Truth be told, I think 98% of Android's "lagginess" problem is due to CPU scaling and power management. A few weeks ago, I was using my old Hero (overclocked to 711MHz, CPU scaling & power management disabled, CM7 installed, running balls-to-the-wall full speed), and it was actually smoother than my dualcore Motorola Photon. Graffiti input was absolutely flawless (on the Photon, it's mostly accurate, but has its moments when I'm left wondering WTF the phone's power management is trying to do because it starts making weird recognition errors). On my Xoom, Graffiti is fucking unusable. It lags worse than my Hero did at 508MHz with stock HTC kernel and 1.5. I suspect Motorola did the same thing HTC originally did -- said, "Hey, we're displaying a soft input area, which is just sitting there idle with a bitmap waiting for a blunt keypress, so let's drop the speed down to something absurd like 200MHz" -- totally ignoring the fact that somebody might be using an input method that depends upon frequent sampling at close intervals.
It's sad when a tablet with 1GHz dualcore CPU can't accurately do something a 16MHz glorified 680x0 could almost do in its sleep with 99.999% lag-free accuracy.
We don't need more aggressive power management, we need 4800mAH batteries so we can enjoy our phones and have them last all day. The problem is that manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are all afraid to release a phone that's thicker than last year's iPhone, so they all ship with anemic & undersized batteries. Take a phone with a 4.25+ inch display, make it a millimeter thicker, and redistribute the innards to make full use of every cubic millimeter of interior space for either electronics or battery (the Evo 4G, for instance, wasted nearly 25% of its internal volume on an empty orange plastic frame, and most new phones are no different). Maybe ship the phones with TWO batteries -- a custom, non-(easily)-replaceable battery that takes those space-filling frames and fills them with 1800-2400mAH worth of Lithium gel, and a second ~1700mAH battery that's replaceable and gets used first and recharged last. If you add the volume of the space-wasting frame with another ~3.5" x 5.5" x 1mm of lithium gel spread out across the entire area of the phone, it would be no big deal to make phones with 4,000+ mAH batteries.
I'm not 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure that single-bit SPI reads from microSD are too slow for realtime 16-bit PWM stereo. In other words, even if you buffered a few bytes in the chip's SRAM, the time it would take to physically shift 32 bits from the card (for the next two 16-bit samples) would exceed 1/44,100th of a second. In fact, if you were trying to bitbang 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo audio, I'm not sure you'd even have enough time to iterate through the 32 bits and decide whether or not the output should be high or low at a sufficiently high rate to avoid audible artifacts.
There are some things an 8-bit CPU just wasn't meant to do, and high-quality digital audio is one of them. It makes more sense to just wire a dedicated.mp3 codec chip up to the flash, and use the 8-bit CPU as the controller (in fact, that's basically what most dedicated MP3 players used to DO circa 2001). You use the MCU to do things like sense button presses, and communicate with the mp3 player chip itself (and possibly the amplifier chip) via i2c or SPI.
Nowadays, the moment of truth for jumping to ARM (instead of adding ASICs to 8-bit MCUs) tends to arrive with network connectivity. You can pair an 8-bit MCU with a Wiznet chip, but at that point the 8-bit MCU starts to feel kind of vestigial, and it usually ends up being cheaper to just step up to an ARM9 paired with a dumb ethernet chip instead of pairing a relatively expensive Wiznet chip (that does the heavy lifting for tcp/ip) with a mid-level 8-bit MCU.
Way back in the ancient days of yore (when 2600 was a videogame system and not a magazine dedicated to hacking), there was something called a "Sprite", and its purpose was to allow you to control individual pixels of a "large" (or what passed for it in 1977) and sparse display with lots of potential pixels, and very little ram. Back then, you literally had the following graphic elements at your disposal:
* A 20 pixel "playfield" that could be doubled, mirrored, and/or stretched. The 20-pixel chunk could be stretched, duplicated, or mirrored. You could reload its definition registers between scanlines and reuse it to display different things on different rows.
* A pair of 8-pixel sprites that could also be doubled, mirrored, and/or stretched. 8 pixels wide, one pixel high. You'd set it to some horizontal offset from the left, enable it manually when the raster reached a specific scanline, then leave it on until you got to the end of the last scanline where it should be displayed. If you wanted it to look different on the next scanline, you reloaded its 8-bit register with a new value.
* Three single-pixel sprites -- two missiles, one ball. They basically consumed ~two bytes apiece... one byte for horizontal offset, and one byte for control & attributes (width, motion-delay, etc).
Just to give you an idea how crude it was, there's a reason why the score digits in Circus Atari were uneven... it used player 0 to draw digits 1 and 2, and player 1 to draw digits 3 and 4. It drew digits 1 and 3 on the odd scanlines, then reloaded the register and offset to draw digits 2 and 4 on the even scanlines. When some game I can't remember came out that had a 6-digit scoreboard, it was considered groundbreaking because it went a step further, and reused the same sprite twice on the same scanline. It used player 1 to draw digits 1, 2, 5, and 6, and player 2 to draw digits 3 and 4. It defined the sprites for digits 1 & 3 or 2 & 4, then paused a few clocks and reloaded the byte for player 1 with the data for digits 5 or 6.
The crazy thing about the 2600 is that few of its limits were truly hard. I think someone a year or two ago actually hacked a homebrew 2600 cartridge using an ARM9 microcontroller that tricked it into doing 160x384 interlaced graphics (by tickling the vertical retrace clock register at exactly the right moment to trick the TV into drawing the next field as an even interlaced field instead of just redrawing odd fields over and over again) and did insane things like simulate cartridge rom so it could rewrite itself on the fly in ways that would have been physically impossible on any cartridge of the era. From what I recall, it actually sparked a debate among the 2600 homebrew community over how far you could legitimately go stuffing modern microcontrollers into faux 2600 cartridges to act as coprocessors before you defeated the whole point of saying it was a "2600 game". I think the consensus was that it was OK to do things like the later Activision games did (incorporating shift registers and stuff into cartridges to auto-update the bank of ram seen by the 2600), but pre-rendering 26 megabytes of video kernel code into 6502 assembly to reload the registers in slightly different ways, then spooling it from a microSD card was just being kind of silly. Still, it's kind of amazing what you can pull off with the crude, primitive chips in a 2600 when you're able to offload everything from program logic to kernel code onto modern chips, and just drive the 2600's bare metal "from the outside" (so to speak).
It's sobering, in a way, when you consider that much of what modern GPU chips do is software controlled as well, and think about just how far a modern GPU could probably be pushed if Moore's Law didn't automatically mean there'd be a version that's 500MHz faster on the shelves next year. If Mars were colonized today, had a videogame industry, and a new videocard on Mars cost $15,000 ($89.95 plus $14,909.05 shipping, with roughly 14-18 month delivery time), we'd probably see similar tricks being hacked out of 10 year old videocards by Martian programmers today.
I believe that Samsung's strategic goal here is to get a court to reason that at least some of the claims Apple is suing them about constitute fundamental technologies that are as necessary to a modern phone as Samsung's. They'll fail in a court that interprets the black letter of the law, but if the legal roulette wheel happens to stop on the green "00", they *might* get enough of a win to buy a few more years to play tit-for-tat with Apple.
Legally, their case is poor. Equitably, the fact that Apple is being unsportsmanlike and trying to take away consumer freedom to run anything besides Apple's tastefully-appointed, but authoritarian and censored IOS might give Samsung enough of an edge in an American/Australian/British/Canadian court to tip over the "Apple Cart".
IMHO, the ultimate revenge would be for Google to "accidentally" leak a fully-functioning copy of Ice Cream Sandwich, ready to reflash onto a jailbroken iPhone 4S. Oooooh, I can hear the delicious cries from Cupertino now, and see the happy guerrilla parade through downtown Cupertino of liberated iPhone owners singing "Shine Sweet Freedom". Maybe build a symbolic jail (well, ok... "fort") of neatly-stacked ice cream sandwiches around Steve Jobs' etched-glass iTombstone, and position little green Android statues around it as symbolic guards. Maybe stick a Tux doll on top of the tombstone itself. Simultaneously disrespectful, but oh-so-cute, and likely to end up on the cover of Time magazine with the word "iCoup!" (I'll stop now, and won't play on the obvious pun of "iCoup" with a 3 lines of poetry having 5, 7, and 5 syllables).
The same person for whom you shed tears probably has a shitload of debt whose burden diminishes as the currency in which it's denominated inflates.
In more relevant middle-class terms, most people who fall into the upper 70-80% or so (not poor, but absolutely not *wealthy*) benefit tremendously from moderate inflation, because they have enormous amounts of debt, but it tends to be long-term debt with fixed interest rates (mortgage, student loans). Point blank, with real deflation, the top 0.2% would see their net worth soar, and what's left of the middle class would be completely crushed by long-term debt that would have to be repaid with deflated dollars (until the house got foreclosed upon, and someone in the top.2% bought it for a pittance relative to what its former owner spent paying for it over the yeras). For every person who goes all Teaparty-like and rants about eating cold cereal and saving every cent in their mattress, there are thousands of nominally middle-class Americans who owe 2-3 times as much money as they earn in a single year and would be completely *fucked* by actual deflation.
You have savings? Investments? Great. You probably have a few thousand dollars' worth. Now look at your mortgage, your student loans, and add up how much you still owe on both. Unless you're a complete anomaly and statistical extreme outlier, you'd make out like a bandit if your savings became worthless, but everything around you inflated to the point where your mortgage and student loans now consumed half as much of your take-home pay as they did pre-inflation, because those are two huge monthly expenses that aren't going to get any smaller until they're paid off 20-30 years down the road. If somebody offered to wash away $100k+ worth of debt in return for $10-20k worth of your savings, you'd have to be completely insane to say no. Yet, that's what people have been conditioned to do. In pure dollars and cents, the overwhelming majority of Americans would *benefit* from higher inflation, and benefit pretty directly.
> I will exercise my rights as a juror and will absolutely NOT convict you for it !
The problem is, in most jurisdictions, you as the juror would never be allowed to KNOW the circumstances that led to it. You'd go to court, watch the trial, see the defendant get torn apart, vote to declare him to be guilty, then go home, read the evening news, and find out that you convicted a guy for doing something you approve of. In case like this, both the defendant and prosecution go into court tightly scripted, with the defense under constant threat of a mistrial if they so much as HINT that there's a backstory that might influence the jury to find him not guilty for reasons not officially approved of by the court.
> Who knows, "beer money" may help one of these people keep their home.
Oh, please. He said they pay minimum wage and hire someone to work 6 hours per week for $54. That's not going to make the difference between losing and keeping their home. Before you bring up the possibility of someone working all 6 hours at once and working some other job, consider for a moment that the hours might be flexible, but the company would REALLY prefer someone who shows up a couple of times per week for a few hours each time, instead of showing up for a single weekly marathon. If they have a dozen applicants who perfectly fit the target role, why should they waste their time on a group that's statistically likely to either game the position to their advantage (by working all 6 hours in a single stretch once per week) or leave mid-semester the nanosecond something better comes along?
For positions like he describes, college students are perfect, because that's exactly the kind of hours students want... nearly-infinite flexibility, low commitment, steady stream of cash for weekend entertainment. I had a job just like it in college working for a professor, and held it for 3 years until he retired (actually, it gave me an added bonus that was almost worth more to me at the time than the cash... for the first 2 years, I was stuck with a roommate in the dorm, the office was private, and I had a key & 24/7 access...)
Inflation is ALSO the way Adam Smith's invisible hand forces wealthy individuals to actively circulate their money, put it to work, and invest it to avoid having its value inflate away. Money is a medium for exchange, not a long-term store of value, and any currency that BECOMES a long-term store of value is inevitably dysfunctional as a medium for daily use and exchange (because people become too hesitant to spend it, lest they regret someday looking back and realizing that they spent the current equivalent of $180,000 to buy a pizza -- like the ranting Hitler in his "Bitcoin" video).
High and unpredictable inflation is bad, but predictable & steady long-term inflation at low rates is essential to the functioning of a modern economy.
You're assuming, of course, that the 'droid won't lie to the server about its identity, nature, capabilities, or compliance intent.
That doesn't mean it's hopeless, it just means that you (the enterprise) needs to have an official policy prohibiting employees from accessing email with non-compliant clients, and be willing to enforce it if you find out that everyone in Marketing (including the VP) has subverted it because you went overboard and made using it the official way hopelessly dysfunctional. Effective security in any environment not involving the military or national security is a continuum of compromise. If you go overboard to cover your ass and make the "solution" dysfunctional and unwieldy for real users, they WILL find ways to subvert you so they can do their jobs and get real work done. The trick is finding that point that's secure enough to meet at least the minimum non-negotiable requirements without annoying users badly enough to motivate them to actively subvert it (even when subversion itself carries risk of sanctions). In the real world, you're more likely to encounter users who'll just smile in your general direction and do whatever they want than you are to encounter users who'll actively argue and fight with you (especially when those users are technically savvy). The more obnoxious, intrusive, and unwieldy you make the security, the harder they're going to try to subvert it.
IMHO, encrypted partitioning of data is definitely a step in the right direction, and probably the best we're going to see. Users won't tolerate being forced to deal with complex lock screens every time they touch their phone in any context, but won't gripe if they have to authenticate to access their company email -- especially if they don't have to authenticate to find out whether they even HAVE new email. Enterprise developers need to stop and think about how real people use their phones, and figure out what info is so sensitive that it has to be kept under lock and key at any cost, and what information can be freely leaked to the outside world (existence of unread email? sure. Sender names and timestamps? Probably... maybe require that they have securely authenticated at least once within the past few hours. Subject lines? Ummmm, touchy. Maybe require that they've fully authenticated at least once within the past hour, and the phone itself has been continuously in active use (maybe allowing for up to 20-30 seconds of "off" time) since that point.
The problem is that people who do enterprise security see the world through blinders that fail to grasp that security is a continuum, and who keep trying to ram sledgehammer/meatcleaver "one dysfunctional size annoys everyone" non-solutions down everyone's throats, oblivious to both the likelihood and consequences of informal civil disobedience and quiet passive-aggressive rebellion.
I2C, SPI, and Dallas 1-wire as secondary functions on the expansion cable are just taken for granted. You'll have to wait for the iPhone 6we to get Zigbee;-)
As for the camera button... why NOT? Even if you don't care about picture taking, I'm sure just about everyone here can think of something useful to do with another easy to press hardkey, if only to use it like a ctrl key when running a ssh client (light press) or alt key (hard press).
You didn't see the episode of "My life on the D-List" (when he was dating Kathy Giffords for a couple of weeks)? The first thing he did on their date was jailbreak her iPhone in the limo on the way to the restaurant. Mad props, total respect:-D
He probably HAS direct, personal access to the iPhone's source repo, because it was the only way Apple could keep him entertained enough to avoid the scandal of having their founder become the favorite playmate of a big lime green robot from across town;-)
Good god, can you even *fathom* the delicious scandal if Google hired Woz to take Gosling's place as Uber Esteemed Developer?
Exactly. Woz's nightmare would be getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into being the CEO. On the other hand, he'd probably be tickled pink if he were offered the position of CTO (which, if you're a Silicon Valley rockstar, is basically the "I get to do the fun stuff, while that guy over there does the boring business grunt work" position in the company. MBAs dream of being CEO. Engineers dream of being a CTO with veto power over the CEO, so they can tell the CEO to go to hell when he tries to ruin their masterpiece just to shave 17 cents from the manufacturing cost of something intended to retail for several hundred dollars.
Exactly. Woz is doing it for the social event. I'm sure he's had at least one real iPhone 4S for at least a couple of weeks now.
He'll bask in the crowd's adoration a bit, and joke about next year's elite iPhone 5we ("we" = "Woz Edition", sold pre-jailbroken, running OpenIOS, and equipped with a real, honest-to-god camera button).
Ya know what would really be cool? an O'Reilly/Manning-sized book with 200-300 sheets of double-sided e-ink that has a color LCD touchscreen on a convertible laptop-tablet style pivoting hinge. Running some open-source environment, so you can tweak it to your liking. Then you could enjoy the search capabilities of an Android e-reader, the tactile look and feel of a real book (plus the ability to grab bunch of pages and physically flip to page 80 in a half second instead of screwing around with navigation menus), and a place to display color images and video.
Actually, in 2-up form (built into the stand?), e-Ink would be a flawless solution for sheet music. If the sheets for an entire orchestra were laid out so the page breaks occurred at exactly the same place for everyone, the flipping could be automated by an offstage assistant so that page 1 would automatically become page 3 a few seconds after page 2 became the current page (and so on). Make them waterproof and bolted on to lyres, and you have the perfect solution for marching bands. Short of star trek-style visors with built-in heads up displays (which, admittedly, for a marching band could look pretty cool if designed as part of the uniforms), that's another market that's always had lame semi-solutions to limp around with, but never really had a truly GOOD solution to the problem of carrying around music in a way that's portable, but unobtrusive.
Offload the electronics into a separate device (so you'd plug in, update, and "reflash" the next sheet of e-Ink), and you've got awesome, relatively cheap high-end menus for restaurants that can be changed daily. Put the electronics back, and you can casually rewrite the menu between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Make a long sheet of e-Ink, and you've got the perfect solution for apartment buildings and condos with residents who move in and out frequently.
Whomever can come up with a way to buy e-Ink on rolls, cut it with scissors (or at least a reasonable paper cutter), snap on an IDC-like interface to connect it to the (re)writer, and mount it in some kind of frame for safekeeping (ranging anywhere from simple plastic to gold) will totally deserve the patent rights (assuming he can actually make it WORK, and not just pull off a bullshit patent that says it does something without actually being economically viable so someone else can troll it for 18 years later on).
Well then, a reasonable compromise to limit the potential for collateral damage might be a rule that makes it impossible for them to suspend a domain that's been registered in good standing for more than a year without full due process, and provides a way to register a domain quickly, but subsequently complete a more exhaustive registration process that -- when completed -- immediately grants the domain the same protected status as one that's been around for more than a year.
That way, they can still nuke botnet command & control domains, but somebody whose domain has been around for more than a year (OR who has completed the more time-consuming registration procedure) could sleep at night knowing that Metaphorical Judge Dredd isn't allowed to touch THEIR domain. It wouldn't completely eliminate collateral damage, but it would eliminate the overwhelming majority of situations where a legitimate domain owner could suffer financial damage due to a careless or hasty employee somewhere.
> She had the stroke a month and a half ago. The next scheduled flight is one week away. > Maybe this would have been newsworthy on September 10th, but at this point, if she's functional, she can last another week.
I believe her beef at this point was Raytheon's original refusal to send a medical technician on that flight, not the date of the flight itself. She didn't ask for an immediate rescue flight, only one at the first practical opportunity. Remember, the first scheduled flight was scheduled months ago, based on historical weather patterns. It's quite possible that an earlier date might end up being physically viable if she gets lucky. Or maybe not. Either way, she didn't ask them to make a dangerous trip... she asked them to make the first trip a few days early if the weather ends up being better than predicted.
It's kind of like ship traffic into St. Petersburg, Russia. None is ever scheduled for the winter, because nobody knows in advance when the Baltic will ice up. Thus, ships scheduled months ahead of time have conservative scheduling that avoids a several-month window of time when there's likely, but not by any means guaranteed, to be ice that would make the port inaccessible. That doesn't mean a small ship equipped with state of the art sensors couldn't safely navigate into St. Petersburg weeks (or months) before the commercial shipping season begins, it just means that nobody is going to risk delaying a ship full of cargo (with crew getting paid by the day) waiting for the ice to open up in the normal course of business.
Yes... leaders in the new energy economy who get most of their power from nuclear plants across the river in France. The day Germany's Parliament disavows the use of nuclear-GENERATED power -- regardless of where the plant is located -- their "green" agenda can be taken seriously. The fact is, nuclear power is far from perfect, but it's the only thing we have right now that's remotely capable of supplying the energy we need without visible pollution (the waste gets sealed in containers instead of getting blown into the atmosphere). If breeder reactors were used, there wouldn't even be much of a problem with spent fuel disposal.
Germany's anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with love for mother earth, and everything to do with its political culture from the past 50 years. You can't necessarily *blame* them for being that way, but it's dishonest to ignore it & pretend it had nothing to do with current policy there.
Germany worked hard, became wealthy, and it's perfectly entitled to squander its own money on things that will never be economically viable for large-scale commercial power generation if it makes them happy and lets them feel smugly superior to everyone else. That doesn't mean it's an appropriate strategy for everyone else to blindly follow (or follow at all), and it certainly doesn't make them either admirable or above criticism. Few things that don't involve biology are genuinely impossible when the people involved don't really care how much something costs relative to its benefit.
> So in about 200 years we will be completely out.
No, even if "Peak Oil" estimates are right, we'll never be "completely out" -- it'll just cost more to use for the usual purposes than it's worth.
~200 years ago, the western world experienced "peak wood" -- the point at which cutting down trees and burning them for heat and energy was no longer a viable option in any remotely urbanized area. We lived. People switched from wood to coal, and eventually to oil. Furniture and paper still gets made from wood, and you can even spend $10 and buy a shrink-wrapped quarter-log big enough to look pretty burning for a few hours to throw in the fireplace on Christmas.
There appears to be one major "oops" consequence of geothermal power that didn't start to become apparent until it started getting used at commercial scales -- it appears to be capable of causing earthquakes. It seems like if it's done at small scale in just a few widely-scattered places, it's no big deal and gets lost in the chaotic background noise... but when you start soaking up enough heat to power a real city from a single location, well... then you might start to notice local tremors or worse. It's kind of like dumping shit (or waste in general) into a river. If one person who's camping (or an occasional otter) does it, nobody will ever notice. When 10 million people do it on a daily basis, the river's going to be toxic sludge. Soak up a little bit of heat to run a factory, and it's probably no big deal. Soak up enough heat to power a city like Helsinki (or larger), and you might have a problem. Soak up enough heat to power the southern UK or the New York metro area, and you'll be lucky if the earth doesn't start to split and fracture from the temperate difference alone.
Well, it depends what you mean by "cheap". Cheap compared to, say, the mid/late-90s? No. We'll probably never see 99c/gallon gas again in our lifetimes (at least, not under any scenario not involving massive government subsidies to maintain artificially-low prices and rationing of that artificially-cheap (and almost certainly scarce) gas).
Cheap compared to $4/gallon? Probably. The magic price point for shale to become profitable is retail gas prices of approximately $3/gallon. Until the oil industry is convinced that the retail price of gas (taking inflation and taxes into account) will never sustainably fall below that price, it's not going to bet the farm on shale without government subsidies, because something like $2.50/gallon (retail price) is pretty much the absolute floor value at which it can even keep shale operations running without it being worthwhile to just walk away from them. On the other hand, if the US went enthusiastically into shale mining, we can feel pretty confident that no matter what happens to Saudi Arabia or demand from China and India, gas in the US won't ever creep much above $3-4/gallon ever again once production ramps up to maximum levels. The devil's in the $3 detail -- if Saudi-level oil reserves were conclusively identified in Alaska and Congress gave the go-ahead, or China and/or India suddenly found similar Saudi-like domestic oil reserves, shale would become cost-ineffective almost overnight, so it's going to be a LONG time before the oil industry as a whole will be willing to "bet the farm" on shale.
Put another way, environmentalists celebrating dwindling oil reserves in Saudi Arabia with the hope that it's going to force naughty Americans to conserve gas are likely to be in for a bit of a long-term disappointment. The US has a shitload of petroleum... it's just locked up in places we aren't currently allowed to drill and in forms that aren't very nice (economically or environmentally). The fact is, the US economy depends upon cheap petroleum, as does every modern economy on earth. Europeans (or at least Germans) might willingly march back to stone age lifestyles in the holy name of Mother Earth, but Americans (and Russians, and Indians, and China) won't stand for it. The medium-term alternative to oil isn't solar and wind power... it's nuclear fission and coal. Fight shale and nuclear, and the real-world outcome won't be sunny skies and clean solar energy... it's going to be skies that look like those over industrial cities in China, and overburdened reactors built in an era where redundant levels of safety weren't deemed to be important.
The smart "green" strategy would be to push for the replacement of old nuclear reactors with modern ones, and the construction of new ones, to keep energy prices low enough that it's cheaper for consumers to buy electric cars and charge them with nuclear-generated electricity than to buy gas manufactured from oil shale, ethanol, or processed coal. Solar and wind power are economic dead ends, because both have serious scalability and 24/7-availability problems. The fact is, it's just plain cheaper to generate a gigawatt of power in one place and transmit it a hundred miles over power lines than it is to generate a megawatt in a thousand different places, each of which has to be individually maintained and kept in good repair. It was true back when Tesla & Westinghouse argued with Edison, and it's still true today. If you need a point source of electricity far from existing infrastructure, solar and wind might be cheaper. If you need 24/7/365 dependable electricity in the middle of even a small town with existing power transmission infrastructure, it's almost inconceivable that any market-priced solar/wind solution could ever viably compete with any centralized power generation scenario.
Well, it might be make-before-break on the Evo, but it's definitely NOT make-before-break on the Epic 4G. The Epic 4G will stupidly do a hard drop of a wimax connection the moment a second tower is significantly stronger, then sit there stupidly with no network connectivity at all & wait about 30 seconds before it even tries bringing up EVDO. Left to its own devices, it won't even try to re-establish wimax until some stupid internal countdown times out 5 minutes later.
Personally, I think the Epic's firmware was totally written by a development team in S. Korea working entirely from a lab network, and no firsthand experience with seeing how their phones worked in real cities in the US. I just can't believe somebody who eats his own dogfood, works for Samsung/Sprint, personally carried an Epic4G as his real phone, and used 4G daily somewhere besides a test network in a lab could have possibly fucked up the wimax implementation as badly as they did, and left it fucked up without ever fixing it (or even doing anything that seemed to try and make it better). It's like they just shat it out, then walked away and forgot it ever existed. Then again, that's pretty much the tradition of Samsung phones, going all the way back to the SPH-i300...
That's not a "Wimax" problem, it's a "Sprint's implementation of dual-network interfaces on their phones sucks, and Clear's Wimax deployment sucks even more" problem. Wimax isn't a single "thing" -- it's a bag of capabilities, some of which are optional for carriers to implement. Clear just did a shit job, and Sprint didn't do much to help. Make no mistake -- LTE can suck every bit as badly as Sprint/Clear Wimax does today, and properly-deployed Wimax can be as good (or better) than LTE. LTE's real advantage is that it has a long term roadmap to evolve into a single voice+data service with turnkey implementation, whereas wimax doesn't. LTE as deployed by AT&T and Verizon has no inherent benefit over wimax.
Untrue. Sprint's phones are 100% frequency-compatible with Verizon's, and vice-versa. Sprint phones roam on Verizon every day. Sprint just refuses to allow anybody to use phones they didn't sell, because it enables Sprint to be the middleman and wholesaler for every single Sprint phone sold and pocket the profit. When Sprint sells an Evo 3D for $199 to somebody, their real "loss" is less than a hundred dollars compared to what they paid for it. When somebody buys a full-priced Evo 3D to replace his broken phone, Sprint makes about $200-300 of pure profit.
In the old days, Sprint's mantra was that Verizon phones couldn't work, because they had to be programmed specifically for Sprint. Then the Hero arrived, got rooted, and had AOSP ported. For about a week, people scratched their heads wondering about all the wacky text messages that the phones suddenly started showing, and then it hit us... THAT was what Sprint was talking about all along. Less than a month later, the protocol was reverse-engineered, and was a complete non-issue.
At the Verizon end, it's a little uglier... hacked Sprint phones reflashed to be faux Verizon phones can't do EVDO on Verizon, because Verizon does some wacky stuff at the radio modem level that can't be tampered with by end users. In theory, though, all it should take to make a Sprint-branded phone with Qualcomm MDM6600 chipset to work on Verizon is ripped firmware intended for some genuine Verizon phone with the same modem chipset. The problem is, Verizon phones don't have the radio modem firmware neatly abstracted out, and the bootloaders are hardware-encrypted, so nobody (I'm aware of) has ever successfully gotten a reflashed Sprint phone to do EVDO on Verizon (for what it's worth, Sprint phones can't roam on Verizon EVDO, either... they're stuck with 1xRTT; whether that's a technical limit of Sprint firmware, or a business policy decision by Verizon, is anybody's guess). Either way, it's not a hardware-imposed limit -- it's 100% software.
To Verizon's credit, if by some miracle of ${deity} you're able to hack a Sprint phone to work natively on Verizon, they won't stop you. They won't HELP you, but they won't throw insurmountable roadblocks in your face that make it impossible (the way Sprint's magic database of approved MEIDs does).
Elsewhere in the world, CDMA phones are as interoperable with other CDMA networks as GSM phones are with other GSM networks. The phones come with a R-UIM card, which is a superset of the GSM SIM standard (and optional subset of USIM).
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Ahhh, yes.... biometrics: the weak, insecure password you can't change.
Truth be told, I think 98% of Android's "lagginess" problem is due to CPU scaling and power management. A few weeks ago, I was using my old Hero (overclocked to 711MHz, CPU scaling & power management disabled, CM7 installed, running balls-to-the-wall full speed), and it was actually smoother than my dualcore Motorola Photon. Graffiti input was absolutely flawless (on the Photon, it's mostly accurate, but has its moments when I'm left wondering WTF the phone's power management is trying to do because it starts making weird recognition errors). On my Xoom, Graffiti is fucking unusable. It lags worse than my Hero did at 508MHz with stock HTC kernel and 1.5. I suspect Motorola did the same thing HTC originally did -- said, "Hey, we're displaying a soft input area, which is just sitting there idle with a bitmap waiting for a blunt keypress, so let's drop the speed down to something absurd like 200MHz" -- totally ignoring the fact that somebody might be using an input method that depends upon frequent sampling at close intervals.
It's sad when a tablet with 1GHz dualcore CPU can't accurately do something a 16MHz glorified 680x0 could almost do in its sleep with 99.999% lag-free accuracy.
We don't need more aggressive power management, we need 4800mAH batteries so we can enjoy our phones and have them last all day. The problem is that manufacturers like HTC, Samsung, and Motorola are all afraid to release a phone that's thicker than last year's iPhone, so they all ship with anemic & undersized batteries. Take a phone with a 4.25+ inch display, make it a millimeter thicker, and redistribute the innards to make full use of every cubic millimeter of interior space for either electronics or battery (the Evo 4G, for instance, wasted nearly 25% of its internal volume on an empty orange plastic frame, and most new phones are no different). Maybe ship the phones with TWO batteries -- a custom, non-(easily)-replaceable battery that takes those space-filling frames and fills them with 1800-2400mAH worth of Lithium gel, and a second ~1700mAH battery that's replaceable and gets used first and recharged last. If you add the volume of the space-wasting frame with another ~3.5" x 5.5" x 1mm of lithium gel spread out across the entire area of the phone, it would be no big deal to make phones with 4,000+ mAH batteries.
I'm not 100% certain, but I'm pretty sure that single-bit SPI reads from microSD are too slow for realtime 16-bit PWM stereo. In other words, even if you buffered a few bytes in the chip's SRAM, the time it would take to physically shift 32 bits from the card (for the next two 16-bit samples) would exceed 1/44,100th of a second. In fact, if you were trying to bitbang 16-bit 44.1KHz stereo audio, I'm not sure you'd even have enough time to iterate through the 32 bits and decide whether or not the output should be high or low at a sufficiently high rate to avoid audible artifacts.
There are some things an 8-bit CPU just wasn't meant to do, and high-quality digital audio is one of them. It makes more sense to just wire a dedicated .mp3 codec chip up to the flash, and use the 8-bit CPU as the controller (in fact, that's basically what most dedicated MP3 players used to DO circa 2001). You use the MCU to do things like sense button presses, and communicate with the mp3 player chip itself (and possibly the amplifier chip) via i2c or SPI.
Nowadays, the moment of truth for jumping to ARM (instead of adding ASICs to 8-bit MCUs) tends to arrive with network connectivity. You can pair an 8-bit MCU with a Wiznet chip, but at that point the 8-bit MCU starts to feel kind of vestigial, and it usually ends up being cheaper to just step up to an ARM9 paired with a dumb ethernet chip instead of pairing a relatively expensive Wiznet chip (that does the heavy lifting for tcp/ip) with a mid-level 8-bit MCU.
Way back in the ancient days of yore (when 2600 was a videogame system and not a magazine dedicated to hacking), there was something called a "Sprite", and its purpose was to allow you to control individual pixels of a "large" (or what passed for it in 1977) and sparse display with lots of potential pixels, and very little ram. Back then, you literally had the following graphic elements at your disposal:
* A 20 pixel "playfield" that could be doubled, mirrored, and/or stretched. The 20-pixel chunk could be stretched, duplicated, or mirrored. You could reload its definition registers between scanlines and reuse it to display different things on different rows.
* A pair of 8-pixel sprites that could also be doubled, mirrored, and/or stretched. 8 pixels wide, one pixel high. You'd set it to some horizontal offset from the left, enable it manually when the raster reached a specific scanline, then leave it on until you got to the end of the last scanline where it should be displayed. If you wanted it to look different on the next scanline, you reloaded its 8-bit register with a new value.
* Three single-pixel sprites -- two missiles, one ball. They basically consumed ~two bytes apiece... one byte for horizontal offset, and one byte for control & attributes (width, motion-delay, etc).
Just to give you an idea how crude it was, there's a reason why the score digits in Circus Atari were uneven... it used player 0 to draw digits 1 and 2, and player 1 to draw digits 3 and 4. It drew digits 1 and 3 on the odd scanlines, then reloaded the register and offset to draw digits 2 and 4 on the even scanlines. When some game I can't remember came out that had a 6-digit scoreboard, it was considered groundbreaking because it went a step further, and reused the same sprite twice on the same scanline. It used player 1 to draw digits 1, 2, 5, and 6, and player 2 to draw digits 3 and 4. It defined the sprites for digits 1 & 3 or 2 & 4, then paused a few clocks and reloaded the byte for player 1 with the data for digits 5 or 6.
The crazy thing about the 2600 is that few of its limits were truly hard. I think someone a year or two ago actually hacked a homebrew 2600 cartridge using an ARM9 microcontroller that tricked it into doing 160x384 interlaced graphics (by tickling the vertical retrace clock register at exactly the right moment to trick the TV into drawing the next field as an even interlaced field instead of just redrawing odd fields over and over again) and did insane things like simulate cartridge rom so it could rewrite itself on the fly in ways that would have been physically impossible on any cartridge of the era. From what I recall, it actually sparked a debate among the 2600 homebrew community over how far you could legitimately go stuffing modern microcontrollers into faux 2600 cartridges to act as coprocessors before you defeated the whole point of saying it was a "2600 game". I think the consensus was that it was OK to do things like the later Activision games did (incorporating shift registers and stuff into cartridges to auto-update the bank of ram seen by the 2600), but pre-rendering 26 megabytes of video kernel code into 6502 assembly to reload the registers in slightly different ways, then spooling it from a microSD card was just being kind of silly. Still, it's kind of amazing what you can pull off with the crude, primitive chips in a 2600 when you're able to offload everything from program logic to kernel code onto modern chips, and just drive the 2600's bare metal "from the outside" (so to speak).
It's sobering, in a way, when you consider that much of what modern GPU chips do is software controlled as well, and think about just how far a modern GPU could probably be pushed if Moore's Law didn't automatically mean there'd be a version that's 500MHz faster on the shelves next year. If Mars were colonized today, had a videogame industry, and a new videocard on Mars cost $15,000 ($89.95 plus $14,909.05 shipping, with roughly 14-18 month delivery time), we'd probably see similar tricks being hacked out of 10 year old videocards by Martian programmers today.
I believe that Samsung's strategic goal here is to get a court to reason that at least some of the claims Apple is suing them about constitute fundamental technologies that are as necessary to a modern phone as Samsung's. They'll fail in a court that interprets the black letter of the law, but if the legal roulette wheel happens to stop on the green "00", they *might* get enough of a win to buy a few more years to play tit-for-tat with Apple.
Legally, their case is poor. Equitably, the fact that Apple is being unsportsmanlike and trying to take away consumer freedom to run anything besides Apple's tastefully-appointed, but authoritarian and censored IOS might give Samsung enough of an edge in an American/Australian/British/Canadian court to tip over the "Apple Cart".
IMHO, the ultimate revenge would be for Google to "accidentally" leak a fully-functioning copy of Ice Cream Sandwich, ready to reflash onto a jailbroken iPhone 4S. Oooooh, I can hear the delicious cries from Cupertino now, and see the happy guerrilla parade through downtown Cupertino of liberated iPhone owners singing "Shine Sweet Freedom". Maybe build a symbolic jail (well, ok... "fort") of neatly-stacked ice cream sandwiches around Steve Jobs' etched-glass iTombstone, and position little green Android statues around it as symbolic guards. Maybe stick a Tux doll on top of the tombstone itself. Simultaneously disrespectful, but oh-so-cute, and likely to end up on the cover of Time magazine with the word "iCoup!" (I'll stop now, and won't play on the obvious pun of "iCoup" with a 3 lines of poetry having 5, 7, and 5 syllables).
The same person for whom you shed tears probably has a shitload of debt whose burden diminishes as the currency in which it's denominated inflates.
In more relevant middle-class terms, most people who fall into the upper 70-80% or so (not poor, but absolutely not *wealthy*) benefit tremendously from moderate inflation, because they have enormous amounts of debt, but it tends to be long-term debt with fixed interest rates (mortgage, student loans). Point blank, with real deflation, the top 0.2% would see their net worth soar, and what's left of the middle class would be completely crushed by long-term debt that would have to be repaid with deflated dollars (until the house got foreclosed upon, and someone in the top .2% bought it for a pittance relative to what its former owner spent paying for it over the yeras). For every person who goes all Teaparty-like and rants about eating cold cereal and saving every cent in their mattress, there are thousands of nominally middle-class Americans who owe 2-3 times as much money as they earn in a single year and would be completely *fucked* by actual deflation.
You have savings? Investments? Great. You probably have a few thousand dollars' worth. Now look at your mortgage, your student loans, and add up how much you still owe on both. Unless you're a complete anomaly and statistical extreme outlier, you'd make out like a bandit if your savings became worthless, but everything around you inflated to the point where your mortgage and student loans now consumed half as much of your take-home pay as they did pre-inflation, because those are two huge monthly expenses that aren't going to get any smaller until they're paid off 20-30 years down the road. If somebody offered to wash away $100k+ worth of debt in return for $10-20k worth of your savings, you'd have to be completely insane to say no. Yet, that's what people have been conditioned to do. In pure dollars and cents, the overwhelming majority of Americans would *benefit* from higher inflation, and benefit pretty directly.
> I will exercise my rights as a juror and will absolutely NOT convict you for it !
The problem is, in most jurisdictions, you as the juror would never be allowed to KNOW the circumstances that led to it. You'd go to court, watch the trial, see the defendant get torn apart, vote to declare him to be guilty, then go home, read the evening news, and find out that you convicted a guy for doing something you approve of. In case like this, both the defendant and prosecution go into court tightly scripted, with the defense under constant threat of a mistrial if they so much as HINT that there's a backstory that might influence the jury to find him not guilty for reasons not officially approved of by the court.
> Who knows, "beer money" may help one of these people keep their home.
Oh, please. He said they pay minimum wage and hire someone to work 6 hours per week for $54. That's not going to make the difference between losing and keeping their home. Before you bring up the possibility of someone working all 6 hours at once and working some other job, consider for a moment that the hours might be flexible, but the company would REALLY prefer someone who shows up a couple of times per week for a few hours each time, instead of showing up for a single weekly marathon. If they have a dozen applicants who perfectly fit the target role, why should they waste their time on a group that's statistically likely to either game the position to their advantage (by working all 6 hours in a single stretch once per week) or leave mid-semester the nanosecond something better comes along?
For positions like he describes, college students are perfect, because that's exactly the kind of hours students want... nearly-infinite flexibility, low commitment, steady stream of cash for weekend entertainment. I had a job just like it in college working for a professor, and held it for 3 years until he retired (actually, it gave me an added bonus that was almost worth more to me at the time than the cash... for the first 2 years, I was stuck with a roommate in the dorm, the office was private, and I had a key & 24/7 access...)
Inflation is ALSO the way Adam Smith's invisible hand forces wealthy individuals to actively circulate their money, put it to work, and invest it to avoid having its value inflate away. Money is a medium for exchange, not a long-term store of value, and any currency that BECOMES a long-term store of value is inevitably dysfunctional as a medium for daily use and exchange (because people become too hesitant to spend it, lest they regret someday looking back and realizing that they spent the current equivalent of $180,000 to buy a pizza -- like the ranting Hitler in his "Bitcoin" video).
High and unpredictable inflation is bad, but predictable & steady long-term inflation at low rates is essential to the functioning of a modern economy.
You're assuming, of course, that the 'droid won't lie to the server about its identity, nature, capabilities, or compliance intent.
That doesn't mean it's hopeless, it just means that you (the enterprise) needs to have an official policy prohibiting employees from accessing email with non-compliant clients, and be willing to enforce it if you find out that everyone in Marketing (including the VP) has subverted it because you went overboard and made using it the official way hopelessly dysfunctional. Effective security in any environment not involving the military or national security is a continuum of compromise. If you go overboard to cover your ass and make the "solution" dysfunctional and unwieldy for real users, they WILL find ways to subvert you so they can do their jobs and get real work done. The trick is finding that point that's secure enough to meet at least the minimum non-negotiable requirements without annoying users badly enough to motivate them to actively subvert it (even when subversion itself carries risk of sanctions). In the real world, you're more likely to encounter users who'll just smile in your general direction and do whatever they want than you are to encounter users who'll actively argue and fight with you (especially when those users are technically savvy). The more obnoxious, intrusive, and unwieldy you make the security, the harder they're going to try to subvert it.
IMHO, encrypted partitioning of data is definitely a step in the right direction, and probably the best we're going to see. Users won't tolerate being forced to deal with complex lock screens every time they touch their phone in any context, but won't gripe if they have to authenticate to access their company email -- especially if they don't have to authenticate to find out whether they even HAVE new email. Enterprise developers need to stop and think about how real people use their phones, and figure out what info is so sensitive that it has to be kept under lock and key at any cost, and what information can be freely leaked to the outside world (existence of unread email? sure. Sender names and timestamps? Probably... maybe require that they have securely authenticated at least once within the past few hours. Subject lines? Ummmm, touchy. Maybe require that they've fully authenticated at least once within the past hour, and the phone itself has been continuously in active use (maybe allowing for up to 20-30 seconds of "off" time) since that point.
The problem is that people who do enterprise security see the world through blinders that fail to grasp that security is a continuum, and who keep trying to ram sledgehammer/meatcleaver "one dysfunctional size annoys everyone" non-solutions down everyone's throats, oblivious to both the likelihood and consequences of informal civil disobedience and quiet passive-aggressive rebellion.
I2C, SPI, and Dallas 1-wire as secondary functions on the expansion cable are just taken for granted. You'll have to wait for the iPhone 6we to get Zigbee ;-)
As for the camera button... why NOT? Even if you don't care about picture taking, I'm sure just about everyone here can think of something useful to do with another easy to press hardkey, if only to use it like a ctrl key when running a ssh client (light press) or alt key (hard press).
You didn't see the episode of "My life on the D-List" (when he was dating Kathy Giffords for a couple of weeks)? The first thing he did on their date was jailbreak her iPhone in the limo on the way to the restaurant. Mad props, total respect :-D
He probably HAS direct, personal access to the iPhone's source repo, because it was the only way Apple could keep him entertained enough to avoid the scandal of having their founder become the favorite playmate of a big lime green robot from across town ;-)
Good god, can you even *fathom* the delicious scandal if Google hired Woz to take Gosling's place as Uber Esteemed Developer?
Exactly. Woz's nightmare would be getting dragged, kicking and screaming, into being the CEO. On the other hand, he'd probably be tickled pink if he were offered the position of CTO (which, if you're a Silicon Valley rockstar, is basically the "I get to do the fun stuff, while that guy over there does the boring business grunt work" position in the company. MBAs dream of being CEO. Engineers dream of being a CTO with veto power over the CEO, so they can tell the CEO to go to hell when he tries to ruin their masterpiece just to shave 17 cents from the manufacturing cost of something intended to retail for several hundred dollars.
Exactly. Woz is doing it for the social event. I'm sure he's had at least one real iPhone 4S for at least a couple of weeks now.
He'll bask in the crowd's adoration a bit, and joke about next year's elite iPhone 5we ("we" = "Woz Edition", sold pre-jailbroken, running OpenIOS, and equipped with a real, honest-to-god camera button).
Ya know what would really be cool? an O'Reilly/Manning-sized book with 200-300 sheets of double-sided e-ink that has a color LCD touchscreen on a convertible laptop-tablet style pivoting hinge. Running some open-source environment, so you can tweak it to your liking. Then you could enjoy the search capabilities of an Android e-reader, the tactile look and feel of a real book (plus the ability to grab bunch of pages and physically flip to page 80 in a half second instead of screwing around with navigation menus), and a place to display color images and video.
Actually, in 2-up form (built into the stand?), e-Ink would be a flawless solution for sheet music. If the sheets for an entire orchestra were laid out so the page breaks occurred at exactly the same place for everyone, the flipping could be automated by an offstage assistant so that page 1 would automatically become page 3 a few seconds after page 2 became the current page (and so on). Make them waterproof and bolted on to lyres, and you have the perfect solution for marching bands. Short of star trek-style visors with built-in heads up displays (which, admittedly, for a marching band could look pretty cool if designed as part of the uniforms), that's another market that's always had lame semi-solutions to limp around with, but never really had a truly GOOD solution to the problem of carrying around music in a way that's portable, but unobtrusive.
Offload the electronics into a separate device (so you'd plug in, update, and "reflash" the next sheet of e-Ink), and you've got awesome, relatively cheap high-end menus for restaurants that can be changed daily. Put the electronics back, and you can casually rewrite the menu between breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Make a long sheet of e-Ink, and you've got the perfect solution for apartment buildings and condos with residents who move in and out frequently.
Whomever can come up with a way to buy e-Ink on rolls, cut it with scissors (or at least a reasonable paper cutter), snap on an IDC-like interface to connect it to the (re)writer, and mount it in some kind of frame for safekeeping (ranging anywhere from simple plastic to gold) will totally deserve the patent rights (assuming he can actually make it WORK, and not just pull off a bullshit patent that says it does something without actually being economically viable so someone else can troll it for 18 years later on).
Well then, a reasonable compromise to limit the potential for collateral damage might be a rule that makes it impossible for them to suspend a domain that's been registered in good standing for more than a year without full due process, and provides a way to register a domain quickly, but subsequently complete a more exhaustive registration process that -- when completed -- immediately grants the domain the same protected status as one that's been around for more than a year.
That way, they can still nuke botnet command & control domains, but somebody whose domain has been around for more than a year (OR who has completed the more time-consuming registration procedure) could sleep at night knowing that Metaphorical Judge Dredd isn't allowed to touch THEIR domain. It wouldn't completely eliminate collateral damage, but it would eliminate the overwhelming majority of situations where a legitimate domain owner could suffer financial damage due to a careless or hasty employee somewhere.
> She had the stroke a month and a half ago. The next scheduled flight is one week away.
> Maybe this would have been newsworthy on September 10th, but at this point, if she's functional, she can last another week.
I believe her beef at this point was Raytheon's original refusal to send a medical technician on that flight, not the date of the flight itself. She didn't ask for an immediate rescue flight, only one at the first practical opportunity. Remember, the first scheduled flight was scheduled months ago, based on historical weather patterns. It's quite possible that an earlier date might end up being physically viable if she gets lucky. Or maybe not. Either way, she didn't ask them to make a dangerous trip... she asked them to make the first trip a few days early if the weather ends up being better than predicted.
It's kind of like ship traffic into St. Petersburg, Russia. None is ever scheduled for the winter, because nobody knows in advance when the Baltic will ice up. Thus, ships scheduled months ahead of time have conservative scheduling that avoids a several-month window of time when there's likely, but not by any means guaranteed, to be ice that would make the port inaccessible. That doesn't mean a small ship equipped with state of the art sensors couldn't safely navigate into St. Petersburg weeks (or months) before the commercial shipping season begins, it just means that nobody is going to risk delaying a ship full of cargo (with crew getting paid by the day) waiting for the ice to open up in the normal course of business.
Yes... leaders in the new energy economy who get most of their power from nuclear plants across the river in France. The day Germany's Parliament disavows the use of nuclear-GENERATED power -- regardless of where the plant is located -- their "green" agenda can be taken seriously. The fact is, nuclear power is far from perfect, but it's the only thing we have right now that's remotely capable of supplying the energy we need without visible pollution (the waste gets sealed in containers instead of getting blown into the atmosphere). If breeder reactors were used, there wouldn't even be much of a problem with spent fuel disposal.
Germany's anti-nuclear stance has nothing to do with love for mother earth, and everything to do with its political culture from the past 50 years. You can't necessarily *blame* them for being that way, but it's dishonest to ignore it & pretend it had nothing to do with current policy there.
Germany worked hard, became wealthy, and it's perfectly entitled to squander its own money on things that will never be economically viable for large-scale commercial power generation if it makes them happy and lets them feel smugly superior to everyone else. That doesn't mean it's an appropriate strategy for everyone else to blindly follow (or follow at all), and it certainly doesn't make them either admirable or above criticism. Few things that don't involve biology are genuinely impossible when the people involved don't really care how much something costs relative to its benefit.
> So in about 200 years we will be completely out.
No, even if "Peak Oil" estimates are right, we'll never be "completely out" -- it'll just cost more to use for the usual purposes than it's worth.
~200 years ago, the western world experienced "peak wood" -- the point at which cutting down trees and burning them for heat and energy was no longer a viable option in any remotely urbanized area. We lived. People switched from wood to coal, and eventually to oil. Furniture and paper still gets made from wood, and you can even spend $10 and buy a shrink-wrapped quarter-log big enough to look pretty burning for a few hours to throw in the fireplace on Christmas.
There appears to be one major "oops" consequence of geothermal power that didn't start to become apparent until it started getting used at commercial scales -- it appears to be capable of causing earthquakes. It seems like if it's done at small scale in just a few widely-scattered places, it's no big deal and gets lost in the chaotic background noise... but when you start soaking up enough heat to power a real city from a single location, well... then you might start to notice local tremors or worse. It's kind of like dumping shit (or waste in general) into a river. If one person who's camping (or an occasional otter) does it, nobody will ever notice. When 10 million people do it on a daily basis, the river's going to be toxic sludge. Soak up a little bit of heat to run a factory, and it's probably no big deal. Soak up enough heat to power a city like Helsinki (or larger), and you might have a problem. Soak up enough heat to power the southern UK or the New York metro area, and you'll be lucky if the earth doesn't start to split and fracture from the temperate difference alone.
Well, it depends what you mean by "cheap". Cheap compared to, say, the mid/late-90s? No. We'll probably never see 99c/gallon gas again in our lifetimes (at least, not under any scenario not involving massive government subsidies to maintain artificially-low prices and rationing of that artificially-cheap (and almost certainly scarce) gas).
Cheap compared to $4/gallon? Probably. The magic price point for shale to become profitable is retail gas prices of approximately $3/gallon. Until the oil industry is convinced that the retail price of gas (taking inflation and taxes into account) will never sustainably fall below that price, it's not going to bet the farm on shale without government subsidies, because something like $2.50/gallon (retail price) is pretty much the absolute floor value at which it can even keep shale operations running without it being worthwhile to just walk away from them. On the other hand, if the US went enthusiastically into shale mining, we can feel pretty confident that no matter what happens to Saudi Arabia or demand from China and India, gas in the US won't ever creep much above $3-4/gallon ever again once production ramps up to maximum levels. The devil's in the $3 detail -- if Saudi-level oil reserves were conclusively identified in Alaska and Congress gave the go-ahead, or China and/or India suddenly found similar Saudi-like domestic oil reserves, shale would become cost-ineffective almost overnight, so it's going to be a LONG time before the oil industry as a whole will be willing to "bet the farm" on shale.
Put another way, environmentalists celebrating dwindling oil reserves in Saudi Arabia with the hope that it's going to force naughty Americans to conserve gas are likely to be in for a bit of a long-term disappointment. The US has a shitload of petroleum... it's just locked up in places we aren't currently allowed to drill and in forms that aren't very nice (economically or environmentally). The fact is, the US economy depends upon cheap petroleum, as does every modern economy on earth. Europeans (or at least Germans) might willingly march back to stone age lifestyles in the holy name of Mother Earth, but Americans (and Russians, and Indians, and China) won't stand for it. The medium-term alternative to oil isn't solar and wind power... it's nuclear fission and coal. Fight shale and nuclear, and the real-world outcome won't be sunny skies and clean solar energy... it's going to be skies that look like those over industrial cities in China, and overburdened reactors built in an era where redundant levels of safety weren't deemed to be important.
The smart "green" strategy would be to push for the replacement of old nuclear reactors with modern ones, and the construction of new ones, to keep energy prices low enough that it's cheaper for consumers to buy electric cars and charge them with nuclear-generated electricity than to buy gas manufactured from oil shale, ethanol, or processed coal. Solar and wind power are economic dead ends, because both have serious scalability and 24/7-availability problems. The fact is, it's just plain cheaper to generate a gigawatt of power in one place and transmit it a hundred miles over power lines than it is to generate a megawatt in a thousand different places, each of which has to be individually maintained and kept in good repair. It was true back when Tesla & Westinghouse argued with Edison, and it's still true today. If you need a point source of electricity far from existing infrastructure, solar and wind might be cheaper. If you need 24/7/365 dependable electricity in the middle of even a small town with existing power transmission infrastructure, it's almost inconceivable that any market-priced solar/wind solution could ever viably compete with any centralized power generation scenario.
Well, it might be make-before-break on the Evo, but it's definitely NOT make-before-break on the Epic 4G. The Epic 4G will stupidly do a hard drop of a wimax connection the moment a second tower is significantly stronger, then sit there stupidly with no network connectivity at all & wait about 30 seconds before it even tries bringing up EVDO. Left to its own devices, it won't even try to re-establish wimax until some stupid internal countdown times out 5 minutes later.
Personally, I think the Epic's firmware was totally written by a development team in S. Korea working entirely from a lab network, and no firsthand experience with seeing how their phones worked in real cities in the US. I just can't believe somebody who eats his own dogfood, works for Samsung/Sprint, personally carried an Epic4G as his real phone, and used 4G daily somewhere besides a test network in a lab could have possibly fucked up the wimax implementation as badly as they did, and left it fucked up without ever fixing it (or even doing anything that seemed to try and make it better). It's like they just shat it out, then walked away and forgot it ever existed. Then again, that's pretty much the tradition of Samsung phones, going all the way back to the SPH-i300...
That's not a "Wimax" problem, it's a "Sprint's implementation of dual-network interfaces on their phones sucks, and Clear's Wimax deployment sucks even more" problem. Wimax isn't a single "thing" -- it's a bag of capabilities, some of which are optional for carriers to implement. Clear just did a shit job, and Sprint didn't do much to help. Make no mistake -- LTE can suck every bit as badly as Sprint/Clear Wimax does today, and properly-deployed Wimax can be as good (or better) than LTE. LTE's real advantage is that it has a long term roadmap to evolve into a single voice+data service with turnkey implementation, whereas wimax doesn't. LTE as deployed by AT&T and Verizon has no inherent benefit over wimax.
Untrue. Sprint's phones are 100% frequency-compatible with Verizon's, and vice-versa. Sprint phones roam on Verizon every day. Sprint just refuses to allow anybody to use phones they didn't sell, because it enables Sprint to be the middleman and wholesaler for every single Sprint phone sold and pocket the profit. When Sprint sells an Evo 3D for $199 to somebody, their real "loss" is less than a hundred dollars compared to what they paid for it. When somebody buys a full-priced Evo 3D to replace his broken phone, Sprint makes about $200-300 of pure profit.
In the old days, Sprint's mantra was that Verizon phones couldn't work, because they had to be programmed specifically for Sprint. Then the Hero arrived, got rooted, and had AOSP ported. For about a week, people scratched their heads wondering about all the wacky text messages that the phones suddenly started showing, and then it hit us... THAT was what Sprint was talking about all along. Less than a month later, the protocol was reverse-engineered, and was a complete non-issue.
At the Verizon end, it's a little uglier... hacked Sprint phones reflashed to be faux Verizon phones can't do EVDO on Verizon, because Verizon does some wacky stuff at the radio modem level that can't be tampered with by end users. In theory, though, all it should take to make a Sprint-branded phone with Qualcomm MDM6600 chipset to work on Verizon is ripped firmware intended for some genuine Verizon phone with the same modem chipset. The problem is, Verizon phones don't have the radio modem firmware neatly abstracted out, and the bootloaders are hardware-encrypted, so nobody (I'm aware of) has ever successfully gotten a reflashed Sprint phone to do EVDO on Verizon (for what it's worth, Sprint phones can't roam on Verizon EVDO, either... they're stuck with 1xRTT; whether that's a technical limit of Sprint firmware, or a business policy decision by Verizon, is anybody's guess). Either way, it's not a hardware-imposed limit -- it's 100% software.
To Verizon's credit, if by some miracle of ${deity} you're able to hack a Sprint phone to work natively on Verizon, they won't stop you. They won't HELP you, but they won't throw insurmountable roadblocks in your face that make it impossible (the way Sprint's magic database of approved MEIDs does).
Elsewhere in the world, CDMA phones are as interoperable with other CDMA networks as GSM phones are with other GSM networks. The phones come with a R-UIM card, which is a superset of the GSM SIM standard (and optional subset of USIM).