I used MySQL because it's free, and because it's the database I grew up with. The problem is, the moment you move more than a baby step away from mysqldump, you can pretty much forget about good documentation and free software... and non-free in this context almost always means "several hundred or thousand dollars". As a matter of reflex, I pretty much quit reading the moment I see anything that requires commercial licensing, because I know I can't afford it. MySQL used to do a decent job of maintaining its community documentation, but ever since Oracle bought them, I don't think they've so much as edited a typo.
The truth is, the situation with free (as in beer, if not liberty) MySQL really has been kind of like a boiling frog for the past few years. There are a LOT of things that "just work" with MyISAM and small tables that will fall over and die (or at least present unanticipated complications) if you try to do the same thing with InnoDB partitioned tables, and the community documentation doesn't do a very good job of pointing them out or making them obvious. 95% of the time, the only place you'll even find those nasty complications and side effects documented is in a wiki footnote at the bottom of one of the manual pages in the "Partitioning" section.
> Local rent-seeking behavior goes away since nobody can corner any market entirely,
Utterly, totally, and completely wrong. What ends up happening in the real world is everyone rapes everyone else, then claims it's not their fault and they're forced to do it because everyone *else* is evil. Just look at Europe. I believe one multinational carrier there actually got fined by the EU for sloppy minute-counting that enabled their customers to avoid paying some of the usual roaming charges when using the same carrier's network in another country. That's right, they were fined for NOT raping their customers and charging the mandatory roaming charges when those customers used the same carrier's network in another country.
AFAIK, there's not a single country on earth that started out with fractured, roaming-rich networks and ended up with (more or less) free nationwide use prior to the arrival of a new competitor who DID manage to buy spectrum nationwide and effectively roll out a nationwide network to compete with them.
Making them locally-owned public utilities is even worse, because THEN they're politically motivated to offer dirt cheap basic service for local users (who vote for the elected officials who can hire and fire the utility's management), and subsidizing those cheap fees for local voters making local calls by charging the most outrageous fees for everyone else that they possibly can.
There's already a solution for rural areas that the major carriers aren't interested in. Sprint has an entire division that deals with rural wireless cooperatives who are allowed to build their own tower infrastructure and use Sprint's spectrum for free in return for allowing unlimited free roaming by Sprint's own customers. Much of Nebraska farm country falls into this category. That's why there are places where Sprint's map shows service, but Sprint itself won't allow you to sign up as a customer if you have a zipcode in that area. I believe some/all of South and/or North Dakota, and other similar thinly-populated areas do as well. If you own a trailer park in the middle of the Nevada desert and want Sprint service, all you have to do is raise a few hundred thousand or million dollars, form a rural wireless company, sign the deal with Sprint, and run the infrastructure yourself (or pay Sprint to run it for you).
This also neatly solves the rent-seeking roaming problem, at least as far as visiting urbanites have to care. The local government might end up coughing up 4% of its annual tax revenue to subsidize the local wireless network's construction and continuing operation, but it's contractually forbidden to try and pass those charges along to Sprint customers visiting from other areas.
You're right that vertical integration is bad, but balkanizing the core infrastructure just fucks things up and makes a billing mess for everyone. IMHO, the happy medium lies in between... you want to have at least one or two nationwide networks, but once you have them there's no good reason to go on a rampage and try to force the consolidation of the others. Having at least a few regional carriers is good, too. Sprint ultimately forced AT&T and Verizon to make nationwide free roaming (and unlimited free domestic long distance everywhere) a reality, but it was aggressive regional carriers like MetroPCS who applied pressure from the OTHER direction to force things like nominally-unlimited airtime on all of them (the catch with Metro was that in its early years, your phone wouldn't work *at all* outside of your local service area, let alone roam at expensive rates).
By the way, in case anybody's wondering, there's a good, not necessarily obvious reason why lots of TV stations that used to have VHF licenses voluntarily gave them up for UHF, even though VHF licenses were historically the desirable ones that stations were literally desperate to own -- mobile devices. VHF has long range at lower power, but needs a fairly large antenna to receive the signals efficiently. UHF, in contrast, can have a properly tuned antenna that's just a few inches long. For handheld and mobile devices, it's a lot easier and more convenient to deal with a small UHF antenna that's a few inches long instead of a big, unwieldy VHF antenna that's a few FEET long. The TV stations KNOW that mobile reception is the one realm they still somewhat have to themselves.
> They should have sold the frequencies by market area (city, zip-codes, etc.) and not nation-wide.
Great. So then we could have a situation like we did prior to the arrival of Sprint around 1999, when every city had different cellular carriers, and sometimes you couldn't go 50 miles away from home without paying extra to roam. In case anybody has forgotten, roaming charges in the US were still common AND punishingly expensive less than 10 (hell, 5 or 6!) years ago unless you were a Sprint customer. Sprint's network might have sucked in most places, but if you lived in a real city and 99% of your travel was to other real cities and the major highways between them, it was rare to end up someplace that literally had no service unless it was totally out in BFE. You might have had to go outside, or even climb up on a roof to get a usable signal, but at least you weren't getting charged $5 plus a dollar per minute the way people with Verizon or AT&T did. There's a reason Sprint achieved early popularity in Florida and Texas -- both states were horribly fractured between hostile, rent-seeking regional carriers, and Sprint was literally the only way to travel around the state without getting raped by roaming charges.
Backing up remotely hosted web applications, even on a dedicated server you control, is amazingly hard to do. Let's start with MySQL. We back up our database daily using Zmanda. A few months ago, we had to restore it. It took THREE DAYS. Why? Because MySQL's backup and restore workflow has basically gone nowhere in 5 years, and hasn't scaled well to accommodate gigabyte-sized partitioned databases. From what I've read, the main problem is that it has no efficient bulk-insertion protocol. It inserts one record, updates the indices, picks its butt, grooms itself a bit, inserts the next record the same way, and continues for the next 47 million records (getting slower and slower each time). It works fine when you have a database with a few thousand rows, but completely goes down in flames when you try scaling it to really huge sizes. We literally ended up having to split our largest table into two -- one for semi-recent records, and one for really ancient ones, so in a disaster we could bring the semi-recent ones back up quickly, then let MySQL piss around for the next week restoring the other 80% at its usual glacial pace without having the entire app be down the whole time.
There's also the matter of sheer backup size. Suppose your server has about 100 gigabytes of data on the hard drive, 95% of which is related to your application. Tar it, download the tarball, and you've just burned through half of what Comcast will let you download for the entire month. Assuming, of course, that your cable modem doesn't crap out at some point before it's done and cause the whole thing to fail.
This is a problem nobody really seems to like talking about. Lots of Linux hacks exist and have been abundantly written about, but they all seem to have been written for an era when file size was measured in megabytes, or at least your largest file didn't exceed the amount of ram by more than 2-4 times. When you start talking about 16 gigabyte files, everything goes straight down the toilet.
Trying to negotiate with Apple would be like trying to negotiate the fate of the human race with the aliens in "Independence Day". Apple doesn't want the others to pay them, Apple wants the others to die and disappear. As a result, companies like Samsung have no choice than to "go Kamikaze" against Apple, because the only Apple-acceptable alternative would be complete and total capitulation.
Right, but his argument was that there are physical filters on specific frequencies to block transmission, and my counterpoint was that any scheme that rigid and immutable would fail in America because our needs are much more dynamic and subject to change from day to day as carriers merge, acquire spectrum, and reorganize their band plans.
Logical filters, maybe, but certainly not physical ones. Otherwise, AT&T's GSM network (and a fairly big chunk of T-Mobile/US's network) couldn't exist. In America, using the same band for uplink and downlink is the norm. I believe this is also the case in Australia and a few other places where 850MHz and 1900MHz (without 2150MHz) are used for UMTS.
Well, the HD2 was kind of an exception, because it was literally the last of the line and was already well into the Android evolutionary hardware curve. I was mainly talking about HTC phones from roughly 2004 through 2008, when there were still people crazy enough to think that single-core smartphones (as in, a single CPU controlling everything from the OS to the phone itself) were viable, let alone a good idea. Anyone remember the useless, crippled super low-end Windows Mobile 6 "smartphones" that lacked touchscreens and couldn't really do much besides display custom wallpaper and wave the (Windows) flag?
I'm pretty sure only about 14 cents of the $5 is FAT32-related, and the bulk of it is due to patents that originated with Windows Mobile. Like it or hate it, WinMo was doing more or less the same stuff Android does today circa 2004. IOS and Android just made it pretty, and gave the dialer app a finger-friendly user interface.
Architecturally, PalmOS phones and WinMo phones were VERY different, and iPhones & Android phones have more in common with WinMo than PalmOS hardware.
Metaphorically:
A PalmOS phone (pre-Treo) was a Dragonball PDA duct-taped onto a cell phone through a serial port, much like a PC with an internal non-Winmodem.
A Windows Mobile phone (and later Treos) was a nasty Windows XP PC with $14 HSP winmodem that offloaded everything to software, including the signal processing itself.
An Android phone is kind of a compromise between the two extremes, like the later-vintage Lucent Winmodems that had a real DSP for the heavy lifting grunt work, but used the host CPU for logic and high-level protocol. There's a software RIL that mediates between the two, but much of the "radio" side has been moved back into its own dedicated hardware (or at least its own dedicated chunk of silicon with its own dedicated CPU on the same die). The "unitary" Windows Mobile hardware model was cheaper to manufacture, but bound the OS very, very tightly to specific architectures (it's not a coincidence that basically all Windows Mobile phones came from HTC -- porting WinMo to some other phone hardware would have been a MAJOR undertaking well beyond the capabilities of any group of hobbyists, even WITH the sourcecode).
Anyway, the bundle of hardware similarities between WinMo's hardware-software architecture and Android's is where most of the royalties go. Between Palm, Microsoft/HTC, and Motorola, it's pretty hard to make a modern phone without infringing on SOMETHING owned by them.
Do you know what role tablet PCs will have in the hardware lives of Slashdot users 10 years from now? They'll be our laptop's second monitor, and desktop computer's auxiliary input device (now EVERYONE can have a Wacom-like tablet!). Normal users will use a tablet as their mouse. Slashdot users will buy a $150 OLED mousepad with overlay that looks transparent, but the mouse sensor will see as a complex pattern to assist with motion detection (and of course, something like a Hall-Effect sensor to disable any touch capabilities it might have when the mouse itself is on top).
Slashdot users will still have real mice, though, because even the best capacitive screen sucks donkey balls next to a thousand+ hertz sample rate high-res gaming mouse. Once you've gotten spoiled by a mouse like the Logitech G700, you can't go back and join the rest of the grunt world. Wireless gaming mice have firmly taken their place next to the Model M as "must have" peripherals:-)
Don't forget braindead ISA cards that only supported one or two specific IRQs, or stopped at IRQ9 so the manufacturer could omit the last precious inch of circuit board needed to properly support IRQs 10 and above.
So you'll buy your Intel|AMD RGCPU with 16 gigs, GPU, 32core CPU, and plug it into the motherboard you bought from newegg. Then bolt the cooling system you bought from newegg onto it, stick it into a case you bought from newegg, and continue like you do now.
People transitioned from 8-bit computers to gaming consoles because:
a) The 1541 was brutally slow. Fastload just made it semi-tolerable.
b) PCs (prior to ~1992, Gravis Ultrasound + ET4000 + 486/66) sucked worse 8-bit systems for games
c) Videogames crashed and burned on any Amiga higher than an a500 with a meg of chip ram and no hard drive (ok, overgeneralizing a bit... but not much), and Sonic on the Genesis wasn't much below the standards of mainstream Amiga games at the time, anyway. I know, I owned both simultaneously.
d) Mac was worthless for gaming, period, until well into the late 90s and OS/X, and an Atari ST with display capable of flicker-free 640x480 was equally worthless for games.
e) I'm not even going to get into the mid-90s and mention the agony of trying to get a Gravis Ultrasound to work with anything that didn't explicitly support it. Good god. The day I installed Windows 95 was the first time in... well... EVER... that most of the hardware on my PC worked properly at the same time.
As for the popularity of consoles NOW, there's a reason why I refuse point blank to buy PC games -- the only difference between most of them and trojans/rootkits/malware is the EULA. I refuse to dirty a nice, pristine installation of Windows anymore with the crap that's required to run any modern PC game. Modern games are too invasive, and wantonly vandalize your whole PC for the sake of enforcing their DRM. Screw them. The last PC games I ever bought were Prince of Persia and Sim City 3000... both of which ended up having to be cracked to work properly on my computer (apparently, they didn't like the fact that the Dell D600 I had at the time had a removable optical drive, or something to that effect).
It's largely incompatible with the nicest desktop form factors, too, but that hasn't banished mATX (or more) from the desktops of NewEgg's customers. Cases have gradually diminished in size to the current norm of a rectangle wide enough for a stack of 2 or 3 horizontal 5-1/4" drives, a stack of up to 3 3.5" drives exposed to the outside world, the minimum box necessary to accommodate a microATX mobo vertically or horizontally, and that's pretty much the end of it. The only real place left to go would be a pair of boxes... one containing the mobo/cpu/ram/videocard/pci(express) cards, and one tethered by a siamese eSATA+displayPort+USB3+firewire/power cable with (surprise, surprise) a few exposed bays for 5-1/4" drives and (USB) 3-1/2" drives (or peripherals having the same form factor). I think IBM even had a series of desktop PCs like this a few years ago, right before they were bought by Lenovo.
The crucial point this article ignores is the fact that people who buy appliance-like computers (*cough* Macs) don't buy much/anything component-related from NewEgg NOW, so why worry about whether they're going to do it later? Likewise, the people whose first thought when you say "new PC" is "what motherboard did you get" (and buy most of their hardware from NewEgg) aren't going to be settling for appliance-like PCs anytime soon, either.
In a very real sense, if your desktop PC has "7", "Vista", "XP", "2000", or "NT" somewhere in the name of its operating system, you're running a direct descendant of VMS. Polluted a bit by 20 years of inbreeding, exposure to toxic waste, and enemy attacks... but a descendant nonetheless.
You have one thing backwards... historically, COMPAQ was the high-end corporate laptop brand, and HP made the junk sold by Circuit City & Best Buy. Their desktop PCs are another matter entirely, but Compaq's higher-end/corporate laptops were pretty much best of breed and the worthy adversary of any Thinkpad. Anybody remember the Armada M700? We had them at my old company when I first started. Had Moore's law not rendered them obsolete, they'd probably still be in use today. They were tanks. Awesome keyboards second only to a real Thinkpad, real pointer sticks, butter-smooth LCD hinges, and they just plain felt *solid*. By comparison, the Dells the company bought to replace them felt like junky plastic toys.
> Q: should the students be liable for the crime of trespassing?
Yes, because at that point you've explicitly and unambiguously revoked their permission to enter your garden and take vegetables.
It would be another matter ENTIRELY if you never confronted the students, observed them giving vegetables to the homeless, then escalated immediately to calling the cops the next day by arguing that giving the vegetables to the homeless automatically terminated their permission to enter your garden and take vegetables.
It sounds like splitting hairs, but it's the difference between making the individual absolutely, explicitly, and unambiguously aware that his permission to enter has been revoked, vs claiming guilt by automatic recursive fiat. The computer analogy would be if Facebook terminated your use due to TOS violations, and you proceeded to take advantage of a security exploit to resurrect your profile and continue using Facebook after they'd told you point blank you were no longer welcome.
In metaphorical terms, American law isn't binary and digital -- it's analog and gray. Generally speaking, the more obvious you (or a government) makes the boundary between legal and illegal, the more enforceable a law becomes. It helps to have lots of legal resources behind you to back up your position, but at the end of the day, American common law frowns upon insidious illegality. You can have quite a few situations where the students could find themselves in a position where you'd prevail over them in a civil lawsuit, but nevertheless fail to get them convicted of committing a crime. For example, if instead of telling them that they were no longer allowed to enter your garden, you sent an email to the principal of the school and expected HIM to tell them. At that point, you'd have a fairly clear case to sue them (though they'd arguably have an equally clear case to cross-claim the principal for failing to tell them if he failed to do so), but would have a difficult case to make in a criminal trial for trespass (assuming the prosecutor even pursued it).
Yes, but you can't buy albuterol without a prescription. Most people who use Primatene as their primary asthma rescue drug are poor and lack insurance. The need to take time off from work and get an official prescription can be a substantial barrier. The cost of the albuterol isn't $30... it's $30, plus the cost of the doctor visit, plus the lost wages from taking part or all of the day off from work.
The difference is, in America albuterol is fairly expensive (about $55 per inhaler) compared to Primatene (about $15-20), and Primatene is available without a prescription. For people without health insurance (and jobs where taking the day off to go to the doctor means not getting paid) whose asthma isn't quite bad enough to put them at daily risk of death, Primatene is an important safety net. If the FDA approved albuterol as OTC, it would be almost moot... but Primatene's OTC status was largely due to historical legacy. The FDA rarely takes away OTC status, but tends to be quite resistant to adding new drugs to the list.
HFA is a weaker propellant, and has a pretty nasty taste & odor to boot.
Primatene's problem is complicated, because the ban isn't entirely motivated by love for Mother Earth(tm). The DEA wants Primatene off the market, because it's basically aerosolized ephedrine ready for meth production.
* If Primatene is reformulated with HFA, it has to be re-approved by the FDA
* Re-approval would be expensive, and the resulting drug would have only limited patent protection due to massive amounts of prior art.
* The DEA wants reformulated Primatene to include additional ingredients that (supposedly) won't affect asthmatic users, but will taint the ephedrine so it can't be used for meth production.
* A new version reformulated to DEA standards WOULD be profitably patentable, but the FDA isn't thrilled about adding chemicals of no benefit to users to a product used by extremely vulnerable people whose breathing is pretty fragile to begin with. They know that somewhere out there are at least a few dozen people likely to die if they use the new formula, and have made it clear that they're going to hold approval of the new version to the highest possible standards and nix it at the *slightest* hint of trouble.
* Primatene's maker is happy about patentability, but worried about lawsuits. Catch-22.
It's more complicated than what I wrote above, but that pretty much sums it up. It's the perfect storm of stupid symbolic environmentalism, corporate greed, and the war on drugs. Made worse by the fact that the majority of longterm Primatene users are poor and lack proper health care (people with health insurance use albuterol, unless they have very mild asthma and accidentally go somewhere without their inhaler, at which point they run to Walgreen's and buy Primatene to keep around "just in case"). That's also the main theory of why Advair (combination of a steroid and long-but-slow-acting alpha agonist) has a signficantly higher death rate among poor and minority users with seemingly moderate & controlled asthma -- they get prescriptions for Advair and albuterol, buy the Advair, but skip the albuterol because the new formulation is expensive & they don't need it very often. The problem is, when they DO have an acute attack, all they have on hand is Advair, which isn't suitable as a rescue inhaler, and a small percentage of them end up dying under circumstances where albuterol would have saved them. It's a hard theory to ethically test, but one that explains a bothersome side effect (death) of Advair whose victims are overwhelmingly poor Americans.
AT&T and Verizon might be Bell's children, but their cultures and long-term business strategies are about as different as you can get. AT&T's long-term strategy is to abandon wired infrastructure, and spend as little money as possible expanding capacity in favor of capping users into submission. Verizon's long-term strategy is to run fiber everywhere, costs be damned, and charge top dollar for a premium service. In a very real sense, when the original AT&T got broken up, SBC inherited the cheapskate Soviet-style bureaucrats, and Verizon inherited the execs who worked at the bleeding edge of the front lines & believed in making cool things happen, costs be damned.
In more historical terms, SBC's management grew from the folks who did their best to talk rural customers into sticking with party lines (because it meant they didn't have to run more copper out to BFE). Verizon's management grew from the folks whose earlier bosses made satellite communication viable, and made live TV press conferences in the middle of nowhere possible (at staggering cost, absorbed by everyone since they were still a monopoly and could get away with it) way back in the 50s and 60s.
That said, both companies are control freaks... an attitude they both inherited from the old AT&T. The sad thing is, they're control freaks for the sake of being control freaks. Obviously, they want to make more money, and know they can do it by trying to create walled content gardens and crippling users' phones to steer them towards premium services, but when you really dig down to it, they'd do it even if cost and profitability were complete non-issues, just because that's how they've *always* been.
It's legal, but it's hard to think of any meaningful competitive retail environment where you could actually get away with charging more to a subset of customers unless you somehow managed to provide more value than competitors charging less. If I want to charge wealthy people $5 for a can of diet Coke, but sell the same can to poor customers for a nickel, and the store next door sells it for a dollar, chances are that most of the people I'd try to charge $5 will go next door and buy it there instead.
For an example of a real company that voluntarily offers lower prices to a poorer group of buyers (not necessarily verifying their income, but relying on the fact that they're statistically likely to be near the bottom of their lifetime salary figures), just look at Microsoft and student discounts. A registered college student can buy a copy of Visual Studio Enterprise Edition for approximately what it costs a normal person to buy a copy of Microsoft Word from Newegg, In this case, part of the reason they can get away with charging radically higher prices to normal customers is the fact that VSEE's normal customers tend to be enterprise customers who think it's sane to go through 5 levels of purchasing approval so an employee can get a $300 RAM upgrade that could be expensed for $50 if they just bought it at CompUSA at lunch on the company credit card. American "Enterprise" customers are a strange beast that in some ways would have even had Soviet bureaucrats shaking their heads in disbelief (the Soviets put up with it because they had no choice, but even they would have had their minds blown to see private entities voluntarily adopting the same practices).
As others have pointed out, the big danger is that we'll start to see "subsidized" hardware that's locked to crippled, adware-laden versions of Windows... and that subsidized hardware will end up being popular enough with the mainstream masses to make unlocked hardware ridiculously expensive by comparison (adding in not only the forfeited subsidy, but also the added premium for maintaining a separate niche product line). Or just as bad, manufacturers that start shipping PCs with locked bootloaders and force you to waive your warranty rights to get the unlock code (a-la-Android). Those forced waivers would never pass legal muster as long as the Magnuson-Moss act doesn't get repealed, but 98% of consumers have never heard of it, and don't realize that when push comes to shove, courts won't enforce contracts that violate a law, and the same courts look upon contracts of adhesion ("take it or leave it") with *extreme* prejudice against powerful parties when it comes to enforcing unfavorable terms upon a much weaker party.
CompUSA has a halfway decent selection of motherboards, CPUs, and everything else needed to build a reasonable new PC for a price that's not enormously more than you'd spend online if you had everything FedEx'ed. Unfortunately, I believe CompUSA now has a major presence only in Florida, Texas, Northern Illinois, North Carolina(?), and a few other stores scattered around the country. However, I believe Fry's out west has a comparable (if not slightly better) selection. (Sigh. Someday, ${deity} will smile in Florida's general direction, and we'll get to have Fry's too... )
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I used MySQL because it's free, and because it's the database I grew up with. The problem is, the moment you move more than a baby step away from mysqldump, you can pretty much forget about good documentation and free software... and non-free in this context almost always means "several hundred or thousand dollars". As a matter of reflex, I pretty much quit reading the moment I see anything that requires commercial licensing, because I know I can't afford it. MySQL used to do a decent job of maintaining its community documentation, but ever since Oracle bought them, I don't think they've so much as edited a typo.
The truth is, the situation with free (as in beer, if not liberty) MySQL really has been kind of like a boiling frog for the past few years. There are a LOT of things that "just work" with MyISAM and small tables that will fall over and die (or at least present unanticipated complications) if you try to do the same thing with InnoDB partitioned tables, and the community documentation doesn't do a very good job of pointing them out or making them obvious. 95% of the time, the only place you'll even find those nasty complications and side effects documented is in a wiki footnote at the bottom of one of the manual pages in the "Partitioning" section.
> Local rent-seeking behavior goes away since nobody can corner any market entirely,
Utterly, totally, and completely wrong. What ends up happening in the real world is everyone rapes everyone else, then claims it's not their fault and they're forced to do it because everyone *else* is evil. Just look at Europe. I believe one multinational carrier there actually got fined by the EU for sloppy minute-counting that enabled their customers to avoid paying some of the usual roaming charges when using the same carrier's network in another country. That's right, they were fined for NOT raping their customers and charging the mandatory roaming charges when those customers used the same carrier's network in another country.
AFAIK, there's not a single country on earth that started out with fractured, roaming-rich networks and ended up with (more or less) free nationwide use prior to the arrival of a new competitor who DID manage to buy spectrum nationwide and effectively roll out a nationwide network to compete with them.
Making them locally-owned public utilities is even worse, because THEN they're politically motivated to offer dirt cheap basic service for local users (who vote for the elected officials who can hire and fire the utility's management), and subsidizing those cheap fees for local voters making local calls by charging the most outrageous fees for everyone else that they possibly can.
There's already a solution for rural areas that the major carriers aren't interested in. Sprint has an entire division that deals with rural wireless cooperatives who are allowed to build their own tower infrastructure and use Sprint's spectrum for free in return for allowing unlimited free roaming by Sprint's own customers. Much of Nebraska farm country falls into this category. That's why there are places where Sprint's map shows service, but Sprint itself won't allow you to sign up as a customer if you have a zipcode in that area. I believe some/all of South and/or North Dakota, and other similar thinly-populated areas do as well. If you own a trailer park in the middle of the Nevada desert and want Sprint service, all you have to do is raise a few hundred thousand or million dollars, form a rural wireless company, sign the deal with Sprint, and run the infrastructure yourself (or pay Sprint to run it for you).
This also neatly solves the rent-seeking roaming problem, at least as far as visiting urbanites have to care. The local government might end up coughing up 4% of its annual tax revenue to subsidize the local wireless network's construction and continuing operation, but it's contractually forbidden to try and pass those charges along to Sprint customers visiting from other areas.
You're right that vertical integration is bad, but balkanizing the core infrastructure just fucks things up and makes a billing mess for everyone. IMHO, the happy medium lies in between... you want to have at least one or two nationwide networks, but once you have them there's no good reason to go on a rampage and try to force the consolidation of the others. Having at least a few regional carriers is good, too. Sprint ultimately forced AT&T and Verizon to make nationwide free roaming (and unlimited free domestic long distance everywhere) a reality, but it was aggressive regional carriers like MetroPCS who applied pressure from the OTHER direction to force things like nominally-unlimited airtime on all of them (the catch with Metro was that in its early years, your phone wouldn't work *at all* outside of your local service area, let alone roam at expensive rates).
By the way, in case anybody's wondering, there's a good, not necessarily obvious reason why lots of TV stations that used to have VHF licenses voluntarily gave them up for UHF, even though VHF licenses were historically the desirable ones that stations were literally desperate to own -- mobile devices. VHF has long range at lower power, but needs a fairly large antenna to receive the signals efficiently. UHF, in contrast, can have a properly tuned antenna that's just a few inches long. For handheld and mobile devices, it's a lot easier and more convenient to deal with a small UHF antenna that's a few inches long instead of a big, unwieldy VHF antenna that's a few FEET long. The TV stations KNOW that mobile reception is the one realm they still somewhat have to themselves.
> They should have sold the frequencies by market area (city, zip-codes, etc.) and not nation-wide.
Great. So then we could have a situation like we did prior to the arrival of Sprint around 1999, when every city had different cellular carriers, and sometimes you couldn't go 50 miles away from home without paying extra to roam. In case anybody has forgotten, roaming charges in the US were still common AND punishingly expensive less than 10 (hell, 5 or 6!) years ago unless you were a Sprint customer. Sprint's network might have sucked in most places, but if you lived in a real city and 99% of your travel was to other real cities and the major highways between them, it was rare to end up someplace that literally had no service unless it was totally out in BFE. You might have had to go outside, or even climb up on a roof to get a usable signal, but at least you weren't getting charged $5 plus a dollar per minute the way people with Verizon or AT&T did. There's a reason Sprint achieved early popularity in Florida and Texas -- both states were horribly fractured between hostile, rent-seeking regional carriers, and Sprint was literally the only way to travel around the state without getting raped by roaming charges.
Backing up remotely hosted web applications, even on a dedicated server you control, is amazingly hard to do. Let's start with MySQL. We back up our database daily using Zmanda. A few months ago, we had to restore it. It took THREE DAYS. Why? Because MySQL's backup and restore workflow has basically gone nowhere in 5 years, and hasn't scaled well to accommodate gigabyte-sized partitioned databases. From what I've read, the main problem is that it has no efficient bulk-insertion protocol. It inserts one record, updates the indices, picks its butt, grooms itself a bit, inserts the next record the same way, and continues for the next 47 million records (getting slower and slower each time). It works fine when you have a database with a few thousand rows, but completely goes down in flames when you try scaling it to really huge sizes. We literally ended up having to split our largest table into two -- one for semi-recent records, and one for really ancient ones, so in a disaster we could bring the semi-recent ones back up quickly, then let MySQL piss around for the next week restoring the other 80% at its usual glacial pace without having the entire app be down the whole time.
There's also the matter of sheer backup size. Suppose your server has about 100 gigabytes of data on the hard drive, 95% of which is related to your application. Tar it, download the tarball, and you've just burned through half of what Comcast will let you download for the entire month. Assuming, of course, that your cable modem doesn't crap out at some point before it's done and cause the whole thing to fail.
This is a problem nobody really seems to like talking about. Lots of Linux hacks exist and have been abundantly written about, but they all seem to have been written for an era when file size was measured in megabytes, or at least your largest file didn't exceed the amount of ram by more than 2-4 times. When you start talking about 16 gigabyte files, everything goes straight down the toilet.
Trying to negotiate with Apple would be like trying to negotiate the fate of the human race with the aliens in "Independence Day". Apple doesn't want the others to pay them, Apple wants the others to die and disappear. As a result, companies like Samsung have no choice than to "go Kamikaze" against Apple, because the only Apple-acceptable alternative would be complete and total capitulation.
Right, but his argument was that there are physical filters on specific frequencies to block transmission, and my counterpoint was that any scheme that rigid and immutable would fail in America because our needs are much more dynamic and subject to change from day to day as carriers merge, acquire spectrum, and reorganize their band plans.
Logical filters, maybe, but certainly not physical ones. Otherwise, AT&T's GSM network (and a fairly big chunk of T-Mobile/US's network) couldn't exist. In America, using the same band for uplink and downlink is the norm. I believe this is also the case in Australia and a few other places where 850MHz and 1900MHz (without 2150MHz) are used for UMTS.
Well, the HD2 was kind of an exception, because it was literally the last of the line and was already well into the Android evolutionary hardware curve. I was mainly talking about HTC phones from roughly 2004 through 2008, when there were still people crazy enough to think that single-core smartphones (as in, a single CPU controlling everything from the OS to the phone itself) were viable, let alone a good idea. Anyone remember the useless, crippled super low-end Windows Mobile 6 "smartphones" that lacked touchscreens and couldn't really do much besides display custom wallpaper and wave the (Windows) flag?
I'm pretty sure only about 14 cents of the $5 is FAT32-related, and the bulk of it is due to patents that originated with Windows Mobile. Like it or hate it, WinMo was doing more or less the same stuff Android does today circa 2004. IOS and Android just made it pretty, and gave the dialer app a finger-friendly user interface.
Architecturally, PalmOS phones and WinMo phones were VERY different, and iPhones & Android phones have more in common with WinMo than PalmOS hardware.
Metaphorically:
A PalmOS phone (pre-Treo) was a Dragonball PDA duct-taped onto a cell phone through a serial port, much like a PC with an internal non-Winmodem.
A Windows Mobile phone (and later Treos) was a nasty Windows XP PC with $14 HSP winmodem that offloaded everything to software, including the signal processing itself.
An Android phone is kind of a compromise between the two extremes, like the later-vintage Lucent Winmodems that had a real DSP for the heavy lifting grunt work, but used the host CPU for logic and high-level protocol. There's a software RIL that mediates between the two, but much of the "radio" side has been moved back into its own dedicated hardware (or at least its own dedicated chunk of silicon with its own dedicated CPU on the same die). The "unitary" Windows Mobile hardware model was cheaper to manufacture, but bound the OS very, very tightly to specific architectures (it's not a coincidence that basically all Windows Mobile phones came from HTC -- porting WinMo to some other phone hardware would have been a MAJOR undertaking well beyond the capabilities of any group of hobbyists, even WITH the sourcecode).
Anyway, the bundle of hardware similarities between WinMo's hardware-software architecture and Android's is where most of the royalties go. Between Palm, Microsoft/HTC, and Motorola, it's pretty hard to make a modern phone without infringing on SOMETHING owned by them.
Do you know what role tablet PCs will have in the hardware lives of Slashdot users 10 years from now? They'll be our laptop's second monitor, and desktop computer's auxiliary input device (now EVERYONE can have a Wacom-like tablet!). Normal users will use a tablet as their mouse. Slashdot users will buy a $150 OLED mousepad with overlay that looks transparent, but the mouse sensor will see as a complex pattern to assist with motion detection (and of course, something like a Hall-Effect sensor to disable any touch capabilities it might have when the mouse itself is on top).
Slashdot users will still have real mice, though, because even the best capacitive screen sucks donkey balls next to a thousand+ hertz sample rate high-res gaming mouse. Once you've gotten spoiled by a mouse like the Logitech G700, you can't go back and join the rest of the grunt world. Wireless gaming mice have firmly taken their place next to the Model M as "must have" peripherals :-)
Don't forget braindead ISA cards that only supported one or two specific IRQs, or stopped at IRQ9 so the manufacturer could omit the last precious inch of circuit board needed to properly support IRQs 10 and above.
So you'll buy your Intel|AMD RGCPU with 16 gigs, GPU, 32core CPU, and plug it into the motherboard you bought from newegg. Then bolt the cooling system you bought from newegg onto it, stick it into a case you bought from newegg, and continue like you do now.
People transitioned from 8-bit computers to gaming consoles because:
a) The 1541 was brutally slow. Fastload just made it semi-tolerable.
b) PCs (prior to ~1992, Gravis Ultrasound + ET4000 + 486/66) sucked worse 8-bit systems for games
c) Videogames crashed and burned on any Amiga higher than an a500 with a meg of chip ram and no hard drive (ok, overgeneralizing a bit... but not much), and Sonic on the Genesis wasn't much below the standards of mainstream Amiga games at the time, anyway. I know, I owned both simultaneously.
d) Mac was worthless for gaming, period, until well into the late 90s and OS/X, and an Atari ST with display capable of flicker-free 640x480 was equally worthless for games.
e) I'm not even going to get into the mid-90s and mention the agony of trying to get a Gravis Ultrasound to work with anything that didn't explicitly support it. Good god. The day I installed Windows 95 was the first time in... well... EVER... that most of the hardware on my PC worked properly at the same time.
As for the popularity of consoles NOW, there's a reason why I refuse point blank to buy PC games -- the only difference between most of them and trojans/rootkits/malware is the EULA. I refuse to dirty a nice, pristine installation of Windows anymore with the crap that's required to run any modern PC game. Modern games are too invasive, and wantonly vandalize your whole PC for the sake of enforcing their DRM. Screw them. The last PC games I ever bought were Prince of Persia and Sim City 3000... both of which ended up having to be cracked to work properly on my computer (apparently, they didn't like the fact that the Dell D600 I had at the time had a removable optical drive, or something to that effect).
It's largely incompatible with the nicest desktop form factors, too, but that hasn't banished mATX (or more) from the desktops of NewEgg's customers. Cases have gradually diminished in size to the current norm of a rectangle wide enough for a stack of 2 or 3 horizontal 5-1/4" drives, a stack of up to 3 3.5" drives exposed to the outside world, the minimum box necessary to accommodate a microATX mobo vertically or horizontally, and that's pretty much the end of it. The only real place left to go would be a pair of boxes... one containing the mobo/cpu/ram/videocard/pci(express) cards, and one tethered by a siamese eSATA+displayPort+USB3+firewire/power cable with (surprise, surprise) a few exposed bays for 5-1/4" drives and (USB) 3-1/2" drives (or peripherals having the same form factor). I think IBM even had a series of desktop PCs like this a few years ago, right before they were bought by Lenovo.
The crucial point this article ignores is the fact that people who buy appliance-like computers (*cough* Macs) don't buy much/anything component-related from NewEgg NOW, so why worry about whether they're going to do it later? Likewise, the people whose first thought when you say "new PC" is "what motherboard did you get" (and buy most of their hardware from NewEgg) aren't going to be settling for appliance-like PCs anytime soon, either.
> I think that VMS is an opportunity lost
VMS >> 1 = WNT
In a very real sense, if your desktop PC has "7", "Vista", "XP", "2000", or "NT" somewhere in the name of its operating system, you're running a direct descendant of VMS. Polluted a bit by 20 years of inbreeding, exposure to toxic waste, and enemy attacks... but a descendant nonetheless.
You have one thing backwards... historically, COMPAQ was the high-end corporate laptop brand, and HP made the junk sold by Circuit City & Best Buy. Their desktop PCs are another matter entirely, but Compaq's higher-end/corporate laptops were pretty much best of breed and the worthy adversary of any Thinkpad. Anybody remember the Armada M700? We had them at my old company when I first started. Had Moore's law not rendered them obsolete, they'd probably still be in use today. They were tanks. Awesome keyboards second only to a real Thinkpad, real pointer sticks, butter-smooth LCD hinges, and they just plain felt *solid*. By comparison, the Dells the company bought to replace them felt like junky plastic toys.
> Q: should the students be liable for the crime of trespassing?
Yes, because at that point you've explicitly and unambiguously revoked their permission to enter your garden and take vegetables.
It would be another matter ENTIRELY if you never confronted the students, observed them giving vegetables to the homeless, then escalated immediately to calling the cops the next day by arguing that giving the vegetables to the homeless automatically terminated their permission to enter your garden and take vegetables.
It sounds like splitting hairs, but it's the difference between making the individual absolutely, explicitly, and unambiguously aware that his permission to enter has been revoked, vs claiming guilt by automatic recursive fiat. The computer analogy would be if Facebook terminated your use due to TOS violations, and you proceeded to take advantage of a security exploit to resurrect your profile and continue using Facebook after they'd told you point blank you were no longer welcome.
In metaphorical terms, American law isn't binary and digital -- it's analog and gray. Generally speaking, the more obvious you (or a government) makes the boundary between legal and illegal, the more enforceable a law becomes. It helps to have lots of legal resources behind you to back up your position, but at the end of the day, American common law frowns upon insidious illegality. You can have quite a few situations where the students could find themselves in a position where you'd prevail over them in a civil lawsuit, but nevertheless fail to get them convicted of committing a crime. For example, if instead of telling them that they were no longer allowed to enter your garden, you sent an email to the principal of the school and expected HIM to tell them. At that point, you'd have a fairly clear case to sue them (though they'd arguably have an equally clear case to cross-claim the principal for failing to tell them if he failed to do so), but would have a difficult case to make in a criminal trial for trespass (assuming the prosecutor even pursued it).
Yes, but you can't buy albuterol without a prescription. Most people who use Primatene as their primary asthma rescue drug are poor and lack insurance. The need to take time off from work and get an official prescription can be a substantial barrier. The cost of the albuterol isn't $30... it's $30, plus the cost of the doctor visit, plus the lost wages from taking part or all of the day off from work.
The difference is, in America albuterol is fairly expensive (about $55 per inhaler) compared to Primatene (about $15-20), and Primatene is available without a prescription. For people without health insurance (and jobs where taking the day off to go to the doctor means not getting paid) whose asthma isn't quite bad enough to put them at daily risk of death, Primatene is an important safety net. If the FDA approved albuterol as OTC, it would be almost moot... but Primatene's OTC status was largely due to historical legacy. The FDA rarely takes away OTC status, but tends to be quite resistant to adding new drugs to the list.
HFA is a weaker propellant, and has a pretty nasty taste & odor to boot.
Primatene's problem is complicated, because the ban isn't entirely motivated by love for Mother Earth(tm). The DEA wants Primatene off the market, because it's basically aerosolized ephedrine ready for meth production.
* If Primatene is reformulated with HFA, it has to be re-approved by the FDA
* Re-approval would be expensive, and the resulting drug would have only limited patent protection due to massive amounts of prior art.
* The DEA wants reformulated Primatene to include additional ingredients that (supposedly) won't affect asthmatic users, but will taint the ephedrine so it can't be used for meth production.
* A new version reformulated to DEA standards WOULD be profitably patentable, but the FDA isn't thrilled about adding chemicals of no benefit to users to a product used by extremely vulnerable people whose breathing is pretty fragile to begin with. They know that somewhere out there are at least a few dozen people likely to die if they use the new formula, and have made it clear that they're going to hold approval of the new version to the highest possible standards and nix it at the *slightest* hint of trouble.
* Primatene's maker is happy about patentability, but worried about lawsuits. Catch-22.
It's more complicated than what I wrote above, but that pretty much sums it up. It's the perfect storm of stupid symbolic environmentalism, corporate greed, and the war on drugs. Made worse by the fact that the majority of longterm Primatene users are poor and lack proper health care (people with health insurance use albuterol, unless they have very mild asthma and accidentally go somewhere without their inhaler, at which point they run to Walgreen's and buy Primatene to keep around "just in case"). That's also the main theory of why Advair (combination of a steroid and long-but-slow-acting alpha agonist) has a signficantly higher death rate among poor and minority users with seemingly moderate & controlled asthma -- they get prescriptions for Advair and albuterol, buy the Advair, but skip the albuterol because the new formulation is expensive & they don't need it very often. The problem is, when they DO have an acute attack, all they have on hand is Advair, which isn't suitable as a rescue inhaler, and a small percentage of them end up dying under circumstances where albuterol would have saved them. It's a hard theory to ethically test, but one that explains a bothersome side effect (death) of Advair whose victims are overwhelmingly poor Americans.
AT&T and Verizon might be Bell's children, but their cultures and long-term business strategies are about as different as you can get. AT&T's long-term strategy is to abandon wired infrastructure, and spend as little money as possible expanding capacity in favor of capping users into submission. Verizon's long-term strategy is to run fiber everywhere, costs be damned, and charge top dollar for a premium service. In a very real sense, when the original AT&T got broken up, SBC inherited the cheapskate Soviet-style bureaucrats, and Verizon inherited the execs who worked at the bleeding edge of the front lines & believed in making cool things happen, costs be damned.
In more historical terms, SBC's management grew from the folks who did their best to talk rural customers into sticking with party lines (because it meant they didn't have to run more copper out to BFE). Verizon's management grew from the folks whose earlier bosses made satellite communication viable, and made live TV press conferences in the middle of nowhere possible (at staggering cost, absorbed by everyone since they were still a monopoly and could get away with it) way back in the 50s and 60s.
That said, both companies are control freaks... an attitude they both inherited from the old AT&T. The sad thing is, they're control freaks for the sake of being control freaks. Obviously, they want to make more money, and know they can do it by trying to create walled content gardens and crippling users' phones to steer them towards premium services, but when you really dig down to it, they'd do it even if cost and profitability were complete non-issues, just because that's how they've *always* been.
It's legal, but it's hard to think of any meaningful competitive retail environment where you could actually get away with charging more to a subset of customers unless you somehow managed to provide more value than competitors charging less. If I want to charge wealthy people $5 for a can of diet Coke, but sell the same can to poor customers for a nickel, and the store next door sells it for a dollar, chances are that most of the people I'd try to charge $5 will go next door and buy it there instead.
For an example of a real company that voluntarily offers lower prices to a poorer group of buyers (not necessarily verifying their income, but relying on the fact that they're statistically likely to be near the bottom of their lifetime salary figures), just look at Microsoft and student discounts. A registered college student can buy a copy of Visual Studio Enterprise Edition for approximately what it costs a normal person to buy a copy of Microsoft Word from Newegg, In this case, part of the reason they can get away with charging radically higher prices to normal customers is the fact that VSEE's normal customers tend to be enterprise customers who think it's sane to go through 5 levels of purchasing approval so an employee can get a $300 RAM upgrade that could be expensed for $50 if they just bought it at CompUSA at lunch on the company credit card. American "Enterprise" customers are a strange beast that in some ways would have even had Soviet bureaucrats shaking their heads in disbelief (the Soviets put up with it because they had no choice, but even they would have had their minds blown to see private entities voluntarily adopting the same practices).
As others have pointed out, the big danger is that we'll start to see "subsidized" hardware that's locked to crippled, adware-laden versions of Windows... and that subsidized hardware will end up being popular enough with the mainstream masses to make unlocked hardware ridiculously expensive by comparison (adding in not only the forfeited subsidy, but also the added premium for maintaining a separate niche product line). Or just as bad, manufacturers that start shipping PCs with locked bootloaders and force you to waive your warranty rights to get the unlock code (a-la-Android). Those forced waivers would never pass legal muster as long as the Magnuson-Moss act doesn't get repealed, but 98% of consumers have never heard of it, and don't realize that when push comes to shove, courts won't enforce contracts that violate a law, and the same courts look upon contracts of adhesion ("take it or leave it") with *extreme* prejudice against powerful parties when it comes to enforcing unfavorable terms upon a much weaker party.
CompUSA has a halfway decent selection of motherboards, CPUs, and everything else needed to build a reasonable new PC for a price that's not enormously more than you'd spend online if you had everything FedEx'ed. Unfortunately, I believe CompUSA now has a major presence only in Florida, Texas, Northern Illinois, North Carolina(?), and a few other stores scattered around the country. However, I believe Fry's out west has a comparable (if not slightly better) selection. (Sigh. Someday, ${deity} will smile in Florida's general direction, and we'll get to have Fry's too... )