube video on that. My 2GHz Thinkpad T61p can barely play 720p30 h.264 without falling flat on its face and gasping for breath. Anything can play 480p60 MPEG-2, but high-profile 720p60 and 1080p30/i60 h.264 can bring even mighty computers to their knees and leave them stuttering & dropping frames.
And don't even get me STARTED about Ajax and sites that try using Javascript to build the entire DOM from scratch in realtime. A site like Amazon (or Slashdot, in desktop mode, attempting to post) will bring even a Galaxy S3 to its knees & make the soft keyboard choke on every other touch.
^^^ Oh, and I forgot the other detail about gas shortages. Trucking gas in from more distant fuel depots isn't feasible, because hurricanes tend to hit in the middle of summer, when we're stuck with EPA-mandated fuel blends that differ between different metro areas. If BP or Shell sent tanker trucks from Tampa down to Miami or Fort Lauderdale the week after a hurricane with fuel intended for the Tampa-Orlando area, it would be a federal crime for gas stations in Miami or Fort Lauderdale to sell it (this was in the Miami Herald the week after Katrina, when a local journalist wanted to know why, exactly, every gas station south of West Palm Beach was sold out, and tanker trucks were parked at Port Everglades & sitting idle instead of driving up to Tampa or Jacksonville to fill up. The answer was, "It would be against the law". So, instead, individuals had to load up their own pickup trucks with empty gas cans & drive to Fort Pierce (the southernmost metro area where "Central Florida Blend" gas could legally be sold), then drive home with the equivalent of a 5-kiloton liquid bomb.
A robust power transmission network, for one thing. Half the time, even a little baby Category 1 hurricane can take down the power grid in a quarter of the state for days. Backup power is expensive to maintain on your own for something like a datacenter, and would be utterly prohibitive to try and maintain on your own to keep a factory open without commercial power.
There's also the matter of fuel for those generators... most of Florida has no natural gas service, and if we get two hurricanes a week apart (as happened in 2005 with Katrina and Rita), ships can't dock to resupply fuel depots, and gas stations start running out of gas sometime between days 5 and 8. And when a quarter of the residents are buying gas for both their own cars AND another 10-20 gallons per day for their generator at home, depleted gas supplies might start running out EVEN IF there isn't a second hurricane.
We have other problems, but reliable electricity is the big one. Florida has the power grid of a remote rural village in a poor third-world country.
People might *say* taxes and labor are huge factors, but if you look at the real world, things like environmental laws, lawsuit-risk, and legal compliance costs are bigger issues.
If your factory is in Texas and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, they'll get an injunction shutting down your production line and ordering you to surrender or destroy the goods. If your factory is in China and a federal court in the US determines that your product infringes upon somebody's patent, you can still probably save the day by shipping them to some other country that doesn't automatically follow the decisions of American patent lawsuits.
If your factory is in California or the EU, and your design depends upon some older component that isn't available/reliable/affordable in RoHS-compliant form, you won't just be prohibited from selling it there... they won't even allow you to MANUFACTURE it there for export to other states/countries.
Put another way, if you do your assembly work in the US, your risk is higher because there are more things that can disrupt your ability to manufacture, sell, or export your products... and more things that can go wrong to disrupt your supply chain.
That's not to say that China doesn't have its own problems (especially in the "sustained quality" department), and that's why countries with significantly higher labor costs and taxes than China, but looser regulatory climates (like Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia) have their manufacturing growing by leaps and bounds. It's why India has lots of call centers and software companies, but struggles to grow its manufacturing -- it has almost as much bureaucracy and legal risk as the US.
The most successful industry in India -- pharmaceuticals -- flourishes mainly because India has appropriate regulations to monitor safety and quality, but nevertheless doesn't blindly buy into American IP laws, so you can make drugs there that Americans would feel safe buying, but lawyers wouldn't allow you to manufacture in the US due to patents. India doesn't recognize "use" patents, only manufacturing-process patents; if somebody in the US gets a new use patent for some old drug in a new dosage, India says, 'that's nice, we'll be selling it next week because it's the same drug.' Ditto, for drugs that are still under patent, but somebody can find a significantly different way to manufacture. In America, you can patent the existence of a molecule. India only allows you to patent the steps that get you from some raw material TO that molecule.
In theory, Florida is a low tax state that should be the land of golden American opportunity for American manufacturing. In reality, our state infrastructure is shit, and the closest thing we have to an industry not related to tourism is limestone and phosphate mining. That's because industry requires infrastructure, and when a state or country doesn't have enough of the right kind of infrastructure to attract factories, the best it can hope for is a low-paying service economy whose only manufacturing comes from low-tech mining and export of the raw materials to somewhere else.
We need another variant of "turn signal" to indicate "I'm making a U-turn to the left (or Right, in left-driving rountries)". Like maybe alter the blink cadence so that if you move the turnsignal-stick one more notch further down (because you really, REALLY mean it when you say you're turning left), every second or third "on" cycle gets replaced by a fast double-blink. Maybe augment it with a few LEDs along the left side that move from front to rear in a marquee-like manner to make it abundantly clear to someone observing the car from the left.
This would be useful to warn drivers who are waiting to turn right that the car in the left-turn lane somewhat ahead of and to the right of them is, in fact, about to turn directly into their path if they proceed with the right turn without being careful.
Whoops... it looks like the celebration might have been a bit premature, and the Photon/Electrify/Atrix2 might still be firmly under Motorola's evil thumb. Unless, of course, THIS exploit ends up inspiring the discover of something similar on the Tegra2 phones (which, AFAIK, *are* built around the MSM 8960 baseband chips, though apparently not in quite the same way as the phones in the referenced article).
Yes, because it's *so* much safer to wrestle with a badly-refolded & unwieldy 3x5 foot sheet of wrinkled paper that has "AAA" printed on it and can't be pinch-zoomed to enlarge microscopic type...
Finally, I can pull my Photon out of the drawer I threw it into in a fit of rage almost a year ago, and let it have the useful Android afterlife denied to it by Motorola. The evil bastards at Moto gimped that poor phone so badly, it couldn't run ADK (despite theoretically having a sufficiently-new kernel... they went out of their way to exclude ADK support it from the kernel), and somehow managed to even have Issues(tm) with IOIO, which is probably the most compatible ADB-based hardware/io bridge you can GET for Android.
Motorola ruined it as a phone, but maybe it can at least be useful now as an embedded hardware controller with touchscreen and full complement of sensors. The sad thing is, had the MoPho been an open phone called the "Nexus M", I would have totally loved it, and lots of us would think Motorola was an awesome company instead of regarding them as the spawn of Satan, sitting at the right hand of Steve Jobs and playing footsie with Steve Ballmer under the table at a dinner party hosted by Verizon. ;-)
> My point being, why upgrade the long haul transport when we can't get everyone on?
Because dark fiber isn't equally-available to network service providers. Lots of small, disruptive companies managed to buy up a couple of dark fibers in the days following Worldcom's collapse, before bigger companies snapped up most of the remainder to hoard and maintain scarcity. If a dozen small, disruptive companies that own a fiber or two apiece can make that one fiber do the work of 8, it really doesn't *matter* whether it would be cheaper to just use cheaper and simpler modulation methods on 8 dark fibers than to use exotic equipment to multiplex 8 times the data onto one. In the real world, if you aren't Verizon or AT&T, the cost of acquiring 7 more fibers is likely to be a lot higher than the cost of buying expensive electronics gear and stacking 8 times the data onto the one you already have.
Here's another example: back in the late 70s, the amount of money a big company with offices in New York and Chicago paid to MCI for a virtual trunk line connecting their PBX systems in the two cities was WAY more than what it cost AT&T to actually own and operate a comparable inercity trunk line.. but the amount charged by MCI was less than AT&T charged, and it ended up being several orders of magnitude cheaper for employees in New York to make Chicago calls by picking up their desk phone, connecting directly (via MCI) to their company's PBX in Chicago, hitting 9, and dialing the local Chicago number, than it would have been to have just directly placed a long-distance call through AT&T and paid their per-minute charges and taxes to make the call.
As my dad explained it to me (he used to work for MCI), it was technically against AT&T's TOS back then to run your own intercity bridge and use a PBX in one city to make calls from another... but the Carterfone decision made AT&T's authority to dictate such terms legally questionable, the FCC was in no mood to enforce such terms anyway, by the time the feds started to care about lost excise tax revenue even medium-sized companies were doing it, and AT&T was hoping that if it quietly behaved itself and didn't cause a fuss, it might be able to avoid getting broken up. Later, MCI built switching centers where they allowed companies like IBM and Ford to just lease a colocated PBX (maintained by MCI) so they could purchase leased trunk lines into cities like Miami where they didn't have a direct presence, followed by a whole chain of incremental steps that allowed companies to share their local POP, trunk lines, and pool of local POTS lines with other companies, until finally MCI just started offering outright bulk prepaid long-distance service to companies. At that point, you still had to jump through hoops that basically boiled down to "dial a local number to connect to a local PBX, dial the desired number, let the system switch you over via private trunk lines to the destination city's PBX, which connected you to a local phone line, dialed the local number on your behalf, and connected you to it"... but it worked, and allowed large (and eventually, medium-sized, gradually extending to smaller) companies to place long-distance calls for a fraction of what AT&T charged.
Put another way, the way disruptive companies like MCI did an end run around AT&T was more expensive than the internal efficiencies enjoyed by AT&T, but ended up being cheaper for end users because AT&T didn't pass those efficiencies along, and instead milked them for every mononopolistic rent-seeking penny they could. The same is true with fiber. If you own a fiber and can use it however you please, being able to multiply its capacity is HUGELY disruptive to larger companies whose business plan is to maintain artificial scarcity and keep prices high.
More importantly, much of the local impetus comes from disruptive companies like Google who have more backhaul than they know what to do with who then turn around and make it available to end users in a cit
Flash media, by Sandisk's own reckoning in one of their white papers, has a realistic lifespan of about 10 years (roughly 5 years until the first unrecoverable read error for MLC media, roughly 15 years until the first unrecoverable read error for SLC media, with both unlikely to be directly-readable by any consumer operating system due to accumulated errors after ~20 years and require professional data recovery (SLC takes longer to get to its first hard error, but once the avalanche begins, it accelerates until SLC becomes as unreadable as MLC). Remember, flash media is like a leaky bucket that starts to drip the day you format it. Flash is absolutely NOT even REMOTELY close to being a passive long-term archival medium. The only thing we have RIGHT NOW that can be remotely considered suitable for long-term passive archival storage in the consumer realm are non-LTH BD-R discs.
Has anybody ever reverse-engineered the Scansnap protocol, or at least come up with some way for people like us to either launch their .exe (or maybe use one of their .dlls directly) to tell the scanner, "Scan everything in the feeder as a 300dpi double-sided grayscale .jpg with filenames that follow ${some-template}, then let me know when you're done and how many pages you actually scanned?"
I hate... Hate... HATE the software that came with my ScanSnap FI-5110EOX2, because it makes it a total pain to do anything that resembles bulk scanning. I have crates of old stuff I'd love to scan and toss, but they make it so fsck'ing cumbersome, with so much realtime babysitting required, I've never gotten around to ever making a dent in the mountain. There's no fast & easy way to verify if a page mis-scanned, or two pages stuck together, or whatever, without actually stopping to load the pdf it just created and look at every page. I've wished on countless times I could just count the pages, stick them in the feeder, tell it how many pages it should find in the feeder, and tell it to go... and notify me immediately if the number it finds doesn't match the number I said were supposed to be there.
I could swear I remember a program from ~10 years ago (I think its name was something like MagicDesk or something) that could actually do intelligent human-guided document recognition. Basically, you'd scan a document. If it had no idea what it was, you could tell it, "This is a Capital One bill... look at (select rectangular area for logo) to recognize it as such, and look (select another rectangular area with account #) here to figure out which account it is, and look (select a third rectangular area where the date is). From what I remember, the program's fatal flaw was that it saved data in some proprietary format that couldn't be exported into anything useful, and (from what I remember) it didn't work on newer versions of Windows. The weird thing is, I don't think any program that ever came out since that time ever did anything comparable... and ${deity} knows, I've looked for one. When you have literally two dozen bankers' boxes of old stuff going back 10 years, scanning to one pdf document at a time just isn't going to cut it, nor is any workflow that requires major menu-navigation, dialog-swatting, and staring at a "busy, please wait" screen for a minute or more per document.
There *HAS* to be some better bulk-scanning workflow that lets you split up the scanning and identification/naming into two different parts... say, one part that focuses on scanning everything, with safeguards to avoid missed pages that basically just scans everything to a directory full of color or grayscale jpeg images, then a second step that makes it easy to assemble that directory full of sequentially-named images into coherent documents that you can then walk away from and let it chew on the files after giving it hints and identifying them.
The problem with most businesses is that they want to have their cake & eat it too... they want to get you to opt into paperless statements, but they don't want to allow you to fetch your statements via automated means. They just want to spam you monthly (or more), then make you go to their site, log in, and generally set things up to make it as hard to automate those logins as possible. If companies like CapitalOne and Chase would let you just give them your public key, encrypt your statements with it, and email them directly to you (or allow you to fetch them in some standard manner via a web service), I'd happily let them off the hook and go all-electronic. But I'll be damned if I'm going to settle for statements I have to go out of my way to obtain. At least printed statements can be tossed into a box and ignored for years unless I care enough to look at them, as opposed to ephemeral online statements that go bye-bye after 12 months.
One small detail to add... M-Disk is the best there is *if* you need or care about DVD-ROM compatibility, but for roughly the same price per disc, you can get non-LTH BD-R discs with roughly 5-6x the capacity. M-Disk is basically a non-LTH BD-R disc with the track geometry of a DVD-ROM. Either way, non-LTH BD-R and M-Disk are the way to go if you want long-term passive archivability (ie, the ability to write a disc, throw it in a box, forget about it for 25 years, and still be able to read it. While there aren't any guarantees that DVD or Blu-Ray will be mainstream 25 years from now, I'd feel pretty safe betting that someone will sell drives capable of reading them without drama, even if doing anything useful from that point requires a bit more work.
Non-LTH BD-R discs rock. They're by far the best long-term media we've ever had (well, with the possible exception of Magneto-Optical discs from ~10 years ago, which is basically what non-LTH BD-R discs *are*). LTH discs, though, are pure shit. They exist solely to enable factories to crank out BD-density media using the same unreliable organic dyes that we've been suffering with for ~15 years. They've gotten better, of course, since the first CD-Rs came out 15 years ago, but they aren't anywhere NEAR the same league as magneto-optical technology when it comes to archival stability (MO works by using the laser to melt & liquefy a substrate, then using a magnet to quickly orient reflective particles floating in the melted substrate before it re-solidifies for all eternity. Organic dyes start out light, then darken when burned by the laser... or sunlight... or possibly even slow chemical oxidation over time).
And in 2008, 99.9% of Nokia's phones were GPRS paperweights in the US, because they couldn't do 1700/2100 or 850/1900 MHz UMTS, and couldn't even do EDGE, which left uselessly-slow 9.6-19.2kbps as their only working option here. Nobody sane would have bought such a phone to use here.
Nokia's own sales reps at their Miami store admitted that the store's only purpose was to sell phones to visitors from Latin America. When their sales shift was over, and they were safely out of public view, the AT&T or T-mobile sim came out of their Nokia phone, and went back into their WinMo phone or Treo. Some used it to tether their Nokia via wi-fi, but as stand-alone American phones, Nokia phones were useless here.
Circa 2003, Nokia made a business decision to exit the US, and they suffered *dearly* for it by becoming de-facto nonexistent to most influential magazines, blogs, and web sites with international users that were based in the US.
To a company like HP, the real cost of Windows (Home, at least) is about $20-25... they pay ~$35 to Microsoft, but if they shipped it with Android, they'd have to pay $10 to Microsoft anyway.
Microsoft has only three things to blame for the piss poor sales of Windows 8 (and hardware that ships with it) -- themselves, Metro, and Windows 8 itself. If they'd left well enough alone, and allowed Windows 8 users to change one or two preferences settings and have Windows 7's look and feel back, just about everyone would have upgraded to it without a second thought.
OEMs can go with a long-term losing strategy of lower prices, or they can mount a direct assault on Apple the way Google did with the first Nexus One by raising the hardware bar to some point WAY above the level Apple is willing to allow. A shit netbook is no match for a Macbook. A notebook with 2560x1600 13.3-17" display would turn heads. A notebook with a non-chiclet keyboard that didn't utterly suck for anyone who knows how to type faster than 100wpm would get noticed. A notebook with a second display clamped onto the back of the main one for travel that's powered by a powered USB hub built into the laptop's own power brick would get a standing ovation.
A Macbook is not God's Chosen Computer -- there are plenty of ways to leave Apple in the dust hardware-wise. If you can't make a computer that's a 2/3mm thick laminated-glass slab like Apple, the solution isn't to make one that's 5/6mm thick and try to undercut Apple by $10. The solution is to say 'fuck Apple', make it an inch thick, give it a mechanical keyboard, and pack the empty space inside with 4 pounds of Lithium Ion gel that can run an i7 at full bore for 16 hours without breaking a sweat. Let the bitchy fashion queens who think the world begins and ends with Facebook have their credit-card thickness tablets with soft keyboards, and let people who use their computers to get real things done not be crippled.
Beware... mechanically, a Velociraptor is NOT "enterprise grade". If you try to treat one like it is, disable spin-down, and leave it spinning 24/7, there's a VERY high likelihood that it won't live to see its second birthday. Their build quality is probably a few notches above average consumer drives (which now seem to fail after 6-14 months when kept spinning 24/7), but they also tend to get run a lot harder than average consumer drives, and their failure rate among the nerd elite appears to be a LOT worse than enterprise-class 7200rpm drives. Storagereview.com has been tracking Velociraptor failure rates for years... and they're sobering.
If Microsoft doesn't back down and quit trying to cripple desktop PCs into second-rate tablets, Apple just might beat Microsoft for new desktop and laptop sales in some future year, too. Especially if PC hardware continues its relentless race to the crap commodity bottom & Apple can resist the urge to do the same with its hardware.
Don't laugh. Back in 2008. if you told a group of guys with Windows Mobile phones that it would be dead from Microsoft-induced suicide by 2010, you would have gotten laughed at. The original iPhone was a dumbed-down crippled toy by comparison, and Android was just a whispered rumor. Microsoft had a device that was largely dysfunctional for making voice calls, but one hell of a kick-ass pocket laptop with wireless internet access.Then, right around the time they finally started to look like they were learning how to make a phone... they pulled the plug.
Three years ago, Microsoft crawled from the Vista abyss and gave us Windows 7. The skies parted, the angels sang praises not heard since the midnight release parties of Windows95... then Microsoft threw it all away two years later in the wretched name of Metro.
Microsoft is proof-positive that corporate insanity (or alzheimer's) is real and exists. They're going to put themselves out of business, then wonder how they could have fallen so far, and so completely, in so little time. And if they don't, it'll only be due to thirdparty developers working tirelessly to give us the Windows we actually *want*.
Actually, it's the biggest flaw in American legal theory. In democratic countries that follow Napoleonic Law (guilty until proven innocent), it's understood by everybody -- including legislators -- that prosecutors wield ENORMOUS power of literally life and death, freedom and imprisonment. As a result, they have laws restraining prosecutors, and prosecutors themselves have both enormous discretion to not prosecute AND intentionally-limited resources to force them to prosecute wisely. In America, we have this cherished official ideal that everyone is innocent until proven guilty... except in practice, most people don't actually believe it despite pretending to pay lip service to it, and because we all officially buy into the fiction that the legal system is about bringing criminals (and ONLY criminals) to "justice", we give prosecutors nearly unlimited authority and resources to prosecute anyone for anything without real risk to themselves should they go overboard besides unemployment, then go a step further and subject them to a political culture that rewards prosecutors who are "tough on crime" and achieve a high conviction rate.
We have prosecutors who believe that it's OK to destroy someone's life throwing everything they have at them on the theory that a court will sort everything out, and lawmakers who give prosecutors sweeping powers in the belief that if they don't, somehow, someday, a pedophile ax murderer will sodomize an infant, then kill it, eat it for dinner, and go free unless prosecutors can pull off a "Hail Mary" pass and send him to prison for 25 years on a conviction for transporting an overdue library book across state lines.
The idea of innocence until proven guilty is fundamentally good... but our courts, legislators, and political bodies who pay the salaries of prosecutors need to come to terms with the fact that the reality rarely lives up to the ideal. One way might be for lawmakers to pass new, restrained laws going forward, and textually disambiguate them in a way that allows everyone "downstream" (prosecutors, courts, etc) to recognize laws without them as being unrevised relics from the era of "shoot 'em all, let God sort 'em out" laws that need to be interpreted with a healthy dose of skepticism and restraint by everyone downstream. Off the top of my head, rotated (horizontal) CJK angle brackets come to mind as one unambiguous possibility, since they've never previously existed in English before (U+300C and U+300D... basically, "[" minus the bottom, and "]" minus the top). I'd illustrate them here, but Slashdot still can't deal with Unicode.