There is a ton of outrage over border security right now and Internet technologies that came out of DARPA sure as hell made the military a lot more efficient while lots of the infrastructure was built by universities and private organizations expanding on the research that came out of DARPA.
ACH is not even close to a single point of failure, you're referring to a whole network. Is the Internet a single point of failure for any organization? The whole Internet can go down? Really? ACH runs on all of the same technology only segregated from the rest of the Internet.
As for biometrics, as you assuming that card swipes will actually verify that identity is consistent with a central database somewhere? Good luck with the government putting something like that together if you recall the FBI's latest attempts to modernize. How would that work considering the numbers of places without an Internet connection. Are they going to share a phone line with credit card machines now? No, the reality is that different biometric information will be encoded on a fraudulent Real ID matching the identity thief.
The only thing Real ID accomplishes is making it MORE difficult to recover your identity once it has been stolen. Since you couldn't possible have had the information forged. It would also make it easier when presenting ID but we should only rarely ever have to present ID. Given the current state of constitutional abuses I would definitely say now is not the time for something like this.
I might be wrong on this but last I remembered gas station owners didn't set the price of gas, the refinery companies do. I recall a guy in Michigan I think it was who lowered the price of gas 30 cents taking a loss but was then fined by the city because there is apparently a maximum range stations owners are allowed to charge and it's relative to everyone else. It's completely asinine that prices change on a daily basis given that the gasoline is already in the tank at the station.
You do make a good point though, if the restrictions on station owners were lifted and they were allowed to profit from liquor sales then the price at the pump would drop. Too bad I don't see that happening. Station owners would use the gas to get people to the stores so they could upsell. Sounds good for them as well as consumers.
You mean a processor that does more and offers rock solid performance versus and overclocked rig that needs rebooting every few hours?
Parent has an odd notion of what scaling is, although technically that would be considering scaling up when the general industry trend is scaling out. My database and web servers are Opteron based for good reason, exactly the ones you specified. Seems a shame AMD not being able to keep up on the lower end of things but they really aren't challenged by Intel in the mid-range server market. Would be nice to see some larger AMD setups, like 8-way 16 core, or 16-way 32 core. Architecturally speaking if that hardware were released it would only widen the lead at the top end and Intel really has some serious problems with scaling out.
This is pretty common practice with Oracle, this is why people pay good money for Metalink access. It's a very valuable tool if you have to work with Oracle products. We used it extensively to get our in-house application working flawlessly with Oracle 10g. There is tons of sample code up there. I doubt they found any actual DBMS code.
Except that mastering a Blu-ray disc is no different and requires no additional effort to master an HD-DVD disc. When it comes to game consoles they are different architectures and require significantly more effort to produce for multiple platforms. Of course with that said it sounds like Sony should also be investigated. If Sony didn't pay them to be exclusive then perhaps they would have saw money in producing the games for multiple platforms.
Really? All Linux software is free of licensing headaches? Licensing the OS has always been brain dead easy for most any platform. It's the software running on the OS that causes the headaches. Of course on both platforms I have tools for inventory management to keep all the licensing straight. It's even unified so I can monitor and control both environments with it. I don't manage a lot of servers, about 24 so far. 20 of them are Windows and four are Linux based. I visit each of my servers on the same schedule applying patches centrally is quite easy.
The bottom-line is not easily segregated between Linux and Windows because of the software that runs on top of it. Some of the Windows software is a hell of a lot cheaper than similar software on Linux. Think MS SQL on Windows versus Oracle on Linux. Since I alone manage 24 servers with the associated apps I'm sure as hell not going to look at the source and tweak as necessary on a linux box assuming I even have access to the source. I'm going to pay for some support and let my partner worry about such details. Support on the Microsoft side of the fence is a lot cheaper than support on the Linux side. 99% of the time it's not needed on either platform so pricing of support is very important.
Hybrid environments are easy and make a lot of sense from a risk mitigation perspective. I also find that working in one environment gives me ideas on how to better work with the other environments. Best practices for the most part are platform inspecific. That goes for DNS/DHCP and for RADIUS. Although I must say, DHCP on linux is much much much better than DHCP on Windows given Option 82 support and all.
I have no idea where you get your information. On the 64 bit end of things the Opteron has been hammering the Xeon for years. This is the area I have experience as I run a website which sees millions of users. The Opterons in addition to being more stable also perform a hell of a lot better. The numbers add up too as integer performance has been a strength of AMD for quite some time. Maybe in the gaming arena Intel's 64bit offerings perform faster but certainly not in the real world with IIS/SQL 2005 and Apache/mySQL. I run both environments and both are consistent.
Intel's shared FSB has been a joke for years, I have no idea why you would defend it as being sensible when Intel could do it right from the get-go and not have to redesign the chip later costing them more money. It's all about short term gains which you seem to think is a good idea. AMD made enough money to buy ATI I don't think they are exactly hard up given that their processors are back to being cheaper and performing in line with Intel. The Core 2 Duo is more expensive than the equivalent Athlon. The only place where there is real competition is at the top end of the consumer chip market where Intel holds the performance crown. For the price AMD is clearly a better value which is why more and more OEMs are releasing AMD products. Think Dell, Think Sun
You're statements are pretty much bizarre considering the Core 2 Duo and the latest Athlon X2 products or the Athlon FX series processors are very competitive in 32 bit so there is no smaller margin to make up in the 64 bit otherwise the processors would be performing identically in which case you've already proved the point of why AMD is the smart move.
AMD's most expensive desktop processor? $800 Throw that money at Intel and you will get a processor that is slower than the Athlon FX. If you want to spend $1300 on a chip then sure Intel will be faster, a whole 10fps faster in your game. That's definitely worth the extra $500.
Also, why do you think MS went with an Athlon processor for their low cost PC they are selling in India? Perhaps because AMD is squarely in the best performance for the dollar? That strategy has always worked for AMD. They ran into trouble when they dropped it for a while and raised their prices.
So you're saying AMD shouldn't mentioned the only reason Intel beat them to it is the fact that Intel cut stupid corners to produce a product for the sake of being first?
Stability of AMD server chips certainly shows that AMD has an idea about SMP while Intel is still scratching their collective balls. When things go to 64 bit you really start to see AMD's strengths as their current offerings are more than competitive. The desktop arena is a tough market that Intel current has the crown for but only because of Intel cutting corners. The technology itself is not superior to what AMD is offering. The only difference being that Intel can manufacture and when they want to, they can engineer. For some reason Intel is sticking with the whole FSB idea for communicating among cores. That's just plain silly although admittedly easier than AMD's approach. Which is why Intel is winning right now. It remains to be seen whether this was a short term gain with a long term sacrifice. Intel certainly has a lot of money so they could be doing both capitalizing on what AMD lacks working on their own upcoming products to meet or beat AMD's next gen. Should be interesting to see if Intel learned it's lesson from the Athlon days of glory.
That should be the lawsuit material then. If you can demonstrate a loss of credibility or lose a job over this stuff then you have a case for a lawsuit. If there is demonstrable harm done whether physical or otherwise then there is recourse in a lawsuit. Sounds reasonable to me. That said, how many people are cyberbullied once they are out of high school?
Sounds like reception is thrashing the battery since as I'm sure you know it ramps up the power to get better reception if the signal is weak.
The only feature about the Treo that is lacking in my experience is the amount of ram which sounds like is the source of your troubles. Also, first gen Treo 700s had the issue you describe with data corruption. It's interesting to see that the problem exists on the Palm side as well as the WM side. The AIM and MSN clients are rock solid on my end but I have excellent reception in most places I go. I also have a car adapter to charge it while I'm on the go. I have an airline adapter for regular devices which I could use to charge the phone although honestly I've never needed to.
Do you use your phone as a modem or a router to use the EVDO network? Dialup kills me so using it as a modem wouldn't really be nice on my end. Of course everything I want to do I pretty can do through ActiveSync so it's never been much of an issue. My laptop has a built-in Verizon wireless radio which thankfully the company pays for so life is pretty easy when it comes to connectivity for me. If only Navision and Oracle were as easy to deal with.
That said, about once a week I do pull the battery just because the memory wasn't getting released from the extremely limited ram on the phone. Once it's cleared up the phone is good for another week. Sometimes I allow text messages to build up too much, it takes about an hour to get rid of 800 text messages through the delete all option. The phone is quite useless during that process too.
The iPhone just doesn't impress me, probably because I despise Apple with it's constant lock-in. They make a good GUI, hard to argue that. Beyond that the only thing special about the iPod was iTunes integration which brings the whole thing back to lock-in.
I have the 700w and we've been buying the 700wx phones which are even better. We don't have crashes and I'm surprised about your battery life problem. Perhaps you need to mess with the power save features. I have a 4gig SD card in it which I keep a good amount of music on. I routinely use it for 4+ hours at a time while in flight and the battery doesn't even blink. I can't imagine the Palm OS is that inefficient with power management. Perhaps you need to turn the screen brightness down or something. We have about 20 in our office and the only time someone seems to have an issue if when they open a power point presentation or a PDFs on their phone. Acrobat is atrocious on any smartphone I've seen. We use it for email with ActiveSync and it just goes and goes.
All of the smartphones I've seen have different issues but I've come to the conclusion that the Treos do a lot more good than harm. I definitely find mine reliable although I'm unsure of why you would need more than 24 hours standby time on a smartphone. I plug it in at night when I go to sleep. Takes about two hours and it's fully charged. I'm thinking maybe your phone is defective. I've got three or four days without charging the phone at max and it was downloading my email the whole time which is pretty impressive. Of course it also depends on signal strength. If you have poor coverage in your area that would certainly explain the battery issues.
Except that this day of silence is to draw attention to the issue, much like the read people stop buying gas for a day. Has nothing or at least, very little to do with making them lower their prices. This will make a lot of people aware that the net radio stations are being extorted, a few of those people will be driven to do something about it that otherwise were unaware. If even a thousand people write to their congress critters about the issue, considering 72 million listeners that seems like a reasonable figure then there may be some legislative support stepping in to fight this obvious abuse of power.
If Pandora has to pay a minimum of $500 per channel and I have roughly 22 channels on my account alone right now then they are basically paying $11,000 just so I can listen to music. Could they pass that on to me? Sure but I would stop using the service and a truly great service dies. I keep Pandora even on my cell phone because I love it so much. The pricing is out of reach because it's modeled after traditional broadcasting services which realistically don't apply to net radio with it's unlimited personalization options.
In short, the pricing is absurd and most people don't even know what's happening.
If installing a 3rd party app caused the phone to not work then you should use a different 3rd party app. The reset only gets you back to usable within 30 seconds of your phone dying so you can receive phone calls again. If the app only causes problems when you run it then you can just pull the battery and pop it back in for a soft-reset which won't result in the loss of anything.
If you don't think the iPhone will have the same troubleshooting procedure you're in for a world of hurt given that this is a 1st gen product. How well did OS 10.0 work? You will have to reboot/reset/factory reset your iPhone depending on what you do with it. Since you don't have the option of installing 3rd party tools then you only have to worry about Apple screwing up the development of it here and there. This will happen and there is no question in it. The bonus is that a firmware release will probably fix issues as the thing enjoys proper QA from the public.
For the record, I have a Treo and have never needed to hard reset it. There is a lot of development support out there for it which means there are both good apps and bad apps that get installed. Fortunately when it comes to smart phones we don't just install every bit of software we come across. If we have a problem we evaluate software to correct the specific issue. That has yet to cause problems on any of the phones in this company at least.
I am not desensitized to the problems but my Samsung A900 has the same issues with text messaging and Razrs have the same problem as well, sometimes it takes a while to send a message. That's pretty much the only issue I ever come across. Occasionally there is slow performance on both the A900 and the Treo in which case I pull the battery and pop it back in.
It's really not difficult considering it only happens once in a great while and it's not like the cell phone is so mission critical it can't afford ANY downtime.
If you have a Treo running Windows Mobile or Palm OS you just do a hard reset and you're back to how it was when you opened the box. Why would users have to go back to store? Even then, the person at the store will just do a hard reset for the customer because they can't read the half page quick start/troubleshooting guide. It's a matter of pressing and holding two buttons, one of which you can't normally press since it is behind the battery. I wouldn't say this is a nightmare support experience at all considering all the software out there for these phones.
There is tons of 3rd party support for pretty much every phone out there with a computer interface, this is simply not an excuse. Apple wants complete control and they are willing to work with AT&T to make it happen. It's no different than how Apple has ever behaved on every other endeavor including the ipod. Not sure why you think it would be any different now.
Or you are misinformed. First of all copying DLLs is not illegal. Second, you don't qualify what newer codecs are. Third there are hundreds of codecs you can use to encode WMV files since it is just a container like avi. Anything you can play H.264 on you can play WMV on if the WMV was encoded with H.264. If your problem is with the choice of codec then you have a valid platform gripe as not all codecs work on all platforms.
Furthermore, there are over 800 million Windows machines out there which qualifies as a strong majority of users out there. It makes sense as a first step for an entity such as the BBC.
That's funny because the G5 we have in-house encodes WMV files and simply doesn't care what format the video is in. I have no trouble going to sites with Ubuntu or SUSE and playing WMV videos either. As I originally said, DRM is the issue, not the WMV itself.
As for phone support, I have the Samsung A900 as well as a Treo 700w which does have Windows Mobile. Both support it though.
Furthermore, it's not difficult for a server to give out streams in multiple formats. The Niagara SCX we employ here has no trouble throwing out Quicktime, Real Media, or WMV, or any number of other formats. Most other production broadcast equipment I've seen does the same thing. Flash is getting pretty ubiquitous these days but it's no wonder the sites with money develop a flash solution and the sites with a lot less go with other file formats.
A lot of the content industry could learn a lot from the porn industry if they were willing to listen. They really know how to get their product to people. Is it any wonder they often use WMV?
Sounds to me like the problem isn't technological at all then. You present a logical reason why the BBC would want DRM but it's quite an issue given how much DRM is abused these days. Technology isn't going to solve this problem though. They need to find an alternative method for funding, like perhaps and Internet tax in addition to the TV tax? I don't know, I imagine a tax on every medium they are a part of would go a long way to solving the funding issues as people invariably change which device they choose to watch shows on.
The problem with Tivo and DVR technology is that if I watch a show for the first time late in the season I can't go back and watch all the other episodes because I was impressed. So instead I have to do the illegal thing and download the shows so I can actually watch them so I can finish out the season knowing what people are talking about at lunch. Of course most popular shows are broadcast online now these days as well in the U.S. at least. This is a new and welcomed change and has actually stopped me from wanting to download them torrent sites.
You are correct, a 200k download times 100 million potential viewers is nothing to worry about. Oh wait, that's a lot of bandwidth!
I actually don't think that is a big deal but it's more work than just deploying with WMV and the thousands of people out there that already know how the whole process works as it relates to production and encoding.
No, you seem to have missed the point. The problem is with the DRM and not the format they chose. I don't care what content they wish to share. They should setup a site for those in Britain without DRM and a site for everyone else with it because they sell the content. Problem solved. I can understand why those in Britain would be annoyed given that they pay taxes to support the BBC and I can understand by the BBC would want DRM.
Of course if they got rid of the DRM completely and just went to an account based system which charged people if they weren't from Britain then everything would be fine.
Alternatively they should just provide it for free since the public of Britain already paid for it.
You do know that WMV is just a container right? And that it is not inherently DRM-locked right? Sounds like your gripe is with the DRM and not with the use of WMV. A lot of people seem to be mixing the two up. WMV files can be encoded in a lot of different ways and with free and open-source tools. What is the problem beyond DRM?
There are over 800 million Windows machines out there, that sounds like a pretty good target to shoot for. People call me crazy though. They don't mess with you anymore after they think you're crazy.
I dunno, last I checked I quite easily watched all the WMV porn I liked on my SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora installs. Why must I install Windows to watch WMV? My phone even plays WMV files. Perhaps you're more concerned with the DRM? That would make a lot more sense. Get rid of the DRM and then the problem goes away.
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I can't decide, is your reply serious?
There is a ton of outrage over border security right now and Internet technologies that came out of DARPA sure as hell made the military a lot more efficient while lots of the infrastructure was built by universities and private organizations expanding on the research that came out of DARPA.
ACH is not even close to a single point of failure, you're referring to a whole network. Is the Internet a single point of failure for any organization? The whole Internet can go down? Really? ACH runs on all of the same technology only segregated from the rest of the Internet.
As for biometrics, as you assuming that card swipes will actually verify that identity is consistent with a central database somewhere? Good luck with the government putting something like that together if you recall the FBI's latest attempts to modernize. How would that work considering the numbers of places without an Internet connection. Are they going to share a phone line with credit card machines now? No, the reality is that different biometric information will be encoded on a fraudulent Real ID matching the identity thief.
The only thing Real ID accomplishes is making it MORE difficult to recover your identity once it has been stolen. Since you couldn't possible have had the information forged. It would also make it easier when presenting ID but we should only rarely ever have to present ID. Given the current state of constitutional abuses I would definitely say now is not the time for something like this.
I might be wrong on this but last I remembered gas station owners didn't set the price of gas, the refinery companies do. I recall a guy in Michigan I think it was who lowered the price of gas 30 cents taking a loss but was then fined by the city because there is apparently a maximum range stations owners are allowed to charge and it's relative to everyone else. It's completely asinine that prices change on a daily basis given that the gasoline is already in the tank at the station.
You do make a good point though, if the restrictions on station owners were lifted and they were allowed to profit from liquor sales then the price at the pump would drop. Too bad I don't see that happening. Station owners would use the gas to get people to the stores so they could upsell. Sounds good for them as well as consumers.
You mean a processor that does more and offers rock solid performance versus and overclocked rig that needs rebooting every few hours?
Parent has an odd notion of what scaling is, although technically that would be considering scaling up when the general industry trend is scaling out. My database and web servers are Opteron based for good reason, exactly the ones you specified. Seems a shame AMD not being able to keep up on the lower end of things but they really aren't challenged by Intel in the mid-range server market. Would be nice to see some larger AMD setups, like 8-way 16 core, or 16-way 32 core. Architecturally speaking if that hardware were released it would only widen the lead at the top end and Intel really has some serious problems with scaling out.
This is pretty common practice with Oracle, this is why people pay good money for Metalink access. It's a very valuable tool if you have to work with Oracle products. We used it extensively to get our in-house application working flawlessly with Oracle 10g. There is tons of sample code up there. I doubt they found any actual DBMS code.
Except that mastering a Blu-ray disc is no different and requires no additional effort to master an HD-DVD disc. When it comes to game consoles they are different architectures and require significantly more effort to produce for multiple platforms. Of course with that said it sounds like Sony should also be investigated. If Sony didn't pay them to be exclusive then perhaps they would have saw money in producing the games for multiple platforms.
Really? All Linux software is free of licensing headaches? Licensing the OS has always been brain dead easy for most any platform. It's the software running on the OS that causes the headaches. Of course on both platforms I have tools for inventory management to keep all the licensing straight. It's even unified so I can monitor and control both environments with it. I don't manage a lot of servers, about 24 so far. 20 of them are Windows and four are Linux based. I visit each of my servers on the same schedule applying patches centrally is quite easy.
The bottom-line is not easily segregated between Linux and Windows because of the software that runs on top of it. Some of the Windows software is a hell of a lot cheaper than similar software on Linux. Think MS SQL on Windows versus Oracle on Linux. Since I alone manage 24 servers with the associated apps I'm sure as hell not going to look at the source and tweak as necessary on a linux box assuming I even have access to the source. I'm going to pay for some support and let my partner worry about such details. Support on the Microsoft side of the fence is a lot cheaper than support on the Linux side. 99% of the time it's not needed on either platform so pricing of support is very important.
Hybrid environments are easy and make a lot of sense from a risk mitigation perspective. I also find that working in one environment gives me ideas on how to better work with the other environments. Best practices for the most part are platform inspecific. That goes for DNS/DHCP and for RADIUS. Although I must say, DHCP on linux is much much much better than DHCP on Windows given Option 82 support and all.
I have no idea where you get your information. On the 64 bit end of things the Opteron has been hammering the Xeon for years. This is the area I have experience as I run a website which sees millions of users. The Opterons in addition to being more stable also perform a hell of a lot better. The numbers add up too as integer performance has been a strength of AMD for quite some time. Maybe in the gaming arena Intel's 64bit offerings perform faster but certainly not in the real world with IIS/SQL 2005 and Apache/mySQL. I run both environments and both are consistent.
Intel's shared FSB has been a joke for years, I have no idea why you would defend it as being sensible when Intel could do it right from the get-go and not have to redesign the chip later costing them more money. It's all about short term gains which you seem to think is a good idea. AMD made enough money to buy ATI I don't think they are exactly hard up given that their processors are back to being cheaper and performing in line with Intel. The Core 2 Duo is more expensive than the equivalent Athlon. The only place where there is real competition is at the top end of the consumer chip market where Intel holds the performance crown. For the price AMD is clearly a better value which is why more and more OEMs are releasing AMD products. Think Dell, Think Sun
You're statements are pretty much bizarre considering the Core 2 Duo and the latest Athlon X2 products or the Athlon FX series processors are very competitive in 32 bit so there is no smaller margin to make up in the 64 bit otherwise the processors would be performing identically in which case you've already proved the point of why AMD is the smart move.
AMD's most expensive desktop processor? $800 Throw that money at Intel and you will get a processor that is slower than the Athlon FX. If you want to spend $1300 on a chip then sure Intel will be faster, a whole 10fps faster in your game. That's definitely worth the extra $500.
Also, why do you think MS went with an Athlon processor for their low cost PC they are selling in India? Perhaps because AMD is squarely in the best performance for the dollar? That strategy has always worked for AMD. They ran into trouble when they dropped it for a while and raised their prices.
So you're saying AMD shouldn't mentioned the only reason Intel beat them to it is the fact that Intel cut stupid corners to produce a product for the sake of being first?
Stability of AMD server chips certainly shows that AMD has an idea about SMP while Intel is still scratching their collective balls. When things go to 64 bit you really start to see AMD's strengths as their current offerings are more than competitive. The desktop arena is a tough market that Intel current has the crown for but only because of Intel cutting corners. The technology itself is not superior to what AMD is offering. The only difference being that Intel can manufacture and when they want to, they can engineer. For some reason Intel is sticking with the whole FSB idea for communicating among cores. That's just plain silly although admittedly easier than AMD's approach. Which is why Intel is winning right now. It remains to be seen whether this was a short term gain with a long term sacrifice. Intel certainly has a lot of money so they could be doing both capitalizing on what AMD lacks working on their own upcoming products to meet or beat AMD's next gen. Should be interesting to see if Intel learned it's lesson from the Athlon days of glory.
That should be the lawsuit material then. If you can demonstrate a loss of credibility or lose a job over this stuff then you have a case for a lawsuit. If there is demonstrable harm done whether physical or otherwise then there is recourse in a lawsuit. Sounds reasonable to me. That said, how many people are cyberbullied once they are out of high school?
Sounds like reception is thrashing the battery since as I'm sure you know it ramps up the power to get better reception if the signal is weak.
The only feature about the Treo that is lacking in my experience is the amount of ram which sounds like is the source of your troubles. Also, first gen Treo 700s had the issue you describe with data corruption. It's interesting to see that the problem exists on the Palm side as well as the WM side. The AIM and MSN clients are rock solid on my end but I have excellent reception in most places I go. I also have a car adapter to charge it while I'm on the go. I have an airline adapter for regular devices which I could use to charge the phone although honestly I've never needed to.
Do you use your phone as a modem or a router to use the EVDO network? Dialup kills me so using it as a modem wouldn't really be nice on my end. Of course everything I want to do I pretty can do through ActiveSync so it's never been much of an issue. My laptop has a built-in Verizon wireless radio which thankfully the company pays for so life is pretty easy when it comes to connectivity for me. If only Navision and Oracle were as easy to deal with.
That said, about once a week I do pull the battery just because the memory wasn't getting released from the extremely limited ram on the phone. Once it's cleared up the phone is good for another week. Sometimes I allow text messages to build up too much, it takes about an hour to get rid of 800 text messages through the delete all option. The phone is quite useless during that process too.
The iPhone just doesn't impress me, probably because I despise Apple with it's constant lock-in. They make a good GUI, hard to argue that. Beyond that the only thing special about the iPod was iTunes integration which brings the whole thing back to lock-in.
I have the 700w and we've been buying the 700wx phones which are even better. We don't have crashes and I'm surprised about your battery life problem. Perhaps you need to mess with the power save features. I have a 4gig SD card in it which I keep a good amount of music on. I routinely use it for 4+ hours at a time while in flight and the battery doesn't even blink. I can't imagine the Palm OS is that inefficient with power management. Perhaps you need to turn the screen brightness down or something. We have about 20 in our office and the only time someone seems to have an issue if when they open a power point presentation or a PDFs on their phone. Acrobat is atrocious on any smartphone I've seen. We use it for email with ActiveSync and it just goes and goes.
All of the smartphones I've seen have different issues but I've come to the conclusion that the Treos do a lot more good than harm. I definitely find mine reliable although I'm unsure of why you would need more than 24 hours standby time on a smartphone. I plug it in at night when I go to sleep. Takes about two hours and it's fully charged. I'm thinking maybe your phone is defective. I've got three or four days without charging the phone at max and it was downloading my email the whole time which is pretty impressive. Of course it also depends on signal strength. If you have poor coverage in your area that would certainly explain the battery issues.
Except that this day of silence is to draw attention to the issue, much like the read people stop buying gas for a day. Has nothing or at least, very little to do with making them lower their prices. This will make a lot of people aware that the net radio stations are being extorted, a few of those people will be driven to do something about it that otherwise were unaware. If even a thousand people write to their congress critters about the issue, considering 72 million listeners that seems like a reasonable figure then there may be some legislative support stepping in to fight this obvious abuse of power.
If Pandora has to pay a minimum of $500 per channel and I have roughly 22 channels on my account alone right now then they are basically paying $11,000 just so I can listen to music. Could they pass that on to me? Sure but I would stop using the service and a truly great service dies. I keep Pandora even on my cell phone because I love it so much. The pricing is out of reach because it's modeled after traditional broadcasting services which realistically don't apply to net radio with it's unlimited personalization options.
In short, the pricing is absurd and most people don't even know what's happening.
If installing a 3rd party app caused the phone to not work then you should use a different 3rd party app. The reset only gets you back to usable within 30 seconds of your phone dying so you can receive phone calls again. If the app only causes problems when you run it then you can just pull the battery and pop it back in for a soft-reset which won't result in the loss of anything.
If you don't think the iPhone will have the same troubleshooting procedure you're in for a world of hurt given that this is a 1st gen product. How well did OS 10.0 work? You will have to reboot/reset/factory reset your iPhone depending on what you do with it. Since you don't have the option of installing 3rd party tools then you only have to worry about Apple screwing up the development of it here and there. This will happen and there is no question in it. The bonus is that a firmware release will probably fix issues as the thing enjoys proper QA from the public.
For the record, I have a Treo and have never needed to hard reset it. There is a lot of development support out there for it which means there are both good apps and bad apps that get installed. Fortunately when it comes to smart phones we don't just install every bit of software we come across. If we have a problem we evaluate software to correct the specific issue. That has yet to cause problems on any of the phones in this company at least.
I am not desensitized to the problems but my Samsung A900 has the same issues with text messaging and Razrs have the same problem as well, sometimes it takes a while to send a message. That's pretty much the only issue I ever come across. Occasionally there is slow performance on both the A900 and the Treo in which case I pull the battery and pop it back in.
It's really not difficult considering it only happens once in a great while and it's not like the cell phone is so mission critical it can't afford ANY downtime.
If you have a Treo running Windows Mobile or Palm OS you just do a hard reset and you're back to how it was when you opened the box. Why would users have to go back to store? Even then, the person at the store will just do a hard reset for the customer because they can't read the half page quick start/troubleshooting guide. It's a matter of pressing and holding two buttons, one of which you can't normally press since it is behind the battery. I wouldn't say this is a nightmare support experience at all considering all the software out there for these phones.
There is tons of 3rd party support for pretty much every phone out there with a computer interface, this is simply not an excuse. Apple wants complete control and they are willing to work with AT&T to make it happen. It's no different than how Apple has ever behaved on every other endeavor including the ipod. Not sure why you think it would be any different now.
haha, I apologize, someone please mod my previous post into hell so it is not discovered.
Or you are misinformed. First of all copying DLLs is not illegal. Second, you don't qualify what newer codecs are. Third there are hundreds of codecs you can use to encode WMV files since it is just a container like avi. Anything you can play H.264 on you can play WMV on if the WMV was encoded with H.264. If your problem is with the choice of codec then you have a valid platform gripe as not all codecs work on all platforms.
Furthermore, there are over 800 million Windows machines out there which qualifies as a strong majority of users out there. It makes sense as a first step for an entity such as the BBC.
Humorous as you can encode WMV in H.264. So you mean the iPod doesn't support the file extension.
That's funny because the G5 we have in-house encodes WMV files and simply doesn't care what format the video is in. I have no trouble going to sites with Ubuntu or SUSE and playing WMV videos either. As I originally said, DRM is the issue, not the WMV itself.
As for phone support, I have the Samsung A900 as well as a Treo 700w which does have Windows Mobile. Both support it though.
Furthermore, it's not difficult for a server to give out streams in multiple formats. The Niagara SCX we employ here has no trouble throwing out Quicktime, Real Media, or WMV, or any number of other formats. Most other production broadcast equipment I've seen does the same thing. Flash is getting pretty ubiquitous these days but it's no wonder the sites with money develop a flash solution and the sites with a lot less go with other file formats.
A lot of the content industry could learn a lot from the porn industry if they were willing to listen. They really know how to get their product to people. Is it any wonder they often use WMV?
Sounds to me like the problem isn't technological at all then. You present a logical reason why the BBC would want DRM but it's quite an issue given how much DRM is abused these days. Technology isn't going to solve this problem though. They need to find an alternative method for funding, like perhaps and Internet tax in addition to the TV tax? I don't know, I imagine a tax on every medium they are a part of would go a long way to solving the funding issues as people invariably change which device they choose to watch shows on.
The problem with Tivo and DVR technology is that if I watch a show for the first time late in the season I can't go back and watch all the other episodes because I was impressed. So instead I have to do the illegal thing and download the shows so I can actually watch them so I can finish out the season knowing what people are talking about at lunch. Of course most popular shows are broadcast online now these days as well in the U.S. at least. This is a new and welcomed change and has actually stopped me from wanting to download them torrent sites.
You are correct, a 200k download times 100 million potential viewers is nothing to worry about. Oh wait, that's a lot of bandwidth!
I actually don't think that is a big deal but it's more work than just deploying with WMV and the thousands of people out there that already know how the whole process works as it relates to production and encoding.
No, you seem to have missed the point. The problem is with the DRM and not the format they chose. I don't care what content they wish to share. They should setup a site for those in Britain without DRM and a site for everyone else with it because they sell the content. Problem solved. I can understand why those in Britain would be annoyed given that they pay taxes to support the BBC and I can understand by the BBC would want DRM.
Of course if they got rid of the DRM completely and just went to an account based system which charged people if they weren't from Britain then everything would be fine.
Alternatively they should just provide it for free since the public of Britain already paid for it.
Except that you said exactly the same thing as I said. Thank you for agreeing with me. The problem is with the DRM and not WMV.
Well that's crap too then, they should remove the checker and the DRM and then everyone will be happier.
You do know that WMV is just a container right? And that it is not inherently DRM-locked right? Sounds like your gripe is with the DRM and not with the use of WMV. A lot of people seem to be mixing the two up. WMV files can be encoded in a lot of different ways and with free and open-source tools. What is the problem beyond DRM?
There are over 800 million Windows machines out there, that sounds like a pretty good target to shoot for. People call me crazy though. They don't mess with you anymore after they think you're crazy.
I dunno, last I checked I quite easily watched all the WMV porn I liked on my SUSE, Ubuntu, or Fedora installs. Why must I install Windows to watch WMV? My phone even plays WMV files. Perhaps you're more concerned with the DRM? That would make a lot more sense. Get rid of the DRM and then the problem goes away.