There are many answers, but realistically, it enables you to use it as a "free" wi-fi hotspot. (as in, no extra charge from the carrier.) Some other cool stuff, too. Useful stuff, not just changing your background.
I could write an app that displays on the screen "Hold down the red button on the side for 10 seconds, then press this button, then do this, and your app will give you free pr0n!"
It sounds stupid, but it would be trivial to socially engineer thousands of people to do something to hardware, if that were my end goal. Granted, not smart users, but then, that's not really who these guys are after. Plenty of low hanging fruit on the shallow end of the gene pool.
I mostly agree with your point, but I can think of a few examples where a user could unlock a phone and cause harm to others. For example, they could increase the signal strength to something beyond the approved FCC limit for mobile devices. This would harm anyone in the competing spectrum, and isn't something you could regulate on a server end.
If course, when I'm talking about "unlocked" here, I'm also referring to things you could do the hardware as well as the firmware. (i.e. open the device up and replace the fancy electric stuff and whatnot.)
No, clearly it is you that doesn't understand that making chips out of RISC makes them faster. That has always made me wonder, why don't they just make all chips out of RISC. I mean, it's clearly better than whatever other stuff they make the other chips out of. 2.4 times better in fact.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, because you're mostly right, however, I think you'd be surprised at all the things that Windows CE is embedded into without most people even knowing it. Television sets, ATMs, Generic set-top boxes, kiosk displays, just to name a few. There are quite a lot of devices that use a WinCE kernel without any branding or splash screen.
Really, though, I agree with you. I think these embedded devices are what the GP post was referring to.
Well, best implementation aside, the Intel GMA3150 is almost universal on netbooks. I'm not trying to argue over which is better or which is easier to develop for, but practically speaking, Canonical should not have released Unity as the default interface on a release called "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" with a bug that seems to make the default install nearly unusable on 95% of netbooks on the market. It's blunders like this that make people think that Linux sucks, when in reality, it's a very viable alternative to Windows.
Wait, you're calling Intel an odd chipset? On a netbook? I'm pretty sure you haven't been netbook shopping recently.
Here is the list of the top selling netbooks in September: http://www.netbookreviews.com/best-selling-netbooks-of-september/
9 out of those 10 use Intel graphics chipset.
If a chipset is in 95% (+) of all netbooks sold, it's really irrelevant whether it sucks or not. You really should make sure your OS that's called "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" supports the hell out of it.
I will say from experience that Unity sucks a big fat one on netbooks. I'm not talking about old netbooks, either. I just bought a brand new HP Mini 210 and an Acer AO532h Both have an Atom N450, which isn't the fastest processor in the world, but Unity runs like a slideshow on both of them. It's supposed to be a distribution optimized for netbooks. The dock is almost unusable because of the lag, and it launches apps slow as hell. The 10.04 netbook interface was much faster and more responsive. Sure Unity is (or could be) slick and pretty, but the netbook remix isn't supposed to be about slick and pretty. It's supposed to be about fast and easy performance on sub-standard hardware.
I think at this point it might be entirely appropriate to separate the netbook distro from a tablet distro. Tablet PC's have substantially more horsepower than netbooks, the two projects have completely different goals. Why have them in a single distro? On my netbook I ended up hacking in the old netbook interface and it works great, but what I did is out of the reach of most people that the Ubuntu community is trying to attract. If they could get this OS on $250 netbooks from Wal-Mart, maybe the general public would realize that Linux doesn't suck, and isn't hard to use. I shouldn't need to re-compile my kernel to figure that out.
Your understanding of insider trading is all kinds of wrong. Insider trading is when you know something about a company that the general public does no know or have access to, then use that knowledge to gain financially in a way that a person in the general public wouldn't be able to do. For example, if I work for a pharmaceutical company and I get wind that the FDA is going to approve "Viagra plus" next Tuesday. If I then go out Monday and buy a bunch of stock in the company, knowing full well that it's going to go through the roof, THAT is insider trading. Conversely, if I already own a bunch of stock and I know that "Viagra plus" isn't going to be approved by the FDA on Tuesday, and I dump my stock on Monday to keep from getting burned, that also is insider trading.
What I described is perfectly legal (assuming I don't have any insider knowledge of the "hot stock.") The problem is, if I've got nothing invested, there aren't many people (specifically stock brokers) that would be willing to risk their money knowing that I will get 70% of the profits. Guys like Milken and Madoff built a legitimate reputation for themselves as savvy investors before trying to pull their schemes. Also, they didn't target smart stockbrokers, they targeted gullible and ignorant rich people and promised huge returns. They also didn't say they were going to keep 70%, it was probably more like 1% or 2% (which can still amount to some serious cabbage when you're talking about funds in the billions of dollars.)
Zimbra has been a more than adequate replacement for Exchange in my company. It's definitely lighter on features/bloat, but I see that as a positive, not a negative. Also, it saved our company a not-insignificant amount of money, and it can be accessed on platforms other than Microsoft. Of course, YMMV.
How about if you went to a stockbroker and said "Hey, I know this really hot stock. I can tell you which one it is, and YOU can invest YOUR money into it. On top of that, YOU can keep 70% of the profits!"
I'd like to meet any stockbroker that would go for this sort of arrangement, because I've got some pretty mean ideas for investments, and hell, I'd let them keep 75% of the profits!
There's a whole hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence that Norman was likely at least a catalyst for the shootings, but I agree with you, there isn't enough real evidence to even bring charges, let alone try to prosecute.
Norman was on campus the day of the protests, wearing a gas mask and and a.38-caliber pistol for protection. He was photographing demonstrators and said he regularly sold the photos to the FBI and the Kent State police department.
I am far more bothered by the fact that a) Mr. Norman was on the payroll of the FBI at the time and b) authorities (may have) lied under oath about the fact that Mr. Norman discharged his weapon during the protest. This implies that the FBI was at least indirectly involved in the massacre and directly involved in the cover-up.
I'll give you that Mr. Norman probably didn't directly trigger the massacre, although shooting a gun in a crowd of angry people probably didn't contribute to happy peaceful feelings at the protest. However, the government at the time seems to have actively and knowingly participated in a cover-up. This bothers me a lot. It should bother everyone. A lot.
Definitely a fair point. However, if someone starts waving a gun around and firing shots, that's a good way to whip up a crowd of angry people into a fury, where the guardsmen might have legitimately felt threatened. 70 seconds is probably too long for him to have been directly responsible, but just about the right amount of time to have been a crucial catalyst.
This implies that there are single bit errors in digital cables. There are not. They necessarily have error correction built in. When talking about something like a SATA cable, even a single bit error in a transmission is capable of crashing a system and causing catastrophic data loss. Any system that's used for hard drives REQUIRES absolutely ZERO uncorrected data errors ever. The iSCSI protocol, which essentially channels hard drive data over an Ethernet connection, has an enormous amount of buffering and error correction built in for this reason. I could literally unplug my SAN for 10 seconds (maybe longer) and plug it back in, and get no data errors.
I always just took it as a given that the PADD was a large part of the inspiration behind the iPad. I mean, even the name pays homage. I can easily envision someone like Steve Jobs sitting down with a designer and some episodes of ST:TNG and saying "Now make me on of those".
It's pretty apparent that the set designers on ST:TNG were visionaries. It's pretty difficult to accurately envision the future, even if it's only 20 years ahead of time. Credit needs to be given to those guys. I just hope that Apple had the decency to give them free iPads when they were released.
Honestly, the best reporting on this type of stupidity is "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It's a shame that a news program whose explicitly stated goal is humor is the only outlet reporting this stuff.
1) 1996 - Microsoft introduces Pen Computing Services for Windows 95
2) 2000 - Bill Gates unveils the "Tablet PC" concept at Comdex.
3) 2003 - Microsoft unveils "Windows XP - Tablet PC edition"
4) 2005 - Microsoft "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005" is released
5) 2010 - HP Slate demoed at CES.
There are a slew of other examples, but GP said at least 5, so he is in fact correct. Gates had the vision almost 15 years ago that Tablet PC's were going to feature prominently in the future of computing, but Microsoft consistently screwed up the execution. (With the exception of a few niche markets, like medical applications, which use the Tablet PC routinely and effectively)
Slashdot Mirror
There are many answers, but realistically, it enables you to use it as a "free" wi-fi hotspot. (as in, no extra charge from the carrier.) Some other cool stuff, too. Useful stuff, not just changing your background.
I could write an app that displays on the screen "Hold down the red button on the side for 10 seconds, then press this button, then do this, and your app will give you free pr0n!"
It sounds stupid, but it would be trivial to socially engineer thousands of people to do something to hardware, if that were my end goal. Granted, not smart users, but then, that's not really who these guys are after. Plenty of low hanging fruit on the shallow end of the gene pool.
I mostly agree with your point, but I can think of a few examples where a user could unlock a phone and cause harm to others. For example, they could increase the signal strength to something beyond the approved FCC limit for mobile devices. This would harm anyone in the competing spectrum, and isn't something you could regulate on a server end.
If course, when I'm talking about "unlocked" here, I'm also referring to things you could do the hardware as well as the firmware. (i.e. open the device up and replace the fancy electric stuff and whatnot.)
Definitely a troll, but look at the very next post...
Expect much more of the same while you protest.
Fixed that for you.
Definite sarcasm. I guess I should have made it sound even more ignorant. :)
It's just RDP or ICA. It would be just fine over 10mb, probably even coax, although I don't think you can do PoE over 10base2.
No, clearly it is you that doesn't understand that making chips out of RISC makes them faster. That has always made me wonder, why don't they just make all chips out of RISC. I mean, it's clearly better than whatever other stuff they make the other chips out of. 2.4 times better in fact.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, because you're mostly right, however, I think you'd be surprised at all the things that Windows CE is embedded into without most people even knowing it. Television sets, ATMs, Generic set-top boxes, kiosk displays, just to name a few. There are quite a lot of devices that use a WinCE kernel without any branding or splash screen.
Really, though, I agree with you. I think these embedded devices are what the GP post was referring to.
Well, best implementation aside, the Intel GMA3150 is almost universal on netbooks. I'm not trying to argue over which is better or which is easier to develop for, but practically speaking, Canonical should not have released Unity as the default interface on a release called "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" with a bug that seems to make the default install nearly unusable on 95% of netbooks on the market. It's blunders like this that make people think that Linux sucks, when in reality, it's a very viable alternative to Windows.
Wait, you're calling Intel an odd chipset? On a netbook? I'm pretty sure you haven't been netbook shopping recently.
Here is the list of the top selling netbooks in September:
http://www.netbookreviews.com/best-selling-netbooks-of-september/
9 out of those 10 use Intel graphics chipset.
If a chipset is in 95% (+) of all netbooks sold, it's really irrelevant whether it sucks or not. You really should make sure your OS that's called "Ubuntu Netbook Edition" supports the hell out of it.
I will say from experience that Unity sucks a big fat one on netbooks. I'm not talking about old netbooks, either. I just bought a brand new HP Mini 210 and an Acer AO532h Both have an Atom N450, which isn't the fastest processor in the world, but Unity runs like a slideshow on both of them. It's supposed to be a distribution optimized for netbooks. The dock is almost unusable because of the lag, and it launches apps slow as hell. The 10.04 netbook interface was much faster and more responsive. Sure Unity is (or could be) slick and pretty, but the netbook remix isn't supposed to be about slick and pretty. It's supposed to be about fast and easy performance on sub-standard hardware.
I think at this point it might be entirely appropriate to separate the netbook distro from a tablet distro. Tablet PC's have substantially more horsepower than netbooks, the two projects have completely different goals. Why have them in a single distro? On my netbook I ended up hacking in the old netbook interface and it works great, but what I did is out of the reach of most people that the Ubuntu community is trying to attract. If they could get this OS on $250 netbooks from Wal-Mart, maybe the general public would realize that Linux doesn't suck, and isn't hard to use. I shouldn't need to re-compile my kernel to figure that out.
Your understanding of insider trading is all kinds of wrong. Insider trading is when you know something about a company that the general public does no know or have access to, then use that knowledge to gain financially in a way that a person in the general public wouldn't be able to do. For example, if I work for a pharmaceutical company and I get wind that the FDA is going to approve "Viagra plus" next Tuesday. If I then go out Monday and buy a bunch of stock in the company, knowing full well that it's going to go through the roof, THAT is insider trading. Conversely, if I already own a bunch of stock and I know that "Viagra plus" isn't going to be approved by the FDA on Tuesday, and I dump my stock on Monday to keep from getting burned, that also is insider trading.
What I described is perfectly legal (assuming I don't have any insider knowledge of the "hot stock.") The problem is, if I've got nothing invested, there aren't many people (specifically stock brokers) that would be willing to risk their money knowing that I will get 70% of the profits. Guys like Milken and Madoff built a legitimate reputation for themselves as savvy investors before trying to pull their schemes. Also, they didn't target smart stockbrokers, they targeted gullible and ignorant rich people and promised huge returns. They also didn't say they were going to keep 70%, it was probably more like 1% or 2% (which can still amount to some serious cabbage when you're talking about funds in the billions of dollars.)
Zimbra has been a more than adequate replacement for Exchange in my company. It's definitely lighter on features/bloat, but I see that as a positive, not a negative. Also, it saved our company a not-insignificant amount of money, and it can be accessed on platforms other than Microsoft. Of course, YMMV.
How about if you went to a stockbroker and said "Hey, I know this really hot stock. I can tell you which one it is, and YOU can invest YOUR money into it. On top of that, YOU can keep 70% of the profits!"
I'd like to meet any stockbroker that would go for this sort of arrangement, because I've got some pretty mean ideas for investments, and hell, I'd let them keep 75% of the profits!
Which car company do you work for?
There's a whole hell of a lot of circumstantial evidence that Norman was likely at least a catalyst for the shootings, but I agree with you, there isn't enough real evidence to even bring charges, let alone try to prosecute.
Norman was on campus the day of the protests, wearing a gas mask and and a .38-caliber pistol for protection. He was photographing demonstrators and said he regularly sold the photos to the FBI and the Kent State police department.
(Emphasis is mine)
I am far more bothered by the fact that a) Mr. Norman was on the payroll of the FBI at the time and b) authorities (may have) lied under oath about the fact that Mr. Norman discharged his weapon during the protest. This implies that the FBI was at least indirectly involved in the massacre and directly involved in the cover-up.
I'll give you that Mr. Norman probably didn't directly trigger the massacre, although shooting a gun in a crowd of angry people probably didn't contribute to happy peaceful feelings at the protest. However, the government at the time seems to have actively and knowingly participated in a cover-up. This bothers me a lot. It should bother everyone. A lot.
Definitely a fair point. However, if someone starts waving a gun around and firing shots, that's a good way to whip up a crowd of angry people into a fury, where the guardsmen might have legitimately felt threatened. 70 seconds is probably too long for him to have been directly responsible, but just about the right amount of time to have been a crucial catalyst.
This implies that there are single bit errors in digital cables. There are not. They necessarily have error correction built in. When talking about something like a SATA cable, even a single bit error in a transmission is capable of crashing a system and causing catastrophic data loss. Any system that's used for hard drives REQUIRES absolutely ZERO uncorrected data errors ever. The iSCSI protocol, which essentially channels hard drive data over an Ethernet connection, has an enormous amount of buffering and error correction built in for this reason. I could literally unplug my SAN for 10 seconds (maybe longer) and plug it back in, and get no data errors.
This is, at least, somewhat plausible. He must be using a horrible sound card, but at least it doesn't defy the laws of physics.
I always just took it as a given that the PADD was a large part of the inspiration behind the iPad. I mean, even the name pays homage. I can easily envision someone like Steve Jobs sitting down with a designer and some episodes of ST:TNG and saying "Now make me on of those".
It's pretty apparent that the set designers on ST:TNG were visionaries. It's pretty difficult to accurately envision the future, even if it's only 20 years ahead of time. Credit needs to be given to those guys. I just hope that Apple had the decency to give them free iPads when they were released.
And nobody cares!
Honestly, the best reporting on this type of stupidity is "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart." It's a shame that a news program whose explicitly stated goal is humor is the only outlet reporting this stuff.
1) 1996 - Microsoft introduces Pen Computing Services for Windows 95
2) 2000 - Bill Gates unveils the "Tablet PC" concept at Comdex.
3) 2003 - Microsoft unveils "Windows XP - Tablet PC edition"
4) 2005 - Microsoft "Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005" is released
5) 2010 - HP Slate demoed at CES.
There are a slew of other examples, but GP said at least 5, so he is in fact correct. Gates had the vision almost 15 years ago that Tablet PC's were going to feature prominently in the future of computing, but Microsoft consistently screwed up the execution. (With the exception of a few niche markets, like medical applications, which use the Tablet PC routinely and effectively)