The REAL problem is that as cheap, corner-cut bottom-dollar hardware becomes the ubiquitous norm, the cost of getting something even SLIGHTLY better begins to go up exponentially because Joe Sixpack and ten million of his friends are no longer absorbing most of its fixed costs. You end up in a situation like we have today, where the worst and cheapest of cheap hardware enjoys 99.997% of the economy-of-scale benefit, and the hardware YOU want to buy ends up costing 4-16 times as much, and isn't 4-16 times better. So, we end up with things like optical-disc players that literally and physically break after just a few months. 45" or larger LCD TVs that cost $400, but randomly die after 9-30 months and can't be meaningfully repaired because TV repair shops aren't staffed by EEs with hot air rework tools, service manuals barely exist & are often reverse-engineered, and it usually ends up costing more to pay someone to TRY and fix it (with no assurance of success) than to throw it to the curb and buy a new one, even if the actual problem is a cold solder joint somewhere.
Or, my pet peeve: the disappearance of proper deinterlacing chips, like Faroudja's DCDi that could somehow make ratty analog interlaced broadcast video look good, in favor of cheaper solutions that completely brutalize the quality of scaled 1080i60 video & anything that didn't start out as 24fps film.
Not to mention my other pet peeve -- "720p class" TVs whose specs are basically fraudulent & work by treating 1080i60 like fake 540p60, and hacking both fake 540p60 and 720p60 down to 480p60. Hint: any TV smaller than 32 inches advertised as "720p class" is VERY unlikely to actually have 1280x720 physical resolution (or better), unless it's explicitly advertised as having a 1366x768 "computer" mode. It completely blows my mind that it's even legal to advertise a panel having a physical resolution of 850x480 (give or take) as "720p class" just because it's capable of converting 720p60 and 1080i60 into something it can display on the fly instead of freaking out and displaying an error message. Or "720p60/1080p30" camcorders whose actual video quality looks like a $20 USB webcam, because they're feeding source video that's NOWHERE close to 1280x720, let alone 1920x1080, into a media processor ASIC, encoding it as 4mbit/sec h.264, and calling it "720p60" or "1080p30" just because that's its nominal encoding resolution.
IMHO, "spec inflation" is the biggest crime of all. If $80 camcorders were required by law to be advertised based on their image sensor resolution rather than their encoded output resolution & disclose their dynamic range at a given signal/noise ratio, and $99 19" TVs had to disclose their physically-addressable pixel resolutions & be advertised as 18.51" TVs, we wouldn't have nearly the problem we do now, because it would make their absence of quality more obvious. Unfortunately, manufacturers are now allowed to sell garbage disguised as real products, and simultaneously destroy the market for the real thing.
There's a guy (I think his name is Vic) at roombareview.com who can rebuild your fur-caked 400 series with new sealed bearings that aren't as vulnerable to cat hair. The 500-series 'pet' models come with sealed bearings out of the box.
Have you ever tried connecting a micro USB cable in the dark, or without stopping whatever you were doing and focusing 100% of your attention on it? EVERYONE hates that aspect of micro USB.
Sprint's wimax was a disappointment, but it's what made them tolerable while their EVDO service deteriorated to levels that would have been laughed at by someone paying 250 Rupees/month for unlimited 1xRTT 100kbps service in India. The fatal mistake made by Sprint's management, which I believe is going to cost them *dearly* over the next 12 months in terms of lost customers, was to throw away everything they gained with wimax by not giving us a year or two of phones with dual-mode LTE+wimax 4G radios. Had Sprint gone dual-standard for a year or two, they could have spent 2012 deploying LTE to cities without wimax and putting band-aids on their 3G, THEN worried about replacing wimax entirely with LTE. As it stands, a Sprint iPhone 5 STILL won't have reliable LTE in most parts of America before next summer, and Sprint is *hemorrhaging* Android customers who upgrade to a LTE-only phone, then leave Sprint in disgust before the return period expires and the really BIG ETF kicks in.
The chipsets exist, and cost about $5 in "Samsung quantity" more than LTE-only chips. Sprint just didn't want to keep paying Clear $5/month per wimax-enabled subscriber for service. Unfortunately for Sprint, that decision will likely turn out to have been penny-wise, and pound-foolish, because now they're losing subscribers left and right who won't be paying them anything *at all* going forward.
> Surviving on a planet without its own ecosystem, where the only way to stay alive over the long term is to maintain a high-technology industrial base is quite another.
People forget that the indigenous American tribes whose ancestors first colonized the western hemisphere *had* technology compared to, say, the first Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalis, and Homo Sapiens taking their first steps around the old world. How long do you think *anyone* --third-century Inuit or not -- would have survived in northern Canada without tools, fire, and warm clothing? Quite a few European colonists with arguably more sophisticated technology died anyway during the 16th Century because they lacked the domain-specific knowledge & technology of the Indians.
Yes, survival on Mars requires technology. So does survival in many places on Earth. How long do you think the population of Las Vegas would last without electricity if you built an impenetrable laser death fence around the state of Nevada to prevent their migration elsewhere? Or Yellowknife, for that matter? Even in places where survival without technology were technically possible, can you even *fathom* anything besides hopeless misery and despair someplace like Miami without modern technology?
Florida's indigenous tribes didn't die out because of European colonialism, they all died out because technological progress is impossible in a place that's so hot and miserable, all you can do is hang on & survive for 9 months out of the year, then scramble during the remaining 3 months to acquire enough food and supplies to get you through the 9 months when you can do little besides hide in the shade and be miserable. In cities like Miami, Rio, and Dubai, the line between "climate control" and "life support" is a lot blurrier than someone from a more temperate climate could ever really appreciate.
> if the children's inheritance is going to be a dying cesspool of a planet?
Endless whingeing by environmentalists aside, the planet is in WAY better shape today than it was circa, say, 1960. At least, in the US and Europe. You might have read somewhere about orange rivers in the US that used to catch on fire & burn, acrid air pollution throughout the northeastern US, factories that used to belch smoke into the air, etc. And the 1960s were a net IMPROVEMENT compared to, say, London or New York circa 1890, when city-dwellers walked around ankle-deep in horse poop and flies, choking under endless smog because people burned coal for heat and cooking & smokestacks were considered to be a sign of progress. And pollution in 1970s New York was *nothing* compared to the truly epic pollution everywhere within the former Soviet Bloc (including a certain nuclear power plant whose own designers thought the design was reckless and risky right from the start).
Sure, China and India are now where the US and Europe were about 50 years ago. And 50 years from now, there's a pretty good chance they'll have their own nutty environmentalists going bonkers about carbon even though the worst of the environmental pollution they (or at least their grandparents) remember from the early 2000s will be history, and Africa will be the planet's new industrial cesspool for a few decades.
Earth is far from being a cesspool. Parts of it, sure. But for the most part, the areas that were truly cesspools a hundred years ago are now rather expensive office space & apartments. Like, for example, Canary Wharf and Hell's Kitchen.
Assuming, of course, that the iPhone 5 can be meaningfully repaired by anyone, let alone end users. Apple seems to have a new fetish for assembling devices with glue instead of screws, and designing them to be thin-at-all-costs instead of... well... repairable for common forms of damage.
> I guess the author never heard of Sprint, which has unlimited plans and without data caps or throttling.
When your average EVDO speeds are 80-100kbps on a GOOD day, there's no need to cap or throttle. Someone did a study a few months ago comparing data speeds in South Florida, and even MetroPCS was faster than Sprint.
For a comparable example, look at the Raspberry Pi. On one hand, it's a cheap SBC intended to run Linux. But the SoC itself has huge parts without public documentation, and anybody trying to write open drivers for it is going to have a huge challenge ahead. For now, it's "Broadcom's buggy.ko binaries, or nothing at all."
It's probably safe to say that someone will almost certainly find a way to run Linux on this chip. What they probably WON'T be able to do is take advantage of the chip's full capabilities, and Linux running on it will always be crippled or compromised in some way (at least, until long after nearly everyone has ceased to care about this specific chip).
The difference is, if you tried doing it with a 32-bit alpha-blended desktop, VNC would have to shovel raw bitmaps over the network when you moved that semi-translucent terminal window that's partially-obscuring kEdit. RDP would just say, "move window XXX to a new origin of (x,y)", and all the alpha-blending window-translucency magic (and dropshadows, and everything else) would be rendered locally.
RDP between two computers running Windows works decently well over slow network connections, even with large displays and 32-bit alpha-blended eye candy. The same can't be said for VNC.
AFAIK, there are ways to connect to a Linux box "using" a RDP client, but at the nuts & bolts level, all they're doing is scraping bitmaps just like VNC and wrapping them in RDP to kludge it into working.
Their only advantage is that you can use the RDP client you already have instead of having to download and install a VNC client first.
OK, big, honest question... you have a computer running Mint 13 with Cinnamon. Or KDE, if it makes things easier. You want to connect to it over the LAN from a laptop running Windows using a win32 X server. What, exactly, is the proper way to do it? Is there any way to use X11 remotely in a RDP-like manner (passing primitives over the LAN instead of scraping bitmaps like VNC)? Or do you basically have to set up each and every single application you want to run remotely over X, and configure the Win32 X server to be your local window manager, font server, etc? I've been told that if you wanted to genuinely run Gnome or KDE remotely over X, you'd theoretically have to port KDE or Gnome to Windows, then integrate them locally into the win32 X server, and hand-configure the windows X server to mimic the look and feel of your desktop settings on the remote computer running Linux.
It seems like Linux (and by extension, X) has no real RDP-like middle ground between X and VNC that allows casual, adhoc remote desktop rendering without having to settle for bitmap-scraping.
What Nintendo really needs to do is make a family of kick-ass high-powered Android phones with proper game controls, then make them usable as game controls for the Wii-U.
I shouldn't take so much pleasure from Moto's misfortune, but fuck it. Motorola are evil bastards, and they deserve to burn for their crimes against Android and humanity. A company that burns with such pure evil, Google's had to send in the entire Vatican several times to try and exorcise the company's senior management... and had to guarantee the Pope himself tickets to Google IO for the next 5 years to get them to come back after the casualties they suffered during last month's attempt.
I'd be *thrilled* if there were a recall of my old Photon. It's been dead to me since Motorola cruelly locked its bootloader back in May, and I'd love to get a forced refund to buy some nice, new toys for my new, open, non-bootloader-locked Galaxy S3.
And if Apple tried to force the recall of my reflashed S3, they'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Or if you want to do it wholesale at top-quality, a $21 Chinese HDMI splitter (which, conveniently enough, will probably decrypt the HDCP protection, then not bother going to the trouble of re-encrypting it instead of just outputting DVI-with-HDMI-pinout), then feed it to a $85 FPGA dev board from eBay that's been programmed to capture a frame of pure pixel-addressed RGB data to sram before writing it out to microSD.
I own a Sharper Image vacuuming robot that would totally rock and beat my two Roombas like an unloved child, if its battery could manage to last for longer than 6-9 minutes. It's not a wimpy sweeper... it's a big, mean, dustbuster on wheels with REAL vacuum that can suck up a wad of cat hair from 2 feet away. I really wish I could come up with some way to retrofit a better power source onto it.
Yeah, I've considered mounting a pivoting rod to the ceiling fan like a big festoon and powering it directly with wires, and even contemplated replacing the battery pack with supercapacitors, and putting inductive-coupled charger coils under the carpet in strategic locations to give it a quick fill-up every few seconds as it runs. Know any Libyans with a spare RTG?;-)
I have two. Unfortunately, one of mine likes to catch big palmetto bugs (a gigantic semi-flying roach found in Florida) in her mouth, then runs through her special door into the house, races up the stairs, jumps up onto her daddy's bed, and spits them out to proudly demonstrate her hunting skills and offer her daddy a late night snack, which he inevitably declines...
You're forgetting the other side of the problem... the American public hates speed limits, but tolerates them precisely because enforcement isn't guaranteed. It allows drivers to rationalize their continued existence by discounting the likelihood that they themselves will fall victim to them, and ensures that when they do, others are buffered from their temporary opposition to speed limits by the same ability to rationalize that *other* people get tickets. Look at red light cameras. In states where tickets were nearly impossible to fight, public opposition ended up getting them removed. In states where tickets issued for technical violations can be successfully fought, there's not as much opposition. And jurisdictions where people believe they're used only to ticket people who literally and intentionally drive straight through them (as opposed to people who make right turns without coming to a complete and total stop for 3 seconds with no oncoming traffic, or who come to a stop 3 inches in front of a line painted into the pavement below a camera pointing straight down), there's a fair amount of support for them.
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who observed that the most effective way to get an unpopular law overturned is to enforce it rigorously. The more likely somebody is to get away with breaking it, the more likely they are to tolerate its continued existence.
Honda might be a Japanese company, but it builds so many cars in the US, it's a de-facto American automaker. Believe it or not, Honda sells cars in Japan that were manufactured in the US. It's partly a political publicity stunt that enables them to get tax benefits from the US and offset penalties they might otherwise have to pay, but it doesn't change the fact that there are Honda vehicles on the streets of Tokyo that were made in Ohio.
Surprisingly, the US sells a lot of high-quality raw materials and component parts to Chinese companies that build things for clients with zero tolerance for failure (like China's space program). If you want to buy a bolt with laser-etched serial number that can be traced and audited all the way back to the raw ore at the mine, you basically have one choice: buy American. European and Japanese companies have the same ability to manufacture it, but they lack the abundant natural resources of the US that enables American companies to do it for a fraction of the cost. It's a very niche market, but it's one where the US is likely to be dominant for a long time.
Absolute quality is a funny thing. It's surprisingly hard to get at *any* price, and a large part of its value comes from being able to trust that the supplier has controls in place to guarantee that quality. The only way a company in China can achieve that level of quality today is by eliminating other Chinese vendors from its supply chain so that its only variable is the quality of its own workers and factory (which, individually, can be every bit as good as the US, Europe, and Japan).
> While it is impressive that you can direct an application to use a remote display,
And yet, 99.999% of people who have to access a remote Linux system whose native desktop is KDE or Gnome end up having to use VNC to access it remotely, because X is such a violent bitch to use remotely, even over a LAN, that Linus Torvalds *himself* probably shudders at the thought of trying to do remote X from a computer running Windows, and would tell someone who suggested it for a 10-minute adhoc connection that they're completely insane.
In my experience, the biggest problem with trying to get X to work remotely is the fact that there's literally a thousand things that can go wrong, and no way to incrementally bootstrap it one baby step at a time, confirming that the usual things that cause problems are absolutely working before proceeding to the next step. It either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, your likelihood of effectively troubleshooting it and actually getting it to work in any reasonable amount of time is basically "nonexistent". If you don't have admin rights to the remote Linux box, it's basically a lost cause, because you'll never figure out what's actually going wrong.
Hell, just try to get a group of hardcore Linux users to even agree where the role of "Window Manager" rightfully BELONGS in a scenario where a Windows PC is running an X server and connecting to a remote Linux PC whose desktop environment is KDE or Gnome. My coworkers and I have had The Discussion over lunch countless times, and there's still no real consensus... or even consistency. Every few months, someone will feel masochistic and decide to try getting KDE or Gnome to work over remote X to Windows, beat themselves up for a few days, then give up and swear to god they'll never try again.
> If the kernel drivers can't be written because of trade secrets, patents and copyrights, then it's hardly > the fault of Linux that the hardware manufacturers are being arseholes.
Yes it is, because this isn't a new problem, IP laws aren't about to change, and everybody involved with kernel development knows the big hardware manufacturers have no intention of giving an inch of compromise. The kernel developers blame Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom for not being open. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom blame the kernel developers for being pedantic. End users, fucked at both ends, throw in the towel and install Windows.
It might not be desirable to bend over backwards to maintain eternal compatibility with 20 year old peripherals, but it's ENTIRELY reasonable for end users to feel entitled to have binary drivers that work today still work with the next kernel or two unless some horrible bug or vulnerability of the most urgent kind is discovered in the meantime.
This problem has been coming to a head for more than 15 years, and probably won't get solved until Google puts its foot down and gets a few of their employees to come up with some kind of thunking and abstraction layer that can be used to enable slightly old loadable kernel modules to keep working with at least one or two future kernels.
I can't speak for AT&T's non-LTE markets, but they rock in South Florida... especially compared to Sprint. Sprint has sucked beyond belief here for months, and we're still at least a few months away from the point where Sprint's LTE coverage will be at least as good as their current Wimax coverage. IActually, think we're still at least another month or two away from the first LTE towers even getting officially lit up.
Half the reason I left Sprint was because I hated my old phone (a crippled, bootloader-locked Motorola Photon) with a passion, and any new phone I could have possibly bought from Sprint would have been LTE-only and had no meaningful data service to speak of here. Around these parts, Sprint's 3G EVDO speeds are 80-120kbps when you're lucky, 40-60kbps in most places, and dip down into single-digit kbps rates at least a few times per week. Sprint's wimax speeds here aren't terrible (~4-6mbps down, 3-4mbps up), but most of the towers are too far apart to work properly if you're in a moving vehicle, and Sprint's management idiotically refused to give us at least one generation of top-tier Android phones with dual-mode wimax+LTE radios to smooth over the transiton.
Truth be told, I would have happily paid $249 for a Sprint Galaxy S3 with more expensive dual-mode wimax+LTE radio, especially if they stuck a real SIM card in it and enabled it to use GSM overseas as well. Instead, I ended up walking away from Sprint for at least the next two years, because I just couldn't live with them anymore.
Sprint should be very afraid right now. I wasn't the first in my circle of friends to leave. Over the past 3 months, 5 of my friends and coworkers upgraded to new Sprint LTE phones, got frustrated by their dysfunctional EVDO, and ended up returning their phones and leaving Sprint before it was too late to walk away without paying an ETF. I'm sure I won't be the last. Half my family members are ready to follow me to AT&T, especially after they found out how fast my data service is now.
Sure, Sprint might be 25-30mbps in scattered places once in while a few months from now, but I can *guarantee* that it's going to be AT LEAST a year, probably two, before somebody can get into his car in western Dade or Broward county, then drive downtown while enjoying 6-20mbps service every inch of the way like AT&T customers can in most parts of South Florida now.
I can't speak for other parts of the county, but with specific respect to Broward County, Florida, here's a pretty thorough analysis (compiled with lots of help from my friends over the past 3 weeks):
T-mobile: pretty consistently 6-15mbps just about everywhere. The worst speedtest scores I saw twice in a row were around 4mbps, but I did see 1-2mbps scores followed by 4-6mbps on a fairly regular basis. Most places were above 10mbps. They aren't "fast", but I'd say they're solidly usable. I really came close to going with Tmo, but AT&T's 26mbps speeds were just too intoxicating after years of Sprint famine. Plus, T-Mobile has poor coverage in my parents' neighborhood on the west coast of Florida, and didn't look very inspiring along Alligator Alley or the Turnpike between West Palm Beach and Orlando.
In terms of max speeds, AT&T and Verizon are both in a dead heat -- 26-28mbps.
Verizon's New York heritage shows... their coverage in downtown Fort Lauderdale & other dense areas east of I-95 is second to none, and usually 5-10mbps faster than AT&T. On the other hand, AT&T generally spanks Verizon out in suburbia, especially west of I-75 (where Verizon is almost totally still EVDO) and places like Coral Springs, Weston, Sunrise, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar. Both AT&T and Verizon seem to have pretty solid LTE coverage along I-75 and 595.
Slashdot Mirror
The REAL problem is that as cheap, corner-cut bottom-dollar hardware becomes the ubiquitous norm, the cost of getting something even SLIGHTLY better begins to go up exponentially because Joe Sixpack and ten million of his friends are no longer absorbing most of its fixed costs. You end up in a situation like we have today, where the worst and cheapest of cheap hardware enjoys 99.997% of the economy-of-scale benefit, and the hardware YOU want to buy ends up costing 4-16 times as much, and isn't 4-16 times better. So, we end up with things like optical-disc players that literally and physically break after just a few months. 45" or larger LCD TVs that cost $400, but randomly die after 9-30 months and can't be meaningfully repaired because TV repair shops aren't staffed by EEs with hot air rework tools, service manuals barely exist & are often reverse-engineered, and it usually ends up costing more to pay someone to TRY and fix it (with no assurance of success) than to throw it to the curb and buy a new one, even if the actual problem is a cold solder joint somewhere.
Or, my pet peeve: the disappearance of proper deinterlacing chips, like Faroudja's DCDi that could somehow make ratty analog interlaced broadcast video look good, in favor of cheaper solutions that completely brutalize the quality of scaled 1080i60 video & anything that didn't start out as 24fps film.
Not to mention my other pet peeve -- "720p class" TVs whose specs are basically fraudulent & work by treating 1080i60 like fake 540p60, and hacking both fake 540p60 and 720p60 down to 480p60. Hint: any TV smaller than 32 inches advertised as "720p class" is VERY unlikely to actually have 1280x720 physical resolution (or better), unless it's explicitly advertised as having a 1366x768 "computer" mode. It completely blows my mind that it's even legal to advertise a panel having a physical resolution of 850x480 (give or take) as "720p class" just because it's capable of converting 720p60 and 1080i60 into something it can display on the fly instead of freaking out and displaying an error message. Or "720p60/1080p30" camcorders whose actual video quality looks like a $20 USB webcam, because they're feeding source video that's NOWHERE close to 1280x720, let alone 1920x1080, into a media processor ASIC, encoding it as 4mbit/sec h.264, and calling it "720p60" or "1080p30" just because that's its nominal encoding resolution.
IMHO, "spec inflation" is the biggest crime of all. If $80 camcorders were required by law to be advertised based on their image sensor resolution rather than their encoded output resolution & disclose their dynamic range at a given signal/noise ratio, and $99 19" TVs had to disclose their physically-addressable pixel resolutions & be advertised as 18.51" TVs, we wouldn't have nearly the problem we do now, because it would make their absence of quality more obvious. Unfortunately, manufacturers are now allowed to sell garbage disguised as real products, and simultaneously destroy the market for the real thing.
There's a guy (I think his name is Vic) at roombareview.com who can rebuild your fur-caked 400 series with new sealed bearings that aren't as vulnerable to cat hair. The 500-series 'pet' models come with sealed bearings out of the box.
Have you ever tried connecting a micro USB cable in the dark, or without stopping whatever you were doing and focusing 100% of your attention on it? EVERYONE hates that aspect of micro USB.
Sprint's wimax was a disappointment, but it's what made them tolerable while their EVDO service deteriorated to levels that would have been laughed at by someone paying 250 Rupees/month for unlimited 1xRTT 100kbps service in India. The fatal mistake made by Sprint's management, which I believe is going to cost them *dearly* over the next 12 months in terms of lost customers, was to throw away everything they gained with wimax by not giving us a year or two of phones with dual-mode LTE+wimax 4G radios. Had Sprint gone dual-standard for a year or two, they could have spent 2012 deploying LTE to cities without wimax and putting band-aids on their 3G, THEN worried about replacing wimax entirely with LTE. As it stands, a Sprint iPhone 5 STILL won't have reliable LTE in most parts of America before next summer, and Sprint is *hemorrhaging* Android customers who upgrade to a LTE-only phone, then leave Sprint in disgust before the return period expires and the really BIG ETF kicks in.
The chipsets exist, and cost about $5 in "Samsung quantity" more than LTE-only chips. Sprint just didn't want to keep paying Clear $5/month per wimax-enabled subscriber for service. Unfortunately for Sprint, that decision will likely turn out to have been penny-wise, and pound-foolish, because now they're losing subscribers left and right who won't be paying them anything *at all* going forward.
> Surviving on a planet without its own ecosystem, where the only way to stay alive over the long term is to maintain a high-technology industrial base is quite another.
People forget that the indigenous American tribes whose ancestors first colonized the western hemisphere *had* technology compared to, say, the first Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalis, and Homo Sapiens taking their first steps around the old world. How long do you think *anyone* --third-century Inuit or not -- would have survived in northern Canada without tools, fire, and warm clothing? Quite a few European colonists with arguably more sophisticated technology died anyway during the 16th Century because they lacked the domain-specific knowledge & technology of the Indians.
Yes, survival on Mars requires technology. So does survival in many places on Earth. How long do you think the population of Las Vegas would last without electricity if you built an impenetrable laser death fence around the state of Nevada to prevent their migration elsewhere? Or Yellowknife, for that matter? Even in places where survival without technology were technically possible, can you even *fathom* anything besides hopeless misery and despair someplace like Miami without modern technology?
Florida's indigenous tribes didn't die out because of European colonialism, they all died out because technological progress is impossible in a place that's so hot and miserable, all you can do is hang on & survive for 9 months out of the year, then scramble during the remaining 3 months to acquire enough food and supplies to get you through the 9 months when you can do little besides hide in the shade and be miserable. In cities like Miami, Rio, and Dubai, the line between "climate control" and "life support" is a lot blurrier than someone from a more temperate climate could ever really appreciate.
> if the children's inheritance is going to be a dying cesspool of a planet?
Endless whingeing by environmentalists aside, the planet is in WAY better shape today than it was circa, say, 1960. At least, in the US and Europe. You might have read somewhere about orange rivers in the US that used to catch on fire & burn, acrid air pollution throughout the northeastern US, factories that used to belch smoke into the air, etc. And the 1960s were a net IMPROVEMENT compared to, say, London or New York circa 1890, when city-dwellers walked around ankle-deep in horse poop and flies, choking under endless smog because people burned coal for heat and cooking & smokestacks were considered to be a sign of progress. And pollution in 1970s New York was *nothing* compared to the truly epic pollution everywhere within the former Soviet Bloc (including a certain nuclear power plant whose own designers thought the design was reckless and risky right from the start).
Sure, China and India are now where the US and Europe were about 50 years ago. And 50 years from now, there's a pretty good chance they'll have their own nutty environmentalists going bonkers about carbon even though the worst of the environmental pollution they (or at least their grandparents) remember from the early 2000s will be history, and Africa will be the planet's new industrial cesspool for a few decades.
Earth is far from being a cesspool. Parts of it, sure. But for the most part, the areas that were truly cesspools a hundred years ago are now rather expensive office space & apartments. Like, for example, Canary Wharf and Hell's Kitchen.
Assuming, of course, that the iPhone 5 can be meaningfully repaired by anyone, let alone end users. Apple seems to have a new fetish for assembling devices with glue instead of screws, and designing them to be thin-at-all-costs instead of... well... repairable for common forms of damage.
> I guess the author never heard of Sprint, which has unlimited plans and without data caps or throttling.
When your average EVDO speeds are 80-100kbps on a GOOD day, there's no need to cap or throttle. Someone did a study a few months ago comparing data speeds in South Florida, and even MetroPCS was faster than Sprint.
For a comparable example, look at the Raspberry Pi. On one hand, it's a cheap SBC intended to run Linux. But the SoC itself has huge parts without public documentation, and anybody trying to write open drivers for it is going to have a huge challenge ahead. For now, it's "Broadcom's buggy .ko binaries, or nothing at all."
It's probably safe to say that someone will almost certainly find a way to run Linux on this chip. What they probably WON'T be able to do is take advantage of the chip's full capabilities, and Linux running on it will always be crippled or compromised in some way (at least, until long after nearly everyone has ceased to care about this specific chip).
The difference is, if you tried doing it with a 32-bit alpha-blended desktop, VNC would have to shovel raw bitmaps over the network when you moved that semi-translucent terminal window that's partially-obscuring kEdit. RDP would just say, "move window XXX to a new origin of (x,y)", and all the alpha-blending window-translucency magic (and dropshadows, and everything else) would be rendered locally.
RDP between two computers running Windows works decently well over slow network connections, even with large displays and 32-bit alpha-blended eye candy. The same can't be said for VNC.
AFAIK, there are ways to connect to a Linux box "using" a RDP client, but at the nuts & bolts level, all they're doing is scraping bitmaps just like VNC and wrapping them in RDP to kludge it into working.
Their only advantage is that you can use the RDP client you already have instead of having to download and install a VNC client first.
OK, big, honest question... you have a computer running Mint 13 with Cinnamon. Or KDE, if it makes things easier. You want to connect to it over the LAN from a laptop running Windows using a win32 X server. What, exactly, is the proper way to do it? Is there any way to use X11 remotely in a RDP-like manner (passing primitives over the LAN instead of scraping bitmaps like VNC)? Or do you basically have to set up each and every single application you want to run remotely over X, and configure the Win32 X server to be your local window manager, font server, etc? I've been told that if you wanted to genuinely run Gnome or KDE remotely over X, you'd theoretically have to port KDE or Gnome to Windows, then integrate them locally into the win32 X server, and hand-configure the windows X server to mimic the look and feel of your desktop settings on the remote computer running Linux.
It seems like Linux (and by extension, X) has no real RDP-like middle ground between X and VNC that allows casual, adhoc remote desktop rendering without having to settle for bitmap-scraping.
What Nintendo really needs to do is make a family of kick-ass high-powered Android phones with proper game controls, then make them usable as game controls for the Wii-U.
I shouldn't take so much pleasure from Moto's misfortune, but fuck it. Motorola are evil bastards, and they deserve to burn for their crimes against Android and humanity. A company that burns with such pure evil, Google's had to send in the entire Vatican several times to try and exorcise the company's senior management... and had to guarantee the Pope himself tickets to Google IO for the next 5 years to get them to come back after the casualties they suffered during last month's attempt.
I'd be *thrilled* if there were a recall of my old Photon. It's been dead to me since Motorola cruelly locked its bootloader back in May, and I'd love to get a forced refund to buy some nice, new toys for my new, open, non-bootloader-locked Galaxy S3.
And if Apple tried to force the recall of my reflashed S3, they'd have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.
Or if you want to do it wholesale at top-quality, a $21 Chinese HDMI splitter (which, conveniently enough, will probably decrypt the HDCP protection, then not bother going to the trouble of re-encrypting it instead of just outputting DVI-with-HDMI-pinout), then feed it to a $85 FPGA dev board from eBay that's been programmed to capture a frame of pure pixel-addressed RGB data to sram before writing it out to microSD.
I own a Sharper Image vacuuming robot that would totally rock and beat my two Roombas like an unloved child, if its battery could manage to last for longer than 6-9 minutes. It's not a wimpy sweeper... it's a big, mean, dustbuster on wheels with REAL vacuum that can suck up a wad of cat hair from 2 feet away. I really wish I could come up with some way to retrofit a better power source onto it.
Yeah, I've considered mounting a pivoting rod to the ceiling fan like a big festoon and powering it directly with wires, and even contemplated replacing the battery pack with supercapacitors, and putting inductive-coupled charger coils under the carpet in strategic locations to give it a quick fill-up every few seconds as it runs. Know any Libyans with a spare RTG? ;-)
I have two. Unfortunately, one of mine likes to catch big palmetto bugs (a gigantic semi-flying roach found in Florida) in her mouth, then runs through her special door into the house, races up the stairs, jumps up onto her daddy's bed, and spits them out to proudly demonstrate her hunting skills and offer her daddy a late night snack, which he inevitably declines...
You're forgetting the other side of the problem... the American public hates speed limits, but tolerates them precisely because enforcement isn't guaranteed. It allows drivers to rationalize their continued existence by discounting the likelihood that they themselves will fall victim to them, and ensures that when they do, others are buffered from their temporary opposition to speed limits by the same ability to rationalize that *other* people get tickets. Look at red light cameras. In states where tickets were nearly impossible to fight, public opposition ended up getting them removed. In states where tickets issued for technical violations can be successfully fought, there's not as much opposition. And jurisdictions where people believe they're used only to ticket people who literally and intentionally drive straight through them (as opposed to people who make right turns without coming to a complete and total stop for 3 seconds with no oncoming traffic, or who come to a stop 3 inches in front of a line painted into the pavement below a camera pointing straight down), there's a fair amount of support for them.
I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who observed that the most effective way to get an unpopular law overturned is to enforce it rigorously. The more likely somebody is to get away with breaking it, the more likely they are to tolerate its continued existence.
Honda might be a Japanese company, but it builds so many cars in the US, it's a de-facto American automaker. Believe it or not, Honda sells cars in Japan that were manufactured in the US. It's partly a political publicity stunt that enables them to get tax benefits from the US and offset penalties they might otherwise have to pay, but it doesn't change the fact that there are Honda vehicles on the streets of Tokyo that were made in Ohio.
Surprisingly, the US sells a lot of high-quality raw materials and component parts to Chinese companies that build things for clients with zero tolerance for failure (like China's space program). If you want to buy a bolt with laser-etched serial number that can be traced and audited all the way back to the raw ore at the mine, you basically have one choice: buy American. European and Japanese companies have the same ability to manufacture it, but they lack the abundant natural resources of the US that enables American companies to do it for a fraction of the cost. It's a very niche market, but it's one where the US is likely to be dominant for a long time.
Absolute quality is a funny thing. It's surprisingly hard to get at *any* price, and a large part of its value comes from being able to trust that the supplier has controls in place to guarantee that quality. The only way a company in China can achieve that level of quality today is by eliminating other Chinese vendors from its supply chain so that its only variable is the quality of its own workers and factory (which, individually, can be every bit as good as the US, Europe, and Japan).
> While it is impressive that you can direct an application to use a remote display,
And yet, 99.999% of people who have to access a remote Linux system whose native desktop is KDE or Gnome end up having to use VNC to access it remotely, because X is such a violent bitch to use remotely, even over a LAN, that Linus Torvalds *himself* probably shudders at the thought of trying to do remote X from a computer running Windows, and would tell someone who suggested it for a 10-minute adhoc connection that they're completely insane.
In my experience, the biggest problem with trying to get X to work remotely is the fact that there's literally a thousand things that can go wrong, and no way to incrementally bootstrap it one baby step at a time, confirming that the usual things that cause problems are absolutely working before proceeding to the next step. It either works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, your likelihood of effectively troubleshooting it and actually getting it to work in any reasonable amount of time is basically "nonexistent". If you don't have admin rights to the remote Linux box, it's basically a lost cause, because you'll never figure out what's actually going wrong.
Hell, just try to get a group of hardcore Linux users to even agree where the role of "Window Manager" rightfully BELONGS in a scenario where a Windows PC is running an X server and connecting to a remote Linux PC whose desktop environment is KDE or Gnome. My coworkers and I have had The Discussion over lunch countless times, and there's still no real consensus... or even consistency. Every few months, someone will feel masochistic and decide to try getting KDE or Gnome to work over remote X to Windows, beat themselves up for a few days, then give up and swear to god they'll never try again.
third that.
I thought Windows low-latency audio was a mess, and then I discovered that Linux wasn't as bad as I thought. It's actually much... MUCH... worse.
> If the kernel drivers can't be written because of trade secrets, patents and copyrights, then it's hardly
> the fault of Linux that the hardware manufacturers are being arseholes.
Yes it is, because this isn't a new problem, IP laws aren't about to change, and everybody involved with kernel development knows the big hardware manufacturers have no intention of giving an inch of compromise. The kernel developers blame Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom for not being open. Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Broadcom blame the kernel developers for being pedantic. End users, fucked at both ends, throw in the towel and install Windows.
It might not be desirable to bend over backwards to maintain eternal compatibility with 20 year old peripherals, but it's ENTIRELY reasonable for end users to feel entitled to have binary drivers that work today still work with the next kernel or two unless some horrible bug or vulnerability of the most urgent kind is discovered in the meantime.
This problem has been coming to a head for more than 15 years, and probably won't get solved until Google puts its foot down and gets a few of their employees to come up with some kind of thunking and abstraction layer that can be used to enable slightly old loadable kernel modules to keep working with at least one or two future kernels.
AT&T will absolutely have to increase their bundled limits to remain competitive... but they'll do it "the AT&T Way" --
Today: "3 gigs for $30, or 5 gigs for $50 with free tethering, and $10 per additional gig"
Tomorrow: "10 gigs for $55 with free tethering, $25 per additional 5 gigabytes thereafter.
I can't speak for AT&T's non-LTE markets, but they rock in South Florida... especially compared to Sprint. Sprint has sucked beyond belief here for months, and we're still at least a few months away from the point where Sprint's LTE coverage will be at least as good as their current Wimax coverage. IActually, think we're still at least another month or two away from the first LTE towers even getting officially lit up.
Half the reason I left Sprint was because I hated my old phone (a crippled, bootloader-locked Motorola Photon) with a passion, and any new phone I could have possibly bought from Sprint would have been LTE-only and had no meaningful data service to speak of here. Around these parts, Sprint's 3G EVDO speeds are 80-120kbps when you're lucky, 40-60kbps in most places, and dip down into single-digit kbps rates at least a few times per week. Sprint's wimax speeds here aren't terrible (~4-6mbps down, 3-4mbps up), but most of the towers are too far apart to work properly if you're in a moving vehicle, and Sprint's management idiotically refused to give us at least one generation of top-tier Android phones with dual-mode wimax+LTE radios to smooth over the transiton.
Truth be told, I would have happily paid $249 for a Sprint Galaxy S3 with more expensive dual-mode wimax+LTE radio, especially if they stuck a real SIM card in it and enabled it to use GSM overseas as well. Instead, I ended up walking away from Sprint for at least the next two years, because I just couldn't live with them anymore.
Sprint should be very afraid right now. I wasn't the first in my circle of friends to leave. Over the past 3 months, 5 of my friends and coworkers upgraded to new Sprint LTE phones, got frustrated by their dysfunctional EVDO, and ended up returning their phones and leaving Sprint before it was too late to walk away without paying an ETF. I'm sure I won't be the last. Half my family members are ready to follow me to AT&T, especially after they found out how fast my data service is now.
Sure, Sprint might be 25-30mbps in scattered places once in while a few months from now, but I can *guarantee* that it's going to be AT LEAST a year, probably two, before somebody can get into his car in western Dade or Broward county, then drive downtown while enjoying 6-20mbps service every inch of the way like AT&T customers can in most parts of South Florida now.
I can't speak for other parts of the county, but with specific respect to Broward County, Florida, here's a pretty thorough analysis (compiled with lots of help from my friends over the past 3 weeks):
T-mobile: pretty consistently 6-15mbps just about everywhere. The worst speedtest scores I saw twice in a row were around 4mbps, but I did see 1-2mbps scores followed by 4-6mbps on a fairly regular basis. Most places were above 10mbps. They aren't "fast", but I'd say they're solidly usable. I really came close to going with Tmo, but AT&T's 26mbps speeds were just too intoxicating after years of Sprint famine. Plus, T-Mobile has poor coverage in my parents' neighborhood on the west coast of Florida, and didn't look very inspiring along Alligator Alley or the Turnpike between West Palm Beach and Orlando.
In terms of max speeds, AT&T and Verizon are both in a dead heat -- 26-28mbps.
Verizon's New York heritage shows... their coverage in downtown Fort Lauderdale & other dense areas east of I-95 is second to none, and usually 5-10mbps faster than AT&T. On the other hand, AT&T generally spanks Verizon out in suburbia, especially west of I-75 (where Verizon is almost totally still EVDO) and places like Coral Springs, Weston, Sunrise, Pembroke Pines, and Miramar. Both AT&T and Verizon seem to have pretty solid LTE coverage along I-75 and 595.